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Experimental Fashion

Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body

Professor Francesca Granata author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:23rd Feb '17

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Experimental Fashion cover

The fashion body unbound.

Shortlisted for the Millia Davenport Publication Award

Experimental Fashion traces the proliferation of the grotesque and carnivalesque within contemporary fashion and the close relation between fashion and performance art, from Lady Gaga's raw meat dress to Leigh Bowery's performance style. The book examines the designers and performance artists at the turn of the twenty-first century whose work challenges established codes of what represents the fashionable body. These innovative people, the book argues, make their challenges through dynamic strategies of parody, humour and inversion. It explores the experimental work of modern designers such as Georgina Godley, Bernhard Willhelm, Rei Kawakubo and fashion designer, performance artist, and club figure Leigh Bowery. It also discusses the increased centrality of experimental fashion through the pop phenomenon, Lady Gaga.

This is a timely book in that many of the concepts discussed resonate strongly with the current cultural context: gynophobia and fear of the fat feminine body; neoliberalism, corporate greed and the "enterprising self"; and fear of border crossings and the breakdown of cultural categories. * Morna Laing, "Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture" *
The strengths of this book are two-fold, both reframing Bakhtin's theory of the Grotesque body as a tool for the analysis of fashion and also its ability to theorize the very edges of fashion [...] [I]n doing so, Granata does both fashion studies and design history a great service. * Ellen Sampson, "The Journal of Design History" *
A very welcome contribution to the field of fashion studies, not least through its attention to an aspect of fashion—experimental fashion—that has so far been given little attention. * Agnès Rocamora, Reader in Social and Cultural Studies at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London and author of "Fashioning the City" *
[H]er work begins to bridge a gap in literature concerned with the intersections of fashion practice and performance art. [...] While Granata's work is both methodologically and theoretically complex it is presented with absolute clarity and this level of accessibility is highly commendable. * Fenella Hitchcock, "Costume: The Journal of The Costume Society" *
Granata continually reconsiders the grotesque within the contexts of different fields of both culture and academe. Borrowing from psychoanalysis, feminist theory, performance and film studies, she creates a vivid narrative that inspects grotesque corporealities in a variety of cultural forms through meticulous analysis of primary sources. * Jana Melkumova-Reynolds, "International Journal of Fashion Studies" *

ISBN: 9781784533786

Dimensions: 234mm x 156mm x 25mm

Weight: 493g

232 pages