Laura: How would you describe your practice, or, to be more specific, what is your job title?

Adele: I have been described as a fashion activist, an agent, a fashion psychologist, a protagonist. I’m interested in how clothing can affect the relations and interactions between people – and how they bring out the characters we play in everyday life.

Laura: It’s funny because I always identified your work more as a performance art practice, but within a fashion context. But I wonder if you align with fashion or with art, or do you see yourself as somewhere in between? How do you position yourself between these worlds?

Adele: Recently I have been presenting work in museum or gallery contexts that could be tied to a fashion festival or contemporary art events. The ideas come from fashion, dress and clothes, but are executed through participatory situations and I think this is how the projects can slip between the two. I’m interested in how the people around us affect the way we feel in what we wear and if we dress for others rather than for ourselves. In some ways the situations are a material investigation into people, fashion and the psychological or sociological processes at play. These situations I create aim to give the participant a ‘aha’ moment where the immaterial workings of fashion are made visible to them. Participation is essential in these situations, since to feel part of fashion we engage with each other through action and experience. I’m trying to reveal the feeling of fashion that comes from people. Not from clothes.

Laura: The way that art and fashion increasingly work together is interesting, recently we’ve seen this in all from local projects here in Melbourne, like the retail/gallery space Centre For Style, to Prada’s Fondazione Prada gallery in Milan, it seems that fashion and art are evermore intertwined.

Adele: Yes, I am very interested in curators that deal with this space between art and fashion practices, people like Luca Marchetti, José Teunissen, Nick Knight, who are curating shows with fashion practitioners working non-conventionally. The field of fashion is rapidly expanding, particularly in what it is that a fashion practitioner does. If we are opening up what fashion is, and what fashion can be, then we can look at fashion as something that is beyond clothes, as something that surrounds clothes; a performance or immersive experience might reveal the feelings and interactions fashion provokes and allow us to reflect on our everyday experience of wearing clothes. Performance is a very powerful tool that can be used to start to unpack some of these ideas and to think about fashion as a concept.

Laura: Performance in fashion is interesting because it is something so integral to the industry on many levels, from catwalk presentations, to photo shoots and red carpet events, all are very much acts of performance that are not necessarily natural, or accidental. How do you work with these materials or structures?

Adele: I guess I am interested in all of these components and the roles they play in shaping our perception, or behaviour in daily life. Those of us who aren’t on the catwalk or a celebrity, look up to these ideals to adopt a style or set of behaviours. So when we adopt what they are wearing, we are not just adopting the physical garment, but the character or performance that comes with that. I think this is an interesting dynamic, and one that plays an integral role in the creation of fashion.

Laura: Yes, and traditionally fashion has been questioned or deconstructed more on a surface level, to create a new aesthetic in a way. I’m thinking here of classic examples such as Martin Margiela or Rei Kawakubo. But it’s interesting that your practice examines fashion as a set of behaviours. How important is being commercial, or in-tune with the fashion industry to you? Is it something you actively engage with or reject?

Adele: I guess what interests me about traditional fashion is that it has such a profound effect on a wide audience, essentially I am interested in people and how ideas are adopted, spread and have an impact on us. I like looking to large commercial brands and thinking about the tools and branding they use to get people on board.

Laura: The garments in your piece, ‘Imagining Chanel’, although unseen in the presentation, were integral in their absence. What role do fashion objects have for you?

Adele: Well, I really enjoy the way Coco Chanel speaks of fashion, and what curator Amy de la Haye has written on Chanel and her approach to fashion is incredibly interesting. When you say the word ‘Chanel’ most people have an image that comes to mind, and a similar function occurs when we observe garments, and the information we take in. We are taking in sartorial information all the time. How we describe a garment to a friend – for instance: ‘I’ve just bought this red dress, it has polka dots, and so forth…’ That person starts to imagine the dress in their mind based on information from their own experience. By pulling pieces of information together from what they know, they construct this dress through description. I am interested in the power of this memory or imprint that physical garments leave in our imaginations. So with ‘Imagining Chanel’, I am suggesting that we are all designers, and that we all actively play a role in the design process.

