Rachel Homewood

My design career spanned over 12 years, working on a variety of product areas for major high street retailers, covering women’s and men’s casualwear, formalwear, knitwear and underwear. I managed a small design team for multiple customers, including Marks and Spencer, Bhs, Asda, Tesco, Dunnes and Carrefour Europe.

In 2006 I started lecturing at Southampton Solent University, teaching on a number of their fashion courses, including Fashion Communication, Fashion Design and Fashion Photography. In 2010 I joined the University of Portsmouth, teaching on the BA (Hons) Degree course in Fashion and Textiles. My research interests include using digital media for the exploration of the design process for fashion.

Digital fashion design is a subject area that I have particular interest in. Having worked on a variety of CAD software over the last 15 years, technology has dramatically changed the way designers develop their designs, to expand and enhance the development process. I am especially interested in the interaction between fashion design and the use of a variety of digital software to enrich the design and development process. I have developed and applied digital projection as part of the curriculum, this has dramatically enhanced the design process for our students and how they are individually responding to this digital application. I intend to research, and eventually integrate in the curriculum, the use of 3D software to challenge and expand the conventional methods of designing fashion, through virtual cloth manipulation using advanced forward thinking technologies. I also intend to investigate the production of virtual presentation boards which will enable the viewing of final designs in a three dimensional format.