Bohemian and the mystic take centre stage
Hiruni Fernando thought fashion design would be a breeze, a veritable walk in the park. After all, all you have to do is draw a few pretty pictures, cut out some shapes, stitch them together and stick them on a model, right?
Udara inspired by the mysterious
Two and a half years later, she’s happy to swallow her words and wipe that grin off her face. The confident girl is still present and correct, but now it’s a different kind of pride with which she carries herself. Hiruni is amongst 33 young designers graduating from this year’s batch of the Advanced Diploma in Fashion Design at the Lanka Institute of Fashion Technology (LIFT). After two years of hard work, perseverance and a heady dose of unbeatable enthusiasm, she was able to present her collection to an appreciative audience and distinguished panel of judges at the 2013 LIFT Fashion Awards, held last November.
Hiruni won the award for the Best Styled Collection for her ‘Art Nouveau’ series, which she worked on for six months before presenting it at the show. An only child and student of Holy Cross Convent in Gampaha, fashion design was where she has always known her talents lay. Hiruni’s mother passed away when she was eight years old, and it was her father, aunt and uncle she grew up with, who supported her in her decision to become a student of fashion design. When she walked on to the ramp following her collection’s debut, they were the ones wiping happy tears from the corner of their eyes.
The soft, dreamy silhouettes of her collection drew on Renaissance paintings and the optimism of the latter centuries of the last millennium, when art nouveau was in fashion and flower power wasn’t just a catchy phrase. The six dresses she created for the show had a uniform top in a solid colour, with the A-line skirt of the dress being the main focus. Hiruni banked on an intensive two year course in everything from pattern making to cutting and sketching to create this collection. “It was a lot of hard work and late nights,” she says. “But we made it.”
Hiruni’s Art Nouveau series
She first identified the raw fabric she wanted to work with before drawing her designs and feeding it to a computer to be coloured with Photoshop. The designs were then printed onto the raw fabric, which was subsequently cut and manipulated to her preference. Hiruni’s collection focused on simple cuts and minimalistic design-“I wanted to highlight the textile I was using,” she says. The designer was awarded the accolade for Best Styled Collection thanks to some inspired handiwork with flowers and pan leaf to create fanciful headgear and very bohemian bags to complement her work.
Looking forward, she plans to continue on the learning curve and gain some experience in the batik industry, the perfect foil for her love of textile design.
The favoured feathered creature of the Greek goddess of Wisdom Athena, owls hold a special place in mythology-which is exactly why Udara Wickramarathne based her collection on them. With an equally eerie name, ‘Mystic Dwellers of the Night’, to go with it, she indulged her love for the mysterious and it paid off, earning her the award for Best Constructed Collection at the LIFT Fashion Awards.
Udara is from Kurunegala and finds inspiration in mythology, particularly that of the Greek, Roman and Celtic variety. “There’s something very mysterious and elegant about it,” she says. “I absolutely had to translate that onto my work.” Her collection in emerald and black took her quite some time to mastermind and began with finding some inspirational raw material, matching that with the ideas in her head and getting approval from the exacting board of lecturers at LIFT.
Udara uses an embellishing technique for this collection, as she finds it makes her fabric stand apart. With an admitted fondness for bling, it’s no surprise that her collection is an exercise in glitzy splendour. Even as we speak she toys with a huge pendant of an owl at her throat-“I love owls, as you’ve already guessed,” she smiles. “That’s another reason they’re the focus of my collection.”
To find her fabric she trawled through Pamunuwa and Pettah, eventually finding material that helped her imagine what the collection would look like. “That first step is really important,” she says. “If you don’t find the right material then you’re in some serious trouble.” Following that she developed an extensive and colourful scrapbook of the designs she hoped to present at the show, which she presented to her lecturers for approval. Then it was time for the ‘mock-ups’, a process whereby designers use miniature figurines to fashion a rough version of their collection.
At 23 she considers herself a little too young to launch out on her own so she’s hoping to find some apprenticeship work with a reputed designer or company to gain more experience.