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Stop the Fashion System? The
revolution cited ancient Rome, just as fashion cites an antiquated dress.
Fashion has a scent for what is current, whenever this moves within the
thicket of what was once. —Walter Benjamin The word fashion, adapted from the French façon and from the latin factio implies a making, a giving
shape or form to something. Moreover, the word fashion is related to a
particular way or “mode” of making something—hence the French term mode and the Italian moda.[1] With these etymological premises in
mind, I would like to consider the text as a process of metonymy within the
ongoing act of making, or fashioning. As factio,
the fashion text is a complex of signs which we find belonging to two
different natures and grammars: verbal and visual.[2] As mode,
fashion, especially in Italy in the last few years, has become a big industry
with a complicated apparatus and a network of social hegemony (advertising,
cinema, television, videomusic, etc.). In a way, this industry is a
consequence of an ideology that praises the triumph of appearances, and the
eager and quick consumption of images. Such a phenomenon represents the
condition of a mass-society where one celebrates the superficiality of
fashion as a mere image (mode), and where it has become more difficult to
criticize a given text or discourse. What do I mean by this? Reality is a very
intricate and complex network of “knowledges,” fragmented into very
specialized fields. The more knowledge we acquire, the more segmented and
specialized this knowledge becomes. In this process of specialization, we may
lose a much broader understanding of the mechanism constituting a given society.
Such a fact also represents a limit to our knowledge. More and more we seem
to be interested in our particular, individual dimensions and we are losing
curiosity and the opportunity to know and explore different universes that
appear to be far from those individual ones. What has become more and more
difficult is to employ a critical
attitude and method toward the “reading” of a text or a given reality. More
often, the text is accepted or rejected uncritically according to the current
fashionable ideology. Fashion (as mode)
with all its enchanting universe of simulations and appearences, represents a
text par excellence, but a very
complex one. The image in the fashion text represents a
site where different languages coexist; it is for this reason that images are
so powerful. They can constitute a discourse in themselves and initiate a
discourse which is organized and articulated depending on social and
political instances. It happens that having the right “look” for the
appropriate circumstance or event is like wearing the right mask or also
knowing the rules of the social and political game. Alternatively, an outfit
may not be considered appropriate to the situation, that is, it may not
“fit.” For instance, it is interesting to observe that the English verb
“suit” means “to meet the needs or wishes of, to be convenient for, or also
to fit in with.” The French word “complet”
is clearly related to the idea of wholeness. The very name and its function
seem to meet here on the plane of representation. Apparently a “suit”
suggests the notion of a certain integrity or wholeness and “plenitude,” that
may or may not exist, a plenitude which may “mask” a fragmented self. Traditionally the different images of women
on a methaphoric level and those conveyed by the fashion-system have been
produced in order to fulfill men’s needs. From the ethereal angels to the
dark ladies, women were not autonomous subjects
producing a discourse, they were objects
of discourse, ideology and expectations of a male dominated society. As a
consequence these objects have been
considered and perceived as subjects,
and identities with which other women can identify. In so doing one confuses
the very rules of the game that is politically connotated. A game that is not
neutral, such as language. It is interesting to note that, especially
in the latest fashion trends, there has been a very strong emphasis on the
erotization of the look, showing powerful and sexy bodies recalling the myths
of Hollywood (both female and male) in magazine advertisements. What is
ironic in this very theatrical mise en
scene is that, parallel to this trend, many other changes have been
taking place. I am referring to the many subtle ethical changes in personal
relationships that have rendered them more and more difficult in the eighties
and nineties, the post-Aids culture. In the seventies feminist movements, in
Italy, claimed that “Il personale è politico” (“personal life has a political
connotation”). This was an important achievement for the feminist movement,
because in so doing personal lives and diverse experiences of women were
discussed and revisited on political grounds, and were not confined any more
to the hidden places of private life. Feminists claimed that the first thing
that needed to be changed in a male dominated society were personal
relationships between men and women, friends, lovers and family. They also
maintained that the liberation of a woman’s sexuality could occur by
acquiring a new awareness of her own body and erotic drives. At that time the
“correct” feminist look was supposed to be very “masculine” and if someone
dared to look more “feminine” she was not considered a proper feminist. Her
