This week we started our interviews. We interviewed Sydney Guerrier, Justin Weathers, and June Lei. After conducting a our first few interviews, we solidified our interview protocol. Holly added a script before our questions in our protocol. It describes our project, film, and gives the respondents information on their ability to opt out of certain questions or let us know if there are certain parts they wish to exclude from the final film. During our first interview, we interviewed Sydney on the main quad. In addition to our questions on our initial interview protocol, Holly and I both asked additional probes when appropriate. Since then, we have added most of these questions into our protocol and added new questions as well. These new questions touch on how the respondent describes their own style, their definitions of resistance and if they feel constrained to look a certain way. After conducting the second interview of Justin in his room, we decided that we will interview all other respondents in their rooms as well (if they allow us to). We believe that interviewing the respondent in their own room gives the viewer more information about the respondent including their decorations, fashion inspiration and what their closet looks like. Also it allows the respondent to show specific articles of clothing that they mention or pieces that are significant to them. We will reach out to Sydney to see if we can schedule a time to film him in his room and follow up with the additional questions.
Holly and I discussed how the respondents talked about ways in which millennial fashion does not have its own distinct trends but instead repurposes older clothes and looks to past generations for style inspiration. For instance, Justin and June both mentioned thrift shopping as a source for their clothing. June also mentioned thrift shopping and buys fabric to sew her own clothes. Both Sydney and Justin described respectability politics as an influence on their views of fashion as oppression and resistance. As black men, they described the role of fashion in different aspects of their lives. They both talked about the tension between their style at home in their urban neighborhoods versus their style at Bowdoin. Sydney talked about clothing items, such as ripped jeans, that would have not been accepted by his family because it could confirm certain racial stereotypes, even though he wears them on Bowdoin’s campus where they are seen as fashionable. Similarly, Justin talked about the tension he felt between his dad’s working class job and his experience attending a predominantly white private high school outside of his neighborhood. This tension was magnified when he began working in Nordstrom selling expensive menswear and accessories.
We also scheduled three more interviews. For one of these interviews, we will be interviewing Isaac Greenwold and Callye Bolster together. Unlike essays where it is difficult to follow conversations and see interactions between people, film enables us to do so. Also in group interviews, participants tend to be more relaxed and build off each other’s ideas. We thought that the unique medium for this project would allow for a more true depiction of the natural conversations that occur when we talk about these topics. Since Isaac and Callye both have unique, fashionable styles and are also dating, we figured they would be a great couple to participate in a group interview. Additionally, we scheduled interviews with Nick Barnes and Professor Devgan next week. Moving forward, we will continue to analyze our interviews using a sociological lens as well as further researching our preliminary findings.