“Making It “ In Fashion Design

  After responses to our first brochure, we are sending a new brief one with photo explanations.

How Do You “Make It “ In Fashion Design?

Be a part of writing an exciting fashion design book. Designers, consumers, students and beginners (who sew), who would like to learn online free by cooperating with Shirley Willett, www.shirleywillett.com, a well- known industry expert in creative design, pattern engineering, manufacturing, and education. Her unique methods are needed to make it, have been tested over 60 years, and are easy, fun and rewarding. We start with brief and introductory Foundation Design Skills that prepare you for our methods: Inner Visualization, Manual Skills, Creativity in every step, Self-Evaluation techniques, etc. Then we go to in depth lessons: Templates that make perfect first patterns ready for production, simple Pattern manipulation techniques, methods for Draping creative styles, Truing for accuracy, and many special lessons on Bodices, Skirts, Dresses, Sleeves, Collars, Blazer, Pants, etc.

Email fashionclass@shirleywillett.com to request becoming a part of our cooperative book effort, telling us about yourself, and what you want to learn.

“Color Codification of Emotional Energies”

There is nothing more exciting than being quoted by another scientist in academia, when you have innovated a new theory. I designed this chart for a conference, “Innovations”, sponsored by Boston University, October 29-30, 2002. I explained, “Energy follows thought. When we use our will to take control over thoughts, they take control over our emotional energies, which in turn, control chemical releases in the brain. The first step toward mastery, the long term goal, is to become conscious of every emotion we experience as we experience them.”

Ashley Wilkie, in a blog for a UK university quoted me and my color chart, December 15, 2014: “A table of colors with their properties defined by Shirley Willett, the model presented is used as a guideline for the basic emotions with their colors. The model that she presents, figure 3, has many overlaps with the data found from Claudia Cortes work with the only difference it reduces the list to the basics. (Jiang and Bian 2013, pp.189-194)” [Note: Wilkie eliminated “Joy” from my original. http://ashleywilkie.co.uk/blog/?tag=design&paged=2 ]

Boston Fashion Industry Meetup with Jay Calderin, Boston Fashion Week

The group photo was taken by Domenico, at the Boston Fashion Industry Meetup, July 24, 2012. We are the six organizers: Joseph Gualtiere, Vicky Anson, John Bilotti, , yours truly, Shirley Willett, Kathy Benharris, and Ron Ranere. If you want to know more about our meetup, go to  http://fashion.meetup.com/1/   We would love more fashion people, especially designers, to join us.

 The other photo is Jay Calderin, founder and organizer of Boston Fashion Week. He gave a great talk about all the exciting details of the week in the fall. If you want to know more about Boston Fashion Week, go to http://www.bostonfashionweek.com/

I have great news about myself. I will be the feature article in the fall issue of Boston Common Magazine. They are doing a Boston heritage issue and will talk about my involvement as Boston’s number one designer in the 1950s and 1960s, and then my suede manufacturing in the 1970s. I am not sure when the next issue comes out, either August or September. If you want to know more, go to

  http://bostoncommon-magazine.com/

Sketch Pattern Shapes That Will Make This Volley Ball

The volley ball is pictured with two views. Try “sketching” the shapes of the pattern pieces - the FEWEST PATTERN PIECES - that it takes to cut the fabric pieces for sewing together to make the ball. The 2D “shape” is what is important, and the relationship of shape to each other pattern pieces.

So many have requested my “Fashion/Pattern Design for Beginners” online, that I decided to try this first step of a class I teach at the Brookline Adult & Community Education (Boston area). This first step is a test for whether my pattern making system can be taught online.
http://www.brooklineadulted.org/bin/catalog/bldCatalogPage.pl?Key=36&File=CraftsandSkills.txt
This is a very different approach from any other pattern making book, class, online, etc. It is a non-mathematical pattern making system called Stylometrics, that I developed through National Science Foundation research grants on engineering design for the fashion industry. The purpose of my system is "to build the ability to SEE inside the mind, and for designers to CREATE solutions to their pattern problems”. Most pattern makers use math & rules, set up in books, and answer the same problems over and over again – which is OK for mass production of commodity styles, and competition between designers and pattern makers, and CAD systems – but not for creative high fashion designers. It’s what Frank Gehry, the world-famous architect, said when he began designing jewelry for Tiffiny’s: “Beauty Without Rules”. My dream is to set up STANDARDS in “Primitive & Generic Patterns” so that designers can evolve "creative high fashion styles easily" and also mass produce them easily. From what I have learned from others, I believe I had the only “mass-produced high fashion clothing manufacturing in the world” in the 60s, 70s & early 80s. Eventually those standards will involve consumers and dressmakers, so consumers will be responsible for their own "fit" (variation from the standard) with their dressmakers. It's a whole new fashion industry.