EXHIBITION – What’s Left? A Critical Reflection on Fashion Week
Fashion Week is a moment in which not only the industry but also the public eye is focused on fashion. In the frame of a week, a massive amount of presentations, opinions, discussions, fashion shows, blog posts, tweets, fashion designers, ephemeral materials as well as scandals and gossip are created, staged and performed. But, what happens after this week? Where do the material and immaterial remnants of these events go? How does Fashion Week affect our constantly-evolving vision of fashion, its actors, its practices and values? In short, what’s left?
What’s Left? A Critical Reflection on Fashion Week takes an oppositional stance on the ‘What’s next?’ attitude of the fashion industry, and proposes a retrospective interpretation of its most ephemeral and representative event: Fashion Week. Using as a case study the Paris Spring-Summer 2015 Fashion Week, students in the course ‘Curatorial Practices in Contemporary Fashion’ at Parsons Paris problematize and critically look at this event, exploring its nature, its perceptions and its remains. Starting their investigation from the article “The Field of Fashion Materialized” written by fashion scholars Joanne Entwistle and Agnés Rocamora (2006), the students have discussed their visions and experiences of Fashion Week, and have debated how this event often overshadows – rather than celebrates – discussions about innovation, creativity and fashion design.
What’s Left? investigates the whirl of meanings and values that Paris Fashion Week assumes, embraces and proposes, through the individualization of four themes: chaos, participation, (im)materiality andoverflow media. Each theme aims to discuss and explore a component of Fashion Week, inviting the visitors to reflect not only on what the fashion show has become today, but also on the multiple implications that such event produces and leaves behind in our understanding of fashion and its values.
Project Chaos: Video & Sound Installation by Hilary Stuart Grant Sullivan, Bugce Gulen andSofia Korol.
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