Fashion, Representation, Femininity
Transcription
Fashion, Representation, Femininity
Fashion, Representation, Femininity Author(s): Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton Source: Feminist Review, No. 38 (Summer, 1991), pp. 48-66 Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1395377 . Accessed: 31/05/2013 14:55 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Palgrave Macmillan Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FASHION, REPRESENTATION, FEMININITY Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton It would seem that fashion, as a field of cultural activity, has managed to barricade itself against systematic analysis; it has put up rather a successful fight against meaning. Perhaps it would be more positive to say that fashion has always existed as a challenge to meaning where meaning is understood to involve some notion of coherence, a demonstrable consistency. This challenge is precisely what attracts those of us who believe that the practices which a culture insists are meaningless or trivial, the places where ideology has succeeded in becoming invisible, are practices in need of investigation. The game then becomes one of applying a meaning-generating system, like semiotics or sociology or psychoanalysis, to a meaningdestroying one such as fashion and seeing what happens. In our case we are seeing what happens when you apply the perspectives of feminist cultural analysis. The first thing which happens, of course, is that one has a sense of having embarked on a misbegotten and somewhat perverse project but, after that, things start to get interesting. Rather than try to justify or describe our involvement in this project in the abstract we would like to demonstrate our approachesby discussing the work of four women fashion designers, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Vivienne Westwood, and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Gargons. We approach their work in relation to questions of representation, subjectivity and the construction of sexual identity which have emerged from the conjunctionof feminist and psychoanalytic theory. There are two things which are taken so much for granted in any conservative discussion of fashion that, mysteriously, it becomes very hard to point at them. These two things are, one, fashion's traditional identification with femininity and, two, the primacy of the body within any clothing system. We have turned to both feminism and psychoanalysis for help with these problemsbecause they have both elaborated Feminist Review No 38, Summer 1991 This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Fashion, Representation 49 rather effective strategies for talking about femininity and about bodies, or to put it the more orthodox way, the body. The Body always manages to sound rather disembodied; the problems of language, specifically the contrast of fashion's seductive patter and the severities of contemporary analytical discourse, are ones which, perhaps, are primary when tackling the question of ascribing meaning to fashion. Feminism, as we know, produced an important vocabulary for discussing the ways in which representations of the female body construct femininity. If we see women's fashion as a field of representations of the female body it then becomes a significant text of how culture constructs femininity and how it addresses that representation to women. In appropriating and arguing with the perspectives of psychoanalysis, feminist theory increased the scope of its analysis of representation. Psychoanalysis suggests that picturing the body is fundamental to the construction of a gendered identity, and explores the psychological and social implications of sexual difference. The notion that the idea of sexuality is constantly changing in fashion is surely not alien to any one who has thought about fashion. In psychoanalytic terms this can be re-articulated as the idea that sexuality is both a structured and a structuring discourse. Essentially we see the idea of the body as something which is culturally constructed, and this idea as complementary within feminism, psychoanalysis and fashion. On their own, accounts of fashion which focus on the history of styles are unable to account for the way in which worn fashion generates meaning. Here we want to focus on women as both producers and consumers of fashion design, and hence on a practice, a signifying practice. We have chosen to look at work from the 1930s by the couturiere Elsa Schiaparelli first as there already exists a debate at the intersection of design history, women's history and twentieth-century art history to which we can refer. If we are looking for methodologies to ascribe meaning to fashion, Schiaparelli's work presents an interesting case. Her work is associated with the Surrealist movement in the 1930s and this association has been used to give it status. In some accounts of twentieth-century fashion, one feels that any connexion with fine art comes as a great relief, in that it may be used to justify the claim that fashion means something by transferring upon fashion the status of fine art. Interestingly, however, artists and writers on art in the modernist period have frequently embraced fashion as a way of countering the established hierarchies of cultural