Give costume students a brief – to produce a dress that captures the essence of the Yorkshire countryside and the floral elements of a new fragrance product – and it’s astounding what they’ll come up with.
From flower-studded gowns and those with sculptural petal trims to dresses inspired by dry stone walling and using Yorkshire tweed, the results of a project between Huddersfield University and Linthwaite-based company Zoflora were stunning – and all quite different.
As Clair Sweeney, course leader on the Costume with Textiles BA course, says: “We like our students to work on live projects and we’ve got a couple running at the moment. Zoflora is an iconic household name and we’re delighted to be working with them. The students are very excited they will see their outfits on show at two big events.”
The top five will be seen on the Great Yorkshire Show catwalk on July 12, while three of the designs are being displayed at this week’s Royal Horticultural Society’s Hampton Court Flower Show, at which Zoflora is sponsoring an Outstanding Natural Beauty garden.
Fifteen second-year students submitted designs and five were selected by Clair and her colleagues to face a judging panel from Zoflora and the Great Yorkshire Show. Zoflora, which manufactures disinfectant and has just launched a new limited edition floral fragrance variant called Green Valley, asked for costumes that were colourful, reflecting both Yorkshire and flowers in the RHS garden.
The finalists only had a couple of weeks to get their ideas off the drawing board and onto models. The overall winner will be announced at the Great Yorkshire Show.
For some students it was a question of working flat out for hours a day in order to complete the task as the challenge came hot of the heels of end-of-year course work. Design partners Ryan Boulton, 23 and Tiffany Crossman-Smith, 20, moved in together in order to complete their garment.
“It was a brilliant team effort,” said Tiffany, who explained that Ryan came up with many of the design elements while she solved the technical problems.
Their dress, which has a tight bodice top and sculptural skirt produced some extremely difficult technical challenges, not the least how to keep the skirt folds from collapsing. However, their efforts were not in vain and the dress is being worn by Yorkshire actress Lucy-Jo Hudson at the RHS show.
Laura Ella, 27, created a dress inspired by the floral notes in the new fragrance – wild pansy, lily of the valley and buttercup – and produced her own printed fabrics and hand-painted structural elements while Gail Preece, 45, and Rebecca Robinson, 20, teamed up to make an embroidered dress inspired by Yorkshire stone walls and Sheffield steel, with floral sprigs and patches of moss.
Gail said: “We worked on it every day for nearly four weeks.”
Anne-Marie Stanworth, 20, and Kirsty Wise, 22, used printed fabrics created by Anne-Marie and embroidery by Kirsty to jointly create a costume with a waterfall-effect and meadow flowers. Their head-dress, representing a foxglove, was a striking accessory.
Chelsea Gill, 20, used fairy lights set in laser-cut perspex surrounds to give her dress added impact and featured Yorkshire tweed embellished with flowers to represent the county’s natural beauty.
* The designs can all be seen in the Skipton Building Society’s Fashion Pavilion at The Great Yorkshire Show next week. Huddersfield designer Kevan Jon is also showing at the event.
