Fashion and Movement Conference, 22 – 24 September 2011

Between the wars the Duchess of Windsor (1895/6?-1986) was a quintessential female sartorial modernist. It was an image built on a type of obsessive discipline and iteration of gestures and actions in ‘appearing’ and also in managing a household – ‘she was always in control’, noted her friend Carol Petrie. Photographic and drawn representations of her by Man Ray, Cecil Beaton and Horst played a role in disseminating new silhouettes and profiles for modern women. Yet these images are frozen, and they drain the kinesic element of wearing garments for which she was notable. The Duchess of Windsor brought her clothes into a range of animated performances, which can be reconstructed through film, photography and memoirs. The jewellery collection constituted a type of endless writing over the body, being inscribed with private messages in the prince’s hand-writing by the jeweler-engravers. Their technical and aesthetic innovation lay in their ability to move, to be flexible and pliable, to mould to her clothes and her body. Her initials and quasi-royal cipher were embroidered onto both inner and outer clothing, and incorporated into the structure of her dwelling spaces. This paper will relate the modernity of the Duchess’ sartorial movement to more archaic and emblematic poses. Perhaps her appearance was so compelling because it linked her contemporary life to early-modern traditions of personal jokes and personal allegiances reiterated through the wearing of clothes, craft practices and gift exchange.

The Fringed Zonari of Peloponnesus: More observations on the Classification and the Technology of the String Belts in Greece.
Sofia Tsourinaki, Pireaus

In agricultural societies through Europe, dress has functioned to communicate important attributes of the individual to the community. In rural Greece, women used to attire their bodies in socially – approved garments to signify age, gender, marital status and motherhood. My presentation will focus on a long belt of Peloponnesus, Greece, called zonari. The Peloponnesian zonari has been interpreted by scholars as a modern example of the ancient string skirt, a ritual textile with eye-catching cords and moving tassels worn to indicate the childbearing ability of women. These skimpy and breezy garments appear in clear representations on female statuettes from the «Old European» cultures which existed as far back as the Palaeolithic era. The Peloponnesian zonari is made in a technique called sprang, a process of interworked elements produced on a frame so that the fabric is built up on both ends. Archaeological and linguistic evidence indicates that, in Europe, the technique has been in practice for over three thousand years to make head bands, hairnets and caps. The specified prophylactic characteristics of the belt (unusual structure of sprang technique, long fringed tassels, tie-dyed ornamentation and protective quality of the color) went beyond mere decoration by signaling the woman’s reproductive goals to the community.

Technologies and Techniques of Movement 

Textile Futures. New Materials for Fashion, Design and Architecture.
Bradley Quinn, London

Textiles connect a variety of practices and traditions, ranging from the refined couture garments of Parisian fashion to the high-tech gossamer filaments strong enough to hoist a satellite into the stratosphere. As fashion textiles embrace technology, they transform clothing into wearable computer interfaces by integrating software, communication devices, healthcare systems and speech recognition sensors. As high-performance fabrics are being reconceived as immersive webs and information exchanges, their ability to interface with the built environment has resulted in a new paradigm of lightweight, interwoven architecture. These days, carbon fibres, non-woven fabrics, coated textiles, metallic fabrics and tri-axial meshes are popular alternatives to bricks and mortar, while tensile buildings and pneumatic structures forge a new direction for outdoor structures. Pliable textiles are revolutionising earthquake construction, and geotextiles enable landscape architects to reshape the natural terrain. As today’s textiles change how the body is experienced and how the urban environment is built, they reveal their capacity to transform our world more than any other material.

«This attire must be both practical and becoming»: The Development of Ladies’ Ski Clothing from Skirts to Trousers.
Rebecca Niederhauser, Zurich University of the Arts 

The bourgeois discourse on the human body and its special anthropology of women call for a cultural technology of the body. Fashion and movement are two performative categories capable of constructing gender-specific bodies. Correspondingly, nineteenth-century fashion mirrors the culturally constructed conception of the female sex, which the imagination conceives as inefficient, fragile, and passive. It is not until women were permitted to do sports on hygienic grounds that a debate on the redefinition of femininity began. Sports thus became a site for the reproduction and staging of gender relations. Consequently, such inclusion gave rise to the alignment of sports fashion with specific motion sequences, a development exemplified by the protracted transition from ladies’ skirts to trousers, a shift that documents the changing image of women toward vitality, resilience, and performance. Using the example of the parallel emergence of the rise of winter sports on the basis of hygienic grounds and ladies’ winter sports fashion in the late-nineteenth century, this talk discusses to what extent fashion and movement construct gender-specific body images through their mutually contingent interaction, and thus can be understood as a body technology.

