Mirjam Rouden Textile Design Studio

info@mirjamrouden.com

www.mirjamrouden.com

Mirjam Rouden graduated from CSM (MA Fashion Print) in 2003 and set up the studio shortly after, initially working mainly with Parisian couture houses, but have lately gone over more to working with commercial brands in London and the US.

Mirjam Rouden Prints

New York/London

Autumn/Winter 2011-12

Adam

Adam

Tracy Reese

Tracy Reese

When all the interns first entered the studio we were all told to start immediately in doing some hand painting onto fabric and Mirjam said she will see which ones are the best and the interns whose work wasn't as good would be put to do something else. This made everyone really nervous and flustered because it made us all feel it was like an interview!!

Needless to say, the fabrics that i painted didn't quite make the cut, so I was found something else to do. Kind of embarrassing, not going to lie.

The print below, I thought was a really good print, but Mirjam didn't like it. This really started to make me re-evaluate if my judgement was good enough, because she is working in the industry, selling hundreds of prints to clients all over the world including Diane Von Furstenberg, Twenty 8 Twelve, Valentino, Tuleh, Sonia Rykiel, and Catherine Malandrino. She clearly has a better eye for what sells and what people want to wear then I do!

Throughout the 5 week placement, i worked very closely with one of the designers on a project H&M had asked her to do. They had sent over some images of floral prints from designers on the catwalk and asked for some prints that were of similar style to these that they can use in there new season's clothes. Karolina, the designer i worked with within the studio, then talked me through how we were gong to create the designs.

My design, using bird wings

She had some very old books of drawings of flowers that were published before 1942 and wanted to have these photocopied to use the images. At first, i was confused as i thought there would eb a copyright law on this but she assured me that any books published before 1942 were not under copyright, something i never knew and found quite interesting. So, the drawings of flowers and leaves were scanned in to Photoshop, cleaned up and used to create compositions.

Another of my designs using bird feathers

The most difficult part of this task was making sure we didn't both use the same image in different compositions because the same image can't appear in 2 different prints, even if it was a small leaf that you can barely see, because if they were both bought my different companies or designers and they have the same image within them then that is, in a sense, infringement of copyright because they should own that image.

Another design of mine, using a section of a bird wing.

Photoshop work was something i worked mainly on throughout my time in the studio. I, previously, had some experience with Photoshop and so was fairly confident i could do well in this area, but the designers were so helpful in anything i was unsure about and even didn't mind going over something i was already knowledgable in, but not necessarily confident in. This helped me become much more confident in Photoshop and i seemed to learn more and more about the tools and features every day i was working on it. I am confident this will be extremely useful in future, when employees need someone more confident in Photoshop, which i am very grateful of the studio to have taught me. 

During the first week of my internship at Mirjam Rouden Textile Design Studio I was told to draw flowers to help create some designs to be scanned into photoshop to be made into floral compositions to be digitally printed. At first, I thought this would be for a few hours but after two whole days of drawing I started to find myself very bored.

Themes we were told to focus on in the studio were florals, because this is a very popular theme for spring, and also, animal prints and animal skins, which was something i believed was much more relevant to my kind of work then flowers and florals, which is something Mirjam also agreed on, on looking through my portfolio. In a sense i felt like Mirjam was criticising me for not having florals in my portfolio, even though nothing was ever mentioned when i applied for the internship.

Interestingly, Mirjam explained to us not to use green or to use as little amounts of green as possible within our drawings because green is most unpopular colour fashion. This was something i was unaware of and so, was very valuable to learn.

Mirjam then chose what drawings she liked and what she thought would translate well into a print. There was definately a lot of tension in the studio when she was walking past and judging people's drawings, because some of the drawings we thought were really good she would think were not good at all and unsuitable. It was always a surprise to each of us what drawings she liked and so it was just constantly a guessing game.

My digital print

I often wondered, previously, how it is possible to send a client the print you have produced or created but seeing it in process helped me understand fully. A piece of fabric within Mirjam Rouden's studio was, on average, about 1.5mx1m. There were 2 different types of prints produced within the studio in the time i was working there.

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Hand-painted prints were made using procean and acid dyes, making it quite difficult to see what you are doing or have already some on the print. I found with this method it was much more a case of being very careful not to make smudges, or, if mistakes are made, trying to incorporate this into the design. I found this method quite fun but very time consuming. It was exciting to see what our prints looked. Also, with this method of hand printing, you cannot replicate something and change the colours or size, although this could be possible with computer editing, but that was not something Mirjam was interested and rightly so. A hand print should be much more unique then a digital print that can have every aspect of it altered and tweaked if needed.

To evaluate my time working at Mirjam Rouden studios, I found the experience there very valuable and interesting. It was exciting and very interesting to get to know how an everyday studio works and how they go about printing samples and sending to clients. It was very helpful to see how everything is done and ho they go from the very beginning point to managing the clients in a business sense all the way through to sending the actual prints to customers. I found that this time spent within this studio has given me experience I will never forget, and will help me within the industry because i found at particular moments throughout my time that the opinions and thoughts amongst the interns, who were younger and obviously less experienced then the employees, was very different and almost in contrast to that of the employees, who clearly have more of an eye for what sells and what clients want and will be interested in, as well as the kind of trends that will be fore coming, making them much more knowledgable in forecasting new trends that we should print designs for.

Working with Mirjam was not exactly ideal at times as we were left to do repetitive tasks quite often and a lot of us seemed to get quite bored and people would leave early then allowed and generally take advantage of the freedom we were given, but as i was working more closely with the employees, I was needed to do certain tasks that may have differed everyday so I felt that i was a more valued intern then maybe some of the others who were just made to do drawings all day every day.

In conclusion, I am pleased that I have had the opportunity to work with Mirjam as it has expanded my knowledge of the textiles side of my degree, but now that I have some information and knowledge and experience in that area, I would be more inclined to now pursue a more fashion-based internship as I believe this will teach me new and different things, offering me a whole new and exciting experience.

Sophie Chiesa