Interview Questions to ask Models
When I am out on shoots with the different models I have confirmed thus far, to add more body and structure to my final product and to coincide with the imagery and visuals of the magazine, I hope to ask them all the same questions which I will pre-prepare which relates to their fashion sense and the clothes they wear and how they can express themselves through this.
I aim to ask all the models the same questions, however, I am yet to decide on the number of questions I will ask and what the actual questions will be. The purpose of the questions and what they will expose about the modes will be to reveal more of their personality and to add a little more context to what the audience see in the visuals as the question and answers will hopefully expose more about where their sense o style comes from and why they dress the way they do.
Below are a few example questions of what I may ask them but I will need to decide upon a final set amount of questions later.
- what would you describe your style of fashion as?
- if you could wear one brand for the rest of your life, what would it be?
- do you go for comfort over style or style over comfort?
- do you feel as though there is a certain pressure on boys to fit in to a society even though there are the inevitable stresses that come with adolescence?
- why do you dress the way you do?
- would you say you take pride in your appearance and make an effort each day to dress well?
- do you feel like you can express yourself through the clothes you wear? if so, why?
- does dressing the way you do give you a sense of comfort in your own skin? a means of expression as such…
STREET + FRUiTS Magazine / Bill Cunningham / Fashion Weeks
This blog post focuses on a range of alike factors within street fashion photography and I will be looking at different contributors to a particular look of street fashion photography. This post focuses on the particular style of candid, informal and ‘snap-shot’ like images that come from worldwide events such as Fashion Weeks in cities such as London, New York and Paris. I will also be looking at a couple of photographers and their contribution to this style of fashion photography through the work they have made. This style of photography differs to what I am producing where I focus heavily on creating high quality, well composed, framed and edited images that coincide with the actual content – my work is a combination of subjects and their passion for clothes as well as well thought-out images to coincide with this and document. The style I am going to show here focuses more on the fashion aspect and documenting it with a snap shot on the street and this type of photography is present even in Jersey in Gallery magazine where they often include a segment looking at randomers on the street and their choice of clothes that day. It was photographers like Bill Cunningham in New York who pioneered this quick, snapshot like photography.
Shoichi Aoki is a Japense photographer and the creator of STREET Magazine, TUNE Magazine and FRUiTS magazine.
Aoki was born in Tokyo and began documenting street fashion in Tokyo’s fashionable Harajuku in the mid 1990s when he noticed a change in the way young people were dressing. Rather than following European and American trends, the Japanese community as a whole, not just young people were customising elements of traditional Japanese dress including changing the way traditional garments such as kimonos, obi sashes and geta sandals looked. People also combined them with handmade, secondhand and alternative designer fashion in an innovative DIY approach to dressing.
street fashion >> street fashion is fashion that is considered to have emerged not from studios, but from the grassroots streetwea - generally associated with youth culture, and is most often seen in major urban centers.
streetwear >> casual clothing of a style worn especially by members of various urban youth subcultures.
fashion week >> A fashion week is a fashion industry event, lasting approximately one week, wherein fashion designers, brands or "houses" display their latest collections in runway fashion shows to buyers and the media. These events influence trends for the current and upcoming seasons. As well, the media provide coverage and documentation on the influence this week has on the rest of the public as they make an effort to style the most sought-after brands and this is where the element of street photography coincides with the more rigid approach to a professional fashion shoot in several cities where brands hoard to show off new collections.
In 1997, Aoki founded the monthly magazine FRUiTS, now a cult fanzine with an international following, to record and celebrate the freshness of fashion in Harajuku.
fanzine >> a magazine, usually produced by amateurs, for fans of a particular performer, group, or form of entertainment.
STREET magazine is a publication that looks at several of the worlds fashion weeks each year and documents the happenings on the streets of the cities during the fashion week. It was founded by Shoichi Aoki.
FRUiTS magazine is a fanzine that looks at the new and emerging Japanese street style of fashion taken up by many of the country’s sub cultures. It looks specifically at the style of females in the popular area of Harajuku and the photography adopts an amateur-like approach where composition or range of shots are not taken into account. Instead, all shots are full body shots of people who have been briefly stopped in the street for a photo. It was this sort of street photograph that pioneered the much more contemporary, staged and formal shots today and American photographer Bill Cunningham showed off this much more subtle approach to photographing strangers tremendously in his work before his passing in 2016. I will now move onto to talk about his unique approach to documentation the New York style on the same streets for his whole career.
William John “Bill” Cunningham Jr. (March 13, 1929 – June 25, 2016) was an American fashion photographer for The New York Times, known for his candid and street photography.
