Bling Fatigue 

'I want to start with this quote, probably my favourite quote I’ve heard over my studies and what inspired my initial ideas for this thesis; ‘The thing about the climate is that you can either be overwhelmed by the complexity of the problems, or fall in love with the creativity of the solutions.'

This quote is by climate activist, Mary Heglar, and at the start of the writing period for this thesis, like many other young climate activists including everyone else on my course I’m sure, I felt completely overwhelmed by choosing a topic or a path to go down concerning sustainable transformation of fashion and other design industries. And I heard this quote and thought ‘but I’m struggling to fall in love with the creativity of the solutions’. All this constant bad news has actually dampened a lot of my passion for design, and for the fashion industry. And with a growing mental health epidemic amongst the young people who are about to have to tackle these massive climate issues which I was constantly aware of in my peripheral vision; in documentaries and on social media, I realised the only way to not just fall back in love with these incredible, innovative sustainable solutions I was hearing about all the time, but also to be able to support their implementation on a mass scale in the future, was to build my foundational knowledge of wellbeing and mental health at the intersection of sustainable transformation and the fashion industry. 

So I used this thesis period to design well being focused, emotionally responsible fashion brand foundations which are tangible enough for designers at even the smallest of scales to start implementing them, in the pursuit of collective change. Having grown up in Scotland, I also situated the research and brand concept in Edinburgh, to understand real life conditions and the implications of contributing to  a local, healthy fashion economy.'  - Katie Christie, Introduction to Colloquium, 2022