At this point, we have discussed the early writings on fashion as a system (e.g., “Key Fashion Theories” in Chapter 3) and the development of fashion history literature (prior sections of the current chapter). As we have seen, much of the early writing in fashion history has concentrated on elites in the West. Now we will briefly describe theoretical developments in related fields that have intersected with the work of scholars interested in textiles and dress, giving rise to fashion studies.
Rise of cultural and critical studies
The emergence of the new fashion history hinged on changes in the objectives and analytic approaches in the social sciences and humanities, and especially as occurred in sectors of the related fields of sociology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, history, literary studies, and linguistics. The shift toward interpreting culture included turning away from structuralism. Post-structuralist and post-positivist critiques blossomed in mid-century, and the emerging fields of cultural studies and social critical theory grew in influence. They turned attention to power relationships and cultural identity, and thus questioned metanarratives of privilege such as Eurocentrism.
The shift toward interpretive non-positivistic methods had already begun in German sociology in the 1930s; Georg Simmel was among those who rejected positivism in the study of societies (Levine 1971). Critical social theory had already been formed in Germany’s Frankfurt School in the 1930s with a foundation in Marxist theory. Among that group, Walter Benjamin (see Chapter 3) contributed to fashion theory through his conception of modernity, understood in part to mean experiencing and adjusting to the “now” through fashion participation.
Post-structuralist scholarship in history, cultural anthropology, and sociology provides focus upon the meanings of cultural forms, whether social or material, and upon how those meanings are created, transmitted, and interpreted in everyday life. The cultural turn, as this shift in analytic methods and objectives is often called, created new or alternative points of departure for scholarship (Jameson 1998). Understanding previously marginalized groups and issues surrounding marginalization gained a central role in intellectual discourse. Studies related to identity—race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, social status, and place—increased. The effects of economic power and of the processes of production and consumption that intertwine with identity also received increased scholarly attention. Interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary scholarship grew in importance as multiple perspectives or cross-disciplinary research skills were needed in order to address topics of concern.
Literary theory was crucial in the development of the cultural turn and new scholarship. French literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes was also a semiotician and he used that technique in The Fashion System ([1967] 1983). Similarly, critical literary theory, often based in the hermeneutical method, was developing detailed and nuanced understandings of a text. This methodology, which first developed for written texts, can be applied to any “text” or cultural form, such as the corset. The corset has been variously interpreted as deforming women’s bodies, disciplining women’s bodies, impeding conception, and stimulating eroticism (Davies 1982; Steele 2001).
The field of cultural studies engages social and political consciousness to examine power relations inherent in cultural systems; it aims to produce change. Following its inception at the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies in the 1950s, the influence of cultural studies spread in the second half of the twentieth century. Led by Stuart Hall, the early work examined white working-class youth subcultures. The ethnographic work of Dick Hebdige (1979) provided insights into British youth subculture and inspired fashion scholars to further consider the dress of non-elites as important sites of inquiry. The rise of cultural studies as a disciplinary field stimulated scholars to bring forward the voices and stories of the marginalized.
Important thinkers that contributed to the cultural turn include Clifford Geertz and Pierre Bourdieu. Geertz was an American anthropologist whose development of the ethnographic analytic technique called thick description influenced many dress scholars (Geertz 1973). For example, Gwen O’Neal used Geertz’s methodology to support the argument that an African-American aesthetic of dress has its roots in West African culture (O’Neal 1998).
Pierre Bourdieu’s contributions include the concept of habitus. Habitus is an individual construction encompassing both the formation of and the reaction to social constructs such as race and gender. It extends to how one chooses to dress oneself. Habitus reflects location within a society, including one’s taste and preferences (Bourdieu 1977, 1990). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher, identified the body and the way it experiences the world as the primary force in one’s perception of the world (1976). This theory, known as corporal schema, countered the prevailing philosophy that perception develops in the mind.
Bourdieu, it should be noted, also employed structuralist techniques and relied on statistical data analysis for his important work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984). The project outlined how those with cultural and social capital, for example, a university degree, set taste standards, and that in this way the production of taste exemplifies the reproduction and sustainment of cultural dominance. In order to find acceptance, people in lower class groups must sublimate their own preferences and conform to the tastes of the dominant classes in possession of cultural capital.
Judith Butler, an American feminist philosopher, theorized gender, identity, and performativity (1988, 1990). Her theory of gender performativity proposes that categories of gender, such as the normative concept of masculinity in a male, are socially constructed. In the case of normative masculinity, an array of bodily movements and behaviors that are constructed and perceived as masculine constitute the masculine gender identity, but the particular bodily movements and behaviors are not in themselves a specific gender. Butler understands such socially constructed gender norms as a means of control. Butler’s work has influenced gender and identity studies, and has proven applicable to fashion studies, as dress is often a primary component of gender presentation.
