New work for my ongoing project ‘This is Not Nostalgia?’

In 2015 after years of wearing secondhand & vintage clothes I began creating ‘fashion’ imagery using preloved items to question why everything in fashion magazines was always ‘new’. Why the constant ‘buy buy buy’ message? What begun as an anti ‘fashion’ creative protest, a way to disrupt the status quo, grew in to a long-form project.

At first the concept of these shoots was to demonstrate that having a vintage influence does not mean that the images are not contemporary; curating influences from the past does not mean that the images themselves are “retro”. These style influences are all around us in the here and now, they are current.

As the project has developed, it’s led to opportunities for me to talk about sustainability & image-making. Continuing to questioning (push back) on what a ‘fashion image’ is. This approach now chimes with the increasing interest in the mainstream for sustainability in the fashion industry. There’s growing desire for sustainable fashion as consumers begin to ask where their clothes come from. Almost paradoxically, the consumer demand for sustainability imposes a commercial imperative on this most egalitarian of impulses. These are interesting times to be contributing to fashion media.