Special issue Modes Pratiques

special issue

Out of the fitting room


The book you are holding is a special issue of Modes Pratiques. Two or three times a year since 2015, the “staff” of Modes Pratiques has met at the Duperré School of Art and Design in Paris to talk. We talk about clothes and fashion, fashion people, fashion scholars, fashion gossip and the like…  From the indis-pensable chaos of our conversations stories emerge, as do thoughts and pro-posals—some whimsical, others fanciful. Many of our ideas remain unfulfilled, abandoned in the fitting room of our ambitions.
From this nebulous body of intuitions then emerges what will become the focus of the annual issue of Modes Pratiques: its core theme. “Norms and Transgres-sions” was the theme of the first issue. “Without Fashion“ was the second one. This special issue, translated in English, presents a selection of papers pub-lished in these two French editions.
Norms, formulated or not, are one of the threads of the way clothes are made, worn, and perceived. Transgressions illuminate their borders. In Modes Pra-tiques n°1, we followed several tracks, among them: bathing etiquette in Cal-ifornia in the early twentieth century, crew uniforms, blue-collared clothes in nineteenth-century Paris, drag-queen balls in Paris, dance halls during the 1920’s and 1930’s, and “Voguing“ ceremonies in today’s suburbs…  
“Can we live without fashion?“ asks Modes Pratiques Issue n°2. This issue ex-plored frontiers where fashion is ignored, banned, rejected or demonized: times of scarcity during World War I, nudist utopias in Germany at the turn of the twen-tieth century, French feminist wardrobes, Wild Boys escaped from the novel of William S. Burroughs, the Summer of Love in 1967, the clothing regime of  Sioux reservations, veil addicts during the French Revolution, and the story of Tarno, a young funk music lover from Nigeria who became an Islamic preacher …

ISBN 9791095518112

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