Fashionscape Design: Creating New Situations for Wearing Clothes Nishio Yoshinari
Fig. 1 Familial Uniform: Nishio Family 2006 / lambda print / h: 103 cm w: 145.6 cm × 2
For modern civil society, clothing gives its members a sense of security and confidence, and functions as a medium that facilitates communication. In order to be accepted as a legitimate member of society, it is necessary to learn cultural norms and expectations in relation to the body. In other words, both selfexpression and communication through clothings is practiced within the accepted norms of a given culture. Furthermore, in today’s contemporary globalised society, new clothing is manufactured and presented to us each season, inviting our participation in an unremitting act of consumption. Considered in this way, while assuming the role of a form of communication, clothing might also be said to hinder certain other forms of communication that might otherwise have been possible. This, I consider to be the central concern that informs my practice as an artist. H o w e v e r, n o t w i t h s t a n d i n g t h i s r e a l i s a t i o n , I feel that clothing has more potential as a communication tool than any other medium, due to the fact that everyone is already a participant in, and practitioner of, clothing.
In my practice, I have aimed to redeem the active engagement of people as clothing practitioners, and restore the latent communicative possibilities of clothing. I refer to my art practice as “fashionscape design”, signifying the design of unexpected situations in which clothes are worn or utilised through art projects and workshops. My experiments, which take numerous forms, aim to diversify and broaden the ways in which people interact with clothing, including the action of acquiring, wearing, changing, washing, and disposing of garments. My early work Familial Uniform (Fig. 1) focuses on the relationship between fashion and communication. For this work, I recreated family photographs that had been taken twenty years previously, using the same locations, people, and clothing − exactly as they all appear in the original images. What made this work possible were the close family ties that had endured through the years.
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