This relationship between description and garment is also particularly powerful in museum collections. Museums are required to describe the garments in their collections, so it becomes something quite different to the physical garment. This is very much what Roland Barthes discusses in his first chapter of The Fashion System. Barthes talks about the relationship between ‘image-garment’, ‘written clothing’ and the ‘actual garment’ as three separate garments. ‘Imagining Chanel’ was an exploration into these relationships but I also wanted to get the audience excited, and to further research of the collection at the NGV.

Laura: Well it sounds like the physical garment is very important to your work, even though it isn’t present. But perhaps the descriptions of garments, in Chanel’s time, were much more integral to the presentation of the collection?

Adele: Yes, by eliminating the garment I was trying to draw attention to the intangible elements that surround clothes. There’s a quote where Chanel speaks about fashion as being something in the air, something we breathe, smell and taste, it affects all the senses, it is a way of life. I wanted to highlight the other senses, the imagination, our role and what feel beyond their physical presence.

Laura: Looking at high-profile artists like Tino Seghal and Marina Abramovich, among many others, whose performance pieces are exhibited in an art context, could there be potential for a performative fashion practice to have similar function with the fashion industry, and how could this work?

Adele: Yes I think so, I feel like this is what I am trying to work out through my fashion practice and in my PhD. I’m interested in the experience being the ‘thing’ that is fashion. Tino Seghal’s work is of interest as he rejects the production of physical objects: the artwork is the situation that comes together through the audience and interpreter. The scholar Ingrid Brenninkmeyer says, ‘It becomes impossible to demystify fashion as long as the focus is on material objects.’ Through performance, participation and situations I’m aiming to open up the capacity, perception and understanding of fashion.

Laura: How does language and text engage with your work?

Adele: I find language and text fascinating, like we were saying, drawing from Barthes’ theories, but I am really interested in the different ways that fashion can be expressed. Language is one of the ways that you can experience a garment or a sensation or a feeling of ‘fash-on’!

All images of Adele Varcoe’s ‘Imagining Chanel’ performance held at MUMA, Melbourne in 2014, courtesy of Phebe Schmidt.

Laura Gardner is Vestoj’s former Online Editor and a writer in Melbourne.

These structural forms; internal belts, gathers, labels and immaculate stitching, are captured as abstract forms in Adam’s photographs, reminding us that a garment is a multi-faceted object that can be examined both in intimate detail, and as a stylised object or image in a gallery space. Looking at new ways of engaging with garments in an institutional archive, the series reveals and explores what is inevitably hidden from view in exhibiting and storing fashion objects. On closer inspection, these structural details force us to view garments as individual objects or artefacts, in absence of the body.

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To create these images, the garments hung in the National Gallery of Victoria’s photographic studio like specimens. Draped from equipment and stands, prodded and propped with tripods, the objects were circled and inspected in detail, held in place with artificial arms wearing white gloves and tissue paper. The clock was ticking; six hours to photograph nine garments when about half-way through, the signature hand-stitched chain at the base of the Chanel jacket refused to cooperate, hanging dogmatically for much longer than the others, reigning over us with arrogant authority, like the grand Dame herself.

This was the setting that accompanied the project ‘Inside Out’, devised by Vestoj’s Laura Gardner following a visit to the NGV fashion and textiles store. Hung on individual coat hangers or flat in boxes, archival garments are disassociated from the body, affording them different views. As objects they can be turned, opened and uncovered, and their individual architectures discovered. These acts were mimicked in the photographic studio, as photographer Adam Custins peaked up through and into the interiors of garments, recording their structural forms on Polaroid film.

The project was inspired by a hat by the London-based milliner Stephen Jones, ‘Mr Whippy’, 1995 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) where white soft pleated fabric is piled lusciously on the brimmed form to create the impression of a soft-serve cone, complete with a glossy red cherry on top. Inside the crown, a neat ring gathers the silk lining to its centre. This single elegant detail sparked the concept for ‘Inside Out’: to reveal the hidden construction details of works in the NGV’s Fashion and Textiles collection and the internal scaffolding upon which a garment sits. Through collaboration, these undersides of a garment’s exterior are revealed with a photographer and a writer, reinterpreting the gallery archive.

