This article makes a case for fashion, as part of the creative industries and as a major employer of women, as well as a significant space for self-organised work, to attract more sustained attention on the part of feminist scholars with a view to developing a stronger policy lobby for the sector with priority being given to issues which focus on the quality of livelihoods in the sector. Drawing on interviews and observations carried out within the course of a three year study which investigated working lives of fashion designers (predominantly female) in London, Berlin and Milan, the argument presented emerges from an analysis which focused on two key factors: the impact of adverse economic circumstances following the euro-crisis of 2008 and the role of urban cultural policies in the ability of designers to establish a creative practice. With the help of three provisional, indeed tentative, concepts, each of which relies on questions of space/place, we suggest that this expansive sector contains potential to become a more equitable and socially engaged field, particularly with reference to women's working lives and through the development of regionalised centres with an emphasis on doing fashion differently. KeywordsGender and creative economy, fashion spaces-of-labour, fashion-human-capital, femaleled 'post-Fordist place-making' (Colomb 2012), urban cultural policy. 1 Phase One Report CREATe/Goldsmiths Fashion Micro-enterprises London, Berlin and Milan is available at http://research.gold.ac.uk/26280/ feminist fashion policy-makers to emerge, working at the interface of the fashion schools, local and national governments, the industry, especially at start-up level, and with the fashion media. Fashion has the potential to become a much more egalitarian and diverse sector, and this is a timely moment, given the wider social awareness which has emerged in the last few years, often spearheaded by young people and by students, to request that words such as antiracism, job creation, under-employment, welfare-to-work, and regional development find a place in fashion's everyday professional vocabularies.At the same time it is instructive to understand why there has been resistance to this kind of emphasis in both fashion pedagogy and in fashion studies scholarship. So reliant has the teaching of fashion been, in order to garner academic credibility and a place within the university system, and indeed a place alongside the teaching of the fine arts, on establishing

People might assume that dancing with a digital avatar would be a relatively distant, dehumanizing or disembodied process. However, in this article we propose that effective and creative choreographic practice can be achieved by working with a virtual representation of a dancer, and we offer two case studies to evidence the practical application of motion capture technology within this context. We observed that the virtual model quickly and naturally becomes an extension of the dancer's interiority and that a dynamic affective attunement between dancer and avatar spontaneously develops. We describe how the relationship between the physical and the virtual dancing body raises several practical, theoretical and even philosophical questions for choreographic approach, style and process. Building from Susanne Langer's (1953) germinal conception of the 'virtual powers' of dance, we articulate a practice-led research opportunity to critically reflect on conventional choreographic practices through the affordances of a specifically digital virtuality, in ways that can open out the kinds of affective, emotional and phenomenological frameworks within which creation occurs. The unique affordances of recent motion capture systems, offer naturalistic threedimensional environments with an increased improvisational interactivity that simply cannot be achieved with video-based media.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract