theme reflection
By participating in all the lectures, I had a better understanding of the importance of the three main themes of this unit, sustainability, diversity, and social responsibility. Fashion is one of the core elements in modern society, and the industry is growing bigger and wilder throughout the world. As a fashion student, it is crucial for us to keep those three core values in mind as we further continue our study and future career.
During my studies at LCF, I am allowed to be creative and express my thought freely with my projects. I was also taught to consider the audience of each project, to establish the message and the ideal impact of each targeted audience. To be respectful about the diversity of cultural background and be more considerate of different perspective will avoid the project to be offensive or be involved with controversy. The diverse of cultural differences and social status in nowadays society should be acknowledged. Do more research, be more familiar with the targeted social group. Social media and internet nowadays has made everything more visible and transparent. The awareness of cultural appropriation and cultural diversity has begun to be the main theme to consider for artists around the world. In the past, I did a few projects about the social group that I wasn’t really familiar with, such as the LGBT group and the homeless group in London. Sometimes it will be tough to collect cultural elements from the group that I’m personally not connected to. It took me a while to observe and did research to collect news articles, understand the background information and educate myself before interview them and further produce the project.
Sustainability is a huge part that designers and artists should be aware of. For my project, mostly I collect garments or unwanted fabrics from womenswear student to complete my styling look. As a stylist, it is important to not keep purchasing one time use garments or accessories just to complete one look. Be creative and use the methods of layering, folding, sewing to create different looks and also be sustainable and eco friendly to the environment. By learning the consequences of fast fashion industry, and the chain reaction of the environmental damage, sustainability should be in our conscious while doing creative works. How to be creative, yet incorporate the idea of regeneration? Our tutor also suggested by using alternatives material to continue our creative journey. Fashion should not only be limited by fabrics, leather, fur. It should contain a lot more elements, and this is something we should be discovering. I started to observe materials from daily life and tried to merge more dynamic elements to editorial shoot. As a result, it turned out to have unexpected outcomes, and more visual impact.
To sum up, learning those three themes this year was mind-blowing and has definitely changed the approaches for my creative process. While pursuing our personal aesthetic, it is crucial to keep those three themes in mind. The more understanding of those themes will make my work in the future more professional and meaningful.
11th May 2020 @ 9:13 am
Ya-Yun’s reflection on the Better Lives themes simply but thoroughly summarised the ideas behind the themes, their importance and influence. While they very accurately described the themes of diversity and sustainability, they could have focussed a little bit more on the theme of social responsibility. Although I believe that social responsibility is more of an umbrella term which encapsulates both diversity and sustainability as you cannot be either sustainable or support diversity if you are not also responsible and socially conscious.
I enjoyed how they already made a point to include a personal project in the Styling group and thought about how to apply the theme of sustainability to their work and personal development. It shows how these themes affect us in all aspects of life and how important they are in order to reach a project goal that is socially responsible, conscious and considerate. Especially the work as a stylist requires working with lots of fabric which sometimes can be wasteful hence why incorporating sustainability into your work ethic is so important and right.
Further, they mentioned how being an LCF student teaches you to work considerately of others, be respectful and take advantage of social media to research and educate yourselves on important messages and societal issues. I can very much agree that LCF teaches us students ethical lessons starting with this whole unit about Better Lives.
Generally, I liked and enjoyed the brief summary of the Better Lives themes. A suggestion I have would be that they could have focussed on one of the lectures more and elaborated on what was learned. That would give the reader a closer look at what the themes actually want to portray and how they apply to a certain case. Nonetheless, the message was very clear and perfectly represented the key ideas of this unit while also showing how strongly they personally feel about Better Lives and its vital themes.