by Laura Gardner, Web Editor, Vestoj

Advertising, or more specifically, branding works with a currency of space, visibility, and therefore exposure. The effectiveness of branding will relate to the size and potential impact of such a space. Branding in sport is perhaps the first direct facilitator of corporeal branding, the space for a capitalist identity on the body. Despite a long history of endorsement from famous figures, in film and music for example, the use of the body in sport is an inverse of this relationship, and a more recent phenomena.

Michael Jordan and Spike Lee for Nike, 1991

The most successful of the early ‘collaborations’ between athlete and brand could be attributed to the one between basketballer Michael Jordan and sportswear company Nike [1]. The partnership has worked dually in launching Jordan’s career as an individual sportsman and super brand. Then, the highest-paid sportsman in the business, the alliance unfolded into the sportsman’s own clothing and footwear brand ‘Air Jordan’, for which the early eighties imagery of the sportsman mid-flight, suspended in ‘air’ formed the template for the logo of the brand (one only has to type ‘Michael Jordan Nike’ into a Youtube search facility to see the extent of the Nike/Jordan output). The spirit of this long running partnership between Jordan and Nike continues in a new global system of branding alliances and stakeholders. More recently Nike closed a $250 million, 10-year contract with golf champion Rory McIlroy. A weighty financial and time commitment that reflects how lucrative this industry has become, the 24-year old, who juggles Nike with his other sponsors Bose and Omega; says, ‘I don’t want a lot of sponsors. I want a few quality ones.’ [2] suggesting that these relationships have become inevitably symbiotic.

Roger Federer front row at Fashion’s Night Out with Anna Wintour and Blake Lively (http://www.zimbio.com/)

Now a highly lucrative global industry that sits in the arena of advertising and industry, the relationship between athletes and big brands is absolutely necessary in any dialogue on sport and even fashion, with brands offering credibility and commercial value to an individual. This is crucial to the effectiveness of the entire business, McIlroy cites one of his personal and professional influences as Tennis champion Roger Federer, as a symbol of ‘grace and good taste’ [1]. This no doubt connects with the values of the brands for which Federer endorses, such as Nike, Rolex and Louis Vuitton (Federer’s 2012 sport earnings of $7.7 million were dwarfed by the $45 million he received for sponsorship) [3]. Given this, the values of the individual sportsman become imbued with those of the sporting brand and the necessary clarity of boundary is therefore distorted. Reflecting, in many ways, Nike’s original imperative in the Air Jordan collaboration, to ‘…erase all boundaries between the sponsor and the sponsored.’ [4]

1. S. Elliott (2013). Losing a Step, Nike Seeks to Regain Its Edge. The New York Times. April 14. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/business/media/nike-once-cutting-edge-seeks-to-regain-its-brand-aura.html?pagewanted=all
2. K. Crouse (2013). The Branding of Rory McIlroy. The New York Times. May 4. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/sports/golf/the-branding-of-rory-mcilroy.html?pagewanted=all
3. Roger Feder’s 2012 profile on Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/profile/roger-federer/)
4. N. Klein (2000). ‘No Logo’. p 51. London: Harper Collins

By Emily McGuire

“Do the interns get Glocks?”

“No, they all share one.”

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson, 2004)

Karl Lagerfeld and Victoria Beckham. Bottom image: Lauren Conrad and Whitney Port intern at Teen Vogue in The Hills (ohsevendays.blogspot.co.uk)

A quick online search for fashion internships and you will find ‘dream jobs for fashion divas’ alongside ‘fashion intern horror stories’ as top search results. Unpaid fashion internships have gained notoriety as a critical – and highly coveted – first step to engagement with the fashion system[1]. Glorified by marketing, and romanticised in pop culture there is an enormous demand in the industry. The fashion intern community mascots the image crisis and socio-economic issues[2] regarding unpaid labour where the economic value of work is diluted in an otherwise rigorously capitalist industry. As a full-time intern in New York City for several luxury brands, my experiences have revealed the unstable and highly idealised culture of unpaid fashion internships and the power play that exists between intern and industry.

As a relatively recent global phenomenon, understandings of the fashion internship are vague and generally undefined to both industry and intern alike. The term is perhaps best understood by the rhetoric that circulates within the industry and proliferates marketing.  Phrases like, ‘an exciting opportunity’ and ‘a great way to get experience’ saturate listings on fashion internship listing websites, constructing an understanding of internships as career-focused, offering positive situational learning for the intern’s benefit[3]. The true experience of fashion internships often contradicts these luring ideals. Positions are unofficial, unpaid, unstructured and largely unsupervised, comprised of menial tasks, errands and observations. This reflects the allocation of interns by the industry to supporting productivity and cost-effectiveness. This insecurity within the workplace reflects the insecurity of the intern identity: anonymous, disposable and subservient. Phrases like, ‘I’ll get the intern to do it’ which often circulates fashion studios, reinforce a nonspecific, homogenous image.  Indeed, the purpose and identity of the fashion internship are open to interpretation and subsequently, widespread misuse. As a new entrepreneurial spirit underpins the fashion system[4], the application process, serial interning and intern inequality are highlighting serious complications for the fashion intern community.

