Róisín Hurley Hirschkop

About

Growing up I was constantly distracted by the digital world. There, I would waste my days away clicking through runway photographs and any scans of fashion magazines that I could find. I was fascinated by how people seemed to convene digitally to form new subcultures, and how the internet became a space to document this. I became increasingly curious about internet aesthetics, subcultural style, and the ways in which people collected clothing.

While at McGill, I pursued a joint degree in History and Art History, which allowed me to merge my interests. After graduating, I remained in Montreal and worked in fashion for several years as a copyeditor at SSENSE. Although the role was not what one might typically expect – it involved research, writing, coordination, and presentations on garment anatomy and designer collections – it forced me to view clothing from a different perspective. I reflected on objects from their conception, through their methods of production, to their eventual consumption. This experience deepened my curiosity about how fashion knowledge is disseminated and legitimised, prompting me to explore these topics further by undertaking the History of Design course.

For my first essay, I looked at a pair of Yves Saint Laurent boots from his 1963 Fall/Winter collection, commonly known as the ‘Robin Hood’ collection. My research allowed me to explore how the political and cultural shifts in Paris came to impact Saint Laurent’s design practice, assessing how his influences – ranging from modern art to the newly emerging countercultures – were reformulated for the luxury market. This research allowed me to engage closely with the changing landscape of fashion media and the tensions surrounding its intellectualisation.

However, it was this interest in fashion knowledge and the digital that drove my dissertation research for this course. By reflecting on how fashion – as a field of research – was at points peripheralised by associations with ephemerality and flippancy, I sought to contextualise its gradual emergence as an academic discipline and how this led to new forms of conceptual design. My dissertation evolved out of this convergence of digital culture and fashion effort to legitimise itself, specifically looking at the rise of amateur fashion archivists on social media platforms and their mimicry of the aesthetics of elite cultural institutions. The research methods for my dissertation involved the framing of digital accounts as hypertextual ‘designed’ objects, the close reading of online fashion forums, and visual analysis of fashion memes.

Instagram: @rosshhir | Website: Róisín HH