showOFF: creative labour in the fashion industry

Exhibition

The New School, Parsons Paris

8 – 10 December 2017, Glassbox, Paris, France

"ShowOFF" is a research exhibition curated by the MA Fashion Studies students at The New School Parsons Paris. The fashion industry is a complex and ramified system that produces desirable images, imaginaries and commodities. Despite the high visibility of fashion products, the creative labour that goes into the making of this desirability remains hidden. The research exhibition ShowOFF explores the different forms of labour, professions, and values involved in fashion image-making. It aims to illuminate the issues of creative capital, hierarchy, value, and network, in order to demythologise notions of labour often romanticised within the fashion system.

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ShowOff is about deconstructing the glaring patina that surrounds fashion imaginaries. By focusing on process of creation of fashion images, the exhibition spotlights the different figures and elements of labour that animate this segment of the fashion system. Ultimately, despite the glamorous aura that surrounds the industry, ShowOFF reveals its unequal distributions of prestige and wealth and the dissemination of precarity.