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, off ering 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.
The Dress section this time around contains a selection of papers presented at the ‘Fear and Fashion’ session of the ‘Anthropology of Fear’ conference organised by the New Literary Observer together with the European University at St. Petersburg on 17–18 May 2019.
The section opens with Julia Petrov’s Fashioning Fear, which reviews how and why clothing has become associated with horror in the modern era. The medieval symbolic understanding of clothing as being laden with the presence and terror of death is key to the understanding of how costume functions in the Gothic and horror literature and film of succeeding centuries. The Romantic period, in particular, saw the cultural and historical origin of the use and associations of certain types of clothing and fashion with villains and victims, identifying character archetypes through costume, such as masks and blood-stained garments. With the birth of mass media, the transmission and hybridization of horror costume tropes increased, locating horror not within the body of the killer or the seams of their clothes, but within the audience’s recognition of what they represent. Social rituals, in particular presented opportunities for the examination of tradition, and so the role of dress in enacting and subverting social expectations around weddings, funerals, masquerades, and holidays such as Halloween is explored for its ability to inspire terror.
Dress possesses characteristics which enable its easy application in horror contexts. Its aesthetic functions permit its narrative role: to reveal or conceal the shocking body, to attract or repulse the viewer, to identify the villain or the victim. All these functions, in turn, have psychological effects: Mood may be set, morality or immorality may be conveyed, innocence may be corrupted. Dress in horror fashions abjection and disguise.
When dress is used in horror literature and film as a plot device, it is used knowingly. It reflects the properties and characteristics of dress in the ordinary world, but these are often twisted in unexpected ways for narrative effect. The ability of dress to be a marker of the wearer’s personality or social status may turn out to be misleading, with dangerous consequences. Clothing’s outward beauty can hide grotesqueness. Its protective function may fail to contain the mortal flesh underneath. Thus, dress becomes an untrustworthy signifier, but also an effective narrative element. We are all familiar with dress; we all intuitively know how it should function. Therefore, to disturb that ‘nature’ is to add to the disturbing effect of horror.
In fact, our fears about clothing are reflective of much deeper anxieties around the vulnerability of our bodies. The psychological tension comes from a fear of the disruption of boundaries — the social and physical categories we shore up against chaos. The stain, the wrinkle, or the tear can be metaphors for universal human anxieties, including shame, disorder, loss, trauma, and abjection. In horror, questions of identity are entangled with how dress facilitates role enactment. Th e element of masquerade has an added frisson, in that the audience cannot know how deep the usual disguise goes. Sometimes, the true horror is when the mask hides something even more horrible. Th erefore, dress in horror can be understood as the guise of society’s norms and fears, displaced, symbolized, and condensed in horror as they might be in a dream. Th e fears inherent in horror are coded visibly through the dress of characters: foreignness, decadence, (sexual and material) hegemony, anonymity, disability, criminality, ageing, etc. Any disruption of “normal”, accepted, and ordered boundaries, through dress or otherwise, might presage even worse things to come — the greatest fear of all being the oblivion of death. In horror, the boundaries of the body, including death or life, as well as its powers of attraction and/or repulsion, are defined by clothing and accessories. The doom of irrelevance and decay which defines the fashion cycle, mirrors humanity’s own fears of inevitable mortality.
Clothing is supposed to protect us, but instead, it exposes us to the ravages of time, to the threat of death, to the inequalities of gender and class hierarchies, to the hidden monsters, and all our mortal, moral shortcomings, laid bare. This is the danse macabre of clothing and horror: life and death, beauty and ugliness, the grotesque and the sublime, stitched together in wickedly attractive seams.
Alice Morin looks at Fear and Fantasy as Motive(s) in American Fashion Magazines in the 1960s and the 1970s.
Fear — of the unknown or of an articulated enemy — anxiety, anguish, are central to the construction of the great American narrative, bringing the country together as one. As cultural products, fashion and the fashion press integrate elements of this narrative into their content and discourses.
Rebecca Arnold pointed fear as a driving element behind fashion and fashion images’ innovativeness all along the 20th century (Arnold 2002). The 1940s saw, in a context of postwar consumerism, prosperity and socio-political consensus, the rise of a specifically American fashion. American fashion first imposed itself as a business system, with the boom of ready-to-wear. Then it became a creative force to be reckoned with, through the emergence and promotion of American designers such as Betsey Johnson, operating in boutiques, American figures of the counter-culture such as Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, who had their own stylists, and, later, international household names such as Halston or Bill Blass, all giving birth to a proper American fashion scene. These upheavals to a decades-old system over which Europe, and especially Paris, had been reigning, took place while the US were under pressure from within, with political protests and social movements, and from the outside, with a Cold War still in its hot phase.
