BOLD. ALLURING. ENIGMATIC. BEAUTIFUL. DARING. “This is more than a singular design or just a line of handbags, Aura is a lifestyle, a way of movement throughout the day... an interactivity encompassing what fashion tries to engage. These handbags represent a new form of thought, user development and intrigue, creating a personal experience for each and every identified user.�
Daily Activities
Social Lifestyle
Personal Style
Utilizing a moodboard is imperative in fashion design and is often indicative of the feeling and expression emoted through the piece. We honed in on the irony of solar power, sunlight and current energy-centered designs. Instead, we developed a new thought process, and opened our eyes to conceptualizing through opposition. This board iterates the mood, form, tone and feeling of our design.
In order to further understand “our girl” we went inside her handbag. We pulled all of the possible necessities that a freelance industrial designer living in NYC would need to carry with her day-to-day. We maximized the size capacities of each item and employed these dimensions within our final orthographic patterns. The essential needs of “our girl” resides in her planer/ notebook, headphones, makeup carry-all, phone, keys, and wallet.
COLOR
Our color story was a simple choice after gaining inspiration from studying “our girl’s” lifestyle and harnessing the energy of our moodboard. Opposition and irony were two words that we wanted our design story to remain influenced by. Typical solar designs may employ yellow, orange, or white. However we decided to embody a different form of the sun, a solar eclipse.
STYLE
‘Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.’ - Coco Chanel ‘Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.’ – Rachel Zoe
TREND
Current trends should never dictate the decisions of a good designer, instead they should influence them to go further, get ahead of the curve and stay there. We researched current fall and spring trends, but only allowed them to push us above our resting design ideas and engage our minds to think of bigger, better, and more beautiful designs.
This flexible solar panel is made of silicone and rubber, allowing it to bend and curve. However, the thickness and materiality of this solar panel type is not condusive with the design of a handbag.
Solar Cell Beads are a new research venture in wearable energy started in China. Although these beads are very small, and can be woven into fabric, they are not a very attractive textile to work with in high fashion.
MIT’s cutting edge technology in printable fabric and paper solar cells is not yet available to the public. The efficiency of the cells needs to be improved upon, but the concept works the best with high-end fashion design.
Solar panels are currently being used at a large scale on backpacks and other types of bags. The intrusion of these panels breaks up the design and draws the eye’s attention.
Woven Polymer Electrode solar cells are another future possibilityin the wearable energy design field. However, the materials that the cells are woven into are currently limited and the efficiency is unknown.
After deciding on the incorporation of solar power in our handbag, we began to research the endless types of acquiring solar energy and narrowing the options down based on what would work best with our design. A new technology at MIT caught our eye because of its versatility, simplicity and accessability to be used in fashion design. The other forms of technology were either too bulky, not flexible, unnatractive, or not functional for fashion design.
The Aura handbag design in-takes solar energy from the sun’s rays throughsolar cells printed on the exterior fabric of the bag, and stores the energy in an external battery. The external battery then hooks up to your cell phones charger and charges your phone on-the-go while remaining in your handbag. However, this battery can be removed from the handbag pocket, and charged on a local energy source, such as a wall socket. So when the sun is away, your phone can still play.
As soon as we had nailed down the style, mood and color story of our design, along with the type of solar technology we wanted to use, we realized that a textile designer was necessary to complete our design. The printed solar cell technology gave us the freedom and ability to create a pattern unique to our handbag design. We conveyed to our textile designer the process and inspiration behind our handbag and allowed her to freely interpret what our design meant in the language of textiles. She returned to us with five versions of a pattern that we felt were perfectly indicative the mood we wanted to create.
IMAGE OF FABRIC AND FINISHING SAMPLES BOARD GOES HERE
Fabric choices are essential in fashion design. Often, the leathers, suedes, metallics, silks, cottons, etc are what draws a buyer in and allows them to further understand the design concept. We chose fabrics that both complemented the textile design for the solar fabric and furthered the impactual mood of the handbag. The oxblood suede is indicative of the heat of the sun, the black leather as cool and dark as the solar eclipse, and the copper accents representative of the lustful sheen created by sunlight.
Flats sketches are a quick and neccessary way to explore the aesthetic of a design in fashion. We did several rounds and ideations of flats sketches to continue evolving our design, allowing it to freely form itself.
The flats evolved into color testing and fabric placement. By using markers and pens, we were able to explore the relationship between the form and the fabrics. Each flat was viewed as a stepping stone to the evolution of the final form design.
HANDBAG
Once we finalized our handbag form and flat sketch, we began applying the dimensions we acquired from studying “whats in her bag.� We definitely wanted an oversized look that was able to encorporate our girls daily items needed for her lifestyle.
CLUTCH
The clutch design was a little bit more difficult to decide upon, when beginning to assign dimensions. We made several quick scale models to understand the relationship of the shape and size. We ended up scaling the design up approximately 25% to incorporate more space.
In order to decide on the placement of fabrics and the material quality that we wanted for the design, we studied the form with rendered flats. We prefered to keep the black leather to a maximum and the print and oxblood suede to a minimum because we think this resulted in the best high end look. After completing this process we began our final design, starting with canvas models and thn finalizing with our actual materials.