AW21 'Earth to Sky' - Paper Cloth Cutting the New Collection!
Our mission, our cause and our fundamental reason for existing is to provide employment and training to refugee and new migrant communities, particularly women. We tend to focus a lot on the former, but our new collection has provided us with an opportunity to focus on the latter!
This season, we had the absolute honour of working with a new member to The Social Outfit Fam Bam - Alice Cliff from Paper Cloth Cut. A superstar creative pattern cutter who has worked with Alexander McQueen & Chloé, Alice visited The Social Outfit and generously offered her time in running a workshop with the aim of up-skilling and teaching new pattern cutting skills to our team.
The workshop was a huge success, with several of our new styles being ideated, prototyped and developed in the workshop! Alice brought all of her extensive pattern cutting knowledge to the cutting table (pun intended) and shared it with each of our sewing technicians.
One of the styles developed was our gorgeous Noir Weave Wrap Skirt
I spent two days with five wonderful women who were so excited to learn. We started with some exercises in half scale to explore how to add volume and seams to the basic dress pattern, we then worked together to make the wrap dress in full scale. The women cut and sewed the first sample in calico and a few tried it on the test the size and volume. After a few small alterations we then used this pattern to create a wrap skirt in two versions.
From this dress, we were also able to develop the Abstract Forest Wrap Dress and Olive Ruffle Wrap Skirt!
