Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body
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Overview
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.
The fashion body unbound.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Against Power Dressing: Georgina Godley
Chapter 2 Fashioning the Maternal Body: Rei Kawakubo
Chapter 3 Performing Pregnancy: Leigh Bowery
Chapter 4 Deconstruction and the Grotesque: Martin Margiela
Chapter 5 Carnivalized Time: Martin Margiela
Chapter 6 Carnival Iconography: Bernhard Willhelm
Chapter 7 Fashion and Performance: Lady Gaga
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
- Title: Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body
- Author: Francesca Granata
- Series: Dress Cultures
- Publisher: I.B. Tauris
- Print Publication Date: 2017
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 232
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781786720290, 1786720299
- Resource ID: LLS:9781786720290
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T13:19:55Z
Francesca Granata is Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons the New School for Design, New York. She is the editor and founder of the journal Fashion Projects. Her work has appeared in Fashion Theory, Fashion Practice, and The Journal of Design History, The Atlantic as well as in a number of books and exhibition catalogues.