Fashion Practice

Sewing Reality: Fashion in Non-fiction Media
University of Bedfordshire, Luton Campus, UK
9th June 2018


As two distinct art forms, fashion and film have flirted with each other in symbiotic relationships since the dawn of the medium: from British and American actualities showing current high-street fashion, to French newsreels capturing fashion shows. The synergy has been mutually influential also as far as other media are concerned, with pop stars and television dramas inspiring catwalks and collections. While the literature on film and fashion is quickly growing, this interest has primarily focused on fiction and includes, among others, works on the construction of femininity and masculinity through costumes, the definition of national identities through cinematic clothing, and the haptic pleasure of fashion in film. Non-fiction material remains an understudied source, with only a few scholarly works shedding some light on early cinema’s attention to the fashion world, still and moving images in fashion archives, celebrity and fashion, but also make-up culture and TV entertainment, the relationship between austerity and sewing/knitting programs, and the political potential of fashion documentaries.

This interdisciplinary symposium wants to fill this vacuum and excavate and reassess the role of non-fiction media in shaping our understanding of fashion across multiple platforms and different national contexts. The event aims to create an open space for dialogue between fashion and documentary studies, drawing from different methodologies and approaches: media and cultural studies, ethnography, audience research, marketing and public relations.
Sewing Reality aims to discuss the interconnection between fashion and media industries, the audiences of factual moving images about fashion, as well as the past, the present and the future of fashion documentaries.


Curated by: Dr Elena Caoduro, University of Bedfordshire, UK

Keynote Speaker: Pamela Church-Gibson, Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK

PANELS

1a: Fashion Documentaries

• Rona Murray - Have Fun: Fashion Matriarchies
• Daisy Richards - Muses, Mythology and The First Monday in May
• Karen Ritzenhoff - A maverick on the streets: Bill Cunningham, photography and New York fashion

1b: The Pleasure of Sewing

• Laurel Forster - Bringing up the Subject of Sewing
• Joanne Knowles - ‘I should have stayed at home and finished the hem on my skirt’: Sewing, domesticity and distinction in teenage girls’ magazines of the 1970s and 1980s
• Nickianne Moody - Bunty’s Cut-Out Wardrobe Goes to Art College
• + Rosie Steele’s poster

2: Fiction/Factual fashion exchanges

• Rachel Velody - Stitching authority
• Mariaemanuela Messina - Fashion Cinema and Representations

3: Capturing the Fashion Real

• Mark Pickering - HUMAN SEE, HUMAN DO: A case study exploration of the para-social interaction between celebrity blogger and fashion consumer
• Boel Ulfsdotter - Shooting fashion: the double-bind of a non-fiction approach to Paris Fashion Week

4: Fashioning the Archive

• Silvia Vacirca - Call to fashion reality: a closer look at Istituto Luce Archive fashion cinejournals (1939-1941)
• Jihane Dyer - Documenting Fashion Histories on the BBC, 1989-2014: Temporality and Cultural
• Sigrun Lehnert - The Fashion of East and West in German Cinema Newsreels
• Giulia Caffaro - The Italian Ready-to-wear Fashion through Carousels

Abstract Branded content appears to be the most promising frontier of contemporary companies’ strategies within our hyperconnected society. This new context requires brands to demonstrate an increasing capacity to engage customers in continuous interactions and cultural exchanges through on-going narratives co-created with their audiences and perceived as authentic components of their hybrid physical-digital daily experiences. Within the physical-digital networks of interactions, (fashion) brands assume a new social role largely as original contents’ producers and editors. Products lose their ultimate meaning while narrations that deliver brands’ values become the true reason the public engages in conversation with the brands and recognises their social and cultural influence as their actual value. Maintaining distance from the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility as a mere greenwashing act, this paper presents an exemplary design practice seeded and nurtured in Mumbai and later grown globally, rooted in the idea that social innovation and culturally intensive industries such as fashion can enfranchise social innovation.

