FASHION NOTES

Peter Wollen

 
In his essay on 'Invisible Fashions' Ackbar Abbas talks about the way in which certain types of theory can themselves become fashionable. We can see this at work, he points out, even in the world of 'fashion theory' itself, where it has become fashionable to regard clothes primarily as bearers of social identity and meaning, an approach which originates in the post-modern discursive field where cultural studies meet semiotics. I must admit that I have some problems with this way of conceptualizing clothes. It is not completely wrong, I would readily agree, but it can also be limiting. Clothes are intimately related to wearers and their bodies, of course, but they also have their own qualities and their own identity simply as clothes. When we encounter clothes in everyday life, in the street or at work, they are a crucial element in the self-presentation of specific wearers, along with their gestures, deportment, language, life-style, etc. But we also encounter clothes in other contexts when they are not being worn - in shops, in closets, in museums, in photographs, in imagination. In these situations, clothes are disembodied, abstracted from specific use. We can see them as things in themselves, just as we can see cars or telephones or chairs or ceramics or cricket bats or watches or violins as objects, which are designed for use by embodied individuals but are also granted an identity and value of their own, a right to be considered autonomously as well-designed, original, ingenious and even beautiful. We should be careful not to fetishize the body as the source of meaning, as if drawing or stitching or shaping were not as human as display or adornment, as if the production of clothes was less vital or real than their consumption.

In her vivid and informative essay on Mr John and the extraordinary hats which he designed, both for private clients and for the film industry, Drake Stutesman notes how 'the film hat served complex functions'. It was designed to convey information about the wearer's character, state of mind and social status. It aided the cameraman by casting a downward shadow or providing a tonal contrast. In this respect, it was the job of the hat to enhance the face by framing it without overwhelming it. In her analysis of Josef Von Sternberg's Shanghai Express, she describes in detail how changes of hat correspond to changes in the fortunes of the principal character, played by Marlene Dietrich, each new item of millinery 'making us look at her all the more, yet continuing to impress as a hat.' These hats both had an identity of their own and were extraordinary examples of design, thought and workmanship. Drake Stutesman recounts a telling and unforgettable story, well worth repeating - 'A woman came to his salon, needing a hat immediately. He took up materials and shaped a hat on her head. She loved it but was shocked at its price. John calmly undid the hat and handed its pieces to her. "That's $3.59," he said, "You make it."' The moral of the story, as Mr John intended, was that a hat, like any other garment, is an object in its own right which has been planned and produced by the milliner. It is for his creativity and skill that he is paid, creativity and skill which are akin to those of every kind of craftsperon or artist. In this respect a hat by Mr John is no different from a car by Bugatti or a chair by Mies Van Der Rohe or a sculpture by Brancusi.

In his provocative essay, Ackbar Abbas focusses on the consumer - the dandy, the fashion victim - rather than the producer. As a result, he is much less specific, much more given to generalization about the fashion system as such, rather than discussing specific garments, wending his way through the writings of Baudelaire, Simmel and Benjamin, which are themselves rather non-specific, in order to conclude that fashion always points us towards the momentary and the transient (Benjamin's Jetztzeit, immediate 'nowness', albeit always 'shot through with fragments of the past') without ever actually solving its riddle, pinpointing its true meaning. I am not convinced that fashion is really about a kind of randomized or arbitrary transience at all. On the contrary, it has a history whose overall shape and dynamic can be described quite clearly and logically. It is by no means arbitrary in its development. Look, for instance, at Brummell, the progenitor of dandyism and the single greatest influence on Baudelaire's attitude to fashion. Unfortunately Benjamin failed to understand the importance of Brummell to Baudelaire, preferring to concentrate on the flâneur rather than the dandy. Baudelaire, moreover, himself misunderstood the true weight of Brummell's historical significance.

As Ackbar Abbas notes, Brummell sought 'to be fashionable without being seen to be fashionable. In other words, fashion had to be invisible.' Brummell himself put it this way, as cited by the famous courtesan, Harriet Wilson: '"No perfumes," Brummell used to say, "but very fine linen, plenty of it, and country-washing. If John Bull turns round to look after you, you are not well-dressed; but either too stiff, too tight or too fashionable"' (Laver 1968: 21). The foundation of Brummell's dandyism, as James Laver has pointed out, lay in 'the repudiation of gorgeous and conspicuous attire' (ibid 28). As John Harvey notes, in his classic Men In Black, Brummell 'eschewed colour of any strength'(1995: 30). Brummell took pride in meticulousness rather than flamboyance, creating the conditions in which the classic English gentleman's outfit could gain ascendancy over the opulence and hyperbole of the aristocrat's peacock plumage. In France, Balzac himself claimed to have heard from Brummell's own lips 'the immortal sentence' to the effect that if people are struck by your appearance you are not well-dressed (Laver 1968: 78). Such invisibility, however, as Abbas points out, could yet be penetrated by one's peers, by fellow devotees of the dandy's code.