The interview setting crystallises the fashion industry’s authoritative relationship with its intern community.  For interns, the interview is a critical first point of contact with the industry where the applicant’s best work is showcased for approval and validation.  Despite that the work is usually unpaid and informal, the company accepts the intern; the intern does not accept the company. Motivated by reputation value to charm and impress employers, prospective interns are processed like employees where a position must be earned. In my own personal experience, at an interview for such a position, upon showing my portfolio I began to explain the construction of a particular garment I had made, provoking  the comment, ‘we just might have to use that idea!’ from the interviewer.  I replied with, ‘thank you’ despite feelings of complete anonymity and disempowerment. Lured by the cliché rhetoric, ‘It’s who you know’ interns become willing victims for the exposure and self-marketability provided by fashion internships. The interview represents a doorway to this new entrepreneurial spirit of contingent labour[5]. Free agency, autonomy and self-direction are positive aspects favoured by unpaid interns. However, this new spirit also signifies a casualisation of the workforce of which self-exploitation is a direct consequence[6]. Marketing and media reinforce this stigmatic image through which a promotion of subservience and submission as seemingly necessary to progress, underlies romanticised pop culture imagery and glorified accounts of insider status. While Free Fashion Internships describes ‘fashion intern hopefuls like you’ like contestants and Intern Queen advises interns to ‘know their place’[7], the interview setting solidifies fashion internships as exclusory and interns as insecure.  Indeed, the formalities of the interview perpetuate disempowerment as part of the fashion intern identity.

From desire and desperation for a covetable reputation rises a subculture of serial interns. A market saturated with demand for unpaid labour and little opportunity to progress, serial interning have become habitual within the fashion system. Reputation capital is the key incentive mechanism for interns where respect, references, networks and experiential learning are quantified[8]. Prestigious, respectable internships often require the completion of previous internships and most placements do not result in an official paid position at all. Undertaking multiple internships simultaneously or consecutively has become an obligation in response to this. I have undertaken six unpaid internships at luxury brands globally, sometimes three at a time five days per week. Since none of them realised into an official position, my references are critical supporting material for self-marketability as confirmation of my reputation through an association with these studios. The bargaining powering of respectable references is outweighing remuneration value.  Indeed, why pay for labour ever again if it is accepted for free? A ‘race to the bottom’ is highlighted by unpaid interning, reinforcing the perception that certain kinds of work have no economic value. Serial interning has normalised the subservience of fashion internships where reputation serves as insurance against a perilous job market. The value placed on talent and labour in the fashion industry is no longer clear-cut, and the necessary distinction between intern and employee is an increasingly exploited grey area.

Blair Waldorf and Dan Humphrey intern at W Magazine in Gossip Girl (themoderngrad.files.wordpress.com)

Privilege is a critical factor in the widening socio-economic inequality that defines – and divides – the unpaid fashion intern community. To work for free, interns commonly rely on external, most likely parental support to undertake a full-time internship. This has been my own experience and that of many of my interning contemporaries. To undertake unpaid work with minimal sacrifice to quality of life – that is, to have all financial needs met – therefore signifies socio-economic privilege. This lifestyle of quasi-inequality is romanticised by the aspirational characters of pop culture; from Blair Waldorf at W Magazine in Gossip Girl and Hannah Horvath in Girls. This majority group is less likely to feel discontent with the lacklustre conditions of unpaid fashion internships because they sacrifice less for the experience, normalising intern exploitation[9]. In this inherently exclusive and self-preserving culture in the fashion system, the already-privileged continue to benefit, empowered with a head start to respectable credentials. For many young people, the financial hardship accrued through unpaid labour restricts them from entering the intern community at all[10]. This discrimination highlights a growing outsider majority of non-interns, those limited within the widening gap between outsider status and industry involvement[11]. Pressured by limited entry-level alternatives and intern experience as a pre-requisite, not undertaking an unpaid fashion internship is considered more detrimental than the unfavourable circumstances they present. Indeed, socio-economic privilege preserves access to industry opportunity, diluting meritocratic values and perpetuating an intern hierarchy.

