Co-Edited Volumes by Victoria Pass
Design History Beyond the Canon , 2019
Design History Beyond the Canon subverts hierarchies of taste which have dominated traditional na... more Design History Beyond the Canon subverts hierarchies of taste which have dominated traditional narratives of design history. The book explores a diverse selection of objects, spaces and media, ranging from high design to mass-produced and mass-marketed objects, as well as counter-cultural and sub-cultural material.
The authors' research highlights the often marginalised role of gender and racial identity in the production and consumption of design, the politics which underpins design practice and the role of designed objects as pathways of nostalgia and cultural memory. While focused primarily on North American examples from the early 20th century onwards, this collection also features essays examining European and Soviet design history, as well as the influence of Asia and Africa on Western design practice.
The book is organised in three thematic sections: Consumers, Intermediaries and Designers. The first section analyses a range of designed objects and spaces through the experiences and perspectives of users. The second section considers intermediaries from both technology and cultural industries, as well as the hidden labour within the design process itself. The final section focuses on designers from multiple design disciplines including high fashion, industrial design, interior design, graphic design and design history pedagogy.
The essays in all three sections utilise different research methods and a wide range of theoretical approaches, including feminist theory, critical race theory, spatial theory, material culture studies, science and technology studies and art history. Design History Beyond the Canon brings together the most recent research which stretches beyond the traditional canon and looks to interdisciplinary methodologies to better understand the practice and consumption of design.
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Peer-Reviewed Articles by Victoria Pass
Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 2020
In American fashion magazines in the 1930s, images and descriptions of white women taking on the ... more In American fashion magazines in the 1930s, images and descriptions of white women taking on the clothes of non-white women abound: burnouse cloaks, coo-lie caps, sombreros, turbans, and saris all make frequent appearances. This paper will explore the ways these fashions are given meaning for readers in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar so that we can understand how these Orientalist and Primitivist fashions were used to construct their wearers' modern white femininity. The fashionable white woman was rendered modern through her infinite malleability-she can reshape her appearance with clothing, jewelry, makeup, diet and exercise-while the "other" is primitive, eternally wearing that same traditional clothing. This paper will consider the specific cases of the branding of the Bali bra, the sari, as well as "coolie" coats and hats.
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Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, Oct 2013
Elsa Schiaparelli is usually remembered for her whimsical and outlandish designs, shocking pink, ... more Elsa Schiaparelli is usually remembered for her whimsical and outlandish designs, shocking pink, butterfly-shaped buttons, the high heel hat and trompe l’oeil sweaters. What is less remembered are Schiaparelli’s darker designs. In the late 1930s, on the eve of World War II, Schiaparelli’s designs took a distinct sinister turn. This article explores two designs from her 1938 Circus Collection that were collaborations with the Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí: the Tear-Illusion Dress and the Skeleton Dress. Comparison of these designs with the work of contemporary designers Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen and Olivier Theyskens shows the darker undertones of Schiaparelli’s Circus Collection and its significant impact on designers at the turn of the twenty-first century. These designs reassert the corporality and mortality of the clothed body and emphasize its vulnerability. Drawing on Caroline Evan’s readings of deathliness and trauma in postmodern fashion, I will examine these impulses in the work of Schiaparelli. This article will seek to show the dark side of Schiaparelli’s work and the ways in which she responded to the impending threat of totalitarianism in the late 1930s.
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Book Chapters by Victoria Pass
Design History Beyond the Canon, 2019
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Iké Udé: Style & Sympathies, 2013
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Book/Exhibiton Reviews by Victoria Pass
BmoreArt.com, 2019
A review of Camp: Notes on Fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Design & Culture, 2019
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caa.reviews, 2019
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International Journal of Fashion Studies, 2015
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Design & Culture, 2017
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Design & Culture, 2019
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Photography and Culture, 2011
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Other Essays by Victoria Pass
Black One Shot, 2020
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Co-Edited Volumes by Victoria Pass
The authors' research highlights the often marginalised role of gender and racial identity in the production and consumption of design, the politics which underpins design practice and the role of designed objects as pathways of nostalgia and cultural memory. While focused primarily on North American examples from the early 20th century onwards, this collection also features essays examining European and Soviet design history, as well as the influence of Asia and Africa on Western design practice.
The book is organised in three thematic sections: Consumers, Intermediaries and Designers. The first section analyses a range of designed objects and spaces through the experiences and perspectives of users. The second section considers intermediaries from both technology and cultural industries, as well as the hidden labour within the design process itself. The final section focuses on designers from multiple design disciplines including high fashion, industrial design, interior design, graphic design and design history pedagogy.
