by helene.goedl -

IMPULSE #4 | Lecture Performance: “REPAIR!_Fashion” by Evelyn Roth

On the 27th of October, a lecture performance by designer Evelyn Roth took place as part of the program of the Vienna based “re:pair festival” 2024. The lecture performance dealt with the role of the repair process in the current fashion system. Under the title “REPAIR!_Fashion – The Relevance of Repair as an Act of Creativity in Circular Processes”, Roth engaged in an act of repairing a garment live on stage before elaborating on the role and the status of the act of visibly repairing and mending garments. Using the example of a blouse, Roth illustrated the repair process as a socio-political statement and creative act. Within the design context, the lecture discussed the possible future of design processes in circular workflows.

The focus of the talk was on the emerging hierarchical change in the structure of fashion: REPAIR!_Fashion aimed to be understood in the context of a systemic and structural change in fashion. Repairing fashion provokes an expanding aesthetic perception and a political positioning that the act of repairing as a design process entails.  In the words of Orsola de Castro, upcyclist, fashion designer, author and co-founder of Fashion Revolution: “Repairing your clothes can be a revolutionary act. “1

About Evelyn Roth

“Evelyne Roth is a designer and a lecturer on the BA in Fashion Design, the MA Master’s Studio ICDP and the cross-institute CoCreate programme of the FHNW Academy of Art and Design. She has held posts at a number of institutions as an expert in Design Thinking and Forecasting. Questioning common processes in the fashion industry, attempting to break with them and launching products that make a contemporary statement are all part of her holistic brief as a designer. Her practice and teaching in design focus on circular design, research, conception and materiality.”2

Key Takeaways

The main issue concerning the visible repair and resale of clothes Roth illustrated in her lecture is the uncertain legal status of reselling a visibly mended garment as a new or updated design under the name of the repairing designer. Roth highlights that for a long time, the goal of repairing was to make the repair process as invisible as possible. She mentioned brands like the luxury fashion house Hermès, who have a dedicated repair program for their bags. The goal of their repair strategy is to “reset” the products to their original state as well as possible, without leaving visible traces of the repair process. Roth postulates that the act of repair should be reconsidered as a creative act of its own which is allowed to leave traces. Through her example of a blouse however, she illustrates what the challenges for such a recontextualization can bring. In her performance, Roth visibly mended a blouse which was originally designed by Dries van Noten. If she wanted to resell the blouse as her own design, there would be a legal argument for copyright infringement because of the protections on the original design. The entire discussion went into more detail, illustrating that within fashion, copyright is a complicated question in general. Some aspects of fashion designs are protectable by copyright, like pattern designs. Certain other aspects however, cannot be protected by copyright, such as silhouettes for example. The copyright question does not come up when a garment is sold without visible mending manipulations as a second hand item attributed to the original designer, which begs the question – when does a repair become visible enough to be relevant and what are the rights of the visible mender in this process.

My impression of the talk was that this issue is certainly interesting and seems to be quite complicated. I personally do not quite see the visible repair of garments and the resale of them on a large scale as an issue that reach dimensions where it will really disrupt the fashion system. However, I of course have not done extensive research on this and can therefore only state my first impression and general opinion in this case. 
As for the relevance to my research topic – I believe digital fashion faces a similar issue of copyright and especially ownership. These topics will be discussed further in a future regular blog post.  

1Programm – Re:Pair Festival 10.-27.10.2024. October 27, 2024. Re:Pair Festival. https://repair-festival.wien/programm/?date=2024-10-27.
2FHNW. “Evelyne Roth.” Accessed November 11, 2024. https://www.fhnw.ch/en/people/evelyne-roth.

Sources

“Evelyne Roth,” FHNW, accessed November 11, 2024, https://www.fhnw.ch/en/people/evelyne-roth.

Programm – Re:Pair Festival 10.-27.10.2024, October 27, 2024, Re:Pair Festival, October 27, 2024, https://repair-festival.wien/programm/?date=2024-10-27.

All Images © Helene Goedl 2024

by helene.goedl -

IMPULSE #2 | Event: “ORF Lange Nacht der Museen” – Mode Wien Pop Up Museum

On Saturday, October 5, 2024, this year’s “ORF Lange Nacht der Museen” (“night of museums”) took place throughout Austria. For the 24th time, the event allowed visitors to explore a large number of museums with just one ticket. Once again this year, numerous museums and galleries participated in the event and opened their doors from 6.00 pm to midnight.

