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For contemporary fashion designer Iris van Herpen, technology is not an afterthought but central to her approach and vision. Her experimental designs have pushed the boundaries of textile thinking in fashion. The Dutch couturier, who is renowned for her extraordinary 3D printed dresses, focuses on the transformative power of technology. By experimenting and innovating, Van Herpen not only pushes the boundaries of fabric and craftsmanship but also the boundaries of couture. Such an emphasis on the material and process is crucial for her dress-object making. It is precise, carried out with the meticulous rigour of aesthetically motivated scientists, but there is a warmth there, a naturalness as seen in her shows such as Ludi Naturae from 2018.

Sustainable fashion is an approach to fashion that is socially and environmentally responsible, ethical regarding nature, the environment, people but also conscious regarding the profession. The results of the research of the Croatian designers’ attitudes regarding concept of sustainable fashion have shown that most of the respondents are acquainted with this concept through documentaries (Holy and Borčić, 2018). That is not surprising because there are many attractive documentaries on the topic of fast fashion unsustainability and promotion of sustainable concepts in the fashion industry. This work explores how documentaries frame the concept of sustainable fashion and of fast / cheap fashion, which emotional appeals appear in films, how narrative is done and how fashion in general is presented. The content analysis will be conducted on following documentary films: True Cost, The Next Black, Slow Down Fast Fashion, Unravel, River Blue and Ethical Fashion Documentary. The aim of the paper is to explore whether documentaries that promote ethical concepts in fashion industry use manipulative, propagandistic persuasion techniques.

This paper explores the ways in which contemporary fashion and the concept of ‘architectural wear’ and clothing create new ways of understanding contemporary culture and society, as well as how does fashion now appear as a new way of understanding body- space. Fashion is inextricably linked with the body and creates new time/space categories, but more important new corporeal experience especially when dealing with the concept of architectural wear and objects. Fashion for survival or refugee wear especially in the era of great political change is of great importance, because it detects how societies treat or rather don’t treat this specific problem within contemporary fashion. Moreover, this problematic opens up another interesting field within fashion studies and fashion history and that is the notion of art in fashion as well, specifically the relationship between architecture and fashion. With close comparative reference to a range of examples including: Studio Orta’s Refugee Wear project, Kosuke Tsomura’s Final Home, Hussein Chalayan Afterwords collection, Rick Owens architectural 2017 men’s collection, this paper will argue that within the concept of architectural wear and performance, fashion gains new meaning and the body can be re-performed in various forms so it can easily move and inhabit various areas. Fashion in contemporary culture can no longer be perceived as an image or a process. Instead, these two polarities wind together and form new body architecture. The main aim of this paper is to display how ‘architectural clothing’ creates new ways of recasting the body garment as well as the body itself. The body is not a spectator, but rather a medium through which we engage with the world and it exists in relation to the space it inhabits. The ways in which the body garment is assembled and then worn on the body expresses new bodily situations. The body is always ‘emplaced’ in a world that is constructed of objects and other subjects. This paper will also try to elaborate why contemporary fashion, after the 1990s changed its relation both to body and dress due to social, cultural and political change, especially in terms of refugee wear and clothing.

This paper explores the ways in which contemporary fashion and its hybrid, eclectic form creates new ways of understanding the construction of the body within fashion performance. Fashion can be perceived both as an image (Roland Barthes, 1967) and as a process, especially under the influence of various cultural elements as well as technology. Fashion is inextricably linked with the body and creates new time/space categories but more important new corporeal experience. Although he does not explore fashion per se in his writings, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his phenomenological approach created a new framework for understanding bodily experience as well as its ‘corporeal’ nature (The Phenomenology of Perception, 1962). In fashion, we engage with the world and the term ‘body’ in a philosophical sense, it is crucial to be explored if we want to fully comprehend the link between body and dress, in this case, body movement. Nevertheless, contemporary fashion after the 1990’s adheres the bodily experience, especially in fashion performance. The performativity of fashion now seems to appear as a groundbreaking field within fashion theory, linked with both theatre, fashion and body design. With close comparative reference to a range of examples including: Tilda Swinton’s performance in Oliver Staillard’s The Eternity Dress, Croatian performance artist Tajči Čekada, together with the work of Hussein Chalayan, Viktor & Rolf and Rei Kawakubo’s 1997 collection Body-Meets Dress-Dress-Meets-Body, this paper will argue that within performance, fashion gains new meaning and the body can be re-performed in various forms. Fashion in contemporary culture can no longer be perceived as only an image (the semiotics of fashion) or only a process. Instead, these two hypotheses wind together within the form of fashion performance. This complex field of fashion and performance and their strong impact on body-image and body- process is crucial if we want to understand the chaos of contemporary fashion and its constant re-enactment.

