1,720,988 research outputs found
Dictionary Dressings
No full textThe exhibition highlights an image and text archive composed by Femke de Vries and showcases explorations by practitioners who investigate materiality, form and modes of use. Overlapping and interlinking theory with hands-on making, Dictionary Dressings pushes beyond trends and accepted social and design codes to offer a fundamental shift in perspective that contributes valuable insights to the broader cultural discourse of fashion and dress.
The exhibition brings together practice-led approaches by BLESS, Conny Groenewegen, Elisa van Joolen, Ruby Hoette and participants of the Dictionary Dressings workshop. This ongoing project is captured in a book designed by Hans Gremmen and Corine van der Wal
Standard Practice
Get PDFStandard Practice is concerned with the values and impacts of standardisation. Through an exploration of the methods and discourse of various standards, the research constructs and disseminates alternative standards and reconfigured standards, in order to generate debate about regulation.
Standard Practice is concerned with the values and impacts of standardisation. Through an exploration of the methods and discourses of various industrial and professional standards, this research constructs and disseminates alternative and reconfigured standards in order to generate debate about regulation.
The first part of project created a visual ethnographic study of ‘scale practices’; a curated collection of everyday objects used to demonstrate and compare scale. This collection inspired a series of public lectures examining how scale practices move from the commercial into the cultural arena. The project was then developed into a brief for Masters students; asking them to critically examine the formative and disciplinary standards that delineated their practices, looking for opportunities to creative redirect their practice through shifts in the standards that help form their previous work. Engaging MA Design Expanded Practice students as active, co-researchers allowed the further development and dissemination of the work.
The research was initially framed in relation to a ten- week postgraduate brief led by Corinne Quin and Ruby Hoette, and with the participation of members of the British Standards Institute (BSI) in the spring term of 2018. The preparation, delivery and outcomes of the brief generated a range of prototypical alternative standards which were exhibited at a BSI conference, with a display of prototypes and textual material coming out Quin and Hoette’s brief (December 2018).
An educational case study (Standards and design at Goldsmiths University) was produced and published by the BSI to disseminate the learning from the project. Quin won an BSI Education about Standardization award for the project in 2019.
Subsequently the project was developed by Quin as Sizegiver, an edited collection of photographs capturing ubiquitous demonstrations of scale (2020), and Sizegivers, a visual vernacular of popular artefacts printed true-to-scale by photogram (2020). The publication and photogram are published online, through the researcher’s Instagram and GRO.
The enquiry was supported by a review of standards, including the BSI and International Standards Organisation database whose elements are licensed to a range of professional and industrial bodies, along with diverse historical standards including DIN 476 which led to the dimensions of A4 paper. The researchers recognize that while standards are essential for replicability and quality, the application and effects of standards are also political, as evidenced by the Nazi-era architecture of Ernst Neufert, who extended DIN 476 into the dimensions of social housing. Standards are therefore taken as paths for mediation and speculation, to provide contexts for design interventions that support alternative forms of calibration, expose issues, or counter blind spots.
The project has been disseminated through a range of public outputs aimed towards different audiences, including; Quin, C. (2020) Sizegiver, Aldgate Press [artist’s book] - A visual catalogue of found photographs capturing ubiquitous demonstrations of scale; Quin, C (2020) Sizegiver [art object] and ‘Sizegiver; visual languages of measurement in digital space’ [conference] at the BSI Standards Conference; A Podcast on the Standards Show [podcast]; ‘As Big as A…” [Article], Disegno #36 , The Quarterly Journal of Design, September 2023
MODUS
No full textThis publication marks the launch of MODUS: a first step towards a network for expanded fashion practice. The central thread is a glossary of practices - a developing lexicon of habits, methods, rules, techniques, repetitions and actions - that together, points towards a shared manual for expanded practice. Into this glossary four essays are woven from academics and practitioners revealing questions and challenges as well as suggesting approaches or perspectives that expanded fashion practices might offer.
We hope that this document be read not as a definitive explanation but as a live provocation, that it might be used as a tool to facilitate conversations between the practitioners working in this expanded field and writers/theorists from other disciplines ranging from sociology, cultural and critical theory to politics and economics. We invite you to engage with it as a working model: add notes in the spaces, highlight and draw connections between ideas. It is a blueprint for new ways of thinking, being and doing fashion which forms the foundation of the MODUS project
Dictionary dressings
Get PDFDictionary definitions are unadorned with the adjectives that the fashion industry uses to distinguish its output. Dictionary definitions reveal that, while those within the fashion industry look to more specialist texts to understand their field, laymen’s or lexicographers ’ understanding of a garment is not ornamented by connections to culture, history or style. While the language of the fashion industry helps us to understand the relationship between garments, contexts, and style, dictionary definitions free designers from the historical or cultural contexts that are so important in the connotative meaning of any garment
Unpicking the Fashion System
No full textThis project frames the fashion object as a unique artefact carrying evidence of human activities and transactions. It involves collecting clothing and textiles, tracing their production, patterns of use and layers of value and meaning.
The word ‘collection’ within the fashion context generally refers to a set of garments using variations on a theme of colour, material and details, produced and presented seasonally by a brand or designer. This project began as a way to expand the idea of the ‘collection’ and in doing so reflect on how meaning and value might be generated through clothing. It aims to experiment with alternative understandings of the ‘fashion collection’, specifically to investigate the notion of authorship in relation to a designers practice and more broadly to explore ways in which the fashion object and system are intertwined.
The process used is a reversal of the traditional fashion production - de-constructing garments and through this accepted processes and outcomes. The act of taking apart or unmaking to understand plays a central role. Specifically I use dissection and collage as tools that mirror the fluid and dynamic relationships that constitute fashion (clothing/dress/dressing… ) and the shifting role of the fashion designer. The material ‘undoing’ acts as a metaphor for the mechanisms of the fashion system that can also be unravelled and opened up to the possibility of reformatting
Patternmapping
No full textPatternmapping is an ongoing project that uses the process of pattern cutting and creating garment pattern sheets to register the diversity of personal histories and narratives of a particular community or location through dress. The process at the centre of the project inverts the workings of the fashion industry, taking existing garments as source material for documentation rather than producing new garments, and thus playing with the tensions and contradictions between individual expression, collective identity and reproducibility that are inherently bound up in contemporary (fashion) culture. Patternmapping includes collaborations with various writers and practitioners and experts and manifests in various forms including installations and publications
Conversation Pieces #2 and #3
No full textFashion is often associated with making a statement – Statement pieces, a statement outfit. What if fashion were to be considered in more fluid terms? As a conversation, a discussion, an exchange, a negotiation or even a heart to heart? What insights does this provide for engaging with materials, process, value and authenticity? Based on this premise and taking both definitions of the term as starting points Conversation Pieces explores ‘conversations’ on different levels in fashion.
Conversation Piece #2 and #3 are presented as an interactive installation for the Everything and Everybody as Material Conference 2017. Conversation Piece #2 consists of a series of dissected garments to be rearranged and re-configured both on and off the body to construct and photograph group portraits. The act of unpicking along original seam-lines dissects each garment into loose pieces that quote from and refer to, the form and construction of the garments from which they came and yet are open to re-interpretation in function and placement. The images made using these garment fragments as props form contemporary versions of the 18th Century Conversation Piece painting genre as a document of the various compositions and new garment assemblages formed by participants at the conference
Conversation Pieces #1, #2 and #3
Get PDFDuring the Fashion Research Network Interdisciplinary Symposium I exhibited a series of objects and images from various iterations of the project Conversation Pieces. This project relates to the conference themes of Fashion and Space (particularly Collaboration and Exchange) as well as Fashion
Making and Display
Workshop – Unpicking the Fashion System
Get PDFDuring this workshop participants experiment with methods of dissection and collage as tools with which to actively engage with the fluid and dynamic relationships that constitute fashion and the shifting role of the fashion designer. Unpicking garments along original seam-lines functions as a metaphor for the unravelling of the mechanisms that constitute pervasive fashion practices and production processes. The resulting loose garment elements can then be rearranged into new formations or mappings - proposals for collective ways of engaging with fashion production and a new fashion ‘collection’. The workshop will draw on the concept of the personal wardrobe, within which various styles, brands and materials are brought together. It will activate the tacit knowledge embedded in the practice of curating we each employ in the daily act of dressing. This will inspire and inform a wider discussion around the roles of designer and wearer in contemporary fashion culture. This workshop functions as a platform to collectively explore innovative and inclusive modes of ‘doing’ and ‘being’ fashion
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