Critical Reflective Summary

From my chosen garment being the band jacket, my final piece is an editorial for Vogue named ‘What makes a Princess’. I started off researching The British Royal Family in comparison with the perception of Disney Royalty. It was clear that Disney portrayed their Princesses as the ‘perfect’ female with the most stunning beauty and who live happily ever after in a life of luxury. This ideology of a Disney princess was implanted in children’s brains as the normality meaning the word princess has connotations of perfectness and beauty. My research into the interview with Princess Diana, and Meghan Markle was a turning point as the connotations of a Princess created by Disney was flipped to a life of entrapment and old fashioned tradition. This made me become more interested in how fiction influences the perception of real life. I then started looking at different ways in which princesses are portrayed through the film ‘A Cinderella Story’ as well as different fashion shows. A Cinderella Story is based on the traditional narrative of Cinderella but with a modern twist, with additions of teenage high school drama. This led me to become interested in modern ways in which princesses are portrayed therefore I looked at a few different designers that make princess style ballgown dresses such as the Cinderella dress that Tommy Hilfiger designed for Zendaya to wear at the Met Gala but also dresses by Zac Posen. By looking at real life fashion designers it created a link between Disney Princesses and the fashion industry and led to have the idea of linking Disney Princesses with a high fashion context for my final piece. As a further development I looked at Tim Walker as he is a photographer that focuses on fantasy. This inspired me to look more deeply at fashion photography for my final piece. The idea of an editorial took my interest after discovering the American Vogue editorial, ‘Cinderella Story’ by David Sims. The illustrator Daria Artemieva led me to the idea of creating an editorial for Vogue that is based on stripping the fantasy out of Disney Princesses. My alternate idea for my end product is to create a fashion show that is based on the traditional Disney Princesses within a fantasy setting of a castle. Although I had more interest in the back story of the Vouge editorial. Therefore, I chose four Disney Princesses that I wanted to base my photoshoots off and created a mood board for each princess and planned for my shoots. Firstly, I took my Ariel model to the beach and did the photoshoot there, I was very happy with the outcome of these images and looked exactly how I wanted them to. I then used my Sleeping Beauty model in a bedroom setting at university. These photographs are my least favourite as the lighting in the university bedroom was dull and hard to make look like the setting of Sleeping Beauty that I wanted. Due to lockdown, I couldn’t use another bedroom other than university halls that we are staying in, however without the restrictions we could have used my room at home which would have had better lighting and more fitting scenery. For my Belle character I had chosen my model but at the last minute she pulled out and therefore I had to quickly find another model. Luckily, I found a girl who was perfect for the characterisation. After improvising and creating my own rose bush these photographs turned out exactly how I wanted them, and I was very pleased with them. Finally for my Princess Jasmine photoshoot I wanted to use a night stary sky to replicate the magic carpet scene in the movie however the lighting was not good in the dark and therefore I decided to edit the sky afterwards. As I was editing the sky, I needed to find a location that had a clear sky without obstructions from trees and buildings as the editing wouldn’t work. Overall, after the editing these images weren’t my favourite as the editing wasn’t the best and if I would to do it again, I would have paid for a better software to edit on. When all the images are collated, they look the way I wanted them to and portray the ideas behind the photographs. When laying out my images as a Vogue editorial I realised I took all my images in landscape which limited the design layout, therefore if I was to do this again, I would take a mixture of portrait and landscape images. When looking at other Vogue editorials most of them are between 10 and 12 pages although I don’t have enough images to do this and therefore if I was to do this again, I would take a variety of images for each princess to be able to create a longer editorial. Overall, I am very happy with my final editorial for Vogue as it links with my personal beliefs and interests and explores a narrative behind the images.