Seminar

Design Talks: Re-fashioning the human

At the turn of the twenty-first century, experimental fashion presented grotesque bodies-out-of-bounds, which moved a critique to norms of beauty and propriety. This shift was influenced by feminism’s desire to open up and question gender and bodily norms and particularly the normative bodies of fashion, as well as by the AIDS epidemic. In the twenty-first century, fashion designers have continued this exploration, further breaking down boundaries between bodily boundaries, humans and non-humans, subjects, and objects. As the centrality of the human comes into question, in the wake of the current climate crisis, posthumanism has increasingly come to bear on experimental fashion.

Francesca Granata is Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design. Her research centers on modern and contemporary visual and material culture with a particular focus on fashion history and theory, gender and performance studies.

The talk will be moderated by Fredrik Floen.