Seminar #3 Revealing the Self - Travelogue

We were asked to write our own travelogue for this week seminar. Mine is about my trip to United Arab Emirates, Dubai and how I saw fashion in there.

 Last year with my family we travelled to United Arab Emirates, Dubai to spent our Christmas holiday.  First thing I noticed as our tour guide was telling us about the city on our way to hotel that they like in Dubai to have everything the biggest in the world (buildings were fighting to be the tallest and also fastest built, even Ferris wheel “London Eye” was going to be the biggest in the world).

I could not help but notice how everyone were dressed, especially women. Women were all wearing burka. Some of the women were all covered and you could see only their eyes and for some of them you could see their beautiful faces. For coming from Finland this seemed really overwhelmed for me. Not only that these women have to cover themselves, but not to be able to express through clothing and to look all the same. It took me couple days to start looking more closely these garments. They seemed to me first only black and all looking the same when viewed from a distance, but when I looked closely I could see that they were all different. I could see different fabrics and also amazing handwork on the garments. Some of them had embroidery on them made with black on black so I could not first notice it from distance and some of them had also small beading on them. I also noticed that women were expressing their fashion style also through brooches, bags and shoes. This of course is what I saw in tourist are, but I don´t think that everyone has that luxury.

Through whole trip I was questioning from myself how should I been dressed in this vacation. Even I don´t think anyone should be right to say how I dress, but the mood and the feeling I Dubai made me uncomfortable.

So should I respect my own ethics or as a tourist should I respect their culture? At the same time do I then respect only men´s thoughts or the women´s thoughts?

Seminar #2 Fieldwork

The set text “Reading the Landscape: describing and interpreting field sites“ indicates how the fieldwork can be used in your own research. It recommend of using notebook for writing or sketching all your thoughts down, which you might not remember afterwards. Also by sketching what you see or what are you interested makes you to look the object/view more closely.  The main point is to put everything down and not leave anything out even you won´t use that in that specific project, but you mind come back to it in your other projects. (Phillips and Johns, 2012)

Me myself the most important design tools are my phone and small black notebook.  I take pictures anywhere I go with my phone. It can be architecture, textures, fabrics or interested garment in streetscape. To my notebook I write things what come to my mind or I draw shapes of clothes I think I could use in my coming collection, but I also research capture lot of pictures from social media, internet and books.

I think in fashion designer take lot of inspiration from past fashion style periods and modify them into more modern designs. I think found fashion images are important to understand history of fashion.

I don´t know how would I use soundscapes and/or smellscapes in your own discipline. 

I will be continuing my developing practice research subject to my final project. I´m interested of technical aspects of design and in my last project I was researching different pleating techniques and I developed different hand pleating techniques and used on of them in my final garment. For my final project I fill be researching more pleating techniques and I will be visiting Ciment Pleating workshop as my “fieldwork” research. My own find text "The art of folding: Creative forms in design and architecture" gives me the basic knowledge of heat-set pleating method, which Ciment Pleating workshop is using. In this pleating method pleating happens using two already pleated sheets of Kraft paperboard that fit together perfectly as a mould for the fabric. The fabric would be placed carefully between the Kraft paperboards and next step is “the most delicate part of progress” where from both end of the table person will be shaping the pleats by hand. For the last the paperboards are rolled up and put into a steamer. Temperature used in the steamer depends of what material will be used. (Trebbi, 2015, pp.68-71) In my fieldwork I will observe the working method, interview the staff, taking lot of research pictures and I will also try how different fabric materials will work with the pleating method.

 Reference list:

Phillips, R & Johns , J. (2012) “Reading the Landscape: describing and interpreting filed sites”, Fieldwork for Human Geography, London: Sage, pp. 115-142. File 2.6MB

Trebbi, J-C. (2015) The art of folding: Creative forms in design and architecture. Spain: Promopress.

Seminar #1

My last developing practice project concentrated on understanding how the different pleating methods work. In that project my goal was to discover the new structural forms of the pleats by manipulating the fabric.

