Fashionable Discourses
Yesterday, myself and my peers, first year Fashion Studies Masters students, started installing our semester long project with WWD. This exhibition, titled “Fashionable Discourses: Rethinking Today The WWD Archive (1990-2001),” will be open December 3rd until December 15th. Fashionable Discourses reveals how contemporary issues were discussed (or not) before the proliferation of a more globalised online media landscape and showcases an example of the ways in which the fashion discourse can be a thermometer to measure the fluctuating concerns in our contemporary society. This exhibit pushes the viewer to reflect on the meanings of representations, and on canons of representation and their historical contingency. As Masters students, we were invited to explore these questions by looking at the digital and physical archives of Women’s Wear Daily (WWD), focusing on gender, labour, sustainability and race in the 1990s.
We spent months combing through the archives to find articles and ads that took part in the our field’s discourse. After finding articles, discussing key underlying words and themes, and partaking in a master class with Miles Sosha, the current Editor in Chief of WWD, we started brainstorming ways to start showcase what we had found in a creative and academic fashion.
Our groups are titled ‘The Rage to Recycle,’ ‘Gender games,’ ‘Diary of a Factory Worker,’ and ‘Reaching for Ethnic America.’ We chose to name our individual sections based off of the titles of key articles we found that exemplify the underlying discourse. With our sections discussing about different topics, each group chose to showcase their section in different ways.
My group, ‘The Rage to recycle’ made a performance art video to comment on the push of overconsumption of vintage fashion we found in our articles. Our articles used the words ‘eco,’ ‘green,’ and ‘natural’ to push consumption of seemingly ‘sustainable’ products onto their consumers. As a result, we decided to showcase our articles on a skeleton rack with clothing hangers. Viewers are able to take the articles off of the rack, look at them, and put them back, playing with the idea of consumption.
‘Diary of a factory worker,’ has numerous levels to their display. They have five large articles describing their overall findings, a book and timeline they made chronological analysing the change over time throughout the 90s through globalisation and outsourcing, and a video of the Rana plaza explosion in 2013 that comments on the issues that still persist today.
‘Reaching for Ethnic America,’ an exhibition piece that focuses on race and representation in WWD from 1990-2001. Their main areas of focus are on questions of agency, value-making, and discourse. It looks at who is writing, who isn’t; who is worth marketing to; and who or what is the word ‘ethnic,’ the commonly used term in WWD 1990-2001 to describe any racialized individual/group. They display articles, spotlight quotes, show videos of relevant contextual information, and present a book to showcase our research more in-depth.
Finally, ‘Gender Games’ decided to make a video and also a booklet of articles and key terms. They found that their main axes of the discourse around gender were characterised around three thematics: femininity, masculinity and unisex. These shifts are also reinforcing their decision to showcase academic books and quotes that give a larger context to the journalistic discourse developed in WWD.
This will be our first exhibition with the Fashion Studies program, so make sure to mark your calendar for this Friday, December 3 to experience this exhibition! Click to learn more.
