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STAGING THE FASHION SHOW AND ITS SPACES Tiziana Ferrero-Regis and Marissa Lindquist The fashion show has a long and rich history, which has been amplified by the invention of the moving image, the spread of magazines, pop and club culture, the corporatization of fashion, fast fashion and, lately, li...

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STAGING THE FASHION SHOW AND ITS SPACES Tiziana Ferrero-Regis Staging Fashion: The fashion Show and its spaces

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STAGING THE FASHION SHOW AND ITS SPACES Tiziana Ferrero-Regis and Marissa Lindquist

The fashion show has a long and rich history, which has been amplified by the invention of the moving image, the spread of magazines, pop and club culture, the corporatization of fashion, fast fashion and, lately, live-streaming on the internet. Its current configuration – through the organizing principles of seasons, places and spaces – is inseparable from the modern fashion system as fathered by Charles Frederik Worth in the 1860s. Charles Worth has been identified as the creator of haute couture, which came to define the ‘sublime, heroic moment’ (Lipovetsky 1994: 55) of fashion. His introduction of two seasonal collections a year created a rhythm for fashion change and of fashion time. In the first decade of the 1900s, these seasonal presentations, at fixed dates and times in the couture salon (Lipovetsky 1994), transformed into fashion events that through their repetition generated expectations and aspirations for a rapidly growing number of bourgeois female clients. Within this systematic presentation of fashion, space became instrumental to the creation of the modern fashion moment, the perception and pleasure of being in the act of discovering newness. The site of this discovery shapes up our response to the presentation of new fashion. Notwithstanding the affective force of the fashion show, its primary purpose is to sell merchandise and promote the fashion industry, becoming increasingly attuned with the spectacle, the acceleration of fashion, the expansion of digital media and the creation of extraordinary settings. The fashion show is a moving spectacle that must constantly find new and alluring ways to present fashion, in alternative spaces, outdoors, readymade, as Strömberg calls them in this volume, or in completely artificial spaces. Sometimes these spaces are not always successful, as Suzi Menkes commented on Instagram on the occasion of Givenchy spring/summer 2020 menswear collection shown at Villa Palmieri in Florence at dawn: ‘Oh no! What a let down! The Givenchy Florentine show is in the fading half light. What were they thinking . . . “poetic” maybe?’ (Menkes 2019). While the collection is visible on the show’s live-streaming and video, not all audience members seated in the garden could see the models strutting along the garden’s paths. The use of space and its effects failed to address multiple interests and viewers – it catered for the internet audience, yet disappointed spectators on location. The fashion show is widely diverse and cannot be contained within a genre or set of practices, despite attempts to categorize it as art (Skov et al. 2009) or performance (Duggan 2001), whose conventions are

