Blog 3 – Personal Development Reflection
For the Better Lives unit, I chose to study Fashion Journalism as I thought it would give me skills that would be helpful for my actual course, as it would give me the ability to look at the Better Lives themes from a more analytical standpoint.
We were asked to write a 500-word feature piece on any of the Better Lives themes that we took an interest to, so I chose diversity as I feel as though something that hasn’t really been talked about within the industry is how brands are now marketing towards being diverse and inclusive in order to boost their sales as opposed to doing what is right. Because of the backlash that big companies face in an age of cancel culture for not including enough minority groups within their runways or campaigns, they make changes only because they realise their sales are going down or they know it will gain them positive press, as opposed to doing it from the beginning because they believed it was the right thing to do.
Because of COVID-19, we didn’t get as many resources and as much help as we would have got if we weren’t at home, however, I did like the freedom we had to write about anything we liked as it gave me a chance to research something I actually found interesting. From researching this topic, I definitely feel as though at this point diversity is definitely something that is almost impossible to get right, as there will always be a group missing and will always be someone annoyed about it.
This task definitely opened my eyes to the issues of the industry, especially as at the end we got to peer review other people’s work and get feedback on our own. Reading what other people chose to write about definitely opened my eyes to the issues of the industry, as no one really chose to write about similar topics, and it also gave me a chance to see how other people write about/tackle difficult to talk about topics.
I’m not exactly completely proud of my project outcome as I feel as though the online lectures did hold us back a bit, but I definitely do feel like I’ve learnt something and will be using these skills again in the future.