The Fashion Edit

<p dir="ltr">Background </p><p dir="ltr">Malcolm Barnard (Fashion and (the) Image, 2007) writes that fashion and dress are materials from which individuals construct self-images, however, as Tansy Hoskins (Stitched Up, 2014) observes, most fashion items are produced by fashion brands, not individuals. The question of how everyday people may represent themselves through fashion is , thus, a key concern for fashion-practice as Caroline Evans & Minna Thornton (Fashion, Representation, Femininity, 1991) insist. Similar concerns are addressed in the work of practitioners such as Martin Margiela (various) who engages strategies for resisting the fashion industry’s representations and in the work of Anouk Beckers (JOIN Collective, 2020) who encourages individuals to participate in garment making and design. </p><p dir="ltr">Contribution </p><p dir="ltr">In this interactive workshop Cibis proposes editing and redactions as strategies for personalising mass-produced fashion-garments to better represent individuals. Participants in the workshop were invited to redact details from pre-made garments by applying black patches over unwanted areas. The individual interventions were documented photographically and as editorial statements on swing-tags. The wide range of results produced suggested that editing has significant and wide-ranging potential in the context of self-representation through dress.</p><p dir="ltr">Significance </p><p dir="ltr">This workshop was accepted for inclusion in the 2019 AAANZ Conference at the University of Auckland. The workshop was submitted as part of Cibis’s successful application to the selective Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers Masterclass run by esteemed beauty historian Jill Burke. At the conference, the workshop received a high level of interest and engagement, especially from other creative-practice researchers and resulted in an invitation to write about the work shop from Linda Tyler of Context: Dress/Fashion/Textiles, the journal of Costume and Textile Association of New Zealand which was later published in 2020.</p>