“The Transmogrify of a Towel” Talk
2022

“Titled 360°, the Winter '22 collection is set in a glass rotunda simulating a giant man-made snow globe as an apocalyptic state. Physically, the show occupied the Parc des Expositions du Bourget in Paris. Inside, an infinite white field mourns the predictability of seasons (in addition to political stability as we know it), mapping a multitude of winters onto each other.  Guests watched in the cold, as models walked through the worsening manufactured snowstorm.

Demna reveals that the scenography mirrors his own experience of escape, trekking on foot up a Georgian mountain as a 10 year old child. The section where young men were wrapped only in towels and underwear, in particular.”

The whiteness of the towel against the whiteness of snow begs us to reckon with the towel’s profound semiotics.   This parallels Demna’s “own feeling of helpless exposure to the elements.” Though Demna’s narrative is a courageous display of vulnerability, what does the towel itself say? What is the rhetoric of the thing in itself? Towel dressing in the space of the runway, especially in our COVID years, has become something of a phenomena.”

ENG 294: Literature and Fashion at Princeton University

Special thanks to Professor Anne A. Cheng and TA Moeko Fujii for the invitaiton.