Art and fashion: aesthetic micropolicies of the 80s

In Seismopolite. Journal of Arts and Politics, N°10, 2015. Abstract: The citizenship and social life atomism created by the Argentinian dictatorship were faced with the challenging values of collective production and creation of the celebrations held during the 80s.

Proceedings of the 35th CIHA World Congress Motion: Migrations, 2023

During the nineteenth century and a great part of the twentieth, fashion was a clear marker of gender, as well as a device for disciplining the body. Being dressed according to biological sex, occupation and social class was imperative for the rising bourgeoisie, who saw extreme danger in transgressing any of these norms. This paper analyses some of these occasions and the conflicts raised by public opinion when crossdressers and "serious" actresses filled the centrical theaters thanks to their drag shows. Likewise, liminal characters on the edge of the law made crossdressing a way of life, allowing them to travel, hide and intervene from the margins. Moreover, it focuses on the images of these crossdressers, paying particular attention to the styles and poses used to shape their appearance. My main hypothesis sustains that the identity of these "other" genders was effective precisely because it understood and mimicked "correct" female or male identities that, in turn, were based on a masquerade. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, the public persona of "proper" men and women rested on stereotypical and theatrical forms, in which preestablished poses obliterated the personality, psychology and particular ways of each human being.

This article intends to analyze the Chilean film Tony Manero, directed by Pablo Larraín, through the fashion phenomenon, thus displacing the question of Chilean identity and American Cultural Industry – which are often considered central elements in the interpretation of the film – and placing the focus on the disturbing way which Raul, the protagonist of the film, participates in the disco fever. Using film analysis, we will try to show that what is disturbing and critical in Tony Manero is not the imitation of a supposed American model in the context of Chilean dictatorship, but the fact that Raul itself is considered a model among his colleagues. To achieve our goal, in addition to film analysis, we propose a methodological approach about fashion and the disco phenomenon, as well as a brief consideration about the film Saturday Night Fever.

Annual International Conference, Exeter, 2­-4 September, 2015: Geographies of the Anthropocene, 2015

Liliana Maresca (1951-1994) was an Argentinean artist that played a key role in the underground artistic wave that rose in the early eighties after the dictatorship. Maresca worked with sculpture, installations, performance and poetry and she also created a broad range of hybrid experiences in between politic activism, civil insubordination and subversive urban pedagogy. Her agency was keen to generate social participation and awareness about colonialism, the merchandising of the art system as well as to propose an alternative sexual lifestyle. She also produced several photographic series in black and white using self-portraits where she questioned gender roles and generated a criticism about dispositive of sexuality. Even in the last years of her life, when she was HIV positive, she continued to work until her death, criticising the objectivation of her body against any moralistic interpretations of her sickness. I will explore her dissident creativity together with the connexion with some feminist Argentinean projects and her life leaning towards anti- authoritarianism and antipatriarchalism. Moreover, I will focus on the free community of artists that was spontaneously created in Maresca’s flat, where she lived with the daughter. This paper also aims to visualise and discuss alternative narratives of the artistic subversion against the patriarchal order over the anglo-saxon background.

Hispanófila, 2016

La humanidad gime sufriendo suplicio con los diferentes instrumentos de tortura que se llaman levitas, corbatas, pantalones, sin que salga por ahí un redentor que predique una cruzada de ropa. Ni aún ese odioso aparato inquisitorial a que damos el nombre de sombrero de copa tiene los detractores que merece. (Pérez Galdós 232) 1

The article presents a reflection about the use of clothing as a political text in recent movements of resistance and opposition in contemporary Brazil. The strategy of using the anesthetization of the body is not new. It can be seen in different moments of history, as in the clothes worn by Mahatma Gandhi and in the tribal outfits worn by Nelson Mandela in a trail session or even in the youth pacifist movements of the 1960’s. More recently however, due to contemporary mediacentrism, which intensely articulates verbal and non-verbal languages, images are most sought in mediatized messages and can be used as powerful political texts. In Brazil, specifically, the streets became a stage in 2013 for a series of demonstrations by different social movements that stressed their claims by using outfits disconnected from their dominant/hegemonic codes. This was the case, for example, of the use of skirts worn by male university Law students, in the traditional University of São Paulo -USP – in solidarity to a colleague who was prevented from entering the school because he was wearing a dress; the Slut Walk when female demonstrators deliberately wore their lingerie as a form of protest and the Black Bloc strategy; which even though has been occurring in Europe for more than 30 years, is recent in Brazil. With an epistemological support of the British cultural studies and the Latin-American theories of mediations we seek to understand how the political texts present in youth outfits express forms of resistance and opposition as proposed by Raymond Williams. And they reinforce, if not the emptying of, but maybe how “worn out” are verbal discourses (oral or written) when facing a society of images. But the commercial media in general, when mediating the political current events tends to distort the meanings of such aesthetic messages which, according to Umberto Eco are ambiguous and allow “a number of interpretative choices” (Eco, 2011). An analyses of, for example, the headlines of the main newspapers of the city of São Paulo - collected during the most intense two weeks of the demonstrations - stress out only positions of vandalism and violence without any questioning of the depth of social claims and popular discontentment. We propose a dialogue between these authors in order to reflect upon these possibilities of “interpretative choices” which are evident in Brazilian contemporary commercial media and which allows them for leading on a form of mediation which sustains hegemonic positions and tend to delegitimize social forms of resistance.

Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, 2014

Book review. Roger Padilha and his brother Mauricio may already be familiar to some as the New York-based fashion publicists, creators of the fashion public relations agency MAO PR, and as authors of The Stephen Sprouse Book (Rizzoli, 2009). Antonio Lopez: Fashion, Art, Sex & Disco, their second book, is an introduction to American fashion illustrator and artist Antonio Lopez (1943-1987), the circles he frequented, and the la vie est bonne atmospherics surrounding him.

Printing Fashion 4, 2024

This paper explores the role of fashion as a "pharmakon"—both poison and remedy—within the Brazilian art scene during the Abertura period (late 1970s to early 1980s). Through case studies of artist Leonilson and the radical Porn Art Movement, I delve into how fashion contributed to subverting cultural norms and power structures. I examine fashion’s influence on identity, body politics, and marginalized communities, highlighting its capacity to challenge colonial legacies and reshape narratives of self-expression in a period of political and social transition.

Fashioning Spain: From Mantillas to Rosalía, 2021

Alvarado' s piece tells us about tailoring and the recycling of styles, but also about ingenuity and creativity. We begin with Alvarado' s suit constructed of simple, purloined linens executed using couture techniques because it represents a key point in contemporary Spanish history in which fashion played a pivotal role in the zeitgeist. During the long transition process after nearly four decades of military dictatorship , fashion became a vehicle for expressing agency, creativity, and political leanings. As we will see in this collection, the work of successful designers and business models also consolidated in tandem with democratization and changes in patterns of consumption. The story of how fashion in Spain made it to this point, however, is just starting to be told. Despite being the origin of globally renowned designers and industrial models, Spain has not been deeply studied when it comes to fashion. 3 This is especially so for the twentieth century. In contrast, the Spanish Golden Age (roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and the centuries following it have received substantial scholarly attention.� Carmen Bern is' work on Don Quijote (2001) is foundational, and the two volumes edited by Jose Luis Colomer and Amalia Descalzo (2014) are comprehensive and indispensable for understanding fashion in this period. Amanda Wunder succinctly explains the challenges scholars face when studying fashions during a long-past historical period. For instance, the most widely available primary sources-polemics, laws, portraits, poems, and theatrical works-were produced by a small group of elite males from the court. Relying on evidence from the male-dominated court is limiting, however, because "such sources reveal very little about women' s actual experiences" with clothing (2015: 141-2). By using a wider body of evidence that includes Inquisitorial depositions, letters, poems written by women, tailors' record books, an _ d lesser known portraits sitting in storage, women' s voices and experiences have been reinserted into the historical narrative (2015: 142). 5 This expansive approach to archival research has deepened our understanding of Golden Age culture and fashion. Interactions between society, fashion, and modernity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have also been the focus of studies by Ana Maria Diaz Marcos (2006), Francisco de Sousa Congosto (2007), and Jesus Cruz (2011). 6 Among several works on these two centuries in Spain, we would like to highlight Rebecca Haidt' s Women, Work a11d Clothing in Eigliteenth-Ce11t11ry Spain (2011 ). This is an important interdisciplinary contribution to fashion studies in our discipline of Spanish cultural studies. Haidt' s book is a cultural history of theatrical depictions of Madrid fashions such as the maja and the petimetra.7

This paper aims to briefly presente the path of a PhD Research "Politics Of dressing: cuts on the bias" focusing on the considerations presented in the last chapter. We will presente some artists works that exploring meanings through the use of clothing and/or body, by taking some of the force lines that cross the vestiments flows in the fashion field, as well as some of the concepts investigated along the thesis. In this way, we selected three works that touch on our outlined issues: Wanted me, Lenora De Barros (São Paulo, 2001); AZ Six Month Seasonal Uniforms, Andrea Zittel (New York, 1991--‐2002), And Detachment, Marilá Dardot (São Paulo, 2005), which will be commented.