‘Fashion Fetish’

Alongside the recently passed exhibition Selling Sex, SHOWstudio launched Fashion Fetish — a series of multimedia projects, films, and essays by industry women. Ruth Hogben, Daphne Guinness, Liberty Ross, Aimee Mullins, Asia Argento, and Dasha Zhukova were a few participants who commented on the “contentious and provocative” fusion of fetish and fashion. Although the exhibit is over, the website indicates new works will continue to be posted.

“Fashion Fetish hands the power entirely to female fashion professionals, asking them to address the notion of Fashion Fetish and examining their individual visions of women. In contrast with Selling Sex, which reimagines the female relationship with sex, Fashion Fetish focuses on a woman’s relationship with clothing. Although as fashion historian Anne Hollander has asserted, the nude in art always wears ‘The fashion of her time’ — fashion’s influence can be felt across the naked flesh, her body as ‘fashioned’ as a corseted ball-gown. Dressed or undressed, this project offers a clear field, a blank canvas and an open mind to a selection of some of the most important women working in fashion today — designers, stylists, models and image-makers — inviting them to present their own interpretation of Fashion Fetish. Their visual interpretations of the Fashion Fetish theme are then used as the inspiration for a host of female authors, journalists, and cultural commentators to ‘unpick’ fetish in a series of accompanying essays, each written to correspond with a particular piece.”