Research project Framing the 1970-1990s Image Industry
The dissertation 'Framing the 1970-1990s Image Industry; the New York Downtown Scene and the Fabrication of Style through Music Videos and MTV' places the New York underground music and art scene at the focal point to explore the material culture on the Lower East Side and the cultural scene it embodied and nurtured.
The research studies the influence of the downtown scene’s style sensibility through new media platforms. By thinking through fashion, the scene is regarded to be an emotional engine, practice, image-maker and social network within the increasingly internationalized and medialized aesthetic economy. The research combines theories and methods from fashion, music and urban cultural studies with hermeneutic phenomenology and scene thinking. As such, the dissertation is multidisciplinary and assembles primary sources from conducted interviews with downtown luminaries intermixed with archival studies. It critically reassesses the hybridity between the sensibility of place, the scenery and the symbolic staging’s of attitude through style in moving images. As such, the presented case studies provide a dialogue between the material culture of a transgressive time-period often referred to as postmodernity and the growing aesthetic economy of the fashion system. The aim is to create an understanding of the Downtown scene and its influences on today’s fashion landscape.
Project members
Project managers
Jessica Conrah
Doktorand
