‘Fashion, Vision and Visuality’
CFP Deadline: November 7, 2011
38th Annual AAH Conference & Bookfair
The Open University, Milton Keynes UK
March 29 – 31, 2012
Session Convenors:
Caroline Evans, University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
c.evans@csm.arts.ac.uk
Andrea Kollnitz, Centre for Fashion Studies, Art History Department, Stockholm University
andrea@fashion.su.se
This session looks at representations of fashion across media and contexts, spanning art and industry, still and moving images. It will investigate the role of fashion in the cultural imaginary, and ask whether its representations solicit a particular kind of visual pleasure. How, for example, might the spectator’s embodied experience of fashion and cloth create specific viewing competences, and what currency does the idea of a haptic gaze have in the consideration of images of fashion? Do representations of fashion create the possibility of different visualities and/or new ways of seeing? The session will explore fashion primarily as image but will investigate how such images relate to fashion in other fields and forms: as object, as performance, as part of the experience of everyday life. It will investigate the fashion image in relation to cultural competence, identification, and the look. The session’s own interests concern modernism, but it welcome papers on the visual and sensual impact of fashion from any period. Topics might include: the role of fashion in the visual culture of modernism, the power of fashion magazines and the diffusion of fashion imagery in contemporary culture, the image of fashion as pleasure and seduction in film and film costumes, fashion as fetishism and bodily experience, the rhetoric of fashion in representations and self- fashioning as part of artistic promotion.
For more information about the conference, go to: http://www.aah.org.uk/page/3369
Object of Fashion 