When we were told that we were collaborating with 2nd year photography students for the first 5 weeks of social and Cultural studies 3, I was very much looking forward to seeing what our research tasks wold be, which students I would be working with and how different our approaches to finding the answer would be. i was also interested to see how our classes would be integrated and just how much fashion/photography we would be learning. My group, consisting of 3 photography students and 2 fashion students, were very enthusiastic and we found it very easy to dive in and begin discussing our text. It was very interesting to see what the photography students perception of fashion was and how they responded to the fashion text. I noticed that 'their' fashion was all about the designers, the logos, the brand names etc and they delved very little into the actually look or feeling or mood of fashion. This was evident in their response to our given text which focused mostly on the superficial, the celebrity and other public figures that they attributed to fashion. obviously the power of fashion advertising and marketing had worked...
The text itself was difficult for us to decipher anyway due to the language used. Through many discussion sessions just throwing around ideas and opinions we concluded that our text was related to the superficiality of fashion and the fact that women make it superficial. With all our ideas flying around it was hard to decide what exactly to focus on and how broad we should go with our research... After speaking to the teachers we decided to focus on the first core points we extracted for our visual essay.
The most challenging obstacle with regards to our group dynamic was trying to find time to meet and actually physically do the work. It was all well and good that we could talk to no end but it was a different story when we actually put something together. That lack of communication and clashing timetables meant that our visual essay didn't really come together until the last minute. Personally I would have preferred it be done early but I guess we got it all together in the end with a relatively successful outcome that we were all happy with. Despite all the negative comments coming from other members of the class about the photography/fashion collaboration I was pretty happy with the whole exercise. I was very pleased and found the videos we watched interesting and informative, giving us both a photography and fashion perspective. Helping to make the link between our two professions and design in general, stronger and more evident. Within the groups work I got to meet new students that potentially I will have to collaborate with again in the future, got to see fashion from their perspectives and had to learn to manage group dynamics in order to have a successful response to the task we were given. All in all I found it a fun and informative 5 weeks.
