Blog post 3

Throughout the Better Lives course, I had the opportunity to attend the Fashion activism project. In this course we focused our attention to the role of Creative direction in Fashion and how this can underline themes such as sustainability, diversity and social responsibility.

During the course we have been assigned in a group of students, and each group has been also delegated analyze a specific Brand. The aim of each group was to create moving images related to the given brand. 

My group has been commissioned to create a video for Bode, in order to do this, we started by analyzing the Brand in its Aesthetic, Ethos and Positioning in Fashion.

Essentially Bode is a menswear brand which was born in New York with the aim to create clothes by recycling old fabrics.

For this reason our initial idea was to create a video that would have been focusing on the sustainability theme, and we wanted to express this topic by creating a narrative video that would have been representing a protest against the waste in fashion industry, everything located in an idealistic city identified as New York City. We imagined to include a 60’s vibe through the utilize of filters in order to highlight the retro characteristic of the brand.

Unfortunately, due to the current situation of Covid-19 this idea could not go through and thus, not been pursued. At this point, we started reconsidering our concept. Although, our initial idea resulted a bit confusing, as it was tough for us to communicate and sharing our concepts, we finally managed to stick with the idea of sustainability as it gets along with the main focus of the brand. In order to be successfully in our project, we decided to equally share for each component of the group a specific task. I personally started researching old footage video of the process by creating sustainable clothing. Frankly, the research of video has been a bit tricky since there are not many videos posted online concerning the chosen topic.

Alongside with the sustainability theme in our video we also introduced another topic. We have chosen to pursue the diversity topic; this choice has been taken by considering an important factor, that it the brand under analysis when it comes to shooting prefers to have a mix of cultures in them. Mixing old footage video of the brand with video of making sustainable clothes we produced a campaign that would have been shown in BODE shops as a way to make the consumer curious to discover more about the brand and its way to operate.

 Thanks to this course I had the possibility to have a personal development, in fact, this project gave me a real opportunity to work in a team, thus, to collaborate with people from all over the world with different culture and perspective. 

For the first time, being in a team gave me a real idea of what will be my work in the future, I have really appreciated working with my group despite the fact it has not been so simple due to our different point of view.

As a result this course made me think about my previous mistakes and my limited knowledge concerning these topics. However, I felt very engaged, and this has made me feel I need to change part of my choice in order to give a contribute to support a more sustainable world.