Blog Post 2- Themes reflection
After watching the lectures and being in the middle of my project, Fashion Activism, I came to realize what I have to do differently in my future career. The Better Lives themes are Social Responsibility, Sustainability, and Diversity. Through the lectures and the seminars, I now have a better understanding of what they mean, especially in the fashion context. I now see that in order to produce powerful and successful content in the fashion industry all these themes have to be represented on the work. I am part of the Fashion Activism project, which focuses on creative direction for fashion, meaning that through the lessons I learned how to communicate the Better Lives themes through a moving image.
In the future, I would like to work producing campaigns and events for fashion companies. Before this unit started, I knew the importance to consider Social Responsibility, Diversity, and Sustainability throughout this practice, but I had never realized how fundamental these are if you want to succeed and make a difference.
In the Fashion Activism project, we were supposed to create a moving image to a specific brand or brand collaboration. My group was assigned with the Lazy Oaf and Time to Change collaboration, which is about mental health. Lazy Oaf is a young brand with street style-inspired designs and the collaboration main idea was around the slogan “it is okay not to be okay”.
When we had to start to create ideas, I first identified which Better Lives theme directly relates to this collaboration, and this is the one about Social Responsibility. Social Responsibility is directly related to this because it promotes the idea of dealing with social problems like depression through fashion. The brand is aimed at young people, which makes this collaboration very relevant, as this is an issue that involves many youths and is not always discussed. After identifying this, I thought about how my group and I could implement the other two themes when creating our moving image.
First, we had the idea of creating a video using the members of the group for the cast. However, due to the current situation, lockdown, we had to change the concept. Together, we came to the agreement of each member producing a gif, which expresses our own vision around this issue, and then editing them together into one video. We decided to follow the brand esthetic: plain colors, minimalistic, and fun. Due to self-isolation and online classes we agreed on guidelines that have to be followed when creating each individual gif so that we have the same layout.
I want to express the theme of Sustainability in this project in the way that we are producing the content. This means, creating a moving image that does not produce waste and turns to be something positive towards others. Diversity will be implemented to the project when we edit all gifs into one video, as each member from the group comes from a different part of the world and has different viewpoints in relation to the problem.