Imagined possibilities and bodily feelings embedded in personal fashion archives

Abstract

This article examines the significance of the body and its sensory and embodied aspects associated with a historical milieu and set of practices associated with ‘rave’ subculture and its relationship to fashion creativity. It focuses on a personal fashion archive that documents menswear designed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Using an autoethnographic approach, the study investigates how the design of the garments in the archive was shaped by ways of experiencing and understanding the body that integrated the embodied experiences of moving and dancing with electronic music, the embodied experience of dressing, and the embodied experiences of designing men’s fashion in the years that followed. While rave and electronic dance music cultures received considerable scholarly attention in the mid- to late 1990s, less attention was devoted to men’s fashion and the interaction between fashion design, embodied experience and the rave sensoria. Moreover, while this study lays at the intersection rave and electronic dance music culture, fashion and design, all of which are understood to have European and North American origins, the article considers the way those practices took a unique shape within an Australian context. The contribution aims to provide insight into fashion as part of situated and embodied practices, that take place in local milieus, and the way fashion creativity can be understood not as surface ‘ripples’ moving out from global fashion centres or trickle-down versions of ‘authentic’ fashion developed elsewhere, but as fashion creativity, shaped by global forces, energies, and technologies, and embodied and enacted via local manifestations.