Footnotes* on consuming between the blurry lines of fashion sustainability
Deliverables: Text-based installation comprised of typography inkjet-printed on 384 sheets of 100% recycled paper, wheat pasted and tiled onto a wall, measuring 40 x 10 ft.
Project Type: Graduate thesis project
Role: Graphic Designer
Tools: Adobe Illustrator and InDesign
Footnotes* on consuming between the blurry lines of fashion sustainability highlights excerpts from a group discussion amongst seven student designers and visual artists during two zine-making workshops about sustainable fashion practices. The installation depicts how student designers balance sustainable practices with convenience and other factors that compete with sustainability. I have interpreted and named the multiple dimensions of this ‘balancing’ as footnotes. The footnotes highlight the mixed perspectives and blurring within the three categories of fashion consumption, maintenance, and messaging.
An aim of the Footnotes* installation is to make sense of the dense information landscape, physical and digital, that surrounds us everyday through the language of graphic design in a collective reading experience or a “talking wall” to reframe current design and messaging practices that perpetuate fashion mass-consumption. In the installation, the format and concept of footnotes are employed to communicate the range of responses of each student designer that together is encompassed by an overarching theme of ‘consuming between the blurry lines of fashion sustainability’. This overarching theme emerged in the analysis of transcribed audio-recordings from two zine-making workshops that I conducted with various student designers and artists about sustainable fashion consumption, maintenance, and messaging. Seven (7) footnoted taglines are associated with each participant’s main experience, derived from the sub-categories that emerged from the qualitative summative content analysis (see Table 1).
The typography serves as a visual manifestation of the student designers’ language that expresses their tone, energy, and thought process during the zine-making workshops. Student designers’ perspectives are conveyed in a non-linear way through the use of typography that mimics the flow and rhythm of talking. The talking is displayed visually to bring to life student designer descriptions of the individual zines. Further, the quality of the footnotes provides an entrance and escape from the one-way stream of discourse, and is expressed in the main footnote ‘taglines’ such as “I am Long Wearing”.
Table 1. Taglines and footnotes on the three categories of fashion consumption, maintenance, and messaging
