Conference: Benjamin, Barthes, and Fashion

BBF poster

Registration is now open for Benjamin, Barthes, and Fashion

Friday 28th June 2013

University Place Room 6.207

The University of Manchester Oxford Rd. M13 9PL

Fashion and Theory: Exploring critical perspectives in fashion and dress studies
Benjamin, Barthes, and Fashion

Historian, philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin wrote on fashion’s relationship to modernity, commodity fetishism, history, and memory. In his unfinished Arcades Project, the notes for a large section on Fashion reveal Benjamin’s desire to read the medium of dress culturally, materially, historically, and through his own brand of Marxist analysis.

Roland Barthes developed a semiotic system for interpreting the discourse of fashion. Barthes’ The Fashion System, the seminal work on fashion and semiotics, suggests fashion can be understood as a language composed of codes, signs, and significations. Both Barthes and Benjamin wrote on fashion’s relationship to temporality, memory and history, and both critically investigated the potential of dress as metaphor in literary and visual analysis. In the vein of such work as Caroline Evans’ Fashion at the Edge (2003), which utilizes Benjamin’s writing on fashion and time, and Malcolm Barnard’s Fashion as Communication (1996), which engages with Barthesian semiology, this conference presents new critical readings of fashion that engage with Benjaminian and Barthesian theories.

This international, interdisciplinary conference brings together researchers who are examining these themes across the mediums of film, advertising, contemporary fashion, painting, and exhibitions.
Caroline Evans is our confirmed keynote speaker.

Advanced booking is required.
Registration for the conference is now open online: http://tinyurl.com/nb6jf9d

For more information see: http://benjaminbarthesandfashion.tumblr.com

Full Programme:

10:00 Registration

10:30 Welcome Gizem Kiziltunali (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Session 1 Discourses of Fashion10:35-10:55 ‘The Jeans that Built America’: myth, music and image in advertising for Lee and Levi’s between 1985 and 1994. Paul Jobling (University of Brighton)

10:55-11:15 The Language of Fantastic Man: a Barthesian Analysis of Twenty-First Century British Fashion Writing.
Megan Wray Schertler (Varsity, London)

11:15-11:35 Reconsidering Roland Barthes’ ‘Chanel- Courrèges Match’. Hannah Adkins (Fashion Institute of Technology, New York)

Discussion chaired by Gizem Kiziltunali (Manchester Metropolitan University)

11:45-12:00 Coffee/Tea Break (provided)

Session 2 Costume: Representations of Fashion12:00-12:20 The Conventional World of Historical Film Fashions. Elena Dimitrova Trencheva (Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland)

12:20-12:40 Well-dressed folds and creased allegory: The semiotics of cloth hanging in two productions of Parsifal. William Filipski McDonald (Middlesex University)

12:40- 13:00 Dressing the Surface: Fashion and Aesthetics in Franz Winterhalter’s ‘Portrait of the Empress Eugénie Surrounded by Her Ladies of Honour’, 1855. Lynda Nead (Birkbeck University of London)

Discussion chaired by Wendy Ligon Smith (University of Manchester)

13:15-14:15 Break for Lunch (not provided)

Session 3 Fashion Spaces
14:15-14:35 ‘The Concise Dictionary of Dress’ and the Language(s) of Fashion Exhibition. Michal Lynn Shumate (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

14:35-14:55 Within the labyrinth: tracing and exhibiting resonances. Flavia Loscialpo (Southampton Solent University)

14:55-15:15 Outer Dark. Continuing After Fashion. Mahret Ifeoma Kupka (Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany)

15:15-15:35 Citing the Sun: Marc Jacobs, Olafur Eliasson and the Production of Aesthetic Myth. Grant Johnson (The City University of New York)

Discussion chaired by Wendy Ligon Smith (University of Manchester)

15:45- 16:00 Coffee/Tea Break (provided)

Session 4 Clothing and Identity
16:00-16:20 Traces of Memory: Clive Rundle’s Mesh-Shirt: S/S10. Erica de Greef (The Research Centre in New Identities, Cape Town, South Africa)

16:20-16:40 Lost and Found: The Hand Knitted Jumper, exemplar for Fashion’s Agency. Angela Maddock (Swansea Metropolitan University and Royal College of Art)