We cannot leave the discussion of cultural studies without mentioning the philosophical concepts of deconstruction and postmodernity. Deconstruction is a philosophic critique proposed by Jacques Derrida during a period of social upheaval in the West (1967 [1978]). It questioned the power structures and hierarchies of existing cultural institutions in order to include the marginalized and forgotten peoples within history. Postmodernity was characterized by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1979) as the period after modernity, that is, after the devastation of the Second World War, in which attainment of a single truth and of progress ended. He described postmodernity as a rupture between modernity and the next historical era. Multiple truths and the end of beliefs in metanarratives mark postmodernity. The postmodern condition, that is, the experience of postmodernity, includes feelings of ambivalence in the experience of postindustrial society infused with technologies and in the face of the end of progression toward truth. In postmodernity, the barriers or boundaries of society exhibit permeability or even breakdown. The philosophies of deconstruction and postmodernity share the position that a single historical narrative no longer holds and that, instead, multiple and diverse human experiences are present. Fashion as it has been occurring since the late 1960s is recognized as an expression of postmodernity.
Marshall McLuhan observed the multiplication of imagery in his famous book The Medium is the Massage (1967), which became a catch phrase of the 1970s. He prophetically identified the circulation and recirculation of imagery as a critical component of the culture of that time and increasingly in the future. He made these observations decades before the arrival of the internet, the personal computer, the tablet, and the smartphone. The contemporary proliferation of images intersects with the notion of simulacrum. Simulacrum is Latin for “likeness,” but in recent philosophical discourse its meaning has expanded. Jean Baudrillar
d expounded on the complexity of imagery, and of images made from or of other images, and complications related to the real or original and the simulacra or copy ([1981] 1994). He argued that in postmodernity, symbols of real things such as events, places, and objects, rather than the things themselves, shape reality. Consider an animal-printed fashion piece such as a scarf; it represents the animal, yet was drawn from an image of an animal or a print of an artwork of an animal, and was then created as a printed textile in an industrial setting. An actual animal has little or no relationship to the scarf. Baudrillard’s analysis provides fashion scholars a rich theoretical basis to examine fashion practice in relation to image proliferation and simulacrum; he drew attention to the postmodern breakdown of borders and boundaries between cultural forms, between the actual and its image. Simulacrum is also involved in contemporary reflexivity, flush with selfies and online posts, and in historicism in fashion wherein the historical is reimagined, styled, photographed, and broadcast repeatedly.
Taken in sum, the perspectives discussed in this section may be assessed as foreshadowing the need for a global and inclusive view of fashion history. They provide openings for inquiry into the dimensions and occurrences of fashion among non-elites, non-Western cultures, and in varied power or economic structures. They also suggest to the fashion discipline that critical questions and analyses are needed in order to amplify the understanding of power relations related to fashion and the production, consumption, and practice of fashion. This book, Fashion History: A Global View, is a product of these perspectives. Through examination of the symbolic concept “fashion,” it critically analyzes the historical formation of the meaning of fashion as a term and as an expression of privilege; that is, this book investigates the problematic heritage of Eurocentrism including Imperialism and Social Darwinism, in the conceptualization of fashion.
Rise of fashion studies
Developments in related fields affected by the rise of cultural and critical studies, especially linguistics, anthropology, sociology, feminist studies, geography, art history, history, languages, and comparative literature, aroused interest in the history of dress. Beginning in the 1960s, fashion gradually emerged from the shadows to become an accepted topic of academic study in the new millennium.
Linguistic interpretations were among the first to theorize fashion. French cultural critic and linguist Roland Barthes published The Fashion System in 1967 in which he deciphered words and images in French fashion magazines. He focused on the silent communication of the printed fashion magazine page to readers. He did not study actual garments or accessories; rather, he studied words and images. The Fashion System raised awareness of alternatives to object analysis and study of art representations. Semiotics, the methodology he used, is a structuralist method of analysis, but Barthes transitioned to a post-structuralist position as his work continued. He found that there might be multiple interpretations of a written text. It cannot be overemphasized how much his work affected dress studies in that it opened up a new interpretation of dress as a form of silent communication. The concept has been applied to ethnographic costume and textiles from Central and South America in Costume as Communication (Schevill 1986), as well as to American fashionable dress in What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (Baumgarten and Watson 2002).
In the field of anthropology, the emphasis was on theorizing material culture. Two major works appeared: The Fabrics of Culture: The Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment (Cordwell and Schwarz 1979) and Cloth and Human Experience (Weiner and Schneider 1989). These works looked at dress and textiles as a system, whereas anthropologists had mostly ignored dress before these publications. Later research focused on identity formation. Anthropological studies were among the first to succeed at merging materiality with theory.
