Making Another Austria 2015

Since its inception in 2012, the International Fashion Showcase, organised by the British Council and the British Fashion Council, has become an annual event that takes place across the whole of London, receiving significant attention in the UK as well as abroad. Having been granted the privilege of taking part in this unique fashion festival over the last two years, Another Austria has established itself as a new and exciting platform for the Austrian fashion scene with innovative perspectives on contemporary fashion and design. Its central focus remains the same as in the two previous editions, namely, to stage a dialogue between Vienna- and London-based
emerging artists from different creative fields.

Writing Fashion marks the new title and conceptual backdrop of the current exhibition at IFS. Initiated as a counter movement to the image based culture of fashion today, the exhibition seeks to offer alternative expressions of fashion and design. Poets, writers and fashion editors have been invited not to describe but to find inspiration for their own writing in the visual works, without prior knowledge of the designers themselves or the artistic contexts of their individual works. The presented poems, narratives and essays are the result of their encounters.
In the exhibition Another Austria: Writing Fashion, we find not hashtags but words, letters and sentences standing alongside one another and sharing centre stage with the pieces from the collections of six young Austrian fashion designers. Word and image are given equal weight and conveyed through the various channels of visual and textual communication. This interdisciplinary collaboration has resulted not only in an online campaign consisting of images surrounded by moving words, but also in the performative piece ‘Narrative Threads’ that will be presented at the Austrian Cultural Forum London. In addition, this booklet includes texts by scholars from the field of cultural studies, all of whom delve deeper into the realm of fashion, literature and text, and situate it within its historical contexts.

It is a great pleasure to be able to present to you the third edition of Another Austria at the International Fashion Showcase in London. I hope it will provide surprise as well as enjoyment through its experimental portrayals of contemporary fashion and design; and that these will serve to foster international networking and to demonstrate Austria’s status as a growing country with great creative potential.

I am especially grateful to all of the participating artists as well as the Arts Division and the Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria, the Austrian Cultural Forum London, departure – the creative unit of the Vienna Business Agency and Advantage Austria. My heartfelt thanks go to my entire team in Vienna and in London, as well as the project coordinators of the British Council and the British Fashion Council.

Claudia Rosa Lukas