Blog Post 4 – Peer Review
For the peer review, I am discussing Kaylee-Rose Payne’s third blog post where she reflects on her project and better lives experience. Like myself, Kaylee chose ‘In and Outside of Fashion: Sportswear’ (Styling) as her project brief for better lives, therefor I thought it would be interesting to discover another’s point of view and experience of the same subject.
She begins by discussing the benefit that better lives gave her an opportunity to try and learn something new, and the realisation of how important styling is. I agree with this statement as, by taking part in those activities that other creatives, that you will most likely be working with do, it allows you to appreciate them and their work more. In terms of the styling and production project, you realise how much goes into arranging visuals and how a stylist’s choice can make or break a look/ an image.
Kaylee then goes onto talking about learning about the idea of messages portrayed from the body and camera positions, and how these signals can be interpreted globally so it is important to be conscious of class and culture appropriation. I think this highlighted well the issue that education about diversity, and ethical issues surrounding it, is essential to know before creating work, especially studying fashion journalism, so you don’t offend anyone or cause controversy that could possibly ruin a career.
Kaylee perfectly reflects the better lives theme of sustainability by giving ‘1 dress, 365 days’ by Sheena Matheikin as an example of recycling looks and being innovative with garments. By highlighting the issue of ‘posting for the gram’ – outfit pictures through the popular hashtag ‘#ootd’, she reflects on social responsibility on social media with these trends growing the need for new garments to be socially acceptable. I also liked the fact she pointed out that many trends are cyclical, so by keeping garments that may come back into fashion, a person can be sustainable instead of throwing them to waste.
Reflecting on the styling workshop, Kaylee describes how she worked with aspects of the theme diversity to explore body shapes, adding padding to the biceps and shoulders to create a typically masculine figure on a female model – the idea that women can also be muscly. Her group chose 80s rave as a subculture and portrayed this era with bright colours and shoulder pads, however I feel the subculture could’ve been made more specific by working with a more typically popular example such as Acid House, Punk, New Romantics – maybe this is something to explore further in future. Also, as part of the masterclass, Kaylee seemed to explore sustainability by recycling materials to make garments – drawing on paper to repurpose the print for a skirt. Something I particular like about Kaylee’s reflection of the project, is that she discussed how she added what she learnt about body posture and camera positions into her images of the styled look, exploring diversity through the strong and powerful stance of the model – symbolising empowerment of women and the feminist movement.
The only thing I would suggest to improve the work to make it more relevant to today’s world, is that Kaylee could’ve mentioned how COVID-19 effected the six-week project and how the better lives themes can be applied to this situation when working from home.