Go Green over Jellies

Most little girls have a pair of jelly shoes at some point during their childhood years.

Image from Rambling Mummy

I still have an old brown pair that I wore while gallivanting all over Europe in 2009, but I never considered them the next must-have fashion item.

Late last year, a Jelly Shoe Store called M Dreams popped up in Pitt St mall, and suddenly, jelly shoes were no longer an 80's memory best forgotten. Even Fashion Hayley had something to say.

I got mine from Juju shoes online, and they arrived in the post today. I'm super excited to be strutting around in my high heeled glitter jellies tomorrow! They're really comfortable too.

Image: mine

And that's not the end of it. Jelly shoes are made from PVC, which is extremely durable (hence why my brown ones are going on 5 years!), isn't going to upset any animal activists, weather proof, and 100% recyclable. This means if they do break, or I get tired of them, they can be put in the recycle bin along with my empty milk bottles, which means zero waste.

In fact, the Brazilian company that make Melissa Shoes actually recycle their old unsold stocks and use the plastic for the new collection! It really brings a new scope to the idea of "wearing plastic bags on your feet". Recycled Coles plastic bags could end up being jelly shoes!

Jelly shoes comes in many style, and great colours. So get green with envy over jellies!

Daddy's Little Princess

Daddy's Little Princess at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre by Linda Wilken opened a couple of weeks ago. If you remember, I first met Linda by chance at the Firstdraft Depot where she was undertaking a residency and I was working at the Big fag Press. We discovered we had some conceptual ideas in common and I interviewed her for Ivory Tower Magazine last year (page 10 in this document).

Sexualisation and objectification of young girls is a current social and political issue. This exhibition represents the way young girls in contemporary western cultures develop their identity based on popular culture and stereotyping which begins in childhood. Influenced through magazines, music videos, social media and the internet, these ‘young consumers’ are being seduced into stylising themselves on hyper-sexualised ideals.

-From the Casula Powerhouse website

Here are some photos I took of Daddy's Little Princess.

[All photos are mine of Linda Wilken's work at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre]

HOMERUN

So I'm in the last week of my honours major project! Not getting much sleep, but every day gets me a step closer. I've set my print deadline for next Monday or if I have to, Tuesday. Then I have two weeks while proofs and prints are happening to put up the rest of my Street Art, work on my website, load things onto The Loop and update various social media platforms like my facebook page, twitter @LouiseKAnderson, and Instagram (LouiseKateAnderson).

I've joined in to work on promoting our year group through our social media pages as well. @utsfashion, #utsfashion, #futureoffashion, and UTS: Fashion, not to mention our continued fundraising from raffle tickets, & cupcakes every Monday in the DAB building, and our Pozible page.

Our catwalk is the evening of the 4th December in the UTS great hall. The exhibition there at #fashionspace runs for a week.

*Instagram photo mine. Cupcakes by Amanda Algeo

i'm perfection

One of my articles involves inteviewing/ surveying models to find out how they feel about their looks. So many times have I heard from a friend "wow, if only I looked like that". But... everyone sees their own flaws and noone else's. It's not like Miranda Kerr has some magical ability to never have a bad hair/ skin day. We're all human, right?

A friend showed me this website, where models talk about the unseen flaws of their bodies.

i'm perfection

Photoshoot - Sunday

So, a last minute change in plans for Sunday has seen me ask everyone I know about interesting locations in Sydney for fashion shoots. For my current concept I was looking for something interesting, but not too busy. And not a ocean/ beach scape. Cockatoo Island would be PERFECT if not for the thousand current biennale visitors. I'd love to do a shoot there for fun one day though. Must put that on the list of things to do post- December.

If anyone remembers, this is the shoot where I'm deleting the body from the frame. A little like this:

I had the idea just yesterday to have the model create a high contrast shadow behind her which will stay in the photos once the body has been edited out. Kind of like an echo.. or something metaphorical like that.

I've decided on Ballast Point Park. One of my writers recommended it and I remembered that my friend Mara Page took some shots there once. So I did a location scout today. The clothes are very earth-y colours, and I think it works well with the location.

*All the rest of the photos are mine.

And thanks to my awesome friend Kathleen Moodie, I borrowed some Fleur Wood clothing. Styling the outfits was tricky because they all need sleeves of some kind and I can't have jewellery over skin or it would be too hard too edit. I still have to buy socks of some kind for the coral shoes (too hard to edit the square cut out bits of the shoes).

(the flash makes the clothes look bad but they're actually very pretty silks and cottons!)

 And that's that! I'm semi-nervous, semi-excited about Sunday!

Fashematics

My cartoonist told me about Fashematics. A satirical blog which collates images to parody catwalk fashion.

SurveyMonkey thoughts

I've been reading through my 44 SurveyMonkey responses. Some of the answers have been really thought-provoking. About 80% of people who answered my survey described themselves in general as "informed consumers", which is great - that's pretty much the target market I was looking for. In retrospect I would have not titled the survey as "fashion", because I think a few people answered "no" as they are not informed consumers of fashion.

Consumers feel strongly about topics across a wide spectrum of issues - political, environmental, religious, culture, technological and social. Some specific issues brought up were: gender equality, gay rights, fair trade, design authenticity, poverty, health, secularism of ethics, "slow" design, renewable resources, sustainable town planning & city building, the banning of smoking in public, support of local & organic produce, anti-animal testing, anti- mass productions, and waste/ landfill ethics. The most prominent issue for my survey responders was environmental sustainability and fair trade. 7% of my responders did not answer the question.

