UNIT SEVEN
F ASHION :
GIR L EDIT ION
CONTENT S CONTEXT & R ESEARCH
P RACT ICAL SKILLS
P R OBLEM SOLVING
P LANNING & P R ODUCT ION
EVALUAT ION & R ELECT ION
R: What inspired you to create We Are Hundred Club? G: I wanted to break the balance between fast fashion retail stores and exclusive custom unaffordable clothing. R: So, is it just you behind the scenes of your brand, or do you have a team behind you? If not, do you wish, in the future or something to have a team behind you? Or do you much prefer working on it yourself? G: At the moment, it is just me and my boyfriend who helps with the designs and posting out the items. I love working on it all myself as I have full visibility of every single part of the process and can really pour my heart into it.
WE AR E HUNDR ED CLUB
I was lucky enough to work with an up-incoming brand We Are Hundred Club. Throughout the photo shoot, I got the chance to ask some questions to the creator, Gabriella Wassell.
R: Where would you say you got your influence from? And at what moment do you think you decided you wanted to create your brand and why? G: I have always wanted to have my own ‘thing’ that was super personal to me and what I liked and wanted to see, for example, representation of normal girls, styled in their own make-up and with their own clothes as I think that’s super cool and inspiring. R: Would you say you were more influenced by social media or the people surrounding you in everyday life? G: Luckily, we are based in East London where there are ‘anything goes’ fashion wise, we get a lot of inspiration from the people we pass locally most days. Instagram is also massively influential for us with having so many worldwide creators pushing boundaries.
R: Do you feel like your brand has influenced your fashion? G: My brand is a direct representation of my own personal taste and fashion, I wouldn’t put anything out that I wouldn’t be pumped to wear myself.
R: Do you have any up-incoming plans for your brand? G: We want to find ways to expand out of t-shirts. We would love to use our style and incorporate them into items such as jackets, trousers and posters. Also stuff like podcasts, live events and building a community. R: What is one of your biggest achievements since you started up? G: I’d say seeing people excited getting their packages and wearing our clothes. R: I’m curious as to what the process is like for deciding what your next design is going to be? How easy is it to create them? G: We have a constant backlog of little ideas and doodles ongoing for when we need to work on the next drop, it usually takes about two weeks. R: And lastly, where do you see you and your brand in the next year or so? G: I see us just carrying on creating cool stuff and growing as much as possible, in an authentic and organic way.
SOP HIE
WATERS “I wanted to make a skirt out of old white shirts and to embroider pictures onto the pieces. After seeing Rosie’s work on Instagram, I thought she would be perfect to photograph the skirt, she was so helpful and knew exactly what I was picturing and how to make it better. The pictures were how I imagined them to turn out, there were so many to pick from which was perfect and Rosie knew exactly how to take and edit the photographs to add to the grunge theme. I was so happy with the outcome and so many people complimented her work.”
“The artist and architect, guadi, inspired the shapes and sihouette for my design. I am pleased with the outcome of my design as it reflects my research and technical ability.”
“Recently, I was given a project on tailoring cobined with the theme of architecture. In this project I looked at architecture from the Regency Period as I love how detailed the buildings are and how they inspired me to experiement with different textiles techniques such as free machine embroidery, in order to create detail.”
“I worked with Rosie Johnson for the photoshot which was enlightening as I got to see my garment being photographed and modelled.”
Quotes by Izzy Dance, a Fashion Design student currently in her second year of studying a BA
IZZ Y DANCE
MODEL, JESS FITSPATRICK PHOTOGRAPHER, ROSIE JOHNSON DESIGNER, IZZY DANCE
MODEL, IZZY DANCE PHOTOGRAPHER, ROSIE JOHNSON
tABAT HA
LET CHFOR D
PHOTO SET SHOT BY TABATHA LETCHFORD
PHOTOGRAPHER, TABATHA LETCHFORD
Tabatha Letchford is currently studying Level 3 UAL Art & Design and specialises in photography at Folkestone College. Letchford explained that she had always known that she was creative but was never sure which path she would take, until one of her closest friends suggested that she should take Photography GCSE. She explained that she is currently going through the UCAS process to University and has applied to do Fashion Communicatio and Promotion. Letchford describes her photography, “focused on the female gaze and feminist movement, testing boundaries and showing girls and women from a different perspective.” She feels her work is a accurate representation of herself and the opinions she has. “My photography is extremely positive and doesn’t hold anything controversial.”
