It's all gone orange...Happy Queen's Day!

To all my good Dutch friends wishing you a Happy Queen's Day! For those that are unfamiliar with this today is a big national holiday in the Netherlands for the celebration of the Queen's Birthday. Technically the date is the birthday of Queen Beatrix's mother, but has since been retained as the Beatrix's 'official' birthday, and as the national day to celebrate the Netherlands. The whole country literally turns 'orange', with much partying in both private homes and in the streets. As a foreigner living there one of the most curious rituals to was to see the sight of every city, but particularly noticeable in Amsterdam, being turned into one big jumble sale. Queen's Day is also the one day in the year when the general public can legally trade and sell goods on the street, usually contents of peoples attics or storerooms, such as old clothes, furniture, broken lamps and the odd valuable curio like a suit of armour.

My own research is looking at the value of cultural identity and how this portrayed through fashion in city culture. It remains curious how often ideals around cultural superiority are still played around national identity, and particularly through the so-called 'soft' display of clothing. In the UK England recently had it's national Saint Day, St. George (shared also with Russia and Portugal), yet this day is not a national holiday here. Indeed the whole idea of patriotism in the UK has become a much debated aspect of culture over recent years, especially as a unified sense of British identity has dissipated. Yet building up a strong identity of place, and an affiliation with place, remains important both culturally and within the fashion industry itself. There is a strong need it appears in all of us in feeling some kind of pride in the locality, through embracing it, and in turn feeling the locality embrace you. This process of identification with place and the emotional attachment we give to place is something I continue to explore through my research/curatorial project, Fashion Souvenirs. Why do people still feel the need to visibly demonstrate their affinity with particular places through the clothes they wear? As I have discovered 'patriotism' isn't necessarily linked only to your own country, as in this globalised world many of us have many 'homes' or home countries or cities, even if the attachment was made with just one or two visits. Instinctively it seems, we know when we have arrived 'home'.

Blythe House Archive Visit

As I was talking over with someone only the other day, one of the truly amazing things about living in a city as vast and infinite as London is that, however many years you live here, or however many visits to the city you make, you never really get to know it all. Friday last week proved this well enough again when I had the opportunity to visit Blythe House, hidden behind the behemoth of Olympia and the Earl’s Court exhibition centre. Having never stayed in a hotel in the city, Earl’s Court has always remained something of a mystery for me. Earl’s Court oddly remains one of London’s prime tourist hotspots, despite the area not being particularly central, or cool, and having the advantage of only being on a direct tube line to Heathrow. Since the MA students in our department are working on a project to do with archives and personal biographies, we also had the opportunity to accompany them on a visit to this mystery corner of London, and to visit the textiles archives of the British Museum.

Beginning life as the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank, today Blythe House is a humungous space acting as a repository of artefacts from the British Museum, the V&A and the Science Museum. One of series of recently astonishingly sunny days, it seemed oddly incongruous to enter a building whose every window seemed shuttered with blinds to keep out the light, hazardous to protecting delicate artefacts. After negotiating our way around the labyrinth of corridors and stairs, passing a room piled high with crates, and boxes, we entered the study area of the British Museums textile archive. Collection Manager Helen Wolff had laid out for us on a table a sample selection of cloths and garments from the archive, and proceeded to give us an introductory talk about the chosen artefacts and the role and activities of the museum’s textile collection. Amongst them were a beautiful and intricately embroidered loose gown made by the Miao people of China, a richly decorated jacket from Palestine, a bark textile from the Oceania region, and some ‘modern’ textiles from South America and West Africa. She also introduced us to a sample of textile artefacts collected from the desert coastal regions of Peru, some of which had originally been used as totems to accompany the dead into the afterlife. Since they had been buried deep underground in such an arid landscape, this had helped to preserve both their form and colour. Following on from this, Helen guided us around the main store area, with textiles kept either in crates on shelves, or for more delicate items, laid out flat in aluminium drawer units. Many other textiles were kept rolled up in acid-free tissue paper and calico, which were then placed on racks on pull-out screens. This we were told was one of the best ways in which to keep textile lengths, rather than folding them up, which had often been done in the past.

One of the key aims of the museum is make their collection as accessible to textile researchers and other interested parties as possible. To this end Helen and her colleagues are working towards photographing and cataloguing the museums entire textile collection. Much of this is now available to view online through the British Museum’s own website, via their dedicated research section on the website, viewable here: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database

While my own practice in fashion research is more about the present day workings and developments of the fashion industry, the visit to the archives at Blythe House opened up the possibilities that the collections of ‘ethnographic’ institutions can offer. While we can all enjoy and wonder at the splendour of blockbuster exhibitions showcasing the work of famed and fabled designers, the seemingly more ‘humble’, and intrinsically humanistic work of textile producers remain equally fascinating. In conjunction with my own recent (re)visit to the Tropenmuseum (Tropical Museum) in Amsterdam, it is surprising how overlooked the development and processes of textiles are in the realm of curated exhibitions on fashion and textiles. Yet at the same time, institutions, like the British Museum and the Tropenmuseum, can offer an intriguing and significant insight into broadening the scope and depth of fashion and textiles research.

