Diary 002: Progress Updates and World Building
The Gist? Building Team, Processes and Defining Research Approach.
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It’s been over a year since I shared progress updates on archiving(dot)fashion, but things are looking up again. For starters, I now have company. I hired a research associate at the start of the year, and together, we can do research with a level of detail that lived in my fantasy for most of 2024. I am sharing this context because I’ll oscillate between describing some of our actions and plans with “I” or “we.” We are indeed a “we,” and some decisions are no longer entirely mine. So, enjoy this update no one asked for, but I’m hoping sharing our progress will become the norm in 2025!
Break Time’s Over
The break was unintended. Last year started on a good note — I started the registration process for archiving(dot)fashion as a company and got that done. I had other plans for the year, but between trying to do my best at my 9-to-5 job, constantly feeling anxious because my dad was critically ill, and coping with the pressure of being a creator online, I gave up on everything archiving(dot)fashion-related. Oddly enough, as challenging as the year was, I'm grateful that I came out of it making peace with my approach to research and storytelling.
The truth is I’m an overthinker, and I like it. I like being thorough, even if it may seem slow to others, especially when it comes to things I care about. But I’m also chronically online, and I’d be lying if I said the prominent discourse on what it means to be “authentic” and “yourself” didn’t get to me. At some point, I felt the only way to be “authentic” was to turn on my camera and share my unfiltered thoughts with the world. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but that’s not me. I’m more inclined to fully immerse myself in a subject, carefully consider my thoughts, and then write a script or article to share with the world. I don’t have much to say, so I’d rather speak well about the little I know.
And when the noise was too much, I [unintentionally] did the following to keep myself sane:
Shared my thoughts with friends who have enough context on my reality, and they reminded me to pace myself,
Extended my work trip to Kenya and wrote a story about my time there. Doing the research for that story – having conversations with people about style, their ideas on leadership, and nationhood - brought back my spark.
I also shared some videos on TikTok that I now consider unimpressive, but that’s the beauty of growth: you look back and are excited about how much better you're doing.
Team and New Identity
In December 2024, I was in a better mental space, so I started planning for the new year. I finally admitted that I needed help, and bootstrapping this alone wasn’t a measure of success. I realised I wasn’t alone all along; I’d worked with people whenever I shared my article with friends for feedback or reluctantly shared my struggles, asking them for help. So, why not put a structure around having company to think through things and work together?
I thought of Olachi. Earlier in the year, she volunteered to work on a foundational research project at archiving(dot)fashion, and we were figuring it out together gradually. We had lunch a few weeks before Christmas. I asked her about coming on board full-time, and she was interested. I was so excited!
I spent the holidays with my family, wrote the job description, planned for the year, and created a filing system. If I planned to bring a new person on board in the new year, I needed a structure to ease them into things. Having someone else to figure things out together and meet our goals has been lovely.
Over the last year, I’ve met people who have interacted with the work in person in Nigeria and gotten a better understanding of how people perceive this. So, it finally felt right to do a visual identity design. We have a new look, and you can also see it across other online platforms where we have a presence, including Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Threads (we repurpose our Twitter posts for Threads).
Evolving Research Approach
When I started working on archiving(dot)fashion, I genuinely didn’t know what I was getting myself into. In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t. The fact that I didn’t have a rigid idea of what this should be or how to go about it has opened me up to a world of learning I never would have been exposed to.
As a result, our research approach is highly contextual and very responsive to our needs and constraints. We follow our curiosities and answer the questions we deeply care about. I’ve worked on projects that still haven’t seen the light of day, because I’m not convinced I understand the subject enough. So, why write my confusion as knowledge? There is knowledge to be found in having open questions, but it’s been a struggle to define how much understanding is enough understanding. I decided to write about fashion from a historical perspective because, as a Nigerian, I don’t know enough about Nigeria to understand us. And even as the dream expands, that quest to fully immerse ourselves in the story is still dear to us. We want our stories to be grounded in context and meaningful to the people it is about. For instance, if I hadn’t spent time in Kenya speaking to people about their president’s style, the story would have looked very different, and I doubt I’d have liked its shape. Being close to a story can introduce bias, but my biggest fear is that distance also introduces an unintentional lack of care, and I just can’t live with that.
