the taryn zhang blog

Issue after issue has cropped up and now, when I was supposed to get the first round of samples by Christmas of last year, I won’t be getting the samples even in time for Valentine’s Day. March 2010 is the new projected finish date. March. That means we’re 10 weeks behind schedule.

When I started on the debut collection in Fall 2009 with (what seemed at the time as) the distant future launch date of Fall 2010, I questioned whether I was being a bit of an early bird, starting a full year in advance. Clearly I was not. At this point, it will be rush-rush just to meet the Fall 2010 goal. I’ve still got quality testing to do, photo shoots, lookbooks, line sheets, dossiers, meetings with prospective buyers, arranging for a visit to Guangzhou, corporate and administrative stuff and of course, production of the debut collection and final QA. All I can do at the moment is pray that it will all work out in the end and when the samples do finally arrive in March, work like an ox. (Oxen are stereotypically hard workers, right?)

On a happy note, the factory seems to be working in earnest and in good faith to do everything it can to materialize my vision.

Sitting in my "corner office." This is where I design.

I am reminded again why I love books. You may learn anything you need to learn from books, like fashion and design.

The books that are teaching me more than I ever presumed I would need to know:

Helen J. Armstrong, Patternmaking for Fashion Design (Prentice Hall 3rd ed. 1999);

Gini S. Frings, Fashion: From Concept to Consumer (Prentice Hall 9th ed. 2007);

Sharon L. Tate, Inside Fashion Design (Prentice Hall 5th ed. 2003);

Kathryn McKelvey and Janine Munslow, Fashion Design: Process, Innovation and Practice (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003); and

Mary Gehlhar, The Fashion Designer Survival Guide (Kaplan Publishing, 2008).

It’s like law school all over again. I’m highlighting passages, placing little color-flag-stickies (I have no idea what they’re formally called) to bookmark the chapters I want to reread, and taking notes. For Gehlhar’s book, I even started an outline.

There is an academic element to fashion and since I lack the degree from a design school, this is my best alternative. I found the titles to these books by searching online for design school syllabuses (or syllabi? apparently both forms of the plural are correct) and noting the required readings posted by the instructors. The above five books were the ones I decided on.

Samples production for the Alpha Collection isn’t even complete yet and I am already eager to apply the knowledge I’ve learned from these books to design the Beta Collection. Nuts.

I am making a “last minute” change to the Alpha Collection. In the initial lineup, I designed a bowler bag, The Postmodernist. For the woman who “defies convention, that woman who is simple when it should be complicated, complicated when it should be simple, a woman with nonlinear aspirations and motivations, the woman who needs enough space in her handbag for Derrida…”

The Postmodernist

The two columns of horizontal lines are pleats and the sides are a combination of smooth material and draping. The back “V” are folder pockets. The Postmodernist was going to be another large bag, alongside The Overachiever and The Workaholic, and while I need a bag that can fit half my office desk and three-fifths of my bathroom counter and still leave room for portable nourishment (snack bar, fruit, etc.), not everybody else is a pack rat. I started to entertain my sister C.’s suggestion, to include a clutch.

I’m not a personal fan of clutches, generally. They don’t make sense to me. Why would I want to manually clutch a purse when I could hook one over my shoulder and leave both hands free? That in mind, I set about designing a clutch for my sister C. and also one that could offer the option of a chain that someone like me could whip out and use.

My intent was to simply modify The Postmodernist design, from bowler bag to clutch, but then I confronted the unanswerable questions “What is postmodernism? What does it mean to be postmodernist?”

Not the can of worms a designer handbags and accessories business needs to open, no sirree. Man, what was I thinking before when I named a purse “The Postmodernist”?! Plus, while I believe that the above bowler bag design could get away with being called Postmodernist, nothing else I was coming up with could! I scrapped the idea of The Postmodernist handbag altogether and went with something different, or sort of different…

The Modernist

And naming this clutch The Modernist makes so much more sense, which will be explained in the description blurbs on the website once I’ve gathered and organized my thoughts.

This is no tiny wallet-sized clutch, no. This clutch is made to fit a slim issue of a literary journal, a small paperback novel, a book of poetry or pen and notebook, fulfilling a requirement that I would have of any clutch I’d buy. You may now go to that fancy evening function in style and still have on your person your favorite book or Moleskine for those spurts of inspiration.

The gray TZ thing is a metal plaque with the Taryn Zhang logo embossed into it, either silver-tone or gold-tone depending on the style selected. I know it looks crappy in the line drawing I did in MS Paint (which, by the way, is the program I use to do the technical drawings; I know, so sophisticated), but I hope the actual thing will look fabulous.

I’m going through reams of color/fabric swatches right now for the exterior and interior lining of the handbags. (I’m not choosing any of the materials in the image above; image exists up there for blog presentation purposes only.) The time spent so far on swatches has been longer than anticipated, but I hope it will pay off in the end.

If left to my own devices, I admit I would probably opt for a genuine leather line. However, my cute vegetarian kid sister has sent threats to skin me alive and wear me if I use leather, so I’m slowly sifting through my eco-friendly options. For an animal lover, she’s quite amenable to cruelty to humans. =)

I have never been good at math, and that is putting it mildly. I actively sought out paths that would take me as far from math as possible. It worked, for a while, but now boom. Here it is. Math. In purse-making. Or more specifically, in pattern-making.

For instance, geometry. (I think it’s geometry…that’s how bad my math is…I don’t even know what form of math the math is called.)

A few nights ago before bed, I read “The Library of Babel” again (by Jorge Luis Borges) and then dreamt of hexagons. I woke up the next morning with a determination to make a hexagonal handbag.

I quickly realized a hexagonal handbag would look quite stupid, so I settled for a hexagon-inspired handbag. Either way, the pattern would need to start with a hexagon, and I couldn’t for the life of me draw a regular hexagon.

Then junior high geometry rose up from the purlieus of my memory and went “Boo.” Internal angles…120 degrees.. total 720 degrees…something about diametrically opposite vertices…and I would have to buy a compass. My father used to have a set, yes a set of stainless steel compasses that came in a solid wood and velvet box. I had thought to myself, wow, dorkus maximus, but now the idea of owning a set of stainless steel compasses that come in a solid wood and velvet box quite tickles me.

Calculating proportions, circumferences, diameters, all these I have had to do to make the purse patterns; allocations and costing sheets, figuring out yardage of fabric required for the patterns, and even foolishly converting inches to centimeters before finding an online calculator that does it for you. Math is far more pervasive in the arts than I’m comfortable with. On one side of my work table, there’s the sewing machine and mounds of fabric. On the other side, there’s a ruler, protractor, calculator, graph paper, and now I need to add a compass to that collection of stuff I thought I would never use again after I left high school.

I don’t know how other designers do it. Pattern-making is a royal [EXPLETIVES REDACTED]. But it’s the only way to keep costs down, to do it myself. I’ve already established that I can’t realistically sew and make the purses myself and sell them. My sewing skills are somewhere at the level of my math skills. See earlier blog posts and photos for proof of that. So I really, really want to at the very least be able to provide the patterns, and not hire a pattern-maker. That means I’ve gotta sharpen up those math skills. Let the good times roll.