Theses

Thesis 1: Global Tales and Stories

2017-05-03 Theses

The names of independent fashion and style magazines unfold a narrative of global politics: migration, decolonization, casualization, diaspora, and hybrid identities.   „Realism – after poststructuralism and decolonization – presupposes a fractured, contestable narrative perspective. There is no longer a standpoint from which to definitively map particular, local stories in an overarching sequence, no narrative of human history, of enlightened progress, of economic development, or of a disseminating global system. In the early twenty-first century the grand, explanatory narratives haveRead More

Thesis 2: Fashion featuring Critique and Knowledge

2017-05-03 Theses

Independent fashion and style magazines opened up new discursive spaces for fashion critique and the self-reflection of the fashion system.       “Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces ofRead More

Thesis 3: After Avantgarde

2017-05-03 Theses

Independent fashion and style magazines advance the aesthetic and formal discourses of the late 1980s and early 1990s anti-fashion generation in the liminal space between art and fashion.       “The sphere of social production traditionally called “avant-garde art” and the one called, since 1947 (Horkheimer/Adorno), the “culture industry” have performed a successful merger. One force that fused them is fashion. (…) The fashion of the 1996 art season was fashion.” Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Critical reflections, ArtForum, January, 1997.Read More

Thesis 4: Shifting Geographies and New Topographies

2017-05-03 Theses

Independent fashion and style magazines are part of historical and postcolonial shifts in decentralized fashion production and the geopolitical positioning of fashion centers.       “For Fashion (as for Leibnitz), to be in a particular place is to pass through it. (…) The geography of Fashion marks two ‘elsewheres’; a utopian ‘elsewhere’, represented by everything that is exotic, exoticism being an acculturated geography; and a real ‘elsewhere’, which Fashion borrows from outside itself – from an entire economic andRead More

Thesis 5: Post-digital Materialism

2017-05-03 Theses

Currently we are witnessing the transformation from digital fashion media into print media. Simultaneously to the exhibition new forms of post-digital materiality are emerging.       “The great man-made simulacra pass from a universe of natural laws into a universe of forces and tensions, and today pass into a universe of structures and binary oppositions. After the metaphysics of being and appearance, after energy and determinacy, the metaphysics of indeterminacy and the code. Digitality is its metaphysical code (Leibniz’sRead More