BLOG 1: Future Importance
Reflections on one or more of the Better Lives lectures and how they have influenced your thinking;
Over the past 2 weeks, I have been influenced by the lectures I have been attending to perform a Better Life. The themes are Diversity, Social Responsibility, and Sustainability while still using fashion to examine the past and future importance to build a sustainable future and improve the way we live before it’s too late.
The lecture about ‘Power’ from Julia Crew the course leader of MA fashion Design raised some very alarming points in my opinion. Fashion has always been a medium to show wealth and power, for example, there is 62 billionaires in the world and 6 of those own the largest fashion houses around today, for example, Zara, h&m and Louie Vuitton, although there are many different interties of power especially in the fashion industry, for example, Malcolm X once said that “the media is the most powerful entity.”
Due to our smartphones everything and anything being accessible online now, from buying clothes to being exposed to 4,00 – 10,00 adverts a day. Julia told us the astonishing jump in misguided sales by a 40% increase just by being the advert sponsoring LOVE ISLAND every night. This proves that the consumerism drive is what humans are abusing. This inspired me to do more research into consumerism in the UK and I found that 38 million items of new clothing are bought every week and 11 million go to landfills according to wrap.org. This shows that the media and advertising are driving consumption and consumerism of fashion products to a completely unsustainable level.
Although we as customers have the power to stand up and empower our voices, as we are the people that drive the trends. We’re voting with our wallets we, speak, brands will listen. Many sustainable companies have started campaigns to help our environment and the current state of the industry like LOVE NOT LANDFILL which was set up to swap and trade clothes that have been donated via clothing banks and Trade which is a second-hand clothes store that donates to charities. We also have the power to boycott brands if we believe they are being unethical in any way, for example, Ivanka Trump fashion brand was paid poverty wages and women’s rights were violated. After the customer started to boycott, in July 2018 she closed the brand. This shows that we do have the power to make a change but with the evolving technology it might not be enough.
In Nick Almond’s lecture on Emerging technologies in Fashion he mentioned the use of artificial intelligence, AI is pattern-seeking software, Fashion trends are patterns. AI’s are able to predict what consumers like before they even know they like it and use ‘Generative Design’ is just around the corner which is digital clothing which allow people to ‘try it on’ before it’s even made, this will lower the job opportunities if this takes off because we won’t need fashion stores anymore like the Futurist, Thomas Frey: Thinks that 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030 if AI becoming popular. One popular AI is Lil Miquela, a model, and musician created by California robotics and A.I. start-up Brud. Lil Miquela has more than 1.8 million followers across her social platforms, with the bulk coming from Instagram. On the platform, she has a 2.54% engagement rate on recent posts, putting her squarely on par with the typical human influencer, according to CreatorIQ’s analytics. This shows that the stigma is gone in 2020, we want to follow and support a human-looking advertisement AI. Which Google, Apple and Elon Musk for Tessler will see and invest more money and time into their creation?
Overall, the ‘better lives’ unit has opened my eyes into seeing how the world should be evolving but us humans have affected the natural flow of our environment because of our nasty spending habits and our constant need for innovation however in the fashion industry we want to be able to innovate our ideas although at the same time having empathy for the environment because there is no fashion on a dying plant.
By Rebekah Pavey