Costume

Written By Rachel Hann

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In 2013, I co-founded the biennial conference and exhibition Critical Costume. This international research network has now hosted major events in 5+ countries, spanning 3 continents. My research on costume argues for an interdisciplinary understanding with a focus on the subversive and eventual qualities of costuming: whether professional, amateur, or critical.

Projects

Featured
Critical Costume Network
costume
Critical Costume Network
costume

Critical Costume is an international platform to promote research and practice on the interdisciplinary study of costume. The principal activity of Critical Costume is a biennial conference and exhibition, with the provision for smaller events where appropriate. The purpose of the organization is to support practitioners and researchers to debate the status of costume within contemporary and historical cultures.

costume

Publications

Featured
Can bad costumes do good things?
short form, Costume
Can bad costumes do good things?
short form, Costume

Any discussion of bad costume is therefore a discussion on how costumes are judged to behave in line with expectations, whether agreed or implicit. Yet, I want to suggest that bad costumes can reveal the work of costume that may have otherwise been unseen or dismissed as frivolous. Bad costumes can offer a method for investigating how costumes are judged, understood, and politicised.

short form, Costume
Transgendering-assemblages: Sin Wai Kin’s trans techniques and acts of boybanding
Articles, Scenographics, Costume, transness, Nonbinary, Open access
Transgendering-assemblages: Sin Wai Kin’s trans techniques and acts of boybanding
Articles, Scenographics, Costume, transness, Nonbinary, Open access

This article investigates the artist Sin Wai Kin’s (單慧乾) speculative approach to drag through the prism of ‘transgendering-assemblages’. Influenced by the assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda and Jasbir Puar, I propose that transgendering-assemblages actualize the properties of transness through particular trans techniques.

Articles, Scenographics, Costume, transness, Nonbinary, Open access
Costume Scenographics
Articles, Scenographics, Costume
Costume Scenographics
Articles, Scenographics, Costume

What do costumes do? I ask this question with two positions in mind. First, I am interested in how costumes produce a sense of atmosphere, occasion, or event. Second, I propose that costuming as a socio-material technology orientates feelings of world.

Articles, Scenographics, Costume
Gender-Assemblages: The Scenographics of Sin Wai Kin</a>
Articles, Scenographics, transness, Nonbinary, Costume
Gender-Assemblages: The Scenographics of Sin Wai Kin
Articles, Scenographics, transness, Nonbinary, Costume

The concept of gender-assemblage is proposed as a critical framework to identify, critique and negotiate the more-than-human processes of gendering. Sin’s drag draws upon their non-binary identity to speculate renewed discourses, actions and expectations for gendered practices.

Articles, Scenographics, transness, Nonbinary, Costume
Ada M. Patterson – in conversation with Rachel Hann
short form, transness, Open access, Costume, climate crisis, practice research
Ada M. Patterson – in conversation with Rachel Hann
short form, transness, Open access, Costume, climate crisis, practice research

Interview with trans artist Ada M. Patterson (b. 1994, Bridgetown) based between Barbados, London and Rotterdam. She works with masquerade, performance, poetry, textiles and video, looking at the ways storytelling can limit, enable, complicate or abolish identity formation.

short form, transness, Open access, Costume, climate crisis, practice research
Sportswear Performs</a>
Costume, forewords
Sportswear Performs
Costume, forewords

Whether the fit of a hat or the flow of a dress, these costumed relations can alter an individual's performance. Athletes know this same relationship. To perform in a certain way again and again, requires a bodily preparation that is inclusive of the clothes worn.

Costume, forewords
Debating critical costume: negotiating ideologies of appearance, performance and disciplinarity
Articles, Costume
Debating critical costume: negotiating ideologies of appearance, performance and disciplinarity
Articles, Costume

This article investigates a proposed focus of ‘critical costume’. Critical Costume, as a research platform, was founded in 2013 to promote new debate and scholarship on the status of costume in contemporary art and culture.

Articles, Costume
Beyond Scenography
Books, Scenography, Scenographics, Costume
Beyond Scenography
Books, Scenography, Scenographics, Costume

Beyond Scenography offers a manifesto for a renewed theory of scenographic practice for the student and professional theatrical designer. With sections on installation art and gardening as well as marketing and placemaking, this book is an argument for what scenography does: how assemblages of scenographic traits orientate, situate, and shape staged events.

Books, Scenography, Scenographics, Costume
Costume Politics
Articles, Costume
Costume Politics
Articles, Costume

Costume is subversive. It subverts the rules of a fashion system and exposes the theatricality of dress. Accordingly, the politics of costume are arguably a politics of ‘othering’: how the conscious subversion of appearance serves as an act of bodily estrangement. Yet, as evident in the Prague Quadrennial (PQ) tribes in June 2015, this othering is an active process that is undertaken equally by those engaged in the event of costuming and those who witness this act.

Articles, Costume
Editorial: Critical Costume
Articles, Costume, practice research
Editorial: Critical Costume
Articles, Costume, practice research

Costume is critical. It is critical to making performance, critical to spectator- ship, critically overlooked within scholarship, notable when in crisis, and a means of critically interrogating the body. It is therefore critical that we discuss costume. Yet, it is equally imperative for costume to find appropriate methods and frameworks to support new forms of practice. A critical discourse of costume aims to promote new questions and scholarship on the intersections between body, design and performance. This is the concern of critical costume.

Articles, Costume, practice research

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