Fashion Criticism: An Anthology

Andy Warhol, "Pat Cleveland in A Halston Fashion Show,”, Circa 1970s. Courtesy of Andy Warhol Foundation

I'm thrilled to announce the publication of the new book I edited, Fashion Criticism: An Anthology , due from Bloomsbury on February 25. The book anthologizes the wealth of writing on fashion from the late 1800s (it begins with an Oscar Wilde piece) through today. I'm particularly excited with the writers whose work we were able to include, among them today's great fashion critics (Robin Givhan, Judith Thurman, Guy Trebay, Vanessa Friedman, Lynn Yaeger, Suzy Menkes, etc), writers not always associated with fashion (Judith Thurman, Hilton Als, Angela Carter, Bebe Moore Campbell) and some wonderful surprises (including Susan Sontag and Eve Babitz, both originally writing for Vogue).

I will be in conversation with the New Yorker critic and writer Judith Thurman for the book launch on Wednesday, February 24th hosted (virtually) at 7pm EST by McNally Jackson.

The event is free and open to the public, but attendees must register in advance on the McNally Jackson website

This book started a while back (too long to mention!) after we dedicated the third issue of Fashion Projects to fashion criticism. I realized how overlooked the field still remained despite the wealth of writings on fashion in a range of publications. As Robin Givhan of The Washington Post—the only critic to win a Pulitzer prize for fashion criticism— succinctly put it, fashion criticism is “a victim of terrible sexism,” which comes from “both men and women.”

Fashion Curation Panel on March 9th

Join us for a panel on fashion curation Saturday, March 9th from 2-5pm at Parsons School of Design (65 West 11th Street Room B500, New York, NY 10011). The panel celebrates Hazel Clark and Annamari Vänskä's highly recommended book Fashion Curating (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the new issue of Fashion Projects, which covers the same topic.

The panelists are:

Marco Pecorari, Ph.D. Assistant Professor and Program Director, MA Fashion Studies, Parsons Paris 
Sarah Scaturro, Head Conservator, The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Simona Segre Reinach, Associate Professor of Fashion Studies, Bologna University
Karen van Godtsenhoven, Associate Curator, The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Annamari Vänskä, Ph.D. Adjunct Professor of Fashion Research, Department of Design, Aalto University 

Moderated by: 

Hazel Clark, Ph.D., FRSA, Professor of Fashion Studies and Design Studies, Parsons School of Design
Francesca Granata, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies, Parsons School of Design; editor of Fashion Projects

Thank you to Valerie Steele and Tanya Melendez for letting us coordinate the event with the Museum at FIT “Exhibiting Fashion” Symposium on Friday, March 8th

Experimental Fashion Lecture at the Somerset House, London, April 6th

Fig. 12 Merce Cunningham, Scenario, BAM, Brooklyn, 1997, photograph by Dan rest. Courtesy of Louie Fleck at the BAM Hamm Archives

by Francesca Granata

I will be giving a lecture on my book "Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body" April 6th at the Somerset House in London organized in partnership with the Fashion Research Network.

I am particularly excited to discuss the work of Rei Kawakubo, whose exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is forthcoming. Most of my research on Kawakubo's work was, in fact, conducted at the Met's Costume Institute while I was there as a Polaire Weissman Research Fellow. Equally exciting was to research Kawakubo's collaboration with Merce Cunningham for Scenario at the Cunningham Archives, then located at Bank Street, and at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts.

For anyone interested in coming to the lecture and chatting afterwards about experimental fashion while sipping wine, please visit the Somerset House website, as advanced reservations are required.

Experimental Fashion's Book Launch on March 16th at Parsons School of Design, New York.

LEIGH BOWERY, JULY 1989, LOOK 9, PHOTO FERGUS GREER, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST 

Please join us for the launch of Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body by Francesca Granata, Director of the MA Fashion Studies in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, the New School for Design.

The author will be in conversation with German fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm and Charlene K. Lau, Parsons Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual and Material Culture.

The event details!

Thursday, March 16th, 6:30-9:00pm
Parsons School of Design
Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building
65 West 11th Street
New York, NY

This event is free to the public and a reception will follow.
RSVP by clicking here.

Experimental Fashion (published by I.B. Tauris) is a study of designers and performance artists, including Leigh Bowery, Rei Kawakubo, Martin Margiela, and Bernhard Willhelm.

The book argues that the proliferation of bodies-out-of-bounds in fashion at the turn of the 21st century was influenced by feminism's desire to open up and question gender and bodily norms and particularly the normative bodies of fashion. This proliferation was also tied to the AIDS epidemic and mediated the fears of contagion and the obsessive policing of bodily borders that characterized the period.

Book Release—Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival, and the Grotesque Body

by Francesca Granata

Leigh Bowery, July 1989, Look 9, Photo Fergus Greer, courtesy of the Artist 

I am thrilled to announce the publication of my book, Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival, and the Grotesque Body  (I.B. Tauris). Experimental Fashion is a study of designers and performance artists at the turn of the twenty-first century whose work challenges established codes of what represents the fashionable body through strategies of parody, humor, and inversion. The book argues that the proliferation of bodies-out-of-bounds in fashion during this period was influenced by feminism’s desire to open up and question gender and bodily norms and particularly the normative bodies of fashion. It was also tied to the AIDS epidemic and mediated the fears of contagion and the obsessive policing of bodily borders that characterized the period. 

Rei Kawakubo, "Body Meets Dress", Spring/Summer 1997. Courtesy of Firstview

Starting in the 1980s, the book investigates the ways designers such as Georgina Godley challenged the masculinized silhouette of the power suit and its neoliberal exhortations, while Comme des Garçons’s Rei Kawakubo questioned the sealed classical body of fashion, in part thanks to her collaboration with choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Cindy Sherman. Fashion designer, performance artist, and club figure Leigh Bowery upended gender codes and challenged fears surrounding the bodies of gay men through the decade. The book also examines Martin Margiela’s “deconstruction fashion” of the 1990s and the way his work challenges norms of garment construction and sizing. It enters the new millennium through the work of Bernhard Willhelm, which shows the increased cross-pollination of fashion and performance art and the renewed interest in upending codes of masculinity. The book concludes by examining how experimental fashion—particularly in its grotesque and carnivalesque variety—moved from the margins to the mainstream through the pop phenomenon of Lady Gaga.

Naturally, there are countless people to thank for helping me with the book. These include Caroline Evans, Alistair O'Neil, and Elizabeth Wilson (my dissertation advisors at Central Saint Martins); Philippa Brewster at I.B. Tauris; Kaat Debo, who allowed me to do research in the ModeMuseum Collection in Antwerp; and  Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda, who granted me a one-year fellowship to do research in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume. I could not be happier with the book! It can be ordered here.

For those in New York, save the date for the book launch on March 16th at Parsons School of Design at 6pm in Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building  65 West 11th Street, where I will be in conversation with fashion designer Bernhard Wilhelm.

Martin Margiela, Enlarged Collection, Autumn/Winter 2000, courtesy of Firstview