SUMMARY

Dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of fashion from an academic perspective, the quarterly journal Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture views fashion as a cultural phenomenon, offering the reader a wide range of articles by leading Western and Russian specialists, as well as classical texts on fashion theory. From the history of dress and design to body practices; from the work of well-known designers to issues around consumption in fashion; from beauty and the fashionable figure through the ages to fashion journalism, fashion and PR, fashion and city life, art and fashion, fashion and photography — Fashion Theory covers it all.

In this issue's Dress section, Karen de Perthuis offers The Synthetic Ideal: The Fashion Model and Photographic Manipulation. How do realworld relationships between dress and the body differ from those portrayed through fashion? Such is the central question addressed by De Pertuis in her analysis. On the catwalk and in life, fashion has always been restricted by the human body in a way that has not been the case in representation. However, with the advent of computer manipulation of the image, the boundary between garment and skin is dissolved, not as in the practices of tattooing and piercing, in order to regain some lost site of authenticity, but rather to assert the supreme authority of artifice. Fashion, ever at battle with nature, finds itself released from the limitations of the human form and revels in the freedom to invent a humanity where any trace of the organic has been eliminated. In the images of fashion photographers who have embraced the extremes of digital manipulation, Baudelaire’s description of fashion as a ‘sublime deformation of Nature, or rather, as a permanent and repeated attempt at her renewed reformation’ is taken to its extreme. At one level, the newly manipulated form directly imitates sartorial fashion. However, on a more fundamental level, the reconstruction of the fashionable ideal is a culmination of Fashion’s attempts to represent its essential mode of being. In the synthetic ideal, fashion gives full reign to its obsession with artifice and fantasy and finally resolves, on the body of the model, its ongoing dialectic between mortality and immortality.

Paul Jobling presents On the Turn — Millennial Bodies and the Meaning of Time in Andrea Giacobbe’s Fashion Photography. People have long tended to associate the advent of new centuries and millennia with special hopes and fears. Fin-de-siècle apocalyptic anxiety; a time seen as possessing special meaning. Heightened tensions accompanied the onset of the second and third millenia, as well as the start of the twentieth century. This piece by Paul Jobling looks at the relationship of the turn of the century to identity and the tension between traditional values and new beginnings. These are the key themes that Jobling takes the opportunity of elaborating with specific reference to the work of Andrea Giacobbe, and in particular to the millennial symbolism of one of his fashion spreads, ‘Simplex Concordia’, which appeared in The Face in July 1996. On the one hand, he deals with the kinds of corporeal transubstantiation that take place in the spread in the context of cyborg theory. And on the other, he wants to account for its temporal symbolism in terms of kairos or apocalyptic time, which seems to offer, as the literary critic Frank Kermode contends, ‘an escape from chronicity, and so, in some measure, a deviation from this norm of ‘reality’.

In De/constructing Fashion/Fashions of Deconstruction: Cindy Sherman’s Fashion Photographs, Hanne Loreck maintains that neither in the art system, nor in cultural theory have fashion and art ever been as close as they were in the 1990s, when the genre boundaries between the so-called fine and applied or decorative arts were broken down programmatically. In the project of denaturalizing the genders, this encounter between fashion and art can prove highly productive aesthetically and visually as well as theoretically. Loreck aims to clarify how the artist Cindy Sherman redefined the dress in relation to the gendered body, or, conversely, how the body can be viewed as a figure representing the dress and masquerade. In examining Sherman’s work, the article shows how Sherman’s conscious and unconscious visual constructions changed along with the theories of feminist and gender studies. The article concludes that what is significant about Sherman’s photographs is that they evidence at all times the difference between realism and the Real. Sherman orchestrates the relationships between reality and representation by means of a masquerade that can also be called fashion.

Olga Annanurova’s (Im)Possible to Try On: Some Thoughts on Soviet Fashion Photography takes a look at a series of photographs first published in the 1970s and 1980s by Soviet Woman (‘Sovietskaya Zhenschina’) magazine, and subsequently shown at the ‘Made in the USSR: Soviet Fashion of the 1950s to 1970s’ exhibition of 1998. The author focuses in particular on the visual impressions that the series produces on contemporary viewers. For some, these shots are a revelation; others may have seen them many years ago. They may come across as naive or natural; some viewers may not recognize them as dating back to Soviet times. In ascribing (or not ascribing) the pictures to that particular era, viewers will take into account factors such as the models’ poses, facial expressions, outfits and makeup, as well as the conditions of the photo shoots, such as lighting and background. A certain awkwardness in the models’ stances and expressions could be seen as pointing to a mismatch between the bodily experience of the models, and the image they are trying on, taken from Western fashion photography practice. This disjointedness in the body’s mode of being was, indeed, typical of Soviet people in the 1970s and 1980s, when the previous bodily canons had not yet fully dissipated, and the new ones had not yet become fully formed or fixed. This unsettled state of affairs is evident in the models’ dress and overly gaudy makeup, whilst the natural light of the photo shoot serves to heighten the effect and highlight the texture of the textiles and background, thus allowing the ‘Soviet’ to come through and be physically palpable in particular details. The quality of the images is also a significant factor in shaping viewers’ impressions. The coloring and print quality of images from a Soviet women’s magazine are such that viewers are immediately put in mind of the period in question. The later reproductions, however, are closer in quality to the glossies of today, thus producing an interesting contrast to the image content itself. This contrast means that viewers might even fail at first to notice the Soviet nature of the pictures, perceiving it later with something of a shock. It is this awkwardness of simultaneous development and erasure of meaning in the eyes of the viewer that is of particular interest to Annanurova in her research.