In gallery display, the construction details of a garment are typically hidden from view. Insides are often filled with a mannequin, the outside view of the garment prioritised to replicate how the garment would be worn. Yet with or without mannequins, it can be difficult to provide two views simultaneously, to show the outside and the underside of the same form. To view the outside one looks at, to view the inside one looks in, as such, these two realms remain separate. ‘Inside Out’ aims to address this, positioning the viewer inside the garments, at times looking in, and at other times looking up. For Christian Dior, dresses were constructed like buildings,¹ and, like buildings, garments can be traversed, to afford both an inside and outside view. This project aimed to traverse the garment interiors through the eye of the photographer, and inject the camera through the hollow garment to reveal and explore its scaffolding, hidden from view from the exterior.

Nine works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries featuring critical and unexpected details of construction were selected from the NGV collection. Some construction details were predictable, such as the whalebone stays within a nineteenth century bodice. Other details were less predictable, such as the fine, contrasting, fan-like stitches at the top of these stays, or the hatched padding inside the chest of a man’s tail-coat from the 1930s – applied to enhance the pectorals and to improve the wearer’s form.

The project offered alternate views of the garment; the photographer’s lens, cropped, framed and lit to abstract and mystify the technical attributes. The forms were re-interpreted by Custins, revealing their unexpected beauty and inner secrets. Working with the confines of the limited stock of the Polaroid film format, each work was photographed merely once, twice at most, rare in the digital age. Added to that was the unpredictability of the film itself. As the last of its kind, it was aged and temperamental in the process of development, adding a capriciousness to each of the images as they were forced to surrender to the medium of the Polaroid, which brought with it elegance, charm and risk.

The outcome is an image series created by Custins that interprets the construction details of the garments into abstracted terrains, painterly textures and abstracted symmetrical marks. They provide an intimate view that allows viewers to traverse the internal spaces of garments, and seek the marks made for, and by, the absent body.

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1. E. TERRY & SON, Southseaactive England 1900sDress c.1908viscose, rayon, cotton, glass(a) 49.0 cm (centre back) 53.0 cm (sleeve length) (bodice)(b) 121.0 cm (centre back) 34.8 cm (waist, flat) (skirt)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneGift of Miss P. Acklon, 1979 2. CHRISTIAN DIOR, Paris (couture house)French est. 1946Christian DIOR (designer)French 1905–1957Zelie, cocktail dress 1954 autumn-wintersilk122.0 cm (centre back) 32.0 cm (waist, flat)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbournePurchased NGV Foundation, 2006 3. CHANEL, Paris (couture house)French 1914–1939, 1954-Gabrielle ‘Coco’ CHANEL (designer)French 1883–1971Suit 1970 spring-summersilk, wool, brass, metal(a) 64.0 cm (centre back) 58.2 cm (sleeve length) (jacket)(b) 64.0 cm (centre back) 38.5 cm (waist, flat) (skirt)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneGift of Mavis Powell, 1986 4. ENGLANDDolman 1880silk, metal, elastic53.0 cm (centre back) 55.2 cm (sleeve length)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbournePresented by Mrs Gordon Landy, 1983 5. MDME BRONTE, London (dressmaker)English active 1890sEmma Jane EXLEY (designer)active 1890sAfternoon dress c.1895silk, ballen, metal hooks141.5 cm (centre back) 30.0 cm (waist, flat)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneThe Schofield Collection. Purchased with the assistance of a special grant from the Government of Victoria, 1974 6. STEPHEN JONES, London (milliner)English est. 1980Stephen JONES (designer)born England 1957‘Mr Whippy’, hat 1995 spring-summer, Legasty collectionpolyester, silk, synthetic sparterie, metal, paint150.0 cm (outer circumference) 28.0 cm (height) 49.4 cm (width)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbournePurchased, 1996 7. TAGNEY & RANDELL, London(tailor)English 1845–1948Tail coat c.1935wool, silk, linen113.5 cm (centre back) 64.0 cm (sleeve length)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneGift of Mr J. McG. Edwards, 1979 8. ENGLANDPelisse and dress c.1818cotton, silk metal (buttons and hook and eye)(a) 141.0 cm (centre back) 66.0 cm (sleeve length) (pelisse)(b) 4.8 cm x 4.8 cm (ribbon) (c) 136.0 cm (centre back) 35.0 cm (waist, flat) (dress)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneThe Schofield Collection. Purchased with the assistance of a special grant from the Government of Victoria, 1974 9. ENGLANDWedding gown c.1885silk, cotton, balleenNational Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneGift of Mrs Sister Winifred Hurley, 1962

