Alison J. Clarke, University of Applied Arts Vienna
![DSC01407[3]_429.jpg](http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/hg26/materialworld/DSC01407%5B3%5D_429.jpg)
www.thedeathoftaste.com
Moving from London to Vienna a few years back, I experienced an irrepressible and distinctly non-academic nostalgia induced by the plethora of quaint fashion-related specialist shops selling ‘real’ things with ‘real’ uses right in the centre of the city; from miniature tailor’s dummies to ‘proper’ hand-made hats. Adjacent to the Versace designer flagship store a highly ornamented button shop (established in 1841) sold, just prior to its closure earlier this year, around150 buttons a week to dedicated home dress-makers of Vienna. A tiny embroidery and haberdashery shop with an extraordinary range of diamante accessories, still incongruously co-exists metres away from the Timberland global casual-clothing store on one of the most prestigious shopping streets in Vienna. Only recently, the city’s most famous traditional high-end clothing shop closed down to be taken over (marble fixtures, fittings and all) by the H&M mega-clothing store promoting their new Kylie Minogue collection to the eager Viennese consumer. Located in areas of ‘prime’ global real estate, sought by fashion labels desperate to secure their place in a city on the cusp of burgeoning new style markets of former Eastern Europe, oddities such as button shops and diamante specialists stand as the relics of a former fashion economy.
![DSC01389[3]_429.jpg](http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/hg26/materialworld/DSC01389%5B3%5D_429.jpg)
www.thedeathoftaste.com
From Veblen through to Simmel and Barthes, fashion has pre-occupied contemporary theorists as the form of material culture most expressive of modernity’s accelerated consumption of style and shifting social hierarchies. With the rise of a globalized fashion industry, where H & M clothing stores offer twenty-four seasons of fashion a year, in places as diverse as New York City and Slovenia, the dynamics of any discernible ‘fashion system’ have altered considerably since the late 19th and 20th centuries.
The contents of the 19th century mahogany drawers of a now demised Viennese button shop were once part of a local taste culture, mediated at different social levels by the dress –makers, consumers and couturiers of the city. In the 21st century the manifestation of style and taste, from London through to Iceland, Russia and Turkey, is underpinned in by a complex network of stylists, forecasters, buyers, post-production artists and on-line editors who mediate the seasonal style shifts in relation to local taste cultures. ‘Fast-fashion’ retailers such as UK fashion flagship store Top Shop pride themselves on being able to transform a ‘static’ (i.e. non-selling) t-shirt into a best-seller overnight; by removal en masse from the rails, shipping to a local warehouse where a style feature is adapted and the items re-positioned on the shop floor for sale again within hours.
Much contemporary clothing, its cut, its fabric and its style, is as ephemeral in its materiality as the editorial in which it is embedded. Future material culture study collections may happily contain the contents of a 19th century Viennese button shop; but will the Kylie Minogue bikini make it past the second washing machine cycle?
Observations regarding the accelerated temporality, changing materiality and place-specificity of style could just as easily be made of fashion in the 18th century (and indeed were). But the rise of an entire industry given over to the rationalization, harnessing and circulation of style knowledge, and the extraordinary rapidity of style change in the most everyday of our contemporary material cultures raises issues regarding the impact of a contemporary taste-making industry on other forms of material culture (from technologies through to food) and the ways in which style and taste are embedded in place.
The Death of Taste: the Future of Fashion, a London/Vienna symposium, explores the cultural phenomenon of contemporary style-change and taste-making from the perspective of its multiple agents (models, stylists, designers, consumers, retailers, editors, and buyers) asking how the differing materialities of clothing, from the fleetingly fashionable 1980s retro -neon T-shirt to the hand-made hat, can be understood (if at all) as a discrete entity of material culture called ‘fashion’. Once the centre of 20th century Modernity, inspiring contemporary discourses around style and ornament, Vienna offers a unique venue for such a debate.
Organized by the department of design history and material culture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in cooperation with London College of Fashion, the two-part symposium (the first held at the ICA, London November 2006) highlights the crucial intersection of place/style in the ‘making’ of material cultures.
Click below for contact details and conference program
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John Flaxman, Monument to John & Susannah Phillimore, 1804, Plaster, UCL SC1009, Courtesy of UCL Art Collections