Yixue Wang

The final outcomes we developed as a group is called Retrograde, an Online Vintage Trendology App, as the group theme highly involved data analysis and machine AI learning, the app heavily invested in data that’s related to the fashion and pour the data into machine learning, the app profile expand the idea and the chance of how it is profitable, which with the premium membership, I think the highlighted part of the app is that it is highly inclusive, the set up of profile will allow you to chose you to wish to go either trendy or anti trendy, by doing so the target user for the app can be heavily expanded and with included of the free users, we encouraged people to download and experience the app, meanwhile contributed the data for the app ecosystem.

Overall I’m very satisfied with the group final outcome, I think the idea is very innovative and it touched the area I never stepped on before and even though the idea is still very unpolished, we still managed to present a workable, profitable application that could help improved fashion industry. A little flaw was that due to the time consuming we weren’t able to develop it is VI and UI, to make it more presentable.

As my personal development, as an illustrator, I tried to create a fashion editorial video fully on digital, with a workflow of    Clo3d, Cinema 4D and Daz studio; As my research carried out, I realized that most of the virtual editorial shoot, not like a traditional photo shoot, as the freedom of creating everything barehand, 3D artists always like to create a story of the shoot,  for instance, Vogue Chinese International is called ‘future transit’ and Paper Lady Gaga issued was called ‘transformation’.

Therefore I named my shoot ‘beauty of glitch’ to reference the idea of ‘beauty is painful’ and throughout the video, the characters are always binding with glitch, I imagine it would be painful and unpleasant, so he jumping around and try to get rid of it, with one clip he seems to succeeded but turned out it was just temporary, in the end, he decided to live along with the environment, to me, it reflects the situation of compromising of the young generation of people who try to make something different and at the end blend into the society.

As a conclusion I consider my personal development is a success, I tried something that I never tried before and successfully debunk some technical wall that I wasn’t able to break through, but still, there are some technical issues I still unable to solve and as the time consuming I wasn’t able to polish it more so the general outcome still looked quite not ‘life alike’, but it is a very valuable experience and I think this experience helped me a lot.

With the theme ‘Emerging Technologies in the Fashion Industry’, we got a perfect opportunity to explore the possibilities of technology Influenced the new fashion trend as the nowadays technology is skyrocketing but in most of the fashion industries we still keen on the old technique, it caused a lot of problems, including unnecessary material waste and mass manufacturing of high street fashion brand, I believed that fashion industry need radically change, and this theme is the perfect chance for us to explore that.

we had some initial open discussion on how mainstream technology such as BlockChain and Large Data Analysis affecting the industry, and we mentioned bitcoin and P2P finance, also how to google research trend can generate a model on how the trend goes based on the Large Data  Analysis.

To me, this is an absolutely new area to explore even though I’m very highly fully engaged with the digital-based fashion media, but I never interpreted ‘fashion with technology’ as data-based operations and marketing strategies, as a fashion illustrator I believe it is very important to carry out my own research on this particular topic as illustration doesn’t play a big part in it; But instead, if you interpreted technology as CG and more graphic-based technology, then illustration plays a very important part in it, virtual fashion is getting more and more vitals and visible nowadays as the result of technology evolves, in addition at the current time of Covid-19 outbreaks, with everything converted to the online, fashion industry is in some way been forced to convert into a new form.

At 2020, a new pandemic Covid-19 changed the life of everyone on the earth, also the fashion industry, the traditional paper media are urgently seeking a new way to produce front cover and promotion, such as Vogue Chinese International may issue and Paper magazine January issued showed the great potentials of full CG virtual fashion in the future.

In another filed, virtual online personality is also a big hit on the new era, Hong Kong virtual personnel Ruby Gloom is the perfect sample, as a creative person, she uses 3D software to establish her virtual figure as a ‘alter ego’, in the commercial aspect, as the technology evolves, the way of fashion promotion marketing can be turned upside down, a celebrity can be live stream appeared in a different location for editorial ‘photoshoot’, and the stylist, photographer, set manger etc. can be located in different area worldwide and work remotely meanwhile simultaneously.

Furthermore, as the climate change is affecting the world, we as a creative individual, try to stop or decrease the rate of wasting material or inessential wasting is something we should really think and reflect about, and I believe that virtual fashion is the best solution.

The first two weeks enter the Project Better Live, I had a brief understanding of what the project stands for and I personally very interested in the concept of sustainability as a young generation grow up with digital world, I think fashion industry urgently needs a changeover and this project is the perfect unit for the practice of this idea.

At the lecture of Power in Fashion with Julia, I had a very sarcasm feeling, as the most valuable net worth person in the Fashion industry is not a person who really into Fashion, but instead a businessman, a steak-holder. By this lecture, It reminded me as a creative individual who steps foot in the fashion industry, I need to use my platform well and resources to express my mind.

The lecture Design and Empathy to me is like a mental roller coaster, as I was lucky enough to actually visit the prison furniture exhibition in CSM in person, I wasn’t that impressed by the work, but after this lecture with Lorraine, I truly understood the importance of ‘participation’ in design, in my note, I put down ‘Lock uself in prison’, by experience the different perspective, the designer able to build a relationship with the target audiences, also it makes the design more ‘humanly’, this lecturer remind me one of my friend complained to me that all antique luxury Chinese wooden chairs in her house were so uncomfortable, and she doesn’t understand why it designed like that, now consider the time background, the craftsman who made that chair might very likely never got the chance to actually afford a chair like such, therefore its not hard to know why it is not comfortable, simply because it is a design without empathy; But overall, due to the time, in my opinion those design which lack of empathy is forgivable; But as a Chinese born young generation, during my life I realized there is a lot of design in China actually lack of empathy, they are not desirable, either handy or useful, you can almost felt how rush the product is produced, at China there is a lot of small designer brand who sell there works in TaoBao, a e-commercial platform which work similarly as Amazon, I always try to purchase my clothing on it as I consider it is the way to encourage growth of small individual designers instead of high polluting high street brand, but sadly sometimes after I spend more money invest in a garment, the quality sometime can be really bad, I even need to resew it to make it wearable, and to me that is fashion without empathy, and I hope I can discover a solution for this problem during this project.

Another lecture I attended is called Fashion and Well-being, on my note, I put down a conclusion ‘Human’s desire is endless’, I think fashion industry is a perfect sample why human’s desire is endless, because fashionable garments are so addictive, so everyone is working hard on approaching to it, it is a semi crowd psychology to me; I think it is very big challenge to break this circle and be able to find a way to let fashion choices to be more well-being, I will look more into it later in this unit.