Ninotchka, it’s only a hat!
If fashion is your trade
then when you’re naked
I guess you must be unemployed, yeah
-Pulp
Was annoyed to discover that my taste in dresses exceeds my budget by a considerable margin. Why do I even try on $120 dresses? It’s downright masochistic.
-from a blog entry by Juniper June
On fashion: I hate The Gap as much as anybody, and not solely because of their ties to sweatshop labor. I also hate them because they make boring, conventional clothing that is often ugly. I hate them because they spawned variants like American Eagle Outfitters, who try to do everything in their power to limit American men to the range of fashions displayed in the film A River Runs Through It. So I am starting out with some appreciation for fashion, including high fashion, simply because it’s not bland, baggy, and sunflower yellow.
It used to be that you had to give The Gap some credit. Fashion shoots would use Gap basics as foundations, and then build around them with interesting jackets, or skirts, or accessories. Also, it was a cheap place to buy sturdy clothing. Nowadays, American Apparel is better at making basic clothing at affordable (if not bargain) prices.
Fashion is in the air a lot right now, because of America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway. That means potential alternatives to The Gap, which is a good thing. It also means a return of what I like to call The Comment About Fashion, which goes like this: “Fashion is an under-appreciated mode of personal expression; though it is frequently accused of being superficial, it is actually one of the most immediate and effective ways of bringing the aesthetic into real life. It catalyzes a love of detail and a smart, rhetorical appreciation of audience.”
Of course, nobody would use the word “catalyzes” except under duress, but you get the point: fashion lets us exclaim our identities to the world, and turns those identities into a poem. I have had this conversation about twice a year since my sophomore year of college, and I usually agree with it. I am pleased to announce that fashion has finally grabbed so much of the spotlight that it is now worth trying to define a place within the world of fashion. Let me try to define mine, not by wearing something (I’m wearing an undershirt and shorts, with jogging shoes and intentions towards the gym), but by writing something.
1. Fashion is a symbol of identity, not identity. Therefore it is necessarily either transient, or oppressive.
The moment, at the prom, when the prom dress matters most, is the very first moment the spectator sees it. So, there is the first viewing by a sibling, and the first viewing by friends. There is the first viewing by the parents, the first viewing by the date, the first viewing by the assembled crowd in the high school gym. However, what happens at the prom has more to do with the people inside the dresses and tuxedoes, and doesn’t depend on the dress unless something goes terribly wrong.
Of course, if someone lives up to their costume, that is electrifying. It’s like discovering that rare writer who talks like the people in her books. Still, at that point fashion becomes an accessory to a performance, and not something in and of itself. It moves from the foreground to the background, and this is what ought to happen. Only in the artificial setting of the runway, under the icy spell of celebrity, can fashion appear to be an absolute.
(That’s what I love about the lyric from Pulp. Javis Cocker describes a person who is so dependent on the static image they have prepared, that they have no way of explaining themselves or deciding their actions under the vulnerable conditions of intimacy.)
Not all fashion is prepared to fade into the background. Some pieces of clothing are so constricting, or bulky, or painful, or fragile that they can’t survive more than a few kinds of activity. At that point they begin to be, not the expression of the person, but the sacrifice of the person. Much has been made of the fashion model’s body type; among other things, the extreme thinness of the female model looks right because she is literally being consumed by clothing.
This is why fashion is different from something like a wall hanging, which is also more noticeable at first than it is after an hour. The wall hanging does not have to be specifically designed to accomodate a person. That usually makes for boring art. It also does not have to be worn.
2. Fashion cannot escape the body. If we maintain a certain irony towards the body, we are obliged to take the same stance towards fashion.
Fashion is an art of desire.
Consider the following picture, from the recent New York Times article “Mad About London” (September 24, 2006). What’s the first thing you’re thinking? Right, that a black bear has jumped on the model’s head. But let’s assume we can’t see her face because she’s turned towards Giles Deacon; it could be a pretty sweet hat. Certainly the dress with the piano fringe is appealing.
Where the dress ends, a pair of long legs begins. The dress doesn’t make sense without them; another sort of woman would never be able to wear it.
We’re all sick of hearing about how modeling causes anorexia and drowned Ophelia. I’m not sure that the fashion industry is entirely responsible, but in any case, I’m not here to reiterate that point. However, I will say that an industry that needs a continual supply of young and beautiful people creates a confusion in everyone’s mind between youth, beauty, and the deliberate achievements of art.
Beautiful people are always in fashion. They can wear a T-shirt or a hoodie and seem to be stylishly casual. If they don’t sleep all night, they look fetchingly ragged, where another person will look shockingly worn. At a party, a beautiful person with style will paralyze many and draw the rest, while a plain person will risk “trying too hard” and will get a heap of suspect compliments.
