Rowena Luke-King

When designing fashion fabrics it is easy to lose sight of the fact that you are not only working within an extremely competitive ever changing industry, but that once your designs have been converted into cloth, they will be cut and made into clothes. It is therefore essential to carry out extensive trend and market research to ensure that your designs are not only appropriate for clothing, but are right for the fashion season for which you are working. During this course you will investigate the international fashion textile market, analysing current trends, designer collections, forecast information and influential world events. You will look at the work of trend forecasters and textile designers whilst you develop a presentation board that illustrates your own fashion fabric predictions. You will be introduced to hand dyeing whilst creating colour swatches to illustrate your fashion colour predictions and you will experiment with transfer printing, applique and hand embroidery whilst producing textile designs to support your presentation. No previous experience is needed for this course which combines an interest in both fashion and textiles and which will give you the confidence to start forecasting trends and designing fashion fabrics yourself.

Rowena Luke-King has had an extremely diverse career in design. She has worked as a designer and colour consultant for textile design studios and leading retailers such as Marks & Spencer and NEXT. She has produced collections of clothes, accessories, hand printed fabrics, greetings cards and wrapping papers for a number of stores including Fiorucci and has worked as a stylist in the music industry (stage clothes that she created for 'Adam and the Ants' have been exhibited in the Victoria & Albert Museum). Rowena studied fashion and textiles at Central Saint Martins and is currently involved in sourcing vintage fabrics for the fashion industry.