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.

This issue’s Dress section is once again devoted to constructions of gender.

Leah Payne’s ‘Pants Don’t Make Preachers’: The Image of a Female Pentecostal Minister provides a chapter from Gender and Pentecostal Re­vivalism: Making a Female Ministry in the Early Twentieth Century. This innovative volume provides an interdisciplinary, theoretically fresh answer to an enduring question for Pentecostal/Charismatic Christiani­ties: how do women lead churches? This study fills the lacuna by exami­ning the leadership and legacy of two architects of the Pentecostal move­ment — Maria Woodworth-Etter and Aimee Semple McPherson. In this chapter, the author examines the ways in which fashion helped to stress the striking religious image and gender role of the two women, thereby impacting their careers as religious leaders. Maria Woodworth-Etter and Aimee Semple McPherson were healing evangelists, highly influential in American revivalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At that time, the ministry was very much a male domain: so it had been for centuries, with few exceptions. Throughout the development of the Christian tradition, women ministers were usually part of small religious communities that tended to attract derision and were often persecuted. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, most Americans saw this attitude towards women pastors as correct and natural.

Ricardo E. Zulueta offers Gender Flux: Transatlantic Influence on Fashioning the Cross-Dresser in American Silent Cinema. From the post-Victorian era to the enforcement of the Hays Code in 1934, European theatre and film played a significant role in the temporal conditional, socio-cultural acceptance of gender fluidity in the US. The author sug­gests that during a time period that spanned between approximately 1906 and 1934, the popularization of female/male impersonators served as a transgressive force, propelling a meaningful dialogue on social tole­rance. The selection of films in this article represents an attempt to nar­row the vast field and introduce the strongest evidence to substantiate this assertion. Each film reveals a direct link to a European artistic tra­dition; all cast the cross-dresser as protagonist; costume/fashion plays a central role in characterization; and finally the narratives demonstrate a socially progressive point of view regarding the negotiation of gender roles. Through detailed film sequence readings and costume and cul­tural analysis, Zulueta conducts an examination of these North Ameri­can pi votal silent motion pictures and their antecedent British, French, German, Italian, and Spanish artistic influences. In order to better un­derstand the complex political climate simmering beneath the artifice of twentieth-century drag, this article also contextualizes these texts within the social crisis that erupted as a result of modernity.

Masafumi Monden suggests that Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides (1999) can be viewed as visualizing the (re)negotiation process of the twinned aspects of girlish ‘autonomy’ and ‘restriction’. Although the film’s references to more established images of girlhood are observable, its vague, narrative neutrality, supported by cinematic aesthetics with a dreamy and melancholic effect, leaves their meanings largely un­explained. Connected to our contemporary ideas about adolescence, fe­mininity is generally linked to either pathological fragility or emphasized sexual assertiveness. Monden questions the legitimacy of these binaries and instead reads The Virgin Suicides as a depiction of female comple­xity, as the subtle complexity of the heroines contradicts these stereo­types. Instead of situating on either polar of extreme assertiveness and fragility, Coppola presents her conception of adolescent girls as floating between these two. The film’s ethereal and maidenly aesthetics conveyed through the visual qualities of the Lisbon Sisters, including the dresses they wear, effectively layer the girls’ sense of autonomy and sexual matu­rity, signifying the negotiation of idealizing, suppressing and empower­ing adolescent girls. The tragic fate of the girls, on the other hand, limits the film’s capacity to offer an alternative to the monolithic idea of ado­lescent ‘girlhood’ and how it is visualized in our contemporary culture. Eun Jung Rang contributes Blue or Pink? That is the Question: Ho­mophobia and Its Influence on the Gendering of Colour Symbolism. Gen­der demarcation by the colours blue and pink in children’s clothing be­came too conspicuous to ignore during the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century in America. This article elucidates the cor­relation between the history of colour fixation for babies of each gender and the formation of gender identity during this period. The investiga­tion into the colour assignment to babies of each gender from the late Victorian era to the post-war era will demonstrate the vying relations of both sexes that were represented by blue and pink and the evolving in­terrelationship between colour and social structure when the fear of ho­mosexuality was particularly widespread in the Euro-American world.

