The Wear Project

In order to gain a fuller understanding of the complex part dress plays in our everyday lives in the UK today, the aim of my postgraduate study is to draw out individual sensory experiences of wearing everyday dress, situating them within social and cultural contexts and exploring the inter-related physical, meaningful and emotional aspects to multi-sensory interaction with dress.

Studies in costume & performance, 2018

This visual essay introduces an independent collaborative artistic research project between costume designers Charlotte Østergaard and Jeppe Worning utilizing mask as costume to examine one's relationship to the MASK from two perspectives: inside and outside. The research process starts with artistic practice: beginning by interacting with the objects/materials of study, we engage in a critical dialogue with the experiences we invoke. How can we as costume designers have an awareness of the costume from within and at the same time keep a gaze from the outside? Starting from the inside, we must dare to act as performers wearing the object of study, feeling it from the inside. As a wearer, the feeling of the material on the body may be a personal experience; it is also critical to incorporate a second perspective-perceiving the MASK from the outside. This project provoked a critical dialogue between the sensorial feeling (inside) and the visual expression (outside) of the mask. The dialogue between these two perspectives challenges us to become 'active observers' to our artistic expression. KEYWORDS costume design method mask sensory qualities aesthetic qualities movement artistic research inside outside CHARLOTTE ØSTERGAARD Independent Costume, Textile and Fashion Designer MASK: Dialogue between an inside and an outside perspective of costume VISUAL ESSAY

‘Presence and Absence: The Performing Body’

Bugg J. ‘Emotion and Memory; Clothing the Body as Performance’, Adele Anderson and Sofia Pantouvaki (eds.), Presence and Absence: The Performing Body. Oxford: Interdisciplinary press, 2014, pp.29-52 Abstract This chapter focuses on clothing as performance and scenography and the presence and role of clothing and costume design in performance. I explore through my practice as a designer, the clothed body as a site for production of meaning, narrative, performance and communication in an interdisciplinary setting. The intention is to expose the role of costume and clothing design as a generator of performance and meaning through design by drawing on embodied experience, memory, sensory interaction, emotional and physical triggers in garment design as a generator of embodied communication. The design within this research draws on oral histories of dress and seeks to engage viewers and wearers on an emotional and experiential level by connecting to cognitive understanding and memory. This work builds upon aspects of my completed doctoral research which identified that the intersections of subject disciplines are increasingly complex and new interdisciplinary ways of working have emerged that focus on the body and clothing, challenging preconceptions, traditional approaches and subject definitions. I argue that as performance and experimental fashion practice both increasingly move into new and site-specific contexts and as focus is extended around the role of the performer, audience reception, conceptual and experimental approaches, the divisions between clothing designed as conceptual fashion and clothing designed as costume for performance have become less defined. I suggest that it is the shared use of clothing and the performing body to communicate meaning that has enabled a hybrid practice to emerge between fashion and performance. I place emphasis on clothing the body as a visual and physical communication strategy and in relation to research in the fields of performance, costume design, fashion design and fashion communication. I suggest that by focusing on the body as the site for production of meaning and performance, clothing can be not only present in the production process of performance, but also can become a generator of performance and communication through design. By focusing on costume and clothing as a form of narrative and scenography, I have been able to take into account how the emotional and physical factors as well as the site of the body itself contributes to the making, intention and reading of work in the context of hybrid fashion, clothing and performance practice within a contemporary context.

Fashion & Performance; Materiality, Meaning, Media is an evolving exhibition collaboratively curated by Anna Nicole Ziesche and myself. Most recently developed for the Design Hub, Melbourne in February 2015, it is the outcome of the curators’ individual and collaborative research and the performative development of a smaller pilot exhibition of the same name for the Arnhem Mode Biennale in 2013. The research and resulting exhibition demonstrates a commitment to investigate and communicate contemporary ideas around dress, the body, and performance in ways which connect but go beyond traditional parameters of fashion or performance. Through contemporary moving image based works, material artefacts, garments and performance the exhibition exposes artistic approaches driven by the moving and dressed body that embrace aesthetics, form, spatial concerns, bodily narratives and process as performance. In the work of all the selected artists and designers the performance relies upon clothing and the wearer’s active engagement as integral to the development of the performance and all are communicated through time based media. Performance is usually experienced in and through the live moment and could be understood as becoming something other than performance through mediated forms such as film and exhibition that are separated from the live experience. The problems associated with exhibiting film, dress and lived experience are confronted here in the curatorial process for Fashion & Performance. Through discussion of the research lead, curatorial approach an analysis of curating ‘dress film’ through performance based strategies and bodily knowledge’s of dress is uncovered. Understood through writings on performance and technology, interactive art, and embodiment this chapter explores how the ‘mediated experience’ of clothing and the body, curated through this specific exhibition has extended the experience for the viewer/ participant. Ultimately the curatorial approach sought to engage audiences on an experiential level through their own bodily knowledge, kinaesthetic, sensorial engagement and knowledge of wearing.