In addition to varied exhibitions, many exciting special events were part of the evening. Visitors could choose their personal highlights from the wide range on offer and visit all participating museums and events with just one ticket. The participating museums offered a wide range of experiences, from small, curious and eccentric locations to large, renowned cultural institutions.1

I decided to explore the “long night” in Vienna this year, and one of the participating institutions I selected for one of my visits was of special interest to my thesis topic and my research into digital fashion.
The PopUp Museum of Mode Wien in the Guild House of Viennese Fashion Makers was located in the historic center of Vienna. The site used to serve as an accommodation for itinerant garment makers. The exhibition “Symbiosis”, which was on display during the “long night” pays tribute to the creative energy and craftsmanship of the Viennese fashion scene.2

Why was this Exhibition relevant for my Thesis?

In my research into fashion design, one component of interest for my research is the way fashion is displayed in museum exhibitions. Fashion has a long history of “fighting” to be viewed as an art form, often times being perceived as lesser than classic artistic disciplines such as painting, sculpture or even literature and music. The idea that fashion is more trivial as an artistic discipline certainly has many underlying causes, not least of which is the aspect that fashion was and is to this day perceived as a female domain as well as a part of pop culture, which lowers its merit in the eyes of certain fractions of the art scene. Interest in fashion is not often equated to other interests in the arts, often being dismissed as something mundane and trivial. In recent years however, the perception of fashion has shifted and the artistic merit of the craft as a discipline of art is finally gaining more traction. Along with this tension of fighting for its place in the art cannon, exhibiting fashion can be a challenge because fashion usually depends to a certain extent on the incorporation of movement, body and the context of being worn. This makes it a challenge to exhibit in an engaging way.

Exhibition Review

The space in the guild house was divided into sections. In one of the rooms, the exhibition “Symbiosis” was displayed. This exhibition featured designs from Viennese fashion designers in correspondence with artworks by local artists, all elaborating on the same topic. The correspondence between the garments and the art pieces created an interesting dialogue and extended and re-contextualized the designs on display. The overall exhibition design however, was unfortunately not quite as successful as it could have been. Since the “long night” always attracts a large number of visitors, the exhibition was quite crowded and the space did not provide good opportunities for easy crowd guidance, resulting in a rather hurried exhibition experience. 

The other section of the space was dedicated to a pop up shop where some local designers had the opportunity to sell some of their designs and give insights into their design process. The designers were present and this provided an opportunity to ask further questions about their creations which was a nice component. Overall however, I would have preferred if they could have dedicated the whole space to the exhibition concept in favour of a better visitor flow and a more pleasant overall visiting experience. It became quite clear that the exhibition was likely more of an afterthought and the pop up shop spatially took priority over it, which was a pity. Although I understand the overall concept and I appreciate the approach with the correspondence to other art disciplines, I must say that I have seen fashion exhibited in more engaging ways in other museums, such as the exhibition “Dressing the Body” at the Disseny Hub Barcelona. 

Images

1ORF Lange Nacht Der Museen. “Info,” 2024. https://langenacht.orf.at/info.
2ORF Marketing & Creation GmbH & Co KG. “ORF Lange Nacht der Museen Booklet.” Press release, 2024.

Sources

“Dressing the Body. Silhouettes and Fashion (1550-2015),” Disseny Hub Barcelona, December 12, 2023, https://www.dissenyhub.barcelona/en/exhibition/dressing-body-silhouettes-and-fashion-1550-2015.

“Info,” ORF Lange Nacht Der Museen, 2024, https://langenacht.orf.at/info.

ORF Marketing & Creation GmbH & Co KG, “ORF Lange Nacht der Museen Booklet,” Press release, 2024, accessed November 11, 2024.

All Images © Helene Goedl 2024

by helene.goedl -

IMPULSE #1 | Film: “Notebook on Cities and Clothes”

About the Film

In his 1989 film “Notebook on Cities and Clothes”, Wim Wenders documents Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto’s journey through developing a collection for a fashion show in Paris. Although Wenders previously expressed a disinterest in fashion, he accepted the commission to create a film on Yamamoto when he was approached by the Centre Pompidou in Paris for the production.
In the film, Wenders intercuts interviews with Yamamoto with documentary scenes shot in his atelier while he develops a collection with his team. In the process, Wenders finds appreciation and understanding for the process of fashion design by finding parallels to his own creative practice. Wenders labels this project as a “diary film”, shooting primarily without a team and filming most of the material himself.1 

About his approach to fashion before making the project, Wenders says in his voiceover in the film: “The world of fashion… I am interested in the world, not in fashion. But maybe my judgement was premature. Why shouldn’t I try to approach the topic without prejudices. Why not look at fashion like any other industry, the film industry for example?”

