Blog 4. Reflections on your peer’s work using the Better Lives themes as a framework for analysis
After reading blog posting for writing peer’s work reflection, I found that a great review written by Yushan Chen. The reason why I choose this blog post is she has a clear understanding of the fashion industry and her interpretation of the fashion industry gives me arouse sympathy, especially the problem of diversity in the fashion industry. Yushan Chen wrote this reflection after reading Carlos’ blog and it is talking about the method that the fashion industry deal with diversity and the impact of the fashion company’s efforts with own interpretation.
Followed by Yuschan’s argument, I agree that fashion companies are trying to take the lead casting diverse colour of people for models, plus-size models, disabled people, and a full range of ages models for look book, collections or campaign adverts compared to the past. This trend seems that fashion society is paying more attention to diversity and is going in a better direction. However, despite such efforts, the fashion society continues to face problems with the constant chaos of diversity, and the development of the fashion industry can be seen insignificantly. This is not only occurred diversity, but also the sustainability of fashion. It seems that fashion companies use diversity as one of the marketing strategies for creating an ethical corporate image-making, not an accurate understanding culture that they manage.
In fact, many brands speak of diversity and show off form their collections, but I think the reason why problems continue is they borrow other cultures without a precise understanding. For example, Dolce& Gabbana advert in 2018, describing ridiculously an Asian model ate spaghetti with chopsticks, and 2020 s/s Gucci collection designed garments alluding to mental patients can be representative of the backside of the fashion society. Now the fashion market is globalised, I think that fashion companies need to deal with issues such as cultural appropriation with more attention in order to attract consumers who come from other countries.
In order to get rid of this, I strongly agree with her argument that diversity starts from understanding each other’s culture so that you can fight against discrimination and give opportunities regardless of limitations. Followed by this, I think you start by ‘not being aware of the difference’ between you and others. This is because that by recognising the difference, you might think that you have extraordinary talents or customs, and which thinking can lead to discriminate against each other. ‘Not recognising differences’ here does not mean neglection, but comprehension so that we do not create a hierarchy from differences. In other words, it cannot be said that having different cultures, customs or races is better for others because differences from cultures are just the way we think about what to use it depends on where we live.
In global society, it is natural circumstances that you are inspired by different cultures, and it might be bring interesting outcomes as collaborating between distinct different cultures. However, most important aspect in this process, you have to respect and understand cultures that you do not know as much as you can. As a result, fashion industry seems to become an industry where does not be aware of diversity but accept diversity itself naturally. After that, we can go to the next step that Yushan mentioned.