What is fashion? [session 5]

• Fashion is a statement of ones individuality
• Art
• Diverse
• Expressive
• Time line
• Trend
• Religion/culture
• Sexual advertisements
• Status, wealth, personality- Labels
• Gender identity
• Non verbal communication
• Performance of identity

Fashion is NOT:

• Limited or restricted
• Always accepted
• clothing

Charles Frederick Worth
Charles was born in England and worked in several London drapery shops before moving to Paris, the fashion capital in 1846, where he made his mark on the fashion industry. Worth is seen as the first fashion designer and is credited as the first fashion designer to put labels onto the clothing. he manufactured. Worth gave his customers luxurious materials and meticulous fit. He completely revolutionised the business of dressmaking. He was the first of the couturiers, dressmakers considered artists rather than mere artisans. Worth was also responsible for the development of the first fashion magazine. By the 1860's stylish women could see original designs by Worth in a publication Harpers Bazaar. As new designers appeared, their designs and creations could also be seen in the new fashion magazines. By the turn of the twentieth century, this was the primary method of spreading the news of the fashion trends in Paris. At first, the gowns were illustrated with drawings, but as photography developed and became more sophisticated in the early twentieth century, the fashion press used more and more photographs of new designs. At the same time, fashion and art were merging. These artists not only painted, but also created textile designs and fashion illustrations. Until the Second World War, even mainstream fashion journals like Vogue and Vanity Fair continued to publish fashion illustration by modern artists, encouraging the connections between fashion designers and visual artists. Charles Frederick Worth also introduced the first couture house. Haute Couture' is the French word for the highest, most exclusive work a big fashion house produces

Paul Poiret was a French fashion designer. His contributions to twentieth-century fashion have been likened to Picasso's contributions to twentieth-century art. Poiret moved to the House of Worth, where he was responsible for designing simple, practical dresses. Poiret established his own house in 1903, and made his name with the controversial kimono coat. Though perhaps best known for freeing women from corsets and for his original inventions including hobble skirts. The simplicity of his clothing represented a "pivotal moment in the emergence of modernism" generally, and "effectively established the paradigm of modern fashion, irrevocably changing the direction of costume history.

What is Fashion Design?

• A system of signs, symbols and iconography 

that non-verbally communicates meanings 

about individuals and groups

• Largely used to express individual identity

• Capitalism/Consumption

• Ethics

• Power

• Gender Identity- through fashion plays with the stereotyped way of portraying male and female as well as the challenges to the dominant ideologies that are conveyed by the signs of the body.

• Identity- the visible performance of out outward identity

• The Body

• Response to politics


Werner Sombart takes the view that spending (especially by women) on luxuries such as clothing for conspicuous consumption are a significant part, and has been a key feature of capitalism ever since its original accumulation phase. "Fashion is capitalism's favourite child."

What is Graphic Design? [session 3&4]

Graphic design is a multi media practice and a way of translating words.

A sign is : "something which stands to somebody for something in some capacity" - Charles Sanders Pierce,1977.

There are many signs and visual forms of communication that are universal, for example the signs male and female signs.
Men are symbolised by a jutting arrow, an age-old instrument of war.Women are signified by a cross, a design used on battlefields around the globe to identify non-combatants who bravely work to tend the wounded. Our similarities are more important than our differences. The circle symbolises both men and women. That shows we all have the potential to be whole, rounded human beings.
  
These signs have been constructed and learnt, they are not common sense which some people mistake the understanding of them for.

Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano, 1438-40 

This image is one of the first images that had an indication of geomatary as the eye is bought in through the image. Paolo Ucello was developing an intense interest in perspective under the influence of Masaccio’s and Donatello’s works, he became engrossed with developing the new science of perspective in painting. 

Visual communication is the communication of ideas through the visual display of information. Primarily associated with two dimensional images, it includes: art, signs, photography, typography, drawing fundamentals, colour and electronic resources. Recent research in the field has focused on web design and graphically oriented usability. It is part of what a graphic designer does to communicate visually with the audience.
Human communication was revolutionized with speech approximatley 200,000 years ago. Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago, and writing about 7,000. On a much shorter scale, there have been major developments in the field of telecommunication in the past few centuries.

CAVE PAINTINGS

The begginings of creative practices originated from Cave Paintings.

Cave or rock paintings are paintings painted on cave or rock walls and ceilings, usually dating to prehistoric times. Rock paintings are made since the Upper Paleolithic, 40,000 years ago. It is widely believed that the paintings are the work of respected elders or shamans.


PETROGLYPHS

Petroglyphs are images incised in rock, usually by prehistoric, especially Neolithic, peoples. They were an important form of pre-writing symbols, used in communication from approximately 10,000 B.C. to modern times, depending on culture and location. Many petroglyphs are thought to represent some kind of not-yet-fully understood symbolic or ritual language.

GEOGLYPHS

Geoglyphs are drawings on the ground, or a large motif, (generally greater than 4 metres) or design produced on the ground, either by arranging clasts (stones, stone fragments, gravel or earth) to create a positive geoglyph or by removing patinated clasts to expose unpatinated ground. Some of the most famous negative geoglyphs are the Nazca Lines in Peru. Other areas with geoglyphs include Western Australia and parts of the Great Basin Desert in SW United States. Hill figures, turf mazes and the stone-lined labyrinths of Scandinavia, Iceland, Lappland and the former Soviet Union are types of geoglyph. The largest geoglyph is the Marree Man in South Australia.

