Lorna Thomas

Abstract

This practice-based PhD asks searching radical questions of the costume designer’s role in crafting visual representations of identity in popular culture. Specifically, it locates the communicative language of costume design as being centrally determined by dominant social politics (hegemony) and interrogates the integrity and social implications of the cyclical cultural referencing and hegemonic re-affirmation this implies.

Further, the research seeks to explore the means and ways by which the designer might either subvert or transcend the socially constructed archetypes of categorised identity (race, gender, sexuality, class, disability etc.) which can produce an artificially prejudiced and presumptive relation to the subject.

Profile

Trained as a costume designer and maker at the London College of Fashion, UAL, Lorna has enjoyed some rewarding and challenging professional experience during her short time as a freelance costumier. But from designing and making the central costume for the Paralympic handover ceremony at the Birds Nest Stadium, Beijing, to the smaller scale burlesque/cabaret work which constitutes much of her portfolio, an academic appreciation for the social politics which have informed her vocational work have demanded some acute critical evaluation, leading to a years study of Gender and Media at the University of Sussex, and ultimately provoking this PhD research project.