Le Tapis Noir/ The Black Carpet

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Backgound Fashion design is conventionally exhibited by designers at commercial runway shows and performed by celebrity consumers at red carpet events. The exhibition High Risk Dressing / Critical Fashion was a series of creative responses to the unconventional activities of the Fashion Design Council in the 1980s, which instead held performances in night clubs, the clothing paraded by friends and associates. Invited exhibitors in High Risk Dressing were asked to rethink and respond to FDC paraphernalia held by the Design Hub archives. Contribution Sprynskyj and Boyd, of the fashion practice S!X, drawing upon their experience in using both runway and gallery as fashion event-spaces, created, with Le Tapis Noir / The Black Carpet, a multi-media work of three components. A static work comprising a dress with a chandelier-print, shoes and stockings, and pieces of a broken chandelier, was placed on a square of hotel 'sticky carpet' as if discarded after a night out at a dark-carpeted St Kilda venue. A black and white film silently displayed a woman dancing solo. Thirdly, a fashion performance, half-parade and half-party with DJ, was held at the 'bar' set up in the exhibition space. The work contributed to the exhibition's critique of the commercially and institutionally sanctioned places and events that disseminate fashion to the public, while also taking that critique outside the design gallery and academic institution in which critique itself is conventionally performed. Significance The Black Carpet further developed Sprynskyj and Boyd's archival research methodology, which has produced a number of commercial works and was investigated in their respective PhD projects. High Risk Dressing / Critical Fashion was the major exhibition held at the Design Hub in 2017.