Fashion Performance: Materiality, Meaning and Media

RESEARCH BACKGROUND The exhibition concept draws on research into the intertextuality between contemporary experimental fashion and performance design in film and explores the shifts in thinking about cross-disciplinary approaches to theory and practice. In particular there is limited documented research from a practitioner's perspective. The exhibtion focus is on artists who explore the relationship between clothing and the body and the wearer's response to clothing and identified shared methodolgies that investigate the communication of messages and ideas. The intention was to examine this hybrid area of practice to reveal multiple and complex meanings. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION The exhibition included time-based media; garments; installations and a series of live performances bringing together an extraordinary selection of contemporary moving image in one space. The cross-fertilisation of processes and approaches opened up new platforms of communication that are not associated with commercial fashion practice and exposed audiences to new interpretations and different possibilities of understanding the relationship between fashion, art and performance. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE A number of leading international artists and designers contributed to this exhibition including, Hussein Chalayan, BOUDICCA, Bart Hess, Lucy Orta, Maria Biasse and Marie Schiller. As a result Diane Pernet, founder of ASVOFF film festival, invited the curators to submit a selection of films from the exhibition for potential screening at ASVOFF in Paris in October 2013.