The College has worked closely with the V&A for a number of years on a variety of projects. Andrew Bolton, Joint LCF/V&A Research Fellow in Contemporary Fashion before his recent move to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has produced a series of innovative exhibitions interpreting the cultural and aesthetic parameters of contemporary fashion. Among these are the Joint V&A/LCF Fashion in Motion and Fashion Forum exhibitions and public lecture programmes which have included participants such as Louis Vuitton, Issey Miyake, Anna Sui and Richard James.

Andrew Bolton's other projects during his time as LCF/V&A Research Fellow include an exhibition at LCF entitled The Supermodern Wardrobe, looking at how men and women dress for the urban environment. Andrew has also written and published on these and other topics. A more recent exhibition arising from this collaboration, Men in Skirts, looked at how contemporary designers have re-invented the skirt for men and the many forms the male skirt can take. This was accompanied by live walks in the V&A galleries as part of the Fashion in Motion programme at which male models wore work by designers including Jean Paul Gaultier, Paul Smith, Yohji Yamamoto, Vivienne Westwood and Dries van Noten.

The newly appointed joint LCF/V&A Research Fellow, Judith Clark, is concerned with issues surrounding the exhibition of dress. Her own exhibition space, Judith Clark Gallery, has allowed her to promote the study of dress through exhibitions and seminars. Her recent research has centred around two main areas:the first is concerned with Warfare and the history of armour as dress and is a collaboration with psychoanalyst and writer Adam Philips, with the intention of producing an exhibition and publication; the second involves research towards an exhibition intended for the new museum of dress at Antwerp representing the genealogies of modern dress and how these may be best represented through exhibtion display. This follows on from Judith's research into the architecture of curation - the effects of privileging certain points of view towards a more aggressive curatorial narrative.

The increasingly productive and exciting collaboration between the College and the V&A has, from 2002, been enhanced by the appointment of the first LCF/V&A Designer in Residence, Simon Thorogood. Simon is a designer who sees his work as continuing the thread of Couture as the traditional wing of innovation and experimentation within fashion. He aims to extend the frameworks of fashion and go beyond clothing and confront limits with architecture, music, technology etc. He aims to ask questions about how we communicate and participate with fashion in a world that is increasingly abstracted and pluralistic. Simon has exhibited in a range of settings in locations including Vienna, Tokyo and New York. This annually revolving post provides an opportunity for innovative designers to create some ground-breaking work for public display in response to the fashion and textiles collections of the museum, drawing on the technical and intellectual environments of both institutions.

Future major projects include a proposed international conference and publication on creativity within fashion examining the nature of 'process' in contemporary design to be hosted at the V&A in collaboration with LCF and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. This would draw on the work of researchers and designers at both these institutions and foster a dialogue between institutions, practitioners and scholars.

Contact:
Research Administrator
London College of Fashion
20, John Princes Street
London W1G 0BJ
Tel 020 7514 7690 email research@fashion.arts.ac.uk