Dr Remie Cibis
Alumni, RMIT
Research Summary:
Dr. Remie Cibis’ current research investigates how material and participatory fashion practices, involving garments and wearers, can critique and expand the narrow frame of representation typically promoted by visual fashion-images. Her research proposes that while the fashion industry predominantly employs visual fashion-images to market fashion-products to wearers – idealising, automating, and commodifying how they see themselves – that material and participatory fashion practices can instead be activated by wearers to reimagine these images for themselves. These ideas and themes are explored using workshops and iterative, practice-based methods (including photography, scanning, digital manipulation, printmaking, pattern-cutting, sewing, collage, and wearing) that invite everyday people to take part in the process of fashioning their own representations.
Biography:
Dr. Remie Cibis is a critical and expanded fashion practitioner and Lecturer in Fashion & Textiles at RMIT University, Melbourne. Her research explores how clothes can be understood as images and what this means for wearers. Combining garment-making, performance, photography, and interactive workshops, she seeks to understand how fashion-images are produced and to design new opportunities for wearers to fashion their own representations using material and participatory fashion practices.
Cibis’ research has been presented at Melbourne Fashion Festival, Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, and in various gallery spaces including Conical, First Site and Federation Square’s FedTV. Recent projects include Less is More. More or Less, Sarah Scout Presents (Melbourne/Naarm), The Fashion Edit, The University of Auckland (Auckland/ Tāmaki Makaurau), Ready-To-Wear, KINGS Artist Run (Melbourne/Naarm) and Collaged Clothes, The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Boras, (Boras). Recent publications and papers include Fashion Text Collaborative Glossary (Viscose Journal), Deletion Dressing (Radical Fashion Excercises), The Fashion Apparatus (The Sixteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society) and The Fashion Edit (Context Journal).
Cibis holds a PhD (Fashion & Textiles) RMIT University 2024, Masters of Fine Art (Interdisciplinary Arts Practice) VCA & MCM Melbourne University 2017, a Bachelor of Design (Fashion) (Hon.) RMIT University 2011 and a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) (Hon.) Monash University 2006.
Supervisors: Ricarda Bigolin, Sean Ryan
Remie Cibis, Ready-to-Wear, 2022, interactive exhibition/workshop, KINGS Artist Run: North Melbourne/Naarm, photographed by Agnieszka Chabro