The two most prominent American fashion magazines, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, championed this American scene in an enthusiastic, albeit ambivalent way. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, when American fashion confirmed its prime place in their pages and in international commerce networks, the tension between fantasy and fear was palpable in their photographic productions as well as in the accompanying texts. This paper proposes a case study of how both elements operate in mirroring ways, at the same time answering and feeding each other in these magazines’ content.
First, it examines how the climate of panic in the 1960s, due to socio-cultural uncertainty and unrest and a still vivid nuclear threat, was met with unabashed inventiveness in clothing and in their staging. It particularly focuses on the buoyant, excessive photographic series and on the articles and paratext along them, which came out as remarkably future-oriented. This ensemble, which can be seen as a form of escapism, put forth, for the first time, a carefully crafted “world of fashion”. Detached from realities and prone to agitation, sometimes to cruelty, this closed circle of fashion avant-garde proved to be fertile ground for the interweaving of fantasy and fear, whether in the leitmotivs it favored or in the ways it has itself been represented since.
Secondly, this paper turns to the 1970s and observes how the status quo was progressively re-established in images and in text, in photographs and articles. Both embraced a more bourgeois, smoother aesthetic and discourse, while the casual, practical and glamourous “American style” was at its peak. However, such a toned-down shift still allowed for a fruitful dialogue between fear and creativity, with fear (of the social changes operated but also driven by the necessity to maintain the political, socio-economic and cultural model of consumerism) paradoxically making way for new modes of expressions, be it in writing or photographic practices, while fantasy manifested itself in refined lifestyles. Of peculiar interest is a new sensitivity, manifested through a more intimate way of staging preoccupied with subtle details, through varied yet still unattainable women role models, as well as through injunctive and concerned articles.
Thus, this paper will look closely into the historical intertwining of fear and fantasy, of external and internal pressures, of images and text, of macro-history and cultural aesthetic productions, to conclude to a productive tension at the core of fashion images-making in context. The fact that this is especially palpable in moments of fear makes this modus operandi all the more topical today.
Hilary Davidson presents her paper Fear or Fashion?: The Archaeology of Australian Convict Uniforms.
Between 1788 and 1868 Great Britain transported about 162,000 men, women and children to its penal colonies in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), and other Australian areas. The convicts — often convicted of nothing more than stealing loaf of bread — were sentenced for 7 or 14 years, or for life, during which they worked as indentured labourers. After they finished their sentence they were free to settle the new country and expand Britain’s colonisation of Indigenous lands.
Every Australian schoolchild learns that convicts wore pale shirts and trousers with big black arrows on them marking them out as prisoners of the state. However, new research into archaeological artefacts from Hyde Park Barracks (HPB) in Sydney has challenged this idea, and brought to light more nuanced narratives about how convicted people negotiated fear and fashion in their governmentissued clothing. The Barracks opened in 1819 as place to sleep, feed and control upwards of 600 male convicts, and by the time it ceased housing convicts in 1848, had seen an estimated 50,000 inmates pass through its entrance gates. On one side of these prisoners’ clothing were the so-called ‘punishment suits’, made from coarse woollen fabric named ‘parramatta’ aft er the place it was woven locally, the Female Factory in the colony’s other major town of Parramatta. The hot, rough suits went over ordinary clothing and were coloured black and yellow, instantly identifying the wearer as a convict. To wear the suit was to be punished by the suit in Sydney’s hot and oft en humid climate. Th ese were indeed a fashion of fear, shaming to the wearer.
On the other side was the everyday government-issued convict clothing, which attempted to create a uniform of penal identity. Th ere are three known nearly complete convict shirts surviving in Australia, two from HPB and one from a Tasmanian site, dated to the early 19th century. The shirts are made from white cotton fabric striped with blue, and one does indeed have a big black arrow stamped on it marking it out as government property. But this arrow marks the shirt, not the wearer, who could have tucked the arrowed section discreetly into his trousers. In fact, further research amongst around 200 scraps of convict shirts found under the floorboards of the Barracks has shown that convict clothing fits into a broad, global trend of British working men’s dress, especially that of sailors, with striped cotton and plain linen shirts, and canvas and duck trousers being issued, and worn worldwide.
