Marion Lean
(Royal College of Art)
Fatma Sagir
(Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)
Send message to Convenors
Format:
Roundtables
Stream:
Body, Affects, Senses, Emotions
Location:
Aula 2
Sessions:
Monday 15 April, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Fashion fast forward: transforming body, fabric and media in a changing world [P+R].
Panel Body03 at congress SIEF2019: Track Changes: Reflecting on a Transforming World.
Fashion faces challenges in a dramatically changing world. Social, economic factors and the pace of change in new media and technology development are forcing bodily practices, design, textile and (social) fabric into the transformation process. This panel seeks to explore this complex phenomenon.
Long Abstract:
With the rise of celebrity culture and fashion and lifestyle blogging the body is at the centre of attention. Fashion shows have opened to include bloggers enabling broader audiences beyond professional designers, luxury consumers and fashion journalists.
The creation of these new actors is one side effect of the accompanying debates on body awareness and diversity, tugging along discussions about bodily practices in digital culture as much as in "real life".
New media technology changed the way the body and self is presented through digital alterations of images, but it also gave way to innovative approaches towards creating textiles and designs. Novel materials and wearable technology applications create further possibility to recreate the body and its interpretations presented not only as imagery, but abstract data visualisations. Sharing and competing using data representations has potential to influence positive changes in health but also marginalises users to digital selves, also seen through use of online personas on social media platforms.
As the body, becoming a status symbol in itself, is presented in new dimensions, it is the designers turn to disrupt/appropriate innovation using new, functional smart materials as well as traditional fabrics and techniques and their cultural narratives to create new designs mirroring these changes. In doing so, they face challenges from serving questions of health, sustainability, economic and gender justice as much as aesthetics and design innovation.
This panel seeks to explore these challenges and transformations from a variety of perspectives such as new materialism and its practices, among others.
Biotechnological Fashion is changing our perspectives upon the body and the self. By analyzing three creative projects, we would like to think about the transformations upon the concepts of dress, body, and environment with the aid of some new philosophical and biological approaches.
Paper long abstract:
Wearable technology and novel materials are changing our interpretations of the body and the self by presenting them not only as imaginery, but also as abstract data visualisations. In between all these new approaches that are being brought into Fashion, we perceive a proliferation of certain biotechnological practices that might hint those perspectives.
We would like to examine those practices from Timothy Morton´s ecological thought. This author conceives that all forms of life are interconnected, in a vast mesh that penetrates all dimensions. We would also like to take into account Maturana and Varela´s approach to the appreciation of the living through their Santiago´s Theory of Cognition. It understands living systems as cognition systems, describing cognition as the very process of life itself. Thus, human beings are defined as agents constructing the world, not as agents discovering it. These perspectives blur the boundaries between our bodies and the environment. By adopting this standpoint, we hope to explore dress as a permeable membrane that beclouds the oppositions between humans and animals, between the natural and the artificial, between the self and its surroundings.
Projects such as 9/4/1615 (Maison Martin Margiela, 1997), Victimless Leather (The Tissue Culture Art Project, 2004), and Pure Human (Tina Gorjanc, 2106) explore all these new perceptions of the human and the world around us through dress and biotechnology. This paper aims to examine this paradigm shift by exploring these three creative projects, correlating the new concepts to the practices of fashion design.
In this paper, I present the contemporary fashion projects using polish traditional folk costumes. I argue that this kind of project provoke to discuss traditional methods of describing material world and at the same time provoke reflection on the creation of new languages to describe them.
Paper long abstract:
In February 2018 Vogue was launched in Poland with the inaugural cover shoot, staged by Jürgen Teller outside Warsaw's Stalinist-era Palace of Culture and Science. In October that year we could buy the same magazine with smiling girls in traditional folk costumes. The reaction in both cases was a combination of contrast aesthetic feelings. Traditional polish folk costumes were always associated on different levels with its aesthetization, exotization and instrumentalization understood not only as an emphasis on the visual aspect, but above all as the presence of the reality ordering system behind it. Whereas in the times of the Polish People's Republic, both folk outfits and the clothing recommended by the government were renewed and figuratively reinvented. The politicized form of clothing was supposed to shape visually, but above all, to construct new thinking about ways to dress coherent with desirable social practices.
Therefore outfit could have been be a sign of opposition to the Party's recommendations. The folk costumes that were used by communist politicians in a specific way redrawing the existing cultural reality and artificially produced divisions into high and low art, for what is elitist and popular. Unexpectedly they became a game with conventions and common schemes, evaded the obvious by moving on the boundaries of existing orders and duplicated cultural clichés. In this paper I discuss clothing as an extremely versatile and accurate instrument of cultural expression, but at the same a complex link between the privacy of the body and its public meaning and emotions connected with it.
Football (soccer) jerseys for professional male players are increasingly designed with a tighter fit which infers a fit male body and a lifestyle. Replica kits for fans emulate this tight fit but are worn by bodies that are substantially different, thereby offering a subversive aesthetic.
Paper long abstract:
Football (soccer) jerseys for professional male players are increasingly designed with a tighter, snugger fit. Such design infers a fit male body and a lifestyle, which accompanies and cultivates such a body. Replica kits, which are manufactured for the consumption of fans often emulate this tight fit but they are purchased and worn by bodies that differ substantially from the increasingly valorized fit athlete's body. This paper discusses the multiple male aesthetics that are produced in the process and through the practice of differing bodies wearing the same garment. I specifically juxtapose the body and the sociality of the disciplined, professional and fit male footballer to the body of male fans with bellies. I argue that the reverence of a specific fit male body which results in tightening jerseys and which tighter jerseys celebrate, produces the unintended consequence of highlighting less-than-fit bodies and body parts as well as the social practices that yield such bodies through fans' dressing practices. With an ethnographic focus on Turkey, I demonstrate how the idealization of a specific male body is subverted, albeit unintentionally, by the very forces that create it in the first place.
Shopping for a wedding dress has to be a special experience. The fact that there are TV shows that center on the process of finding a gown underline this assumption. How is the bridal shopping experience staged by the media?
Paper long abstract:
Since 2007 marriages in Germany have been on the rise and the wedding industry is booming accordingly. Not only are there specialized wedding planners, fairs, fashion blogs, magazines, but also TV shows devoted to the wedding phenomenon. The bridal gown, more precisely, the process of finding and purchasing one, plays an important role in so called documentary soaps such as 'Zwischen Tüll und Tränen' (Between Tulle and Tears). This show has been broadcast on a daily basis on VOX's afternoon program since 2016. Based on selected episodes, I will carve out the fundamental patterns of how the shopping process is medially represented in this show.
Subsequently, I will compare these patterns to the personal experiences of brides. These individual perspectives will be shown by means of case studies, based on theme-centered interviews with former brides. Where do they buy their wedding dresses? Who accompanies the bride on the search for her dress? What is the purchase procedure? Last but not least: What does the (shopping of the) wedding dress mean to the bride? These questions are at the fore of the presentation.
has 1 download
1