Football/Fashion Design

Football Fashion Design

Teachers Notes

I originally wrote this scheme to guide pupils through the design process by creating designs for football kits. I felt the boys would be engaged because of the football theme and the girls due to the fashion design element.

Early on it became apparent that the mention of football was a big turn off for the girls. I find that by flagging up the fashion and designer label aspect of the scheme and the flexibility within the scheme for the girls to create ‘designer T-shirts’, as opposed to football shirts, kept the girls interested and both girls and boys are happy to complete their research and devise either Fashion Design Team names in the knowledge that they would then work with this as a ‘fashion label’ or Football Team names. This allows all pupils to follow the same lesson plans under the titles of football or fashion.

I created resource boards showing designer fashion and football fashion. This allowed the pupils to identify with well known designers and design teams like Puma and Nike or Burberry and Yves St. Lauren. These pictures I took from Sunday magazines and for copyright reasons this is the only resource I have not been able to include. These boards can be produced at little cost and are essential to show fashion design in context and prompt class discussions about contemporary designers.

Animal books are generally in plentiful supply. I find that it is helpful to use a collection of numbered volumes because this eases the distribution of books in subsequent lessons. Photographed animals are more desirable as a drawing exercise but less able pupils achieve good results if studying drawn images.

I have created three power point presentations. The first, filed with these notes, shows the project in its entirety. It illustrates the design process from locating a design source to drawing, abstracting pattern, exploring other media in collage, printing repeat patterns, experimenting with scale and colour ways and creating a photomontage. Throughout, there is exemplar work and examples from my own classes. I have not allocated this to a lesson as I feel that introducing this too early may influence the pupils’ research choices, by lesson 4 this may become helpful with the direction of the project.

The second presentation filed with lesson 1 is aimed at introducing the project in terms of establishing the importance of colours and patterns as means of group identification this is intended to inform inspire and stimulate discussion, leading the class towards research into designers of sportswear and fashion and independent/pair research into animal patterns as a design source.

The third presentation filed with lesson 2 explores some design sources for pattern making.

I hope you find these helpful. I have also added samples of I.T. alternatives to a number of the more practical lessons, which could be used in place of, or in addition to, the existing lesson plans.

There are 12 lesson plans in this scheme of work.The project can run for a whole term or alternatively most of the lesson can stand alone if required.