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defined by the designer’s own approach to fashion. The common element in all fashion shows is that they employ skilled workers from fashion designers, models and technical crew to production designers and more recently architects. This aspect offers a rare opportunity to investigate the multilayered complexity of the encounter between space, fashion and the body. While scholarship of the fashion show is abundant, it is scattered in many journals and is concerned mainly with discussions about the fashion show from within fashion studies. Little attention has been paid to how fashion and the space of its presentation have interacted with each other, how they have transformed the fashion industry and, in turn, how they have been transformed by fashion approaches, performance, the spatial arts and spatial design, film and digital media. We recognize that in the past the spectacle of fashion, bodies and clothes obscured the stage, thus the aim of this book is to engage with the complexities of the fashion show through the reciprocal influences between the fashion show and its spaces, revealing how looking towards this interaction contributes to an augmented experience of fashion and provides a representation of our societal milieu. Motivated by the many explorations of the fashion show and its spaces of the last sixty years, this book positions the fashion show and its space at the centre of investigation, fleshing out the study of the show from multiple perspectives. Fashion inhabits many spaces and places; the retail environment is, for example, a space that emphasizes the consumer experience of fashion. However, retail is placed at the end of the supply chain; its function is to create emotional experiences in consumers and to communicate predominantly the brand’s position in the marketplace. Naturally, the architectural space is paramount to this end, and the many flagship stores of luxury brands around the globe well illustrate this point. However, Staging Fashion concentrates on the presentation of fashion in its aural moment, at the point in which newness is revealed to the world. The exploration of fashion and architecture in a retail environment would warrant a further systematic exploration. John Potvin’s edited collection The Places and Spaces of Fashion (2009) precedes the intentions of this book in that it offers an analysis of performance and fashion’s display in various sites with essays that span from modernity to the contemporary period; its essays pay attention to the fluidity between architecture, interiors and the body. Myzelev and Potvin (2010) have placed more emphasis on this perspective affirming the strong role that both fashion and interiors have had in the formation of modern identity. Thus Staging Fashion opens up to the reciprocal influences and the instrumental relationships between urbanism, architecture, the performative and plastic arts and film and digital media that have significant bearing on the presentation of the fashion moment, on the one hand, and the validation that such events in turn highlight and contribute to the renewal of historical or disused sites, and act as an agent for cultural tourism, placemaking and urban creative clusters, on the other. We acknowledge that positions held between fashion and architecture are often fraught or conflicting; therefore Staging Fashion provides examples of approaches, techniques and theories underpinning the spatial and creative disciplines transferable to the fashion show context. To understand these momentous shifts in the development of the contemporary fashion show, in Chapter 1 we offer an overview of fashion presentations and how they have established their own discursive and cultural space. At the time of writing, climate emergency protests have put the finger on fashion’s polluting and unethical practices. In July 2019, the Swedish Fashion Council cancelled its fashion week, amid global climate concerns. Extinction Rebellion activists mounted protests during London 2019 Fashion Week. Fashion weeks, the rhythmic succession of fashion’s newness, occur now in around 100 locations in the world. They are regarded as a marketing device not only for local fashion but also as a promotional tool for tourism. It is fair to speculate that in the near future, local fashion weeks will become increasingly

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important to an industry that must reinvent itself as a localized and sustainable industry. However, it is not possible to speculate on the disappearance of fashion weeks in the four fashion capitals of Paris, London, New York and Milan. On the contrary, 2019 New York Fashion Week (NYFW), taking advantage of the negative political climate of Brexit, was a triumph. In line with the historical competition between Paris and New York, NYFW maintained a media attention high through a tight and shorter schedule of shows. Tom Ford, newly appointed chairman of the Council for Fashion Designers of America, expressed his plan to make NYFW a global event, and American fashion international. Notwithstanding the conduct of business as usual in New York, London, Paris and Milan, in November 2019, Prada was the first luxury brand to sign a financial loan connected to sustainability plans (Barr 2019). The brand had already been collecting and storing all architectural materials used in Prada’s fashion shows designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). These complex catwalk constructions now have been recast in an exhibition by Rotor (Celant 2011), a collective specialized in deconstruction and reuse of building materials. Likewise, the materials of one of Chanel’s most opulent and grandiose shows – the 2018 Cruise collection – which featured a 148-metre replica ship built within the Nave of the Grand Palais was deconstructed, and its materials upcycled or recycled. Creative reuse of catwalk materials may be part of a progressive industrial reconversion of fashion, but it is difficult to speculate on the demise of fashion shows as they are the aesthetic montage of fashion’s aura, whether they are artistic, minimalist or excessively baroque.

Structure of the Book This book is divided into three parts. The chapters explore the themes presented here through manifold readings of the fashion show and its space, whether it be through studies of individual or collaborative practice, discussions of alternate sites for the display, or in the progressive transformations of the fashion show and its derivatives enabled through media. There is considerable overlap of themes and theories through the chapters, as fashion and spatial theory share many authors who have engaged with both fields. Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Elizabeth Wilson recur across the chapters, articulating key themes that have to do with fashion, the urban zeitgeist, social production, bodily transfiguration, indeterminant space, temporary and heterotopic sites, and the glaze of the digital simulacra. These themes offer a fertile ground for the exploration of complex visual, philosophical, creative and spatial dimensions of the fashion show and its spaces.

