mirror stage

getting closer

Thomas Tait, recent MA student from Central Saint Martins just got a great write-up in the New York Times T Magazine Blog. Thomas' collection and sillhouette draws from an exaggeration of the bone structure, especially from the profile. While i found that the CSM MA students got tons of press and recognition in London, and on London-based web publications, Tait is one of the few I have seen cross-over to the mainstream American fashion sources. AND my friend Tommy from Saint Martins worked for him on his collection .. so basically that means:  I am closer to being a famous fashion designer. But I don't think I will make anything for a long time that looks as Fashion, tailored, and polished as Thomas Tait.

The Revival of Madam Death

Walter Benjamin is one of the first theorists to qualify fashion and how it reorganizes society in the modern era with his work in The Arcades Project. Section ‘B: Fashion’ relates fashion to modernity in its reconceptualization of the relationship between life and death and its implications for the construction of identity and temporality.

As I have discussed in previous posts, in pre-modern societies dress was simply a function of deeply rooted social roles. In the nineteenth century, industrialism and urbanization uprooted identities in the metropolis as citizens became independent of the land and anonymous on the streets.  Social roles were destabilized and individuals needed a new means of establishing their roles within the newly expanding web of society.  In Paris, as Benjamin describes, people came to rely on consumption and outward appearance to both distinguish them and identify with certain social groups amongst the crowd. Referencing Rilke, Benjamin writes,

Squares, O squares in Paris, infinite showplace

where the modiste Madame Lamort

winds and binds the restless ways of the world

those endless ribbons, to ever-new

creations of bow, frill, flower, cockade, and fruit. (63)

This verse, once unpacked, contains the crux of Benjamin’s argument.  In nineteenth-century Paris, the role of dress is repositioned as attention is turned to the public sphere. Haussmannization, the administrated destruction of the old city and the opening up of the streets, paved the way for the emphasis on visuality and a public, performative way of life.  Thus, the city became an “infinite showplace,” in which spectacle was never ending and appearance took precedence as a social organizer of the anonymous citizens. Benjamin follows Rilke with Alphonse Karr saying, “Nothing has a place of its own, save fashion appoints that place” (63). Stepping away from Benjamin’s argument, this statement also relates to Judith Butler’s stance on the performative nature of identity (as I find most conceptualizations of fashion and identity can do).  Identity is constructed exclusively through the repeated actions that code it; there is no intrinsic identity that exists for an individual outside fashion in the crowded spectacle of modern life[1]. 

The act of wearing fashion (and viewing the image of a person wearing fashion) codes the wearer in terms of gender, social, and economic roles, as well as any other subgroups that develop in society. Those able to keep up with the “ever-new creations” (and those who, by contrast, are not on trend) are distinguished visibly by social, economic, and cultural role. Fashion, as personified by “the modiste Madame Lamort”, or Madame Death, binds the otherwise destabilized individuals of the city to a social and cultural order. Endlessly “ever-new”, the form of fashion helps to explain the complex image that Benjamin paints of fashion in modernity as la mort, the Madame of Death.

Benjamin, through his notes, seems to pose how fashion embodies the boundaries between life and death and simultaneously transcends them. The nature of fashion is the conjoining of the organic body with the inorganic material of clothing. Death, or the inorganic (Benjamin uses the two terms to signify the opposition to life), is spectacularized through fashion. It also endows a “sex appeal [to] the inorganic” by directing the gaze and hinting to the body beneath the clothing. The more active the activity of wearing, such as Benjamin’s example of the images of the female cyclist, the more the inorganic provokes desire. Fashion therefore upholds the importance of death and spectacularizes the boundary between life and death, organic and inorganic.

But fashion also “mocks” death through the process of continuous beginnings and the temporal organization around the “elimination of all discontinuities and ends” (66). New fashions are seamlessly introduced without officially acknowledging the end of the previous ones. The passing of a trend alludes to an ending but never acknowledges it directly.  There is also the revival of the old and the appropriation (see Baudrillard) of the past that complicates the passing of time.  What does it mean to have an organization of time that both strongly alludes to the relationship between life and death but “mocks” (66) it at the same time? What role does life or the organic have when all desire is directed by the inorganic? The living body is the only constant in the society driven by the asymptotic approach to death, besides the constancy of change.  That body, however, has no place in the context of society, no role in the crowd, without a coupling with death.

