SEAM ZINE
September 2023 - May 2024Founder, Creative Direction, Editorial Photography, Branding, Styling, UI Design, Book Binding, Magazine Layout
2024
About
Seam Zine is a digital and physical fashion publication created for young adults, interested in the fashion and the arts scene in England, who have visual impairments. Through contemporary and boundary-pushing content, I aimed to normalise learning and interacting with different underrepresented communities, through their chosen ways of communication, to destigmatise and promote equality for minority groups.
The zine’s role in the creative space is to change the thought process, particularly in the fashion community, towards disabilities and highlight the unheard and marginalised voices of people with disabilities. This issue includes features of photography, art, fashion, and articles specially designed for the visually impaired as well as interviews with important voices that have championed, allied, and broken down barriers for people with disabilities in the UK arts scene.
The concept of Seam Zine is a biannual publication running in an Autumn/Winter and Spring/Summer schedule, alongside the typical fashion seasons. Each issue will focus on a different marginalised demographic or a physiological and social issues such as disability, mental health, race, and sexuality, including members of each demographic each time as a part of the creative team to make each issue as authentic as possible. Seam Zine would be published in England and especially promoted in London, focusing on the young creative hotspot of talent in London, that will be open to becoming a part of the Seam Zine community that will collaborate and partake in creating future issues of the Zine and encouraging the brand ethos as a lifestyle themselves.
Seam was created through my first-hand experiences seeing how disabilities not only physically exclude people, but also socially exclude people from every part of our culture. Through my final major project at the University for the Creative Arts, I wanted to help decrease the gap in equality between people with and without disabilities, especially in an industry where people with disabilities are actively ignored; seen as a risk and as less beautiful than able-bodied people. I hope this conceptual publication will start conversations between my target audiences about why people with disabilities are excluded from the fashion industry. Through this conceptual project I aim to normalise learning about how to communicate and include people with disabilities better, to drive change and make the upcoming fashion scene become a more inclusive and welcoming career prospect and place to be.
Seam aims to create opportunities for people to understand why the fashion industry is inaccessible and unequal to people with common disabilities around the world. I hope to make a difference by unveiling these issues and helping to include people with disabilities in the increasingly prevailing fashion community.
Design Features
- Vacuum-formed, transparent zine sleeve to allow for the design of the cover to be felt as the clothes were
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Branding representing human features (hands, eyes, mouths) , linking to the focus of different senses in the body throughout the zine
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Colour scheme using contrasting colours at all time for clarity and to be colour-blind friendly
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Editorial fashion features designed especially with visual impairments in mind
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Fabrics and textures from the editorials featured throughout the zine
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Ability to use taste, smell and touch in the ‘sensing differences’ editorial through sented fabrics, edible paper and collaged paper and fake piercings.
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Braille used throughout the physical magazine.
- Audio used throughout the digital zine, accessed through QR codes
Digital Zine
Click Here!
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Collaborators:
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