Mannerisms in the Margin of Footwear and Accessory Design

Abstract for paper presented at “Imagining the Unusual: Cognitive Dissonance, Pattern Breaking and Other Fantastic Beasts”: An interdisciplinary conference in Moscow, September 2019

We live in an increasingly bland and homogenous culture of consensus where an anti-intellectualism presides. A mercantile culture of commodity fetishism and objectification both in everyday life as well as in education. Accessories are those things that cling on to a larger structure, they are the margins yet informing the centre. This paper explores how these margins can effect and challenge the centre. How can the eccentric, the exotic, the bizarre and strange furnish the aesthetic, the escapist, or the ideological possibilities of designed objects?

Conceptual design offers a space, free from market pressures, in which design can engage in and explore new areas in order to experiment and develop alternative methodologies related to larger social and cultural issues and anticipate possible futures. Such critical and speculative design methodologies can contribute to different ways of thinking about footwear and accessories. The designers’ projects discussed in this paper aim to provoke thought about our current way of life in the form of two papers: THE PERVERT’S CRITIQUE and MANNERISMS IN THE MARGIN OF FOOTWEAR AND ACCESSORY DESIGN.

Starting with THE PERVERT’S CRITIQUE where a few of Moorer’s own projects investigate how accessories, as commodity fetishes par excellence, can invert and turn on itself as it were. Deconstructing several accessories from his own practise through the lens of Deleuze’s essay ‘Coldness and Cruelty’ the aesthetic construction of the fetish is laid bare. In doing so, it shows that fetishism itself can partake in cultural discourse and criticise. How can the concept of the perverse function as a voice within critical design practice as a critique ‘unmotivirt’?

The paper then asks in MANNERISMS IN THE MARGIN OF FOOTWEAR AND ACCESSORY DESIGN how design education can reclaim its place at the forefront of social and cultural change discussing projects that are social and critical as well as speculative. Offering new perspectives for possible future scenarios that challenge instead of enhance the mediocre. In other words, how can critical pedagogy participate to inform critical design proposals exploring the possibility for design to function as an aesthetic counter-discourse through subversion and re-purposing in order to offer alternatives to the soulless pathology of normality and increasing monotony in our culture reflected by the contemporary design of the everyday?

“Imagining the Unusual:
Cognitive Dissonance, Pattern Breaking
and Other Fantastic Beasts”

An interdisciplinary conference in Moscow, September 19-21, 2019.

The unusual, extraordinary and eccentric in the last decades is more often seen in advertising than in academic discourse. Beginning from at least the mid-19th century, European culture grows increasingly suspicious both of this rhetoric and of what stands behind it, which partly coincides with the era of scientific methods of world cognition. In fact, such categories as “great person”, “genius”, “extraordinary event” come to belong to the realm of mass culture, where they are ruthlessly exploited for profit. As the result of this, researchers avoid talking about the unusual, preferring either to banalize it or to exclude it from the academic discussions altogether. We, on the other hand, suggest talking about this elephant in the room, which both draws the eye and prevents serious discussion. We specifically concentrate on the link between the impression (of emotional reaction, sensory organs) and its rationalization – verbalization, portrayal, evaluation, usage, etc. Among the possible topics and problems to discuss we would like to offer the following:

● Is the unusual possible per se or is it always integrated into some tradition of representation of the unusual?
● How do affective/emotional reactions to the unusual work?
● The “good” and the “bad” unusual (exclusiveness, curiosity, whim, eccentricity, nonsense): how does the value attribution of the unusual happen?
● Regimes of the usual: structuring the order, in the context of which the difference is perceived
● Images of the Other: exotics, anomaly, monstrosity
● The museum object: from cabinets of curiosity to the defamiliarization / ”mummification” of contemporary experience
● Readers’ / spectators’ anticipations and breaking those: the unusual “inside” the canon (e.g., a sudden plot twist; portraying a mythological creature) and “against” the canon (e.g., breaking the boundaries of genre)
● Sensations and modern “production of novelty” (in media, fashion, etc.)
● “Designing” the unusual and extraordinary
● The extraordinary as extraterritorial: extraterrestrial, spaceless, utopian