It is time to start the INSIDE THE FASHION INDUSTRY blog series and dig deeper into all the steps to develop a successful clothing line. Choosing your inspiration and creating your mood board is the first step, so, as I promised, let’s start with first things first.
In previous blog posts, I wrote about choosing your inspiration, creating your mood board, and choosing trends, now let’s put that information into practice.
Steps and tips for choosing your inspiration and creating your mood board.
1. Inspiration can be anything
Your inspiration can be anywhere. Legit, anywhere! The design in front of a door, the colors of a rainy day, a season, a historical period… Anything that can bring you joy and stimulate your creativity can become your theme.
Keeping the inspiration ideas open is great because there are absolutely no limits to what you can do/use to design your collection, but that can also be an issue since you have all the options in the world. If you are having creative blocks, the theme you chose will give you style, design, and color direction, and will, later on, help you with creative direction for your photoshoot.
Your theme does not have to be something physical. Your inspiration can be a poem or a historical moment - anything that makes you think and brings images to your head.
Searching trends, creating a list of things that you like and inspire you will help narrow down some ideas. Once you have your favorite topic to use as inspiration, you are good to start on your mood board.
2. Inspiration and mood board walk together, but they are not the same thing
Like I mentioned, your inspiration can be something intangible. When you are choosing a poem, for example, the poem gives you different emotions and those are the feelings and images you will search to start creating your mood board.
Trend research is always important, but choosing your inspiration and starting selecting pictures related to your theme is what will help you when you are ready to start sketching and selecting colors.
3. The final mood board
Ok, your mood board needs to be a selection of the best pictures from your inspiration. No, throwing a bunch of pictures together is not going to help you, it will just look messy and will make you confused. Selecting pictures and putting them together is what will help your creativity to bloom and (very important) it will give you a direction in colors and fabrics to use on your collection.
Again, your pictures do not have to be the exact reflection of your inspiration. Your mood board can obtain pictures of your inspiration along with pictures of the trend research. Adding a couple of trends to your mood board will keep you on track of the season you are planning on launching and make sure that you are not designing an entire collection of garments that will not sell.
4. Conceptual collection
When you are designing a conceptual collection things can happen a little differently. Conceptual collections are to show a concept (DUH!) and not exactly to sell a product or streetwear garments. So when designing a conceptual collection you want to look at maxi trends (very well represented in Nelly Rodi books), but not seasonal trends.
Here is an example of a maxi trend mood border I created - back in the day when in fashion school.
Now, with these tips and directions, you can start working on your inspiration and mood board. If you do not plan on doing that right now, I hope you found some good insights here.
For the next step, we will look back to your mood board and start the hands-on part, sketching your collection.
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