My name is Chelsea Keating and I have been studying Visual Merchandising and Display the last three years. Doing this course has allowed me to explore my creativity and gain a lot of new skills, and I got an insight into what it takes to be in the Visual Merchandising industry. I have done previous fashion courses, and studying Visual Merchandising made me realise that I want to be in the creative side of fashion.
For my Major Project, I had the honor to do my display in my work placement Brown Thomas. Studying the trends coming into the store, such as Twilight tropics and the Spring/Summer trend Euphoric, both played a role in my inspiration for my display. My display is called “Fit is the newFashion,” as I wanted to explain to the Brown Thomas customer that why can't every aspect of the day be a runway? Strong fashion sense and strong women feeling good while working on themselves. This year the trends are all about feeling good, bright colours and women feeling their best selves. I introduced a Tropical twilight background to give an outdoor feel to my display as my mannequins were working out. Sex and the City played a huge role in my display. Their reboot series “And just like that” inspired me. As the characters in the episode matured, they refused not to dress stylishly and continued their high fashion style no matter what task they were doing. My concept considered this, and therefore my theme is style and strong women getting into shape no matter what age. You will see the famous characters dressed in their best looks in my display. Fuchsia pink was the hero colour in my display as I wanted my floor and exercise equipment in all the same colour. My chosen looks had a combination of pinks and greens to go with my fuchsia pink floor and equipment, and the element of green in the looks matched my background. The props that I have made for my display were tropical leaves, these were made on a laser cutter. My thought process of having tropicalleaves created to use for props was because I wanted my backdrop to look 3D and to have leaves that gave a tropical forest vibe to my display.
The Found Object brief that I had to create a display for was a second-year project, this was a brief that I had much fun with and got to put my creative skills to the test. For the Found Object brief, my role was to create a display on any found object that I had at home as it was during the Covid 19 pandemic lockdown. The reason behind this brief was to create eye-catching displays with items that we already have. The found object that I decided to use for my display was a Blue Wkd bottle. I decided to use this as my found object because during the lockdown, pubs, nightclubs, and any place to have fun was closed. The bottles that I had were leftover in my house as that was the only place at the time where young people could enjoy a drink at the weekend. It was coming into Summer, and my home had leftover bottles, and I used this as inspiration to create something eye-catching. My idea was to spray-paint the bottles into a Summertime palette of blues, pink, yellow, and green. I used dark blue paint in the background to give a beach feel to my display, as my idea was to have my styling stand out while having an ocean blue background. I broke my glass into tiny parts and spray-painted them to fit onto a skirt, this turned out well as the skirt appeared as if it was made of stained glass. I used the bottle caps to create a bralette. I added some of the leftover bottles into the corners of my display to show the bright colours and to portray the prop that I have chosen. I thoroughly enjoyed this brief as I had to really think of what I could create with things in my house. I enjoyed designing a skirt made of glass as it was challenging, and I learned how to problem-solve. I also enjoyed the aspect of designing a bralette out of bottle caps as it looked like a wearable piece of clothing.