Blithe Spirits: Absent British Women Couturiers - The Rahvis Sisters

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This Practice based MPhil/PhD project intends to unearth, investigate and interrogate the absence/presence dichotomy surrounding the successful and prolific female designers - The Rahvis Sisters (Raemonde and Dora). It is concerned with how the Rahvis sisters' enduring ghostly presence via the medium of film and newsreel, newspapers and directories, challenges British culture's disavowal of the importance of accomplished women couturiers within the canon of Post War British Couture. This will be framed within a Feminist critique, particularly when locating where the Rahvis are and are not situated within Fashion History, are and are not posited, and do/do not exist today. Whilst engaging in an exploration of the fragments, the partials and the remnants of the Rahvis' existence, Archival and Artistic practice will be employed and discussed with regards to how, when and where we may discover them. By analysing and decoding these various historical communications as a form of provocation, the gaps and traces of their existence may be read and understood both in practice and theory. These readings will motivate the practice-based part of this project resulting in a collection of designs borne of the fragmentary descriptions of Rahvis' garments in newspapers and magazines (Trove.nla), a Faction novella constructed from found remnants of the Rahvis' biography in newspapers and interviews (Trove.nla, Pathé 1958) and a site-specific immersive performance, in the form of an interrogative fashion show, drawn from the residues of environments left to us in newsreels (Pathé, 1958). An Archival method (Pathé 1958, Trove.nla, British Phone Books 1929 - 1981, et al), will therefore work hand in hand with this practice-based, interdisciplinary methodology, with philosophical approaches to narrative, history and memory being applied and acknowledged.