history and the pieties of high art. (Examples might include Baudelaire, the Sezessionists, Surrealism and Pop Art.) If we are looking for new ways of evaluating fashion it might be more productive to use fashion history to question the methodology of art history rather than stretch art history to cover fashion. The discussion of women's fashion has tended to reproduce unthinkingly preconceptions about femininity. It is clear, however, that the cultural conception of the feminine is capable of being both reproducedand changed through dress. By focusing on the way in which This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 50 Feminist Review a work negotiates the terms of sexual difference and constructs the feminine, it may be possible to assess more accurately how the work actively negotiates difference and generates meaning. For example, a comparison between Chanel's work in the 1920s and Schiaparelli's in the 1930s would suggest radically different ways of representing/ constructing the feminine. A genuine polemic emerges from such comparisons which contrasts Chanel's appropriation of masculine power with Schiaparelli's appropriationof female masquerade. Chanel's contributionto women's fashion was the adaptation of the forms and details, but above all the meanings, of a certain type of masculine dress to that of women. Her approachto style was analogous to that of classical male dandyism, that essentially masculine cult of distinction which was crucially mediated through dress. Dandyism offeredthe possibility of social mobility, something which was of the first importance to Chanel personally and more generally to women in the changing social climate in the early years of the century. Additionally, Chanel's early work exemplifies the modernist project in design to dispense with superfluous detail and decoration, and to espouse the cause of functionalism. Perhaps the functionalist or antidecorative move in art and design may indicate a cultural rejection of the feminine in favour of an exclusively masculine model of power. In this context Chanel's dandyism and her modernism interlock. Figure 1 shows a black sequinned cardigan evening suit of 1926 worn with a sleeveless jersey top. The antidecorative rhetoric of Chanel's modernist approach is maintained in this version of the three-piece suit despite the abundant use of sequins. The machine aesthetic is exemplified by the suit's metallic sheen, straight lines and tubular forms. Schiaparelli's work indicates a contrasting approach to what women require from dress. Where Chanel insists on an invulnerable dignity, Schiaparelli espouses excess and folly in fashion. She embraces the decorative, the superfluous and the nonfunctional in a repudiation of the restrictions of masculine dress which Chanel adopted to signify control. Schiaparelli's work may even, as in Figure 2, play with the dangerous theme of the body's vulnerability. The Tear Dress of 1937-8 powerfully counterposes violence and anxiety with poise and tranquillity. The print of trompe l'oeil rips on this evening dress was designed by Salvador Dali. It is worn with a separate shawl which repeats the tear motif in appliqued organza flaps. On the dress, the rips are gashes of purple and black, on the shawl they are pink tongues. The imagery of violence, the suggestion of attack, is counterposed by the elegance of the dress, its existence as sophisticated fashion, the fact that it is not rags, not torn. It is a piece suggestive of a fantasy which is both acknowledged and denied. Violence and eroticism are simultaneously displayed and made to disappear;beauty is brought to bear on rupture. If, using feminist precedents, we foreground the gender of the designer in an analysis of her work, the question becomes: 'how does gender affect her practice?' It is perhaps worth reiterating here the extent to which fashion has offered women opportunities of expression This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Fashion, Representation 51 -r .?..." ...: .i:I.. . ..... .. ................ ....::.1:i Figure 1. Chanel, 1926. Black sequinned evening suit with cardiganjacket and straight skirt worn with a sleevelessjersey top. This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 6 52 Feminist Review c; ? ? ?::i~ . ? ....~ ;i' ';~i :.:.. .. . !~ . ?..~. ' .~:?:, ,-,~~,, ii: ,,:~:~: :raa .:i :?:? U *?. i* '11j ;'::a ?"'**:' .... '~4~ ..... J*i .:..:.:.?.Z'~;;,:,...: .. i. . ~ ~.:,......:. ;:.'..:... ....;?? Figure 2. Schiaparelli, 1937-8. 'Tear'dressand head shawl. The dress is in silk crepewith a printed trompe-l'oeildesign of rippedfabric by Salvador Dali. On the shawl the rips are appliquedflaps offabric. This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions rz4 0 Fashion, Representation 53 denied to them historically by the male-dominated world of fine art: painting, sculpture and architecture. Coutureenabled women to be both creative designers and businesswomen. In the early years of the twentieth century the only comparable area of opportunity was show business, with the differencethat the stage requires the presentation of the woman herself as performerand decorative object rather than as a power behind the scenes. The association of Schiaparelli's work of the 1930s with Surrealism in itself presents psychoanalytical