bruno

Folds of Beauty: Film, Fashion and Architecture

Giuliana Bruno

Re-turning to beauty, this lecture begins by questioning the idea, suggested long ago by Wilhelm Worringer, that beauty might be a vital feeling. Beauty could be something that moves in us. It might also be something that moves in matter, which itself is a projection of our inner activation, our inner motion. But how does an object of material culture move? How does a film, an object of clothing, a piece of architecture move? How does this matter move and moves us? And what moves in us? At stake in the definition of beauty is the motion of an emotion. The main question, then, becomes the form of this motion. What is the form of this projected double movement of spirit and matter that may lead to experience beauty? What exactly is this form that has the power to transform?

In pursuing answers to such questions, the lecture focuses on the transformative beauty of the fold. Unfolding a notion of beauty, it travels from the philosophy of the fold put forth by Gilles Deleuze to the fashions of Issey Miyake to the "fabric" of beauty in Wong Kar-Wai's cinema. Along the way, it unfolds the sartorial architexture of beauty. This will be a story of pleats ...