The Business of Fashion-Lulu's thinking

Last Friday, my fabulous CIDA crew attended the evening event called the Business of Fashion: Inspiration, information and networking, held by Fashion Capital (one of the UK's leading fashion portal). Unlike CIDA, Fashion Capital (FC) aims to emphasise a one-stop online support resource for all sectors of the clothing and fashion industry. According to the shape of FC logo, the online company  hopes to hang all sorts of fashion contents all together included relevant news,trends, online learning, community, multimedia gallery and online Boutique. According to Jenny Holloway's positive speech during the evening event, she particularly pointed out that fashion is a fun and vibrant business. From my perspective, fashion designers always feel uncomfortable when the fashion industry becomes more and more commercial due to the high demands in the market. They really need a professional supporting agency which could fully understand their contradictory demands such how to put creativity into their fashion business without being commercial. Meanwhile, the professional supporting agency could offer them high quality and specific advices.

In terms of the event venue, City Business Library is one of the leading public libraries offering business information and professional events. No doubt, it is an ideal place for  fashion business networking. Overall, apart from CIDA, there are nine supporting organisations participated in the event (Business Launchpad, Companies House, Craft Central, and etc). Every exhibitor got plenty of chances to promote themselves to attendees, and meet up with other like-minded organisations. Apart from the exhibitors, the hundreds of attendees can seek for professional advices and mingle around with other interesting people. As a part of the CIDA crew, my main task is to describe how wonderful CIDA is and explain how it works such as the membership scheme and its massive benefits. Generally, I was bit excited about promoting CIDA to someone that is unfamiliar to me. At the beginning, I did not connect my tongue and my mind. My potential clients felt confused about my short briefing. After several tough rounds, I could described CIDA and its working procedure in a detailed way. In fact, I met a really "interesting" 35 year-old woman (paying attention to my ironical tongue). Basically, she wanted to set up an enterprise about vintage jewellery and asked our help. I told her CIDA was the good place that helps you to set up your own creative business. She believed it and asked me more details. During the conversation, she kept announcing her unique and sharp taste. She showed me all her vintage jewelleries and accessories. When I got back to my place, I start to think that to some extent, people may feel uncomfortable and impatient about her. To be honest, she is so good at promoting herself. At least, she is one of the few attendees I remembered. That could explains being passionate and unique are really essential in the context of the creative sectors. I need to figure out my own personal branding right now.

Finally, speaking of networking, in the UK, both men and women are welcome to participate in events and forums which specialised in networking. However, in China, 'Guanxi'(social networking) is normally attended by gentlemen. One of the chief reasons that female creative labours get lack of promotion is due to the informal social networking. They always feels like to be excluded by this gentlemen's club. Well, here you go, an other post- feminist thinking pop in my mind now.

Designer’s Fiesta 4- Lulu’s experience

On the 27th of September 2013, Rebecca sent me to spend a marvellous half-day learning new skills and understanding recent trend in the UK’s creative field at The Designer’s Fiesta-‘a celebration of design and digital’. The event is hold by UK’s leading Adobe Authorised Training Centre- Academy Class.

Venue:

The holding place is very easy to approach; only 7 minutes walk from Blackfriars station. The venue called 15 Hatfields is quite versatile which is a professional place for conferencing and events. A modern reception area located next to the entrance which leads to 4 main conferences rooms, which could be seat no more than 80 individuals. It also gets a large conference room downstairs which could contain around 150 people. Each conference room served with HD video conferencing and web casting facilities, which is perfect for workshops and presentation.

My first time to promote CIDA:

I arrived at the registration desk around 14:10. Sara, one of the event organizers told me that a young digital designer called Laura hoped to find out what CIDA about, and how it works. After a short conversation with her, I found out she hoped to build up a small design enterprise in London. CIDA, one of Designer’s Fiesta partners is exact the ideal agency, which specialised in supporting and representing entry-level creative and artists. Thus, I left her the general office tel. She gave me her business card for exchange. At the end of the conversation, I started to promote our upcoming event creative XPO.

