The Courtauld's video: Fashion Interpretations Symposium Part II

Part II: Lisa Cohen / Olga Vainshtein / Elizabeth Kutesko – Tuesday 1st December, 7pm – 8pm Lisa Cohen is a writer. She is Associate Professor English and of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. “I am interested in how experiments with biographical writing might document lived experiences of clothing in new ways. For this project, I’m thinking about clothes and grief: about how sartorial remnants hold the bodies of the dead and our memories of them; about what it looks, feels, and smells like to re-encounter these objects. I’m writing about my encounters with people who have shown me charged, cherished, and even neglected clothes they have held onto, sometimes for decades. This work grows out of the book I’m completing, a meditation on queer friendship, notions of preservation and decay, and Enlightenment legacies in the context of the long history of HIV/AIDS” Olga Vainshtein is a Senior Researcher at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. “I have written on the history of Dandyism and male costume, beauty and gender, fashion and body and recently – about the use of Photoshop in fashion photography and about semiotics of fashion in Edith Wharton’s novels. In 2006 I founded the Russian version of Fashion Theory journal. My current research interests are focused around fashion and fiction. For this project I am exploring intersections between Fashion and Literature. I aim to examine how literature as an artistic medium reinterprets fashion. Fashion in fiction is frequently analyzed as a social monitor for taste and status, but literature has its own discursive peculiarities. My goal is to gain insight into the ways literature can translate and reconfigure the development of fashion itself. Elizabeth Kutesko is a fashion historian with a particular interest in Latin American bodily practices and the intersection between dress, cultural identity, representation and power. She is currently Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Central Saint Martins and the author of Fashioning Brazil: Globalization and the Representation of Brazilian Dress in National Geographic (Bloomsbury, 2018). She has published articles based upon her research in the Global Fashion Special Edition of ZoneModa journal (December 2019) and the Brazilian Fashion Special Edition of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (November 2016). Fashion, Medium, Modernities: Claude and Dina Lévi-Strauss’ Snapshots of São Paulo, 1935-7 This paper is organised around a series of 44 original photographic negatives taken by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (and possibly also his wife Dina) in São Paulo between 1935 and 1937. We see recently built neighbourhoods and avenues, urban transportation networks, and new patterns of consumption in the form of restaurants, cinemas, cafes and department stores selling the latest fashions from England and France – all captured amidst crumbling Old World facades and general urban detritus. These photographs are held by the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo and were published for the first time sixty-years later in Brazil in the photobook entitled Saudades de São Paulo (1996). Claude and Dina Lévi-Strauss travelled to Brazil in 1935 as part of a small cohort of young French academics invited to help establish the newly founded University of São Paulo. This transnational programme of cultural exchange must be contextualized within the specific context of the French-Brazilian “special relationship” which dates to the mid-sixteenth century. France’s failed attempt to colonise terrain in Latin America and create France Antarctique evolved into a pursuit of cultural hegemony in the region that found fertile breeding ground in Brazil, who imported French luxury fashion and consumer goods. Elizabeth Kutesko | UAL / www.elizabethkutesko.com