Discussion chaired by Gizem Kiziltunali (Manchester Metropolitan University)

16:50-17:00 Break

17:00 Keynote
Factories of Elegance: The Optical Unconscious of Twentieth-Century Couture Houses. Caroline Evans (Central Saint Martins, UAL)

18:00 Closing Remarks Wendy Ligon Smith (University of Manchester)

The Yuanmingyuan in Britain and France: Representations of the ‘Summer Palace’ in the West

Organised by the Centre for Museology and funded by the Centre for Chinese Studies

In October 1860, at the culmination of the Second Opium War, British and French troops looted, and then burnt, the imperial buildings in the Yuanmin- gyuan (or ‘Summer Palace’) in the north of Beijing. Over a million imperial ob- jects are estimated to have been taken from the site: many of these are now scattered around the world, in private collections and public museums.

A two–day workshop at The University of Manchester

8th-9th July 2013

This two-day workshop will explore the ways in which objects from the Yuan- mingyuan have been represented in the West. It will be the first such event to combine approaches from specialists in the history of collecting with the views of curators of Yuanmingyuan objects.

Confirmed speakers include James Hevia (Chicago), Greg Thomas (Hong Kong), Nick Pearce (Glasgow), Vincent Droguet (Château of Fontainebleau).

For further details contact: louise.tythacott@manchester.ac.uk There is no charge for attendance but numbers are limited. To secure a place contact: hannah.mansell@manchester.ac.uk

Yuanmingyuan Workshop poster (pdf)

Jean-Luc Nancy has had to cancel his visit to Manchester

Art History and Visual Studies is very sorry to report that Jean-Luc Nancy has been ill and has had to cancel his visit to Manchester as our Pilkington Chair.

This is very disappointing for everyone, including Jean-Luc Nancy.

As there has been so much interest in his visit, all of us in AHVS would appreciate your help in spreading the word.

Thank you for your understanding and help.

Jean Luc Nancy: 2013 Pilkington Lectures

Two Lectures and a Masterclass

Monday, 3 June 2013

What Does ‘Politics’ Mean?

5:30 pm John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, reception to follow

Tuesday, 4 June 2013

What Does ‘Art’ Mean?

5.30pm John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre

Special thanks to CIDRAL and French Studies for help in supporting these events.

Above: Pontormo, Visitation, 1528-29

Masterclass

Monday, 3 June 2013: 11am-1pm

Masterclass on his Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body

11-1pm John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre

Download the reading for the masterclass (5.7mb)

Special thanks to CIDRAL and French Studies for help in supporting these events.

Above: Titian, Noli Me Tangere, c.1514

Next AHVS talk ….

Wednesday 15 May

Anna Lovatt (The University of Manchester)

‘Wavelength: On Drawing, Sound and Frequency in Art since the 1960s’,

4.30pm Mansfield Cooper G20

Brian Dillon “Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing”

1 May, 4.30pm, Mansfield Cooper G20

Brian Dillon is a writer, critic and UK editor of Cabinet. His books include I Am Sitting in a Room (Cabinet, 2012), Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011), Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005), which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. He writes regularly for the Guardian, the London Review of Books, frieze and Artforum. A collection of his essays, Objects in This Mirror, will be published by Sternberg Press in 2013. He lives in Canterbury, and teaches Critical Writing at the Royal College of Art.

Thursday Lates: An Evening of Fashion, Music, Art and Marcel Proust

An Evening of Fashion, Music, Art and Marcel Proust

Thursday 30 May 2013

6pm – 8.45pm

Join us to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way at Manchester Art Gallery in partnership with the University of Manchester.

Enjoy a multi-sensory journey back in time to the late 19th century Parisian salons from which the novel was born, and explore highlighted works from the Gallery’s collection that relate to Proust’s novel.

Musicians from RNCM will be in the Galleries performing chamber music inspired by late 19th century Paris.

A special guided tour will take you round the Galleries: starting with a talk by art historian Sophie Preston highlighting Proust’s relationship with Manchester, and finishing with a discussion by dress historian Wendy Ligon Smith on Proust’s beloved Delphos gown by Venetian designer Mariano Fortuny, newly on display.

Come early and enjoy a drink in our Cafe bar

For further information please visit the Gallery website.

Book here:

http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/6426033439#