POLITICAL STATEMENTS IN CONCEPTUAL FASHION: THE VOICE OF NATIONAL SENTIMENTS AS A SELF-REFERENCE IN THE READY-TO-WEAR COLLECTIONS OF ALEXANDER McQUEEN AND HUSSEIN CHALAYAN (original) (raw)
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In the homogenized environment of the global fashion system creativity and differentiation have almost been reduced into forms and silhouettes and clothing has been transformed into a commodity. However, the movement of deconstructivism has marked a critical era in contemporary fashion. By the end of the 1980s Hussein Chalayan had taken over the critical position of Martin Margiela, the pioneer of deconstructivism in fashion, through his controversial discourse and designs against consumer culture. Chalayan has put up resistance against the image-oriented approach of the fashion industry through his conceptual attitude by deconstructing the meaning of the clothes to re-semantify them and change their ontology. In order to construct meaning, Chalayan develops three different conceptual paths, addressing social problems, symbolic narration, and/or phenomenological events. In all three paths the idea is the epicentre for Chalayan’s inter-disciplinary design process in which he draws no distinction among the world of clothes, objects, images and spatial environments. Within this chapter, Hussein Chalayan will be analysed as the designer who pioneered the radical and critical channel in the global fashion system, marking a new era in fashion history in terms of the possibilities of incubating a critical role through design discourse. Keywords: Hussein Chalayan, deconstructivism, radical fashion, re-semantification, object-clothes.
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An understanding of social and cultural background is crucial to understand the styles of a fashion designer. The designer's national background and the nation's identity are the main elements to determine the designer's style. The aim of this study is to examine the relation between the social and cultural backgrounds in British society and Alexander McQueen's designs. The multiculturalism in British contemporary arts, the public popularization of arts, and the harmony between traditional and modern arts are reflected well in the collections of the British-representative fashion designer, Alexander McQueen. With this research, the direction of future fashion styles could be anticipated examining the current cultural situations.
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Fashion is a statement, a stylised form of expression which displays and begins to define a person, a place, a class, a time, a religion, a culture, and even a nation. This interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the historical, social, cultural, psychological and artistic phenomenon of fashion. Fashion lies at the very heart of persons, their sense of identity and the communities in which they live. Individuals emerge as icons of beauty and style; cities are identified as centres of fashion. The project will assess the history and meanings of fashion; evaluate its expressions in politics, music, film, media and consumer culture; determine its effect on gender, sexuality, class, race, age and identity; examine the practice, tools, and business of fashion; consider the methodologies of studying fashion; and explore future directions and trends.
Defining Moroccanness: Aesthetics and Politics in Contemporary Moroccan Fashion Design
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a new generation of Moroccan fashion designers has started to emerge which clearly distinguishes itself through a radical style break. They no longer adhere to the idea that Moroccan fashion should be defined by stereotypes of Moroccan cultural heritage and therefore limited to the characteristic local garments such as the qaftan, jellaba, gandura, selham or marked by typical local crafts such as distinctive embroideries, couched plaited cord, braided bands and needle lace. Instead, they aspire an artistic freedom to question, criticise, define and conceptualize Moroccanness in their designs in an abstract and theoretical manner. However, this generation finds itself widely accused of ‘not being Moroccan’ and their annual platform, the Casablanca Fashion Week, has a hard time securing public funding. As part of an Orientalist heritage, Moroccan artists have been incorporating components of their cultural heritage into their work in order to justify its ‘Moroccanness’ towards a western audience. But over time, these ‘stereotypes’ of Moroccan cultural identity have been internalized, resulting in processes of self-Orientalism in the construction of national identity. Contrary to Orientalism, self-Orientalism exploits the Orientalist gaze to turn oneself into the Other and to create, maintain and strengthen an own national cultural identity. Morocco’s political powers, in their turn, have been actively using so-called traditional Moroccan fashion to stimulate the consumption of a culturally marketed self to create a sense of belonging, further national interests, stimulate international tourism, influence foreign investments and as a tool for public diplomacy. Therefore, the artistic produce of this new generation is considered a thread to national identity and therefore to national unity. This paper explores the tensions Moroccan fashion designers are dealing with between their avant-gardist artistic ambitions to challenge ideas of Moroccanness and political power based on (national) traditionalism, between artistic aspirations to transcend national borders and the public’s longing for cultural anchorage and (national) authenticity in a rapidly globalizing and industrializing postmodern world.
