Florals are one of the most popular patterns on fabric. Walk into a clothing store and a floral print is guaranteed to cover a few garments. I myself have designed or refined a bunch of florals for Mata Traders like the Roses print and the Falling Florals print. You might be asking what makes this floral print different?
One of many images from StyleSite Trend Forecast for Spring 2014.
We always start by looking at the trend forecasts to see if there is something we can adapt for the clothing we make. The image above hooked us in. Check out how intricate the designs are and how the colors are so vibrant that they pop off the screen! I immediately started researching tropical and local flowers of Brazil and started drawing. I had pages of sketches but ended up using 2 main flowers as my focal images to then construct the grand repeat. For weeks I worked on using 4 or 5 vibrant colors weaving them in-between each flower in a vision of a dress bursting with an energetic floral. Towards the end of the design period, reality set in and the entire design team realized that we needed to change our perspective on this specific print.
Yes, having a super crazy colorful dress would be awesome but how many of these colors can we really get with the natural dyes from our cooperatives? Would 5 colors be too much to produce? What if it doesn't translate to a dress? With a new vision, we scaled the colors back from 5 to 2, we produced the print on a large scale and made one color variation in similar blues and one in red and purple.
From right: Parisian Book Shop Dress & Isle of the Sky Dress
The dresses came back wonderfully! The scaling back of color makes these dresses seem so much more sophisticated. The Isle of the Sky Dress in the blue fabric is calming and almost has a floating feel to it, while the Parisian Bookshop Dress in the red and purple color combo is vibrant and gives of a dramatic vibe.
This is a perfect example of evolution in a print. We started with a wild vision of different Brazilian flowers cascading in many colors across dresses and ended up with a simpler and calmer version. The design team had to figure out how this fun and crazy trend could work for us and our abilities and facilities and in the end created a wonderful print.