The leggings experiment, my first leggings designs

THIS IS AN ARCHIVE POST FROM 2014

For quite a while now, it has felt like a natural step to expand the Virivee range with leggings. They are obviously a related product, and customers regularly ask me whether I’m going to make leggings too.

So I’ve decided to try putting together a small collection for autumn.

There are already an enormous number of brands making leggings. Pretty much every small or large clothing brand seems to have them, so I don’t want to create just another pair of basic leggings.

My goal is to design patterned leggings that are beautiful and wearable, but also a little different from what is currently available. Something that stands out from the crowd because of its design, without becoming completely impossible to wear.

I’ve been collecting inspiration for the collection for a while now, and I’ve narrowed my ideas down to three main directions.

The first is geometric patterns.

The second is a more vintage and antique-inspired direction.

And the third is somewhat related to the geometric idea: Voronoi patterns.

I’m making lots and lots of designs in each direction, and eventually I’ll have to declare one of the three the winner. The first leggings collection will then be made up of designs from that group.

Vintage inspiration

I spent a few days exploring the vintage direction, and I was amazed by how much beautiful graphic material in the public domain can be found online.

There are huge amounts of old illustrations, ornaments and graphic designs whose copyrights have expired and which can be freely used. I highly recommend looking into public-domain archives if you’re working on your own creative projects.

I collected a lot of beautiful material, but it still needs to be processed and adapted. In the end, I decided that I want to use these images for something else, so for now I’ve taken the vintage direction out of the running for the leggings collection.

Geometric patterns

The geometric direction is proving to be the biggest challenge.

I actually had a pretty good idea quite early on about the kind of patterns I wanted to create, but there are probably a million different colour combinations I could make.

And that’s the problem. At some point I have to stop making variations and narrow everything down to just a few designs.

These were some of my inspirations:

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The image on the left is a painting. I have to admit, I don’t remember who painted it, but I really liked it.

The image on the right is actually a tablet wallpaper that I noticed on someone’s screen during a conversation. I liked it so much that I asked them to send it to me because it was exactly the kind of thing I could imagine turning into a leggings pattern.

Of course, the geometric direction has already evolved quite a lot since then. The final patterns don’t look exactly like these references, but you can definitely see where the inspiration came from.

Voronoi patterns

The Voronoi patterns are probably the most interesting direction of all.

It took me quite a while to find the right editor that would let me create nice-looking patterns without having to be an expert in this particular type of graphics.

Eventually I found one, and I started experimenting.

Once I found the right script, creating the patterns became much less of a pain. It’s still a fairly fiddly process, though. Luckily, I was able to create quite a few interesting variations relatively quickly.

For now, I’m testing the different patterns with a few close friends and people I know.

Once I’ve narrowed everything down and the final selection for the Virivee leggings collection is ready, I’ll post it here too.

This is only version 0.1, after all.