Ms Charlotte Hallows
Charlotte completed her Master of Arts (Visual Culture) at Monash University in 2002. She currently works frelance as a writer and artist. She has published reviews in Eyeline, Like and Post-West. Charlotte has had several solo exhibitions at TCB.inc.
The Wasted and the Wasteland: On Fashion, Consumption and Excess
The central figure of "Sex in the City" writer, Carey Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) is a model consumer whose excesses of shoes and clothes are haunted by fantasies and fears of waste of homelessness and sex work. Bradshaw's accumulation and display through conspicuous consumption is a kind of 'Mannerist' excess and event. The figure of the bag lady also constitutes an event in the milieu of the street in the city. Waste figures in critiques of consumptive excess centred around dispossession and marginality -poverty, homelessness, addiction, illness and exploitation. Waste is a constitutive contradiction which accompanies and exposes consumption. We encounter waste as we negotiate cultural processes and cultural material. Waste concerns space and the formal properties of things and their use-values and exchange. This paper will present material on 'waste' which preoccupied modernity - the Lumpensammler (the ragpicker that so interested Baudelaire), and Lumpenproletariat (which figure in Marx's analysis of urban-industrial processes). Waste figures in Georges Bataille's analysis of the sacred and transgression. This paper will than consider contemporary fashion's fascination with waste and uselessness in allegories of decline and signage such as the rip, the tear, vintage or second hand and customizing.
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