Further development: Color Experimentation & Fabric Swatches

 

Developing from my first design (see picture above), I made 6 different sketches of the women costume that I'm going to make into a 3d outcome. All the design are based from the two fabric (songket) that was brought from Indonesia. The first songket (see fig. 1) has the color palette of red, brown and gold, this gave me the impression of a more feminine, fun and bright concept with yellow and orange as the main hue. For the second songket (see fig. 2), the deep red paired with black and silver gave a sense of dark feminine and bold empowering feels to it. These contrast concept and mood is what I have developed further into a few sketches. 

                                            Fig. 1                                                                Fig. 2

For the first songket fabric, I paired the red, brown and gold color combination with yellow and white. As it can be seen on the image below, the design no. 1, 3 and 5 use similar songket and batik with the only difference of playing around with the white and yellow color on the outfit. Discussing these design with my mom and my Indonesian friends, they all thought that the brown and gold color combination is the best to portray Indonesian traditional garment, one of the reason is because most batik has bright and playful color, therefore to pair the dim and dark-color songket (see fig. 1&2), it will complement better with brighter and cheerful colored fabric. 

Moving on to the design sketches of my second songket (see fig. 2), I was inspired from 'Kebaya Janggan' (see fig. 4) which is a Javanese women's national costume that are prominently in black-colored Jacquard fabric and has an asymmetrical front button with collar and overall look similar to men's formal suit or tuxedo. I thought it was the perfect top that matches with the songket color scheme of red, black and silver and also gave a mysterious and dark feminine feeling. Therefore for my design no.4, which can be seen on the image below, I modified the 'Kebaya Janggan' into a cropped blazer with gold borsch pinned on both sides of the collar. As for the design no. 2 (see image below), I made the bolero to be an asymmetrical one sleeve top, paired with exaggerated high-slit pencil skirt. 

Fig. 3

Fig. 4 Kebaya Janggan 

From the six design sketches above, I narrowed it down to one finalized design that I'm going to recreate as a 3d outcome. However I'm still contemplating of which color lace best complement the songket and batik that I'm going to use, therefore I made three different sketches to visualize the design (see image below).

Fig. 5

Here are a few design inspiration of the bolero I plan to make for the final outcome (see images below). All these top are made from lace fabric, where a few of them has a collar and others that don't.

Fig. 6

As for the skirt, I wanted it to drape asymmetrically and still has a structure on it, so I'm going to make a square skirt using stiff lace fabric usually use as curtains. This type of fabric is not only lightweight and has a stiffness to it, but with its translucent lace pattern, it will be the perfect fabric as the top layer of my two-tiered square skirt (see fig. 5). 

Fig. 7