Free and open to all to attend, no booking required
Dates: 1-10 October 2024
Location: Wolfson Studio, LCF East Bank, 105 Carpenter's Road, Stratford, E20 2AR
Open hours: 10am - 5pm, Tuesday - Sunday
Fashion illustration is a long-standing form of clothing, accessory, beauty, figurative, and identity communication dating back to the sixteenth century.
‘Between 1520 and 1610 more than two hundred collections of such engravings, etchings, or woodcuts were published, containing plates of figures wearing clothes particular to their nationality or rank. These were the first dedicated illustrations of dress and the prototype for modern fashion illustration. The illustrations likely found their way to dressmakers, tailors, and their clients, serving to inspire new designs.’
- Sarah Goethe-Jones, costume designer and fashion historian.
Whether depicting fashion realistically or suggesting abstract ideas and forms, fashion illustration is a powerful imagination ignition, both informative and inspirational.
Not exclusively used to visually speak designer catwalks and seasonal looks, through the ages fashion illustration has highlighted cultural dress and detail, shifted perceptions of human physicality via proportion and silhouette, and documented significant societal style changes from historical garb such as royal attire right through to workwear. The point is, fashion illustration in all its variety is a significant media to visually speak through.
It’s a common conception that sartorial drawing and painting leans into stylised portrayals of people, often as caucasian, slender, elongated figures. Over the past two decades that trend has started to change.
The Unseen Fashion Faces and Figues exhibition aims to widen and further represent parameters and progress, through the art of fashion illustration. The exhibition features over forty artists’ works that go beyond current norms and represent people of all shapes and sizes, backgrounds, cultural and ethnic origins, abilities, and unique characteristics within a fashion context!
The array continues to inspire and grow, via live workshops led by artists, Rob Unett, Bex Cassie, Martha Zmpounou, Faye Dobinson, and Francesco Poiana.
This project is created and presented by London College of Fashion, UAL, in collaboration with Cass Art, supported by Liquitex and Clairefontaine.