HUICHUN Yang

I had the opportunity to read several different blogs and each student had a lot to say. For my final blog, I decided to review XiuyiJian’s blog. The blog attracted my attention because she put her makeup outcome in the blog, which happened to be my undergraduate major. And I think this way I have more say in this blog.

In this blog post, she starts with an overview of how the course uses makeup techniques to create characters. Secondly, it explains her analysis of the emotions she wants to express. She ended up creating what she wanted to create.

She was interested in Power’s talk on “fashion slavery.” I think in her work, she is very careful to use the knowledge and techniques she has learned to analyze the roles and makeup. What the whole makeup look wanted to express was “half happy and half sad”. Without the makeup tools, I felt that her makeup interpreted the meaning she wanted to express very completely.

As for “half happy and half sad”, my understanding is that the fashion industry is bright on the surface, but behind it there are a group of people who are suffering every day. Millions of women, children and coolies are being squeezed. In class, she simply designed what she thought of. Through the photos she submitted at last, we can see that she has made great changes to her makeup. It is proved that she did analysis and research on the role during the holiday to improve the makeup of the role. As for the design of sewing needle on wound, I think it is a very good combination of “fashion” and “slavization”. Fashion cannot be separated from sewing needle, while abuse makes people change beyond recognition. It is these “needles” that keep the “surface ”of the wound from being exposed to the public.

On the final of her blog, she details the story behind the characters. When these stories are combined with makeup to see, it can make people put themselves in the shoes of people in disaster and poverty. I think this character design helps to arouse people’s sense of social responsibility. As I said in blog2, it is only by adding commonweal content when culture begins to spread that people will naturally have a sense of social responsibility.

“fashion slavery” is a sad, serious and little-known topic. I think it’s only through constant promotion, performance and presentation that people can understand that there are such a poor lot of people on the planet. Don’t regret something only when it happens right in front of our eyes. Special effect makeup technology also played an important role here, realistic wound shocking, can play a role in warning people.

Thanks to Xiuyijian’s outcome, people can intuitively feel all this. I think she fully reflects the theme of “fashion slavery”. But I think she can combine the theme of “social responsibility” to make her blog richer and more layered.

My undergraduate major is “Hair, the Make – up and Prosthetics for Performance”. The reason why I chose “Navigating Through Clothing” is that when I was doing professional courses, I used to have a lot of ideas about costumes. But since I only learned about makeup and didn’t know anything about costumes, it was difficult for me to improve my ideas. I chose this theme because I wanted to learn more about costumes, to get a complete picture of how the whole character is designed and executed, to improve and develop my ideas.

In the lecture of better lives, I came up with the idea of making costumes out of vintage clothes, which is combined with the theme of “sustainable development”. In the process of research, I found that a lot of clothes were discarded because of burning, but in my opinion, those clothes were exactly in line with the character setting of “poor and miserable” of the protagonist of my story. So I came up with the idea of using burned clothing to complete part of the costume. The costumes are made in this way, low cost and in line with the character image, and easy to make, consistent with the theme of sustainable development.

Then I made a collage of my character’s image, choosing some old clothes that had been burned as part of the costume, as well as some patched fabrics. But though the characters’ clothes are shabby, they are well-groomed. I think it’s part of the completion of the fairy tale. Throughout the fairy tale, the candy house and the end result are beautiful, so in my opinion, it is necessary to maintain some respectability in the costumes.

Due to the covid-19 crisis, people are isolated at home and cannot go to the fabric market or the antique market to select suitable goods. This special period made me focus on the fabric around me. Doesn’t the best “sustainable development” start with the little things around us? I looked at the fabric in my home and found that some textures were very suitable for the costumes. I think this kind of work is very special. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I hadn’t been isolated at home.

The subject of “Navigating Through Clothing” has enabled me to do a lot of different things in my life today. Before I got into better lives, I had no idea how to complete a costume. When fairy tales really need me to design clothes, I feel a lot of pressure. Before that, I thought it was easy to design costumes, because many plays already had perfect costume models. But when I really began to research, I found that costume design can be imaginative, and all the fantasy can be completed here. Despite the pressure, my design is free and happy. And when we analyze the script, there will be a sense that the characters are really around, and we need to explore and understand their hearts, which is really different from what I thought before.

