大象传媒

Priest and former chaplain at the London College of Fashion Joanna Jepson examines the ways in which we seek to construct our image while searching for our true identity.

We cast our gaze back to the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve were naked and harmonious, at ease with their identities before the fall, and we explore the fallout that followed the consumption of the forbidden fruit.

Joanna argues that, in a culture of consumerism, the market forces exploit our craving to create and recreate our images of ourselves through fashion and other material goods. She explains that "the noise of marketing strategies urge us; drive, goad, beguile and coax us to build our identity in the image of their narrow ideals of beauty, success and happiness. And all the time it pulls us out of ourselves. We are left feeling incomplete, inadequate, discontented, stuck in a cycle of exhausting comparisons. It diminishes us."

Joanna contrasts this situation with the lives of a group of contemplative nuns with whom she spent time when she was 21. She reveals that living with the nuns taught her to "come home to herself" and to learn the true meaning of the saying "beauty comes from within".

Presenter: Joanna Jepson
Producer: Max O'Brien
A TBI Media production for 大象传媒 Radio 4.