Exhibitions off the Beaten Path: Fashion at the Time of Fascism

The exhibition Fashion At The Time Of Fascism - Italian Modernist Lifestyle 1922-1943 examines the relation between fashion, modernism and Fascism and will be on view through June 18. Although, not off the beaten path geographically, as it is in London, the exhibition is housed within a smaller and relatively new venue, the Fashion Space Gallery at the London College of Fashion.

The exhibition is curated by the Italian scholars Mario Lupano and Alessandra Vaccari and it is based on their honominous book. It is, in fact, described as a visual essay. (For those who miss the exhibition, the book, which is described in a New Yorker review as "handsome," can be easily found in Italian and English.)

Like the book, the exhibition, which is comprised of a range of media from actual garments to fashion and film magazines, is organized around four main concepts: Measurement, Model, Mark and Parade. Those are described in the literature accompanying the exhibition as follows:

"Measurement investigates the aspects of modernism which are closer to the concepts of order, rationality, scientific rigor and technical control. Rationalization in the productive processes of fashion is exalted by the use of beauty machines and sartorial instruments to measure the body, such as the one Domenico Caraceni patented.

Model is more directly connected with the discourse on “types” and lifestyles and is devoted to the dress code and models of style that become reference points for the whole epoch: from the iconic value of the “duce” to the stars of Hollywood and Italian cinema.

Mark analyses the connections between fashion and the construction of identity processes: from search for originality in national products, to authority of fashion creators, to the attempt of structuring an Italian fashion system.

Parade deals with the catwalk rite in its elements of modernist seriality and is concerned with fashion display in exhibitions, shop windows, cities and parades. In order to better grasp the theoretical configuration elaborated in the book and consequently organize a critical discourse on the modernist conception of fashion design in Italy, the exhibition includes the conceptual maps which, for each single session, identify the relationships between modernist ideas on the one hand and fashion practices on the other."

Francesca

The Concise Dictionary of Dress

Pretentious 4, photo by Julian Abrams.

The exhibition "The Concise History of Dress" recently opened at the Blythe House—the V&A repository for their reserve collections of furniture, textiles, dress, ceramics, jewellery and fine arts. Commissioned by Artangel, the exhibition is curated by fashion curator Judith Clark and the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.

The exhibition consists of an hour long tour through the building and re-describes clothing in terms of anxiety, wish and desire, as a series of definitions created by Phillips and accompanying installations designed and assembled by Clark:

"Phillips’ definitions for words commonly associated with fashion and appearance – such as armoured, conformist, essential, provocative – were paired with eleven installations created by Clark on a walk through this vast building, from its rooftop to an underground coal bunker. "

We have yet to visit the exhibition, but it does sound both evocative and innovative in its curatorial and display choices, so it's certainly not to be missed. It is also accompanied by a book, with photographs by Norbert Schoerner.

Conformist-3. Both Images: The Concise Dictionary of Dress Judith Clark and Adam Phillips. Commissioned and produced by Artangel in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum. Photo: Julian Abrams.

Fashion Projects Launch/Screening Event!

Boudicca, Film Still, Essay, 2009

The M.A. Fashion Studies At Parsons The New School for Design presents:

A screening to celebrate the new issue of Fashion Projects. The screening features a range of short experimental films on the topic of fashion and memory--the topic of the new issue. They include films by the British-based fashion design duo Boudicca, Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf, designer Shelley Fox, and fashion photographer Laura Sciacovelli. The screening is curated by Tamsen Schwartzman and Francesca Granata.

The screening will take place Friday the 23rd of April at 6 pm in the Wollman Hall, 65 West 12th Street. (PS: It will start promptly!). A reception will follow the screening.

The event is free and open to the public. Below is the official flyer: Feel free to circulate it.

SP10 PDF Fashion Projects

SP10 PDF Fashion Projects Event Invite

Fashion Projects #3: Editorial Letter

by Francesca Granata

Back Cover: Eugenia Yu, "Tie Dress" from Father Collection

In thinking of clothes as passing fashions, we repeat less than half-truth. Bodies come and go; the clothes which have received those bodies survive. They circulate though secondhand shops, through rummage sales, through the Salvation Army; or they are transmitted from parent to child, from sister to sister, from brother to brother, from sister to brother, from lover to lover, from friend to friend. (Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things” The Yale Review 1993 vol. 81. no. 2, pp. 35-50)

The idea of dedicating an issue of Fashion Projects to the topic of fashion and memory started while reading Peter Stallybrass’s “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things,” an engaging and lyrical essay on the author’s remembrance of his late colleague Allon White through the garments White wore.

Stallybrass’s piece elucidates people’s intimate relations with clothes—i.e. their materiality, their smell and creases—and the inextricable relations between clothes and memory. It traces the way in which clothes retain "the history of our bodies." Wearing White’s jacket at a conference, the author describes the way clothes are able to trigger strong and vivid memories: "He was there in the wrinkles of the elbows, wrinkles that in the technical jargon of sewing are called 'memory'; he was there in the stains at the very bottom of the jacket; he was there in the smell of the armpits."

My interest in the topic was then piqued while sitting in on a class on fashion curation taught by Alistair O’ Neil at the London College of Fashion, where a number of students curated a fashion exhibition comprised of used gowns and top hats, their main value resting not in their design or historical relevance to fashion in history, but in their being second (or maybe third or fourth) hand, thus retaining intricate yet irretrievable history in their signs or wear, their stains, their scents. This lyrical exhibition, titled "A Walk in the Wardrobe" and staged in an old and seemingly abandoned space, was a reminder of the importance of reconnecting with the materiality of cloth and clothes.

This issue’s focus on clothes and memory dovetails with attempts to promote sustainability within the fashion industry. It invokes a counter-tendency in contemporary fashion which reinstates the importance of materiality and emotional connections to our garments in the hope to slow down the accelerated cycles of consumption and discard promoted by current fashion models. As Stallybrass points out, moments of emotional connections with clothes and cloth become, in fact, rare in the accelerated rhythm of contemporary societies: "I think this is because, for all our talk of the 'materialism' of modern life, attention to material is precisely what is absent. Surrounded by an extraordinary abundance of materials, their value is to be endlessly devalued and replaced."

The various contributors to Fashion Projects explore this theme in disparate ways. Sarah Scaturro, textile conservator of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, revisits, together with photographer Keith Price, the museum’s textile collection and her intimate relation with it. She also discusses curatorial practices with Judith Clark, whose exhibition “Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back”—based on Caroline Evans’s theories—is an exploration of the complex temporalities of fashion. Tamsen Schwartzman interviews Tanya Marcuse on her photographic work in fashion archives, while fashion designer Shelly Fox discusses her own design and textiles practice. Erica Weiner recounts her use of other people’s memories via old photographs and human hair for the making of her jewelry, while fledgling designer Eugenia Yu tells Erin Lindstrom of her collections based on her family memories. Finally, Lisa Santandrea revisits North America’s industrial past and obsolete technologies, as they remain embodied in knits produced by the now-defunct Ohio Knitting Mills.

Fashion Projects #3

Cover Image: Shelley Fox, "Foundation," Study and Telephone Room, Belsay Hall: Northumbria, 2004. Photo: Keith Paisley.

Fashion Projects 3 is out and will be available in newstands and bookstores in North America, as well as on our website! The issue focuses on the topic of fashion and memory and was inspired by a moving essay on the topic by Peter Stallybrass. It features interviews with fashion curator Judith Clark, fashion designer Shelley Fox, photographer Tanya Marcuse and much more—and was beautifully designed by Shannon Curren.

We hope you'll enjoy our new issue, as we much as we enjoyed making it!