View2 # 18

Textile View2 is a sister publication to the hugely successful Textile View Magazine. It is dedicated to the world of casual, sports and jeanswear for men’s, women’s and kidswear. View2 delivers practical and inspirational information to truly help manufacturers and retailers design, make and sell urban sports products that the market really wants. Its team of contributors all come from the industry itself with experience ranging from the latest fabric developments, through design and development, to marketing and sales. In its form, quality and level of information, View2 mirrors its sister publication with features dedicated to city updates, lifestyle, express, current and future fashion directions.

Welcome to our new issue of View2. As you have no doubt already spotted, we have had a bit of a facelift to iron out any wrinkles that may have gathered with age and inject some fresh energy into our pages. But, there is no change in the scale and scope of information we provide and we hope you like the new look.

This issue we are focussing on DIY, but this is not DIY in the way we all know it, i.e. you buy a kit of something with all the pieces provided, you follow instructions, you build it and hopefully you end up with something that vaguely resembles the picture on the box. We are talking about a modern approach to DIY that allows for customisation and personalization. Where a product is delivered almost complete – the groundwork and hard/skilled work has been done, but there is scope for the consumer to create something exclusive and original. It’s kind of a partial bespoke service: We design it – you finish it off.

An example of a product that sums this up is any one of the stylish mask designs from Wintercroft Masks. For a small fee (around £4.50) you can download a mask template that is easily printable on A4 or US letter paper along with easy instructions on how to create the mask. Then, it is up to you to decorate and personalise to your own taste. The key thing here is that the products are very cool and all you need is a printer, pen, ruler, glue, old cardboard (such as a cereal box) and imagination.

It’s not the old approach to DIY where in magazine terms we would deliver a partially designed cover that looks incomplete along with a set of pens to allow you to finish it off. But instead deliver a partially designed cover (or, in our case, our season introduction graphics) that still look great visually and that you can add to and complete how you wish, using what you have at hand – whether it be a BIC biro, a highlighter pen or some ripped up, post-it notes. In so doing, you can take ownership of the magazine and really make it your own.

Another way of looking at it is how in the past, sneakers have been delivered with two or three different kinds of laces so you can change the final outlook of what you wear–to a point! Now this would be sneakers delivered with a link to a website or info about a free app that is full of ideas on how to create laces out of recycled elastic bands, old ribbons, cables or whatever, or even find a way to do without laces altogether – to inspire but not dictate the end result.

A buzzword of the moment is ‘Normcore’ (Wiki def: “a unisex fashion trend characterised by unpretentious, average-looking clothing”) – you will read it many times throughout this issue as it appears in many of our forecasts as a key direction for future seasons. It may seem a contradiction to the idea of this new DIY approach, but actually, by giving the consumer the opportunity to personalise their product, it completely respects the ‘Normcore’ attitude, because it allows for the personalisation to be as loud or quiet and as detailed or simplistic as the consumer wants.

At the last edition of Denim by PV in Barcelona, we saw many people proudly sporting the jeans they had designed as well as ones they had customised using any number of materials – from hand-sewn-on large scale gemstones, to glossy car paint dip-dyed hems, to bold marker pen artworks and huge scale rips. There seems to be a pronounced need to be able to say, “This was made by me!” Maybe ‘Made By Me’ (MBM) is the new DIY?

So, be inspired to let go just a little this season and feel free to make things truly your own. Our seasonal graphics are ready and waiting for you to give them your personal touch…

You can download them using the link below and when you are done creating send them in to us at view2@view-publications.com and you never know, they could appear in the next issue!