Awarded

Flaka Jahaj

'C'est le pompon', fashion collection, diploma work

Fashion and Textile Design

Jury report

Do the pompom!
Flaka Jahaj wins the Swiss De­sign Award for her fi­nal-year pro­ject ‘C’est le Pom­pon’, with which she grad­u­ated from the Cen­tral Saint Mar­tins Col­lege of Arts and De­sign in Lon­don in 2014.
The fash­ion and tex­tile de­signer drew in­spi­ra­tion for her work from a cush­ion which she spot­ted at a flea mar­ket in Zurich. She was im­me­di­ately cap­ti­vated by its un­usual struc­ture: it was nei­ther cro­cheted, nor knit­ted, nor sewn. After ex­ten­sive re­search on blogs, she pro­gres­sively worked away at the elab­o­rate tech­nique of mak­ing pom­poms. Fi­nally, she lighted upon the idea of com­bin­ing the in­di­vid­ual pom­poms into a larger en­sem­ble. Her method is sim­ple yet play­ful, and rem­i­nis­cent of the boxes of Lego we re­mem­ber from child­hood. In­di­vid­ual, mod­u­lar el­e­ments con­sist­ing of a num­ber of pom­poms are at­tached to­gether, giv­ing rise to an in­fi­nite num­ber of cre­ative and in­ter­ac­tive colour and form vari­ants that Flaka Jahaj then turns into clothes.
The basic mod­ules for the clothes are in sim­ple black and white; base colours em­pha­sise the struc­ture of the de­signs, while pas­tels cre­ate iso­lated high­lights. To give the sil­hou­ette a more grace­ful ap­pear­ance, the de­signer uses black tulle meshes which give the woollen pom­poms a sense of light­ness that be­lies their heav­i­ness and den­sity.
Mar­tina Longo

Biography

Flaka Jahaj
Born in
1983
Education
Fashion Designer