On the afternoon of November 25, 2018, a talk about “How to Design Excellent Fashion Collection” was held successfully in College of Chinese and ASEAN Arts. The speaker, Donna Ives was graduated from Manchester School of Arts. She is incumbent course leader of BA (Hons) Fashion Design at UCA Rochester. The talk focused on the skill and technique in the stunning modern fashion collectionsuch as elaborate the key part of design, analyzea case study and discuss about the current trend of design programs.

Although the talk isreferring tofashion design,butthe knowledge that shared by Ms Donna can be utilized for the students to develop their artistic eye and cognition in design.Students are coming from different arts majors such as Visual Communication Design and Product Design. During the talk, Ms Donna had shared a fewkey parts on how to design a fashion collection with some outstanding students’ work as reference.

The first element: “Draft”. This is the fundamental and alsothemost important element. Student of Ms Donna always has their own way on sketching such as hand-drawing, software drawing and re-creating on photos. Moreover, she mentioned the most effective way is using collage skill. Capture your own ideas and scan the material on computer for collage drawing.

The second element: “Concept”. In the stage of preparing collection work, student is requiring tohave a general concept to start their creation and design. We need to have a preliminary understanding on what we want to do in anything for future development. This is not only a scope for student’s design, but also provides a clearer understanding on the origin of the work’s concept.

The third element: “Planning”. Ms Donna tried to enhance the point byrepeated three times.She reminded that a good collection is not something that can be done in just two or three days, butit’sa systematic planning to get the collection ready few weeksor even few monthsbefore. In this way, we can have enough time toamend, improve and exhibit the collection as perfect as possible.

These are the few elements concluded by Ms Donna.The experience and skill that shared by Ms Donna had benefited the student even though it’s only a few points.After the talk, we interview a few students about theiropinion. One of the Malaysian students, Deborah Yap Xiou Kheng saidthatshe realizes theartin western countries ismorefreedom, abstract and fluent. They don’tneed to do unnecessary explanation for their masterpiece but to get approval from the audience and this count as success for them. However, in Malaysia the student’s thought seems to be restricted. They need to explain in detail about their concept and this is complicated.

Besides, Ms Donna introduces UCA Rochester in this lecture. The teacher in charge of the International Department of College of Chinese and ASEAN Arts, Ms Qun Wan hopes to have morecollaboration between two universities in the future. Thus, the talk ended successfully. We wish all ofthe students able to apply the knowledgethat learned from the talkintheir own creation.