All posts by Maya Regan

I have a remarkably deep love for the Barbican in London (as you can probably tell from the last few posts). I have been trying to find events that are on that I feel connected to and naturally intrigued by. I have a particular passion for film and moving imagery and imagery in motion because they make me feel curious and absorbed, so these cinema events by New East Cinema attract me.

Night Accident is a minimalist and poetic piece of slow cinema about an old man who finds love and purpose to live in a moment of complete despair. The film is lavish in observations and metaphors and is particularly immersing. The film examines themes of loneliness and alienation and is a delightful and graceful picture of two lonely hearts.

All These Sleepless Nights is a documentary and “constructed reality” which delves into the vibrancy of modern-day Warsaw, a city in a state of flux suspended between its traumatic past and a future powered by a new generation bursting with energy. The film effortlessly captures the energy, freedom and relaxed nature of youth.

I feel even more so interested by these films due to their ability to be easily realistic events in everyday life and could be genuine and real reflections of real people.

One of the most centrally important queries when thinking about the worth and significance of the arts is do they really make a difference to our lives? The Art of Change season at the Barbican in London examines topics including whether art and artists actually can bring about significant change, how culture is reflective of a changing society and the impact that society has on art.

In response to the question ‘can art make a change’, artists gave their opinions:

Jacob Sam-La Rose, Poet, performer and founder of Barbican Young Poets commented ‘Through Barbican Young Poets and other programmes I’ve run, I’ve seen young people find themselves through poetry. I’ve seen it save young people’s lives, in terms of the direction they were taking before they got into creative practice. They’ve found different ways of being, and in considering different perspectives, broadened their thinking in new ways. As a result, that’s impacted the decisions they then went on to make…Poetry enables you to approach your life from a different perspective that goes beyond just working with verse or getting ideas down. There’s all this transformative thinking that happens, and that’s an important part of something like Barbican Young Poets. It’s not just a workshop, it’s a community programme – it brings together people from different backgrounds, both culturally and where they come from in terms of their poetry or spoken arts”.

Rhiannon Faith, Artistic Director noted “In preparing Smack That (a conversation), we worked with a group of 30 women who’d survived abusive relationships. Four of them stayed with us through the whole three months we were at Essex charity, Safer Places, and they really became the soul of the show. Along with three dance artists who had also experienced abusive relationships, we came together to make a change and to talk about the issue. Doing the show has been transformative for the women involved. They would tell you about the confidence they now have, and the impact that reflecting on their journey has had on them. The process has been very cathartic for them: talking about what happened to them and how they survived it; how some days they’d take a step forward and other days a step back; and how society let them down. But it’s not just had an impact on the women involved, it’s also had the effect of raising awareness of the issue in the wider community. By performing the work, we’ve made people more conscious of the problem, and in some ways made it easier to talk about. For me, dance-theatre gives you more opportunity to place social issues into a work. If you’re given that platform – and the space and the funding – you have a responsibility to try to help humans, and to try to make a change”.

Chris Steele-Perkins, Photographer reflected on this question and said “I don’t rate art’s ability to create change. I think it celebrates, records and sometimes symbolises change, rather than generating it. Change happens through the accretions of effort and error by all of humankind and the outcomes are essentially random, though with the wisdom of hindsight change may appear to be causal. From the earliest days, visual art has been used to record, from the animals painted in caves, right through the canon of Western art. Painting has recorded battles, new rulers, monuments; it’s told stories and myths, and bolstered religious and political beliefs.When photography and film emerged they were put to the same uses, but widened the base of subject matter to include the poor and dispossessed, a microbe or the galaxy. Throughout history, art has responded to change, not made change. As still images some photographs can acquire symbolic status when they are distilled from the flux and fixed in the memory to resonate there. Consider these two symbols of the futility of war: Picasso’s Guernica, and Philip Jones-Griffith’s photograph of a wounded Vietnamese woman with a fully bandaged face. Both images are powerful, both record a tragedy, both are works of art. Wars continue, the innocent suffer, and art continues to be made. Nothing changes”.

I find each of these comments heavily powerful and provocative and agree with them all despite their differentiation. They each take contextual and authentic evidence to back up their argument that they have visualised and experienced themselves which cements their opinions.

For my current project at uni, my group and I are developing a fragrance brand, identify its consumer and beginning the process of creating the brand’s story. From our primary and secondary research, we will accumulate insights and utilise idea generation techniques in order develop the beginnings of our brand and our brand story.

Smells are routed through the olfactory bulb, which is the region that analyses scents. This part of the brain is closely connected to region that handles memory and emotion. This is how we link certain scents with particular memories from our past. “No matter what the fragrance is, scents and memory are powerfully linked. Certain odours can serve as strong reminders of past experience – more so than other sensory cues, such as sights or sounds”– online article by Imogen Groome for Metro “Fragrance Day: Why does perfume trigger powerful memories?”

Core idea:

We are witnessing first hand in this generation how much technology is influencing and damaging our lives and younger lives. Technology is replacing the outdoor experience we thrived off, its replacing children’s social and environmental development and replacing potential childhood memories. We want to create a collection of fragrances to help restore childhood memories of the outdoors that are inspired by the four elements that create our world which is slowly being destroyed: Earth, Air, Fire, Water. These are memories of campfires, playing in the garden, sunny beach days and long forest walks. With our fragrance we plan to empower the mind and create a mental trigger that re-connects you with the importance of being around nature. We spend on average 90% of our time inside.

• To trigger the memories of feeling free from technology and to reconnect with ourselves
• Re-connecting with nature in the form of each four elements and the importance of taking care of what’s around us
• Getting people to understand the importance of the environment and the issues we have now caused it to face

Three adjectives to describe our brand:

Transporting, Powerful, Beneficial.