Horse Riding Fashion – Clothes made for movement.
Maren Raetzer, Hanau

Movement and mobility are both part of human life. Along with proper motion on foot, for centuries moving around or indeed travelling on horseback was one of the most important types of movement. Horses were not merely a means of transport, but they were used in warfare, for hunting, and for recreational activities. While medieval men and women probably wore everyday clothing when riding, gradually a particular kind of clothing, better suited to horse movement, began to emerge. Female clothing merits particular attention in this respect, since social requirements for fashion propriety and the need for agility not always coincided, and thus gave rise to specific horseriding attire. This talk explores the space that society afforded women on horseback, not only as seen from afar, but also in terms of fashion. Key questions in this respect thus include: how did special clothing enable movement or purposefully restrict it? Which external effects were thereby achieved? When was leeway granted? What does such leeway tell us about then-contemporary attitudes toward femininity? 

«Not without my sportive corset!» Corsets and Movement in the 1920s.
Josephine Barbe, Technische Universität Berlin 

Sport became tops! The 1920s abounded with people running, dancing, cycling, and swimming. Mobility and the freedom of movement were en vogue and rendered obsolete the conventional, steel-reinforced corset. The sporting woman’s role model was the American girl, who was young – athletic – audacious. By introducing rubber, America thus came to the rescue of corset manufacturers! The corset was now subject to a major overhaul: slip-on design rather than lacing; division into a brassiere and suspender belt; and a new name – «Corselet» – all helped update this previously stiff garment. One of its startling representatives was an American para-rubber corset, whose «fat-reducing» effect promised to shape the female body in sustainable manner: a slim waistline was no longer sought-after, but instead prominent breasts and hips had to be sacrificed to the American teen role model – thereby constituting a radical change of the traditional image of «femininity»! The bathing and beach euphoria of the 1920s became a further triumph for the corset industry. While women’s statutory bathing equipment around 1910 still consisted of several parts, whose precious fabrics were ruined by any contact with water, corset manufacturers scored another coup: the bathing suit. Meanwhile, the burgeoning sports movement had not managed to abolish the corset, since modifying the rigid corset to become a flexible, elastic, and breathable body shaper enabled women to enjoy both mobility and sportiness, besides helping manufacturers do good business.

Clothing as Movement and in Motion.
Christoph Allenspach, Zurich University of the Arts  

Clothing epitomises movement, as that which moves per se: first, as a three-dimensional configuration of interacting fabrics, colours, forms, surfaces, and so forth; secondly, as an «accessory» of the human body, whose movement in turn also moves fabrics; thirdly, as that which is perceived just as it appears, in certain and yet different situations. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s aesthetics of the cinema and its conceptual framework, this talk explores clothing and movement in an attempt to approach complex, spatial, and time-based situations and sequences of events. In doing so, I distinguish various different situations: while in everyday situations the movement of clothing tends to be perceived rather casually, since as a rule habitual body movements interact with ordinary clothes, unusual situations, by contrast, such as the presentation of clothes on the fashion catwalk, in dance or in art, can achieve particular effects. In such situations, clothing takes centre stage, whereby clothes and movement are aligned to achieve certain effects – as a result of deliberate fashioning or staging.

Saturday, 24.09.2011 

Rituals and Clothing

Changing Cloaks – Moving Images. Mary Magdalene and Francis of Assisi.
Silke Geppert, Dommuseum Salzburg

Evidence for the passion theatre in Italy has existed since the mid-thirteenth century. Thus, the late Frondiniano lauds offer an account of Mary Magdalene removing a red cloak in her passion and requesting a black one in its place. This «song of the mantle» subsequently became part of numerous passion plays, and it has since shaped the representation of the «covers» worn by this particular saint. Besides this detail of clothing, Mary Magdalene’s synthesised biography had at its disposal several vestimentary precepts, an entire «chamber or wardrobe of clothes,» as depicted in numerous paintings down the centuries. The central site of these covers and how they have changed over time is indeed a prominent place, where being well-attired is advisable, namely, the cruxification of Jesus Christ. Clothing, as a cover invested with the power of speech, provides scholars with a wealth of hitherto uninvestigated material. That said, it is not self-evident to draw conclusions about social dress from the clothes worn by Mary Magdalene on altarpieces. However, this talk claims that the saint’s «covers» are subject to a specific dress code, which is partly contingent on metaphor, partly on symbolism and legend, and that the attiring and removal of such clothing bears a media-related significance for the saint’s life and its meaning. Francis of Assisi and thereafter Mary Magdalene are the first two saints of penance, and whose «vestimentary» biographies came to move images.

