E Was Not For England

After having tones of fun completing my troll doll inspired photo shoot, I felt it was time I revisited the dark side of the 90s. My fourth and final theme is 'drug and rave culture' a huge topic whenever the 1990s is bought up, and it seemed only right that I looked into it and compared it with the lighthearted cover up of cheesy pop and neon colours. The first thing I looked at was the death of 18 year old school girl Leah Betts, and I have to say it made me look at the 90s in a totally different light, the 90s suddenly became a lot darker, scarier and not such a joke. Although this theme was very sad, I became fascinated with the idea of people using drugs as a way to escape the 'throw away' era, and I couldn't wait to start planning and making my final crop-top based upon it.

I wanted to use text in a black and white format in order to create the appearance of a news paper to represent the dramatic news coverage from when Leah Betts died. The text was a poem I found by poet FlowBert 'E Was Not For England' which expressed strong 'real life' emotions on drug and rave culture, and how it affects peoples lives. I took the poem and selected some words I felt important and made them bold and then created my own silk screen. I then printed the text onto my tee, I did this several times, overlapping the words to give it the messed up disorientated appearance. Im really pleased with my top, now I just need to start planning a realistic 90s rave photo shoot...