The Ideal Tee

The world around us is increasingly imaged, as Vilém Flusser (Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 2000) has observed, and in the case of fashion Adam Geczy & Vicki Karaminas (Fashion's Double, 2015) propose that this is doubly true. Given that, according to Anne Hollander (Seeing Through Clothes, 1993), images of fashion frame how we both view garments, and ourselves through them, it has become increasingly critical that the effects of representing garments as images be looked at more closely. These themes are explored in this work through the use of digital collage methods similar to those used by artists such as Kiron Robinson (Um…No, 2017) and Lucas Blalock (An Enormous Oar, 2013) to explore the veracity of the photographic image. Contribution This digital photo series produced by Remie Cibis explores how representations of fashion effect perceptions of garments and of the self. By producing impossible garments as images, from digitally manipulated photographs of existing garments, the work questions how realistic fashion-images really are. Is what you see, really what you get? Can wearers really reflect the idealised images presented to them by the fashion-industry? Shown as part of a virtual exhibition staged in 2020, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the work also contributes to the field by explore new ways of presenting fashion as an image. Significance This work was show as part of the International Conference on the Image Exhibition in 2020 at the University of New South Wales, curated by Tamsyn Gilbert (University of New South Wales). The work was accepted as part of Cibis’s application for the conference’s 8 Emerging Scholar Awards which she was granted by the On the Image Advisory Board made up of 20 experts including Alison Gill (University of Western Sydney) and Tressa Berman (California College of the Arts).The images were created using adobe photoshop as a collage tool. The original images used in the collages are a series of flat-lay photographs that I originally produced in collaboration with Kristin Wursthorn.