Violette Allard

For this peer review, I chose the Blog Post 3 of Beatrice Bredikyte.

She was a part of the project Navigating through clothing and from what I read in her blog posts, has been very interested in sustainability and nature in this Better Lives project. Her finished work was costume for dance created with rubbish that she disposed everyday. The mail goal there was to recycle and see that we can create new things from things that are considered as trash. This is I think a key aspect of sustainability, keeping in mind that you don’t need brand new things, that vintage, second hand, up cycling and recycling are always options and that nothing is meant to be thrown away without thinking about the second life that it could have. Even if her plans to finish her project were disrupted by the current situation, she managed to complete her task and filmed a video of herself in the forest as a witch wearing her dance costume made of old bed clothes, plastic, papers, old mesh, mushrooms and lichens, all of this being extremely sustainable.

However, hovering over her posts, as I said before, this was the main topic she spoke about and diversity and social responsibility were a bit left out, when she could have easily linked them all. All this sustainability work that she does and questions is part of her social responsibility and is showing that she cares about the world and thinks about how she could use the global issues that we all face to create a more positive future for fashion (as she says in her blog post 2). She really focused on the sustainability part of the Better Lives Unit and did amazingly but  I wish she could have talked about diversity and social responsibility because she seems very passionate about things and her point of view could have been really great to share with others!

When the Better Lives project was first introduced to us, I had no clue which topic I would like to study. There was so many things that were of interest to me, but I chose to study Contemporary Photography because that was the topic that I understood the less in all of these. I never really got why a picture could be show in an art gallery, how it could speak to people and make them think. Because to me, when you took a picture it wasn’t really your work, it was simply observing things that others would do and that anyone could see so I didn’t get the point. That’s why I chose to pick this project. I wanted to understand and see photography as the art that it is. At the beginning I had issues with understanding the whole concept and how it worked but through the lectures I discovered that photography can truly convey a message, show things that were hidden to people all around the world and show the impact of decisions made everywhere. A picture is not only a picture, it is a message created by the photographer and it can show ones personality or emotions. I started looking at the pictures that my peers posted in our group project and everything was so different! People really had different perspectives of things and different ways of conveying the same story sometimes. Even if I didn’t see contemporary photography in an artistic way, I started to take pictures on my own, of the things that would surround me, of friends, my family, and I even started to stage things to create my environment and see what I could express. Lectures after lectures I saw the potential of photography and its impact on the world and on the people that make it and the ones who see it. Photography can analyse fashion, analyse people, analyse the system in which we’re living in, ethnicities, genders, sexuality, peoples ethics, sustainability and even more things. It’s a wonderful tool to show people what can be done to make our world a better place (very cliché I know but true) because it evolves around sustainability, diversity and social responsibility. For my project and my view of this, I think that photography is a wonderful thing to try while we are all under lockdown, because sometimes you don’t really think when you take a picture, but the picture will say a lot about yourself even if you didn’t mean to tell something. Photography is the reflection of someones mind and of the world, for better or for worse, and I will keep looking at pictures to see how people embrace their creativity and their ways of thinking.

Nowadays, with social media, everyone can see fashion anywhere, anytime and can claim itself a fashion mogul or a fashion pro quite quickly. Social media made us see fashion everywhere and made it accessible to everyone (which is a good thing, because thanks to these platforms, people finally managed to see diversity and inclusivity in the fashion world) and sometimes, people that didn’t have an interest in fashion would discover that they loved clothes, aesthetics, styles and everything that surrounds this world. And once you discover your love/interest for it, it becomes very hard not to drown yourself in the perpetuous flow of informations, new collections, looks and more. We all know that with globalization, fashion brands are emerging everywhere, relocating their factories in poor countries where labour is cheaper and where they can produce at high speeds without having to pay a lot for the whole process of making a piece of cloth. Everyone can now buy an item the second they see it on someone’s Instagram, you don’t even have to go to the store, everything can be delivered to your door and you don’t have to make any effort of some sort. All of this means that you can see fashion everywhere, anytime, but also that you can buy fashion everywhere, anytime. People buy and buy and buy, sometimes without even knowing how much they’ve spent or how many items they’ve purchased. Fashion is all around us, all the time, and we want to use it as much as we can. But at what cost? What’s the point of buying clothes in high-street shops or to buy them from big luxury brands when you know that either way, the labor making the clothes is probably underpaid and that the factories are all relocated in poor countries? When you know that some brands are destroying what they couldn’t sell rather than recycling or donating it? All of this becomes even more noticeable during this time of pandemic. Everyone is at home because of the lockdown and you can still see that people are buying fashion items online everyday, sometimes only because it makes them feel like everything is normal. Where is the sustainability, the social responsibility and the diversity in all of this? 

The Better Lives theme made me realize that we can all be very selfish and that we could all choose to be more aware of everything that revolves around the fashion world to create a positive and lasting change in it. I intend to be more careful in my work and my research, I want to learn as much as I can about every issue that exists right now to be aware of the changes that need to be made and to be self-conscious. Because sometimes, when you do something at your own scale, you can inspire others to join you and that’s when the big changes arrive. If we all try, then someday we will all succeed to have Better Lives.

I’m writing here to reflect on the Better Lives Theme and the lectures that I attended to. To me, this theme is very important, not because it’s supposed to be, but because I feel like everyone can really connect with the issues that it’s trying to tackle. Diversity, Social Responsability and Sustainability are topics that cannot be put away somewhere far anymore. There isn’t one topic that is more important than the other two, but it’s certain that we don’t all connect to the same one equally. To me, sustainability is the one that grabs my attention the most. The lectures about society, emerging technologies in fashion, nature and sustainability were great to get to know more about the topic and see it as a whole. But when you start to get interested in one area of the Better Lives Unit, you quickly see that they are all connected to each other and that you can’t deal with one issue without having to learn about the others. How can we, as a diverse society, become more aware of our consumption and our needs when we don’t consider ourselves responsible for what is happening in the world? The fact that we are studying this in this period of time is, I think, a good thing that allows us to better reflect on a lot of different issues; we get to have some time to see what are the problems in our society and see that we don’t need a lot of things to survive and live a happy and fulfilled life. I hope that people will take this time to appreciate what they have and see that we can live without having to buy all the time, and consume and generate more and more things that aren’t necessary and that when we’ll go back to normal living, people won’t rush in the stores to buy because they’ve been deprived to use their purchasing power and that we will all be able to see what’s wrong with the way we consume.