2019
CLEMENS THORNQUIST: FASHION IS UNIMPORTANT. BUT CLOTHES ARE IMPORTANT
Dobrila Denegri: Before you engaged with teaching and directing the Fashion Design programme at the Swedish School of Textiles, you had experience of collaborations (as an intern and an assistant) in relation to two really remarkable figures, Robert Wilson and Vivienne Westwood. Is there something from these collaborations that you brought to your way of teaching fashion design?
Clemens Thornquist: I think it is fair to say that my main artistic training comes from working at Vivienne Westwood and with visual artist and theatre director Robert Wilson. Working with them gave me a solid foundation for my own work. And although their works may be very different, there was also some common ground that attracted me a lot. For example, both of them deal with their materials, clothing, bodies, performers, and spaces in a straightforward, material way. This was very different from my time in fashion school, for example, where much design work had to start from narratives and stories before being materialised. Secondly, it was also good to forget and neglect one’s own will and wishes and instead focus on a material that was entirely outside of oneself.
DD: What else (or who else) was influential in creating the method that you practice and implement now in your programme at the Borås University?
CT: Many people have been very influential on my own work. Apart from Bob and Vivienne, Prof. Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, for example, has opened my perspectives to the shared grounds between academic fields, as well as being a great example of how to open up a traditional academic field and challenge its conventions through philosophy, and especially aesthetics. More particularly in my field, the thinking and work of Linda Loppa in the Fashion department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp has also been central to my thinking around foundational issues in body and dress expression.
DD: Do you practice “instructions” from your book “Artistic Development in [Fashion] Design”? Are they part of your reaching program? How do students, trained in such an innovative, experimental, and broad method, which seems to stimulate and motivate creativity in the broadest sense, integrate with the “real world” and the fashion industry?
CT: While fashion and fashion design, on the one hand, build on some very central cultural functions that attract interest from many other design disciplines, fashion design methods have, on the other hand, been a much more underdeveloped area. The idea behind these methods or instructions was to open up the traditional way of doing fashion design by pointing out many other possibilities for developing body-dress expressions and functions. This is still important, I think, as I see the central skill of fashion design as exploring, developing, and giving form to ideas about the body, or in interaction with the body, drawing on skills in material processing, design methods, garment construction techniques, sketching techniques, etc.
And suppose these skills are perhaps not always as respected in the industry as they should be, by exercising these methods or instructions. In that case, they build a general creative confidence, a belief in one’s capacity to realise what one aims to do long term, in one’s own way – something which is important for everyone when facing doubts or other challenging circumstances.
DD: Where is the place for designers’ creativity, experimentation, and reflection in the present fashion system, mostly operating on a profit-driven logic and focusing on branding and marketing?
CT: Fundamentally, I understand that there is in all art an element of design, and in design there is always an element of art. That said, it is true that in the fashion industry, skills, knowledge, and experience that are central to the arts are often absent in many areas of the industry. However, the role of the university must be broader than that of a business school, as it's a central institution for the development of society, not just business. For example, there is substantial evidence of a significant and urgent need for change in the production and consumption of clothing, not least from an environmental perspective. To power this change, creative skills and creative confidence are very important.
DD: When a director of a Fashion Design programme states, “Fashion is unimportant. But clothes are important” - What does that mean?
CT: To me, this statement points back at the fundamental questions of clothing as an artistic field. At The Swedish School of Textiles, this resonates, for example, with the development of what we find to be the much-overlooked theoretical foundation for fashion and fashion design, focusing on definitions and methods in fashion – clothing – design, to explore and develop ontological qualities in fashion design. To me, this perspective on clothing – connected to artistic expressions but not necessarily to business fashion – is something that education and research in fashion design needs to be much more concerned with, in order to develop fashion as a well-grounded area. As we have been working with this for a long time, I’m therefore very encouraged to hear such statements by other fashion institutions.
DD: Is fashion really a way of expressing our individuality?
CT: Unfortunately, I think no, although, of course, fashion as a socio-economic phenomenon is beyond any reasonable doubt driven and promoted by the myth of individuality and personal expression as well as vague promises of personalisation. Still, at its root, to dress is the definition of giving form to ourselves through what we wear, and it still has the potential for difference and individualisation.
DD: A lot has been said and written about fashion and identity, while you seem to focus more on fashion and integrity. What does this relation imply for you?
