Hsiao-Chien Tung

For peer review, I chose one of our peers’ work about foundation and diversity. I thought I should also talk about other themes, since I have been focusing on fashion sustainability throughout the better lives unit.

This fashion feature is written by Adrienne Van Der Merwe. It first talks about how tricky it can be to find an accurate shade that fits our skin tone, especially for darker skin tones. At the same time, it points out how this has become an embedded issue in the beauty and fashion industry. Then she talks about the first thing she realized when she started working as a makeup artist is the lack of diversity in foundation colours available. It also contains an example “Fenty Effect” and a few quotes of powerful people from makeup industry.

 In my opinion, it is no news that makeup brands often do not offer customers enough range of foundation colours. Even though we can see an improvement now, but it is still not enough. I love that the feature raises the idea and calls out that makeup companies are cashing in on the diversity ‘trend’. The quote from Armanda Tounghui is indeed correct and very relevant, it says that some companies are just throwing shades out just so they can say the are ‘diverse’. I also appreciate the personal touch of her own experience and thoughts as a makeup artist, it gives me a deeper understanding from professional’s angle. It is also extremely interesting idea to put the quote from Bari where she said that if a group of aliens landed on earth and went to one fashion show and then left, that would be the only type of person they would think existed or mattered. The author then asks, “who would be represented and seen in the situation and if not anyone, then why and how do we fix it?” It is provocative and somehow effective to find the connection between the alien example and diversity.

As a person of colour, I am glad that people in the fashion industry are being more aware of the topic of diversity. From my point of view, I know it is impossible to change the industry in a blink of an eye, therefore, what we need to do now is continue the discussion and hope for the best.

The Better Lives unit has helped me shape my thinking before creating new projects and giving me a deeper understanding of my chosen course. I was assigned to fashion journalism, which is not what I was expected if I am being honest. But after getting to know more and more about journalism, I start to realise that if there is no journalist, it would be very hard for fashion and art to be delivered to us. Therefore, I am glad that I am in this course, even though it is only for a short period of time.

As we all know, journalists can be troubling at times. I’ve learned that a good journalist needs to be unbiased, especially when articles and publications have a lot of influence over what people see and read. Thus, in our project, write a fashion feature, I decided to be as objective as possible.

Writing has always been my weakness, so I was extremely anxious about that my fashion feature would not be good enough. But the lecturer taught us step by step about what a feature is and how to write one successfully, she taught us things like how we need to target our reader first so we know what kind of writing style we should do, and how to quote someone and how to use data. Everything she taught us was really useful and practical.

In the fashion feature project, I chose to write about fast fashion industry and garment workers’ right, because human right is something that always caught my attention. In the beginning, I thought to myself “why can’t fast fashion companies” have their eyes on subcontractors, who are responsible for paying garment workers. However, the more research I did the more I realized it is not as simple as I thought. Like I’ve mentioned in my first blog post, the phenomenon “race to the bottom”, where companies rush toward countries where prices are lowest regardless of the impact, will always be a problem. Also, manufacturers claim that higher wages will destroy the domestic industry’s ability to compete in the global market and workers could end up being jobless. Indeed, fast fashion companies is in the wrong here and the could improve their strategy, but I also understand the fact that both sides have their own consideration. I would not know this if I didn’t do enough research, I know there are more for me to learn about this particular subject, but I appreciate this unit and fashion journalism gave me a chance to reflect on the dark side of this industry. Fashion is not as glamorous as it seems, our responsibility is to see the wrong under this cover and take actions in order to help others and ourselves, only by doing that we could be proud of being part of this world.

In the better lives units we learned about diversity, sustainability, and social responsibility. All three topics are equally important and relative to every aspect of the world of fashion. However, I think sustainability might have the most impact on how I work in fashion industry in the future. I learned that there are 1,130,000 tones of cloth purchased in the UK, but 800,000t waste form UK clothing during my chosen course – fashion journalism. The number of clothes that are wasted is jaw-dropping, yet there is a massive number of poor people that are struggling to have proper clean clothes to wear every day. How come we cannot just make less production and do not let the waste go to waste? What is the point spending all the money on making garments and just throw it all away once the season is past?

The main reason for the garment waste is fast fashion. fast fashion companies produce a large amount of clothing with cheap price and low quality to meet the fast-changing trends, but fast fashion is neither sustainable nor environmental-friendly, not to mention how unethical the way they treat their garment workers.

I’m major in fashion styling, as a stylist we have a choice to choose what kind of fashion brand we want in our work, and that shows what we support. Therefore, I think we have the voice, even though it may not be loud. Take myself for example, I personally never buy any product from fast fashion brands, not just because they are not sustainable, but also because there are way too many people are suffering due to the way that fast fashion companies’ decisions. I cannot ignore all that and give my money to them just to exchange for some clothes. As a fashion student, we are the ones who have opportunities to decide what we want the fashion industry to be in the future.

I have had the chance to watch and attend a several number of lectures during the first week of the better lives project. The lectures focused on themes such as sustainability, diversity and social responsibility. The one that has had a strong impact on me is the very first lecture I have attended, where Julia Crew discussed the topic of power and how it is related to the fashion industry.

The lecture discussed how power influences every aspect of fashion industry. I have already notice this extremely sad phenomenon before I attended the lecture, but the further the discussion goes the more it upsets and worries me. Especially, when it comes to garment workers that work for fast fashion. There are too many things for us to look at when it comes to fast fashion labour problems, like working environment, child labour, workers’ safety etc. What fast fashion industry needs to focus on is reducing inequalities. “Unfortunately, paying everyone more is not as easy as we think. Solutions require nuance and understanding of the forces of both global and local economics and politics,” says Julia Crew, Course Leader, MA Fashion Futures at London College of Fashion. Politically speaking, raising wages may drive companies to produce clothes wherever it is the cheapest. Economists call this phenomenon “race to the bottom” where companies rush toward countries where prices are lowest regardless of the impact. Manufacturers claim that higher wages will destroy the domestic industry’s ability to compete in the global market and workers could end up being jobless.

In the lecture, Julia Crew also talked about the impact social media has on the world of fashion. Apparently, the influence of advertising is quick, cumulative, and mostly subconscious. Only eight percent of an ad’s message is received by the conscious mind. The rest is worked and re-worked deep within the recesses of the brain. So we process these images over and over again, mostly subconsciously. It is unfortunate that our media manly focus on advertisement, when there are so many more serious and important issues for a to look at. “The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” Says Malcolm X, Human Rights Activist. I do see some fashion related accounts are drawing attention to fashion labour issue on social media, which is a good start. But when I talk to people in real life, I realize that most of the people still don’t know much about what is happening in the fashion industry and how poorly garment workers are treated.

After watching to all the lecture, I think there are a lot of issues deserve our attention. Of course it is very difficult to improve the whole industry in a short period of time or even change it in the future, but that doesn’t mean we should just ignore it and not try at all.