Prose
The title 'Shocking Life' alone suggests multiple readings. ‘Shocking’ refers to her life, one of excitement, privilege and excess; it...
Notes on Fashion as Fetish
Designers and artists have occasionally hinted at the mystery of clothes, at what it is that makes a garment powerful,...
The Self on Display
While fashion designers today reach the heights of celebrity status, the roots of the phenomenon lie in fin de siècle...
Shameless Trespassing
On Cultural Transits, Immodest Exposure and the Grotesque Body
Orientalism, and the related appellation orientalist, opens up to a wide debate on Western visions of the East, and has...
Fashioning Change
Some thirty years ago on July 22, 1985, Pierre Cardin sent nine young Chinese girls down the runway of his...
Beyond the Iron Curtain
For individuals in East Berlin, using fashion for self-expression risked being seen as subversive. As such, attire was purely practical:...
The Green Shades of Shame
Or: How shame procrastinates engagement with the sustainability imperative in fashion
In order to transcend shame and to take action in the realm of sustainability, we need support and a collective...
William Morris on Textile Fabrics
In his lecture to the International Health Exhibition at the South Kensington Museum, London in 1884, William Morris gives a...
Clothing as Coding
Like all new-borns, wearable technologies are invariably smooth, precious and pure. In an i-Device era, the consumer is hidden from...
Helmut Lang: From Fashion to Art and Back Again
Today, Helmut Lang works an artist. His minimalist and deconstructivist work is no longer presented on runways, but represented by...
The Fig Leaf Mentality
On Power, Masculinity, Patriarchy and Man's Most Precious Ornament
It was a particular form of masculinity and male expression that Eldridge Cleaver believed had been suppressed through conventional male...
Fashioning the Freak Show
While some would argue the format of the freak show never gone away, the scopophilic frisson of the American sideshow,...