Rigorous quantifiable research into the widespread effects of unpaid labour within fashion must be undertaken to legitimise the intern community. Structured, enforceable, educational programs and financial incentives would reform and improve the identity of fashion interns and appreciate meritocratic and economic values otherwise diluted by the casualisation of contingent work. Indeed, without interns the fashion industry would grind to a halt; it is in the system’s best interest to nurture them.

1. Henderson, J.M. (2012). Are Creative Careers now Exclusively Reserved for the Privileged?  Forbes. August 31. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jmaureenhenderson/2012/08/31/are-creative-careers-now-reserved-exclusively-for-the-privileged/
2. The legal complications pertaining to unpaid labour are too extensive for this discussion.
3. Perlin, R. (2011).  Intern Nation. P.3. New York City: Verso Publishing
4. Wark, M. (1991). Fashioning the Future. P. 61-63. New York City: Taylor and Francis Publishing
5. Florida, R. (2012).  The Rise of the Creative Class. P.94. New York City: Basic Books Publishing
6. Andrew Ross notes “the flexibility [which free agency] delivers is a response to an authentic demand for a life not dictated by…excessively managed work” (Perlin, R. 2011, P. 37)
7. Carstens, C.I. (2009) www.freefashioninternships.com/about/ and Perlin, R. (2011). Intern Queen Inc in Intern Nation. P.151. New York City: Verso Publishing
8. Florida, R. (2012). The Rise of the Creative Class. P. 74-75. New York City: Basic Books Publishing
9. Perlin, R. (2011). Intern Nation. P. 168. New York City: Verso Publishing
10. Perlin, R. (2011). Intern Nation. P. 159, 163. New York City: Verso Publishing
11. Perlin, R. (2011). Intern Nation. P. 159, 163. New York City: Verso Publishing

John Galliano for Dior Haute Couture spring/summer 2006

By Sophie Pinchetti

In an age dominated by cultural homogeneity and standardised accounts of good taste, imagination pierces through the vapidity. It expresses itself in forceful and unbridled visions, exalting our own power to dream. At the time of his commanding years at the helm of Dior, master designer John Galliano created just this: deliriously fusing story, mystery and myth into clothes. Opening with a spoken word passage from The Book of the Revelations conjuring the insolent figure of the Antichrist, Galliano conceived this collection for Christian Dior during a time of political unrest in France, following the designer’s travels in southern France during the street riots. In a blood-shed palette, Galliano summons the spirit of 1789 – the French Revolution, a time of upheaval, destruction and transformation. Fierce, provocative women defiantly march down the runway to the sound of whips and swords striking, in a violent rapture of dramatic scarlet and red robes and tough leather, some bearing ‘1789’ brazenly tattooed on their neck. It was a collection with perverse and erotic tones that raucous, rebellious libertine spirits such as the Marquis de Sade could have enjoyed. In the theatre of fashion, few deliver originality with such force. This is Galliano’s potent couture, born from an eccentric revelry of merging imagery and creative license, testifying to the fashion industry’s ability to create intoxicating, transporting experiences when wild imagination, exceptional craftsmanship, and wealth combine. In a final display of the mind powering this vision, Galliano appears, incarnating simultaneously vagabond, warrior, and story teller, professing himself as the sorcerer of this intense sartorial mirage.

by Hampus Hagman

‘The whiteness is inseparable from the violent action that separates it out.’

Anders Olsson, Century of Innocence: The History of the White Monochrome

Kazimir Malevich ‘Suprematist Composition: White on White’, 1918

The white shirt: a neutral surface and the basis of a man’s wardrobe – according to many-a-style manual. And thus, the white shirt is invariably presented as a garment that serves as the canvas against which the wearer’s individuality will emerge. According to this line of thought, the white shirt focuses and frames the body, while itself receding quietly into the background. Considered in purely aesthetic terms, this explanation of white is reasonable enough – but metaphysically, semiotically and ideologically it leaves something to be desired. The white shirt has throughout history often been a mark of power, luxury and wealth, and to relegate it to the background is, still today, to underestimate its potentially more aggressive participation in creating meaning for the wearer’s body.

In Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 art theory classic Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space the author finds that the white walls of the art gallery confers a particular value on art by providing a clinically neutral space that allows the art exhibited to be evaluated on its own terms, shielded from the intrusion of the outside world. A similar logic might arguably be applied to the socioeconomic distinction between the white and blue collar shirt, and this dichotomy is indeed an interesting social construct. The condition for the pristine quality of the white shirt is that the environment is kept at bay. This is in opposition to the blue collar work shirt which relies on the possibility of it being dirtied. On the work shirt the results of manual labour are directly visible, manifesting a concrete – indexical, if you will – and rigid bond to economic value. The white shirt, on the other hand, rejects environmental and corporeal messiness; it rejects the social and subsequently the body – the body of others, but even, in its Platonic Form [1], that of its supposed wearer.

