2025
ANNA SCHWARZ “JACLYN”
“The dress shows traces of wear and its age; the sleeves are frayed, the lining yellowed, and the seams puckered. But like all clothing repeatedly worn, it also bears the trace (if only spectral) of the woman who was in and out of it twelve times a day. Who she might have been is unknown. Her reflection, once multiplied to infinity, long ago disappeared from the showroom's mirrored interior. No one remembers her performance, ‘so fleeting, so ambiguous and so minimal’. What we do know is that her identity merged with what she was wearing—if asked her name by a client, she would respond with the name of her dress, ‘Maintenon.’”¹
With these words, Karen de Perthuis discusses a rare Paul Poiret model dress from 1909, housed in the Musée Galliera's collection in Paris, which Caroline Evans mentions in her seminal book “The Mechanical Smile”. Both scholars highlight the most invisible among invisible histories: that of a dress model and a fitting model. A dress model is an original garment created in the atelier by the couturier, serving as a prototype to be copied if purchased by a client or a trade buyer. It is made on the fitting model, a nameless body hired to act as an object or to perform in a way that is “so fleeting, so ambiguous, so minimal”² that no one will ever remember her. In fact, this quote is one of the very few that address the fitting model itself, since in most writings by scholars who addressed the subject, such as Caroline Evans or Alison Matthews David, the focus is either on the living mannequin or on a dummy. A mannequin had its place of visibility in the atelier’s showroom, on the runway, on the street, or even in a photograph, while a dummy would be displayed at the entrance or in the shop window. Only a fitting model occupied that intimate space of the backroom where the creative process would take place, and, thanks to her work, the garment would be comfortable and fit.
This might be the historical background and a broader context for Anna Schwarz’s project “Jaclyn”.
A trained fashion designer, sculptor, and researcher, Anna approached the fashion context at a young age, when she “modelled” for her grandmother, who owned a high-fashion children’s clothing shop in Salzburg, and for her father, who was a graphic designer. Later, in her teens, she started working with an agency, both as a model and, in particular, as a fitting model.
Thus, her awareness of what it feels like to be only a body, an object, basically a tool that serves a designer to make a model, is so strong. The “Jaclyn” project arises from this awareness, as well as from the urge to address this side of the fashion production process that still remains on the margins today.
Jaclyn is a name, a personal name and the name of a person. By naming her research and art project Jaclyn, Anna takes the first step in the process of de-objectifying the woman who is her subject and inspiration: NYC-based fitting model Jaclyn Shuman.
“Jaclyn,” as an artistic fashion-related project, evolved through several phases, each focused on a single dimension of fashion, understood as both the production of material and immaterial objects.
It began in New York when Anna got in touch with Jaclyn Shuman, with whom she had worked previously as an intern. The idea of collaboration sparked, and Jaclyn enthusiastically agreed to lend her body for this artistic project, which included traditional casting and 3D scanning. This process later resulted in a miniature silver sculpture that can be worn as a ring.
This tiny sculpture depicts a cast of a semi-naked female figure, cut at the hips, with her hands crossed and in a pose that appears reflective and calm. Her body language suggests she acts more as an artist's model rather than a tailor's, as her pose evokes a sense of intimacy, vulnerability, or composure. It portrays a person—her inner life, subjectivity, and femininity—captured in the moment in which she was photographed and scanned. Yet we know the scan was made in the mental space of a fitting room, a place where most of the material aspects of fashion are made.
