A Clear Conscience
A Clear Conscience
Make it
This piece is a critic of Western ideas about sustainability which is:
- Clean but actually not sustainable
- Majority of global south taking the burden.
A clean conscience (Olivia Sun / Boomba Nishikawa):
To juxtapose the West and the Global South’s relationships with sustainability and fashion. There is an exaggerated take on the Western “clean girl” aesthetic with the broad shoulder pads and sleek metallic makeup - playing on futuristic themes. This is not only an environmental facade - ‘clean girl’ staples like famous fashion brand rely on perpetuating pollution and poor work conditions, which also spreads the harmful stereotype that to be hygienic and put-together is to dress in a minimalist corporate-inspired style. As a contrast, an ‘unclean’ outfit representing through the ragged conditions of communities who suffer from fashion’s mass consumerist culture with asymmetry, raw hems, and imperfect stitching.
Follow up with the West’s mass consumerism of fast fashion: trend cycles are continuing to accelerate and so clothes keep being discarded, are the consequences of just that.
The outfits made entirely out of garbage bag, broken and recycled materials, which is a literal visual of how many people are covered in waste. Through this conceptually paired, we hope to remind the West of our performative tendencies and the consequences our unsustainable consumption.
This was a 4-piece design and so, there must be continuity and/or a compare and contrast between the final outcome.
The designers mentioned ideas of recycling and garbage, so I came up with the idea of using a plastic drape as garbage in the background. There was a lot of political and criticism involved – that was why I displayed the ‘victim’ in front of all of the criticism but even so, there was always something that protected it.
Challenges: Only brief ideas were given when discussing the visual concepts. The actual garment pieces were only completed by the actual photoshoot deadline so, there was a lot of improvisation in the moment.
The newly edited and color corrected product was done after I got time to process and compose myself. I always thought that this fashion photoshoot was a very interesting project so I kept all the stocks; and revisited them when I felt like it was time. Only then did I focus more on the theme and the consistency that matched with the designer’s idea.
The first edit that made the cut was also my proud child, it is just that we had to also consider the whole look of the look book, and I was not grown back then.
The concept
And the piece going on the runway!