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Wearable Technology

During the summer of 2014, the Barbican staged its Digital Revolution – an exhibition that celebrated technology. From the humble home computer of the 1970s, to innovative special effects and interactive artworks of the present and future, it highlighted the way technology has come to immerse itself within, and drive, almost every aspect of daily life. Fashion is by no means immune to this convergence, and the show duly acknowledged this, by featuring garments by Studio XO for TechHaus, the technical division of Lady Gaga’s Haus of Gaga, and wearable technology by Pauline van Dongen. The examples on display went beyond wearable gadgets that are solely functional, such as sporting devices, and instead demonstrated how technology can be fused seamlessly with sartorial ensembles, breaking any boxy, plastic stereotypes and looking unmistakably like couture.

One dress from Pauline van Dongen’s Wearable Solar collection was especially striking. Smooth, cool leather moulds itself over the torso, joined by a simple, black, wool skirt that sits just above the knee. Generous, but form-skimming shapes prevent the look from being overly sexualized, and instead promote a strong, confident style, enhanced by elongated shoulders. One would be forgiven, from a distance, for presuming that the shining stripes made up of small squares that descend from each shoulder serve a decorative purpose only. However, the dress in fact incorporates 72 flexible solar cells, and is capable of fully charging the wearer’s mobile phone with just two hours of full sunlight.

This is just one example of new ways of thinking and working in the fashion industry, which are re-invigorating the existing model that has been in place for decades. The relationship between clothes and their wearers is changing: dress no longer must necessarily be worn passively. Rather, it is capable of responding, communicating, and even assisting. Furthermore, such developments create new links and dialogues between fashion and other areas, such as the energy industries.

Van Dongen asserts that this will help to restore sustainability, both in her work, through the clear environmental benefits of using solar energy, and, on a more general scale, by increasing the longevity of garments, on the basis that incorporated technology will raise their value (actual and perceived) and theoretically decrease their disposability. The implied sense of frugality and practicality maximizes the usefulness of something that is already a constant accompaniment in everyday life: clothing.

However, this infusion of technology into dress is not entirely new. For example, since the late-1980s the Cyber Goth trend has entailed distinctly future orientated and styled dress, incorporating technological elements such as LED circuits. However, it seems that the 2010s mark a new transition point towards usability and ubiquity within this phenomenon. Since the late 2000s, shoppers have been able to use digital representations of themselves to ‘try on’ makeup and fashion looks in a virtual reality environment, for example at Shiseido and Topshop. The launch of the Apple Watch in September 2014, blends design, function, and lifestyle, and Topshop Unique’s use of virtual reality to transport in-branch shoppers to the heart of its Spring/Summer 2014 catwalk show are two other uses of technology within fashion and design. It seems the Barbican’s crowning of a digital renaissance comes on the cusp of technology’s transformation of the ways we experience dress.

Welcome!

MA Class

Please join us in welcoming this year’s MA students on the course Documenting Fashion: Modernity, Films and Image in America and Europe, 1920-1945, taught by Dr Rebecca Arnold. Look out for their posts when they join our blog team next month!

Fashion Week Reactions Part 4. Redressing Feminism: Chanel’s Fashion Riot

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Under the glass roof of Paris’s Grand Palais, a protest is taking place, a procession of women, signs held aloft, calling for female empowerment, as they stride confidently past the large crowds they have attracted. Its setting is a monumental screen print of a typical Parisian rue dubbed the ‘Boulevard Chanel’; its demonstrators, eighty models centered around such high-profile names as Cara Delevingne and Gisele Bündchen; the props, quilted megaphones and handbags dripping in Chanel iconography.