He began taking candid photographs on the streets of New York City, and his work came to the attention of The New York Times with a 1978 capture of Greta Garbo, a Swedish film actress in an unguarded moment. Cunningham reported for the paper from 1978 to 2016.
Cunningham contributed significantly to fashion journalism, introducing American audiences to Azzedine Alaïa (a Tunisian fashion designer known for manufacturing and selling clothes tailored to specific clients in the 1980s) and Jean Paul Gaultier (a pret-a-porter fashion designer in the late 1900s). While working at Women’s Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune, he began taking candid photographs of fashion on the streets of New York. Cunningham was a self-taught photographer.
fashion journalism >> fashion journalism involves all aspects of published fashion media, including fashion writers, fashion critics, and fashion reporters. Fashion journalists are either employed full-time by a publication or are employed on a freelance basis.
Both photographers Aoki and Cunningham adopted this candid, very informal style of photography which was introduced mainly by other street fashion photographers such as David Bailey and William Klein. However, in my work, I will be focusing more on the actual characters I am photographing and showing this in both my visual work and the text I hope to include alongside the visuals which reveal more about the subjects in an expository style. I will be sing my skills as a photographer to compose and frame a photograph alongside my need to collaborate with my subject to create an intimate and poetic image that underpins the proliferation of fashion and brands and how people are becoming ever-more aware of their appearance – especially boys when males can feel lost in a society that doesn’t really take in to account the inevitable vulnerability of boys during adolescence as they grow up. I will aim to address this very subtly in my work. I am essentially a journalist for my own project.
wabi sabi film // shoot 2 // subject
As well as images of nature I wanted my film to have a subject. The film is about the sun setting and what happens before it. I decided to include a subject because It made the film more interesting and easier to relate to and understand. I wanted my subject to be immersed into the different scenes I planed to capture, such as the grass and by the sea. I wanted the subject to be interacting with the nature such as playing with the grass.
I wanted to mainly focus on close ups of the subject because I wanted most of her identity to remain hidden. I tried capturing the particular important features though such as the lips and the eyes. The day that I choose to capture clips of the subject was poor because the sky got cloudy which meant the lighting wasn’t as good as I hoped. This meant that some of the clips where to dark. If I have time I may try to redo the shoot on a better day to get a better image quality. Some of the shots have a lot of noise because of the high ISO. However, overall I am happy with the outcome of the shoot.
For the last part of the film I want to create a link with the subject and the sun. As the sun disappears and sets behind the sea I also want to replicate this with my subject. I aim to do this by showing the subject running towards the sea, similar to how the sun seems to disappear.
wabi sabi film // shoot 1 // sunset and sea
During the easter holiday I decided to start my wabi sabi film project. It was difficult to find a good time to take the film clips and images because the weather wasn’t that good. I needed a day where the sky was clear so I could capture the different colours and the sunset. I decided to base my film during the evening when the sun is setting because that’s when the light is at its best because of the colours that are created.
wabi sabi film // ideas
As well as a photo book I also plan to create a short cinematic film capturing scenes of everyday life and nature. The film The tree of life is my main source of inspiration for this project as well as the photographer Rinko Kawauchi with her Sublime imagery. To create the film I need to capture a lot of imagery of a few second shots of different things such as light, the sea and everyday events. An idea for the film is to use a subject, a model, as the focus of the film. The film would be about the different things that occur throughout their day while interspersing scenes of nature throughout. I also want to focus on light and how it effects nature throughout the day by capturing different shadows and angles.
My whole project is about the insignificant things and the spiritual elements of everyday so this is also what I plan to capture throughout the film. Like the film The Tree of Life I want to capture immensely beautiful things and scenes. The mood board above contains images of different things and aesthetics that I want to use as ideas for my film.
research // the tree of life
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jul/07/the-tree-of-life-
reviewhttps://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-tree-of-life-2011
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXRYA1dxP_0
The link above is a link to the trailer for the film, The Tree of Life.
The tree of life is an American film created in 2011 by the director Terrence Malik. It was described as an “experimental epic drama film”. The film is about the origins and meaning of life through the view point of a middle-aged man and the memory of his childhood. His
family lived in 1950’s Texas. The film contains clips from his memory, interspersed with imagery of the origins of the universe and life on earth. The film was named the 7th greatest film since 2000 in BBC poll of 177 critics. The main story line throughout the film is the lessons that the oldest son, Jack learns whilst growing up alongside his two other brothers. The clips of his memories are interspersed with amazing images of nature and life. Some of the lessons and emotions that Jack learns about is jealousy, loss, lust and anger.
In a review by Robert Elbert he’s describes the film as “a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives.” The film contains so much human emotion and feeling. When watching the film you immediately connect with it through your own experiences which is what makes the film so powerful.
