Suchergebnisse

Alison Moloney's own practice often involves commissioning new objects, rather than working with existing artefacts, and exploring new media outcomes. Multiple perspectives on the same brief have also long fascinated me, as new interpretations and conversations are revealed, and comparisons and juxtapositions generated. 1914 Now delves into various curatorial roles: an object-led curator; an exhibition maker; a designer and curator; and a museum director, operating an experimental space for the display of dress. Each has responded to the brief for Fashion and Modernity 1914, and all, in their different ways, work with dress in three dimensions, be they historical or next season's samples. I invited the filmmakers and curators to collaborate and for the curators to work with film to realise their expressions. Amy de la Haye is a curator and dress historian whose approach to curatorship involves examining and 'reading' objects, to create multiple narratives that are embedded in historical accuracy and involve didactic communication with audiences. The narrative for her film The Violet Hour is drawn from a surviving tea gown housed in the costume collection at Brighton Museum. This garment reflects the cusp of modernity as the onset of war and its aftermath impacted so profoundly upon women's lives lived, their domestic (and public) spaces and the clothes they wore to negotiate them. Film director and animator Katerina Athanasopoulou filmed the tea gown and worked with contemporaneous advertising illustrations to capture the narrative behind de la Haye's response. The film beautifully captures the foreboding moments of the onset of war and the transformative impact it was to have, through the narrative of the tea gown. Judith Clark is an experimental exhibition maker who simultaneously designs and curates her exhibitions; the choice of object and its placement within an exhibition or installation are inextricably intertwined. The interior architecture of buildings informs her exhibition design, and it is an exhibition maker's workshop that forms the backdrop to her film. The Futurist movement, and in particular the Manifesto of Antineutral Dress written by Giacomo Balla in 1914, inspires an exploration of contexts, display props and the futurist elements of fashion. Working with film director James Norton, Clark applies the concepts of the manifesto to a hypothetical exhibition. The film's stark monochrome aesthetic, with its unexpected blurring and distortions, references not only the multiple lines of Futurist drawings, but also the trials and errors, routes and returns, involved in the exhibition-making process. The distortion, utilitarian architectural environment and experimental Futurist music pay homage to this movement whilst eschewing nostalgia. The avant-garde, Antwerp-based menswear fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck communicates political and social issues of the day through his clothes. His archive not only documents the sartorial style of the day, but also the political and socioeconomic climate when they were created. For his autumn/winter 2014–15 collection Crossed Crocodiles Growl, Beirendonck appropriates the provocative headgear of war – a helmet from 1914 – to form commentary on the political landscape of today. Through the helmet hat, Beirendonck creates a new narrative for an iconic object, reinterpreting a symbol of warfare as a peaceful statement on current political issues. Working with film director Bart Hess, he presents a striking revolutionary army. Kaat Debo is Director of Mode Museum, Antwerp, an experimental venue for the display of dress. Exhibitions often focus on contemporary fashion, and material innovation and its impact upon the discourse of fashion. Debo's response to the brief was to commission a new object, informed by early twentieth-century Irish crochet from the collection at MoMu. The object is a dress designed by architect, artist and 3D-designer Tobias Klein and fashion designer Alexandra Verschueren, which has been 3D-printed by Materialise. This intriguing garment represents the tension between the desire for ornament and the search for the Modern, as the decorative nature of the Irish lace is propelled into 2014. The natural chemical growth of crystals on this 3D-printed dress, with surface design adapted from the floral motifs of the crochet, is for Klein a 'post-natural distortion that finds balance through technology and craftsmanship'.

The UK fashion industry is distinctive for its idiosyncrasy, practicality, resourcefulness and voice from an eclectic nation. Its creative capital spans design, make, styling, journalism, showmanship, retail and entrepreneurship at scales large and small. This is manifest at two extremes – the crafting of cloth holding centuries of refinement and the honing of skills in bespoke tailoring through to the honing of the prevalent business model of production and consumption at a speed and volume that amazes the world and these connections to our cultural identities and our use of technology are vehicles for fashion as a social connector, offering each of us the ability to identify ourselves and get feedback from others. Fashion affects the attitude of most people towards themselves and others. This is a vital consideration to each of us as social animals, to the cohesion of our communities and to our collective state and governance. It is how we act that determines our destiny. It is what we value that determines how we act. About the event: The UK fashion industry contributes £21bn to the economy and directly employs more than 800,000 people. But what about the future for growth, skills and nurturing new generations of talent? Bringing together policymakers and representatives from across the UK fashion industry - including retailers, manufacturers, suppliers and designers - this seminar examined the emerging challenges and opportunities for the industry. Sessions focused on domestic clothing manufacturing and options for capitalising on product provenance, and further emerging opportunities for industry and government to collaborate to promote UK fashion and design internationally. The event is part of a series of events being organised by the Westminster Media Forum looking at the UK's creative industries.

