Turn to the Left

TURN TO THE LEFT
Artists' Fashion Show + live music and DJs
291 Gallery, 291 Hackney Road, London, UK
8th July 2005, 8pm-late, £3 entry

Curated by Jessica Broas and Pil and Galia Kollectiv
in collaboration with 291 Gallery.

With Artists and Designers:

Sarah Baker
Diann Bauer
Jessica Broas
Cast Off Knitters
Chicks On Speed
Kate Forbes
Pil and Galia Kollectiv
Sophie Macorquodale
Emily McMehen
Gail Pickering
Pam Richardson
Bettina Schroeder
Tai Shani
Heidi Stokes
Tatty Devine

Live music by:

Xerox Teens
The Vichy Government
Anat Ben-David
Bishi
Tits of Death
The Lazy Ones

DJs: Jet + Suhail Malik

"A strange conical hat and cape ensemble sported by Hugo Ball at a poetry recital. A kettle worn as a handbag by a Manchester art punk. Art has often converged with the human body in strange new ways through the medium of fashion. The polar opposite of architecture, this meeting point has never been about totality ­ fashion is about heterogeneity, mixing and matching, modifying and diluting the absolute language of advertising and branding. A temporary, shape-shifting medium intended for recycling and manipulation, it has no time for the monumental but all the time in the world for sewing sequins.

Looking beyond the derogatory theoretical concepts that look to shame "fashion", and towards its role in the renaissance of craft

As technology conspires to liberate us from the shackles of manual labour (only to handcuff us to the keyboards and mice of the new slavemasters), we start to think about designing our own shackles, maybe in a nice grey wool knit. The labour of love and the hate of labour seem to coexist and coincide. Painstaking processes are reawakened with post-Marxist pleasures at stake. If Top Shop offers teen girls a truly democratic adaptation of high-design ideas for the mass market, we take on the high street with an ardent D.I.Y. spirit, customising, bastardising and personalising, establishing our own place within this democracy.

Fashion is once more about making and not following.

Denouncing (sex and the city-esque) fashion consumption as empowering/self-expressive and replacing this with empowerment by the handmade, Turn to the Left is a showcase of fashion projects, an opportunity to show ideas that lurk in the dark no man's land that stretches from art to fashion. Between the extremes of total wearability and pure concept, a platform for everything from performative stagewear and one-off designs to hand-crafted artefacts and accessories, reclaiming the catwalk from the closed circles of the industry. A celebration of the subversion of market trends, the fashion equivalent of the garage band myth, a brush with the conceptual, this is what clothing can be and what it can do.

This is low couture ­do or D.I.Y.!"

Further info: http://www.kollectiv.co.uk/

Earlier