Crit No. 2

Although the crit session definately brought more ideas to the table, I think I am now a little more confused about my project because some ideas don't seem to be relevant. But these are the criticisms and the new ideas which I got out of this crit:

• I'm moving too fast with the screen printing and testing with materials at the moment, because my concept still needs to be developed and strengthened so that I really know what needs to be done before I start producing 3D work.
• There is such a wide choice of fashion magazines today, and each title comes out periodically. Can each magazine really say something different? Or at least something different to a magazine which has been published previously? There are so many magazines that can you really look forward to buying next month's Another or i-D? Won't you have already seen or read about these ideas before? Or does fashion change so fast that each month there is something relevant and new to say about it? Or does fashion just repeat itself, in which case what would be the point of a magazine? These are all things I need to think about and investigate into further.
• I spoke before of the ephemeral and throwaway nature of magazines, yet they are still precious; they are such nice physical objects to own and I personally love getting a new issue each month. And although there are some pages which I would be happy to discard, these magazines always encapsulate key moments in fashion history. Maybe this is something to include in my project? How about a magazine showing only classic moments in fashion history and 'timeless' garments or collections? This magazine would clearly not be throwaway and would obviously not come out very often. Would there even be more than one issue? If fashion is just a cycle and repeats itself, then there can only be one set of key moments in its history and so there would only be one issue.
• I need to look more at conceptual fashion designer's. A new idea about codes has come about. A designer's collection is like a code in which you can understand about their concept; the means by which they are trying to say something to the world. Therefore you can only really understand fashion if you know the code. Therefore conceptual fashion is not ephemeral because it has meaning to it. I could interview foundation fashion students for this.
• I need to consider how to give this project 3dimensionality. What materials? What size? What colours? So far I have done everything in black and white because the contrast in these photographs seems to bring out stronger shadows, but I could experiment with fading colours to represent specters/ghosts. One idea is using chalk which easily fades, physically giving a magazine an ephemeral quality.

There is a lot to think about here and having written it all down, it feels clearer to me what I need to research into further.