A Fashion Issue: Identities in Translation

Organisé par Parsons Paris

Date and Opening Hours: December 5–8 2019, 11am – 7pm
Vernissage: December 4, 2019, 6pm
Talk and Roundtable: December 7, 2019, 4pm – 6pm

Historically, fashion magazines have been motors and mirrors of the industry, portraying its innovative practices, its actors, its hierarchies and its geographies. They have been a barometer for the industry’s shifts, its ambitions and the rise of the global market. At the same time, these publications have served as containers of discourses, ideologies and stereotypes on a variety of topics: from race to femininity, from class to creativity.

A Fashion Issue: Identities in Translation navigates these territories, exploring different issues from national editions of Vogue – Spanish, Paris, Italy and Arabia – across different historical moments. The exhibition presents the results of the Parsons Paris MA Fashion Studies students’ research, via a multimedia installation showcasing the controversial fashion tropes, categories and representations that have emerged in these magazines. The aim is to bring visitors to question how Condé Nast, and the multiple editions of Vogue, have shaped, constructed and negotiated different subject-positions; national and local identities; the dialects between the institutional and the individual; discourses about race, diversity and post-colonial. A Fashion Issue explores these themes providing a springboard for evaluating representational strategies in the fashion publishing industry.

On December 7th (4pm-6pm), Glassbox and the MA in Fashion Studies will host a talk, for the "Fashioning Theory" Research Seminar, by Dr Monica Titton, co-author of the book Fashion and Post-colonial Critique (Sternberg, 2019). This talk will be followed by a roundtable with experts from the publishing fashion industry.