Session Details:

Generally, the Designer’s Fiesta was targeted at digital designers and developers to share their tricks and tips related to digital design works. To be honest, I am not quite a digital person. Surprisingly, after attending the event I started to realize how important the digital media and various creative tools are. I was completely blown away by those techniques and tips introduced by those digital design masters especially Mark Gatter’s presentation on ‘Photoshop masks in all their glory’. Besides, there were loads of creative experts and scholars introducing the current trend in CCI field. Each presentation runs for an hour long. Particularly, I do enjoy Marc Campman’s speech on the importance of social media for creatives. During the presentation, he highly recommended that every CCI workers should set up their own website, which is one of the strategies to set up your personal branding. Then you need to regularly socialise your portfolio (twitter, Google plus, LinkedIn) in order to find new customers and peers. According to the official statistics, in 2013, there are over 50% of population are under 30 years old. Those young people are the most active group among social media users. In such a digital era, the status of information is equal to food. Also for the individual company, social media can be a powerful business-generating tool, or a total waste of time. If performed correctly, social media marketing can measurably increase leads and sales. Overall, the event was well worth going to especially for those digital designers and developers. They had some very knowlegeable speakers and provide a great platform for networking with like-minded peers. At the end of the event, the event holders threw a big drinking party for social networking again.

My fifteen days’ study trip back to China

By the beginning of the August, I decided to take one month off in order to get on my final master years’ research project related to cultural and creative workers in Nanjing.  In this blog post, I will offer you guys some results of my dissertation in brief.

In the context of cultural and creative industries in China, TV broadcasting constitutes the largest percentage of the cultural field. Thus, in order to access the current working conditions and experiences of CCI workers, journalists, which account for 70% within media industry in China, might be very worthwhile considering.  My dissertation aimed to offer heterogeneous experiences of female journalists working in News Centre, Nanjing (Jiangsu Broadcasting Corporation) through the adoption of 80 email surveys and 12 semi-structured interviews. Specifically, apart from analysing their day-to-day experiences, I hoped to analyse the obstacles to success facing by female journalists and how the belief in gender equality is being played out in the newsroom.

According to many scholars such as Margaret Gallagher (1995), in a global sense, journalism, as a traditionally male dominated occupation is at present becoming one of few careers with relatively numbers of men and women in the workforce.  However, counting the numbers is still staying on the surface of the reality, the world of the media industry is still dominated by males. For instance, according to China’s state- run news agency “People’s Daily”, posted on March 2012, the media coverage of political conferences interpreted female journalists only as “attractive women’s slideshow”:  only good-looking female journalists get chances to post on the official newspaper. Interestingly, a famous war reporter criticised this tendency, claimed that television is trivialising news by recruiting female reporters with “cute faces and cut bottoms, and nothing else in between”. On the basis of my findings, female journalists in Nanjing both suffered the horizontal and vertical segregation. Apart from the large percentage of men who stayed in the role of top management in the newsroom, normally male and female journalists still assigned to hard and soft news respectively. In addition, during the semi-structured interview, numbers of female journalists reflected their antipathies about the informal ‘Guanxi’ (social network) that is created and played out by gentlemen. In this case, the after-hours culture shared by male journalists posts a big threat to female journalists’ integration into the newsroom culture. Linking back to the key features of cultural and creative works such as unrealistic working hours and a blurred boundary between work and family time, a big proportion of female journalists vehemently disagree with journalism is a good career for a woman who wants to get married and give birth to a child.

In the end, I tried to find out the affinity between post-feminism and journalistic culture in China. Similarly to Western countries where women have the power to be individualistic, post-feminism in China is also much focused on power to become “self-made” and consumption as success in an outcome of individual ability character, and above all self-determination. Instead of the traditional Confucianism, in urban Nanjing, the free choice and agency start to play an important part within the modern society. According to majority of female journalists, as opposed to considering the external structural barriers, they are more likely to adopt explanation that the failure of career success is due to their own faults. 

