For third-year Fashion and Textiles student Jessie-Gray Thornton, it took lots of wrong knotting techniques, many hours of dedication and sheer hard work to conceptualise and design her mind-blowing technical range. She walked away with the coveted Best Technical Range award during the annual DUT Fashion Show 2016 finale held at the Fred Crookes Sports Centre, DUT Steve Biko Campus.
Themed: After Earth, 35 student designers were asked to explore their own vision of our next world. With this broad theme, students had to look at what their beliefs in fashion were and what they wished to portray to the outside world. The best 20 ranges were then chosen and showcased at the finale.
“I was not expecting to win but hard work pays off. I’m so glad that the judges took notice of the amount of work and effort that went into making these garments and also appreciating my fashion style depicting the theme as well,” said Thornton.
The talented designer’s garments, which were all hand-made, entailed garments being made out of the ancient the art of maccramé, which came into existence in the medieval times when the Arab people would knot the excess threads on the edges of their clothing, creating decorative plaits and fringes.
“I just played around with different fabrics with the maccramé technique so it was something that I am really passionate about. Not knowing how my garments would turn out was scary but it all worked out well. The real challenge came when I began fitting the garments onto the models and the difficult part was ensuring that the hand-made garments made out of the knotted-technique was fitting the models perfectly, so for me the process of designing took much longer than the other designers,” she said.
Thornton’s future plans as a budding designer are to continue making hand-technique garments and to also incorporate her love of interior design into her fashion work.
– Waheeda Peters
Pictured: Jesssie-Gray Thornton with models wearing her collection which scooped the Best Technical Range award at the 2016 DUT Annual Fashion Show.
