Annual Design Awards to look at 'Inside' perspective

'There's more than meets the eye'. The saying couldn't be truer for a fashion and design professional. While design is all about how it eventually looks, any true blue professional knows God is in the detail and that the divinity is often 'inside'.

So let's think for a bit. What is it that makes a great garment, a great piece of furniture or a great piece of jewellery? It's what goes 'inside'. Begin with the proverbial apple that falls on your head as an idea, and the journey from there on to the final piece, is all that comes under the purview of 'inside'.

So for this year's theme for The Annual Design Awards, how about looking at brilliance from a different perspective? The perspective from the inside, An approach to the divine that plays on the material, process, detail or technique if you will. Let's begin radical to achieve radical, in other words.

Whether you are a fashion photographer, or a fashion designer or a jewellery designer or a visual merchandiser, let's defy the norm from the start. Must we print on photography paper? May be not. Can negatives be your prints!? Why not. Must furniture be made of wood? Who says! Must garments be made of cloth? Depends on what you are take is.

Then there's another 'inside'. Your very own inside. Your own life experience! All that you have seen, lived, cried and laughed over is an experience uniquely yours. Use it. There are no two exactly alike people in this world (not even the twins) and hence there are no two exactly alike experiences. So open an eye inside. See how you can use your experience in expressing yourself in your work. Go with the gut, go with a hunch. Believe in yourself and what life has taught you. Defy the norms. An artist is nothing if not original. And that originality lies inside.  

Last and most important of all, once you see things this way, you will find that going inside will actually take you to the other side. A side far far away from the ordinary, A world where exception becomes norm where an artist self-actualises himself, where the end provides the means and not the other way. Here, on this side, everything that you do becomes something to behold and cherish.

JD Institute of Fashion Technology