Juliet Herbert•Fashion Communication and Promotion

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What I learned by living at university

Living away from your parents is a pretty big step, there was a few things I realised after I moved out that I hadn’t considered before.

1. Your room doesn’t hoover itself. It takes 5 minutes, just do it.

2. You can eat breakfast for dinner and dessert for breakfast and no one can say a thing.

3. You might have to show someone how to cook rice. Yeah.

4. Kitchen roll doesn’t come with kitchens, neither do bin bags. Huh.

5. You’ll have to PAY to do your laundry.

6. Dad will not be there to take out the bins.

Those are the important ones. Mostly what I learned is that I actually have to do things for myself and that my mom was right about me taking her for granted.

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10 people I’d love to interview

1. Adolf Hitler

2. Heath ledger

3. Ryan Gosling

4. Leonardo da Vinci

5. Frank ocean

6. Ted Bundy

7. Israel keys

8. Madeleine McCann

9. Amy Whinehouse

10. Future me

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Charity shopping tips

Over the past year I have been really into charity shops, I’ve always loved them but I now go quite frequently to my favourite one (Sue Ryder Foundation - Nottingham) as I’m trying to be more conscious of where I buy my clothing. I’ve learned a few things I think.

1. Patience. You can’t walk in and out of a charity shop in 10 minutes. I’m sorry but these things take time, you need to spend a solid hour walking very slowly along each rail. It takes time.

2. Don’t be too picky. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve picked up a few items and pre-judged them only to find the item I thought I’d hate, was the only item I end up buying. Sometimes that ugly grandma skirt can actually look good.

3. Bring a friend. Having someone to scan the rails with is great, it’s also nice when you find something for them and vise versa. It’s also good to have someone to tell you that yes, that top does make you look like like an old woman.

4. Don’t haggle. This is a charity shop people, we want to give them money.

5. Always a really great selection of weird scarves.

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What you actually need to bring to university

So I brought way too much for first year. There’s no beating around it. Everyone told me I was bringing too much, that I wouldn’t need it. They were completely and utterly correct. While packing to go home for the summer I realised just how little of the clothes I brought were actually worn. Sorry Dad.

1. So, the basics. We’re talking bras, undies, socks and your favourite item of swim wear (one!!)

2. You will need clothing so, a system I worked out was that while packing each item, I would hold it for a second and think about:

A: When was the last time I wore this? B: Does this go with multiple other items? When you answer these q’s you have to be ruthless. Put down the jeans you wear twice a year.

3. A toothbrush or two.

4. A wireless speaker, this is essential!!!

5. Like, 3 pairs of shoes - day/night out trainers, gym shoes, boots, maybe a pair of heels if you’re that type of person. You do not need 13 pairs of shoes, especially when you wear the same pair 5 days a week. While nearly having a breakdown trying to pack them into my bags and subsequently having to pay £40 extra at the airport because my bag was too heavy, I can safely say I learned this lesson the hard way, trust me.

6. Some quick recipes for dinner. Pasta and rice will eventually get boring. Fish is pretty good. Aldi is even better.

7. Ear plugs!!! This one was huge for me as I lived somewhere with very loud students at all hours of the day and night as well as a room that seemed to amplify noise. I also had very thin walls (thankyou Chris), you get the gist. Essential.

8. Your favourite mug. I didn’t know I was sentimental with kitchenware but drinking from a mug that was both small and shitty from Wilko was quite terrible.

9. USB stick.

10. Always be armed with cold and flu medicine. Nothing worse than having to trek to the pharmacy while you can barely breathe through your nose. Be prepared for it.

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25 of my all time favourite songs

Dinner and diatribes - Hozier

Someone new - Banks

Nights - Frank Ocean

The Night We Met - Lord Huron

Arabella - Arctic Monkeys

The Weekend - SZA

ELEMENT- Kendrick Lamar

Good kid, m.A.A.d City - Kendrick Lamar

Without me - Eminem

Dissolve me - Alt-j

Goodbyes - Jorja Smith

Phone Calls - Jessie Reyez

Teen Idle - Marina and the Diamonds

Desperado - Rihanna

Wet Dreamz - J. Cole

Super Rich Kids - Frank Ocean

No Hands - Wacka Flacka Flame

Before He Cheats - Carrie Underwood

All The Time - The Kooks

Four out of Five - Arctic Monkeys

Hate It Or Love It - The Game

Hard Place - H.E.R

Shea Butter Baby - Ari Lennox, J. Cole

Time In A Bottle - Jim Croce

Housewife - Dr. Dre

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Lack of female representation in Hollywood movies

I found this chart a few months back, at first I thought it had to be a joke but found that it was actually very true and very disappointing. To think that many of the movies listed here have a female protagonist and yet are still overtook by a male who isn’t even who the movie is focusing on is truly bizarre.