Indeed, the finale of Chanel’s Spring-Summer 2015 ready-to-wear show possessed all the ingredients for a potent collision of fashion and feminism, yet it left many a critic cold and confused as to its underlying intentions. A prevailing mood of discomfort regarding Lagerfeld’s seemingly hollow hijacking of the feminist cause for publicity purposes immediately permeated the international press, giving rise to concerns as varied as they are, perhaps, unfounded. While some dwelled on the apparent hypocrisy of this multi-billion dollar luxury brand’s attempt to promote a liberated individualism by way of exorbitantly expensive garments, others bristled at the narrow spectrum of ‘ideal’ female beauty represented by the designer’s casting of professional fashion models in the role of feminist activists. Protest signs carrying such slogans as, ‘Tweed not Tweet’, ‘Ladies First’ and ‘History is Her Story’ were widely derided as empty and naïve attempts to exploit the gravity of a highly topical social issue. Journalist Alexander Fury even went as far as to suggest that the show had been the very ‘artifice of anarchy’, a noisy, fussy publicity stunt lacking in any real, honest political statement.

But as debates raged over potential misinterpretations of that significantly weighted word – feminism – and accusations of trivialization poured forth, the very point of the show itself appeared to have been not just overlooked, but also largely, and sadly, missed. The true stars of the show were, in fact, the clothes themselves, which formed, in the words of Vogue’s Suzy Menkes, a ‘back-to-Coco parade’, one which confirmed that the dynamic spirit of the label’s fiercely independent female founder still endures, nearly a century after its sartorial debut. Gabrielle Chanel herself was fashion’s greatest inadvertent feminist. She bestowed a freedom of movement and gender blurring right to comfort and function upon women, whose experiences of dress had, thereto, been characterised by restriction, adornment and submission. This specific collection’s layering of menswear-inspired elements (boxy tweed jackets, wide-leg trousers and sailor stripe knits) atop feminine basenotes of florals, unusually vibrant prints and classic Chanel monochrome palettes travelled to the very heart of the brand’s unique heritage, while, simultaneously, allowing the image of the modern, active woman to be effectively reimagined and updated for a post-Coco society.

It is important that such a presentation is not taken out of context as, after all, it seems illogical to dismiss the theatrical spectacle of the show’s format as mere ‘publicity stunt,’ when the very function of a fashion show is that of self-promotion and commercial endorsement. Unlike the design philosophies at the root of the Chanel brand, gender equality debates can arguably never truly be timeless, as constantly shifting social mores require them to move and morph with their times, never standing still. Therefore, to accuse Chanel of presenting a reductive view of diluted feminism seems a step too far, and the very fact that it is engaging in the discussion at all should be applauded. Fashion, viewed through the lens of feminism is likely to remain a problematic concept on many levels, but it should be recognized that attempts to exclude it from the conversation would only be counter-productive. The most negative aspect of feminism’s fraught relationship with fashion does not lie in the sartorial embrace of what it means to be a modern woman, in any era, but in the fact that the two spheres are being forced to uncomfortably co-exist as conflicting and contradictory ideologies. Lagerfeld’s riot of a show may not have brought about longed-for permanent change, but it has taken us one step closer to breaking down the seemingly obligatory boundaries between the two by, at last, allowing them to assume a much-needed dialogue that is imperative to the future success of both.

 

Sources:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/04/are-fashion-and-feminism-compatible-lagerfeld-chanel

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/news/chanel-springsummer-2015-show-review-a-fashion-riot-to-the-feminist-cause-9765074.html

http://www.vogue.co.uk/news/2014/09/30/suzy-menkes-at-paris-fashion-week-day-seven

http://www.irishexaminer.com/examviral/real-life/feminism-or-pure-publicity-chanel-ss15-catwalk-sparks-new-debate-289436.html

http://chanel-news.chanel.com/en/home.tag.spring-summer-2015-ready-to-wear.html?WT.srch=1&WT.mc_id=FA_en_GB_201410_15SShow&WT.mc_t=sea

Fashion Week Reactions Part 1

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As part of a special series this week, we give our reactions to the recent fashion weeks…

Alexis:

“I love New York, I’m a New Yorker, I can’t imagine living anywhere else” – video, DKNY S/S 2015