All in all, I think my course is very helpful to my undergraduate major and is a very correct choice.

Of these three topics, I want to focus exclusively on “social responsibility” in this blog post and think about how this particular topic could change my work ethic in the near future.

As a person who hopes to be engaged in the performance industry in the future, “social contact” will become an important part of my study and work life. In my understanding, social responsibility means to contribute to the society to the best of one’s ability and not to do things that hurt others. In terms of fashion, I think designing some products can help the society to develop better. In terms of performance, I think some programs or plays about minority groups can help them more. Their difficulties need to be known to more people so that more people can help them. Before listening to some lectures, I thought there were very few things a person could do, after all, I was just a student. But after watching so many professors persist in their projects for more than a decade, I understand that if everyone feels small, things will never be completed. “Society” is huge, but it is made up of countless “little” me.

In my opinion, starting from each project, we should pay more attention to the research related to social responsibility. In daily life, we should also take an active part in various public welfare activities. These behaviors can permeate the sense of social responsibility into our daily work, so that the commonweal behavior is no longer difficult. In the outcome, we can choose more vulnerable groups as models, which can not only provide jobs for them, but also make people pay more attention to them. Start with people and things around us and try our best to make more contributions to the society.

If I enter the performance related industry in the future, I think I will face many challenges. First, the industry has a long history, and every little change is a big fight. But the impact of the change is huge. Because the performance industry is equivalent to the “communication tool” of human beings, and is the carrier of cultural inheritance and improvement. If the culture can be changed from the beginning when it is spread, then I believe the development will be as good as possible. People will pay more attention to things related to social responsibility and do their part to create a better society.

If I work in fashion in the future, I think it will be less challenging. Because fashion can provide more space for me to lead freely, but this does not mean that there will be no challenges. For example, the issue of funding and promotion is a huge challenge. If culture is a “communication tool”, then fashion is the “wind” around people. When social responsibility is slowly spread through the fashion industry, social contribution becomes the mainstream, and people unconsciously want to help more people. Thankfully, social responsibility has permeated every aspect of our lives. I hope our society can become better and better.

I have seen some lectures on “better lives” and I have enjoyed the unit from the theme to the structure. I think the topics discussed in these lectures are critical and forward-looking. In the lecture of better lives that I saw, there were many excellent and mature designers or experts who had unique views on some social situations. One of the most interesting was professor Lorraine Gamman’s talk on empathy. “Designers often use empathy to understand the perspectives of others,” she says. Roman Krznarick(2014) defines empathy as ” the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives and using that understanding to guide your actions”.

At the beginning, I was attracted by her personal profile, which said her work with the extend Empathy network and also the Design Against Crime Research. This is a field I have never touched before, and I listened to the speech carefully. Among them, she gave a very interesting example. They designed an “empathy suit” which could allow non-pregnant people to experience the life of pregnant people. I think such a simple design can enhance the sense of social responsibility of many young people and make them think about what is procreation and whether to procreate or not. And a lot of people think that pregnancy is a necessary stage for a woman, it is not a hard thing. I think this design can help these prejudiced people to recognize the hardship of pregnancy, enhance their sense of social responsibility, so that pregnant women can be more protected and contribute to social development. It also helped to make people more understanding of equal rights activists.

Similarly, she also showed some other empathy suits, such as those for young people to experience the needs of the elderly and for thin people to experience the life of obese patients. In my opinion, these designs have improved the attention and social responsibility of users and designers in the two aspects of “paying attention to the quality of life of the elderly” and “paying attention to the quality of life of the obese”. These designs enable experience-seekers to better understand the elderly and people of different body types, and also enable designers to design products that can meet the needs of these people. This lecture gave me a lot of new ideas that I had never seen before and brought me a lot of changes. In the past, I always subconsciously assumed that what I designed was for those underweight young people, but if I really faced some difficult groups, I would be at a loss what to do. After this lecture, I will pay more attention to the living situation of a few people and try to make improvements in my design that are beneficial to the whole society. This lecture is very helpful to enhance teenagers’ sense of social responsibility, and the overall style is not boring and easy to accept, which I like very much.

Reference：

Krznaric, R., 2014. Empathy. Ebury Publishing.

Gamman, L., 2020. Better Lives Empathy Lecture.