Bathing Suit Fashion Design: Tube Top & Boy Short

Series Summary

Why design fashion for models? According to J.P. Prewitt, famous hand model of Bulova fame, models are genetically constructed to become something great: “They’re in peak physical condition. They can gain entry to the most secure places in the world. And most important of all, models don’t think for themselves. They do as their told.” It seems only natural for mothers to want their girls designing fashion and accessories for these legendary lookers. Because of the popularity of shows like Project Runway, fashion design has become a potential career readily consumed by our tweenagers and teenie-boppers. In this free fashion illustration video series, fashion designer Laurel Armstrong offers sample bathing suit designs to help found a diverse bathing suit collection. Armstrong shows how to illustrate various bathing suit elements in fashion illustration croquis, using necklines, cutouts, color and composite designs. Bathing suit designs can be borrowed from a variety of styles, including historical eras, alternative fashion and current trends in dress or suit design.

Video Transcript

"Bathing suits are a really fun thing to design, because there's no real conformity to them. A bathing suit can be as provocative as you want them to be. It could be as demure as you want it to be. It can be anything. Bathing suits are, the range of styles is like, it has no limits no boundaries. Sometimes when I'm just sitting somewhere, it can be my desk at work, I will start just drawing bathing suits. For some reason I just find it fun. The lines are fun. It's fun to take the shape of the body and then mold your garment to it, and a bathing suit is the most perfect example of the ability to do that. A bathing suit is fitted everywhere. When you have a line that you want depicted as curved. It actually will curve on the body. So here I have this variation, which has a boy short bottom. Then it has strap, seam, pieces of fabric lines, I can't even don't know what it's called, but they go straight up and all the skin shows. And so you get to the breast part which is a tube top. And then it goes up to a neck."