---

[1] Fashion itself is a completely performative concept.  The repetitive act of wearing clothing, reading fashion magazines about wearing (see Barthes’ The Fashion system), and purchasing clothes to wear constructs and sustains the fashion system. Out of context of the active body, Elizabeth Wilson describes, clothes evoke an uneasiness that comes from the breaking of the naturalized repetition of wearing the garments.

spirit of the beehive

A Spanish film by Victor Erice from 1973. Perfect costumes, i wish i could post the whole movie

homegrown

 

cut, dyed, sewn by me

worn by sasha

SELF SELF SELF

The modern self was filled with anxiety about the newly realized concept of identity as a construct. For the first time, identity was not limited to kinship, land, or monarchical ties and thus became, as Douglas Kellner in his essay “Constructing Postmodern Identities” describes, “mobile, multiple, personal, self-reflexive, and subject to change and innovation” (141). Modernity brought out a degree of awareness of the different social types one could present oneself as. Kellner writes, “one can choose and make—and then remake—one’s identity as fashion and life-possibilities change and expand” (142). Judith Butler analyzes this performance and construction of identity with respect to gender, and Kellner speaks more generally about the performing and the viewing of the performance as the formation of identities through recognition.

This topic of modernity and identity is one that I have been approaching in depth with regards to nineteenth-century Paris, but (as a non-history major) I always end up more interested in how identity formations carry through to the present. Theories of identity in the present, whether it is described as postmodern or a late modern formation, describe the same processes of construction but with a new kind of naturalized acceptance of the performativity and transience. There is a proliferation, a constant multiplication of types and identities that one can choose to construct for oneself, accompanied by an awareness of this possibility. Additionally, riding on the back of awareness and dissolution of anxiety is pastiche and endless “repetition of past images and forms.” (145) I had accepted repetition of past forms, pastiche, and meaninglessness as the basic underpinnings of fashion. But I have recently realized that that is a very specific postmodern vestimentary development. Although fashion--from the nineteenth century and beyond—has always appropriated from cross-cultural and historical traditions, its references became increasingly scattered, condensed, and flattened further into the modern/postmodern age. The sixties were marked by innovation in fabrics, looking to the future, and influenced by the political climate of the cold war, etc. John Galliano, however, perfected and solidified the form of drawing from narratives of the past and spectacularizing the in the present. The 1990s, less than 20 years ago, were a major trend on the runways this year. Is our postmodern awareness of the speed and possibility of reconstructing identity keeping up with the speed of production? Does it have to be necessity? I think that fashion blogs and metropolitan cities in which keeping up with the trends is a visible necessity (at least for those looking), there task of anxiety-production is more exclusive to the Luddite-type as the real and the virtual increasingly coincide. 

 

pastiche of death and religion in Comme des Garcons and Jeremy Scott

 

Desperately Seeking Susan- Susan (Madonna) and her friend draw from every which way, Jackie Stacey analyzes the function of identification and desire in her essay "Desperately Seeking Difference".

Another question I constantly have is, does awareness of your own self-construction bring back essentialist notions of the true self? Berger describes the woman watching herself being watched—is not one of those woman identities a more “real” self that experiences the construction? The Internet and its use in producing identities takes this question to the extreme. In terms of fashion blogs (like this one, kind of) there is a real person, a physical mass, sitting at their screen creating an image of herself. Through her hyper-linking and uploading, she can construct her identity as “fashion forward”, to use the most reflexive example, or she can post a picture of someone else dressing in a “prepster” look. In both of these cases, the identity constructed does not necessarily correspond to how the individual actually feels about herself, or her personal history, or what she will go do after she finishes the blog post. Does postmodern theory say that that is irrelevant? Kellner argues for the importance of content and value in postmodern superficiality, saying that identity does not disappear in a sea of meaningless signifiers but is just reconstituted. Does this reconstitution account for virtual reality? I am trying to find room for simultaneous, multiple constructions of identity and what occurs at the root. Additionally, the ultimate goal is to figure out fashion and fashion culture’s role in that either as a representation and exemplification of these constructive experiences or an agent in them.

the devil wears pravda

SET

kanye please

i'm still not sure if i think this is too weird or too awesome, but
costumes by phillip lim, art direction by vanessa beecroft, more please
kanye is the new matthew barney
purple black is the new black

What about actual production?