“Filmmaking…should sometimes just be a way of life. Like going for a walk, reading a newspaper, writing something down, driving a car, or making this film. From day to day it writes itself, driven by the curiosity for the topic.2

About Yohji Yamamoto

Yohji Yamamoto was born on the 3rd of October 1943. He is among the most notable modern Japanese fashion designers. Yamamoto is based in Tokyo and Paris. Noted as a masterful tailor, his brand identity is marked by his avant-garde tailoring which also incorporates Japanese design aesthetics.3

Why is this Film an Impulse for my Thesis?

In the course of my research, it is becoming more and more clear that my thesis will deal at least in part with an exploration of the material component of fashion and clothing, the role materiality plays in our relationship to clothing and the challenges this poses for extending the fashion design discipline into the digital world. 

In the film, director Wim Wenders mentions his starting point for his exploration into the world of fashion design – a jacked he owned that gave him a special feeling when he wore it. The piece was by Yohji Yamamoto.2 This is an example for the importance of materiality in fashion design, especially in how the wearer builds a relationship to garments. 

Wenders and Yamamoto connect over the famous August Sander photo documentary work “People of the 20th Century” in which Sander “documented” everyday people in their environments through portraits (The word “documented” is in quotations because we know today that some of the images were staged by Sander and are not truthful to the real circumstances of the portrayed people). While Wenders admires it as an iconic work of photography, Yamamoto is fascinated by the clothes and demeanour of the portrayed people. Yamamoto appreciates how clothes back in that time reflected and communicated a lot more about a persons circumstances in life.2
This can be seen as positive or negative. Clothing as a tool of social stigmatisation is also a common occurrence throughout history. 


Personal Key Moments from the Film: 

  • Digital craftsmanship – Wim Wenders interjects the elaborations of Yamamoto on Sander’s work by questioning the value of digital craftsmanship in comparison to classical craftsmanship. Especially connected to the people depicted in Sander’s portraits. Wenders essentially questions whether digital processes will ever be able to compare to the value of physical craftsmanship.
From: Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989).
  • Craftsmen’s morals – “[…] in short, to find the essence of a thing through the process of fabricating it”.2 – Another instance of an argument in favour of the importance of physical process. 
From: Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989).
  • Designing time – Yamamoto postulates that if he could design anything, it would be time. He says some materials are alive, they age and the true finished garment is a product of time.2 Here, we see another component of the analog fashion’s life cycle that cannot be translated into digital space. Or does digital fashion have the ability to age? What would digital aging look like? Will digital fashion age through outdated formats, low resolution, outdated shading and 3D modelling conventions?
From: Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989).
  • Importance of collaboration – fashion as a collaborative art form is brought up in the final scenes of the film. Yamamoto and his team come together to review the collection shown at Paris fashion week and celebrate. Wenders acknowledges the importance of each of their contributions – does this collaboration get lost in the digital fashion design process?

1“Notebook on Cities and Clothes | Wim Wenders Stiftung.”
2 Notebook on Cities and Clothes.
3 Wikipedia contributors, “Yohji Yamamoto.”

Bibliography:

“Notebook on Cities and Clothes | Wim Wenders Stiftung,” n.d., https://wimwendersstiftung.de/en/film/notebook-on-cities-and-clothes/.

Notebook on Cities and Clothes. 35mm Color, 1989. https://www.primevideo.com/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.52af787f-a727-4c08-92cd-19e1ac0a8357.

Wikipedia contributors. “Yohji Yamamoto.” Wikipedia, November 5, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yohji_Yamamoto.

by helene.goedl -

07 | Digital Fashion – The Sustainability Question

Digital fashion is often touted as a more sustainable alternative to traditional fashion. Since there is no physical production involved, there is no need for raw materials, manufacturing, or shipping, potentially reducing the environmental impact associated with the fashion industry. At the same time, the discussion around digital products and their sustainability is a point of contention on its own, since the ever-growing need for larger server farms, computers and their energy consumption need to be weighed against traditional forms of production. The question to investigate in this instance, therefore is “are digital fashion design technologies a net positive for sustainability in the fashion industry?”. The following is a brief discussion of points for and against this claim and suggestions for further research. 

