Portfolio of Fashion Presentations: Replique L'Otel & Tableau Vivant

Background: These works investigate the relationship between fashion design practice and performance and their material conditions. Replique L’Otel extends Evans’ (2013) history of the relationship in modernity between the form and materiality of a fashion collection and the space in which it is shown. In this project the relationship between the dressing of bodies and spaces is not fortuitous but deliberately staged. Tableaux Vivant questions the lesser rank of fashion within the arts, traditionally conceived, for which fashion objects and scenarios often serve as passive material for photographers such as Man Ray, by reversing this priority and returning the products of his art to its origins in fashion. Contribution: Replique L’Otel sought to explicate the assumption that a fashion presentation is a performance of dressed bodies in an appropriately presented space by designing and presenting printed garments featuring fabric swatches from the Swiss upholstery manufacturer Création Baumann. Set in hotel suites referencing the salon shows of haute couture, the garments uncannily resembled the wallpapers and furnishings, undermining the material difference between the clothed exteriority of the body and the interior surface of the space. Tableau Vivant referenced Man Ray’s appropriation of fashion images, reversing the material and temporal privilege of photography over fashion in modernist practice. Dresses and millinery referencing his technique was part of a triptych along with a film reproducing solarization techniques (HiBall) and photographs replicating the poses of Miller (Coles), both commissioned by S!X. Significance: Replique L’Otel was shown at Melbourne Spring Fashion Week and received in-kind donation ($3000) of rooms by Sofitel. Tableau Vivant was selected for a limited program at the Melbourne Fashion Festival. The projects were selected by panels of experts from the festivals, both of which are the leading cultural programs for fashion in Australia.