Blog 1 – Lecture Reflection
The three themes included in the Better Lives unit are Diversity, Social Responsibility, and Sustainability. To demonstrate an ability to make connections to these several different themes allows you to develop your thinking to fashion in practice. It also allows you to enhance your creativity in these three different elements.
In this first blog post, I will write about two themes from this unit. I picked sustainability and social responsibility, which were the themes of the lectures from Julia Crew (Power lecture) and Lucy Orta (Democracy and Activism). The reason why I picked these two lectures as my blogpost is that I previously thought that I knew about both themes, but after attending I realised that my knowledge was still quite limited and superficial.
In Julia’s lecture, I faced some quite shocking circumstances in the fashion industry of recent years. She taught us definitions of fashion at the beginning of the session. Which surrounds the ideas of fashion being a visual demonstration of wealth, royalty, military power, politics, business, media, and music. Fashion also allows individual self-expression and creativeness to express ones beauty.
On the other hand, fashion has a dark side, which does not have a creative aspect. There is a famous statistic that there is a vast and growing gap between the rich and the poor, which was laid bare in a new Oxfam report. This showed that the 62 richest billionaires own as much wealth as half the rest of the world’s population. (Elliott, 2016) The clothing industry let some people become extremely wealthy over the back of others. The factory and business owners sacrificed and enslaved others in order to get rich. Even though the fashion industry has profits over a few trillion every year, it is clear that the profits are not shared equally to those who are involved in making the articles of clothing. I was aware of it before the lecture, but I did not think about the industry this bad. It is a lot worse than I thought it would be.
When I took a short course at CSM during the project research of Lucy Orta (who is an English contemporary visual artist and known as a pioneer of recycling clothing) it was the first time I’ve heard of her name. As I learned more about her, I became a big fan of her art during the short course, so I was very pleased that I could join her session as a part of the project. After graduating from university, she started her first career as a fashion designer in Paris. In the early 90’s during the global economic crisis and the Gulf War, she created Refuge Wear (1992-1998) (Ongwandee, 2016). These are portable habitats that can be transformed into clothing to offer protection from harsh conditions and be a shelter in emergency situations. During the lecture she was saying that it wasn’t her aim to create design, she was exploring the potential of waste and discover their functional abilities.
Fig 1
The common point of their lecture was repeatedly appealed significance of sustainability, in which small action of each individual would be beneficial to society and it will impact on a large number of people and everyone has responsibilities for that. Through these lectures, I recalled once again how and what fashion meant to be and who it is for. I will continue with what I have been doing (like donating old clothes, not buying real fur, and supporting fair trade products). Even though it’s tiny in the scope of a worldwide industry, I think that small actions will help the fashion industry in the long term
Reference
Elliott, L., 2016. Richest 62 People As Wealthy As Half Of World’s Population, Says Oxfam. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/Jan./18/richest-62-billionaires-wealthy-half-world-population-combined> [Accessed 1 May 2020].
Ongwandee, K., 2016. Lucy Orta : Refuge Wear. [online] Vanillawalk. Available at: <https://vanillawalk.wordpress.com/2016/09/04/lucy-orta-refuge-wear/> [Accessed 3 May 2020].
Fig 1:REFUGE WEAR – HABITENT
Date: 1992 – 1993
Ref: 000
Better Lives 19/20 Lecture 1 – POWER (10.2.2020)
19/20 Better Lives Lecture 13 Democracy and Activism