Successful Contacts

Karen Elliott 

Karen Elliott is fashion designer and lecturer in Nottingham. She’s been designing clothes for clients for quite a while and has lots of experience when it comes to woman’s body image.

We set up an interview with Karen and spent the day with her at her house, and in her study. She even made us some sausage baps! After spending the day with Karen we really got to know her and talked for hours about fashion’s role in society and our body images.

Jane Travis

Jane Travis is a counsellor for Lincoln, Gainsborough, Retford, Newark, Worksop, Market Rasen, Sleaford, Grantham, Wragby and surrounding areas. Jane deals with problems such as low self esteem, relationship difficulties and eating disorders. We interviewed Jane to find out how body image can play a big part in a persons life and her experiences with how it effects women in Britain.

Natasha Devon (Body Gossip Campaign).

Body Gossip is a campaign about body image. Body Gossip campaigns for all body shapes, sizes and issues. They have many celebrity embassadors including Shobna Gulati (Coronation Street), Natalie Cassidy (Eastenders) and Cerrie Burnell (CBeebies) who all talk about their own body image and their experiences.

We interviewed Natasha Devon one of the founders of Body Gossip to talk about the aims of the campaign and her personsal experiences with feeling pressured to look a certain way.

Before Natasha started up Body Gossip, she launched her own body confidence campaign in schools having just beaten a 10 year battle with bulimia. We also asked her a few questions about her battle with bulimia and how body image played a huge part in her life.

Ruby Red

Ruby Red is a boutique in Lincoln. Ruby Red is quite a small shop which sells womens clothes and accessories. Very well known in Lincolnshire, we decided to interview them to find out their policies on advertising clothes and the manequins they use to display their garments.

We also asked Lucy Powis who’s been running Ruby Red for 4 years about how she fealt her shop represented the women of Britain and we spoke to her on a more personal level about being pressured to look a certain way by the media.

The Focus Group 

We gathered a group of girls together to find out their views on magazines and the media’s effects on us women today. We had around 15 magazines laid out on a coffee table where the girls could pick them up, have a read, comment on what they see and ask each other questions. Amy, the narrator, occasionally asked a question that the girls would then answer referring to the magazines in front of them.

The girls were aged from 18 – 24 and all had different opinions on representations of women in magazines. This helped us gain a lot of research as well as content for the final feature.