FASHION LEAH DURNER
Fashion drawings, paintings, collages, and collaborations enable me to explore self-presentation, attitudes toward women and beauty, design, and artisanship; also, to work through both rage and joy.
Fierce is a series of works on paper showing angry women wearing designer clothes and standing in confrontational poses – not presenting themselves as blank canvases for projection or offering themselves for the viewer’s delectation. The title “Fierce” is a play on the fashion-world exclamation of praise for great style.
The initial impetus for Fierce was the announcement that Fall 2020 was to be the last season that Miucca Prada would be the sole woman designer for Prada Women’s RTW. After this season a male co-creative director was brought in and the singularity of a woman’s vision – albeit the decision was made by the woman – was changed. The small number of women fashion designers and creative directors and the limited number of authoritative roles for women within the fashion system inspired this ongoing series – Fierce.
Angry Woman Wearing Prada Skirt and Shirt, Fierce series, 2020, graphite on paper, 60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.92 cm
Prada Jacket, 2020, gouache and enamel on paper, 48 x 42 in 121.92 x 106.68 cm
For this series I try on designer garments and take poses to explore with my own body how the garments feel, and move, and fit. I also act out poses somatically from my own rage and fear which does not always show itself in standardized confrontational postures; the inner rage may only be shown by a clenched jaw, narrowed eyes, or a clenched fist.
I first make a refined large-scale graphite drawing in which I define pose and scale. After the drawing, which establishes and disciplines form, I create a raw and gestural painting. The “refined” precedes the “raw.”
Other works include drawings and paintings of handbags, shoes, jewelry, and clothing, as in my Prada Jacket, and collages made from luxurious fashion magazines.
For my collaborations with AWANTED magazine, Creative Director John Slattery invited me to create new works in response to photographs from his various fashion shoots.
“AWANTED deconstructs the rules of the traditional fashion photoshoot with no makeup, minimal hairdressing, and no retouching.” The model is always named. In the time of early Covid, authenticity, respect, healing, and joy guided this collaboration.
Leah DurnerFebruary 2024
Collaboration with Instagram magazine AWANTED MAG, 2020
Right Page: Leah Durner, Untitled (AWANTED1), 2020, gouache on paper, 30 x 20 in 76.2 x 50.8 cm
Left Page: Model Emma H photographed by Daymion Mardel Concept & Creative Direction, John Slattery
“The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of the visible, and thereby onto a fabric of invisible being. A punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers, and of the Revolution, certain terrains near Aix or in Madagascar, it is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of women, robes of professors, bishops, and advocate generals, and also in the field of adornments and that of uniforms. And this red literally is not the same as it appears in one constellation or in the other, as the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917 precipitates in it, or that of the eternal feminine, or that of the public prosecutor, or that of the gypsies dressed like hussars who reigned twenty-five years ago over an inn in the Champs Elysées. A certain red is also a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds. If we took all these participations into account we would recognize that a naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard indivisible being offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons ever gaping open….Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and flesh of things.“
Maurice Merleau-Ponty The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes,
Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968 pp. 132-33.
Independent Visual Artist Leah Durner is lead co-chair, with Jorella Andrews, Goldsmiths, University of London co-chair, of the panel
Fashion: tissue, textile, toile, College Art Association 112th Annual Conference, Chicago 14 – 17 February 2024. The panel is Saturday 17 February 2:30 – 4:00 CST, 8th floor Lake Erie Room, Chicago Hilton. Other panelists are Pragya Sharma, University of Brighton, Christopher Rudeen, Harvard University, Lauren Downing Peters, Columbia College, and Emma McClendon, St. John’s University
Leah Durner durner.leah@gmail.com 917.251.9867
www.leahdurner.com Instagram: @leahdurner
cover image: Angry Woman wearing Dior from Fierce series, 2024 charcoal and gouache on paper 60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.92 cm