perspectives as an issue when discussing the meanings of her work. In Surrealism, a central concern with the nature of sexuality manifested itself in representations of the feminine which were often violently eroticized. At the same time, the feminine was a metaphor for Surrealism's play on appearances, a discourse of illusion, artifice and masquerade. As a fashion designer, Schiaparelli was well placed to explore and develop such themes; as a woman designer, she turned this to particular account. In her work the theme of femininity as a form of choreographed deception becomes self-conscious, constructive and critical. Behind her handling of women's fashion is a meditation on the wider category of dress itself as a cultural language that inscribes the body. Her approachto dress centres around an understanding of how it acts simultaneously to repress the body and to bring it into the realm of language - the symbolic. As repressed material, one might speak of the body as the 'unconscious'of clothing. Schiaparelli's famous jokes, for example the 'Shoe Hat' shown in Figure 3, are made with reference to this repressed unconscious. She uses the device of displacement to suggest ways in which the unconscious is at work and at play within the language of clothes. The 'Shoe Hat' also came out of her collaboration with Salvador Dali. It is worn here with a black cocktail suit in which the edges of the pockets are appliqued to look like lips, and worn with two brooches on the lapels in the form of lips in profile. The hat in the shape of a high-heeled shoe is shown here in its all-black version, but it was also made with a shocking pink heel. Schiaparelli's work is imbued with an appreciation of the fetishistic function of dress. In the 'Shoe Hat' ensemble the association pocket/mouth/vagina plays against that of hat/high heel/phallus. The piece suggests the body and its relationship to clothes as an interface of multiple fetishistic possibilities. In psychoanalytic theory fetishism is defined as the practice in which some inappropriate part of the body or an object,usually of clothing, is chosen as the exclusive object of sexual desire. The 'Shoe Hat' acknowledges that clothing can supplement the body, that it can make good a lack. Here, for instance, the female bodyis adornedwith the attributes of both sexes. Perhaps the self-sufficiency of narcissism is implied in this exhibitionistic collage of the real and the symbolic body. J. C. Fliigel, in The Psychology of Clothes, written in 1930, rests much of his analysis on an understanding of the unconscious displacement of interest from the body on to clothes, in particular the deflection of sexual interest. In Schiaparelli's work, there is a remarkable This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 54 Feminist Review m I 0 ? I> Figure 3. Schiaparelli, 1937. Black hat in the form of an invertedhigh-heeled shoe, worn with a black cocktail suit with pocketedges appliqued in the shape of lips. This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Fashion, Representation 55 transference of interest from the body to clothes - it is on clothes rather than the body that she paints her images of self-display. As fashion the example of the Shoe Hat and suit is brilliantly transgressive in its appropriation, extension and further inversion of the perverse meanings of women's dress. As a suggestion of something done (putting a shoe on one's head) it evokes the polymorphousperversity of childhood. Within the theatricality of Schiaparelli's work the woman is presented as a performer, a masquerader. Mary Ann Doane (1982) points out that 'the masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance'. By creating herself as a spectacle, ironically, as Schiaparelli did, a woman puts a distance between herself and her observers, a space within which to manoeuvre and to determine the meanings of the show. She takes control of the mask, the disguise, that is femininity. Female narcissism has remained a problem for both feminism and psychoanalysis. Women's fashion may offer a map of this mysterious terrain. If women, in John Berger's (1972) phrase, are condemned to 'watch themselves being looked at' then Schiaparelli pursues the problems into theatre. Here she makes strategic use of female masquerade, the representation of femininity as at once excess and disguise. Figure 4 shows a black velvet jacket worn over a long black dinner dress. The ensemble, with the plumed cap, is from the Music Collection of 1937/8. The buttons of the jacket are in the form of sculpted classical female heads. On the breast, two upside-down hand-mirrors are embroidered and appliqued in gold tinsel and pieces of real mirrored glass. The duplicated symbols of feminine vanity become a warrior's breastplate, armour,military uniform.As Rococcoanachronism the two looking-glasses evoke a fairy-tale hall of mirrors. Thus upholstered, clothes become furniture, the body a stage set. The theatricality of Schiaparelli's work proposes the woman as actress, in terms of both tragic irony and comedy.Ultimately, her work suggests that the woman must play her way out of her predicament, the impasse of femininity. Schiaparelli's work is a useful launching pad from which to try and map out the application of psychoanalytic theory to the