Textiles Student Secures Suzanne Barnes Design Award

Published: 02 Feb 2012   updated: 23 Mar 2012

On Monday 30 January, renowned interior designer Suzanne Barnes came into assembly to award two A level Textiles students for their innovative designs.

Textiles is a fascinating subject choice and is so much more than the common misconception of 'learning to sew'. In fact, textiles can be an innovative and scientific discipline. In 1969, we would have had no man on the moon without a textile technologist creating a space suit that would stop the astronaut burning up, freezing to death or dying of radiation.

This summer at the London Olympics we will see many modern and new fabrics created to help athletes run a nano-second faster and swimwear, such as 'fastskin' (which mimics a shark's skin), helping swimmers become more aerodynamic and finish a hair's breadth before their nearest rival.

When Take That came to Villa Park on 27th of June last year and performed 'Never Forget', the fabulous costumes they wore were covered with tiny LED lights programmed to light up not just with the beat of the music but also in time with each other; an excellent example of textile technologists and costume makers working together to create something innovative and breathtaking.

Although the technical side of Textiles is fascinating, many of the girls who study Textiles are very interested in fashion rather than the technical side of the subject. Indeed, many of our A level Textile girls go on to study fashion-related subjects at University.

With this in mind, as textiles teachers, we felt that we wanted to take our exam girls into another dimension of the subject. At AS level, the students have an opportunity to complete several projects and usually our GCSE and A level girls create a fabulous fashion garment for their exam work. So, last summer, we approached Suzanne Barnes, an interior designer, to work with us and asked her if she would set a brief for the girls. She embraced this with open arms and the Suzanne Barnes Design Award came into being.

After her A Levels, Suzanne came to Birmingham at the age of 19 to study architecture at Birmingham University. After realising her passion was for interior architecture, she went on to graduate with an MA in Interior Design at Central St Martin's in London. She has worked in Birmingham heading up her own Interior Design company for the last 15 years as well as working in television and lecturing on the Interior Design degree course at Birmingham City University.

The brief Suzanne set the girls was to design and create a range of fabrics suitable for the interior of a penthouse apartment, owned by a young male professional, living in Birmingham. Their work had to be inspired by the iconic decade of the 1980s.

The AS students had just a term to research, develop ideas and create their fabrics and Suzanne came into school several times during the project to give valuable advice. They quickly got on with the task investigating the 1980s, finding their own particular inspiration for their designs. The range of ideas they came up with were both diverse and fascinating (and nostalgic for some of us!).

Well done to Nuryia Ismail, who was selected as the overall winner and recipient of the Barnes Design Award, and to runner up Raeesa Anis.

Mrs Mooney
Textiles

Some examples of the girls' fabric creations: