Barnard ed._Fashion Theory An Introduction_2014

Fashion theory
Fashion is both big business and big news. From models’ eating disorders
and sweated labour to the glamour of a new season’s trends, statements
and arguments about fashion and the fashion industry can be found in
every newspaper, consumer website and fashion blog. Books that define,
analyse and explain the nature, production and consumption of fashion in
terms of one theory or another abound. But what are the theories that run
through all of these analyses, and how can they help us to understand
fashion and clothing?
Fashion Theory: an introduction explains some of the most influential
and important theories on fashion: it brings to light the presuppositions
involved in the things we think and say about fashion every day and shows
how they depend on those theories. This clear, accessible introduction
contextualizes and critiques the ways in which a wide range of disciplines
have used different theoretical approaches to explain – and sometimes to
explain away – the astonishing variety, complexity and beauty of fashion.
Through engaging examples and case studies, this book explores:
• fashion and clothing in history

• fashion and clothing as communication
• fashion as identity
• fashion, clothing and the body
• production and consumption
• fashion, globalization and colonialism
• fashion, fetish and the erotic.
This book will be an invaluable resource for students of cultural studies,

sociology, gender studies, fashion design, textiles or the advertising,
marketing and manufacturing of clothes.
Malcolm Barnard is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Loughborough

University, where he teaches the history and theory of art and design. His
interests lie in the theories and philosophies of art and design, especially
the areas of fashion and graphic design.
‘Malcolm Barnard’s Fashion Theory is more than just “an introduction”. He
sets out a clear account of major theorists’ ideas in the context of key writers
on fashion, and shows how some of the most abstract theory is implicated
in the merest comment on, or second glance at, the clothes people wear.
This book will be an invaluable resource for students of cultural studies,
the social sciences and of course the many practical disciplines that study
fashion. Anyone who wants to get seriously involved with fashion or clothing
needs to be able to understand the ideas behind them – and Barnard’s
book is the go-to place to get that understanding.’
Tim Dant, Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK
‘Malcolm Barnard’s Fashion Theory: an introduction is the most compre-

hensive, convincing and yet accessible book imaginable as an introduction
geared specifically for students in fashion design. The book is unique, lucid
and utterly concrete in its message that no statement about fashion is
innocent. Barnard manages to explicate not only the inevitably political
dimension of fashion, but – and partly as an extension of this – to convey
a deep and multidimensional sense of the relationship between fashion
and representation.’
Brian Seitz, Professor of Philosophy, Babson College, USA
Fashion Theory
An introduction
Malcolm Barnard
First published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Malcolm Barnard
The right of Malcolm Barnard to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Barnard, Malcolm,
Fashion theory: an introduction/Malcolm Barnard.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Fashion—Social aspects. 2. Fashion—Economic aspects.
3. Fashion design. I. Title.
GT525.B37 2014
391—dc23
2013039173
ISBN: 978-0-415-49620-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-49621-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-86210-0 (ebk)
Typeset in ScalaSans and Frutiger

by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK
Contents
List of figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction 1
2 Fashion and fashion theories 8
3 What fashion is and is not 25
4 What fashion and clothing do 41
5 Fashion and/in history 57
6 Fashion as communication 73
7 Fashion, identity and difference 91
8 Fashion, clothes and the body 109
9 Fashion production and consumption 128
10 Modern and postmodern fashion 145
11 Globalization and colonialism 161
12 Fashion and (the) image 178
13 Fashion, fetish and the erotic 197
14 Conclusion 215
Bibliography 218
Index 228
contents v
Figures
1.1 Screen grab from Jess Cartner-Morley’s presentation
on The Guardian website 12 April 2013 2
3.1 Facebook Community Page, ‘What is Fashion?’ May 2013 26
6.1 Sender/receiver model of communication 75
6.2 Panzani advertisement 84
6.3 Tony Blair and George Bush at June 2004 meeting of
Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council 85
7.1 Still from YouTube video interview with Jessica Alba,
Vogue, 2012 92
7.2 From Comme il Faut catalogue 2004 100
8.1 A woman looks at a giant poster showing Isabelle Caro,
part of a campaign against anorexia by Italian
photographer Oliviero Toscani, in Milan 110
8.2 Yolanda Dominguez 2011 ‘Poses’ 125
9.1 War on Want action card, 2012 129
11.1 Zambian Coat of Arms 170
12.1 Maison Martin Margiela show, Spring/Summer 1999 182
12.2 TK Maxx logo 192
12.3 Brooks Brothers logo 192
13.1 Dreamcatcher bra by Nichole de Carle London 198
13.2 Patrice, 1977 213
vi list of figures
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people for advice, suggestions, corrections
and permissions to use illustrations: Anne Burns, Lena Ahmed Fallata,
Yolanda Dominguez, Kathryn Hinks, Marsha Meskimmon and Shlomit
Ravid and her colleagues at Comme il Faut, in Israel.
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders for their
permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful
to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will
undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.
acknowledgements vii
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chapter 1
Introduction
One of the arguments used in the ‘Rationale’ for this book, (which a hopeful
potential author writes in order to explain the irresistible academic demand
for the book and which provides the publisher with sound economic reasons
to invest in it and publish it), was that while all accounts and even all
anecdotes concerning what we wear and why we wear it presuppose at least
one theory of fashion, few of those accounts and none of those anecdotes
take the time to explain or even become aware of those theories. The unique
selling point of this book was to be that it would take those accounts and
anecdotes, show what the theories were and explain them in a rigorous but
accessible manner.
Examples of these theories will, of course, be found in many of the
books that are published on fashion and clothing. That is what academics
do: they take a phenomenon such as fashion or clothing and they define,
analyse and explain it in terms of some theory or other. These academics
and their theories will be found in the chapters that follow, starting with
the very next chapter, which explains the nature, presence and role of theory
in every explanation and every understanding of fashion and clothing.
Theories will also be found in the essays appearing in the ever-increasing
number of journals that cater for fashion, clothing and textiles: Berg
even calls one of its journals Fashion Theory, while Routledge publishes
the International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education and
Intellect offers us Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty.
Examples of what we might think of as anecdotal, informal, everyday
statements and arguments concerning fashion and clothing may be found
on the websites of every newspaper that has ever run a story about fashion
or clothing. Following the story of another unfortunate model suffering from
an eating disorder, or lamenting the return or the decline of men’s ties,
introduction 1
there will be pages of comments ‘below the line’ in which the readers offer
their opinions and comments. The point the ‘Rationale’ was trying to make
was that even these informal, everyday opinions and commonplace
assertions concerning what people wear all presuppose some theory or
other. The ‘Rationale’ could reasonably have made the point that these
everyday, commonplace opinions and assertions use exactly the same
theories as the academics in their high-powered books and complicated
essays.
One of the newspapers that I spend a lot of time reading online, The
Guardian, is a rich source of this kind of story and of this kind of below-
the-line comment. Like most broadsheet newspapers, it employs three or
four journalists to contribute articles on all possible manifestations of
fashion and clothing, from the highest haute couture to the most ‘street’
styles. Type ‘fashion’ into The Guardian’s ‘Search Engine’, click the ‘User
Contributions’ button and a story about how to use sheer panels in one’s
dress from 12 April 2013 is first in the list (Cartner-Morley 2013). In this
story, which is accompanied by a video presentation, Jess Cartner-Morley,
the paper’s fashion editor, explains what ‘sheer panels’ are and advises
viewers on how to use them to ‘add textural interest in a minimal way’ to
your clothes and to ‘lighten up’ heavy fabrics (see Figure 1.1). In the video
presentation, she explains that sheer panels are essentially bits of a
garment that you can see through and she distinguishes ‘peek-a-boo sheer,
which is all about “look at my naked skin underneath”’ from ‘sedate
sheer, or polite sheer . . . which is using the sheer as a kind of decoration’
Figure 1.1 Screen grab from Jess Cartner-Morley’s presentation on The Guardian
website 12 April 2013. (Cartner-Morley 2013: www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2013/
apr/12/how-to-dress-sheer-panels)
2 introduction
(Cartner-Morley 2013). In the text that accompanies the video, she says that
‘fashion is rarely sexy’ and that one of the ‘side-effects’ of fashion being
one of the few areas of popular culture that is not dominated by heterosexual
men is that ‘it is not all about shaggable birds’. The Zara vest she is shown
wearing, with its two panels of sheer fabric at the top, is ‘clean and serene’;
it is discreet and an example of the sedate or polite sheer that she has just
explained.
In the first of the comments below the line, MrVholes is quick to point
out that Cartner-Morley does indeed look ‘sexy’ in the top and suggests
that ‘Fashion is rarely sexy’ is a ‘bizarre comment’. In the second of the
comments, Rainbot disagrees with Cartner-Morley’s account of fashion,
saying that High Street fashion is in fact all about ‘birds who want to look
shaggable’. And the third of the comments, from dickybird1, says ‘Why oh
why does the Guardian continue to post the “How to dress” videos??? Does
anyone else find these a ridiculous waste of time, effort and editorial space?’.
These comments are presented here as examples of the informal,
everyday opinions and commonplace assertions that I suggested above
presupposed some theory or other but which did not explain what those
theories might be and may even have been unaware that they were the
products of theory. MrVholes clearly believes that fashion is either often or
always ‘sexy’. While he makes no mention of Bernard Rudovsky, his theory
that fashion is ‘sexy’ can be related to the theoretical account of fashion
and clothing that Rudovsky proposes. As you will see in Chapter 13, Rudovsky
proposes a theory of fashion that operates in terms of natural selection: all
the beautiful and fashionable things that women wear are simply to attract
a male with whom to have sex and reproduce. Like MrVhole’s account,
Rainbot’s account makes no mention of ‘theory’ but is also absolutely
compatible with Rudovsky’s theory in that it relies on two conceptual
frameworks: one concerning desire and one concerning gender. MrVholes’
account speculates or theorizes about the desire of young women to use
what they wear in order to appear attractive to men, or ‘shaggable’ as s/he
has it. However, it also introduces a distinction into the account of fashion.
He presupposes or relies upon a theory of fashion, as well as theories of
gender and desire. Rainbot distinguishes ‘catwalk’ fashion from ‘High Street’
fashion and says that the latter is still dominated by ‘birds’ (young women)
who want to appear sexually attractive. The young women appearing in
catwalk shows must, by implication, be ‘unshaggable’, which will come as
a surprise to many. The garments that appear in these catwalk shows, on
Rainbot’s theory, are not intended to make women attractive to potential
sexual partners. dickybird1 provides an example of a perennial and therefore
strictly unfashionable theory – that fashion is a ‘ridiculous waste of time,
effort and editorial space’. This theory is a kind of ‘classic’ in that it is
guaranteed to appear in every story concerning fashion or clothing in these
introduction 3
kinds of websites. The idea that fashion is a superficial, ridiculous waste of
time and effort that would be better spent on something more serious is
always popular. The serious/frivolous dichotomy is one of the defining
features of Western thought and it often lines up with other dichotomous
pairs, including the masculine/feminine one. For many Western cultures,
therefore, it is very easy to form what almost amount to gender-equations,
(masculine = serious and feminine = frivolous), and to begin the process,
(as in dickybird1’s comment) of implicitly decrying feminine concerns with
fashion as frivolous. Sometimes this theory is countered by another poster
who uses theories of economic production and consumption to point out
that the fashion and clothing industries are worth £X billion to the UK
economy and therefore not a waste of time or effort. Sometimes it is
countered by a poster who uses theories from cultural studies to argue that
fashion and clothing are the very serious ways in which social and cultural
identities are constructed, communicated and either reproduced or
contested, and that they are therefore anything but superficial.
The point is that even these apparently throwaway, everyday comments
and anecdotes, which are found below the line on every newspaper
website or fashion blog, represent theories. They represent theories of what
fashion is and of what its importance is, theories concerning how it might
best be explained and theories of how it works. MrVholes uses Rudovsky’s
theories of sexual selection; Rainbot also uses these theories but also adds
a useful theoretical distinction to the account of fashion; dickybird1 has a
theory of the seriousness or otherwise of fashion. Throughout this book,
I have tried to introduce whatever the topic is by using a story from popular
media – websites and magazines have been favoured because everyone
who is at all interested in fashion and who might therefore be interested
in reading this book will be looking at those media; they are where fashion
gets reported and discussed. Then I have tried to show how those everyday
popular stories may be used to illustrate the complexities of the issues and
how what are often very complicated theories are used, and maybe abused
and confused in the presentation of and argumentation around those
stories.
Consequently, the following chapters will take various approaches to
the identification, analysis and explanation of fashion and clothing, and show
what the main theories are and how they work. The earlier chapters will be
about what fashion is, what theory is and what, if we put the two together,
fashion theory is. The next chapter begins from what I suspect will be many
a fashion and design student’s experience to introduce the nature and
necessity of theory. Many fashion design and textile design students often
do not see the point of having to study fashion theory, or social theory, as
part of the degree or pre-degree work. The argument in this chapter will
follow up and develop the argument just made in this chapter – that even
4 introduction
the everyday and anecdotal things we say about fashion and clothing embody
and represent theories. Whether we like it or not and whether we are aware
of it or not, we are employing and relying on theories about fashion, clothing,
gender, meaning and many other things whenever we say anything about
the things we wear or why we wear them. I can’t help anyone to like this
fact or these theories but I hope to help everyone to be more aware of the
presence and effects of some of those theories.
Chapter 3 surveys and explains the main theories of what fashion is.
These concern whether fashion and fashion design is art or not. Many
people, possibly most people, are happy to think of fashion as a form of
art, but colleges and universities offer degrees in Fashion Design: I know
of none that offers a degree in Fashion Art or Fashion Arts. The notion of
anti-fashion, which does not interact destructively with fashion but which
is definitely not fashion, will also be investigated. And the notion of whether
what we wear is an addition to, or decorations of, our bodies, or whether
our bodies are already additions and decorated, will be introduced here in
the form of the concept of prosthesis.
Chapter 4 concerns the functions of fashion and clothing – it concerns
what fashion and clothing do, from keeping us warm and decent to
communicating our cultural identities. For such a practical-sounding
chapter, there is a lot of theory here. The question of what fashion and
clothing do leads quickly into a discussion of the relation between the
functions of the things we wear and the ways they look. The form/function
debates introduce the question whether discussing fashion and clothing in
terms of function is reductionist: many fashion theorists are accused of
reducing fashion to a single, over-simplified aspect and this chapter will
defend them from that accusation. It will be argued that even the most
‘basic’ ‘anthropological’ or biological functions of keeping a body warm and
dry cannot be immune to style, they must take some form or other. Keeping
us warm and dry will always have to take some culturally located and
therefore culturally variable form. Variation and cultural location are at the
heart of what fashion is and therefore we must say that fashion is always
with us, and that it has always been with us.
The presence of fashion and clothing in history is the topic of Chapter
5. This sounds dreadfully theoretical and very dull. I can assure potential
readers that it is not. Every time the opening or establishing shot of a film
or television story shows a person wearing anything at all, a place in history
is identified. Fashion and clothing are probably the quickest and easiest
ways for a director to indicate temporal location that they have, apart from
the obvious and visually unexciting caption saying something like ‘The North
of England 1915’ or ‘The Future’. The five positions that fashion may take
with regard to history – from simply appearing in front of it to actually
making it possible – will be identified and explained. Finally, it will be
introduction 5
explained that, of course, fashion has no history; while it may have a memory,
it is not the kind of thing that can have a history.
Picking up some of the threads from Chapter 4, on the functions of
fashion and clothing, Chapter 6 will consider fashion and clothing as forms
of communication. I will be trying once more to make my case that, while
fashion and clothing communicate, they do not send messages. Fashion
and clothing are meaningful but meaning is not something that can be sent
or received. The persistence of the idea that fashion is the sending and
receiving of messages will be introduced through the absurd but popular
notion (taken from a website!), that it is possible to send ‘secret messages’.
Presidential ties and hip-hop fashions will be used to explain the weaknesses
of these theories of fashion communication.
And continuing the theme of fashion as communication, Chapter 7 will
consider the notion that what we wear is a representation of identity. The
idea that identity can be represented through what we wear entails a
discussion of theories of difference. And the chapter will consider various
examples of difference – gender, class and religious difference, for example
– before showing how they are all examples of political difference and
explaining fashion’s inevitably political functions. This chapter will argue
that if there is no natural way of being anything, from being male, to being
black, to being old or to being gay, for example, then identity must be cultural
representation. That means that something is acting as a tool to stand for
or represent one’s identity. That something is clothing and fashion; but
clothing and fashion are not the sort of tools that can be picked up and
put down at will: we are always already using them. Indeed, identity and
fashion work in such a way here that we must say that we are them.
Representation is also one of the main themes of Chapter 8, which
investigates the relations between fashion, clothing and the body. These
matters were introduced in Chapter 3 and they resurface here in the form
of the critiques that are often made of the sorts of cultural studies or
semiological theories that I am interested in, which operate with and in
terms of representation. Fashion is often blamed for causing real eating
disorders in real young women, (and less often in young men), and
sometimes leading to their deaths. This chapter must try to explain these
real tragedies in terms of representation, which is often dismissed as ‘merely
discursive’, and the mortal, fleshy body.
The role of fashion and clothing in production and consumption is the
subject of Chapter 9. The trouble that some globally renowned companies,
such as Nike or Adidas, get themselves into through their less than ethical,
fair or sustainable modes of production will be examined here. Where
identity was one of the main themes of Chapter 7, the relation between
identity and consumption is one of the themes of Chapter 9. Tim Dant’s
revision and expansion of the notion of consumption, to include the long-
6 introduction
term use of fashion and clothing will be dealt with here, and related to
issues of sustainability.
Representation is once again the driving issue of Chapter 10, on theories
of modern and postmodern fashion. The chapter begins with the paradoxical
position that designers such as Martin Margiela find themselves in when
they are described as postmodern or deconstructive designers. Their
position is paradoxical because they are usually said to be postmodern on
grounds that turn out to be the mainstays of classical modernist theory.
This paradox is explored and explained through an explanation of
postmodernity as a crisis of representation. Three examples of garments
that have been held up as prime examples of postmodern fashion design
will be shown to be either as much modernist design as postmodern or as
genuinely exemplifying this crisis of representation.
Tommy Hilfiger’s use of the Bollywood star Arjun Rampal to open his
Mumbai store in 2004 is used to introduce the concerns of Chapter 11:
globalization and colonialism. The ways that fashion is used to establish
Western dominance over all the cultures of the globe, and the ways that
fashion is used by local, indigenous cultures to resist and challenge the
dominance of Western cultures are explained in this chapter. Yves Saint
Laurent, Zambia and Micah Silver have all produced and used versions of
the safari jacket, which was ‘originally’ known as the M65 jacket by British
and American troops, to patronize, colonialize, resist and critique various
forms of globalized and localized power. War on Want’s challenge to Adidas
in the 2012 London Olympic Games concerned the latter’s allegedly brutal
exploitation of local economies, while claiming global niceties and
proprieties.
The image of fashion and fashion companies is also the subject
of Chapter 12. In this chapter the notion of fashion as communicating an
image or an identity will be distinguished from the notion of fashion as
an image. The ways in which fashion and clothing are made into images,
as well as the ways that they are used by us to construct ourselves in some
image or other will be explored here. The sense of image as ‘identity’ will
thus echo some of the concerns of Chapter 7.
Finally, Chapter 13 will consider the relation of fashion and clothing to
the fetish and the erotic. This chapter will be concerned with psychoanalytic
theories of the sexual, and the differences between these kinds of theories
and those proposed by Rudovsky, in relation to sexual selection, will be
explained. Given that the word fashion derives from the Portuguese word
fetico, from which the English word ‘fetish’ derives, it will come as no surprise
to learn that there is a rich and entertaining theoretical relation between
fashion, clothing and the fetish. Roland Barthes’ notion of the erotic, as
distinct from the pornographic, will then be related to what we wear and
shown to be no less fun than the notion of the fetish.
introduction 7
chapter 2
Fashion and
fashion theories
Introduction
Most, if not all, fashion design students will encounter fashion theory or
theories of fashion in the course of their studies. Many of them will be
resentful of this fact: some will simply not see the point of theory and others
will be irritated or intimidated by what appears to them to be the wilful
obscurity of impractical, pretentious and overly-complicated nonsense. How,
they may say, will understanding the difference between essentialist and
performative theories of gender help them design better dresses or suit
jackets? They may wonder what the philosophy of aesthetics or the sociology
of class will add to their ability to design successful repeat patterns or
sportswear. The idea that they have to write essays and even dissertations
on these subjects often strikes them as a difficult and unnecessary
distraction from their main subject.
In England, art and design degrees will consist of about 20 per cent
historical and theoretical studies, a figure suggested in the Coldstream
Reports of 1960 and 1970. These Reports argued powerfully that some
element of the history of art and design was to be included in all Diplomas
in Art and Design (Dip.AD). Their insistence later carried over into the
various art and design degrees that the Dip.AD was replaced by. The
Coldstream Reports also suggested that something called Complementary
Studies (which was much less specified than the history of art and design
and which could include anything that helped students to ‘contextualize’
their studio practice) was also to be included.
8 fashion and fashion theories

In America, there is no federal policy regulating the presence or
percentage of theoretical studies in art and design degrees. Universities
and departments are left to make their own decisions, but some credits in
history and theory of art and design are nevertheless routinely required.
Interestingly, many American universities reflect the ‘English’ distinction
between art and design history and complementary studies by dividing this
non-studio element into art/design history on the one hand and subjects
such as film theory, understanding media or semiology, for example, on
the other. Ultimately, however, and as noted above, many fashion and textile
design students throughout the world will resent having to study the theory
or theories of their studio practice, not understanding their relevance, and
finding them alien, irritating or just unnecessarily conceptual.
These art and design students may take a position akin to that taken
by Mrs Brady, head of Complementary Studies at an English art college in
the 1960s, who advised one of her staff that ‘these are artists . . . their brains
are in their fingers’ (Candlin 2001: 3). Mrs Brady is implying that there is
a divorce between head and hand, between thought and action, and she is
asserting that artists and designers are all hand and action. According to
this position, Complementary Studies, including the study of art and design
theory, represents an unnecessary conceptual detour away from the proper
practical and hands-on concerns of art and design. According to this
position, the theory of art and design is an irrelevant distraction from the
central and theory-free pleasures of art and design. And according to some
extreme versions of this position, which you will still hear voiced in art
schools even today, the theoretical study of art and design will actually
prevent art students from producing paintings, textiles, photographs and
performances, such is its paralyzing power.
This chapter will explain the relation between fashion, theory and fashion
theory. It will begin to account for where such prejudices as Mrs Brady’s
come from, how they work and why they are ultimately insupportable. This
chapter will argue that theory is not alien to the production or consumption
of fashion, but that it is at the heart of that production and consumption.
The chapter will show that fashion is not something different from theory:
that all fashion is fashion theory. It will also show that theory is not irrelevant
to fashion design and consumption and that, were it not for some theo-
retical work or some conceptual understanding, no fashion would get
produced or consumed at all. And the chapter will show that theory is not
some unnecessary conceptual complication of simple practical activity. It
will show how the practical and creative activity of fashion design is already
complicated and conceptual.
The dresses, suit jackets, repeating patterns and sportswear noted
above can introduce these relations and arguments. I would argue that
even reading the word ‘dress’ makes every reader think of some version of
fashion and fashion theories 9

femininity. They may be thinking of a young blonde woman, walking
through a golden wheat-field under a yellow sun: they may be thinking of
a brunette standing in the evening cool outside a bar in Italy. But, without
any encouragement or prompting, they will be picturing some version or
conception of femininity. They have a conception, a pre-conception – what
we might call a theory – of femininity that generates an image and an
understanding for them without them even having to try. Similarly, seeing
the word ‘sportswear’ will make every reader think of some version of
social class. Some will picture the 2012 USA Olympic team in their preppy
Ralph Lauren outfits, with their tennis sweaters, blazers and baker-boy caps,
reeking of east coast blue-blood elitism. Others will see unemployed young
people dressed in heavily logoed tracksuit bottoms and hooded sweatshirts,
throwing stones and worse at English policemen while looting sportswear
shops in the riots of summer 2011. Again, a theory – an understanding or
a picture – of social class and a theory of how social class relates to
sportswear is operating without conscious encouragement or prompting
and it is producing an idea or a picture of these things in people’s minds.
Understanding whether gender is a performance or an essence can
help people design ‘better’ dresses because, if gender is an essence, then
conceptions and practices of femininity will not change and dresses
everywhere will always feature spaghetti-strapped tops, nipped-in waists and
flowery patterns. According to this theory of gender, deviating from this
model of feminine identity will not produce successful dresses. However,
if gender is more of a cultural phenomenon and more of a performance,
then the conception and practice of femininity can change and dresses could
feature cap sleeves, no waist and geometric patterns. It could also feature
broken feet, lip-plugs or a burka. Deviating from the model of feminine
identity is possible according to this theory and as a result many more
colours, shapes, patterns and textures become part of the grammar of
successful feminine dresses. Similarly, understanding the relations between
social class and aesthetics will help people design more successful
sportswear because, if large logos and hooded sweatshirts are perceived
as low class, then the higher social classes will not buy them. And if blazers,
for example, are understood to be part of a snooty middle-class aesthetic,
then the economically disadvantaged will not want to buy (or steal) cheap
versions of them.
So, there are theories of class, gender and aesthetics underlying and
presupposed by all fashion production and consumption, and were it not
for artists and designers having an understanding of the elements of those
theories, no fashion would get produced or consumed at all. Theory is not
some alien or overly complicated thing that prevents artists and designers
from being ‘creative’; it describes the conditions for them being able to do
anything ‘creative’ in the first place. In this sense, theory is the main subject

