MA Fashion Curation
My MA Project, 'Scenes from beatnik life', developed my central interest as a curator- the imaginative possibilities of story-telling and fiction in the context of the fashion exhibition. This explored visual storytelling as much as verbal narratives and how they can engage the imagination of the visitor. As the Beats and beatniks were a countercultural group that emerged from a literary subculture in post-WWII American and Europe the link between narrative and Beat clothing was a natural one and full of potential for an exhibition. Sections of Beat writing describing clothing were cut-up and rearranged to create 7 governing narratives on which the exhibition's scenes were based: The Dirty Kleenex, Obscene, Reported Missing, Outfitted for the Apocalypse, An English On the Road, Beat Nights in Soho and Two Ill-fated Love Stories. Each story illustrated a theme from Beat lives using clothing as a visual storytelling device. Scenes from beatnik life was proposed as a pop-up exhibition of sorts across a variety of vacant site in Soho, which was the epicentre of British Beat culture in the late 1950s. Each site would house a scene, or part of a scene, that was a visual representation of a whole story or a moment in a story. Other projects I completed on the MA course included: - A group exhibition entitled 'Looking Twice: Fashion and Illusion' which explored the themes of deception and illusion in contemporary fashion. - A hypothetical exhibition based around a collection of nineteenth-century fashion plates owned by Fanny Brawne, the fiance of the poet John Keats. This project addressed fashion as a fragmented biography of one woman's life.