Blog 3 – Project outcomes and personal development reflection
The Better Lives unit has helped me shape my thinking before creating new projects and giving me a deeper understanding of my chosen course. I was assigned to fashion journalism, which is not what I was expected if I am being honest. But after getting to know more and more about journalism, I start to realise that if there is no journalist, it would be very hard for fashion and art to be delivered to us. Therefore, I am glad that I am in this course, even though it is only for a short period of time.
As we all know, journalists can be troubling at times. I’ve learned that a good journalist needs to be unbiased, especially when articles and publications have a lot of influence over what people see and read. Thus, in our project, write a fashion feature, I decided to be as objective as possible.
Writing has always been my weakness, so I was extremely anxious about that my fashion feature would not be good enough. But the lecturer taught us step by step about what a feature is and how to write one successfully, she taught us things like how we need to target our reader first so we know what kind of writing style we should do, and how to quote someone and how to use data. Everything she taught us was really useful and practical.
In the fashion feature project, I chose to write about fast fashion industry and garment workers’ right, because human right is something that always caught my attention. In the beginning, I thought to myself “why can’t fast fashion companies” have their eyes on subcontractors, who are responsible for paying garment workers. However, the more research I did the more I realized it is not as simple as I thought. Like I’ve mentioned in my first blog post, the phenomenon “race to the bottom”, where companies rush toward countries where prices are lowest regardless of the impact, will always be a problem. Also, manufacturers claim that higher wages will destroy the domestic industry’s ability to compete in the global market and workers could end up being jobless. Indeed, fast fashion companies is in the wrong here and the could improve their strategy, but I also understand the fact that both sides have their own consideration. I would not know this if I didn’t do enough research, I know there are more for me to learn about this particular subject, but I appreciate this unit and fashion journalism gave me a chance to reflect on the dark side of this industry. Fashion is not as glamorous as it seems, our responsibility is to see the wrong under this cover and take actions in order to help others and ourselves, only by doing that we could be proud of being part of this world.