Lun*na Menoh - Spring and Summer Collection 1770 - 1998

Spring summer collection 1770-1998 by Lun*na Menoh, 1998 (Photo: Relah Eckstein)

Spring summer collection 1770-1998 with models by Lun*na Menoh, 1998 (Photo: Steven Nilsson and Jennifer Cheung)

The following film is the complete "Spring Summer Collection 1770-1998.

Watch the video here:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d4eT8CSKGA

Some early work by Lun*na Menoh.   This is work that is really focused on the history of female clothing from the year 1770 to 1998.  A history lesson?  Or re-inventing history?   Alison Bancroft from her book amazing Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self makes some interesting comments

 "Fashion is not a discrete or enclosed collection of fixed objects.  A garnet is not an independent, fully formed entity that is superimposed on the blank canvas of a woman's body.  On the contrary, it exists only when it is in the process of being worn; when fashion is encountered in contexts other than the act of being worn, it can often evoke a sense of disquiet.  Elizabeth Wilson has remarked that, 'Clothes without a wearer, whether on a second hand stall, in a glass case, or merely a lover's garments strewn on the floor, can affect us unpleasantly, as if a snake has shed its skin.'  This unease that wearer-less garments can induce is expired in the fashion / art installation "Spring Summer Collection 1770-1998 (1998) by Lun*na Menoh, which demonstrates the processual nature of fashion with a linear depiction from left to right of consecutive changes in style through time.  More interestingly, though, it demonstrates how imperative the wearer is to the operation of fashion.  These ghostly garments, devoid as they are of any corporeal relation, are suggestive of a sinister otherworldliness that Sigmund Freud calls 'The Uncanny.'  They are simultaneously familiar, almost mundane, in the way that only something as ubiquitous as clothing can be, and also alienated, following their removal from their expected context.  As Freud puts it, '... the uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has brome alienated from it."