The essays in all three sections utilise different research methods and a wide range of theoretical approaches, including feminist theory, critical race theory, spatial theory, material culture studies, science and technology studies and art history. Design History Beyond the Canon brings together the most recent research which stretches beyond the traditional canon and looks to interdisciplinary methodologies to better understand the practice and consumption of design.
Peer-Reviewed Articles by Victoria Pass
Book Chapters by Victoria Pass
Book/Exhibiton Reviews by Victoria Pass
Other Essays by Victoria Pass
The authors' research highlights the often marginalised role of gender and racial identity in the production and consumption of design, the politics which underpins design practice and the role of designed objects as pathways of nostalgia and cultural memory. While focused primarily on North American examples from the early 20th century onwards, this collection also features essays examining European and Soviet design history, as well as the influence of Asia and Africa on Western design practice.
The book is organised in three thematic sections: Consumers, Intermediaries and Designers. The first section analyses a range of designed objects and spaces through the experiences and perspectives of users. The second section considers intermediaries from both technology and cultural industries, as well as the hidden labour within the design process itself. The final section focuses on designers from multiple design disciplines including high fashion, industrial design, interior design, graphic design and design history pedagogy.
The essays in all three sections utilise different research methods and a wide range of theoretical approaches, including feminist theory, critical race theory, spatial theory, material culture studies, science and technology studies and art history. Design History Beyond the Canon brings together the most recent research which stretches beyond the traditional canon and looks to interdisciplinary methodologies to better understand the practice and consumption of design.
By examining fashion in concert with art in the interwar period, I tease out how clothing, particularly women’s clothing, relates to the psyche. Moving past notions of voyeurism, narcissism, and gender as performance, I work to interrogate a crucial aspect of fashion that involves women looking at women independent of the male gaze. This is a gaze that engages with fantasy. Flicking through the pages of a fashion magazine a woman does not see the model only as an object, but projects herself into the clothes the model wears, imagining how she will look in them, where she might wear them. Even if this woman never buys these clothes or sees them in the flesh, she has consumed fashion. I argue that she does not consume it in the erotic or voyeuristic way that traditional feminist theory describes, but rather through identification, which is vicarious and engaged with fantasy.
By engaging with art historical responses to Surrealism I have found new ways to understand a new fashion aesthetic in the 1930s, which I call “Strange Glamour.” I examine the development of this aesthetic and the relationship between fashion and Surrealism by focusing on a series of key events. I begin in chapter one with 1921, the year in which Coco Chanel launched her perfume Chanel No. 5 and Marcel Duchamp created his perfume readymade, Belle Haleine. I compare the ways that Chanel and Duchamp questioned conventions of authorship in art and fashion through the molding of their public personae. They instigated a new kind of relationship between the artist or designer and the work of art or garment in which both parts are crucial to making sense of the whole. This radical change in authorship lays the groundwork for the interactions between fashion and art in the next several decades.
The second chapter focuses on 1927, the year that designer Elsa Schiaparelli created her first design, a trompe l’oeil sweater. This sweater, along with several of Schiaparelli’s other early designs, is directly linked with the Surrealists’ use of trompe l’oeil in painting, and their engagement with the uncanny. This chapter also considers Man Ray’s photographs of Schiaparelli’s hats, which illustrated an article by Tristan Tzara on subconscious expressions of sexuality in the everyday world in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in 1933. Far from being automatic writing, as Tzara describes, I argue that these hats were the self conscious creation of Schiaparelli.
The 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition and the 1937 exhibition La Mode Au Congo at Galerie Charles Ratton frame the third chapter, which considers the role of primitivism in Surrealism and fashion during these years, particularly in relation to sexuality. I examine the designs of French milliner Madame Agnes that were influenced by the 1931 exhibition, and the unique hats made by American milliner Lilly Daché in response to a collection of hats she purchased from the Congo. I also consider a unique group of photographs of these Congolese hats by Man Ray that were shown at the Ratton exhibition.
The fourth and final chapter examines the links between Schiaparelli’s designs of the late 1930s, the uncanny, and Andre Breton’s idea of convulsive beauty, beauty which was meant to shock. I consider Schiaparelli’s designs in the context of Surrealist objects, and examine the important (and often neglected) links between Schiaparelli’s provocative display at the 1937 Exposition Internationale and the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, both in Paris.
My dissertation demonstrates that an examination of the relationship between fashion and Surrealism can enrich our understanding of this period in art and fashion and can also illuminate larger theoretical issues positioned at their intersection. Through a rigorous engagement with archival sources, I trace the historical relationships between fashion and Surrealism and point to the continued importance of collaboration, dialogue, and influence between these realms.