THIS SATURDAY: Radical Fashion Exercises Melbourne Launch + Panel Discussion at Perimeter Books

Radical Fashion Exercises: A Workbook of Modes and Methods

Editors Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran and Laura Gardner warmly invite you to celebrate and launch their book Radical Fashion Exercises: A Workbook of Modes and Methods, published by Valiz, at Perimeter Books (734 High St, Thornbury) this Saturday (September 9) from 3-5pm.

To coincide with the launch, we (the book's editors Daphne and Laura) will be joined by contributors and fashion practitioners Andrea Eckersley, Annie Wu, Adele Varcoe and Kate Meakin for a discussion on the radical possibilities of experimental and critical fashion practice and education. A casual celebration with light refreshments will follow the panel discussion.

Further details can be found on the event listing on Perimeter's website. 

Over one hundred tried, tested, and speculative exercises that expand the way we look at fashion, how we are part of its system, and how we can practice fashion otherwise. 

Radical Fashion Exercises contains a copious collection of bottom-up activities, prompts, and workshops designed by contributors (from all around the globe), who explore fashion in an expanded field. Designers, curators, artists, educators, fashion practitioners, DIY home sewers, students, and other creatives responded to the book’s open call with contributions that challenge how to practice fashion and reflect on its systems, politics and economics. The exercises collected in this book embrace interdisciplinarity, experimentation, and aesthetics and widen fashion’s horizons as a medium for expression, embodiment and sociality.

Radical Fashion Exercises assembles methods for learning and practicing fashion in meaningful, radical and responsible ways. The book is an inspiring tool for design students, designers, writers, and practitioners of diverse disciplines to challenge fashion as a commodity and polluting structure in these times of uncertainty and upheaval.

304 pages, 22 x 15 cm, softcover, Valiz (Amsterdam).

Little solo show Mantle/ Mantel opening at c3 next week

New show Mantle/Mantel opens Wednesday October 30 from 6-8pm.

Recasting the relationship between the body and painting, Mantle/mantel explores how material elements such as garment, sculpture, wall and lighting are implicated in the realisation of an artwork. Geometric shapes in the painting are reiterated in the surfaces of the garment, cast shadows and shelf: coalescing as a total composition. The resulting assemblage of surfaces elaborate Eckersley’s ongoing interest in the human subject implied in encounters with art

Show runs 30 Oct-24 Nov

c3 contemporary art space

The Abbotsford Convent

1 St Heliers St. Abbotsford

Melbourne, Victoria.

Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives Research Residency Award

Robert Rauschenberg, Pelican, 1963.

I am really excited to be taking up a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives Research Residency later next month, where I will be investigating the various materialities expressed in Rauschenberg's practice in relation to fashion. It will be so good to be in New York to explore the conceptual and material aspects of Rauschenberg's use of fabric and garments in addition to his costume designs to build an expanded definition of fashion!