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?