• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.59 no.5
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• pp.41-52
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• 2009

In contemporary art, soft materials are used in various forms and ways as a medium expressing contingency beyond a simple nature of materials. In the late 1960's, the appearance of soft sculpture as a refusal of the stereotyped 'Erection' characteristic of traditional sculpture served as an opportunity for more attention to soft materials. Fashion is the reflection of age, and the mirror of society, culture and arts. In other words, soft sculpture and fashion are artistic behaviors in the same context, which have neither been fixed nor erected. This study finds its significance in analyzing correlation between soft sculpture and fashion, and the importance of contingency as artistic expression means in this age when boundaries between genres are obscure, and artistic values are given to fashion. By doing so, it aims to present the direction toward which fashion should face in the future, establishing a new aesthetic consciousness with which more creative and various expressions are available in fashion as well. This study presented as its theoretical background the concept of soft sculpture affected by Marcel Duchamp among representative examples of the contingency that started to appear in art starting in the early 20th century. It also analyzed the soft sculpture appeared in 1960s and the expression methods and features of contingency appeared in fashion after late 1990s through a new approach of piling up, hanging up, and tying, three categories classified by Maurice $Fr{\acute{e}}churet$. Common features of the contingency expressed in soft sculpture and fashion were derived in the analysis, which are intensive effects of energy, values given to physical properties themselves, and esthetics of anti-form.