Keystage 2 - Textiles - Design a costume

Look at some of the brightly coloured Indian clothes in this website. This activity helps you to design an Indian costume of your own. It should you a taste of some of the processes designers go through. However, another aim would be to use the Plant Cultures website to explore the colour and excitement of Indian fashion.
  

Webquest

Research
First look at some of the pictures of Indian costumes on this website. Some are modern photos and others are from old paintings and carvings.
Modern:
Wedding with bright coloured clothes
Wedding ceremony
Preparing paan for a wedding
Garlic preparation
Story of the mango in dance
Sumati Shah holding chillies
Tea pickers

Historic:
A Muslim noble and his wife
Muslim soldiers in armour and robes
Carved wooden figures

For a wider range of Indian patterns visit:
Textiles of India Gallery
McClung Museum

Mood board
Now collect all your ideas together and make a mood board. This is a poster with pictures from magazines and the internet including close up details of symbols and patterns. It may also include actual samples of materials. Don’t forget to label all the things you include, saying why you chose them. You should be able to catch the mood of Indian costume with its bright colours and rich patterns, with gold threads and jewellery.

You might like to use ideas from nature in your costume, perhaps collecting pictures of plants and leaves from this website.

Design ideas
Decide whether you are designing a costume for a boy, girl, man or woman. There are simpler garments like saris and shawls, or more complicated costumes such as kurtas (long dresses for girls or loose fitting shirts for boys, often with embroidery at the neck). Saris take a lot of material – 5.5. metres long by about 2 metres wide.

Today Asian men’s costumes are less colourful than women’s but in Mughal India the men wore more interesting clothes like in these pictures below.

Muslim man and his wife Muslim soldiers
Draw or trace a figure for your design, like a dummy in a shop window. For help with this you could visit this Fashion design tutorial. You can download fashion templates for a boy and a girl here[link to .pdf document]. Use the figures to make your clothes look realistic.

Using your research and your mood board, sketch out a few Indian designs on thin paper or tracing paper over your fashion templates. Try to get across the idea of the clothing, rather than going into too much detail. Remember to draw it from the front and the back, and don’t forget to label it.

Final design
Now choose your final design and work it up into an attractive colour drawing. Include close ups of some of the design features such as embroidery, buttons, fastenings, seams, coloured thread and accessories. If possible, include samples of the material you would like to use in your garment.