“Other photographers tend to be my main influences, a lot of these i find in magazines such as I-D and Dazed, and on instagram. My favourites right now are Petra Collins, Ashley Armitage and Chloe Sheppard. I particularly like their representation of women and femininity through their photography.” Tabatha Letchfords work is fresh and unique for todays society. The use of bright colours but dulled down into a hazy, dream like way is a beautiful way to capture strong and bold colours in a more feminine approach. She often includes props such as flowers, tiaras and a retro-vintage disco ball. These props are used effectively in her work because it celebrates a few things that would be classed as ‘girly’ in todays society and creates a beautiful dream lke alternate world. Check out Tabatha’s work: tabsnaps. tumblr.com
CONTEXT
& R ESEARCH
at the start of the process of creating my magazine, i decided to create a Pinterest account to collect some images for inspiration for my magazine content and what i wanted to subject i wanted to base my magazine on. i decided to create a fashion magazine as i am very passionate about fashion and do a lot of fashion photography in my spare time. so, i started collecting up a few magazine covers online of magazines that i personally read or find interesting. Firstly, i wanted to make my magazine cover as simplistic as possible, I looked at magazines such as ‘I-D’ and ‘Wonderland’ because they do not have a lot on their covers, its usually just a cover girl/boy and the magazine name and sometimes they wil have a subheader but it isn’t too much and doesnt take your attention away from who is on the cover. I also discovered that i looked at a lot of magazine covers that just had portraits as the cover and not a medium close up. I experiemented a little with what type of photo I would like as my cover, and decided to look at a magazine on a website I signed up for called ‘issuu’ called ‘Mad Sounds.’ The cover is shot as a medium close up and shows more of the cover girls body and does not just focus on her face. I also looked at a few ‘Vogue’ magazines in the libary that had body shots as the front cover. when looking at Vogue, I discovered that they would range from using close up portrait shots to shots that show the whole of the model(s) body when shooting a magazine cover. I found that a shot like that suited my magazine a lot better in comparision to a portrait style photograph. Oh which do not just focus on just so, for my magazine, after looking at some more magazine covers from mad sounds and vogue, I decided to have a full body picture because I personally thought they were more interesting in comparision to just a basic portrait. I also decided on a full body shot because my magazine is about fashion, so I thought it was effective to show the whole of my cover girl’s outfit.
At the start of my research process, I decided to create a online questionnaire to get a rough idea as to what people in todays society get their fashion infulences from and what stye of magazine they prefer to read and where. When I asked as to what influences their fashion, 77% of the people who took the questionnaire anwsered with social media, i.e influencers. Only 11% anwsered that magazines infulenced their fashion. this was helpful research for me because in my magazine, I decided to include a brand that is instagram based and a photographer that showcases her work on Tumblr and Intsagram, fitting along side the social media influenced based. I then asked if they preferred to read a magazine online or printed as I was curious to see if online magazines were more favoured as a lot of people anwsered that social media influenced their fashion choices. I was surpised by the results showing that 90.9% of people said thatthey preferred printed magazines and only 9.1% of people preferred online magazines. As this task is to create and publish an online magazine, I had to go against the crowd and stick to the unpopular online magazine, but when asking people why they preferred printed magazines, a common anwser was that it was more interesting and meant more to people to have a physical magazine compared to one on the internet, though a few people explained that they don’t really purchase magazines unless a certain one included people that they were inteested in. The last question I asked was ‘do you purcahse high fashion clothes or buy cheap alternatives?’ the reasoning for this question ws because I wanted to see if peope preferred high fashion or fast fashion. the results were almost half and half so for that reason, I decided to add ‘hundred club’ as one of my chosen brands to write an article about because they tied in with the social media aspect and the lowkey clothing brand is organic and authentic, so as my results were almost balanced, it made sense to add this brand as it fit most of the topics I was covering in my magazine. I also decided to include work from students on campus as I wanted to avoid well known generic brands and stick with more original, authentic and hand made work.
P R OBLEM SOLVING
At first, I found InDesign quite challenging to work as I have never used the software or any other software like that one before. I had never created an online magazine before, so this was all very new to me and quite overwhelming to start off with as it seems as though there is a lot to understand, but when I got my head around the software, I found it was a little easier than I first thought it was. During the creation of my magazine, I found it incredibly annoying when trying to change the size of a photo, resizing the photographs was probably one of the most frequent problems during this task as my magazine mostly features photos. But I soon discovered how to move both of the frames of the image at the same time so that I didn’t have to countlessly resize them over and over again. I also found the margin around the page a hard to get used to as I needed to keep the text in between the purple margin, but sometimes the writing would be too big or not fit on the page properly so i would have to continuously chop and change my text and my photographs to ensure they fitted the magazine layout. Choosing the right font to fit my magazine aesthetic and also being suitable so that the reader could see it and understand what was written was also another trial and error situation for me. I downloaded a few fonts off a free font download website called ‘DaFont’ which enabled me to make my magazine look a little more creative, different and also fit the magazine aesthetic a little more by having my main magazine font something that was not just a generic one provided by InDesign. When writing up my articles for the practical skills side of my magazine, I started off by using ‘Arial Black,’ I chose this font as the font to be used on the pages for articles etc because it stood out from the photographs or coloured backgrounds I had inserted into my magazine. To start off with, I thought that the boldness of the font was effective against the backgrounds, but I soon began to realise that it wasn’t that effective and that the bold black words seemed to have bled into the background making the font not as visual as I would have liked it to be. So, I tackle this obstacle, I decided to change the font to just Ariel and for some of my articles I changed the font colour to white and also spaced out the linings of the sentences to 16 instead of the default 14.4. I found that doing this made my writing for the articles less clumped together and more elegant and readable for my target audience. another thing that was a challenge when using InDesign is that there is no spell check, so in order to ensure my grammar was correct, i would have to write it up in word and then copy it over to avoid mistakes.
