Better Lives – Blog 1
In the first two weeks of lectures we were introduced to the Better Lives unit and its key themes. There are three key themes which were introduced to us; social responsibility, diversity and sustainability. These themes are important to consider when doing any project within this unit and also in the future.
I found many of the Better Lives lectures interesting, with them provoking new ideas which I will keep in mind in my project. The lecture I found most interesting was by Anna Fitzpatrick. Within her talk she discussed the ideas of sustainability and consumerism within the fashion industry and what these ideas mean.
Sustainability is the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level in ways that sustain people, places and things. Fitzpatrick continued to discuss the ideas of who benefits and who loses from the idea of sustainability. Large shops such as Zara and Primark are high contributors of fast fashion, as they mass produce garments and sell them for cheap which means workers are exploited through a minimal pay.
An idea she mentioned which I felt was interesting was how, if we began to make clothes out of a “more sustainable” material, the production of this will have a knock on effect. This to me makes the idea of sustainability a lot more complex as I began to question if we would ever be able to have a fully sustainable fashion industry. This links on to how fashion is all dependent on land, water, air and animals, therefore the materials used to produced garments can change between being sustainable and not depending on the overall effect on each of these areas.
She also talked about consumerism and the powerful ideology that frames our world view, relationships, identity and behaviour.
Fitzpatrick began to give some statistics about consumerism which personally shocked me. The idea of consumer culture expanded through the course of the twentieth century as clothing prices reduced which resulted in sales increasing. Clothing sales doubled from 2000 to 2014 with the number of garments purchased each year by the average consumer increasing by 60%. I felt that these statistics really made me question how these figures will change over the next few centuries and wonder how we will be able to maintain the fashion industry in the most environmentally friendly way if these figures continue to rise so dramatically.
One of the final points she made was the most shocking to me. She said how in just four years, a CEO of a top fashion industry earns a garment workers lifetime pay. This point makes you realise how unfair the fashion industry is and how influential fast fashion is on peoples lives. Companies are paying people ridiculously low wages for constant, labour inducing work. I left this lecture really reflecting on my own contribution to fast fashion and what I can do in the future to minimise this in my personal life.
1st May 2020 @ 7:14 pm
When reading Zoe’s first blogpost I was drawn in by the way she spoke about Anna Fitzpatrick’s lecture. I had attended this lecture myself and found it very interesting to read her view on it. Zoe highlights how the lecture covers the topic of sustainability in particular, and how this impacts the way she sees and understands the fashion industry.
I agreed with how shocking the statistics were and how we can see the fast fashion industry creating problems for the lower level workers. Anna spoke a lot about how we can understand consumer culture and provided statistics for us to work with. Zoe has written about these statistics and how she feels that they made her question how we will be able to maintain a fashion industry in a more environmentally friendly way if these statistics rise.
Zoe wrote a lot of the information that she took away from this lecture and it was very informative and interesting to read. I found the way she spoke about fashion being dependant on land, water, air and animals and the questioning of if we will ever see a fully sustainable fashion industry fascinating and it put a lot of questions about the industry in my mind.
I skimmed over her other blogposts and she does speak about the other key terms (Diversity and Social Responsibility) but it would have been nice to hear more about how she could relate these back to this lecture. Even so, I did find this blogpost informative and interesting to read and I can see she is engaged in, and enjoying, the lectures and learning that the Better Lives unit if providing.