Projects

Playing Dress Up:  Fashion, Gender, and the Politics of Embodiment

To participate, please application instructions here.

Co-conveners: Tamara Leacock (NYU), Kelly McKay (University of Minnesota), Sean Metzger (UCLA), Jack Halberstam (USC)How do our garments and adornments shape our ways of seeing and being in the world?  This working group takes “fashion” as a starting point from which to initiate a critical and artistic dialogue around questions of politics, identity, queerness, and embodiment.  We seek participants to join us in beginning a collective exploration of how fashion functions as a technology of identity.  We are interested in the political potential of adornment, affective attachments to garments, and the relationship between adornment and embodiment.  As we approach these topics, we are deeply committed to engaging play as a mode of investigation.  We welcome imaginative contributions from scholars, artists, and activists working in fashion studies.  We envision the work group as both a discussion forum and an experimental, artistic research laboratory, a place for sharing our projects-in-process but also for making new work together.  We hope that our collective conversations will speak to the emerging field of fashion studies with a voice distinctly situated in a hemispheric perspective, recognizing the United States and Latin America as playing key roles in shaping the realities of the global fashion economy.  Broadly speaking, we ask: how do we understand the complex relationships between people and clothing?  What kinds of political, social, emotional, and other attachments shape our relationships to our garments?  As we combine our practical work as artists with our scholarly work, we eagerly seek collaborators and interlocutors in this experimental process.  Come play dress-up with us!

A New Earth: Life Post 9/11

A New Earth: Life after 9/11 seeks to explore 9/11 from the perspective of the student generation, the generation who came up into adulthood in a post 9/11 world, a generation feeling increasingly alienated by this nation, and seeking to shape their American identity in lieu of the "War on Terror." It is a fashion, it is video, it is a series of photos, and it is a collage of textiles. The project was born August 2011. Nonetheless, with the emergence of the North East’s first Earth Quake, Tropical rainstorm, and finally Occupy Wall Street, the project seemed evermore timely giving the emerging energy of the locale, now with the impending election. The participants involved are planting the seed for a movement of conscious and resilient living, responding to 9/11 in a way that is honest and independent of group*think. 

*Currently seeking participants for this project. If you got a voice and a perspective that you could share with us, please email: info@reciclagem-themovement.com. 'Obrigada.


Tribal Renaissance

Josephine Baker as a transnational performer and fashion icon managed to convert the branding of “tribal ingénue” into a source of black and female empowerment that enabled her to take over the cultural center of Europe and become, at that time, one of the most photographed women in the world. Josephine Baker succeeded in transforming a derogatory term intended to amalgamate different cultures into a platform that continues to inspire women to this day. Through the avenues of the wearable, functional and visual art forms, “Tribal Renaissance” seeks to create a new visual language of “tribal” imagery, with Josephine Baker’s image as its text, freedom as its song and empowerment as its narrative.

  VIHDA Means Life

 Through a series of six stages: Heartbeat, Sterility, Disease, Water, Rebirth, and Carnival, this fashion-art play portrays through garment, movement, and body a figurative reflection on one woman's internal journey re-forming her relationship with her body after discovering that she is HIV positive. HIV is a virus that has affected many, including an important woman in my life and family, and indirectly, mine. This project reflected my first attempt to produce a fashion show fundraiser of which the "cause" fundraiser for was the central subject and focus of the design and production. It was not good enough for me to just "raise awareness." It was essential for me to raise consciousness and self love to a place where it directly informed my artistic process. The audience, models, participants and I enjoyed this celebration of LIFE- at the end of the day, that is what "vida" and VIHda means!