Fashion in the Expanded Field: Strategies for Critical Fashion Practices

Abstract

This article focuses on current strategies for critical fashion practices in an expanded field of fashion. In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, the field of fashion studies has increasingly scrutinized the relationship between fine art and fashion within an art museum context. Drawing a parallel with Rosalind Krauss's notion of sculpture in the expanded field, this article documents the development of interdisciplinary fashion practices, suggesting that an expanded field allows fashion practitioners to engage in a critical discussion of the fashion system. As a fashion practitioner focusing on nonproductivist interdisciplinary techniques across multiple media (fashion and film, sculpture, installation, and performance), I test this notion by developing parallels between contemporary fashion and Krauss's 1979 diagnosis. This article argues for the relevance of establishing theories of interdisciplinary practice to better understand the contemporary field of fashion, challenging assumptions about fashion's role in the twenty-first century.

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“…The principle was that the new must not be seen simply as the old in disguise, it must break free from the past (Robson, 2008: 164). This promotion of historically untethered newness launched the concept of ‘expanded practices’, a term that has become synonymous with avant-garde experimentalism, particularly in fine art and architecture (Papapetros and Rose, 2014), as well as in disciplines across the creative industries (Torres, 2017). As a result, exhibition curation is deemed to be ‘expanded’ when it radicalizes the exhibition visitor’s ‘ongoing demand for an end product that coheres around an exhibition, around the act of revealing and concretizing’ (Rogoff, 2013: 44).…”