Pirjo Seddiki

Wetterhoff Wintage -tuotteiden taustalla on kunnioitus ja kiinnostus suomalaista tekstiiliperintöä, taitavaa käsityötä ja kestävää muotoilua kohtaan. Tuotesuunnitteluprojektin tavoitteena on löytää uusia kulttuurisia yhteyksiä ja samalla merkityksiä rikkaasta suomalaisesta kansanperinteestä löytyvälle muoto-, väri- ja materiaalikielelle. Hämeenlinnassa sijaitsevan Wetterhoffin Tekstiiliarkiston sekä Hämeen ammattikorkeakoulun yhteydessä toimivan tekstiiliverstaan arkistomateriaalia analysoimalla ja tutkimalla on luotu innovatiivisia ja esteettisiä muotoiluratkaisuja nykyteknologiaaa, materiaalikehitystä sekä kulttuurintuntemusta soveltaen. Koko WetterhoffWintage-projektin tavoitteena on samalla kehittää tuotesuunnittelukonsepteja, joita opiskelijat voivat valmistuttuaan hyödyntää eri tavoin joko omissa yrityksissään tai muissa tehtävissä

"Pirjo Seddiki, Aalto University School of Art and Design, Department of Art ABSTRACT IMAGES OF WOMEN - MEANINGS OF PRETTY AND DECORATIVE The object of this research is the concepts of pretty and decorative, which emerge in visual material gathered between the last decades of 19th century and the beginning of 21st century in fashion and textile design education. The focus is on the interaction between thinking and actions that form the concepts of good taste or aesthetically valuable. The essential question in this research is what is actually made visible in visual material like photographs of women dressed in their self-made garments. The norms that have governed meanings of pretty, beauty, decorative and good taste are challenged by deconstructive methods and phenomena like kitsch and camp. Discussion of beauty is deeply involved with the question of morality. The research expands to study the problematic relation of beauty or pretty and gender. Why has pretty been widely ignored or disapproved by philosophers in aesthetic research? As research data, there are photographs, writings and schoolbooks from years 1885 to 2009, and interviews and observations in praxis as art teacher in Wetterhoff School of Crafts and Design between 1989 and 2009. The research methods or intellectual tools to articulate and understand the phenomena of pretty and decorative are deconstruction and dissemination introduced by Jacques Derrida and the Foucauldean genealogy. Michel Foucault’s reflections on power and conditions of knowledge define the research approach. Womanliness is understood as the performative process, which is actualized in denial or exaggeration of pretty and decorative. The theoretical frame in this research is the genealogical chain from Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde to Lou Andreas-Salomé and Ellen Key. Ellen Key was admired by Fredrika Wetterhoff, the founder of Wetterhoff School. The research text is divided into two major chapters. The first chapter is constructed as a deepening spiral from researcher’s praxis as an art teacher with texts and practical work of Fredrika Wetterhoff towards the philosophical thinking about concepts of womanliness, mask, mimicry and truth. The second chapter consists of photographs, which are understood as an argument or discourse comparative to written texts and interviews of students and staff. Texts and images are sutured with concepts of prettiness, taste, style, kitsch and camp. As visual phenomena, cases of corsets and corset makers and “a woman dandy” are presented."