The body as Factory: a post-productivist fashion practice through film

This chapter discusses approaches to expanded fashion practices. The central focus here is not making garments, but a post-productivist stance, with implications in relation to the production of fashion and its associated meaning. There is an attempt to see fashion beyond its commercial limitations, and instead use fashion film to speculate on our bodies as well as how we perform our materials, clothing, and wardrobes to materialise and dematerialise ourselves. This chapter carefully negotiates film as a useful critical tool, building on fashion’s own ability for image-making, where fashion colludes with dominant narratives. Power is enacted symbolically through bodies via a language of signs that non-verbally convey meanings about individuals; such fashion discourses can be diverted to critically address fashion itself as a system. This exploratory chapter surveys some of the objects, ideas and approaches my practice-as-research into material and immaterial fashion through the semiotics of fashion.