Blog 2. Reflections on how the Better Lives themes might change how you work in the future
Through term 2 and term 3, I have learned about sustainability, social responsibility, and diversity via Better Lives lectures and Emerging Technologies in the Fashion Industry. All of the lectures lead me to have the responsibility of solving problems that the fashion industry faced with. Especially, the Emerging Technology session helped me to produce how I work in the fashion industry as a new creative director who leads to the fashion industry in the future.
Previously, I thought that people aware of their consumption when they are buying clothes or products because, a lot of eco-friendly or vegan products are launched by fashion brands these days and there are documentaries to talk about bad truth of fashion industry. However, through the Emerging Technology session, I realised that consumers do not care about the garment manufacturing process that I expected. In the Emerging Technology session, we searched about fashion trend via Google Trend. I compared the frequency of search patterns between fake fur coat and leather jacket from 2004 to 2020 in the UK. It shows that there is an incomparable interest of leather jacket. It seems that people keep consuming products made by leather or fur even if alternative materials have invented.
(Google Trends, no date)
Equally, this might be linked with lack of advertisement, especially among major fashion brands that is an industry leader by leading fashion trends. Even though major fashion brands are trying to produce eco-friendly clothes, it accounts for small parts of company’s product line because it is unmarketable than other clotheslines. For example, H&M launched sustainability collection line, but I cannot find advertisements related to sustainability collection at both H&M online and offline stores. Also, I cannot find any clothes from sustainability collection at H&M offline store in London. Having experienced, I now believed that media is not only an aspect of consumers’ interests but also, a tremendous influence to change consumers’ perceptions and interests. This means that the degree of media exposure, people become more interested or awarded what the company’s focusing on, and eventually, this influences peoples’ consumption.
In addition, I believe that as a new media platform is able everyone to share information, therefore, floated information makes fashion companies struggle to stand it compared to the past. Therefore, they start to add provocative comments or uncertain information in order to protect existing customers and to attract new customers. However, I think this phenomenon is harmful future fashion industry as well as consumers.
To sum up, I have significantly developed my understanding of the massive impact of mass media and the importance of creating fashion media. This understanding could be useful to me because it encourages me to create the right advertisements that leads a consumer to do ethical consumption.
References
Google Trends (no date) [Screencast]. Available at: https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US (Accessed: 5 May 2020).
10th May 2020 @ 11:36 pm
Blog 4: Peers review
For this peer review, I would like to reflect on Jiyong Lee’s second blog, which reflects on “how better lives themes might change how you work in the future.” We are both in the same class. Therefore we might have the same interest in how technology would lead us to the future as creative directors.
In the blog, he mentioned her awareness of people is considering less of their consumer behavior than she imagined, as the word ‘sustainability’ frequently shows on the publics’ view. She takes ‘leather jackets’ as examples and offers a diagram from 2004-2020 to interpret the fact that people have raised more interest in leather jackets than fur coat recently. It is good to see the evidence she gave, which contains the technology and experiment we have in the class; it also reminds me of the truth that there are large numbers of consumers are lack of knowledge to how sustainability can impact our future lives.
It is interesting to see that experience that she can not find any advertisement and sustainable collection of H&M online, while they claimed they had to produce an exclusive line for it. It occurred to me that even though a lot of brands is catching up the ‘trend’ of sustainability, no matter if they do care about our environment or people’s working condition, there is a possibility that some fashion companies could use the sustainable slogan as part of their promotions or strategies. For those fashion brands that take their benefits in the first place and unwilling to lose their existed consumers, they may keep their producing process and add a ‘sustainability’ line as another way of extending their audience group, at the same time be political right and catching up the trend.
As a creative direction, students who work on media, I realized we are a transmission of fashion brands to consumers in some way. I agree with the point she brought up that ‘it might be lack of advertisement.’ It seems like our responsibility to educate and convey the impact of ‘sustainability’ and the social responsibility we shouldered to the public, as media have a phenomenal influence on public opinion and view. It would be great to use the technology we introduced in class such as ‘blockchain’ ‘google trend,’ bring them to public eyes to make them realize there is a way to supervise the fashion brands’ commitment and to convince people to concern about sustainability and the fact that their behaviors can impact fashion industry in a significant way.
It is an excellent blog to read about. It elicits my thinking of troubles we have inside of the fashion industry and reminds me of the obligation we media students have while working in the industry, although it would be really good to see more details about the author’s proposal of using technology in his or her future work.