Fragments of an aesthetic

<p>Fragments of An Aesthetic is an investigation situated in the discipline of fashion design. In this research, the locus of aesthetics is the word, with the research asking how the aesthetic dimension of word compositions might inform an exploration of an aesthetic: the surface appearance of objects. The interest in an aesthetic emerges from L-R's (the fashion designer) practice where decoration animates the design process and influences the arrangement of elements and the structuring of forms.</p> <p>Roland Barthes's proposition that the rhetorical and metaphorical nature of words is the true signification of fashion prompted L-R's creative investigation. Here; however, the research observes and analyses L-R's play with words in the pursuit of an aesthetic and not a semiotic analysis of representations of fashion. To this extent, it studies a suspended moment of ideation in a fashion design practice where an aesthetic deemed as unknown or undetermined, is imagined, composed and translated. It regards the search for an aesthetic as a search for meaning and is illuminated by theories, philosophies and practices, including those of Adam Phillips and Richard Serra, whose common thread is that a search for an aesthetic as meaning originates from a sensuous experience of words.</p> <p>The research sought to find how the qualities of the words utilised in aesthetic exploration might resist a denotative/literal translation and tend towards a connotative/metaphorical aesthetic. Several experiments: Damage, Aesthetics of Arrangement, Making Meaning/ Making Sense, and Les Mots et Les Images are moments where the designer, posing as a designer-author (producer) and designer-reader (perceiver), used words as objects to think with, as materials to give a perceptible form to ideas, and as mediums that mediate between the designer-author and designer-reader.</p> <p>Within the experiments, L-R composed word-fragments and image-fragments as translations of imagining; the designer collects and composes fragments as cues and hints of an aesthetic. The fragments are not broken-off from something, but in this moment of ideation they are incomplete; they are, conceptually, modular ideas whose arrangements point towards the development of a concept.</p> <p>In Fragments of An Aesthetic, L-R has interpreted post-design process philosophies, theories and practices relating to the rhetorical and metaphorical qualities of words and the aesthetics of objects and applied the understandings he gained to advance his design process. L-R, reflecting on the researchers influences on a moment of his ideation, considers the potential to fashion design as residing in how words can be utilised in ways other than to communicate `fashion-ness'. In searching for an aesthetic, the designer-author, using words, can originate an authorial style. Then, by stepping into the role of a reader, the aesthetic dimension of these compositions can be translated and developed into an image-based aesthetic.</p>