analysis of fashion, in part because she shared with Surrealist painters an interest in the language of the unconscious. The next stage of the inquiry requires one to see whether psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives can be applied to very different contemporarydesigners, designers who do not necessarily make this connexion themselves. We want to look now at two contemporary designers, Vivienne Westwood, and Rei Kawakuboof Comme des Garqons,an English and a Japanese woman respectively, both working in the increasingly international market of ready-to-wear high fashion, rather than the rarified atmosphere of couture in the 1930s. We also want to start, rather perversely, by looking at what it is that these designers are not doing, by asking what it is that they are eschewing, and why this makes them so remarkable. Essentially, both designers avoid any kind of phallicism, or of 'power dressing' in their work. By 'phallicism' we mean the use of This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 56 Feminist Review I >4 0 Figure 4. Schiaparelli, 1939. Black velvetjacket with upside-down hand mirrors appliqued with gold tinsel and pieces of real mirrored glass, worn with a long black dinner dress and a plumed cap. This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Fashion, Representation 57 elements in clothing which are symbolically masculine, which represent the so-called masculine characteristics of power, control and autonomy - the law of the father. Fliigel has argued that 'those male garments that are most associated with seriousness and correctness are also the most saturated with a subtle phallicism' (1930: 76-7). He argues that phallicism is a defence against anxiety. It is manifested in elements in themselves innocuous, even meaningless, but which have come to represent masculinity in our culture: dark colours (associated with sobriety), thickness and stiffness (associated with moral 'uprightness') and tightness (often symbolizing self-control)- all the characteristics of traditional male tailoring, in fact. What we are talking about today, however, and what these two designers miraculously avoid, is phallicism in women's dress. Of course not all women's clothing is 'pervadedby a subtle phallicism'. On the one hand there may be the severe suits of so-called 'power-dressing'but on the other hand there are plenty of Laura Ashleyish untailored floral, frilled and 'feminine' looks. But it does seem to be characteristic of uninteresting fashion, the kind of fashion we are not considering today, that it is caught in the trap of binary opposition, between the classic definitions of what is 'male'and 'female',and never the twain shall meet - or not in one garment anyway. When women's fashion is not prescribing 'power-dressing'(a sort of Armani-suited female-executive look) it is advocating a highly defended 'feminine'look (what the female executive might be expected to wear in the evening to compensate for her lack of femininity in her daily work). We think this false opposition lies behind Vivienne Westwood's statement, 'I've never thought it powerful to be like a second-rate man' (i-D magazine, March 1987). She was talking about shoulder pads, and her dislike of them, but the remark goes deeper than this; she has made a profound point about women's fashion and the social construction of femininity. What is more, this binary opposition is not a straightforward equation in which masculinity and femininity have an 'equal but different' value. Current feminist theory has identified the social construction of femininity as being 'other'. It has used psychoanalytic theory to develop a reading of how the construction of sexual difference positions the feminine as 'outside' or marginal to a culture whose order and language are patriarchal. Thus masculinity is posited as the norm, femininity a differencefrom that norm. Furthermore, if psychoanalysis suggests that the construction of a gendered identity is precarious, this lends added weight to women's sense of alienation from femininity as a 'fixed'identity set up as the 'other'of masculinity. Thus, to go back from this rather arcane theory into the real world for a moment, it is hardly surprising that women should use the idea of masculinity, in the form of shoulder pads, city suits, sober dress, etc., to get credibility in a man's world, and, indeed, hardly fair to criticize women for engaging in this form of power-dressing. What is remarkable, however, about the work of both Westwood and Kawakubois how it manages to escape the controlling discourses of This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 58 Feminist Review patriarchy. Both designers seem to deal exclusively with femininity, and not the femininity of the binary opposition referred to earlier but a more radical and challenging 'version'concernedwith issues to do with women'sbodies, women's sexuality, even with female identity. Furthermore, they appear to do so without reference to the so-called norm of masculinity. It is precisely this 'failure' to refer to the patriarchy surrounding them which makes the work of both designers so radical and so challenging. In the punk collection, on which Westwood'searly reputation was based, the idea of femininity was promotedby the notion of the woman's