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Genuinely novel: 10 years of the Goldsmiths Prize
The Goldsmiths Prize is now in its tenth year, and on the occasion of the awards ceremony last week, I was prompted to reflect on the Prize itself, and what it represents. The Goldsmiths Prize champions true creativity and genuinely novel work. The challenge it lays down is to change the rules, and to be… →
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Opinion: A Question of Age
Many of the world’s leading fashion designers for example Donna Karan, Karl Lagerfeld, or Vivienne Westwood, to name but a few, are in their 60s, 70s, even 80s, yet create clothes that the fashion industry almost exclusively targets at women in their 20s and 30s. It almost seems as though this contradiction, which is at… →
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Opinion: Fashion Education in Prisons
The College’s project with women offenders at Send Prison has given many of us an insight into the contradictions in our attitudes to crime and punishment, forcing us to reassess prejudices and pre-conceptions. Elizabeth Fry, English Quaker and prison reformer, (1780-1845), about to visit prisoners in Newgate, to read them the Bible. My interest in… →
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Opinion: Mirror Mirror
Food is more carefully photographed than old people. Food is celebrated while old age is marginalized. Margaret Morganroth Gullette pointed this out at our conference last week, Mirror Mirror, discussing representations and reflections on age and ageing held here at the College last week. For her, representation of ageing is the new frontier, where are… →
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Opinion: Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is an extraordinarily stimulating event. Not only does it act as a crucible where ideas, arts and crafts are brought together to be juxtaposed, shared and challenged but the backdrop of the city itself shows the relationship between fashion and art. Its physical infrastructure shows how form, function, ideas, culture and craft… →
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OPINION: Sooner or Later
In thinking about ideas or innovations that are ahead of their time, or those which have had a major impact on our lives, it is tempting to focus on those that have had a momentous impact on our day to day living. The wheel, the printing press, the internet, even the iPhone, have all altered… →
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Opinion: The Creative Arts and Rehabilitation
Over the summer we published the first edition of The Beauty’s Inside, a unique and collaborative publication between LCF and HMP Send. The magazine brought together eleven serving women offenders and eleven students from across our School of Media and Communication who, over the course of ten weekly workshops held at the women’s prison last… →
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Opinion: Fashion On Food
For sometime now I have been interested in the relationship between the fashion and food industries. Over recent years we have become increasingly concerned about what we put into our bodies – the quality and source of our food- yet we still don’t place the same emphasis on what we put next to our skin-… →