Writing practice as contemporary practice: Experience, imagination, knowledge

This paper puts forward a fashion practice that experiments with writing as a means to provoke the experience and imagination of fashion. As the core of a practice-based PhD research project, the practice of writing fashion aims to expand the ways by which fashion is expressed in the form of narrative and through the medium of words. The concept of fashion is premised as embodied phenomenon and depth of aesthetic experience - whether real or imagined. Beyond the written page, the research also explores the ways by which the fashion text is communicated and experienced live, through audio-based installations and reading performances. Tapping into the performativity of fashion, the goal is to test what the writing does, to see how knowledge is enacted. It is about exploring how the weight of fashion, as experience, is performed through the gravity of words - to find a language that supports it and a medium that performs it. The discussion in this paper is drawn from one of the prose works produced as an experiment in writing fashion, entitled, 'Through My Writing Body, A Beginning of a Narrative.' The idea of the 'writing body' tests the implication of the writer's body and voice in the production of an imaginary narrative experience. As a metaphor for the 'dressed body' in fashion, it explores how narrative and meaning are generated and performed by and through the self and social body. This piece was written for the purpose of a public reading performance - to capture live the dynamism between my own body and the written body, between the reader and I. Through shifting points of view and voices, the writing pursues a heightened awareness of the multifarious body. It is an attempt to approach fashion through the intimacy of words. By writing, reading and listening in, my purpose is to provoke a deeper sense of closeness - not only towards the body in fashion but also the embodied state of writing. My own voice is on the line - disembodied, but immediate.