Indeed, much of the social fear centred on convict clothing was that they would not be distinguishable from the respectable free settlers, ‘passing as free men’, in the words of one commentator. Th ey also swapped convict clothes for better ones when on business outside the barracks and merged into the general sartorial landscape. Th e economies of dress practised by the government, and the informal economies and practices of agency convicts built up around supposed prison clothing, undermine and complicate the established narratives of the punitive power, demarcation, control and supposed ‘uniformity’ of general convict dress in New South Wales.
In Body we turn back to hair and start with Emma Markiewicz’s paper Performing Health and Beauty in Eighteenth-Century England: The Significance of Hair in the Creation of Appearances. Hair played a central role in the creation of appearances in eighteenth century England, indeed big hair and wig wearing remain an evocative symbol of eighteenth-century England today. English fashions dictated that hair was central to the display of social status, youth and beauty, though establishing the motivations for the widespread custom of wig wearing can be problematic because wigs do not often survive in the historical record. Hair is encountered in the archives preserved as a keepsake, or as a piece of evidence to be used in court, but the wigs so popular in the eighteenth century remain elusive today in their physical form. Th is study traces eighteenth-century understanding of physical nature of hair as part of the body and attitudes to its transformation. It seeks to understand the everyday practice of adapting hair and strategies of use in wig wearing, using descriptions in contemporary journals and hairdresser’s manuals and archival records containing accounts of individuals. In the absence of surviving artefactual evidence, it draws heavily on portraiture and caricature to establish the cultural and social significance behind the central place of hair in the creation of appearances.
Jane Wildgoose looks at Victorian hair jewelry in her article Beyond All Price: Victorian Hair Jewelry, Commemoration & Story-Telling. When the Rothschild Foundation and National Trust commissioned the artist Jane Wildgoose to present an exhibition at Waddesdon Manor, the country mansion built for Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839–1898) containing his magnifi cent collection of eighteenthcentury French decorative arts and European paintings, she focused not on the grandeur of the house or the luxury of its contents, but on a simple lock of hair and a tiny photograph of Ferdinand’s wife, Evelina (1839–1866). This essay gives an account of how these humble objects held the key to a deeply personal story relating to Ferdinand and Evelina. Focusing on the materiality of human hair, and the complex codes for mourning in the late Victorian period, Wildgoose unravels some of the meanings associated with nineteenth-century mourning jewelry, including examples selected from the Rothschild collections and the Royal Collection to accompany Evelina’s hair and photograph in her exhibition Beyond All Price. It also discusses her research trip to Leila’s Hair Museum in the USA, where she learnt techniques for making wreaths from human hair in order to be able to make new pieces of hairwork for the exhibition.
The essay concludes with discussion about Wildgoose’s ongoing work with donated human hair, and her associated research into the historical circumstances thatled to a “unique status” being ascribed to human remains in collections, in the UK government’s Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums.
Geraldine Biddle-Perry contributes Ingrid Bergman, “The Maria Cut,” and the Construction of a Hollywood Persona. Hair, or rather its cutting, styling, and dressing, operates as a powerful cultural form in cinematic practices and filmic discourses. Th is essay explores the richness of this resource and its exploitation in the construction of a Hollywood persona, specifi cally that of Ingrid Bergman, and her portrayal of the emotionally damaged Maria in Paramount Pictures’ adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Th e focus is on Maria’s shaven head that is invested with huge symbolic signifi cance in Hemingway’s narrative and its onscreen transformation. Bergman’s carefully crafted gamine curls were swiftly dubbed the “Maria cut.” Albeit now largely forgotten, the style marked a new era in cinematic hairdressing and its role in the apparatus of star image making. Th e essay examines studio boss David O. Selznick and Bergman’s search for an authentic screen persona that could broker the dual demands of a Hollywood glamour aesthetic and a sense of personal and professional agency. In the context of the film’s release in the US and Britain in the Second World War, the Maria cut embodied a new kind of femininity that solicited and sustained fans’ interests who flocked to the hairdressers to replicate the look.
