Safe Passage
Clothing is an excellent indicator of wearer expectation. The choice of coat, shoe or hat pre-supposes cold weather, rough ground or sun as key elements to an experience of the outdoors. These items act as a barrier between in and out, body and outdoors, providing protection while enabling engagement with an environment unconcerned with human comfort. The aesthetics and construction of clothing — gender, wear, age, material, cut, design, colour and fit – speak to social structures and power dynamics in the context of cultural production. A shoe is never just a shoe. A shoe shows not only an absent physical body, but also the absence of a being in whom particular aesthetic, gendered, cultural and social dialogues intersect.
