PhD Workshop on Fashion and the Body

27 May 2015
Xhosa ibulukwe (ARTEFACT SAM 14395) is a re-purposed, beaded pair of vintage off-white men’s naval or sporting shorts, from Iziko Museum’s Anthropology Collection. Photo: Erica de Greef
27 May 2015

 

To celebrate the 15-year anniversary of sociologist Joanne Entwistle’s canonical fashion studies text, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (2000), The Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University hosted a three-day workshop from 5-7 May 2015 for international PhD students titled “Fashion and the Body”. APC doctoral student Erica de Greef reports on the workshop:
   
The group consisted of fourteen scholars at various stages of doctoral study from institutions in the UK, USA, Canada, Denmark and Sweden, and myself, from South Africa. We presented and discussed our current research with the convening professors Caroline Evans (Central Saint Martins), Joanne Entwhistle (King’s College London) and Andrea Kollnitz (Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University). This workshop approach allowed for engaged debates, lively discussions, and the possibility of interrogating the conceptual challenges of our own work.

I presented a paper that reflects my initial research into the "absent bodies" in the dress/fashion archives of Iziko Museums, a component of my thesis Sartorial Disruption: Investigating the history and disposition of dress/fashion collections and associated museum practices, as a means to imagine the postcolonial fashion museum. My process draws on current issues in fashion collection and curation in museums internationally, as I follow the "traces" found in various garments in the collections to explore notions of temporal entanglement and the inscribed colonial legacies left behind in them.  

Archival objects and their display were the focus of three other research papers, each drawing on the complex relationship between material, disembodied objects and subjective, active bodies. Bethan Bide investigated the material evidence of counter identities to those in dominant post-war narratives at the Museum of London, and the role and agency of the individual in the making of place, in this case the making of London as a fashion capital. Julie Ripley used the ephemerality of surf culture to think about new archival approaches to re-imagine the "absent or missing materials" in the British Museum of Surfing, in the south west of England. And, Lucy Gundry interrogated the intimate and embodied responses of visitors at fashion exhibitions in museums with the "Do Not Touch" rule, as viewers attempt to overcome this tactile barrier through their own tacit, haptic memories. 

Another key theme in the workshop was the co-relationship of media and the construction, manipulation or suppression of fashioned bodies, with papers that addressed "fat", queer, masculine, perfected, and "moder" identities as imagined via regimes of discipline and dress. One further paper presented a critique on the hegemonic, Western discourse underpinning fashion design education, and the challenges of questions of race, class and culture inscribed in pedagogical frameworks. Finally two papers addressed the material object of fashion, through an interrogation of design, form and function, with questions raised in relation to the embodied nature of dress, and the social situatedness of the practices of fashion. 

Although the workshop offered a critical platform for presenting current research in the context of tensions that play out between the subjective (identity) and objective (materiality), the scope of the work still remains firmly located within a Euro-centred hegemony.  My study on the other hand is an instance of new fashion/dress research speaking from the South. At the conclusion of the workshop, we discussed different opportunities and possibilities for jointly publishing an edited volume or journal with the support of the Stockholm University.