The dichotomy of characteristics, embodied in the notions of the artist’s model and the fashion model, influences the positioning of Anna Schwarz’s work and practice as “transfashional,” a realm where fashion intersects with other disciplines. “Jaclyn” as a specific project that revolves around the notion of a model exemplifies this positioning further, since the term is common to various fields, including art, design, architecture, photography, and new media, besides fashion. In each of these areas, it carries different meanings. “It can suggest both the early stages of a project and its final realisation, ranging from an idea that is barely formed to an ideal which reality can never match. But only in fashion is the model a living, breathing human; and only in fashion does this creature have an inert counterpart, in the form of the dress she wears, also known as the model.”³ Continuing this reasoning by Caroline Evans, it is interesting to note the etymology and genealogy of the term, “from the Latin ‘modulus,’ meaning measure or standard, and it's the diminutive ‘modellus,’ from which the old Italian ‘modello,’ or the mould, derived. It drifted into French, ‘modèle,’ in the sixteenth century, and then into English, with the sense of a small representation of an object, like a sculpture’s maquette. Its use to denote a fashion model developed in the twentieth century.”⁴
All of these linguistic passages that bring us closer to the term model seem somehow reflected in the project “Jaclyn”, in its attempt to highlight and dignify a figure of a fitting model, the one who is always “behind the scene, behind the stage, behind the representation, but manifested in the fit, the comfort of our clothes.”⁵
Thus, the final stage of the project restores the visibility of “Jaclyn”, a tiny sculpture which looks like a talisman, through collaborations between Anna and artists or photographers such as Anna Breit, Selina Traun, Susanna Hofer, Lisa Edi, Buerobutter Liebentritt, Anaïs Horn, Elsa Okazaki, Daniel Voldheim, Daria Marshenko, Katarina Šoškić and others.
Their visual interpretations of this object, both as a sculpture and as an accessory, add a narrative layer that, even if implicitly, frames the whole of Anna’s operation as another form of fashion production: the one in which fashion becomes an image or a text.
Through all these collaborations, “Jaclyn” emerges as a symbol of both an individual and a collective body, a personal and collective voice, an artistic subject and an artistic object, which continues to repropose the question: whom and what do we look at when we look at a model?
¹ Karen de Perthuis, The Mechanical Smile by Caroline Evans (Yale, 2013), Fashion Theory, Volume 18, Issue 4, pp. 479–492, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014.
² Caroline Evans, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929, Yale University Press, 2013.
³ Caroline Evans, The Ontology of the Fashion Model, AA files 63, 2011, p. 58.
⁴ Idem.
⁵ Anna Schwarz in personal correspondence by email.
2025
ANNA SCHWARZ “JACLYN”
“The dress shows traces of wear and its age; the sleeves are frayed, the lining yellowed, and the seams puckered. But like all clothing repeatedly worn, it also bears the trace (if only spectral) of the woman who was in and out of it twelve times a day. Who she might have been is unknown. Her reflection, once multiplied to infinity, long ago disappeared from the showroom's mirrored interior. No one remembers her performance, ‘so fleeting, so ambiguous and so minimal’. What we do know is that her identity merged with what she was wearing—if asked her name by a client, she would respond with the name of her dress, ‘Maintenon.’”¹
With these words, Karen de Perthuis discusses a rare Paul Poiret model dress from 1909, housed in the Musée Galliera's collection in Paris, which Caroline Evans mentions in her seminal book “The Mechanical Smile”. Both scholars highlight the most invisible among invisible histories: that of a dress model and a fitting model. A dress model is an original garment created in the atelier by the couturier, serving as a prototype to be copied if purchased by a client or a trade buyer. It is made on the fitting model, a nameless body hired to act as an object or to perform in a way that is “so fleeting, so ambiguous, so minimal”² that no one will ever remember her. In fact, this quote is one of the very few that address the fitting model itself, since in most writings by scholars who addressed the subject, such as Caroline Evans or Alison Matthews David, the focus is either on the living mannequin or on a dummy. A mannequin had its place of visibility in the atelier’s showroom, on the runway, on the street, or even in a photograph, while a dummy would be displayed at the entrance or in the shop window. Only a fitting model occupied that intimate space of the backroom where the creative process would take place, and, thanks to her work, the garment would be comfortable and fit.
This might be the historical background and a broader context for Anna Schwarz’s project “Jaclyn”.
A trained fashion designer, sculptor, and researcher, Anna approached the fashion context at a young age, when she “modelled” for her grandmother, who owned a high-fashion children’s clothing shop in Salzburg, and for her father, who was a graphic designer. Later, in her teens, she started working with an agency, both as a model and, in particular, as a fitting model.