of art and design and not a distraction: it is both presupposed by all creative
production and the condition for the production and consumption of art
and design.
This chapter will consider the role of theory in fashion. It will do this
by asking what theory is, what fashion is and what fashion theory is. The
chapter will then move on to look at how theories of fashion change and
at the charges that fashion theories are a reduction of the phenomenon
that is fashion.
What is theory?
The fashion design students who are mentioned in the first paragraph above
are probably in much the same position as the majority of non-specialists
when it comes to understanding what theory is. The common, everyday
and uncritical accounts of theory that one hears include the idea that theory
is the use of abstract, complicated and hard to understand conceptual
frameworks to explain things that are actually quite practical, simple and
easy to understand. Playing the Megadeth power chords you’ve seen in a
YouTube tutorial is perfectly possible and terrifically satisfying without either
understanding the theory of musical intervals or knowing what a ‘fifth’ is.
Your flowery pattern for the material to make a sun dress is no less summery
and girly for your not understanding that gender is a cultural construction
and not a reflection of essence. However, as also noted above, all of these
things involve theory and, if you do not want to be forever learning other
bands’ chords from a YouTube video or endlessly drawing flowers for sun
dresses, an understanding of how theories and the things described in them
work will benefit you enormously.
Our word ‘theory’ comes to us from an ancient Greek word theoria,
meaning ‘looking’ or ‘vision’. It may be surprising to learn that the word
for what is perceived as conceptual and abstract derives from an activity
that is perceived to be the very opposite of the conceptual and the abstract.
Theorein and theoros mean ‘to look at’ and ‘ spectator’, respectively. The
relation between the conceptual and theoretical and the supposedly non-
theoretical visual may be explained using the well-known story of the art
student, the soldier and the farmer. All three find themselves standing in
a field and each gives a different account of what they see when asked to
describe the scene. The soldier sees a position that would be impossible
to defend, exposed to attack from both air and ground forces. The art student
sees the structure of a Claudian landscape, with some large dark green
trees on the left balancing the more open and lighter central plain, which
is accentuated and given depth by the river that winds to the horizon. And
the farmer sees an unprofitable unit with limited wheeled access, fit for

neither arable crops nor livestock, which will flood in winter. Each sees
something different, according to the conceptual frameworks, or theories,
that they have adopted as part of their identity as farmer, soldier or student.
The student is using ideas from aesthetic theory or the history of art, the
soldier is using ideas from military theory and the farmer is using a
combination of economics, biology and geology to generate what might be
called ‘agricultural theory’. As a result of the different theories, each ‘sees’
something different. It is not that there is a landscape that each interprets
differently: strictly, the argument has to be that each would see nothing
without those ideas, without those conceptual and theoretical frameworks.
Even to describe it as a landscape or a field that each interprets differently,
is to appeal to the ideas of a landscape or a field. These ideas are meaningful
only within the context of one’s understanding of the English language
and one’s understanding of geographical features and art history. Therefore,
in order to even see a ‘field’ or a ‘landscape’, one must have some under-
standing of geographic features, art history and the English language and
this understanding will differ and vary from person to person.
The story also introduces and illustrates the idea of ‘theory ladenness’.
This is the idea that what may be experienced as innocent or ‘neutral’
perception is itself a product of the theories that one holds. It is also the
idea that what one thinks of as descriptions of fact, or of true states of
affairs based on that perception, are also the products of those theories.
Thus, to the farmer, who perceives a field fit for nothing, it is true and a
fact that that the field will not support livestock. To the soldier, who sees
a killing field, it is true and a fact that the field is undefendable. And to the
art student, who sees a Claudian scene, it is a true fact that the right of the
scene balances the left of the scene. However, all of these perceptions and
all of these facts exist only because of their place in aesthetic, military and
agricultural theory. There is no perception here in the sense of a theory-
free or a culture-free perception and theory is a necessary condition for
perception, which, as we have seen, the Greeks called theoria.
In turn, the point about theory ladenness introduces and illustrates a
problem concerning the most appropriate theories with which to account
for and explain the existence and operations of fashion. In the story, the
farmer used theories from biology and geology to construct, describe and
explain what s/he saw, while the art student used theories from art history
and aesthetics to construct, describe and explain what s/he saw. What is
to be noted here is the difference between the kinds of theories that are
being used: there is a difference between theories from the natural sciences
and theories from the social sciences or humanities.
Simply, theories in the natural sciences, such as biology and geology,
for example, claim to explain natural phenomena, and theories in the social
sciences and humanities claim to provide an understanding of social and

cultural phenomena. Confusingly, there are traditions in both natural and
social sciences that claim to be based on observation (rather than ‘theory’)
and elements of both traditions, therefore, claim to be ‘empirical’. The
natural sciences observe natural phenomena and attempt to explain them
on the basis of regularities and repeatable experimentation. While the social
sciences also want to explain the things they are studying, human behaviour,
it is argued that they are also trying to understand that behaviour. This is
because the actors they are studying also have an understanding of what
they are doing: what they do has meaning for them and that meaning needs
to be understood. There is, therefore, a reflexivity or double hermeneutic
at work here. The social scientists are trying to understand the meanings
of the actions and behaviour of people who in turn have their own
understanding of what their actions and behaviour mean.
On one level, therefore, theory is a set of ideas and concepts that we
use to explain and understand the things we experience; at another level,
these concepts and ideas are also the conditions for our experience and
for our being able to understand it. It is this dual aspect of theory that
causes problems: the ways in which we understand ourselves are the
products of the theories of fashion that we are using to explain and
understand ourselves as fashionable people. So our conception of ourselves
as fashionable people is itself the product of theory and this self-reflexive
phenomenon must be kept under constant surveillance in order that it not
mislead us with self-fulfilling predictions. As we shall see, the production
and consumption of fashion may be explained by using various theories,
but were it not for those theories and the things and processes found in
them, there would be no production and consumption of fashion. This is
one of the meanings of saying that theory is not alien to fashion but that
it is a necessary part of, and one of the conditions for, fashion. This chapter
will now consider the definition of fashion.
What is fashion?
It should be clear by now that, and why, it would be naïve to expect a theory-
free account of what fashion is. If the farmer, soldier and art student
mentioned above saw a ‘single’ field as three entirely different things, one
can only imagine how many things they would see fashion as. Surveying
the literature, one finds a startling variety of opinions, the products of a
range of theoretical positions. Some see fashion as high art, the very best
that has been thought and achieved in Western civilization; others see it
as irrefutable evidence of capitalist culture’s moronic obsession with
superficial trivia. In the nineteenth century, the novelist H. G. Wells’ ‘extinct
uncle’ believed fashion to be ‘the foam on the ocean of vulgarity’ (Wells

1895: 17) and the essayist William Hazlitt believed it was a straightforward
sign of ‘folly and vanity’ (quoted in Bell 1947: 112). In the early twentieth
century, James Laver argued that fashion is ‘the furniture of the mind made
visible’ (quoted in Lurie 1981: 3). Later that century, Susan Ferleger Brades
aligned fashion with fine art, saying that they overlap, and set out to make
the same ‘visual discoveries’ (Ferleger Brades 1998: Preface). There appears
to be something like a moral theory or position behind Hazlitt’s judgment
and a theory of the relative merit or worth of different cultures behind
Wells’. Ferleger Brades’ account is motivated by a theory of art and Laver’s
presupposes a theory of culture as the mental equivalent of interior
decoration.
There are approaches to defining fashion that can be used to show the
presence and role of theory even in the apparently practical and un-
theoretical. One such approach would be to suggest that fashion is simply
‘what people wear’. Another approach would be to point to one’s CDG shirt
and say ‘this is fashion’. As with all ostensive definitions, pointing to one’s
shirt presupposes, first, that one knows what is being pointed at and,
second, that one knows what it is about the shirt that is fashion. When one
points and says ‘this is fashion’, is one indicating that the cut, the fabric,
the buttons, the colour, the pose one has adopted or something else about
the shirt is fashion? When one says ‘this is fashion’ while pointing at one’s
shirt, one says nothing about what fashion actually is or is thought to be:
as such the statement begs the question (by assuming that we know what
fashion is). The statement raises and presupposes, while not explicitly
providing an answer to, the questions ‘Will the shirt be fashionable next
year?’ and ‘Was it fashionable last year?’. The ephemeral and changing
nature of fashion is central to, and presupposed by, the definition of fashion
but nowhere implied or indicated in the statement ‘This is fashion’. So, we
can see that there are theories of what fashion is presupposed by the
statement but not addressed in the statement.
Contrary to much popular opinion, dictionaries do not provide theory-
free definitions of words. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary provides
various definitions of the word ‘fashion’ and all presuppose some theory.
One finds ‘the action of making’, ‘a particular cut’, ‘form as opposed to
matter’, ‘manner’, ‘way’, ‘conventional usage in dress’ and ‘current usage’
as definitions. Princeton University’s Wordnet engine adds ‘the latest and
most admired style in clothes and cosmetics and behavior’ and ‘consumer
goods (especially clothing) in the current mode’ to our list. Both of the
dictionaries used here indicate that fashion may be used as both a verb
and a noun. As a noun, ‘fashion’ names the thing that is fashion and it
exists in relation to many other nouns, such as ‘dress’, ‘adornment’ and
‘style’. As a verb, ‘fashion’ is less common and the Shorter Oxford indicates
that such usage is archaic. The distinction or opposition between form and

matter, where form is allied with style, way and manner, is interesting and
we will take a few moments to explain the theory behind it before looking
at what we may learn from the relations of ‘fashion’ and its near synonyms.
In the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, then, fashion is said to be form,
as opposed to matter. Form here is synonymous with manner, style and
the way in which something is done. Matter is synonymous with content,
the material or stuff that is formed or styled. There is a long-standing and
consistent belief or theory in Western thought that style, the way something
is done, can be separated from, and is less important or less serious than,
matter or content. According to this belief, or theory, form, may be separ-
ated from and opposed to matter. Also according to this theory, form, or
style, is less important and less serious than matter, or content. Matter
and content are what counts and this theory appears in many places and
on many levels – we say, for example, that we should not judge a book by
its cover and the news that we are at war is held to be more important than
the typeface used by the newspaper or webpage. This prejudice is also
commonly found in connection with dress and fashion. Dress and fashion
are routinely described and dismissed as trivial, as deceptive and as
frivolous, for example. What is important is the ‘person’ or the ‘real person’
beneath or behind the ‘mask’ of fashion. Sometimes, the word ‘authentic’
is used to distinguish the person from their inauthentic and deceptive
clothing. The authentic or real person is the content or matter here and
fashion, what they wear, is the style or the form in which the person appears.
This theory about the separability of form and content and of the relative
unimportance of form (style) is the root of the common prejudice that
fashion is trivial and unimportant.
It is possible to construct a different theory about the relation between
form and content and to use this to construct a different theory about the
importance and seriousness of style and fashion. The SOED definition relies
on being able to separate form from matter. If they cannot be separated,
they can hardly be opposed. What if we argued that form cannot be separated
from matter? What if we argued that matter could never appear except by
taking some form? If this were the case, then matter cannot be separated
from form. If there is no matter without form, then form could not be
opposed to matter. If matter cannot be separated from form, then it is
unreasonable and unjustified to think of one as being more important or
more serious than the other. Applying these arguments to fashion, one is
able to argue that style cannot be separated from and opposed to the ‘real’
person. Nobody has ever appeared, clothed or naked, without appearing
in some way, without taking on or having some style or other. It is impossible
to think or write that sentence without using ‘way’ or some other synonym
of style and it is impossible to write a sentence without using some style
or other. It is the same with our clothing. Consequently, everyone has to

appear in a way that has some style or other. If matter or content (what
appears) must always appear in some form or style, then style and content
are inseparable and un-opposable. If they are inseparable and un-opposable,
then it is unreasonable and unjustified to think of one (fashion or style) as
less serious or important than the other (the person, or content). We are
now in a position to re-evaluate the importance of fashion and style in
relation to matter and content. Fashion and style are not secondary, trivial
or unimportant in relation to content or matter. There is a sense in which
style has now become content and content style, but we cannot investigate
this sense further here.
It was noted above that the word ‘fashion’ exists in relation to many
near synonyms and the dictionary definitions referred to clothing and dress,
for example. ‘Consumer goods’ in general are included by one definition,
along with the ‘most admired style’. Clearly, these definitions imply and
rest upon whole theories of production and consumption, and of the role
of fashion in social and cultural modes of admiration and emulation, but
the presence of theory in even the most innocent-looking definition has
been established and need only be noted here. Ted Polhemus and Lynn
Procter provide more words that are near but not the same as fashion: they
say that ‘in contemporary Western society, the term “fashion” is often used
as a synonym of the terms “adornment”, “style” and “dress”’ (Polhemus
and Procter 1978: 9). The word ‘fashion’ exists in relation to ‘adornment’,
‘style’, ‘dress’ and ‘clothing’ and it is from these relations that the shifting
senses, emphases and associations of the words are generated. To
complicate the situation only a little, it should also be pointed out that all
consumer goods, all commodities, exist in or as fashion. This includes not
only the things we wear, but all consumer items – furniture, food, cars,
music, household and personal items all come in and out of fashion. And,
as Baudrillard has noted, even our bodies are now consumed as fashionable
(or indeed unfashionable) objects (Baudrillard 1998: 129ff).
To summarize: at least two aspects of the definition of fashion must
be noted. First, the meaning of the word ‘fashion’ is a product of its relations
to many other terms. This is one of the lessons of Saussurean structuralism
concerning the way language and meaning work and it should not surprise
us. We can attempt to regulate and order these relations but ultimately we
will have to look to the use to determine the exact meaning. Joanne Entwistle
makes an attempt to regulate the terms when she says that ‘dress’ and
‘adornment’ have an anthropological pedigree and are used because
anthropology is looking for an ‘all inclusive term that denotes all the things
that people do to their bodies’ (Entwistle 2000: 40). However, it may be
argued that we will still have to look and see to determine the exact meaning
because, as we have just seen with the definition of fashion as all consumer

items, it is also possible to use fashion in precisely this inclusive sense that
Entwistle sees in adornment. Second, the meaning of the word ‘fashion’
includes a shifting reference to the different and changing things that are
actually in fashion, or that are fashionable at any one time. ‘Fashion’ seems
to invite or imply the sense of being ‘in fashion’ and what is in fashion can
and will, of course, go out of fashion. This sense is shared with one of the
ways in which ‘style’ is used. Style is also used to indicate currentness, as
can be seen in the way the dictionary definitions above slide from style as
a manner or ‘a way of doing something’ into ‘a socially or culturally approved
way of doing something’.
These shifting senses and ultimately unregulated (and unregulatable)
meanings encourage or oblige us to conclude at the point from which this
section began, with the idea that fashion is ‘what people wear’. We are back
where we started. Fortunately, there is a theoretician with a theory to support
us here. Anne Hollander defines fashion in the following way:
everybody has to get dressed in the morning and go about the day’s
business . . . [w]hat everybody wears to do this has taken different forms
in the West for about seven hundred years and that is what fashion is.
(Hollander 1994: 11)
Once the issues and theories behind it have been understood, this
may be the best that can be done with a definition of fashion. Fashion may
now be understood as everything that is worn on the body and that is
done to or with the body: all the dress, clothing, adornment, modification
and so on that happens on and to the body in the West is fashion. This
includes, but is not restricted to or exhausted by, catwalk creations, street
fashions, civil, military and domestic uniforms, tattooing, cicatrization and
hairdressing. Even things that do not sound like fashion, such as clothing
or things that are no longer fashionable, are also still fashion. They are also
still part of what Barthes called the fashion system because, as Baudrillard
notes, there is no outside this system. In the modern West, at least, there
is no outside to the fashion system and everything is fashion.
However, Hollander’s Western and modern notion of fashion inevitably
invites questions as to what counts as Western and what counts as modern.
It also invites questions concerning the possibility of non-Western and
non-modern fashion. These are questions concerning the global nature
of fashion: whether fashion is a global phenomenon, whether there is such
a thing as local fashion, and the relation of both to colonialism are all
questions that are raised here. While they will be dealt with in more detail
in Chapter 11, they may usefully be introduced here. Some theories of fashion
argue that fashion is possible only in complex societies. Georg Simmel and

John Flügel, for example, argue that in simple societies, without complex
class or caste systems, there is no fashion. Such theories also tend to
assume that a complex society is a Western society and use terms such as
‘primitive’ and ‘tribal’ as names for non-complex societies: the connection
to Western-centred and globalizing and colonial conceptions of the relations
between Western and non-Western or complex and simple societies begins
to become clear.
Whatever their colonial and global prejudices, and these will be dealt
with in Chapter 11, the argument is that fashion arises only in complex
societies (with class divisions, a hierarchy of classes and the possibility of
movement between those classes). This is because the different classes in
a complex society use what they wear to distinguish themselves from each
other and to emulate those above them in the social hierarchy. As such
class societies arise only with the development of capitalism and the division
of labour; complex societies are said to be modern and Western phenomena.
Consequently, fashion is a modern and Western phenomenon. This
argument may even be proposed as a test: if a society has fashion, then it
is likely to be modern and Western, and if a society is to be judged modern
and Western, then it must have fashion. It should be noted that societies
outside the geographical West may be Western and societies outside the
chronology of capitalism may be modern, but these special senses of
modern and Western should be respected.
Hollander’s notion also starts from the dressed body and account needs
to be made of the undressed body. This chapter will take the position that
the undressed or naked body is itself already subject to the dictates or
suggestions of fashion. It was argued above that nobody has ever appeared
without appearing in some way, in some style or fashion. If this is the case,
then the naked body has also never appeared without appearing in some
way or in some fashion. One’s pose, the way one holds, moves, hides and
displays one’s naked body and its parts are always already subject to the
prescriptions concerning those things that are peculiar and proper to one’s
culture. To that extent the body is always already fashionable, it never
appears without appearing according to the cultural rules of a time and a
place. As Joanne Entwistle (2000) implies, the body is always a ‘fashioned’
body – cultural work has always been done on it and it never appears without
appearing in some style or fashion. There is not some natural, innocent or
‘Edenic’ body that is then dressed in the fashionable garments of culture.
The body is always already produced or fashioned and it is, therefore, always
already a cultured body. It will inevitably sound paradoxical and provocative,
but the body is always dressed; even when naked it never appears without
the trappings of culture. These themes will be returned to and developed
in Chapter 8.

What is fashion theory?
Some of the issues constituting and surrounding what theory and fashion
are have been introduced and explained. We have an understanding of what
theory is and we have an understanding of what fashion is, so it should be
relatively straightforward to put the two together to enable us to understand
the nature and role of fashion theory. However, fashion theory is not as
simple as that. There is no single body or set of ideas and there is no one
conceptual framework that we can look to in order to identify, analyse and
critically explain the production and consumption of fashion. This means
that there is no single discipline that can be appealed to and used as fashion
theory. What we have and are confronted with are fashion theories; there
are many theories concerning fashion. Various different disciplines are used
to account for and explain the different objects, practices, institutions and
personnel that make up the fashion system. Each of these disciplines has
its own sets of ideas and its own conceptual frameworks with which it sets
about defining, analysing and critically explaining fashion production and
consumption. This section must survey those disciplines and begin to assess
which ones are likely to prove useful and fruitful in the analysis and
understanding of fashion.
One thing that many new disciplines or areas of study explicitly and
deliberately set out to do is to avoid anecdote and chit-chat. Saussurean
structuralists and the Russian Formalists tried to do this at the beginning
of the twentieth century when they wanted to put the study of language and
literature, respectively, on a ‘scientific’ footing. The study of costume, dress
and fashion is no different; it too wants to avoid chit-chat and to be proper
knowledge. As Fernand Braudel notes, the history of costume is ‘less
anecdotal than would appear. It touches on every issue – raw materials,
production processes, manufacturing costs, cultural stability, fashion and
social hierarchy’ (Braudel 1981: 311). Anecdotes are little stories constructed
out of random details and accidental observations, and any body of study
that wants to be taken seriously needs to construct its stories and accounts
out of rigorous, theoretical and idea-driven enquiry. One can see from
Braudel’s list that he is thinking of such theory-based social science
disciplines as economics, sociology and cultural studies.
Other people have reached similar conclusions concerning the most
appropriate approaches to the study of fashion and dress. Like Braudel,
Lisa Tickner also argues that many different disciplines are necessary.
Fashion, she says, is a ‘rich and multi-disciplinary subject, and a point at
which history, economics, anthropology, sociology and psychology could
be said to meet’ (Tickner 1977: 56). Elizabeth Wilson breaks ranks with the
social scientists at this point and, like Gilles Lipovetsky, begins to associate

fashion with fine art. Wilson reminds us that the ‘serious study of fashion
has traditionally been a branch of art history’ (Wilson 1985: 48). The art
historians who used costume and fashion in paintings to date and attribute
work could indeed be said to have begun the disciplined study of costume
and fashion. Some fashion and dress historians may also have followed
the more old-fashioned and traditionalist forms of art history in following
the distinction between high and popular art. And Lipovetsky suggests that
fashion becomes more like one of the fine arts than a design discipline in
the late nineteenth century as designers affected to ‘sign’ their creations
and insist on the need for ‘inspiration’ (Lipovetsky 1994: 66).
The effects of ‘theory ladenness’, which were described and explained
in the section, ‘What is theory?’ above, and the status of dress and fashion
theories as ‘scientific’, begin to coincide at this point and we will look at the
work of Valerie Steele and Lou Taylor in order to investigate them. Steele and
Taylor both argue for an ‘object-based’ history of fashion and both propose
a three-part method for the study of those objects, based on the work of Jules
Prown, Professor of Art History at Yale University. According to Prown:
analysis proceeds from description, recording the internal evidence

of the object itself; to deduction, interpreting the interaction between
the object and the perceiver; to speculation, framing hypotheses and
questions which lead out from the object to external evidence for testing
and resolution.
(Prown 1982: 1, quoted in Steele 1998: 329)
On this account, the object ‘itself’ is available and it may be ‘described’

and ‘evidence’ about it ‘recorded’. After these things have happened, theories
or ‘hypotheses’ may be ‘framed’ and then ‘tested’. It will be noted that this
method already contradicts or disagrees with the account of theory and
observation noted above. However, Steele elaborates Prown’s method and
sets it in the context of Fleming’s earlier work which suggested a four-part
method:
1 Identification (factual description).