Maurice Scheltens and Liesbeth Abbenes for Fantastic Man, 2007

In a photo shoot by Maurice Scheltens and Liesbeth Abbenes, for the magazine Fantastic Man published in 2007, this rejection of the body is brought to the point of its obliteration. Here, exclusive white shirts are folded and pressed to form a two-dimensional surface that emphatically bars the garment from bodily inhabitation. Scheltens and Abbenes hereby effectively draw out the connections between the mainstay of the white monochrome in modernist art and the white shirt. The purpose of the white monochrome is often to deliberately evade figuration. It might be seen as the ultimate rejection of the representational objectives of figurative painting and hence as a completely self-referential surface, and so its meaning comes only from its rejection of meaning as such. Scheltens and Abbenes play on this paradox by presenting the white shirt as a refined, self-sufficient surface; an ideal state, preserved only through total disembodiment. While artists of the white monochrome rejected figuration [2], they were nevertheless not blind to the possibility that their blank surfaces could be filled by a meaning that arises in the projections of the beholder. The white shirt could be said to trade on a similar rejection of the meaning that comes from explicit marks (which is to say that it rejects direct contact and the ‘staining’ that might come from it) and in so doing it invites a more fluid and projective meaning to play out on its surface.

Fashion designer Tom Ford

While the white shirt excludes, it is also an acutely receptive and highly charged surface, readily available for perversion. As such the white shirt is a space full of potential. Fashion designer Tom Ford has made much use of the white shirt as a surface for projection. Ford himself appears almost always in a dazzlingly white shirt with an impeccable, perfect fit. When not sealed shut by a tie, the shirt is unbuttoned – just a tad too much. Flesh pushes its way forward, intruding on the pristine surface. The effect is, of course, highly calculated. Through that one-button-too-much cleavage, the exclusivity of the white shirt is turned from something pristine and untouchable, into something highly tangible: sex, desire and glamour.

Lucio Fontana’s ‘Concetto spaziale, Attesa’, 1964

Like Lucio Fontana’s white slash paintings might be said to oscillate between presentation and disruption (Is the slash a framed sign? Or a violation of the pristine surface? Is it vagina or wound?), Ford´s chest gash results in a similar ambiguity [3]. Does the aperture pose a vulgar display of flesh – a tarnish upon the pristine surface of the shirt? Or is the shirt conversely the mere background for the presentation of the splendour that is Ford’s body? This ambiguity is the very point. Ford weighs the poles of vulgar and exclusive against each other and comes up with an irresistible balance. In his white shirt, Ford’s body is both rarified, and a source of desire. Ford, fully aware of this tension, engineers it into a paradoxical lure of exclusion and invitation.

A scene in the film The Comfort of Strangers (dir. Paul Schrader, 1990) perfectly captures this logic of the white shirt as a paradoxical surface that excludes yet elicits projective desires. Rupert Everett’s character is drunkenly inquiring into his on-screen girlfriend’s perception of herself as a sexual object. She replies by turning the tables of objectification on him: ‘People aren’t talking about my thighs or my bottom…The whole damn restaurant is talking about your thighs and your bottom’. The film then cuts to a wider framing of the restaurant; Everett’s character obliviously at the centre of the frame in his brilliant white shirt. At the same time, people around him – men and women alike – strain their necks to look at him. Isolated and unselfconscious, he is the hub of projected sexual desires. The colour white is an underlying but consistent motif in the film, a symbol of both suppression and projection.

This brief trajectory through the theory and practice of the white shirt gives evidence of the tensions and procedures of this garment. In its pure, idealised form it arguably represents the epitome of exclusivity, yet it is through wear inevitably tarnished by the body. The white monochrome in art, as literary historian Anders Olsson pointed out at the beginning of this text, performs ‘a violent action that separates it out’ and in fashion the white shirt debatably fulfills the same function. The power of the white shirt is as strong as it is evocative – through it we claim authority over the discursive meaning of our own bodies.