My aspiration for the project was to create pleating technique to create a new silhouette through reconstructing and modifying the structure of the body influenced by contemporary architecture. I took my inspiration from architecture to experiment with shape and texture and taken them to develop different hand pleating techniques, creating pleating samples. My intent outcome was to create a pleating technique and use that in my final designed garment.

At this point of new project I don´t know yet where my research or design process is going so it made sense for me to look the relationships between architecture and fashion design.

I have chosen text by Jörg Seifert “ Woven Architecture and Constructed Clothes. On Blurring of Boundaries Between The Second and Third Skin” for my research. The author splits the intersections between architecture and fashion design to five different sections.

1.     The metaphorical level

2.     2. The level of the design process

3.     The material level of the designed objects

4.     The material level of the objects

5.      The functional level of the objects (Seifert, 2009, p.209)

The author in every section subject explains the subject through architecture and fashion aspect and brings up things which are not that clearly taken from the other design practice. The author tells in the text “ the curved façade of the Selfridges store by Future Systems, completed in Birmingham in 2003, is covered in its entirety in sequins – a design element which has long been common practice in fashion design” (Seifert, 2009, p.212)

Work from my own developing practice project. Pleating samples inspired from architecture to create shape and texture.

 

Architecture Image: 

King Fahad National Library, Gerber Architekten Accessed at: http://www.detail-online.com/fileadmin/_migrated/pics/DP2014_Gerber_03.jpg (Downloaded: 22 November 2016)

 

Architecture Image:

Vents, Heatherwick Studio Accessed at: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH_uIFyPrEnqHceKuWwDPhOduYBSDBFVVhqD7E87TBoZRJn64IiVRhtzJZcBcr2eraA9lCEXJ8x95RSvWfsalXiRMRE3-i4f7cwlBURVwk537u4h7d5gg3gWMRV1uiosGf0CaQYRneVJwJ/s1600/Heatherwick2.jpg (Downloaded: 22 November 2016)

 

Architecture Image: 

Brick Pattern, Marc Koehler Architects

Accessed at: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/1b/97/9f/1b979f976b3fd53fc56be1ad3b5f0d2e.jpg (Downloaded: 22 November 2016)

 Reference:

Buxbaum, G (2009) Sashion in context. New York: Springer Verlag GmbH

 

Gender Aid Interventions and Afghan Women: Images versus Realities

The author Faegheh Shiraz born in Iran is Associate Professor in the Islamic Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of several academic publications. Her most recent book is “Velvet Jihad: Muslim Women's Quiet Resistance to Islamic Fundamentalists”. She is currently working on another book project hoping to publish it by 2016.

The essay “Gender Aid Interventions and Afghan Women: Images versus Realities” is one of the original essays of book “Muslim Women in War and Crisis” in 2011 by Lina Abirafeh. The author is representing in the essay different cultural viewpoints of Afghanistan women. The text is about how the Western media has been represented Muslim women and how Muslim women represent themselves.

In the mid-1970s there started to be talking about women´s rights and modern technology. The Author points out how Western media perceptions build a certain kind of image of Afghnistan women. The author argues in the text “Afghan women reveals a specific rhetoric that has informed public perception and in turn has informed the design of aid interventions for Afghan women.” (Shiraz F, 2011, p.79) In selected images are often stereotypes of Afghan women and they are portrayed as a weak and not as strong women. The images give a picture that Afghanistan women need to be saved “from something”(Shiraz F, 2011, p.81) and they are not enough strong by themselves.

The author tells that overall interviewed Afghanistan women started to be aware how women are treated in different countries and women from different backgrounds have different opinions of women´s right in Afghanistan. Interviews also show that the most important value for Muslim women is their religion. One of the women pointed out that ”religion is an important part of society. Without it, there cannot be progress.” (Shiraz F, 2011, p.86) Then came national identity, ethnic background and gender and family ranked lower. The author was surprised that women ranked family for last when men as a second most important aspect.