1. Christian Dior, ‘Dior by Dior’, 1958, p.21-22 ↩

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How to Escape the Present

This is the curious thing with garments from the very distant past: the more we speculate – bring them forwards with our clumsy words, tie together loose stitches and reverse the processes of time – the more they erase themselves, in silent defiance. We lose them in our own imperfect memories, whispers misheard, glimpses misread, illusions mistaken for the real. We scrape, unfurl, peel back, and then we forget what we were looking for in the first place. But if we leave them be, they will give us a new image every time we look. They are palimpsests; faint histories partially revealed, transforming at each reading.

***

***

Now, hanging off the surgical rail, is a diminutive English tail-coat. It is a symmetrical wonder of collars, sleeves, buttons (three on each side of the bodice), and of course a precise pair of tails, its most prominent asset, draped over what seems like a surgeon’s tripod arm. This is a black bird in mourning barathea weave, its chest now deflated, hesitantly caught in mid-rescue.

Second only to the tails are the lapels – silky, slyly smiling, hiding something – coaxing us towards some hidden, internal pleasure. The surgeon peels back the large lapels with his gloved tripod arm extension and we peer in, fetishised and feverish, and discover, a matrix of repetitive stitch lines extending from around each armhole; black on black, criss-crossing to form geometric grids, or else marching mechanically side-by-side forming concentric patterns. This might possibly be an incognito bird, hiding in the coded micro-landscape of grids, lines, squares, bubbles, tiny ripples of secrecies.

***

They tell us that this black bodice is part of a majestic mourning gown that would have been worn around the year 1908, perhaps only once. Its sleeves are politely tucked behind its back, elbows bent in symmetry. Our attention is drawn to its raised textured surface, slithering with black cords and flat braids, their fern-like fronds creeping in darkness across the black surface. The woman who wore this had wanted woven hair instead of these cords and braids. She would have been comforted by her body crawling with the hair of the deceased – but she was not granted this solace.

The surgeon had separated the bodice from its skirt and in his unbridled enthusiasm had prematurely opened up the hooks and eyes all along its front, exposing for our pleasure the magnificence of the internal handwork. All around the bodice are stiff stays of varying lengths, arrayed with calculated distance apart from the one another.  They had the monumental job of keeping the woman in mourning upright in her moments of despair, whether real or feigned. They stay hidden between the lining and outer fabric, their existence referred to only by the securing stitches. The person who had put them there had a wicked sense of humour; each stay was fussily secured with five contrast stitches in dull gold thread, in a half starburst pattern – a skeletal hand bidding a perversely cheerful ‘hello’. On her centre back, on the tape that runs along her waist, there is a stitching of a big ‘X’ – black on black: she had taken a vow of secrecy, on a promise made between her and the black bird.

***

Next the surgeon wheels in a structured dolman in silk faille. The little grey lilac creature is a work of stiff symmetry, with calculated ruffles around its neckline, hem, cuffs and down its centre front. It extends longer at the front – a pair of dangling tongues – wanting, longing, feeding. With his white gloved-hand on a tripod arm, the surgeon pushes back the shoulder. And then, poking into the dolman’s low armholes, we see the woman – elbows bent – revealing part of her arms, with her hands permanently and symmetrically poised to receive, to greet another. We gaze straight into the mouth of each sleeve, then into the dolman’s underside – into her interior. The mouth is a cavernous expression, rudely golden in the light, awkwardly open just so: a gaping, a gasp, aghast – a silent scream fixed in place. Lined in contrasting cream silk, the fleshy innards are dressed with quilting lines carving the front and back bodies like surgical markings, a matrix of symmetrically paired vertical and horizontal lines that kiss at the centre back, down the centre front and side seams.

And as we look on, we discover the secret of the dolman: a pair of elastic ties at the centre back waist, designed to secure it in place by wrapping around the woman’s waist. They are a pair of lovers stretched out on a quilted bedspread, arms touching, fingers curling towards one another. Had the woman thought about them in this way? She had been gone for a long time. Right now the pair hangs in silent partnership – one slightly longer than the other – waiting, the full length of their sides touching. Around the year 1880 someone had stitched them in place, had meant for them to be together for a long time.

