Emi Ashizuka

I decided on “Navigating Through Clothing” with Jessica Curtis for my Better Lives project. This unit aimed to broaden your knowledge on a selected subject, which was alongside mixed students who are studying at SMC in their first year. I was pretty nervous about studying with students who I did not know beforehand, so I was very relieved when I saw Jess when I opened the classroom door the first time. 
 
In the first week of class, we were given a handout of Hansel and Gretel and our objective was to design one character from the story. When we went through the narrative together, Jess told us the key points of reading performance texts. She told us to be aware of the character’s physical features, time periods, places, smells, and the weather. She also told us to ask questions like “ What does the character say about themselves” and “What do others say about the character?”. Being able to answer those questions would help our understanding on the portrayal of the final character design.
 
While I was reading the text, I felt Hansel and Gretel were both suffering from hunger, because of a famine. Even though they were physically weak, their hearts and spirits reminded me of a “fighter figure”.  

During the second week of class, we made a visit to the British Museum and the National Theatre. There I was able to get some inspiration for the character design. At the National Theatre, they always have a small costume exhibition which has the costumes for different plays that were performed there. There was a costume that intrigued me, it was a massive body padding, made by a duvet and covered by the cloud suit. This costume was used in “Mr. Gum and the Dancing Bear (2019)”. When I made the body padding suit, we were required to buy poly wadding sheets, which consists of thick cotton to build the padding. The idea of using a duvet really inspired me to use more sustainable or second hand materials if the outcome or the effect is the same.

In the British Museum, at the British Iron Age section, I was fascinated by a bronze helmet and shield from 350-50 BC that was found at the river Thames. These object made me recall the Hansel Fighter’s figure. So I used it in my final character design.
  

 
For Hansel, I decided on a hungry, under-fed fighter. I also wanted to create the opposite of that for when the witch feeds Hansel. To do that I incorporated body padding, to make Hansel look a lot fatter because of all the food that the witch fed him.
 
The first step, while approaching the character design was to draw the main character and the other character’s relationship, to understand their objective mutual relations. I also researched the story’s background (Why did the author write this story, what was the time period, what is the age of the characters etc). 
 
From that, I thought that the helmet and shield that I saw earlier were associated with Vikings (there was no detailed description at the object itself). So I went to the JORVIK Viking Center in York on the 7^th of March to figure out how Vikings lived and what kind of materials they used for the clothes they wore.  Surprisingly, I found out that they figured out skills for dying garments with bugs, vegetables, and other natural products.

I also visited kilt shops and fabric stores in Edinburgh on the 14^th of March to research more about different Clan’s tartan for the character design. It was a great opportunity to see various tartans and the history of it.  

I also visited kilt shops and fabric stores in Edinburgh on the 14^th of March to research more about different Clan’s tartan for the character design. It was a great opportunity to see various tartans and the history of it.  

From my primary and secondary research, I created collages for the task. The moment Hansel was hearing his parents dialogs while sitting in front of the door. I quite enjoyed making the collages, although my final character design wasn’t as good I envisioned it in my collages. I went back to my hometown in the middle of spring break because of this pandemic. After I departed I realised that I left my drawing material in London, so I had to use my iPad which I’ve never really used for this kind of work. That was a massive challenge for me, and I should have trained myself in doing more design work on it.

While I was attending the online lectures I realised that I forgot to decide on the performance type. As a performance course student, this is an unacceptable mistake because we always create designs that associate with different performances. 

To conclude, even though this project mostly overlapped with what I’ve learned at block 1, it also let me reconfirm the processes of making characters again and it will be helpful in my future work. I can learn from the mistakes that I made, and apply that knowledge and experience in the rest of my career.  

All three Better Lives themes are crucial in understanding how to face today’s society as an artist or a designer who produce product and art around the world. However, in this blog post, I will focus on writing about “diversity” in my theme reflection.

