I am a person that believe in second opportunities. I think that people are so complex creatures that it takes more than one time to really get to know how someone is. And this way of thinking is reflected in my works. The more I read, the more I research, the more I shape the way I’m thinking and therefore my works change as well. My major is fashion design, and the way I think about design is not only aesthetics but a language, the language of our body. For many years I’ve been interested in the reason why people get dressed in a certain way. I think that it is not only taking some cloth from your closet and pull them on. It goes beyond that and I think it is linked to our culture and believes.
For every class, I link everything to fashion. It might seem like I’m only thinking about that but the truth is that I think it is related to most of the things that surround us. In my space class, we learned how structures can facilitate the life of people, from handles to the entire building structure. We also looked at the trees as other living things as they are, the way they could move, their peculiarity and uniqueness. In my drawing class, we learn the physiology of colors and how it impacts on human depending on the situation, surrounding and context. All these knowledge make me want to get a deeper view of human related to the world, how culture and beliefs shape our actions and how we express them to the world. I started researching our different cultures, about religions. So it got me to this final project and the research paper. My zine is about social conventionalism and how culture and beliefs shape the perception of people. I found interesting conventionalism that goes beyond culture and had become part of many cultures like determine that blue is for boys and pink for women. Or, women should have long hair and men short hair. But where does it says that that is the right thing? There is only our culture, our community and our beliefs that taught that to us. In the same way, my research paper is linked to my studio project. The way culture and religion shape our actions, it shapes the way we perceive fashion and use it as a tool to communicate. In this way, fashion stops being only for aesthetics and adornment but also as communication. The most interesting thing about connecting my writing and making process is how I can express myself in two different ways and the impact it has on people. How graphics can be interpreted in many ways but how words can be clear as water.
To sum things up, this specific academic semester had shaped the way I see and analyze things. From colors to structures, from places to airports, from communities to a culture. This final project had taught me more than what many books can say, besides learning how to research and how to create a zine, it has taught me how to create and have my own thesis, how to take different aspects of the world and create my own way of thinking. In this way, I will keep asking myself question from what I see, from what I hear and from what I feel, because all my surroundings shape my thinking. The reason that I’m in a new culture, a more liberal one than in my community, I feel that know I have the freedom to express and to seek for the essence and meaning of humans in the world.