Thus, her awareness of what it feels like to be only a body, an object, basically a tool that serves a designer to make a model, is so strong. The “Jaclyn” project arises from this awareness, as well as from the urge to address this side of the fashion production process that still remains on the margins today.
Jaclyn is a name, a personal name and the name of a person. By naming her research and art project Jaclyn, Anna takes the first step in the process of de-objectifying the woman who is her subject and inspiration: NYC-based fitting model Jaclyn Shuman.
“Jaclyn,” as an artistic fashion-related project, evolved through several phases, each focused on a single dimension of fashion, understood as both the production of material and immaterial objects.
It began in New York when Anna got in touch with Jaclyn Shuman, with whom she had worked previously as an intern. The idea of collaboration sparked, and Jaclyn enthusiastically agreed to lend her body for this artistic project, which included traditional casting and 3D scanning. This process later resulted in a miniature silver sculpture that can be worn as a ring.
This tiny sculpture depicts a cast of a semi-naked female figure, cut at the hips, with her hands crossed and in a pose that appears reflective and calm. Her body language suggests she acts more as an artist's model rather than a tailor's, as her pose evokes a sense of intimacy, vulnerability, or composure. It portrays a person—her inner life, subjectivity, and femininity—captured in the moment in which she was photographed and scanned. Yet we know the scan was made in the mental space of a fitting room, a place where most of the material aspects of fashion are made.
The dichotomy of characteristics, embodied in the notions of the artist’s model and the fashion model, influences the positioning of Anna Schwarz’s work and practice as “transfashional,” a realm where fashion intersects with other disciplines. “Jaclyn” as a specific project that revolves around the notion of a model exemplifies this positioning further, since the term is common to various fields, including art, design, architecture, photography, and new media, besides fashion. In each of these areas, it carries different meanings. “It can suggest both the early stages of a project and its final realisation, ranging from an idea that is barely formed to an ideal which reality can never match. But only in fashion is the model a living, breathing human; and only in fashion does this creature have an inert counterpart, in the form of the dress she wears, also known as the model.”³ Continuing this reasoning by Caroline Evans, it is interesting to note the etymology and genealogy of the term, “from the Latin ‘modulus,’ meaning measure or standard, and it's the diminutive ‘modellus,’ from which the old Italian ‘modello,’ or the mould, derived. It drifted into French, ‘modèle,’ in the sixteenth century, and then into English, with the sense of a small representation of an object, like a sculpture’s maquette. Its use to denote a fashion model developed in the twentieth century.”⁴
All of these linguistic passages that bring us closer to the term model seem somehow reflected in the project “Jaclyn”, in its attempt to highlight and dignify a figure of a fitting model, the one who is always “behind the scene, behind the stage, behind the representation, but manifested in the fit, the comfort of our clothes.”⁵
Thus, the final stage of the project restores the visibility of “Jaclyn”, a tiny sculpture which looks like a talisman, through collaborations between Anna and artists or photographers such as Anna Breit, Selina Traun, Susanna Hofer, Lisa Edi, Buerobutter Liebentritt, Anaïs Horn, Elsa Okazaki, Daniel Voldheim, Daria Marshenko, Katarina Šoškić and others.
Their visual interpretations of this object, both as a sculpture and as an accessory, add a narrative layer that, even if implicitly, frames the whole of Anna’s operation as another form of fashion production: the one in which fashion becomes an image or a text.
Through all these collaborations, “Jaclyn” emerges as a symbol of both an individual and a collective body, a personal and collective voice, an artistic subject and an artistic object, which continues to repropose the question: whom and what do we look at when we look at a model?
¹ Karen de Perthuis, The Mechanical Smile by Caroline Evans (Yale, 2013), Fashion Theory, Volume 18, Issue 4, pp. 479–492, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014.
² Caroline Evans, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929, Yale University Press, 2013.
³ Caroline Evans, The Ontology of the Fashion Model, AA files 63, 2011, p. 58.
⁴ Idem.
⁵ Anna Schwarz in personal correspondence by email.
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