70% of my responders avoid shopping at specific stores or buying specific products because of moral/ ethical issues. Stores include: Max Brenner, Fast Fashion Chains, McDonalds, BP, Woolworths/ Coles, Nike, Starbucks, Gloria Jeans, Cotton On, Nestle, Proctor & Gamble, Zara, Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Shell, City Beach, Mossimo, YD, Amazon and Portmans. Products include: Non-organic skin/ beauty products, products made in China, non-organic foods, non-Australian made products, products which use palm oil, cheap fashion, fur products, products tested on animals, caged eggs, large coffee chains, "adult" products.

Responders said they shop at a huge variety of stores. There were responses rangeing from discount stores like hot dollar, zara, topshop, kmart & supre, chain stores like sportsgirl, portmans, jay jays, witchery and general pants, designerwear like gorman, sass& bide, allanah hill, miu miu, mimco, and some higher fashion stores like chanel, prada and bally. There was also a number of people who said they shopped at local boutiques, and well as online stores like etsy.

Magazines of responders included Frankie, Cleo, Russh, W, Numero, Oyster, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Lula, Dazed & Confused, OK, Grazia, Shop Til You Drop, Wallpaper, ID and Madison. Other publications: SMH, Daily Telegraph, BBC online, ABC online, the Australian, Monocle, the Guardian, New York Times online, New Scientist, Reddit, MX, and Sunday magazine. Blogs include: TheyAllHateUS, amandpalmer, showstudio, and design milk blog.

I then tried to gain an understanding of my consumers by looking at the way they make decisions. I separated answers into 4 categories: "humanist", "indecisive", "safe" and "personal". So, for example buying a present for a friend, giftcard would be the "indecisive" option, jewellery would be the "safe" option, something at the oxfam store would be "humanist" and taking her out to lunch would be "personal". In retrospect, I'm not sure these answers worked the way I wanted them to. The response for my movie choice one, for example "A Comedy because there's an actor in it who was funny in some other movie so you think it'll probably be okay" was my "safe" option, but I'm not sure it really determined attitudes, people may have simply chosen it because they like comedies.


I think the most interesting answers came from my question about definitions of beauty and weather society's ideals match what people's ideals are. Every single person who answered the question (34 responses) said they largely disagreed with societal/ media repsresentations of beauty, or that they were influenced by them and wish they weren't. There were many responses who said they recognised beauty in confidence and personality: "inner beauty", and beauty in people who were unique and different. It is therefore so surprising that media strays so far from consumer demands. It is possible, also, that some people shaped their responses based on social desirability, ie what they "should" say in reponse to such a question. But I think that largely the reponses were truthful.


45% of reponders said they did consider or strongly consider a product to have more monetary value if it is ethical/ sustainable/ fair trade/ funding charities/ protesting against malpractice/ etc. 56% said it did sometimes, and only 7% said it didn't. Examples of products people pay more for are: local food produce, fair trade coffee, free range eggs, oxfam toys, underwear made in Australia, organic products, hand made clothing, lush cosmetics, Trilogy products, organic materials & cotton, authenticity of design, vintage clothes, charity products, and non-mass produced products.

A bit of Enlightenment

University of Sydney Newspaper: Honi Soit May 2, Week 8, 2012

I picked this up a few weeks ago at USYD after my meeting with Megan Le Mesurier. I liked the delicate sarcasm, and thought it was a great example of writing which can kind of be described as semi-satire.

I'm planning to contact Dr Anna Boucher, to see if she's written anything else as the "academic sartorialist" or if she might have any input into my project.

Blind Date

[Image sourced from Wikipedia]

So, by chance I was watching a TV series today on Foxtel called "Dating in the Dark", which is essentially exactly as the name sounds - a reality show with contestants who have a series of dates in complete darkness supposedly to reveal their personalities, and then once they fancy a partner, they get to see each other in the light and the audience gets to see the superficiality that follows.

I wasn't so sure of the assessments made by 'psychologists' who gave percentage ratings on "compatibility" and "DNA matches". I don't think such things really exist or can be brought down to mathematics. This was probably added for entertainment value.

When it came down to it, what made or broke these couples up really did end up being superficial, no matter how much the contestants denied that fact or justified it with the "absence of physical chemistry" or the "not my type" argument.

Then I got thinking about clothes, and other ways almost everyone these days manipulates their bodies in some way. I see myself as a fairly non-judgemental person, and yet even I was thinking "hey, you have a bit of a bald patch, so maybe the long ringlets of hair isn't the greatest style for you". The things about one of the girls that bothered my boyfriend was her fake looking eyelashes and the length of her fake nails. I mean, these are things that can so easily be changed or manipulated - nails, hairstyles, body shapes, clothes, jewellery, body hair, tattoos, makeup...  essentially all things which can be grouped into the genre of "fashion".

When one person on the show essentially was very attracted to another person and all that was broken over something as small as long hair and glasses, you have to wonder what have our standards of appreciating a fellow human being become?

Obviously unless you're on a reality TV show, sight is our first and therefore default way of sizing up another person. But if we're really letting small things that can easily be changed stand in the way of the possibility of happiness, love, etc etc... it makes you wonder what you're missing.

Maybe it just comes down to exactly how much that girl was attached to her fake nails and eyelashes.

So is this kind of fashion helping us see people, or blinding us?

I Hurt I am In Fashion

I Hurt I am In Fashion is a blog I was directed to that I am now enthralled by. The wit and irony compliments my opinions perfectly. It's so daring, I believe the author has been sued several times. But some of the quotes and images, it's just - amusing, amazing satire exposing animal cruelty, exploitation, body image myths, chauvanism, and well, just sheer ridiculousness.

 

* All images taken from I Hurt I am In Fashion.