So we overcome this disparity by holding our judgements somewhat in reserve; without jettisoning beauty altogether, we accept that it isn’t fairly distributed, and that nobody looks particularly good in the middle of a bad head cold. We try to look through it — but that also means admitting that most fashionable clothing is designed to be the ornament of a desirable body. We have to confront the truth that anyone can live in a beautiful house, but not everyone can improve equally on the gifts of fashion.
*
So I’m proposing we laugh at fashion like we laugh at ourselves, and not without affection. Perhaps a lightness of touch with regard to this peculiar art will also help us navigate the murky waters of price, and the consumer imperatives and class hierarchies that are inseparable from fashion. After all, one can invite friends into a richly appointed house, but fashion, for the most part, is a solitary stage.
In the spirit of that laughter, I bring you my top five, all-time fashion disasters:
1. A belt pack. I didn’t know it was going to look like a codpiece. I wore it at a summer camp full of people in black turtlenecks, who smoked cloves, and didn’t care a fig for the real convenience a belt pack affords.
2. A pair of Wranglers. Ha ha, cowboy style is hip now. It sure wasn’t on the one day in my entire life I have ever worn a pair of Wranglers, junior year of high school. I had received the pants from my mother; neither she nor I had any idea what they meant. They meant developing the sort of closeness with the bathroom that every high schooler develops on their own special Day Of Mortification. I have never been called “pardner” so much in my life.
3. A black and white checkered shirt. I wore it to a breakfast with a bunch of old friends, one of whom immediately shouted: “Holy shit! What happened to you in England?”
4. A chartreuse green button-up shirt with shorts. I looked sort of like a casualty of Three Feet High and Rising, and was treated accordingly.
5. White jeans that didn’t fit. I couldn’t move in them, I couldn’t breathe in them, and the very first thing that happened to them involved a chocolate dessert.
What about you?
My fashion disasters? Too many to count. I don’t even think I dress very well to begin with. Let’s see… I have a closet full of stuff people would find hideous. But the absolute worst? Jeans that sit above my belly button. >
If I had my own blog (which I may well soon – the amount of time I spend responding to your and tomemos’ make me think I may have something to say), this would be titled: “how the movie adaptation of the Devil Wears Prada taught me stop worrying and love fashion”
Yes, I’m being entirely serious. There is just one remarkable scene where Meryl Streep eviscerates her assistant – who had just before contemptuously referred to fashion as “this stuff” – by describing the process by which a particular hue trickles down from fashion houses and publications to couture collections, to department stores, all the way down until shirts in that hue can be found at your local Gap. This is all to say that while we can laugh at fashion, or treat it with irony, the very clothes we wear would not exist were it not for the creative decisions – however far removed – made in those houses and publications. We cannot pretend we’re outside of it; we live in the world that fashion creates whether we like it or not.
You also fault fashion for not being able to escape the body. I’m not sure whether this is even entirely true, nor why it is necessarily a criticism. Great aesthetic effect is often achieved by negotiating with the formal constraints of a particular genre – thus, the beauty of a sonnet. This isn’t about turning the body into a work of art or treating clothing as an expression of identity, but rather the body constituting formal and generic boundaries with which fashion-as-art must contend. Art is not limited to being displayed on walls and pedestals.
While I think you’re right to emphasize the sign-function of fashion, with all of the problems that entails, I feel like this post both over and understates the implications of fashion-as-sign. Two points:
1) The Overstatement: “I hate The Gap … because they make boring, conventional clothing that is often ugly. I hate them because they spawned variants like American Eagle Outfitters, who try to do everything in their power to limit American men to the range of fashions displayed in the film A River Runs Through It.”
While you’re right to highlight the significant, if somewhat ambivalent, power of fashion as a means of self-expression or as a way into the aesthetic, I think that, the implications of your argument about fashion-as-sign actually runs counter to your conclusions about Gap (sweatshops not withstanding). The problem comes down to the fact that conventional clothing is a duplicitous sign. It means at least two things that are not compatible:
a) It claims to signify identity transparently: I identify myself as identical to everyone else, and I attempt to communicate this by dressing like everyone else, or…
b) It signifies precisely your point #1, the recognition of a gap between sign and referent: the clothing’s own inadequacy as a sign of identity, an abdication of fashion as an expressive means.
I would argue that this ambivalence is inherent in all forms of fashion to some degree. Legibility is always thrown off by the possibility of deceipt (the person that doesn’t live up to their costume, or the commodification of, for example, punk by mall punk) or irony (see Kill Bill, especially vol. 2, especially the bit about Superman dressed as Clark Kent).
