Adrienne Van der Merwe

During the last few months I have taken part in the Better Lives unit surrounding Social Responsibility, Diversity and Sustainability. It has been an informing and renewing topic that I have found very useful in terms of shaping my focus correctly as a future professional in the fashion industry. Through Better Lives I realised that I have a lot of social responsibility to spread awareness and share the importance of tackling issues around diversity and sustainability. In that way, it appears that through focusing on our social responsibility, we can begin to fix other ‘hard to tackle’ situations.

As I have said in a previous blog post, I found the lecture on diversity given by Professor of Fashion Cultures and Histories, Shahidha Bari particularly thought provoking. Bari’s lecture educated me on the importance of researching and analysing inclusivity at all levels of any project or situation I decide to take on professionally or otherwise, in an effort to make sure everyone is represented correctly and treated as they should be and if not, be prepared to fix it. This idea was reinforced for me in my lectures with Nick Almond and Liz Miller. In the physical lectures we had before the Coronavirus, we analysed statistics and stories around the International  Women’s March in 2017, focusing on the USA. In these lectures, the thing that stood out significantly to me is that not all people were being represented by the leading groups. Women of colour difference and women in certain classes were represented far less than their counterparts. This really struck a chord with me and inspired my project feature. 

When I considered my own creative practice, I found that there was a huge misrepresentation in terms of products that suit darker skin tones. I found myself frustrated with the absence of colours in foundation, concealer, blusher and even bronzer to suit the variety of faces I work on equally which is nothing compared to what those who use the products everyday feel on a daily basis. I wanted to express the significance of this issue as best I could in 500 words in my feature.

This Better Lives unit has definitely reshaped my focus in my practice – I will continue on from this by using my position to do what I can to tackle issues to do with social responsibility, diversity and sustainability.

The Better Lives themes have reinforced the importance in social responsibility for me. I cannot simply act through my words of agreement on topics such as inclusivity – I must incorporate the knowledge I have acquired and physically act on it. Social Responsibility works arm in arm with diversity in my opinion. It represents the responsibility of people to equally represent marginalised groups and minorities and to educate ourselves in order to avoid ignorance and communicate understanding and empathy. Through these themes, I have claimed my social responsibility to fully educate myself and use the tools I have been given to help put the positive focus on others correctly rather than solely doing self-serving projects.

The Better Lives lectures and themes have shown me how far we still have to go to have truly become diverse and socially responsible. I chose Fashion Journalism as my Better Lives subject and through this course, I have found that as a society, our journey of inclusion and responsibility has been portrayed superficially as fast-paced when in actuality these courses of action have not been exercised at deeper levels and therefore the genuine progress has been extremely limited.

As a Hair and Makeup student, I feel it is my responsibility to make everyone who I work on feel equally as beautiful or daring. I am going to use these themes to incorporate more inclusivity in my work. I find although I have always focused on inclusivity, I have become comfortable in my work, I feel I need to challenge myself in order to truly be the most socially responsible I can be. I aim to give feedback to my course leader to emphasise the need for more skin-based products that can be accurately matched on a variety of skin tones and skin types. At the moment it seems as though the focus is so small on colour variety and I and my peers, all typical struggling students, have found ourselves incredibly limited by the 4 foundation shades provided in our kits – although the kit has been meticulously planned and has a generous amount of other products, I do feel this is particularly limiting.

I aim to focus attention on makeup companies and apply the pressure for giveaways or more generous student pricing. One massive issue I find, as unpopular as this opinion may be and without taking away from the artists, is that Instagram makeup artists receive large giveaways of sometimes full foundation collections. A large percentage of these MUAs work solely on their own faces or do makeup on friends and do not work professionally on a variety of people. I find this popular giveaway rather aimless as the products given to the various MUAs could legitimately change a training makeup artist’s creative life and remove all limits. Although this doesn’t distract from my social responsibility, I feel this would be incredibly beneficial in aiding Hair and Makeup artists in being able to act on inclusivity further.

During our first series of ‘Better Lives: Intro to’ sessions, I attended a variety of lectures on many different aspects of social responsibility, sustainability and diversity. Being a student in the School of Media and Communications, I understood the importance of being well educated on issues around the three topics in order to avoid ignorance and gain understanding. 

Although I found all of our lectures incredibly informing, the Intro to: Diversity given by Shahidha Bari was particularly thought provoking. In Bari’s lecture, she analyses to what extent diversity is truly exercised in the fashion industry, asking the question “is diversity used simply as a buzzword or has it been truly exercised?” (Bari. S quoted in her lecture). Using “buzzword” to describe the use of diversity was something I found quite accurate and revealing of the fashion industry. 

Bari backed up her point by pointing out that although companies such as Dove and Gucci address themselves as “diverse” they are actually just using the idea of diversity as a selling point, because when it comes down to the final steps – grave errors are made. For example; in 2004, Dove, who always claim to be ‘inclusive’, released an ad on cleanliness that showed a woman of colour lifting her shirt to become a white woman. This was incredibly problematic as it showed extreme prejudice and was flaunting an offensive, racist point of view that has historically held a lot of pain. This sort of ordeal brings the claims of ‘diversity’ into question. If a company is truly diverse, there is no way that such a misguided decision could be made. This leads onto Bari’s secondary point that Diversity needs to not be a face value act but incorporated into inclusivity at every level. Diversity is not new, and it is not solely to do with race. It has deep ties to age, ability, gender, sex and race altogether. Bari points out that in fashion, there are many different types of people working on a singular item at all levels, that perhaps the biggest part of inclusivity is thinking about the ‘supply chain’ and how we can incorporate an understanding and act on the need for inclusivity on every level. The final point I wanted to make was that Bari gave a fascinating allegory for this, “If aliens landed on Earth during fashion week and saw one show before they left, they would think that was the only version of ‘human’ on Earth, what would they see?” I wanted to end on this as I think it really summarises exactly what we should think when we take on a new project – when I’m done with this and I show it to people, what will they imagine was involved? Who does it represent? I think working on inclusivity is the most important thing for the fashion industry and I think that is why I appreciated Shahidha Bari’s lecture so much.