Tuesday 10 November 2009

24 hours in the life of a David David intern: An exclusive glimpse into the fashion industry




Hannah is a Textile Design student in her 3rd year at Central St.Martin’s, specialising in printed textiles. When she got an insider’s glimpse into the studio of London-based, Grimsby-born fashion designer David David this summer, we asked her to tell us all about the glitz, glamour and perspex handbags of the fashion industry.


10.30am
I arrive at the Conduit Street studio, where David Saunders works with his brother Michael. It is a creative and friendly place to work. I got a good feeling from it right from the beginning, when I applied for an internship there. The majority of fashion design studios want fashion students and so there is a limited places available for those studying textiles. Most studios never got back to my emails or CVs and although I managed to get a few interviews I was starting to lose hope! I saw David David's website and really loved his work so I called him up. He offered to interview me the following day.

11.00am
I meet my colleague Tom (who is super stylish by the way), another intern here. Tom is studying menswear design at Ravensbourne University in Kent. At the beginning of my internship I worked with him a lot, usually helping him trace and cut out garment patterns.

1.00pm
I shop for materials and collect some fabric swatches. I get to do some experimenting with inks and printing methods.I get sent to visit quite a few places including boutiques, markets, PR offices, factories and printing offices. This was great as I found out about lots of companies that would be useful to me in the future. David's designs are really colourful, geometric and quite quirky. Although his most recent Spring/Summer 2010 womenswear collection is really sophisticated, using beautiful colours. The cut of the garment is simple and the idea is to have a blank canvas onto which David can incorporate his colourful designs.

3.00pm
I am busy sewing handbags. David designed a hand bag made from laser cut pieces of perspex. It took a good couple of hours to sew them together, some re-doing as I managed to make some mistakes but the end result was great. The bags look lovely! As it got closer to London Fashion Week it got much busier, getting all the sample's ready for David David's presentation and video shoot. There was a lot of pattern cutting involved. I was nervous as there was no more room for mistakes!

5.00pm
I say bye and head off home. It was nice to work in a small studio as I got to see how David works with Michael who manages the business sides of things. It was a small group of us. I met really nice people and over all it was a great experience to see how the fashion industry works. The best bit about the internship was that it was great to finally see the collection come together at the LFW presentation. I dream about the day I’ll get to have some creative input, maybe design some print pieces for the collection. That would be just great!


David has said that the inspiration behind his Spring/Summer 2010 collection was “Japanese geometrics, vodka and coloured glass.” Based on this we really feel you ought to check it out.

MK & HJ

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