Better Lives – blog post 3

This week I finally finished my final piece for my Better Lives: Fashion activism project. This project had me looking at the streetwear brand Lazy Oaf as I had to create a moving image campaign to advertise Lazy Oaf, whilst pushing the Better Lives themes. As creative director, I also had responsibility to consider brand aesthetic whilst representing them – yet it was still my vision. I did want to play around with the aesthetic of the brand and evolve it slightly, using the themes that have inspired me (from the lectures Society, Representation and Culture) which I have spoken about in my previous posts. 

Firstly, I was inspired by looking into British modern society, as I particularly wanted to look at their views on stereotypes/subcultures. Currently online there has been many tweets, and on other social medias, going viral. It was captioned “I want to dress like this but all people in the UK know is Nike fleece” with pictures of more outlandish, slightly artsy clothes. This tweet sparked up debates on my timeline at really interested me and I represented the point I wanted to make well. As many people were pointing out the same thing – which was dress how you want to? Why do you care if everyone else in the UK is in casual clothing? But a lot of people were pointing out that in society today, especially in the UK, we can become negative and judgmental on others. This has a direct impact on how we consume clothes and even what clothes. I think this is a good example of British culture and it shows that people are still scared to push the norms. This theme would single handedly accurately represent Lazy Oaf since they are known to not conform to the norm and is for ‘misfits’, even having the slogan “keep it weird” and this is a running theme in their brand. 

My submission was a series of short moving images, intended for a series of Instagram advertisement type campaign. I made a series of gif-like illustration videos showing someone fighting with identity. I think that you can imply the meaning behind these gifs easily and I featured the tweet in one of them as well so this means people would imply the meaning through the tweet (this could also make it gain more attention and relevance on social media). The illustration shows a male wearing a tracksuit in a urban setting, and then I used Lazy Oaf’s childish doodle style illustrations to imply that he wasn’t being himself. I want to make people question themselves with this and I’m hoping to change people’s relationships with clothes – you can use them to show your actual personality, which I think makes fashion more fun and less of a dull task. 

I feel like my work has improved already throughout this unit because beforehand, when studying Fashion imaging and illustration I would design my work because I liked the outfit or the composition but this has little meaning and no concepts behind it, all be it a bit boring. I think it is much more interesting to have a concept/issue behind your work, this also makes it more interesting and relatable to people – hopefully causing some people to think along the way.