Maciej Sienkiewicz

For the fourth blog post, I review one of my peers’ blog posts. I read over a few of the blog posts on the SMC site and was really interested to see everyone’s response to the Better Lives unit. After reading different blog posts I found that I mostly enjoyed Maja Bebber’s third blog post.

Maja starts her blog by talking about the brand “Lazy Oaf” and explains the feel of the brand, the 90s aesthetic and their “sense of not conforming to the norm”. She then explains that the brand uses packaging and production that is sustainable. Maja shows a good understanding of the brand and summarises the image of the brand well in a short statement. Further into the blog post, Maja explains that her group decided to create GIFs which would suit the bold coloured theme of the brand. I thought it was really interesting that her group wanted to re-invent the brand’s “Time To Change” slogan. As a group she states that their campaign would feature the slogans “Time to” – time to think, time to act, time to talk and time to listen”. This shows Maja re-imagining the brand and presenting the theme of diversity.

Collaboration is another theme that Maja explored as this was one of the lectures that was part of the Better Lives course. Maja mentions how she collaborated with other students from Fashion Photography, Fashion Styling and Production. She mentions that they took part in video calls and group chats to organise their project and communicate throughout the course. I think that this reflects really well as it’s an example of how different students from different courses can come together to create a piece of work and collaborate which was something that was promoted in the Better Lives lectures. Another point on group work that Maja made was that the people in her group were from Germany, Poland, Austria and England. This in itself is a great example of diversity and it was really great to hear Maja talk about the fact that she had a positive experience working with her peers and that they were satisfied with their final product.

I really enjoyed reading Maja’s blog post and I think she explored the theme of diversity well through working in a new group and together creating their GIF idea. She also mentioned that she felt that through this experience she has learned that she is socially responsible to support sustainability and engage in the conversation on mental health. A critical piece of feedback that I would give Maja is that from a structural point of view, as a reader I found it quite hard to navigate the blog as it wasn’t spaced out into individual paragraphs. To conclude, I feel like this was a great blog post and I felt as though Maja has shown that she has learned from the Better Lives unit and presented themes of diversity, social responsibility and sustainability.

For my Better Lives unit I studied Fashion Journalism. After attending the Better Lives lectures in the first two weeks, a lecture that I really enjoyed was Nina Stevenson’s sustainability introduction. This lecture presented how our industrial activities have created and shaped the environment around us and how the fashion industry is a huge cultural influencer. I learned more about the actions that we can take as consumers and as members of the fashion industry to become more sustainable. To create and consume media that is fair and environmentally friendly.

In our lectures, Liz Miller talked us through how a feature is written and the different ways that we can present a message to an audience through writing. We looked at how to focus our research and present the best bits to our reader through “cherry-picking” the best parts that are the most meaningful. When writing my feature, I broke down the skeleton and structure of how features are meant to be written. I looked at Liz Miller’s lecture where she taught us how to write a meaningful feature, this was a lecture that I really enjoyed and felt like I learned a key skill in. 

In my introduction, I presented the topic of my article which was up-cycling in modern fashion. I talked about how upcycling has become a new trend that has people re-designing clothes by cutting, sewing or altering garments in order to give them a new life. In the nub I explored the instagrammer Melisa Minca who brands herself as the “Upcycling/Sewing Queen”. I also summed up the point of my feature which was to give examples of upcycling and to inspire people to get involved. I used quotes from Camilla Carper and Janelle Abbott who are co-founders of Femail, a brand that is passionate about upcycling and sustainability. The quotes I used were very powerful and their expertise on sustainability gave my feature a fair and well-educated backing. I concluded my feature by encouraging my readers to get involved with upcycling, ending with the quote “We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” This is a quote from Howard Zinn which I thought was a very powerful and memorable line to leave my reader with a thought and to remember this piece.

Better Lives has had a huge impact on my personal development as I now see the huge importance of factors such as well-being, sustainability and social responsibility. It has made me promote a lot of well-being media on my instagram and I have written a few pieces on well-being and mental health which will be published in the second issue of Manchester’s Walrus Magazine. I found the Fashion Journalism lectures mixed with the Better Lives lectures have given me an amazing new skill-set and mindset which is leading me to create more written pieces and influenced me to think bigger in my future creative projects. 

Reference:Radin, S., 2020. What’s Behind The Rise Of Upcycled Garments?. [online] Fashionista. Available at: <https://fashionista.com/2019/01/upcycled-clothing-sustainable-fashion-trend> [Accessed 3 May 2020].

