Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body [Hardcover]

Shortlisted for theMillia Davenport Publication Award

Experimental Fashion traces the proliferation of the grotesque and carnivalesque within contemporary fashion and the close relation between fashion and performance art, from Lady Gaga's raw meat dress to Leigh Bowery's performance style. The book examines the designers and performance artists at the turn of the twenty-first century whose work challenges established codes of what represents the fashionable body. These innovative people, the book argues, make their challenges through dynamic strategies of parody, humour and inversion. It explores the experimental work of modern designers such as Georgina Godley, Bernhard Willhelm, Rei Kawakubo and fashion designer, performance artist, and club figure Leigh Bowery. It also discusses the increased centrality of experimental fashion through the pop phenomenon, Lady Gaga.

Francesca Granatais Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons the New School for Design, New York. She is the editor and founder of the journalFashion Projects. Her work has appeared inFashion Theory, Fashion Practice,andThe Journal of Design History,The Atlanticas well as in a number of books and exhibition catalogues.

This is a timely book in that many of the concepts discussed resonate strongly with the current cultural context: gynophobia and fear of the fat feminine body; neoliberalism, corporate greed and the enterprising self ; and fear of border crossings and the breakdown of cultural categories. Morna Laing, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

The strengths of this book are two-fold, both reframing Bakhtin's theory of the Grotesque body as a tool for the analysis of fashion and also its ability to theorize the very edges of fashion [...] [I]n doing so, Granata does both fashion studies and design history a great service. Ellen Sampson, The Journal of ls