“look” was not politically correct, because she was seen as playing the
male’s game, thus reaffirming his power. Another source of this complexity is that
we live in a technological society where the notion of time has completely
changed, and which has led to certain paradoxes in contemporary life. On the
one hand, we are asked to maintain a certain “speed” (in careers, personal
affairs, etc.) and to act according to its dictates. On the other, we need to
be attentive to critical perspectives. Yet such analyses require time (a
deceleration) which we do not “have” and which in its present accelerated
state does not encourage the process of thinking. This paradox also takes
place in an academic environment, where people are required to think. The continous multiplication
of discourses and information due to highly sophisticated technologies,
fragments knowledge into a number of disciplines, and it also fragments our
experience in life and our relationship with reality. In the acceleration of
a technological society we often cannot discern our functions as actors and
spectators in a reality which produces an enormous number of models to be
consumed quickly and immediately forgotten. In this way we lose the capacity
for criticism and self-criticism, and merely respond to the logic of the
“spectacle,” where information itself becomes part of the spectacle. Barthes criticizes the notion of
society-as-spectacle in a creative manner by viewing it from a sociological
perspective (Mytologies). He argues
that our age has to be called “the age of writing”—Ècriture—and not, as many
intellectuals affirm, one of “image” or spectacle. But as we know the notion
of “ècriture” is a very complex one and it changes in the various stages and
phases of Barthes’s career. Especially toward the end of his life his work
was concentrated on the combination and relationships between images and
words. This aspect would have led to a diverse notion of image, that is one which would not respect the rules of
spectacle. Let us consider one of the so-called “new
identities” which presents a stereotype: The woman-manager, or the
career-woman with an androgynous image. The icon of the androgynous woman has
been conceived, represented, and “sold” by the successful Italian fashion
designer Giorgio Armani, especially in the beginning of his career, both in
Italy and in the United States. As an example we might consider that if it
was innovative for women like George Sand in the nineteenth century to wear a
man’s suit and smoke a cigar, it is not so today. As a counter-example, note the phenomenon
of ultra feminine women, such as Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, whose
images prevail in many fashion magazines and advertisements and which the
industry packages as ideals, even as idols. The image is promoted without a
sense of irony and suggests another “model” with which women can identify.
All these contradictory phenomena complicate and articulate the association
between ideology and a certain fashion. As we have stated previously, in the
sixties and in the seventies it was very easy to deduce ideology and
political orientation from the way people were dressed (e.g. the famous
eskimo of the “sessantottino”). One of the main reasons for feminists in the
seventies to deny their femininity in their look was as a means to assert
their equality on the intellectual and social level with men. In so doing,
women’s aim was to weaken and control the power of the “male gaze,” in the
sense that by denying their femininity in dress, they would assert their own
existence not as sexual or erotic bodies, but as intellectual equals with
men. Furthermore, by doing this they also wanted to destroy those social
mechanism that view the female body as commodity. Women wanted to undermine
male power and its patriarchal values by overcoming the gap in social,
economic and political terms that exist between men and women. Consequently
there were political reasons, at that time, for dressing like a man and
refusing to wear feminine clothes, even though this kind of attitude did not
consider other aspects of the feminine universe. These kinds of features of
the “femminista militante” turned out to be after all another “prison.” This
was because in dressing like this, women were responding to another fixed
role or stereotype. These women believed that if one was feminist one could
not be feminine, otherwise nobody was going to take her serously, and so they
tried to dress like men in order to be considered equal to men. But by whom? By men, again, denying that difference which primarily comes from
the body. The body is an undeniable certainty of existence and presence of
the self-as-subject in the world. A feminine body occupies a different
space—in physical, social, and political terms—from a male one. Who decides,
then the rules and the modes of the game in personal relationships and in
society? Who decides which images to convey ideological, social and
moral/ethical values? Is there any space for a personal pleasure and taste?
Is there a chance for women to refuse a stereotypical role or image? These, I
think, were some of the questions which started to arise as a reaction to the
feminist ethics of the seventies. These problematic questions have led to
debates and discussions in many different fields of women’s studies in Italy.
