SIVA, Shanghai

We arrived in Shanghai to a much warmer climate and clearer sky. We were taken on a tour of the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts (SIVA) which was to be our base for the next two weeks, working with students enrolled in the Fashion Communication (Buying) course. The campus opened in 2005, so is very young and was definitely a different feel to what I was used to (from being an undergrad at Otago), including a driving range and 9 hole golf course for the specialised Golf Fashion course.

In the first shared lecture with the SIVA students we looked at buying trends in China and compared these with current trends in New Zealand. I realised in this lecture how different consumer behaviour was between the two groups of students and the contrast between our cultures when it comes to fashion consumption.

The following lecture we presented our ideas that we had workshopped with the SIVA students then the Massey students presented their own individual manifestos and project work so far. A lot of the concepts we discussed in regards to our projects and the course were very new to the SIVA students, especially because the course they were studying had a business focus and the ideas we presented were approached from a design or arts point of view. I think this caused some challenges in the coming weeks because our motivations were very different, which then informed the level of understanding which was already limited because of the language barrier. This highlighted to me more the complexities of the fashion industry and the more specific problems faced in uniting both countries and cultures in rising awareness about its negative impacts.