Leading institution: HEAD – Genève
Project leaders: Aude Fellay, Emilie Meldem
Project team: Aude Fellay, Emilie Meldem
Financing: HES -SO
Co-financing: HEAD – Genève
The project investigates fashion and fashion design through iconic objects drawn from the heyday of the Western fashion and luxury industry (late 90s and early 2000s) via fashion design. The project's critical framework is rooted in various feminist theoretical traditions, the field of critical fashion studies and the lived experience of industry and clothing. Icons are used here to define what we expect from “fashion” and “the fashion system”. The project is divided into two phases. The first is interpretative and critical: a “close reading” of the icons is carried out through their (re)design in order to define, circumscribe and interrogate fashion as a design practice and industry in the light of the criticisms levelled at it; the second is constructive: alternatives to the fashion system are explored both concretely through the creation of objects, and utopically, through “familiar” or non-academic theorizing forms (memes, poems, etc.). Fashion and utopian practices are brought together around the question of desire: if fashion plays a part in shaping desires under and for capitalism, it is indeed one of the terrains from which to contest and reshape desirable horizons. The project will culminate in a collection of objects and a research book.