Call for Papers: Fashion Tales

Photo Courtesy of Modacult

An exciting conference in the field of Fashion Studies is taking place in Milan from June 7 to 9 at the Universita` Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, The conference is organized by Modacult (Centro per lo studio della moda e della produzione culturale.) Abstract are due November 30th!

Since its beginnings in the middle of the XIX century, fashion has been narrated through multiple media, both visual as well as verbal, and for different purposes such as marketing and advertising, art, costume history, social research and cultural dissemination. At the same time, fashion has worked as an important piece of material culture in the modern industrial urban societies: artifacts that embody workmanship, tastes, lifestyles etc. Fashion, namely, has always been both material and intangible, a system of material production and a system of signs. It has always involved differently skilled people whose purposes have often been divergent and barely overlapping. And the same has happened also with fashion events, tales and writings, i. e. the narrative representations of fashion. Media professionals, communication and marketing consultants, academic scholars and curators develop discourses, use similar languages, try to sometimes work together, comparing and sharing jargons and methodologies, in order to create their products: art exhibitions, catwalks, photo books, movies, magazines, ads, blogs, scientific essays and interviews etc. These tales are a part of fashion imaginary, as well as of collections.

For the full call for paper, please visit here.

When Does Fashion Become Art?

by Ingrid Mida

This is the abstract of my keynote address "When Does Fashion Become Art?" to the Costume Society of America mid-west conference which took place at the University of Northern Iowa on Friday, October 14, 2011 at 4 pm. It has been reproduced here to give a context for the upcoming publication of the transcripts of my conversations about art and fashion with Valerie Steele and Harold Koda here on Fashion Projects.

Alexander McQueen Black Duck Feathers Fall 2009-10 Solve Sundsbo Studio (Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Clothing can be a visual mirror of our inner selves. We each get dressed in the morning and make choices how to present ourselves to the world. We construct our identity with our choice of clothing and accessories and signal our belonging or not. This expression of identity through dress makes it a ready subject for artistic practices and interpretation and both artists and designers have considered notions of the body and identity as articulated through fashion.

There has been much debate about whether fashion is art. Fashion scholars such as Sung Bok Kim, Sandra Miller, Anne Hollander and Elizabeth Wilson have considered the question. In my interviews with four curators and scholars, including Matthew Teitelbaum of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Nathalie Bondil of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Valerie Steele of the Fashion Institute of Technology and Harold Koda of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there was no consensus. This was not surprising to me given that fashion designers themselves do not agree on whether fashion is art.

It was an instinct – as a result of my work as an artist - that led me to frame the question in a different way. Instead of asking “is fashion art” it seemed to make more sense to ask “when does fashion become art?” After all, both fashion and art require the translation of an idea into another form. Both share a visual vocabulary and process-oriented development. Both fashion and art also have commercial aspects driving their conception. And both can include multiples as elements of a series or collection.

But, not all fashion is art. What falls into the realm of fashion is just too broad for that statement to be true, especially when fashion can include both garments of haute couture and trendy mass-produced items.

Changing the question to “When Does Fashion Become Art?” leaves open the possibility that some fashion might be considered art. This is especially true when contemporary art is defined by the expression of an idea or a concept. The object – whether painting, sculpture, video, installation or clothing – is important, but only in terms of the manifestation of the idea.

Nevertheless, ideas expressed in terms of fashion are accessible to audiences in a way that contemporary art often is not. One does not have to be a fashion scholar or understand the complex and divergent theories of how fashion works to decipher the language of clothing. We do it unconsciously every day and to me, it is this quality that makes fashion as art such a powerful statement.

Some curators have embraced the concept of fashion as art. Recent noteworthy exhibitions of this type have included The Concise Dictionary of Dress at the Blythe House, London in May 2010, Rodarte, States of Matter at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in March 2011, McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in May 2011 and The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art in June 2011.

Within each of these exhibitions, fashion was presented as a means of conveying a specific conceptual premise. This premise was not just a source of inspiration, but was a message or statement about society, identity or the body. And it is this aspect of fashion – when the form of expression is based on a thematic premise -- that defines for me the point at which fashion becomes art.

Ingrid Mida is a Toronto-based artist, writer and researcher who is interested in the intersection of fashion, art and history.

Lecture at the Benaki Museum, Athens, July 8

Pyuupiru, Mercury Planetaria, 2001

On July 8th, I will be speaking and giving a tour at the Benaki Museum in Athens, in conjunction with the exhibition "ARRRGH! Monsters in Fashion." The lecture is based on an article that I recently wrote titled “Decentering Fashion: Carnival, Performance and the Grotesque Body,” to be published in the upcomingNot a Toy: Radical Character Design in Fashion and Costume (Atopos and Pictoplasma, September 2011).

