Leon Stevenson

What is a fashion collection that doesn’t have garments?

• What is the representation of body in fictional fashion?

• What role can the imagination play when Baudrillard’s overshadowing object doesn’t exist?

• How do the dialectical aspects of garments for Barthes offer new opportunity and investigation for designers?

• Can language be a fashion practice?

• How do we unpick the role of a collection?

By applying this within the framework of a participatory expanded field to explore societal and human relations to better understand myself and the people around me. Indirect relations shape a common social identity. Metaphorical descriptions bridge the gap between abstraction and tangible experiences within the 'fashion process’. The act of observation as part of the medium for its trans- formative qualities plays with how an object can be perceived and how fictional narratives can develop from this.

Sometimes you need to forget what you know, be uncomfortable to allow new dialogues to flourish

Position Statement:

My approach to the subject takes its roots from a critical and expanded fashion practice in terms of a direct relation to the discipline. The basis for structuralism is ever present within my persona as a designer, researcher and thinker; a way of interpreting and analysing language, literature and society, to focus on opposing concepts or structural elements which try to demonstrate how they relate to the entire framework. My current climate means I am predominantly responding to the commercial fashion system that exists that dictates the way we consume fashion, however by my research methods, critical analysis and interdisciplinary approach. New dialogues and alternate systems can appear to create new questions in the space.