Sociologists extended identity formation to its social expression through fashion. Fred Davis, who was influenced by Herbert Blumer and symbolic interaction theory, published Fashion, Culture and Identity in 1992. He argued that clothing is encoded with meanings in cultural context. Joanne Entwistle, drawing on the concept of habitus, coined the term embodied practice in her landmark book, The Fashioned Body (2000). She proposed that the dressed body and the experience of dressing mediate the individual to the social world.
Among feminist authors, Rozsika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch (1984), Elizabeth Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams (1985), Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and Youth Culture (1991), and Caroline Evans’s Fashion at the Edge (2003) are notable for advancing the discourse as it relates to feminism. Parker argued that women’s embroidery was relegated to craft status rather than art status. Elizabeth Barber expanded on the relationship of women to textile work in the widely read Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years (1994). Wilson’s work drew attention to fashion as an expression of modernity; she observed that scholars of fashion repeatedly had to justify their choice of topic. Apologies were no longer needed by the time Evans published her postmodern analysis of fashion in the new millennium.
Geographers, embracing the cultural turn, developed a branch of the field termed “cultural geography” that included exploration of fashion as it relates to space and place. This strand of scholarship produced works that explored fashion and the city such as Fashion’s World Cities (2006) by cultural historian Christopher Breward and cultural geographer David Gilbert.
Fashion historians have had a long relationship with art history. In fact, the field of dress history paralleled that of art history with its prior emphasis on chronological development of high art in the West. Art historians did not pay much attention to dress, however, until Anne Hollander published Seeing Through Clothes (1978). She demonstrated to art historians and fashion historians the ways in which clothes represented in art idealized the human body. In England, the postgraduate studies program at the Courtauld Institute of Art brought art historians to the table by training students to analyze dress in painting and prints. The program was started in 1965 under the direction of Stella Mary Newton, who wrote numerous well-regarded books on dress history such as Health, Art and Reason (1974), Renaissance Theatre Costume (1975), Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince (1980), and The Dress of the Venetians, 1495–1525 (1988). Aileen Ribeiro assumed leadership of the program from 1975 to 2009. Ribeiro has authored many books and articles on the history of dress in art, such as The Art of Dress (1995) and Ingres in Fashion (1999).
In the history discipline, the arrival of the “new history” in the 1970s turned scholarly attention toward cultural history and social history. Dress and fashion became an acceptable subject of inquiry, especially after French historian Daniel Roche published The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Régime (1994). Roche examined inventories of different social classes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, concluding that a clothing revolution occurred by the end of that time. He thought that clothing, more than any other commodity, reflected social values. Roche called for a more holistic study of fashion systems, encouraging others to explore the production and consumption of clothing. Some historians have followed his lea d, for example, Beverly Lemire in Fashion’s Favorite: The Cotton Industry and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (1992), Giorgio Riello in A Foot in the Past (2006), and John Styles in The Dress of the People (2007).
Scholars in languages and comparative literature have embraced the study of fashion, some with a global scope, others with a regional focus. Eugenia Paulicelli, a professor of Italian, along with dress scholar Hazel Clark, edited The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity and Globalization (2009), which explored fashion as it shapes the identity of cities and nations within a global framework. Contributors to that volume focused on recent examples. Meanwhile, Regina Root, a professor of languages and Hispanic studies, has taken a historical approach to her research. Addressing her own Latin American sub-area, she declared that “scholars will need to assess carefully and push forward definitive Latin American fashion histories in the futur
e . . . . The stories remain, for the most part untold” (2013: 403).
All this newfound attention to fashion resulted in an explosion of research. Dress historian Lou Taylor stated that since the late 1990s, “our field has broken its banks and flooded into a fertile plain of new approaches and methodologies” (Taylor 2013: 23). Taylor captured the state of the field well in her books The Study of Dress History (2002) and Establishing Dress History (2004), in which she outlined the development of various methodological approaches to dress history as well as the history of the field itself. Taylor coined the phrase the “Great Divide” in reference to a chasm between the two sides whose main area of research interest was fashion in the early twenty-first century. One side included traditional fashion historians interested in the object/artifact (e.g., material culture), whereas on the other side historians embraced interdisciplinary scholars who employed theory (e.g., cultural studies). An example of an object-based historian is Janet Arnold, who contributed greatly to the field with her pattern books, which are enormously useful to museum curators and costumers (Arnold 1964, 1966, 1985). An example of cultural studies scholarship is found in the work of Christopher Breward, who wrote one of the first general histories focusing on the cultural meanings of fashion: The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (1995). The Great Divide was apparent at a 1997 conference in Manchester, England, entitled Dress in History: Studies and Approaches, selected papers of which were published in Fashion Theory (1998). According to Lou Taylor, in recent years the old divides have collapsed as museum curators and theorists work together to investigate problems in fashion history (2013: 28).
Fashion History Page 10