Fashion Theory, 2019

Fashion is a field fundamentally enmeshed with bodies and materiality. After the global and material turns for history, I contend that we are now experiencing the “embodied turn”: a development that recognizes the processes of doing, making and remaking, and reconstructing as a fruitful methodology with quantifiable, academically valid results. The pioneers of material clothing reconstruction changed dress history and fashion studies. From their lead, new generations of scholars are extending the original approaches, while historical re-enactors using their findings are now an established global community. This article explores how remaking the clothed past can yield unique and useful research insights. How is the embodied methodology of making and wearing reconstructed clothing being done, and in innovative ways? Which directions might this take us; and how do new technologies advance the possibilities of enquiry using reconstruction? My discussion of these questions offers broad-ranging examples of the scholarly search for embodied or experiential dress knowledge to be discovered through re-making the past. I draw on personal experience of re-creating historical clothing, and current doctoral work examining what can be learnt from experimental archaeology to suggest “experimental history” is an equally valid concept. The article also outlines the need for dress and fashion scholars’ more extensive theoretical engagement with methodologies of re-creation. Keywords: reconstruction, experimental history, embodied turn, dress history methodology

Close your eyes. Can you sense your clothing touching you? And that you are touching your clothing? This chapter will address and define the importance of 'Aware-Wearing', a somatic act developed by the author in collaboration with the costume designers and visual artists Sandra Arroniz Lacunza and Carolina Rieckhof. It is proposed here as a significant research methodology for costume design and costume-based performance practices. The central aspects of 'aware-wearing' include dressing and undressing, walking, the sense of touch, the role of the performer-spectator and the materiality of both bodies and costumes. Based on examples derived from my ongoing somatic and interdisciplinary artistic research entitled the Somatic Movement, Costume & Performance Project, I focus on how one particular 'Somatic Costume TM ', the 'Furry Heart Protector' (2015-18) evolved through three interrelated creative stages: design, workshop and performance. These stages are non-linear and cyclical. They work with the somatic-based methods described here to 'inhabit' the costume, with the aim of focusing on how the experience of costume effects and 'affects' bodies (affective being a philosophical term not simply equivalent to emotions). The aim is to further speculate on how we write about, design and perform costume as a 'wearer' opposed to as a 'viewer' , inviting scholars, practitioners and spectators to become active participants in a live multi-sensorial costume experience. There is little research into costume designers' and scholars' experiences and perceptions of costume while wearing it. 'While dress cannot be understood without reference to the body and while the body has always and everywhere to be dressed, there has been a surprising lack of concrete analysis of the relationship between them' (Entwistle 2000: 324). The act of consciously wearing is a practice of embodiment-and a return to the emphatic relationship between costume and the body. Embodiment is noted here as 'the act of incorporating and bringing visible expression to, the materiality of lived experience' (Dean and Nathanielsz 2017: 180). Body and costume move each other in metaphorical and literal manners. The multi-sensorial, intersubjective act of wearing allows subjects to increase their experience and understanding of their bodies, costume and environment as well as the interrelationships between the three zones. Wearing becomes the bridge to knowing

dObra[s], 2018

métodos de pesquisa em moda; moda e ecologia; prática em moda; intervenção em guarda-roupa; agência material.

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2015

I will argue here that for many of us the act of dressing our bodies is evidence of intentional expression before different audiences. It is important to appreciate that intentionality enables us to understand how and why we act the way we do. the novel (and potentially significant) contribution this paper makes to this examination is employing clothing as a means of revealing the characteristics of intentionality. In that, it is rare to identify one exemplar that successfully captures the relationships between the cognitive and physical characteristics of its application. nevertheless, this paper will not attempt to fully encompass the traditional approaches associated with this concept but instead employ both the early and later writings of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his claim that our lived bodies are an expressive space from which we act intentionally. In other words (and this is critical for the approach of this paper), that the manner by which we dress our bodies is likely to offer a significant means of revealing the character of intentionality in everyday life and by this, claim that clothing can communicate. Accordingly, this first-person account closely examines both the cognitive and physical experience of a simple clothing example: 'what to wear?' and the experience of an everyday clothing purchase in a store and its subsequent impact when the item of clothing is worn for different audiences. the ensuing discussion systematically examines the significance of marrying Merleau-Ponty's writings with this everyday example through private and public audiences and in abstract and public spaces.

2019

Research paper presented at <i>Futurescan 3: Intersecting Identities, </i>Glasgow School of Art, 11th-12th November 2015.<br><br><i><b>Futurescan 3: Intersecting Identities</b></i><i><br></i>Edited by Helena Britt, Laura Morgan and Kerry WaltonNovember 2015<br>ISBN: 978 1 911217 08 4