Dadawele Mniki

Healthy Youth Vibes / Fitness, Subcultures and Personal Expression at home isolation time / Fitness at Corona Times Stay-at-Home Styling

Outfit details: bucket hat, scarf turned face mask, camisole, sweatpants, trainer socks and trainers.

Since Lock down/Social Distancing/Quarantine started I have been exercising at home. I follow at home workouts by Maddie Lymburner on one of her YouTube channels called MadFit. She posts new, 10+ minute, daily workouts and I use them most days (sometimes I’m too lazy to exercise or my body aches too much).

I have been listening to a lot of rap, r&b and pop music lately. The music lifts my spirits which is definitely needed right now as it’s so easy to fall into a pit hopelessness and fear for all of our lives. I wear my bucket hat when I am exercising because 1) why not? I wanna look cute while working out and 2) when I’m following the MadFit videos, I listen to my music and I feel like I’m in a music video. It sounds silly and goofy but it’s fun and it helps to give my days some sort of flavour and keeps me from dwelling on the amount of deaths that are going on around us and the uncertainty of our futures (depressing way of ending this a paragraph, I know, sorry).

I have turned one of my scarves into a mask. I could order a mask from Amazon but I do not order from them because of the articles that I’ve seen of how they treat their employees. (I going to buy one of those sturdier masks, for the long-term, but I’m going to order from another place.)

One of the three pillars of the Betters Live project is Social Responsibility and being in the middle of a pandemic Social Responsibility should be on everyone’s minds. It most definitely is on my mind. Whether that’s by only leaving the house once a week to go grocery shopping and only ordering stuff that are necessities. This is all in an effort to help relieve the NHS, slow down and stop the spreading of the Corona virus and to save as many lives as possible.

This is all to say that the Corona virus has amplified how socially responsible I am and how much more socially responsible I can be. Especially with us not knowing what the future holds.

This is going to affect how I get my supplies for my work in the future, for university and for my career. It’s looking like we’re going to be social distancing for the next few years (this is what I’ve read and it feels like a very likely possibility) so the manufacturing of the materials that I need to illustrate might slow down and make it harder for me to buy them.

Digital showcasing is becoming more and more mainstream, Fashion Week London (Previously known as Mens Fashion Week London) will be showcasing completely online for the year 2020.

Yves Saint Laurent are not showing at any of the 2020 Fashion Weeks and going to “take ownership of its calendar and launch its collections following a plan conceived with an up-to-date perspective, driven by creativity.”. This basically means that they will be showcasing their work when they want to.

Everyday more and more people, companies and events are pivoting to being showcasing digitally which makes sense given that we cannot congregate in large crowds.

This encouraging for those of use who might not get the same publicity as our peers, when we graduate, and so with the internet we can showcase our work to anybody who comes across it and hopefully they would want to patronise us.

Better Lives will help me to better do my last project of the academic year ‘Spatial Interaction’ by thinking about how people be able to interact with my work not that they won’t be able to see it face to face.

My peers and I are all grappling with what’s going on right now and continuously adapting to the changes that are being made on our courses and will most likely be made in the future. We all know that life as we know it has changed and will carry on changing so we are all preparing ourselves and changing our future plans so as to not be caught off-guard something else changes, which it most probably will.

The Better Lives project’s three pillars are Sustainability, Diversity and Social Responsibility and they will all be included into how I work in the future.

We are currently in the middle of a Pandemic and the way that we work right now has already changed drastically.

And from seeing the reports of the news everyday (or every few days in my case, my anxiety threatens to kill me if I read more than two articles or if I watch more than one recap/update video about Covid-19) we can all tell that life is going to change drastically, either until they create a vaccine or forever.

That is all to say that with the lessons that we have learnt with the Better Lives project will hopefully help us to manoeuvre the new world that the Corona Virus has created.

Social distancing and self-isolation is something that has recently been implemented as is likely to stay implemented until a vaccine is created. This is going to change how we all work. For example; photo shoots require a lot of people to be together but with social distancing we are seeing new ways of conducting photo shoots. Bella Hadid did a photo shoot via face time for Vogue Italia, she was styled via face time too and had her lighting done by her self-isolation partner. Similarly her sister Gigi Hadid was sent a Chanel suit, from Vogue Italia, and had her self-isolation partner do the photography.

Another effect of the Corona Virus is that a lot of graduate shows have been cancelled. Now many graduates are trying to figure out how they can showcase their work, how they will be able to access potential buyers and employers and how they will be able to carry on their work.

With all of this uncertainty in the air and these new ways of working looking likely to become the new way of working hopefully we’ll get to see a more diversity in the photo shoots, stories, styling and designs that will come from this.

Everybody is (hopefully) being socially responsible and following orders to stay inside and only go out for essentials.

I do not know if this new way of working is sustainable for those of us who aren’t wealthy, but I hope that people at the head of the industry will do whatever they can to help those us who don’t have the income to be able to carry on our work. Because that is what this all comes down to, those who have the money to carry on making their clothing, access to people to be able to do remote photo shoots and access to people who are able to spend their money on anything that isn’t food or rent, will be the ones who are able to carry on working in this industry.

All in all, the three Better Lives pillars are all being implemented into my work and the work that others are doing and hopefully that will continue during this pandemic and after it (in regards to how we will be operating when things inevitably change and enter a new normal. This is all a lot, a real real lot.).

Diversity. What is ‘diversity’?

Definition: Diversity

• The state or fact of being diverse; difference; unlikeness:

~ diversity of opinion

• Variety; multiformity
• The inclusion of individuals representing more than one national origin, colour, religion, socioeconomic stratum, sexual orientation, etc.:

~ diversity in the workplace

• A point of difference.

(from dictionary.com)

Diversity has been a very prominent word around us these few years. People of Colour are demanding more diversity from White People, the people who are at the head of a lot of these industries. (The rest of this post will be focusing on the fashion industry.) When you look around, we’ve seen many different attempts and implementations of diversity. Whether that be adverts with interracial families, models with disabilities, more black and asian models on the runways, models of all body sizes, hijabi models becoming more prominent, etc. While some of the inclusion feels sincere a lot of it is very clearly just done to keep People of Colour off of their backs and to maintain good pr.

What do I think about all of this? I am a light skin black South African girl who immigrated to England, with my mother and sister, when I was 3 years old. I do agree with the sentiment that we need more diversity in the Fashion Industry. I want to see more people who look like me and even more people who don’t look like me. The Fashion Industry is slowly but surely listening to it’s audience.

Although brands include different races, sexualities, identities, ages, stature, body sizes in their runways, look books, adverts and editorial shoots. The execution can sometimes feel very awkward and that is most probably because the people behind the scenes, the designer’s, stylists, photographers etc. are mostly white with like 1 or 2 people of colour.

And so, how do we become better as an industry? Well the people at the top, the people with the money, the people with the most power have to commit to hiring photographers, designers, stylists, models, creative directors etc. that aren’t white, heterosexual and able-bodied. And commit to letting them tell their own and other people’s stories from their perspectives. And it needs to be the people at the top of the industry because they are the gatekeepers of the industry. And it can’t just be a phase, it has to be something so common that we’re not surprised when we hear about renowned magazines or labels having disabled photographers, Asian designers, Muslim creative directors etc.

Those of us who are just starting out in fashion are trying our best to break down these barriers but the entire industry needs to join in for any long lasting change to happen.