What is a designer, or who is a designer? From a place of millennial mainstream, designers seem to be synonymous with influencers and brands. In the era of the brand, it is so vital, one can do naught without it.
By definition, according to dictionary,com, a designer is a person who plans the look or workings of something prior to it being made, by preparing drawings or plans.
From the view here on millennial block, there is a clear misunderstanding and misrepresentation of designers on social media platforms. Is a designer someone who can sew? Someone who can conceptualize ideas and things from a completely new and fresh point of view? Someone who understands the hand of a fabric and its drape on the human form? Someone with an innate sense of style and the zeitgeist of the time.
I look at designers as a healthy mixture of all of these things. There is nothing new under the sun, but life has this cyclical way of bringing things back, and it is the interest added by people who see new ways of doing things that make things new.
In this instagram era the lines are blurred, and we have the freedom to call ourselves anything, and be who we want.
No longer are you expected to go to school or train under another designer, or even have a sense of style or vision. As a man thinketh so is he— You can very easily just wake up one day and call yourself so.
In that freedom there is also a desire to be something and on social media it has become exceptionally easy to portray yourself living the life you want when you may not be living it. And in a way that in itself is designing. You are curating a story and telling it through visuals.
I loathe to call myself a designer. I’ve tried psychoanalyzing why, I suppose in one breath I don’t feel that I’ve earned the right to the title; but I also think that it has been so watered down, that there isn’t much significance to it. I haven’t quite decided what to call myself, though I do design, and I very much have a vision and aesthetic. But I also manage a garment factory, write articles in a newspaper and record podcasts on the weekends. I guess I am a creator of sorts; and I am satisfied with that title…for now.
