Emotion Collection - Blue Air Dress

This is part of a series ‘Emotion Collection’ comprises two performative garments drawing on research into new methodologies for design and communication at the intersection of fashion and performance. This has informed two costume performance films art directed and developed by the researcher in collaboration with a dancer Fukiko Takase from Random Dance company and film maker, Tim Keeling.

This emotion collection practice seeks to connect designer, wearer and viewer on an experiential level that is derived from and performed through body and clothing narratives. The methodology of oral history interviews draws upon embodied experience, memory, emotional and sensory responses to clothing that through analysis uncover shared responses, which are employed as physical and emotional triggers in garment design. This challenges approaches to fashion design where the wearer is not actively engaged and linear narrative in costume design and dismantles hierarchical structures in the production of an interdisciplinary work that places clothing and the body as a generator of meaning and performance through design.

The ‘Blue Air Dress’ film was exhibited at Critical Costume, Arts Centre, Edge Hill University, Liverpool UK 2013. A peer reviewed conference paper has been developed into a 9,000 word book chapter ‘Emotion and Memory; clothing the body as performance’ interdisciplinary press 2014.

• http://www.criticalcostume.com/exhibitio...