Journal: Final Reflection
The fashion industry has complex links to many other sectors, including manufacturing, advertising, raw material processing, transport, and retailing. The immense profits to be gained in the retail industry give rise to the desire to engage in unethical practices. When suppliers, distributors, designers, or customers are exploited or treated unfairly, fashion industry executives have an ethical duty to improve the situation.
Within Fashion Ethics and Culture course, we were given the opportunity to explore the breadth of creative, aesthetic, and social/cultural expression of design through the lens of ethical and historic considerations – as it is and how it needs to change, the role of the MENA region and its relationship to fashion media.
As a student of DIDI, I felt the same link and inspiration between the Fashion Ethics and Culture course and my vision of how I want to be as a future designer and how I should change the current fashion industry status quo with my future career path. The course creates a creative paradigm for learning ethical fashion design through the lens of ethical and historic considerations. Students are introduced to fashion history, cultural criticism, contemporary culture, and the diversity of representation including ethical considerations and perspectives.
In my opinion, this course plays as a moderator between all other fashion courses we study and extend to other courses with depth like sociology and design histories and theories to link and emphasis all courses material in a dynamic way. We covered various subjects relating to Body Image Problems, Fur Trade Issues, Cultural Hegemony and Appropriation, Consumer Over-consumption, Environmental Effects, and Concerns, Advertisement Conflicts, Brand Name Forgery, Sweat Shop Working Conditions, and Exclusiveness and Injustice Issues; that simultaneously vary from micro to macro scale through lectures, group activities, open discussions in class, and individual presentations.
- The True Cost Formula
- Investigate your Wardrobe
- Doughnut Economics
- ATCAC-Disrupting the Fashion System
- Earth Logic: the turning point
- Careers in the Fashion Industry
- The future of Garment Technology in Circular Fashion
- Market Segmentation
- Fashion for Good: Virtual Tour
- Fashion & Society
- Made in America
- “Luxury: Behind the mirror of high-end fashion”
- Empathic Design Process
- SOKO Kenya - A people first company
- Innovative Fashion Marketing
- Key trends innovating Fashion Marketing
- Fashion for Good: Virtual Tour
- Untangled Egyptian Beauty Standards
- The Fashion & Race database
- The Modist- Modest Fashion Dream
- About Time: Fashion and Duration
- The It Girl: Ashley Al Busmait
I enjoyed the above-listed topics and guest lecture discussions we had this semester, but certain to a whole new way of perceiving the world. I would love to deepen and expand my knowledge on the technology and circularity of the fashion industry future as well as focus on modest fashion and ethical practices and success and failure aspects of the Modist business experience. Whether through merging my learning outcome within this semester to my nest fashion studio or final thesis.
Here's my list of the most meaningful subjects for me and some of the highlights of my recent blogs on these topics:
ATCAC-Disrupting the Fashion System
ORIGIN AND HISTORY
Atacac is a Swedish fashion studio that Jimmy Herdberg and Rickard Lindqvist created in 2016. Atacac is designed to disrupt the current fashion system. Atacac is like a laboratory for developing ideas and principles. Then they work as consultants sharing that with other brands to improve their design. The other way they work with other designers is what they call Share-wear. When they release a new product in their online store, they also offer the 2D pattern and the 3D model of the garment for free download. This builds a community of home sellers and independent brands that use their patterns and designs. In certain terms, you can do whatever you want. There is a Credit Common Licence connected to the Share-wear which means you can use it commercially in any way you like, and you can make improvements to it, But you need to give credit back to Atacac if you use it commercially and market the product. You also need to make your development available for other people to keep developing further.
For me ATCAC is a brilliant business module example that is trying to blow the entire system to the ground, I loved how I saw ATCAC embodying every principle, I have been learning for the past 3 years. This blog post and the investigation behind it gave me hope that I can succeed in doing something different with my future dream brand.
Innovative Fashion Marketing
Stretchy Kids’ Clothes Petit Pli gets a growing identity
A sustainable fashion design example that offers apparel that evolves as the wearer grows older has an innovative branding that sounds like “more human” and “less professional." The idea is to reduce the waste of apparel and save parents’ money as children progress up a range of sizes in the first three years of their lives.
It needs time and education to promote meaningful behavioral change. We assume that we are too late for much of our generation. We assume, though, that we are just in time for the next era of LittleHumans. The brilliance of the brand strategy is in anchoring on the opportunity where new parents and young children are more open to improvement and learning than any other part of our community. They do everything not only to promote constructive behavioral improvement but also to make it as seamless as possible.
Marketing as a term became cliché of how much brands are using it without actually making the right –positive impact on their users, within this blog post example of how marketing approach could be current, supportive and extending the brand value to further stage where the client loyalty will be granted due to that extended value, this reminded me of applying the product-service systems methodology, where it's not only the brand responsibility to produce and market a product but they innovate different approaches to extended their after-sale services and product value to emotionally engage their clients.
Empathic Design Process
Empathy is the core of the entire process of Design Thinking. Putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes reinforces our ability to interpret information, and lets us understand how other humans perceive the world around us.
The realm of fashion design is shifting from an external focus on the industry, or an internal focus on integrating technology, to an empathetic focus on people. While it’s not too difficult to rally people around this general idea, it can be hard at first to understand how to translate it into tactics.
I ask myself as a designer, how do we make a good connection between a fashion worker and a customer? My solution to this question is to make fashion employees the hero of the story, create brand ideals around them. Plan company modules to be a win-win for staff and stakeholders. As designers, we should reconfigure how the framework is giving back to the societies through which we work. I expect, as a future fashion designer, to build a secure working environment that will help better the lives of single mothers in Egypt. By offering comprehensive educational opportunities and curating future working talents. The Empathy Concept process will be incorporated not only to understand the consumers but also most critically, to understand the true needs of the heroes behind my future brand.
Technology & future of Circular Fashion
Fashion has always been a major hub for innovation — from the invention of the sewing machine to the rise of e-commerce. As technology, fashion is both forward-looking and cyclical. At $2.2 T, the apparel industry is now one of the top sectors in the global economy. Nowadays, apparel technology is rising more than ever. From robots that sew and cut clothing to AI algorithms that anticipate style patterns, to VR mirrors in dressing rooms, technology automates, customizes, and speeds up every aspect of fashion.
In the optimistic scenario, the future will be led by innovators and collaborators, the industry will leap forward in developing digital passports for clothing that carries an internationally recognized digital asset trigger that could be accessed by designers, retailers, recyclers, and customers alike. This type of standardized infrastructure and labeling approach means that not every brand or approach provider has its own patented approaches, leaving customers stuck in the sea of things to consider. In this way, the future of fashion technologies could truly unify the industry around common practices that would make circularity more visible to everyone.
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