Carolina Johansson

This work operates at the border between fashion and performance, with the intention to explore the performativity of body in relation to forms of dress. The collection is developed by designing new activities of getting dressed, in order to create new forms and expressions in dress. Therefore the acts of spinning and crawling have been explored as ways of getting dressed. By approaching settings of material with the different acts, the established orders within dress has been shifted, with dress that is developed by the movement of body rather than mimicing a bodily shape.

The work is not about dance, it is not about theatre, it is not about choreography. This work is about the activity of getting dressed and what potential knowledge in dress that may be extracted from simply shifting the established order of the relationship between body and dress. However, from a methodological point of view, the work is developed through choreography and performance in relation to arranged space as tools to design the activities, and these may well be viewed as a danced or theatrical and dramaturgi- cal play of body, motion, material and dress.
These aspects are part of the outcome that suggests not only new formal relationships between body and dress and new methods for making dress, but also new ways of look- ing at, and consuming the art of dress.