low life - high fashion
Tora Collective
The Tora Collective is the result of a collaboration project done for an upper division art class that focused on pushing designers, painters, and photographers together to create interdisciplinary work. For this particular project, myself and two other classmates decided to produce a mock fashion company. Tora Collective is a fashion brand based around curating and re- branding clothing found in thrift stores. After defining the brand identity based off of a combination of tattoo imagery (specifically the Bert Grimm tiger) and Japanese fashion, we went shopping for outfits that fit our brand's identity.
My teammates took charge of painting and embroidering the clothing, while I art directed two fashion shoots, and designed for social media.
For the first shoot I used Ilford HP5 4x5 film which I supplemented with color images from my Canon 6D.
The second shoot was just digital, and featured the other outfits that had been finished since the first shoot.
The final and most extensive part of the project for me was designing the Instagram page. I knew that I wanted to create a feed design that allowed for interaction between the individual posts while also maintaining cohesion within each square, but I didn't really know where to start. I ended creating 3x3 grids within Photoshop so as to allow for elements that carried over between each post. These grids were individually cropped and saved to allow for a smooth transition from Photoshop to Instagram.
This allowed for integration between photos, illustrations, and typography to create a unique and cohesive layout that worked within Instagram as a medium to maximize its potential for design.
