Hannah Estrada

Contemporary fashion designers often rely on trend forecasting, and past bestsellers, to guide aesthetic choices to generate mountains of new designs with limited regard for garment functionality in daily life. This approach results in impractical, ill-fitting clothing that fails to meet real needs and too often ends up in landfills. Form Follows Function is a thesis collection, and system of fashion design, that reimagines conventional ready-to-wear creation by looking to the user-centered design practice of the outdoor apparel industry. Coupled with an analog approach to functionality that refers to garment-making techniques that predate industrial fashion, the resulting framework for design centers the wearer’s needs to produce garments of aesthetic and functional value. Choosing to use exclusively natural fibers in the collection, the garments designed using this framework enhance movement, promote versatility, and support responsible consumption by increasing long-term satisfaction and wearability for the user.