Celine Brand

Going through the Better Lives course I had the possibility to engage with the sustainability, diversity and social responsibility themes and reflect on how these topics can change the way I will work in the future.

Firstly, this project gave me the possibility to expand the knowledge of sustainability which I have previously acquired during the Fashion styling and production course.

Being aware of the situation in which we currently are where 75% of clothes are left in landfill make me reflect on how fast fashion is destroying our world. Being conscious  of this reality is making me change the way I made decision, not only as a fashion consumer making me more responsible when it comes to make a purchase, but it will certainly affect the way I  will work in the future, as I am now aware of this issue and I know I will give my contribute to find a solution for this issue. 

Being a Fashion stylist means to collaborate with other and having the possibility to transmit a message through  Fashion, in  the future I would like to sensitize the sustainability theme through my work, in order to do this it will important to show to the consumer the reality behind fashion and raise awareness of the issue of overconsumption. In order to give my contribute to solve this issue, I would certainly love to collaborate with alternative brand that already work in a such sustainable way, and besides my working path, when it comes to purchase clothes I will do it perhaps from vintage shop rather than buying something new, making possible to dictate trend through old clothes.

Alongside with the sustainability issue one aspect I would like to highlight in this blog is another topic discussed during Better Lives course, the Diversity in Fashion. In fact, Fashion should mean inclusiveness and should reflect our multicultural society but most of the times seems to dictate stereotype of beauty, discriminating people with few extra pounds or different color skin.

During my course of study, more precisely, in my previous exams I ‘ve not been using models for my shooting instead I have decided to style friends and everyday people that surrounded me.

 For this reason, I’m looking to continue integrating everyday people in the future work, in addition I would like to expand and transform the model casting which is predominated by a Western European stereotype to a more multi-cultural one, including people with different skin tones. Moreover I would like to show a majority of people with different kind of body, avoiding examples of anorexia to be followed and I will  integrate older people. I have plan to do what just mentioned to avoid any kind of discrimination and stereotype existing in the fashion, making possible for all the consumer to feel integrated and accepted in the world of fashion.

Throughout the Better Lives course, I had the opportunity to attend the Fashion activism project. In this course we focused our attention to the role of Creative direction in Fashion and how this can underline themes such as sustainability, diversity and social responsibility.

During the course we have been assigned in a group of students, and each group has been also delegated analyze a specific Brand. The aim of each group was to create moving images related to the given brand. 

My group has been commissioned to create a video for Bode, in order to do this, we started by analyzing the Brand in its Aesthetic, Ethos and Positioning in Fashion.

Essentially Bode is a menswear brand which was born in New York with the aim to create clothes by recycling old fabrics.

For this reason our initial idea was to create a video that would have been focusing on the sustainability theme, and we wanted to express this topic by creating a narrative video that would have been representing a protest against the waste in fashion industry, everything located in an idealistic city identified as New York City. We imagined to include a 60’s vibe through the utilize of filters in order to highlight the retro characteristic of the brand.

Unfortunately, due to the current situation of Covid-19 this idea could not go through and thus, not been pursued. At this point, we started reconsidering our concept. Although, our initial idea resulted a bit confusing, as it was tough for us to communicate and sharing our concepts, we finally managed to stick with the idea of sustainability as it gets along with the main focus of the brand. In order to be successfully in our project, we decided to equally share for each component of the group a specific task. I personally started researching old footage video of the process by creating sustainable clothing. Frankly, the research of video has been a bit tricky since there are not many videos posted online concerning the chosen topic.

Alongside with the sustainability theme in our video we also introduced another topic. We have chosen to pursue the diversity topic; this choice has been taken by considering an important factor, that it the brand under analysis when it comes to shooting prefers to have a mix of cultures in them. Mixing old footage video of the brand with video of making sustainable clothes we produced a campaign that would have been shown in BODE shops as a way to make the consumer curious to discover more about the brand and its way to operate.

 Thanks to this course I had the possibility to have a personal development, in fact, this project gave me a real opportunity to work in a team, thus, to collaborate with people from all over the world with different culture and perspective. 

For the first time, being in a team gave me a real idea of what will be my work in the future, I have really appreciated working with my group despite the fact it has not been so simple due to our different point of view.

As a result this course made me think about my previous mistakes and my limited knowledge concerning these topics. However, I felt very engaged, and this has made me feel I need to change part of my choice in order to give a contribute to support a more sustainable world.

During the first week of the Better Lives project I had the chance to participate to a various number of lectures focused on themes such as sustainability, diversity and social responsibility. The first lecture I have attended is the one which has impressed me the most, in which Julia Crew discussed the topic of Power and how this is related to the world of fashion.

At first glance, I’ve not immediately connected this topic to the Sustainability concept, as while doing my everyday choice I have been underestimating the power of my action towards the subject. However, going further in the discussion I have realized that Power is one of the main characters in the world of fashion. The lecture made me reflect on the concept we have about fashion which most of the times is blurred by a purely positive idea leaving out the dark sides of it. As Vestoj writes in his Issue 4 “On Power”: “Idealistically power should lie in the origins of creativity. Right now, power in fashion boils down to economic power”.

The first correlation we have analyzed in the lecture is the one between Power and Money, if initially the power of fashion was represented by the clothing as a manifestation of cultures and societies, expressed by Royalty, Military uniform and Politics. Nowadays the power is laying on money and its strength is no longer purely visual, and this is due to the change of our society which has become a Capitalist society, where clothing is now seen only as a commercial product. In my point of view this might be the reason of why fashion has changed the way it operates; now fast fashion has become the new productive system consisting in continuous delivery with the will of selling more.

Considering the fashion system, I’ve been thinking of the consequences of this way of operating.

One with the biggest impact on our world is the Overconsumption, where nearly 75% of clothes are left in landfill polluting the environment. Certainly, one of the contributors of this phenomenon was the use of social media which through advertising and fashion bloggers   led us to an increasingly irrepressible desire of buying something new. 

The use of social media should not only focusing on advertising cloths, instead, social media can give its contribute to the society by becoming a tool to inform and make people aware of the reality of fashion and make people conscious of the consequences of our actions, communication can change the consumer behavior which could became more responsible and sustainable.

Moreover, in order to make this possible it is important that fashion business CEOs should lead and drive a change in the fashion industry. In my opinion one of the solutions could be eliminating the fast fashion system or at least limiting the number of collection and products sold on the market, eliminating the waste of money for fashion shows.

This will lead to manufacture less, increasing the quality, making cloths more durable, and reducing the waste.