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Thinking about the fashion concept will always make us
first think about your most common expression, which is the dresser.
And this dresser, thinking as a diagnostic of the mentality of a time,
as a way of expressing the culture of a certain human group,
is one of the elements that compose this structure
of production of meaning and meaning, which is fashion.
Fashion is much more an intangible aspect,
that we can both separate
between the so-called fashion, which is a term very little used,
but which is very attributed to the concept and the meaning of fashion.
Fashion as a collective and ephemeral form,
of a certain way of appearing, of a certain way of behaving,
which will thus culminate in a certain way of dressing.
Within these processes of production of meaning and meaning,
to think in fashion is to think in the modification,
apparent of certain universes such as architecture,
urban design or design of our own body,
as elements that are integrants of a cultural and social production,
of a people, of a group, of a certain class of people.
When we come to this material expression, which is the dresser,
I usually say that because it is a much more objective,
easy and accessible way of manipulation,
it is by the dresser that this fashion first expresses itself.
It is much easier for me to change the use of this text,
which is a white mesh, and the transformation of a dresser
into a chaos, than necessarily alter the architecture of a neighborhood.
So we track objectively the dresser fashion,
and also forget to think that the entire way of modifying
the appearance of things is also fashion.
In these forms of expression of visuality,
the dresser, as a central aspect of fashion,
ends up concentrating creativity and two stylists.
There is an aspect that is little debated in the fashion universe,
which is to think in understanding,
to think in production, in a certain way,
commercial use of fashion.
Many times it is much more the role of fashion journalist,
fashion journalist, than creators and creators.
And that is where the question of what fashion and art would be.
I remember that a concept that bothered me a lot at the time of graduation,
I am graduated in letters with English,
and we all gave a lot of concept of art to think in literature.
And I heard a lot that art is recognizable from its freedom.
If a certain object has a functionality,
if it is used in an objective way,
it would lose its artistic character.
So fashion would be just a space of applied art,
applied to the dresser, applied to the furniture, etc.
I still did not understand that what bothered me
were the records of social classes, race, ethnicity,
gender and sexuality that were involved.
What are the human groups that have the possibility
of producing some material object and not using it functionally?
So today, as a researcher in the area of gender and diversity studies,
in the area of fashion theory,
I came to understand exactly what bothered me.
What are the women, men and human groups,
what race and ethnicity they are,
what can discern what I use in my daily life,
what serves me to sustain my work
and what simply goes,
if I come with the pain of a room, of an art gallery, etc.
So I end up trying, in my productions and in my texts,
to deconstruct a little of this separation between fashion and art
by the inconvenience that I have with this characteristic
or this concept of art as an object,
among other things, useless, as a free object.
Why?
The manual making is extremely minuscule.
The production of the dresser takes place
before the development of the sewing machine.
There are pieces of clothing that were embroidered
for 10 years to be worn in a certain European area.
There is a valuation that is part of
which social, racial group
and contextual, this person is part of
the possibility of this being understood as an artistic object.
But how many other works
indigenous with their corporate paintings
and adornments made with mizangas, for example,
of the Masai people of Kenya,
which are extremely minuscule,
but also repeated
and which will be called,
pejoratively, artisanal,
as if artisanal were the one
whose process and result were predictable
and art was the one whose process and result
were a process of individual discovery,
subjective and very characteristic
to the creator or creator who is this artist.
So when we think about the cultural differences,
I end up giving up doing this discernment
because each cultural perspective
that looks at these same productions,
we will realize that with text,
text in the sense of objectivity,
text in the sense of what is written with the appearance
depends on different motivations
and consequently on different results.
In this relationship between fashion and market,
it is very easy for us to understand
how the process of persuasion and persuasion
of this new trend of fashion
or this new way of dressing is the correct one at the moment.
We can observe in history the amount of visual expressions
of subalternized groups
that became exactly inspiration
for collections that went to the pastures
or that went to great stars of commercial music.
Since the beginning of the 20th century,
there are cases that were documented
by some other scholars of the anthropology area
and the theory of fashion that were not very published,
but it is very interesting the persecution
that the Zultes, who were a group of black men from the United States,
suffered in the city they lived in
because they used land made of very colorful land.
The problem was not land,
the problem was not the multi-colored land.
The problem was subversion within a western standard
with the signature of an African culture.
So this way of dressing
is also a way of political confrontation.
It is also a way of identification
of your individual and group culture
with the strength of your mother
which needed to be removed.
This removal did not necessarily result
in a culture being commercialized
in a fashion commercial universe,
but other examples can be much more effective
in this contextualization
which are also in this same context of the United States,
the hippie movement,
which has already become new hippie,
hippie chic,
drunk,
several other nomenclatures that were given
to an expressiveness
that before was treated as
subaltern, illegal,
out of the standard,
to the point that until today
we have a kind of hippie character
that does not leave the focus of people,
hippie, etc.
With the punk movement,
in the following decade,
something similar and even more organized,
let's say so.
While in London,
the certain hair cut
would make that person say well,
change pants
not to cross with that guy,
with that strange look,
in the following decade, the 80s,
became the most expensive hair cut
in the beauty salons.
And until today,
music groups, be they
the university rock,
the forró,
etc. have a punk element,
be it the tachinhas or the moicano hair,
to include it in an integrated alternative space.
The pants are already torn
for you in the department store.
The pants already have a dirty appearance
so that you don't need
to have in fact a lifestyle
or a lifestyle
that builds that way of dressing.
The tênis already comes old
as if you had already used a lot,
walked a lot on a skate,
made some trails,
so that it seems that you actually have
the so-called lifestyle,
because in fashion everything has to be said in English,
even in Brazil,
that justifies the adoption
of that way of dressing.
So these strategies are so convincing
that we practically don't even criticize
that that piece comes
with an individual brand,
which is not yours,
it comes leading an identity
that you press the button and buy.
But it is also a process
of critical formation
of subjectivities,
of following patterns
and trends that are hierarchically
postures, to lead an identity
instead of the whole process
and then I bring the term of fashion,
of confection and a minutious mess
of the appearances
of the form of expression of subjectivity.
FAMILY
I try to build a work
that is commercial,
but with some kind of cultural value.
So I face
difficult to produce a product that is expensive, because this labor hand is expensive and needs to be
valued, to the extent that the group of consumers here, existing, do not necessarily evaluate
the autonomy of that product. It is much easier to sell a product whose reputation
surpassed 100 equal pieces in a shopping center than to sell a single piece exclusive
to that customer who is just looking to wear it.
Think in theory of fashion, as a concomitant to the thinking of the ways of producing fashion
collections, end up provoking me to a reflection that, from the theme chosen for the planning
of the collection to its form of confection and materialization, they are imbricated.
So it is no use to me to bring an extremely noble theme of political discussion, or of
such artistic beauty, and that the form of confection of this vestibule is ugly, ugly in the sense
of slave processes, analog work or slave work, which is what supports the fashion industry
in contemporary age. There are many brands that have their writers in their countries,
brands that contract an extremely cheap labor of countries and communities that need
that to survive. So think of fashion as political activism,
both in the sense of themes, content and aesthetic appeals that you raise, as a way of supporting
this way of production, fair and worthy for people who are actually in the productive chain
and who are extremely devalued. There is an hierarchy between the stylist, that person
who creates, because he deals with issues of intellectuality, as if he were extremely
superior in a asymmetrical relationship to that person who worships. And what would be
the creators and creators without the people who can interpret our ideas, many times
crazy and without much sense, and transform that into a possible product, transform that
into a viable product.
Think of this conceptual scope in all these motivations, subjective, political, and all
these aesthetic interests, it ends up being a challenge and needs to be transformed into
design design methodology. Without the process of methodological interpretation that separates
ideas into parts, this idea turbine will never be transformed into a product. The first
step that I use is to transform these ideas into a semantic panel, that is, what group
of images, what references of human groups and other images of photography, cinema, in
this universe of various visualities can direct the process of creation of the pieces.
So the first part is the construction of the semantic panel, of this construction of
the semantic panel, understanding how this relates to culture, economy, politics and
the current moment that the country, the city or its community is living, because the product
to be commercialized or to be understood as an artistic object that it needs to act
on any kind of affinity that the people who are seeing build when they have contact
with that artistic production.
