Sarah Williams
My work focuses on the idea of fashion aesthetics and how this is going through a process of radical change as the fashion industry loses its ground to people like me - young, visually literate, design savvy, audience ready, socially prevalent, doing it for ourselves, female futurists. We are taking the ground back and using our social media platforms to claim fashion for ourselves and to make it anything we want it to be.
It could be argued that this revolution has been going for as long as clothes have been an essential ingredient of our identities. Radicals and subcultures are nearly always associated with a particular look that often becomes the signature of the group’s thinking and it is often the look that we associate most significantly with the grouping. However, until the advent of digital media, these groups were generally fringe movements that became the target of market opportunity. The punk movement clearly illustrates this idea as a movement that believed in anarchy and was driven to commitment to destroy the status quo. Years later, punk is a look that you can buy on-line, and looking punk is no longer seen as a statement of your politics, but might simply be a look for the day.
The speed of information and marketing opportunity is now so short that the open window to scream through exists briefly before all is consumed by the marketing machine. My work, in conjunction with others, is about throwing things through that window, repeatedly. We make zines, we choose locations that are real, we photograph friends, we say what we want, we contradict the big names, we have an audience, we have a huge audience. This is what I do.
Bratz is an expression of my anger at the inequalities that women have suffered since the dawning of time. The anger I feel towards how I and other women are treated fuels the work that I make. In the 21st Century, women should be able to wear what they want, however short the skirt is or how minimal the clothing. Women are sick of being scared to walk out at night because of the fear of getting raped or even murdered. The design and illustrations for my Zine resonate around these feelings. The locations that I have selected act to underpin the cliches that women are subject to, a type of women, subservient, victim, fantasy, objectified, plastic dolly.
