Left
Right
Below
Right
Below
Dress
Silhouette research; digital sketches
Front detail
May 2022
Silhouette research; digital sketches
Front detail
May 2022
In response to the Costume Institute’s In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, this dress reimagines “strength” as defined in the exhibition’s placard: “the ability to produce an effect...a source of power or influence.”
The curatorial emphasis on garments like Carmelo Pomodoro’s gray wool skirt suit and Mainbocher’s service uniform underscores a distinctly Western narrative of power dressing rooted in corporate ambition and wartime pragmatism. While these garments offered certain sartorial liberation, their diverging strategies of empowerment rely on masculine-coded aesthetics that resist the semantic disorder through which hegemonic meanings can be challenged.
Alternative paradigms of strength invoke inherent polysemy, allowing symbols to generate multiple meanings and infinite collisions.1 Chakaia Booker’s Raw Attraction and LaDonna Smith’s experimental musical notation for PARTBE, provided a conceptual context. The jarring tension and emasculating resilience of Booker’s vagina dentata motif, combined with angular percussion cues of Smith’s work, informed the dress’s tertiary palette and silhouette. Draping dupioni silk and taffeta, traditionally used in evening wear, the dress destablizes conventions of power dressing, foregrounding femininity as a source of strength, asserted through unapologetic abstraction, layered complexity and reconfiguration of cultural signifiers. This dress reframes a generative rather than reactionary form of femininity, producing its own visual codes.
The curatorial emphasis on garments like Carmelo Pomodoro’s gray wool skirt suit and Mainbocher’s service uniform underscores a distinctly Western narrative of power dressing rooted in corporate ambition and wartime pragmatism. While these garments offered certain sartorial liberation, their diverging strategies of empowerment rely on masculine-coded aesthetics that resist the semantic disorder through which hegemonic meanings can be challenged.
Alternative paradigms of strength invoke inherent polysemy, allowing symbols to generate multiple meanings and infinite collisions.1 Chakaia Booker’s Raw Attraction and LaDonna Smith’s experimental musical notation for PARTBE, provided a conceptual context. The jarring tension and emasculating resilience of Booker’s vagina dentata motif, combined with angular percussion cues of Smith’s work, informed the dress’s tertiary palette and silhouette. Draping dupioni silk and taffeta, traditionally used in evening wear, the dress destablizes conventions of power dressing, foregrounding femininity as a source of strength, asserted through unapologetic abstraction, layered complexity and reconfiguration of cultural signifiers. This dress reframes a generative rather than reactionary form of femininity, producing its own visual codes.
1 Dick Hebdige, “Style as signifying practice,” in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 117-127.