I think it’s possible to say this and in the same breath still affirm the potential of fashion as an aesthetic form, or even, as Brandon suggests, to understand fashion as a sort of burden. But to do this I think we have to understand expressive fashion as no more than opening–the production or expression of an ambiguous sign in order to necessitate the question of the meaning of that sign (i.e the identity to which it refers) rather than in order to answer that question or close it off.
2) The Understatement: “What happens at the prom has more to do with the people inside the dresses and tuxedoes, and doesn’t depend on the dress unless something goes terribly wrong.”
Let me start by saying the images the end of this sentences provoked were endlessly amusing. I wonder what you and other readers had in mind as far as what could go terribly wrong…
Anyway, of course the importance of the people inside tuxes and prom dresses is undeniable. I don’t mean to deny this. But this scenario brings to mind an alternative possibility. I’m thinking about my prom and the dress Sarah was wearing. And I think it mattered. Not more than Sarah, and not as in any way a sign communicating identity. If Sarah had been a different person it wouldn’t have mattered what dress she was wearing. But Prom, for me, played an important formative role in what is now a seven year relationship. I think it did so in part because it created a shared experience on the basis of an idealized performance. Fashion in this sense plays a role in a spectacle in which disbelief is suspended rather than abandoned, in which nothing is signified but this very suspension.
Spectacle can of course be good or bad. Triumph of the Will is, after all, a sort of fashion show. But in our academic discussions of fashion, let’s keep in mind that fashion-as-sign does not always work by positing an identity which is then to be verified as true or false. If we’re going to take fashion seriously as a sign system, I think we need to grant it the possibility of all of the complex and competing modes of signification we typically grant to literary signs.
I am of course obliged to think about your remarks on fashion in the context of Burning Man. For me, at the event, there was an unpleasant tension between “fashion as expression” and “fashion as display.” The ideology of fashion at Burning Man seems to be the former– “dress like a dryad if at heart, you are truly a wood nymph”– but in practice, I got a sense that the latter sentiment was the transparent motivation behind a lot of costumes– “dress like a dryad if you wish to appear appropriately eccentric and sexy.” It was really uncomfortable for me, as an observer, to find myself having these uncharitable thoughts about people– I wanted to believe that this was a place where everyone was truly a dryad, a fairy, a satyr, but I felt as though I kept just seeing people out on the prowl in slightly weirder getup than they would be sporting in their local nightclub.
Your entry and Matt’s comment above help me see that what I was experiencing at Burning Man were the weird effects of an environment where the “expressive” function of fashion is heavily emphasized. In the real world, I would posit that we feel obliged to “look past appearances” even while, as Matt points out, we feel a contradictory tug toward decoding a possible “expressive” message in someone’s clothing choices. What’s so weird about fashion at Burning Man, then, might be that we are supposed to look at appearances, or through them as though they are reliable signifiers, instead of trying piously to tune them out. And this is why you and I caught flak for not wearing costumes– our street clothes were read as though they signified something like “I’m not that into this.”
That said, I should admit that I’ve always embraced fashion as a mode of self-expression– though it’s a strange and murky art. I stand in front of my closet each morning and try to figure out what it will feel right to be wearing today. As I’m sure you’ve noted, long skirts of one variety or another are generally what feels right these days– where “these days” = the past 10 years. I suppose it’s just some idea of an earth-goddess type femininity that’s lodged deep in my reptile brain.
I have committed many of what seem, in retrospect, to be unconscionable fashion disasters– but at the time I was perfectly happy with all of them.
1) Culottes (elementary school) — I am genuinely ashamed of these in retrospect.
2) Pale pink bellbottoms (high school) — they had little red flowers on them; people called them my “strawberry shortcake pants.” I loved them and embraced this epithet.
2) Purple velvet pants (high school and college) — for a while in high school, I was really into purple. I would show up to school in entirely purple outfits, complete with sunglasses with purple lenses. Pictures exist!
P.S. Your link to my blog is totally mistyped. It is somewhat shamefully a livejournal, and not a blogspot blog.
If you can share the beltpack outfit I’ll admit to my spandex horror. Black biker shorts with with white polka dots, and black lace trim…worn with a spandex top that perfectly mirrored the shorts. Biker shorts; a true fashion disaster.
any guy who quotes Pulp is ok by me!
my FAVE fashion: fannypacks! not even in the ironic sense!
What’s wrong with black biker shorts and black lace trim? sounds like my dream outfit.
then again, i’m tacky.
Sorry Kugelmass – I will comment and read more when it’s not way past my bedtime. NEW BLOG MEAT! GRR!