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said warns us against the possible consequences of assuming a radical, irreducible difference and distance between 'different' cultures: "In our wish to make ourselves heard, we tend very often to forget that the world is a crowded place, and that if everyone were to insist on the radical purity or priority of one's own voice, all we would have would be the awful din of unending strife, and a bloody political mess" (1994, p. xxi). In this presentation, drawing on Said's emphasis on "overlapping territories, intertwined histories", I will discuss the limitations of the concept of cultural appropriation as a critical tool. I will argue that media critiques of cultural appropriation can be viewed as symptomatic of an emotional capitalism (Illouz, 2007) whereby the radicalism of cultural activity is reduced to an increasingly emotional language of so-called cultural sensitivities without regard for issues of labour, production, and the global political economy in its interconnectedness. --- This symposium explored how fashion reacts to, processes, and embraces the global crisis of borders and displacement, engaging academics and a number of young designers from Austria, Ukraine and UK, who live and work in and between their homelands and the West, and creatively draw on their heritage in their engagement with the field of western fashion. Engaging a number of practitioners from these countries resonates with the current world-wide interest in their work. Historically, the phenomenon of fashion was viewed with suspicion in the socialist world, while socialist fashion was frowned upon in the West. Yet the recent burst of creativity and energy in the region has already resulted in designers from the New East becoming some of the hottest names in the global fashion world. This symposium engaged with the latest generation, whose participants successfully reverse an exotic, passive Other into an exotic, yet agency-potent Other. Consequently, their work is actualized as some of the most successful projects in the field of contemporary western fashion. The symposium was part of programme of events which accompanied Calvert 22 Foundation's exhibition Post-Soviet Visions: image and identity in the new Eastern Europe at Calvert 22 Space from 23 February – 15 April 2018.

Aware: Art Fashion Identity co-curated by Lucy Orta with the independent curator Gabi Scardi examines how artists and designers use clothing as a mechanism to communicate and reveal elements of our identity. The exhibition contains work by 30 emerging as well as established international contemporary practitioners including Marina Abramović, Acconci Studio, Azra Akšamija, Maja Bajevic, Handan Börüteçene, Hussein Chalayan, Alicia Framis, Meschac Gaba, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Andreas Gursky, Mella Jaarsma, Kimsooja, Claudia Losi, Susie MacMurray, Marcello Maloberti, La Maison Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Yoko Ono, Maria Papadimitriou, Grayson Perry, Dai Rees, Katerina šedá, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, Helen Storey, Rosemarie Trockel, Sharif Waked, Gillian Wearing RA, Yohji Yamamoto and Andrea Zittel. New work by Yinka Shonibare and Hussein Chalayan, commissioned especially for Aware by London College of Fashion and the Royal Academy of Arts, is on display. Hussein Chalayan presents a new dress inspired by the 300 year old Japanese tradition of Bunraku puppet theatre while Yinka Shonibare has worked with bespoke tailor Chris Stevens to create 19th-century children's dress assembled to form a impressive wall mural. Aware is divided into four sections. Storytelling acknowledges the role of clothing in the representation of personal and cultural history. Grayson Perry's Artist's Robe, 2004, an elaborate, appliquéd coat made of a patchwork of luxurious fabrics, comments on the figure and status of the artist in the world today. Building covers the concept of clothing being used as a form of protection and the notion of carrying one's own shelter, referencing the nomadic, portable nature of modern life. On display is Shelter Me 1, 2005 by Mella Jaarsma who in her work parallels garment and architectural constructions. Jaarsma defines shelter as the minimal construction needed for protection, not yet the shape of a house, but directly related to the proportions of the human body. Belonging and Confronting examines ideas of nationality as well as displacement and political and social confrontation, recognizing the tensions associated with the assimilation of new cultures and traditions. In Palestinian artist Sharif Waked's video installation, Chic Point, 2003, the contradictory interpretations of revealing flesh as a fashion prerogative or as a humiliation juxtapose two worlds, one of high fashion and the other of semi-imprisonment. The importance of Performance in the presentation of fashion and clothing, and in highlighting the roles that we play in our daily life, is explored in the final section. It features film footage of Yoko Ono's performance of Cut Piece at Carnegie Recital Hall, New York in 1965, for which the artist invited the public to cut strips from her clothing. While the scraps of fabric fall to the floor, the unveiling of the female body suggests the total destruction of the barriers imposed by convention.