1. See Plato’s theory of Forms. The ‘Platonic Form’ of an object is an impartial ‘blueprint’ of perfection and here refers to the white shirt in its ideal state, which, in order to maintain its pristine cleanliness, must ultimately exclude the body.
2. Monochrome painting is a significant component of avant-garde art in the twentieth century. As we understand it today monochrome painting is said to have begun in Moscow with Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White in 1918.
3. Tom Ford is himself a confirmed fan of Lucio Fontana. The visitor to his Madison Avenue store was once met by an eight-foot tall aluminum slash piece by Fontana. Ford thought the idea appropriate that a men’s store would, in his own words, “be designed around a vagina”. See Vanessa Grigoriadis, ‘Tom Ford After Sex’, in New York Magazine, May 29, 2007, http://nymag.com/nymag/features/32120/index2.html

By Simon Swale

The Facehunter blog

The blogger and the city; this crucial dynamic is an important and oft neglected aspect of fashion blogs – a consistent presence and relationship that is utterly essential to the context of nearly all of these platforms. To date, the discussion on fashion blogs in academia has been predominantly concerned with the technological and social implications. From a technological perspective; blogs have democratised fashion journalism, offering new means of production, distribution and consumption, in turn providing a platform for social networking around the globe. Anyone with an internet connection has the potential to engage a global audience with their personal commentary of fashion and all its concerns. Blogs offer subjects the possibility for acting and performing, and personalities and identities may become as interchangeable as the very wardrobes that adorn them. Many bloggers, such as The Sartorialist’s Scott Schuman and Style Bubble’s Susie Lau, have themselves become international fashion celebrities for their dedicated and carefully curated blog posts, and the blogger as a citizen and inhabitant of the streetscape is crucial in this context. However, considering the long history of the city as a gendered space, and the fact that blogs themselves are so often gendered domains, it is perhaps surprising there has not been more attention paid to this concern with the representations of women in fashion blogs.

The city is the founding feature of ‘streetstyle’ fashion blog posts. A likely home to the blogger and their audience,  providing the backdrop for the gazed upon subject, the city situates and contextualises the blog itself. We often familiarise ourselves with an un-travelled city through these means; how many of us know London or New York only through images posted on ‘FaceHunter’ or ‘Street Peeper’? Blogs both inform and tell stories but perhaps more interestingly, blogs speak of the relationships between the city and its subjects, and of ourselves as the viewers of these subjects.

Power is not excluded from these relationships which is played out upon the surface of the screen. The city as a gendered space is a concept considered across a range of disciplines, such as art history, film studies, cultural studies and urban geography. In his book City, geographer Phil Hubbard suggests that representations of people and place embed and reinforce dominant social systems [1], so maybe we should be asking; how do fashion blogs reaffirm or contest traditional representations of women in the city?

The very notion of women’s place in the city has been much discussed, especially by feminist scholars Janet Wolff [2] and Griselda Pollock [3] in relation to the concept of the flâneur. Both Wolff and Pollock consider the dominance of the male flâneur, and the invisibility (or indeed impossibility) of the female flâneuse in representations of nineteenth-century Paris. The flâneur features prominently in historical literature as the archetypal city dweller, a male adventurer conceived and critiqued by male writers. At this time men and women’s roles were largely defined by an increased separation of public and private space; the city and the home. Descending upon the dangers of the city, Wolff references Baudelaire when describing women’s role in the streetscape as confined to ‘whore, widow or murder victim’ [4], and although the emergence of the department store provided safe passage, women remained marginalised in discourses of Modernity. In this context, and as a construct that can still be observed in contemporary culture, women are viewed as consumers, in stark contrast to the archetypal male role as producer, and this display of consumption in the form of dress largely reflected a woman’s husband’s wealth.

Today much has changed, yet for all supposed progress, how many representations of women in the media continue to rely on outmoded and condescending stereotypes? Woman as an obsessive  neurotic;  concerned only with her appearance and a plethora of beauty products, the arch consumer, eternally hungry for more, more, more? In contrast, how many images present women in control, in action, a force of nature, a powerful figure at home in the city?  Images of cities seem to remain predominantly those of male production and female consumption, and fashion images are no exception, frequently portraying woman as the object of the male gaze, whether in fashion editorials or fashion advertising.

Can blogs then offer an alternative perspective? Can Tommy Ton’s Jack & Jil be read as a fair portrayal of (at least some) women and their relationship to the city, as it exists in the twenty-first century? Women in positions of control and action, women of strength and character, of ambition and resolve. And not just of women; blogs can be seen to offer strong representations of all those of diminished visibility, across all ethnic, class and cultural differences. Perhaps this new terrain of fashion images can help break what sociologist Chris Jencks [5] describes as the ‘dominant views and appropriations of space have become taken for granted’, this often results in subjects becoming ‘spatialised, divided and subdivided.’