At the same time, I also knew that to tell more stories, I needed to figure out how to make the research process more efficient. The first step was bringing Olachi on board. The next decision I made, which made me less anxious this year, was having three trimesters in a year. I love having odd-numbered splits, so trimesters over quarters. Additionally, my 9-5 runs on a quarter system, so I needed to ensure the pressure isn’t getting “werser” in the same months. And the final step was to focus on building a knowledge base for a theme every trimester. For the first trimester, we looked at the rise and fall of Nigeria’s textile industry. When we looked at the stories we wanted to tell in T1, I quickly realised this knowledge was transversal. So, we decided to spend January through March knee-deep in this research. That way, any additional research we do would be very light when we write the different stories in April.
We've started sharing the first story from T1 on TikTok — it’s a 6-part video series that explores why Nigerian designers struggle with produce affordable fashion (at least for the local market) from a historical lens. It’s our first story focusing on the economy, so we learnt a lot working on it. We’ll share two more articles from our T1 research, so keep an eye out for them in your inbox.
Another motivation for working on this project is to figure out how to use emerging technologies to socialise research findings. We haven’t had the opportunity to do that yet, but we’ll do a lot of that next year. I’m very interested in how people complicate technologies and how technologies, in turn, complicate people. The only reason I became a UX Researcher and, by extension, do social science research is that I took a course on Human-Computer Interaction at University and knew I wanted to do this for the foreseeable future. As a UX Researcher, I’ve mostly worked with web technologies, apps, and, more recently, AI, but I see archiving(dot)fashion as a playground for creative technological approaches to sharing stories. In fact, that’s what inspired its naming.
As a lean team, we’ve been reading about how we can incorporate AI into our process. Currently, we use it for transcribing interviews and minor edits (a paid version of Grammarly). Lately, we’ve been reading and thinking about the speculative archival work of Mayara Ferrao and Linda Dounia. We know there are a lot of ethical considerations to think of as we plan to use it in our work, but the following resources are shaping our early thinking about this:
Vanishing Culture (this is a big one on the fragility of digital cultural preservation, so we’re still reading it)
At some point last year, Ada reached out to interview me about my goal for this project, and I loved speaking with her. The article is up, and you can read it here.
Revisiting Curiosities and Relationships
Last year, I applied to the inaugural archivi.ng fellowship, but I wasn’t selected. We decided to work on the project that inspired my application. It's one of our longer side quests for the year, and we’re a team of five working on it. We reached out to the archivi.ng team, and they have been super helpful with sharing access to newspapers and magazines that aren’t up on their website. We’re super excited about this project and cannot wait (but we have to wait, as we’re being realistic with the timeline) to share it with you later in the year.
Expecting a Kinder T2 and T3
T1 was super hard for me. I was adjusting to the process of going full throttle on my plans for archiving(dot)fashion and balancing them with my 9-to-5. Then, the most heartbreaking thing happened – my dad passed in February. He was critically ill, but we (my family and I) were optimistic he would make it. A week later, I celebrated the saddest birthday I’ve ever had in my life. I’ve felt a lot of things in this time — anger, sadness, pain, guilt, inability to sleep and sleeping to escape everything. I’ve cried, stopped crying, cried again and again, but weirdly enough, working on archiving(dot)fashion has been therapeutic. I had to pause working for a while because I wasn’t myself, but I returned to work at the end of March. Currently, nothing about life makes sense, and I have a lot of questions. But I’m hoping the rest of the year is kinder to me and you, reading this.
Bye Elizabeth, Hello Olachi
We plan to share two more trimester updates with you this year – one in August and the final one in December. I won’t be writing these updates, Olachi will. It will have a more structured feel, but I’m sure you’ll love learning about what we’ve been up to from her.
I’ll still write, but I’ll focus on writing fashion stories.
In the meantime, please don't hesitate to email me if you have any questions or thoughts on everything we’ve shared in this update or at archiving(dot)fashion. I still haven’t figured out how to fund all the research we plan to do (so far, everything has been self-funded), so I’d appreciate any ideas.
Notes and Thank You’s
Thank you so much for subscribing and sticking with me, with us. We don’t share every day, but we’re glad you’re here and rooting for us 🩵
Grateful to Olachi, who edited this and made sure it sounds coherent.
I wrote this article with no sound. But thanks to Chapell Roan’s Pink Pony Girl Grammy’s Performance and Griff’s Miss Me Too on a loop, I made a few final edits. Pop music is truly the soundtrack of productivity!
This is super amazing. I absolutely love how thorough you are😍 looking forward to reading and learning more.
Thanks for the rich update! Eager for your project’s future ✨