Fashion, Representation, Femininity

Transcription

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
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
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
-r
.?..." ...: .i:I..
.
.....
.. ................ ....::.1:i
Figure 1. Chanel, 1926. Black sequinned evening suit with cardiganjacket and
straight skirt worn with a sleevelessjersey top.
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.
rz4
0
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
"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.
60
Feminist Review
/
/
/
0
0
I>0
z0a
Figure 6. Academicfashion: VivienneWestwood'soriginal mini-crini, Spring!
Summer 1986.
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.
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.
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.
64
Feminist Review
r
JTY
Figure 9. Commedes Garcons'RoseRayon Dress, 1985.
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.
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.

Fashion, Representation, Femininity

Transcription

Similar documents

DREAM BIG! - We Are Photogirls

Company profile Dutch fashion house Oilily has been a hallmark of

Walk-for-a-Cause-Bos..

Cocktail - Travel Communication

Issue Number Eighteen

FIT CampusTech R6 Final - Fashion Institute of Technology

Shalwar Fiesta - Sunday Observer

The History of Fashion

featuring missoni paco rabanne ungaro romeo gigli