Ready-to-Wear

<p dir="ltr">Background </p><p dir="ltr">Ready-to-Wear proposes that while fashion-images typically offers wearers a narrow frame of representation to fit themselves into, that they may reimagine these images by wearing them. As fashion theorist Anne Hollander (Seeing Through Clothes, 1978) has written ‘people see themselves taking their place inside the accustomed frame of how things look – something most commonly learned nowadays from (the) camera.’ However, as practice-based researcher Ellen Sampson (Worn, 2020) has recently pointed out ‘while fashion and fashioning are predominantly visual practices … of looking and of mimicry,’ in contrast ‘wearing is an active process of appropriation, alteration and compromise.’ The transformative power of wearing is also explored through the critical fashion practices of Jane Morley (Precarious Bodies, 2018), Ulrik Martin Larsen (Choreographed Dress, 2011) and Chet Bugter (Bodies Making Meaning, ongoing). </p><p dir="ltr">Contribution </p><p dir="ltr">Ready-to-Wear was an interactive fashion exhibition, produced by Remie Cibis, that explored how everyday people might reimagine fashion-images by wearing them. Attendees at the exhibition were invited to compose their own fashion-images using a selection of 40 wearable -images; that had been sourced from current magazines, printed onto silk-satin, and fitted with adjustable gold chains. These interventions, made by Cibis, transformed the relationships of the wearers to these fashion-images from passive and visual, to material and participatory. This allowed the wearers to redefine these images and to fashion their own representations from them. </p><p dir="ltr">Significance </p><p dir="ltr">Ready-to-Wear was shown at KINGS Artist-Run, a Melbourne-based gallery funded by the City of Melbourne. The work was peer reviewed by the gallery’s programming committee and selected for the Melbourne Fashion Festival 2022. The work was later curated by Rosanna Li and Marissa Wood for the Melbourne Spring Fashion Week: Layering Art & Fashion Capsule 2022 at Emporium, Melbourne.</p>