In a further intriguing development in opening up the archive as an exhibition space, fashion curator Judith Clark, together with her partner Adam Phillips, have put together an exhibition at Blythe House. Opening shortly, the exhibition is called A Concise Dictionary of Dress, and has been devised in conjunction with the experimental arts agency Artangel, famed for their collaborations with Rachel Whitread, Roni Horn and Roger Hiorns. The exhibition itself is set to take place in the V&A’s section of Blythe House, in which is located their repository of clothing, furniture and ceramics. Further information can be found at: http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2010/the_concise_dictionary_of_dress

Quote of the Month

Under the rubric of modernity, the emphasis given to individualism has become constitutive of all social practices. Fashion is implicated in these practices because it installs in individuals their sense of being located in the present moment. Fashion produces a social logic that informs individuals how to think and organise their everyday life. Even though fashion may seem a frivolity, it is highly significant in the formation of modern consciousness. Some regard fashion as a measure of liberality, reflecting how well people respond to change, and how tolerant they are of difference. Fashion is not just about categorising and ranking material culture; it is also about the manipulation of desire, pleasure and the play of the imagination.

Joanne Finkelstein, 1996, On Fashion, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press (pp 37)

This is a quote I made use of in a recent peer presentation of my work. As far as possible I try to locate my work and practice in the zeitgeist of what is happening now, which is often difficult to explain to others, even those within the field of fashion research. I do not see my work or practice as that of a historian, someone documenting the past, or breathing new life into some forgotten or 'hidden' aspect. I like the notion that Finkelstein expresses here of how fashion is a part of everyday life, not just something brought and looked at only occasionally. Also interesting is the idea that fashion is not only an attempt at categorization, of putting things into boxes, as we are sometimes so apt to do, as in judging people on their aesthetic appearance. Both of these ideas are something that I feel have an affinity with my own way of thinking about fashion, that is not something that is only 'occasional' but inhabits many different aspects of life, and also that fashion is not so easily categorized, or least that this categorization should be questioned and re-assessed.

Because it had to start somewhere...

In thinking about beginning a blog it occurred to me how naff the idea of this actually was. After all, it seems as if the whole world is blogging, and within the fashion world it’s now almost become a kind of cliché. This is not to do a disservice to those who blog well, like Susie Bubble and Bryan Boy, who are rightly deserving of their status as ‘star’ bloggers, but it takes time, effort and dedication. While the editorial teams of print magazines are said to be trembling at the imminent demise of their publications due to the increasing influence of bloggers, this is in reality unlikely. Television never did kill the radio, E-mail rules, but the fax retains its purpose. Besides, retro is all the rage, in a world where we are so used to the opportunity of ‘choice’, many of us are still happy to put our trust in paper and pencil (or pen) over developing an addiction to yet another infuriating electronic device. Why tie yourself up in the multiple, yet often rather useless, apps, when you can be a member of the ‘Moleskin Mafia’?

And yet here I am, developing the tentative beginnings of a blog dedicated to my own experiences as an academic researcher and curator in the field of fashion. If you’re looking for style tips, or want to know what the hot trend will be for Spring/Summer 2015, then don’t ask me, since I have no idea. My work or practice instead concentrates instead on developing the themes and nuances of this subject that, perhaps selfishly, interest me. Having never had the stamina for keeping a diary before, or any other kind of journal-documentation for that matter, the development of a blog, documenting my process as fashion researcher/writer/curator presents a new challenge. So as with many other things, I am approaching this as ‘project’, since am beginning to have to learn about the importance of documenting the process of what I do, and how I go about this. While the people that know me, well, know that I am great hoarder of information in many ways (books, magazines, exhibition brochures), I’ve never had very sentimental feelings for documenting other aspects of my life as other people do. I have few photographs of friends or family for instance, and so many holidays, birthdays etc. have gone pretty much un-documented (or in pre-digital times, if any photos were taken they remained on the original film, undeveloped, sitting on a shelf gathering dust). For me, the best ‘photos’ were always the photos of the mind, the memories, the smells , the ambiences captured in our heads, to be replayed and relived as and when, perhaps triggered by occurrences and experiences in present-day life.

Yet, since joining as a research student on the MPhil/PhD programme at the RCA last October, I have become more aware of the processes and necessity of documentation as a part of the research. All those seemingly random conversations, lectures, films, reading, scrappy notes and drawings in sketchbooks, visiting exhibitions et al are all a part of the research. During a recent discussion with some fellow research students in our department someone stated: ‘everything is the research’. Even though we all have our specific focus and projects to work on, in a way our work is a re-questioning of everything, not only of our research itself, but also for us as individuals; that is as thinkers, writers and practitioners. Or as I think someone else once said: because it had to start somewhere, and I didn’t know where else to begin...