DCS – Primary Research

I interviewed 29 people that fall into my target audience category (male and female, 18–30 years old, live in big cities, and interested in fashion) for my primary research. I did it all together with the interview about the COVID-19 pandemic. But for this one, I want to know their stories of self-expression from the first time until now. The questions are:

1. Is it hard to express yourself through fashion within your environment?
2. What do you think about the representation (beauty ideal, body image, style preferences) by media and brands in Indonesia? Are they diverse enough?
3. If you ask the question to yourself–do you feel represented by media/brands in Indonesia?
4. What kind of content that you’re engaged the most? Where do you consume these contents?
5. What kind of content you’re hoping to see on self-expression? (no content like that or there are some and you wish to see more of them)

These are basic questions–I’ll adds more questions according to their answers. These questions aim to know their stories, the environment, what type of media and social channels that they use to further prove what I’m going to make.

Some of the evidence I can show (some people didn’t want to be recorded and some wanted to do voice call instead):

Notes taken from the interview (mixed with the dressing up during pandemic interview written half and half in Bahasa and English):

From the interviews, there are some points to highlight:

1. Rising demand for diversity. It is starting to be more diverse now, but some people still feel like brands are just jumping on the diversity bandwagon or doing a gimmick. They want to see if this will lasts.
2. No media focusing on the topic too–though some discussing it through other issues (e.g. femininity and gender), somewhat it’s always only the tip of the iceberg.
3. In Indonesia, the beauty ideal is fair skin, long-haired, and you’ll get plus points if you’re caucasian looking–or half Indonesian. A lot of caucasian models gracing brand catalogues, even for celebrity and influencers, the one that always put in the spotlight are these type of girls. In reality, women in Indonesia have a darker complexion. For men, the beauty ideal is not really a problem, but they have a problem with body image–as the men represented and loved most is the alpha male, masculine type with the slim, fit muscle-y body. None of the movies or tv series shows a bigger, chubby build as the main protagonist. And women have been struggling with this body type problem too. For people aged 19–64 years old in Indonesia, the average height for men is 168 cm and women 159 cm. But media, brands, and designers are using tall models that don’t represent the real people. Some said that it’s hard to get the right size for their body types and the shape of the clothes don’t look as good when it’s worn on their body.
4. Especially to the queer community, as a Muslim majority country, it’s been hard for them to express themselves, especially within their families.
5. The Muslim women who wear hijab are not all adhering to the ‘standard’ modest wear. And these type of hijabers wanted to see more contemporary hijab fashion editorial.
6. For people who are commuting with public transportation, they tend to tone down (not wearing anything flashy and jewellery) and cover themselves because they don’t feel secure being the centre of attention (infrastructure problem). Most of them are also toning their style down to respect their environment (especially family and workplace) and they want to avoid hearing negative reactions or remarks (they usually experienced it before).
7. The media or brands usually expose certain groups of influencers or celebrities and not ‘real people’. Some even said that they don’t trust influencers as much anymore since they’re getting paid to say what they say.
8. Majority of people said that now they know where and with who they can feel safe, and they realised if they just ignore what people say, their environment will get used to what they wear and it will be more comfortable. Even though some comments still come out once in a while, they just brushed it off.
9. Most of them look up to brands and icons from outside of Indonesia because they feel more connected with the style from outside of the country–this also made me realize that Indonesia doesn’t have “style icons”. Almost all of my interviewees chosen foreign people/brands or the more contemporary and edgy brands (like @dibbaofficial, @aestheticpleasure_, @calliecotton). We have some fashion influencers, but like I said they have similar styles (probably because they got endorsed by the same brands too) and just like a theory I found before, these influencers create a certain standard, where followers copy the influencers’ ideals in hope to conform with the current social norm (Brucculieri, 2018), resulted in creating a homogenized expression of self. People think the ones with the most followers are the ‘attractive’ ones, while I think people should know there are different styles out there and I want them to dress and express themselves, not to just copy influencers.
10. They usually search for people or brands (so the flow is either they follow the people then see what brands they’re wearing or they resonate with a certain brand and look for who’s wearing it).
11. They want to see content on real people that they can relate to in terms of style. They want to know more about how (how to style, how-to DIY tie-dye your shirt, how to deconstruct your clothes, etc) and why they wear something. Types of content that offer how outside of fashion (e.g. cooking and gardening) are also the ones that they engaged with the most. The channels are Instagram (saved feature), Youtube, TikTok (for the younger ones, 19–22 years old in this case), and Pinterest (mainly for inspo).
12. Most of the interviewees are familiar with Instagram filter, and they played with quizzes and background filters. I think it’ll be a good engagement for the brand if we can do a collaboration with artists to create that kind of filters as well. (Especially for artists who can’t make their own filters) so we can help them and get the engagement also from their followers.
13. From this interview, I decided to erase the nonconformist from my research questions, as people that I perceived as conformist or a conformist also have the drive to be a nonconformist as well, or doing it very subtly (like a friend of mine wearing the clothes that is the norm for her workplace but she adds polka dot patterns that are very her, or another friend wears flowery/patterned socks just to add the ‘me’ factor when she gets to work).