Fold The Centre for Creative Arts, Cultures and Engagement (CREATURE)

The project is a research-based moving image work exploring the relationship between the experience of bodily trauma and the development of Japanese Avant-Garde fashion structured around a biographical experience.

Drawing upon the genres of both the fashion documentary and the video essay this film travels from post WW2 Japan to Paris in the 80s to working-class, provincial Northwest England during the 1990s in search of a mother’s body obsessed by the key labels of Japanese Avant Garde Fashion (Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons). Using the lens of psychoanalysis, trauma, othering/self-othering the aim of this project is to explore the material connections between this avant-garde fashion movement and the experience of my mother’s body; as a pregnant unmarried teenager in the 1970s who, against a backdrop of forcible adoptions, experienced daily social shaming, and medical mistreatment by the state apparatus due to her predicament. The film explores how the re-purposing of a national identity was captured in the innovative forms of these garments along with great creative technological innovation in Japan post WW2. The project uses an experimental filmmaking approach to distinctly nurture a material understanding of the body, clothing and social structuring and the role of subculture in deconstructing violent social norms.