Wild Dress is a collection of nine brief essays by Kate Fletcher, Professor of Sustainability, Design and Fashion, London of College Fashion. Published in 2019 by Uniform Books, it takes the reader on an intimate journey through the ways in which we interact with nature and landscape, by, with and through our clothing. Drawing on biographical experience of hills, woods and a life shaped by urban concerns, Fletcher explores the relationship between the garments we wear, and our embeddedness in nature.

 

With Zoë Svendsen, director and dramaturg, known for creating interactive and immersive hybrid art-performance events, and Carolyn Downing, award-winning theatre and exhibition sound designer, we have started to explore ways of bringing these stories to life for a live audience. We are seeking residency time to be able to focus together on these questions.

We also want to think about how this performance might be specifically suited to a post-Covid world of performances careful to maintain a certain distance between audience members. Having always conceived our audience members as participants, both an outdoor location, and a certain independence from the crowd, are key features of the core concept for the work.

 

​

​

 

Fashion has long been synonymous with escapism, with trying to free itself from the world and resource limits; with operating as if it is separate from the Earth, the soil, the health of its people. But such a thing is impossible. Fashion and clothes are part of the world.

 

Through a staging of the stories of Wild Dress, the radical, everyday experience of being dressed becomes a gateway to a new relationship with nature. The staging ‘re-stories’ fashion – the poster-child of high carbon culture – as interdependence between garments and nature as part of life and living, rooted in capabilities and action.

 

The staging will be intimate and participatory, taking place in a woodland or other wild landscape, possibly in a festival context. The idea for a performance in the woods is that it will be the first in evolving sequence where aspects are recorded and replayed in a new setting (such as a home, a launderette) with different performers, choreography and garments.

 

Each iteration of the project will involve building and recreating stories of clothing and nature in new ways, alongside different audiences. Each will also emerge out of previous iterations, using recordings, ambient sound from previous locations – allowing us to adapt the performance to each particular circumstance. If possible we also hope to develop a programme of engagement around the performances, in which people can contribute stories, weaving together a wider understanding of how we might alter peoples’ understanding of the relationship between clothing and environment, equipping us for a post-carbon, post-colonial world, in which the clothing industry is no longer full of damage, waste and destruction, but is restructured around the idea of symbiosis between ourselves and the natural world around us.

​

​

 

 

To explore how to use the stories of Wild Dress to draw out our audiences’ own stories of how they understand their relationship to landscape, with clothes as a conduit to how we are in the living world around us.

 

To work out strategies for engagement that make everyone feel like their story is heard – through modelling story-telling by performers who shape the conversation, and encourage each voice.

 

To work out the structure of the performance

 

To explore how we might invite audiences to put on garments of different textures, that make different sounds as they walk, in order to listen (and to place them firmly where they are, in their own bodily rhythms)

 

To work out how to make this a work of breathing together, firelight, and immersion in the living world.