The city of New York has played a role in the shaping of American fashion since industrial professionals such as Eleanor Lambert and Dorothy Shaver worked to promote original American design in the 1930s and 40s. As the site of the country’s garment industry as well as, in advertisements, a prime space of imagined consumption of clothing, New York became synonymous with fashion over the course of the twentieth century. Since its creation in 1988, DKNY, the less expensive extension of Donna Karan New York, has utilised the city as a tool of branding. DKNY even defines itself, according to its current website, as “the energy and spirit of New York. International, eclectic, fun, fast and real.” And the presentation of DKNY’s S/S 2015 collection on 7 September in Lincoln Center began with a video that visualised these ideals. A rapid patchwork of faces, clothed bodies and minute details of New York spaces – from the subway to wire fences and graffiti-covered brick walls – the video set the tone for the show, which presented models of various ethnicities in sporty and colourful garments. Styled by Jay Massacret, the models conveyed a quirky femininity in their A-line skirts and boldly patterned garments. They painted a portrait of style found, according to the video, as “you walk down the streets…different energies, different styles…a lotta noise, colours.” The show thus extended the definition of New York to its outer, less affluent spaces. And the models, dressed in sweaters and neoprene bomber jackets, recalled 1990s B-girls. With their sunglasses, foam stacked trainers, and gelled baby hair and braids (conceived by Eugene Souleiman), they commemorated inner city street style – today a part of American fashion heritage – and the specificity of this image to New York.

Katerina:

Audrey Hepburn’s Granddaughter Emma Ferrer Makes Her Modelling Debut

Fashion has made no secret of its fascination with Audrey Hepburn. From the mid-1950s films Sabrina (1955) and Funny Face (1957), which dramatised the gamine actress’s transformations through Hubert de Givenchy’s couture, to subsequent pronouncements that a new model has something of her eyebrows or quality of movement, fashion has remained entranced with Hepburn’s delicate, extraordinary face and waif-like, ballerina body. The latest model to be cast in Hepburn’s mould is her twenty-one-year-old grand-daughter Emma Ferrer. Ferrer, who to date has been an art student in Florence, is moving to Manhattan and embarking upon a modelling career. Her debut into fashion was the September issue of Harper’s Bazaar, where she was photographed by Michael Avedon, the grandson of the famous Richard, who worked with her grand-mother. Although Ferrer, has been ballet-trained like her grandmother and shares her deportment, she is not Hepburn’s doppelganger in either appearance or life experience. Nevertheless, in the photo-shoot, she has been made to adopt Hepburn’s characteristic poses, for example: her face in profile and tilted up to exaggerate her neck-length; or in a Funny Face style frieze-frame of quirky spontaneous movement. There is something sad and forced about asking a young woman to literally take her grandmother’s position, and in my opinion, the photo shoot is too derivative to be inspiring.

Still, the fashion industry’s interest in Hepburn’s granddaughter indicates that it values a model’s symbolic value in addition to her physical attributes. One speculates that when Lanvin asked Ferrer to make her catwalk debut at their Spring Summer 2015 show on September 25, they wanted to exhibit not only her beauty in their clothes, but the aura that manifests in her blood-relation to Hepburn. It’s too early to tell whether Ferrer will follow the successful path of Georgia May Jagger and other descendants of fashion royalty, but first, her collaborators have to allow her to emerge from Hepburn’s shadow.

Fashioning the Little Mermaid c. 1935

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Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairytale, ‘The Little Mermaid’, is in many respects about a subordinated being who dares to seek a future that defies her society’s expectations. The eponymous protagonist rescues a Prince who falls overboard, and then vows to become human and win his love at great personal cost because the sea-witch who transforms her demands the mermaid’s beautiful voice, and also threatens that if she fails to win the Prince’s love she will dissolve into sea-foam on the morning of his marriage to another.

All visual interpretations of the fairytale face the challenge of expressing not only the mermaid’s transformation into a human, but her desire to be recognised by a so-called higher being, and the love that makes her grow, change and even break. The Parisian Librairie Delagrave edition from 1935, with its illustrations by Maurice Berty and watercolour by Christiane Hameau, is striking in its attempt to interpret the fairytale for contemporary readers.

