Intervention 4

A social event will be held on 14th Dec. festival. Put up a poster with the theme “Fashion students will have more initiative in the future!”, to tell visitors the real feelings of fashion students and the real situation they face. I will collect visitors’ feelings on fashion graduates, and the pressures of the fashion industry. And Follow my Instagram page, which will also be used to promote the website for the future collection of start-up designers.

I was asked and invited to use some of Instagram @1granary’s posts to showcase the various social realities faced by fashion graduates.

Fashion graduates no longer have almost no choice of companies. Despite the fact that British universities and fashion schools are reputed to be the best in the world, too many graduates leave school unsatisfied. According to annual satisfaction surveys, career paths are not adequately explained, technical courses like pattern cutting are missing, and business training is not even covered. In an interview with The Guardian, Sarah Mauer (chief critic of Vogue.com) said: “A huge skills gap is emerging – many universities are no longer cutting patterns, and design houses are desperate for skilled pattern cutters and paying good salaries. People design a collection, but it’s the technicians who sew it.”

If more and more young designers want to set up on their own and create their own labels, then there is no doubt that fashion education needs to be overhauled. A degree in fashion needs time to evolve, the question itself, challenge and reflect. Why does the final product have to be the ultimate collection that students spend hundreds to thousands of pounds to achieve? To simply mimic outdated industry structures, seasonal and traditional fashion presentations, and rules that may never apply to them in the future? There should be choice and flexibility.

Beyond that, how else can we get students to demonstrate that they are already working towards honing a professional skill, interest, area of focus, or aesthetic and technical study? What other option is there than to ask to learn and absorb everything in just three years, instead of focusing on a fleeting collection of modules, ad hoc projects, and hastily realized finales? With the coming uprising of Generation Z, can the tiresome bureaucracy of traditional university education really meet the needs of a new generation of creative talent in practice?

Instead of emailing the university’s job search department and asking them about these sensitive topics, it would be better to make contact with them and build relationships to help each other. The event was an opportunity for fashion students, people wanting to enter the fashion industry from other sectors, and fashionistas of all kinds to recognize the social realities they are now facing. For a fashion graduate, there is no longer a choice us, how can we help fashion graduates have more of their own choices while putting down our posture and allowing everyone to look at their designs with humility.

The platform I can currently offer is a start-up designer buying site to sell fashion pieces, by working with UAL talented graduates. I would also like to showcase this website at the festival at a low to mid-range price point, down to earth price.

Objectives

1. To showcase the range of pricing, style, and taste of the website to be launched, and to allow visitors to add their contact details for subsequent launches.

2. To make contact with UAL graduate job hunting department through this event and give me more resources for graduates.

3. To help the best fashion graduate students get more exposure to their work and gain more financial benefits and autonomy.