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Fashion Revolution: Participation

published on 6 August 2009

SHOWstudio actively seeks to push the internet to its full potential to make the experience of fashion as exciting and provocative as possible. The idea of dialogue is key, and showstudio.com’s commitment to creating interactive media that invites its audience in is an important element of its programming. This approach deliberately stands in opposition to most existing forms of art, where the audience is effectively mute, unable to respond. By allowing their audience a voice and opening up the world of high fashion image-making to quite literally everyone, showstudio.com has created an inclusive, collaborative environment that welcomes the unexpected and the spontaneous; the thrill of the unplanned and unrehearsed creative relationship.

Explore the projects included in the 'Participation' section of the SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution exhibition at Somerset House.

SHOWstudio actively seeks to push the internet to its full potential to make the experience of fashion as exciting and provocative as possible. The idea of dialogue is key, and showstudio.com’s commitment to creating interactive media that invites its audience in is an important element of its programming. This approach deliberately stands in opposition to most existing forms of art, where the audience is effectively mute, unable to respond. By allowing their audience a voice and opening up the world of high fashion image-making to quite literally everyone, showstudio.com has created an inclusive, collaborative environment that welcomes the unexpected and the spontaneous; the thrill of the unplanned and unrehearsed creative relationship.

Sound of Clothes, 2006

Daniel Brown, Nick Ryan

'Synaesthesia' is one part of The Sound of Clothes, a larger project that embodies SHOWstudio.com’s ongoing investigation into re-thinking conventional forms of communicating and describing fashion. The aim of The Sound of Clothes was to reimagine the possibilities of experiencing clothes by utilising the full range of senses, and specifically to explore and expand on the important relationship that music has always had with fashion. The project began as a photographic shoot destined for POP magazine, featuring designer Nicolas Ghesquière’s Spring Summer 2006 collection for Balenciaga. Composer Nick Ryan was invited to interpret one of Nick Knight’s images—of a jacket —as a soundscape. Ryan, a synaesthete who can sense objects as sounds and colours, asked also to see the jacket itself so that he could experience its form and textures first-hand. After working with an orchestra to capture exactly the right sound for each element of the jacket, Ryan passed the tracks on to digital artist Daniel Brown, whose interactive piece invites the viewer to drag the mouse across the photograph, causing the music to change in accordance with whichever section of the jacket it passes over. The project articulated Knight’s own curiosity into what senses photographers must employ in their pursuit of an image. The confidence to know when to release the shutter, to anticipate the right moment in time, comes from a perception that relies on senses beyond sight alone.

In Camera, 2003/2004/2006

David Bailey, Björk, Tracey Emin, Alexander McQueen, Kate Moss, Peter Saville, Juergen Teller, Vivienne Westwood, Nick Knight

Launched in 2003, the live In Camera broadcasts introduced a completely new premise to the interview format, allowing a global online audience, as well as the interviewee’s friends and family, colleagues and peers, to pose questions via a live Forum, resulting in a range of pertinent and original subjects for interrogation. SHOWstudio.com’s unique set of contacts and collaborators gives them the opportunity to ask some of the world’s most respected and celebrated image-makers, designers and artists to take part, allowing viewers rare and privileged access to key creative figures. The set-up is simple: a chair, lighting and a camera, and a mediator who presents the questions and types in the interviewees’ responses. While the interviews particularly focus on working process and origins of ideas, the informal and intimate set-up also allows the interviewees to give candid responses to more personal questions. Interviewees have no prior knowledge of the questions or the identity of the questioners, which adds to the frisson and unpredictability of the live event. The revelatory nature of some answers has even prompted tabloid coverage.