The first month internship experience @ CIDA - Yue

It has been a month since I interned at CIDA. It has been such a great time that I learnt a lot of things. I remember that when in one lecture of the Analysing Cultural and Creative Industries module, we learnt that creative workers have to keep updating their skills in order to survive in the industry. From this one month experience, I find it quite true. I have leant three different softwares by myself during this month--- almost one in a week!

my first design- the rate card for cr8net 2014

Cultural and Creative Industries are abounding with small business enterprises, for which it is crucial to keep the cost low.  For this reason, they need to DIY everything, and thus the employees might be given different task which they may have not encountered before. Take cr8net for example. It is a big conference held by CIDA aiming to bring academics, creative workers and companies together. Last year, even Richard Florida lectured at this conference. It was quite shocking for me when I found that such a big conference was planned and organised by less than ten people. I was asked to design the sponsorship brochure for 2014 cr8net. At first I felt really nervous and confused--- though I have the experience designing mobile phone themes, I consider myself as an amateur in design. On the top of that, I have not used Indesign before, which is a professional design software. I was not sure whether I was able to fulfil this task. However, panic cannot solve anything. So I decided to learn it by myself. I took two days to research online, trying to find out how other companies’ sponsorship brochure look like. After that I watched several tutorials on youtube --- thanks to prosumer culture, there are thousands of free tutorials online. Finally my design of the coversheet was approved by toks, which made me quite relieved!

11 versions in all!

This feature of creative work can be viewed as a double edged sword. On the one hand, as Gill (2007) points out, a number of creative workers complain that they have to spend a lot of time on updating their skills in order not to be kicked out in their work. Though creative workers may seem free and have less pressure than workers in other industries, in fact the learning of new skills takes up long hours in their personal time. On the other hand, from my point of view, this is an excellent chance to push yourself to learn new things. If there is no competition and no challenge at work, people will hardly grow better. Once they lost their job, it will be hard for them get employed again.

Interning at CIDA is not only about learning new skills. Because the organisation is small, people from all departments sit in the same office. I am always interested in marketing and am curious about how companies approaching their potential sponsors and customers. This internship provides me a great opportunity because I can hear Paul making cold calls almost every day ;p I find it really challenging to do the marketing job because you have to have not only courage, but also knowledge about the project. You need to answer the questions immediately without hesitation, otherwise people will not trust you and give you further details. Though I love challenges, I find myself lack of confidence communicating with people in English. Thus I deleted ‘marketing’ from my dream job list after this internship. But still, I truly admire those who are good at marketing. J

 

Because of the problem of accommodation and my dissertation, I have to give up this internship now. I feel so sorry and I really hope to stay to learn more. The people here are really nice, and you are encouraged to solve the problems on your own in order to develop your personal skills. I will never forget this experience which has great influence on my future career.

 

 

 

 

Pompeii comes to London: a shocking lesson at TBM--By Lulu

Last Friday, I visited a blockbuster exhibition “Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum” currently features at The British Museum. This exhibition is quite unique, which captures the true horror of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, meanwhile also offers visitors a full and lively picture about the Roman towns.  Overall, fascinating, shocking and horrifying are all accurate descriptions of this exhibition as you travel to the heart of their remarkable time in history.

At the beginning of the exhibition, isolated from the main exhibition, there were three objects. The first is a plaster cast of a dog. Its collar simply told us that his was probably a guard dog abandoned by its owner when Pompeii was buried in volcanic ash. The second and third objects are both from Herculaneum: a wooden table turned into charcoal and a fragment pieces of fresco.

In terms of the main exhibitions, starting with the bustling street, and moving through the intimate spaces of a home, you will be transported into the lives of wealthy Roman nearly 2,000 years, before devastation struck. From the atrium to the garden, bedroom

 and dining room, I spent almost 1 hour around the section of bedroom. The main theme of the bedroom is called love and lust. The villas of the wealthy were frequently decorated with erotic scenes conveying auspicious messages of fertility and wealth. I attached an example displayed in the exhibition of bedroom. A couple are shown making love on a bed covered with luxurious bedding and cushions. The maid seems free to wander around her owner’s bedroom. On one hand, it clearly demonstrates the open and straightforward approach Romans had toward sex. On the other hand, it fully indicated during that period, there was no distinctive class system.  


Notably, apart from the position of slaves, women in Pompeii and Herculaneum, while they had no political rights, but they could own businesses, possess personal wealth and land and have an education.

