FEATURES

Fashionable Cause

LOLO VELOKO, LAWRENCE LEMAOANA, NICHOLAS HLOBO, NANDIPHA MNTAMBO AND ATHI PATRA-RUGA HAVE VARIOUSLY ADOPTED AND ADAPTED CLOTHING AS THEIR MODE OF EXPRESSION

Nandipha Mntambo, Mlwa ne Nkunzi (right diptych), 2008, archival ink on cotton rag paper,
112 x 84.5cm each Photographer: Lambro

Beyond its shifting hemlines and seductive surface embellishments clothing, or its more fickle manifestation, fashion, operates as visual shorthand able to reflect social and personal identity. This is why it has afforded artists a valuable tool with which to represent theories of sexual difference and construction/deconstruction. Though the dress has always appeared in images of art, it was the feminist art movement in the 1970s that first gave it permission to become subject matter for high art, according to American feminist artist Mira Schor.1 Feminist artists of Schor's era didn't simply harness this visual idiom in an effort to destabilise the tenets of high art – albeit a satisfying spin off – clothing proved to be the ideal vehicle with which to unpack the politics of gender and interrogate the psychological and societal baggage attached to their corporeal façade...READ FULL ARTICLE IN PRINT EDITION

Mary Corrigall

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