I know this is not a topic that many are interested in but as someone who loves cinema and film, it’s a shame that this is the kind of representation that we get as women. This also seems like something you’d see 50 years ago, seeing it now makes me feel slightly hopeless towards the future of cinema.

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Reyna Biddy

I recently came across a writer called Reyna Biddy. Her work is on Spotify but it isn’t necessarily ‘music’. She does sort of spoken word poetry set to soft music. This kind of thing isn’t usually what I listen to but I would really recommend everyone have a listen. The first song I found was one called ‘A Message to Women’ which I’ll insert an excerpt below. Her poetry is about self love and relationships and empowerment. Her most recent album called ‘I Love My Love’ is full of songs like this along with others aimed towards different types of attitude.

“You deserve better than to be called pretty

You deserve better than to get upset and go online to act petty

You deserve better than to be on hold

You deserve better than to hold onto someone who's already let go

You deserve better than to be held in convenience”

“You deserve better than to keep your relationship lowkey, because

Someone might see it, and someone might ask questions

And someone might wonder why someone like you

Would rather hang around a boy who won't commit

When someone like them, is ready to love you

Is ready to learn you”

Self love and accepting yourself is a huge issue for me and thousands of other young girls. Albums like this that you can listen to and actually feel like someone understands and that someone is listening. The reason is not because she knows you but because we’re all going through the same situation.

It’s so important to have confidence in yourself as there will be times when you come across people who may not like you, or betray you or treat you undesirably and you need to be able to handle those situations, alone. You won’t always have someone watching your back so it’s important to have your own.

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Conformity and it’s effects on society

I’ve begun to notice some things about my own generation, in particular, the extremely common mindset many of us have - to be different to everyone else.

Personally, this came to fruition for me in how I often caught myself about to agree with someone because I knew it was a common opinion, or catching myself saying I like an item of clothing when I don’t, just to be part of the group. This sort of compliance is mentally draining as you’re stuck in a state of ‘picking your battles’. I try to stop these thoughts coming out and I’m usually able to verbalise my actual stance on whatever the matter is but, I do see this as a huge problem.

The issue here is that a lot of people fear the judgment of others to the point of being unable to speak about how they really feel. Conformity pushes people to want to ‘fit in’ and go with what others want despite your own opinions.

Some people conform so as not to look stupid or will agree with someone they admire because they think their opinion is most likely the right one. This is an example of someone changing their behaviour in order to look correct.

Another reason we conform, probably one of the main reasons, is to be liked. This is called Normative Conformity, and it is where I have the biggest issue as it’s the most mentally damaging. To young people especially I feel it’s something we need to address and make it less so something that we do subconsciously and start to make it a known ‘bad thing’.

The flip side of this is non-conformity. This is kind of confusing but what I see here is a lot of people making a huge effort to be different that they begin to push themselves too hard and end up losing themselves in it. They lose so much of their own thought that it becomes an obsession with having things that no one else has and being the way no one else is. It also has a tone of people rejecting things they would otherwise like and enjoy because they know it’s too ‘mainstream’ or ‘basic’. They know that if they hold an aesthetic of rejecting the norm, they can no longer have, wear or do anything normal at the risk of being called out for being a hypocrite.

There is so much judgment in our generation which I find quite bizarre considering how open minded we (mostly) are regarding everything else in our own society. It’s something we need to watch as we don’t want to pass it on to younger generations.

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My journey with (attempted) vegetarianism:

So I’ve recently decided to become a vegetarian. As of right now, I’m a pescatarian to start because for me personally I know that cutting meat out entirely would be extremely difficult. I’ve been an avid meat eater my whole life and until coming to university, I had no plans to change that. I would eat a red meat or a poultry centred meal about 5 days a week and never give it a second thought. I was one of those people that would laugh at the thought of veganism and that nothing we do would ever really make a difference.

This changed because of a few things, the first being my knowledge of fast fashion and its environmental impact which I have addressed in other blog posts. Since gaining new information on this impact, something opened up in my head about everything I’d been hearing for years but ignored because I thought it didn’t matter, I don’t think it really hit me until a few months ago. The next reason was a YouTuber that I watch, I know that sounds strange to be actually affected by what someone online says but I would really recommend anyone to check out this channel. Her name is Keelin Moncrieff, she is from my home town in Ireland. She is an anti-blogger (against fast fashion and rejecting the age of consumerism) and is vegan herself. She addressed some of the issues that I myself was unknowingly contributing to by eating meat and it did a very fast turn around in my head. I then went on to watch some of the documentaries on Netflix like ‘Cowspiracy’ and ‘Our Planet’. These documentaries gave me a lot more information on things like my own consumption and how much difference we actually can make by cutting down to eating no meat just 2 or 3 days a week.

