Blog post #1 – Keer Nika Li
Being part of the next generation who will take over the fashion industry in the future, it is our duty as fashion majored students to get to know what is currently happening in the industry. The Better Lives units had enabled me to develop a better, deeper understanding of the essential knowledge of the humanity truths and phenomenon in the industry’s daily practices. Hence, I felt that I was further educated on certain topics throughout the units, which had impacted my thinking while performing tasks in the future.
Even though we talked about ‘Diversity, Sustainability, and Social Responsibility ’ all the time in our daily practices in LCF, I found myself that I was being too shallow after sitting through the units.
We talked about ‘Diversity, Sustainability, and Social Responsibility’ all the time, we promised to perform the thinkings in our projects and works all the time, but we never truly care and wanted to understand the needs of the minorities that we want to include both physical and psychological needs.
I’ve left a very strong impression while I was watching the lecture about inclusivity, and how the lecturer was to design garments for the disabled. I’ve learned that when you’re designing something for a group of minorities, even though you’ve known and researched the group well before you started, it is still essential that to take advice and experiment with your outcome with the actual person from the minority. Understand and studied one’s difficulties well doesn’t mean that you’ve experienced and felt what they’ve been through on a daily basis, and learning from another’s perspective will allow you to be more considerate when designing and engaged with their lifestyles. The same rules will apply to our practices when creating work/art pieces that involve other ethnicities and cultures.
As one of the classmates mentioned in the lecture of Representation, some brands were just made use of Asian/black models when they wanted to show that they’re ‘inclusive’, while many more other ethnicities, e.g. Arabians or southeast Asians were neglected in the scene. The industry is shouting and wanting to prove that they’ve grown and able to perform diversity, in order to make profits from their public image while they did not actually carry out any deeper researches into the minorities that really need more attention. That had made me reflected on how could we, our generation of creative minds to be more comprehensive in the future.
Being one of the future fashion practitioners, it takes courage when we want to challenge the stereotype practices of the industry as an individual. But, challenges are exactly what we need in this growing and diverse industry that will be targeting more and more population. I felt that the unit had encouraged me to have the strength to give out different voices while participates in projects, and only participation will bring more innovations to the scene.