The ManifestoDude
This website has as its aim to promote an analytical and systematic discussion of fashion, conceived as an essentially plural object, at the articulation of a multiplicity of discourses: history of fashion, history of the body and its representations, sociology, anthropology, history of art, aesthetics, etc.
Furthermore we posit that we are dressed by words as much as by garments and that, unless it is insignificant, this activity cannot be devoid of meaning. At last we wish to transcend the opposition between superficiality and profundity to affirm, along with Paul Valéry, that the most profound thing mankind posseses is its skin, what clothes and adorns him. Designers that catch our attention refuse the standardisation of clothing design and build, over the course of their collections, a singular voice and identity that makes away with fashion defined as perpetual renewal and seduction of the ephemeral. They refuse industrial standardization because they affirm the essentially hand-crafted dimension of a garment, which conserves the memory of its origin and inscribes itself in the history of its production and usage. They refuse aesthetic standardization because they play with the formal codes of classical proportions and rules of symmetry, to naturalize the garment and return its rights to anatomy or, on the contrary, to uproot it from its mundane functionality and invent a new body. They refuse gender standardization because they challenge its codes of identification and reject the dogmas of garment sexuation: men are no more condemned to aggressive virility than women to ostentatious seduction. Therefore these designers envision the garment less as a merchandise than an object which maintains with the work of art a dialectical relationship of fascination/repulsion and that is subjected, acknowledges or even showcases the later’s influence. Their undertaking is not to capture trends but to progress on a path. It is precisely these paths that we wish to explore and discuss here. Discuss the Manifesto here
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