Fashion as a site for memory: Reflections on a fashion exhibition, ‘Clive Rundle About Memory’

This article aims to explore the complex curatorial approach of my exhibition titled ‘Clive Rundle About Memory’, held in Johannesburg, 24 June–24 July 2011. The exhibition resulted from investigations into notions of memory in the work of South African fashion designer Clive Rundle. Shown in an art gallery, the installation afforded Rundle’s work a context away from an aesthetic or material approach to the fashion exhibition, rather employing more conceptual methodologies.

I will discuss the components of the exhibition and address the research conducted around Rundle’s work that explored these traces of history and memory surfacing in the present, as sites of narrative with multiple histories and entangled pasts. I have considered the complex constructions of Rundle’s own creative processes with his compositions of dialectical senses, histories and temporalities that blur the boundaries between art and fashion, between function and aesthetics. In this article I investigate the presentation of these fashioned slippages between the past and the contemporary, between history and memory, between absence and presence, and where negotiations of meaning begin to surface and disappear.