Interview with a Designer III

I was privileged enough to get the opportunity to speak with Joseph Turvey abut the collection he designed for River Island AU check out what he had to say below.

Joseph Turvey

It must be quite a different experience designing for a high street brand rather than just designing things for yourself, what have you learnt along the way?

I think just the sheer amount of people that are involved in this one collection. There’s just a team. It’s quite daunting. When you go in by yourself it’s quite a singular process, for me anyway, there’s not many of us working in my studio and going into River Island and there’s just a team for every single stage so that was quite daunting at first. But it’s exciting too ’cause you kind of learn new things and especially with the production side for me, that was an interesting step for me.

Joseph Turvey for River Island

Can you tell me a bit about what inspired your collection?

I started looking at the photography of Jamel Shabazz, which was kind of very street wear and urban and his New York photography was absolutely amazing, you should check it out. And then I wanted to kind of mix that with kind of something completely different, so I looked at Bill Oddie, nature and that kind of rambling and so I got the cameo print and kind of mixed that with street wear shapes and fabrics and yeah, that was kind of the starting point and it’s kind of developed from there.

Joseph Turvey for River Island

What was the best part about designing the collection?

I think just being able to work with so many different people has been exciting, because I work in a small team, and I think just having the ability to just go “this is what I wanna do” and then I don’t have to do the sourcing and that was really nice. Because that’s the bit of design when you’re by yourself which is just the hardest, because you can’t just always do what you want and there’s “find that fabric”, “find that manufacturer” and all that. With this it was just like “this is the design” and some lucky person goes off and the next week I’ve got a sample. That was the best bit for me. It was nice.

Joseph Turvey for River Island

Where would you look to begin your career if you were aspiring to be a fashion designer?
Education for me. I think if I wouldn’t have done my MA in this I wouldn’t be sitting here now. And the process that I went through from my BA to my MA was a massive change and I mean I did women’s wear in my BA and then to men’s and that is down to the tutors who were with me and they kind of… I don’t think I was very strong when I was there, but I think that he managed to see something that was good in me and got the best out of me. I think that’s what the MA does, it just enables you [to take] the skills you have to just evolve them and it changed my mind set with design. I think that made me a better designer and I think that’s the best way for me.