P RACT ICUAL SKILLS In my magazine I decided to only use my own photographs I have taken or photos that have been taken of me. i decided to do this because I wanted my magazine to fully represent my work and include original content. throughout the process of creating my magazine, Ihad been involved in two other students’ work. I was a model for Poppy and Erin’s work as they were both also doing a magazine with the topic ‘fashion.’ when shooting with poppy, we did a lot of colour experimentation with clothing and makeup. throughout the shoot with poppy, we were playing around with the lights in the studio to try and get the right exposure and style for her photographs.
For Erin’s shoot she wanted to play around with different camera angles, from low angles, close ups and medim close ups. we also played around with different light gels to match one of the yellow Daisy dresses she had styled me in, though we found that this was not very successful after we took the photos and looked at them on the computer becaus the yellow did not come out how she was expecting. during the challenge of playing around with the light gels, we we experiment with using from three to one light to try out different colour experiments. she had then decided that the best photographs were the ones where we had directed two white lights on full beam towards the water studio background and a third light directed towards me so that i stood out too but she also wanted the enhance the whiteness of the background so that it did not look grey, in comparison with poppy’s photographs of which we played around with having either one light directed onto the background and then just one on me, which made the background a little more grey.
i did start off with having a photograph of what my article was about on one page and then the article in collumns on the other page, but i personally thought it made my magazine look a little boring and basic. throughout the process of creating this work, i wanted to ensure that my content and concept was as original as i could make it. i had looked at magazines such as ‘Vanity Fair’ i saw in the 25th annual edition that there was a double page spread of actor, Timothee Chalamet but over the double page spread of the actor, there was an article written over it. once i looked at this, i started to notice a few more magazines including page spreads like this so i decided to change the layout of my magazine and have a few of my articles written over the photos so it looks as if the article is all one and the photos are not seperate from it. though it want always successful putting the writing over the photographs because it would often not show up and be very readable. in this case, i decided to add boxes over some of the writing and then change down the opacity so that the boxes were not an eyesore and blended in with the photographs and didn’t look out of place.
P LANNING & P R ODUCT ION
for the layout of my magazine, i decided to have my text over the photographs so that the photographs were a background instead of something that was added to the page. i decided to do that because my magazine is mostly focused on fashion photography so i wanted to have a few double page spreads of fashion photography shoots i had done in my spare time during the process of my magazine.
EVALUAT ION & R EFLECT ION WHAT were the challenges and what did you do to achieve your outcome with this unit? the challenges i faced during the process of creating my magazine was mostly getting the hang of using the software InDesign. as this was my first time using a publishing website, i found it rather hard to be able to use at first as i was not familiar with the layout and as i wasnt experienced with it, it was all foreign to me at the start. i slowly gained an understanding with the website as i used it more often whilst creating my magazine. i found that the things that were a challenge to me had a simple soultion when i got the hang of it.
WHAT skills, knowledge and understanding did you accquire with this unit? the skills i learnt during the process of my magazine making was how to use the software InDesign. i found out how to download free fonts and be able to use them in my magazine to give it a more unqiue and orginal feel to it instead of using defult ones that came with the software. i also learnt a lot about the layout of my magazine and gained an understanding with fonts that bled into my chosen backgrounds and how to tweak little errors like that so that my magazine is more readable to others. WHAT strengths and areas for improvement did you realise with this unit? the strengths i discovered i had with this project during this unit was, when i got the hang of it, i found it really fun laying out all my work and presenting it in a unique and fun way and setting it out in a more creative way instead of just the basic photo on one page and article on other. in conclusion, i really enjoyed creating my magazine and found that all of the little factors that i didnt get along with and found difficult, made me feel as though i was being challenged and when i finally over come my problems, i felt very proud of my achievements.