Illustrations of the mermaid prior to her transformation show her as an inhabitant of a natural realm, largely untainted by civilisation. In a depiction of the mermaid beside a giant octopus, her waist-length brown hair, pink and white floral wreath and rosy cheeks and lips are perennials of Western feminine beauty, and seem untouched by contemporary fashion. Hameau’s gold highlight on the mermaid’s green tail gives her figure sculptural relief, and also indicates her otherworldly majesty. Nevertheless, her eyes’ feline slant and long, lean torso, with arms crossed to conceal her breasts, recalls mid to late 1920s beauty ideals, and indicates that Berty and Hameau’s vision of nature was influenced by the art deco movement.

Although this Libraire Delagrave edition was published in 1935, the mermaid’s transformation, after her acquisition of legs, is dramatised through her relinquishment of a timeless, feminine oceanic realm, to a masculine historic realm, and her subsequent resemblance to the 1920s garconne. In a departure from Andersen’s text, Berty’s illustration of the mermaid on shore in the prince’s court, depicts her with a straight page-boy bob, fashionable in the mid-1920s, wearing an androgynous red tunic and hose, which emphasise the ‘loveliest legs and feet that a young girl could dream of’. Her red garments symbolise her passion for the prince, but also the punishing pain that accompanied her acquisition of legs, because every step felt like walking on hot coals. The notion of sacrifice is further apparent in the mermaid’s androgyny. Although her high-arched feet and legs with their rounded tapering line are gendered feminine, her shorn hair and the phallic sword about her waist indicate that she has given up a measure of her femininity by occupying the active, masculine position of adventurer and wooer. Indeed, the fairytale duly punishes her for her presumption, because the prince admires, but dismisses her current form. He instead prefers to remain faithful to his original memory of her as his rescuer when she still had her fish-tail, and then eventually marries a human princess who mysteriously resembles the mermaid prior to her transformation.

While the patriarchal myth that a woman who occupies a masculine position sacrifices both herself and the love of men is timeless, it appears especially poignant in these 1935 illustrations, which were conceived in the wake of the female emancipation that characterised the post armistice years, and manifested most strongly in mid-1920s fashion. Thus, in their depiction of the mermaid’s metamorphosis for a children’s fairytale book, Berty and Hameau drew attention to society’s lingering discomfort with regard to feminine agency.

SNAPSHOT: ISABELA CAPETO

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Over the last few seasons the Brazilian fashion designer Isabela Capeto has concentrated on expanding her eponymous design house into a globally recognized brand, at the same time that she has been designing and producing innovative collections. Capeto graduated from the esteemed Academia di Moda na Italia in Florence in 1993 and has since worked for a number of Brazilian fashion houses in her native Rio de Janeiro, including the highly coveted (by both the domestic and international fashion cognoscenti) swimwear designers Maria Bonita and Lenny Niemeyer. She launched her own label in 2003 and opened her bright and airy atelier in the leafy Jardim Botanico district of Rio. In 2004 Capeto made her debut at Fashion Rio and in 2005 at Sao Paulo Fashion Week, the largest fashion event in Latin America and the fifth largest in the world following London, Paris, New York and Milan. Her clothes can be purchased in over twenty countries throughout the world, in well-known department stores such as Barneys and Jeffrey’s in the USA, Browns in the UK, Colette and Le Bon Marché in France, Barneys in Japan, and Harvey Nichols in the United Arab Emirates.

Capeto has described her target customer as a modern international woman who wants to exist in harmony with her natural surroundings, free of the stresses of living in a metropolis. Her production processes feed into this domestic ethos: they are labour intensive, using skilled seamstresses and natural fibres to create garments that exude delicacy and evoke simple and subtle sensibilities. Capeto’s design aesthetic is inspired by museums and galleries and each of her romantic, feminine pieces can be interpreted as a work of art in its own right: they are handmade, embroidered, dyed, appliquéd and heavily adorned with lace, sequins, bows, tulle and other elements of traditional dressmaking. She has explained her design process: ‘choosing a theme is the first thing I like to do. After that, I always organize a trip to see, learn and experience the theme as much as I can. I also read and learn from books, artists, pictures, memories of places, food I have tasted, and people I have met’. This mix-and-match style characterizes much of her work, in which she throws together various sources with irreverent abandon, embodying a love of fabric and the blending of numerous geographical and historical influences from Brazil and Europe. Her work references the vibrant colours and lush exuberance traditionally associated with Brazil whilst seeking affiliation with international fashion trends and tastes, in terms of silhouette and form, to articulate the contradictions between nationalism and internationalism, the local and universal, extendable to both the domestic and global consumers that Capeto is increasingly seducing with her sensual, tactile designs.

