Intro To: Diversity – Lecture Reflection

During our first series of ‘Better Lives: Intro to’ sessions, I attended a variety of lectures on many different aspects of social responsibility, sustainability and diversity. Being a student in the School of Media and Communications, I understood the importance of being well educated on issues around the three topics in order to avoid ignorance and gain understanding. 

Although I found all of our lectures incredibly informing, the Intro to: Diversity given by Shahidha Bari was particularly thought provoking. In Bari’s lecture, she analyses to what extent diversity is truly exercised in the fashion industry, asking the question “is diversity used simply as a buzzword or has it been truly exercised?” (Bari. S quoted in her lecture). Using “buzzword” to describe the use of diversity was something I found quite accurate and revealing of the fashion industry. 

Bari backed up her point by pointing out that although companies such as Dove and Gucci address themselves as “diverse” they are actually just using the idea of diversity as a selling point, because when it comes down to the final steps – grave errors are made. For example; in 2004, Dove, who always claim to be ‘inclusive’, released an ad on cleanliness that showed a woman of colour lifting her shirt to become a white woman. This was incredibly problematic as it showed extreme prejudice and was flaunting an offensive, racist point of view that has historically held a lot of pain. This sort of ordeal brings the claims of ‘diversity’ into question. If a company is truly diverse, there is no way that such a misguided decision could be made. This leads onto Bari’s secondary point that Diversity needs to not be a face value act but incorporated into inclusivity at every level. Diversity is not new, and it is not solely to do with race. It has deep ties to age, ability, gender, sex and race altogether. Bari points out that in fashion, there are many different types of people working on a singular item at all levels, that perhaps the biggest part of inclusivity is thinking about the ‘supply chain’ and how we can incorporate an understanding and act on the need for inclusivity on every level. The final point I wanted to make was that Bari gave a fascinating allegory for this, “If aliens landed on Earth during fashion week and saw one show before they left, they would think that was the only version of ‘human’ on Earth, what would they see?” I wanted to end on this as I think it really summarises exactly what we should think when we take on a new project – when I’m done with this and I show it to people, what will they imagine was involved? Who does it represent? I think working on inclusivity is the most important thing for the fashion industry and I think that is why I appreciated Shahidha Bari’s lecture so much.