The Perfect Secretary

My creative drive focuses on empowering bodies through clothing and sending messages by using fashion to express oneself. I believe clothing should share a connection with the body to serve both functional and artistic purpose through fabric textures and experimental silhouettes. My Graduate Collection tells the story of how secretaries are supposed to be perfect and the pressure that has come from this job being romanticised for females. Key office garments such as the pencil skirt, men’s shirt and oversized blazer have been reinvented to create new silhouettes focusing on emphasising the décolletage whilst continuing to flatter the female body for an hourglass shape. Whilst researching for my final collection I explored the secretarial dress code for females in the 50’s a key accessory was a pearl necklace. The irony of being expected to be able to afford a pearl necklace whilst doing so on an insulting wage intrigued me. This manifested into experimenting with pearl details throughout my collection and how they could represent this irony of secretarial dress codes. Handstitched pearl beads around the neckline and low back of look 3 became a result of the research.