Thom Browne, SS16, New York.
The layered suiting ensembles at Thom Browne for Spring-Summer 2016 were embellished with carefully worked appliqué. The motifs were cut in a variety of fabrics and subtle pastel tones and were often spliced into fragments across front closures and shattered across pleated skirts.
It is interesting to think about the planning that would need to go into embellishment that is this detailed. For a start, you’d want to have the fit right of the basic garments before planning the placements of the motifs, since fit changes later would probably be a nightmare, and could throw off the whole sense of proportion of each design.
For the appliqué and possibly patchworked sections that run across the pleats, you’ve got the extra consideration of planning which parts of the designs split onto the top of each pleat. Or to put this another way, you can’t have the motif on the inside folds or pleat underlays since they won’t be visible.
The pleat underlays in the collection are also used to great effect in the collection, since rather than all being from the same self fabric, the underlays are sometimes pieced in as separate panels, allowing multiple contrast colours to be used. Sometimes this is used with subtle tonal variations, or at other times black is used to pierce through the appliqué to create a more graphic effect.
Images from Vogue.co.uk»
Pleat images by The Cutting Class»