:: Sarah Rebecca

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Sarah Rebecca was my final year major project. Sarah Rebecca is a mental health awareness campaign aimed at young women. Sarah Rebecca, through her creativity, aims to change the perception of anxiety disorders in young women by bringing them together through fashion. Mental health issues are very common in young women; the changes to their body, along with the pressures of everyday life, can cause many confusing feelings and emotions. Sarah Rebecca has created a series of fashion collections, which reveal mental health issues within their construction. The first collection focuses on OCD, each garment represents an element of the disorder. The purpose of the collection is for young women to wear the garments as a symbol of acceptance, care and support for one another. Sarah Rebecca wants young women to feel happy in their own skin - and because everyone has loose threads.

The project explored many elements of mental health, but for the first collection the main focus was OCD. Lots of personal reflection and ethnography was carried out during my research, which was expressed in small side projects, like my dolls. The project was contained inside a changing room, this is because the changing room is often the place where you notice your faults, its a place where you try on clothes, and it also represented the change in perception of mental health. It acted as an efficiant way to bring everything together and contain the work in an appropriate way.

// 300.3 Collection

This project was inspired by my own experiences with mental health issues as a young girl. As I have found ways of dealing with my problems and accepted it as a part of me, I wanted to help others do the same through my creativity. Sarah Rebecca is actually my real name, but over the years it has been shortened to Becky. Sarah Rebecca was a very suitable name for the project and it gave me a way of using myself as a role model to other girls.

// The Changing Room