“Superheroes”
An
Artistic Thesis
Tamara
Leacock
Draft Proposal: July 2013
Fashion throughout history has been a salient tool for creating,
segmenting, democratizing and subverting social space. Fashion, especially with
the advent of couture houses losing their commercial stronghold in the
aftermath of World War II and the rise of mass fashion consumption, has become
largely a symbolic enterprise. While celebrity image creation is
centuries old, the contemporary cult of celebrity has a new tenor of inspiring
others to mimic celebrity style, while also attempting to become celebrities
themselves. What I am interested in exploring in this artistic thesis is how
hacking or “reverse engineering” the tropes of celebrity image creation and the
social cues on gender, identity and class they illuminate, can be used as a
platform for ethical fashion. The definition of ethical fashion that I use is
fashion that considers the “triple bottom line”- fashion that considers people,
profit and the planet.
Celebrity attire makes fashion appealing. In the 1880s,
celebrities like Sarah Bernhardt made gender bending and the idea of the
liberated woman appealing. By now, the liberated woman has become a trope. How
can we use the model of celebrity culture, which effectively engages our
imagination, and interrogates our underlying associations with social,
environmental, and class identity, to make ethical fashion appealing? How can
we move beyond the celebrity vehicle? What do the pitfalls of the celebrity
vehicle show us? What are the ethical fashion proponents saying and doing? And
how can we be more innovating and inspiring instead of shaming?
Various authors well known within the circle of the ethical
fashion industry provide helpful suggestions on how to approach ethical fashion
in a meaningful and thorough manner. Elizabeth Cline in Overdressed: The
Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion provides both a factually thorough
and narratively personal account on mass consumption, providing figures and
facts on everything from domestic seamstress labor wages and the production
lead times needed for Chinese mass market manufacturers to copy or “knock off”
independent designers, to her own analysis of her own consumption habits
evident in her own overflowing closet of cheap, disposable fashion. In a personal
voice stemming from her challenging relating her own understandings of self
with her closet of cheap, mass produced fashions, Cline offers a multilayered
class analysis of the contemporary fashion industry, referencing historical
analyses of other authors that documented the synergetic relationship between
rising incoming levels and an increasing interest in mass market, department
store fashion, as opposed to independent design. Furthermore, she explores the
ways in which the popularity of the conventional silhouettes of mass fashion
with an increasing culture of leisure replacing home sewing craftsmanship has
led to the creation of a passive consumer, the very passive consumer upon which
the elitist celebrity-driven fashion brands rely. Cline argues,
As people move away from
making their own clothes, general public knowledge of garment construction
faded. Through the connection is not entirely direct, the loss of sewing skills
happened in tandem with the public accepting simpler and simpler fashions,
until today- where we have collectively accepted the two-panel knit creation
that is a T-shirt as fashion…The less skill involved in making clothes, the cheaper
it becomes, and the less we are willing to pay for it. The more basic clothes
are, the less it matters where they’re made. A tank top can be made anywhere in
the world...”
After several chapters
of explicating the realities of slave wages, lack of appreciation for
craftsmanship and the contemporary addictions to disposable fashion, Cline
proposes a solution and an improved future of fashion in ethical and DIY
clothing. Cline resolves by the end of her text that creating fashion and
fashion systems that invite consumers to have an intimate relationship with
their garments, either through the intimacy engendered from having made or
mended the garment themselves, or through granting the garment a narrative and
subjecthood will be the way to improve the future of fashion. “Superheroes”
will thus build upon this proposal by inviting collaborators to both engaged in
the act of re-craftsmanship and narrative creation through the narrative-laden
subtext of the superhero trope.
Kate Fletcher in Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design
Journeys provides less of a personal account and more of a factual summary
on fashion’s environmental impact, from fiber cultivation to retail
consumption, and potential changes or interventions that both designer and consumer
can take to ameliorate that impact. Divided into chapters based on ethical
fashion solutions from manufacturer to consumer, Fletcher thoroughly explores
the wide range of interventions taken at all levels of the fashion product life
cycle to make fashion environmentally sustainable. Such interventions include
opting for the production of fibers that require less energy intensive and
water intensive usages to consumption practices that inspired more so by
recycling garments that relying upon the consumption of newly created ones.
