Description

Viscose Journal Issue 8 Sound

Viscose Journal Issue 8 Sound examines the myriad of music and sound cultures of fashion. Entirely untethered from materiality and image, sound is the proof that fashion operates just as vividly in the purely atmospheric. From the artfully curated musical narratives of the runway to the ambient sonic environment of shops, fashion both emits sounds and seeks to associate itself with it for its own advancement.Music in particular asserts fashion’s existential relationship to time: it aesthetically time-keeps fashion media and confirms sartorial novelty by mirroring it rhythmically. To a public consciousness, the intimate relationship between fashion and music is obvious and at times even understood as one and the same. Sound glues material such as clothes to wider zeitgeists and mediated lifestyles, and as such, to cultural memory itself. As Mary E. Davis has illuminated, the alliance is profoundly historic: as far back as 1672, fashion periodicals have covered clothes and music as equally essential components of an elegant, fashionable lifestyle.

Music, in fact, surrounds fashion: it enwraps makers, mediators, and consumers alike in ephemeral, yet intensely meaningful, signifiers of taste. Countless designers have come to fashion through musical subcultures and labour in ateliers to particular playlists. Indeed, style most often has a soundtrack of its own, or dances to a specific tune. Fashion emits sounds before and after the musical. The clicking of heels, the rustling of a sweater, the hissing of a zipper. The ambient humming of a sewing machine; the conclusive “beep” from a store cashier.

For the 8th issue of Viscose, we set out to examine the sonic landscapes of fashion most expansively. In billing our issue “sound” we seek to gesture to more visually obscure and materially ephemeral interplays between fashion and the auditory—in wardrobes and shops, on the body and in the nightclub. With music culture at the centre of our inquiry, we hope to seek beyond and towards the more ephemeral sounds the clothing and fashion emits, records, and appropriates. We are pursuing the possibility of rendering fashion in entirely sonic terms, and how this translates into written words, in a print magazine.

Contributors

Max Alper, Arlette, Sigurd Bank, Lizzi Bougatsos, Ana Howe Bukowski, Upsana Das, Aisha Devi, Enantios Dromos, Ana Viktoria Dzinic, Dan Fox, Ryan Aguilar & Michel Gaubert, Theodore Jhang, Sowmya Krishnamurthy, Labour, Mark Leckey, Hanne Lippard, Project X Magazine, Chloé Maratta, Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta & Michael Meeuwis, Ellen Schafer & Nicholas Miller, Ashland Mines, Women’s History Museum, Cheuk Ng, Christian Alborz Oldham, Pilooski, Yat Pit, Seth Price, Frédéric Sanchez, Hyein Seo, Carrie Stacks, Danny Taylor, Terre Thaemlitz, Valentina Triet, Jeppe Ugelvig, Aran Atsuo, Charlot Abhors A Void, Marley Wendt, Skype Williams

Viscose Journal

Viscose is a journal for fashion criticism. Launched between Copenhagen and New York in 2021, the irregular periodical publishes critical writing and research projects by a wide range of authors from the worlds of art, fashion, literature, and academia. Though specially edited thematic issues conceived in partnership with institutions and museums, Viscose gives space to projects that challenge and expand the possibilities of research, practice, and critique of fashion.

Viscose is 100% ad-free, and its past issues have been supported by the Nordic Culture Fund, the Danish Arts Foundation, S.C. Van Fonder, and Design Trust Hong Kong. It is proudly co-published by the International Library for Fashion Research in Oslo, Norway.

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