FASHIONING THE FUTURE

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Sci Fi references come in and out of fashion as futuristic aesthetics periodically capture designers’ imaginations. However, references that may seem forward thinking at first can turn out to be retro-futuristic on closer inspection. Unravelling these unexpected connections is one of the many things that makes studying fashion history an exciting enterprise. Looking at Versace’s Fall 2014 couture collection with its asymmetric, monochrome dresses adorned with sleekly cut geometric patterns for example, I was reminded of the little known British science fiction film High Treason. However, it wasn’t completely incidental that I should recognise familiar motifs because I wrote my dissertation on Gordon Conway’s costumes for the feature. Analysing her designs and thinking about how contemporary viewers may have perceived them allowed me to consider how the sartorial language of science fiction fashions powerful images of life in the future.

High Treason, directed by Maurice Elvey in 1929, takes place in the mechanically-driven world of 1940 and focuses on a love story that unfolds while an escalating international crisis threatens with a second world war. The film addressed contemporary concerns regarding technology and depicted a world where machines were not inherently good or evil, as the outcomes of their use depended on human responsibility and a commitment to world peace. Despite its lofty themes, the feature’s principal aim was to astound viewers with its portrayal of the future, therefore flying machines, automated showers and real-time conversations over television screens are shown as the perks of life in 1940. The movie especially sought to appeal to female audiences, as they were considered the primary consumers of cinema at the time. As a result, women were shown to be equal partners in society, whose participation in public life was a key ingredient to world peace.

Fashion played a defining role throughout the film as an added source of entertainment because it was thought that women would pay more attention to costumes than to anything else they saw on screen. Gordon Conway’s futuristic sketches and costumes therefore reflected on the way that women could be both glamorous and practical in a mechanised world. An imaginative range of evening dresses in the film’s nightclub scene illustrated the combination of these two concepts. Actresses appear in hybrid garments; in dresses with daring slits that reveal short trousers underneath. These costumes were decorated in varied ways, but geometric patterns, asymmetry and the use of reflective textures such as black leather and silver silk characterise the pieces shown. Although these costumes appeared futuristic, they also built on an established association between trousers and emancipation that originated from 19th century American feminists. Conway’s costumes therefore reinterpreted avant-garde aesthetics and referenced forward-thinking political movements from the past in order to craft a believable image of the future, one that seemed new yet familiar at the same time.

It is this mix of familiarity and futurism that seems to have been quite prominent in the 2014 fall couture collections, and perhaps it is not a complete coincidence that designs such as Atelier Versace’s geometrically streamlined collection bring to mind science fiction aesthetics. Fashion is always in dialogue with its own past, even when the futuristic is concerned. Due to its propensity for novelty, it has frequently been used to envisage life in the future over the course of the twentieth century. These sartorial prophecies could be viewed at world exhibitions, in films and on the catwalk. As a result, a visual vocabulary of the futuristic has developed, components of which we can recognise without knowing their precise origin. The influence of science fiction aesthetics on high fashion indicates the extent to which technological advances stir the collective imagination. Furthermore, it calls for a comparison with earlier periods when futuristic fashion proved popular, in order to understand how we approach the future, the body and technology today.

High Treason can be viewed for free at the BFI Southbank Mediatheque.

Questioning the value of my Jean Cocteau scarf: modern art, memory, and self

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Found in a brocante market in Cannes a few years ago, my Jean Cocteau scarf is a treasure that links me to the Côte d’Azur and modern art throughout the year. Wrapping it round my neck, I feel the warmth, not only of the ivory silk it comprises, but also, of my memories of summer sun. Folded, its surreal face print transforms. No longer a sea god’s visage entwined with graphic fish, it becomes further abstracted and hides its complete image.