Malik captures some of the most simplest events in life and portray them in an immensely impacting way. He uses his own memories of his home town and childhood to create portraits of everyday life. The film was inspired by two things, space and time, and spirituality. Malik is a christian and believes in the viewpoint of God creating the world. The film contains visuals suggesting the birth and expansion of the universe, the appearance of life and the evolution of species. The film contains elements of time ; one of the children dying. We also witness the oldest son grown into a middle aged man.The film also contains spiritual elements because Malik includes a scene of an afterlife , a desolate landscape where peopler seen recognising and greeting each other.
Youth Culture + Subcultures
Youth culture is the way that adolescents live and the norms, values, and practices they share. Culture is the shared symbolic systems, and processes of maintaining and transforming those systems.
Elements of youth culture include beliefs, behaviours, styles, and interests. An emphasis on clothes, popular music, sports, vocabulary, and dating set adolescents apart from other age groups, giving them what many believe is a distinct culture of their own.
Throughout the 20th century, youths had a strong influence on both lifestyle and culture. The Flappers and the Mods are two great examples of the impact of youth culture on society. Flappers were a generation of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz. Flappers were seen as out of the ordinary because they would wear excessive makeup, drink excessively, treat sex in a casual manner, smoke, drive cars and flout social and sexual norms. Influences of this never-before-seen behaviour among young women include the death of large numbers of young men in the war, and the Spanish flu epidemic which struck in 1918 which in-turn inspired, in young people a feeling that life is short and could end at any moment. The evolving image of flappers was of independent young women who went by night to jazz clubs which were viewed as erotic and dangerous, where they danced provocatively, smoked cigarettes and dated freely because they wanted dot live life to the fullest without nay worry and made this obvious through their actions and they way they presented themselves through their clothes and lifestyle choices. They were attempting to be controversial and this image has created an icon for the years to follow but the presentation for women nowadays is completely different where actions such as wolf whistles are regarded as misogynistic and demeaning. People have had to change with the times to fit the political laws and to be politically correct.
Betty Boop, the cartoon character invented in 1930 by Max Fleischer as a caricature of a flapper, became an icon of the 1920s.
The Flapper, which stands as one of the most enduring images of youth and new women in the twentieth century, however, when in 1920s many Americans regarded flappers as threatening to conventional society, danced suggestively and openly flirted with boys – in-turn, making them the same icons as males now in the modern day where males have become the power gender who regards females as objects of their sexual desires.
The flapper lifestyle and look disappeared in America after the Wall Street Crash and following The Great Depression. The high-spirited attitude and hedonism were less acceptable during the economic hardships of the 1930s.
Hedonism is the notion that pleasure (in the sense of the satisfaction of desires) is the highest good and proper aim of human life above any unnecessary stresses and once this happiness was achieved, it was believed that this state would stay stationary and one would be free to live life to fullest because of an all round sense of satisfaction. This theory can be related to the idea that boys will be boys and do whatever they want even if it is deemed unnecessary to achieve a sense of pleasure.
Mod is a subculture that began in London in 1958 and spread throughout Great Britain and elsewhere, eventually influencing fashions and trends in other countries, and continues today on a smaller scale. Focused on music and fashion, the subculture has its roots in a small group of stylish London-based young men in the late 1950s who were termed modernists because they listened to modern jazz. The Mods and Flappers often came as two but were still separate groups although interested in similar lifestyle choices such as drinking, smoking and going out with their peers to show off, for the men, the Mods, their masculinity and boisterousness and ability to get any girl as such and for the females, the Flappers acting provocative was the way to show off their body.
Significant elements of the mod subculture include fashion (often tailor-made suits); music (including soul, ska, and R&B) and motor scooters (usually Lambretta or Vespa).
Theories such as the male faze were not thought of in this era of gender development and stereotypes because of the mind-set of all young people to just live life and not worry about the consequences of being flirtatious with no real reason. Now people have become more aware of the relationship men and women should have with one another and how it should be a relationship of respect, people do not branch out into their own sub cultures as much with a mission to attract women through the clothes they wear.
People are much more independent today and do things with the intention to pleas themselves as I have briefly touched upon in my magazine where I ask my models about their experience with using clothes as a way to express themselves and feel confident in themselves, especially in a world that is much more driven by social-media and the millions of voices that circulate such sites.
As well, in todays society, people an especially young people, do take inspiration form the styles and behaviours of eras such as the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s to inform the way they dress and the trends et in these eras have lived to influence the way people dress now and this has gone on to define what street fashion can be.
