Falling against texture: writing as fashion practice
Creators: name: Ha Mitford, Winnie
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 500301
subject: Aesthetics
classificationCode: 500310
subject: Phenomenology

description: In its flickering appearances and rush of narratives, fashion exudes an underlying dynamism cradling the possibility of manifold aesthetic intensities. Rendering a recurring thrust towards potential worlds, fashion manifests a momentum that rouses the imagination and incites change.<br><br>This research pursues the aesthetic potential of fashion in the absence of physical garments. It draws from Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s abstraction of fashion as the elevated, phenomenal expression of ephemerality and transience in the production of the eternally new. The intent is to develop an innovative approach to writing as creative practice based on the lived, aesthetic paradigm of fashion.<br><br>Existing studies of fashion writing – based on its prevalence as a genre in popular media – are mostly situated within the fields of professional practice, criticism, communication and semiotics. In contrast, I engage with writing as an artistic and philosophical endeavour, exploring its capacity to stir and vivify the depth of aesthetic experience that is as palpably lived as it is imagined. The research engages with three areas of research that intertwine: (1) fashion theory, primarily through Ulrich Lehmann’s study of fashion as the metaphysical expression of modernity; (2) aesthetics in relation to lived experience through the phenomenological method; and (3) writing as a medium of creative production.<br><br>I engage with contemporary theorists, writers and creative practitioners to draw connections between aesthetics, perception, imagination, the body as medium, and the sensation of language. To do so, I produced a series of prose-works* – fragments of narratives, word-lists and notes written as brief poems. As exploratory processes, they allow me to engage directly with research questions, concepts and speculations. These writing experiments subsequently lead me to understand why and how I write through the fashion paradigm, that is, as a way of shifting between lived experience and imagination – between the tangible and the imaginable.<br><br>To understand ‘what the practice does’ and the kinds of experiences it could engender, as well as to explore possibilities for future practice, I test the work across a spectrum of formats, audiences and experiential contexts: academic conferences, public exhibitions, print publications, audio recordings and reading performances. Shifting the practice beyond the written page lends a vital sense of immediacy, performativity and contingency; it reveals the myriad ways by which fashion expression can be produced and communicated and at the same time reflects the processes of its own construction.<br><br>The practice is framed as a dynamic approach to ‘writing fashion’ based on lived aesthetics, to catalyse processes that are critical, speculative and performative; this includes the composition of this dissertation. By allowing the practice to be unfixed, I emphasise writing – in parallel with fashion – as a way of opening up rather than narrowing aesthetic expression, thus innovating the way writing is produced and experienced in and as fashion practice. The research contributes to contemporary thinking and practice in the field by offering a mode of writing that mediates the aesthetic, phenomenal and imaginary paradigm of fashion – performing in and as practice the deeper, underlying structure of fashion.