As we move into autumn, such connections with holidays become more significant – a means to use dress, or in this case, accessories, to re-trace our steps – at least metaphorically, and maintain a connection with our summer selves. This scarf, with its pale ground and liquid design in blue, lime, yellow and orange, is my favourite reminder of time spent on the coast.

It is also a minor mystery – although it bears the artist’s signature, it does not contain a clue to its actual maker. This double signature – or in this case, lack thereof – speaks to both authorship and value. For this to have been a major flea market find, it would need to also have the name ‘Ascher’ skimmed on its edges, or that of a similarly august textile designer and scarf producer. While my scarf speaks of its artistic legacy, it remains silent with regard to textile history.

An original Ascher artist scarf can fetch in the thousands. Founded in the early 1940s by Zika Ascher, this textile firm made highly desirable silk squares that carried on their surface the mark of mid-century modern art. With such storied names as Calder, Matisse and Cocteau contributing designs, Ascher’s printed scarves became highly regarded and very collectable. They followed in a line of artist-led textiles, that includes Dufy’s work for Bianchini-Ferier in the early 20th century, and are part of fashion and art’s close visual and material interplay – discussed in Fruszi’s post earlier this year.

Cocteau’s own links to fashion and design abound. His designs have been rendered in embroidery and beading on Schiaparelli’s garments. And his interest in the ways his graphic forms might work in different media mean that his oeuvre extends to include book design and ceramics. His relationship to the French coast is also entwined with his art – and includes two museums in Menton, and murals in the fisherman’s church at Villefranche-sur–Mer.

It is interesting though, to consider where such scarves real value lies – in their silk fabric? The quality of their printed designs? Their link to a ‘modern master’? Or perhaps to the name of the textile or fashion house that spawned them? I would add to this list, and perhaps even nudge to the top of the pile, their value and meaning to their wearers. Accessories always have an intimate relationship to the body. Curled around your neck, warmed against your skin, they shape to your form, while adorning it and drawing emphasis to your face. As we know from endless magazine articles, they can transform an outfit, punctuate your silhouette and raise your fashion status. By wearing a memento of the South of France, I can feel and see its colours and warmth, connect to personal memories, while carrying my love of modern art with me, and display hints of all these elements to those I encounter.

SENSATION AND COSTUME IN SWIMMING STUDIES BY LEANNE SHAPTON

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Featured is actress Whitney Ellis, captured by photographer Champagne Victoria and styled by Monica Munoz

Fashion-orientated depictions of swimming primarily focus on appearance. Swimwear histories and the annual beachwear magazine features alike, discuss the shapes of swimming garments and how the exposed body should look or has looked over time. Appearing before strangers wearing nothing but a few choicely-positioned fig-leaves is certainly an important aspect of the swimming experience, but once you enter the water, other considerations come into play: will the suit cling acutely, forming a seal-like second skin, float buoyantly around you or threaten to leave you altogether?

Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies, a memoir of her swimming experience both as a trainee Olympian and later as a recreational swimmer begins to answer some of these questions as she elaborates upon the sensory aspects of swimming and swimwear. She recounts how the water feels against her skin, hair and muscles, and considers how its variable temperature, smell, colour and parameters vary with each aquatic encounter.

Each swimming experience is synaesthetic, where the look of the water influences the feeling and vice-versa: for example, the Olympium pool in Etobicoke, Canada is ‘blue’, ‘hums in the mornings’ and is of a scale ‘amplified by the density of chlorinated air over the water’s surface’. The pure blue colour and chlorine smell preside over an atmosphere of concentrated swimming ambition. Subsequently, the bodies that enter the pool reflect its streamlined, utilitarian purpose. Conversely, the seawater at the women’s swimming pavilion at Saltsjöbadens Friluftsbad in the Stockholm Archipelago, where clothing is optional, appeared ‘a beautiful olive-green colour, turning (Shapton’s) skin ochre beneath the waves’ and tasted ‘only mildly saline’. The experience of swimming nude amongst other women was one of ‘indifferent animality… as though in our polite blankness we are brushing up against one another, our furs , our similarities’. Here, the water’s olive waves transfigure the women’s forms, both in terms of appearance and sensation, and indicate a natural, non-competitive realm, where bodies are free from scrutiny.

