Tuesday, September 21, 2010

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 19th 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? 

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