Marcos Chin

My Draping Class

On my way into Manhattan over the weekend, I thought about how strange it felt to be finished with something. Teaching ended a couple of weeks ago, and today was the last day of my continuing education course in "Draping" at the Fashion Institute of Technology. I began this course knowing very little about clothing construction and was very much intimidated at the beginning stages of the course. But as I moved along, slowly - very slowly - unfamiliar information began to sink into my brain that  hardened into fresh skills, which then turned into new memories that stayed in my muscles to enable me to cut, and press, and manipulate fabric pieces in such a way to give it three-dimensional form.

Neck to neck

Centre-front to centre-front

Waist to waist

Apex to apex

Hip to hip

Draping class taught us how to create bodices, skirts, and dresses by draping fabric onto a body form (mannequin). The repetition of our movements of placing and then removing fabric onto the body-form; the sequence of marking and pinning the fabric at specific points; the repetition of words spoken to oneself aloud, all finally resolved into a procedure that eventually felt very natural. 

For months I've been waiting for that moment when my process would begin to feel intuitive; when I could understand where to cut the fabric, where to mark it, and how to position it. As I've been illustrating professionally for just over ten years now, I've forgotten what it feels like to have to follow directions from start to finish within my creative process. When I draw for clients, there is a kind of predictability; it needs to exist because it allows me to gauge how long it will take for me to create a drawing from start to finish. In commercial art, where deadlines are pressing, there is seldom enough room or time to be fumbling around on a drawing only for it to result in a not-so-good result. That's not to say that I understand, nor am I able to predict exactly how my final illustrations will look like; however, I will admit for the most part that I do. Those moments in my illustration process where "happy accidents" occur, still exist, but it's contained within a small fraction of my process. The type of illustrations that I do don't lend themselves very well to an expressionistic way of working. My drawings are tight, and my process is very much methodical insofar as my having a definitive start, middle and end point.  If I had to, I could probably reproduce my existing work, and although it would not be 100% accurate, I would come pretty close. Having to refer to notes, or to stop and pause for a long moment about what my next step will be when I'm drawing commercially, doesn't happen very often, and so when I'm called to do this in class, each week, at every single moment to guide me through the various stages of design and construction, it felt strange. 

But over time, I used my notes less and less, and began to hear myself whisper in tandem with the teacher's voice in my head,

Neck to Neck

Centre-front to centre-front

Waist to Waist

Apex to Apex

Hip to Hip

... these were words that my Professor repeatedly spoke in a steady voice to the class instructing us where to pin the fabric on the parts of the body form throughout the draping process. 

There was something so very ritualistic, therapeutic, and meditative about all of this. Every Saturday morning for 7 to 8 hours,  my classmates and I made something from nothing; like alchemists turning stone into silver; we turned pieces of muslin into dresses. We seldom took breaks, and ate quickly during our lunches so that we could get back to our work as quickly as possible, measuring and marking, cutting and pinning our fabric onto our dress-forms,

Neck to neck

Centre-front to centre-front

Waist to waist

Apex to apex

Hip to hip