Print Design:
Third Place, Most Professional

Karrie Gurnow
Rochester Institute of Technology

Fashion all its own

Artist's Statement: The objective of "Fashion All Its Own" was to design a fashion editorial piece with a strong conceptual element as well as to advertise the clothing in an appropriate, creative and professional manner.

The concept that I wanted to establish was one of the idea that fashion can have more personality than the people wearing it. I wanted to explore the idea of clothing becoming something more than just articles that we wear. What if the clothes wore us and we were just "puppets" for the sake of fashion. My entire goal was to convey this idea as well as to allow the clothing to stand on its own and really pull off a believable fashion editorial piece. Each spread has a different scenario but they all relate well to one another. By keeping the design elements consistent along with the subject matter of the photos, I was able to come up with one cohesive piece. The clothing also manages to stand out, as fashion would expect them to.

All of the photographs were manipulated, color corrected, cropped, resized, shifted (you name it), into Adobe® Photoshop®. On the cover, the shirt was cut off the girl and applied next to her. If you are wondering about the collar, it was a separate shot taken by the photographer and then reassembled to the shirt in Photoshop. All of the spreads were manipulated in some small way. In the first spread, the man was actually taken from another shot and placed in the photograph. The shirt that is on his chest was photographed there but the actual color was beige, and so blended in with the brick in the background. The color was implemented in Adobe Photoshop. In the second spread, the skirt was actually photographed suspended on invisible string but the background lined with dead trees was taken out and repaired. The boy's bubble gum was enlarged, the dog was placed using Photoshop on to the pant leg, the head of the boy looking up the skirt was turned upward and a tattoo was taken off the models shoulder. After all touch-ups, repairs and changes, I imported them into Adobe Illustrator. It was there that my design was applied to reinforce the concept.