autonomous control over her self-presentation. The fashion parody of pornography and sex-shop dressing was central to the whole of punk fashion for women. The signifiers of deviance - the straps, the suspenders, the shiny PVCthat make up the 'badgirl' image in Figure 5 - were intended to deceive: punk women clearly were not good girls, but it was far from clear who was to profit (or indeed to suffer) from their badness. This was one of the most aggressive styles for women within any of the post-war youth cultures in Britain and represented a corresponding emancipation of subcultural style. Bondage dress allowed women to express the crudest will to sexual power, or, indeed, to sexual victimization, while preserving a central ambiguity. Punk girls - and they were girls - engaged en masse in the forbidden activity of confusing sexual messages: they looked like prostitutes but were not. They were women but were not 'feminine', 'tarty' but not tarts. This was an exercise of power, not in the literal sense of what could be done, but on the level of representation, of what could be signified. In Westwood's mini-crini, which first appeared in 1986, her perverse and anarchic idea of female sexuality is further developed (see Figure 6). The mini-crini re-presents a consideration of the history of sexuality and of fashion's changing definition of the female form. The hooped crinoline is a productof nineteenth-century Empire, the mini of the 1960s. The mini-crini is a cultural hybrid, requiring to be read in terms of both its antecedents. If the crinoline stands in for a mythology of restriction and encumbrance in women's clothes, in the mini-crini that mythology is juxtaposed with an equally dubious mythology of liberation associated with the mini-skirt. The nineteenth-century crinoline sketched women's hips in an over-large gesture in a period in which women's child-bearing role was highly valued. The implicit association of the huge skirt with fecundity becomes explicit in Westwood'sversion: 'Forthe last ten years we've had shoulder pads and tight hips - that's supposed to be the sexy look, the inverted triangle - but I think people want a more feminine fitting. People want to be strong, but in a feminine way.' (i-D magazine, February 1986). It is very striking that in all her interviews Westwood talks of 'sexiness' in relation to women and fashion. For example, the statement quoted earlier, 'I've never thought it powerful to be like a second-rate man', is followed by 'Femininity is stronger, and I don't This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Fashion, Representation 59 "I _ F.. * .a. . I!, a 4 f f. t r aN ;;im: A.f *< , , d. I X, ? '. Figure 5. Vivienne Westwood,Bondage Collection,1976. Wornby Jordon, the assistant at Westwoodand McLaren'sshop Sex. This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 60 Feminist Review / / / 0 0 I>0 z0a Figure 6. Academicfashion: VivienneWestwood'soriginal mini-crini, Spring! Summer 1986. This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Fashion, Representation 61 know why people keep plugging this boring asexual body. At my age I'd rather have a bit of flab, I actually think that's more sexy' (i-D magazine, March 1987). For Westwood 'sexiness' is not the straightforward attribute that commentaries on fashion so often present it as, but a matter for inquiry, exploration and debate, even for improvisation. All Westwood's work pivots round the idea of a sexuality which is autonomous and subjectively defined. When she talks of what is sexy, the stress is on what will feel sexy to the wearer; thus the issue becomes one of the wearer's libido, rather than one of 'being attractive'. Westwood fosters the idea of a self-defined feminine libido, however demented, which communicates itself idiosyncratically through dress. The 'madness' of her clothes lies partly in the madness of that project:a feminine sexuality working outside the law, outside the constraints of male definition and which is, crucially, linked to our experience of our bodies. The sexiness Westwood expounds is autonomous: if the wearer thinks it is sexy, then it is. Her approach comes close to a kind of sartorial psychosis that has particularly transgressive meanings for women. In her work the themes of autonomy and control, so central to male dandyism, re-emerge as, paradoxically, ordered around disorder. The disorderlywoman and the dandy, the pirate and the sexual deviant (all looks developed by Westwood in her collections) are all 'outside the law'. There is thus a highly 'ideological'content to Westwood'swork. By contrast, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons demonstrates a protominimalist approach which is more akin to a kind of fine-art practice than to the sort of agit-prop polemic of Westwood. She is famous, and has often been derided, for sayings such as: 'I work in three shades of black' and 'I start from zero'. In her earliest collections, which she showed in Paris at the beginning of the 1980s, she questioned the logic of clothing itself. In doing this, however, she did not design from some kind of artistic ivory tower but managed always to foregroundthe body. The early collections were wrapped, torn, draped garments which the wearer chose how to wear (see Figure 7). Flaps and appendages could be tied