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Carmen Baniandrés Gómez                                             

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Carmen Baniandrés Gómez                                             

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I relate to this point as I come from an Art History background and that's the way I approach fashion: it doesn´t matter the discipline I work on, I always search for the substantial base. Yet, I also share point 3 as the more I grow, the more interested I am in fashion outside the industry.

I am particularly interested in how politics and socioeconomically powers have affected the fashion constructions and identities of the different social groups and tribes of the city of Madrid, from the Civil War until now.

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In my dissertation, I want to provide a framework for understanding digital fashion in the broader context of digital art and internet culture. I’d like to conclude my dissertation with a manifesto for building a more creative and diverse future for digital fashion.

There are many problems with the “era of big data” we’re living in, mainly that arts and culture are ruled by the values of patriarchal capitalism and determined by a handful of monolithic forces.

The ‘old antiquarians mapping national customs and habits’ might not have power anymore, which of course has many positives for fashion, but what does the future-obsessed tech billionaire know better? Should we let him decide the fate of digital culture and online identity? You might be like, what do they really have to do with fashion, anyway? But I’d argue that the answer is far too much, as they control the platforms that digital fashion (and all of digital media, and online communities and lives) is shared and created on. They still claim that the internet is ‘open’ and a great way for creatives to share their art with more people than ever before in history, but the reality is more complicated. Large corporations are the internet’s gatekeepers, and by extension the gatekeepers of the future of art and fashion.

As digital fashion begins to take shape as a new design form, the damaging effects of corporate control are starting to bubble to its surface. If we continue on this current trajectory, digital fashion in the future will never be truly egalitarian or creative. (And considering digital fashion’s potential for expression, joy, and community in the online world of the future, that would be doing society a disservice!)

One of the first points I’ve thought of for my manifesto so far is use tech for good, but you could just as easily replace “tech” with “tools”

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What is fashion? I view fashion as a multifaceted subject of study. I am curious and interested in how various academics define fashion and how fashion is viewed in relation to art more specifically. I believe that there is no set definition and this why fashion can be applicable to all. However, I am aware that there is a gap in the academia to define fashion that encompasses a global perspective and believe that there is existing commentary that tends to degrade non-western definitions of fashion as craft, something that is perceived to be outside of the current fashion canon. I believe that when fashion and art are discussed concurrently one can dismantle various hierarchies and unveil new definitions of fashion that can and should be applicable to a global perspective.

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Issie.

I immediately was intrigued by the union of fashion and poetry. Like poetry, fashion is multi-faceted, romantic, structured and well-thought out. Impactful and emotional. Both relevant others, who understand and view it form their own personal lenses,  whilst also simultaneously providing self-comfort and self-realisation to the author/ artist/ wearer. Poetry, for me, is crafted and considered, much like fashion. I am somewhat looking into themes and tropes that inspire and repeat within fashion, and fashion images, and i feel like when studying the more ‘darker’ aspects of inspiration there is a clear link between fashion and poetry, much like the more common union of poetry and art: relating to the very real, ultra human aspects of life. Although, I may not necessarily ascribe to the view that time is linear , the idea that fashion is a tool to decipher one's personal relation to themselves and their existence, ‘memories, re- lived and futures foretold’ is compelling.

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I find this point particularly important, especially in relation to youth and how young people understand themselves. Fashion encompasses all of the psychological complexities of how pre-teens begin to position themselves in relation to their peers, searching for a balance of conformity to the social order and developing their individuality. I do not yet have a dissertation research topic but this is something I have been thinking a lot about, as it relates to the essay I wrote for Research Methods. Teenagers look to their peers for confirmation as those relationships are becoming more important in their lives, maybe even surpassing family, and fashion is often the visible manifestation of those shifting bonds/anxieties.

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In my reading of fashion studies to date, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on the embodied experience of wearing clothes, and participating in the ‘fashion’ system. From the perspective of fashion workers, emphasis is put (and rightly so) on the exploitative nature of global textile and clothing production. I’m interested in a middle ground between the two. A post-production/post-consumption state of garments being repaired and rehabilitated and from the point of view of local skilled workers who have a material relationship with fashion every day but would not be associated as working within the ‘fashion industry; in this way drawing light on the humble and routine manifestations of fashion primarily through the ethnographic method.

