Reflection on my project outcome and my personal development.

For the Better Life project, I decided to choose the Fashion Styling and Production (FSP) pathway as I think it would be a very useful skill to have as a creative direction student and also, I am very interested learning more about it. In FSP, we forced on In and outside of fashion but in particularly sportswear fashion language and sub-cultures. We looked into contemporary sportswear styling in a global context and bring own personal experiences to respond to sportswear as a fashion sub-culture and how FSP links with the 3 better life’s themes which are Diversity, Social Responsibility and Sustainability. The goal for the end of this project was to create 2 full-body experimental and contemporary sportswear styling looks. 

For this project, I decided to focus on 90s hip-hop sub-culture in the USA. For the 1st styling look, we were required to produce one experimental sportswear look under the theme is Youth Expression. For this we learnt how to deconstruct and reconstruct silhouettes, reinventing body shapes and forms in our masterclass to create an outfit. In my outfit, I mainly forced on layering and using colours and materials that remind me of the 90s. My peers reviewed my outfit and said they can see the 90s influences and like the layering work done which created an abstract feel to it. But, to be honest, this outfit looks terrible and It’s my fault because I was so unprepared, I didn’t plan anything, and I didn’t even fully research my sub-culture properly, so the results showed that. Which is why I started further researching into the 90s hip-hop subculture for the 2nd outfit for it to be more successful. We were asked to create a Sportswear look combined with our subculture which was inspired to celebrate a healthier, brave lifestyle. For this, I mainly forced on Hip-hop dances and After researching this subculture and the history, I realised that it has a lot of social issues and the reason why hip-hop dance started was to allows a certain minority to have a platform to perform because they weren’t accepted in the other platforms. In terms of fashion, the dancers didn’t care too much about what they wore, it was about what they felt comfortable and confident while dancing. For the outfit, I was heavily influenced by RAF SIMONS Paris 2004-05 collection and the 90s artist AALIYAH. Aaliyah was known for combing boyish, baggy silhouettes with sexually assertive, confident details and attitude and I wanted to add this element into the styling and show the femininity in the masculine hip-hop culture. The feedback I’ve gotten back touched points on all those elements that I wasn’t them to see which made this very successful. 

Overall, I gained a lot of interesting and helpful information that would be useful to me Previously to the better lives project, I’ve done styling outside of university for my project but not on a professional level and I’ve never been taught anything about styling and production so I glad I choose this for Better Life. One thing I will never forget from FSP class is how to read an image and how the body language expresses and communicate feeling and intentions, I didn’t know the Camera Angle, Gaze and Poses could portray so many diverse emotions. For instances, the camera angle looking down or up can show either the sign of superiority or sign of submission. After learning these tricks and skills, I feel like from now on I’ll be looking at magazine, artwork and videos differently.