Gender & Identity
In all of my past projects I have looked closely into the female gaze movement and focused completely on feminism and so I feel that with this project I want to extend that further and research more into gender and identity overall. When working on TRIPT magazine last year I started to explore this subject a little bit more with the spread of ‘boys don’t cry’, looking into the damaging stereotypes that boys face of having to ‘man up’ etc. This made me want to look into the idea of gender and identity and the stereotypes that come with it, especially within fashion and just develop my research further.
A lot of my friends in Brighton identify as non-binary and this is one of the main reasons as to why I want to look more into gender and identity, making this project quite personal to me. In a recent conversation with my housemate they were talking about how they feel neither feminine nor masculine and this conversation made me think about the gender-fluid movement that is huge right now within the media. I would still like continue working in a very graphic style, using a illustrative style mixed with photograph and imaging to make a magazine or photobook as I realized working on TRIPT that this is my specialism and what I want to continue after uni when it comes to working in the industry.
This is my pinterest board i have put together so far of different things I’ve seen that’s inspired me so far. Ive been really looking into editorials and fashion campaigns that use models that are neither masculine nor feminine and looking at the different ways of styling to make it gender fluid. I also really like the idea of using different methods to distort images so you can only just about see the model, i feel like this is an interesting way to make the images about the clothes rather than the identity or gender of the model. I also was really inspired by Bruce Riley’s resin paintings he does as to me these reminded me of science and DNA, cells etc and made me think that when you strip away peoples genders our DNA etc are all the same and i would like to explore this idea too.