Interviews showed also regardless of the age or background women felt frustrated of failed programs implemented by aid institutions.  They feel that it doesn´t support all of the women. The author point out that most of the women feel that acknowledge of new rights of women show only on paper, but they can´t analyse or understand the freedom and it doesn´t show in their lives. The author analyses in the text  “Afghan women have not been given an opportunity to set their own agenda negotiate changing identities”, and this applies that maybe approaching way doesn´t work for all of the women in Afghanistan.

In my opinion text is for special audience working in the feminism interventions or interested of outside of Western world culture. As now days visual thinking is even more up it can´t be argued that media plays a big role in people´s impression of Muslim women lives. The author point out in her conclusion “it is important to understand hat nature of Afghan “feminism” may not necessarily resemble a Western model”(Shiraz F, 2011, p.90) and be aware of that is important when figuring out how to assist these women.

Wearing burka is part of Muslim women identity. They feel it protects them and they feel it gives them a freedom.  As a fashion designer I´m interested if thoese how don´t want to wear it can do it safe in Aghanistan?

Diesel´s 2013 advertaisment of denim niqab. The brand received mixed reviws of the picture. Some liked diversity of using a fashion model, contemporary styling and traditional religious article of clothing, when other felt disrespectful of using a symbolic, meaningful Islamic headpiece out of context. 

References:

Abirafeh,L. (2011) ´Gendered Aid Interventions and Afghan Women: Images versus Realities´ in Shirazi, Faegheh (ed.) Muslim Women in War and Crisis: Representation and Reality. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 77-91

Shirazi, F. (2016) Muslim women in war and crisis representation and reality edited by Faegheh Shirazi. Available at: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/shimus (Accessed: 27 November 2016).

The university of Texas at Austin - academia.edu (2016) Available at: http://utexas.academia.edu/FaeghehShirazi (Accessed: 27 November 2016).

 Image:

Available at: http://comeintoland.tumblr.com/post/118432987972/new-post-has-been-published-on (Downloaded 28 November 2016)

The Irish Catholic Memorial Card as Material Culture

The author of the article Mary Ann Bolger is a lecturer in design theory and history at Dublin Institute of Technology. She received MA from the Royal College of Art in London, where she is currently researching a PhD on topic of post-war Irish Graphic Design. Bolger is a member of the Institute of Designers in Ireland, the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design and the Design History Society. Her main research interests include typography, visual culture and the material culture of religion. (Bolger M.A. no date)

 

The book "Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity 1922-1992" was written by Linda King and Elaine Sisson. It is a collection of several essays, written from different disciplinary and academic perspectives about Irish design and its visual and material culture history. The text of the twelfth chapter "The Ephemera of Eternity: The Irish Catholic Memorial Card as Material Culture", was originally written by Mary Ann Bolger. The text focuses on the design of the memorial cards. They are mass produced object intimately associated with Irish catholic mourning.

The author starts her text with describing funeral culture in Ireland. The author tells about the political uses of death and the funeral and on the folk tradition of the wake. The origins of the memorial cards came on the nineteenth century from the Netherlands to Germany and from France to the rest of Catholic Europe. They appeared for the first time in Ireland around 1870.

From the 1940’s, the memorial cards started to usually include a photograph to reflect identity of the deceased person. The author argues in the text that “memorial cards with photographs are much more complex entities than those without.” (Bolger M.A, 2011 p.242) The memorial cards help to understand of death and also how to deal with the loss.

The layouts of the memorial cards have not changed that much over the years, but new technology has modernized them. When erlier there were used potraits the author point out in the text that “today, digital technology allows fro the elimination of background detail, previously achieved by tightly cropping the photograph to face of the subject” (Bolger M.A, 2011 p.245) which makes it possible to have stylish and continuons outcome.

  

In my opinion the article is for people interested in Irish culture or religious studies, focusing on Catholic religion. The depth of the text and the way it is written would make me think it is  for specific academic audience. I also think it is for people who are interested how religion influences graphic design. 