2 Evaluation (judgement).
3 Cultural analysis (relationship of the artefact to its culture).
4 Interpretation (significance).
(Steele 1998: 329)
The possibility of ‘factual description’ and the distinction between that

factual element of description and the ‘theory’ or value-driven elements are
common to both methods. In Prown’s method, the theory or value-driven
elements are called ‘interpreting’ and ‘speculation’, and in Fleming’s they

are called ‘judgement’, ‘cultural analysis’ and ‘interpretation’. These latter
are the points at which a value or values (something that is claimed not to
be directly observable or factual) are admitted into the method.
Steele proposes to show how Fleming’s method may be used to
investigate or ‘read’ items of fashion and dress by using a dress in the
collection of the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Connecticut. The first step is
that of factual description and, according to Steele, following the account
of empiricism outlined above, it relies heavily on observation. In her
description she describes the dress a ‘woman’s dress’, which ‘consisted of
a bodice and a skirt . . . a shirred apron overskirt covered most of the front
of the skirt which was full and backswept with a train’ (Steele 1998: 330).
The second step is ‘speculation’ and this involves the framing of hypotheses
that are subsequently tested against the external evidence. In the case of
the dress, these hypotheses will be ‘inextricably connected with cultural
perceptions of sexuality and gender’ (Steele 1998: 331). We see that Steele
intends a clear distinction to be made between fact (the empirical
observation and description of the dress) and value (the culturally loaded
hypothesizing that follows the observation).
It is this distinction that causes the problems with theories of fashion
such as those proposed by Steele and Taylor. This kind of account contains
elements of empiricism (in the emphasis on observation and description)
and positivism (in the emphasis on the difference between fact and hypoth-
esis, or theory) and it will be argued that these elements are more suited
to the explanation found in natural science than to the critical understanding
required in the social sciences. The first of the problems concerns the
possibility of what Steele calls ‘identification’ – the observation and factual
description of the object. This observation and description must be made
without any cultural influence (cultural values) spoiling the factual status
of the observation and description. The trouble is that any words that are
used to describe one’s perception or observation, and any words that
are used to describe the object will be meaningful only within language,
and whatever language is used it will inevitably contain and communicate
any number of cultural values. These values are understood to be precon-
ceptions or prejudices in empiricism and positivism, and they are believed
to prevent the formation of factual descriptions.
There are, and can be, no ‘neutral’ or ‘passive’ descriptions of what is
perceived and observed: it has been argued that perception or observation
is neither neutral nor passive in this regard (see Williams 2000: 34 and
Derrida 1973: 45, 103). For example, to describe the object as a ‘woman’s
dress’ is to use two words that exist and are meaningful only in a network
of shifting and variable linguistic and cultural values and associations.
Membership of a certain culture and language-using community is neces-
sary to understand what is meant by them. Thus, the idea of ‘woman’ will

mean something different in liberal, middle-class Western cultures from
what it means in conservative working-class Western cultures and in all
classes in non-Western cultures. The connotations of ‘woman’ and the
associations with different notions of what is appropriate to femininity will
all change the meaning of the word, rendering it of questionable value in
factually describing an object.
The word ‘dress’ fares no better. The very word will indicate a certain
cut and shape and therefore a distinct version or conception of femininity
in each different cultural context in which it appears. These contexts and
the different meanings to which they give rise will inevitably ‘colour’ the
understanding of the object so described. The words are meaningful only
within existing cultural frameworks of values and beliefs about the world:
they are effectively already the products of theoretical and conceptual activity.
As a result, and as was seen above, the cultural or value-based elements
of theory are already present in the supposedly theory- and value- free
elements of observation and perception. Observation and description, in
the forms specified and required by methods such as these, are simply not
possible: the value- and theory-laden work of culture has always been at
work on observation and description.
What this means for fashion theory is that cultural values are at the
root of what is being understood when we understand fashion. If we are
to understand fashion, we must recognize that our cultural values have
produced the very things that we are trying to describe and understand by
means of our theories because our theories are themselves the products
of our cultural values. There is no objective or value-free description of
fashion objects because all such description is the product of cultural values
(concerning gender, for example). The values bound up in any fashion theory
have already worked to produce any observations and descriptions that we
think we have. Consequently, we are obliged to recognize that when we
study fashion, we are predominantly understanding meanings and values,
not observing repeatable phenomena and explaining facts.
This has an effect on the sorts of disciplines and theories that will be
of most use to us in the study of fashion. They will be social science and
humanities disciplines because these are the disciplines that trade in
understanding and interpretation, that deal with values and understandings.
This is not to say that the natural sciences are anathema but it is to say
that their relevance and value will be limited. They will be limited because,
for the most part, the study of fashion is the study and understanding of
people, who have their own understandings of what they are doing and this
double hermeneutic is absent from the explanation of natural phenomena.
It is not by accident, then, that while there are many academic
disciplines with an interest in explaining and understanding what we wear,
the areas noted by Braudel and Tickner above were all from the social

sciences and humanities. Each of the disciplines that they mention will have
its own ideas, or theories, of what fashion is and of how best to understand
it. There are also many different accounts of the relations between those
academic disciplines and their objects of fashion and dress. The very first
paragraph of this chapter noted the way that some students of fashion and
dress were resentful of, or irritated or intimidated by, theoretical and
historical studies because they saw it as an unnecessary and unnecessarily
difficult distraction from their main business. However, we should by now
understand that theory is a necessary part of any study of fashion and dress.
Elizabeth Wilson, whose list of appropriate areas of academic study
was quoted above, can also help us with understanding the relation between
theoretical studies and fashion. She uses the metaphor of spectacles to
describe the relation between fashion and academic study:
The attempt to view fashion through several different pairs of spectacles

simultaneously – of aesthetics, of social theory, of politics – may result
in an obliquity of view, or even of astigmatism or blurred view, but is
seems we must attempt it.
(Wilson 1985: 11)
This metaphorical use of spectacles is entirely appropriate, given the

ancient Greek derivation of theory as theoria, ‘looking’. Different theories
are presented here as different pairs of spectacles through which one may
view and study fashion. It is also entirely appropriate to insist on the
necessity of using different theories in order to study fashion. The only aspect
in which the metaphor does not support what this chapter has argued so
far is that concerning the removal of spectacles. Where spectacles may
always be removed and dispensed with, theory may not. This chapter has
argued that, were it not for some theoretical perspective, the phenomenon
of fashion would not even appear. Were it not for the art student’s aesthetic
theory and art historical perspective s/he would not see the field as Claudian
at all. Were it not for Steele’s particular cultural take on gender and
sex, her ‘woman’s dress’ would not appear at all. Fashion theory, unlike
spectacles, is inevitable and there is the sense that we are always already
engaged with theory when studying what we wear.
Finally, a word or two concerning the relevance and value of natural
science approaches. There is no sense in arguing that the natural and
mathematical sciences have no part to play in explaining certain elements
of fashion and dress. It is increasingly the case that a knowledge of biology,
chemistry and even electronics and computing is needed to explain the
production, manufacture, existence, properties and appearance of synthetic
textiles. So-called ‘smart’ textiles, involving computers, electronic circuitry,
sensors, displays and various communications’ technologies are being

developed at an incredible pace. Marketing studies are also becoming more
sophisticated and the use of stochastic models, Markov chains and
epidemic theory in the prediction and explanation of trends in dress has
been documented since the early 1970s (Wills and Christopher 1973: 17ff).
Without some knowledge of those natural and mathematical sciences, one
will simply have nothing to say about those textiles and those products. In
order to have something to say about these textiles and the clothes that
are made from them, one will need to know what is going on in the natural
and mathematical sciences.
Conclusion
This chapter has introduced fashion, theory and fashion theory. It has
outlined some definitions of fashion and it has shown the practical and
visual roots of what we know as theory. And it has argued a case concerning
the relation of fashion to theory in fashion theory. The argument has been
that we are always in theory: from the most anecdotal and entertaining story
about fashion to the driest and most academic thesis, we are using theories.
Systems of heuristic concepts and theoretical constructions are producing
what we say. Everything we say is produced and supported by theory. This
argument will be borne out in all of the following chapters, as I try to
introduce the topics by means of some apparently innocent or everyday
account and demonstrate the theory or theories ‘behind’ them. The
following chapter will begin to think about what fashion is.
Further reading
Kawamura, Y. (2005) Fashion-ology, Oxford, Berg; chapters 2 and 3.
Rose, G. (2012) Visual Methodologies, London, Sage.
Svendsen, L. (2006) Fashion: A Philosophy, London, Reaktion Books.
Williams, M. (2000) Science and Social Science, London, Routledge.

chapter 3
What fashion
is and is not
Introduction
At the time of writing in May 2013 the question ‘What is fashion?’ has its
own Facebook community page, which is itself quite fashionable, and it is
liked by 33 people, which suggests it is not yet a mass or a popular fashion.
The page does not provide much of an answer to the question but it provides
a link to the Wikipedia page, which says that fashion is a popular style,
practice or trend and that it is ‘clothing generally’. Closer inspection of the
Wikipedia page tells us that it has ‘multiple issues’ with the notion of fashion
and that it may not contain ‘verifiable information’. A blogger on a website
for teenagers says that ‘fashion is my unique ability to express my emotions’.
Another says confidently that fashion is definitely not self-mutilation. And
yet another says that fashion is brands (blog-trends.com). Elsewhere, an
ex-editor of French Elle says that fashion talks, that it is a state of mind, a
spirit, an ‘extension of one’s self’ and that, whether you prefer hip-hop or
Chanel, fashion translates self-esteem into a personal style. She also says
that it is not to be taken too seriously (www.pbs.org/newshour/infocus/
fashion/whatisfashion.html; last accessed November 2013).
There is clearly not much agreement here and there are indeed ‘multiple
issues’ involved in the definition of fashion. We are confronted by a range
of conventional, contradictory and mistaken references to style, styles,
emotions, culture, the self, the mind, talk, expression, brands, mutilations
and spirit. However, these attempts at definition provide hints toward, and
elements of, a sensible and useful account of what fashion is and is not.
what fashion is and is not 25

Figure 3.1 Facebook Community Page, ‘What is Fashion?’ May 2013. (www.
facebook.com/pages/What-is-fashion/118580781564958)
For example, while neither fashion nor individual garments can be said
to literally ‘talk’, there is little doubt that they communicate, or that they
are used to communicate. One of the bloggers reported here says that she
uses fashion to express her emotions: emotion is being communicated
through or by what this young woman wears. Other people use fashion to
communicate other things: cultural membership is indicated, for example,
in the reference to hip-hop and Chanel. Different people will construct and
communicate membership of different cultural groups by wearing different
garments. Baggy jeans worn low will communicate membership of some
hip-hop cultures and the signature suit and heavily logoed handbag will
communicate one’s allegiance to Chanel. Similarly, while it is hard to believe
that a mass-produced garment, worn by thousands of people, contributes
anything towards anyone’s ‘uniqueness’ or sense of self, the impression
and the experience of that unique self persist and must be explained. One’s
sense of identity and uniqueness easily survives wearing the same jeans or
having the same haircut as one’s friends.
And while the idea that fashion translates that sense of self into style,
or that it is an extension of one’s self, might be dismissed as involving too
much calculation or an overly mechanical conception of fashion, we have
to use something with which to communicate and we must use something
with which to construct ourselves as unique and individual members of
cultures. This example is slightly different from, and slightly trickier than,
the other examples, but it is no less a part of what fashion is and is not.
Fashion is not quite so readily or happily understood as a prosthetic as it
is understood as communication, or as expression of some unique self.
And the self is not so readily understood as the product or construction of
26 what fashion is and is not

that prosthesis as it is understood as some natural essence that we have,
or are. However, fashion as communication is a cultural phenomenon: the
garments that we wear are not us but they are things we use to represent
or stand for ourselves. A garment, then, is something that stands for, or
represents, something else – oneself, the self, one’s emotions, identity and
so on. Therefore those garments are tools and ultimately prosthetic devices
that make possible the representation or translation of an idea or an
experience of the self and of ourselves, and thereby communicate it to other
people.
This chapter will investigate what fashion is and what it is not. It will
introduce the relation of fashion to our ideas of art and design – many
people think that fashion is art, but all of our colleges and universities offer
Fashion Design degrees and nobody reads for a Fashion Art degree. It will
also introduce the idea that there is something that is not fashion –
something that some theorists have called anti-fashion. What makes
something fashion or anti-fashion has been analysed as a product of different
kinds of society and of different conceptions of the ways in which we are
members of those different societies. This chapter will also introduce the
idea of what we wear as a tool or prosthesis – as something that is not us
but which is used to construct and communicate ourselves – something
outside us and other than us that makes us possible. This last will be
followed up and developed in Chapter 6 on fashion as communication and
Chapter 8 on fashion and the body.
Fashion and art

Art galleries, websites, blogs, academic journals, popular magazines and
all kinds of newspaper regularly ask the question, ‘Is Fashion Art?’. In 2012,
the website artinfo.com reported Karl Lagerfeld claiming that fashion is not
art and that he is against showing fashion in museums and galleries (Binlot
2012). Valerie Steele, who edits the academic journal Fashion Theory and is
chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, employs
a form of ad hominem argument, saying that when people of the same
‘calibre’ as Lagerfeld, Miuccia Prada and Rei Kawakubo say that fashion
is not art, it is difficult to disagree. Ad hominem arguments are hardly
arguments at all, of course, and it is the easiest thing to disagree with the
claim that fashion is not art. Pierre Bergé, who was one of the founders of
the Yves Saint Laurent company, disagrees with the argument and
contradicts himself twice in the same statement when he says that fashion
is not art but that some fashion designers are artists. The fashion designers
Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, Balenciaga and Chanel were artists,
according to Bergé, but he does not explain how it is that what these artists

produce is not art. He develops and refines this nonsense by adding a
potentially offensive reference to sex, saying that fashion only exists when
it is worn by women, ‘otherwise it is not an art’ (Binlot 2012). Again, quite
how the sex of the wearer turns clothing into fashion and design into art
is not made clear.
If fashion designers are poor guides as to whether fashion is art, fashion
journalists and editors are little better. Sung Bok Kim notes that Diana
Vreeland, who was editor of both Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, believes that
fashion is not art. Vreeland says that art is ‘extraordinary’ but fashion is
not; she says that art is something ‘spirituelle’ but fashion is not; she says
that art has ‘intangible vitality’ but fashion has not (Sung Bok Kim 1998:
53). What Vreeland does not and cannot say is what any of these words
mean or how they may be used in relation to the things that people wear.
‘Extraordinary’ means outside or beyond the ordinary, ‘spirituelle’ means
‘not material’ in French and ‘intangible’ means untouchable. They refer to
areas beyond our experience but because they refer to areas beyond our
possible experience, they are ultimately completely meaningless and
inapplicable to that experience. These precious and vacuous terms cannot
be used to define either art or fashion and they cannot, therefore, be used
to distinguish art from fashion.
In slightly more academic territories, Richard Martin argues in the
journal Fashion Theory that fashion and art are ‘similar if not identical
impulses’ (Martin 1999: 111). He cites Viktor and Rolf’s numbered, limited
edition plastic shopping bags, white dresses, dresses made from collage
and modernist dresses as evidence that fashion can deal with its products
as though they were art. The argument seems to be that, by numbering
and limiting the number of garments or objects that are produced, as in a
run of artists’ prints, those garments and items are turned into art. We will
see in a moment that the reproducibility of ‘art’ objects is actually one of
the stronger arguments for not calling those objects ‘art’. And Susan Ferleger
Brades, Director of the Hayward Gallery in London, argues that fashion and
art ‘overlap’ and that they are in pursuit of a shared set of visual discoveries
(Ferleger Brades, in Hayward Gallery 1998, Preface). This is not quite arguing
the identity of fashion and art but it is using the pursuit of visual discoveries
to affirm some common ground; the novelty of what is thus ‘discovered’
is presumably what is important here. What is abundantly clear is that the
relation between fashion and art is far from being well understood.
The notion of function is often appealed to in the attempt to distinguish
art from design, and Alice Rawsthorn and Zandra Rhodes use it in their
debate over whether fashion is a true art form (Rawsthorn 2003, Rhodes
2003). Rawsthorn says that ‘fashion has a practical purpose, whereas art
does not’: the function of fashion as an ‘item of clothing intended to be
worn’ determines that fashion is not art. The argument is simple:

• art has no function
• fashion has a function
• therefore fashion is not art.
There are two problems with this simple argument. First, it is not clear that
the ‘item of clothing’ is the same as a piece of fashion and Rawsthorn is
sliding from one to the other here. The function of fashion is not quite the
same as the function of clothing: the function of an item of clothing may
be to keep our bodies warm and dry, but (while it may be a side-effect) it
is never the purpose of an item of fashion to keep a body warm and dry.
Every modern and Western attempt to keep a body warm and dry will be
subject to fashion, but this merely proves the point concerning the
difference between clothing and fashion. Second, it is not true that art
has no function. Art has many functions: it constructs, communicates
and reproduces the owner’s social, cultural and economic position, for
example. By purchasing, owning and displaying one or other kind of art,
one identifies oneself as a member of a certain socio-economic class and
as a member of a certain culture. The purchase of the art reproduces the
people and the institutions that exist to produce and sell art works (artists
and art markets). These are the social, cultural and economic functions of
art. Art also functions aesthetically; its function may be to draw our attention
to the nature of our own aesthetic and sensory experience. And art functions
communicatively. It is surely a commonplace to say that artists express
themselves through their art and that art is meaningful. Fashion also
performs precisely these functions and, therefore, art and fashion cannot
be differentiated on the basis of art having no function.
Rhodes takes a different view and argues that having a function does
not preclude the possibility of something being art. She believes that fashion
can be an art form, despite its having a practical function. If a painting were
to be made into a fresco, ‘a part of a wall’, she asks, ‘would you say it was
not art because it was practical?’. The implication is that we would want to
call it art, despite its having a practical function. Fashion on her account
is, therefore, an ‘applied art’ and it can be opposed to ‘fine art’. However,
it is not the ‘art’ that is acting as the wall, or that has a practical function:
it is not the ‘art’ that helps to keep the ceiling up and it is not, therefore,
in spite of the function of the art that we want to call the fresco art. The
colours and shapes of a painting may have been incorporated into some
wet plaster but the colours and shapes are not the ‘art’ and it is not the
‘art’ that makes the wall and stops the ceiling and upper floors falling down.
Therefore, it is not in spite of the function that we want to call it art –
because, as part of the wall, it has no function.
There is a hint, in Viktor and Rolf’s numbered and limited-edition bags
and dresses (noted above) of a satisfactory answer to the question whether

fashion is art or not. The hint refers to the notion of reproducibility and
reproduction, and this notion is dealt with in Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Writing in 1936,
Benjamin claims that art possesses ‘aura’ and that reproduction destroys
aura. He is writing about mechanical reproduction, which includes machine-
made prints and objects, but the electronic reproduction of CAD, word.docs,
jpegs, TIFFs and mpegs also destroys aura. Aura is the sense of unique-
ness and authenticity that is felt whenever one confronts a work of art –
an oil painting or a sculpture, for example. There is only one original of any
oil painting or sculpture and that work of art exists uniquely ‘at the place
where it happens to be’. This uniqueness is the cause and the product of
the history of the object, the changes in condition and ownership it has
undergone. Authenticity is also in some sense the product of that history
– authenticity is the presence of the art work as that presence is manifested
in the patina, for example, or in the provenance of the work (Benjamin 1992:
214). Aura is the product of a work of art’s position in a tradition or its role
in ritual (Benjamin 1992: 214, 217). A painting or a sculpture will always
have been made as part of a history, with an awareness of what has gone
before in the tradition and as a response to that tradition. There is an element
of ritual here in that the sequence is unrepeatable (un-reproducible) and
the point of it is to be there at the moment.
Aura, the sense of uniqueness and authenticity, is destroyed by or
‘withers’ in the age of mechanical reproduction (Ib.: 215). Therefore,
mechanically produced and reproducible ‘art works’ are not, in fact, art
because they do not possess aura. Mechanically (re)producible images and
objects have no aura because they have no uniqueness and no authenticity:
they are not part of a tradition or a ritual. As mechanically (re)producible,
these objects and images are available in many copies or editions and this
availability precludes any uniqueness and any role in tradition or ritual.
Machine-made and reproduced images and objects may exist in many copies
all over the world; they have no special role in a tradition or ritual. They
thus have no aura. Baudrillard’s example of the wedding ring sheds a little
light on this process. The wedding ring is a unique object and all its meaning
and importance is the product of its part in a ritual, which happened once
in two people’s lives. In contrast, costume jewellery and fashionable rings,
accessories, exist in many editions and copies and they have no part in
ritual and no part in history (see Baudrillard 1981: 66–7 and Chapter 5).
The consequences of these thoughts for our account of fashion may
be becoming clear. As mechanically (re)producible, most of the things we
wear and all fashion will not count as ‘art’. Most of the things we wear will
not count as art because they will be the products of mechanical production
and reproduction. All fashion will not count as art because for a fashion to
exist the items that are fashionable have to be available for many people

to wear and, therefore, they will also have to have been made in multiple
copies. Existing in, or as, multiple copies or editions, those garments will
not have aura and they will not be art. However, some of the things we
wear may be counted as art. Anything that is bespoke would count as having
aura and, therefore, as being art. A Savile Row suit, or a dress made by
hand for one particular woman would also have to be considered to be art
on this account. The bespoke Savile Row suit and the handmade dress exist
only as unique items; they are the products of activities that could certainly
be called rituals and they have very particular places in traditions and
in the history of people’s lives. The process of visiting one’s tailor or
dressmaker, discussing the material and style, being measured, wearing
the suit or the dress for the first time and having any alterations and
corrections seen to, is quite clearly a ritual. It is also a ritual that stands in
a long and highly respected tradition of non-mechanical clothes production.
Consequently, most of the things we wear and all fashion items are not
art. Because art consists in one-off, unique productions, which have a place
in ritual and tradition and which possess aura as a result of that place, the
mechanically (re)produced clothes that we wear are not art. Anything that
is bespoke, however, which is handmade once for us and us alone, may be
considered to be art. Such items will be the products of their place and role
in traditions and rituals of clothes making and they will have authenticity
and uniqueness as a result of those places and roles. They will, in short,
have aura.
Fashion and design

If all fashion is not art, then it must be something else. The something else
that is conceptually and dichotomously opposed to art is design. We might,
therefore, be encouraged to think of fashion as design. We would not be
alone; as has been noted, colleges and universities offer qualifications in
fashion design, not fashion art.
One reason for this has been suggested above and it concerns function.
One of the arguments noted above was that art is different from design
because design has a function or functions and art does not. This was shown
to be nonsense, as art clearly has all sorts of functions: it has social, cultural,
economic and aesthetic functions, for example. On what is perhaps a ‘lower’
level of functionality, fashion also has residual or minimal ‘practical’ or body-
related functions. Although not strictly operating as fashion, the clothes we
wear will protect us to some extent from extremes of temperature. They
will have some minimal function in maintaining bodily functions, therefore.
Also not strictly operating as fashion, they will also have the function of
maintaining culturally appropriate levels of modesty or display. Fashion,

therefore, can be considered to be design, because it has all these various
functions.
While these debates start from wondering whether fashion is design
or not, in 2009 the designer Philippe Starck began a debate by insisting
that some ready-to-wear clothing he had designed was not fashion (Davies
2009). Starck claimed that ‘I will never be idiotic enough to do fashion’.
His argument concerns the disposability and ephemerality of fashion:
the clothes he has designed are not to be considered as disposable or
ephemeral and they are, therefore, not fashion. He claims that his knit
dresses, cashmere and jackets are ‘classic’, sustainable and ‘impervious to
the petty constraints of la mode’. The notion of the fashion classic is an
odd one and it will crop up in this volume again in Chapter 5 and Chapter
12. A classic garment is one that is claimed to be outside of time, or to be
‘fashionable’ in every time. This is clearly contradictory: fashion is only the
movement from one garment to another in time, and the idea that a garment
can remain fashionable throughout all time makes no sense. It will also be
argued later that what is claimed to be a ‘classic’ is always merely the passing
taste of one group that is being passed off as the taste of all groups. The
notion of the classic is thus related to political power and to the social
dominance of one group who are trying to impose their class-specific
taste as a universal taste. If there can be no such thing as a classic and if
everything is therefore fashion, then Starck’s designs must also be fashion
and he must be quite idiotic enough to ‘do’ fashion, just like the rest of us.
It has also been pointed out that some of the functions of fashion are
social, cultural, economic and aesthetic functions. Fashion’s social function
has always been to indicate either membership or the desired membership
of a specific, usually higher, social class. Fashion’s cultural function has
always been to construct and indicate membership of certain cultural groups:
Goth, hip-hop, casual and punk are the names of cultural groups whose
identity is obviously constructed through the use of fashion. Thorstein
Veblen’s (1992) late nineteenth-century account of the economic functions
of fashion is one of the foundations of fashion studies: the notion of
conspicuous consumption and the practice of conspicuous waste are both
economic phenomena and essential elements of what fashion is. And it is
often almost impossible to imagine what the outrageous and impossible
creations that are seen at every new catwalk show are for if it is not to
challenge the audience’s aesthetic prejudices. Art cannot be different from
design on the ground that design has a function and art does not, because
both art and design have functions.
A second and slightly less convincing reason why fashion may be said
to be design concerns the anonymity of the artist or designer. We are familiar
with the idea of the artist as a named individual and art has operated since
the Renaissance on the basis that the producer of the work, the artist, be

identified and named. Design has often not operated in this way. Unless
one’s wallpaper is ‘famous’ it is unlikely that one will know the name of the
designer. William Morris’s wallpaper designs are famous in this way and
companies with the rights to reproduce his designs will profit from pointing
out that they are by William Morris. However, most wallpaper is not
identified with a named designer. Similarly, it is unlikely that one knows
the name of the person who designed the birthday or Christmas cards that
one sends, or the labels on every product in the supermarket. And so it is
with the things one wears: it is unlikely (unless they are called ‘designer’
or they are named) that one will know the name of the person who designed
them. Design in general is more often than not ‘anonymous’ and we do
not know the name of the person who designed it. On this basis, as we
do not know the name of the person who designed most, if not all, of the
things we wear, fashion is design and not art.
Fashion understood as design thus deconstructs the distinction between
nature and culture. The argument is not simple but it is worth setting it
out. It begins from the idea that there is no version or conception of the
human subject that does not rely on our using some tool or design,
something that is not natural and that is not us, in order to exist. Clothing
and fashion are not me and they are not naturally occurring parts of me,
but in order to appear fully or properly human, I have to wear some clothing
or other and that clothing is what makes fashion. There is, therefore, no
natural understanding or version of us that is not made possible by that
which is not us and that which is not natural. Fashion may, therefore, be
said to have effectively and comprehensively deconstructed the nature/
culture dichotomy.
Thinking of fashion as design is to think of it as having a function, or
a set of functions. To think of fashion as having a function is to think of
fashion as a tool. And to think of fashion as a tool is to think of it as a
prosthetic. A prosthetic is something that is not us but which we use, which
is added to us, and without which we would consider ourselves incomplete.
These ideas will be explored in more detail in the section on fashion as
prosthesis below.
Fashion and anti-fashion