CT: It is true that fashion is often regarded as a cultural expression of something, and yes, often it is in terms of identity, in the sense of something expressing a similarity or affinity with something already existing outside of ourselves. In this sense, fashion – through clothing – is about expressing something, an idea. My interest, I guess, is more in the reverse, in how something worn, a piece of clothing, affects the body and wearer and how this inward interaction constitutes in itself an expression that afterwards may be conceptualised as an idea. Put differently, it means that my interest lies as much in the foundation for embodied expression wherein the act of wearing constitutes the wearer, as how the wearer constitutes what they wear.
DD: It strikes me to notice how certain formal principles pervade both your visual work, as well as the work of some of your collaborators and students I invited to take part in the “Transfashional” project. These are very different in an aesthetic and conceptual sense, yet somehow similar in composition: in your photos, which I saw, there is a recurrent motif of a single figure, in an empty and slightly abstracted space, looking quite self-absorbed either in their thoughts, or in some manual work, or some other activity. Sometimes the photographed figure seems to “belong” to the space it inhabits; sometimes it looks displaced. Sometimes it seems that you establish a relation with your subject, but in most cases it looks like you act as a voyeur (or a scientist), observing and capturing the scene from a distance. But what appears as a common denominator is an interplay between two basic elements - a body and a space. I found the same thing - a figure occupying the centre of an “empty” and relatively neutral scene - in works by Ulrik Martin Larsen, Saina Koohnavard and Linnea Bågander…
Body and space - two terms which have both physical and metaphysical connotations… What role does material (the “garment”) play in relation to these two points?
CT: A way to describe the role of the material in much of this research is to make a distinction between the difference in materials exploration and materials selection.
In this kind of research, the material – a garment or wearable – is explored through the body or through relationships between the body and space. As a process, it is about discovering and finding garments and materials through the body in relation to space.
In more programmatic terms, one can say that the Body, Dress, Space research program (bodyandspace.com) explores new expressions and functions in clothing and fashion by approaching garments as a material that connects body and space. This is, for example, different from a traditional design process, where materials are selected at a later stage based on already-defined criteria, or from Barthes’ notions of fashion, where ‘to dress’ in a certain way is not to act but to display the meaning of doing. Instead, ‘to dress’ is here primarily ‘to act’, and where the act of being is constituted through body-material-space interactions in an a priori meaning. Nothing but to act with the material is intended, and meaning is not conveyed or acquired through the act, but where wearing serves as an explorative process, in turn allowing for an infusion of meaning.
2019
CLEMENS THORNQUIST: FASHION IS UNIMPORTANT. BUT CLOTHES ARE IMPORTANT
Dobrila Denegri: Before you engaged with teaching and directing the Fashion Design programme at the Swedish School of Textiles, you had experience of collaborations (as an intern and an assistant) in relation to two really remarkable figures, Robert Wilson and Vivienne Westwood. Is there something from these collaborations that you brought to your way of teaching fashion design?
Clemens Thornquist: I think it is fair to say that my main artistic training comes from working at Vivienne Westwood and with visual artist and theatre director Robert Wilson. Working with them gave me a solid foundation for my own work. And although their works may be very different, there was also some common ground that attracted me a lot. For example, both of them deal with their materials, clothing, bodies, performers, and spaces in a straightforward, material way. This was very different from my time in fashion school, for example, where much design work had to start from narratives and stories before being materialised. Secondly, it was also good to forget and neglect one’s own will and wishes and instead focus on a material that was entirely outside of oneself.
DD: What else (or who else) was influential in creating the method that you practice and implement now in your programme at the Borås University?
CT: Many people have been very influential on my own work. Apart from Bob and Vivienne, Prof. Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, for example, has opened my perspectives to the shared grounds between academic fields, as well as being a great example of how to open up a traditional academic field and challenge its conventions through philosophy, and especially aesthetics. More particularly in my field, the thinking and work of Linda Loppa in the Fashion department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp has also been central to my thinking around foundational issues in body and dress expression.
DD: Do you practice “instructions” from your book “Artistic Development in [Fashion] Design”? Are they part of your reaching program? How do students, trained in such an innovative, experimental, and broad method, which seems to stimulate and motivate creativity in the broadest sense, integrate with the “real world” and the fashion industry?
CT: While fashion and fashion design, on the one hand, build on some very central cultural functions that attract interest from many other design disciplines, fashion design methods have, on the other hand, been a much more underdeveloped area. The idea behind these methods or instructions was to open up the traditional way of doing fashion design by pointing out many other possibilities for developing body-dress expressions and functions. This is still important, I think, as I see the central skill of fashion design as exploring, developing, and giving form to ideas about the body, or in interaction with the body, drawing on skills in material processing, design methods, garment construction techniques, sketching techniques, etc.