Forget-Me-Not, 2001

Peter Saville, Julie Verhoeven

Inspired by the use of the French eighteenth century textile Toile de Jouy in the Spring/Summer 2001 fashion collections, creative director Peter Saville commissioned the young illustrator Julie Verhoeven to create ‘wallpaper for the computer’. Acknowledging the contemporary anxiety about the mainstream role of pornography in fashion photography, in addition to concerns about the availability of sexual imagery on the Internet, Saville supplied the artist with reference imagery of Japanese rope suspension bondage to introduce an element of erotic danger; a counterbalance to the delicate detail of the historical textile source. From this, Verhoeven produced a sequence of virtuoso, linear vignettes that grew increasingly dark in subject and expressive in execution as the series progressed. Experimenting with Flash software to create the final interactive, SHOWstudio.com’s designers developed a labyrinthine route through the drawings using various ‘hotspots’ in each of Verhoeven’s densely packed graphic layers. In contrast with pornography that is consumed passively, as a film or stills might be, Forget-Me-Not demands an active participant. It is impossible to explore this provocative project without acknowledging one’s complicity in stimulating further depravity. The user has to navigate the drawings by stroking their cursor over the various sexual acts and organs depicted, until they find the gateway to the next, more explicit level.

Design Download, 2003/2004/2005/2006/2009

John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Yohji Yamamoto, Martin Margiela, Junya Watanabe, Gareth Pugh, Antony Price

Design_download is an ongoing project that offers the chance to access downloadable paper patterns by leading fashion designers. The premise is a riposte to the elitist nature of high fashion, offering everyone the opportunity to own a ‘designer’ garment, and giving designers the chance, quite literally, to ‘dress the world’. Viewers from as far afield as Finland, Tasmania and Korea have taken part, downloading the pattern, cutting pattern pieces in a fabric of their choice, assembling the garment and then styling it in a photograph, which is posted on SHOWstudio.com’s project gallery. Design_download was launched with an intricate jacket pattern by Yohji Yamamoto, whose design was only revealed by constructing the garment itself, and additional patterns have been offered by John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Junya Watanabe, Gareth Pugh and Antony Price. Maison Martin Margiela offered an unfinished design true to their principles of deconstruction, prompting the maker to make crucial decisions about the finished nature of the garment. As such, the incomplete pattern is emblematic of how design_download offers a creative engagement between a fashion designer and a viewer interested in the craft of making clothes, linking them through digital technology and the relaying of stitches. The examples on display here were created as part of a competition launched prior to the exhibition, whose final designs were selected by SHOWstudio.com and SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution’s curators.

Bring & Buy, 2005

Ann-Sofie Back, Jodie Barnes, Judy Blame, Namale Bolle, Tal Brener, Francesca Burns, Cathy Edwards, Katy England, Nicola Formichetti, Simon Foxton, Katie Grand, Jacob K, Jonathan Kaye, Erika Kurihara, Alister Mackie, Noki, Nancy Rhode, Sarah Richardson, Katie Shillingford, Jamie Surman

Bring & Buy was driven by Nick Knight’s desire to show how clothes could be given value other than that accorded to them by their label and prominence in the pages of fashion magazines. A request was sent out in July 2005 to SHOWstudio.com’s collaborators and viewers to donate garments that held some special significance for them. It asked that the clothes be accompanied by their story—who they had belonged to, when they had been worn, what special part they had played in the wearer’s life. Submissions were received from viewers worldwide, as well as from well-known international stars such as Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Tilda Swinton and Björk. The garments formed the basis of a major fashion shoot for the October 2005 issue of i-D magazine, curated by Nick Knight. Inspired to break down the territorial barriers created by magazines where photographers and stylists are forbidden to work on rival publications, Knight assembled a cast of stylists from magazines such as POP, i-D, Dazed & Confused, Vogue, AnOther Magazine and Arena Homme Plus, in order to style actors and fashion models including Erin O’Connor, Naomi Campbell and Karolina Kurkova. SHOWstudio.com viewers were witness to the entire trajectory of the project, from the parcel opening to the styling sessions and photoshoots. Viewers were invited to enter into dialogue with the team, sending comments and questions via a live rolling stream. Following the shoot, the garments were auctioned on eBay to raise money for Oxfam.

Explore

Video

Time Lapse Film: Naomi

25 December 2006
Watch the interactive light projections graffitied across the giant Naomi Campbell sculpture by visitors to SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution at London's Somerset House.
Image Gallery

Live Project: Taking More Liberty's

06 August 2009
Taking More Liberty’s celebrates spontaneous creativity and the sheer unbridled exuberance and theatre of London’s streets.
Image Gallery

Live Project: Casting

06 August 2009
Every visitor to the SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution exhibition was invited to participation a ‘virtual casting session’, browse the stills from the interactive.
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