Veblen articulated a withering critique of the leisure class for its excessive consumption and pleasure in it. He called their “pecuniary” or moneyed culture “conspicuous consumption” and pointed to its wastefulness. The conspicuous consumption of the leisure class included participation in a fashion system that demanded changes of clothes for the varied events of their day. Dressing fashionably for day-to-day social events such as lunches, teas, business events, and evening soirees entailed maintaining a fine wardrobe and staff to attend to it.
A high-society wedding served as the premier social event of the 1899 season, commanding attention to fashion details attained through extravagant expenditure. The story behind the wedding scene depicted in Figure 3.1 exemplifies Veblen’s leisure class. The bride, Julia Grant, was the granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant, eighteenth president of the United States and the general who won the American Civil War. Julia had toured Europe with her wealthy aunt, the socially prominent wife of Chicago real estate tycoon Potter Palmer. Julia met her future husband, Russian prince Cantacuzène, in Rome and they became engaged two weeks later. Their wedding took place in the fashionable resort of Newport, Rhode Island, the ultimate in Gilded Age conspicuous consumption with its grand summer cottages, where Mrs. Potter Palmer had rented the mansion “Beaulieu.” Harper’s Bazar photographed the event and reported the details because they believed it was the “most important society wedding in the United States this season” (“Miss Julia Grant’s Wedding”: 853). Julia wore a Paris-made gown of heavy white satin with a tulle veil (Cantacuzène 1921). An entire paragraph was devoted to describing the floral decorations at the church and the house. The magazine justified the photo spread with this claim: “This wedding . . . sets the standard and the style for the weddings that are to follow this winter” (“Miss Julia Grant’s Wedding”: 853).
Figure 3.1 “Miss Julia Grant’s Wedding Gown,” Cover of Harper’s Bazaar, October 7, 1899. The magazine sent a photographer to fashionable Newport, Rhode Island, to cover the wedding of the season, the marriage of Julia Grant, granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant, to Russian prince Michel Cantacuzène.
Veblen indicated compassion for the feelings of non-elites in relation to their dress, writing that when one falls “short of the standard set by social usage in the matter of dress,” “the sense of shabbiness” is keen (Veblen 1899: 168). Veblen understood that dress communicated social status and the ability to follow fashion. He also made clear that one’s fashion might purposefully communicate the privilege to consume in abundance.
Key in fashion theory development is the analysis of change processes and the direction of change through a society. Georg Simmel had echoed Spencer’s early statement on fashion and change, imitation, and pursuit of novelty. Simmel lived in Berlin, where he studied urban settings, and the theory he presented would have been easily observable. He articulated in his 1904 essay a theory of fashion, abstracted in this chapter’s opening quotation, which held that fashion occurs in stratified societies where social mobility exists and that the lower status group emulates the fashion of the higher status adjacent group. As this process takes place, the higher status group moves to new fashions, or innovations, in order to differentiate from those who have imitated their fashions. The impetus of conforming to, or imitating, the looks of the higher status group is the basis of the trickle-down theory of fashion change. In this model of the direction of change within society, innovations disseminate from the elites downward through the status hierarchy. Simmel concluded that the dual process of imitation and differentiation present in a society of hierarchical classes compels fashion change ([1904] 1957). Since these two socially formed drives—imitation and differentiation—are widely acknowledged as prime motivations for adoption of new looks or styles, Simmel is often credited with identifying the “engine of fashion change” (Kaiser 2012: 22).
Multiple theories and models
In the search for how and why fashion occurs and changes, several models and explanations found voice in the following years of the twentieth century. In 1930, J. C. Flügel produced a discourse titled The Psychology of Clothes from the perspective of psychology. In the chapter on the motives to wear clothes, he discussed bodily protection and modesty as basic needs. He determined that both are affected by cultural context. The drive to decorate the self, however, he determined to be primal, noting that even in cultures with no clothing, the people are decorated with marks or supplements to the body. He called on past anthropological research by Schurtz in 1891 to declare that decoration was the “motive that led, in the first place, to the adoption of clothing” (Flügel 1930: 17). Indeed, shell beads dated to 110,000 years ago, found in 2009 in the Grotte des Pigeons at Taforalt, Morocco, are the oldest extant evidence of this urge (Barton et al. 2009). While a few beads may not be fashion, the find is telling about the human urge to embellish the body, and decorating the naked body with clothing, makeup, and other forms of alteration is an obvious element of fashion. This basic human urge equates to Craik’s fashion impulse, which we introduced in Chapter 1.
When he passed away in 1934, German essayist Walter Benjamin was preparing notes on fashion. Historicism and its role in fashion change was one of the topics that was posthumously published in an edited work titled The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Buck-Morss 1991). Historicism is a term used to describe the recycling of ideas from past fashions, or fashion history, within new fashions. Benjamin’s term was tigersprung, or tiger’s leap in English. His tigersprung metaphor, studied in depth by Ulrich Lehmann (2000), aptly caught the notions of energy and capriciousness of fashion change. An example of tigersprung can be found in the Dolce & Gabbana Fall/Winter 2013 collections that included tunic-shaped dresses and gowns embellished with encrusted embroideries that clearly drew upon jewelry and mosaics of the Byzantine era.
