Claire Kennedy Design,The Art of Design

The Art of the Design
I'm often asked if I ever run out of ideas and how do I come up with so many designs. The first - never, and the second, amazingly enough, I seemed to be fully of them. Probably because I don't allow myself to have too many limits. But mostly when I quietly draw and start contemplating designing a gown, ideas are plentiful, mostly because I don't put too many limits on myself. My biggest limit is availability of fabric

This summer I had the opportunity to go to a formal evening event, but not worthy of a ball gown. So I wanted a short, cleanly elegant and after-five formal dress. We have a fabulous upholstery place, where I'm not afraid to do my best Scarlet O'Hara/Carol Burnett imitation! Since fabric is my basic limitation, I started there, and with a few designs in mind. I did more on the art and process of design in my blog here.


The Design This is what I had in my brain when I started. I do not normally draw this out, I just know what I want, but for this exercise, I did draw out what I was thinking about (since it was hard to impart telepathically!!!)	The Fabric I fell in love with this translucent fabric when I had seen it at the shop earlier, and found some gorgeous true celadon green silk to tone with it. I don't like things too "match".	The Finishing When a dress is this clean and classic, it may need just a smidge of "oomph" that can really set it off. That would have been trim and I found two that just screamed WOW!
The Dress Well, this doesn't look like anything I bought - but that's OK - that's often how the creative process works. The other limit I have is time, and since I didn't start to work on this till late, I was limited with what I could do - that translucent fabric could still make a gorgeous coat to go over this dress.	The Details Details are so important and are so often left off so much ready-to-wear. I adore purple, but with my ruddy complexion, it's clashes like OU & Texas! So I wear it as an accent and usually away from my face. In this case, as the lining which would take a very sharp eye to notice, but I knew it was there.	More Design When the design and line of a dress is good, it's really good. As I began to play with the design and layout of this dress, I loved the fact that I could at a future occasion wear this with the lapel folded over - an asymmetrical look.
The Trim Although I wore the dress as it was in the last picture, I still have two other options. One is the translucent coat, and the other is to add this beaded trim to the dress. The dress was elegant with some striking jewelry, however as I began to picture this with the coat and this trim, I'm very excited about the look.		Close-up Here is a close-up of the trim on the dress. It does accentuate the asymmetrical design of the front closure. This is also an very elegant design, but am still inthralled with doing the trim on the coat.