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Kym Longhi

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Fashion News - hat and gown

gown and hat from the installation "Fashion News"
gown and hat from the installation "Fashion News"

fashion news - hat and gown
fashion news - hat and gown

Fashion News - hat and gown

Fashion News - hat and gown | Media List


Statement

This is the evening gown as sarcophagus. I conceived and designed this piece to be worn as a costume in Penny Freeh's dance theater work, "Paper-Mache Cabaret." As glamorous facades these gowns conceal and restrict, but they are open in the back so that ultimately freedom is possible. These husks of women suggest death, the birth of new identity, and fashion fun.

The gowns are from a fantasy section in the middle of the piece, during which a character papier-maches her own body and dreams of her new image. Women, writhing on the floor, shed their gowns like snakes only to rise up again as the vampiric bustle of an evening gown or as catty socialites, stabbing each other with coy sideways glances. They struggle to come out of their self-imposed hiding - wrestling themselves out of the cocoon to fly away on gossamer wings. Newspaper represents image, hype, and the latest trend. We clothe ourselves in the zeitgeist of our times, obscuring our authentic self. Like performance, newspaper is ephemeral: life passes before our eyes, the stories come and go… and we recycle the old to make way for the new.