And suppose these skills are perhaps not always as respected in the industry as they should be, by exercising these methods or instructions. In that case, they build a general creative confidence, a belief in one’s capacity to realise what one aims to do long term, in one’s own way – something which is important for everyone when facing doubts or other challenging circumstances.
DD: Where is the place for designers’ creativity, experimentation, and reflection in the present fashion system, mostly operating on a profit-driven logic and focusing on branding and marketing?
CT: Fundamentally, I understand that there is in all art an element of design, and in design there is always an element of art. That said, it is true that in the fashion industry, skills, knowledge, and experience that are central to the arts are often absent in many areas of the industry. However, the role of the university must be broader than that of a business school, as it's a central institution for the development of society, not just business. For example, there is substantial evidence of a significant and urgent need for change in the production and consumption of clothing, not least from an environmental perspective. To power this change, creative skills and creative confidence are very important.
DD: When a director of a Fashion Design programme states, “Fashion is unimportant. But clothes are important” - What does that mean?
CT: To me, this statement points back at the fundamental questions of clothing as an artistic field. At The Swedish School of Textiles, this resonates, for example, with the development of what we find to be the much-overlooked theoretical foundation for fashion and fashion design, focusing on definitions and methods in fashion – clothing – design, to explore and develop ontological qualities in fashion design. To me, this perspective on clothing – connected to artistic expressions but not necessarily to business fashion – is something that education and research in fashion design needs to be much more concerned with, in order to develop fashion as a well-grounded area. As we have been working with this for a long time, I’m therefore very encouraged to hear such statements by other fashion institutions.
DD: Is fashion really a way of expressing our individuality?
CT: Unfortunately, I think no, although, of course, fashion as a socio-economic phenomenon is beyond any reasonable doubt driven and promoted by the myth of individuality and personal expression as well as vague promises of personalisation. Still, at its root, to dress is the definition of giving form to ourselves through what we wear, and it still has the potential for difference and individualisation.
DD: A lot has been said and written about fashion and identity, while you seem to focus more on fashion and integrity. What does this relation imply for you?
CT: It is true that fashion is often regarded as a cultural expression of something, and yes, often it is in terms of identity, in the sense of something expressing a similarity or affinity with something already existing outside of ourselves. In this sense, fashion – through clothing – is about expressing something, an idea. My interest, I guess, is more in the reverse, in how something worn, a piece of clothing, affects the body and wearer and how this inward interaction constitutes in itself an expression that afterwards may be conceptualised as an idea. Put differently, it means that my interest lies as much in the foundation for embodied expression wherein the act of wearing constitutes the wearer, as how the wearer constitutes what they wear.
DD: It strikes me to notice how certain formal principles pervade both your visual work, as well as the work of some of your collaborators and students I invited to take part in the “Transfashional” project. These are very different in an aesthetic and conceptual sense, yet somehow similar in composition: in your photos, which I saw, there is a recurrent motif of a single figure, in an empty and slightly abstracted space, looking quite self-absorbed either in their thoughts, or in some manual work, or some other activity. Sometimes the photographed figure seems to “belong” to the space it inhabits; sometimes it looks displaced. Sometimes it seems that you establish a relation with your subject, but in most cases it looks like you act as a voyeur (or a scientist), observing and capturing the scene from a distance. But what appears as a common denominator is an interplay between two basic elements - a body and a space. I found the same thing - a figure occupying the centre of an “empty” and relatively neutral scene - in works by Ulrik Martin Larsen, Saina Koohnavard and Linnea Bågander…
Body and space - two terms which have both physical and metaphysical connotations… What role does material (the “garment”) play in relation to these two points?
CT: A way to describe the role of the material in much of this research is to make a distinction between the difference in materials exploration and materials selection.
In this kind of research, the material – a garment or wearable – is explored through the body or through relationships between the body and space. As a process, it is about discovering and finding garments and materials through the body in relation to space.
In more programmatic terms, one can say that the Body, Dress, Space research program (bodyandspace.com) explores new expressions and functions in clothing and fashion by approaching garments as a material that connects body and space. This is, for example, different from a traditional design process, where materials are selected at a later stage based on already-defined criteria, or from Barthes’ notions of fashion, where ‘to dress’ in a certain way is not to act but to display the meaning of doing. Instead, ‘to dress’ is here primarily ‘to act’, and where the act of being is constituted through body-material-space interactions in an a priori meaning. Nothing but to act with the material is intended, and meaning is not conveyed or acquired through the act, but where wearing serves as an explorative process, in turn allowing for an infusion of meaning.
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