Lucy Gundry

The original context for dress is on the living body, but when body and dress are separated and dress is re-constructed on a mimetic body, as in the exhibition, what happens to dress? Current curatorial debates centre on ‘enlivening’ dress. My doctoral research will look into the debates that envision the way dress might ‘embody’ liveliness in the exhibition space, specifically looking at touch. When we enter a dress exhibition, we enter as a dressed body to view ‘other’ dressed bodies. How much of our own sense of being a living dressed body feeds into our ‘reading’ of the mimetic dressed body? What role does touch play?

In our daily lives we inhabit, consume and construct our identities around dress through touching the materiality of the object with our hands, eyes and imagination. Yet, when we enter the exhibition space we enter a code of conduct: Do Not Touch. My research investigates to what extent dress in the exhibition context can embody a sense of touch without physically touching, within a framework of phenomenological discourse. This is supported by observational and qualitative research data gathered from seminal dress exhibitions, interviews with curators and experiments exploring the haptic aesthetic relationship between the living and mimetic ‘dressed body’: viewer and viewed.