This week I read descriptions of two very disparate sides of fashion. First, I continued my exploration into the production of identity and the relationship that adornment has to self-definition in Jennifer Craik’s The Face of Fashion and Davis’ Fashion, Culture, Identity.  Then I completely switched gears to the history of production in the fashion industry, as told by Elizabeth Wilson in Adorned in Dreams. Also, this reading was all against the backdrop of New York Fashion week as I took a trip to the JF and Son show that I worked on over the summer. As these three sides of fashion converge—the history of production and exploitative labor, the coding of garments to signify self, and the fashion show of an independently produced line of which I am very personally invested—my mind returns to the familiar muddled state in which I question the significance and relevance of everything I have been working on.

In The Face of Fashion, Craik sets her goal as the “dissolution and reconstruction” of the term ‘fashion’.  She sees the relationship fashion has to society not as a singular trajectory of influence but an overall permeation through different realms of society. The “technology” of fashion relates but is not unique to the economic system of fashion because we see it in other modes of adornment such as religious, military, and mourning dress.  Aspects that she notes to be specific to the western, economically dependent fashion system include planned obsolescence (system as contingent on “newness, or newness”), the consumer relationship, the aesthetic expression of current “ideas, desires, beliefs circulating society”, and ambivalence.  Just as she positions high fashion’s non-singular influence in society, Craik poses the process of self-identification through adornment as one that is not necessarily a flat projection.  Codes of dress, according to Craik, are an active construction of “the relationship between the body and its lived milieu… [And] clothes construct a personal habitus”.  This notion of personal space implies a depth of self that works in interplay with the body. Craik writes, “Clothing and immediate surroundings are used to protect and project a sense of self”.  I hope to unpack the dual function of protection and projection with future work.

As I work my way through fashion theory I continue to discover new paradoxes of fashion.  Most of them relate to the theoretical or ideological productions of fashion. But the biggest paradox of the fashion system is the masquerade of the glamorous image behind which lies the exploitative sweatshop factory.  Wilson discusses how the late 19^th century rise of mass production and consumerism brought on both growing freedom for middle class women and growing danger for labor class girls as they went blind in factories and lived at the mercy of the supervisor. The freedom comes to those women to can afford to consume and actively engage in the processes of projection/protection Craik discusses. There is thus a fetishization of production that, like most of the contradictions within the rigid fashion system, has not changed since its inception. If anything, it is greater because the labor has moved overseas and further away from the spotlight of fashion.  How does this reposition the consumer? Does it set up America in relation to countries of production such as China now in the way that Uptown, bourgeois New York related to the Lower East Side in the 1910’s? What does it mean that the uptown vs. downtown contrast with respect to clothing is now mostly that of aesthetics and style rather modes of living and working?

Perhaps in a convenient coincidence, JF and Son is a young company with a storefront in Soho that aims to dissolve the gap between production and consumption.  Fair trade working condition and independent owner ship allow the costumer to know the exact source of the garment they are buying.  The owners are also not interested in the spectacle and glitz of the fashion world because they know what comes with it such as dictatorial systematization, unfair overseas production, environmental waste, etc.  It is my hope that this shift will influence fashion more and another, more physical reconstitution of the term will be necessary. But judging from the constancy of the traditional system is there any hope of a coup? 