At the end of the exhibition you are confronted, finally with death. I was totally shocked by the sight of a family: parents and two children-, who died together, huddled in an alcove under the stairs of a house. One child is on the mother’s lap. Mother and father appear to be falling backwards, reeling from the blast of tremendous heat that destroyed them. A child on the right hand side posited as ‘boxer’ pose, tried to fight with the searing heat.

Overall, it is a sombre way to finish the whole exhibition, as I leave and enter into a more peaceful environment- gift shop.

Reducing everything to patterns

Hey everyone, it's Alexia. As i'm sure you've surmised from the other interns, we were asked to wander around Brick Lane and share our thoughts. Since I've moved to London I've rarely spent any time in that area so I most curious to explore this 'super creative hub' everyone's mentioned.

To be honest, immediately upon arrival my poor minimalist sensibilities were a bit overhwelmed! There was just layers upon layers upon layers of colour nearly everywhere you looked and it seemed as if every bit of creativity was in competition with one another. And the more I looked, the more things started to seem the same.

So! I took a step back and embraced the sameness, focusing on discerning patterns- and not only was that way more interesting, I began to notice individual touches reocurring throughout the street. It became like a scavenger hunt.  These are some of my findings.

Tesselations

Large Eye Fixations

The Same Hand At Work

Portraits

This might not come as a surprise, but my favourite parts were the quietest ones, tucked away and hidden in plain sight.

"99% of people will not notice this" / "76% of Statistics are made up on the spot"

Special tour in Bricklane- Yue

Last week, all of the interns at CIDA got a new task, that is, to explore the area around Brick lane. I have only been to Brick lane once to try its Asian food market, and it was really nice. However, this time the purpose is totally different. As two of us were ill yesterday, we decided to keep this trip relax and simple.

Our short visit started here.

I did a little research about Brick lane because I did not know about it well. All I know is that it is considered as the centre of creative industries in eastern London, but I do not know the reason. According to Wikipedia, Brick Lane is a street in East London, England, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It runs from Swanfield Street in the northern part of Bethnal Green, crosses Bethnal Green Road, passes through Spitalfields and is linked to Whitechapel High Street to the south by the short stretch of Osborn Street. Today, it is the heart of the city's Bangladeshi-Sylheti community and is known to some as Banglatown. It is famous for its many curry houses. In addition, Mavrommatis(2006) points out that this area used to be famous for high unemployed and unskilled workforce rate. However, as a result of the founding of  'Creative Industries Task Force' and the internet revolution,

creative labours such as web designers, computer engineers, art directors, music producers etc. began to gathered around in this area. According to Mavrommatis,

in Brick Lane, a local redeveloped brewery building provided the space for these new forms of entrepreneurial creativity to blossom. Through the passage of time, a variety of cafes, bars, exhibition spaces, etc. conglomerated around the Brewery. These new ‘creative’ cultures inscribed their lifestyle patterns onto the surrounding urban vernacular. Within a few years, Brick Lane’s vernacular landscape transformed through the insertion of a ‘creative community’ and its ways of life. These new lifestyles settled side-by-side with ‘native’ ethnic populations, bodies, languages, cultures, etc. In short, a new ‘creative’ Brick Lane was born based on entrepreneurial creativity and the spread of new digital technologies.

However, during this short visit we were not able to gain the full picture of  how this area acted as the creative centre though there were a several art centre and galleries around it, illustrating the artistic atmosphere in this area. The most impressive thing about Brick lane is the street art. They are almost every where. Luckily, we even met some artists who were just painting graffiti on the wall. I walk to office everyday, and compared to Liverpool Street which I have passed by several times, Brick lane gives a more vibrant and creative feeling to me. Perhaps that is one of the demonstrations of the life style of creative workers.

 

 

 

During this trip, I found one CD store 'Rough Trade East' which I thought was quite vintage and creative. The founders opened this store in 2007 against a towering tide of scepticism and doubt. Today, it's rated one of London's major retail destinations, winner of numerous awards, a law unto itself. Their aim is to unite inspiring people with listeners. Visitors can listen to the music on their machine in store and trying to find their favourite independent music. This store provided new means for music artists to approach listeners, which I find quite meaningful. Because nowadays, digital music industry such as iTunes has influenced the market of traditional music industry, and the stereotyping of music consumption has made independent music less known to ordinary people.