Cara Edden, design process

Siren Armour is celebrating the strong, determined woman. A woman who can achieve anything she puts her mind to, but with a playful hop, skip and a wink at the same time. It is a combination of the strong nature of the Sirens living on Li Galli island, channelled through strong and structural armour influences, juxtaposed with the playful half-bird embodiment of a siren. The playful movements of birds create the movement lines seen in the Siren Armour collection.

The movement lines have natural drapes and flow within the pieces, then become solid and strong, holding their lines with the strength and protection over the woman's body as armour does. To create the movement lines, Cara plays with draping on the stand with basic samples of ruffles and gathering, manipulating them into the directions inspired by images of Kingfishers in flight and the directions of the blurs around their movements that are captured in a still photo. The volume of the gathers being pulled together and released creates varying volume and texture within the drapes, giving the impression of the movement caught in a moment.

A key technique Cara uses to create fixed movement lines is with fluting. Developing the fluting through the collection, it begins as fixed lines travelling down the body, with each individual line, individually sewn onto a base layer of fabric. The lines encase the body as the wearer becomes an embodiment of the siren in motion, the mix of alternating colours representing the blur of colours caught in the still image of the birds' blur of movement. This develops into shaped fluting lines and then adding a 3D element so the fluting shapes curve over one another off the body, and curve down the body, shaping around the wearer's body.