In addition to my blogging, I am also a researcher. While studying MA History and Culture of Fashion (now MA Fashion Cultures) at London College of Fashion, I met a wonderful group of women who I organised an academic conference with. FASHION // INTERSECTIONS: Bodies, Cultures, Spaces took place on Friday 15th July 2016 in central London, aiming to explore fashion’s intersections, interstices, overlaps, compatibilities and incompatibilities with other disciplines.
The academic study of fashion engages the approaches, theories, and methodologies of various disciplines and fields. Recent publications such as Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to the Key Theorists (2015, ed. Rocamora and Smelk) and The Handbook of Fashion Studies (2013, ed. Black et al.), along with the increasingly diverse titles of fashion journals attest to the multi-, inter-, and cross-disciplinary nature of the field. Sitting at the nexus of cultural curiosities and theoretical preoccupations, it is these very intersections that render the field of fashion studies endlessly and excitingly nuanced.
The conference will provide an opportunity for the exchange of new ideas and research that both challenges and exceeds the boundaries traditionally considered in the study of fashion.
FASHION // INTERSECTIONS: BODIES, CULTURES, SPACES
Date: Friday 15th July 2016
Venue: London College of Fashion, 20 John Prince’s Street, W1G 0BJ
Tickets: £12 / £8 students (+ booking fee), available from Eventbrite
More information: Please see our website or follow us on Twitter
FASHION // INTERSECTIONS COMMITTEE
Paula Alaszkiewicz is a Paris-based specialist in fashion history and curation, working with the exhibition-maker Judith Clark. With a background in art history, Paula’s approach to fashion studies is firmly rooted in theories of vision, space, and museology. Her MA thesis explored museum fashion exhibitions in relation to a history of site-specific fashion display, visual perception, and architecture. Later this year Paula will begin a PhD in art history at Concordia University in Montreal, where she will expand her previous research to explore the international exhibition as a significant and experimental site of fashion display.
Julie Bréthous is a researcher and writer specialised in feminism, subcultures, and body identies. Her MA dissertation, ‘The Tattooed Parisienne’, looked at the myth of the Parisienne, and how the integration of new practices of the self, such as tattoos, have resulted in its evolution. Her current research follows up on it as she looks at how dominant notions of knowledge profoundly shape women’s bodies and can be challenged by new types of power structures. Now co-blog editor at The Costume Society, she also works as a research assistant, and has helped Underground England uncover their early history to construct a new content marketing strategy.
Trained in design and pattern cutting, Fenella Hitchcock is a writer, researcher, and lecturer specialising in fashion and cultural history. Her MA dissertation focused on the life, work and dress of Soho ‘character’ and self-proclaimed dandy Sebastian Horsley, and was inspired by work undertaken within the Museum of London’s fashion and decorative arts archive and The Last Tuesday Society gallery. Fenella’s work encompasses a multi-methodological and interdisciplinary approach, though she cites oral testimony as her method of choice. Her current research is an analysis of contemporary clubbing and counterculture, a collaborative project with performance artist and film/zine maker Angel Rose. She is also co-editor of The Costume Society’s blog.
Ellen McIntyre is a production coordinator for a British, mid-market fashion brand. She has contributed to a variety of academic and consumer publications, including Fashion Theory, Fashion, Style and Popular Culture, Vogue, The Guardian, and WGSN, amongst others. In 2015 Ellen completed a scholarship-awarded postgraduate course at London College of Fashion, studying MA History and Culture of Fashion. Her thesis, ‘Style, Shame and Stereotypes: Working-Class Women and their Performance of Femininity in Contemporary Britain’ looked at the relationship between gender, class and identity. During her degree Ellen completed an internship with the V&A for Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. She also lectured at the University of Huddersfield, and worked with the Barbican Art Gallery and Kerry Taylor Auction House. Before graduating Ellen began working as an archive assistant at Burberry.
Jana Melkumova-Reynolds is a writer and editor based in London. Over the last 13 years, she has contributed to a variety of consumer, business and academic publications on fashion, including Fashion Theory, Vogue, GQ, Business of Fashion, SHOWstudio, WeAr, and many others. Her interests include embodiment, gender, medical humanities, and fashion as a workplace. Her MA dissertation explored representations of prosthetics and disability in style media. She is currently co-editing a volume provisionally entitled Bodies in Flux: Hyperbolic Genders, Postmodern Anatomies and Virtual Corporealities, to be published by Brill in 2017.
A fashion scholar with an interest in object analysis, the body, and identity, Lorraine Hamilton Smith‘s primary research focus is twentieth and twenty-first century underwear. The title of her MA dissertation was ‘From Kestos to Ultrabra: Technological Changes to the Bra in the UK, 1930-1994’. The bras she purchased as part of this research were donated to the London College of Fashion Archives, and two have been loaned to the V&A for their 2016/17 exhibition Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear. Her current research centres on identity, underwear, and trans/non-binary genders.