For my project I decided to focus on the slow fashion movement, the effects and issues of the fashion industry, as for example overconsumption and material waste, that are causing environmental harm and contribute to global warming, because of the use of pesticides and the disposal of residual chemicals, the amount of CO2 released in the production, manufacturing and distribution of garments, and the immense quantity of energy and water consumed. On the socio-economic sphere, the fashion industry also has a negative impact and many inequalities exist –poor working conditions, low wages, exploitation and violation of human rights in the LEDCs and factories that provide and produce clothing for western companies.

I did a brainstorming of ideas to decide what was going to be my main point of interest; I read and took notes of some papers and articles –the ‘Fashion Revolution Love Story, the Fashion Revolution Whitepaper, as well as the ‘How to be a Fashion Revolutionary’ informative leaflet-, that all linked to the campaign of ‘Who Made my Clothes’, and talked about many other organizations whose aim is to fight for a more ethical fashion and a better future. There has been an increasing demand in the last 5-6 years for sustainable fashion and transparency in brands from the new generation of consumers, who are more socially conscious and involved in activism, who are concerned with what happens in the world, who are engaging and demanding, and aware of the impact of the industry on society. More and more brands are becoming sustainable; sustainability, slow fashion design, recycling and re-use are essential nowadays and are more common than ever before.

I looked at different contemporary designers that used a specific collection as a form of activism and protest, such as Daniel W Fletcher, whose collection focused on the Brexit election and voting, creating garments and accessories with STAY labels and using the brand’s promotional imagery and ad campaigns as a protest or political campaign.

Another designer is Kerby Jean Raymond (for Pyer Moss) who, known for his activism, brought Black Lives Matter back to the runway in New York Fashion Week 2016.

Then I researched on the slogan tshirt. Katharine Hamnett’s brand launched in the 80s, her thsirts with slogans like Choose Life were very famous because of their political stance and anti-establishment attiude, against the government’s decision making, especially relating to war and economic issues. Her brand essence and ethos continued to become stronger and she showed concern and discontent towards many issues that the society was facing through her collections and messages. she adopted an ethical philosophy which put her in the vanguard of sustainable fashion (Interview fashion spot.com)

Activism through fashion was also seen in the catwalk during New York Fashion Week in 2017, where designers like Prabal Gurung (‘Girls just want to have fundamental rights’) and Dior (‘We Should all be feminists’) made political statements relating to gender equality, human rights and feminism. For a designer like Prabal Gurung, who regularly dedicates his work to the strength and grace of women, an even more overt examination of female power was at the core of his finale. (Viva)

Jeremy Scott’s collection had statements like ‘Our voice is the only thing that will always protect us’. As he said ‘We have to fight for everything we believe in. That’s the expression I wanted to use’. Lutz Huelle also showed social consciousness when he appeared in the catwalk of his FW16-17 collection with a World Peace Now slogan tshirt.

At the V&A I saw the works of various female artists like Phoebe Cummings, Celia Pym and Laura Ellen Bacon in the Woman Hour Craft Prize exhibition. Celia Pym uses darning, knitting and embroidery to create intimate works that speak directly to human experience. She has worked on a number of publically engaged projects which aim to bring the value of mending to a wider audience. (BBC)

Her focus on making mending visible is really interesting and relevant for my project around sustainability and slow fashion. The sculptures by Rachel Kneebone showed a mastery of detail and perfect execution of each of the different engravings.

In another trip to London I went to the Tate Modern. In the display works I was attracted by the photographs of György Kepes ‘Composing for the camera’, which were taken in 1938 till 1942. They show how he arranged objects in the studio specifically to be recorded by the camera. He was interested in the realtionshio between art, science and technology and his images include scientific and mechanical items alongside material from the natural world.

Lighting and composition are crucial elements of his work, what made me realize how important lighting is to create a certain effect or sensation and to transmit different feelings.  Light was an abiding concern throughout his career. He explained: ‘The whole visible world, natural and man-made, is a light world. Its heights and depths, its great outlines and intimate details, are mapped by light’.

