Month: December 2020

Since the showcase can only have a maximum of five images, I need to divide what I’ve already done into five parts.

I continued to use the bright color scheme in the poster, hoping that it would grab the audience’s attention and create a positive feeling.

No.1

Based on the original poster, I made the slogan in the shape of a ribbon and added a small pair of scissors to convey the theme of “combat body-shaming”.

No.2

The subject of this one is “Beauty is not a size”. There are 2 body types: plus-size and skinny along with the corset pattern.

N0.3

This image contains three body elements – skin tone, striae, and tattoo – to convey the theme “Your body is not wrong, society is.” Everybody is beautiful and we don’t need to care what others think.

N0.4

I used Photoshop to simulate how the posters would look on the side of the road, keeping only the three posters with the highest scores from stakeholders. Then I added a passing figure of a Chinese woman to create a more realistic visual effect.

N0.5

As a final conclusion, I used the poster of “self cheers” and “high fives” to express my hope to help young Chinese women to improve body acceptance through my intervention.

Achievement in Chinese society

By measuring my intervention, I tested the hypothesis that the situation of body-shaming in China can be improved by increasing the diversity of model body in the advertisements. Broadly translated feedback indicates that my stakeholders’ body confidence raised from 54.3 to 67.5 percent after my intervention.

It is worth to mention a touching moment during the interview, one of my stakeholders (Xinyu Tang) told me that when she saw a body similar to herself in a picture, she suddenly realized that she does not think that kind of body is not good which remind she should not lack confidence with herself. I am glad to see these little changes which can confirm the positive implications of improving Chinese young women’s body acceptance in this way.

New knowledge I Learnt

I learned new understandings as a result that the key to help Chinese young women achieve self-acceptance is changing their views from negative to positive of bodies beyond the homogeneous representations which not only need displaying more inclusive model bodies but also expressing positive emotion towards beauty of different natural bodies through advertisements.

Challenge

There is value in this learning which has primarily focus on helping young people in China who have been body-shamed, but nonetheless recognized limitations. Firstly, due to the limitation of methodological, I do not have enough research about how visual advertising works which would help me to make more targeted visual designs. Secondly, compare with Chinese population my participants are still narrow. In the future, I need collect more data of a wider sample size. Thirdly, I cannot make a reality campaign to testing practically for logistical reasons which limited me to get more feedback from random samples.

Future plan

Therefore, future work needs to build on these findings. I am planning to contact localization Chinese lingerie brands directly and present my learning results, making an attempt to find a way to change the negative body-shaming situation after I return back to China.

I’m going to look for models on social networks who are real consumers of the brand. When shooting pictures, focus on life situations as background, for example, in the gym, jogging, on vacation, or meeting with friends to make images more resonate with young Women in China.