The Body section continues its exploration of the history of fashion by tracing the treatment of various parts of the body throughout histo­ry. This time around, we once more turn to hair, and offer the classic es­say Magical Hair by the well-known English social anthropologist Ed­mund Leach. Gaining fame for his work with the peoples of South and South-East Asia, Leach produced a wealth of fascinating research into myths and symbols. Combining psychoanalytical and anthropological approaches, in this famous piece he looks at the symbolic and ritual im­portance of hair in different cultures. The anthropologist analyzes cross-cultural patterns associated with long and short head hair, especially of males. He points out that head hair, its treatment, and its abundance or absence is often a symbolic marker of social and, also, spiritual power. For example, Leach shows that the shaved heads of Hindu male ascetics symbolize their detachment from worldly, including sexual, attachments. Interestingly, the same message is conveyed by the wildly long, matted and uncontrolled hair of other Hindu male ascetics. In these cases, both the absence of head hair and abundant wild head hair put the person outside the bounds of everyday life.

Anya Kurennaya offers The Rise of the New ‘Blue Rinse Brigade’: The Impact of Celebrities on the Social History of Unnatural Hair Co­lour. Within the field of fashion studies, there is a sizable body of work that discusses hair as a component of the embodied self and as a tool for identity formation. At the same time, within fashion studies and celeb­rity and cultural studies, celebrities are often cited as a source of popular fashion inspiration. However, there is a paucity of work exploring the intersection of these two ideas and, furthermore, on the specific impact of ‘celebrity hair’ on everyday beauty practices and identity formation. This paper takes the concept of unnatural hair colour — that is, hair dyed a colour that does not occur naturally — and traces its historical and cul­tural evolution along two tracks: the celebrity-oriented, and the alterna­tive and underground scenes. A comparison is then made between con­temporary celebrity trends in unnatural hair colour and everyday hair dyeing practices as documented on online forums devoted to hair. While on the one hand, individuals often dye their hair unnatural colours as an individualizing expression, forum comments demonstrate that they often choose styles and colours that allow them to approximate the style of a particular celebrity, and often express displeasure if they fail to ap­proximate the results of their chosen celebrity hair colour or style. Analy­sis of this commentary, in conjunction with visual analysis of unnatural hair colour trends in celebrity culture, yields the finding that a singular beauty practice can at once signal both uniformity and differentiation, conformity and rebellion, or individuality and togetherness.

This issue’s Culture section is devoted to fashion and utopia.

Flavia Loscialpo offers Utopian Clothing: The Futurist and Construc-tivist Proposals in the Early 1920s. ‘Can fashion start from zero?’ is a question that, as observed by theorists, historians and curators, ulti­mately haunts those radical sartorial projects embodying a ‘new’ vision of the world. In the experimental overalls designed at the beginning of the twentieth century by Thayaht in Italy and Stepanova, Rodchenko and Popova in Russia, it is possible to follow and progressively unfold the aspiration to a total renovation and reorganization of life. The differ­ences between the artistic contexts to which these artists belong — Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism — have often induced critics to discuss their sartorial proposals separately, overlooking their points of convergence. Within this article, the overalls by Thayaht and the Russian Constructivists are instead analyzed in relation to each other, as agents of change, or rather as instances of a ‘utilitarian outrage’. In examining their biographies, the article questions the newness of these creations, the rhetoric of the ‘new’ that accompanied them and their status as ‘an­ti-fashion’ projects. Combining material culture with cultural history, it argues that their iconoclasm and utopian potential resides precisely in their proposing a rationalization of clothing, and in ‘questioning the very fashion project itself’, in both its symbolic and tangible presence. Finally, on the basis of archival research and interviews conducted at the Thayaht-RAM Archive, Florence, the characterization of Thayaht’s TuTa as a Futurist creation, which has often been taken for granted, is reconsidered and problematized further.

