Fashion is an expressive cultural form, involving silhouette, color and texture, enlivening the material culture discourse by its relationship to society, history, economics, and technology. Museums and educational institutions began...
moreFashion is an expressive cultural form, involving silhouette, color and texture, enlivening the material culture discourse by its relationship to society, history, economics, and technology. Museums and educational institutions began amassing collections of dress in the wake of the many world expositions of the mid 1800’s. Blockbuster exhibitions of fashion such as the annual gala at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum, New York, have helped shape the status and role of fashion as cultural phenomenon. Visual representation of human appearance can be seen as early as in the Paleolithic drawings of the Venus and the Sorcerer in the deepest chamber of Chauvet Cave, throughout the history of art, and in contemporary mass media. Two - dimensional imagery has been augmented by QuickTime Virtual panorama and zoom technology. But to be fully appreciated fashion needs to be experienced on a body where motion can express the properties of fit and fabric. This paper describes a project which aims to enhance the museum experience of dress in new and interactive ways, in particular, through 3D simulations of the fashions and model body types of the 1930’s, a period when modernity, fueled by advances in technology and mass production, replaced tradition in design and the “American Look” of fashion was born. Using advanced processes for motion capture and body animation, historic sartorial and sociological research, and the holdings of a world class fashion collection, movement and embodiment are being investigated to provide the most accurate virtual depiction of fashionable women of the period.
