Mr Frank Cartledge
Design Communication
Chelsea College of Art and Design, London Institute
frank.cartledge@btinternet.com
Frank is theory co-ordinator for Communication Design at Chelsea College of Art and a visiting lecture for fashion and textiles at the Royal College of Art.
'Re-animating the Fabric in Time.'
As we appear evermore submerged into a technological mediation that prioritises movement over stasis, will we begin to relearn the silhouette, reassemble the frozen image into one single continuum? This paper proposes an exploratory study of clothing as movement and duration. Whilst acknowledging the catwalk as a site of movement and a 'perfect' 'situation' to explore clothing as kinetic form, its most popular interpretation is still confined within the frozen image. As such those qualities of cloth which differentiate it from, for example, a curtain or sofa become lost. The result is that clothing becomes read as a silhouette on mannequins or outline on models often forgetting the constraint and freedom it can add or subtract to the body and the relationship to its environment as the body moves within it. We come to perceive clothing as that which frames the static body as opposed to that which lives through space/time in relation to the body. Starting from an understanding of garments as surfaces which continually interact with both wearer and environment, the paper will then explore the possible mapping of some of the these trajectories and their readings within particular filmic examples. Can one construct a reading of clothing that is more than momentarily specific; that understands the garment as more than pure surface, but the mediation between body and environment as it travels through time and space?
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