So I went through all the photo sharing options before I finally settled on embedding Google Slides into this post. Corey and I plan to include slideshows on our website of the images we find in UMW yearbooks that we think exemplify what people wore on our campus in the ’80s. I began experimenting with Flickr. I thought you could create an embeddable slideshow gallery on Flickr, but every time I embedded my gallery it would just show the first picture as if I uploaded the picture into this post straight from my computer so unless I was doing something wrong, that was pointless. I then decided to see what options WordPress has for gallery uploads. If you click “Add Media” at the top of the text box and upload your images, you will see that you can create a gallery. I tried that. It just uploaded all of the images individually. That still wasn’t what I wanted. I’m sure there are some plugins that create galleries, but I think those are static to the page rather than the post, which might work for our final website, but that doesn’t really work for this blog. Finally, I decided to make a Google Slides presentation of the photos. It was easier than I thought and though I did not add any text or anything to fill up the blank space around the edges of the photos, I’m glad we have that option open to us for the final slideshow we will create. I’m sure we will use text in order to draw attention to certain parts of the photo like the jewelry, hair, etc.

Anyway, enjoy these photos from the late ’80s. These aren’t all of them, they are just some of my favorites from 1985 and 1986. I didn’t want to share all of them yet because I want to leave some things a surprise on our final website.

So I went into this a little pessimistic. I’ve made podcasts a few times in the past for class and I always used my iPhone to record and Garage Band on my Mac to edit. I was a little like an old person when I found out I have to learn Audacity to do this blog post. I wasn’t planning on learning Audacity because I already had a program that worked for me. However, I reluctantly downloaded Audacity onto my laptop just for this.

I began by coming up with a few interview questions. My interview had to be fashion related, but I could interview anyone I wanted. I ultimately decided to interview my friends about campus fashion and the things they see that irk them. I came up with five questions and decided to interview three people. The first person was my best friend and total fashionista, Kelly. She was the most animated about the topic. I then decided to get a fashionisto’s perspective so I interviewed my boyfriend. However, that interview was outside, it was a windy day and he was a little timid to be interviewed so that audio had to be tossed out. He basically just reiterated what Kelly had said anyway. My final interview was with my friend, Ryan, who doesn’t care about fashion and wears the same hoodie, jeans, and sneakers to class everyday. I should probably mention that I recorded all of these interviews on my iPhone because it was easier to pull out than my laptop and a little less noticeable to them as I interviewed them.

Once I downloaded (Uploaded? What’s the difference?) my audio files to my computer and to Audacity, it was time to start playing around with them. I was slow at first. I could not figure out how to split files or cut files, but luckily YouTube exists so I just watched tutorials until I figured it out. Once I found all the functions that I’m used to in Garage Band, it was easy to adapt to Audacity. It’s actually much more user friendly than Garage Band. I also realized late into my audio editing that I need to have an intro, outro, and something to connect the two audio clips together so I had to record on Audacity. Usually, my laptop doesn’t record the best audio but it did this time. I think it actually came out clearer than my iPhone audio.

After I had all my audio edited and arranged the way I liked, it was time to download it. That was a pain in the butt. I don’t like that you have to download something separate from the internet in order to download MP3 files from Audacity. It took me a while to understand what I had to do but hopefully that was a one time thing and I won’t have trouble downloading again.

Overall, I actually think I prefer Audacity over my old methods. I’m a stubborn person so it takes a lot to change my mind about something. Anyway, enjoy my audio clip! I think it’s quite funny. Oh and just as a warning, my friends curse a bit. Who knew they could be so passionate about what to wear and what not to wear on campus?

This week I decided to play around with Timeline JS. I am fairly familiar with the other tools that Corey and I plan to use for this project. Timeline JS was the only tool that I had never used before. Luckily, the instructions were easy to follow from filling in the spread sheet to publishing and embedding the actual timeline.

I decided to create a timeline that shows the cultural and entertainment news that may have affected the way people dressed in the 1980s. Part of what Corey and researching for our project is how popular culture (specifically from MTV) affected the way people dressed in relation to their gender. The timeline I created was just a rough sketch of what our final timeline will look like. I got all the information from historyplex.com. For our final timeline I would like to find more specific dates and include more information about why these events are significant to development of fashion trends in the ’80s. For example, the song “Like a Virgin” by Madonna came out in 1985, which prompted a lot of women to start wearing long, layered necklaces and Michael Jackson popularized the red leather jacket after his “Thriller” music video came out in 1983. Likely, our final timeline will also include pictures and links to our sources.

Like I stated earlier in this post, this timeline is rough. It definitely needs some pictures and more information, but I also kind of like it without the pictures. It matches my minimalist black and white theme. Of course it isn’t very engaging as it is so the final product will definitely include visuals. Enjoy my minimalist timeline of the ’80s below!

I’ve customized many websites in the past four years. I am a serial blog creator and destroyer. I’ve only used blogger for my website customization though so this was new for me. I first decided to change the theme. I wanted something clean and minimalist. The first theme I changed my blog to was Activello. I tinkered with that theme for a while, but I couldn’t figure out how to get a header image like they showed in the preview. After about 30 minutes I gave up and switched to my current them. From there I removed the sidebar, because it really isn’t necessary for this site’s goals. I then changed the header to this black and white star photo I found labeled for reuse on Google. I knew that I wanted a minimalist image and for some unexplained reason I am obsessed with stars right now so this image was perfect! I also tried changing the header color, but any color other than white doesn’t stand out against the image I chose so I changed it back to it’s original white. I think my website is better now than it was, but I’m probably going to continue to play around with it here and there when I find time to make it even better.

Corey and I are both very easy breezy people. We were both okay with any topic for our project which was both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing about it was that we had the whole world of fashion open to us. The bad thing was that having the whole world of fashion open makes it hard to narrow it down. Eventually, we did narrow it down though. We have decided to focus on the fashion of ’80s because I hate it and he loves it.  I think these conflicting views of the era will keep our project interesting to us both and will help us maintain a balanced view on the fashion at that time.

After deciding on our decade, we wanted to narrow down our topic of research further. What about the ’80s is so compelling? After our discussion in class on ’80s fashion we decided we wanted to explore the relationship between gender and clothing in ’80s fashion. We noticed that women wore shoulder pads to appear more masculine and some men grew their hair long (hair bands) which gave them a more feminine appearance. This was also a prominent time for the androgynous look. We want to explore more of these gender norm bending trends in the ’80s to understand the origins and motivations of such trends.

One thing we had to keep in mind as we narrowed down our topic is the resources we have available to do our research. I had mentioned in class that most school libraries keep an archive of old school yearbooks. We intend to look at those yearbooks to see what people in Fredericksburg, VA really wore during the ’80s because average people tend to have more subdued looks than those of the celebrities at that time.

We will also have to conduct interviews. I plan to interview my fashion history professor to get a scholar’s view on fashion in the ’80s and since he lived through the ’80s he can also give a first hand account of what he saw people wearing and what he himself wore. We will also likely talk to alums about what they wore in the ’80s and maybe even a few current students who are wearing ’80s trends today.

Fredericksburg is also rich in antique shops so perhaps we will be able to find some clothes from the ’80s in one of them to document and try on.