While this artistic thesis will be to demonstrate the ways in which narrative
subjecthood in garments can inspire social change, the larger, industry impact
of the thesis will be to contribute to the larger efforts of supporting the widespread
acceptance or “stewardship” of ethical fashion. Fletcher’s text provides an
informative summary of the many factors that will be considered in the creation
of the capsule fashion collection, upon which the artistic engagement of the
thesis will be based.
When considered alongside the heavily factual industry texts of
Kline and Fletcher, the essays from scholar and self-proclaimed “hacktivist”
Otto von Busch provide the balance needed to connect these industry based texts
and factual based social analyses to more creative approaches to reengaging
social information. Otto von Busch in his seminal research “Fashion-able”
provides the blueprint for a new and revised role for designers: “ it is a role
that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, turned and
shared among many participants as a form of social activism.” He further
explains, “In this practice, the designer engages participants to reform
fashion from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a collective experience
of empowerment, in other words, to make them become fashion-able.” The role of the designer
is enabling and empowering the individual, who is re-designated as having the
role of co-creator, rather than passive consumer.
In addition to considering writers and texts of the ethical
fashion industry, I have also explored the theorists of image-based theoretical
concepts such as celebrity culture and dandyism. Pamela Church Gibson in her
text Fashion and Celebrity Culture illuminates the ways in which celebrity
culture has continued to deeply impact our contemporary understandings of
material and visual culture. Gibson in particular highlights the ways in which
celebrity support of brands and fashion aesthetics influences in particular the
ways in which women relate to their bodies and social corporeal worlds in ways
that are not often enough acknowledged in fashion studies. This text was
particularly helpful because in creating an image and fashion based thesis, I
must consider the ways in which “fashion” as a medium and genre is often
filtered through celebrity image creation.
Artist and web developer, Giana Gonzalez is an example of how one
may approach using branding and celebrity vocabulary to use fashion as a
vehicle for social justice. In his text, “Engaged Design and the Practice of
Fashion Hacking,” von Busch articulates his concept of fashion hacking using
Giana Gonzalez’s “Hacking Couture” practice as an example. Gonzalez, reframing
her web coding practices into the vocabulary of fashion and celebrity culture,
creates community based workshops where she assists participants in breaking
down the image vocabulary of renowned fashion and luxury brands and invites
participants to re-communicate these brand elements in the expression of their
own identities. In essence, Gonzalez’s work serves as a vehicle for
democratizing fashion by breaking down the barriers of exclusion that fashion
brands build to quarantine their image. The work of Gonzalez and von Busch help
to challenge the control that elitist celebrity culture, as contextualized by
Gibson, works to have around the expression of social identity.
Lastly, similar to Gonzalez and von Busch, contemporary dandies
and in particular the black dandies of Monica Miller’s Slaves to Fashion provide another enriching example for the ways in
which challenging the elitism and reclaiming the vocabulary of branded
sartorial expression can be a powerful vehicle for social justice. Miller in
her seminal text explores the ways in which enslaved Africans and people of
African descent in the early 19th and 20th centuries
reclaimed the historical figure of the sartorially rebellious dandy to reclaim
their rights to personhood via self-expression. Through their appropriation of
high end western garb, African Americans effectively challenged the social
discriminations of their personhood by dressing in ways that would inspire
pride and support self-expression. Unlike celebrity culture and elitist fashion
branding, which survives by usurping the adoration of the public in support of
a few, fashion hacking and dandyism by disenfranchised social groups are
methods of democratizing access to the vocabulary of visual culture and
sartorial expression that will support a cultural environment of aesthetically
expressed social justice and hopefully social change.
I intend to use these methodologies by creating a series of
artistic interventions that build upon my independently fashion design practice
while considering how that practice can have a social impact similar to what
has been generated through these fashion hacking and dandyism models. The
artistic thesis, entitled “Superheroes” will be a capsule collection, fashion
editorial, and mixed media installation that will invite participants to use
recycled garments from their own closets to recreate themselves as their own
“superhero.” Beyond encouraging participants to merely create highly fashioned
or “dandified images,” based upon the subtle vocabulary of celebrity driven
high fashion, this artistic project will invite participants into a more
imaginative space by not only creating their idea bodies and personas through
fashion but creating an ideal that is beyond the vocabulary of elitist
celebrity culture, the superhero.