(I am thinking of the formation of a group of philosophers such as Diotima).[4] In such a reality it is almost impossible
to immediately associate a particular look with a definite political
orientation as one could do in the sixties and the seventies. One of the
reasons is because the structures in
which political ideas are expressed and conveyed have completely changed as
well. These aspects might also explain why political parties do not respond,
or have trouble responding to, the social changes and needs of people,
especially the younger generations. All these described aspects were actually
present in various political and feminist groups in the late seventies. They
did not belong to political parties, nevertheless they were trying to express
their dissatisfaction with certain rigid codes and modes employed by the
parties or institutions in order to understand their different needs. These
were meant, for example, to assert the principle of “Quality of life.” This
issue required the political parties to rethink their modes but also the
political domains and tenets that lead toward the transformation of society.
One of the dangers in our society where information becomes a spectacle, is
that media appropriates some feminist or progressive slogans and renders them
clichès. Consequently their original
intended meaning is completely lost and the hierarchy and value systems
governing a given society never change. The modes and forms shift, but they
remain the same in their substane. In this way, the rules governing social
values seem to be reaffirmed even more strongly, instead of being questioned
or criticized. In the current fashion scene we can
observe an aspect of “carnivalization” on one hand, and on the other, a
constant recurrence of quotations from different ages and epochs. These
aspects deal with the notion of identity, and refer to the ancient myth of
the mask, as Barthes observes in his Système
de la mode. Thus, fashion seems to articulate the Sphinix’s questions on
identity—Who am I?, Who are you?—which are both tragic and playful at the same
time. Fashion has a lot to do with fascination
and the desire of the wearer to seduce and enchant through the evocative
power of dress, and also to The logic of “carnivalization” which
underscores these “trends” in the fashion industry today has a different
nature than it had in the past. First, the fashion industry claims that there
are no rules in fashion, that one ought to be free to choose a variety of
fashions and trends. At this point it might be useful to comment on the
Moschino’s advertisement. It says: “Stop the Fashion System” and then the
fashion designer Moschino himself tells us a story, which is more precisely a
fable, and like all fables has a moral at the end of it—“La moda non esiste
più, ma esistono la gente e i vestiti” (Fashion does not exist any more, only
people and clothes). What kind of meaning does this statement convey,
together with the images in the rest of the text? It seems very ambiguous.
Moschino, one of the top fashion-designers in Italy, is responsible along
with other designers for deciding about the look and consequently fashion. So
his saying that “fashion does not exist any more” is a contradiction in
terms. By negating fashion, he actually sends us the opposite message. In
other words, Moschino, in ironizing the fashion system with all its social
events—fashion shows —, makes them fashionable and thus responds to the
system itself. Moschino’s advertisement is a very clear example of the above
mentioned “carnival” atmosphere, in which the ideology of the fashion
industry is supported rather than subverted (thus it misreads Baktin’s
interpretation of “carnevalization”).[5] Moreover, since this “rule” is spread by
the mass media it is one to be followed, and thus precludes the sort of
freedom and subversion one associates with “carnival.” Lately there has been
a tendency in publicity and advertisement toward “narrativity.” Ads tell us
stories. Are they substituting the ancient storytellers? This tendency is
completely opposite to the logic of quick consumption of images and
experiences. The device which these texts activate is that of
memory, whose Reprinted with permission of NIKE, Inc. principles control
the making of a story and in more general terms of history. It is thus
interesting to recall the function of dress in literature with all its
evocative power. For example Goethe’s Werther or Albertine in Proust’s Recherche, and the association between
dress and love. Werther wished to be buried with the same clothes he wore the
first time he met his beloved Liselotte. Clothes, especially their colors,
seem to hold the secret and the particular “flavor” of a moment, it becomes
the visible and tangible sign of a moment that would otherwise have been
forgotten. The dress here becomes writing, which expresses the passage of
time with other words. These new types of narrative ads play with such
literary models constituting an example of intertextuality. In sum, there are two distinct tendencies:
one which suggests that subjects follow the rules of fashion and another
which maintains that subjects must distance themselves from such rules. The
latter element constitutes that which, within any given text, escapes its own
rules or any tidy ordering principle. It escapes what Barthes has called “le
sens obvie” (“L’obvie et L’obtus,” L’obvie
et L’obtus) and it overthrows the entropy of imagination and creativity
to which the clash of images, in the society of the spectacle, leads. Barthes, in the essay “L’obvie et
l’obtus,” offers the critic important theoretical insights for the
understanding of fashion. Here he distinguishes the “obvious meanining” of a
sign (which responds to the logic of communication or the “simple” act of
decoding a message) from its “obtuse meaning.” Barthes recovers the
mathematical reference of the word “obtuse,” which, in his own view, exceeds
the “common sense” or the canonical definition of the word. It is something
which is not comprehensible (from the Latin cum-prehendere—to contain) and consequently not conformable to
the rules of a pre-established symbolic order. In this way he also shows that
there is an obvious meaning and an “obtuse” in the word itself and its use.
