As anticipated in yesterday's post, I'm currently in Moscow to present my new lecture, entitled "Woman in the Mechanical Age: Manipulating, Morphing and Idealising the Female Body", during the Cycles and Seasons event.
The lecture moves from one main point: contemporary fashion constantly plays with genders, reinventing new identities, creating innovative shapes and silhouettes capable of altering the human body.
This is not new though: very rarely through the centuries women wore garments that highlighted the real contours of their natural bodies.
The popularity of a design was indeed dictated by exaggerated hips, busts and derrieres or by minimised waists: crinolines imprisoned women in cages impairing their walk, Dior’s “New Look” popularised instead cinched waists.
All these trends played with shapes, emphasised a part of the human body, transforming it into a mathematical variable that could be changed and altered according to the times, the structures used to support a design or the fabrics employed to make it.
The lecture will look at how the female body has changed throughout the decades, using images and film clips, exploring the universe of Russian masterpiece Aelita by Yakov Protazanov, iconic Metropolis by Fritz Lang and dystopic Blade Runner by Ridley Scott, and analysing the subtle, scientific, technological, outrageous and industrial mutations that occurred in fashion via collections by Thierry Mugler, Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen and Kei Kagami among the others.
From crinolettes to cyberbodies, robots and gynoids, the lecture will illustrate how mutating your body is a way to reject traditional aesthetic principles and find new ones through construction, materials, form and concept.
The lecture - preceded by an Aelita-inspired video by Jay Artworx accompanying DJ Batman's track "The Ghost of Anna El-Tour" - is at Moscow's Multimedia Art Museum tomorrow at 6.30 p.m. and I'm looking forward to meeting there the Cycles and Seasons audience.
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