The terms fashion and anti-fashion are not ways to begin describing the
difference between people who ‘love’ fashion and people who ‘hate’ it so
much that they try not to wear anything that could possibly be taken or
mistaken for fashion. The distinction between fashion and anti-fashion is
also not to do with deliberately wearing flares when straight legs are in or
wearing ‘A’-line skirts when ‘H’-line or ‘Tulip’ skirts are in. The distinction

is another way of distinguishing fashion from what is not fashion. These
terms are probably most familiar from Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter’s
(1978) book, called Fashion & Anti-Fashion, which has been updated and
republished under Polhemus’s name alone, with the same title but a slightly
different subtitle from the earlier volume (Polhemus 2011). However, the
idea of distinguishing fashion from anti-fashion, and of linking the ideas
to two different conceptions or types of society and, ultimately, to two
different conceptions and experiences of time, may be traced back to Georg
Simmel’s 1904 essay ‘Fashion’.
In this essay, Simmel argues that ‘two social tendencies are essential
to the establishment of fashion’ and that, if either of these tendencies is
missing from a society, then ‘fashion will not be formed’ in that society
(Simmel 1971: 301). Simmel is arguing that the existence of fashion is made
possible by one kind of society and not by others. The first of the social
tendencies is the need for isolation, our need to be separate from others,
different from those around us and not part of the crowd; Simmel calls this
the ‘differentiating impulse’. The second tendency is our need for union,
to be with others, sharing things with those around us and part of a group;
Simmel calls this the ‘socializing impulse’ (Simmel 1971). Among what
Simmel unfortunately refers to as ‘savages’ and ‘primitive races’, the
socializing impulse will be much stronger than the differentiating impulse
and fashion will not be formed. In such societies, there will be a much
simpler class structure, possibly involving only one class or caste, and people
will all belong happily to it with no need or desire to distinguish or
differentiate themselves from their fellow members. What the members of
these simple societies wear is not fashion, therefore, and it may be
distinguished from fashion. And, among what Simmel calls the ‘classes of
civilized races’, where the ‘danger of absorption’ into the group is felt, the
differentiating impulse will be stronger and as a result fashion will be formed.
In such societies, there will be a complex and hierarchical class structure,
and when people feel that they are becoming too much a part of their class,
the possibility and the desirability of signalling their difference will be made
possible by fashion. What the members of these complex societies wear,
therefore, is fashion. Different kinds of society, differentiated by the
existence or not of the two impulses, are the bases of Simmel’s explanation
of the conditions of fashion and they may be used to distinguish fashion
from non- or even anti- fashion.
The different kinds of society are also explained in relation to different
conceptions and experiences of time. This is made clear when Simmel says
that fashion ‘always occupies the dividing line between the past and the
future’ (1971: 303). According to Simmel, in complex societies, where the
differentiating impulse exists alongside the socializing impulse, the need
for the new is stronger than in simple societies. This is because simple

societies have no need for ‘new impressions and forms of life’. Consequently,
simple societies do not experience the temporal process in which something
becomes fashionable and almost immediately ‘goes to its doom’ (Simmel
1971: 302–3). There is a connection, for Simmel, between the simpleness
of the society, the absence of the differentiating impulse and the experience
of time. Such simple societies do not experience time as a process in
which things come and go as fashion. Complex societies, in which the
differentiating impulse is present, do experience time as a process in which
things come and go: as soon as something is understood as fashionable,
it is ‘the beginning of the end’ for that thing as fashion (Simmel 1971: 303).
Writing 25 years or so later than Simmel, John Flügel also relates
the conditions for fashion to different forms of society in his (1950) The
Psychology of Clothes. Flügel uses the terms ‘fixed’ and ‘modish’ clothing
rather than non- or anti-fashion and fashion but, like Simmel, he uses ‘certain
differences of social organization’ to explain the distinction (Flügel 1950:
129). More precisely, he explains the social organizations as different
relations to time and space. For Flügel, fixed costume ‘changes slowly in
time . . . but varies greatly in space’ and modish costume ‘changes rapidly
in time . . . but varies comparatively little in space’ (Flügel 1950: 129–30).
Non-fashion or anti-fashion changes and varies from place to place but
remains largely the same over time in those places. And fashion changes
quickly and a lot over time but is largely the same in many different places
or ‘localities’ as Flügel has it. This sounds plausible. We are not surprised
to see a great diversity in the clothes worn by different indigenous cultures
all over the world, and we are not surprised that they are still the same
years later. And we are used to finding much the same fashionable items
in the shops whether we go to New York, London or Brisbane, and we are
not surprised when those fashions are different a few months later. It should
be noted at this point that the ‘we’ referred to in the last two sentences is
not innocent: this ‘we’ is modern and Western and it is precisely the
fashionable ‘we’ that is characterizing the dress of the other as non-Western
and non-modern anti-fashion.
Fixed costume or anti-fashion varies in space (is different in different
places) because it is identified with a specific local or indigenous culture
and the place that it inhabits. Anti-fashion or fixed costume, on Flügel’s
account, is more likely to be encountered ‘outside the sphere of western
influence’ and because of this it is relatively unchanging in time. Flügel says
that as fixed, ‘its whole value depends . . . upon its permanence’ (Flügel
1950: 129). Fashion or modish costume ‘predominates in the western world’
and does not change much from place to place; as noted, the same items
and looks are found in North America, Europe and Australasia. Flügel’s
account supports the idea that fashion is a Western and a modern
phenomenon and that a test of a society’s modernity and Western-ness

would be to see whether and to what extent that society had fashion or not.
These matters underlie the various debates making up and surrounding
the definition and relations between the local and the global, which will be
discussed in Chapter 11. It should be clear, however, that the difference
between what is fashion and what is not fashion is produced by different
societies’ conceptions and experiences of time and space. The ways in which
these different societies, fashion and anti-fashion relate to notions of the
global and the local will be explored in Chapter 11.
We can now examine Polhemus and Procter’s account of fashion and
anti-fashion, which begins from Flügel’s account of fixed and modish
costume and takes in Evans-Pritchard’s anthropological account of time
(Polhemus 2011: 29, 31). Where Simmel and Flügel wrote of savages and
primitives wearing fixed modes of costume, Polhemus and Procter write of
Queen Elizabeth II’s use of ‘traditional’ forms of dress. Where Simmel and
Flügel write of civilized classes wearing modish fashions, Polhemus and
Procter write of Dior’s 1953 ‘Tulip-line’ dress. Each dress is explained by
being related to different cultural conceptions of time, as well as by the
wearers’ different relations to the social structures of which they are part.
The nature and function of fashion and anti- fashion can be understood
by considering Queen Elizabeth II’s 1953 coronation gown. This gown is
‘traditional, “fixed” and anti-fashion’ and it functions as a ‘symbol’ of
continuity. It functions as a symbol of the continuity of the British monarchy
(Polhemus 2011: 30). In standing for, and representing, the continuity of
the British royal family and of the institution of monarchy, the gown makes
possible and reproduces the position of that family in, and as, that
institution: it has the ideological function of making a historical contingency
appear to be natural and, therefore, tolerable (see Chapter 5, for more on
this). The ‘Tulip-line’ dress is quite different: it functions as a ‘symbol of
change, progress and movement through time’ (Polhemus 2011: 31). In
standing for, and representing, change, it enables the women wearing it to
identify themselves as fashionable, interested in the novel and welcoming
the different. It thus has the ideological function of challenging tradition,
of contesting the status quo and the continued existence of old structures
and practices.
The gown and accessories worn by the Queen for her formal
engagements in 1953 are not much different from those she may be seen
wearing in 1952, 1954, 1955 and so on, until the present. They usually involve
a white or cream satin/silk gown, crown/tiara, gloves and a sash bearing
the arms of the Order of the Garter. Although Polhemus does not consider
the more informal clothing worn by the Queen, it could be argued that this
is also anti-fashion. It commonly consists in plain, unadorned skirt, under
a plain, unadorned coat, with matching hat and white gloves. The colours
are invariably pastels and the same colour is carried throughout the

ensemble. It is very difficult to tell what year or even what decade the
photograph has been taken in by attending only to what is being worn. Even
a cursory glance at the history of 1950s’ fashion indicates that women’s
frocks were changing rapidly, even within the same year. Dior’s own ‘New
Look’ of 1947 was succeeded by his ‘Princess line’ of 1951. 1953’s ‘Tulip line’
gave way to the ‘H’ line of 1954, which was in turn rendered unfashionable
by the ‘A’ and ‘Y’ lines of 1955. It is neither original nor controversial to
point out that constant and incessant change is what fashion is: what is
worn in one year is invariably quite different from what is worn in other
years.
According to Polhemus and Procter, different conceptions of, and
relations to, time are at the root of this explanation. They cite the work of
Evans-Pritchard to make the point that conceptions of time ‘reflect and
express’ a culture’s ‘patterns of social organization’; these conceptions
mirror what members of a culture think are the correct and proper ways of
relating to each other (Polhemus 2011: 31). Traditional anti-fashion is a
‘model of time as continuity . . . [and] the maintenance of a status quo’. As
a result, it is entirely ‘rational’ that the Queen should wear a gown that
represents ‘timelessness and changelessness’ (Polhemus 2011: 32).
Someone who desires upward social mobility, a ‘social climber’ who desires
an improvement in their own social status, perhaps, will wear clothes that
reflect a conception of time as ‘change and progress’. The fashions worn
by such a social climber will ‘advertise . . . socio-temporal mobility’.
Therefore, the desire for an improvement in one’s social status depends,
or makes sense, on the basis of a conception of time as change (Polhemus
2011: 32–3). This is why the ‘Tulip-line’ dress and every other fashion item
that has ever existed is a challenge and a contestation of the status quo.
The status quo is things staying as they are: fashion is change. Therefore,
a fashionable frock does not only symbolize or represent change and
difference. It is the embodiment of difference, change and of things not
staying the way they are. Fashion, then, requires and reflects an experience
and a conception of time as change and difference.
As monarch, a queen has no interest in symbolizing, let alone being
an agent of, discontinuity and change. However, this idea does not prevent
the tiresomely regular attempts of newspaper fashion journalists to suggest
otherwise. The present British Queen and her son, the future British King,
are routinely proposed as ‘fashion icons’ in even the more left-leaning British
press. In September 2012, for example, the British Style Award contest, which
is sponsored by the British Fashion Council, included HM the Queen, HRH
the Prince of Wales and HRH the Duchess of Cambridge in the list of
nominees. And in the summer of 2012, both The Guardian and The Telegraph
newspapers ran articles asking whether Prince Charles is a ‘fashion icon’.
To his credit, Prince Charles appears to understand his predicament far

better than the fashion journalists and he is reported to have ‘poo-pooed’
the idea that he is a fashion icon (Leitch 2012). The Duchess of Cambridge
is a more problematic figure. In the UK, journalists are unsure whether to
ask whether she is a ‘style icon’ or a ‘fashion icon’: The Telegraph going for
the former and the BBC going for the latter while simultaneously fudging
the issue and calling her style ‘classic’ (The Telegraph 2011 and BBC 2011;
see Chapters 5 and 12 for more on the ideological function of the ‘classic’).
It seems fair to say that she wears acceptably bland and conservative styles
produced by appropriately high-status but not too expensive designer labels.
According to the arguments proposed here, however, neither she nor any
of the other members of the royal family wear fashion.
Fashion as prosthesis
The idea of fashion as prosthesis may seem odd. However, if we are happy
to think about fashion and clothing as having functions, then we should
not be squeamish about calling fashion and clothing prosthetics. The
sections above on whether fashion is art or design used the notion of
function to show that art could not be distinguished from design on the
basis of one having functions and the other not. We are, therefore, happy
to think about fashion and clothing as having, and performing, a variety of
functions. To think about clothing and fashion as having, and performing,
functions, whether they be to keep our bodies warm and dry or to construct
a social and cultural identity, is to think of them as tools, as things we use
to accomplish some task or other. The task may be communication, identity
creation, looking nice or keeping us dry, but the clothes have functions and
to that extent they are tools. As tools, they are prostheses: something that
is not us but which we add to ourselves and without which we would
consider ourselves incomplete. Strictly, clothing and fashion are no different
in this respect from both our bodies and language. Neither our bodies nor
language are us but we use them to represent ourselves to other people. I
am not my hair, fingernails or limbs, and I am not the English language,
but I use all of them to represent myself to other people. What I think of,
and experience, as myself is not available to anyone, including myself, except
as representation in, and through, tools such as language. My body and
the language I use are prosthetics, therefore, which are not me and which
I need to learn to use but without which I would hardly be (me) at all.
This conception of fashion as prosthesis must be distinguished from
those approaches to prosthesis that conceive it as a progressive or
increasing integration of machines and non-human parts into bodies. This
conception presents prosthesis as an extension or enhancement of the
properties and capabilities of that body (see the essays in Smith and Morra

2006, for example). The conception that is being proposed here presents
the body itself as already prosthetic. Consequently, the properties and
capabilities of the body are not being enhanced or improved, they are made
possible as, and by, prosthesis. It is the prosthetic that makes us possible
as bodies. This is because there is no non-cultural definition or experience
of the body ‘proper’. Any definition of the body must be the product of
cultural values and beliefs: in one culture a proper body will be thin and
pale; in another it will be tanned and muscular. There is no right and wrong
to be discovered, there are only different cultural ideals, which vary from
culture to culture. Similarly, the terms one uses to describe one’s experience
of the body will always come from some pre-existing language, reproducing
the values and beliefs of the culture that speaks and thinks the language.
If there is no natural and non-cultural definition or experience, then all such
definition and experience must be cultural and if it is cultural, then it must
be learned, or added. As something that is added, it is what is commonly
understood as prosthetic. If the prosthetic is necessary for any experience
and understanding of the body, then the prosthetic cannot be an enhancing,
augmentation or extension of the body: it is what makes the body possible
‘in the first place’.
Therefore, fashion and clothing should not be conceived as simple
enhancements, augmentations or extensions of ourselves: they are also what
make our experience, and ourselves, possible. This means that any notion
of fashion and clothing as decoration must be handled very carefully. It is
not that there is a body that is then decorated; strictly, it is the ‘decoration’
that makes the body possible, and fashion and clothing are just some of
the ways in which that can happen. There is no pertinent analytic difference
between a body that is tanned and muscular and a body that is dressed in
a short skirt. Neither is ‘the body proper’ and both involve the use of
prosthetic tools, the result of cultural decisions made regarding how to
fashionably adorn a body. The muscles and the skirt are the same kind of
prosthetic tool, there is no natural level of musculature and there is no
natural shortness of skirts; both are tools selected for their function, their
fashionableness or otherwise.
This conception of prosthesis and of fashion as prosthesis will be
developed in terms of sign and communication in Chapter 6 and in terms
of the body in Chapter 8.
Conclusion
This chapter has investigated what fashion is and is not. Whether fashion
is art or not and whether fashion is design or not has been discussed and
it has been argued that fashion is not art. Indeed, on the account presented

here, a lot of what is called ‘art’ is not art. Rather, fashion was seen to be
design; the presence and role of function was seen to be decisive. The relative
anonymity of design, including fashion design, was also proposed as a
slightly less fundamental reason why fashion is design and not art. Anti-
fashion, originating from some anthropological discussions that may be
quite shocking to modern minds, concerning ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ ‘races’,
was also covered. Different conceptions of time and space were seen to
structure the responses to fashion of some social and economic groups
in even the most apparently modern societies, however. Finally, the way in
which a conception of fashion as design obliged us to think of fashion as
prosthetic and to understand even ‘the body’ as a product of prosthesis,
of ‘add-ons’, was explored. Having established fashion and clothing as
prostheses and tools, the following chapter will investigate what fashion
and clothing do.
Further reading
Arnold, R. (2009) Fashion: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Davis, F. (1992) Fashion, Culture and Identity, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press; chapter 8 on anti-fashion.
http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/prosthesis/; last
accessed November 2013.
Jain, S. (1999) ‘The Prosthetic Imagination: Enabling and Disabling the
Prosthesis Trope’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 24, 1, Winter:
31–54.
Pappas, N. (2010) ‘The Naked Truth of Antifashion Philosophy’, in Scapp,
R. and Seitz, B. (eds) Fashion Statements, New York, Palgrave.

chapter 4
What fashion
and clothing do
Introduction
The previous chapter used the idea of function to distinguish art and design,
and considered the argument that fashion is design because it has a function
or a series of functions. This chapter will begin to identify and explain those
functions; the chapter will analyse what it is that fashion and clothing do.
We will see that many of the discussions around what fashion and clothing
do have their origin in early anthropological accounts of adornment. These
discussions concern the ways in which what we wear protects us from the
elements, keeping us warm and dry, for example. They also refer to cultural
values regarding appropriate levels of modesty and display. And they
introduce the communicative functions of what we wear, the ways in which
fashion and clothing are meaningful.
Fashion and clothing and function

First of all, it is worth reminding ourselves of Alice Rawsthorn’s argument
from the previous chapter concerning the difference between fashion and
art, because it inadvertently uses the idea of function to illuminate an
important difference between fashion and clothing. Rawsthorn says that
‘fashion has a practical purpose, whereas art does not’ (Rawsthorn 2003).
There are two mistakes here. The first mistake, as we saw in the previous
chapter, is that art has plenty of functions or purposes, including social,
what fashion and clothing do 41

cultural, economic, aesthetic and communicative functions. Fashion,
therefore, cannot be distinguished from art on the basis of art having no
function. The second mistake is the more interesting one and it involves
the idea of a ‘practical purpose’. This mistake may be made clear by asking
two questions. First, one must ask whether Rawsthorn is not sliding from
thinking of fashion to thinking of clothing here. Second, one must ask about
the possibility of an impractical purpose and what difference it might make
to our understanding of fashion.
It was argued in the previous chapter that Rawsthorn was indeed illicitly
moving the terms of the debate from fashion to clothing. It may be true
that fashion has no practical purpose in the sense that most, if not all,
fashion is not primarily designed to keep one warm or dry. Keeping us warm
and dry are ‘practical purposes’ and, while fashion may not perform them,
it is easy to argue that clothing does. One might also argue that fashion
has impractical purposes and those impractical purposes would be those
that did not involve functions such as keeping one warm and dry. The social,
cultural and economic purposes performed by fashion might, just, be judged
to be impractical purposes.
The conclusion to be drawn from these premises might, therefore, be
that the functions of fashion are subtly different from the functions of
clothing. One might conclude that the ‘practical’ and ‘impractical’ functions
are what differentiate fashion from clothing. Where fashion performs the
‘impractical’ functions of constructing and perpetuating cultural identities
and differences, social position, economic status and of challenging our
aesthetic preferences and presuppositions, clothing has the ‘practical’
functions of protecting our bodies from extremes of temperature, ensuring
that we are appropriately covered and so on. The problem, of course, is
that these functions cannot be easily distinguished like this. What counts
as keeping our bodies warm, dry and modestly displayed will always take
different forms in different cultures. Some will take to down-filled jackets
at the slightest chill, while others will walk the snowy streets in high
heels and short skirts. Similarly, it is difficult to deny that constructing and
reproducing social and economic structures are some of the most ‘practical’
things that what we wear could possibly do. What is more ‘practical’ than
making possible and perpetuating our society, economy and culture? What
is more ‘practical’ than enabling communication? However, for the purposes
of analysis, the rest of this chapter will attempt to maintain some such
distinction between practical and impractical functions and purposes.
Thomas Carlyle
Writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Thomas Carlyle pro-
poses either a logical or a chronological sequence of functions in clothing.
42 what fashion and clothing do

He argues that the first function of clothing was ornament. It sounds rather
counter-intuitive, but he says that ‘clothes . . . began in foolishest love of
ornament’ before they went on to provide ‘increased Security and pleasurable
Heat’ (Carlyle 1987: 31). Clothes then started to provide cover as a response
to our shame and modesty. And finally, their function became that of
enabling us to be individuals, making distinctions between ourselves and
establishing a ‘social polity’ (Carlyle 1987: 32). By ‘social polity’ Carlyle means
political society, a group of people who relate to each other politically to
form an organized society. One of the things that clothing does on Carlyle’s
account, therefore, is to make society possible. This is quite a claim and
one that he reasserts later when he says that society is ‘founded upon Cloth’
(Carlyle 1987: 48). And by sliding so rapidly from the decorative and
protective functions of clothing to the social and the political functions,
Carlyle is drifting in much the same way as Rawsthorn does from the
practical to the impractical functions of clothing and possibly also from the
functions of clothing to the functions of fashion. He also introduces in these
pages the notion of prosthesis. He has the central character of his book,
Professor Teufelsdröckh, say that ‘Man is a Tool-using animal’ and that
clothes are just one example of the tools that he uses (Carlyle 1987: 33).
That clothes begin in the love of ornament sounds unlikely at first. One
imagines an early man or woman naked and shivering in the pouring rain,
thinking to themselves ‘What I need is decoration’. And one is tempted to
think that they would more likely be thinking that what they need is protection
and insulation from the elements. However, in that there can and will be
no protection and insulation that is not also subject to culturally specific
aesthetic preferences, then the decoration is at least as originary as the
protection and the logical/chronological doubt noted above never actually
becomes pertinent. These points, along with their relation to the notion of
prosthesis, are followed up and developed in some detail in Chapter 8, on
the body. Tempting as it may be to imagine Carlyle’s account as moving
from a concern with the natural and biological to a concern with the social
and cultural, or as moving from a relatively simple account of clothing’s
function to a relatively complex one, such temptation should be resisted.
It looks as though Carlyle is moving from a simple account of clothing’s
function as decoration, through a slightly more complicated concern with
protection and then modesty to quite a sophisticated account that takes in
social and cultural identity and politics. However, he is not in fact moving
from the natural to the cultural or from the simple to the complex because
as soon as there is clothing, all the functions arrive at once. Even the
supposedly original and simple function of decoration is already a social
and cultural marker and it already establishes a relation to others. Even the
ostensibly natural need for, or response to, protection is already a cultural
activity because there can never be a non-cultural response to that need.

Therefore, even the ‘foolishest’ decoration already establishes social,
cultural and political identities, positions and relations. Carlyle’s account
of clothing as protection may be supplemented by reading John Flügel’s
account, which begins with a quote from Carlyle (Flügel 1950).
Carlyle’s illustration of the way in which society is founded upon cloth
is found in his story about Red and Blue. In this story, there are two
individuals. One is dressed in ‘fine Red’ and the other is dressed in
‘threadbare Blue’. Red says to Blue: ‘Be hanged and anatomised’. Blue hears
this and marches to the gallows, where he is hanged and his bones eventually
made into a skeleton ‘for medical purposes’. As Carlyle says, Red has no
physical hold on Blue, but because Red is a judge and the red is part of the
‘plush gown’ worn by judges, Blue obeys. Society, in the form of different
social identities and hierarchical statuses, positions of authority and
unquestioning obedience, is made possible by what these characters are
wearing, and Carlyle’s imaginary Professor concludes ‘Society . . . is founded
upon cloth’ (Carlyle 1987: 47–8). The merest decoration, indicated by ‘Red’
and ‘Blue’, is enough to establish social identities and political relations.
The other suggestion, that clothing also performs functions relating
to modesty and protection, may also be further explained. The value of
something like modesty is found in all cultures and all cultures will treat it
slightly differently, permitting and forbidding different levels of display and
identifying different body parts to be either displayed or hidden. What is
too short and immodest to mature or middle-class women in the UK may
well be the skirt length of choice to younger or working-class women. Unable
to wear shorts to the office, male London bankers will sweatily envy their
female colleagues’ ability or permission to go bare-legged in the summer.
And different levels of religious observance among Jewish and Moslem
women will determine that different levels of concealment, called tzniut
and hijab, respectively, are appropriate to them. For Christians, especially
Christian women, both Old and New Testaments provide guidance on
modesty and discretion with regard to dress. Isaiah iii, 16–24 records the
Lord’s threat to punish the mincing wantons of Zion by confiscating their
mufflers, ear-rings and nose-jewels. And St. Paul instructs Timothy on
women’s dress: women should be shamefaced and sober eschewing gold,
pearls and costly apparel (1 Timothy ii, 9–10). Still other cultures will happily
allow women to bare their breasts or pubic areas but ensure that they are
consumed with shame should they ever appear in public without their lip-
plugs or ear-rings (see Roach and Eicher 1965: 16–17 for the former and
Polhemus 2011: 22 for the latter).
What a body needs protection from and what counts as protection are
also culturally variable. Sometimes they are contradictory as well as variable
and many cultures believe that garments worn on the body can protect
from spiritual dangers. Solomon Poll and Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins et al.

note the example of the Hasidic Jew who described how traditional Hasidic
clothing left him feeling safe from spiritual harm. The man apparently
believed that his Hasidic hat and coat functioned as a ‘guard and shield’
to protect him from ‘sin and obscenity’ (Poll 1965: 146, Roach-Higgins
et al. 1995: 221–35). The pubbers and clubbers of the Bigg Market in
Newcastle UK feel less need for spiritual protection but they also appear
to feel less need for physical protection, famously braving the northern cold
in skimpy frocks and high heels. In some sort of contrast, middle-class
Lands’ End and Boden customers are encouraged to slip on a pair of fleecy
lined trousers and a thermally enhanced plaid shirt as soon as Labor Day
(US holiday on the first Monday in September) has passed. It is clear that
what counts as cold and what counts as protection from that cold are
culturally specific and, therefore, take different forms in different cultures.
Form and function

