Industry Guest!

Yesterday at university we had the very great pleasure of having a guest speaker come in and give us a few tips, advice and info on the fashion industry! Christian Vila, who is a menswear designers for Ben Sherman came in to speak to us. On first sight I quickly associated him with Ben Sherman; he has definitely managed to adopt their style! He wore a red check print shirt buttoned up to the top with velvet elbow pad cut outs and a pair of dark chinos with high desert style boots, he looked very ‘this is England’ which is a style I personally love! Christian has previously worked for brand such as Drunken Monkey and Fenchurch International. He has currently and “mistakenly fell” into the world of graphic designing and told us of the graphic design process. He said he is usually given a space of two weeks to design a collection of graphic tees which then get finalised, sent off and can be in the market for sale from one to two weeks later- this, I found just insane! The fashion process is so faced paced; it does seem very exciting (but busy!!) 

 

Christian showed the group some recent designs he has put together to go on graphic tops, one was of just the back of a caravan, however because of the popularity of Instagram and the current Vintage trend his job was to tweak the picture to fit into this style, the image looked pretty amazing after, the caravan was rustic with the Ben Sherman stripes going through one side of the van (this was something significant to the brand incorporated in the design) and a number plate spelt BENS1983 was also added for effect, the shape and colour of the design looked like the Instagrams ‘early bird’ effect… it was all done very well! 

The recent vintage trend is something Ben Sherman adopts into their designs, along with a specific focus on music, some designs that were shown also included images of music symbols and guitars. One design was a photo of a guitar as a Polaroid, but was rotated and repeated many times in different ways and grouped onto the shirt. It really makes you want to pick up and pen and just draw 

 

xx