Gone are the days when fashion relied on a runway launch with coinciding press promotions to show a couturier’s new range. Today, design houses are thinking beyond traditional methods of display to stimulate interest in their collections, such as to the internet, fashion film and, more recently, fashion installations. This book offers a critical evaluation of the changing ways in which fashion has been exhibited, focusing specifically on the recent turn toward installation, whether in the form of static presentations, interactive performances or the more conventional curated designer exhibition.Connecting viewers – and consumers – on an immersive level, the fashion world has begun to appropriate installation methods traditionally associated with displays of experimental art, transcending the runway system and its constraints. This book turns to the designers who have pioneered fashion installations, such as Aitor Throup, Muccia Prada, Walter Van Beirendonck and Hussein Chalayan among others, and also looks back to the early influential fashion displays by designers such as Worth and Poiret to provide historical context.Divided into three parts, and covering a variety of installations from Vivienne Westwood’s fashioned ‘concept’ stores to Gareth Pugh’s immersive films, this ground-breaking book positions the designer as the curator and exhibition-maker and offers the first focused study of the pertinent concept of fashion installation.Fashion studies examines material cultures and signs, but what are the parameters of such signs? We are familiar with the study of the style of garments, placing them in an historical setting and against the background and intentions of a designer. But what of all the other aspects that draw us into the ambit of the fashion spectacle? Soon after the birth of haute couture in the latter half of the nineteenth century, canny fashion designers were quick to understand the power of staging in the catwalk, and the seductions of the boutique. Then and now, by the time any garment was purchased, it was wrapped up in any number of narratives and expectations, many of which had been carefully curated and instilled by the fashion house itself. For the last two decades, the fashion catwalk has been more than a launching pad for collections, it is very much an event unto itself, sites of scenic possibility and invention. Here body, performance and mise en scène coalesce to be more than a spectacle, but something that draws from cinema, myth, theatre, and performance art. For fashion is never reducible to the garment alone. It is an experience where the perceptions of the viewer intertwine with the models and performers, amidst the imaginative environments that can be more than just wish-images, they suggest different frameworks for living and being. Fashion installation, like installation art, is more than situating the fashion object, it is about alteration, in which space and object enter into aesthetic alignment for an augmented aesthetic, and critical play.

Fashion Installation: Body, Space, and Performance PDF

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