ANALYSIS OF TASK 2

KEMI AJAYI

Task 2 has been considerably more interesting than Task 1. We have chosen to look into the trend of the disco pants and I have been given the task of researching into the history of them. Once again I am struggling with how much I need to find out but it is definitely a more engaging task. I also find it interesting to look at past trends and how they affected my life as when we looked into disco pants, we all realised that we each have taken on a variation of the trend. For example, a few years ago, ‘jeggings’ and ‘treggings’ were at the height of fashion, especially for teenage girls so it has been fun to reminisce in a way on what we each wore at a younger age. However, although this is a more interesting task, the whole project makes me feel a bit lost. I feel as if there is not a lot of direction that has been given to us and we have been left to find everything out on our own. I understand that this is what university is all about but I do feel as if there is the constant questioning of “Is this right?” or “Is this what the tutors want to see?”

JESSICA STAINES

This task seemed more fun and interesting to research because we all had our own knowledge that we bought to the table. We started off by sitting in our group researching various old trends that we were interested in. We quickly decided on disco pants as our trend. We all knew about them, and were keen to find out how they started, and why they became so popular so quickly. We then moved on to mind map around disco pants, splitting it up into five main sections which included popularity, history, then and now, variations and the future. This mind map gave us all a section to research in more detail, and the types of information to include in those sections. Compared to the previous task, this was more independent. I think this was due to the clear direction everyone had and because of the division of the sub topics. On top of that, we had more of a discussion as a group in our first session because we all had knowledge and a different opinion on the disco pants.

ELISSA BARBER

For our second task we decided to look into the history, present, and future of 'disco pants'. We evenly distributed the areas amongst ourselves and my role was to look into where they would be in the future. I found it very hard to track and predict their future presence even using sources such as WGSN and LSN Global as there is no information to suggest if they will reappear or not. Therefore, I decided to look into other trends which may have been adaptations and/or modernizations of them. I was particularly surprised to find a number of trends which may be connected such as super stretch high-waisted jeggings; these incorporate the stretch that the disco pants allowed and the high-waisted style. I also found a connection between them and performance wear leggings. As the fabric used in disco pants is also used for dancewear leggings, there is a real link between that previous trend and the current one with sportswear. Until this task I never gave much time into thinking about how current trends have been adapted and modernized from previous ones and how much can be connected together. I enjoyed looking into this as I discovered a lot more than I expected to.

MEGAN McROBERT

This task I felt was more interesting as it looked into the different areas of trends themselves rather than the trend platforms. I thought this was a more beneficial task to help me understand trends and predictions as they happen and how the trends die out. In this task I was looking at the popularity of disco pants, at first we just divided up the sections we were going to look at, but with more group discussions we realised that each section overlapped slightly so had to go into more detail of what each section covered and I think this was a really good way of woking as a group to help everyone collect the right information. I did feel a bit unsettled with this project though, as we collected all this information for it then to be dismissed and then it all feels a bit pointless so felt slightly disheartened by the whole project so far, almost like there isn't much point in it all.

KATHRYN SPARKS

I was much more interested in this task as I had lots of ideas and so did the group which lead to a good discussion. We choose to do disco pants as this is a trend familiar to us all and I felt confident in this as I taken up this trend during its popularity. I found there was lots we could write about and research therefore we made a mind map. The mind map was helpful in splitting up the task between ourselves, as we made sub headings with points leading off from those. This meant we all had a better understanding of what we needed to research. However this task raised the question of how much research is too little or too much, so we weren’t sure on the amount needed, but did what we thought best.