Our Strange Relationship with the Sri Lankan Fashion Industry
Colombo Fashion Week, 10 years ago.
Pilar from Venezuela. I’m 6 feet tall, and she would have to bend down to talk to me. She remains the tallest woman I have ever met.
You wouldn’t think of glitzy fashion weeks and wargame miniature painting going together. Strangely, they do. Fashion designers work with color, materials, and 1:1 scale models.
Miniature painters also work with color and materials, but our models are smaller. Both sides can appreciate the other’s work, and have similar discussions about design.
Entirely by accident, we’ve ended up interacting with the fashion industy, on-and-off, for years. Many of our painters are fashion design graduates. Two of us in management are, among other things, dressmakers.
I want to talk a little about this. Fashion has helped our work, and we, in turn, have done a little bit to help out fashion here and there.
Early Years: Colombo Fashion Week
The HSBC Colombo Fashion Week, 2013. It was four nights of shows, back to back. I was young enough at the time that I specifically wanted the burden of managing it, along with my Paintedfigs work, just for the mental exercise that strain would give me. I must have been completely mad.
From 2005-2015, you could do anything in this town if you were at least semi-competent. I did everything from being an underground MMA announcer (for which I would wear a suit), to being the backstage manager for a few years for the Colombo Fashion Week (for which I didn’t).
Hiring Fashion Graduates As miniature Painters
It all just bit of fun on the side. However, it’s how I discovered the common ground between painting miniatures and designing clothes. This would effect our hiring practices. We had always preferred candidates with art backgrounds and formal art training. From this point, we understood fashion design graduates would likely make good miniature painters. We began hiring them, and noticed this was indeed the case. Many of our strongest painters today are fashion graduates.
side note: What Happens At A Fashion Show?
Models are much smarter than people give them credit for. They tend to support each other, and see solutions to problems that can come up on the ramp.
The man in red is Arry Dabas, from Bangalore, India. Arry would watch out for problems people were having, and would let me know about them. This is a bigger deal than it sounds - South Asians are not often forthcoming with problems.
Weeks or even months of planning come to a specific moment where everything has to go perfect. Many people have work to do for it. Any one of them may not be ready - compromising the show. You will only find out on the day, and have hours to fix it.
Just hours.
Practicing choreography.
Designers will send their clothes in. The clothes should turn up the night before, or in the morning of the show. They don’t always — that causes drama.
Choreographers drill models in the dress rehearsal. The models may make mistakes or seem unready. The choreographer might then melt down.
Volunteers need to know which models they are dressing, and with what outfits. if you don’t have enough volunteers, you can end up with screaming models.
Outfits need to be documented in pictures. They need to be lined up on wracks. There are never enough hangers for some reason. Lack of equipment can cause bottlenecks, and there will likely be an injury.
later PAINTEDFIGS involvement
During the Fashion Week years, the other Paintedfigs team members only have an occasional and peripheral role in these shows. What lead to a deeper connection with fashion was that I got to meet a chap named Naveed Rozais:
Naveed is on the right. Everyone thought it was hilarious to say one of names quietly, and have us both answer, thinking they were asking for us.
Naveed now has more experience managing fashion shows than anyone else in the country.
Naveed went on to run over 50 shows over the next 10 years. He did so working in organizations that controlled the shows. Lately, however, he started an event management company. He sent me a message about a show the company had landed.
I asked if we could help out. He said yes. This was that show:
What was different this time was that a bunch of the Paintedfigs team were interested in helping out. Their background was in fashion; here was a chance to get some useful experience and have their own company help and cheer them on:
It went well, and the team had a blast. We’ll be volunteering at more shows from now on.
Our Art Director’s Collection
Aishwarya Tennekoon, Paintedfigs Art Director
Aishwarya Tennekoon is something of a young celebrity artist out here. He’s an architect by training, and our art director. Right now he’s working behind the scenes, but you’ll encounter him directly as time goes on.
Under his personal brand Aishwarya has been making cosplay costumes and props for years. Recently, he was invited to present a cosplay-based collection at a show. This was the first time someone from Paintedfigs had been ever had anything like this happen, so we were all quite keen. Painters helped him with the sewing work after hours, we put in a bit of sponsoring and printing time. Here’s what he did.
In the year 40,000, there is also fashion
I feel the more art streams the team gets exposure to, the better. This has driven our capacity building in 3d printing, the crafting you see in our advanced basing, and even our making our own figures:
Oh yeah; we made a Conan.
It has made the team more confident in themselves as artists, and given them more tools to solve problems or add value. It’s also a ton of fun!
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this unusual glimpse of what we get up to at an unusual company.
Navin
Shameless tags: miniature painting service, warhammer painting service, warhammer 40k painting service, miniature painting services, miniature painting commission, professional miniature painting, miniatures painting service
Paintedfigs is a miniature painting service. You can send us your figurines to paint, and we also have painted miniatures for sale. We paint mainly Games Workshop (Warhammer 40k, Warhammer Fantasy, Age of Sigmar, Necromunda, Space Hulk, Bloodbowl, and so on), Star Wars, Warmachine and Hordes, and pretty much every Kickstarter and board game under the sun.
And we do so at the lowest rates on Earth (we’ve checked).