PICTOGRAMS, IDEOGRAMS AND LOGOGRAMS

A pictogram or pictograph is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration. Pictography is a form of writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. It is the basis of cuneiform and hieroglyphs. Early written symbols were based on pictograms (pictures which resemble what they signify) and ideograms (pictures which represent ideas). It is commonly believed that pictograms appeared before ideograms. They were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BC and began to develop into logographic writing systems around 5000 BC. Pictograms are still in use as the main medium of written communication in some non-literate cultures in Africa, The Americas, and Oceania, and are often used as simple symbols by most contemporary cultures.

An ideogram or ideograph is a graphical symbol that represents an idea, rather than a group of letters arranged according to the phonemes of a spoken language, as is done in alphabetic languages. Examples of ideograms include wayfinding signage, such as in airports and other environments where many people may not be familiar with the language of the place they are in, as well as Arabic numerals and mathematical notation, which are used worldwide regardless of how they are pronounced in different languages. The term "ideogram" is commonly used to describe logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters. However, symbols in logographic systems generally represent words or morphemes rather than pure ideas.

A logogram, or logograph, is a single grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other writing systems, such as alphabets, where each symbol (letter) primarily represents a sound or a combination of sounds.

The way that things were produced were limited by technology until the invention of mechanical movable type printing led to an explosion of printing activities in Europe within only a few decades. As early as 1480, there were printers active in 110 different places in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Bohemia and Poland. From that time on, it is assumed that "the printed book was in universal use in Europe." The industrial revolution introduced more leisure time. It was not long before images were generated such as fashion images which had a huge impact on fashion design. However generated art was seen as distasteful and soulless because it was processed by a machine. 

Arts and Crafts movement was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910, continuing its influence until the 1930s.It was largely a reaction against the impoverished state of the decorative arts and the conditions by which they were produced.

Paul Rand was an American graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs. He started to produce images that  challenged the way we see things. Graphic design was suddenly understood to be able to manipulate meanings it was seen as futurist art playing with contemporary and moving away from tradition.

Graphic design is meant sell products and services and make people buy them and which can sometimes involve selling a lifestyle. Where as information design is easily understood to send a particular message.

Is it possible to asses the quality or understand a piece of graphic design?

• The context is crucial 
• culture comfort zone
• different audiences
• The impact of the image 
• Graphic designs job is to communicate as opposed to certain fine art which is based on our own interpretations.

There have been many critical responses to the 2012 Olympic logo, comments about the logo have suggested that the logo is unimaginative and too much to take in with the various shapes colours and information the logo is giving. The internet and news are full of controversies relating to the poor design of the logo. The jagged emblem, based on the date 2012, comes in a series of shades of pink, blue, green and orange. The brand identity was designed by Wolff Olins and the following statement has been published on the official 2012 Olympics website:

"The number 2012 is our brand. It is universal and understandable worldwide.

Our emblem is simple, distinct, bold and buzzing with energy. Its form is inclusive yet consistent and has incredible flexibility to encourage access and participation. It can communicate with anyone from commercial organisations to kids playing sport. It feels young in spirit. Full of confidence, certainty and opportunity. Not afraid to shake things up, to challenge the accepted. To change things."

What is photography? [session 2]

 1. The art or process of producing images of objects on photosensitive surfaces.
2. The art, practice, or occupation of taking and printing photographs.
3. A body of photographs

Before the invention of photography people used various techniques to illustrate their surroundings. Techniques such as paintings, carving and sculpturing. Images have been projected onto surfaces for years. Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries. The image below is the earliest known, surviving heliographic engraving in existence, made by Nicéphore Niépce in 1825 by the heliography process.

The first permanent photograph (later accidentally destroyed) was an image produced in 1822 also by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. His photographs were produced on a polishedpewter plate covered with a petroleum derivative called bitumen of Judea.

“View from the Window at Le Gras” [Circa, 1826]

This image was captured by Louis Daguerre in late 1838. It was the first-ever photograph of a person. The actual image is of a busy street, but because exposure time was over ten minutes, the city traffic was moving too much to appear. The exception is a man in the bottom left corner, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to show up in the picture.

The First Photograph of a Human ”Boulevard Du Temple” [Paris, 1838]

Tom Stoddart-1998
A rich local man steals the maize for
which a child has queued for hours

This image is a is part of a group of photos from the country of Sudan. It was captured in the winter of 1998 which was a key date in Sudanese history. 1998 was the peak of a famine and civil war in Sudan it was also the year the Americans (land of government and regulation) destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. A hundred thousand people died in Sudan in 1998. The photograph illustrates that in a world without law, regulation or government, rich people will regularly steal food from starving children. Where as in a world with law and regulation children will not be left to starve and the rich will not steal and everyone will be looked after. 

Early photography ethics were not considered as people were so fascinated by the fact that it recorded nature more realistically than any other art form such as painting and drawings had ever done before and because of this, people trusted it and believed it portrayed reality. However it was not long before fake and manipulated photographs began to appear which was not long after the invention of photography.

Technology was not that advanced when first introduced which made it difficult to capture certain things due to the long exposure which is why some photographs were staged, such as war photographs. Images do not always mean one thing as sometimes the means are constructed. 

In 1917, Elise Wright, age 16, and her cousin Frances Griffiths, age 10, used a simple camera to produce what they claimed were photographs of fairies in their garden in Cottingley, England.

The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on faries he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand magazine. Conan Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, but others believed they had been faked. In the early 1980s Elsie and Frances admitted that the photographs were faked using cardboard cut outs of fairies copied from a popular children's book of the time, but Frances continued to claim that the fifth and final photograph was genuine.

Photography is one of the new media forms that changes perception and the structure of society.

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