Hugo Taylor

In an attempt to stick to the conceptual framework that I laid out in my second blog post, I ended up choosing punk as the subculture that I would engage with for my styled look. This was something that my parents had identified with when they were young and draws on lots of visual cues from our wider cultural background, for example the adoption of tartan and kilts. In a retrospective way, I started to revise the subculture making these ties more obvious, choosing a mohair jumper, a staple of the punk wardrobe, that had a stag’s head on it: a very popular motif in Scotland (especially with my grandmother).

To bring punk up to date, in line with the better lives themes I devised a sub-sect that I dubbed ‘Earth punk’. They have left behind the self-destructive behaviour of the original punks like drug taking excessive aggression. While they retain their rebellious nature, it is manifest in very different ways: rejecting society and the economy by living off grid. I was inspired to make this change as I found that, in isolation, I found comfort in reconnecting with nature, which I hadn’t realised how much I missed living in London. It means that not only would this lifestyle be more sustainable, only taking the essentials from nature, but it would also be beneficial for the individual’s mental, relieving the pressures of society. The t-shirts of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s Seditionaries were another aspect of punk culture that I found myself drawn to, featuring graphics of Snow White snorting lines of cocaine and Mickey Mouse doing heroin. In line with the general direction of my project I swapped these out for another graphic tee, this one with a sleeping gun motif and reading ‘give peace a chance’ across the back.

When it came to the improvised accessories I decided that using natural matter to make them was the way forward as this stayed true to my new subculture, this is what they would have around them if they were living in a caravan in the woods. I safety pinned a leaf to my fishing hat as a nod to both the punk DIY aesthetic but also the practical aspect of trying to blend into your surroundings if you want to be successful in catching anything. I also remembered that a couple of weeks previously I had been tasked with hacking ivy of trees and had been interested in the strange furry texture of the stalk. I went back to one of the trees that was the worst affected and cut myself a piece the right size to be a mask that ended up looking like a beard from a comical disguise. I thought this worked nicely as a subversive and humorous way of protecting identity may be in the interest of someone who didn’t want to be logged in the government bank of facial recognition knowledge.

When the Better Lives unit began, my recent move to London from the countryside fuelled my interest in the social responsibility and diversity themes, and I intended to pursue these in my creative work. Unfortunately, the quarantine left me stranded at home with only my family to work with and so instead I decided to do a more introspective project, diving into my heritage against the backdrop of the English countryside that I was surrounded by for the majority of my formative years.

To make my exploration of Sustainability genuine, I felt it necessary to do it twofold: both in the concept and execution. The sportswear aspect of the unit leant itself to this as in general exercise is a positive pastime that is healthy for both people and the planet. There are, however definitely disparities between sports regarding the extent to which they impact lifestyle as a whole, and therefore the repercussions that they will have on whether people live sustainably. This made me think about people who could live completely sustainably and I imagined what sports activities someone who lived off the grid would partake in. Perhaps it stretches the boundaries of what we define as sport as they are no longer leisure activities, but hiking is presumably unavoidable and something like fishing might be necessary alongside gathering for sustenance. These also happened to correlate with past stages of my personal style evolution, which brings me onto being sustainable in my execution.

Considering the beginnings of my concept it would not make sense to shop for garments to use in my look, especially as in quarantine anything I bought would be online and therefore have to be packaged and shipped. Fortunately, much of my wardrobe is already vintage which means that my ownership of them in general has had a smaller footprint whether they have been bought at a charity shop or passed down through my family. At home I found a fishing vest that was used by my grandfather that married the idea of sustainability and channelling my heritage. A family kilt in his regimental tartan elevated this from a familial to cultural reconnection. Trying to innovate and use things like these that are not items I would usually wear but are items that are readily available to me, styling older items in subversive ways that give them a new lease of life is definitely something that I till be looking into taking forward into my future work. I will certainly employ this technique with my friends as well as my family once quarantine is lifted as well.

Though the current situation meant that I was unable to style my piers, I still felt a sense of inclusivity behind the scenes as I was able to communicate with other members of the class around the world to discuss ideas. This for me served as an apt indicator of the resilience of the better lives themes and kept me looking forward to a time when we will all once again be able to enjoy our lives much better collectively.

Having been lucky enough to receive a privileged upbringing and generally being personally unaffected by the most pressing societal issues, social responsibility was the theme that initially jumped out at me as the one I could engage with most effectively. I was particularly taken with the ‘Making for Change’ initiative that Claire Swift touched upon in her lecture. This is certainly something I would like to engage with in future, predominantly because this is an obvious way that I can put my privilege to use to help others; others ways were not as simple as it is educational rather than monetary. I think the fact that it is with female prisoners makes it all the more worthy as they are such an overlooked sect of society, as is much of the population within correctional facilities naturally because they are by definition out of sight for the mainstream. This relates to a crucial point that Lorraine Gamman touches on in her lecture on empathy while referencing the writing Roman Krznarick. He wrote ‘empathy withers and dies when we fail to acknowledge the humanity of other people’ (Krznarick 2014), and this is a prominent issue for the prison population who, being that step removed from society, are often reduced to a statistic. This interest is certainly not true altruism on my part though, I am sceptical that exists at all. I believe that ‘the creative journey enables reflection and provides a safe space to evaluate life’ (Albertson, in Wilkinson 2015). Therefore while operating in the creative realm of empathy, you are not only helping the less fortunate party but opening the door to significant personal and artistic growth for yourself, a suspicion affirmed in this project by the student response. Something that I feel I have only truly appreciated since I started my higher education is that beauty is authenticity, whether that be the pureness of simplicity or the intricacy of complexity. This makes it apt that the inmates are weaving as I imagine that many of their stories revolve around hardship, and it takes a certain level of detail to truly forget the prejudice and engage with their real, human stories instead. As it is ‘the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives and using that understanding to guide your actions’, empathy can also then be evoked through artwork and thus a third party, the viewer, enters into this beneficial cycle. My conclusion is then that the project is a win-win-win situation. I also found that this seemed to overlap organically with the other themes, for example the up cycling of waste bound high vis vests, not to mention the boundary breaking inclusivity of the concept.

Krznarick, R. (2014). The Empathy Instinct [p. 38]. London: Rider Books.

Krznarick, R. (2014). The Empathy Instinct [p. 42]. London: Rider Books.