I’m sure many people saw the new statistic that if we don’t make moves to stop the damage we’re doing, then the effects will be irreversible by 2030. This is shocking to hear.

The reason I’ve done this and would encourage others to do so, is because I feel that our planet really is dying and if we don’t do something to stop the horrible effects of our own consumption then our planet may truly be on its last legs. I still have occasional slip ups (why this post is called an attempt) but I think what’s important is that I’m trying my best.

The guilt I now feel standing in the meat aisle in ‘Aldi’ makes me feel like I’m choosing between spicy chicken wings or the end of the world as we know it. As someone so young, I don’t want this to be the world my younger peers have to grow up in.

Below are the links to the videos that really played a part in changing my perspective.

https://youtu.be/xa_71sm7jY4

https://youtu.be/pPx3Lz2ro3A

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Reflective: Term 1

I really enjoyed my first term of this course, I think that’s because the lecturers cover such a broad range of topics and styles of learning/teaching, that we never had too long on any one subject. For example when I didn’t like a part of the module, we would be moving onto something else next week so it wasn’t a problem.

I liked most of the work but I was not a fan of the first photography based project we did as I’m not very familiar with cameras or photography in general. While I was happy to try figure it out, having to work around the rest of my teams ideas and decisions proved quite difficult in some cases. I would have preferred the teams to be pairs as two people can sort through their vision easier than 5.

My favourite task we did was one of the recent ones. We had to produce 3 photographs and we could edit and direct the photography (by this point I was more familiar with photography and photoshop) ourselves. I liked this because the subject matter was broad, my team was given ‘bag’ to advertise along with a different photo shoot as inspiration. My team and I also had a fairly similar vision of what we wanted and were able to agree on it. I was quite happy with our result but I think we could have improved on it in some ways.

The summative brief has definitely been the hardest task we were given, an InDesign report. The actual execution was not the difficult part, which was the ‘contexts’ stage, for me anyway. I felt this was the most difficult because we had to have 3 moodboards as well as research for each. Research is not one of my strong suits as I find it extremely tedious as well as unnecessary a lot of the time. The making of the report was actually quite fun when I was able to properly familiarise myself with the software. I enjoyed designing each page but it was quite a large task as the work load equated to anywhere from 30-60 pages worth of information and imagery. Mine ended up near 40 pages, it took me weeks.

All together, I’m really interested to see what the next term will entail. I hope we get to look more into the industry side of fashion as a whole as well as more on the marketing and branding.

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Book: Hegarty on Creativity - There are no rules

This book was a lot more enjoyable to read than the last, it was filled with interesting anecdotes relating to creativity and having the motivation to use your creative powers. It was also printed in a really cool style, words were plastered across two pages and there’s small drawings relating to what the page contains. It was easy enough to read as it’s quite small but also because it’s made up of about three small paragraphs on each page, all very spaced out so it was visually appealing.

One of my favourite points he made was to ‘consume information from unusual sources’. I liked this because while it’s kind of obvious, it’s not something I was immediately aware of. If I were to watch and read and take in a lot of dull or boring information, I would most likely be full and boring myself. We express ourselves through creativity whether it’s in what we do, how we act, what we wear, the words we write, how we write, our hobbies, it can literally be anything because everything in life involves a little creativity. If we absorb unusual and interesting information, we would be full to the brim of that which is out of the ordinary, this leads to a different kind of creativity.

I also liked his point about how creativity and the formation of ideas does not happen on command, there is no ‘sit in a room for an hour and come up with an idea’ that’s just not how it works even though it would be convenient. My best ideas that I have had have been mostly from influences outside the field I’m studying. Mostly a movie or a poster or an article I read, these are the things that while engaged in them, I often have epiphany moments where the perfect idea just pops into your head, mostly at 3am when you should be sleeping. Those are the best kind. Having to come up with ideas is one of my favourite parts of a project. The ideas stage in general is quite fun for me because I enjoy the endless possibilities of ideas, they can be literally anything and don’t have any constraints.

This book is something I like to think I could refer to when I’m struggling with my own creativity. Those small pointers it contains can really help with you have a bit of a block.

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Book: Fashion Brands, Mark Tungate.

This book was a fairly nice read despite being a lot of information at once. I found it quite hard to get through as it was a bit slow. The information was really informative in regards to designers/brands and their starts in regards to who started what and when.