Part one: Body and space Until very recently, when in February 2018 Dolce & Gabbana sent drones with handbags down the runway in Milan, and a fashion show in Saudi Arabia in June 2018 used drones instead of models, producing a ghost-like effect of clothes floating in the air, the model’s body has been essential to the fashion show as much as its space. One of the central tenets of fashion theory is that without a body, fashion does not exist. Joanne Entwistle’s key text The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Social Theory (2015) highlights that all cultures dress and adorn the body in some ways, situating the dressed body at the centre of all social relations. More importantly, bodies show clothes in movement, a fundamental aspect

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of the fashion show. Walk, movement, pose, smile and attitude are elements that Evans (2013) isolates as constitutive of the fashion model, especially conceptualized within the frame of the cinematic fashion show as the representation and creation of the ‘modernist body’ (Evans 2013: 250). This body continued to represent the feminine ideal of perfection and symmetry while being fundamental to the seductive presentation of fashion. In 1998, Paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins opened Alexander McQueen spring/summer 1999 show No.13. Since then, catwalk and fashion shows have become sites that test difference, from the grotesque, the non-normative gender to the cyborg, exposing the less-than-perfect body. Also, queering the body through performance, semi-permanent or permanent modifications has become an increasingly visible practice that tests a myriad of conditions such as intimacy, meaning, sensibility, presence, gesture, politics and social relations, which are played out in spaces of privacy and in public realms such as the stage set or in urban life. Heidegger rethought the relationship between space and body not as one in which bodies inhabit empty spaces, but as a participatory one where both commingle and communicate (Mitchell 2016). The body is not isolated and independent from its surroundings but is co-present with the space that it inhabits. These reflections emerge in the first part of this book, which addresses the many ways in which bodies converge with the staging of the fashion show. A historical overview of fashion shows, informal and formal, and their encounter with urban spaces and unusual sites opens Part One. In ‘The discursive space of the fashion show’, Ferrero-Regis and Lindquist explore the trajectory of fashion shows and how social and cultural upheavals have accompanied the rhythm of fashion change from modernity to present day. Their chapter explores uncommon spaces that were already used for fashion shows, such as the deck of the Cunard Cruise Liner during the 1925 Liverpool Civic Week. Other key moments that changed the fashion show in the second part of the twentieth century occurred with Halston’s first collection held within his salon at the Bergdorf Goodman, although American department stores had already played a fundamental role in launching Poiret’s fashion in 1914. Synergies are uncovered between modernist architects Le Corbusier’s and Adolf Loos’s construction of space programmed for movement and spatial experience, and the choreography of the fashion show. These and other histories and narratives constitute a body of knowledge that can be called the discursive space of fashion. Potvin’s ‘Through the looking glass: Thom Browne and the tailoring of a queer design’ leads with an examination of Tom Browne’s queer strategy to design that encompasses also the spatial presentation of his collection, proposing that in the crowded landscape of many seasonal releases, designers need to maintain a coherent vision not just with space but through the way in which bodies perform within this space. Through the analysis of three of Thom Browne’s shows – fall 2016, spring 2018 and spring 2019 – and specifically focusing on interior design, Potvin contends that the unconventional and atmospheric presentations imposed themselves on the clothes, determining the way in which the clothes were read. Browne’s use of two aesthetics, austerity and camp (Potvin 2020: 31), that define the designer’s vision, together are viewed by Potvin as undermining the conformity of menswear tailoring and the catwalk. Similar to Potvin’s appraisal of the commingling between fashion and space, Quinn highlights Chalayan’s sense of the visual through architectural systems and theories of the body in ‘In his own words: Chalayan speaks’. In homage to Chalayan’s twenty-five-year anniversary of his career, Bradley Quinn dedicates a survey, a retrospective so to speak, to Chalayan’s approach to fashion, design, architectural tectonics and space. Just as the futurists thought about speed and extraordinary possibilities for clothes in the 1910s, Chalayan explores aerodynamics, technology and architecture as they interact with the body. Quinn emphasizes how clothes belong to a modular system in which they are part of the intimacy of