Performative Paraments: On the Functions of Visual Representations of Liturgical Gowns in the Context of the Holy Mass from the Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries.
Barbara Margarethe Eggert, Berlin

More an exception than a rule in the twelfth century, the illustration of liturgical gowns had become firmly established by the fifteenth century. Depending on the type of gown, evidence exists for genuine forms of ornamentation, principles of composition, and a spectrum of motifs. Particularly within the context of the Holy Mass, paraments either enter into dialogue both with their wearers’ body movements and with the spoken word, or they temporarily replace word and action. As indispensable design elements of liturgical actions, the functional potential of textiles is by no means limited to identifying clerical hierarchy and the locating of divine services in the church year, as conveyed by the accidental use of colour. Instead, as I argue, paraments should be interpreted as reality-engendering, representative elements of the performance of liturgical actions and their different levels of meaning. Based on a study of chasubles, dalmatics, and tunics, this talks aims to show how textile iconography not only transformed celebrants but also rendered simultaneous the history, present, and future of salvation. That is to say, I explore how transtemporality was brought about, and how donors knew how to use the performative potential of paraments to embed their memoria.

Performing Cloth(es): Clothing and Ritual in Traditional and Contemporary Africa.
Ursula Helg, University of Vienna

Textiles enjoy great esteem and attract much attention in most African cultures. Traditionally, they play an eminent role in religious, social, and political life. Along with ornamental painting, scarification, plastic-physical changes of the body, and hairstyles, they are one of the oldest and most important visual means of expression. Both processed and unprocessed, they establish meaning and sense, and function as a medium of distinction. Wearing certain items of clothing and particular accessories serves not only to demonstrate identity, social affiliation, wealth, and power, but indeed also to mark transitions in life, such as birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. It is within the context of such ritual occasions and other feasts and ceremonies that the rhetoric of textiles optimally unfolds. Thereby, the body is elaboratedly staged as a speaking image, and changed into a stage. Using selected examples, this talk discusses textiles and fabrics as an ephemeral medium of constant change.

L’Adonis du jour: Men in the Boudoir. 
Anna-Brigitte Schlittler, Zurich University of the Arts 

In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the act of getting up and dressing – le lever du roi – had literally become the centrepiece of the absolutist court and its mechanics. Already in the previous century a visible, both politically and symbolically significant ritualising of «the daily life» of the French kings had begun to emerge before the eyes of a carefully selected public sphere. Manifoldly documented in various written sources, this ceremony disappeared once and for all following Louis XVI’s fall from power. Nevertheless, the daily metamorphosis of the absolutist monarch occasionally still casts its shadow on (French) visual culture to this day. In the following centuries, the motif of men getting up in the morning and dressing erratically runs through various different media and contexts – from the genre image through caricature to film. Not seldom are important contemporary discourses reflected therein, for instance, libertinism or the bourgeois dissociation from the conventional image of aristocratic malehood.

On the Catwalk

How Fashion Photography Started to Move: Paul Poiret, Edward Steichen, and Jacques Henri Lartigue in the Early Twentieth Century.
Joya Indermühle, University of Zurich

In the early twentieth century, a development of fashion images and pictures became apparent that can be traced to a changing notion of fashion on the one hand, and to the rise of photography and film as new media on the other. This constellation led to increasing interest in fashion as a phenomenon taking effect on the moving body. The haute couture designer Paul Poiret played a decisive role in the changing aesthetics of fashion photography. His designs revolutionalised fashion and demanded new visual strategies. Studio photography of the 1910s, which adhered to a canon of static poses and exchangeable arrangements, failed to do justice to Poiret’s avant-gardist fashion designs for the modern woman. In view of fashion photography representing movement, pioneering tendencies emerged from Poiret’s circles. This talk focuses on two such examples: on the one hand, I explore Edward Steichen’s pictorialist photographs, which employ natural lighting, seemingly accidental details, and pose-associating motion sequences, to convey a sense of spontaneity unusual at the time. On the other, I discuss photographs shot outdoors by Jacques Henri Lartigue, whose work features elegant ladies attending glamorous events – often pictured in motion or in conversation, thereby affording these pictures the immediacy of a snapshot.

When Fashion Shows Became Fashionable.
Marie Helbing, Technische Universität Dortmund

Clothing must come alive on the human body and unfold in space so as to take effect on the beholder and the wearer (Lehnert 2001). From this principle, which conceives clothing per se as an inevitable act of performance, we may infer another leitmotif of fashion, namely, that of dynamics. Taken together, performance, change, and tempo are phenomena of modernity, through which they are in turn constituted and rendered tangible (Virilio 1989, Loschek 2007). Fashion shows blend these principles, only to summon them anew each season. This talk considers the displaying of clothing as a media- and dynamic practice. Tracing historical developments from the mid-nineteenth century through current shows, I explore changing staging practices and historically specific influences, as reflected in the presentation of fashion. This synopsis reveals the emergence of displaying fashion on the body and in space, whereby the stage becomes a moving advertising space for fashion designers (Helbing 2010). The history of fashion shows thereby implies aspects of fashion history, since fashion is the principal element of that which is displayed. Along with the catwalk, it forms the continuous basis of staging and production, allowing viewers to immerse themselves in a fairy tale world. Fashion and staging, I argue, are thus equally important.

Controlling Space/Controlling Movement: Theatre, Ritual and the Illuminated Runway Body.
John Potvin, University of Guelph