Benjamin’s work on fashion has influenced many fashion theoreticians, among them Caroline Evans (2003) and Elizabeth Wilson (1985). Benjamin examined an array of fashion’s aspects: the influence of the group in fashion selection, imitation, and differentiation, and the sense of contingency and possibilities in modernity that contributes to feelings of ambivalence. Benjamin also discussed shopping, using the nineteenth century as the lens. Metropolitan shopping had been transformed in the nineteenth century with the appearance of department stores and their large pane glass windows. In this discussion, Benjamin analyzed Constantin Guys’s illustrations of Parisians and Charles Pierre Baudelaire’s ([1863] 1964) essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” which commented on Guys’s works as “the painter,” as well as on shopping. Benjamin was intrigued by Baudelaire’s commentary on commodity culture that resonated in the 1930s and which continues today (Evans 2013). Baudelaire connected the experience of modernity to fashion. Fashion, for Baudelaire and Benjamin alike, expressed the ever-fleeting present, bringing into focus the current moment. Benjamin also played with Baudelaire’s fashionable strolling couple, the flȃneur and flȃneuse who were envisioned in Guys’s ink sketches. They walked the boulevards of Paris, enjoying the social process of seeing and being seen in their fashionable attire.
Another characterization of fashion change observed that people prefer incremental change in their fashions rather than sudden change (Brenninkmeyer 1973). Termed “historical continuity,” this explanation of fashion adoption proposed that consumers experience greater comfort in choosing fashions that are similar to what they already own rather than adopting a completely new style. Consumers need time to adjust to change that is in process.
James Laver, a British writer and keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum, expanded the theory of Western fashion’s “shifting erogenous zones” first advanced by Flügel ([1937] 1945; 1969a). His inspired analysis of Western fashion over time revealed that fashion change includes a shift in emphasis from one bodily feature or zone to another and that it relates to the current ideal of sexual attractiveness. This concept is most easily observed in female fashions,
but it is present in men’s fashions also. For example, Alexander McQueen’s “bumster” pants of the late 1990s evolved into a widely popular “low rise” jeans style for young women with the waistband resting low on the hips. When combined with tops that ended above the waist, the look revealed the belly button and bare midriff. It became the erogenous zone of the early 2000s. Belly button jewelry gained popularity and drew focus to the midriff. Young women wore this fashion whenever the weather and social context allowed. In 2008, a shift toward leggings made of stretch knit fabrics instead of denim occurred among young women. Tops became loose and tunic-like, covering the body to the hip joint. In Laver’s analysis, the erogenous zone of female fashion had moved from the waist, belly button, and hips to the legs, as their shape was now nearly fully visible. The shifting erogenous zone explanation of fashion change reinforces the notion that fashion expresses the human desire for novelty that was previously acknowledged by Spencer, Simmel, and Sapir. The public had become tired of the exposed midriff and was newly pleased to focus on legs. Notably, even men’s casual pants and shirts as well as suits became much more closely fitted by 2012, increasing the visibility of leg and torso contours through the clothing.
In contrast to the directional flow of fashion change described as trickle-down and posited by Simmel in 1904, fifty-nine years later C. W. King (1963) published the trickle-across theory of fashion change. The theory described a horizontal flow or simultaneous adoption of new fashions across the various class strata, or commercial price points, of fashion products. Whereas the trickle-down theory of fashion change relies upon elites, who in the original conception of the theory were the well-to-do upper class, by the 1960s the category of elites had evolved to include celebrities from entertainment and popular culture that were seen by the public in mass media. Beyond the change in the concept of elites, the new infrastructures for rapid and widely disseminated visual communication and those that further enabled mass manufacture and delivery processes provided the means for simultaneous adoption of new styles. With these elements in place, fashionable apparel and accessories could be delivered at all price points to a wide geographical spread nearly simultaneously. Furthermore, fashion influentials at each stratum could affect fashion consumption and change processes.
The next important directional flow theory of fashion change came in 1970 when George A. Field proposed the status float phenomenon as an aide to fashion marketers. He recounted observations of style adoption moving from youth cultures and “Negro subculture” into the dominant white culture (Field 1970: 46). In proposing this theory as a counter to the trickle-down theory, Field was a forerunner in understanding changes in style leadership. Also called the trickle-up theory, this direction of fashion change may be found much earlier than the 1970s, for example, in the movement of styles and behaviors in New Orleans’s Storyville prostitutes that made their way into local fashion. Field mentioned cigarette smoking and using deeply colored rouge and lipstick by prostitutes as examples.
Later, in 1994, anthropologist Ted Polhemus reframed the status float concept as the bubble-up theory in Street Style: From Sidewalk to Catwalk. Living in London, he had witnessed the eruption of youth subcultures there that deployed fashion as a vehicle to show authenticity. In youth subculture, identity expression and thus the symbolic meaning of a look and its parts hold primacy as the members strive to style their unique visible markers of social difference. While differentiating from the dominant culture, subculture members are understood as conforming to their subculture’s styles or standards. Subcultural styles also serve as inspiration to fashion designers, hence the name “bubble up,” crafted by Polhemus.
