Given Life by Art, Death by Fashion
In the year 1991 the French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased the rights to AnnLee – an anime figure created by the Japanese company ‘Kworks’. Unlike the typical ‘hero’ characters in manga fiction, AnnLee was sidelined to an unmemorable, secondary role, limited to only a few scenes. By purchasing the rights of the anime character, the two were able to give her a basic identity by inviting a group of artists to contribute their own interpretations of AnnLee by incorporating its image into various works of art. The collaborative initiative, aptly titled “No Ghost Just a Shell”, explored questions of identity, authorship and the value of intellectual property in the digital capitalist age. The title of the project suggests a character with no ‘soul’, reflecting on the commercialization and commodification of fictional characters in modern media.
The conceptual act that Huyghe and Parreno conceived in the early 90’s resonates to this day and is particularly relevant to the inaugural issue of CHAIRS which focuses on the disappearance of the garment from the fashion campaign. As part of the same project, Parreno introduced a video installation ‘Anywhere Out of the World’ (2000), in which an animated AnnLee delivers a monologue where she contemplates on her character’s journey through the years and particularly on her ‘imprisonment’ in the medium of manga. Today, in the digital space, the nature of this imprisonment is ever more brutal and violent.
Just as AnnLee is imprisoned in her medium, one could view creations of the fashion industry as being ‘trapped’ within the fashion campaigns. This brings us to the topic of the disappearance of the garment from the fashion campaign – the journey of the garment mirrors AnnLee’s journey to liberation.
Today we are able to view AnnLee’s story through various postmodern prisms – psychoanalysis, feminism, colonialism and more. I propose to implement the same approach to the product of the fashion industry – the garment. What does it mean to ‘imprison’ the garment in the fashion campaign and how would its liberation look like?
• Price tag – the cost of production
• Photoshoot – raw imagery
• Creative director – designer, tailor
• Fabric - cotton farmer
Could we argue that the items on the left constitute a ‘shell’ while the items on the right are the imprisoned characters in the fashion campaign? Behind the highly visible items such as the tag price, the photoshoot and the creative director are the imprisoned characters of uncertain form and origin, hidden from public view.
Imagine the same clothes you see on the glossy pages of fashion magazines, liberated from their capitalist overlords, fulfilling themselves. No studio lights, no model, no photographer, no story. The garment tells its own story as a piece of art, not as a piece of merchandise using language that speaks of the creation process, rather than commercialization, thus overcoming its original capitalist destiny.