Grainger Creative Research Residency 2025 - Sophie Knezic

Sophie Knezic
Fancy Pants: Percy Grainger’s Towel Clothes and Radical Fashion

Fancy Pants is a research project that aims to bring to international attention the historic significance of Percy Grainger’s Towel Clothes Collection. Although Grainger is primarily known as a composer and musician, his ancillary creative project (in collaboration with Ella and Rose Grainger) of designing clothes deserves wider recognition. Featuring 28 separate garments all made from towels, including items such as bolero jackets, men’s shirts, Bermuda shorts, tunics, leggings, a lumber jacket and sleeveless vests, the Towel Clothes testify to an experimental and flamboyant imagination that transformed everyday materials into a bold fashion vision.

The research project proposes to identify key attributes of the Towel Clothes that can be understood as pioneering fashion design practices, developing methods that have only recently been advanced by the progressive wing of the fashion industry known as radical fashion. Radical fashion refers to practices that actively work against dominant structures, dramatically altering industrial fashion’s standard modus operandi. Radical fashion eschews commercialism in order to rethink fashion in terms of DIY practices, recycling and circular modes of production.

Fancy Pants is both a scholarly and design project that will form in dialogue with the Towel Clothes Collection. The research will investigate the Towel Clothes as a progenitor of avant-garde fashion, situated within developing trends in textiles and fashion in the 1920s-30s but with links to contemporary experimental couture.

Biography:

Sophie Knezic is a writer and visual artist with a broad area of expertise in contemporary art. Her research specialisms include the metaphysics of transparency and temporality, experimental film and video, sound art, humour in art and a developing interest in the history of fashion and experimental couture. Her PhD Transparency, Translucence and the Crystallisation of Time was completed in 2015. Sophie’s writing has been published in Broadsheet Journal, Memo Review, Art + Australia and Art Monthly Australasia and she is a regular contributor to Frieze and Australian Book Review.

Her recent publications include chapters in The Body in Sound, Music and Performance (Routledge, 2022); Humor in Global Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024); and the inaugural Juncture Exhibition catalogue (Linden New Art, 2024). Sophie is currently Associate Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at VCA Art, University of Melbourne and between 2018 and 2022 lectured in Art History, Theory + Cultures in the School of Art at RMIT University.