The contemporary debate around fashion and cultural appropriation is a highly inflammatory, reactionary debate that defies any attempt at historical contextualisation. One can always argue, through in-depth historical investigation, that what is allegedly appropriated is not the exclusive property of a specific community but an already appropriated product of what Edward Said calls 'overlapping territories, intertwined histories', that is, 'the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized coexisted and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories' (Said 1993, p. xxii). In his analysis of production, Karl Marx explains how the members of society appropriate 'the products of nature in accord with human needs . . . and finally, in consumption, the products become objects of gratification, of individual appropriation' (Marx, 1978, p. 227). Marx also explores the appropriation of living labour by machinery, by objectified labour –an appropriation which together with the worker's propertylessness is the fundamental condition of the bourgeois mode of production (Marx, 1978, p. 293). Thus, both Marx and Said are devoted to historicising appropriation, seeing it as a phenomenon determined by history –by colonialism in Said's account and by the bourgeois mode of production in Marx's writings. Contemporary fashion media discourse around cultural appropriation, however, does not seem to be interested in historicising the phenomenon of culture. The debate as it keeps striking back through the volatile space of social media is momentary and very emotional, conveying a powerful sense of anger, excitement and possessiveness –a politics, in other words, of what Achille Mmembe calls viscerality (Nilsen, T. & Bangstad, S., 2019). Thus, drawing on Marxist and post-colonial theory, this paper will explore the meaning of this shift from a historically embedded understanding of appropriation to an incendiary, everyday politics of experience and viscerality. In doing so, the paper will conceptualise appropriation in its relationship with affects and history, interrogating its critical value in terms of confronting fashion's inequalities in the era of neoliberal racial capitalism.

"This book presents, above all, a study of the establishment and development of the Soviet organization and system of fashion industry and design as it gradually evolved in the years after the Second World War in the Soviet Union, which was, in the understanding of its leaders, reaching the mature or last stage of socialism when the country was firmly set on the straight trajectory to its final goal, Communism. What was typical of this complex and extensive system of fashion was that it was always loyally subservient to the principles of the planned socialist economy. This did not by any means indicate that everything the designers and other fashion professionals did was dictated entirely from above by the central planning agencies. Neither did it mean that their professional judgment would have been only secondary to ideological and political standards set by the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, as our study shows, the Soviet fashion professionals had a lot of autonomy. They were eager and willing to exercise their own judgment in matters of taste and to set the agenda of beauty and style for Soviet citizens. The present book is the first comprehensive and systematic history of the development of fashion and fashion institutions in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Our study makes use of rich empirical and historical material that has been made available for the first time for scientific analysis and discussion. The main sources for our study came from the state, party and departmental archives of the former Soviet Union. We also make extensive use of oral history and the writings published in Soviet popular and professional press."

The fact that political power stayed firmly in the hands of the Bolsheviks while at the same time the capitalistic NEP acted as an economic system, contributed to the confusing status of the phenomenon of fashion during the 1920s. The NEP fashion magazines that followed, such as Poslednie mody (Latest Fashions) and Zhurnal dlia khoziaek (The Housewives' Magazine) , found themselves in their natural habitat, as in the NEP circles of new-rich Russian capitalists, their wives and girlfriends, western fashion was eagerly accepted. New fashion magazines published numerous drawings of flapper dresses, which were literal copies of the latest western fashion trends. So, unpredictably, fashion and socialism had enjoyed a brief period of coexistence during the 1920s in the Soviet Russia.