Value streams for collected post-consumer textiles continue to be analyzed within the global challenge to develop and employ commercially viable, yet ethical and sustainable strategies within the fashion industry. Upcycling is an existing strategy applicable to fashion production, with discarded materials used to design and create higher value products, keeping them in productive use for longer. A number of very small, niche upcycling enterprises have emerged in the UK. These brands have succeeded in creating stylistically relevant and commercially successful fashion styles utilizing waste textile materials. The advantages of scaling these enterprises up are not only environmental, but also economic and social, thereby creating a sustainable and innovative business model for UK-led fashion production. Due to high levels of three key metrics of carbon, water and waste, UK government agency WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) has identified textile products as prior- ity materia...

The Fashion & the Senses Symposium held at LCF on 27th March 2015 was an international multi-disciplinary forum for industry professionals, practitioners, academics and postgraduate students with a shared interest in this emerging field - fashion and the senses. It was co-organised by Sara Chong Kwan, Associate Lecturer in Cultural and Historical studies at LCF and a final year PhD candidate, and Bethan Alexander,  Course Director of the MA in Fashion Retail Management at LCF.

With the utterly linear way of production, distribution, and consumption, today’s fashion industry has become the second most polluting industry globally. During the conventional garment production process, considerable offcuts waste has been generated, which has led to a detrimental impact on the environment. How to minimize fabric waste during the design process has become an urgent requirement for fashion designers. Fashion practitioners have proposed plenty of sustainable examples; however, how to bring these practices into classroom teaching and create an unfettered environment for fashion design students to develop their own solutions is still a domain to be explored. Many practitioners and researchers have already addressed the necessity to evoke an alternative teaching and learning approach in sustainable fashion design education. In this article, the author set out her cross-cultural experience of conducting a fashion design workshop adopting the studio-based approach. By outlining the holistic teaching and learning process, proposing testing questions and critical reflections around pedagogy, activities, and projects, the author wishes to provide a reflective educational example on educating future designers as agents of in-depth change to contribute to the sustainable fashion industry.

Abstract Going against the traditional productivist nature of fashion design, this practice-based Ph.D. proposes a strategy for critical fashion practices in a research context at the intersection of fashion, fine arts and film methodologies. This interdisciplinary strategy investigates fashion in the expanded field, exploring fashion practice as a form of critical thinking, questioning the fashion system itself: a practice of unmaking, the purpose of this research is to develop a practice-based method of producing an essay film as an artistic reflection critically discussing the problems of the fashion system, providing new insights into the way a fashion designer develops new approaches that can expand the action spaces available for fashion. Since the etymology of the word ‘fashion’ relates it to the Latin factio, meaning ‘making’ or ‘doing,’ to ‘unmake’ fashion carries in itself a paradox; it is both a metaphorical undoing and a methodological one, a practice of fashion resistance by not producing clothing, a deconstruction of fashion in order to understand what it’s made of – like unpicking the seams of a jacket in order to analyse its construction. It de-constructs underlying assumptions regarding a transition to post-productivism, exposing the limitations of current market-driven fashion design processes. Drawing on Rosalind Krauss’s notion of sculpture in the expanded field (1979),  as used in the discourse on cinema (Bardon et al., 2015), this research documents the development of experimental fashion films since the 1980s and the interdisciplinary fashion practices that stand at the edge of the fashion discipline. It investigates how thought experiments can steer the creative process towards a critique of fashion, drawing from modernist conceptual and de-materialised art practices towards the development of a conceptual fashion. The research methodology developed within the practice extends the potential of communicating through the essay-film format in order to critique fashion within the contemporary context of heightened concerns about climate change and environmental issues induced by mass-production, fast-fashion, and global fashion distribution and consumption. This is developed through a juxtaposition of allegorical images resembling a thought process: the fashion image is used as a thinking-form for constructing a critique of its own systems. The thesis emphasises the importance of taking a critical stance to fashion due to the lack of self-reflection within current fashion practices, synthesising a body of knowledge to inform practitioners of experimental, critical fashion while revealing complexities within the communication of these concerns, proposing fashion as the representation of a deconstructive thought where dress itself becomes ‘immaterial’.