There was a few interesting topics that I liked such as that about being a ‘smart consumer’. This is someone that thinks about their buying and doesn’t exclusively wear designer clothing just because it’s expensive, a smart consumer understands that you could be dressed head to toe in Gucci and still look good. The author had a lot of admiration for someone who buys designer sparingly, when they can afford it, only if they really wanted it. He mentions how these days it’s very common for the average person to pair their designer with their high street, for example a girl wearing the Dior saddle bag with a Zara sweater and Topshop jeans.

I also really liked the comment about how fashion trends are not just clothing. It’s in everything, movies, home decor, makeup etc, all the way down to your phone case. According to this book, trends start at the fabric mills. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it, how designers will see a certain fabric and then have an idea of what to do with it, and so on and so forth. If that same fabric or style is taken on by a few designers, it becomes a domino effect and by the time you’ve let Kim K get her hands on it, it’s a trend. From what we learned in our lecture about the cycle of fashion and trend forecasting, I think that by the time a celebrity wears a trend, that basically means it’s dead and if you wear it, it’s practically social suicide, or something. It is hard to resist sometimes though.

I also think it’s curious how brands such as Adidas and Nike have been able to transform their brands into streetwear, when before they were for sport clothing, worn by athletes. Now literally everyone owns something from these brands. It’s also strange that they were able to inflate their prices so much and people don’t think it’s ridiculous at all, at least not enough to not buy them. Adidas and Nike are now luxury brands. Champion also used to be quite tacky sportswear but is now revered a sportswear/street style brand. Very bizarre.

This book contained way too much information to process all at once, unfortunately a lot of it was quite boring to read and I had to skim over some but despite this it was quite informative.

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Podcast: The High Low

This episode was about Theresa May and the role of fashion in Politics. They talked about how Theresa May is constantly critiqued and asked about what she’s wearing. I think this sparks an interesting conversation on why women, no matter their political position, job or social standing, will always be reduced down to what they’re wearing or their skincare routine or even what are they doing to have a body like that?

Why do female politicians have to wear boring tweed suits with no fun or flair to them. Theresa May has made something that is usually dull and drab into something interesting. Personally I love to hear what she has to say and see what kind of outfits she’s going to wear.

Being a Prime Minister, she should be asked about the future of the UK, not just the brand of her heels. On the other hand, why can’t women in power be respected as a politician as well as respected for her fashion sense? Women’s opinions are often skipped over as they would rather ask the man beside her.

There was an example of it in an interview with Scarlett Johannsonn with some of the other (male) cast members of the newest Marvel film. The interviewer went around asking the men about how they prepared for their role, what kind of practise they do to learn their lines, how do they get into character, what do they think of the director etc. The interviewer gets to Scarlett and proceeds to ask her what kind of undergarments she wears under her catsuit. Anne Hathaway was similarly asked what her trainin regime was to fit into her catsuit for her role in Batman. These kind of questions were shut down by both actresses but why were they asked in the first place?

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Documentary: House of Z

I loved this documentary. Even before being assigned to watch it for my course, it had been on my Netflix list for months. Not quite sure why I never watched it. Before watching, I knew who Zac Posen was but I did not know his career story. I didn’t know that he had a huge hit to his reputation and still managed to bring himself back up. We learn about his backstory of his upbringing in SoHo New York and of his younger years, how he started by creating dresses for friends and girlfriends.

He had a few famous friends, Claire Danes being a notable one. He was also friends with Anna Wintour’s son, you definitely can’t say he didn’t know the right people. Danes was one of the first to show up to an event and say she was wearing Zac Posen. He met Claire in St. Anne’s school in Brooklyn, here he found many of his models that he would create his formative masterpieces for.

He later did an internship at the Met museum as well as with Nicole Miller. He quickly shot to stardom as was nicknamed fashions newest ‘golden boy’. The spotlight loved him and he loved it right back. This was part of the reason for his downfall, because he shot to fame so quickly, it left him very little room for mistakes. When he inevitably did make a mistake, it was very easy for other fashion big wigs to say that his downfall was ‘inevitable’ and that he was just having his 15 minutes of fame etc. Many in the industry thought he’d been given his standing in the fashion world and that he did very little to earn it, pure luck some said.

Something I didn’t like about this feature was that I would have liked to learn more about Zac’s early life, I felt it was skimmed through. There was a large chunk of time dedicated to the making of the infamous green dress (pictured), I felt that this was slightly unnecessary as this was supposed to be about his life and career, not really one particular design.

[jojordan]

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[the-original-supermodels]

Sexy Jean - ELLE France (1990) Veronica Webb by Pamela Hanson

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By Zhou Yubo For Cosmopolitan China 2018