BEHIND THE DESIGN: BRAZILIAN FLORAL

Florals are one of the most popular patterns on fabric. Walk into a clothing store and a floral print is guaranteed to cover a few garments. I myself have designed or refined a bunch of florals for Mata Traders like the Roses print and the Falling Florals print. You might be asking what makes this floral print different?

We always start by looking at the trend forecasts to see if there is something we can bring in to the clothing we make. The image above hooked us. Check out how intricate the designs are and how the colors are so vibrant that they pop off the screen! The image depicts a Brazilian floral trend, and I immediately started researching tropical and local flowers of Brazil. I had pages of sketches but ended up using 2 main flowers as my focus to then construct and repeat. For weeks I worked with 4 or 5 vibrant colors, weaving them in between each flower in a vision of a dress bursting with an energetic floral. Towards the end of the design period reality set in, and the entire design team realized that we needed to change our perspective on this specific print.

Yes, having a super crazy colorful dress would be awesome, but how many of these colors can we really get our cooperatives’ printing processes? Would 5 colors be too much to produce? What if it doesn’t translate to a dress? With a new vision, we scaled the colors back from 5 to 2, increased the scale, and made 2 color variations – one in similar blues and one in red and purple.

The dresses came back wonderfully! I think the scaling back of color makes these dresses seem more sophisticated. The Isle of the Sky dress in the blue fabric is calming and almost has a floating feel to it, while the Parisian Book Shop dress in the red and purple color combo is vibrant and has a dramatic vibe.

This is a perfect example of evolution in a print. We started with a wild vision of different Brazilian flowers cascading in many colors and ended up with a simpler and calmer version. The design team had to figure out how this fun and crazy trend could work within our limitations and in the end created a wonderful print.