These issues all circulate around the notions of form and function and in
the arguments concerning the priority to be accorded those notions. They
were hinted at in the section above that discussed Alice Rawsthorn’s
argument about fashion having a practical purpose but art not having a
practical purpose (Rawsthorn 2003). What Rawsthorn is getting at here is
the way that art seems to be all about appearance, or form. What we are
concerned with when we experience and talk about art is the artist’s way
with line, their use of colour, the shape and texture of the work, the noise
it makes and so on. These are all the formal aspects of a thing and they
are the things that are stressed and concentrated on when we experience
and talk about things that are art. We are not concerned with the job or the
function that the piece of art is here to do. Indeed, while we are experiencing
and talking about the art, we are probably not even aware that the thing
has a function. Consequently, most accounts of art, including Rawsthorn’s,
argue that art has no function and that what is most important about art
is its form. Art ‘prioritizes’ form in the sense that most people believe that
art is more about lines, shapes, colours and textures than it is about function.
In contrast, design is said to ‘prioritize’ function. This is also seen in
Rawsthorn’s argument when she says that fashion has a practical purpose
(Rawsthorn 2003). She believes that fashion is design and she argues that,
as design, it has a practical purpose or function. The argument is that when
we experience and use things that are design, we are not so concerned with
the way they look, with their formal properties. When we are dealing with
design and design objects, we are more concerned that they do the thing
they were designed to do than the form that they take. So, we are more
concerned that our drill will make a hole in our wall than whether it comes

in pastel colours or matt finishes. And, indeed, while we are using the drill,
we are probably not even aware of its colour or finish. Consequently, most
accounts of design, including Rawsthorn’s, argue that what is most
important about design is its function. Our everyday experiences and
explanations of design, therefore, ‘prioritize’ function over form.
These accounts would usually be held to be consistent with a famous
slogan of design, that ‘form follows function’. This slogan is taken to mean
that the shape, texture and overall appearance of design objects are as they
are because, or as a result of, the job or function that the design object
has. The function comes first and the form is secondary. The form is often
called ‘styling’ and sometimes one hears slightly disparaging talk of ‘mere
styling’, when some allegedly trivial detail in an object changes. The slogan
‘form follows function’ is held to justify the distinction between design
objects and non-design objects (what we might call ‘art’, for example). As
we have seen above, in ‘design’ objects the function predominates and in
‘art’ objects the form predominates.
However, Louis Sullivan, who is credited as the originator of the
statement that ‘form ever follows function’, actually argues that his phrase
is the
pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic, of all things physical
and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of
all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the
life is recognizable in its expression.
(Sullivan quoted in Roth 1983: 345)
Sullivan believes that ‘form follows function’ applies to all human

production, as well as all of nature. He believes that it accounts for all
intellectual, emotional and religious experience, as well as the experience
and production of physical objects. The most outrageous of these claims,
that ‘life is recognizable in its expression’, goes so far as to suggest that
life itself (as opposed to actual living things) can be represented and that
it can be recognized in that representation (see Derrida’s essay ‘The Theater
of Cruelty’ in Derrida 1978: 234). However, for us the immediate and pressing
claim is that form follows function in all human production; all human
production must include the things and activities that we might want to
call ‘art’. If this is the case, then the distinction between form and function
cannot be used to distinguish art from design (because form will follow
function in both). And if we cannot distinguish art from design, then we
cannot decide whether fashion is art or design.
We can now revisit Rawsthorn’s theory concerning fashion and function,
to take another look at where it goes wrong and to explain why it goes
wrong. Rawsthorn’s basic argument is that form follows function in design

and that fashion is design because it has a function. She says that art has
no function and that, therefore, fashion (which has a function, a practical
purpose) is not art. However, if Sullivan is correct, then fashion and art
both have functions and both are as much art as they are design. This is
surely correct. Art has plenty of functions, including aesthetic, social, cultural,
economic and political functions. Art has been used to decorate rooms; it
has been used to challenge tastes and aesthetic rules; it has been used to
communicate political arguments; it has been used to construct and
communicate social status; and it has been used to demonstrate what
Thorstein Veblen called ‘pecuniary strength’ (Veblen 1992: 80ff). Fashion
shares all of these functions. Fashion is decorative and obeys various
different aesthetic rules; fashion communicates political identities, relations
and allegiances; fashion constructs one as a member of various cultural
groups; and it is where Veblen begins from in his account of ‘conspicuous
consumption’ (Veblen 1992: 60). In all cases the look or appearance of the
objects follows from their function, whether that function be social, cultural,
economic or whatever. In no cases, therefore, can art be distinguished from
design on the basis of function. And in no cases can fashion be said to be
art or design, because art cannot be distinguished from design on the basis
of having or not having a function.
These issues are raised in slightly different form, but also starting from
something that Alice Rawsthorn did, in Andy Hamilton’s (2011) essay ‘The
Aesthetics of Design’. In 2003, Rawsthorn curated an exhibition of Manolo
Blahnik shoes and in 2004, she curated an exhibition of the British flower-
arranger, Constance Spry’s work, both at the Design Museum in London.
These exhibitions apparently led directly to the resignation of James Dyson,
the British product designer, from his post as the museum’s Chairman of
Trustees on the grounds that the museum was showcasing fashion and
style rather than ‘serious design’ and that it was failing to uphold ‘the
difference between design as styling and design as intelligent problem-
solving’ (Hamilton 2011: 53–4). Dyson appears to have believed that
fashion, shoe design and flower-arranging are not ‘serious design’ in that
they do not solve any problems and that they are mere ‘styling’.
Hamilton’s view is that design solves problems and ‘improves the look
. . . of the product through style, decoration and embellishment’ (Hamilton
2011: 54). On his account, the designer’s job is not just to find solutions
to serious functional problems, but to find ‘elegant’ solutions, to solve the
problems ‘with style’ (Hamilton 2011: 56). There are two fatal problems
here. First, there can be no neutral and objective standard of ‘elegance’.
We may ask, to whom are these solutions supposed to be ‘elegant’? Every
different cultural group will have its own idea and definition of what is elegant
and, even if we could decide what ‘elegance’ is, each culture would interpret
and apply the definition differently. Therefore, there can be no culture-free

standard of what constitutes solving a problem ‘elegantly’ and all solutions
will be equally the product of fashion. Second, there is no solution that will
not have some style or other. One cannot solve a problem without doing
it in some way, or fashion, or other. And one cannot do anything without
doing it in some style or other. So it is not a question of solving a problem
‘with style’ – it is impossible to solve a problem without a style. Hamilton
seems to be confusing ‘a style’ with ‘style’.
It is a misconception to think of design as either problem-solving or
fashion, and it is a misconception to think of them as existing as opposite
ends of a spectrum, so that there may be more of one and less of the other
in any particular ‘solution’. Apart from raising the question as to how these
things are to be quantified and measured, this latter misconception is found
when Hamilton suggests that the Movado watch is ‘largely styling’ but that
the Citroën 2CV car is ‘almost pure problem solving’ (Hamilton 2011: 56).
The Movado watch has to solve any number of ‘serious design problems’.
These include problems concerning how to design the case, the watch face,
the numbers, the layout, the colours, the textures, the strap, the clasp and
so on in such a way that they will appeal to the market. That market may
be young, old, affluent, male, female, Western, Asian and so on: the solutions
to those design problems will all affect whether and how the cultures, the
markets that it is ‘aimed at’, will interpret the watch and consequently either
buy it or not buy it. The 2CV is the product of any number of ‘styling
decisions’. How are the headlights to fit onto the front tyreguards? Are there
to be front tyreguards? Should the roof have metal fluting or a retractable
canvas roof? What should be the curve of the engine covering at the front?
What shape and texture should the door handles have? Each of these ‘styling
decisions’ will also have to be made with the target market, the cultural
groups that it is hoped will actually buy the car, in mind. What would a
practical, frugal, time-pressed, rural man or woman in France make of a
canvas roof, or removable seats? Would they be more or less likely to buy
a car with a single rear door that opened at the top or from the side?
So, contrary to what both Dyson and Hamilton argue, Blahnik’s
‘fashionable’ shoes and Spry’s stylish flower-arrangements are not ‘un-
serious’ and they do concern ‘intelligent design problems’, and Rawsthorn
is correct to exhibit them in the Design Museum. The fashionable shoes
must solve the serious problem of enabling grown women to walk around
safely and elegantly; they must solve this problem and do these things whilst
also appealing to those women’s tastes and values, and appearing
fashionable and attractive. The flower-arrangements must perform the
serious business of articulating space, by using three-dimensional, coloured
forms that will fall over if they are too long and look stumpy if they are too
short, while satisfying the aesthetic tastes and beliefs of certain classes and
cultural groups of people. While it is impossible for shoes not to have a

style, it is essential that they have the correct or appropriate fashionable
style for the cultural group they are aimed at. And while it is impossible for
flowers not to appear in some style or other, it is also essential that they
take on the correct fashionable style for that particular group of flower-
arranging afficionados. This is not to see fashion and problem-solving as
an either/or option, and it is not to see them as the opposite ends of a
spectrum.
What it is may be explained in terms of one final interesting twist
in this increasingly complicated argument. It concerns the ‘prioritizing’
of form and function that has been referred to throughout this chapter.
And it starts from the relatively simple observation that while form may
follow function, function cannot appear without taking some form.
Form may follow function and one’s Burberry trenchcoat may look the
way it does because it has the function of stopping the rain trickling down
one’s neck. But the function of keeping the rain out has to appear in some
shape, texture, fabric and so on: that function must take some form and it
must appear in some way or other. Therefore, form is not secondary to
function and it is not some ‘decoration’ or ‘embellishment’ that is added
afterwards. Contrary to what Hamilton thinks, the thing is always already
‘decorated’ or ‘embellished’ (Hamilton 2011: 54). Form is the way that
function appears and function must appear in some form or other; it
cannot not appear. Prioritizing one or other term is, therefore, senseless:
each is the condition for the other and neither is possible except on the
basis of the other.
So, while the look or appearance of a thing is always determined by its
function, the function of a thing cannot appear without taking some form,
without having some look or other. Having to have some look or other,
having to appear in some way or other, a thing will always have a style. In
that it will always have a style, it will always be subject to fashion: that style
could be replaced at any moment by another, different style. One
consequence of this is that everything is fashion. As Sullivan said, ‘all things
human’, from the concepts that we use to construct, represent and explain
our perceptions and experiences, to the hats we wear to keep the rain off,
will have a function and that function must take some form. Taking some
form and appearing in some way, those things will always have a style.
Nothing can appear without having some style or other, without appearing
in a style. So, contrary to what the hysterical former president of the
Industrial Designers Society of America says, we are not ‘seeing design creep
into everything, everything’ – it was always already there (Hamilton 2011:
54). Insofar as things have to have a form and a style, they will always be
replaceable by things taking different forms and different styles. These are
essential aspects of what objects and fashion are and we had better get
used to the inevitability of fashion in design.

Function and reductionism
In The Fashioned Body (2000), Joanne Entwistle raises the question whether
explaining fashion in terms of its function is ‘reductionist’. A reductionist
account is one that is ‘simplistic’ and that attempts to be ‘all inclusive’
(Entwistle 2000: 57). While it might be claimed that there is nothing wrong
with simplicity (I am trying to write simple sentences, for example, in the
hope that they will be easily understood), and while there is no obvious or
natural point at which simple (good) becomes too simple (bad), an account
that explains all fashion and clothing phenomena in terms of one thing
might be deemed reductive. Entwistle argues that those accounts of fashion
and clothing that deal with function are likely to be reductionist because
they start from ‘why?’ questions. The question ‘Why do we wear clothes?’
attracts or encourages answers that attempt to explain why we wear all
clothes and to give a single answer. As we have seen above, this question
may be answered by saying that ‘we wear clothes for protection’ or ‘we wear
clothes for modesty’. In both cases all clothing and fashion phenomena
are reduced to a single element, a single function. Both answers may
therefore be said to be reductive on Entwistle’s account.
Enwistle provides a survey of the possible answers to the question ‘why
do we wear clothes?’ She reports ‘protection’ from the elements, modesty,
decoration, display and exhibition. Other possible answers to the question
include Veblen’s, which is couched in terms of conspicuous consumption
and pecuniary emulation, and Baudrillard’s, which adds or emphasizes the
waste and irrationality of fashion to Veblen’s account. Simmel develops
Veblen’s ideas to account for fashion in terms of social emulation and Laver
attempts to explain why we wear clothes as an aid to seduction in the interest
of sexual reproduction. All these accounts are reductionist in that they are
too simple and in that they attempt to bring all clothes-wearing under one
heuristic principle. They are, therefore, reductive on Entwistle’s account
(2000: 57–65).
What she proposes instead is that dress is understood as ‘a situated
practice that is the result of complex social forces and individual negotiations
in daily life’. Adopting such a framework of situated practice for one’s
investigations of fashion ‘opposes crude reductionism’ (2000: 65). However,
it is not clear that it is the why questions that are the problem; it is more
likely that the answers given to why questions are reductive. One may ask
why questions of items of dress worn in a situated social practice, while
fully aware of the complex social forces and individual negotiations that are
taking place in daily life and still produce a reductive answer.
Consider the question, ‘Why did Vivienne Westwood not wear knickers
when she received her OBE from the Queen in 1992?’. This question asks
after a situated and complicated social practice – a common person, a

subject, is wearing no knickers while receiving an honour from the highest
social-ranking person in the land, the Queen. It asks after Westwood’s
individual negotiations, as it asks explicitly after her individual motivation.
An answer might be ‘because she hates royalty’. Clearly, this answer is
reductive; it is both too simple and it uses only one heuristic principle. It
is too simple because it invites many further questions, including, ‘If she
hated royalty so much, why accept the honour in the first place?’. There are
other heuristic principles available: vanity, pride, political ignorance, desiring
the recognition of fashion as a serious creative industry and a sense of
personal achievement, all spring to mind. It is the answer, rather than the
question, that is reductive and proposing ‘individual negotiation’ and
‘situated social practices’ as a solution to the problem of reductionism does
not necessarily escape the charge.
Function and communication

Fully aware, therefore, of the alleged dangers of ‘reductionism’, it is still
possible to argue that these particular or specific functions of what we wear
(the jobs that our clothes do and the purposes that they fulfil), introduce
the most important function that all clothes and all fashion perform: that
of communication. The argument is that, whether an item of fashion or
clothing is performing the function of protecting, attracting or displaying,
it is always also performing the function of communicating. This is because
there can be no non-cultural form of any of the functions identified thus
far, including protection, attraction or display. Each and every example will
have to take place within some culture or other and each example will, there-
fore, be the product of that culture’s ideas, beliefs and values. Therefore,
every item of fashion or clothing that performs one of these functions
will be representing and communicating cultural values and beliefs. This
section will then argue that it is not reductive to claim that all fashion and
clothing may be explained as forms of communication.
We can easily see many different ways in which clothing performs the
function of modest concealment. The function of concealment for the
purposes of modesty does not appear in itself or by itself: it has to appear
in some form or other. Each of the Abrahamic religions, for example, has
a different set of rules concerning appropriately modest dress for both men
and women. Each of them presents a variety of different forms of modesty,
a set of different ways in which modesty can be performed by what we wear.
In Judaism, the rules are called tzniut and there are various laws concern-
ing the concealment of hair, arms, neckline and legs. In Islam, the rules
come under the label of hijab and hijab takes different forms in the differ-
ent interpretations of Islam, concerning whether or how much of the hair,

shoulders, arms and legs must be concealed. In Christian Catholic churches
it is customary for women observers to cover their heads and arms. Non-
Abrahamic cultures have other ways of performing modesty and reference
has been made to the early anthropologists who reported the shame felt
by women appearing in public without their lip-plugs or ear-rings (see Roach
and Eicher 1965: 16–17 for the former and Polhemus 2011: 22 for the latter).
There is no non-cultural way of performing modesty, therefore, and any
manifestation of it must take some cultural form. In that it must take some
cultural form, every manifestation of modesty must represent some culture’s
beliefs, ideas and values. In the Abrahamic religions, it seems that women’s
hair is especially dangerous and potentially immodest: other cultures deem
lips and ears to be in need of concealment or adornment. The values and
beliefs in each case are different. The values and beliefs are represented in
the different items, garments and practices that go to make up modest
behaviour. It is those values and beliefs that make the items, garments and
practices meaningful – both to the people, the members of the culture,
who are performing them and to those outsiders (non-members) who would
seek to understand them. The items, garments and practices, therefore,
have a communicative function as well as a ‘practical purpose’ of ensuring
modesty. Moreover, this communicative function is not something that is
added on later to anything like an original function: there can be no ‘original’
or pure function of modesty because it cannot but appear in cultural (value
and belief driven) form.
It is the same with the other functions and we may look briefly at display
or seduction as an additional example or illustration. Even a brief glance
at the history of fashion and clothing is enough to suggest that European
men displayed rather more of their legs than we do now, for longer than
we have been covering them up. Between around CE 500 and 1500, men
wore breeches and stockings, which slowly turned into doublet and hose.
Eventually, the doublet became so short and the hose so tight that by the
second-half of the fifteenth century, a codpiece was required (see Laver
1969a: 68). It is not until the around the nineteenth century that men begin
to hide their legs, disguising and concealing their actual shapes and outlines
by wearing looser garments on their legs. Barring short periods in which it
has been fashionable for European and Western men to display their genitals
(through the use of tight jeans, for example), the penchant for relatively
loose and contour-hiding trousers has been predominant.
Again, it is the case that different cultures with different values find
different ways of performing masculine display; they also find different ways
of enabling men to dress seductively. Where for the longest time in Europe
men’s legs were their most seductive and attractive feature, more recent
developments have seen attention shift towards manly chests and shoulders.
The values of the cultures have changed in that what are believed to be the

most attractive aspects or parts of the male body have changed through
time and space. Consequently, if one wishes to be a member of the culture
or to understand the behaviours of members of other cultures, one needs
to understand the beliefs, values and practices surrounding display and
seduction. European men in the fifteenth century were not complete tarts,
they were performing their culture’s version of display and masculine
attractiveness. Similarly, modern Englishmen are not complete frumps, we
simply have a different set of values, beliefs and practices with which to
construct and communicate our barely resistible attractiveness. Given that
there can be no non-cultural function of display, each and every case of it
must take some cultural form or other. Taking some cultural form is to
represent that culture’s values, ideas and beliefs. It is thus to communicate
those values, ideas and beliefs and the function of communication is,
therefore, already part of the function of display.
In addition to the argument that these almost ‘anthropological’
functions are always already also performing communicative functions, it
was claimed above that this move was not ‘reductive’. It was claimed that
this is not to reduce fashion and clothing to a single, over-simplified aspect
or heuristic principle. It is not to reduce the phenomenon to a single aspect
because it builds at least two aspects into every attempt at the explanation
or understanding of the phenomenon. If every account of modesty, display
or seduction is also inevitably an account of how that modesty, display or
seduction is also a form of communication, then it cannot be reducing it
to a single aspect. It seems to be quite the opposite of reduction, in fact.
Unsurprisingly, the argument works in the opposite direction. If every
example of fashion or clothing performing some act of communication is
also an example of at least one of the other functions being performed,
then again, there is no reduction as more than one account is generated.
There can be no communication without something being communicated
and the garment or practice in question must also be doing something
else, as well as representing the values of the culture it is a part of. The
something else will be one of the functions identified in this chapter –
protecting, concealing, seducing and so on.
Fashion, communication and

representation
It has been argued in this chapter that one function that all fashion and
clothing performs is that of communication. This may be explained by saying
that everything we wear on, or do to, our bodies and ourselves as clothing,
fashion or any other form of adornment, represents the ideas, values and
beliefs that we hold as individual members of various cultural groups. It is

important to make this explicit because I am committed to a version
of communication as representation in this book. Fashion is a form of
communication and the form of communication that it is involves repre-
sentation. This position has had consequences in the previous chapter and
it will have consequences throughout the rest of the book, especially in the
following chapter and in the chapters on identity and difference and on
fashion and the body.
Representation may be explained as one thing standing for another
thing and I am committed to arguing that we have to use representation
in order to communicate. Therefore, I am committed to arguing that the
kind of communication that fashion performs is a representational form of
communication. Because we cannot use telepathy or direct thought
transference to communicate, we have to use things to stand for our
thoughts and the things we have to use are words. Spoken and written
words stand for or represent concepts and ideas, and it is these concepts
and ideas that we have to use to describe our experiences and perceptions.
On this account, hairstyles, body modifications, clothes and make-up
are things that stand for other things. Our use of cosmetics may stand for
or represent our gender identity, for example, and our hairstyle may
represent or stand for our understanding of the world as having no future.
My gender identity and my experience of that identity are not jackets and
ties but I use jackets and ties to represent that identity at those various
times and places where I appear. Your spiky, gelled hairstyle is not you but
you use it over thirty years after 1975 to represent your belief that punk
never died and that there is still no future. In these ways, then, we use
fashion to represent the values and beliefs that are part of the cultures that
we are members of, negotiating the extent and nature of our membership
as we go.
This account of communication as representation is not universally
popular or accepted. Many people call it ‘textual’ or ‘semiotic’ and argue
that it ‘reduces’ all fashion phenomena to ‘texts’ or representations.
Entwistle’s critique of representation is that it ‘displaces the idea of
embodiment and the individual and can give us no account of experience
or agency’ (Entwistle 2000: 70). But it is not representation that is the
problem, here: it is not representation that prevents us from explaining the
behaviour of individuals or their sense of agency. It could be argued that
it is only through representation that we have any access at all to these
phenomena. Our experience and perception of embodiment is not
identifiable or describable unless we use words to represent our perceptions
and experiences. Our experience and perception are not concepts, values
or words, but concepts, values and the words we use to represent them to
ourselves and others are all we have. How else would we describe our
experience and perception of embodiment except through using words? To

describe and explain the experience of embodiment while wearing a corset
or tight jeans is impossible unless we use words. Valerie Steele (2003),
David Kunzle (2004) and even Umberto Eco (1998) are obliged to use words
and concepts to do just that. Even miming the experience or explanation
would be to use representation in the form of bodily movements and
gestures. In terms of individual and agency, one might point out that
pearlized lip-gloss is not femininity; it stands for and represents one
individual member of a culture’s idea or understanding of femininity at some
time and in some place. One constructs oneself as an agent and as active
by using the lip-gloss to stand for or represent one’s membership or one
challenge to the membership of a culture. If I come into the university
wearing pearlized lip-gloss, I am using it to represent my individual take
on modern academic masculinity. By using it (representationally) I am active
and constructing myself as an individual. It is by no means clear how using
representation to identify and explain my experience ‘displaces’ either my
experience or my intention and agency.
Finally, then, I must argue that this account is not reductive: it is not
reductive to say that all fashion is communication and that communication
works by using representation because we have nothing outside of
representation by means of which to communicate. There may be an outside
to representation and Derrida may be correct to call it the other (although
calling it the other is inevitably to reduce its otherness) but as soon as it
is representation, it is no longer other. Cultural values are all we have and
the differences between those cultural values are what generate the
differences in meaning, intention and the degrees of cultural membership
that make fashion even the slightest bit interesting.
Conclusion
This chapter has identified and explained various functions performed by
fashion and clothing. Some, those involving protection, modesty and
seduction, for example, have been tentatively identified as ‘anthropological’
and distinguished from the communicative function. Saying that they are
‘anthropological’ is partly a reference to the early anthropologists who were
interested in asking and answering the ‘why’ questions about clothing. It
is also partly a reference to Roland Barthes’ account of meaning in his essay
‘Rhetoric of the Image’. In this essay he refers to a minimal level of meaning,
a level that applies to knowing that the shapes in a picture represent
tomatoes, or a string bag, for example. He calls this the anthropological,
and wants to indicate that this is a very low level of meaning, almost nothing,
as he says, but not nothing (Barthes 1977: 42). It is not nothing because it
is cultural: one still needs to be a member of a culture to understand this

level of meaning. One needs to be a member of a culture that goes shopping
in order to understand and recognize a string bag. And it is this needing
to be a member of a culture that introduces the function of communication
into all examples of fashion and clothing. Because all examples of fashion
and clothing will have this cultural level of meaning, they will represent
different cultural values and beliefs. Consequently, they will all be performing
communication. Fashion as communication will be further explained in
Chapter 6.
Further reading
Eicher, J. B., Evenson, S. L. and Lutz, H. A. (eds) The Visible Self, New York,
Fairchild.
Roach-Higgins, M. E., Eicher, J. B. and Johnson, K. K. P. (eds) Dress and
Identity, New York, Fairchild.

chapter 5
Fashion and/in
history
Introduction
This chapter will consider the relation between fashion and history. Fashion
is often used as a kind of shorthand for ‘the past’ or for particular periods
of ‘the past’ in films and television dramas. (It is also used as a kind of
shorthand for ‘the future’: certain genres of science fiction film often feature
‘unisex’ and minimalist clothing in the latest metallic or intelligent textiles,
where they stand metonymically for progress and temporal difference.) And
many would claim that history cannot be successfully or fruitfully taught
without referring to fashion, to the ephemeral things that people wore and
used in their everyday lives. This relation to history resolves very quickly
into a relation to time because history is often conceived as the simple
passage of time and because fashion is itself defined as the passing of one
style and its replacement by another. Given that temporality is at the very
centre of any possible theory of fashion and history, it is surprising how
late the study of fashion history came to the academic party. Anthea Jarvis
says that ‘the history of dress and fashion was not studied seriously in
academic circles before the 1960s’ (Jarvis 1998: 299). Lou Taylor agrees
and adds that the ‘old’ universities in the UK judged object-based studies
of dress and textiles history to be improper subjects until as late as the
1990s (Taylor 2002: 64–5). This impropriety was held by some male-
dominated institutions to be potentially damaging to the ‘real history’ that
they taught and they feared that the study of fashion history would ‘trivialize
history itself’ (Taylor 2002: 1–2).
fashion and/in history 57

