Garments are beliefs to be worn. Clothes dress our intimacies, disguise what we are ashamed of, and enhance what we are proud of. They wrap our existences, not by affixing a superficial price tag or logo to who you are, by functioning as material entities that accompany us.
The seemingly trivial act of dressing and undressing is a subconscious ritual shaped by our tastes, social belongings, and capital in multiple forms. Although most of us participate in (high) fashion through looking more than through wearing — a disposition of the picto-fetishizing age we operate in — fashion is sensual, and garments are there to be touched and not just gawked at on a screen. Our bodies inhabit and animate fabrics and are thus living parts of the sartorial archive, transforming the living body into an archive itself.
“DEVILS ON HORSEBACK” centers on archives and bodies and their relation to garments and broader fashion practices. Fashion’s material manifestation gives physical body to non-physical things, keeping a textile record of cultural paradigms, personal experience, collective consciousness.
While some of the works on view emulate the language of trend cycles, we propose that they — and fashion in general — are not just based on fads. The garment is an archive inhabited daily, but the cultural significance of our clothing is continuous, un-removable. Our stories are entwined with those of fashion, told through tailored tissues.
