Olivia Hearnshaw
Olivia Hearnshaw is a womenswear designer recently graduating from the University of Brighton, where she studied Fashion Design with Business Studies. Previous experience includes internships at Richard Nicoll and French Connection. Her inspiration and aesthetic is strongly influenced by shape, mood and simplicity, her graduate collection explores circular pattern cutting.
Olivia’s graduate collection ‘The Importance of Ma’ explores mood and shape through the Japanese concept of ‘Ma, concentrating on the interaction between body and movement and how it can influence and define a garments final form. The concept of ‘Ma’ can be referred to as the negative space between the garment and the body, a space that interacts with movement to transform a silhouette. The collection conveys a quiet, poetic and harmonious mood, which is played off against awkward austerity; there becomes an oddity amongst the subtlety. Exploring this mood through shape and form, focusing around a process of circular flat pattern cutting and draping. Shapes become displaced and distorted and the fluidity continuously changes the form, transforming two-dimensional shape combinations, letting the fabric fall and curve and build organic shapes. This collection explores the beauty of things modest and simple, quiet and harmonious yet with an element of the extreme and unusual.