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Fashion brand Dolce & Gabbana also borrows lot of inspiration from Catholic religion. In the Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2013-2014 collection you can see Dolce & Gabbana using sacred mosaics of religious figures, rosaries and appropriation of the crucifix.

 

Dolce & Gabbana RTW Fall/Winter 2013-2014, inspired religious icon prints were a premonition to the recent media focus on the Catholic Church.

Reference:

Bolger, M.A. (2011) ´The Ephemera of Eternity: The Irish Catholic Memorial Card as Material Culture´, in King, L and Sisson, E. (eds), Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity, 1922-1992. Cork: Cork University Press, pp.235-247.

Mary Ann Bolger (No date) Available at: http://bavacs.blogspot.co.uk/p/mary-ann-bolger.html (Accessed: 28 November 2016)

Huffpost Style (2013) Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/vogue.fr/vogue-paris-runway-report_b_2772514.html?slideshow=true#gallery/283376/0 (Accessed: 28 November 2016)

Image:

Huffpost Style (2013) Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/vogue.fr/vogue-paris-runway-report_b_2772514.html?slideshow=true#gallery/283376/0 (Downloaded: 28 November 2016)

Vogue (No date) Available at: http://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-2013-ready-to-wear/dolce-gabbana/slideshow/collection#2 (Downloaded: 28 November 2016)

My Body is My Manifesto!

Theresa O’Keefe is a Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. In her research, she talks about feminism, gender, social activism and radical social change. She is the author of several articles and the book "Feminist Identity Development and Activism in Revolutionary Movements" (2013).

The article "My Body is My Manifesto! SlutWalk, FEMEN and Femmenist Protest" by Theresa O’Keefe was published online in the peer reviewed, interdisciplinary journal Feminist Review in 27 of June in 2014. Using an intersectional analysis to look contemporary forms of women´s popular protest SlutWalk and FEMEN to bring questioning use of the gendered body in struggles for women´s emancipation. The author explains the importance of understanding the role of the body in movements that go against system of oppression, such as racism patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, etc. In both protests they use body as a political weapon. She explains in the text how both movements fail to ‘(re)appropriate patriarchal signifiers’ and how by failing to do that they end up reinforcing these signifiers and their associated norms.

SlutWalk and FEMEN are both driving movements of feminism. SlutWalk started After Toronto police officer suggested in talk about campus rape that to solve campus rapes would be that young women would  “avoid dressing like sluts”. People in SlutWalk protests are often dressed using sexualised items like fishnets and corsets. The author brings up the difficulties of using word slut. In the text O´keefe references to Dines and Murphy “SlutWalk might think that proudly calling themselves “sluts” is a way to empower women, they are in fact making life harder” for young girls (O´Keefe, 2014, p.7)

FEMEN group fights to protect women from repressive political regimes. Their protest tactics are getting more attention then the actual issues they seek to address. FEMEN even go further in this direction by choosing women for their protest actions, whose bodies fit the heterosexual male vision of sexy attractiveness. They are activists who resemble more of celebrity look like “mostly white, with long blonde hair, able-bodied conventionally attractive” (OKeefe, 2014, p. 8) and use their topless body as a product to sell their message.

The author criticises “both of SlutWalk and FEMEN relates to the preceding in that these ´movement´ ostensibly lack any structural analysis”.  These protests represent only part of female group. They do not give change to different cultures to be part of them as they can´t relate to way they are protesting.

In my opinion, this text is a great reading for those who are interested in feminist movements. The text gave me different aspects of the movements that I did not know about. The ideas behind the SlutWalk and the FEMEN are good, but the way they implement can make it worse, especially for young women. It is therefore essential to think about more appropriate ways of feminist self-expression and protest. As Pamela Church Gibson already broached feminism fashion design aspect and raised problematic new trend pornostyle (Church-Gibson P. 2014) and I think these feminism protest play a part in it. 

