Ms Karen de Perthuis
Karen is currently finishing a PhD thesis called 'Fashion's Imaginary' which focuses on the relationship between fashion and the body as represented in images of the fashion model. In her other life, she works as a costume designer and fashion stylist in the local film, television and music industry.
The Synthetic Ideal: the Fashion Model in the Age of Digital Manipulation
On the catwalk and in life, fashion has always been restricted by the human body in a way that has not been the case in representation. However, with the advent of computer manipulation of the image, the boundary between garment and skin is dissolved, not as in the practices of tattooing and piercing, in order to regain some lost site of authenticity but rather to assert the supreme authority of artifice. Fashion, ever at battle with nature, finds itself released from the limitations of the human form and revels in the freedom to invent a humanity where any trace of the organic has been eliminated. In the images of fashion photographers who have embraced the extremes of digital manipulation, Baudelaire's description of fashion as 'a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather, as a permanent and repeated attempt at her renewed reformation' is taken to its extreme. At one level, the newly manipulated form directly imitates sartorial fashion. However, on a more fundamental level, the reconstruction of the fashionable ideal is a culmination of Fashion's attempts to represent its essential mode of being. In the synthetic ideal, fashion gives full reign to its obsession with artifice and fantasy and finally resolves, on the body of the model, its ongoing dialectic between mortality and immortality.
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