Matilda Holtom

About Matilda Holtom

Posts by Matilda Holtom:

blog post three: the project outcome and personal development

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I enjoyed taking part in my Better Lives project Messaging Fashion. As a group, we had to present a presentation on our proposed brand and charity collaboration, ending with a press release of our collaboration.

The designer brand we were given was Wales Bonner, we paired our brand with the charity Mosaic (a London based LGBTQ+ youth centre) to raise awareness for gender pronoun visibility. The collaboration we developed sees Ibrahim Kamara style members of the Mosaic community dress to express themselves in Wales Bonner, for a shoot alongside an article and discussion panel between Mosaic and Grace Wales Bonner for i-D magazine. The release of this collaboration will be 21st of October 2020 (International Pronouns Day), with the hashtag ‘#SayItRight’. 20% of the profits of the collection will go to Mosaic’s mentor program. Our aim for this collaboration is to educate and normalise gender fluidity and pronouns to a wider audience. In turn allowing for more young people dealing with gender pronoun issues to have a safe space to explore both their gender and sexual identity with the correct help and encourage creativity and self expression through fashion and image. 

The ideas for our collaboration stems from the Better Lives themes of sustainability, diversity, and social responsibility. In terms of sustainability, the clothing IB Kamara will style Mosaic members in will be items from Wales Bonner’s latest collection ‘Lovers Rock’, and so no new clothes will be created for this collaboration. Our collaboration looks at themes of diversity as we are casting LGBTQ+ Mosaic volunteers as models and part of the panel discussion; working on promoting positive awareness of gender pronoun issues. Social responsibility is a theme at the centre of our public relations project. With this collaboration we wanted to raise awareness and educate society on the need for gender pronoun visibility and the negatives of misgendering someone.This project has allowed for personal development within my work. I have seen myself take more time in researching for my project to make sure I am selecting the correct creators that are working towards themes of sustainability, diversity, and social responsibility in their work. These themes are current issues in which members of the creative fashion sector need to be influenced by so that progress can be made in a positive light. I have gained more education on these themes through the Messaging Fashion brief, allowing me to take ideas from all the core aspects of the unit into my next pieces of work. Since we have all been working at home due to Covid-19, learning to work effectively as a group online has been tough and wasn’t effective at the start. However, once we got our heads around it, we were able to create a presentation that was strong. This experience has made me have to be more patient and navigate remotely communicating with people in a professional manner.

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blog post two: the themes

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The Better Lives themes of sustainability, diversity, and social responsibility have made me think about how I am going to develop my practice.

Sustainability as a theme is very relevant right now. I believe I am already working in a sustainable manner as I source garments for styling from charity shops, people I know, my own collection, and create pieces myself. However, the theme of sustainability can still be brought into my sphere of thinking in terms of developing my work and the garments I use. I understand sustainability, within a fashion context, to be a theme of preventing unnecessary elements (such as fast fashion) from taking over the industry, trying to ensure these aspects of fashion are kept to a minimum – through education and slow elimination of fast fashion. There are ways in which I can take the Better Lives theme of sustainability to develop my work: looking at brands that are sustainable in terms of the creation of garments and their key messages in terms of sustainability; creating looks with materials I can reuse (items I already have), recycle (fabric, card), or return.

The Better Lives theme of diversity has made me think about the development of my practice and who I cast to be styled. As my practice progresses, I am looking to cast more diverse models (in terms of gender, race, age, ability, size, etc.) as casting different types of models increases the visibility of different types of people involved in fashion, allowing different people stories to be told. This theme has made me think about working in diverse creative teams to draw on different experiences people have developing work that is created.

The final theme, social responsibility, has made me think about issues I feel comfortable covering in my practice. I enjoy creating work that is bold, colourful, and fun. In my work so far, I have not looked at many themes of social responsibility, however, connecting my style to relevant social topics could enable viewers of my work to understand the social topic in a light-hearted fashion. Social responsibility is very important and something I must consider when creating work, especially in this covid-19 time period.

Looking at all three themes, Better Lives has helped me think about how to develop my styling practice in the time of now. Sustainability, diversity, and social responsibility are hot topics in fashion. Knowledge of these issues will enable my work to develop in a positive manner, able to touch on subjects important to myself and society in a way that is sustainable.

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  1. Rusa Biebeda Mijero: Peer Review: I instantly really liked how you mentioned that you are sustainable in everyday life by sourcing clothing items…

  2. Kalisah Mohamed: When searching for a blog post to peer review I wanted to further my personal understanding by choosing a post…

blog post one: the lectures (power)

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In these last two weeks, I have attended some really interesting lectures. Julia Crew’s lecture on the 10th of February has shaped my thinking on how much influence people in power have over the fashion industry. Fashion is powerful… The fact that Love Island can increase sales by 40% on BooHoo by just including some of their garments on the show illustrates how much power the media and influencers have over the youth and their fashion choices. Similarly, the pressure social media puts young users to keep presenting a new, updated, fashion forward feed, not only leads to increased anxiety and depression but 100 billion garments a year, with 75% of that clothing going to landfill. Personally, I think this is mad. The constant bombardment of fashion brands is becoming very invasive, brainwashing the youth into a fast fashion style craze. Fast fashion won’t decrease until the media understands the power they have is having a detrimental effect not only on the environment but on our youth.

The distribution of money in the fashion industry due to power isn’t creating better lives either, infact, quite the opposite. The industry is competing in the ‘race to the bottom’ to produce clothing at the cheapest price point possible to insure the cost of goods is cheaper for the supplier, to produce even more cheap clothing. A vicious cycle. The businesses that work in this way suggest it ‘creates better lives’ by ensuring the workers keep their jobs. However, in reality the workers are exploited to the max; forced to work overtime and unpaid in terrible conditions, all for our consumer culture and love for fast fashion.

However, as consumers we also have the power to set trends and choose where we spend our money. The power isn’t just in the hands of influencers and rich businessmen, but us. We are the ones buying their stock and generating their money; boycotting gives us the power and the ability to reshape the industry. As a consumer collective, we could bring down the reign of fast damaging fashion. A new dawn. The potential to allow the fashion industry to create better lives by dismantling the current toxic regiment brands are stuck in. 

Being young creatives branching into the fashion industry, we are able to influence each other in positive ways. In her lecture, Crew said ‘power is control, but power is also freedom’, the utilization of this can push our generation of designers to inspire a new approach in terms of technology, material, to make sure exploitation is eradicated from the industry. This power shift could also make the media and the way we portray and inform fashion more equal and less harmful to the planet and consumers. Power is positive, if it’s in the right hands. We can change lives through fashion with this power. To quote Extinction Rebellion who has protested against the many negative attributes in fashion and the many environmental issues the industry has caused, “there is no fashion on a dead planet”.

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