The map of fashion

Abstract

The relationship between the body, fashion, the map and the making of place is a rich area of exploration by a variety of creative practitioners, anthropologists and theorists. This essay discusses the proposition that fashion, or the clothed body, is the ‘stuff’ of the inhabited landscape. Conceived of a map of fashion, this map documents and communicates an embodied landscape through a topography that lives, breathes, pulsates and evolves through the everyday actions of those that are there. The ‘place’ of this landscape is both here, and there. It is a landscape that transitions as the individual moves through the various locations of their lives. It is a landscape of the collective and the singular. My clothes mark and identify me, our clothes create an individual collective; a landscape of colour, shape and form, that is positioned within the constructed and natural world. Through the Map of Fashion this paper and the creative artefact that it discusses, explores how every garment is an intimate map of the place making of lives lived.