2019

LARA TORRES “AN IMPOSSIBLE WARDROBE FOR THE INVISIBLE” AND “UNMAKING”

Several years after launching her label in Portugal, Lara Torres began to orient her work towards theory and art, two fields that enabled her to articulate reflections on the conditions that independent, sustainable, and ethically responsible brands face within the current fashion system and industry. 
These reflections spanned from questions such as, ‘if stopping to produce can also be considered a design decision?’, up to ‘how immaterial productions can substitute material ones, and still represent an act of resistance?’ 
Her short films “An Impossible Wardrobe for the Invisible” (2011) and “Unmaking” (2017) are attempts to come to terms with these doubts. Poetic yet poignant, her work is a personal response to what a fashion designer can do when she/he cannot create fashion. What a designer, like Lara, can actually do is create space for criticality, reflection and debate. This ‘space’ can take multiple forms and, as in her case, be evoked through visual narratives that speak of destruction, dissolution, transformation, and ultimately redemption and rebirth. 
Her films trace this kind of trajectory in an abstract, yet visually and emotionally compelling way. Not only within her films, but also the sculptural works in which she “freezes” garments, impregnating them with a porcelain glaze, binding them to crack and break if worn. 
Her work addresses the theme of transformability, performativity and passage from one stage to another. 
When garments start breaking, vanishing, dissolving, we face the process of destruction, which is just a passage towards another stage, though: the moment of creating something potentially unrepeatable, unique. 
In a time when copying and reproducing have become so common and easy, making something no more than a trace, yet impossible to replicate, calls for reflection. 
It calls for addressing the issue of values and what we attribute value to in a system based on materialistic, profit-driven logics and unceasing production and consumption. 
It poses the questions of what and how should be produced in the future, and, most of all, why we are making what we are. 

Lara Torres has been a Senior Lecturer in the Fashion and Textiles Department since 2016 and is the Course Leader for the MA in Fashion and Textiles at the University of Portsmouth. She holds a doctorate from London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, with her thesis titled “Towards a practice of unmaking: the essay film as critical discourse for fashion in the expanded field”. Lara's research resides at the intersection of fashion, fine arts, and film practice and theory. It explores concepts related to the expanded field of fashion, critical fashion, and fashion film practices.