The author documents and discusses the independent books, magazines, and print projects produced by fashion designers since the 1980s when fashion and art aligned and fashion publishing transformed. Significant collaboration among fashion designers, graphic designers, photographers, and artists developed in the 1980s and continues in the twenty-first century. Self-published zines and lookbooks, small-press photobooks, and independent magazines point away from the fashion industry and towards the febrile and conceptual world of artists’ books and magazines. Fashion designers’ practices have expanded, and book making and publishing, rooted in art and graphic design, have become significant and symbolic multidisciplinary activities within specific networks of distribution.

In this review, I critically examine the fashion and art exhibition "fashion after Fashion," April 7-Aug 27, 2017 at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, curated by Hazel Clark and Ilari Laamanen. The exhibition design was commissioned work by six interdisciplinary artists/designers who incorporated a mix of sculpture, performance, and audiovisual material into their installations. The different installations, taken together and experienced together, acted back and upon each other in interesting ways in the exhibition, which was a strength of the curators' method; the use of commissions exclusively acted as a kind of artistic method in itself. The first and most notable thing about the exhibit was that there were no clothes on mannequins. While the exhibition's premise was on fashion, the intentional absence of clothing was a risky strategy the curators pursued to intervene in how viewers think about fashion. The installations were purposely amorphous and abstract as well to inspire a broader consideration of what fashion can be and what bodies can do. Though the relationship between fashion and the body has been a constant topic in fashion scholarship, this exhibition offered a new perspective through commissioning and showcasing the category-defying work of recent fashion and art school graduates and performance artists.

This paper focuses on current strategies for critical fashion practices in an expanded field of fashion. In the late 20 th century and early 21 st century, the field of fashion studies has increasingly scrutinized the relationship between fine art and fashion within an art museum context. Drawing a parallel with Rosalind Krauss's notion of sculpture in the expanded field (Krauss, 1979), this paper documents the development of interdisciplinary fashion practices since the early 1990s, suggesting that an expanded field allows fashion practitioners to engage in a critical discussion of the fashion system. As a fashion practitioner focusing on non-productivist interdisciplinary techniques across multiple media (the fashion film, sculpture, installation, and performance), I test this notion by developing parallels between contemporary fashion and Krauss's 1979 diagnosis. Most literature connecting fashion and art focuses on defining this relationship. Some authors (Geczy and Karaminas) discuss the evolution of fashion image-makers throughout the 20th century as having moved from depicting perfection and elegance to articulating fashion's ephemerality via digital media formats (2012). In this context, according to Healy, the cinematic/video apparatus has given fashion designers and curators the possibility to construct atmospheric environments and facilitated interdisciplinary practices (2013), where clothes are presented as part of a larger work signifying the fashion idea (Healy, 2013). With the advent of the digital age amidst growing concerns regarding sustainability and the fast fashion system, could this mean the end of a certain form of fashion related to production and consumption? Indeed, a postmodern understanding of fashion might suggest open-ended explorations of a possible new role for the designer within a post-product society (Margolin,1998). This paper argues for the relevance of establishing theories of interdisciplinary practice to better understand the contemporary field of fashion, challenging assumptions about fashion's role in the 21st Century.

The fashion industry is experiencing rapid structural change as new manufacturing and distribution technologies emerge. Simultaneously, the environmental impact of garment production and the sector’s record on workers’ rights provokes increasing disquiet. This article explores how new technologies for distributing and making clothes interact with a shifting industrial policy agenda as neoclassical and neoliberal economic paradigms lose their dominance, and state intervention becomes fashionable again.

Contemporary ready-to-wear production, which relies on manufacturing goods speculatively in hope that they will meet consumers’ needs, is massively wasteful, and the sector has experienced a series of shocks as established brands fail to correctly anticipate demand. Online-bespoke ¬– in which garments are made to the specifications of the customer ¬– has emerged as a promising sector. In changing how we buy and produce garments, can we transform how we value our clothes, the resources from which they are composed, and how we value the people who make them?

This article argues that in order to reap the benefits of new and disruptive technologies, national governments and multilateral organizations must develop industrial strategies to shift current market incentives. Protections for fledgling sustainable and technologically innovative fashion brands, along with Pigovian taxation (taxation targeting negative externalities like pollution), are required to transform the industry.

