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

We want more Anish Kapoor: the Indian sculptor's Royal Academy exhibition under review

REVIEW: Forty fully-grown adults stand in the Large Weston Room of the Royal Academy of Arts staring intently at what art students describe as 'a ritual arena in which a symbollic act of repeated violence is allowed to occur.' What this means in ordinary speak is staring at the wall waiting for a cannon to fire twenty-pound shells of wax into the wall. Every twenty minutes.

We all jump as the red wax hits it at fifty miles an hour and splashes all across the carved ceiling. A member of staff informs me that they've tried to fire the gun less regularly as the already reinforced walls of the Royal Academy are starting to cave under the pressure of Anish Kapoor's Shooting into the Corner. Even larger in scale is Svayambh, an installation occupying five galleries that will make you watch a block of wax move through doorways at snail pace for up to 45 minutes depending on how stupid you are and how long it takes you to work out it isn't going to do anything more interesting anytime soon. It smells of wax and looks so gloopy you want to touch it. In fact some idiot has already left finger prints (in spite of the rules).

More true to his usual work are Yellow and Non-objects which have the clean lines and shiny surfaces that Kapoor is well known for. They too are imposing and visually thrilling. For the most part, however, the clever part isn't the geometry or the philosophical grounding of his work. It's the fact that he's made forty fully grown adults stare at the wall waiting for some wax to fly. And then he's made them realise how absurdly idiotic they've been.

The exhibition is running until 11th December. So go see it for goodness sake.

MK

Talkin' 'bout my generation: From Generation X to X Factor!

Sarah*, 22, an undergraduate, still feels burning shame when recalling her dad's 60th birthday party. After knocking back her third Vodka Coke, she was about ready to hail a cab and pass out in it. Her dad and his entourage of aging city bankers, were just getting started.



Young people like Sarah* are not alone in their reluctance to party as hard as the freedom pass wielders lurking in the corner of your average Central London nightclub. According to sociologists, cycles of generational change can adequately explain this distressing phenomenon. Repelled by the behaviour of our parents, the theory goes that we’re disinclined to repeat their mistakes. Thus, Generation Y has embraced stability and conventional values just as vehemently as the babyboomers had rebelled against them. According to popular American authors, Strauss and Howe, we’re also locked in a cycle of ‘crisis’; unlike our parents who had a major war behind them, we feel that the episodic disasters since the 90s are part of a build-up to a catastrophe of even greater proportions.

A survey of 100 University of London students suggest that we are simply more traditional and stable than our parents: 72% claimed to be in a relationship and when pressed on their drug taking, 68% only' fessed up to the odd toke of a 'dubie' at a particularly riotous house party. My own experiences corroborate this; while my American mother loves to remind me how she skipped her high school prom in favour of an anti war demonstration, my most rebellious memories revolve around smuggling contraband Smirnoff Ice past an overzealous PE teacher. Contrary to the media hype of today’s troubled youth, the US News World Report released in May 1999, reported that alcohol consumption among 17- 18 year olds had dropped from 20% since 1980 and drug usage, teen pregnancy and homicide rates had also decreased.

The recent Taylor Swift and Kanye West scandal was both an example of MTV's marketing genius, and proof that the public will side with the innocent girl next door over the bad boy, who even the President deigned to call a 'jackass' on national television. Whereas the babyboomers and Generation X had made rock gods out of the Rolling Stones, Kurt Cobain and the Sex Pistols, our pop stars are so PG that a stint on the Disney channel now seems to be a prerequisite to career success. Even the iPhone has jumped on the 'born-again' bandwagon, with a new application available this month where users can download a purity ring for just 59p.



Advances in science have confounded our piteous attempts at rebellion as quite frankly, we know too much. While our parents could legitimately argue that they didn't know that cigarettes were bad for you, a typical pack of Marlboro Lites could confront you with anything from images of decaying, yellowing organs to warnings of 'low sperm counts'. As a result, we're no longer interested in the romanticism of the 'live fast, die young' message and instead we want to remain healthy and wrinkle free for as long as possible. Generation Y are also more fiscally cautious. As demonstrated by the rather uplifting Times ad campaign featuring a graduating class under a giant banner with the words “unemployment is at an all time high”, it's no longer viable for us to believe that a good education will automatically pave the way for a comfortable, middle-class life. Instead of partying through our student years without a care in the world, we're facing a prospect of insurmountable overdraft in a limited graduate job market. Joy.

The sad fact is that sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll have been replaced by puppy love, Pinot Grigio and sentimental Indie music. On the upside, if there’s any truth to the pendulum theory, we owe it to our future children to make the most out of our youth, lest Generation Z become a population of pill poppers. So the next time you're contemplating a night in to watch the X Factor, just say no.

CF