One of my frequently asked questions is, “How do you come up with ideas?” Well, the truth is that I am constantly filling my “creative pot.” Design isn’t just a single moment of inspiration. It’s a process that might begin with an indescribable eureka flash but requires a method to move from idea to a completed project.
Designing a Black Cape
One of the small projects on my plate is a black cape. My design brief was simple, a velvet and beaded lace cape or capelet that gives a Victorian or Edwardian impression. What fun! Once I had a general idea about what my client was interested in, it was time to begin my favorite stage of design, research!
Costume Research: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
These seven black capes are all from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Their website has a searchable database of their collection. The Costume Institute houses the collections of both the Met and the Brooklyn Museums. It is one of my absolute favorite places to conduct research about historic costume. www.metmuseum.org
I simply put “black” and “cape” into the search bar and it gave me lots of examples of capes. Of course, being an art museum, it also offered me works of art featuring cape designs as well. While there’s nothing wrong with works of art, I used the advanced search features to hone the search down to garments.
Costume Research: Pinterest
No search for historical costumes would be complete without hitting my favorite image storehouse, Pinterest. What I like most about the Pinterest website is that it allows you to collect and organize images from around the web into useful pinboards that you can refer to often. You can even customize captions, making notes to yourself about the images you save.
I keep images of capes on a Pinterest board labeled “Steampunk Inspirations.” I spent some time adding a few more images to my board as I poked around the Pinterest website and then further out onto the web for examples of short black capes.
Pinterest is a free website that anyone can join and use as often or as little as you like. As a designer, I find it particularly useful for organizing visual data and storing it in the cloud for later use.
Costume Research: Books
Perhaps it’s a little old school to refer to books, but since I’ve collected a lot of costuming books over the years, I took a moment to 
pull some of my favorites to see if there were any images that I found particularly useful. My collection includes many exhibition guides and I really love having an excuse to pull one out and look for inspiration.
Costume Research: General Web Search
My last go-to strategy for costume research is to hit the web and do some basic searches. I could pour for hours over hundreds if not thousands of images and pages. So, to keep from falling into the research rabbit hole, I begin by making a list of search terms. I write this list down and pay attention to which terms work. When I find things I like, I pin them to my Pinterest board for future retrieval. In case you might be wondering, I always start with Google and then move on to Bing and use the same search terms, often with different results.
But now it’s time to get on with this project!
Off to sew,
Dawn Devine ~ Davina
Friday, November 17, 2017