The Deconstructivist Approach: Self-Fashioning Problematization
The lack of embodied practice in fashion is one of the main issues I have encountered by observing closely the body relationship with the material dimension within the fashion world. Even from the bodily movement in the runways, the organic, bios, forms of life part of the living bodies are dismissed in the conceptualization of fashion. Therefore, this idea of interconnectedness with the living form is originated by the emphasis on self-styling rather than self-fashioning. To give a sense of what self-fashioning means, self-fashioning defends an individual self-agency, confined within the anthropocentric normativity by suppressing otherness. Likewise the way Braidotti engages with the notion of defamiliarization, self-styling, through a deconstructivist scope, conveys a sense of dis-identification with the dominant male-centred subjectivity toward a relational connection to multiple others ((2) p.167).
Dressing the body like Kawakubo, is also about providing dysfunction as a factor of deconstruction. Deconstruction as Derrida has articulated consisted in a process of undoing and decomposing not only the body within the piece of clothing, but also to elevate the body in an interactive state of awareness with the space ((3) p.159).