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interiors, which are part of architecture, and in turn is part of an urban system. This layered architectural construction of clothes defines the intimate area of the body, which becomes self-contained and functional. In the particularly poignant show After Words (autumn/winter 2000), the models walk in a bare, white chamber where minimalist furniture create an interior space. The end of the show points to clothes as a ‘means to carry away possessions’ (Quinn 2020: 48), like when one has to evacuate or escape. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas’s chapter ‘The fashion chamber and the posthuman dissolution of gender’ looks at the fashion show as a form of installation and performance in which fashion and art converge. Geczy and Karaminas articulate installation within the context of fashion display, as an approach to testing ‘material and immaterial approaches’ spatially, and the dynamic role the body and bodies have in viewing, and as components of, the overall work (Geczy and Karaminas 2019: 7). The authors look at the fashion space through a taxonomy that includes sealed, open and still spaces to analyse Gucci’s Cyborg autumn/winter 2018/2019 show. Geczy and Karaminas interpret the catwalk as a sealed space – the fashion chamber – where the audience is transported to another world, which, in the case of Gucci’s show, is one of horror. Here, indefinite bodies are imaginary others that re-orient gender and identity away from their discursive constructions, allowing new possibilities through discontinuities in a space that is cut from the world. In ‘“Savage beauties”: Alexander McQueen’s performance of posthuman bodies’ Justyna Stępień, like Geczy and Karaminas, highlights that posthuman fashion can reconfigure and alter boundaries between body and matter. Both chapters celebrate the non-perfect and the ugly, opening up possibilities for body extensions and considering difference as a posthuman progress. For the author, like in a cabinet of curiosities, the catwalk becomes the exhibition of manipulations between human bodies and different species. In Stępień’s discussion of McQueen’s Voss the human crosses with birds, while in Geczy and Karaminas’s discussion of Gucci’s Cyborg, posthumanity consists of the intimacy between dragons and humans. It is important to reflect on the similarities of the two shows that have to do with posthuman disruption, because they elicit a similar critique of twentieth-first-century fashion shows. The three authors refer to Braidotti’s (2013) systems of signification that have imposed boundaries to the human body. Stępień looks at the design work of McQueen, the way in which the designer treated, manipulated, cut, moulded the body, for example, in Plato’s Atlantis, whereas Gucci’s Michele expresses his posthumanism through the artistic direction and styling of the show. In their fashion shows, McQueen’s Voss and Plato’s Atlantis and Alessandro Michele’s Cyborg attempt to liberate the model’s body from canonical and disciplined beauty, one opting for human–animal interaction, the other for horror. Finally, in ‘Under the skin: Designing immersive experiences in fashion display’, the Stitchery Collective, represented by Sarah Winter, Madeline Taylor, Kiara Bulley, Anna Hickey and Bianca Bulley, review their immersive projects: Collective Collection (2014), a site-specific work held in an historic Queenslander-style building Franklin Villa, and From Home, With Love (2015), an installation exploring Australian relations during the First World War at the State Library of Queensland. The authors discuss the intentional framing of the work as a form of inclusive participatory design and an exploration of Ingrid Loschek’s (2009) theory of skins, reclaiming the space between memory, emotion, clothing, place and the body. They do this through a re-interpretation and deployment of the fashion show in other sites and other contexts. The Stitchery Collective focuses upon the engagement of the viewer experiencing the event by drawing upon intimate lived experience and spatial and multi-sensory approaches stimula...