Diversity NOW! – Evaluation

Diversity NOW! is a live competition aimed for creatives to lead the way and expand the future of fashion beyond stereotypes and boundaries of beauty and the body, such as age, size, gender, race, physical ability. My task was to design a poster, film, editorial narrative or write an article on any aspect of diversity and fashion. I started out by creating a mood board, researching what the word ‘diversity’ could cover, ranging from disabilities to skin colour to sexuality.

After experimenting with physical collage, investigating different areas of diversity such as race and religion, I noticed a theme that I kept coming back to: body image and the opportunity to challenge the idea of plus size. The average UK womens’ size is size 16; however, plus-size models are considered those size 10/12+, but plus-size clothing on the high street is labelled as size 18+. How can there be such a big difference in these labels?

This lead me to produce a test shoot looking at the labels in clothes, using a wide range of sizes, from 8-16. Using the images from the labels test shoot, I created a digital collage. I chose an image from the test shoot as my main image which show only size 12, 14 and 16, as these are the ‘middle’ sizes between plus-size models and plus-size on the high street. I also used an image of the iconic plus-size model Ashley Graham, as well as a tape measure to reflect size. The definition of plus-size is a finishing touch as it clearly shows the challenge of what is ‘normal’.

The next step in my development was looking at how the numbers and letters on labels can be interpreted as data. Therefore, I explored different ways of displaying data in visually exciting ways. I found the book ‘Information is Beautiful’ particularly inspiring as used one of their ideas as inspiration for my final poster: the graph of straight lines connected with coloured circles.

This evoked the thought of my final poster: using a line drawing of a woman I had done in life-drawing class, and combine that with the coloured circles to look like the graph. The circles not only make out a women’s figure, but also the scattered-ness signifies how carelessly people are being labelled. By adding number and letters to the circles, they then started to also act as clothes labels. I experimented with having an image from the labels test shoot as the background in different transparencies but I took away focus from the main message. The caption/strapline was the final touch to emphasise the message I wanted to send the viewer about labels and definitions, and how ‘definitions define, not numbers, not letters’, referring to clothes label sizes.

If I can do the project again, or had more time, I would have like to push the idea further through combining it with photography and potentially using a woman or a series of women of different shapes and sizes.