How Better Lives themes will change my work in the future

Studying Better Lives has made me think a lot more deeply about the true meaning of fashion. Not just the clothes, catwalks and fancy photoshoots but how we as fashion students can change the world and make fashion more diverse, sustainable, ethical and fair.

Aside from studying Creative Direction for Fashion at London College of Fashion, I work on a project called “be kind to your mind”. This is a mental health platform that I created to give support and advice for young people struggling with mental health. After attending the well-being lecture I was really inspired to delve deeper and try to learn more about it. This better lives unit has given me knowledge to promote well-being, motivation and managing your mental health to the people that are a part of our platform.

Before Better Lives I didn’t really have much knowledge on well-being or how it can affect people in their professional and personal lives. My better lives unit that I have been studying is Fashion Journalism, where I have learned to analyse texts and understand how articles are presented in different spaces, their importance and how they can present data, facts and opinions to have an effect on the reader. Mixing well-being and fashion journalism had me researching different publications such as “Glamour” and “Happiful” which are magazines that focus on well-being. They have many articles that give advice on a wide range of topics that help people to manage their mindset and control their emotions in a positive light. I will use the knowledge that I have gained from this better lives unit in well-being to encourage people to look after themselves, their mental health and wellness and promote well-being through my social platforms and create content for people who may need guidance in this field.

Another topic that I learned about was Culture, attending Anna Fitzpatrick’s lecture which talked about cultural heritage, climate emergency and sustainability. Here I learned about how consumer culture measures success through consumption and how we are made to think that consuming more makes us more happy. This has very negative effects on people as it creates mental health problems, exploitation and waste as people feel the need to constantly keep buying more items or engaging in more content. 

This lecture had a great impact on me as before I didn’t realise the huge negative impact that consumer culture and fast fashion had on people. Now I understand that quality is so much more important than quantity. I always looked at brands such as Nike and Apple as being very successful and admired their great wealth, yet now I see that their manufacturing is very unethical in lots of areas and they constantly make people feel like they need to keep buying more. I will always in future as a Creative Director look at creating campaigns that are ethical and do not force people to feel the need to keep buying more and more, yet invest in a product, movement or service that is sustainable, ethical and fair.

Better Lives Lecture that influenced my thinking

I attended Dr Jekaterina Rogaten’s lecture on well being in the second week of the Better Lives lectures. This lecture really intrigued me as looking at the psychology behind creativity in fashion is something that I hadn’t really explored in detail before. Through attending this lecture I gained a lot of new knowledge on how well-being affects everyone and how looking after yourself and others can have a positive effect on our everyday lives. 

Dr Jekaterina Rogaten talks about how well-being is about striving to have “more pluses in your life rather than not having any minuses”. I found this quote very interesting as it points at aiming for a higher goal of emotional and physical state rather than being satisfied with just being okay. There are many elements of well-being and this lecture dug deep into breaking down different elements such as choice, flow state, achievements, rest and safety. 

In the present day we make a lot more decisions on a daily basis than people did 50 years ago. Dr Jekaterina Rogaten explained that life is a matter of choice and the more choice and freedom we have the more unrealistic expectations we also have. We often find ourselves looking and striving for perfection but then realising that nothing is really good enough. Too much choice can have a negative effect as we can reach a decision paralysis which is when there is too much choice and making a decision becomes very hard. 

Learning about flow was another very fascinating part of the lecture as 95% of us will experience it in our lives whereas 5% of the population will not. Flow state is when you lose awareness of yourself and become so fully engaged in an activity that you lose track of time. It’s a very productive state but people need to switch off and rest as being in flow state for a long period of time can be very exhausting and can have negative effects both physically and mentally. When in flow state, someone does not feel neither happy or sad as they are simply focusing and being at one with their activity. 

I think that the main reason why I found this lecture so interesting is the fact that we were able to see creativity and people from the point of view of a psychologist who analyses behaviours from a scientific point of view. This lecture influenced my thinking as it made me a lot more aware of the great importance of well-being and how it can affect everyone in the world through everyday life. It has made me understand how sustainable fashion has a positive effect on people’s emotions and how employer’s working circumstances directly affect their employees’ mental well-being. In the fashion industry we have to keep in mind the consumer’s well-being as well as the employee and business well-being. This was one of my favourite lectures that I attended during my time at LCF, it was incredibly informative and interesting.