***

Next: a cream boucle wool jacket, with gold buttons and a chain circling the hem. To get the full effect of its circular motion, it is raised high so one peers upward into its internal void. From below, the chain floats weightlessly; a quiet miracle where gravity is mere perspective. This will never be worn again, harbouring a weighty history that has stubbornly ceased to continue. The chain must link and unlink. Over the course of time, after repeated attempts at remembering and amending, and after all these attempts at reversing the processes of time, we realise that all stories must fall apart, must be wholly re-imagined.

***

And then, nervous punctuation mid-sentence – an exclamation mark mid-story: a curious hat makes its way onto the surgical table. It is a mass of fine accordion pleats draped around a broad brim. The pleated cream satin dances in careless, improvised whirls, folding around itself in a circular motion and forming soft peaks and melting folds. It is a mysterious formation – a swift, spontaneous dance of soft, vanilla cream – oozing and drooping. The surgeon, in one clinical move, flips the hat around to reveal the mechanics of its conceit. The pleated satin is draped and secured around a small circular form at the base of the hat – a cyclonic device which holds the swirls together, tentatively, by its sheer internal force and tension of the dance. But I say, let us not forget, that on the other side of the eye of the cyclone, lays a bright little red cherry: the heart that makes it dance.

***

We are nearing the end, and, hanging, in heavy folds of cream brocade and silk, is a full-length English dress from 1895. It has a high neckline, and drapes heavily on the front and back. The two leg-o’-mutton sleeves, with full-fat-fecund potential, hold more than one pair of arms. The milky fabric smells like dairy-fresh flesh, the skin held together by the lovers’ seal locked within the weave. A long time ago, for a brief period in their lives, they had been brought together and then held apart before they destroyed each other. The dress sighs in folds and tucks, the gap between each breath a falling apart of a seam, and the weave loosens and the skin wastes away, so that with each breath taken, a tiny part of the lovers’ seal is unlocked.

This is a dress of seams that breathe; they inhale to hide and exhale for escape. It is a dress for two lovers, who, for a long time now, have been held at arms’ length from each other, and when the dress finally falls apart they will meet again, for a brief while.

***

Waiting at the back of the row is the bride, dressed for the sole purpose of greeting her husband for the first time. But this is what we have imagined – perhaps she had loathed that day in 1885. Her dress, assumed to be originally covered in lace, but all that is left are traces of surface stitching where the lace might have been placed, and later removed. Her cream satin skirt now hangs lifeless, and makes no protest when it is pried open at the centre back, revealing the whalebone crinoline floating around her hips. Two circular scaffoldings orbit an imaginary centre, creating a void. As she walked down the aisle, her hips swaying side to side, the crinoline might have trembled.

***

Lastly, floating on the photographic stand, is a woman-child in the shape of a delicate, white cotton dress. Before she was a bride she had dared to dream of other loves, other lives. Now, strung up by her shoulders, she is merely swaying in this clinical place. Her gentle, puffed sleeves are crinkled from a late morning rise. The white flowers, seeds and leaves embroidered on her hems would have once liked to sing and dance on the lawn. But for now, she is mute. Her back is turned towards us. She is slit open, down the full length of her back, from the neck past her waistline, to reveal her interior. The void in her being is temporarily padded out with tissue paper, her paper-thin skin peeled back. The surgeon has to work quickly. The lights, cameras and sharp instruments are all pointing at her. In the light, she is so translucent that she is almost not there – only an impression and a faint outline are left of her. For a while I thought she might have just escaped. At the base of her neck is a little ribbon; someone close would have tied that for her, before fastening her with hook and eyes down her back. On the inside of centre back seam, is an inscription of her name. Each time she was tied in, someone would have seen and whispered it to themselves.

Then the camera takes its shot, catches her just before she flees – or does it? And then we wait for her to re-emerge from 1818 – a magical conjuring, a chemical-synthetic, spiritual-ectoplasmic divination. And as the image begins to float to the surface of the photograph, she herself plates up the pièce de résistance: the dress without the body, the ghost without the form, the name without the person: ‘Caroline Foster’.

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All photographs taken on the day of shooting at the National Gallery of Victoria.