Anastasia Denisova awarded JJC Trust grant for work on sustainable fashion

Anastasia Denisova has been awarded a JJC Trust grant to pursue research around sustainable fashion and the media. Her research will examine how the media promote excessive fashion buying, how they appeal to status, wealth, sexuality, power when they try to convince people to buy more fashion goods. The research will span from the traditional media players (Vogue, ELLE), newspaper columns and gossip magazines, to Instagram and blogging influencers (incl. Chiara Ferragni and others).

This research will be essential in helping us understand how exactly fashion media and influencers encourage the audience to buy more, and where there are intervention points which would enable us to bring sustainable fashion into mainstream. The research also aligns with the University of Westminster’s commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals.

JJ Charitable Trust, who have awarded Denisova this grant, seeks to accelerate the transition towards a sustainable future both by communicating the value of sustainable, cleaner, long term choices in consumption using clever creative attractive strategies as well as enabling access to those choices. Taking its lead from the DivestInvest campaign, JJ seeks to raise the awareness of the damaging impact of professional and public consumer choices, as well as highlighting the companies that aren’t taking their impact seriously, whilst clearly signposting those consumers towards exciting alternatives, away from polluting and damaging choices to those that are non-polluting and sustainable for the long term.

.

Photo by Lauren Fleischmann on Unsplash