Bloggers and their subjects may provide the action and documentation of what philosopher Michel de Certeau would call ‘spatial practices’ [6], helping to undermine and reconstruct the determining conditions of social life. Stand. Pose. Shoot. Marking space, the documentation of a range of heterogeneous subjects across the city may help reconstitute identities and configurations of power and gender. If ‘space is becoming the principle stake of goal-orientated actions and struggles’ as philosopher Henri Lefebvre [7] suggests, we must take all the tools at our disposal to contest it.

Film and city scholar Guiliana Bruno reminds us; visual representation is not merely optic, but also haptic [8]. The city is no mere backdrop to a fashion shoot but a tangible place within it. Fashion blogs represent real people in real spaces, in everyday situations, and potentially offer unheralded visibility and documentation for divergent classes, races, ages and sexualities within contemporary society. We should not consider these people the mere objects of the gaze but seek to reinstate the individuality of their subjectivity. We cannot allow ourselves to be subsumed by the personality of the city which we inhabit, or the discourses of power that swirl about us. The power relations that exist in the city are real, but so are the identities of the people who inhabit them: let us hear their voices and know their stories.

It can be suggested that any previously mentioned examples contain thousands of images that portray women as strong confident and empowered individuals. Women demand attention as they command the space about them (just consider the paparazzi like frenzy as bloggers seek to capture their images!). Fashion blog posts essentially provide a context for how many women function in their relationship to the modern world, intrinsically linked to the city for both work and play. Blogs reveal women to be as much at the heart of social, economic and cultural production, as they are with consumption. Undoubtedly consumption retains a large focus for any enquiry of women and fashion, but the production/consumption relationship is today less dichotomous. Reflecting the nature of blogs themselves, images of women in fashion blogs represent the potential for action in both production and consumption at the same time. The relationship between a woman’s appearance and her husband’s wealth of yesteryear has been largely replaced by representations that embody women’s independence and her ability for her own means of production. This means of production is intimately linked to the city. Women are as vital a part of our cities as men, contributing to all facets of modern life, and it is through fashion blogs perhaps that this knowledge is most prolifically documented. It may have happened in previous centuries, but in this one, women will not be hidden from visibility.

By John Steinbeck, 1947

“Louie tapped the counter with his fingers. He had let the little fingernail on his left hand grow very long. It was curved, like half a tube, and sanded to a shallow point. Louie didn’t know why he did this, but he was gratified to notice that some of the other bus drivers were letting their little fingernails grow too. Louie was setting a style and he felt good about it. There was that cab driver who had tied a raccoon’s tail on his radiator cap and right overnight everybody had to have a piece of fur flapping in the breeze. Furriers made artificial fox tails, and high-school kids wouldn’t be seen in a car without a tail whipping around. And that cab driver could sit back and have the satisfaction of knowing he had started the whole thing. Louie had been letting his little fingernail grow for five months and already he’d seen five or six other people doing it. It might sweep the country, and Louie would have started the whole thing.

He tapped the counter with the long, curved nail, but gently, because when a nail gets that long it breaks easily. Edgar looked at the nail. He kept his left hand below the counter. He was growing one too, but it wasn’t very long yet, and he didn’t want Louie to see it until it was much longer. Edgar’s nails were brittle, and he had to put colourless nail polish on his to keep it from breaking right off. Even in bed it broke once.”

A still from Flaming Creatures (1962-63) A film by Jack Smith. Black and white, sound, 16mm.

By Sophie Pinchetti

In a new series on the Vestoj blog, we explore the apparent role of fashion and dress in film. With the power to transgress social codes and conventions, clothes can reveal themselves as a weapon, a provocation, a liberation; in darker times, repression. From documentaries to features to recordings of performances, this series of films explores fashion’s intimate complicity to the film medium in order to summon power in both contemporary and past times. From the ritualistic and transformative use of clothes in Kenneth Anger’s epic film Lucifer Rising (1966-1980), to the phantasmagorical Catholic Church fashion show in Fellini’s Roma (1972), fashion and style are both tools acting as symbols and expressions of power. Breaking past the dominant narrative, clothes have a rich history within underground cinema and experimental film, amongst the most notable being American artist Jack Smith’s notorious and censored masterpiece, Flaming Creatures (1962-63) where transgender dressing catalyses and infuses form to Smith’s utopic vision of a reality transcending gender taboos and societal norms. Revealing itself as integral in the construction of an identity, sartorial style in documentary films such as Paris is Burning (1990) pronounces itself as rebellion and challenge in the face of hardship: clothes that are empowerment through performance, demanding a redefinition of reality. Manifested in the endless and strategic game of power present in all dimensions and relations, clothes fluidly unravel on celluloid between forces of power and oppression.