The historian Eric Hobsbawm picks up on the relation to the future
and to science fiction when he writes that fashion designers ‘sometimes
succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional
predictors’ (Hobsbawm 1994: 178). He also takes exactly the opposite
position from those male-dominated old university history departments
when he says that why fashion designers should be able to do this is ‘one
of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture,
one of the most central’ (Hobsbawm 1994: 178). Far from being a trivializing
danger to a venerable academic discipline, fashion designers raise a
question that is one of the most obscure for history and central to the
historian of culture. Other historians and fashion historians agree with
Hobsbawm. Lisa Tickner proposes history as one of the disciplines that is
needed to explain fashion (Tickner 1977: 56). Taylor writes that economic,
social and cultural history are the three sub-disciplines of history that are
needed (Taylor 2002: 64–5).
The following sections of this chapter will continue to explore the
relations between fashion and history, and between fashion and time.
Having established that, viewed from one angle, temporality and fashion
give rise to history and, viewed from another angle, give rise to science
fiction, the chapter will concentrate on the relation between fashion and
history. It will outline and explain the three basic and relatively simple
positions that history can take with regard to fashion. History can be
conceived as a backdrop to fashion; it can be conceived as the context of
fashion; and it can be conceived as being produced and transformed by
fashion. There are also two more sophisticated and radical positions that
may be described. The first is that fashion has no part to play in making
history and that it is, therefore, (politically) ineffective. The second is that
fashion has no relation to history: this is the counter-intuitive claim that
fashion has no history. Having outlined these arguments, the chapter will
examine the notion of ‘retro’ and ‘classic’ fashion and fashion items. It will
argue that they are thoroughly ideological phenomena and that they both
stem from an attempt to escape or refuse history in the service of a dominant
social group.
History and fashion: five positions
Backdrop
The first of the five possible relations between fashion and history is that
history is a backdrop to fashion. This is the idea that history, in the guise
of events or things that happen, goes on in the background of fashion or
behind fashion’s back. Fashion is the main event but history is a series of
58 fashion and/in history

background events and the two are not thought of as being related in any
meaningful way. History is scenery, as the painted backdrops at the theatre
are scenery and as the matte or chroma key backgrounds in films provide
the scenery. This is neither a sophisticated nor a useful heuristic position
and the history of fashion may be glad that there are not many proponents
of it and that what proponents there are do not adopt it all the time.
However, in his book Costume and Fashion (1969b), James Laver occasionally
presents history in this way. He says, for example, that in Britain after 1968
the optimistic social and economic climate of the early 1960s started
to fade as unemployment and inflation rose . . . . People began to
question the human and environmental consequences of technology.
(Laver 1969b: 266)
Hippy fashions are presented and described in the following two pages with
no mention of any questioning of environmental consequences and Punk
is presented and described four pages later with no mention of how it might
relate to unemployment or inflation: history here is a simple backdrop, going
on inertly in the background of the fashions.
He does something similar when he writes about the fashions
immediately before the Second World War. Commenting on French fashions
at Longchamps in 1930, he says that ‘The skirts are on the eve of going
long again and the waist is about to resume its normal place’ (Laver 1969b:
237). There is a tension here between fashion as a simple Baudrillardian
sequence of differences (skirts are long, then short, then long again; see
Baudrillard 1981: 78–9) and fashion as the norm. If there is a norm, then
fashion cannot be a sequence of differences and Laver’s position is
reminiscent of Veblen’s when he fails to believe that the ‘transient . . .
mimicry’ of fashionably shaved faces will not soon be replaced by the normal
practice of men wearing beards (Veblen 1992: 130). History simply occurs
in the background of fashion and neither one is considered to be any part
of the explanation of the other.
Context
The second position is probably the one with which many students in
England will be most familiar, it being the default position of most, if not
all, of the historical and theoretical studies programmes in art and design
that have been instituted in higher education since the Coldstream Reports.
This position holds that history is a context for fashion: it is a setting within
which fashion takes place. History on this kind of account can be something
that fashion reflects or it can be something to which fashion points. In
all cases, however, fashion derives its meaning and significance from its

historical context or setting. This concern with context is probably why
those historical and theoretical studies’ programmes were so often called
‘Contextual Studies’. According to this position, history is one of the settings
within which fashion appears and fashion is a historical concept insofar as
examples of fashion and clothing are held to be meaningless if considered
out of their context in history. In his 1931 essay ‘Fashion’, in the Encyclopedia
of the Social Sciences, Edward Sapir says that the qualities of fashion ‘depend
on a context’. For example, a ‘moralist’ may condemn a garment or a kind
of behaviour as a ‘mere fashion’, while a normal or ‘ordinary person’ will
not mind being called fashionable: in this case, the moral context changes
the meaning of the term and the practice of fashion (Sapir 1931: 139).
History as a context that fashion reflects may be found in a web-based
teaching resource where the author says that ‘the French Revolution
brought on outlandish fashions, reflecting the unrest of the times’ (www.
yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/2001/4/01.04.11.x.html; last accessed
November 2013). The fashions are said to ‘reflect’ their context and the
unrest in the context is found in the outlandishness of the fashions. The
assumption is that understanding the unrest of revolutionary times will shed
some light on, or give some meaning to, the fashions. And that is clearly
what is expected to happen here: once one knows that the times are
revolutionary and filled with unrest, one will be able to see this reflected in
the outlandishness of the things people are wearing and understand them
more fully as a result. Laver may also be seen to adopt this position on
occasion. When he is writing about nineteenth-century crinolines, he says
that the garment ‘symbolizes’ the ‘supposed unapproachability’ and actual
seductiveness of the Victorian Englishwoman (Laver 1969a: 184). The
context is gender in nineteenth-century England and the crinoline gets
its meaning from that context. In this context, it means the imagined
unapproachability and actual seductiveness of a certain type of woman.
A contrasting context for the same garment gives a different meaning and
this can be seen when Laver explains the meaning of the crinoline in Second
Empire France between 1852 and 1870. When the Empress Eugénie wore
the crinoline in this context it reflected her prosperity and extravagance ‘to
perfection’ (Laver 1969a: 185). In one context the garment means a certain
kind of sexual allure; in another it means prosperous extravagance.
Transforming
The third position argues that fashion is able to produce and transform
history. This position is significantly different from the positions discussed
so far because where history pre-exists fashion in the first and second
positions, it is made possible by fashion in this third position. This
preposterous sounding claim may be explained by approaching it through

showing what is wrong with an example of the second position. According
to the second position, fashion reflects or indicates its context and it is
made meaningful by its context. In a book entitled Fifty Dresses that Changed
the World, the Design Museum explains the Jersey Flapper Dress designed
by Coco Chanel in the middle of the 1920s. Their claim is that modern,
emancipated young women in the 1920s changed the perception and role
of women in a male-dominated world with their ‘slang, exposed limbs and
go-getting attitude’. The dress liberated them by enabling them to move
more freely and more comfortably, and even to get dressed and out of the
house more quickly, than previous fashions. By enabling a new range of
movements and a new way of dressing, the dress challenged gender
stereotypes: by virtue of its simplicity, it enabled women who were not well
off to dress in a liberated and fashionable way and thus challenged existing
class identities.
Now, on the second position, one would say (as the Design Museum
unfortunately does say) that the dress ‘reflected social change’ (Design
Museum 2009: 10). The second position would argue that the context is
European society of the 1920s and, according to the Design Museum, the
dress ‘reflects’ the changes in gender and class identities that are going on
there. However, it is also possible to see the dress, not as reflecting changes
going on elsewhere, but as the change itself. The dress is not reflecting
social and gender changes. Rather, it is those changes; it is enabling those
changes and it is the means by which they are made possible. So, where
the text of the Design Museum’s book says the dress ‘reflects’ change, the
title of the book is actually more accurate – the dress changes the world
and makes history. The dress is one of the ways in which relations between
men and women are changed and it is one of the ways in which women’s
behaviour is altered or modified, enabling them to be more active, for
example. In that the relations between people are changed, the dress effects
political change and in that it enables women to move differently, it effects
gender change. In both cases the dress is making and changing history; it
is not reflecting history and it is not happening in front of a backdrop of
history.
This theory or understanding of the relation between fashion and history
is a relatively recent phenomenon. John Styles suggests that it is made
possible by three developments in social science and humanities disciplines.
Those developments are: the rise of feminist scholarship; the emergence
of cultural studies; and ‘a shift in interest across the social sciences from
production to consumption’ (Styles 1998: 385). Lou Taylor’s reference to
old male-dominated institutions in which dress history was ignored as a
matter of course in the early 1960s, has been noted above but it fits in with
Styles’ identification of the emergence of a set of new and critical feminist

approaches to the subject. Feminist thought, made up from an interest in
a ‘new women’s history’ and a concern for the ways in which consumption
related to ‘identity, autonomy and resistance’, made possible and encour-
aged the study of the ways in which ‘mass-produced goods could be
appropriated by and used by working class consumers to contest established
authority’ (Styles 1998: 385). The move from a male-dominated interest in
the production of high-status artefacts for aristocratic and dominant
cultures (or art history) to a new, critical, feminist interest in the consump-
tion of mass-produced fashion items and their relation to feminine identity
and autonomy, gave rise to the new study of fashion and dress. Fashion
and dress can now be theorized as agents of social, cultural and political
change, rather than as the reflections of or pointers to it.
An example of this third approach, which starts from the assumption
that fashion may make and change history, may be found in Angela
Partington’s account of the way in which certain English working-class
women adopted and adapted aspects of the New Look in their construction
of a new and ‘unofficial’ feminine identity after the Second World War. This
account may be contrasted with that found in the Design Museum’s account
of flapper dresses in that it is not ambivalent as to whether dress reflects
change or is the occasion of it: Partington’s account is all from this third
position. She says that in the late 1940s and early 1950s there were two
dominant models of femininity: one could be the ‘dutiful homemaker’
or one could be the ‘tempting siren’ (Partington 1992: 154). Aligned with
these two models were two fashionable ensembles: for the siren, there was
the New Look of 1947, and for the housewife, there was a choice between
Utility styles and the shirtwaister dress. Partington argues that, supported
by ‘official’ marketing, the design profession intended for the New Look to
be set aside for glamorous occasions and seductive activities, while the
Utility styles and shirtwaister dresses would be worn for more everyday,
housewifely activities (Partington 1992: 157). However, what many working-
class women did was to select and adopt elements from both styles in ways
that enabled them to ‘articulate their own specific tastes and preferences’
(Partington 1992: 160). So, for example, the body of shirtwaist dresses
would be combined with a New Look style skirt to create a practical garment
that could be worn everyday but which nevertheless had a certain glamour
and luxuriousness about it. As Partington points out, by mixing the styles
in dresses that they made themselves, these women were challenging
the dominant and dichotomous stereotypes of femininity (Partington 1992:
158). Siren and housewife combined to confuse and thus challenge the
old identities to which women had been confined by the officially available
styles. The dresses were making and changing history, not simply or merely
reflecting it.

Reflecting
The first of what were referred to above as two more sophisticated or radical
positions takes the idea of fashion reflecting its context from one of the
positions above and develops it into an argument about fashion having no
part to play in making history and, therefore, being historically ineffective.
An example of this position may be found in Nathalie Khan’s (2000) essay
‘Catwalk Politics’. Like the Design Museum text above, Khan’s essay is
slightly ambivalent on the matter of whether fashion reflects or shapes the
times, but it does explicitly make the argument proposing fashion’s
ineffectiveness. The essay begins under the heading of the social and political
‘contexts’ of fashion and Khan identifies a number of examples of fashion
that ‘reflect upon the wider social landscape’ (Khan 2000: 115). Her first
example is the 1984 T-shirt that Katherine Hamnett wore to meet UK Prime
Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and which featured the words ‘58% Don’t Want
Pershing’. Pershing is the name of the American nuclear missile that
Thatcher’s Government had agreed could be based in the United Kingdom,
while ‘58%’ is the percentage of UK residents who did not agree with basing
the missiles in their country. Other examples mentioned by Khan include
Benetton’s use of people with HIV in its advertising, breast cancer awareness
T-shirts worn by supermodels and the anti-fur campaigns of the early 1990s
(Khan 2000: 115–6).
These examples are often presented as instances of people using fashion
to take a political and radical stance against something to which they are
opposed. They are ostensibly political interventions. Hamnett wore the T-
shirt into the middle of Thatcher’s home to be photographed there making
her point about how unwelcome the nuclear warheads were. Benetton’s
advertising was renowned for taking a series of more or less extreme stands
on a variety of emotive subjects; by the mid-1990s, they had tackled religious
celibacy, inter-racial sexual relations, the death penalty and civil war in
their advertising. PETA’s 1994 anti-fur campaign used a photograph of five
naked supermodels, (including Heather Stewart White, Fabienne Terwinghe
and Naomi Campbell), all claiming that they would rather go naked than
wear fur.
However, Khan takes the position that these and other campaigns like
them were ‘ephemeral’ and, therefore, not true, meaningless and unable
to either make history or change society (Khan 2000: 116). Let us take these
claims in turn. The first claim is that fashion’s ‘ephemerality’ leads us to
‘question the veracity’ of such ‘political statements’ as Hamnett’s concerning
the missiles. Quite how the fact that the T-shirts were a passing fashion
item (although they still regularly appear, thirty years later) leads anyone
to question the truth of a statement or an argument is not clear. The fact
that the T-shirt was a fashion item does not make what is written on it true

or untrue. The T-shirt may have a false statement or an invalid argument
printed on it; the truth or validity of the statement or argument is not a
function of it being printed on a fashion item. The second claim is that the
ephemerality of a fashion item ‘confirms that any message it purports to
forward will remain meaningless’ (Khan 2000: 116). Again, meaning is not
a product of how long the message exists for. It is difficult to imagine a
fashion item that has no meaning. It will be argued in the next chapter that
meaning is a product of the interaction between the values held by a person
and the fashion item. One has certain values as a result of one’s gender,
age and cultural identity, for example, and those values help to generate
the meaning of a garment. If this is the case, then the length of time that
the item exists for is utterly irrelevant.
Khan’s third and fourth claims are that fashion’s ephemerality renders
it unable to affect history and unable to change society. Let us take these
in order. Khan quotes Andrea Rosen approvingly when she argues that,
because art is ‘all about permanency’ and fashion is ‘all about the moment’,
art is ‘fascinated’ with fashion’s ability to address the everyday, rather than
‘creating history’ (Rosen cited in Doe 1999: 4). Essentially, the third claim
is that fashion cannot create history because it is ‘all about the moment’.
There are various problems with this argument. The first concerns the
duration of permanence: how long does a ‘moment’ have to be for it to
become ‘permanent’? This is not a fatuous argument: if you are claiming
that fashion’s inability to change history is a result of it being a ‘moment’,
then you had better define ‘moment’. Some ‘moments’ have been
momentous: an explosion lasts only a fraction of a second but explosions
are claimed to have led to the start of the First World War and to have
shortened the length of the Second World War. The history of fashion is
littered with ephemeral items that changed the course of history. Bloomers,
divided skirts and the abandonment of corsetry are all fashion moments
but many would argue that they changed the course of gender history,
enabling women to become active members of nineteenth-century society.
The idea that fashion’s ephemerality renders it unable to create history is
clearly nonsense.
The fourth and final claim is that fashion can only ‘promote a particular
set of values if those values reflect current trends’ and that, because of this,
fashion can ‘reflect but it cannot renew society’ (Khan 2000: 116). Again,
it is difficult to make much sense of this argument. One may argue that it
is simply not the case that fashion can only promote values if those values
‘reflect current trends’. And one may argue that, if fashion is promoting
values then those values are current values and reflect current trends. For
example, few would argue that modern Europe or America are Victorian
societies and, therefore, few would argue that modern European and
American values are those of Victorian society. However, there are many

societies and websites that promote Victorian values and that will sell you
perfectly functional reproduction Victorian clothing in order for you to live
your life in Victorian style. The Victorian Society and The Gentlemen’s
Emporium are only two of the many organizations that exist to promote
Victorian values and sell Victorian ‘fashions’. There is, therefore, a fashion
for this kind of thing and either fashion is in fact promoting values that are
not ‘current’ or those values and trends are in fact ‘current’ because fashion
is ‘promoting’ them. The first part of this final claim, then, makes no sense.
Because the second part of the claim depends on the first and the first
has just been shown to be invalid, it is tempting to simply dismiss that
second part. However, even if it were true that fashion can only promote
certain values if those values are current, it is still untrue to say that fashion
reflects but is unable to renew society. All the arguments explained above
in the section on ‘context’ may be presented and rehearsed again here. It
is also possible to argue that fashion renews society all the time in that it
is one of the ways in which existing social and cultural identities, structures
and hierarchies are reproduced. The conservative values of conformity, hard
work and a certain version of masculinity that were ‘promoted’ by men’s
suits in the 1960s were reproduced by the wearing of those suits. The cultural
identities and the social hierarchies were, precisely, also renewed by the
wearing of the garment; they were supported and their continued existence
was at least partly assured by the men wearing the suits. Away from the
sense of ‘renew’ as reproduction, there is a more ‘revolutionary’ sense of
renew as ‘change’. And one may cite women’s fashions of the 1960s, or
Punk fashions of the 1970s, as examples of fashion changing society. The
claim here has to be that these fashions are not reflecting something
happening elsewhere in gender identity and politics for example, but that
these things are the thing that is happening, they are the change in society
and not a reflection of it.
Fashion has no history

This is the second of the two allegedly more sophisticated positions that
were noted in the introduction. It is the argument that fashion has no relation
to history, which is to say that it has no history. At first sight, this argument
appears obviously invalid: fashions are located in a sequence, and they come
before and after each other, therefore fashion has a history. However, if
history is more than a simple and meaningless sequence of events and if
fashion is nothing more than a simple and meaningless sequence of events,
then the relation between fashion and history is no longer quite so obvious
and the theory that fashion has a history is no longer ‘guaranteed’, as it
were. To put this another way, if fashion is no more than one thing being
followed by another different thing, if it is merely a sequence of different

things and if history is a meaningful narrative of events, then there need
not be any relation between fashion and history and fashion could indeed
be said to not have a history. It could be argued that Jean Baudrillard
proposes exactly this account of fashion in his For a Critique of the Political
Economy of the Sign (1981).
Baudrillard’s account of fashion here is that it is indeed a sequence of
differences and that whatever meaning it possesses and whatever aesthetic
experiences it generates are no more than the empty effects of the
differences between things in that sequence. According to this account,
fashion has no history because it has no relation to anything outside of
itself that could make it meaningful on any ‘deeper’ level than that of simple
difference. What would be outside of it and what would make it mean
something, would be history, considered as a meaningful temporal narrative
of symbolic and politically significant and consequential events in the world.
Baudrillard’s account begins from what he calls the logic of differen-
tiation (Baudrillard 1981: 67). This logic is a development of Ferdinand de
Saussure’s account of the linguistic sign. For Saussure, the sign is what it
is by virtue of its place in a structure; any identity it has is the result of its
differences from, its relations to, all other signs. Language is, therefore,
a structure of signs in which there are, as he says, no positive terms: a
structure is made of the differences between those signs and the linguistic
sign gets its identity, value or meaning from the differences between it and
all the other signs (Saussure 1974: 120–1). Fashion follows the logic of
differentiation on Baudrillard’s account and the fashion sign behaves much
like the linguistic sign. In fashion, there are no positive terms and whatever
distinguishes one fashion sign from another constitutes it (Saussure 1974:
121). As a result, nothing is naturally ‘beautiful’, ‘summery’ or ‘smart’. For
the same reasons, nothing is naturally ‘fashionable’, ‘unfashionable’ or ‘ugly’
either. What is proclaimed and presented as in fashion, beautiful and
summery is only any of those things because of the differences between it
and all the other garments existing at the same time in the world of fashion.
To illustrate his theory, Baudrillard uses the example of women’s skirts.
He says that neither long skirts nor short skirts have any meaning in
themselves and ‘only their differential relation acts as a criterion of meaning’
(Baudrillard 1981: 79). Only the difference between the two skirts makes
them meaningful and, by themselves, they have neither meaning nor value.
So, the short skirt does not mean ‘sexual liberation’ on its own and it has
no ‘fashion value’ by itself. Only in relation to a different skirt, (the long
skirt, for example), does the short skirt connote sexual liberation and only
by being different from the long skirt does it have value as being ‘in fashion’.
As Baudrillard notes, this differential process is completely reversible and
the value of fashionability that it gives rise to is entirely transferable. The
movement from the short skirt to the long skirt is the same differential

process (fashion) and it will generate the same effect, that of constructing
the value or meaning of the long skirt as fashionable. Nothing outside the
logic and the process of differentiation gives what we wear any meaning or
any value as fashion. Few people would agree that history is a sequence
of different events that precede and follow each other with no meaning.
Therefore, if history is conceived as being more than a simple sequence of
different events, then it is difficult to understand how fashion (which is no
more than a simple sequence of events on this account), could have any
relation to history. As Baudrillard says, the logic of differentiation deprives
the fashion object of its ‘substance and history’ (Baudrillard 1981: 93).
Fashion, as an example of the logic of differentiation, as a sequence of
differences, conjures away history and replaces it with the signs of change
(Baudrillard 1998: 33).
Baudrillard uses another example to illustrate and explain the argument
that fashion has no relation to history. His other example involves two rings:
a wedding ring and an ‘ordinary’ ring. The logic of differentiation is joined
by a logic of symbolic exchange to explain the ways that these two rings
operate. The logic of differentiation is also called the logic of sign value,
because it works on the level of the sign and of the meaning or value of
the sign, as we saw above. And Baudrillard is careful to remind us that
consumption is involved – the rings, along with everything else that we buy
and wear, are consumed, not as objects or commodities, but precisely as
signs – as values and meanings. The wedding ring, as Baudrillard says, is
unique and symbolic. Only one is bought and worn, and it symbolizes the
duration and permanence of the married couple’s relationship. A married
man or woman would no more think of changing their ring than they
would think of possessing and wearing two or three wedding rings. The
ordinary ring is quite different in that it is neither unique nor symbolic.
One may wear as many ordinary rings as one likes, putting them on and
taking them off as often as one likes: the ordinary ring is an accessory, an
object of consumption and part of the ‘constellation of fashion’ (Baudrillard
1981: 66).
The ordinary ring is a sign, an object that is consumed; it is not symbolic
and it is not a unique indication of a unique event happening outside of
the series of changes that is fashion. In this sense, the ordinary ring has
no relation to history. It does not symbolize a unique and life-changing
event and it does not indicate or signify anything apart from itself. Every
fashion item is like the ordinary ring in that every fashion item also obeys
the logic of differentiation. Any meaning or value that it possesses is a
product only of the difference between it and every other fashion item.
The wedding ring, which symbolizes something unique and outside the
logic of differentiation, therefore relates to history, to something outside
the simple series of changes that constitute fashion. The fashion object,

operating as a differential sign, does not relate to anything outside of that
logic of differentiation and it does not, therefore, relate to history. The signs
of change are as near as fashion gets to history and it may, therefore, be
said that while fashion may have a memory, it does not have a history.
Fashion, history and understanding

In their history of Renaissance clothing and fashions, Ann Rosalind Jones
and Peter Stallybrass raise the question whether history is a help or a
hindrance to understanding fashion. More accurately, they raise the question
whether our location or position at a certain point in history helps us to
understand what the fashions of previous historical circumstances meant
to the people living in those previous times. None of us is an eighteenth-
century French courtier; how then are we to understand what dressing as
a milkmaid would have meant to someone who was? Similarly, none of us
has experience of nineteenth-century American city life; how are we to
understand the appearance and astonishing impact of the bloomer? Jones
and Stallybrass’s problem is how we might understand the fashions of the
European Renaissance, given that none of us is from that period and none
of us can possibly have had any experience of that time.
Let us examine what is involved in these claims, which imply that we
are unable to understand what the eighteenth-century French courtier and
the nineteenth-century American would have made of the garments. The
first thing to note is that the meanings and the experiences of the milkmaid
fashion and the bloomers are held to be generated by the values, beliefs
and ideas held by the eighteenth-century French courtier or the nineteenth-
century American. This process will be explained in further detail in the
following chapter. The second element is that, because the values of the
courtier and the American will have been different from those we hold now,
the meanings and experiences that garments have for us will also be
different. Finally, the assumption is that these differences in values and
beliefs are the result of historical differences (we are from different time
periods) and that because we cannot go back in time to erase or nullify
that difference, we can never understand the garments as the people from
the earlier periods. History here is a hindrance to the understanding
of fashions from the past because the historical difference that generates
the different values in terms of which those fashions are meaningful, is
unbridgeable.
It is for this reason that Jones and Stallybrass say that ‘we need to undo
our social categories’ in order to understand the significance of clothes in
the Renaissance (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 2). Our social categories are
our values and beliefs, and they are the products of our historical situation.

