• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.540-551
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• 2019

This study analyzes a new fashion phenomenon for critical fashion. Critical fashion is a message-centered fashion that delivers consciousness and sociocultural issues for contemporary society. The research method for this study combined literature reviews and case studies along with a research scope, that reviewed aspects of critical fashion through works, presentations, and images of collections, various media, and joint projects from the 2000s to the present day. This study indicates that critical fashion exhibits a conceptual pattern that metaphorically expresses the message of designers' perspectives on society and the fashion system. Critical fashion designers' socially critical messages began to emerge in avant-garde fashion influenced by avant-garde art movement that then developed into a conceptual fashion heavily influenced by conceptual art movement before it evolves into concepts of critical fashion. Critical fashion has been influenced by community-oriented critical art, which signifies that the characteristic of criticism of an art system is expressed through the language of fashion. In conclusion, critical fashion resists the idea of the integration of a cultural industry whose homogeneity is continuously collapsing the differences for the purpose of consumption and challenges to the established fashion system.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.717-729
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• 2019

This study defines critical fashion designs and investigate its critical messages on fashion itself. The critical messages on fashion are categorized into two major issues of a fashion industry system and fashion consumer culture. This study contributes to the understanding of meaning and value for critical fashion messages that match critical art. As the research method, this study combines a literature review and case studies and the research scope focuses on cases that have appeared in fashion media since the 2000s when social critical messages in fashion began to emerge. The results of the study are as follows. Critical designers such as Viktor & Rolf, Elisa van Joolen, Issey Miyake, and Mary Ping have delivered messages challenging the nature of fashion industry system that criticize the cycle and limitation of a fashion system and pursues changes in perception of sustainability. The critical message on fashion consumer culture articulated by designers such as Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Hussein Chalayan, and Ricarda Bigolin & Nella Themelios insist on the formation of community while delivering a critical message on social, political, and cultural problems that raise the mechanism of social awareness through fashion design.

• Journal of the Korea Fashion and Costume Design Association
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.87-103
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• 2020

This study investigates critical fashion and discusses its critical messages, as it challenges the existing system of the fashion industry. This study reviews the literature on critical art and critical design and analyzes exhibition catalogs, magazines, and websites related to critical fashion practices. Thereupon, this study assumes the two distinctive messages of critical fashion design: materiality and experience, and the redefinition of the ideal body. First, materiality and experience pursues a change in perceptions of clothing materials by way of deconstructing clothes and exposing the process of production. This type of critical fashion breaks away from the traditional sartorial conventions and articulates new structures and experiences through dematerialization. Second, the redefinition of the ideal human body attempts to subvert the stereotypes of ideal beauty and introduce a variety of beauty in the human body. This type of critical design reconstructs the human body through transformation, expansion, and deconstruction and is often liberated from the dichotomy of gender norms.

• Journal of the Korea Fashion and Costume Design Association
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-18
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• 2021

The purpose of this study is to analyze and understand the approach of critical fashion by comprehending the appropriation of art as a sociocultural phenomenon that influences contemporary fashion. This study inquired into the relevant literature to explain the theoretical background behind critical fashion, and conducted a case study using exhibition catalogues, exhibition works, articles, fashion magazines, and fashion-related websites in order to examine cases of appropriation strategies. As a subversion of meaning by using an existing transposable object image to deliver an experience unlike the actual image, subversive appropriation in critical fashion takes existing things as they are and rearranges them with the purpose of subverting social values while having its subversive style of appropriation. Referring to a style that focuses on labelling the distance between the subject, that refers and that which is referred to, referential appropriation has been reprogramming existing things with an internal and introspective attitudes. In other words, from an exploitative style of appropriation aimed at expanding the meaning with found in objects by avant-garde fashion designers, to a subversive style of appropriation aimed at subverting meanings with transposable objects by conceptual fashion designers, there has been a change toward the referential style of appropriation aimed at expanding artistic forms with created objects critical fashion designers.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.530-544
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• 2022

Based on a follow-up study on critical fashion's strategies for object appropriation, this study aims to understand the appropriation of art as a social or cultural phenomenon influencing modern fashion, as well as to analyze and comprehend how to specifically approach the appropriation of critical fashion's letters through the appropriated interpretation. To explain the theoretical background of critical fashion's appropriated interpretation, it examined the related literature and data. Moreover, a fashion book-based literature review and a case study were conducted using sources, such as exhibition books, exhibited works, news, fashion magazines, and fashion sites, to examine letter appropriation strategies. In the critical fashion, the appropriation of subversive letters subverts meanings by providing experiences different from those based on real images of letters, which are displaceable. The appropriation of such subversive letters to challenge the value of modernism aims to subvert social value by bringing and relocating existing objects while focusing on their external forms. The appropriation of referential letters focuses on delineating the distance between the subjects who quote something and the quoted something and reprograms the existing letter objects with an introspective and reflective attitude. In other words, critical fashion designers can effectively express their messages through the appropriation of letters, such as graffiti and typography, which are manifestations of challenge or resistance. Appropriating letters as a creative action pursues unmarginalized humans who possess their existence.