The Body section once more takes up the theme of parts of the body in culture and focuses, again, on hair. Yulia Demidenko’s The Hairdressers’ Century: On ‘Pigeon Wings’ and ‘La Belle Poule’ combs through the history of eighteenth-century male and female hairstyles. Around that time, the hairdressing profession rose to new prestigious heights, finding unprecedented recognition in Europe. The eighteenth century can indeed by rights be named the ‘century of the hairdresser’. This hitherto unseen flourishing of the hairstyling art produced a whole array of masters, from the legendary Legros de Rumigny and Baulard to Beaumarchais’ creation, Figaro. The development of contemporary hairstyles proved a key milestone in the history of the hairstyling art.

Maxine Craig contributes The Decline and Fall of the Conk; or, How to Read a Process. In the 1940s and 1950s, most black women straightened their hair; some black men conked theirs. The difference between hair straightened with a hot comb and hair conked with lye was social. Though the origins of a beauty standard that celebrated long straight hair undoubtedly reflected standards of the dominant white culture, the pressures to conform to the standard were usually exerted from within African American communities. While a preference for straightened hair was the prevailing African American standard of beauty, that was not the only view. As soon as hair straightening emerged as the dominant and expected practice, there were African Americans who criticized it. Advocates for black pride often directed their attention to body practices, likening hair straightening to skin bleaching and calling both the actions of a person ashamed of her race.

Lung-kee Sun offers Politics of Hair and the Issue of the Bob in Modern China. Hairstyles may have varied throughout China’s long history, but they were often central to Chinese cultural politics, and remained so down to recent times. In this paper, Chinese cultural expert Lung-kee Sun presents a brief historical overview of how evolving hairstyles have been viewed in China, focussing in particular on attitudes towards the female bob that became popular in the country in the early twentieth century.

This issue's Culture section is devoted to Soviet leisure practices. Galina Zelenina’s ‘I Have a Hobby — I Collect Jews’: The Search for Identity as a Pastime looks at a range of leisure activities, as described in biographical interviews and memoirs of Soviet Jews. The author examines holiday activities as well as everyday group leisure pastimes and individual hobbies. Besides recounting, structuring and commenting on various relevant memoirs (that do not, on the whole, in themselves possess striking ethnocultural value), Zelenina aims to home in on, and to interpret the ‘Jewishness’ not so much of the pastimes themselves — these were shared by millions of Soviets, and, indeed, foreigners too, — but of the surviving memoirs of, and reflections on, these pastimes. Finally, Zelenina examines the dialectic of leisure time and identity in the broader history of Jews in the USSR.

In The Science and Technology of Free Time during the Soviet ‘Thaw’: Objects that Shaped Leisure in 1950s and 1960s USSR, Doctor of History Natalia Lebina takes a fascinating and detailed look at the objects and accessories that Soviet people used in their leisure time in the 1950s and 1960s. The author concludes that during this period, material objects played a huge part in changing people’s everyday living experience, their leisure pastimes in particular.

Jeffrey Horsley’s article A Fashion ‘Muséographie’: The Delineation of Innovative Presentation Modes at ModeMuseum, Antwerp is taken from doctoral research executed at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London. It discusses the delineation of a repertoire of innovative presentation modes evident in the display of fashion in the museum that Horsley defines using the terms ‘threshold’, ‘landscape’, and ‘object’. The presentation modes and the techniques employed to realize them, identified through comparative analysis of a sample of almost one hundred fashion exhibitions, are each discussed in detail and supported by reference to four key exhibitions staged at ModeMuseum (MoMu), the Fashion Museum of the Province of Antwerp, Belgium.

In the Life of Remarkable Things column, Liuba Bakst takes a closer look at an item of summer headgear, popular for over two centuries — the Panama hat. In the course of her research, the author discovered a curious artifact, proving that the Panama hat gained popularity in Europe around half a century earlier than had previously been thought. Bakst also examines the origins of the famous hat’s name, pointing out that the link with the country in question is a somewhat tenuous one.

In the Events section, Ksenia Borderioux visits the ‘Déboutonner la Mode’ exhibition at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris (10 February — 19 July 2015), and presents her impressions in Little Buttons, Big Fashion.

In Songs of Love, Elena Igumnova reviews ‘Robert Doisneau: The Beauty of Everyday Life’ at Moscow’s Multimedia Art Museum (12 February — 10 May 2015).

Anya Kurennaya offers Dreamy, Idle, Sexy: her take on ‘Yves Saint Laurent + Halston: Fashioning the 70s’ at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York (6 February — 18 April 2015).

Female Power and a Show of Contradiction by Gaba Naimanovich reviews ‘Women Fashion Power’ at London’s Design Museum (29 October 2014 — 26 April 2015).

Ellen Mcintyre presents On the Sweet Sense of Attachment: a look at ‘Wedding Dresses 1775–2014’ at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (3 May 2014 — 15 March 2015).

Ekaterina Shubnaya’s An Invitation to Dance takes a look at ‘Léon Bakst: In the Whirl of the Dance’ at Moscow’s MustArt Gallery (13 February — 12 March 2015).

In this issue’s Books section, ‘Mademoiselle, Do Not Talk to the Young Ladies, for There Are None Here’ by Olga Vainshtein reviews Car-olyne Evans’ The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929. Yale University Press, 2013.

In D&G-monogatari, Ksenia Gussarova reviews Masafumi Monden’s Japanese Fashion Cultures: Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan. London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2015. 204 p.; ill.