Inspired by social justice fashion project, Articulo 8, “Superheroes” will staged in multiple “artistic
actions.” Fashion designer, social researcher, and former student of von Busch,
Lucia Cuba, created in 2012 a fashion capsule collection to raise awareness of
Articulo 8, the obscured law of forced sterilization instituted in her native
Peru. The capsule collection was staged and restaged in multiple settings or,
as she refers to it, activist “actions” to increase the audience and exposure
for the information. The actions included a conventional runway show, an art
installation, numerous editorials, and a think tank for invited designers to
discuss how clothing, if treated and activated like subjects, can help to
inspire new ideas on gender, identity, and thus lead to social change. Inspired
by this model, “Superheroes” as an artistic thesis will be showcased in several
forms including a traditional fashion show, a photography based visual art
installation, a fashion editorial, a digital fashion editorial and a
practice-based graduate conference work group. The first iteration of the
project will take place at the Hemispheric Institute’s graduate student
conference, the Hemi GSI Convergence, during a workgroup that I will lead with
PhD candidate and artistic colleague, Kelly McKay of the University of
Minnesota on how active participation on the sartorial game of dress up can
inspire new ideas around gender and social identity. In addition to exploring the
papers and proposals from the participants, we will invite to bring in used
clothing, which will be altered and changed in the formation of their own “superheroes.”
As the conference takes place in the celebrity-saturated city of Los Angeles,
the workshop will also include an editorial shoot with potential collaborations
with a local celebrity stylist. While “Superheroes” seeks to illuminate new
paradigms of sartorial expression beyond celebrity-referencial vocabularies,
the project, in an effort to remain legible to larger audiences, will still
remain tangentially related to celebrity-based sartorial vocabularies.
A subsequent action wlll include the publishing of the fashion
editorial photos of “Superheroes” into a magazine, alongside essays from the
participants about the social identities that they sought to create. The
purpose of this fashion editorial will be to use the inspiring and provocative
outlet of the fashion magazine editorial to speak to larger social issues while
providing the models with greater opportunities of subjecthood by publishing
their essays, a form of acknowledgement not often extended in fashion
publishing, where models that are not celebrities are often rendered anonymous
and voiceless. Using my current position as fashion editor of print and
digital, New York and Rio based lifestyle publication, The River Revista, I will be able to ensure that the photos are
able to appear in both print and digital methods. The digital iteration of this
project will also include the use of a new technology, SCALAR, a new digital
resource that will provide an easier platform for integrating the digital
networked based methods of fashion social justice utilized by Gonzalez and von
Busch, while also extending the audience for how fashion can be used as a
vehicle for social change through encouraging practices of imaginative
subjecthood. A third iteration of the project will include a traditional
fashion presentation which, after the garments are engaged through these
subject-heavy non-traditional means, will be depersonalized again in order to
better illuminate the subjects that were once activating them. The final
iteration of the artistic thesis will be an art installation in which all
stages of the project will be curated in a single, gallery space to illuminate
the process and breadth of how the concept of the sartorially expressed “superhero”
can invite and inspire conversations on both ethical fashion and social change.
Bibliography
Cline, Elizabeth L.
2012. Overdressed: The Shockingly High
Cost of Cheap Fashion. Peguin: New York.
Fletcher. Kate. 2008.
Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys. Routledge: London.
Gibson, Pamela Church.
2008. Fashion and Celebrity Culture. Berg:
London.
Miller, Monica. 2009. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the
Styling of Black Diaspora Identity. Duke University Press: Durham.
von Busch, Otto. 2008. Fashion-able: Hacktivism and Engaged Fashion
Design. University of Gothenberg: Gothenberg.
von Busch, Otto. 2008. Post-script to Fashion-able. University
of Gothenberg: Gothenberg.
von Busch, Otto. 2009. “Engaged
Design and the Practice of Fashion Hacking: The Examples of Giana Gonzalez and
Dale Sko.” In Fashion Practice. Vol
1. Issue 2. Berg: London.
von Busch, Otto, Gisela
Aguilar et al. 2012. Just Fashion:
Critical Cases on Social Justice in Fashion. Self Passage: Gothenberg.
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