Diversity means “Understanding that each individual is unique and recognizing our individual differences. These can be along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies. It is the exploration of these differences in a safe, positive, and nurturing environment. It is about understanding each other and moving beyond simple tolerance to embracing and celebrating the rich dimensions of diversity contained within each individual” (Queensborough Community College, 2020) 

Recently, ‘cultural appropriation’ is a frequently argued topic in the fashion industry. It comes down to ‘the use of one culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals or technologies by members of another culture regardless of intent, ethics, function or outcome’ (Kirkland, Representation, 2020) It is clear that there are rising incidents of cultural tone-deafness emerging more and more in today’s fashion industry.

Before the lecture, I never heard about the phrase `cultural appropriation’ before entering my current course. There is a statistic of my country’s population’s nationalities.  In Japan 98.1% is of the population is Japanese, 0.5% is Chinese and 0.4% is Korean. Then there is about 1% of people that are from somewhere else. (Japan Ethnic groups – Demographics, 2016) 
However, nowadays the number of foreign national workers has been drastically increasing, especially in Tokyo, yet the majority of the ethical group in Japan is Asian. There is a common idiom that reads “All Japanese are mentally middle class”. Japan used to have different castes before the second world war, but nowadays, there are no longer any castes that exist in Japan.

From my experience, before I went abroad to the United Kingdom, I hardly ever had a chance to associate with different ethnic groups of people, the background would help me to be less ignorant about cultural consciousness back then.
 

Attending Teleica Kirkland, Representation lecture was significantly helpful to deepen my understanding of the theme and it was also able to broaden my view. She said: “Designers and promoters still use racially insensitive images and doses outrage marketing under the guide lack of understanding to sell their products”.  Even though fashion should be addressed without any restraints because it is a form of art, it still should not be acceptable to misrepresent cultures and society in a deliberate manner. 

I learned from the lecture that I should be conscious of different cultures during my next projects and products. I should always make sure to do enough research so I do not appropriate other’s cultures in a way that might make a viewer of user of such a project or artwork uncomfortable. Even when it is simply inspiring. In my 3D effect course, we mainly create character designs for puppets props and costumes based on scripts or other narratives. So it is essential for my work to understand cultures on a deep level so that I can avoid ignorance and tell facts based on the history of a culture to the world.  

Reference 

Qcc.cuny.edu. 2020. Queensborough Community College. [online] Available at: <https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/diversity/definition.html> [Accessed 6 May 2020]. 

Indexmundi.com. 2016. Japan Ethnic Groups – Demographics. [online] Available at: <https://www.indexmundi.com/japan/ethnic_groups.html> [Accessed 8 May 2020]. 

19/20 Better Lives Lecture 10 Representation 

https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/d11c1d14-73bd-4332-bc03-019eb32f4f97

For the peer review, I have chosen to discuss Yi An Chen’s third blog in which she reflects on the ’Navigating Through Clothing’ course that I also attended. The reasons why I have chosen to review her blog are because I have always been curious about what others think about the course. There were students who are not from the performance department during the project and she is one from the PR course. I have met her in the class, and she was very enthusiastic to learn new costume design skills.
 

At the beginning of her blog, she mentions that the different learning processes of costume design and her own subject are very different. So, I can imagine that this attributed to the course being a big challenge for her. Although it was difficult, she engaged well with the course and her costume was exceptionally clear and covered the main themes well.
 
The movement of performers is always something that designers have to consider when they pick different materials and fabric. This is something she also mentions in her blog. With this, I think it’s easy to envision someone wearing your product in your mind and think about materials that you might use for different body parts. For example, it’s probably not a great idea to have rigid materials around limbs or other moving body parts if the performer is supposed to do a difficult dance.
This isn’t something that I really thought about before, and I never really considered the movement of performers in my own work, so I’d like to incorporate this realization into my next work. 

In the primary research, she mentioned that she struggled to find inspiration from the museum visit and to bring the inspiration that she did find back into her final character design. This is something that I totally understand, and it’s still not an easy process for me, even though I’m a 3D student. But she does reflect that after the online session, she understood how to apply primary research into the design on a higher level.
 
Her final character design was The Little White Duck from the given text, Hansel and Gretel. I love her idea of the attempt at the character design because I personally felt that the little white duck doesn’t have much presence in the story compared to the other human characters. This means that she read the text very diligently and with a lot of thought.
 
