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Self-fashioning: Deconstructivist Approach and Post-Gender Curatorial Practices in the World of Fashion

Highlights: Thierry Mugler 80-90's

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Thierry Mugler: Museum Practice Analysis
Mugler's French designer exhibition in Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is divided in six acts called Stars and Sparles, Act III, The Photographer's Eye, Belle de Jour and Belle de Nuit, Metamorphosis:Fantasy Bestiary, and Futuristic and Fembot Couture. For the purpose of my exploration, I will draw my analysis from Metamorphosis:Fantasy Bestiary.

Montreal of Fine Arts, Couturissime is putting emphasis on self-fashioning rather than putting emphasis on affectivity. I would argue that the Deleuzean concept of affects would have really benefit the exhibition curated by Thierry Maxime Loriot ((1), p.7-8). Affective curatorial practices would engender a collective bond in museum practices. Instead of focusing on a single self-styling perspective from a fashion curator, the museum would gain in zoe-centrality by taking into consideration new modes of fashion representations rather than the self-fashioned mannequin which are disembodied and very normative.

With that idea of perpetual becoming through Zoe affects, it would be better to generate an aion narrative rather than a chronos narrative((2) Braidotti,p.165) In Mugler's couturissime, the use of linear narrative storyline in six acts celebrates Mugler's autobiographic career in a very anthropocentric. The interpretative skills from the outsiders perspectives seem to me almost omitted as the restricted area between the mannequins and the audience does not allow any interaction with the piece of creations. This kind of elitist setting evokes a kind of a constant oppressive affect which underlies the patriarchal museum culture.

I think that challenging the fashion identity is about undergoing a critical approach of the materiality itself. Mugler chooses to work with artificial fabrics to substitute animal derived products. The designer uses the intersectionality between animal and femininity to raise non-human behaviour conferred by a piece of garment. The dialectic alludes to the zoe implications of becoming animal through the idea of sexual competition. In a way, Mugler's sexual competition through the magnifying lens of animal features also underly the idea of a posthuman subjectivity. This posthuman subjectivity is driven by the representation of the abject theory. The abject theory is a framework that embraces the rejection or something that was banished in a violent way. Mugler's Zoe femininity underlies the discourse of selfhood's move toward the otherness, without being necessarily egalitarian and non-gender.

To contrast, I would argue that Julia Kristeva's notion of subversive body could produce a new form of engagement into the museum world. Especially Mugler's sexualization of the female body through animals engenders a problematic curatorial challenge. The affect of displaying maternal body rather than objectify the body into desires would constitute a new kind of semiotic.((3)p.5). As I encountered the mannequins, I found that the use of feminine face traits were disruptive in terms of interpretative space for the viewers. Therefore, Foucault would defend the discursive production of maternal body as a tactic of self-amplification or self-styling because the effects of sexualized characteristics would ask for a patriarchal contextualization ((4)p.117). Moving away from the gendered mannequin is a site of negotiations in order to reclaim a post-gender body within posthuman fashion practices.

Sources:
(1) Van den Hengel, Louis. "Zoegraphy: Per/forming posthuman lives." Biography 35.1 (2012): 1-20.
(2) Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.
(3) (4) Butler, Judith. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. routledge, 2011.