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In my reading of fashion studies to date, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on the embodied experience of wearing clothes, and participating in the ‘fashion’ system. From the perspective of fashion workers, emphasis is put (and rightly so) on the exploitative nature of global textile and clothing production. I’m interested in a middle ground between the two. A post-production/post-consumption state of garments being repaired and rehabilitated and from the point of view of local skilled workers who have a material relationship with fashion every day but would not be associated as working within the ‘fashion industry; in this way drawing light on the humble and routine manifestations of fashion primarily through the ethnographic method.

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This is particularly potent to me as I wish to focus on numerous internationals connections in Fashion cultural exchange and textile trade, both contemporary, colonial and pre-colonial. I also wish to focus on free-from draped garments, giving multiple meanings to the word ‘space’, as I believe this manifesto backs.
I strongly resonate with the points of patterns, networks, mazes and constellations, each word with a similar meaning but a different connotation to emphasise the scope of fashion. I would like to take a multi-disciplinary approach that does its best to leave the colonial framework, emphasising new networks that can be a small step towards increasing depth in fashion pedagogy.

I certainly believe that Fashion Studies and its multi-disciplinary nature, as well as its universality across humanity, warrants a need to be taken seriously, and also that its complexity is on par with physics and mathematics. I would argue that Fashion being more subjective leads it to be conversely more complex. And to acknowledge its complexity and expanse is not enough to heal the rift between the two domains. In fact, I am unsure what this would entail. Does the rift connote respect among the fields or does it mean a genuine academic collaboration? Either way, both are rather difficult to attain, though perhaps not impossible. The creative can enhance the technical and vice versa.

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Whilst this statement is true of fashion in general, it is particularly true for the state of Fashion today. In a time when we are trying to create a more sustainable industry, designers are relying on new technologies and science to improve their practices. From using textile treatments that are cleaner, safer and more energy-efficient, to using new techniques to recycle existing fabrics, the relationship between the two cultures has never been so close.

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This point, I feel, works in an intersectional reading of fashion, when considering how performance and spectacle and sound have historically functioned in the African Diaspora, as a self-fashioned intervention in oppressive space. With that said, fashion can also be borne and cultivated out of situations of anxiety and surveillance, where hyper-visibility under state-sanctioned violence must be counter-acted through establishing visibility on one’s own terms — Establishing an alternative hyper-visibility where dress is an instrument e.g. the Black Panthers; The Salvation Army; African Zionist Churches. It also builds upon the idea that, through responses to modernity, self-fashioning, imaging, pose, any individual can be and have an “image”, and be a reproducible, photographable subject, even if their locale is some obscure corner of the world. Visual examples of this include the fashion photography of Seydou Keita, Felicia Abban, Malick Sedibe etc. who articulated new kinds of citizenship in the early years of the African independence era. Which was supposed to communicate a renewed, 20th century sense of belonging and being beyond colonialism, suffering, and exploitation. Also thinking about photographers like Ronald Ngilima, where self-fashioning and photography were employed to establish a sense of permanence in space/place, as a kind of counter-narrative to Apartheid governments’ weaponisation of housing in policing Black movement.

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Fashion as means of self-expression reveals so much more about us than just the clothes we are wearing. Under all the trends and mass consumption of cultural commodities, I feel like that there is a hidden layer of true individuality within fashion, which remains inevitably untouched due to our positionalities. THE ISSUE With cultural commodities though it is that they are yet another means of exploitation within the capitalist system. Consequently, I personally feel like it is important for other people to consider their own positionality when creating and consuming culture to understand the meaning of fashion out of other people's perspectives, as well as their own individual relation to it. If we consider fashion as stories which are being told means we have to take our time and listen. In my dissertation I want to portray how the Black community how the representation of diversity and the Black community has changed after the events of 2020 and compare it to the initial emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2013. The over saturation of diversity through tokenism eventually renders the agency of the story invisible while taking  the personal and selling it for profit.