Keynote Speakers

Elizabeth Wilson
Valerie Steele
Christopher Breward
Unfortunately, Stella Bruzzi is no longer able to attend the conference.

Elizabeth Wilson

Professor Elizabeth Wilson continues to be at the centre of fashion scholarship, ever since the publication of her elegant and provocative study Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity in 1985. Previously based at the University of North London, she taught cultural studies for ten years, and is also active in the media world, writing regular articles for the Guardian, London, the New Statesman and New Left Review. Elizabeth has appeared in several British television programmes on the arts and architecture; and has broadcast many times for the BBC, on Woman's Hour and the arts programmes Start the Week, Kaleidoscope and Night Waves, and on several one-off programmes in Europe and North America. Her visiting lectureships have included The Lewis Mumford Memorial Lecture, Parsons School of Design New York, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Keynote Paper:
Magic Fashion
The idea that there might exist a magical dimension to fashion runs counter to the theoretical analyses of dress that dominated for most of the past century. The hostility to fashion displayed by Thorstein Veblen and J C Flugel in particular was partly due to what they perceived as its irrationality. Over the past two decades, however, fashion theory has moved on. There has been an explosion of interest in dress studies, drawing on a richer variety of theoretical approaches. One of the more influential writers has been Walter Benjamin whose observations on fashion in The Arcades Projects has attracted many commentators, perhaps for the very reason that they are fragmentary and often ambiguous.
In my presentation I attempt to build on his awareness that the interest of the Surrealists in dress had important implications. Their preoccupation with the relation between organic and inorganic, for example, drew attention to the relationship between garment and body. I look particularly at the way in which garments may sometimes come to acquire the qualities of a fetish to an individual wearer and suggest that our relationship to garments can be not only of deep psychological importance (hardly a new idea!) but can also bear a freight of meanings squeezed out of consumer society. The Surrealists rebelled against the reduction of all meaning to a rational calculus and mere hedonism and our relationship to our clothes often expresses a similar protest.

Valerie Steele

Valerie Steele received her Ph.D. from Yale University and is Acting Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. One of the world's most respected fashion historians, she is also founder and editor of the journal Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, and the author of 10 books, including Handbags: A Lexicon of Style, Shoes: A Lexicon of Style, Women of Fashion: Twentieth-Century Designers, The Corset: A Cultural History and Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power.

Keynote Paper:
Fashion: The Museum as Exhibition Site
A number of spectacular and popular exhibitions of fashion have recently been staged in museums around the world. These include the Victoria and Albert' Museum's 'Radical Fashion', the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's 'Jackie Kennedy' and 'Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed', the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology's 'The Corset' and to come in 2003 the exhibition 'Femme Fatale: Fashion and Visual Culture in Fin-de-Siecle Paris'. This paper deals with the issues that arise out of the display of fashion within museums, as a form of installation art.

Christopher Breward

Christopher Breward is a professor in Historical and Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion London Institute, where he leads postgraduate studies (MA & PhD) in fashion history and theory. He is the author of The Culture of Fashion (Manchester University Press, 1995) and The Hidden Consumer (Manchester University Press 1999), and co-editor of Material Memories (Berg 1999) and The Englishness of English Dress (Berg 2002). Pending publications include Capital Fashion: Clothing in the life of the city, which relates to a forthcoming exhibition at the Museum of London, and also a book called Fashion, which is about to be published by Oxford University Press in their History of Art and Architecture series. He is on the editorial board of Fashion Theory, is series editor 'design' for Manchester University Press and is incoming chair of the Design History Society.

Keynote Paper:
Capital Fashion: Clothing in the Life of the City
In the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau describes the importance of mythical texts in aiding our understanding of urban cultures and spaces which are layered and complex. Gestures and narratives are isolated by de Certeau as the 'true' archives of the city. As he states ' the wordless histories of walking, dress, housing or cooking shape neighbourhoods on behalf of absences: they trace out memories that no longer have a place.' Taking these fascinating ideas as a starting point this paper proposes to trace the ways in which fashionable dress, through its ephemeral, cyclical and spectacular tendencies, acts as a temporal and generational link in the history of the city. Besides the commercial and industrial imperatives which have identified centres such as Paris, New York, Milan and London as particular centres of sartorial creativity in the modern period, localised and poetic processes of fashioning have also offered a medium by which cultural memories are enacted and reformed in the context of urban life and its representation. Using case-studies drawn from ongoing research in London I hope to demonstrate how the situated act of dressing can, in de Certeau's words 'render the city believable, affect it with unknown depth to be inventoried, and open it up to journeys.'

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