Phillips Strawbridge, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design

I was born in Gemany into an army family, and I am 23. My long-term ambition is to work as a creative director at a high end fashion house, before establishing my own premium menswear brand. Using the work of the Memphis design collective as my starting point, I was particularly drawn to the work of Michelle de Lucchi, who tended not to use the range of bright colours often associated with the Memphis movement, but bold, geometric black and white designs features. With this in mind I embarked on a search for similar inspirational images and soon encountered photographs of World War One battleships, which had been painted with the “dazzle camouflage”, credited to artist Norman Wilkinson. This surprisingly garish style of camouflage was based on the principle of confusion rather than concealment, distorting dimension, perspective and proportion, so that enemy ships found it difficult to glean the direction and shape of a potential target, in particular finding it hard to differentiate between bow and stern.  These precepts and colour schemes formed the basis of my design work.