"The History of Fashion Journalism is a uniquely comprehensive study of the development of the industry from its origins to the present day, and including professionals' such as Dylan Jones's vision of the future. Covering everything from early tailor's catalogues through to contemporary publications such as LOVE, together with blogs such as StyleBubble, and countries from France through to the United States, The History of Fashion Journalism explores the origins and influence of such well-known magazines as Nova, Vogue and Glamour. Combining an overview of the key moments in fashion journalism history with close textual analysis, Kate Nelson Best brings to life the evolving face of the fashion media and its relationship with the fashion industry, national politics, consumer culture and gender. This accessible and highly engaging book will be an invaluable resource not only for fashion studies students but also for those in media studies and cultural studies"--

The landscape of design is changing, fuelled and inspired by emerging technologies, the economic downturn and environmental concerns: fashion is entering a new frontier. The Web 2.0 revolution is changing perceptions and influencing a younger generation, but can co-creation challenge traditional design methods for fashion and promote sustainability, and can designing together enable the democratization of fashion? This paper aims to map co-creation within a fashion context, as part of a PhD study using participatory practice methods. A series of case studies will be used to define co-creation communities, the role of the individual and the sustainable benefits of working together. The viewpoint of both the designer and consumer will be explored to identify what methods and tools they might require to enable them to work together.

In his critique of the contemporary 'ethics of difference', Alain Badiou argues that the relegation of ethics to the 'recognition of the other' and the 'ideology of human rights' is characterised by a rather dubious, shallow and hierarchical understanding of difference: 'the problem is that the "respect for differences" and the ethics of human rights do seem to define an identity! And that as a result, the respect for differences applies only to those differences that are reasonably consistent with this identity (which, after all, is nothing other than the identity of a wealthy –albeit visibly declining– "West")' (Badiou, [1993] 2002, p. 24). Drawing on Badiou's disavowal of the 'ethics of the Other' as 'the servant of necessity', that is, as a complacent, and essentially hierarchical, form of activism that does not disturb the capitalist structures and institutions of worker subordination, this paper aims to critically engage with the 'feminist t-shirt' phenomenon. Printed & statement T-shirts for women have been central to recent feminist protests and demonstrations, including the Women's March on Washington. Some of these t-shirts, however, were actually manufactured by companies that had allegedly used sweatshop labour in Central America. Focusing on the debates around the 'feminist t-shirt' in particular—and the so-called mainstreaming and commodification of feminist politics in general—this paper seeks to interrogate the persistent historical division between the peripheralised material production of fashion, to which the exploitation of cheapened female migrant and refugee labour has always been central, and the Eurocentric symbolic production of fashion and activism, that is, the privileged domain of design, discourse and political subversion. More precisely, this paper will discuss how neoliberal discourses of 'crisis', 'compassion' and 'humanitarianism' obscure, and reinforce, the increasing degradation of work as well as the physical and systemic/discursive violence endured especially by women refugee workers, leading to ever-more authoritarian and hierarchical divisions of humanity and labour.

Fashion has a significant relationship with its social, political, and economic context, and is able to trigger, reflect, and respond to wider changes. When such changes involve violence, horror, or trauma, this process has particular ramifications due to fashion's deep intertwinement with the body, both physically and conceptually. From depictions in luxury fashion magazines of headless women after World War I, to ghostly interpretations of death as the Internet took hold in the 2000s, fashion and violence have shared a unique connection. Violence can be found, implicitly and explicitly, across fashion's multiple layers: object, body, and image. The forms that violence manifests itself within include notions of physical assault, fragmentation, psychological violence, sexual violence, the abject, and deathliness, which will be explored in chronological order across the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first. The eruption of violence onto the surface of fashion—which itself serves as an external surface to the body—exposes important revelations about the individual and society from which it is spawned.

A long tradition -- A feel for tweed -- Saints and rebels -- Land of wool -- Patriotic cloth -- From Donegal to Oxford Street -- The Gaelic revival --Hand weaving steps towards art -- Irish tweed : the headline act -- The call of Irish tweed -- Changing times -- Tweed : 'the most valuable and brilliant facet' -- Riding the waves -- Days of resurgence -- Living legacy -- A final word.