With this understanding that we call analysis of the world scenario, we will think of what
target audience is for what target audience is directed to that collection, but to think
of what target audience is directed to that collection also goes through the construction
of a commercial briefing. I need to understand what is the range of fabrics that I will use
to know what is the investment range, what is the level of financial investment that I
will have to do to acquire them and then reproduce those pieces that were to pass them
in fabrics that are the same or similar, what is the type of investment that I will make
in modeling research, what modeling technique will be used, if the mullage, which is the
three-dimensional modeling that is made directly in the mannequin, where I can start the croquis
that I made on paper and continue to design and develop this model, or if I will make
a flat model that will give me the possibility later to reproduce in a very objective way,
cutting the parts of the fabric and bringing the reproduction of the pieces, what are the
aviations, what are the benefits of fabrics that I will use, embroidery, embroidery,
tapestry, what are the benefits of fabrics that will transform that piece into a singular piece
and if this singularization to pass it, it will come out reproduced in the commercial collection
or something similar and with a lower cost and the cost means research time, it means
development time of the pilot piece, which is the first piece, reproduction time, that
is, the sewing of that piece until it becomes a product serialized there, so there are several
elements to be analyzed before designing the croquis because a commercial piece is so difficult
to be developed and sold as a conceptual piece of high-cost because this makes much more
reference to the added value of that piece, that is, in what context it was produced,
because who it was signed, what is the level of fame and visibility that this person
who signs has, if I want to exemplify, for example, the strength that a department store
like CIA, which comes out in the 19th century as a fabric company and becomes a company
of pieces, of ready-made clothes, the same strength that this company has to have, a brand
like Dior, for example, also has, selling the product with the idea of ​​the unicity of
singularity is as difficult as massifying and I, in this middle term, as a creative creator
who also needs to be commercial, so that this sustainable commercial part ends up
having a triple challenge, which is to build pieces that bring an aesthetic visual interest
that respect the political assessment that I intend on the middle of them, which can
come both because of the productive process as in the collection in which I use
pieces of fabric that would be discarded by a confection and thinking about the strategies
for the benefit of fabric, that the working classes had to develop, learn and improve
to sustain the luxury of elite classes and superiors, is that I bring a collection where
I think about post-coloniality, what is the legacy of this colonization in our country,
what are the processes of redimensioning and subversion, that the groups were built
and transformed that artisanal doing in the identity of its community and how is that
in the future, with all the gender and sexuality discussions that I bring in my brand, I can
put it in a sunbed.
Almost 99% of the models I work with are black models, although after a trajectory
of subversions, street performances, of close-ups, as we call them, I come to study a process
of subversion within the pattern, how can I penetrate into fashion weeks, how can I
appear in certain magazines where black women and black models never appeared, exactly
that model within the pattern, very thin, very young, very much within a pattern of
western beauty, it is not very tight and at the same time this political struggle is
heard, so there is a negotiation process that is also objective, there is a negotiation
process that is also strategic, there is no point in a complete subversion and zero
news because we do not change the impression that the new generations and their demands
will have from what is fashion production.
We will promote men who are the first women to be selected.
And this is the room.
I ask you to join me in the audience.
The coffee is ready.
The coffee is ready.
The
coffee is ready.
The coffee is ready.
The coffee is ready.
Let's enjoy.
Not all stylists have the obligation to break, the obligation to subversion, and to subvert is also very difficult.
Most of the stylists who get visibility from a certain subversion strategy are in the market for about 30 years.
And the smaller brands, in addition to the very high costs to sustain a fashion parade, an international trip to the presentation of a collection,
there is still the lack of support. This name is not so strong yet for me to invest in a certain resource.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
The themes that I refer to for the construction of collections generally touch on issues that will cause a reflection on my ancestrality.
It is a very actionate discourse in black feminism, in intersectional feminism, and that made me, from this political positioning,
understand definitely the demand to speak of me and through the reflection on me, on my trajectory, which means my body politically, with this hair,
finally walking around, as I can also share reflections on the trajectory and life stories of other women.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
This is not the case with stylists.
