I Won’t Be Quiet So You Can Be Comfortable Shirt
This idea of the white shirt as a representation and interrogation of the nature of labour in contemporary world can be read throughout fashion in different forms. Is it, for example, not a misreading to see this in Giambattista Valli’s Fall-Winter 2014 collection featuring evening skirts worn with plain white cotton shirts? They might point to a modern woman split between work and play as much as look back, if obliquely, to the chemise à la reine of Marie-Antoinette. ConclusioIn his 24 hour performance piece Mount Olympus, Jan Fabre pares down costume design to bare essentials: white cotton sheets, torn, draped, folded and tied over naked bodies make up the entire range of costumes used throughout the performance, for every character in each story. In many instances the dancers tie or tear pieces of fabric themselves and dress or undress on stage, as they work their way through the corpus of Greek tragedies that form the basis of the piece.
I Won’t Be Quiet So You Can Be Comfortable Shirt
While most evidently the white sheets recall the Greek chiton, the ancestor of the white shirt, Fabre’s radical costume choice also evokes an idea of the white shirt as a blank canvas: a light, plain support on which any story could be written, any dreams dreamt, any life lived. In this respect, showing the making of the costume on stage, with a strong DIY aspect, and exposing the incredible versatility of the material is on a par with the recent increase in the development of specific brands and fashion lines devoted to the white shirt.While those brands often emphasise the craft of making, they bypass something that Fabre underlines: the idea of creative work, which is associated to the expression of the individual. Just as the writer, since Balzac, fuses identity with activity by being represented ‘wearing’ a blank page, the white shirt in the era of dematerialised labour may well carry, in a subliminal way, an invitation to act.