Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body

摘要

Reading Francesca Granata's book, Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body, coincides, for me, with a visit to 'Rei Kawakubo/ Comme des Garcons: Art of the In-Between' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is the closing weekend, and along with hundreds of other conceptual fashion fans, we have been corralled into the sculptural halls of the Costume Institute. Bodies jostle against one another obscuring the view until one is not sure where the padded rains coats of Sunday morning museum-goers begin, and the voluptuous curves of Kawakubo's distorted silhouettes end. Kawakubo's misshapen dresses and her Japanese postmodern aesthetic are at the centre of this book. It is these swollen bodies, bodies spilling out and beyond the normal bounds fashionable dress, with which this book is concerned: bodies which are fashioned and yet not fully fashionable—bodies that through the act of dressing fail to conform. Granata's book explores how over a 35-year period from the1980s to 2010s a small subgroup of designers and performance artists sought to subvert and re-appropriate the predominant hetero-normative bodily aesthetic.