Also fashion Designers use their fahionshow for the benefit of bringing out women´s rights. Like example Karl Lagerfield did in Chanel Ready To Wear Collection Spring Summer 2015 show, where end of the fashion show models and Karl Lagerfield walk through the catwalk protesting Women´s rights.

References:

O’Keefe, T. (2014) ‘My Body is My Manifesto! Slutwalk, Femen, and Femenist Protest,’ Feminist Review, 107, pp. 1-19. 

Church-Gibson, P. (2014) ‘Pornostyle: Sexualised Dress and the Fracturing of Feminism,’ Fashion Theory, 18: 2, pp. 189-206.

Elman S. (2015) Chanel Ready To Wear Collection Spring Summer 2015 Available at: http://pinstake.com/chanel-ready-to-wear-spring-summer-2015-archives-sara-elman/aHR0cDp8fHNhcmFlbG1hbl5jb218d3AtY29udGVudHx1cGxvYWRzfDIwMTR8MTB8NDU2MzY5MDMyXmpwZw==/ (Downloaded 10 October 2016)

 

Visual Activism

The author Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is currently Deputy Director of the International Association for Visual Culture and organized its first conference in 2012. His research interests are visual culture, cultural history, disability studies, contemporary art and new media and human rights. Currently he is working on a project entitled “The Visual Commons #BlackLivesMatter”. (Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2016)

Pelican in the UK published Mirzoeff´s most recent book “How To See The World” in 2015. In chapter “Visual Activism” Mirzoeff is answering his question “So what then is visual culture now?” (2015, p. 289).  According to author visual culture might be also known as visual thinking. The author goes through how visual activism has changed form past years, he also talks about another form of it called visionary organizing and what part social media plays.

For the benefit of the general reader in it giving examples of the different scenarios of visual activism. The author argues that even the issues of identity, gender and sexual identity and how artists and filmmaker present it might be the same that in 1990 but the way how we engage them have changed. Giving example of artist who calls herself as a “black lesbian” and a “visual activist” and about her work “between the freedoms offered by South African constitution and the realities of homophobic violence encountered by LGBTQI” (2016, p. 290 ). 

The author´s tells examples of companies how try to replace labor with machines to make more profit and bring up another form of visula activism, visionary organizing. Instead of doing that visionary organizing way to think is “how we might use our creative energies to better end then cutting jobs and increasing profit” (2015, p. 295).  People around the world are trying to find to new ways to establish it. The author deduces that the reason why 24 percent of young people in Germany wanted to became artist is that “art might seem to be only way to live for yourself in global economy, as opposed to the dominant so-called ´service economy´ in which we work” (2015, p. 295).  What drives it is the constantly changing technology, which came with the new social media channels like Youtube and Snapchat. It makes possible to information to spread from country to other fast, what was´t possible in the past. The author exmaple of shooting incidend and spread slogan form scene “Hands Up, Don´t Shoot” is a good example how social media appers today.

The book has been published in 2015 and I think visual thinking will be crowing as technology evolves. Fashion designers and people part of fashion industry are a big part of visual activism and they are taking part of issues happening in world. Like example designer Sophie Theallet asked other designers to join her not to design clothes for Melania Trump to support her husband's presidential campaign. () Also Anna Wintour appeared sitting front row at multiple shows in a Marc Jacobs campaign T-shirt emblazoned with Clinton’s face.

 

References:

Mirzoeff, N. (2015) ‘Visual Activism’ How to See the World. London: Pelican Books (pp. 289-298)

Mirzoeff, N. (2016) Nicholas Mirzoeff. Available at: http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/bio.html (Accessed: 19 November 2016)

Available at: http://www.elle.com/fashion/celebrity-style/news/a40869/sophie-theallet-calls-on-designers-to-not-dress-melania-trump/ (Downloaded: 19 November 2016)

Available at: http://www.backstagetales.com/hillary-clintons-new-campaign-stylist/ (Downloaded: 19 November 2016)