Archivist Addendum: Fashion Interpretations
London, 2021 – Archivist Addendum launches as a slim box [307 x 220 x 35mm] of uncoated card, stapled together. Inside is a collection of papers and photographs – the final outputs of Fashion Interpretations: Dress, Medium & Meaning, an international, interdisciplinary network led by Rebecca Arnold (The Courtauld Institute of Art) and Judith Clark (London College of Fashion) which looked at the relationship between dress, medium and meaning.
The participants’ overlapping concerns were about how representational modes translate and reconfigure meaning: Rebecca Arnold writes about the interplay between illustration and photography in interwar issues of American Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar as Richard Haines draws archival fashion on his iPad. Charles Tepperman looks at how amateur home movies have captured and mediated our engagement with dress; Elizabeth Kutesko presents Claude Lévi-Strauss’ candid snapshots of São Paulo c. 1935-7 as a study of a city and its people.
Tara Darby captures the archives of the fashion label BLAAK (1998-2012) before they vanish to the Museum of London; Lisa Cohen writes about clothing and loss. Olga Vainshtein’s research presents Little Lord Fauntleroy as an archetypal fashion plate. Roman Kurzmeyer and Judith Clark explore exhibition making and the double meaning of medium. Elisa de Wyngaert muses on a fantasy exhibition. Sofie and Maarten capture the 22-year archive of A.F. Vandevorst. Leanne Shapton presents a series of new paintings that draw on the haphazard aesthetics of selling second-hand clothing online.
Founded in 2020 by Jane Howard and Dal Chodha, Archivist Addendum is a publishing project free from the confines of a bound periodical. Non-seasonal and multi-format, it occupies the nascent space between standardised fashion editorial and arcane academe:
It can be laid flat or placed vertically on a shelf. With lettering on both its lid and its spine, it plays with two formats: book and box. Books are usually read sequentially. If you want to classify papers you place them in a file. If you put papers in a box they will be safe – but there will be no guarantee of order.
— J.C.
Published in an edition of 150 copies.
