Julian Roberts is one of the artists that I’ve looked at in the Fashion rotation. His ways of creating garments, the cutting and the simplicity have honestly grasped my attention. Because of this task, I dug in-depth of where his inspirations came from,  who and what influenced him and helped him to carry on experimenting towards the final masterpiece.

This is one of Julian Roberts’s early work from a catwalk show. Tunnel technique was used to create and design the garment, which is also known as the subtraction cutting. Two fabrics composed the garment: the white ink-wash style contrast with plain dotty orange fabric. But the flowing lines and drapes establish the elegancy successfully without being distracted by the collision of the exciting orange and the bright yellow. According to Roberts’ other works, he kept the simplicity of the bodies throughout most of his subtraction cutting works, then his concentration will be investigating the essence of the tailoring method.

From my research about Julian Roberts’ working process, his type of tailoring does not consist of the precise accuracy of the measurement, and he would often have the fabric two times longer than the body length or even more. Hence, the creativity that he can spread on one piece of cloth won’t be limited.

However, this particular garment has more elements on decorating, visual awareness than many of his other works where he was obsessed with exploring the potential of subtraction cutting and make interesting shapes and forms to give the clothing different volumes. Although some of the garments might look a bit elementary, it does involve some attractive colour combination and illustrate the beauty of lines, creasing and draping with a quite straightforward format. In addition, it’s this style of simplicity that makes the garment effective and delicate which applies to the Japanese designers who has influenced and inspired him.

Reference :

[1] Tumblr (2001) Subtraction Cutting by Julian Roberts. Available from: http://julianand.com/ [ Accessed 17 October]

[2] University of Derby (2016) Julian Roberts Fashion Designer at the University of Derby Part 1. Available from:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2xnUoCVWbI [Accessed 30 October]

[3] University of Derby (2016) Julian Roberts Fashion Designer at the University of Derby Part 2. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC25scyJx9U [Accessed 30 October]