I have a complex relationship with fashion. Having studied fashion design at university, spent the better part of my career working with garments and fashion in general and now occasionally teaching fashion design, I am fully aware of the ins and outs of fabrics, pattern cutting, construction and finishing. When I’m wandering around shops, I tend to levitate towards both mens and womenswear departments to inspect and examine the tactile merits of garments …read more
When I’m not writing or editing a column for Address online or working on the next issue, my time is spent thinking about fashion criticism as part of my research degree at London College of Fashion. Criticism is very difficult to define and most of my research is drawn from discussions and definitions from other disciplines such as graphic design, product design, music, theatre and film, where the subject is more evolved. Against these, fashion is starving for, not just criticism, but also discussions …read more
American philosopher and one of the leading voices in defining art criticism, Noël Caroll divides the task of a critic, in his book On Criticism, into two parts. On the one hand critics describe, classify, contextualize, elucidate, interpret and analyse artworks and objects. All of this suggests that a critic should have an ability to capture the object of criticism and to position it against something bigger: frameworks, contexts, narratives or histories. In order to do this …read more
