Fashion and the Humanities: Exploring New Angles

by Rizvana Bradley

I am currently completing my sixth year of Ph.D. work in the Literature Program at Duke University, and am working to develop a variety of critical approaches to theorizing fashion and the body. I have taught courses at Duke that are intended to enable students to recognize how various literary, filmic and artistic texts continue to richly shape fashion culture, and highlight the complex theoretical and social issues contemporary fashion thematizes.

Having greatly admired the academic work coming out of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, I was excited to introduce students at Duke to the field now referred to as critical fashion studies. Initially I was at a loss as to how to design such a course, as some four years ago there was nothing like the CSM model being taught in US universities. Typically courses would mention fashion incidentally, or as an object of inquiry. With respect to the latter approach, fashion is constructed either purely as an anthropological object, proposing an analysis of historical dress, or as a sociological phenomenon, providing a detailed account of subcultural styles, for example. I knew that content-wise, the course I wanted to develop would incorporate the best of these strategies, but be less a fashion history course. I was most interested in concentrating on aesthetics, and spotlighting the visionary photography and runway productions happening in fashion since the late 1980s.

From the start it was evident that students had little exposure to an international fashion culture, the richness and eclecticism of various fashion figures, image-makers, entrepreneurs and designers. The courses challenged them to think about designers’ creative efforts in refreshing new ways. The first course, “Contemporary Fashion: Image, Object, Idea,” I taught once. I then taught a course entitled, “Fashion, Literature and the Avant-Garde,” twice. The final course, “Art, Media and the Body,” placed fashion in dialogue with the contemporary arts more broadly. All of these courses include fashion in the context of discussions about contemporary artistic practices that are currently provoking key concerns in the humanities, specifically questions of discourse, identity, representation and subjectivity, as well as certain questions about aesthetics, materiality and difference. Students learn that some of the most innovative fashion designers explore these themes in complex, beautiful and challenging ways. For this reason, the readings for the courses draw from different disciplines, among them, philosophy, critical theory, science studies, and feminist theory.

Hussein Chalayan, Vogue, December 2008

Fashion does not exist in a vacuum, but is an art form that reflects socio-cultural mores, fears, anxieties and desires. Students are incredibly responsive to the visual material, and are required to analyze various collections by looking at detailed shots of garments, videos of runway shows, and interviews with designers. Key contemporary designers are examined against a backdrop of critical theory, feminist thought, history and philosophy. Students learn to approach fashion design with a critical (sometimes skeptical) eye and interpret the spectacle of a runway show or photographic image by relating the garments on models to such themes as trauma, modernity, gender, death and technology.

Collectively as a class, we explore the idea that the spirit of the avant-garde in fashion, runs parallel to the spirit of the artistic avant-garde in many ways, chief among them a resistance to representation, evident in a general turn toward abstraction. Increasingly fashion is partially turning away from the literal, from the tangible, and towards the ephemeral, the emotive and the affective. Students are encouraged to use a range of philosophical and critical themes to question the normative body, the virtual and figural construction of the body in time and space, and the bodily production of affect and sensation.

Studying designers as theatrical as John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, with the minimalist sensibilities of Yohji Yamamoto and Rick Owens, the different body experiments of Gareth Pugh and Walter van Beirendonck, and technological innovations of Hussein Chalayan, students were able to draw their own conclusions about today’s design practitioners, who seem to not only be working and making, but also thinking at the fringes of disciplines and design philosophies in order to expand the cultural scope of fashion today.

Elisava: Fashion, Film and Performance

Papabygote, Elisava, 2010

Another end of the year show which I visited in July was organized in conjunction with the graduation of the masters students in fashion design at Elisava, a school of design in Barcelona. It was great to witness the experimental and imaginative projects completed by the graduating class. In a testament to the multi-media nature of fashion today, the students were recquired to complete a collection, stage a performance to present their collection and produce a short video showcasing their work and the concepts behind it. Also in the spirit of collaborations, the majority of the students worked in pairs or more for the completion of the work—a system that brilliantly debunks the outdated notion of the “genius” artist (and by extension designer) for the more realistic idea of collaborative work.

The program is directed by Beatriu Malaret and Toni Miró; the year-end presentation was attended by Diana Pernet, the Parisian fashion critic and video journalist. Through Pernet, I learned that a number of different tutors from various disciplines work at Elisava (for instance, Alex Murray-Leslie of Chicks on Speed). This is probably one of the reasons for the experimental and innovative nature of the work.

One of my favourite pieces was the film and collection by Papabygote. Their short is witty and subtle and reminded me of the work of David Bestué and Marc Vives, the brilliant video artist duo, also from Barcelona.

Francesca

Fuzz &, Elisava 2010

Royal College of Art: Department 21

Department 21, Royal College of Art.

Among the year end shows that I visited in a rather happenstance manner this summer, the one I found most stimulating was that of the Royal College of Art in London. Off to the side of the exhibition space was what looked like an outdoor seminar room which was, in fact, a self-built outside deck and the “exhibition space” of Department 21, where a series of free lectures and workshops took place concomitantly with the show. An entirely student-run initiative, Department 21 was started to promote new models of art and design education and interdisciplinarity. Its name plays on the fact that are 20 existing departments at the Royal College.

