Abstract
Since 2011, students at Stockholm’s Beckmans College of Design have created gowns inspired by each year’s Nobel Prizes. As one press release asserts, the project shows “what unites Nobel laureates, artists, and creators: creativity.” This chapter explores how this fashion design project links a constellation of feelings and behaviours associated with “creativity” to those of peace, which is a key part of the Nobel brand. The chapter argues that the Beckmans project demonstrates how fashion as means of shaping feeling adapts older liberal international visions of peace-making, in which culture generates cross-cultural understanding, for a neoliberal era of creative capital. The chapter focuses particularly on how a garment inspired by an award for climate scientists illuminates links between climate modelling and fashion modelling as ways of capturing attention and directing thought and feeling. This design and the Beckmans project as a whole invite viewers to understand their own capacity to sustain attention and appreciate good design as vital to making peace. By framing peace as an affective and aesthetic category, this fashion design project reinstantiates what Eunsong Kim and Gelare Khoshgozaran note is the widespread presumption that “culture is the experiment towards peace.”
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Notes
- 1.
Brown locates this “magical remainder” specifically in the early twentieth century, but this image makes clear that such a remainder can also be reanimated in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
- 2.
We can understand this image in terms of what Eugénie Shinkle contends is the move by contemporary fashion photographers including Jurgen Teller and Terry Richardson to create images of awkward bodies that, in turn, are “part of a wider trend towards the production of images which quite literally incorporate the viewer into the production of meaning” by provoking visceral reactions (2012, 74).
- 3.
That is not to say that affective flatness necessarily blocks any political effects. For a discussion of the queer possibilities of flat affect in fashion photography, see Filippello (2018).
- 4.
In making this claim, I am thinking of Poulomi Saha’s insistence in An Empire of Touch (2019) that even “fast fashion” or “ready-made” garments bear the traces of the labourers who produce them.
- 5.
I am indebted to Rivky Mondal for this point.
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Sheehan, E.M. (2023). Making Peace Sensational: Design for the Nobel Prizes. In: Filippello, R., Parkins, I. (eds) Fashion and Feeling. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19100-8_11
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