In Tatlin’s Clothing Designs as Anti-Fashion, Natalia Kurchanova argues that Vladimir Tatlin’s approach to clothing design goes against what most people understand by the word ‘fashion’. Instead of a ‘surface decoration of the body’, Tatlin’s simple, undecorated, and even bulky clothes encased the body in the manner of a climate-control space suit, deliberately avoiding the quality of fashionable ‘surface decoration’. Us­ing art history research and phenomenological theory, Kurchanova at­tempts to prove that Tatlin’s famous slogan ‘let us place the eye under the control of touch’ elaborated an aesthetic in which the drive for physi­cal, palpable sensation did not eliminate, but took priority over abstract thought. This drive can be conceptualized as phenomenological, as op­posed to semiotic, responding to our primal desire to make ourselves at home in space defined in concrete physical terms, including the space of our own bodies, rather than to abstract signs that orient us within that space. This argument is supported by the observation that foundational critical and theoretical texts on fashion — such as Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life, which sees fashion through the lens of paint­ing, style and surface decoration, or Roland Barthes’ The Fashion System, which sees it through language and sign systems — cannot be applied to Tatlin’s creations without major strains and distortions of meaning. The best theoretical foundation in art history for his coats, pants, and dresses comes from the German architect Gottfried Semper, who directed his at­tention to the ‘eternal, invariable element’ of beauty, which Baudelaire decided to ignore in favour of a ‘relative and circumstantial element’. In the section on textiles in his treatise Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, Semper compared architecture to dress in terms of figuration and symbolic function. There, he also introduced the notion of adornment as ‘that which covers nature’ in the most necessary and practical way devoid of the apparent whimsy of fashion. In other words, Semper thought of architecture as a form of ‘dress’, in which art and form, aesthetic and ethical functions could not be separated, mani­festing a certain connection to the permanent ‘law of nature’ — that is, to necessity of style to the survival of man that lies at the basis of art.

Yulia Demidenko in her paper New Dress for a New World: Vla­dimir Tatlin’s Clothing Designs in the Context of His Time turns to Vladimir Tatlin’s Normal-clothes, examining his designs not so much as a project in ‘constructing life’, but as a direct response to the challenges of the era of War Communism. Seen in this light, Tatlin’s design solu­tions have more to do with living conditions in contemporary Petrograd, than with any deliberate attempt by Tatlin the Constructivist to resolve creative problems through the formulation of new principles of work. As conditions in Petrograd changed, new forms of dress lost their re­levance; with the disappearance of demand, they gradually turned into a kind of aesthetic Utopia of the new times.

Anat Helman’s historical case study Kibbutz Dress in the 1950s: Utopian Equality, Anti Fashion, and Change reconstructs and analyzes dress practices in the Kibbutz during the early years of the Israeli state. The Kibbutz — a utopian communal society — was regarded as the in­carnation of Zionist agricultural pioneering, but in the 1950s it was go­ing through a certain crisis. The special dress worn by male and female Kibbutz members both for work and for leisure, served as an inten­tional anti-fashion. It internally preserved and externally signaled the community’s egalitarian, austere, socialist ideals. However, as the Kib­butz was going through various demographic and economic changes, communal clothing institutions and local adornment customs were gradually modified as well. Disputes over the sartorial sphere touched upon combined issues of practicality and principle, such as forms of clothes distribution, and attempts to allow more personal freedom of choice while at the same time maintaining material equality and col­lective conformity among Kibbutz members. These disputes reflected wider debates about the community’s future development, and attest to the central role that dress played in consolidating and symbolizing the unique culture of the Kibbutz.

In this issue’s Museum Business column Maria Terekhova contrib­utes How Peter the Great’s Boots Discovered America: Diana Vreeland and the Western Approach to Russian Dress in Museums. On December 6, 1976, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art threw open its doors with a new exhibition entitled ‘The Glory of Russian Costume’. Brainchild of its eminent curator Diana Vreeland, the project drew on the collections of major Soviet museums to showcase Russian dress from the eleventh to the twentieth century. As the first foreign exhibition showing historical costume from the USSR, the event was a resounding success, going on to form Western opinion of Russian dress and style for many years. The or­ganization leading up to the exhibition was, however, far from straight­forward. A chain of diplomatic spats and deep disagreements around the event went to show just how different were the Soviet and American ap­proaches to the exhibition of dress. Taking a look back at the exhibits in this landmark event, the author allows us to gain a better understanding of Western ideas on Russian costume and Russian style.