Emma Tarlo’s paper Great Expectations: The Role of the Wig Stylist (sheitelmacher) in Orthodox Jewish Salons looks at wigs in Jewish culture. Wigs are curious liminal objects that hover somewhere between the categories of prosthesis and clothing and offer a variety of possibilities for the transformation of appearances from hair substitution and covering to disguise. In this article, I focus on the particular demands and expectations placed upon the sheitel (Yiddish term for wig) worn by increasing numbers of married Jewish women who identify as frum (Torah-observant). Based on research in Jewish wig salons in Britain and the United States and on Jewish online forums, internet discussions and blogs with a wider geographic reach, this article sets out to show the complex web of material, social, emotional, aesthetic, and moral concerns that cluster around the sheitel and to highlight the role of the sheitel macher (wig stylist) in managing these anxieties and expectations. If all wigs are fraught with expectations in terms of their capacity to enable successful social performances, sheitels, it is argued, carry a particularly high burden of expectations owing to their contested and multivalent role as material embodiments of religious commitment, social status, and fashion competence and owing to the ambivalent feelings many Jewish women have towards their wigs.
Janice Miller’s article Manscaping and After: Power, Parody and the Hairy Chest is concerned with the ways that contemporary ideas of crisis and struggle in relation to white, Western masculinity are expressed through the body, placing particular emphasis on the grooming of male body hair and of the chest, in particular. “Manscaping,” made mainstream in the early 2000s, was promoted in men’s magazines and newspapers, which encouraged men to groom their chest hair in the name of personal pride and hygiene. This article will explore how, in response to these fashionable cycles, deeper issues of masculine identity are being contested through the bodies of men in a variety of media. It will settle on an analysis of the way that chest hair and manscaping have converged in online activities, which display chest hair shaped in ironic ways. It will argue that this is a form of parody and resistance that can be connected to a volatile political landscape and uses Sally Robinson’s notion of the “wounded body” (2005: 6) to argue that this is a reactionary move intended to maintain masculine dominance by making a visible refusal to adhere to the complex demands made by fashions in male chest hair.
The Culture section turns to the topic of fashion, design and appropriation and start with Jennifer Craik’s paper Is Australian Fashion and Dress Distinctively Australian? The idea of “fashion” as being a characteristic of Australian culture is frequently regarded as a non sequitur. Fashion is seen as belonging to far-flung cosmopolitan sites elsewhere while Australia is a far-flung site cut off from the trappings of civilization. Equally, Australia has long been regarded as being cut off from the “finer things” of civility, fashion, and good taste. At best, an Australian sense of style is regarded as anything that is practical, informal, and casual— T-shirts, practical footwear, moleskin trousers, and wide-brim hats; as an outfit thrown together without much thought. And yet, there has been an abiding interest in fashion sice European settlement in Australia, even in the early days of the convict colony. One recurring element of this fascination with fashion is what it means to speak of distinctively “Australian” fashion as opposed to derivative styles copied from elsewhere. Does it make sense to imagine such a thing? Moreover, if there is such a phenomenon as Australian fashion, when does fashion and dress practice in Australia become un-Australian? This question lies at the heart of this article.
In her paper Moda da Bahia: An Analysis of Contemporary Vendor Dress in Salvador Kelly Mohs Gage discusses the history related to the “traditional” Baianan dress worn by women in contemporary tourist areas of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Examining fugitive slave advertisements, travel diaries and images from the nineteenth century, it becomes clear that the dress of twenty-first century vendors in tourist areas of Salvador maintains a close visual and personal connection to the dress of female slaves. Goffman’s theory of personal front and Sansi’s theories on cultural appropriation in Afro-Brazilian traditions serve as the framework to assess characteristics of the twenty-first-century dress of acarajé vendors and shop girlsin Salvador that are based on nineteenth-century female slave clothing, addressing components of cultural authentication in terms of a shift from slave imagery to one of pride in heritage and African culture (and commercial gain).
Ekaterina Vasilieva’s paper Finnish Glass Design: Appropriations, Identity and the Question of the International looks at issues of identity and appropriation in an unusual area. The chief focus of Vasilieva’s research is the problem of identifi cation within the International style system. The author examines this issue within the context of Scandinavian design, an area which set a major precedent in twentieth-century design and fashion. From the point of view of identity and the reflections with which it is associated, Scandinavian, and Finnish design in particular, present an interesting phenomenon. On the one hand, the design forms that developed in the Nordic countries can be seen as veritable canons of International style, a trend that appeared in the middle of the twentieth century and went on to become one of the key universal artistic programmes of the last century. On the other hand, however, Finnish design served as a major means of expression of national identity. Besides off ering fascinating artistic material in the areas of fashion and design, it set a unique precedent semantically. This unusual combination of the phenomenon of a universal style’s emergence, artistic appropriation and a means of asserting national identity, forms the main focus of Vasilieva’s study.
