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.

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[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