hes the one

You know when you find that person that is doing exactly what you want to do but awesomely and it makes you want to just give up? Or take the more positive option and scour the internet for their contact information so you can be enveloped in their cloud of inspiration? Well, I just did that after finding Charles Anastase, a french designer who showed at London Fashion week. Its a name I'd heard before but never really known, and I even had a couple images from his SS2009 show on my computer that I've been trying to trace for years. So I guess he's my 'type', which is cool to know.
He plays with conventions of femininity and messes around with proportions in a way that makes my heart melt. The combinations of textures and prints and colors are mismatched and coordinated in that precarious balance that I strive to teeter on. Give me more but take it away before I get depressed!

i have no more words

"delight in disorder"

A sweet disorder in the dress

Kindles in clothes a wantonness

A lawn about the shoulders thrown

Into a fine distraction:

An erring lace, which here and there

Enthralls the crimson stomacher:

A cuff neglectful, and thereby

Ribbands to flow confusedly:

A winning wave, deserving note, in the tempestuous petticoat:

A careless shoe-string, in whose tie

I see a wild civility

Do more bewitch me, than when art

Is too precise in every part

by robert herrick

spring 2011 so far: gary graham and band of outsiders

+ my mantle

The Fashion System according to Barthes

In The Fashion System, Roland Barthes talks not about the garments that construct the system of fashion but about the written text that breathes life, gives meaning to, constructs myth around said garments.  This presents, or rather resolves, the chicken-or-the-egg question about the Fashion System and its operations in the larger cultural context.  What came first: prints at the races or the Vogue article about prints at the races? In both The Fashion System and “Myth Today”, Barthes describes the process of the appropriate of myth in society via discourse.  He therefore separates the physical object of the printed dress, for example, from the written code that signifies and equates it with fashion. This is most basically explained at the beginning of “Myth Today” when Barthes describes how, “things pass from closed, silent existence to an oral [or written] state, open to appropriate by society” (Mythologies 109).  To apply this to the process by which a garment goes from a silent, soley technological  existence to a Fashion sign, Barthes describes how the writing of fashion signifies the signified ideology of fashion. Without the writing and discourse of fashion which makes up the vestimentary code, “fashion is an arbitrary value” (Fashion System 39). 

To summarize briefly that which Barthes explains almost to the point of exhaustion, there are two types of relationships that can be formed in the utterances that signify the ideology of fashion. The explicit, “Set A”, or the “real vestimentary code” is a sentence that set up an equation between real clothing and the world. For example, “prints win at the races” equates the real garment with the activity in the world. Set B implicitly establishes the vestimentary code in that the clothing signifies Fashion itself without relating it to a concrete place or action (“women will shorten skirts to the knee”(37)). These two sets operate on the most elemental level of the rhetorical system of fashion; They become the signified for the “Written vestimentary code” which them is the signifier of the “Connotation of Fashion” which finally comes to signify the “Rhetorical system” (37). 

What stuck with me from Barthes’ analysis of the method by which fashion rhetoric emerges was the life breathed into the garment by the written word. I was skeptical to place so much responsibility on fashion reporting and magazines, not wanting to blindly accept or even relate Barthes to what Meryl Streep proposes in the The Devil Wears Prada. But, after revisiting Mythologies I realized the primary importance of discourse in creating myth.  This relationship of dependency that Barthes poses between the speech/image/discourse and the real object is still turning in my mind. In “Myth Today he writes, “mythical speech is made of a material which as already been worked on” (110). Then in The Fashion System, he takes apart he “already worked on” material and at the hands of the description. He writes “The described garment is a fragmentary garment”. All that is coded as fashion is what is chosen to be emphasized in the discourse. “Prints” or “white details” or “open collars” (what Barthes terms “variants”) stand alone in the description as a fragment of the real. This investigation of whole material existence but fragmentary and amputated rhetorical existence could prove to be an interesting topic to explore and develop in a physical project.

today, with the fading of print journalism, websites like Style.com are the source for fashion tips and thus the creators of the fashion rhetoric.  This screenshot shows the new, most explicit and image-dependent ways of constructing the real vestimentary code. These flat images of garments are equated with real life activities and places such as, as seen here, the summer music festival. Does this change the way the fashion rhetoric is constructed from what Barthes was saying? Is it more didactic or less or is that not even an issue?