Evelyn Brannon summarized Polhemus’s tracing of the “path of the black leather jacket” (Brannon 2005: 100). As an academic fashion forecaster, she seeks to comprehend the fashion change process. Brannon noted that today seldom is one theory of directional flow able to explain the entire process of fashion change. She pointed out that in the case of the black leather jacket, each of the directional theories played a role. The black motorcycle jacket moved from subcultures (motorcycle gangs), where it had a functional role as protective gear, to mass fashion as a rebel look. From these groups, meanings had been attached to the style such as rebellion. Next, the style moved to other outsider groups. When Marlon Brando wore one in The Wild One (1953), the rebellion link was made stronger, but the jacket also became identified with a movie idol. By the 1970s and 1980s, black leather jackets were widely adopted. Numerous visible celebrities wearing the style boosted its adoption by the wider public across the decades. Some examples are The Ramones and Bruce Springsteen. Fashion designers Katharine Hamnett and Jean Paul Gaultier, who are inspired by street styles, first showed the style on fashion runways, and many designers have followed suit. The path of the black leather jacket to reach the mass market where it was enthusiastically adopted took decades. It continues to be reinterpreted by high-end fashion designers as well as at lower price points. The black leather motorcycle jacket example shows that fashion change processes in Western contexts can be slow and that they may be characterized by upward, downward, and crosswise movement in the social system.
As shown by the several sociologists mentioned above who contributed to fashion theory development, sociology played a critical role. An additional important contributor to fashion theory from the field of sociology was Herbert Blumer, a key figure in the subfield of symbolic interactionism, who is known for his preference for qualitative and interpretive methodologies, and especially for his work in collective behavior. In that vein, Blumer proposed a theory of collective selection to explain how social groups come to prefer the same idea, item, or style. According to Blumer, fashion serves by “enabling and aiding collective adjustment to and in a moving world of divergent possibilities” (1969a: 282). Collective selection functions to orient individuals toward the future and the contemporary social order (289–90). Blumer’s conceptualization of fashion, in its consideration of it as a participatory process that assists the individual and the social group in adjusting to the contemporary moment, is similar to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of fashion.
Fred Davis, an American sociologist, observed and wrote about fashion, notably in Fashion, Culture, and Identity (1992). Like Baudelaire and Benjamin, Davis associated fashion with modernity. Davis proposed that fashion is a universal social process and like Spencer, Simmel, and Sapir, he recognized that the search for novelty played a role in it.
Toward cultural meaning
Researchers working in the approach called structuralism systematically analyze relationships, and in this process, they discover and interpret meanings of cultural acts and products. Grant McCracken and Roland Barthes employed structuralism. Barthes was a French intellectual, and he decoded fashion magazine images and texts using semiotics in The Fashion System ([1967] 1983). Semiotics, the study of signs and what is signified (their meaning), is used to decode the underlying meaning of cultural products. Signs may be linguistic or another mode of communication, including dress (Bogatyrev 1976; Morgado 1993a,b). Barthes dissects the inter-action of clothing (the technological object) and representations of clothing (both icon ic and verbal). Among Barthes’s contributions to fashion theory are emphasis on the process of meaning making and recognition that a variety of meanings occur. For Barthes, fashion is not a language, such as has been suggested by Alison Lurie in The Language of Clothes (1981). Lurie and Barthes would agree that there is a system of communication at play within fashion.
McCracken, an anthropologist and marketing consultant with an interest in contemporary consumer culture, has also analyzed meaning in fashion items. In “Culture and Consumption” (1986), he examined the role of meaning in products as created by marketing and the consumer. In a comparative discussion, he emphasized that the instability of the meanings of the West’s cultural products is due to the West’s social imperative for change and its tolerance of revisions and disruptions to norms. McCracken further
suggested that although clothing communicates, the process of assigning, changing, and understanding meanings of language and dress is not the same entity.
The development of fashion theory into the 1990s is diverse and complex. Many theorists looked to understand the directions of a change, but found no simple model. They looked to find the original impulse for fashion and many understood a human need for novelty, or similarly, for decoration. Others examined both the individual psychology of fashion and its role in social groups, both in the mass market and in subcultures. Some sought to understand the meaning and communication that occurs in and through fashion items. Theorists also developed concepts concerning the role of fashion in identity and in relation to social change.
Theorists, in using their own culture as their subject, misapplied the theory of speciation of organisms to human societies. In that error, ethnocentrism took hold of fashion theory. Until female anthropologists analyzed the development of anthropology and ethnography as scholarly fields, ethnocentrism was given little recognition (Baizerman, Eicher, and Cerny 1993; Eicher, Evenson, and Lutz 2008: 102–04). Until the history of fashion theory became an active topic in discourse, the mistakes of the nineteenth century continued to shape fashion theory. Fashion was understood to occur in capitalistic, socially mobile societies. An implied control of where fashion occurred dominated considerations of the definition of fashion.
Fashion History Page 7