FRAMING RURAL FASHION: OBSERVATIONS FROM BADMINTON HORSE TRIALS

摘要

This visual essay offers a perspective designed to extend and complicate the dialogue surrounding rural fashion through a consideration of just one of the spaces it (recognizably) inhabits. As a case study, the spectacle of Badminton Horse Trials provides a multitude of associations: an internationally renowned sporting event, geographically and culturally located within the English countryside; an affiliated and substantial 'pop-up' shopping village, which makes the Trials a retail and fashion event as much as an equestrian event; a landscape setting that supports a temporarily constructed space, embracing aspects of both the rural and the urban(e); and a frame/stage for a series of socially codified interactions informed by dress and communicated through visible appearance and self-presentation. The combination of word and image presented here invites interrogation of the field of fashion and the overlapping contingencies of visual/verbal communication, with a view towards opening up a discourse within fashion to a wider theoretical and practice-led visual community.