Fashion as Creative Practice: A Study of Modernist Poetics
Lead Research Organisation:
Birkbeck, University of London
Department Name: English, Theatre and Creative Writing
Abstract
My thesis examines the understudied relation between modernist poetics and fashion. It asks why two discrete objects-clothing and poetry-converged at a particular historical moment, and shows how this relation evolved through case studies of five writers: Stéphane Mallarmé, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. These case studies demonstrate how changes in the social and material conditions of the fashion industry are formally postulated by modernist texts. In this vein, I offer fashion as a paradigm for modernist poetic practices.
My project will discover the possibilities and limitations of different formal representations of clothing: it is fundamentally concerned with the (ultimately gendered) differences between writing about fashion in a theoretical essay and in a lyric poem. My work will provide a new critical perspective on both the history and theory of fashion writing, and on the aesthetic, social and political concerns of modernist poetry.
My project will discover the possibilities and limitations of different formal representations of clothing: it is fundamentally concerned with the (ultimately gendered) differences between writing about fashion in a theoretical essay and in a lyric poem. My work will provide a new critical perspective on both the history and theory of fashion writing, and on the aesthetic, social and political concerns of modernist poetry.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Saskia Barnard (Student) |