The word "fashion" conjures up glamorous images out of glossy magazines or quick Instagram posts featuring our fave influencers, brightly smiling and posing with trendy garments or accessories in their latest sponsored post. But this is just one side of the story: after all, fashion can be explored from different angles and perspectives, or can be used as an excuse to look at more important issues, as proved by a recent project by Clémentine Schneidermann and Charlotte James.
"It's Called Ffasiwn", opening tomorrow at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, is a photographic project shot in the post-Industrial South Wales Valleys that features groups of local children in costume (the event will also include some of the creations they wear in the images).
This geographical area in South Wales is made up of small towns separated by mountains and hills. The end of the coal mining industry in the 1980s had a devastating impact on the region that became one of the most deprived areas in the UK with high rates of unemployment and child poverty.
The images created for the project are the result of workshops with local children organised by James and Schneidermann to introduce them to the creative arts and foster their self-esteem.
A while back Charlotte James, a creative director and stylist (she worked with different clients including Ace & Tate, Helmut Lang, SSAW and Twin Magazine) from Merthyr Tydfil, the largest town in the Valleys, started experimenting locally taking pictures in the community. In 2015, after meeting Clémentine Schneidermann, a French photographer living in South Wales and also focused on documenting the local communities, the two decided to work together.
Their collaboration developed into a series of fashion workshops at the Gellideg youth centre in Merthyr Tydfil, and at the Coed Cae Interact club near Brynmawr, with children aged 8 to 14. The point of the workshops was using fashion in a humorous way, to play and have fun with it, while learning some skills, offering the possibility of discovering more about the creative industries and, last but not least, working also with the children's families and parents.
In some cases the workshops revolved around a colour or a celebration, such as red for Valentine's day and black for Halloween; some of the events were also run with fashion designers and children learnt customising clothes, sewing and styling second-hand clothes sourced on eBay or in charity shops, or created their clothes from patterns.
Schneidermann ran workshops for children who wanted to be behind the camera, but also visually documented the outcomes of the workshops, taking pictures that wouldn't look out of place on the cover of an album by the Manic Street Preachers.
The photographs look grim and bleak, but also surreal visual tapestries woven in the local social fabric: the stories behind these pictures take place in the working men's clubs, in the bingo halls and beaches, but they also attempt to subvert stereotypes of the working-class Valleys towns and their residents.
It is clear that this is not your conventionally glamorous photoshoot featuring designer garments, but an essay exploring social issues and portraiture, performance and landscape photography.
Dressed in funeral black with extravagant hats or in bright red, clad in pastel green or lilac, the children stand out in the desolate spaces surrounding them, including pebble-dash houses and dramatic mountains and community centres. At times the bright colours of their clothes create juxtapositions with these environments, at others the prints and colours of their garments camouflage with the textures of a wall, the colour of a house or a sofa.
Here there is a street party with purple bunting and purple ribbons on telegraph poles; there a group of girls in green faux fur garments stand among the grass in a housing estate, their gestures often represent a desolate Carnival, as the streets around them are empty, the landscape and the architectures are monotonous and ominous, oppressive and unbearable presences reminiscent of the alienating and isolating power of spaces in Antonioni's film.
There is a dark sense of doom looming over the children in the images: the clothes look incongruous in these spaces in which the human presence has been largely erased.
"The photographs show that while the Valleys wear the marks of time, they're no match for the elixir and hope of a new generation – the project is a celebration of this," state Clémentine Schneidermann and Charlotte James in a press release.
Yet garments and accessories represent an act of rebellion, second-hand chiffon is a survival tactic, extravagant hats are glitches hoping to disrupt an environment of solitude.
Fashion peacocks outside of fashion shows venue egomanically pose for street-style photographers in borrowed clothes, the children in these images take instead distance from real fashion, but invite viewers at the same time to bravely look at them wearing their own creations for self-expression and self-confidence.
Schneidermann and James explain indeed that the title of the exhibition ("ffasiwn" is Welsh for fashion) came from the first workshop and shoot they did, "The girls were outside dressed up in their costumes and the boys on the estate were calling them names. Instead of being put off, the girls shouted back 'It's called fashion, look it up!'"
Directors pay attention: there's maybe enough material for a moving film, a story of struggles and achievements à la "Billy Elliot", behind these pictures.
"It's Called Ffasiwn" is at the Martin Parr Foundation, 316 Paintworks, Arnos Vale, Bristol, BS4 3AR, from 27th March to 25th May 2019. A zine of the project will be published by the Martin Parr Foundation to coincide with the exhibition and, on 7th May 2019, Clémentine Schneidermann and Charlotte James will be in conversation at the Foundation with Lucy Kumara Moore, Director of Claire de Rouen Bookshop, curator and writer on contemporary art, photography and fashion.
Image credits for this post
All images in this post © Clémentine Schneidermann and Charlotte James
1. Demi, Bryn Farm, 2018
2. Last Days of Summer, Blaenavon, 2018
3. Ghosts, Merthyr, 2018
4. Nia (Valentine Disco Party), Gurnos, 2018
5. Valentine Disco Party, Gurnos Social Club, 2018
6. It’s Called Fashion (Look it Up), Merthyr Tydfil, 2016
7. Autumn, Coed Cae, 2016
8. Spring, Gurnos, 2017
9. Summer Street Party, Merthyr Vale, 2018
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