Fashion exam portfolio workbook, Post 1966. Special Collections Showcase, October 2012

This month's Archive Treasure is a Fashion Exam Portfolio Workbook completed at the Medway College of Design

The series is available for reference at Rochester Library. For access please email archives@ucreative.ac.uk or Rebekah Taylor at rtaylor8@ucreative.ac.uk

Search it on the catalogue here archives.ucreative.ac.uk/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmVie...

This exam fashion workbook was donated by William Preston, completed by his late wife, Anne Preston. Anne Preston studied at Maidenhead College of Art, and went on to a specific fashion and design course at Medway College of Art in 1966, then after becoming a teacher at Warrenfield School on the Britwell Estate in Slough. She left teaching when she married William Preston as he was to work overseas.

The fashion exam portfolio is a product of its time, and demonstrates fashion and dressmaking trends and techniques in the 1960s, while also giving a condensed history of fashion since the 1800s.

It provides information regarding

1) Taking measurements of the body, with accompanying drawings

Blocks

• Bodice Block

• Skirt Block

Darts

• Underarm dart

• French dart

• Waist dart

• Neck dart

Sleeves

• French sleeve

• Bishop sleeve

• Full sleeve

• Cap sleeve

2) Information on history of cotton, silk, flax and wool, with examples of different types, including

Cotton

•Slubbing

•American cotton roll

•Cleaned cotton

•Carding

Flax

•Bleached yarn

•Linen bed spread

•Natural flax

Wool

•Swaledale

•Welsh mountain

•Romney marsh

3) Information on French modelling

4) Information on buttonholes, including buttonhole sketches

5) Images of designs from newspaper clippings from the late 1960s

 

Done