engleski

Body as a Process: Contemporary Fashion and Performance

This paper explores the ways in which contemporary fashion and its hybrid, eclectic form creates new ways of understanding the construction of the body within fashion performance. Fashion can be perceived both as an image (Roland Barthes, 1967) and as a process, especially under the influence of various cultural elements as well as technology. Fashion is inextricably linked with the body and creates new time/space categories but more important new corporeal experience. Although he does not explore fashion per se in his writings, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his phenomenological approach created a new framework for understanding bodily experience as well as its ‘corporeal’ nature (The Phenomenology of Perception, 1962). In fashion, we engage with the world and the term ‘body’ in a philosophical sense, it is crucial to be explored if we want to fully comprehend the link between body and dress, in this case, body movement. Nevertheless, contemporary fashion after the 1990’s adheres the bodily experience, especially in fashion performance. The performativity of fashion now seems to appear as a groundbreaking field within fashion theory, linked with both theatre, fashion and body design. With close comparative reference to a range of examples including: Tilda Swinton’s performance in Oliver Staillard’s The Eternity Dress, Croatian performance artist Tajči Čekada, together with the work of Hussein Chalayan, Viktor & Rolf and Rei Kawakubo’s 1997 collection Body-Meets Dress-Dress-Meets-Body, this paper will argue that within performance, fashion gains new meaning and the body can be re-performed in various forms. Fashion in contemporary culture can no longer be perceived as only an image (the semiotics of fashion) or only a process. Instead, these two hypotheses wind together within the form of fashion performance. This complex field of fashion and performance and their strong impact on body-image and body- process is crucial if we want to understand the chaos of contemporary fashion and its constant re-enactment.

Body, contemporary fashion, corporeal experience, performance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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