Sustainable Fashion Zine: SHANGHAI Co-oP
Location: Shanghai, China
I was very privileged to have the opportunity to take the Sustainable Fashion course at NYU Shanghai taught by Professor Nimrah Syed, which beyond expanded my understanding of sustainable living. I was able to break away from preconceived ideas that sustainability is unobtainable and realised that my decisions, even on a daily basis, have an impact on the global world and its circulation.
The topic of conscious consumption appealed to me the most, as I soon realised the extent of my contribution to Fast Fashion. Buying articles of clothing or any other accessories without the intent of maintaining them is a waste of resources, from the perspective of the consumer as well as the producer. I then pin-pointed education and gaining awareness as the first step of transforming one’s mindset in consumption.
The flaw in shaming consumers into sustainability is the key element in the mindset “my contribution won’t matter on a global scale”. The more knowledge I gained about the little steps that simultaneously improved my quality of life as well as the environment, the more passionate I felt about informing the community around me — that said I began acknowledging what type of communication my peers were receptive to, and what made them defensive. It wasn’t the information that differentiated the two outcomes, but rather the way it was presented.
These realisations pushed my parter and I to conduct a five week research project on conscious consumption by delivering a set of options for sustainable fashion as its final product. Our personal interest in fashion allowed us to weight out the options already available and further analyse what can be implemented for the purpose of raising awareness.
We chose to present our findings and suggestions in a Fashion-Zine, which would outline sustainable options for clothing shopping. Taking the opportunity to explore the vast city of Shanghai, we based our research what was available to us locally and then attempted to apply it to the bigger picture.
My partner focused on collecting the content, and my main goal was to find the right way to present it. We quickly strained away from long informational articles, as they symbolise the one way we do not want to appeal to our audience. Instead we provide six options of sustainable shopping without explicitly flashing ‘sustainability’ in the reader’s face. The idea of presenting the look-book in this way is to grasp the attention by the visual appeal of the outfits only later to realise their origins and impact on the environment. We want to show that sustainability does not mean wearing a brown bag tied at the waist.
As all of the outfits were styled, we selected places around Shanghai to shoot each look based on its utility and visual correlations. Each shoot took a couple of hours of experimentation as I had to manage two key components: the aesthetic appeal and representation of the clothing, as well as my model. Four pictures were selected for each option, and I began story boarding the zine.
This series, like any other creation, tells a story through the emotions of the creator. I began drafting the story board of the 60 pages as a continuous design visually as well as contextually. To break away from the stereotypical ‘earthy’ tones that are often imagined when thinking about sustainable fashion, I chose a vibrant colour spectrum that bleeds each chapter into the next. The focus on colours also encouraged me to select a pop-culture theme that would further tie in the project visually. Cinematography is used to provoke emotion through its story telling, and I chose to use movie references to differentiate the chapters. Using the colour scheme (frame by frame) of each movie contributed to my initial focus on colour representation. Each Inspiration Page contains the frame by frame colour reference from the selected movie, and the rest of the chapter plays around with the colours introduced in the movie. Box-Templet is the highlighting of information by creating a rectangular shape around it to bring it the the forth-ground — I used this idea, but instead of highlighting textual information, I used rectangular patterning to focalise the visual referenced on each page.
The essential in my design process was simplicity. I had a significant amount of content, with a very powerful message, as well as the aesthetic elements I wanted to incorporate — I needed to find a way to not overcomplicate the experience for the reader. The counter to my goal was to make it exciting rather than plane and boring. The choice of how the main photo-shoot images would be displayed was the central point of my story-telling. I chose to maximise the space for each individual photo, while also not having the placement repeat again — thus the choice of cropping and displaying the images off-page in some cases.
The clothing pile shoots also came with a challenge- with very minimal resources we attempted to replicate a high-fashion way of display. Since we did not promote buying any of the pieces particular to the zine, I chose to not show every lining of every pieces, but rather play around with shapes and colours to further intrigue the reader for the purpose of them turning the page and wanting to read the short descriptions of where these pieces came from.
The middle of the zine contains a survey we conducted, and thus I chose to have a continuous spread from left-to-right for variation. In a sense, I was working on a very symmetrical and inter-linked design, as I tried to image the type of informational content I would consume with my somewhat shot-attention span.
I primarily worked in Adobe Photoshop, as well as Lightroom and Design to achieve the desired aesthetic. I have gained a lot of practice in design editing, as well as photography through the duration of the project. The SHANGHAI Co-oP allowed me to not only gain understanding and experience of being a conscious society citizen, but also allowed me to find ways to communicate my concerns to a targeted audience. Overall, I would like to thank my Professor for inspiring me to transform my way of living, as well as my wonderful project partner Alessandra Hallman for her undivided commitment to make a change. This was my first step towards becoming a conscious consumer and I would hope it inspires others, just like myself, to get educated over staying blissfully ignorant.
