I’m beginning to catch myself thinking in womenswear.
That’s a strange sentence to write because it isn’t something that happened all at once. There wasn’t a day where I walked into the studio and suddenly understood it. It has been happening slowly, almost without me noticing.
When I first decided to move Obscurant into womenswear, I thought I was signing up to learn a different set of technical skills. I expected more draping, different pattern blocks, and a new approach to fit. All of that has been true. But it hasn’t been the biggest change. The biggest change is that womenswear keeps asking me questions I never had to ask before.
For years my instinct was to begin with structure. How is this built? How do these seams come together? How can I make this cleaner, stronger, more precise? Those questions came naturally because they had been shaped by years of designing menswear. One thing I’ve noticed is that I don’t always start there anymore.
I’ll spend time at the dress form before I even think about making a pattern. I’ll pin fabric, move it around, take it off, and start over. Sometimes nothing comes from it. Other times moving one seam or changing the angle of a fold completely changes the direction of the garment. A year ago I probably would have tried to solve that problem through the pattern first. Now I’ll let the garment sit for a while before deciding what it needs. I’m not in as much of a hurry to arrive at the answer.
I don’t think designing womenswear has changed what I value as a designer. I still care about construction. I still care about proportion. I still care about making garments that feel considered. This process is changing how I get there.
I’m spending more time exploring. More time draping. More time making something just to understand why it does, or doesn’t work.
I think I expected womenswear to teach me new techniques. What it has done is change the way I approach my process.