Better Lives Blog Post 2
How Better Lives themes will change my work in the future
Studying Better Lives has made me think a lot more deeply about the true meaning of fashion. Not just the clothes, catwalks and fancy photoshoots but how we as fashion students can change the world and make fashion more diverse, sustainable, ethical and fair.
Aside from studying Creative Direction for Fashion at London College of Fashion, I work on a project called “be kind to your mind”. This is a mental health platform that I created to give support and advice for young people struggling with mental health. After attending the well-being lecture I was really inspired to delve deeper and try to learn more about it. This better lives unit has given me knowledge to promote well-being, motivation and managing your mental health to the people that are a part of our platform.
Before Better Lives I didn’t really have much knowledge on well-being or how it can affect people in their professional and personal lives. My better lives unit that I have been studying is Fashion Journalism, where I have learned to analyse texts and understand how articles are presented in different spaces, their importance and how they can present data, facts and opinions to have an effect on the reader. Mixing well-being and fashion journalism had me researching different publications such as “Glamour” and “Happiful” which are magazines that focus on well-being. They have many articles that give advice on a wide range of topics that help people to manage their mindset and control their emotions in a positive light. I will use the knowledge that I have gained from this better lives unit in well-being to encourage people to look after themselves, their mental health and wellness and promote well-being through my social platforms and create content for people who may need guidance in this field.
Another topic that I learned about was Culture, attending Anna Fitzpatrick’s lecture which talked about cultural heritage, climate emergency and sustainability. Here I learned about how consumer culture measures success through consumption and how we are made to think that consuming more makes us more happy. This has very negative effects on people as it creates mental health problems, exploitation and waste as people feel the need to constantly keep buying more items or engaging in more content.
This lecture had a great impact on me as before I didn’t realise the huge negative impact that consumer culture and fast fashion had on people. Now I understand that quality is so much more important than quantity. I always looked at brands such as Nike and Apple as being very successful and admired their great wealth, yet now I see that their manufacturing is very unethical in lots of areas and they constantly make people feel like they need to keep buying more. I will always in future as a Creative Director look at creating campaigns that are ethical and do not force people to feel the need to keep buying more and more, yet invest in a product, movement or service that is sustainable, ethical and fair.