Beginnings of my Primary Research
My fashion artefact, red trainers, was given to me as a name out of a hat so we couldn’t choose what we were going to focus on for the next few weeks so I didn’t know what to expect. I’m feeling positive that it’s an object I can research as trainers are something I wear constantly myself however having to research something so niche might be something I struggle with. Although the brief says we can look at our object generally as well, therefore I will start of my research looking into trainers in general and specify at a later date.
My primary research began with me visiting different shops and finding different types of red trainers. I went into Sports Direct, SIze, TK Maxx and Offspring for a variety of shops; sportswear or miscellaneous. My findings were that there were little to no red trainers for children, younger than the age of 5, and if there were red shoes they would be little pumps/dolly shoes aimed at young girls. There were significantly more red trainers, shoes with red accents aimed at men than women, although there were still some for women but they were the classic shoes that come in a series of colourways, e.g. Converse All Stars in red or Adidas Stan Smiths with red details. As I’m interested in the social and historical aspect of wearing trainers relating back to feminism and the femininity of women/children, I found these results interesting and something I will take forward when writing my essay.
I then gained first hand imagery by going along the main roads of Brighton and photographing people wearing trainers that were red or had red accents on them. This allowed my research to be more authentic than if I took photographs of people that I was friends with which would also limit the variety of images I would get. I didn’t do this for aesthetic purposes just to gain research and see what trainers people were wearing, what they were wearing them with and any patterns I could spot. I found that, relating my shop visits and outside photography together, I could hardly spot any children wearing trainers but could spot a lot of adults wearing red trainers, usually with outfits that were more plain. My next step in my research would be to do some observational sketches looking into the shape of trainers and asking people on their opinion on them to get a more varied range of sources to form the basis of my sketchbook.