They are also a problem for the understanding of people’s interpretations
of fashion and clothing. Consequently, according to Jones and Stallybrass,
they need to be ‘undone’ in order for us to understand what the fashions
meant to people of an earlier time. This sounds like a clothing metaphor
and it is very interesting. They do not say that our ideas, our categories,
need to be removed completely or cast off, but that they need to be undone.
This suggests a loosening of one’s tie and the undoing of the top button,
or the unfastening of a blouse: something that eases and relaxes and maybe
makes other things possible.
This is fair enough because it is not as if we either want to, or are able
to, cast off those ideas, those categories. Those ideas, beliefs and categories
are what give us any access to the world at all, and to remove them or cast
them off entirely would leave us blind and unable to discern any meaning
at all in the things that surround us. Among the social categories that we
need to undo in order to understand the ‘world view’ of Renaissance men
and women (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 2) are the ideas that ‘subjects are
prior to objects’ and wearers are prior to what is worn. Among the ideas
from the past that we need to understand are the ideas that a surface
appearance can have its own kind of depth and that clothes mould and
shape people ‘both physically and socially, [constituting] subjects through
their power as material memories’ (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 2). So, we
are not being invited to remove or cast off our ideas of subjects and objects
or of clothes as appearance/essence. Rather we are being invited to loosen
or undo our ideas so that they may take in or comprehend someone
else’s idea of those ideas. If we had no conception of how what we wear
either does or does not display or conceal our ‘inner’ selves, then we could
not understand someone else’s different conception of that relation.
According to Jones and Stallybrass, it is, therefore, Hal’s view at the end
of Henry IV Part 2 that we need to understand if we are to make sense of
the constitutive function of clothes in the Renaissance. This is the view that
fashion may be worn ‘deeply’, that it inscribes us and upon us (Jones and
Stallybrass 2000: 3). We are not such postmodern dupes that we cannot
conceive of anything apart from surface but, were it not for our experience
and understanding of surface, we would have little insight into Hal’s
understanding of wearing sorrow like a fashion, in his heart.
Following Hans Georg Gadamer (1975: 245ff Second Part, II, 1 (b) (1))
we could argue that our historical location, which generates our ideas and
values, is both a hindrance and the condition for understanding the historical
location, the ideas and values, of other people. And, continuing in this vein,
it should be noted that the structures of the arguments outlined here are
entirely parallel to those outlined in the chapter on globalization. If, as
L. P. Hartley suggested (2004: 5), the past is a foreign country, then that
the problems of understanding the fashions of the past are analogous to

the problems of understanding the fashions of another country, should come
as no surprise. The inhabitants of the past, like the inhabitants of foreign
countries, do things differently. One of the things they do differently is
fashion and the various differences play a role in making the understanding
of those fashions possible but not identical to those of another culture or
historical period.
Outdated or classic?
There is a website concerned with the correct use of the English language
that asks the question, what is the difference between the terms ‘old-
fashioned’, ‘out of fashion’, ‘unfashionable’ and ‘outdated’? The answer
given is that, while all of these phrases could be used insultingly, to put
someone down, only one could be used positively (stackexchange.com).
Only one phrase could have ‘good’ put in front of it and still make sense.
That one phrase is, of course, ‘old-fashioned’. We happily talk about good,
old-fashioned fun, and Google’s auto complete search function suggests
good old-fashioned pancakes and good old-fashioned bluegrass. The
relation between fashion and time, or fashion and history, is clearly an
important one. It is the relation that makes the difference between being
appropriately or acceptably dressed and being dressed inappropriately or
unacceptably. What makes something ‘out of fashion’, ‘unfashionable’
or ‘outdated’ is simply time; the passing of time turns the fashionable
into the unfashionable, the outdated, and it turns fashion into the out of
fashion. Time as the passage of time turns the present, the current and the
fashionable, into history, the past and the unfashionable. It may strike us
as odd, therefore, that we may still talk of ‘good old-fashioned clothes’. The
sense here is that the clothes are well made or of good quality, as they
‘used to be’.
This is an ultimately paradoxical reference to a value involving fashion
that is held to be ‘timeless’. It is paradoxical because fashion is very much
‘of the time’ and is, therefore, the opposite of timeless. We talk of fashion
‘seasons’ and the point of seasons is that they pass and are replaced by
another season. The value that is thus held to be both inside and outside
time in the phrase ‘good old-fashioned clothes’ is ‘high quality’ or ‘good
quality’, a persisting or reliable condition of being authentic or otherwise
excellent. Andy Hamilton provides an example of this kind of thinking when
he says that ‘classic’ means ‘excellent of its kind’ (Hamilton 2011: 68). It
is surely these connotations of quality, excellence and authenticity that
lie behind the positive valuations of ‘retro’ clothing. Something must
differentiate the positivity and attractiveness associated with ‘retro’ or
vintage clothing from the negativity and ugliness associated with dowdy,

unfashionable cast-offs. It is suggested that it is some idea of high quality,
authenticity and excellence that makes the difference. It may also be argued
that these values at least partly motivate the concept of the ‘classic’ fashion
item, or the ‘fashion classic’. Various garments are routinely trotted out in
fashion magazines and paraded as ‘classics’. The ‘Little Black Dress’,
Burberry trench coats, Chanel 2.55 handbags and the navy blue blazer are
all regularly given this treatment and identified as classic items. The concept
of the classic is also a paradoxical reference to a fashion value that is held
to be timeless and, therefore, good for all times and all time. Simmel is in
no doubt on the matter and argues that the classic is not merely paradoxical,
but that it is ‘far removed’ from fashion and ‘alien’ to it (Simmel 1971: 321).
Strictly, this is true, even though, as Simmel also notes, the classic
occasionally comes back into fashion, falling under its sway every once in
a while.
The explanation of this phenomenon to be proposed here is that the
classic is not so much to do with idealist notions of high quality or timeless
design, but that it represents one dominant group’s taste at one time and
place, and that it is presented by that group and accepted by the majority
as good or fashionable taste at every time and place. Clearly, nothing
fashionable can be in fashion all the time or for all time – that is the point
and definition of fashion. The assertion that certain items are ‘classics’ is
the assertion that those items are in fact fashionable all the time and for
all time, and the assent to their existence as ‘classics’ is the assent to that
assertion. Given that the assertion is effectively made on behalf of one
dominant class or group’s taste, the assent to the assertion is the acceptance
and adoption of that dominant group’s taste. It does not take much research
to find that the items mentioned above all have their origins in upper middle-
class and aristocratic tastes, and at least two of them reference the upper
echelons of the British armed services.
The classic, therefore, has a role in the identification and establishment
of a dominant class and in the maintenance or reproduction of that
dominant class’s position in a social hierarchy. The role is ideological: it
turns a historical claim concerning items of clothing that exist as fashionable
at one time and place into an apparently a-historical claim, that this fashion
is good for all time and at all times. As Roland Barthes says, ideology turns
history into nature and the ideological function of the classic is also to turn
history into nature (Barthes 1972: 141). The notion of the classic depends
on its being taken out of history and made timeless, or a-historical, and
therefore apparently natural. An important difference between history and
nature is that history has been made by people but nature has not: the
classic is presented and understood, therefore, as though it is a product of
nature rather than a product of a particular social group’s tastes and styles.
Where the actions of people making history can be challenged and undone,

the actions of nature cannot. If the things that a dominant social group
consumes are seen as natural and unquestionable, then that group’s
position at the top of a social hierarchy will also be seen as the product of
nature rather than history. The culturally loaded and historically specific
Chanel handbag appears to be a classic as naturally and innocently as grass
is green or as buds appear in the spring. Finally, and most importantly, the
social position of those using that handbag appears to be equally natural
and therefore unquestionable.
Conclusion
This chapter has accounted for the main relations that can exist between
fashion, what we wear and history. Five central positions on the matter
have been identified and explained. History as inert backdrop to fashion,
history as the context of fashion and history as the product of fashion were
outlined. Two more positions, that fashion is a politically ineffective
reflection of existing historical and political ‘reality’ and that fashion can
have no relation to history, were also explained. Finally, the entire notion
of the so-called fashion ‘classic’ was analysed as a relation to time and
history and therefore not outside of either. The following chapter will follow
up one of the hints noted above regarding the construction of meaning in
what we wear and consider the subject of fashion as communication.
Further reading
Bentley, M. (1999) Modern Historiography: An Introduction, London,
Routledge; especially chapter 14: The History of the Present.
Breward, C. (1998) ‘Cultures, Identities, Histories: Fashioning a Cultural
Approach to Dress’, Fashion Theory, 2, 4: 301–13.
Jenkins, K. (1995) On ‘What is History?’, London, Routledge.
Taylor, L. (2002) The Study of Dress History, Manchester, Manchester UP.

chapter 6
Fashion as
communication
Introduction
An article entitled ‘Is Ann Romney Sending Secret Messages With Her
Clothing?’ appeared in New York magazine on 13 June 2012 (http://nymag.
com/daily/intel/2012/06/ann-romneys-secret-clothing-agenda.html).
Written by Margaret Hartmann, the article concerned the tops and dresses
worn in public and in her television appearances by Ann Romney over the
course of the 2012 presidential campaign waged by her husband, Mitt
Romney. While it is in itself of no importance here, the top that received
much attention in the article was a $1,000 Reed-Krakoff bird-print blouse
that featured ‘a giant seagull soaring into her armpit’, according to
Hartmann.
What is of no little importance here is the title of the article. It is
important because it introduces all the issues of this chapter, which concerns
fashion and communication. It also introduces most of the mistakes that
people make when they think and write about fashion and communication.
There are three such issues and three such mistakes, and they are all
characteristic of what is known as the sender/receiver model of com-
munication. First, the title refers to ‘messages’. It assumes or presupposes
that messages are what we are talking about when we talk about clothing
and fashion. Second, the title refers to ‘sending’. It assumes or presupposes
that messages are sent by people’s clothing and, inevitably, that they are
received by the people who are looking at that clothing. And third, the title
fashion as communication 73
refers to ‘secret messages’. It assumes or presupposes that the messages
sent may be not shared or private.
Hartmann attempts to identify the ‘message’ that Ann is sending through
her clothing and says that ‘experts are divided’ as to what it might be. The
‘image consultant’ Sandy Dumont says that the striking top may be a
‘counter’ to Mitt’s sober-suited, stiff formality. Another possible message
concerns a lack of sophistication: that, despite having the horse-riding tastes
appropriate to one of the richest women in the country, she can still relate
to ‘ordinary people’. And the ‘political analyst’ Taylor Marsh says that the
message is ‘This is who I am. I like this shirt’. Despite referring to the sending
of messages, Hartmann does not attempt to identify the recipients of those
messages. However, we may spend a moment imagining them. We may
assume that the first message is sent to the voters of America, who are
wondering whether Mitt is the kind of guy they want as President. If his stiff
formality is a problem for these voters, then the relaxed informality of his
wife may solve it. The recipients of the second message are easier to find as
they are implied in the description of the message. They are, of course, the
relatively unsophisticated and the relatively poor people of America, to whom
the blouse says ‘Don’t worry, I look as vulgar as you sometimes’. And the
third message is surely also intended to be received by the voters of America.
The common-sense and no-nonsense electorate is to be addressed and
impressed by the blouse’s ‘This is me and here I stand’.
The third issue is the most curious and self-contradictory, but it is not
uncommon in accounts of meanings and messages. The idea that a message
might be a secret message makes no sense at all, of course. If a ‘message’
remains truly secret, then it is not a message because it is not sent by
anyone and it is not received by anyone. The point of a message on this
kind of account is surely that it is broadcast, sent and received; and that,
clearly, is not anyone’s idea of a secret. Struggling charitably to imagine
what Hartmann might mean here, one wonders whether the message is
intended for personal friends, or a political inner circle, or to those ‘in the
know’, or to fellow Republicans. On such an account, sceptical or distrusting
Republicans might feel reassured and included by having their fears and
worries assuaged by this colourful blouse. Alternatively, personal friends of
the Romneys might feel a smug familiarity, having seen this blouse at an
intimate private dinner perhaps. Democrats and other strangers will not
receive the message and will feel left out and slighted.
However, to even think about these inside groups, these inner circles of
good friends and close colleagues, is already to think about a message that
is not, or is no longer, or never was, a private message. Whatever the message
is, it has been made public and to make it public is the end of its private
existence. It could also be argued that, in order even to think the message
to oneself (and not say it or display it in one’s blouse), that message must
74 fashion as communication
already be in principle shareable and therefore not private. In order to be
even, or only, in principle communicable, the message is already not private:
the code must already exist and the point of a code is that it is understandable
by more than one person. Similarly, the groups are only groups because they
consist of people who communicate with each other and communication is
the sharing or making public of meanings. To that extent the ‘message’ never
was secret and it never had a private existence; there are no private codes
and there can be no private messages or languages.
Via these three elements, this apparently simple headline introduces
the issues with which this chapter will deal. And, as we shall see, it is also
through those elements, which are central features of the sender/receiver
model of communication, that three main mistakes are introduced when
people think about fashion and communication. The rest of this chapter
will examine various models of communication in order to determine which,
if any, are appropriate to the job of describing fashion as communication.
The chapter will look first at the sender/receiver model, then at semiotic
models, which argue that meaning is negotiated, and finally at some
critiques of both in order to explain fashion as communication.
Sender/receiver models
Sender/receiver models of communication are also called ‘process’ models
because communication is conceived as a process in which someone sends
a message to someone else through a channel. In our case, the channel
will be what we wear – fashion and clothing – and is also called the medium.
Accounts of this model traditionally begin with the work of Claude Elwood
Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949), who were working in telecommu-
nications after the Second World War. Their model may be represented in
the form of a diagram, see Figure 6.1.
In this diagram, the information source provides the information that
is to be transmitted and the transmitter (the encoder) puts the information
into a signal appropriate to the channel. This signal is then sent in the
channel or medium to be received and decoded as a message by the receiver.
At any and all points in this process the signal may be distorted or interfered
with – a distorted signal is said to be ‘noise’ or ‘noisy’.
Information source Transmitter (encoder) Signal Receiver (decoder) Destination
Noise
Figure 6.1 Sender/receiver model of communication
One may quite easily imagine the telecommunications equipment that
this model describes. The mouthpiece of the telephone might be part of
the transmitter, which turns sound into electrical charge, the wires would
be the channel along which the electrical charge moves and the earpiece of
the handset might be the receiver, which decodes the electric pulses and turns
them into sounds. Imagining how this model may be turned and applied to
what we wear, however, is less easy. Who or what is the sender or transmitter
in this case? Is it the person who designed our shirt? Is it the shirt itself? Or
are we, the wearers, the senders? What of the receiver – is it the wearer or the
spectator of the shirt? Is it both; could there be many receivers? And what
would constitute fashion noise; what could interfere with or distort the fashion
message? These are very simple problems, which concern the metaphorical
turning of the model from one topic to another, but there are no obvious
answers and the model is not looking convincing so far.
It should be fairly clear that clothing and fashion do not send messages of
a very specific nature. By this I mean that they do not send messages con-
cerning the minutiae of one’s everyday life. Roz Chast’s cartoon, in which
the clothes of Rhonda Perlmutter III send messages saying that she likes
tuna and that her mother lives in Sacramento, effectively makes the point
that is also made by Fred Davis (1992: 7), Grant McCracken (1988: 64) and
Colin Campbell (1997: 347) that clothing does not communicate such
specific things as these. So, it will be a problem for the sender/receiver
model to explain how, if clothes and fashion do not send messages like
these, they send messages at all.
There are more complicated problems that concern the operation of
the model, supposing that we could simply apply it to fashion. It would be
a poor designer who did not know the people for whom they were
designing. The designer need not know the people personally, or individually,
of course, but it would be expected that the designer would know the kind,
or the type, of people for whom they were designing. They will know the
age, sex, social class, cultural identity and so on of their ‘target’ market,
and they will tailor what they design according to what they know of the
preferences of that target market. There is a sense here in which the ‘target’
market, who are presumably the ‘receivers’ of the garment/message, are
in fact determining or creating the nature of what is ‘sent’. This slightly
paradoxical phenomenon has not escaped the notice of the fashions careers’
advisors at wetfeet.com, who explain it like this:
as a designer you’ll need to be able to understand who will use your

design as well as how they will use it. In other words, you’ll need to
know what the market you’re designing for wants and needs in the
products you’re designing.
(from www.wetfeet.com/careers-industries/careers/
design; last accessed July 2012)
They clearly understand that the receiver is effectively generating the
message in ways that the simple sender/receiver model cannot account
for.
The sender/receiver model remains both prevalent and popular despite
these problems. Not unconnected with this model is the idea that fashion
is a language. People commonly think of speech or writing when they think
of communication, and if fashion is to be understood as communication,
then it probably seems reasonable to them to think in terms of fashion as
a language. The most well-known example of this is Alison Lurie’s The
Language of Clothes (1981). In this book, Lurie valiantly seeks out the fashion
equivalents of some of the elements of language. Individual garments are
said to be like words and there are fashion equivalents of archaic, slang
and foreign words, for example. Where an affluent fashion leader may have
several hundred ‘words’ in their ‘wardrobe’, a poor sharecropper may have
only five or ten ‘words’ in their ‘vocabulary’ (Lurie 1981: 5). Blue jeans and
baseball caps are offered as the equivalents of ‘slang’ words, acceptable in
everyday life but not in any formal context (Lurie 1981: 8).
As Grant McCracken points out, this is a metaphorical use of language
and its transference from writing and speaking to what we wear is not
straightforward (McCracken 1988: 64). McCracken’s case is closely argued
and complex but it reduces to the claim that clothing is ‘incapable of creating
new messages’ (McCracken 1988: 68). Language has ‘combinatorial free-
dom’ – it is able to combine words into new sequences that communicate
things that have not been communicated before: clothing lacks this freedom
and can only repeat existing and ‘pre-fabricated’ messages. As a result,
clothing cannot communicate ‘irony, metaphor . . . [or] ambivalence’
(McCracken 1988: 69). When fashion and clothing tries to be novel and
original in the ways that language can be novel and original, by combining
elements in ways that are not familiar, communication fails as people are
confused and can make no sense of what they are seeing. As McCracken
says, ‘For the clothing code, novelty of the sort possessed by language
is not an opportunity for communication, but a barrier to it’ (McCracken
1988: 66–7).
Quite how those messages first come into existence and then become
old messages is not explained and this is a serious weakness in McCracken’s
account. The logic of the account demands that they must have come
into existence once, that they must have been new and original once and
that the ‘barrier’ of confusion and lack of sense must have been overcome.
If the clothing message came into existence and became an old message,
it must have been understood for the first time, it must have been poss-
ible to understand it as a new thing that had not been communicated or
understood before. And if that must have happened, then fashion must
have had the ability to make new combinations and it must have been
possible to understand those new combinations and make them meaningful.
If that could happen then, why can it not happen now?
What is needed here is an account that does not depend on the first
time of a new understanding, because it presupposes a prior time when
there was no code or structure according to which the new item could be
understood. In clothing and language, the structure or code always pre-
exists us and any new combination we make always presupposes that
existence. Consequently, language and clothing both enjoy some
combinatorial freedom and the existence of the code guarantees that any
initial ‘bafflement’ that results from that freedom can always, in principle,
be overcome.
Colin Campbell’s elegant and powerful critique of the sender/receiver
model is aimed squarely at the ideas that meaning in fashion and clothing
is a message that is sent and received, and that communication through
clothing operates in any way like a language (Campbell 1997). Campbell
points out that, in order for anyone to receive a message through clothing,
one must first of all know what ‘language’ is being ‘spoken’ and one must
be fairly certain that the person to whom one is sending any message also
knows the language (Campbell 1997: 342). A 1991 Gallup poll indicating
that 45 per cent of people asked thought that turn-ups on men’s trousers
were ‘fashionable’ and that 43 per cent of people asked thought that
they were ‘unfashionable’ is taken to suggest that getting on for half of all
people do not know actually know the ‘language’ of trousers at all (Campbell
1997: 343). In a series of moves consistent with those described below
in the semiological account of meaning, Campbell correctly concludes
from this that ‘the “meaning” of any one particular item of clothing . . . will
differ depending on who witnesses it’ (Campbell 1997: 343). Another entirely
correct conclusion is that, even if some successful communication with
some people is achieved, it is likely to be at the expense of not
communicating at all with others and of sending yet others a message that
was not intended at all (Campbell 1997: 344).
Semiotic models
The English word ‘semiotic’ means ‘relating to signs’ and it derives from
the ancient Greek words, semeion meaning ‘sign’ and sema meaning ‘signal’.
Semiotic models of communication are also known as ‘structuralist’ models
because they argue that structures make communication possible. These
structures are social structures on the one hand and the structures within
which signs exist on the other. These structures are explicitly acknowledged
in semiology as always pre-existing us and it is the interaction between the
elements making up these two kinds of structure and ourselves that creates
and reproduces meanings. It is also through this interaction that we
construct ourselves as individuals and as members of cultures and societies.
As Fiske says, ‘semiotics . . . defines social interaction as that which
constitutes the individual as a member of a particular culture or society’
(Fiske 1990: 2–3). We become, or are made, members of different societies
and cultures by interacting with other members and learning the meanings
of the different signs used in and by those societies and cultures.
Communication through or by means of fashion and clothing is a social
and cultural interaction that constitutes us as members of those societies
and cultures. Membership is dependent upon us learning and knowing the
meanings of what we wear and wearing them at the appropriate times and
places.
It is worth noting at this point that this account of fashion in terms of
signs, thinking about the things we wear as signs, is consistent with the
idea of fashion as prosthesis, introduced above in Chapter 3. The things
we wear are literally not us and they are not literally us. However, we use
the things we wear to represent, or stand for, what we think of as us, or as
ourselves. Our clothing and fashion stand for, or represent, our cultural,
sexual, national, class and other identities. They are, therefore, tools and
another word for tool is prosthetic. As signs, then, the things we wear are
prosthetic devices or tools that we use to represent ourselves.
On this account of communication, meaning is constructed and
negotiated and, therefore, subject to endless change and revision, as cultures
change and as members of those cultures change. Consequently, meaning
is not something that is sent from one place and received in another in
the ways that messages are said to be in the sender/receiver model of
communication. Meaning on this account is more like Roland Barthes’
conception of connotation in his 1977 essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image’.
Connotation is a shifting set of associations and feelings concerning the
object that are aroused in an individual as a result of their cultural identity
or location. Meaning is the product of the interaction between the
individual’s cultural values and beliefs (which they have as a result of being
a certain age, nationality, gender, class and so on) and the item of clothing
or fashion. Given that different people will be members of different cultural
groups, they will possess different beliefs and values, and the meaning of
items of fashion will differ between them.
For example, a balaclava will mean something different to an elderly
English ex-serviceman from what it will mean to a young Russian female
fan of Pussy Riot. It will do this not because it sends a different message
(it is the same item; how could it?), but because the cultural values held
by the elderly man will be quite different from those held by the young
woman. It is the interaction between the different values and the item that
generate the different connotations, not the item itself. To the elderly male
ex-serviceman, the garment may have connotations of extreme danger, of
the possibility of dying and the memories of friends and colleagues who
did die. It may also connote certain masculine notions of comradeship and
discipline. To the young woman, the garment may connote a violent and
noisy femininity, a failure to conform to many consumer ideals. It may also
make her think of a grainy and shaky video shot in the main cathedral in
Moscow and the political radicalization of a generation of Russian women.
The cultural locations of these two imaginary people are totally different –
one is old, one is young; one is male, one is female and so on. The cultural
beliefs and values they have as a result of those different locations or
identities determine that they make different things of the garment.
According to one set of values and beliefs the garment means one thing,
or one group of closely related things. And according to a different set of
values and beliefs, the garment means another, different thing, or group
of things.
This negotiation or interaction between values and objects is also one
of the ways in which an individual is (or is not) constructed as a member
(or not) of a cultural group. It therefore relates to matters of identity, which
will be explored in detail in Chapter 7. Agreeing on what garments and other
items of fashion are and are not cool, or masculine, or ‘too old’ is a
large part of what makes one a member of a cultural group. It would be
difficult to sustain a serious claim to membership of any Goth culture while
expressing a preference for pastel twinsets, discreet eye shadow and a nice
tan, after all. And if your values and beliefs lead you to understand that
skimpy tops and short skirts are immodest and decadent, then you are
unlikely to be constructed or seen as a member of any contemporary Western
youth cultures. This is because it is the sharing of the cultural values, via
the application of those values to items and practices of fashion and
clothing, that produces the shared meanings of the items. And it is whether
the values and the understanding of those meanings are shared or not that
makes an individual a member of the cultural group or not. Therefore, the
interaction between the individual, the cultural values and the item of
clothing constructs the meaning of the object and the identity of the
individual at the same time.
It should be clear how this semiological model deals with the problem
of ‘secret’ messages that was raised in the introduction to this chapter. The
New York magazine headline asked whether Ann Romney was sending
‘secret’ messages with or through her $1,000 Reed-Krakoff blouse. It was
argued that the idea of a ‘secret’ message made no sense: a message was
either public and shared, or it was not a message. We are now in a position
to see that not only are messages not sent and received through clothing,
but that what we are talking about are meanings that are constructed and
negotiated by members of cultures. Consequently, we can explain how it is
that different groups of people in Hartmann’s story will construct different
meanings for the blouse according to the different beliefs and values that
they hold. The different beliefs and values are playing the role of different
‘codes’, according to which the same item has different meanings for the
different groups holding those beliefs and values. So, the unsophisticated
and less affluent voter in Hartmann’s account will be reassured by the
‘vulgar’ blouse that Ann is just like them – that she shares their trashy and
garish aesthetic values, for example. The wealthy Republican voters men-
tioned above will be reassured by knowing the source and the price of the
blouse – their shared valuation of expensive and exclusive designer goods
will be understood and reproduced.
This semiological account also allows us to explain how and why it is
that Campbell’s statements above are correct (if not necessarily for the
reasons he gives). He said that ‘the “meaning” of any one particular item
of clothing displayed will differ depending on who witnesses it’ and he argues
that:
Successful communication to some people – presumably the ‘target’

