Fashion Installation:
Body, Performance, Scene, Show, and Air

Wednesday, November 14th
6pm
U L105
63 5th Avenue

Drawing on the soon-to-be published book, Fashion Installation: Body, Space and Performance (written with Vicki Karaminas), Adam Geczy examines the scenic, the staged and the specular since the beginnings of haute couture at the end of the nineteenth century. The transition from clothes to fashion is one based on image, imagination and desire. As such, fashion is a performance, always something staged, based always on something unreal, unresolved and beyond the everyday self and world. While many of the earliest designers and fashion entrepreneurs knew this intuitively, today the spectacle of fashion occurs increasingly in virtual realms, in dreamscapes, where the material garment has all but disappeared. If fashion is defined by time, the spaces of fashion are those of “air”, nimbuses of suggestiveness like those generated by perfume.

Dr Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at Sydney College of the Arts of the University of Sydney. Having published over fifteen books, he along with his long-standing collaborator Vicki Karaminas, is one of the world’s leading scholars on the art-fashion cross-over. He is also editor of two journals with Penn State University Press, and series editor of the book series, Fashion and Visual Cultures (Anthem Press).

Hosted by the MA Fashion Studies Program, Parsons School of Art and Design History and Theory