The exhibition Soul of a Nation was relevant to the subject of Activism as it displayed the work of Black artists during the civil rights movement in America in the late 60s; they responded, through their art, either abstract or legible, to political and cultural changes and embraced the African American culture and their power. Throughout the exhibition we can see the importance of typography, vibrant contrasting colours and strong, sharp outlines to release a message or create a feeling of strength and passion. Colors such as red, black and yellow are reiterated in many of the works displayed. The paintings and collage works of artists like as Romare Bearden (Mysteries II, 1964), Gerald Williams and Reginald Gammon (Freedom now, 1963) had a graphic strength and powerful shapes, colors and other illustrative elements. Roy de Carava’s photographs were very thought provoking.

‘I felt it my moral obligation as a Black artist, to try to graphically document what I feel socially’ David Hammon

My first idea was to do a shoot to show female empowerment through freedom of clothing, focusing on the use of underwear and fetish clothing, such as leather belts, waspies and corset, as outerwear. In this case, I wanted to play with the opposing ideas of oppression and empowerment embedded in the corset. I looked at the tight lacing and the use of corsets in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, that aimed to constrain the woman’s manners and enhance her curves; this was of course restrictive clothing for the women’s movements. I then looked at Jean Paul Gaultier’s conical corset for Madonna and Vivienne Westwood corsetery as outerwear that became popular during the punk movement of the late 70s and 80s. I was happy by how the shoot turned out but it was very styling-orientated and, as I later changed my idea, -I decided to do my project about consumerism, the fashion industry and its issues- I did not go into more detail on the shoot and on the theme of feminism

As part of my primary research I went to London to see exhibitions. The Balenciaga ‘Shaping Fashion’ V&A exhibition was incredibly inspiring and I was absorbed by the many dresses exposed, and it actually fueled me to write my dissertation about the designer and the sculptural, architectural clothes of his late creative phase in the late 50s and 60s.

I went to a talk in the Fashion & Textile Museum that was about the influence of music in Fashion, presented by Katie Baron, the author of the book ‘Fashion + Music: Fashion creatives shaping Pop Culture’. It was very interactive as we could directly ask questions to the author and I found it really thought provoking. Then I went to see the ‘World of Anna Sui’, which linked with the talk, as music and culture were her main points of interest for her work. In her designs we could see her different influences and inspirations for her collections throughout the years, such as the exotic, decorative qualities of indigenous, the Victorian dress and Art Nouveau, the Ballet russes, the 60s Mod, Britain’s youth and subculture -punk and grunge- (where she captured the style and essence of the movement in a positive, colorful way). For Sui, the music scene was the major force in the youth culture of the late 1980s and early 90s. Her grunge collection of 1993 was her personal response to the moment and the music, ‘’I think that, with hindsight, this way have been a moment in my career where my own past and present came together, more so than with other collections, which, however much I cherished them, were a carefully stitched-together tapestry of obsessively researched elements. My grunge collection was more ‘felt’ than it was thought’’

For my first attempt towards the project, I wanted to research about the freedom of dress, the female body and sexuality relating to current issues of slut shaming, catcalling and sexual harassment in a patriarchal society. For protest, I wanted to look at the judgmental and denigrating attitudes towards how women dress and how much skin she shows, and the supposedly transgression of society’s established and normalized ideas, codes of dress and sexual conduct.

