BLOG 3 Influence on Project Outcome

Throughout my time and learning in my Better Lives project; “Inside and outside of Fashion” I learned about the importance of fashion as a symbol within our society, which is a concept that I have taken with me during my daily life, and thus having a great influence on my thought process in regards to the fashion industry, from high fashion to ready to wear fast fashion retailers. Looking at the highlighted Better Lives themes, sustainability, inclusivity and social responsibility I have been able to connect them with my ordinary life and within my fashion world, making connections with the world that surrounds me. This project was very instrumental to my thought processes as a journalism student, it made me question more and made me seek more information behind some concepts and ideals. For my final project, we were instructed to create to styled looks based on a subculture we had studied.  Upon creating my final project, I was finding it hard to think of subculture that identified me and spoke to me enough to create a look, but I decided to shift my perspective into something more holistic than a tight knight subculture which had rules and restraints even though most subcultures were created as an escapism from the ones we had set in our society. With this mindset, I decided to look at my nationality and my context looking at what was happening around me. I started by looking at Italian fashion and what that means, and saw that most of me and my peers a lot of vintage clothing even though that is not a subculture as there is not much meaning behind that, I found that those clothes came from a very specific time in Italian history, the 60s and 70s, post war, in which the country was finding itself whilst having to combat recession and depression, but still having an economic and cultural boom. In this era is where a lot of what people see as staple Italian was created, fashion houses in Milan were starting to take off, films by movie directors like Sergio Leone were becoming popular thus the aura and an illusionary image was starting to grow around the country even though it was still in turmoil, having inside terrorism and political divisiveness.  Through this I started to look at the style and fashion of the older Italian generation. 

For my styled look, I was inspired by the older generation in my country. To into more detail I was specifically looking at the “old grandpa” style that is now becoming a trend as vintage. I wanted to pay an homage to the clothing and senior citizens in Italy during a time where their survival is not a guarantee, as they’ve given us so much about culture, style and fashion. So much of Italy’s culture was created throughout their lifetimes is still recognised for their creations, therefore I believe as a youth we owe it to them to recognize what they’ve given as a nation. To create this look I decided to an oversized checker male blazer and a white bandeau top to completely place the attention on the blazer. The blazer represents this older generation also the beige, all colours that we use to associate with them as well as they don’t tend to use bright colours because of their ideals on vulgarity and being extra, also may represent this unspoken part of Italian society; the judgement, in Italy it is taught that do not be vulgar, do not attract attention to yourself, respecting yourself and god. Such ideals that this older generation holds, an ideal that my generation is constantly fighting against at dinner tables or protests are comments we will once miss when they’re gone. For the bottoms, I decided to wear some puma sports shorts to again represent this moving of time. It could be argued that the shorts are a sense of realism from the actual outfit as a lot of people would mix a classic formal item like a blazer with a sportswear piece