The Politics of Practice-Based Fashion Research

This Fall, the Austrian Center for Fashion Research, in collaboration with MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, is hosting a one-day symposium to bring together a group of pioneering fashion scholars and practitioners to explore critical contemporary fashion (research) practices. They will investigate the transformative potential of critical fashion knowledge between theory and practice, between doing and thinking, and beyond assumed disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. The symposium aims to react to changing paradigms in fashion practice and its promise to be a tool for criticality outside of fashion’s commercial imperative.

Abstract

A Fashion Ontology, Researching the possibilities for knowing through an expanded fashion practice

20th century art was dominated by undefined borders between artistic practices. The need to name and organize art was acted upon not only due to methodological reasoning but also to perpetuate the status quo and its associated hierarchies. Inevitably, the boundaries between Fine Arts and Applied Arts became redefined. It is through the subordination of fashion to a Post-Duchampian understanding of what fashion practices are, that this paper will concentrate on discussions surrounding the definition of fashion. The aim of this study is to voice the concerns of fashion practitioners in the early 21st century, thereby testing the boundaries of the discipline. Interdisciplinary and wide ranging, this ‘paper-as-installation’ fills a gap in practice-based-research by bridging practice and theory. The research methodology developed within this practice extends the potential of film as a means by which to explore theoretical possibilities for knowing through expanded fashion practice. Within a context of heightened concerns about climate change and environmental issues induced by mass-production, fast-fashion, and global fashion distribution and consumption, the proposed work challenges the understanding of fashion as the creation of garments, objects and environments. Instead, by deconstructing underlying assumptions and exposing the limitations of current market-driven fashion design processes, this project suggests that fashion production may shift to the formation of new philosophical and theoretical notions via which the discipline may further evolve in socially and environmentally responsible ways.