Ekaterina Kulinicheva offers her paper ‘Cultural Appropriation’ as a Tool in Modern Olympic Uniform Design: How It Is Used and Received. The author examines the specific range of visual tools that are used in the design of Olympic parade uniforms in order to pay homage to the host country or region. As a rule, these include adapting particular items of clothing, patterns or images associated with the cultural stereotypes linked with that country or region, or reproducing directly the designers’ particular vision of the local vestimentary ‘specialities’. These methods could be termed ‘Olympic cultural appropriation’. Kulinicheva’s research leads her to conclude that this group of tools corresponds to the function of Olympic parade uniform that could be termed ‘themed costume’, the theme being the host location. The ways in which these design methods are used are on the whole similar to the processes usually branded ‘cultural appropriation’ in cultural industries, especially where the designers are working with well-known cultural stereotypes. Olympic outfits, however, appeared and are used in a very different context to that which accompanies other items in the fashion industry, and this, most likely, explains the difference in attitudes towards these products. Whilst cultural appropriation within the fashion industry is today frequently subjected to criticism, the author failed to find any sources that would be critical of Olympic uniform in the same way. At the same time, the use in Olympic uniform design of symbols representing other cultures has at times been criticised for a different reason, due to its apparent contradiction of a key function of present-day Olympic uniform, that of visually asserting the national identity of the wearer. This would appear to show that this function of Olympic outfits, although it may not be the only one, is largely seen as the most important.
Turning to this issue’s In Focus column, Claire Baker offers An Experiential Investigation into the Embroidery Practices of the Chernobyl Babushka. This paper contextualises and personalises a cohesive line of enquiry into the textile practices of the ‘Babushkas’ (elderly women) of Chernobyl through empirical research: observing, as well as gathering and recording testimonies and histories in the field.
Chernobyl as place (or rather non-place) is the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident of 1986. In the aftermath of the disaster, 91,200 people were evacuated from areas around Chernobyl, and it is now deemed to be uninhabitable. 128 people remain, their legacy the declining remains of a forgotten community and the loss of their prominent textile heritage. The ‘Embroidery as a Language’ project was implemented in order to see how a common interest such as embroidery could be used within the context of action research methodology to encourage stronger connections and, as a consequence, promote the sharing of relevant and new information about regional embroidery, in turn helping to preserve the past and to take it forward into the future. For the so-called ‘self settlers’, those who refused to leave or returned following the disaster, building up an archive and preserving their history through recording personal experiences and narratives, are of paramount importance. This paper tells the story of the poignant ongoing experiential study of the self settlers and their embroidery that has developed over the past four years during ten separate visits to the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
In the Events section this time around, Elizabeth Castaldo Lunden reviews ‘Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich’ at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, 9 May 2019 — 1 September 2019.
Aleksandra Selivanova and Ksenia Guseva offer Textiles: To Be Remembered and Re-evaluated, a review of the conference ‘Textile Legacy: Material and Immaterial’ held on 29 November at the Museum of Moscow in connection with the ‘Fabrics of Moscow’ exhibition which ran at the museum between 20 September 2019 and 2 February 2020. The exhibition is the subject of the review contributed to this issue by Ksenia Gusarova.
In this issue’s Books section, Ekaterina Vasilieva offers Glamorous Communities, a review of Elizabeth Wilson’s ‘Bohemians: Th e Glamorous Outcasts’, the Russian translation of which (‘Bogema: Velikolepniye Izgoi’) was published by the New Literary Observer, Moscow, in 2019.
Chris Hesselbein presents Shoes with Meaning, his take on Elizabeth Semmelhack’s ‘Shoes: The Meaning of Style’, Reaktion Books, 2018.
In A Source of Inspiration for Costume Designers, Jennifer Gald takes a look at ‘Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture, and the Body’ by Donatella Barbieri, with a contribution by Melissa Trimingham (Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2017).