In this presentation titled Contemporary Fashion as an Event: The New Media and Body Transformations I will try to establish the necessary interdisciplinary relationship between the field and the notion of contemporary fashion that emerges after the 1980s, new media as new opportunities for the development of the fashion process and events and their significant influence on the understanding of fashion and the articulation of the interdisciplinary fashion studies. In the research and scientific sense this presentation will develop the thesis that contemporary fashion cannot exist without the influence of the media on the body and the fashion object. At the same time it changes the logic of acting in the virtual world by fashion-image appearing on the display of the media screen as the new image, but also in the performative sense as the fashion- body. The work will also show the possibilities of constant transformations of contemporary fashion in the way of representing the body in fashion through the altered role of new media and performing arts. Contemporary fashion appears as the reinterpretation and re- performance of the event in all its most noted actualizations. The body in fashion is nowadays in the centre of the performing action because fashion, especially after the 1990s, represents the intersection of various new media and performative forms. Unlike the traditional approach to fashion as an indicator of social change in contemporary society, this approach deconstructs not only the society, but also the modern understanding of culture. It seems necessary to follow the path of understanding the culture that unites the concepts of identity, communication and the emergent network. Contemporary fashion in analogy with conceptual and performative art at the end of 20th century is determined by corporeality in all its aspects of appearing. Body, however, cannot be understood just as a function or a structure of an immediate human action in a pre-set world anymore, but more as an autonomous event in a network of an image representation. Thus, fashion refers to the visual construction of the body as an event and in this way shows an irreducible lifestyle phenomenon in the spectacle of today's society. With close comparative reference to a range of examples including: Tilda Swinton’s performance in Oliver Staillard’s The Eternity Dress, Croatian performance artist Tajči Čekada, together with the work of Hussein Chalayan, Rick Owens, Viktor & Rolf and Rei Kawakubo’s 1997 collection Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, this paper will also argue that within performance, fashion gains new meaning and the body can be re-performed in various forms due to new media influence. Fashion in contemporary culture can no longer be perceived as only an image or only a process. Instead, these two hypothesis wind together within the form of fashion performance. This complex field of fashion and performance and their strong impact on body-image and body-process is crucial if we want to understand the chaos of contemporary fashion and its constant re- enactment. Why the media nowadays combine the terms fashion and body into the fashion body? Identification of the fashion language as well as the sign system of fashion is of great importance in the field of research, as we explore the attempt to create a new identity construction, gender/sex questions within fashion, as well as the transition from class-social model to visual semiotics in the postmodern theories of fashion. For these reasons this dissertation will focus on the ambiguity of fashion: on the one hand fashion as visual semiotics, and on the other fashion as the body in the process. Fashion in semiotics appears as a text whose layers have different levels of meaning while in performing in the virtual world fashion appears as the body in an event. Thereat, this epistemological difference suggests the intensified research of the relationship between the text and image, which afer Roland Barthes became crucial since an image in the digital context cannot be decoded anymore simply by using the language as a universal signifier. The event has become a crucial category of the new interpretations of contemporary fashion. It is therefore necessary to show how the semiotic model in the new media has moved from text to screen, from language to code, and how fashion is explored as the new possibility of a physical event in the fashion object.

The work displays why has technology changed the structure of designing clothing especially in contemporary fashion and adheres the connection between fashion, technology and new media.

This paper questions in what way new media influence image and text transformations and their communicative identity. The relation between images and texts in the digital age of new media has been changed due to the process of immersion of virtual reality. Visual culture is now experimenting with different communication channels, using new media manipulation to shape new possibilities of reality or realities. New realities create new visual experiences and produce fragments of digital images. The multiplication of images and texts in images results in a different way of understanding visual culture in general. Understanding new media and the process of intermediality gives us a new perspective of image-text relation. Is it possible to revive the power of images and texts in the age of new media simulation? Moreover, new media constantly re-explore the true meaning of both images and texts, as well as new time-space categories linked to reality. The visual construction of culture now consists of different layers of new media communication which need to be decoded if one wants to comprehend the new visual reality and its symbolic meaning. Images and texts are now significantly different, always in function of media, never revealing what is their logic. Understanding the new communication of visual culture today not only explains the new tools being used in a complex system, but also the way in which communication creates new artificial realities.

Last few years fame and celebrity issues have become more visible in social sciences and humanities, creating incredibly stimulating interdisciplinary field. Although it is a relatively new area of academic interest it seems that some important issues still remain invisible. World of fashion, and particularly world of fashion modelling industry, for decades has produced a special kinds of celebrities – fashion models celebrities. Modelling as profession and public supermodel persona are both permeated with ambivalent and contradictory meanings – on the one hand „the beauty myth“ (Wolf 1991) is being differentiated and pluralized, but on the other hand youthful appearance and super-slender body still remain dominant standards in the context of fashion / modeling / media landscape.