Brianna Da Silva
Working with the Social Studio last year inspired me to see fashion as more than just something you wear.
Fashion can be a vessel for artists, creators and workers to share their stories and do their part for society and the environment. I think it is essential that ethical fashion becomes the new standard in order to create a sustainable future for the fashion industry.
My photographic series investigates transparency within the fashion industry, an important part of ethical and sustainable fashion. It’s about knowing where and how your clothes are made. Using the brand’s production facilities as a backdrop, we can see what goes into making an item when everything is done responsibly. It provides a peek into some Melbourne slow fashion brands, presenting their backstories and what goes on behind the scenes of the items the model is wearing.
As a fashion photographer who also wants to help the environment and do my part to make the world better, I often find it difficult to combine these things with my work. When looking for inspiration for this project, I found a lack of artworks dealing with ethical fashion and little to no photographers investigating this issue. There is much emphasis on the negative side of fast fashion, which is a major issue, but there is little work directing our attention to the positive side of how slow, ethical fashion provides an answer.
This project is a first step towards investigating ethical fashion through my photography and hopefully finding ways to inform the viewer and encourage them to think differently about fashion.
Untitled, 2020
Pigment print
594mm x 420mm