Fellini’s Roma (1972) directed by Frederico Fellini. Colour, Sound, 35mm.
 

By Sophie Pinchetti 

In the realm of spectacle, fashion and image reign. Agents of illusion and artifice, they play a role within the system and game of hierarchy. With Italian filmmaker and provocateur Frederico Fellini’s unbridled theatricality, the Catholic Church comes under such consideration and mockery. Following on from his cult films 8½ (1963), La Dolce Vita (1960) and Satyricon (1969), Fellini takes on the Vatican’s power in the eternal city of Rome in his 1972 film, Fellini’s Roma. The film unravels with Fellini’s signature exuberance, in a semi-autobiographical epic taking us from a brothel in Rome’s red light district, to streets of wandering hippies and flower children, and the nocturnal spaghetti dinners of Italian families, to crescendo eventually through a Catholic Church fashion show in a carnivalesque take on Rome’s deeply religious fervour. With a sense of the worshippers’ collective hysteria, the pressure mounts through the catwalk of ecclesiastical styles and confections, culminating with a blinding, supreme and godly mirage of the Pope glistening in baroque splendour. No stranger to the Church’s power, Fellini had previously been accused of communism, atheism, and treason for his film La Dolce Vita, which was condemned by the Vatican and censored, rendering the viewing of the film a sin in the early Sixties. While Pope Benedict XVI’s recent resignation in Rome has seen the papal throne’s power pivot towards South America with new Argentinean Pope Francis, this film testifies to Fellini’s critical observation of the power of the Catholic Church in Italy, with clothes speaking little on humbleness and spirituality, and lengths on the material excess, corruption and bureaucracy of the Church.

Fellini’s Roma (1972) Directed by Frederico Fellini. Colour, Sound, 35mm.

Dress in protest can serve a variety of functions; as well as a tool for activism, and a costume as such, fashion is also a source of protest. Protest against the fashion industry has become a mainstay to the system itself, from protests on how fashion represents the human body or dubious production methods to the treatment and practices of using animals in production and the more emerging issue of the treatment of interns in fashion businesses. Protest has long been a means of challenging and undermining these questionable processes.

The elaborate and often gruesome demonstrations from PETA have made them perhaps the most iconic and sophisticated protest institution in the fashion industry. Their protest against the fashion industry’s use of animal products, in particular the use of fur, has been a mutifaceted and all-out attack. For example they have gone to the lengths of setting up an entire website that parodies the British fashion house Burberry in a sort of mock replica of Burberry’s own website, also creating a game called Fur Fighters where the player is constructed as a wounded animal, fleeing the fate of becoming a fur coat. Their site Bloody Burberry continues in the style of the original Burberry site, and features highly-articulated ‘shoots’ where models appear with animal carcasses instead of real fur.

Image from bloodyburberry.com

More historically we could look at punk as a sort of protest or subversion through dress: here clothing plays a role in dissidence that is both embodied and all-encompassing. It could in fact be argued that punk here teaches us of the power of embodiment in confronting and challenging an audience. Disrupting the body can thus be seen in both the case of subcultural dressing, particularly punk, and protest dressing, particularly PETA. On this note, even a lack of clothing, for example in PETA’s ‘I’d rather go naked campaign’ can be construed as another use of clothing (through the lack thereof) as a means of subversion through the body. The use of clothing is very distinctive here – as essentially a protest on the body, or more specifically; the body as a commodity.

Christy Turlington poses in the PETA campaign ‘I’d Rather Go Naked’ from 1993

A more recent instance of activism in fashion was held by the activism group ‘Intern Labour Rights’ which was created during ‘Occupy’. The group held a protest at the latest New York and London Fashion Weeks, addressing the practice of using unpaid interns in fashion studios – a very real and often internalised issue in the industry. This action was, arguably, a much needed address on an issue that is emerging as pertinent in the fashion industry.

Perhaps protest or activism against ‘fashion’ acts as a sort of means of policing, as it generally addresses the isolated, extreme and ethically dubious practices of the fashion industry – such as the use of fur, or interns – and is an integral and integrated aspect of the fashion system. It is difficult to really disempower and democratize the industry as a ‘whole’ by means of protest, but perhaps it can be of use in reigning in particularly abhorrent practises by offering some sort of recourse in addressing these activities.

