blog post three: the project outcome and personal development
I enjoyed taking part in my Better Lives project Messaging Fashion. As a group, we had to present a presentation on our proposed brand and charity collaboration, ending with a press release of our collaboration.
The designer brand we were given was Wales Bonner, we paired our brand with the charity Mosaic (a London based LGBTQ+ youth centre) to raise awareness for gender pronoun visibility. The collaboration we developed sees Ibrahim Kamara style members of the Mosaic community dress to express themselves in Wales Bonner, for a shoot alongside an article and discussion panel between Mosaic and Grace Wales Bonner for i-D magazine. The release of this collaboration will be 21st of October 2020 (International Pronouns Day), with the hashtag ‘#SayItRight’. 20% of the profits of the collection will go to Mosaic’s mentor program. Our aim for this collaboration is to educate and normalise gender fluidity and pronouns to a wider audience. In turn allowing for more young people dealing with gender pronoun issues to have a safe space to explore both their gender and sexual identity with the correct help and encourage creativity and self expression through fashion and image.
The ideas for our collaboration stems from the Better Lives themes of sustainability, diversity, and social responsibility. In terms of sustainability, the clothing IB Kamara will style Mosaic members in will be items from Wales Bonner’s latest collection ‘Lovers Rock’, and so no new clothes will be created for this collaboration. Our collaboration looks at themes of diversity as we are casting LGBTQ+ Mosaic volunteers as models and part of the panel discussion; working on promoting positive awareness of gender pronoun issues. Social responsibility is a theme at the centre of our public relations project. With this collaboration we wanted to raise awareness and educate society on the need for gender pronoun visibility and the negatives of misgendering someone.This project has allowed for personal development within my work. I have seen myself take more time in researching for my project to make sure I am selecting the correct creators that are working towards themes of sustainability, diversity, and social responsibility in their work. These themes are current issues in which members of the creative fashion sector need to be influenced by so that progress can be made in a positive light. I have gained more education on these themes through the Messaging Fashion brief, allowing me to take ideas from all the core aspects of the unit into my next pieces of work. Since we have all been working at home due to Covid-19, learning to work effectively as a group online has been tough and wasn’t effective at the start. However, once we got our heads around it, we were able to create a presentation that was strong. This experience has made me have to be more patient and navigate remotely communicating with people in a professional manner.