Moreover, Barthes relates the obtuse meaning to the notion of “sense
supplementaire” which gives an imaginative openness to the text, and to the
notion of sign. Consequently, we can appropriate the “sens supplementaire”
within the concept of fashion as factio
and not as mode, and this projects
the “openness” of that concept. In this way, fashion as factio serves to undermine fashion texts, and can recover
Baktin’s notion of “carnivalization.” Thus, it may help free the subject from
the constraints (the “comprehension”) of rules, and perhaps from the tyranny
of the fashion system with its own dictates. The Barthesian view offered here suggests
another perspective which needs to be explored in further studies, not only in
mass culture but in literary criticism as well. Images as language do not
merely reflect the world—like a
passive mirror—, they represent it, or in some cases they “say” or express
the very moment of collision between different dimensions. Between language
and images a fluctuating passage is established—a passage—that creates the
textual space which the critic is involved in reading. Reading fashion as a text commits the
critic to an activity that is different from mere interpretaion such as
decoding a message. The latter suggests an attitude of mere explanation or
description which implies that a pre-established truth exists. The critic
should not simply discover these presumed hidden truths: the critic must
employ perspecvtives which recreates the text. The act of reading is not a
passive one and it is not so distant from writing or creating a text. In this
way a subtle interplay is established between the two acts of reading and
writing. In approaching a text one must question the very tools used as mechanisms
of trasformation. An ultimate interpretation does not exist since as we have
seen, the fashion text constitutes an example of the mobility of the text and
therefore of multiple interpretations. Fashion criticism in the society of
spectacle and information is a theoretical device with its threads, holes,
and even trends. Yet in it one can read the changes and multiplicity of a
reality with its ghosts, “replicants,” androids, and knights whose silk-armor
passes through the urban desert searching for a way to tailor the future. Eugenia Paulicelli Queens College, City Univerity of New York Works cited Bakhtin, M. L’opera di Rabelais e la cultura popolare: riso, carnevale e festa
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de Semiologie. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964. ___. Système
de la Mode. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967. ___. L’Empire
de Signes. Geneve: Skira, 1970. ___. “L’obvie et L’obtus.” L’Obvie et L’Obtus—Essais Critique III. Paris: Editions
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[1]The title of this essay is a quotation from Moschino’s famous Advertisement, which I consider as an example for my argument in the present discussion. I examine the Italian cultural and political landscape, where the structures of feminism differ from those belonging to Anglo-American culture. However, the way I discuss certain aspects of my own culture has been affected by my experience of working, teaching and living in the United States. To what extent the perception of my “italianità” has changed it is difficult to state and measure. It is very important for me that the two different languages and cultures are continuously involved in a dynamic relationship, which generates a diverse openness in the awareness of words and images I employ to describe and depict Italian phenomena.
[2]In the present essay the images (or the photographic texts) I have chosen both sup-port my argument that fashion can be seen as mode and as factio and are also part of the communicative “game” we establish with reality. Moreover, in the making of this game it is possible to note how images (in the streets, on different occasions, and in magazines, advertisements, film, television) might condition our actions (Factio) and our (Mode) to the point that our actions are accepted because they are fashionable.
I have considered a number of fashion magazines; Italian, American, French and Spanish that have given me many suggestions. I wish to thank Cristina Conception who introduced me to the American magazine Visionaire the Future whose art-work and cover-design are very intriguing. They gave me more ideas and diverse “images” on the fashion-system. See Cunningham (story and photograph).
I would also like to thank Stephen Sednaoui, Nike Inc.; Nick Braiol from Marilyn Monroe Estate; and, Michelle Stein from Moda & Co, Moshino for granting me permission to reporduce the photographs that illustrate this article.
[3]See page 24.
[4]See Holub’s “The Politics of Diotima.”
[5]See also the Nike tennis shoe ads. They are four pages long and present a strong emphasis on narrativity and the development of an argument with a “feminist” viewpoint.