Post #3 - Keeping up with the creativity!

In the meantime, I relentlessly kept looking for jobs. I modified my CV approximately 170 times and applied to over 75 jobs. Not only did I not find a new job, but I received at least two rejection emails a day. It was frustrating and painful. I started doubting my worth and my capabilities and I felt lost and fed up. I was convinced this pandemic would have lasted 3 months.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

Despite the fact that looking for a job at that time didn’t seem to be the best idea, I enrolled online fashion courses and I finished a couple:

• Understanding Fashion: From Business to Culture at Institut Français de la Mode

• Fashion English at FASHION ENGLISH

After a while living locked down, I felt the need to find a hobby.

Since I was younger, I always liked to draw. It relaxes me a lot and allows me to put my brain at rest, which is something I am extremely bad at. Therefore, I got a Wacom pad and a drawing pencil for my iPad and started sketching and drawing. It healed me a lot and helped me go through this awful time. I started learning new skills and shared my sketches in my personal instagram profile. People liked the drawings so much that I created another instagram account called @thesketchish, where I would upload what I draw.

At the time, a friend of mine was working on getting herself a new job in the Human Rights field and she started to write her own blog. She loved the drawings so much that asked me to collaborate with her to illustrate her articles. I was astonished and happy that she asked. I realised that something that started just as a hobby to get a break from work could go further than I expected. After the collaboration, she got a job in the field she wanted thanks to the blog.

Post #2 - It's OK not to be OK

I have always been a very organised person and as such I had some plans in my head: finishing my MA by August 2020, going to London by September, keeping my current job and finding a new one there by the end of the year at the very latest. With covid, all of these were not meant to happen. Or at least, not the way I wanted.

After submitting my dissertation I needed a break. I never thought the pandemic was going to hit me mentally as hard as it did. At that point, I had not been happy at work for a long time and I wanted to leave as soon as possible. Moreover, I was far away from my family and I had no idea when I was going to be able to see them. What if anyone gets sick? What if it happens and I’m stuck here? I kept repeating to myself.

I couldn’t keep it up with so much pressure on my shoulders and neither could I leave my job at the moment. It was certainly irresponsible and selfish to even think about leaving a job while many people were losing theirs. Looking back, I know it is not either selfish nor irresponsible. On the contrary, it was just exactly what I needed to do to be able to breathe.

Obviously, I am only capable of seeing that now that I feel good, healed and happy.

What I did instead was pausing my studies. I was not able to get inspired or creative and I needed time off from the screen. However, the distance between me and my laptop didn’t last long. I’m used to working hard, giving my best every single time and fighting for what I want.

And that is what I did.

I created an Instagram account called @wearingmylanguage which I wanted to use as a means of communication to educate people about the importance of language within the fashion industry and the relation between verbal language and non-verbal fashion communication using storytelling that involved curiosities or facts. I curated a selection of pictures that I found interesting and relevant and wrote the captions in English and Spanish to reach a broader audience.

Post #1 - What is going on?!

In February 2020, little did we know about the pandemic. However, a couple of months later everything shut down - including University.

Feeling not only agitated but also worried and confused, students and professors spent a few weeks figuring out how to proceed with the studies. Under normal circumstances, I would have submitted a printed edition of my bilingual glossary which I wanted to produce with Lucy, a MA Graphic Design student, with professional pictures taken in the Fashion Studio. However, we had to come up with a totally different approach in order to be able to submit the project online. The quality of the piece of work, of course, was the same but the joys of working on a collaborative practice via Zoom was not even close to doing it in real life.

Although it was hard and challenging, we both worked very well together and were able to present a fabulous website where the glossary was displayed. Not only we produced it to be graded as a project, but also to be developed in the future as an educational tool for institutions and students from Spain who are keen on learning the vocabulary of fashion.

Due to covid, I started working from home and my social life ended in a blink. Since I had to do the dissertation under covid circumstances, which meant being at home 24/7 and in front of the screen, I felt that my creativity was diminishing little by little and I really struggled to focus on the MA.

I tried to find ways to develop my creativity and, therefore, I started learning Photoshop and InDesign on my own. This allowed me to submit a good dissertation both content and creative wise by turning the dissertation into a magazine. Not only did I enjoy learning these skills, but it also helped me to dissociate work from leisure and find some creativity amongst so much darkness and uncertainty.