and wrapped in a variety of ways so that each garment permitted a multiplicity of wearings. Kawakubo refuses to be prescriptive: by allowing the wearer to 'make'the garment by making the final decision on how to wear it, Kawakubo communicates a respect for the body, as well as for the intelligence and autonomy of the wearer. For her, clothes are not something that we wear passively: they require our active collaboration. She followed up this highly criticized collection with the elastic collection (Figure 8). Huge openings in the garment simply reveal another beneath. Again, the wearer 'collaborates' in the design by choosing how to wear the garment, which hole to put her head through and where to arrange the spare hole in a pattern more or less decorative. Both collections met with some hostility. The American fashion press in particular condemnedthem as 'unsexy'. Kawakubo'sresponse has been to assert that one does not rely on one's clothes to be sexy but on oneself. This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 62 Feminist Review m 0 z 0ri q U I q a gI z s m qe 5i Figure 7. Questioning the logic of clothing: Commedes Gar9ons'wrapped collection, 1983. This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 63 Fashion, Representation .^ '!3^ ._. 2: ( 0_ \s > L. 74 U 0 0 24 >4 m z 04- I '.: .... . -.c...-.. . :.,~.:, Figure 8. Comme des Garcons'Elastic Collection, 1986. The wearer chooses how to put on two similar garments, one over the other and where to dispose the spare holes. This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 64 Feminist Review r JTY Figure 9. Commedes Garcons'RoseRayon Dress, 1985. This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Fashion, Representation In Kawakubo's work, as in Westwood's,the meaning of 'sexiness' is of critical importance, and it is not a conventional meaning. It brings together ideas about femininity, the body, sexuality and the self which can all be articulated through dress. Fashion, like psychoanalytic theory, stresses the primacy of the body, the immediacy of our experience of the body. Kawakubo,in her work of this period, manages to cut through, or by-pass, the many definitions of'femininity' in favour of a more complex but less over-determinedrepresentation. Garments like the one shown in Figure 9 reveal parts of the body through unexpected vents or holes, but they are parts of the body that have, as it were, no name - the back of a knee, the side of a ribcage. Kawakubo's work presents the body as resistant to or outside of language - thus she performs a kind of 'making strange'. But, like Schiaparelli, she also understands dress itself as a cultural language which inscribes the body and which brings it into the realm of language - the symbolic. In Kawakubo'swork parts of the body are not presented as static but as moving and hence constantly changing. The emphasis on the 'under-determined' parts of the body challenges the vocabulary of 'sexiness' in women's fashion, exemplified, say, by the slit skirt. In Kawakubo'sdesigns, eroticism is a function of undoing the cliches about the female body. 'Starting from zero' amounts to 'making strange', and in this way Kawakubo allows one to 're-see' the body and all its possibilities. Emphasizing its continuity, even its contiguity, in space calls into question the practice of 'seeing the body in bits' that has been identified as intrinsic to the representation of the female body in patriarchal culture. Women, in Rosalind Coward's (1984) phrase, are 'the defined sex', and it becomes almost impossible to see the female body outside its cultural definitions. Working in the midst of culture's pre-eminent discourse of artificiality - fashion - Kawakubo'ssculptural work points towards the undefined, undetermined female body in a way which is wholly original. Such work is at the cutting edge of the highly elaborate field of representations that constitutes women's fashion. We can learn as much by looking at this work as part of a system of representations as by studying it purely in terms of the history of styles. Both approachesmay complement each other. Although we have looked here at work by famous designers we hope that this kind of discussion could usefully be extended to cover other types of fashion, and other ways in which it is producedand consumed. Notes Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton are co-authors of Womenand Fashion: A New Look (Quartet Books, 1989). The book brings together fashion and semiotics, psychoanalysis and style, interweaving the vocabulary of fashion literature with that of cultural studies and feminist theory. This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 65 66 Feminist Review The text is a transcript of a talk given at the 1989 Art Historians Conferencein London as part of a programme of papers on new perspectives in dress and fashion history. References John (1972) Ways of Seeing London:BBC Publications and Penguin BERGER, Books. Rosalind(1984) Female Desire London:Paladin Books. COWARD, DOANE, MaryAnn (1982) 'Theorizingthe Female Spectator',Screen, Vol. 23, no. 3-4. FLUGEL,J. C. (1930) The Psychologyof Clothes London:Hogarth Press. This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Fri, 31 May 2013 14:55:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions