With a raft of huge new fashion exhibitions hitting London this summer, you'd be forgiven for overlooking the smaller fish, but the latest offering from London College of Fashion's Fashion Space Gallery is not to be missed.
[/b]Present1 Imperfect2: Disorderly Apparel Reconfigured[/b] is touted as 'a playful project that tests the principal elements of exhibiting fashion: object, body, text, installation'.
Curated by Amy de la Haye, the name behind both some of my fvourite exhibitions and favourite fashion books over the years, the exhibition focuses on apparel which is damaged, worn-out or perished. The items exhibited in Present Imperfect are prized for these very qualities. However, similar apparel can be overlooked or suppressed, left to lie dormant or languish in museum stores, and are rarely exhibited. Present Imperfect seeks to render these seemingly awkward items of dress as compelling.
Six items have been loaned for the exhibition, with the selected apparel including; two Victorian kid leather gloves from the 1830s that are burned, forever contorted in corporeal gesture. A cotton ballet singlet, borrowed from the Rambert Archive, was once animate but now lies limp, imprinted by repeated exertion. Shattered linings are properties common to a contemporary Stone Island jacket and an afternoon gown crafted over a century ago by leading London couture house Redfern. A template leather jacket by Alexander McQueen for his spring/summer 2005 collection features photocopied and glued pattern motifs and red felt-tipped annotation redolent of cut-and- paste zines.
The apparel is framed by modular structures, designed by Jeff Horsley and commissioned from SetWorks that safeguard and actively communicate ideas about the apparel and the body.
Each structure proposes a strategy that alludes to the human form in its absence: a glove placed at the location of a hand; an impression of a dancer’s figure milled from a 3D body-scan by the Digital Anthropology Lab at LCF to a representation of a pattern-maker’s measures suggests process and proportion.
Fashion Space Gallery
London College of Fashion
20 John Prince’s Street, London, W1G 0BJ
Free admission
Open unti lSaturday 4th August 201
www.fashionspacegallery.com
Love Laurel x