Further reading:

http://www.bloodyburberry.com/

http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Our_Dumb_Animals.html?id=EEcsAAAAYAAJ&redir_esc=y

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/865172/the-devil-pays-nada-occupy-wall-street-protests-intern-abuse

http://internlaborrights.wordpress.com/

Joseph Kosuth, ‘One and Three Chairs’ 1965

By Gabriella Frykhamn

Given its infancy in the world of academia, fashion studies still shows signs of a discipline in the making, measuring and comparing itself against the long tradition of critical thinking in subjects such as art and architecture. With this in mind, we can in fashion theory often find a reliance on certain key figures. One such figure is Roland Barthes, whose name reverberates throughout the field of fashion studies. Considering that Barthes was not only one of the earliest academics to write about fashion, but also one of the first to develop a theory on fashion, the reliance on his work is hardly surprising. But bearing in mind that references to Barthes are seemingly scattered throughout almost every academic article on fashion, I find myself asking; where is the assessment of this author’s own work?

Barthes argues that fashion is a language, and that it therefore has a grammatical structure. ‘Fashion’ is the abstract place in which clothes enter into a passage of transformation collecting the attributes that have come to define our constructed notion of fashion. In his often cited book The Fashion System from 1967, Barthes writes that this transition from clothes into ‘fashion’ takes place with the aid of words and images describing a garment. Barthes’ theory on fashion falls under the heading of ‘semiology’: the study of signs and their communicative functions.

Arguably The Fashion System in its entirety can be summed up, as Barthes does, in its preface: ‘this study actually addresses neither clothing nor language but the “translation”, so to speak, of one into the other, insofar as the former is already a system of signs’ (1). The term ‘clothing’ in this sentence is interchangeable, and changeable, and the notion of fashion is the fixed point or terminology to which the physical object is ascribed.

However, it’s the tendency to cut and drop quotes from Barthes without actually engaging with the theory that underlies the text that is my point of concern here. Barthes scholar Andy Stafford picks up on this when he notes that Barthes’ ‘writing on fashion seems to percolate slowly, in fragmentary form, into fashion theory; it is regularly cited, incidentally, here and there; and yet it is not treated as a body of writing’ (2). Similarly, Nicole Pellegrin writes in The Berg Companion to Fashion that ‘Barthes also wrote many diverse works on fashion. Often referred to but very little read for themselves’ (3).

The danger with ‘referring to rather than reading’ Barthes is that the actual arguments made by the late semiologist run the risk of being lost. Since Barthes’ theory of semiology and its referential sign system has a fundamental value for a critical discussion on fashion this is important to keep in mind. When lifted from their original context disembodied quotes are inevitably disassociated from the arguments they were initially meant to support. In other words, an isolated quote such as ‘fashion is to make something out of nothing’ (4) is now open to interpretation and subsequent re-interpretation, its original meaning evermore diluted the further we stray from its source. Where Barthes’ semiotics of fashion should be a rigorous interpretation of the fashion system, it all too often instead becomes a shortcut for intellectuality and the sort of pretentiousness that fashion scholars are all too often accused of.

Similarly, there is often a lack of an evaluative standpoint where Barthes’ work is concerned. Arguably, the majority of writers who actively use The Fashion System do so without providing support for why they use it to buttress their argument. Instead, any lengthy involvement with The Fashion System tends to take the shape of a summary or a direct application of the work, which in turn seemingly neglects Barthes’ own statement that ‘this venture, it must be admitted, is already dated’ and therefore ‘what is proposed here is already a certain history of semiology; in relation to the new intellectual art now being sketched out’ (5).

Bearing all this in mind, it was with great satisfaction that I recently read Michael Carter’s article ‘Stuff and Nonsense: The Limits of the Linguistic Model of Clothing’. In the prefaced abstract he aptly observes that ‘ever since the late 1950s and early 1960s when Roland Barthes revolutionized our conceptions of dress, most scholars have worked with an idea of dress as being a system of social communication, one that was structured like a language. Over time this conception of dress has attained such prominence that alternative ways of comprehending costume have been completely absent’ (6).

All this said, my hope is that fashion academia will open up for a more critical reading of Barthes. For fashion studies to grow into a more established field of academic research, fashion scholars should aspire to be more analytical and innovative in their assessments, not only of new subject matter, but also, and perhaps more importantly, of already established work. After all, for any academic discipline to be taken seriously there needs to be an examination of the subject from within the field itself.

Footnotes:

1. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard, 1983, p.x

2. Andy Stafford, The Language of Fashion, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter, 2006, p. 120

3. Nicole Pellegrin, The Berg Companion to Fashion, ed. Valerie Steele, 2010, p.53

4. Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, trans. Linda Coverdale, 1985 , p.67

5. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard, 1983, p.x

6. Michael Carter, Stuff and Nonsense: The Limits of the Linguistic Model of Clothing in Fashion Theory, 2012, p.343

If you want to read more of Gabriella’s writing, have a look at fourzerozero.blogspot.se