Tailoring Suits, Shaping Bodies

Symposium & Roundtable

The symposium examines the return of tailoring as an emblematic and defining attribute of contemporary fashion design and reflects on how structured, fitted garments like the suit no longer only embody ideas of tradition, masculinity, and respectability, but are increasingly used to disrupt concepts of sex, gender, power, and conformity.
Noted fashion designers and fashion researchers will discuss on the role and future of tailoring in fashion with a particular attention to gender, identities and the body.

Speakers:
Nicola Brajato (fashion researcher, University of Antwerp)
Peter Do (fashion designer, New York City)
Daisy Knatchbull (founder of The Deck London, Savile Row tailoring house for women)
Jay McCauley Bowstead (author and fashion researcher, London)

Roundtable Discussion with Grace Wales Bonner (head of Fashion at Angewandte), Nicola Brajato, Peter Do, Daisy Knatchbull, Jay McCauley Bowstead, and Rosalind McKever (curator, Victoria & Albert Museum London).
Moderated by Dr. Monica Titton.

Open Q & A from the audience will follow.
Pleaser register for the event via Eventbrite.
Registered attendees will receive the Zoom link via email.

About the speakers

Peter Do is dedicated to creating a new future in fashion through thoughtful design. Born in Biên Hòa, Vietnam, Do immigrated to the suburbs of Philadelphia at the age of 14. He studied Fashion Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and was the recipient of the inaugural 2014 LVMH Graduate Prize. Do went on to work in the RTW atelier at Céline and then at Derek Lam. Peter Do is carried in renowned retailers globally.

Jay McCauley Bowstead
Contemporary Menswear: Hybridity, Flux and Globalisation
This talk explores how designers today activate the creative potential of men’s fashion by dissolving barriers between formerly distinct genres of clothing and by troubling polarities of identity. Addressing notions of hybridity, the talk investigates how sporting and tailored, southern and northern, masculine and feminine, and eastern and western references are synthesised in innovative menswear collections. Geopolitics, economics and shifts in patterns of work and family life have exerted a considerable impact on the sartorial developments of the present day. But moments of flux and contestation can be seen throughout the evolution of tailoring: both the Ottoman inspiration behind Charles II’s vest [waistcoat] in the seventeenth century and the equestrian origins of the tailcoat in the eighteenth illustrate the perpetually hybridising, evolving nature of style. By attending to the dynamic and syncretic qualities of menswear, the talk seeks to expose the shifting tectonics that animate contemporary discourses of gender, taste and nationhood.

Jay McCauley Bowstead is an author and researcher whose scholarly work to date has focused on masculinity, gender, and design, as well as the relationship between ethics, fashion production and public policy. Recent publications include a special issue of Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion (2021) co-edited with Charlie Athill; an article exploring how new technologies interact with shifting industrial policy for Fashion Practice (2021); a chapter on cultural hybridity in the edited collection Dandy Style (McCauley Bowstead in Cole and Lambert 2021); and a co-authored article on designer Charles Jeffrey (Hitchcock and McCauley Bowstead 2020). Jay’s monograph Menswear Revolution was published in 2018.

Nicola Brajato
Queer(ing) Tailoring: Rethinking the suit, gender, and sexuality for a post-tailoring material and symbolic vocabulary
Starting from his research project on the relationship between the Antwerp fashion scene and masculinities, Nicola will introduce the idea of queer(ing) as a methodology through the case study of Belgian fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck. The presentation aims to offer an investigation of Van Beirendonck’s sartorial practices through the analysis of his queer approach to tailoring. Nicola will focus on the historical and material meanings of the suit in the making of hegemonic and heteronormative masculinity, and how the designer has been capable of undertaking a material critical discussion of these meanings through the queering of the suit. In order to do so, the presentation will introduce an analytical framework based on three criteria: queer(ing) design, queer(ing) surface and queer(ing) styling. In bringing together fashion theory, critical studies on men and masculinities, and queer theory, the suggested framework aims to open up the sartorial practice of tailoring and its relationship with masculinity, gender and sexuality, in order to critically engage with its normative meanings and to propose a new understanding of its features. To conclude, some other examples of contemporary fashion attempts to rethink tailoring and the suit will be introduced.

Nicola Brajato is a PhD candidate in fashion and gender studies at the University of Antwerp funded by the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO). His current research aims to investigate the impact of Antwerp-trained designers in critically questioning the idea of masculinity, the male body and menswear. Previously, he was research scholar at the fashion studies department of the University of Bologna with a project on fashion archives aimed to the realisation of an exhibition on the relationship between club culture and fashion. As part of the research project, Nicola curated the site-specific art work “Fashion in Paradise: Rimini and the Golden Age of Discoteca Paradiso”. He has published articles on the relationship between fashion, identity and the body in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, Dune: Writings on fashion, project and visual culture (FlashArt), and Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion.

Founded by Daisy Knatchbull in 2019, The Deck offers stylish, successful women an alternative to mainstream brands and fast fashion. The Deck is a contemporary made-to-measure tailoring brand, by women, for women and the first female-only tailor with a shopfront in the history of Savile Row.

Dr Rosalind McKever is Curator of Paintings and Drawings at the V&A and co-curator of the exhibition Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear. She specialises in modern European art and is especially interested in its relationship with fashion. Prior to joining the V&A she worked at the National Gallery, London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Organized and hosted by Dr. Monica Titton.