UNLABEL‑ Fashion Beyond categories

How we dress influences how we are perceived. The exhibition UNLABEL - Fashion Beyond Categories, conceived and realized by students of the ZHdK, uses current positions of fashion designers to encourage us to question stereotypical gender identities.

Clothes make people: For a long time now, people have no longer just wrapped themselves in fabrics to cover their bodies or protect themselves from wind and weather. Fashion is always a means of self-representation, of differentiation as well as a projection surface for social constructs. Thus the understanding of "gender" is subject to social, political and cultural attributions. Corresponding norms - which become visible in fashion - change over time and develop differently depending on the social context. Which clothing is considered male or female and how can such attributions be rethought? The exhibition UNLABEL - Fashion Beyond Categories examines this on the basis of current works by eight fashion designers and artists who confront conventional gender norms with alternative designs and concepts.

Deconstruct, analyse, test

The accompanying programme invites the participants to explore the topic in greater depth: The Zurich fashion designer Sandra Kuratle designs skirts together with the visitors and examines these designs for gender-specific characteristics. The participants will also experience for themselves how clothing influences their relationship to their own bodies: in a movement workshop with performance artist Miriam Coretta Schulte or by trying on selected items of clothing in the exhibition. Within the framework of a panel discussion, the cultural, historical and economic backgrounds of the exhibition will be explained to invited guests on the basis of a market analysis of the fashion industry.

Details of the educational programme with workshops and talks can be found on the website of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich.