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The Soft Edge
Year:
2025
A study in tailoring, tension, and quiet complexity.
The Soft Edge was developed during an internship with Karen Walker as a four-look collection created in response to a refined tailoring brief.
The project explored how structure can soften without losing clarity, and how softness can remain intentional rather than decorative. Through this lens, the collection sought to blend sharp architectural lines with sculptural drape, asymmetry, and controlled looseness — garments that feel resolved, yet quietly unsettled.
Grounded in research into contemporary suiting, The Soft Edge reinterprets traditional tailoring through subtle shifts: curved panel lines that guide the eye, displaced seams that alter balance, sculptural bow-like structures functioning as softened armour, and silhouettes that relax without collapsing. These decisions became a way to examine how strength can appear gentle, and how formality can coexist with ease.
Throughout development, I worked with crepe, wool suiting, viscose, and matte textured fabrics to study how material behaves when asked to oscillate between precision and fluidity. Influences from sculpture, contemporary directional designers, and yin/yang principles all shaped the collection’s pursuit of equilibrium: restraint balanced with release, structure held lightly rather than rigidly.
Although distinct from Architecture of Flesh, The Soft Edge shares an underlying commitment to emotional architecture and material sensitivity — a belief that garments can express tension, nuance, and vulnerability through their construction alone. The collection became a pivotal chapter in my practice, teaching me how softness can be deliberate, how structure can shift without breaking, and how tailoring becomes most compelling at the moment it learns to yield.
It also marked an important professional milestone: translating conceptual thinking into a commercially aware, brand-aligned outcome, while still maintaining a personal voice. As an internship project, The Soft Edge represented the intersection between industry expectations and an emerging design identity — a bridge between academic exploration and professional practice.
