Emotion and Memory: Clothing the Body as Performance

Abstract

This chapter focuses on clothing as performance and scenography and proposes an elevated presence of clothing and costume design in performance. Through my research and design practice I explore the clothed body as a site for production of meaning, performance, and communication. The intention is to expose the role of clothing design as a generator of performance and meaning through design by drawing on embodied experience, memory, sensory interaction, and emotional and physical triggers in garment design as a generator of embodied communication. The design 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 previous research, which identified that interdisciplinary ways of working have emerged that focus on the body and clothing and challenge traditional discipline approaches and definitions. I argue that as performance and experimental fashion practice increasingly move into new and site-specific contexts and employ increasingly 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. By focusing on the body as the site for production of meaning and performance, clothing not only can be present in the production process of performance, but also can become a generator of performance and communication through design. By addressing 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 contribute to the making, intention, and reading of work in contemporary hybrid performance practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.