Clothing the space of flesh: fashion as material narration

Abstract

In this thesis, I conceive clothing as a corporeal surface in order to re-envision clothing, the corporeal, and the surface. I conceive clothing as a frame for embodied experience in the world, and the body as a means by which clothing is brought into worldly existence. Taking clothing and the body to be mutually constitutive, I draw on texts from a range of registers—literary, artisanal, experiential, theoretical, artistic, conceptual—in order to locate their material interrelation. The act of location is an important reflexive concern of the thesis. In examining the interface of clothing with space, I figure clothing as a spatial form. Each chapter of the thesis examines the significance of clothing through an aspect of its materiality: through its skin-like corporeal immediacy; through its multiplicity in relation to dimension; through its function as a revisable dwelling; through its uncanny figuration in display; and finally through its promotional address in the shopping space of the city. The material on which my argument builds is treated as in itself conceptual. That is, the thesis attends to clothing in its immediate manifestation as matter, in all its richness and complexity, rather than appending conceptual meanings to it from a remove. I treat the mutual material intimating of clothing and body according to its own logic, of simultaneous ephemerality and tangibility, immediacy and evasion, interiority and exteriority, in order to unfold their shared complexity.