ANABELA BECHO
Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. She is a fashion researcher at CIAUD (FCT/SFRH/BD/140442/2018), and a PhD candidate and guest lecturer at Faculty of Architecture/University of Lisbon. Author of the research seminar on fashion, Contemplating Dress, that focus on history, theory and practice of fashion design. She is the author of the chapters Contemplating a Madame Grès Dress to Reflect on Time and Fashion, (The Journal of Dress History, Volume I, Issue 2, Autumn 2017); Kindred Spirits: The Radical Poetry of Japanese and Belgian Designers (Fashion Game Changers, Bloomsbury, 2016); The Whole World – António Lagarto’s Costumes and Fashion (De Matrix a Bela Adormecida, INCM, 2015); Moda e Costumes – L’Air du Temps (Jogo da Glória – O Século XX Malvisto pelo Desenho de Humor, Museu da Presidência, 2012). She has written for several publications including: Relance, Vogue Portugal, Doze, ELLE, GQ, Ícon, Número, Arte Capital, Up Magazine, Blitz. Fashion Conservator at MUDE - Museu Design e da Moda, Coleção Francisco Capelo (2011-2018). In 2018, she presented the paper Fixer les plis, suspendre le temps: Grès’ innovative pleating technique, at the ICOM Costume Annual Meeting (Utrecht). In 2017, she co-organized the symposium From the Pleasure of Preserving to the Pleasure of Displaying – The Politics of Fashion in the Museum (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon), and presented the papers Time and the absent body: Glimpses of the sublime in a Madame Grès’ dress (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon) and Suspending Time in Fashion: On Madame Grès (1903-1993), Contemplating Dress and Glimpses of the Sublime (New Research Conference organized by The Association of Dress Historians, University of Brighton). In 2016, she participated in the panel discussion Game Changers/MOMU (Antwerp). In 2015, she curated the exhibition Kaleidoscope - The Couture of Christian Lacroix; and co-curated the exhibitions Iconoclasts’80 (2014), Unique and Multiple (2014), Tell me what you like...and I’ll tell you who you are (2012). In 2011, Anabela Becho was awarded the fashion prize for Best Press Communication at the Fashion Awards, Fashion TV Portugal.
view on patterns
Fashion has a transhistorical nature; this, despite the fact that it is always associated with the quest for novelty. The ‘new’, when it comes to fashion, is a fallacious concept; in the world of clothing, there is no such thing as progressive evolution, nor is there a temporal narrative. Through the Tigersprung —‘tiger’s leap’—, which assails historical linearity, fashion is capable of jumping from now into the past and back into the present, without getting tangled up in temporal moments or aesthetic configurations, fusing the eternal or ‘classical’ ideal with the contemporary. History repeats itself, reinventing the past under a new light, and fashion takes this to a higher level. The plurality of meanings of the word pattern shows it clearly, simultaneously signifying an example to copy, a repetition of motifs, a particular technique, or a drawing or shape used as a scheme to make something. The pattern, an ideal of the past to be copied as a model, is reinvented through new insights and techniques — new patterns — that will, in turn, generate another pattern that will be copied in the future. And so the cycle of fashion continues. My research focus on Madame Grès’ long draped dresses, that can be seen as the pattern of her work.