Salar Bil is The Forefather of conceptual fashion based in Tehran. He is one of the pioneers and is aware of his society’s problems, he explained that Tahmineh Milani was humiliated for her own paintings inspired by others and she’s one of the former feminists that paved the way, So the goal is to move forward with understanding the history and solving problems not bashing each other we are all the same person at the end so if you wanna work for your society and culture solve the problems with reasoning instead of making each other humiliated, He explained in one of his articles that one of my biggest concern after the world boycotted Iran and the country’s economy entered a recession, I was asking myself how can I continue my work? In fact, I asked myself how I can practice fashion in an economy that is not stable, bankrupt, and in a recession?
For answer, I found Sherrie Levin’ works “After Walker Evans” very inspiring. Walker Evans photographed during the Great Depression of 1930’s. But how about Sherrie Levin? Was she in a bad economic situation that appropriation became her medium? Or can the appropriation itself be a theme for art? In fact, Levin in the early 80’s started to photograph from the photos of Evans from the Great Depression. As result, we can read Levin’s photo as a reaction to the early 1980’s recession that was the result of the 1973 oil crisis and 1979 energy crisis. The question may be what can these cases have to do with fashion? Does appropriation in fashion mean plagiarism? Well, let’s look at some most important fashion icons for answering these questions and see how cultural appropriation made such an unforgettable collection in fashion history. Leigh Bowery was a famous British drag queen whose extravagant and avant-garde looks made an impact on fashion. S/he was married to Nicola Bateman and died of Aids in 1995. But her legacy felt not only in club kids culture but in haute-couture fashion. The extravagant looks of Leigh Bowery in fact was an inspiration to Alexander McQueen. McQueen just a few months before her death met Bowery at London’s Freedom Café. In 1993, Bowery formed the Romo/art-pop band Minty. Because Minty’s show was too much for Westminster City Council, he closed down the show at Freedom Café after only one night. This meet has influenceddeeply McQueen’s work. As part of his AW09 show, the now-iconic Horn of Plenty,models were sent out alabaster pale with lacquered, oversized, sex-doll lips.It didn’t just gesture to Bowery, but lifted directly from the artist’strademark visage and overdrawn clownish mug. It makes sense as to why – forboth Bowery and McQueen, the body was a site of transgression and theirrespective designs always teased the borders of human repulsion. Thesecartoonish lips served as the intermediary between the glamourous and the grotesque
Artists from manycultures are constantly engaging in cultural appropriation. Picasso famously appropriated motifs which originated in the work ofAfrican carvers. Painters who are members of mainstream Australian culture haveemployed styles developed by the aboriginal cultures of Australasia. The jazzand blues styles developed in the context of African-American culture have beenappropriated by non-members of the culture from Bix Beiderbecke to EricClapton. Paul Simon has incorporated into his music elements of music fromSouth Africa’s townships. The American composer Steve Reich has studied with amaster drummer from Ghana and the rhythms of Ewe culture have influenced hiscompositions. But is appropriationplagiarism or there is a difference between appropriation and plagiarism? Thisis a tricky concept for people to grasp. As a rule of thumb, a found (re)sourceimage (the one you found on the web instead of taking yourself) must be atleast 65% changed to be considered an appropriation rather than plagiarism.Artistically, appropriation simply means to take a source image that is notyour own and change it significantly to suit your own personal vision.Plagiarism means to directly copy something from someone or somewhere else.
Every phenomenon in history undergoes many changes, and these changes are also a reason to redeline the meaning of these phenomena. Fashion is
one of these phenomena that has undergone many changes in the last few centuries. The word fashion first means the style and gradually, with the change of the capital of art to New York, this word was replaced by innovations in the clothing industry. But
today, the word fashion has gone beyond all these definitions. Even familiar names in the fashion industry have found their foundations where a broader concept than fashion is considered. So, Salar Bil, who achieved great success in the field 2010s as a multimedia artist and of fashion in the was able to gain a place in the Iranian fashion scene and thus attracted the attention of domestic and
foreign media to his extravaganza designs, now take the first steps towards building a fashion foundation. That is, Salar Bil intends to try to play a prominent role in thinking about the phenomenon of fashion in Persian, and the journal is one of these
new possibilities of Salar Bil. In the end, Salar Bil’s Foundation tries to shape discourse about fashion and its problems by articles, pictures, drawings, clothes, accessorics, etcculine signifier (This Sex 171).