To begin this investigation, we must first narrow in on the exact point of contention we are about to engage with. First and foremost, it is important to define that the following discussion explicitly concerns the adoption of digital design techniques and their impact on the fashion industry as an integrated part of the whole design process. The aim of this discussion is decidedly not to isolate digital fashion design as its own standalone practice and discuss its impact on sustainability and the environment in isolation. It is not the intent of this text to view digital fashion practices detached from the overall fashion industry in this particular case. 

Having defined the field of discussion thus, we can make comparisons on the impact of digital versus traditional design practices. A useful starting point is to identify which steps and practices in traditional fashion design have the potential to be replaced with digital design technologies in the first place. 

One obvious use case for digital methods is the design process itself. Idea finding, sketching and mood boarding can all be done with digital tools, avoiding paper waste. This, however has quite a small impact on sustainability in regards to the entire process. 

Another frequently identified step in the production process is the prototyping phase. Prototyping fashion design products is an often time- and material intensive process. Using digital prototyping methods has the potential to cut down on cost, time and material usage in the overall process. Designers can more quickly explore and test design ideas and prototype garments in digital space. They can also utilise the findings from digital prototyping to optimise the production process by optimising pattern constellations and material usage. 

Finally, digital design methods can entirely replace the production phase if the collection or piece of clothing is designed to stay digital altogether. Here is also where we need to make an important distinction and introduce a vital caveat in the discussion so far: the distinction between using digital methods for traditional fashion production versus designing entirely for the digital space.

Many designers rightfully point out that in designing for a physical collection, all the above mentioned steps can hardly be entirely replaced with digital methods. Haptics, material behaviours, look and overall impression of textiles might be simulated in digital programs, but the simulation often does not translate to the reality of its physical counterpart, making any efforts to replace the traditional methods obsolete. 

Are digital fashion design tools therefore only an improvement to sustainability if the collections they produce stay within the digital space altogether? To answer this question, we would have to make calculations based on a predefined assumption, which we would have to agree on beforehand. One such assumption that is often proposed is that digital-only fashion products might have the potential to replace cheaply made, trendy fast fashion items, clothing pieces that go through the most rapid trend cycles and are usually purchased and discarded within the same year or even within the same fashion season. Proponents of this idea suggest that developments in augmented reality applications might hold the potential for future digital-only fashion to be “worn” in digital space and made visible in the physical space by AR devices, enabling the “wearers” to showcase their digital-only outfits in this way. But this idea seems quite utopian and depends entirely on a massively increased prevalence of AR device usage within the next years and decades. It might not be an impossible development, but, looking at the history of AR devices and their usage, it seems an unlikely development as of now. 

Another argument for digital-only fashion items gaining popularity is the nature of fashion merchandising and influencer culture that depends mostly on representing outfits on digital platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. For these platforms, physical ownership of a garment is not necessary. Rather, the models or influencers wanting to showcase a new outfit could just as well rely on digital fashion for their content. 

All the above mentioned strategies and theories on developments in the digital design market are interesting and hold potential for the future, but it seems that even with the novelty of digital fashion contributing to its popularity, it will ultimately lose out to traditional fashion in the long run. Because fashion remains a physical and haptic medium, digital fashion might only have the potential to supplement existing practices. From today’s point of view, it seems far-fetched that digital garments might replace sectors of traditional fashion in the consumer market any time soon. Therefore, the question of its sustainability impact remains a debatable point as well. Server farms and computer technologies that are necessary for producing digital fashion in the first place might even worsen the overall environmental impact of the already problematic fashion industry. Despite all these pessimistic outlooks, digital design methods might still hold potential for improving the fashion industry’s sustainability. But, as all other questions in this young design discipline, this needs to be analysed and researched in much more depth in order to draw meaningful conclusions on its overall impact. 

Further reading: 

Benson, Sophie (2021) Is digital fashion really the industry’s eco-friendly saviour? Dazed Digital. https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/53877/1/digital-fashion-clothing-industry-saviour-climate-sustainability-the-sims-avatar

Daria Casciani, Olga Chkanikova & Rudrajeet Pal (2022) Exploring the nature of digital transformation in the fashion industry: opportunities for supply chains, business models, and sustainability-oriented innovations, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 18:1, 773-795, DOI: 10.1080/15487733.2022.2125640

Hoekstra, Charlotte (2021). Digital fashion for sustainable change: A strategy for digital fashion at Tommy Hilfiger (Master Thesis). TU Delft. https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:d268a227-5be0-4969-bf6d-b2edd5fef0c8?collection=education