Throughout the year, the founders took over a temporarily vacant space at the college where students were assigned studio space regardless of their departmental affiliations and where a series of lectures, seminars, critiques and presentations were developed. They also published a small book to recount the project.

In their own words: “Department 21 appropriated institutional territory to explore alternative models of education and to create a new kind of conceptual and social space. […] Department 21 adopted a radical strategy towards a broader definition of education, of practice and of disciplinarity. As an autonomous space, it encouraged a greater critical awareness of the students’ role within the institution.” (Polly Hunter, Bianca Elzenbaumer and Fabio Franz edited, Department 21, London, June 2010)

Francesca

PS Also, on the topic of design education, you might be interested in reading my short interview on Ecouterre on teaching sustainable fashion.

Teaching Sustainable Fashion: A Theoretical Perspective

Martin Margiela, Spring/Summer 1990

This past spring I taught a Senior Seminar at Parsons on the topic of sustainable fashion. The seminar was based largely on the exhibition that Sarah Scaturro and I co-curated at the Pratt Institute, as well as on my work on experimental fashion and the intersection between fashion, memory and materiality, which was explored in both Fashion Projects and in my doctoral studies. The class was meant to give a theoretical as well as a cross-cultural and historical perspective on the relation between fashion and sustainability.

It was interesting to notice the challenges and the rewards of the process. One of the main challenges consisted in the fact that incorporating sustainability in fashion demands a radical re-thinking of systems of consumption, distribution and production, so much so that the very topic of sustainable fashion can be in and of itself rather controversial and, in some sense oppositional to traditional fashion education.

What was perhaps most rewarding was to notice students’ imaginative incorporation of sustainable practices in their own work. (This was a theoretical/historical class, so the work was produced within the context of their studio classes.) For instance, the work of Seung Yeon Jee, which was based on her research in Kurt Schwitters’s collage techniques incorporated notions of modularity within her work, and as she herself noted promoted a level of participation from the consumer in the design process. Through complex pattern-making techniques Jee created garments which could be worn in a number of different ways—all of which were at the same time experimental, functional and visually engaging.

Below you can find a description of the class. I would love to hear any feedback by fashion educators and anyone interested in the topic of incorporating sustainability in fashion and design education

Seung Yeon Jee, Thesis Collection, 2010

SLOWING THE FASHION CYCLE

This seminar provides a theoretical framework to think about issues of sustainability in fashion as they are articulated in our changing relations to materiality and the physical objects that surround us. Reconnecting with the materiality of clothes, as both producers and consumers, points towards a slowing down of the accelerated cycles of consumption and discard promoted by current fashion models.

The seminar addresses the historically shifting meanings and values of clothes. It focuses on the way contemporary artists and designers have recuperated lost relations with the physicality of clothes through their exploration of our emotional connection to them and their ability to retain memories and histories that bind people in complex networks. The seminar provides readings that explore this counter-tendency and places it in historical and cross-cultural contexts, as well as investigating the work of specific practioners, such as fashion designers Martin Margiela and Susan Cianciolo and artist Andrea Zittel.

Francesca Granata

Exhibitions off the Beaten Path: Fashion at the Time of Fascism

The exhibition Fashion At The Time Of Fascism - Italian Modernist Lifestyle 1922-1943 examines the relation between fashion, modernism and Fascism and will be on view through June 18. Although, not off the beaten path geographically, as it is in London, the exhibition is housed within a smaller and relatively new venue, the Fashion Space Gallery at the London College of Fashion.

The exhibition is curated by the Italian scholars Mario Lupano and Alessandra Vaccari and it is based on their honominous book. It is, in fact, described as a visual essay. (For those who miss the exhibition, the book, which is described in a New Yorker review as "handsome," can be easily found in Italian and English.)

Like the book, the exhibition, which is comprised of a range of media from actual garments to fashion and film magazines, is organized around four main concepts: Measurement, Model, Mark and Parade. Those are described in the literature accompanying the exhibition as follows:

"Measurement investigates the aspects of modernism which are closer to the concepts of order, rationality, scientific rigor and technical control. Rationalization in the productive processes of fashion is exalted by the use of beauty machines and sartorial instruments to measure the body, such as the one Domenico Caraceni patented.

Model is more directly connected with the discourse on “types” and lifestyles and is devoted to the dress code and models of style that become reference points for the whole epoch: from the iconic value of the “duce” to the stars of Hollywood and Italian cinema.

Mark analyses the connections between fashion and the construction of identity processes: from search for originality in national products, to authority of fashion creators, to the attempt of structuring an Italian fashion system.

Parade deals with the catwalk rite in its elements of modernist seriality and is concerned with fashion display in exhibitions, shop windows, cities and parades. In order to better grasp the theoretical configuration elaborated in the book and consequently organize a critical discourse on the modernist conception of fashion design in Italy, the exhibition includes the conceptual maps which, for each single session, identify the relationships between modernist ideas on the one hand and fashion practices on the other."

Francesca