I found my old sketchbook from 2015 and saw how much my silhouettes changed

I used to draw everything with these tight fitted waistlines and now I'm all about oversized draping and asymmetric hems. What shifted in your design approach over the last 5 years?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_parker2mo ago

Wait hold up. 2015 you were doing tight waistlines? That's crazy to me because back then everyone was all about that bodycon life and high waisted everything. I remember trying to force fitted silhouettes on everything and they always looked stiff and awkward. For me the big shift was realizing that draping actually hides mistakes better than tight fits. Like you can be off by a centimeter with a fitted waist and it looks terrible, but with oversized stuff you get this cool organic flow thing going on. The asymmetric thing really clicked for me when I started caring more about how fabric moves instead of just how it looks flat. It's wild how our brains evolve on shape and proportion over time. Lowkey jealous you kept your old sketchbook though. Mine got ruined in a move back in 2017 and I lost all that timeline stuff. Bet it's cool to see the progression.

paige862mo ago

Oh man, I gotta push back on this one a little. Tight waistlines in 2015 were the only way to get that clean, structured look that made people stop and actually study a garment. Draping hides mistakes sure but it also hides intention. There's nothing accidental about a fitted waist that lands exactly right. I remember doing a pencil skirt with a two inch waistband and the whole thing fell apart because I misjudged the hip curve by a hair. But that's the point - you learn more from those failures than from letting fabric just do its thing. Asymmetric draping can look great but half the time it reads as lazy, like you gave up halfway through and called it avant garde. Always felt like draping was the easy way out honestly.

hernandez.finley1mo ago

Right, because nothing says "I'm a serious designer" like sweating over a waistband for three hours only to have your model breathe wrong and suddenly you are the one who needs to be let out. I've definitely had that moment where I'm staring at a draped piece thinking "this is genius" and then realizing it just looks like a fancy bedsheet got caught in the wind. At least with a sketchbook you can flip back and laugh at your old attempts at "avant garde" that were really just "I ran out of pins.