Fashion & Performance: Materiality, Meaning, Media (original) (raw)
Related papers
Critical Studies of Fashion & Beauty, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic brings into sharp relief the performative aspect of the way we dress. Staring at one’s own face among many others during the online meetings and classes requires new make-up and dressing routines. Combining nice tops that are in view with sweatpants for the part of the body that (hopefully) no one can see, reveals that dress is, after all, performative: we dress not only for ourselves but also for others; for the public gaze. In this Introduction to the issue of Critical Studies of Fashion and Beauty (December 2020), Anneke Smelik and Susan Kaiser explore the theme of performance and performativity. Performance pertains to the theatrical such as the fashion show, fashion film or fashion shoot. It also refers to embodied behaviour, i.e. to the ways in which individuals imagine how they appear to others. Goffman’s metaphor of the stage as presentations of self in everyday life is particularly apt for the study of clothing and appearance. The concept of performativity derives from philosophies of language. The idea of performative agency as developed by Butler has resonated deeply in gender studies and queer studies, because it offers possibilities for change and transformation. The act of dressing is an important part of performing one’s identity. The articles in this issue show how performance and performativity are intricately interwoven within the field of fashion.
Performance Costume: New Perspectives and Methods
Performance Costume: New Perspectives and Methods, 2021
Even though costume has been dressing the performing body since the ancient world, methods for its analysis are yet to be fully explored. Performance Costume draws on the experience of internationally renowned academic researchers and hands-on theatre, film and experimental performance practitioners to set out an alternative vision for exploring costume across time and place. From the actress on the Victorian stage to design for high quality contemporary TV, this text opens up a new awareness and dignity for costume to be considered in and on its own terms. Recent research has connected the study of costume with theories of the body and embodiment, design practices and artistic and other forms of collaboration in vital new ways; like fashion and dress, costume is now viewed as an area of dynamic social significance and not simply as a passive reflector of a preconceived social state or practice. Offering new approaches to research on costume, and exploring a wide variety of cultures, settings and performance contexts, Performance Costume reveals fresh insights into the better-known frames of historical, theoretical, practice-based and archival research into costume for performance, and considers it as an active agent for performance-making and a material embodiment of ideas shaped through collaborative creative work. A genuinely groundbreaking expansion of the field of costume studies, this is an invaluable text for students and researchers of costume, performance, theatre and film studies and design.
Emotion and Memory; clothing the body as performance
‘Presence and Absence: The Performing Body’
Bugg J. ‘Emotion and Memory; Clothing the Body as Performance’, Adele Anderson and Sofia Pantouvaki (eds.), Presence and Absence: The Performing Body. Oxford: Interdisciplinary press, 2014, pp.29-52 Abstract This chapter focuses on clothing as performance and scenography and the presence and role of clothing and costume design in performance. I explore through my practice as a designer, the clothed body as a site for production of meaning, narrative, performance and communication in an interdisciplinary setting. The intention is to expose the role of costume and clothing design as a generator of performance and meaning through design by drawing on embodied experience, memory, sensory interaction, emotional and physical triggers in garment design as a generator of embodied communication. The design within this research draws on oral histories of dress and seeks to engage viewers and wearers on an emotional and experiential level by connecting to cognitive understanding and memory. This work builds upon aspects of my completed doctoral research which identified that the intersections of subject disciplines are increasingly complex and new interdisciplinary ways of working have emerged that focus on the body and clothing, challenging preconceptions, traditional approaches and subject definitions. I argue that as performance and experimental fashion practice both increasingly move into new and site-specific contexts and as focus is extended around the role of the performer, audience reception, conceptual and experimental approaches, the divisions between clothing designed as conceptual fashion and clothing designed as costume for performance have become less defined. I suggest that it is the shared use of clothing and the performing body to communicate meaning that has enabled a hybrid practice to emerge between fashion and performance. I place emphasis on clothing the body as a visual and physical communication strategy and in relation to research in the fields of performance, costume design, fashion design and fashion communication. I suggest that by focusing on the body as the site for production of meaning and performance, clothing can be not only present in the production process of performance, but also can become a generator of performance and communication through design. By focusing on costume and clothing as a form of narrative and scenography, I have been able to take into account how the emotional and physical factors as well as the site of the body itself contributes to the making, intention and reading of work in the context of hybrid fashion, clothing and performance practice within a contemporary context.
Costume, performance, and society: Engaging in a dialogue
Zbornik Akademije umetnosti
Bearing in mind the potential of costume to construct and actively create meanings and to initiate, shape, and define a performance, the paper examines the nature and role of performance costume in projects and performances of several important Croatian artists who are either costume designers or performance artists or both, such as Vlasta Delimar, Ivana Popović, Ksenija Kordić, Tajči Čekada, and Ivana Bakal, and whose work significantly modified the notion and status of costume and costume design(er) in Croatian performing arts at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. Furthermore, it focuses on the strategies of costume design(er) in articulating the relationship between costume, performance, and society with special emphasis on the position of costume design(er) and costume based performance towards producing, interpreting or performing various individual and collective identities, body, ecology, social activism, and the artist's social status.
The Tête-À-Tête of Performance in Fashion and Art
2012
Performance art has always been considered a treat to Modernist Art; it was theatrical in the pejorative sense Michael Fried gave to the word. When we look at his arguments we might conclude that not alone performance art or minimal art is theatrical but fashion as well. Of course Fried did not talk about fashion, neither did Greenberg, but both saw it probably as belonging to mass culture, which was a treat to the autonomy of the so called high art as well. In my presentation I want to look more closely to performance in art and performance in fashion starting in the time Fried published his «Art and Objecthood», the end of the sixties, till about three decades later. I will concentrate more in particular on the early moment and compare this with the situation of the nineties. What has changed in the development of performance art and fashion and in their relation? Performance art in the sixties and seventies tried to stay as far as possible from the theatrical sign or to use the w...
Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body
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. 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.
Theatre of Fashion: Scenographic Fashion Shows as Theatrical Practice in Design
2019
Contemporary fashion design is increasingly taking to the stage-in the figurative sense, but also quite literally. Scenographic practices, familiar to us until now only from the theatre, the concert stage and the opera, today are progressively turning up in the conquest of consumption's commercial spaces. However, here, too, "scenography" does not just mean creating a visual background, a pretty décor or striking set design for the presentation space and the staging of fashion and brands. In the contemporary fashion context, scenography is much more of an aesthetic activity that weaves together individual creative cross-media practices in a transdisciplinary holistic work of art that speaks to the totality of audience senses and, via the bodily sensations induced, conveys a certain type of knowledge. Simultaneously, the scenographic practice in the design process induces a shift in the audience's focus to the overall atmospheric staging from the commercial promotion of the individual designer collection. In an engaging manner, here the scenographer's art and story-telling generate for seasonal fashion an emotionalising spectacle that, though transient and fast-paced, nevertheless through its unique imagery lays claim to and promises a universal, enduring substance like the arts do. It furnishes a device for generating significance by touching off sensory experiences and triggering emotions. Thus, in today's theatre of fashion, all are becoming equally entitled actors and performing cast members: from the stylish product to the choice of the model presenting it, to the choice of real location and participating audience that instantly plays live via smartphone on the relevant social media platforms and in the virtual Internet space.