Exhibition
02 October 2015 - 31 January 2016
Fashion is an expression of the times in which it emerges. In view of the fact that there’s nothing at all unusual about shooting a film clip with one’s smartphone these days, it’s hardly surprising that designers and fashion companies have also discovered the medium of the internet clip for their own purposes. Within that context, the boundaries between the advertising film and neighbouring genres such as the music video or the art film are becoming ever more fluid.
On the occasion of the B3 Biennale of the Moving Image 2015, the Museum Angewandte Kunst presented a selection of fashion films. The show manifested the biennial theme Expanded Senses by allowing visitors to experience an interplay between clothing and the body, sound and digital technology in a wide range of film clips and multimedia video installations. Via movement, sound and visual effects the displays together found their way to a new, independent genre and thus, each in their own way, represented an expansion of the possibilities offered by traditional forms of fashion presentation such as photography, illustration and the fashion show. At the same time, they exemplified the countless contemporary productions that all contribute to the heterogeneity of the phenomenon.
“The Fashion Film Effect” – the show’s subtitle is a term coined by the fashion theorist Marketa Uhlirova – is first and foremost a means of presenting clothing in motion. This intent is enhanced by the capacity of the film medium to expand fashion’s physical qualities to include further sensory elements, in which context experimental effects as well as sound and rhythm play fundamental roles. Particularly the non-narrative fashion film explored the creative possibilities of both fashion and film. The materiality of clothing is infinitely exponentiated into an elastic, polymorphous variable.
Curator: Dr. Mahret Kupka, Museum Angewandte Kunst