One moment if history that could not be forgotten was the introduction of the mini skirt in the 60s by designers such as Andre Courreges, Paco Rabanne, and, most importantly, Mary Quant who, influenced by the mood of the era, the sexual revolution and the socio-cultural phenomena happening at the time, aimed to respond to the new generation of independent-minded consumers and to women’s aspirations by reflecting the emerging new attitudes of young people into her designs. In an interview for The Guardian in 1967, she stated ‘‘fashion doesn’t really influence the climate of opinion; it reflects what is really in the air. It reflects what people are reading and thinking and listening to, and architecture, painting, attitudes to success and to society’’. The miniskirt marked the end of the era of conformity and a positive breakthrough for youth power and womens liberation. The miniskirt began to evoke powerful political and cultural sentiments when it became associated with feminism; it became a potent symbol of the youth movement and women emancipation due to its anti-establishment demeanor and celebration of the female form and exposure of skin, which was mostly associated with free will and sexual liberation, inscribing power over the female body. Alexander Plunket Greene, Mary Quant’s partner, told Rolling Stone in 1987 that ‘people were very shocked by the clothes, which seem so demure and simple now. At the time they seemed outrageous’. Many people, especially the older generation, were against the miniskirt and so there were many protests from young people that defended it.

After the Fashion & Textile Museum I went to the White Cube for the ‘Dreamers Awake’ exhibition, which explores the enduring influence of Surrealism through the work of more than 50 women artists. The exhibition consisted of different sculptures, paintings, collages, photographs and drawings from day from relevant surrealist artists of the past as well as contemporary emerging artists.

‘‘Woman has a powerful presence in Surrealism. By focusing on the work of women artists, ‘Dreamers Awake’ hopes to show how, through art foregrounding bodily experience, the symbolic woman of Surrealism is refigured as a creative, sentient, thinking being. Repossessed by its owner, the fragmented, headless body of Surrealism becomes a vehicle for irony, resistance, humour and self-expression’’

This relates to the subject of Activism: art, as well as fashion, is a way of expressing personal views and thoughts, that aims to make the audience look into more detail, think outside the box and encode, decode and interpret the work in their own way. The work that I liked the most was by feminist artist Linder; I did not know the artist until then and her collages and strong images really captured my attention. I particularly enjoyed the paintings of Louise Bourgeois with Tracey Emin (2009-2010), a series of dyes painted on cloth, that, through abstract and soft lines, colors and writings express feelings of melancholy, hoplessness, and emphasize the patriarchal elements of society relating to love, sex and maternity. Maria Bartuszova’s sculptures such as the ‘Rounded Torso’, as well as the works of Berline de Bruyckere and Dorothea Tanning, focus on the female body, distorting it and deforming its shapes.

To start my research for the Brief on Activism, I firstly did some brainstorming to decide what kind of activism or specific movement I wanted to focus on. Having informed myself on the different waves of feminism characteristic of a particular era in history, and on the current political issues occurring in the world, I thought that exploring third wave and post-feminism could be very interesting for this brief, as we know that this movement that fights for equality is now stronger than ever, especially due to the advent of social media, which, apart from reaching a wide audience and making campaigns and protests easier to organize, it is a space for self expression where people raise their voice through images, posts, etc.

For a styling & photography outcome, I thought that the type of visuals, color palette, typography and slogans relating to this movement are very eye catching and interesting to analyse as well as to produce. I looked at various female activists as well as artists, who express their views through captivating imagery, bold statements and strong messages. Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of women activists that stand for women’s equality and representation in the art world and entertainment industry, where patriarchy is still visible. Their gorilla masks and type of clothing created a strong identity that has left a mark. Their slogans and messages in bold strong typography, really make the audience think.

Like American artists Barbara Kruger (born 1945) and Jenny Holzer (born 1950), the Guerrilla Girls appropriated the visual language of advertising, specifically fly-posting, to convey their messages in a quick and accessible manner.  (Tate.org.uk)

I looked at the conceptual artist Barbara Kurger. The use of the contrasting colors red, black and white is reiterative in her art work, creating a strong image and straightforwardness. ‘‘Kruger’s work was concerned with the arresting of the gaze by the power of an image, aided by the slippage between the rhetoric of that image and the slogans she overlaid’’. (Fashion & Modernity, pp184)

What attracted me from Pussy Riot is their aesthetics, colorful balaclavas and stockings, and identity politics. This way of dressing in a way represents a political ideal, evokes revolution and discontent. In an interview for V Magazine, one of the members of the group, Nadya Tolokonnikova, explained her views on the aesthetics of punk performance and why she wanted pussy riot to look clownish.