Nostalgic Designs: Part I: Daytime Dresses

Aka, old sketches, memories and nostalgia, and why didn’t I make any of these???

Photo by Sindy Süßengut on Unsplash

In place of a chapter today, to break up the (probable) incoming string of several chapters from The Sword of Myn’, I hope you won’t mind a slightly different post. I thought I’d share some of my older designs, from before I actually started sewing.

Part I will be the more everyday outfits, while Part II, likely coming next month, will be special occasion and costume designs.

Most of these are probably from 2018-early 2020. Back then, I had a perhaps strange habit of either only sketching the design, drawing the design on a figure with a head but no limbs, or an oddly headless figure? I didn’t care much about the figure since the point was the dress! I tended to draw the figures to a disproportionate fashion scale, too.

I didn’t “try to think and work like a fashion designer,” either, which even now I don’t go through the long process they would for a collection, but instead of trying to design a dress around a theme or Frankensteining together various elements the way I often do now, I would draw the dresses that popped into my mind. I still do, but it seems harder to pull them out of my mind than it appears to have been back then.

Somehow, I think a lot of these older designs suited my real style and/or internal design mechanisms better, before I tried to be semi-professional to prep for the possibility of having my own fashion house - as if this method made my designs make more sense, or be worth more, or make me more believable.

These designs might not have necessarily worked for me physically, had I made them, but they make me happier to look at than many of my more recent sketches, as much as I like those.

What do you think? Is there a design you think I ought to resurrect at some point and make?