Exploding Fashion: Cutting, Constructing and Thinking Through Things

《时尚爆炸》颠覆了传统的历史方法，创造了对过去物质文化的新的理解形式。它以两种方式“爆炸”了时装设计过程的神秘性。首先，通过揭示裁剪师的神秘角色，解构了设计师作为唯一创造天才的神话。其次，它对四个历史性的设计进行了逆向工程，这些设计师是改变游戏规则的设计师，他们也是创新的模式切割者，数字化地将博物馆的物体重新激活为移动图像，这些图像在视觉上讲述了这些东西是如何制作的，以及它们是如何在身体上移动的。这个项目因此突出了模式切割者，一个重要的制造商和技术人员在时装设计过程中，其作用基本上是不承认的设计历史和陌生的消费者。该项目为这一疏忽提供了一个早就应该纠正的问题。就像织物的经线和纬线一样，它交织着两股探究：第一，时装设计的参与性，第二，研究图案切割作为身体技术的文化和历史意义。就像一幅爆炸图，该项目提供了一个视觉引导的理解，时尚是图案切割的对象。在博物馆档案馆中，历史学家和裁剪师将一起仔细研究少数高度复杂的服装，使用几种视觉方法来“分解”它们，以了解它们的结构。这包括制作纸样、帆布（服装的帆布原型）、纺织品样品和运动服装的数字可视化，以2D、3D和4D格式制作一系列“实体化”调查，作为逆向工程的一种形式。该项目因此揭示了时装设计过程的后台视图，旨在使不可见的东西变得可见。它将推动时尚，使人们更好地理解历史上的服装设计曾经是如何作用于身体的。作品包括在萨默塞特大厦（伦敦）举办的大型展览、与展览相关的书籍、学术期刊文章、博物馆学习日、几个工作坊、时尚行业展示以及与时尚媒体合作的在线项目。该项目将策展作为一种创造性实践形式，能够揭示和叙述时装设计作为一种视觉、运动和三维知识。时尚策展介于学院和博物馆之间，通过展示物品、图像和文本，在历史和当代之间架起桥梁。由于时尚研究的新方法，对历史服装的剪裁和结构的仔细阅读已经被抛弃，这个项目试图在当代背景下重新部署它，以便为现代服装的制作提供新的解释。研究团队由专业的样板裁剪师，历史学家，策展人和数字视觉师组成，他们将调查样板裁剪师被忽视的作用。该项目使用了关于协同设计的想法，将流程和程序置于作者和风格之上，这些都很少在时尚界得到测试。爆炸时尚采用三种形式的实践：模式切割，可视化和策展。它结合了实践者和历史学家的方法在一个混合的方法;它将技术人员和学者带入辩论，并调查从业者的“通过制作思考”的模式是否可以为时尚历史学家提供新的范式，使我们能够将模式切割理论化为文化和技术，使用身体的文化和历史理论作为一套技术。该项目是伦敦艺术大学的一个桥梁，它将时装设计实践与学术历史和理论联系在一起，并利用其在这两个领域的专业知识来产生创新的时装思维，这是伦敦作为时尚之都的独特地位，在设计，教育和策展方面表现出色。

Exploding Fashion destabilizes conventional historical methods to create new forms of understanding about the material culture of the past. It 'explodes' the mystique of the fashion design process in two ways. Firstly, it deconstructs the myth of the designer as sole creative genius by uncovering the intriguing role of the patter cutter. Secondly, it reverse-engineers four historical designs by game-changing designers who were also innovative pattern cutters, digitally reanimating museum objects as moving images which visually narrate how these things were once made, and how they moved on the body.This project thus foregrounds the pattern cutter, an essential maker and technician in the fashion design process whose role is essentially unacknowledged in design histories and unfamiliar to consumers. The project offers a long overdue corrective to this oversight. Like the warp and weft of fabric, it interweaves two strands of enquiry: firstly, the participatory nature of fashion design, and secondly, the cultural and historical implications of studying pattern cutting as a technology of the body.Like an exploded-view drawing, the project offers a visually-led understanding of how fashion is an object of pattern cutting. Working together in museum archives, historians and pattern-cutters will study a small number of highly complex garments in close detail, using several visual methods to 'explode' them in order to understand their construction. This involves making paper patterns, toiles (canvas prototypes of the garments), textile samples and digital visualisations of the garment in motion, to produce a set of 'materialised' investigations in 2D, 3D and 4D formats as a form of reverse engineering.The project thus reveals a backstage view of the fashion design process, and aims to make the invisible visible. It will set fashion in motion, animating a greater understanding of how historical dress designs once worked on the body. Outputs include a major exhibition at Somerset House (London), a book associated with the exhibition, academic journal articles, a museum study day, several workshops, a fashion industry showcase, and an online project with a fashion media partner.The project employs curation as a form of creative practice capable of revealing and narrating fashion design as a type of visual, motile and three-dimensional knowledge. Fashion curation sits between the academy and the museum, bridging the historical and the contemporary through the exhibition of objects, images and texts. Due to the new methods developed in fashion studies, the close reading of the cut and construction of historical dress has been discarded, and this project seeks to redeploy it in a contemporary context in order to offer new interpretations on the making of modern clothing.The research team consists of professional pattern cutters, historians, curators, and digital visualisers who will investigate the overlooked role of the pattern cutter. The project uses ideas about co-design which privileges processes and procedures over authors and styles that have rarely been tested in fashion. Exploding Fashion employs three forms of practice: pattern cutting, visualisation and curation. It combines the methods of practitioners and historians in a blended approach; it brings technicians and academics into debate, and investigates whether the practitioner's mode of 'thinking through making' can offer new paradigms to the fashion historian, allowing us to theorise pattern cutting as both cultural and technological, using cultural and historical theories of the body as a set of technologies.Situated at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, the project bridges fashion design practice and academic history and theory, and draws on its expertise in both areas to produce innovative fashion thinking that is unique to London's status as a fashion capital that excels in design, education and curation.