Pan Macmillan Storybook - 1960s Fashion Research

Since I was in charge of character design, I began researching 1960s fashion for children at the time, this involved looking at the shapes of clothes, the textures, the colours and the haircuts. As part of this I went even further back, looking at the 1940s and 1950s as well. It was mainly important to have a vintage, minimalist style.

Initially I began drawing out outfits for girls that I thought could be applied to Mabel and Heather. These were drawn from images found of photographs of 1960s children and fashion sewing patterns for clothes. I found there was a big focus on skirts and dresses, often embellished with big buttons, ribbons and belts. I looked at coats and hats as well that could be used as the children are meant to be wearing warm clothes. I found that the designs that looked best were the ones that used softer, more neutral colours rather than anything bright. In particular using textures has worked effectively in adding depth to the outfits, they seem more original and stylised than the quick pen experiments. For the future designs it will be important to use texture to keep the vector illustrations consistent with the collage backgrounds.

I than began looking at haircuts for the girls, it was important that the two girl characters be distinctive from each other yet it also be apparent that they are related. The two that particularly worked were the blond bob haircut and the curly haired ribbon haircut. These were taken forward eventually, the curliness became the relating factor. I also did a quick experiment with real hair as a texture for the illustrations. I thought this worked fairly effectively to look authentic, for the middle child I decided to take this forward as a texture.

 

I then began looking at boys 1960s fashion and briefly experimented with colour. I particularly liked the look of having trousers braces. I purposefully used natural colours for the most part, thinking about what would work best with the moorland backgrounds. I needed to be sure they wouldn't clash, but also that they wouldn't blend in.