Angela Fusco (NTU Alumni, BA Hons Fashion Design) is the Senior Design responsible for all products at Purple Brand, Paris. PURPLE was founded in 2017 at the intersection of industrial design, streetwear, and luxury fashion to launch a collection of men’s denim and luxury basics. She leads her team who strive to expand and refresh the offering of the product category through new fabrics, fits, and signature trim details.
"It’s of importance to me to create effortless, yet intriguing, design concepts and to push the boundaries of expectations surrounding denim. I enjoy exposing myself to a variety of experiences and so pull inspiration from numerous elements to design products for the future. My experience working with both apparel design and textiles engineering has given me a particular eye for color, material and finish used in a variety of environments, and I am forever looking forward to future innovations."
She mentioned that the outbreak of the war between Russia and Ukraine has had a great impact on the U.S. economy and even changed the direction of her career. Artificial intelligence is growing, our economies are colliding, and the fashion industry is struggling, which is having a huge impact on our approach to design, and there will be changes in what luxury is, what it means, how it will fit into the economy, and how we consume it.
In her 2020 denim project, she used the idea of weaving to change the properties of the fabric through the fiber content, so the basis of her project was to add carbon fiber, but traditionally very rough fiber, make denim with the face, it will be very durable, but carbon fiber is brittle in terms of tensile strength, so it breaks easily, but when it is combined into a structure, it will be very strong. Through her introduction, I was able to clearly understand the characteristics of the fabric she made, which also attracted me to explore new fabrics and discover new ideas.
One of the things that really impressed me was Angela talking about when she was at Levi's, thinking about the issue of environmental protection. She asked if there is a new fiber that can replace cotton, because the use of cotton requires a lot of water, especially denim, which will produce a lot of water waste and waste, which will actually bring a lot of burden to the environment, so she proposed the use of soybean fiber, which has a shorter growth cycle and does not need so much water, I think this transformation is indeed a sustainable development concept, which will bring some new ideas to my own design, such as how to make my project related to the sustainable development of the environment, as a designer should balance environmental pollution with the progress of the project。
She mentioned the shift in people's mindset after the pandemic, where people are more concerned about the comfort and functionality of clothing, the shift from working from home to the office requires people to rebalance their work and life, and the emergence of artificial intelligence is also impacting our work, which reminds me of the reading I read not long ago, "The States of 2024". I think the two most important points are that the emergence of artificial intelligence has brought about an impact and changes on our design methods and marketing methods in the fashion industry, and the other point is that people have begun to love outdoor sports more after the epidemic, which has brought a lot of demand for sports performance clothing, and many brands are adjusting their development strategies according to these changes, so I found that in addition to starting from the perspective of a designer, I am constantly trying to explore from the perspective of a leaderThis opens up more possibilities for my future career development.
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