From Production to Consumption: The Cultural Industry of Fashion
2013
What do Marlies Dekkers’ lingerie and contemporary flagship stores have in common? What links American Apparel’s campaign to reform the U.S. immigration law and an ancient doll called Pandora? In a few words, the answer is: fashion. Fashion as an emblematic field to understand the contemporary social world. Fashion as a ‘cultural industry’ where the pole of production and that of consumption meet each other: on the one side, every process of ideation, designing and manufacturing carried out by professionals working in the fashion companies, and on the other, the complex and heterogeneous group of social actors who face the apparel proposals by buying (or not buying) clothes and - in so doing - putting them into their everyday lives as generators of meanings. The book aims to explore fashion as a meeting point between producers and consumers as well as processes and people whose work connects the two dimensions, making the materiality of clothes a doorway to join the immaterial horizons of fashion. Table of Contents The Crossroad between Production and Consumption: An Introduction to Fashion as a Cultural Industry Marco Pedroni - FREE DOWNLOAD Part 1: Designing and Producing Fashion The Knock-On from the Knock-Off: Recent Shifts within Australian Mass Market Fashion Design Practice Alice Payne ‘Everyone Deserves to Dress Well’: Democratization of Fashion in Turkey and the Case of LC Waikiki Ayşe Nil Kireçci The Invisible Presence of the Internalised Corset: Post-Feminist Values Materialised in Marlies Dekkers’ Lingerie Daniëlle Bruggeman Part 2: Communicating Fashion Meta-Modernism in Fashion and Style Practice: Authorship and the Consumer Julianne Pederson Pandora in the Box: Travelling around the World in the Name of Fashion Lydia Maria Taylor What is Special in the Collections? Fashion Brands and Semiotic Saturation Emanuela Mora Part 3: Consuming Fashion The Evolution of the Retail Space from Luxury Malls to Guerrilla Stores: Tracing the Change of Fashion Cecilia Winterhalter Sellers of Experience: The New Face of Fashion Retail and the Role of Consumers as ‘Store Readers’ Marco Pedroni An Exploratory Study into the Strategic Significance of Visual Merchandising: The Case of Vintage Fashion Retailing Karinna Nobbs, Julie McColl and Linda Shearer The Political Power of the Online Shop: American Apparel’s Virtual Campaign for Immigration Reform Emma C. McClendon
Notions of Tradition and Modernity in the Construction of National Fashion Identities
There continues to prevail a false dichotomy in current fashion scholarship between so-called static traditional dress associated with the non-West and dynamic modern fashion associated with the West. This dichotomy is especially the result of a largely artificial disciplinary separation between the anthropology of dress and fashion theory on the one hand and a Eurocentric hegemonic fashion discourse on the other hand, that aims to preserve the boundary between the West/Rest and as such, to both protect its position of power and ensure the maintenance of a conceptual Other on which to rely for self-definitional purposes (Niessen 2003). This paper is part of an ongoing cross-regional interdisciplinary comparative research project that aims to contest this dichotomy through comparing western with non-western case-studies from a dynamic non-Eurocentric point of view, focussing rather on similarities and intersectionalities than oppositions, using a combination of anthropology of dress, fashion theory and cultural studies discourses. The research’s main hypothesis is that cultural anxiety, as a main stimulator for an endless and repetitive cycle of change (Davis 1992, Kaiser 2012), is the principal common constituent of both traditional and fashionable dress. The research argues that both clothing styles are equally used in a continuous invention and construction of national narratives that inevitably and constantly relate to global issues of identity, production and consumption (Paulicilli and Clark 2009). It argues that national fashion identities have more to do with categorical thinking—the drive to classify and compare in order to develop a sense of identity–—than with distinguishable cultures or characteristics (Kaiser 2012). In the same way that cultures have become brands and cities have become logos, national fashion identities have become ideologies, e.g. conscious or unconscious beliefs, attitudes, habits, feelings and assumptions (Kawamura 2004).
Three Generations of Moroccan Fashion Designers: Negotiating Local and Global Identity.
Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013
That fashion trends are not arbitrary but manifestations of social, political, cultural and economic developments in society is widely accepted by social scientists around the world. But that this phenomenon is not limited to Western societies has not been debated and illustrated enough. The case-study of the Moroccan fashion industry provides a clear example of ‘traditional dress’ that is far from static, but rapidly changing as a result of important socio-economic changes in society. A first generation of Moroccan fashion designers in the sixties was confronted with the consequences of the French Protectorate, a nationalist movement and a free Morocco facing Europe. They succeeded in adjusting Moroccan fashion to a cosmopolitan and active lifestyle while incorporating European aesthetics and notions of ‘freedom’. The nineties brought the democratisation of fashion through the introduction of national lifestyle magazines, fashion schools and European fashion brands, turning a second generation of designers into national celebrities. Moroccan fashion became the materialisation of a general longing for a ‘Moroccan type of modernity’. Simultaneously, and contrary to what may be expected, the introduction of European fashion brands on a large scale did not threaten the continuity of Moroccan fashion, but boosted its development through the introduction of new consumption patterns, resulting in the commodification of Moroccan fashion. The turn of the century has not only been met by the growing impact of globalisation on Moroccan society, but also by important local developments such as increasing urbanisation, growing religious extremism and mounting social segregation. A new generation of Moroccan fashion designers finds itself analysing its cultural heritage against a global background and reinventing Moroccan fashion far from folkloric stereotypes. What is really being negotiated are the concepts of tradition and modernity in the construction of (national) identity.