Transcript Fashion Theory

The Clothed Body
Patrizia Calefato
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Fashion theory: between
semiotics and cultural studies
• The term ‘fashion theory’ refers to an
interdisciplinary field that sees fashion as
a meaning system within which cultural
and aesthetic portrayals of the clothed
body are produced.
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The use of the term ‘fashion theory’ points to
a transverse theoretical approach which,
in advance of any professional know-how,
constructs favourable conditions and
theoretical filters by selecting from among
the human and social sciences (including
literature, philosophy and art) the fashion
system understood as a special dimension
of material culture, the history of the body,
the theory of sensibility.
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• Fashion Theory is also the title of an
international quarterly edited by Valerie Steele
and published by Berg (Oxford) since 1997
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Antecedents and fundamentals
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Georg Simmel
Thorstein Veblen
Werner Sombart
Walter Benjamin
Linguistic structuralism
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Georg Simmel (1858-1918)
• Georg Simmel’s 1895 essay on fashion
defines it as a system of social cohesion
that allows the individual’s membership
of a group to be dialectically reconciled
with his relative spiritual independence.
Fashion, says Simmel, is governed by
motives of imitation and distinction,
which are transmitted vertically to the
community by a particular social circle.
They are accompanied by the
‘stimulating, piquant’ charm that fashion
conveys through what Simmel describes
as the ‘contrast between its broad, allpervading dissemination and its rapid,
fundamental evanescence’ and as the
‘right to be unfaithful to it’
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Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)
• Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory
of the Leisure Class (1899)
includes spending on clothing
as part of conspicuous
consumption by the upper
middle classes
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Werner Sombart (1863-1941)
• Sombart (1913) takes the view
that spending (especially by
women) on luxuries, of which
clothing and cocotteries are a
significant part, has been a key
feature of capitalism ever since
its original accumulation phase.
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Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
• Fashion is the “sex appeal of the
inorganic”.
• Fashion represents the triumph of the
commodity form, in which the body
has become a cadaver, a fetish. In
fashion, in an exemplary manner, the
relationships between the living and
the inorganic are Marxistically
inverted and duplicated: the (female)
body displays the charm of a
devitalised, estranged nature, and
remains as an envelope, an
adornment, a cadaveric support for
clothing.
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Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857-1913)
• Course of general
linguistics
• fashion, unlike language, is not a
completely arbitrary system, since the
obsession with clothing that fashion implies
can only move so far beyond the conditions
dictated by the human body.
• The mechanism of imitation concerns both
the phenomenon of fashion and the
phonetic changes in language, but its
origin, says the Course, remains a mystery
in both cases.
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Nikolaj Trubeckoj (1890-1938)
• There is a homologous relationship
between the system of language and
the system of clothing, between
phonology and study of costumes,
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Pëtr Bogatyrëv (1893-1971)
• Analysis of the folk costume of Moravian
Slovakia, using a functionalist approach
that identified a hierarchy of functions in
the costume, including practical, aesthetic,
magical and ritual functions :
• practical
• aestetical
• magical
• ritual
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Edward Sapir
(1884-1939)
• He wrote the ‘fashion’ entry in
the Encyclopaedia of the Social
Sciences, in which he
established the differences
between fashion and taste and
between fashion and costume,
in that the latter is a relatively
stable type of social behaviour,
whereas the former is subject to
constant change.
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Clothing, fashion, identity
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Roland Barthes
(1915-1980),
The Fashion
System, 1967
• Fashion as a social discourse
• Barthes does not deal here with real fashion, but with
fashion as described in magazines
• The garment is completely converted into language
• Even image is merely used in order to be transposed into
words
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• Barthes’ lesson, which thus goes beyond actual
semiology, is that fashion only exists through the
apparatus, technologies and communication
systems that construct its meaning.
• The post-modern context makes clear that a
whole series of social discourses from film to
music, the new media and advertising, are the
places where fashion exists as a syncretic,
intertextual system, as a reticular reference
between the signs of the clothed body and as a
constant construction and deconstruction of the
subjects that negotiate, interpret or receive its
meaning.
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Dick Hebdige: Subculture (1979)
• style as a form of aesthetic and ethical
group membership in mass society with
emerging in crowd cultures made up of
blocks that include ways of dressing,
music, literature, film and daily habits – a
pop universe that is expressed in ‘street
styles’ ranging from rockers to punks,
which Hebdige contrasts with fashion seen
as one of the ‘pre-eminent forms of
discourse’.
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M. Mc Laren & V. Westwood, end 70s
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The Wild Ones, Peter Lindbergh 1991
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From trickle-down to bubble-up,
• ‘Trickle-down’ is turned into ‘bubble-up’, as
is clearly shown by the history of two
garments that are emblematic of the
twentieth century: jeans and the mini-skirt.
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Carnaby Street, 1967
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Fashion as mass fashion
• The place where ‘a complexity of tensions,
meanings and values – and not only in
relation to clothing’ is manifested.
• This complexity is centred on the body and
the ways in which it exists in the world, is
represented, is masked, disguised and
measured, and clashes with stereotypes
and mythologies.
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The clothed body
• is the physico-cultural territory in which the
visible, perceivable performance of our
outward identity takes place. This
composite cultural text-fabric provides
opportunities for the manifestation of
individual and social traits that draw on
such elements as gender, taste, ethnicity,
sexuality, sense of belonging to a social
group or, conversely, transgression.
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Gender identity and clothing
• gender identity through fashion plays with
the canonic, stereotyped ways of
portraying male and female on the one
hand, and the challenges to the dominant
discourse that are conveyed by the signs
of the body on the other.
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Rita
Hayworth,
Gilda
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Humphrey
Bogart, 1953
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Young
Dinkas,
Sudan
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Etudes d’étoffes, G.
de Clérambault,
1918-34, Marocco
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Etudes
d’étoffes, G. de
Clérambault,
1918-34,
Marocco
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Coco
Chanel,
1929
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Burberry, coll.
2000-2001
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Young
Japanese
man
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Windowlicker,
1999
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Pubblicità Ferré jeans
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Dal film “The Full
Monty”, P. Cattaneo, 1997
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Dal film “Priscilla la regina
del deserto”, S. Elliot, 1994
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‘From sidewalk (or street) to
catwalk’
• the places of everyday culture are those
that determine fashions even before style
research has produced the actual artefact
as a luxury commodity sign.
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Narrativity
• Every fashion effectively contains within it
a narrative, or story, that explains its uses
and determines its rhythms
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Spatiality
• The street, the catwalk, the whole world
become spaces, territories in which
objects come to life and bodies interact.
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Myth
• Fashions take constructions of meaning
and figures of imagination which are
reproduced in the social sphere and make
them emblematically natural and eternal,
even if transient.
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Sensoriness
• Human senses, in their complexity and
reciprocity, are at work in the reproduction
and communication of fashions
• There are stereotypes of feeling, but there
are also forms of excessive sensoriness
which can use the intrinsic fetishism of
fashion, the living power of objects and
garments, to invert and humanise their
meaning.
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