“ARRRGH! Monsters in Fashion” includes contemporary designers whose work questions aesthetic norms, particularly bodily norms, by making reference to contemporary characters. It is curated by Vassilis Zinadiakis, creative director of ATOPOS, a nonprofit based in Athens, for the exploration of contemporary visual culture. The visit is made possible by the American Embassy in Athens.

So please do come and say hello in the chance you are there (here are the details)!

Francesca

Alexander McQueen: Art, Beauty, and the Unique Body

Gallery View. Cabinet of Curiosities, Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Speaking Sunday June 19 at 3pm at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is model and athlete Aimee Mullins in conversation with Harold Koda, curator in charge at the Costume Institute. Mullins, who is a double-amputee, has collaborated with a range of artists and designers, including Alexander McQueen as well as Nick Knight and Matthew Barney—who cast her in Cremaster 3 wearing fantastical prosthesis perhaps most notably a pair of non-functional “glass” prosthesis. In 1998, she walked the runway for Givenchy (then designed by McQueen) wearing specially designed hand-carved boots/prosthesis, which are included in the Met exhibition “Savage Beauty.” Much has been written about her collaborations with McQueen, Knight and Barney—and while many, including Mullins herself, interpret as a mean towards greater visibility, others see it as spectacularizing "the disabled body." (These debates are evident in academic writings on the topic, which includes Vivian Sobchack’s and Marquard Smith’s articles in "TheProsthetic Impulse and Caroline Evans’s Fashion at the Edge.)

What has perhaps remained unaddressed and what I think is brought to the fore specifically by her collaboration with McQueen is the way it blurs the lines between medical prosthesis and fashion. This blurring is evident if we think of the history of Western undergarments, such as the corsets (some of which were orthopedic in kind), bustles, or cage crinolines, or more simply extreme high-heels or eyeglasses.

Francesca

Aimee Mullins, McQueen for Givenchy Show, AW 1998

ARRRGH! Monsters in Fashion: An Exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens

by Francesca Granata

Currently on view at the Benaki Museum in Athens is the exhibition "ARRRGH! Monsters in Fashion." The exhibition includes the work of contemporary experimental designers and visual artists, including Martin Margiela, Walter Van Beirendonck, Bernhard Willhelm, Henrik Vibskov and Charles Le Mindu. "Monsters in Fashion" is curated by Vassilis Zidianakis, Creative Director of ATOPOS CVC, a non-profit cultural organization for the promotion of visual culture, which is also based in Athens and was founded in 2003 by Stamos Fafalios and Vassilis Zidianakis.

ATOPOS is unique in its function as an independent curatorial platform which promotes scholarship and organizes exhibitions on fashion and greater visual culture. It fills an important gap for independent curatorial voices and non-profit organizations in the field of fashion curation—a vital and established practice in the field of contemporary art, where organizations, such as Independent Curators International began as early as the 1970s. ATOPOS's touring exhibition "RRRIPP!!! Paper Fashion (currently on view in Melbourne) and the accompanying catalogue greatly advanced the scholarship on the use of paper in the history of fashion, as well as bringing forth novel exhibition practices.

The current exhibition "Monsters in Fashion" promises to do the same, as it was developed with the accompanying book "NOT A TOY: Fashioning Radical Characters," (Pictoplasma Publishing, Berlin, 2011) edited by Vassilis Zidianakis and featuring essays by Valerie Steele (Director and Chief Curator of the Museum at FIT) Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox (founders of the international curatorial partnership C2), Jose Teunissen (professor at the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts, Arnhem), the anthropologist Ted Polhemus, as well as myself. Hopefully, the exhibition will travel as extensively as the previous one did, and both eventually will be shown on this side of the Atlantic.

I am really thrilled, as I was invited to Athens to speak at the Benaki Museum on the topic of the grotesque in contemporary fashion in conjunction with the exhibition, so a more complete report on the exhibition is forthcoming!

For now I will leave you with some images of the exhibition and the curator's evocative words:

"Characters are abstract and reduced figures with a strong anthropomorphic appeal and bold graphical silhouette. Over the last decade, they have humorously sampled and remixed their way through visual codes and media, confronting the viewer head-on, regardless of cultural background. This aesthetic approach has a strong influence on contemporary fashion and costume design. International artists create playful dresses, avant-garde costumes and hairstyles, re-inventing the human body and sending their monstrous, enigmatic, radical and grotesque new Characters onto the catwalk and beyond. They redefine the relation between body and costume by mixing visual communication codes and questioning the established aesthetic norms."