This interview-article is a commentary on some of the early reverberations of Covid-19 on the fashion industry. It introduces R.i.(a)P., a work by fashion designer and professor Wowo Kraus to pull focus on some of the immediate industry reactions, and the underlying ambiguity of fashion, branding and death. Fashion evades death, just as death continues to be tabooed in global Western culture. Through its evocative aesthetic and materiality R.i.(a)P. can illuminate some of the blind spots of this industry. Here Kraus talks about the ideas and intricate making processes behind his work.

A Fashion Ontology, Researching the possibilities for knowing through an expanded fashion practice 20th century art was dominated by undefined borders between artistic practices. The need to name and organize art was acted upon not only due to methodological reasoning but also to perpetuate the status quo and its associated hierarchies. Inevitably, the boundaries between Fine Arts and Applied Arts became redefined. It is through the subordination of fashion to a Post-Duchampian understanding of what fashion practices are, that this paper will concentrate on discussions surrounding the definition of fashion. The aim of this study is to voice the concerns of fashion practitioners in the early 21st century, thereby testing the boundaries of the discipline. Interdisciplinary and wide ranging, this 'paper-as-installation' fills a gap in practice-based-research by bridging practice and theory. The research methodology developed within this practice extends the potential of film as a means by which to explore theoretical possibilities for knowing through expanded fashion practice. Within a context of heightened concerns about climate change and environmental issues induced by mass-production, fast-fashion, and global fashion distribution and consumption, the proposed work challenges the understanding of fashion as the creation of garments, objects and environments. Instead, by deconstructing underlying assumptions and exposing the limitations of current market-driven fashion design processes, this project suggests that fashion production may shift to the formation of new philosophical and theoretical notions via which the discipline may further evolve in socially and environmentally responsible ways.

Abstract Since the 1980s China has been the prime producer internationally and, since a decade ago, one of the main fashion consumers. Western brand dependence and its logos coexist in China with various forms of self-affirmation and predilection for other Asian aesthetics, not least Japanese and Korean. Joint ventures with Western fashion companies are also part of the present-day fashion choice, preventing us from understanding the current fashion system in China. Chinese leadership in production and strong consumer practice will very probably soon extend to design and branding. But what is Chinese fashion? This question is important regarding not only the specific characteristics of Chinese fashion, but also the whole international fashion system. This article will attempt to address these questions.

To counter the unsustainability of the current mainstream fashion system, an increasing number of designers are activating practices of social making aimed at empowering people through shared learning experiences. Within this context, the collaborative network Mode Uncut initiated Make Yourself…, a project focused on socializing value creation through making clothing differently. This article presents the project which took place in BITZ Unibz FabLab in Bolzano (Italy), as a case of social making of clothing in a “makershop” (i.e., a makerspace combined with a pop-up shop where diverse locals make clothes using discarded textiles and second-hand garments). Through this participatory action research project, it emerged that the process of bringing together diverse locals in a makerspace can help generating different clothing concepts, and that these concepts can bring about different value propositions for local clothes production. As an outcome of the project, a framework for social...

This article presents and introduces a new approach for researching into fashion, textile and clothing design. Following Christopher Alexander's understanding of a pattern language the aim is to present and propose a pattern language which assists with the visualisations and designs of garments that use narrative, non-visual forms as forms of inspiration. To visualise the descriptions of the Slovenian mythological creatures, a guided method for designing the garments was developed, based on fashion design practice and different proposed mythological patterns. Furthermore, the design components during the drawing process were defined and analysed. The above-mentioned type of research is important in order to better understand the phases in the design process during drawing. On the basis of the gained results it can be concluded that the proposed pattern language and the guided method have great potential for creating new interdisciplinary knowledge. This developed method for visualising gar-ments' forms was tested on Slovenian mythological creatures but it could be used with any written texts. Moreover the method can also be used for educational purposes and further research into fashion design processes because it provides a classified environment that can be easily observed, analysed, and discussed.