This week has been an absolute blur, from my tutorial with Itai, learning breakthrough and turnaround in proposed outcome, I feel my work has become much more contextually rich and the outcome more focused. I’ve been looking back at my research and noting parts of it that I could re-visit and found aspects of research that made more sense in hindsight, which was great! After establishing that I was interested in experience, I developed a methodology involving a combination of phenomenological and ethnographic techniques. This really helped me develop the final outcome’s narrative and I feel like my research area has been defined more thoroughly.
In terms of changing the outcome from a series of advertising campaigns, to a short film and detailed trend report, this has assisted me greatly, I realise that I was trying to deal with too many themes and becoming too concerned with product design as opposed to media itself. I revisited the idea of ‘the glass bedroom theory’ and Caroline Evans identifying meaning within fashion imagery which, ‘stretches simultaneously back to the past and forward into the future’ and rather than being an end product, describes fashion images as, ‘fertile primary sources, [that] can generate new ideas and meanings and themselves carry discourse into the future’. So a practice-based research project is how I would define my outcome.
Now I have had a chance to establish my purpose and objective, which is speculating on the merging of physical and digital worlds and how this links to the construction of identity and beauty ideals, I have also began to think about potential business opportunities and how this sits within the current market. I’ve been looking particularly at fashion week changing into a ‘ gender-neutral digital platform to replace the next twelve months of LFW, which will be built on as a global showcase for the future’ (British Fashion Council, 2020) as a basic for how experience and digital communication is evolving within the fashion industry. This incidentally is supported by my collaborative unit, where I worked with Bloomsbury and Net-a-Porter, writing articles about archive fashion footage and examining the evolution of the runway.
I only have a few days left now, so I will spend that time looking at social media and distribution strategies and further detailed plans for the film.