Shapton’s book also features black and white photographs of her swimwear collection, modelled by white, headless linen mannequins. She describes how one high-necked black Speedo, ‘used for training, 1988-1992’, was ‘made of nylon, more durable and less flexible than Lycra’ and worn doubled up with other suits in order to provide extra weight and ‘drag’. Shapton compared the team’s uniform mentality to their extra suits to that of a ballet company because ‘we’d roll them down wet after warm-up, as ballerinas roll legwarmers up over their knees and then down around their ankles.’ While Shapton’s competitive swimwear was exposed to the shared, routine experiences of a team, her often vintage, recreational swimwear, which hangs shapelessly from the mannequins, acquired personal associations. She reproached one vintage Cole of California, brown zebra-stripe full piece for being ‘slightly too short in the waist’ despite its pattern’s promise to transform the wearer into the zebra-fish it resembled, and recounted that a whimsical Vintage Charmant mustard-yellow and white polka-dot bikini was worn to host a suitably retro pool party ‘where guests played Bananagrams, croquet and Catchphrase’.

Shapton demonstrates how swimming is always an occasion because one leaves behind one’s terrestrial habits and gains ‘knowledge of watery space, being able to sense exactly where my body is and what it’s affecting, an animal empathy for contact with another element.’ Thus, each entry into the water, whether competitively in a team, or recreationally, is ripe for memory-making. Our swimming costumes, and how they transform in the water, become part of our aquatic beings. As we move through the water, we notice that racing stripes are the image of speed, or the ruffle around our bikini resembles a gill. We remember these garments not merely by how they appear dry, but by how they perform when wet.

Sources:
Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (London: Penguin Books, 2012).

5 minutes with…Emma McClendon

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Emma McClendon graduated from The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2011 and is now an assistant curator at the Museum at the FIT, New York. She is currently working on an exhibition on 1970s fashion by Halston and Yves Saint Laurent. She lives on the Lower East Side.

What are you wearing today?

I am wearing Alexander Wang boots and a shirtdress by Veronique Leroy. I am also wearing faux-leather shorts from Zara underneath my dress…a funny fact about New York is that in summer a lot of girls wear shorts beneath their dresses because it’s a particularly windy city! But it’s also just too hot not to wear something flowing.

How would you describe your style?

I would say minimal but with an interest in volume and different kinds of shapes and silhouettes. I wear a lot of black, white and navy. I definitely have a favourite silhouette that I wear. I tend to like chunkier shoes with skinny pants and bigger tops.

Who are your favourite designers?

Personally, I gravitate towards stuff by Alexander Wang, I wear a lot of Theory as well and I like the more minimal stuff from Opening Ceremony, based here in New York. I also wear a lot of Reformation – they are a great sustainable brand that make all of their pieces out of pre-used or upcycled materials.

What is your dress code at the FIT?

There are things I wear to work such as pencil skirts and collared shirts that I might not wear during my “off-duty time”. I probably wouldn’t wear my denim overalls, oversized sweaters and jean jackets to work. In a way, I suppose I have more tones of grunge in my off-duty look that I don’t bring to work. This is no doubt a product of having grown-up in the Nineties!

Have you ever worked on an exhibition that inspired you to dress differently?

Every exhibition that you work on affects some aspect of the way that you dress. You look at different styles and time periods every day, and you start to gravitate towards pieces. I’ve been working for the last six months on a show about 1970s fashion and since then I have invested in a jumpsuit. Also, I used to have really long hair… but after admiring a picture of Anjelica Huston on the Halston runway, I decided to cut my hair short like hers.

Did your style change whilst studying in London?

Yes. One thing that came out of me being in London was definitely black opaque tights with everything, anytime of year!

New York City summers are HOT. What are your tricks to stay cool?

You need to wear short skirts and flowing things because it is so hot here that you will die otherwise. I deal with the heat by carrying my make-up in my bag in case I need to touch-up and by leaving a jacket at work (for when it gets too cold inside with the air conditioning). One thing I would say about New York summer is that you have to embrace the heat and accept the fact that you are going to be sweaty and nasty – we are all in it together and everyone feels disgusting!