Экспериментальная мода
Francesca Granata
Experimental Fashion

Translated from English Demidova Ekaterina

2024. 165 x 240 mm. Hardcover. 240 p.

ISBN 978-5-4448-2287-6

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Annotation: How do the grotesque and carnival manifest themselves in fashion? How is fashion related to the art of performance? Could experimental fashion go mainstream? Francesca Granata's book is devoted to provocative and eccentric phenomena that diverge significantly from usual conceptions of high fashion and the body. The author focuses on the creativity of designers who entered the history of fashion with bold experiments: Rei Kawakubo, Georgina Godley, Martin Margiela, Bernhard Willhelm, and performance master Leigh Bowery. All of these designers managed to shift the boundaries of the bodily and challenge generally accepted ideas about the normal body, the absoluteness of classical style, and femininity—in short, they challenged the topography of the body itself. Investigating the phenomenon of the grotesque body, which was at the center of the experiments of fashion designers at the end of the 20th century, Granata relies on the theory of the grotesque developed by Mikhail Bakhtin. The phenomena of displacement, deconstruction, and the search for the latent meanings of the corporeal in the sphere of experimental fashion are considered through the prism of ideas developed by Freud, Derrida, Foucault, and other intellectuals. The author's interviews with Georgina Godley and with the widow of Leigh Bowery complete the book, immersing the reader in the period of the 1980s and deploying a wide panorama of ideas and trends that have largely come to determine modern attitudes toward corporeality and fashion.

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