Let Barbie help you get in touch with your creative side

I am a 22 year old male and I spent my Friday playing with dolls. Yes that’s right dolls, and I loved it!

I attended the Fashioning an ethical industry event in Bristol a few weeks ago and was lucky enough to be a part of Lyla Patel of Traid’s workshop.

We were all handed a doll with a generic, basic black dress. At first I felt a little silly dressing up a doll but there was so much fabric and shiny stuff on the table I had no excuse to not come up with something. The end result was a hit if I do say so myself.

The fascinating part of the activity was seeing everybody else’s individual takes on dressing the doll. Each one was completely different from the last. I was shocked to see how everyone could interpret the same dress in such a unique and different manner. The workshop really brought to life Sheena Mathieken’s uniform project who has been making her dress look completely different everyday for the past 10 months.

This made me wonder, why don’t people customise their clothes a lot more in their day to day lives? Imagine some of the amazing creations we would see in a single day.

The reason people may be afraid of looking different could be down to their fears to look less than ordinary. Nobody wants to look different because we are all trying to fit in with one another and most of us use the excuse of ‘I am just not a creative person’.

But when put in a position like I was with the doll activity you realise how much power you have over your look. And how many dynamic creations you can come up with if you just experiment. It just depends on how much you dare to be different.

Image Credit- Freddycat1 on Flickr at Creative Commons 

One girl wears One dress for 365 days

Its crazy how anytime we hear of a big event coming up we automatically think ‘I need to go shopping’. When all you need to do is put your creative hat on and look at what you already have and experiment.

Certain TV shows promote excessive spending and think to be fashion forward; you need to own a closet like Victoria Beckham’s. Fashion is a form of art and allows you to express who you are through the clothes you wear. Shows that feature young, well groomed, rich girls who appear in a new dress in every scene are expressing their wealth as opposed to their creative selves.

Sheena Mathieken on the other hand is showing us all how one dress can be worn to just about any look or event. She has taken on the challenge to wear one dress everyday for a whole year as part of a Uniform Project



All the donations made from the project will benefit the Akanksha Foundation, a grassroots organization in India that helps fund education and provide school uniforms in the country's slums.

She accessorises the basic dress with vintage and borrowed extras. The dress is a basic black dress that can be worn back to front or as an open tunic.

Clicking through the pictures I thought it was amazing how this girl seemed to look fashionable and completely different everyday but with the same dress.

It is important to see the positive message in her mission. We buy a lot of clothes but we don’t really need them. And people in other parts of the world can barely afford a uniform.

The time has come for you to take what you already own and inject your personality into it!

Thought of the day

It’s you’re birthday and you’ve seen a dress on the high street that is £30 and another similar one for £60. Which one do you go for?

Now what if I told you that the £60 dress has been ethically produced; the workers who made it have been paid properly and under safe and comfortable working conditions. But the £30 dress is being modelled by your favourite actress and has bypassed ethical concerns. Now which dress do you choose?

Ethical fashion is quietly becoming a top priority for shoppers. Even Tesco has started making clothes from end of line stock that would have gone to the landfill and affected the environment. Clearly the demand for ethical fashion is rising.

But studies still find that having image based campaigns are more popular than those that use being ethical as the main selling point. Take American Apparel for example. They began using ethical fashion as their unique selling point but had to switch to a more image based racier marketing strategy because it brought in more revenue. People do care about being ethical but what priorities come before being ethical? And how can we change this?

Gaining vanity, Losing morals

You’ve waited 4 months and spent £60 on a piece of Lyle and Scott knit. You’re feeling good, confident and looking cool. As you come out of the station you see the homeless guy wearing the same knit how do you feel?

You’d feel embarrassed and the item would be of less value to you. Right? Not to worry though you’re favourite brands are doing something about this. It was reported by the Evening Standard Lyle & Scott threatened to torch up to £1 million worth of unsold sweaters....but is this really the way to resolve issues of unsold stock when something positive could come out of excess supplies?

“Cynthia Magnus, a postgraduate student, stumbled upon cut-up clothes outside one of H&M's biggest outlets in Manhattan's Herald Square: slashed Puffa jackets and gloves with the fingers chopped off. Just 50 feet away, a homeless man slept on cardboard boxes.”
-Bonfire of the Fashion Vanities, The Evening Standard

The UK has a population of 58 million with more than 4 people per 1,000 estimated to be homeless. To retailers it is better to burn the clothes and damage the environment than donate and help 14.5 million homeless people. Does this seem like the right way of preserving a brand name?

Surely taking off the brand label and donating the clothes to shelters would be more appropriate. The material could go to organisations that make something new out of clothes like Traid.

The amount of energy used in burning clothes has a huge impact on the environment.

The manufacturing process uses a lot of energy through its use of polyester and other synthetic fabrics they require large amounts of crude oil which release emissions. They include explosive organic compounds, acid gases such as hydrogen chloride, which can cause or aggravate the respiratory system.

Is this the real price of our vanity?

Read the article and let us know what you think...

Bonfire of the Fashion Vanities

It’s time we stopped measuring ourselves against logos we wear and brands we buy.