Rachel K. Ward - Biography

Rachel K. Ward, Ph.D., is a rising philosopher who specializes in the intersection of fashion and art. She is a Professor of fashion media at the European Graduate School (EGS) where she teaches an intensive summer seminar. The focus of her work is visual culture as meta-language, specifically how fashion images serve as a site for the negotiation of desire. For Ward, fashion photography functions as an intersection of aesthetic, ethical and social values. As a popular but equally creative and often progressive media it crosses thresholds of both journalism and art. The result is a unique form of media that works to advance ideal, mythical and capitalist desires.

Ward has a combination of academic and professional experience in the US and Europe. Her Ph.D. dissertation was entitled “The Vanishing Point: Decadence, Desire, Truth”, receiving the Magna Cum Laude distinction at EGS. Ward also holds an MA in Art History, receiving Cum Laude distinction at the University of Florida. Her graduate thesis on artist Edward Ruscha, entitled “Scenic Drive,” was published by MAXXI in Rome. Ward also holds a BA in Psychology, with an Art History minor, from Stetson University, Florida. Ward supports her academic work with more than a decade of professional experience in international fashion and art. She has been featured for her creative work in Vogue (Paris), as well as in the New York Times, Artforum’s “Best of” and others. Additionally, she has written journalism for the New York Times global edition, Haute Living, V Magazine and ArtReview. She has also consulted in fashion and art branding, photography and private collections.

Philosophically, Ward draws from continental thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Barthes, and Derrida. The legacy of Baudrillard has had the greatest influence on her work however. Her dissertation “The Vanishing Point: Decadence, Desire, Truth” was inspired by Baudrillard’s text “Beyond the Vanishing Point of Art.” Ward focuses on the vanishing point of human desire, mainly decadent values that are overrun by desire, and laid bare with nonchalance. She explains, “After deconstruction and the denial of credible truth, we witness a decadence of anthropocentric meaning…we have reached the vanishing point. There is not a new hope for edification, but rather, a state of no hope where we first began. It is no longer a question of being without a question of truth. If Cartesian doubt was evidence that humankind was not open to all truth of reality, deconstruction is evidence that amid the hoax of ideology, humankind was not open to ontological truth.”

Her dissertation was the basis of her book All for Nothing (2010, Atropos), described as “a philosophical call-to-arms.” In this text, Ward continues the focus on desire toward cultural decadence. She writes, “Whenever desire is satisfied, the desire diminishes and we reach a vanishing point. In time, desire returns. The tyranny of desire is observed in the constant turnover of fashion and technology or, on a grand scale, the rise and decline of civilizations.” The book takes the reader through both singular and cultural manifestations of extreme desire and decadence such as fame, luxury, vanitas, fashion, intoxication and love. The everyday practices of decadence are not only legitimized by contemporary media, but celebrated as the ultimate achievement, even though, Ward suggests, we are left with a feeling of desperation that desire cannot be satisfied in a culture that is continually on to the next best thing.

Ward has taught a combination of media and critical studies courses. She previously served as a visiting assistant professor at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida where she taught communication studies and was as guest lecturer in branding from 2007-8. Between 2009-11, Ward worked as an instructor of media, fashion and luxury studies in Paris, France. She taught for study abroad programs in Paris of New York University, the University of California, and Parsons School of Art & Design. Additionally, she lectured at the Summer Study at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France.

Her professional work includes art curating for organizations and private collections. Most notably she created two independent site-specific exhibitions. The first was in 2003 in the ice cave of Saas-fee Switzerland, “Eispavillon.” The second in 2004, was at Eero Saarinen’s landmark terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport, titled “Terminal 5.” She has also worked in fashion with Ralph Lauren, Saks 5th Avenue and at the Festival International de Mode et de Photographie, sponsored by L’Oreal, Hermes and others. Her branding experience includes Wolff Olins in New York and Partner + Partner in London.

Currently Ward balances academic and professional roles. She continues to write fashion and art journalism for a number of publications. She also continues to address the legacy of Baudrillard. In 2011 Ward wrote for C-Theory, a text titled “Radical Being,” in response to Jean Baudrillard's text for C-Theory "Radical Thought." There she concludes that “Baudrillard does not ask for a production of radical thought but that we allow radical truth as being.” Ward is also a regular contributor on media and post-modernity for The Other Journal. In a recent text entitled, “Love by Any Means Possible,” she writes, “Connecting via technology normally means being alone. And even in an email or chat with another person, we are frequently connected to other things online, reducing any relationship to one among many things. And those relationships, along with everything else in technology, have a new urgency that speaks more of desire than love. Desire drives us toward impossible satisfaction that needs to be resolved again and again. Most technology is driven by the ethics of desire – ‘meet your needs now.’ By contrast love is aligned with the eternal, with patient endurance and ultimately a resolution of desire, without end. Love gives us the sense of greater life beyond the self, what Lacan called ‘be-eternal-ing.’”

Her daily exploration of fashion and art can be found at www.fashionversusart.blogspot.com. Here she looks at the ways in which fashion and art break out of their conventional barriers. The bog, which began as a course with Parsons Paris, is intended to expose the framing of media forms and the way in which creativity is segmented through the classical boundaries of fashion and art.