GIRL GANG CONCEPT

Today I began thinking about a concept for my collection, the brief said I had to ‘’forecast key trends for AW-2017/2018, extracting from the LS-N Global macro trend ‘BLACKLASH BRANDS’ as your initial thread’ so I began thinking about controversial things that may be frowned upon by society. I first came up with the idea of girls and guns as this is something you never see and violence is usual associated with the male gender. Girls have always been painted in society as sweet innocent and just there to look pretty and be polite. As I started looking into this though I wanted to widen my concept and came across the phrase girl gangs and all the connotations that come with it. The phrase girl gangs is often used in feminism as it is empowering a gang of girls fighting for there equal rights, it also has the association of a gang of girls going around and causing violence. I want to use both these meanings to inspire me as they can both be used for the backlash brands trend.

The feminism side of girl gangs has made me want to look at Frida Kahlo, Pussy Riot and the Guerrilla Girls; their style and how they moved feminism forward. I think although women have gained more equality in westernised countries, it is still a big problem as women are still treated like slaves in many countries. There is a lot of backlash that comes with feminism as many people see it as an anti-man movement even though it is about fighting for equality. As for the violence idea of girl gangs I want to look at the film ‘Spring Breakers’ and Japanese’s 70’s girl gangs, even though the girls in these kind of gangs are violent if you look at some of their intentions there is also an underlying theme of feminism. One example is the Japanese’s girl gangs would wear long skirts so their bodies could not be sexualised by men. Already from looking at the imagery I have collected I have ideas of masculine silhouettes made with a mixture of hardwearing and floaty fabrics, but the colour scheme will be different shades of pink, baby blues and maybe lilac. As girls have always been told that pink is their genders colour, but that doesn’t mean that pink is any less tough.