At the end of her reflection, she writes that she doesn’t think that her final character design was a success. I disagree, I saw her collage work at online session and it definitely left me with a good impression, because I can still recall the image vividly. Her collage was sophisticated and used raw flowers which was subtle and intense at the same time. I was really fascinated by her work, and I would want to tell her that she should be proud of what she made.
 
 

To conclude, I think while reading someone else’s reflection, I was also able to reflect differently on my own works and the next steps that I can take in future projects. It was great to meet people from other courses and share ideas. I think Yi An Chen’s reflection was both honest and thoughtful and showed me my work in a different light.

Blog 3

The three themes included in the Better Lives unit are Diversity, Social Responsibility, and Sustainability. To demonstrate an ability to make connections to these several different themes allows you to develop your thinking to fashion in practice. It also allows you to enhance your creativity in these three different elements.
 
In this first blog post, I will write about two themes from this unit. I picked sustainability and social responsibility, which were the themes of the lectures from Julia Crew (Power lecture) and Lucy Orta (Democracy and Activism). The reason why I picked these two lectures as my blogpost is that I previously thought that I knew about both themes, but after attending I realised that my knowledge was still quite limited and superficial.
 
In Julia’s lecture, I faced some quite shocking circumstances in the fashion industry of recent years. She taught us definitions of fashion at the beginning of the session. Which surrounds the ideas of fashion being a visual demonstration of wealth, royalty, military power, politics, business, media, and music. Fashion also allows individual self-expression and creativeness to express ones beauty. 

On the other hand, fashion has a dark side, which does not have a creative aspect. There is a famous statistic that there is a vast and growing gap between the rich and the poor, which was laid bare in a new Oxfam report. This showed that the 62 richest billionaires own as much wealth as half the rest of the world’s population. (Elliott, 2016) The clothing industry let some people become extremely wealthy over the back of others. The factory and business owners sacrificed and enslaved others in order to get rich. Even though the fashion industry has profits over a few trillion every year, it is clear that the profits are not shared equally to those who are involved in making the articles of clothing. I was aware of it before the lecture, but I did not think about the industry this bad. It is a lot worse than I thought it would be.

When I took a short course at CSM during the project research of Lucy Orta (who is an English contemporary visual artist and known as a pioneer of recycling clothing) it was the first time I’ve heard of her name. As I learned more about her, I became a big fan of her art during the short course, so I was very pleased that I could join her session as a part of the project. After graduating from university, she started her first career as a fashion designer in Paris. In the early 90’s during the global economic crisis and the Gulf War, she created Refuge Wear (1992-1998) (Ongwandee, 2016). These are portable habitats that can be transformed into clothing to offer protection from harsh conditions and be a shelter in emergency situations. During the lecture she was saying that it wasn’t her aim to create design, she was exploring the potential of waste and discover their functional abilities.

Fig 1 

The common point of their lecture was repeatedly appealed significance of sustainability, in which small action of each individual would be beneficial to society and it will impact on a large number of people and everyone has responsibilities for that. Through these lectures, I recalled once again how and what fashion meant to be and who it is for. I will continue with what I have been doing (like donating old clothes, not buying real fur, and supporting fair trade products). Even though it’s tiny in the scope of a worldwide industry, I think that small actions will help the fashion industry in the long term

Reference 

Elliott, L., 2016. Richest 62 People As Wealthy As Half Of World’s Population, Says Oxfam. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/Jan./18/richest-62-billionaires-wealthy-half-world-population-combined> [Accessed 1 May 2020]. 

Ongwandee, K., 2016. Lucy Orta : Refuge Wear. [online] Vanillawalk. Available at: <https://vanillawalk.wordpress.com/2016/09/04/lucy-orta-refuge-wear/> [Accessed 3 May 2020]. 

Fig 1:REFUGE WEAR – HABITENT 

Date: 1992 – 1993 
Ref: 000 

https://www.studio-orta.com/en/artworks/serie/1/Refuge-Wear

Better Lives 19/20 Lecture 1 – POWER (10.2.2020) 

https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/81f5f93f-89c9-4e6d-a3ff-17d0eafcfc76

19/20 Better Lives Lecture 13 Democracy and Activism 

https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/3923e31d-2534-4582-a5f3-4d6f035523c5