Brummell, of course, did not make his own clothes, yet there is a real sense in which he designed them. He told his bespoke tailor what it was he wanted, in cut and colour and materials. His trousers and coat were customized. In one aspect at least - the tieing of his cravat - he himself became an artist of sorts, determining the exact pattern of folds and loops, laboriously and lengthily manipulating the cloth with movements of his neck, his chin and his fingers, in order to accomplish exactly the desired effect. It is in this secondary sense, by deciding the precise way in which clothes will be draped or buttoned or combined, that the consumer can show a limited creativity. In Brummell's case the long-term effect was indeed to change the whole direction of male fashion. It is in this sense too that fashion has its own history, which evolves out of the interaction between designer and client or consumer. Whether directly or indirectly, patterns of consumption and consumer preference have an impact on patterns of production, just as trends launched by designers affect the choices of their customers. Brummell's taste for cleanliness, sobriety and attention to detail led eventually to the long hegemony of Savile Row in men's fashions and, in turn to the rise of Worth, founder of French haute couture, and eventually to the adoption of traits drawn from male and English models of dress by Gabrielle Chanel in her top-down transformation of female French fashion: tailoring, meticulous craft, black, 'making the male suit female with no hint of androgyny', as Anne Hollander (1995: 135) has put it.

The existence of such a history implies, inevitably, the eventual construction of a canon and a museum. Geraldine Howell celebrates exactly such a project in her essay on Zandra Rhodes's projected Fashion and Textile Museum in south London. Not surprisingly, Rhodes's project stresses the complex process of designing and making clothes, by incorporating an actual working space into the plan of the Museum. Rhodes was particularly concerned that children and young people should gain an understanding of how clothes come into being, from the first reveries and thoughts of the designer to their final appearance on the runway and in the shops. This was already the stance taken by Rhodes in her 1984 book, The Art of Zandra Rhodes, co-written with Anne Knight, in which she documents in detail the source of her inspiration for clothes, largely drawn from vernacular fabrics and garments she had encountered on travels around the world, together with detailed accounts of the actual process of making the clothes - the lettucing of frills, the placement of seams, the flaring and fluting of fabric, the pleating of sleeves, etcetera, complete with working sketches and diagrams. At the same time there would be internships for students on site and an area for runway shows.

Rhodes's project is significant because it provides an opportunity for showing consumers - and, after all, museum visitors, like shoppers, are consumers at heart - the way in which clothes evolved, both as objects of use or, looked at in another way, as objects of beauty and exercises of skill, leading the viewer through the process of production, making it visible rather than reducing it to a name on a label. The fashion world has changed enormously in the last few decades, as designer names have become commercial brands rather than artists' signatures. Like Hollywood, Paris and other fashion centres have undergone enormous changes since, say, 1948 when Dior licensed his name to Kaiser Roth for the sale of stockings or, even more significantly, 1959, when Pierre Cardin signed a licensing deal with a ready-to-wear dress manufacturer, Vaskene. In this way, Cardin not only expanded his own customer base, at a time when new technology was closing the gap between ready-to-wear and couture, but also undermined the position of the copyists who had exploited Parisian couture by selling re-makes at low prices. In this way, he set in motion a trend which transformed the fashion industry. The world of couture adapted itself to the norms of postmodern capitalism, hitching itself to the show-business and entertainment wagon, reconfiguring itself as a life-style symbol-provider, submitting itself to the imperious norms of celebrity and media culture. Fashion has always hovered near the interface between art and commerce, but in recent decades the balance has shifted conspicuously, as couture has been absorbed into the larger world of mass marketing. Street style seemed to offer alternatives, but, as we can see from the example of Westwood and, indeed, Rhodes, even punk could be recycled into couture.

Baudelaire saw dandyism as an attempt by a band of disenchanted outsiders to create a new kind of aristocracy - almost religious in its sense of vocation - which would resist the ascendancy of the rising industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, and seek to revive, in a new form, the values of a lost civilization. As the fashion world, with its consumerist camp-followers, its devotees of the presentation of self and its niche life-style theorists, is engulfed by the triumphant post-modernity of global capitalism, we can only put our hope in the efforts of museums to maintain a sense of the materiality and history of dress design, the memory of both the self-consciously artistic environment of the haute couture tradition and the subterranean legacy of vernacular arts and crafts movements, from which - as Zandra Rhodes so clearly demonstrates - designers have constantly drawn to renew its creativity. I think of Dior stretching, weighing, stroking, rubbing, holding to the light, draping, judging, discarding, reverting, re-draping, re-examining, the ritual procedure which, he observed 'would baffle an outsider' but 'consists of choosing, from thirty black wools, all of excellent quality, the sole one which is in fact suitable' (Dior 1957, cited in Wollen 1992: 34) Or, as Mr John put it, con brio, 'the heat from the lights, the glue from the many pots, the dyes, the fibres, the fuzz, the I-don't-know-what-all. It's in my own workroom - that late afternoon, unmistakable millinery smell. I love it. I'd die without it.' So would fashion.

Peter Wollen teaches film at the University of California Los Angeles. In 1998 he curated the exhibition 'Addressing the Century: 100 Years of Art and Fashion' at the Hayward Gallery, London and published a new expanded edition of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, BFI 1998.

References

Dior, Christian (1957) Dior by Dior London: Weidenfeld Nicolson.

Harvey, John (1995) Men in Black London: Reaktion Books.

Hollander, Anne (1995) Sex and Suits New York: Alfred A Knopf.

Rhodes, Zandra and Knight, Ann (1994) The Art of Zandra Rhodes London: Zandra Rhodes Publications and Michael O'Mara Books.

Wollen, Peter (1992) 'In Black and White: Dress from the 1920s to Today' Columbus Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts.