Fashion and Modernity

The Fashion & Modernity project, is a major collaboration with Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and is funded by an AHRB large grant until 2004. Through a range of interlocking collaborative and individual studies resulting in publications, symposia, conferences and exhibitions this project will investigate the relation of Western fashion to modernity from the late eighteenth century to the present by establishing a critical relationship between theories of modernity and contemporary cultural theory and practice in fashion. The project leader is Caroline Evans, Senior Research Fellow, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

The project is focused on the development of consumer culture in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, it aims to scrutinise the relationship of modernity to technology, industrialization and consumption, examining their effects both on subjectivities (raising questions of body and identity, be it national, gendered, posthuman, etc) and on appearances (raising questions of the importance of fashionable appearances in periods of rapid transformation).

The project has two aspects. The first is collaborative work where a large group of individual researchers will come together for a symposium and conference, resulting in two group publications. The symposium will focus on history and theory and the conference will address the interface of history and theory with contemporary practice.
The second aspect involves the work of a smaller group of individual researchers, more specifically focused on fashion, where outputs are books, an exhibition and a practice-based PhD project.

Examples of single-author books to be published by LCF and CSM staff as part of the work of the project include:
Christopher Breward, Fashioning London: Dress, Space and Identity 1750-1970 (Berg Publishers, 2003) accompanied by a major exhibition of the same title at the Museum of London in 2003;
Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (Yale University Press, 2003) and Living Dolls: A History of the Fashion Model 1850-2000 (publisher to be confirmed, 2005);
Alistair O’Neill, Mapping Fashion in Modern London 1870-1995 (Reaktion Books, 2002) and Tommy Nutter and the Disproportionate Suit (2004)

Other projects culminating in chapters in the two published collections entitled Fashion and Modernity (2004) and Fashion: History/Theory/Practice (2005) include:
Andrea Stuart: Queen Henrietta: 17th century masques, self-fashioning and gender;
Caroline Dakers: the development of the retail haberdashery market in the early 19th century;
Kitty Hauser: a critical article and performance based on the work and studio of Degas, in whose paintings women’s participation in fashion is seen as a kind of theatre of the city;
Becky Conekin: surrealist and fashion photography as symptomatic of modernity in the post-war work of photographer Lee Miller;
Andrew Hill: the experience of modernity and of fashion in the film ‘Performance’;
Frances Geesin: on her collaborative work as a textile designer with the electronics firm Philips.
Suzanne Lee: ‘Digital Dress: Fashioning the Future’;
Jamie Brassett: ‘Spaghettification’: the ways in which technoproducts & bodies can interact in order to ensure that subjective & objective entropy is lessened, & emergent possibilities heightened;
and chapters by Judith Clark on curating, Jane Harris on digital technologies, Shelley Fox on design and Sharon Baurley on textile design and new technology.

Funding from the AHRB for the whole project amounts to almost £300,000 over three years.

Contact:
Dr Rob Lutton
London College of Fashion
20 John Princes Street
London W1G 0BJ, tel. 020 7514 7690 email research@fashion.arts.ac.uk

http://www.arts.ac.uk/5911.htm