The Concise Dictionary of Dress
Blythe House, London W14
28 April - 27 June 2010

Located within the working store for the V&A's vast reserve collections of furniture, ceramics, glass, jewellery, textiles, fashion and fine arts, The Concise Dictionary of Dress began with a journey through a turnstile, into an industrial goods lift and up to the first in a sequence of intriguing definitions in a walk-through dictionary of dress...

Cast objects and photographs, tableaux of clothing and accessories were arranged amongst the rolling racks and wrapped objects stored at Blythe House, the former headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank in Olympia, west London. The anatomy of the building revealed surreal and evocative interventions in unexpected places; metaphors of repression and ceremony; fragments of the clothed body briefly glimpsed.

Commissioned by Artangel, The Concise Dictionary of Dress re-described clothing in terms of anxiety, wish and desire, as a series of definitions created by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and accompanying installations designed and assembled by fashion curator Judith Clark.

The Concise Dictionary of Dress is also a 128-page hardback book. Illustrated in colour and with written contributions from Adam Phillips and Judith Clark and specially commissioned photography by Norbert Schoerner, it was published in April 2010 by Violette Editions in association with Artangel. The Concise Dictionary of Dress was produced by Artangel in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum. It was supported by Arts Council England, Artangel International Circle, Special Angels and The Company of Angels. Artangel is also grateful to the London College of Fashion for their support of this project.

http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2010/
the_concise_dictionary_of_dress

States of Mind/ States of Dress
Judith Clark, and Adam Phillips in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi.
Event to coincide with the exhibition held at London College of Fashion 9 June 2010
Filmed by the Open University:
http://www.openartsarchive.org/oaa/content/
states-mindstates-dress-0
http://www.openartsarchive.org/oaa/content/
states-mindstates-dress-1

DEFINITIONS - ADAM PHILLIPS

Armoured

1
Keeping a dark or secret profile.

2
Hardened for the elements; soft-centred.

3
Inviting attack by being prepared for it, provocative.

4
Heavier.

5
Sustaining belief in the inside and the outside, the invulnerable space and the essentially unprotected body.

6
Clothes as noise.

7
Undressing revised.

COMFORTABLE

1
A refuge; a nostalgia; the calm before or after.

2
The affluence of ease.

3
Fear of the future, rehearsed.

4
Pleasure as convenience; measured longing.

5
Space protected to forget that protection is required.

6
Invisibly armoured.

CONFORMIST

1
A state of essential simplification; safe in numbers.

2
Recipient of an unnoticed demand, complicit; choosing not to choose; compliant, and therefore enraged; unwitting double agent.

3
Blended into a selected background.

4
Committed to difference, and by it; horrified by the idiosyncrasy of desire; uniformly agreeable.

5
Accurate, diligent; wired for surprise; mourning variety.

6 Consensus as spell; idealist.

Creased

1
The fold fixed.

2
The line designed by use.

3
Spread for conversation, sometimes with laughter.

ESSENTIAL

1
Distracting.

2
Reduced to a, or the minimum; pared down, spare, no more than itself.

3
A virtue made of a necessity, or vice versa.

4
Of exaggerated importance; privileged to avoid confusion, fix attention, or encourage sacrifice.

5
That which quickens or concentrates a space; the forcing of focus.

6
Exclusive; letting the trivial, the irrelevant and the superfluous out of the bag.

7
More of the same.

8
Coercive, without aspect.

fashionable

1
A form of alarm; armour for the anticipated emergency; secret knowledge of contemporary intimidations.

2
Excited impatience with the body; something made to disappear; anything that can be refashioned.

3
Of its time by promising a more alluring future; a kick start, a longing, a private nostalgia.

4
History without footnotes; the past in new clothes; undercover conservation.

5
Taking liberties with the future and parasitic on it.

6
Anything that tries to stop the present collapsing back into the past; the new without fear.

7
Something that makes space for itself.

8
An experiment with pleasure, without proof; living for the last moment.

loose

1
Never knowingly over-attached; a disappearing act.

2
A moveable feast; not conforming to contour or arrangement; subject to influence and gravity; seeking direction.

3
Of uncertain boundary.

measured

1
Against chaos; a way of thinking about disarray; calculated excess.

2
The fitted as fitting.

3
Proportion as the mother of virtue.

4
The milder ecstasies of the considered.

5
Contained by the idea of containment.

plain

1
Nothing special where nothing special intended.

2
Hiding to make room.

pretentious

1
Something pretending to be something that it is.

2
An experiment in excess; excess on trial.

3
The courting and claiming of ridicule; making embarrassment the solution and not the problem.

4
Exposing a certain blandness in the environment, a needless uniformity in the situation; a revealing of assumptions; a reinforcing of conventions.

5
Full of misgiving.

tight

1
The holding in that is a holding out for something.

2
Restriction as exposure.

3
The triumph of continence.

4
Squeezed; mean; tensed; lithe; sleek; close; in readiness.

5
The intimate as threat and embrace; the line between torture and comfort.

6
A gathering, a collecting, a smoothing over.