Earth – Taking you back to the memories of walking through the frosty spring gardens. Scent – Woody base note, Aromatic mid note using more lavender scents and a fruity but light top note

Fire – Taking you back to the memories of sitting around a burning campfire with your best friends. Scent – Dark woody base note, Smokey floral mid note and warm spicy top note

Air – Taking you back to the memories of walking through a deep forest with strong pine trees. Scent – Woody but fresh base note, spicy fresh mid note and a light but more citrus top note

Water – Taking you back to the memories of a refreshing walk along the beach during the hot summer months. Scent – Slightly salty and spicy base note, more musky but light mid note and fresher top notes that we would typically recognise with ‘male’ fragrances

Primary research insights:

• Fragrance helping to restore mind-sets
• Nature fragrances having power over the mind
• Disconnect to reconnect

References to nature and connecting with nature through scent and visual merchandising.

Miller Harris’ new scents ‘Tender’ and ‘Scherzo’ were presented in a display of rocks as well as Proenza Schouler’s new fragrance ‘Arizona’. When talking about Arizona with the promoter in Selfridges, she said the story is all about disconnecting to reconnect, a free state-of-mind and the scent is about enhancing nature with its rare ingredient of cactus flower.

“Kids these days are getting iPads at the age I wasn’t even allowed a phone. I think that’s awful”.

“Technology is taking a lot of good experiences away”.

“People nowadays are way less chatty”.

“I find it easier to speak with people older than me”.

“I just think that technology is controlling everyone’s lives…it’s almost like a must have thing even for the younger generation, stupid if you ask me”.

Secondary research insights:

• The desire for wellbeing through a new focus on ingredients that improve health and mood.
• Evoking past experiences
• Uplift and energise
• Naturally derived ingredients with new accords to stimulate the senses
• Nature inspired ingredients
• People want comfort

FIT fragrance consumer trends – interest in added benefits, customisation, extension of scent

“I think there is a move towards connecting fragrances with pleasant experiences from real life. In times of instability and uncertainty, people might look closer to their own lives for a familiar, comforting fragrant experience.” – Sarah McCartney, 4160 Tuesdays

According to the annual Green Beauty Barometer survey conducted in 2016 people aren’t just wearing perfume to smell fantastic or sophisticated, they’re wearing it to be taken on a journey.

What’s happening in the market in relation to elements:

Brands focusing on ingredients that are reminiscent of being by the sea.

• Molton Brown’s Coastal Cypress & Sea Fennel Eau de Toilette evokes the smell of the seaside.
• Philosophy’s Pure Grace Summer Surf Eau de Toilette features a sea-spray accord for a refreshing summery aroma.
• Michael Kors’ new Turquoise scent sees topnotes of waterlily combined with cucumber and lime.

What’s happening in the market in relation to memory:

• Supersense have created The SMK which enables you to carry smells with you and to record and memorise a moment. You just break open the SMELL KIT AMPULE, release the abstract smell molecules and take a deep breath. This smell will bring back the memory and the emotion of this very moment each and every time you open another of the same ampules.
• French mother-and-son duo Katia Apalategui and Florian Rabeau spent eight years developing a technique to reproduce human scent by taking the person’s clothing and extract the odour.
• Marketplace’s scent project in 2015 asked Parisians what smell they would choose to bottle. One woman said “the baby smell. When you have another baby in your hand and that reminds you the smell of your own children.
• Givuadan has partnered with communic­ations marketing agency JWT Singapore to create bespoke “Smell a Memory” kits that harness the power of scent to evoke emotional memories, certain times in their lives and stories among Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.

Consumer:

Obvious consumer:

Age: Teenagers to middle aged. Gender: Unisex. Income: Average. Hobbies: cycling, countryside walks, yoga. Lifestyle: Healthy vegan diet, enjoys the fresh air, gathering with family and friends, home cooking. They are passionate about caring for the environment ie; recycling, using renewable energy sources

Target consumer:

Age: Teenagers to early adults. Gender: Unisex. Income: Average. Hobbies: Watching television, Netflix, blogging, gym, online shopping. Lifestyle: Technology obsessed (spends several hours on their mobile phone in a day), enjoys takeaways and fast food, gaming. They would prefer to be indoors than outside, they are conditioned to everything being instant and fast paced.

Paris Womenswear A/W 18 was a stark reflection of what is happening to women all over the world, whether this was depicted as a reaction to the continuous calls for equality, a revision of femininity or a response to the #MeToo movement. Many attitudes were hostile and sharp with power and confidence.

Dior Womenswear A/W 18 saw their runway as an adoration to the 1968 liberators and the freedom that distilled from this time. Walls were plastered with quotes and emblems.  A quote from Diana Vreeland – ‘The sixties were about personalities. It was the first time when mannequins became personalities. It was a time of great goals, an inventive time…. and these girls invented themselves.’ – was the foundation of the collection.

Valentino and Jacquemus were significant collections. They focused on the typical expressions of femininity and a sensuality that can often be aligned with fifties Hollywood. Valentino showed a stereotypical woman who hadn’t abandoned femininity in the times of #MeToo. Valentino celebrated decadent silhouettes, scalloped edges, giant florals and soft pinks.

Jacquemus was cinched, sheer, sexy and smooth, with voluptuous hats, sumptuous textures and tones. This collection emerged to be all about woman’s shape, and ‘every body is a bikini body’ confidence. These women felt naturally confident and strong in their own skin.

Alexander McQueen also offered a strong and powerful woman. These women were almost Amazonian in appearance with thick plaits, stomping boots, fringing and animal prints. There seemed to be an aggressive and unashamed sexuality which expressed an almost f*ck you to the patriarchy.