Most major youth subcultures have had an associated street fashion. Examples from the 1950s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s include:
- Hippies (denim, bohemian style, long hair, flower power and psychedelic imagery, flared trousers)
- Teddy Boys (drape jackets, drainpipe trousers, crepe shoes)
- Punk fashion (ripped clothing, safety pins, bondage, provocative T-shirt slogans, Mohican hairstyle)
- Skinheads (short-cropped hair, fitted jeans, Ben Sherman button-up shirts, Fred Perry polo shirts, Harrington jackets, Dr. Martens boots)
- Gothic fashion (black clothing, heavy coats, poet shirts, big boots, makeup)
- Preppy (argyle sweaters, chinos, button down oxford cloth shirts, and boat shoes).
- Hip hop fashion (ultra-baggy pants, ECKO, Tribal Gear, South Pole, Avirex, FUBU, Sean Jean, NIKE)
- Hipster or indie (glasses, jeans, beanies, sneakers, ties, suspenders, checked shirts, beards)
- Rasta (African-inspired clothing, dreadlocks)
- Greaser (subculture) (Levis 501 jeans, t-shirts, leather jackets, sunglasses, Cowboy boots or motorcycle boots, hair gel)
- Urban (colourful apparel, large accent jewellery, skinny jeans, jackets, t-shirts)
- Feminine (dresses, hats, sunglasses, hand bags, floral prints)
wabi sabi // photobook ideas 2
Here is a further development of my photo book to display most of my final images from my project. I tried to display images that link together so that a story is created. I also linked images based on colour and tone. I really like how my book is developing and am very happy with the layout so far.
Magazine Cover Experimentation
As I have previously stated, I intend to produce a magazine for my final piece for this project I am currently undertaking for my exam work.
I didn’t really have any ideas of what I wanted to achieve from my magazine cover and what I wanted to go for when producing the first few drafts if my cover because i knew that they would be drafts and that it would be likely I will change the cover’s layout or overall design for the final product. I began experimenting with different typography designs in Adobe Photoshop and I created one text design before the ones you see below but automatically decided it wasn’t what I wanted because it looked too polished and too f’forced’ as I was using default Adobe font types. I immediately took out my notebook and began handwriting the magazine title – which I already had an idea for in my head when I began – I wanted to call the magazine ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ a soon as I began the focus on teenage boys for the project because I felt it works really well.
The below images show the process of which I went through to create my current final draft of which I am very happy for and I intended to use this for my final product, however, with a few layout or design alterations if needed.
The images below show the process I went through to create the handwritten title and it was actually the first attempt which I used in my Photoshop mock up of the magazine because it had the look I was going for. However, it is likely I will re-produce this text again both on paper and then digitized into Photoshop because I know I can create a better version of this through more careful production of the specific lines to create stick men as well more polished looking letters. However, the look is supposed to be very rough and not clean and polished like a default font on software would because it is handwritten and I want to keep this authenticity.
After creating a couple of versions of the cover using fonts provided by Photoshop in their wide selection, I felt it may look more realistic and it would fit the theme better if I also handwrote the text ‘issue one’ and ‘£8’. I did this on the same piece of paper as well as drawing some arrows to add in also. I also drew a squiggly line to import into the software to use as an underline because I was not able to do this using the underline feature I usually would when working with provided fonts.
When I first inserted the handwritten text into Photoshop from an imported picture I took with iPhone of the notepad and the writing on it, I made it priority to remove all the negative space around the text – being the white paper. I did this through selecting the magic wand tool to manually select the white space around the text. This allowed me to erase the white paper which left me with the text – what I needed for the title to work. In order for me to remove this white space cleanly without the selected area bleeding into the writing, I had to apply some basic colour correction effects onto the imported image first to ensure the black writing was as dark and heavy as possible and the white surroundings was as light as possible to provide a clearly defined area to select so that I could erase the white surrounding.
After this, I noticed the writing was actually quite fine and didn’t stand out too much – as expected because I was not able to apply any bold effects to the type as it was not directly imported through Photoshop’s selection of fonts. To make the text I had imported stand out more so against the blank background I had chosen, I applied Layer Style effects such as a colour overlay to change the colour of the text as well as a ‘stroke’ to give a darker, more defined and bold outline to the text. I then, later on, applied a drop shadow effect.
This provided me the basis to move forward from to create tweaked and better versions of this primary design of my title.
The second draft shown above includes major alterations from the first version as I have imported a photograph from my shoot with Max. As well, I have changed the look of the title through changing the colour, positioning, size and removed the underlines. I have re-sized the size of the ‘issue one’ and ‘£8’ text aas OI feel this would look better once printed – I was taking into consideration the proportions and sizes of features once printed.
I have also produced a second version of the same draft but just with a different coloured background to give me a couple of options to choose from if this was what I was to go for in the final stages.