audience for one’s ‘message’ – is thus only likely to be achieved at the
expense either of a lack of communication with others, or of sending
them a message which is not what was intended.
(Campbell 1997: 344)
Campbell argues these points against the sender/receiver model and against
the idea that clothing functions almost exactly like a language; they are for
him faults of the model and illustrate that the idea is mistaken. However,
on the semiological model, they are true, utterly unsurprising and indicate
no faults or mistakes at all. Of course an item will mean something differ-
ent to each ‘witness’ – meaning is generated in the interaction between an
individual’s cultural values and the item and different values will generate
different meanings. Only if we want the same message to arrive as we
assume was sent is there a problem when meanings change and differ
between individuals.
Similarly, if the meaning of the Goth’s leopard print T-shirt (as a
reference or homage to their culture’s punk roots or as an indication of
rockabilly tendencies) is understood as such by other Goths, then
communication can be said to have been successful. But this is not because
of a message having been sent and received – it is because of the shared
Goth values. If you do not possess or know the values, you will not under-
stand this nuance of meaning, although you may have them explained to
you. As a result, you will understand the culture better than you did before.
Strictly, there can be no such thing as a ‘lack’ of communication, and what
Campbell experiences and describes as such a ‘lack’ of communication is
explained by the fact that the individuals do not share the same values. To
the Goth the T-shirt may be reverent and hark back to a punk heritage;
to the non-Goth it is simply tacky and cheap and connotes a vulgar lower-
class form of femininity. There is no lack or failure of communication,
because a meaning is understood, it is just not the one that the Goth
constructs. And again, what is presented as the ‘arrival’ of an ‘unintended’
message and as a problem for the sender/receiver model is explained in
the very same way. The meaning is constructed according to the values of
the person doing the understanding. It makes no sense to talk of unintended,
because meaning is not a product of intention, it is a product of an
interaction between the values of the interpreter and the clothing item.
Meaning
The following paragraphs will explain in more detail the kind of meaning
that is being proposed and used in this chapter and they will consider the
case of the United Kingdom ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s frog pattern
silk tie.
In his 1977 essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, Roland Barthes identifies
connotation as a level of meaning and it is only the account of connota-
tion that is of interest here. This is because, although Barthes refers to
denotation, a literal or ‘non-coded’ and culture-free meaning, he admits
that it does not exist. When he is discussing what is required to recognize
and understand the contents of the image – the tomato and the string bag,
for example – he says that what is needed is a knowledge ‘bound up in our
perception’, that this knowledge is ‘not nil’ and that it is ‘anthropological’
(Barthes 1977: 36). That is, we need to have some culturally specific
knowledge even to recognize the things as tomatoes and string bags: were
it not for that cultural, and therefore coded, knowledge, we would not
recognize or understand these things. This level of meaning is already
cultural, therefore, and to that extent connotational. Consequently, and
despite Barthes’ inconsistency on the point, a non-coded denotational level
of meaning does not exist.
On the understanding, then, that there is no such thing as denotation,
that any apparently literal or denotational meaning is in fact always
metaphorical and connotational, we may begin to account for meaning as
connotation. What is of interest here is that Barthes explicitly identifies
connotation with culture (Barthes 1977: 46). As a result, he says that the
reading of any image can, and will, vary between individuals, and that this
variation is not random or ‘anarchic’. Rather, these different interpretations
and readings are the products of the different knowledges and kinds of
knowledges that these different individuals will have as a consequence
of their different cultural locations and identities (Barthes 1977: 46). As well
as providing a series of different values and beliefs, these different cultural
locations and identities provide a series of different ‘practices and
techniques’ and a series of ‘attitudes’ (Barthes 1977: 47). Each of these
provides more ideas and beliefs in terms of which the image or object may
be read and made meaningful.
In the essay, Barthes carefully and methodically explains the workings
of the connotative signs that he identifies in the Panzani advert. He says
that there are four connotative signs and he identifies the signifiers and
signifieds of each. He also identifies the ‘generally cultural knowledge’ that
each requires in order to be meaningful to, or in order to be understood
by, anyone. He makes it absolutely clear, then, that these are not messages
that are being sent, they are meanings that are being constructed in the
interaction between culture and image. The different kinds of knowledge,
the beliefs and values, of the culturally located individuals who see the image
in the adverts are used to construct the different meanings of the image
and the advert. If one does not have the knowledge, or does not share the
values, then one will not understand the meaning: this will be most obvious
in the case of the fourth of the connotations.
The first signified that Barthes identifies is that of ‘a return from market’
(Barthes 1977: 34). Its signifier is the half-open bag and the contents spilling
out over the table. Together they make the connotational sign. In order to
construct this connotational meaning and for communication to take place,
one needs to know certain things and one needs to have certain beliefs and
values. Barthes says that we need to be familiar with the idea of ‘shopping
around for oneself’ (Barthes 1977: 34). The values of a certain self-
sufficiency, of a particular way of ensuring that one does not go hungry,
are required in order to construct this meaning. If one lives in a culture
that forages in the undergrowth for berries, or if one has servants to do the
shopping and the cooking, one is likely to construct quite a different meaning
here. The second signified is Barthes’ famous idea of ‘Italianicity’. Its signifier
is the white, green and red of the mushrooms, pepper and tomato in the
bag. In order to construct this meaning one needs to be familiar with ‘certain
tourist stereotypes’ (Barthes 1977: 34). Unless one lives in a culture in which
tourism is popular or at least possible, unless one understands the idea of
Italy and its flag, one will construct a different meaning from the colours.
The third connotation is that of ‘a total culinary service’ and its signifier
is the ‘collection of different objects’. Barthes does not explain the values
or cultural knowledge that is necessary here but hints that it is a familiarity
with brands and brand names. It is, he says, as though Panzani furnish
everything one needs for a ‘carefully balanced dish’ (Barthes 1977: 34–5).
And the fourth signified is that of the nature morte or ‘still life’, signified by
the ‘composition’ of the image. Clearly, unless one has some knowledge
Figure 6.2 Panzani advertisement. (Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives.)
of certain traditions of European painting, one will be unable to construct

this connotation. The knowledge of art history, which is necessary to
construct and understand the nature morte connotation, is the knowledge
most likely to be absent and this meaning is, therefore, the one that is least
likely to be constructed. This is borne out anecdotally by any number of
undergraduate classes I have taught, where this connotation has never been
constructed. As Barthes says, the connotations he has identified could be
added to and his account does not exhaust the image. One obvious way
in which cultural identity constructs different meanings that Barthes does
not mention is through gender. The meaning of the shopping bag, slung
onto the kitchen table, constructed by a single man will be entirely different
from that constructed by a married mother, for example.
Case study 1
The nature of connotational meaning, the role of cultural beliefs, values
and ideas in the construction of meanings and the way that different values
construct different meanings should all be clear. Now we need to explain
how these ideas apply to the things we wear. The matter of ex-Prime Minister
Tony Blair’s tie in the photograph will be used to illustrate how these ideas
explain the construction of meaning in fashion and clothing.
The tie features green frogs on a red background and was, apparently,
one of Blair’s favourites.
First, we should note the role that cultural knowledge plays in seeing
and recognizing the garments in the photograph. Even to see and recognize
the garments being worn as suits, shirts and ties requires some cultural
knowledge that is not available to all cultures. Another angle on this would
be to point out that, even what appear to be the most basic elements of
understanding the meaning of the clothes here, are already connotational:
there is no denotational, non-coded or literal understanding possible. As
Figure 6.3 Tony Blair and George Bush at June 2004 meeting of Euro-Atlantic
Partnership Council. (Credit: NATO Photos: www.nato.int/multi/photos/2004/
m040629f.htm)
soon as they are recognized as such, the suits, shirts and ties are culturally
loaded: their meaning is connotational.
Second, we can consider the colour of the ties here. Both ties are
red. The colour is a connotative signifier. But the cultural differences
between the two men mean that the signifieds of these signifiers will be
different and the meaning of the red will be different for each. Blair’s liberal
background and socialist values will produce a meaning that is different
from Bush’s conservative background and decidedly non-socialist values.
Neither man is strictly sending a message with the red. If they were, the
message of socialist solidarity would be the same and that is surely
unthinkable. Rather, the values that each holds are interacting with the colour
to generate different meanings. The same colour connotes different
meanings because of the different cultural and political values that each
man holds.
If the material that the ties are made of is considered, more layers of
connotation and cultural difference are found. It is almost certain that both
men’s ties are made of pure silk. Both men are engaged at this time with
various Muslim groups and both claim to represent various Christian values.
At the time of this photograph, 2004, it is likely that neither man would set
out deliberately to offend either Christians or Muslims by wearing anything
inappropriate. However, according to some Muslim scholars, Surah A’raf
Ayah 26 of the Qur’an indicates that it is haram, or forbidden, for men to
wear garments made of pure silk (www.al-islam.org). Because neither Bush
nor Blair has this knowledge, because they do not hold these cultural values
and beliefs, neither understands the potentially offensive meaning that the
ties will have for some Muslims. Again, the same material connotes different
things, according to the different values possessed by members of different
cultures. According to the sender/receiver model of communication, we
would have to conclude that the men were deliberately sending offensive
messages to their Muslim audience because that was ‘the’ meaning of the
silk. But now we can see that meaning is the result of the interaction between
values and item, and if one does not hold the values or possess the
knowledge then no such meaning, or a different meaning, is constructed.
The frogs on Blair’s tie are potentially unsettling, if not actually
offensive, to some Christians. The frog has long connoted uncleanliness in
Christian and Old Testament belief systems. Chapter 16, verse 13 of The
Revelation of St. John The Divine, for example, refers to frogs as ‘unclean
spirits’. In chapter 8 of the book of Exodus, the second of the plagues
inflicted by Yahweh on the Pharoah of Egypt is the plague of frogs. Blair’s
Christian beliefs are now well known, even if he downplayed them during
his time in office, but either way it is simply not plausible to suggest that
he would have wanted to unsettle or offend fellow believers at this time.
Consequently, one is obliged to conclude that he does not know this element
of Old Testament theology and, therefore, does not understand this
meaning. However, according to the sender/receiver account of communi-
cation, if we thought that Blair did know this reference, then we would have
to conclude that he was deliberately sending an offensive or unsettling
message.
Case study 2
Hip-hop, street or urban clothing may be used to show not only the ways
in which different cultural values construct different meanings of clothes,
but also the ways in which those clothes and those meanings may be used
by subordinate or ‘subaltern’ cultural groups to resist, oppose and challenge
dominant cultural groups. The different meanings that are constructed
will be explored and explained here, and the ways in which they are used
politically to resist and challenge dominant cultures will be dealt with in
the next chapter.
Let us start on a very broad scale, with some very broad-brush
indications of the different meanings of what members of youth subcultures
wear. Those members consider what they wear to be ‘cool’, ‘hot’, ‘trendy’
or any of the other slang terms used by youth cultures over the years to
indicate what is most recent and most ‘in fashion’ at the time. Authority
figures, including parents, teachers, policemen and so on, have described
the meaning of what these youths wear as ‘delinquent’, ‘disrespectful’ and
sometimes ‘criminal’. The worst or most threatening meaning that such
groups give to the clothing is that it is somehow socially pathological; that
it is indicative or a symptom of a social malaise. Social scientists often give
the clothing a slightly different meaning, saying that it is ‘deviant’ from
social norms or resistant to a dominant and constructing social or cultural
order. The different values and perspectives adopted by these different
groups generate the different meanings.
On a smaller scale or a more tightly focused level, we may ask about
the meanings of individual items of hip-hop wear and about the meanings
of ensembles of such clothing. Some theorists have quoted the rapper
Treach who explains the use of gold chains or dookie/Dukie ropes as a
means of showing solidarity with black prisoners and as a reference to slavery
(quoted by Wilbekin, in Light 1999: 280). Membership of the group is
established and the meaning of the ropes is negotiated through the relation
between the knowledge and the values and the object itself. If you possess
the values and have the knowledge, then you will understand the mean-
ing of the gold chains in this particular way and the necessary, if not
the sufficient, conditions for membership of the group are satisfied. The
meaning of the drooping or sagging pants/trousers worn by certain black
cultures is also much debated. Some suggest that it is another way of
showing respect and sympathy for fellow black people in prison whose belts
have been removed in an attempt to prevent suicide by hanging; less
sympathetic commentators suggest that the practice is an unwitting aping
of gay male prostitute style. Baxter and Marina (2008) argue convincingly
that among the black youth cultures of New Orleans, it is the sympathy
with fellow black people in prison that motivates the practice. The meaning
of the low-slung or saggy trousers/pants is generated by the relation to the
knowledge and values of black solidarity in an act of resistance directed at
the dominant white culture.
Baxter and Marina report and explain the meanings of other forms of
sartorial display as resistance or challenge to the various authority figures
in these communities – parents, teachers and the police, for example. It
becomes clear that what is being resisted or challenged by the use of the
particular clothing and hairstyles is ‘conformity’ with the ‘right’ way and the
‘proper’ way. The right and proper way is defined by the various forms of
‘authority’ the young people encounter, in parental, school and local
government dress codes, for example. As John, one of their correspondents
points out, ‘you could wear baggy pants and pull em up and wear em right
. . . I was taught to wear my pants on my waist’; he is aware of the school
dress code but says ‘nobody ain’t gonna tell me nothin’ (Baxter and Marina
2008: 106–7). We can clearly see that the different values and beliefs, as
to what constitutes the right and proper way to wear one’s pants/trousers,
for example, generate the different meanings of the style. The values held
by the parents and school principals regarding saggy pants/trousers
generate the meaning of worrying delinquency. The young people’s values
generate the meaning of independent rebelliousness.
Yet another way in which different values and beliefs may be seen to
generate different meanings of hip-hop and street style clothing may be
seen in the attempts of the authorities at the National Basketball Association
(NBA) to institute a dress code for its players. In 2005, American basketball
had a poor image. In recent years, there had been a brawl at a Pistons–Pacers
game in The Palace in Auburn Hills, Kobe Bryant had been charged with
rape, Allen Iverson had been arrested on drugs and firearms charges
and there was, according to David J. Leonard, a general perception that
American basketball was being ‘overrun’ by criminals and ‘gangstas’
(Leonard 2012). One of the final straws came during the 2004 Olympics,
according to Leonard, when the USA team attended a dinner in a high-class
restaurant wearing ‘oversized jeans . . . large platinum chains and . . .
diamond earrings’ (Leonard 2012). In response to this perceived crisis, David
Stern, the Commissioner of the NBA, attempted to impose a dress code
for all NBA players in 2005. The code expressly forbids sleeveless shirts,
sports apparel, chains, pendants or medallions worn over the player’s
clothes, and sunglasses while indoors (NBA 2012).
To the NBA, hip-hop styles connoted unprofessionalism and were
associated with criminality. According to the NBA’s values and interests,
which would be those in support of a profitable, TV-friendly and wholesome
family sport, the sports clothing (snapback hats, Starter jackets and so on),
dookie chains and diamonds all represented (meant) a threat to those values
and interests. The code was perceived by many as racist, directed against
the kinds of garments and styles that black hip-hop fans wore and was seen
by them as explicitly anti-black and anti-hip-hop. To the players, the style
represented ‘authenticity’ and a chance to express their personalities. Never
far from the action, Allen Iverson said the code ‘makes it kind of fake’ and
resented the fact that the prescriptions prevented people from expressing
‘their own style’. Although he does not mention racism explicitly, he does
say of the NBA and the prohibitions that ‘they’re targeting guys like me
. . . guys who dress hip-hop’ (bbc.co.uk 2012). The values of the players are
clearly different from those of the NBA authorities and one can clearly see
how the meanings of the garments and the styles are constructed quite
differently according to the membership of one or other of the cultural
groups involved.
Conclusion
This chapter has outlined the sender/receiver model of communication

and shown how it is inadequate to account for the production and under-
standing of meaning in and through what people wear. A slightly alternative
conception of meaning construction, involving the interaction between
cultural values and the items of clothing, has been suggested. It is claimed
that this conception better explains the presence, as well as the absence
of, and the differences between, the many and varying interpretations of
fashion and clothing.
This account of meaning and communication in clothing and fashion
enables us to explain the construction and communication of different
meanings through what we wear without having to try to explain away either
messages not arriving or the arrival of potentially embarrassing messages.
It also enables us to explain the creation or construction of new and novel
meanings. Because every member will have a different understanding of
their culture’s own values and because every member will have a more or
less complete understanding of their own culture, the possible constructions
of meanings are infinite. There is and can be no limit on the number of
novel constructions and understandings, because there will be an infinite
number of combinations of levels of knowledge, different knowledges and
individuals with which to construct meanings.
The following chapter will build upon this conception of meaning to
show in more detail how the politics of fashion and clothing operate in
terms of resistance.
Further reading
Campbell, C. (1997) ‘When the Meaning is Not a Message: A Critique of
the Consumption as Communication Thesis’, in Nava, M., Blake, A.,
MacRury, I. and Richards, B. (eds) Buy This Book, London, Routledge.
Damhorst, M. L., Miller, K. A. and Michelman, S. O. (eds) (1999) The
Meanings of Dress, New York, Fairchild.
Johnson, L. (2010) ‘Pod Peeps: Why the iPod and Other Gadgets Are
Fashion Staples in the “Hood”’, in Scapp, R. and Seitz, B. (eds) Fashion
Statements, New York, Palgrave.
McCracken, G. (1988) Culture and Consumption, Bloomington and
Indianapolis, Indiana University Press; see chapter 4.
chapter 7
Fashion, identity
and difference
Introduction
In an interview for Vogue with Ryan Smith, the actor Jessica Alba says ‘fashion
represents one’s identity’ (video available at www.youtube.com/watch?
v=vwGDBFjxgUo&feature=related_; last accessed July 2012).
Elaborating a little, she says that fashion ‘is your personality, on the
outside’ and that it represents ‘who you are’. The interview is interesting
for many reasons, but what is most interesting for us here in this chapter
is that Alba expresses a series of very common assumptions concerning
the relation between fashion and identity.
First, she says that the relation between fashion and identity is one of
representation: fashion represents identity. Representation is correctly
placed at the centre, at the heart of fashion and what we wear. As central
and essential to an account of fashion as representation is, it may yet require
some explanation. Simply, representation is one thing standing for another
thing and we are familiar with it in many areas of our lives. In America
and the UK, for example, elected Members of Congress and Members of
Parliament are not us but they stand for us and represent us in The House
of Representatives and The House of Commons, respectively. In our case,
in this chapter, fashion is said to represent, or stand for, one’s identity.
What we wear represents or stands for us, or stands for something about
us. It is as though one’s identity exists somewhere, separate and apart from
what one wears, and that what one wears stands for that identity. As we
shall see, this is indeed part of what clothing and fashion do, and the
fashion, identity and difference 91

Figure 7.1 Still from YouTube video interview with Jessica Alba, Vogue, 2012.
appearance of representation and identity so early in the account accurately

indicate that this is a political phenomenon: the politics of fashion are here.
Second, Alba says that fashion is one’s personality on the outside: it is
who you are inside, but on the outside. This indicates that one’s identity
is one’s personality and that it is thought of as something interior, as
something private and known only to oneself. Alba’s statement also assumes
that what one wears, the fashion, externalizes that identity, that personality,
so that it appears on the outside. So who you are, your personality or
identity on the inside, is represented by what you wear on the outside. The
representation of identity is closely linked to the idea of image. We happily
speak of having an image to uphold or maintain. And we talk about our
public image without hesitation. The sense of image and how fashion relates
to the image are dealt with in more detail in Chapter 12 of this volume.
However, there are various questions that need to be dealt with in this
chapter. We need to think about whether our identities are exhausted by our
personalities or whether perhaps there are elements of our identities that
are not covered by personality. What of our class, gender, ethnic/race or age-
related identities? How does fashion and what we wear represent our
ages, our genders, our ethnic and our class positions?
92 fashion, identity and difference

The interview is interesting, thirdly, for what is not said within it, or for
what it does not talk about. There is, for example, no mention of difference
in the entire interview. This is also consistent with most people’s most
common assumptions about what fashion is and how it relates to identity.
The assumption here is that there is identity, that one has an identity and
that it is simply represented or externalized in what one wears. It is as though
one’s identity were self-sufficient, existing without any relation to anything
else except the clothes and fashions that represent it ‘on the outside’. On
this account, only then, after the garments have established and represented
one’s identity, can there be any reference to other, different identities.
In the previous chapter, the meaning of what we wear was said to be
a product of the interaction between the values and beliefs that we hold as
a member of various different cultural groups and the item in question. As
we saw, different cultural values and beliefs could generate quite different
meanings for the same garments. The different meanings of the garments
were constructed in this interaction and used to generate membership of
the different cultural groups: knowing the meaning and wearing the clothing
were necessary conditions of being a member of a particular group. If you
wore skull-caps and thought they were ‘gangsta’, you were constructing
yourself as a member of a different cultural group from someone who
did not wear them and believed the caps represented criminality and
delinquency. Some examples of the different meanings that are constructed
were explored and explained in the previous chapter, and the ways in which
they are used politically to support some groups, and resist and challenge
others were hinted at. If this is how membership of the groups is generated,
how cultural identity is formed, then this chapter must look in more detail
at that process and then begin to explain the relations between those cultural
groups as they support, resist and challenge each other. The relation between
groups is called politics and the entire chapter will be concerned with the
politics of what we wear.
This chapter will investigate these three sets of assumptions concerning
what identity is and how fashion and what we wear relates to identity. It
will argue that there are many aspects of identity and they have to do with
more than one’s ‘personality’ – we are said to have sexual, ethnic, racial,
gender, national, class and other cultural identities, for example. This chapter
must account for how those identities (which are to do with our political,
economic and social existences and which are not, therefore, purely
personal or simply individual) are constructed and represented in what we
wear. It must also account for whether identity is most usefully thought of
in terms of insides and outsides: whether it is the case that an interior
identity or personality is simply externalized by fashion and what we wear.
And this chapter must consider the role of the various sexual, ethnic, racial,
gender, national, class and cultural differences in the construction and

communication of identity. Does one have an identity that may then be
seen to be different from other identities or is one’s identity the product of
the relations to those other, different identities?
Inside and outside

Let us take the first of the points raised by Jessica Alba’s interview that
fashion and what we wear is our personality ‘on the outside’. This statement,
which sounds like the purest common sense, makes a number of unjus-
tifiable assumptions. It is also inconsistent with the statement, which she
also makes and which also sounds like common sense, that fashion
and what we wear represent our identities. These assumptions and
inconsistencies need to be explained. First, we need to understand that if
something represents something else, then the thing doing the representing
cannot be the thing, or the kind of thing, that is represented. The image of
Jessica Alba in the video is a representation of her: it is not her. So, the
things we wear that represent our identities are not our identities; what we
wear stands for or represents our identities. The question is now whether
it is possible to have any idea or conception of our identities that do
not involve representation. Can we have a non-represented conception of
our identity? If we cannot have any such non-represented conception
of identity, then it makes no sense to speak of inside or outside because
any and all conceptions of our identity will necessarily involve representation
– that is, they will all require something that is not our identity (something
that is other than and external to it) being used to represent it. As we have
to use some form of representation (thought, spoken and written language,
for example) in order to even think to ourselves, it is argued in this book
that we cannot have such non-representational conceptions.
Second, if this is the case, then all representation is outside and there
is no inside. Everything we think and say is representational and employs
the ‘externalization’ of what we think in some system of representation.
These systems of representation are not us and they exist apart from us,
outside us and before us. We have, and can have no idea of, our ‘personality’
that is not represented, that does not involve ‘outside’ or external
representation of that ‘personality’. Personality never exists inside and can
only be external and externalized; this is where the inconsistency in Alba’s
statements comes from. That ‘external’ representation must include thought
and language, as well as clothing and other fashions. Fashion, therefore,
represents our identities but those identities do not exist in any ‘inside’
because external representation is necessary in order that we can even
describe them to ourselves. They exist only as representation, as ‘externaliza-
tion’. These are quite difficult philosophical issues and you are entirely free

to ignore them, but they describe the conditions for the possibility of fashion,
communication and identity: a position on them is presupposed by
everything that is said about fashion, communication and identity.
Meaning and identity

It was argued in the previous chapter that the meaning of garments differed
according to the different beliefs and values in relation to which they
were interpreted. The NBA commissioners held certain commercial and
conservative beliefs and values, and the sportswear and platinum chains
worn by the players connoted criminality and other family-unfriendly values
to them. To the players, who possessed different economic and cultural
values, the same garments connoted loyalty and a commemoration/
condemnation of slavery. It should be clear now that understanding the
same meaning as other people is one of the conditions for membership of
the same cultural group as those other people. This is little more than a
description of what happens when those NBA players agree on the meaning
of their chains. Wearing the garment and sharing the understanding of what
is worn and why it is worn makes people into members of the group, it
gives them the identity of, in this case, young black African-Americans.
These issues can also be seen to play out in the example that intro-
duced the previous chapter, Ann Romney’s $1,000 Reed-Krakoff bird print
blouse. It is not just that the meaning of the blouse differs between the
different social and cultural groups who see it; it is also that people are
made into members of those different groups through their different shared
interpretations of the blouse. The possession and relation of the values to
the blouse generate different meanings and it is this process that generates
membership of the different groups. Knowing that the thing is by Reed-
Krakoff will construct one as a member of a different group from someone
who does not know this, because the connotations will be different:
one set of connotations will be of high-end, luxury, exclusive ‘designer’
wear and another set of connotations will be of garish, vulgar and tacky
seabird-patterns. Identity, therefore, is as much a product of knowing and
understanding the meanings as the meanings are the products of the values
held by members of the different cultural groups: each presupposes and
conditions the other in a process of negotiation and change.
Identity may be performance but only on condition that knowing or
understanding the meaning of the performance, the meanings of the things
one wears and does, is part of the performance. There is still no room or
role for ‘essence’ on this account, as values may be acquired and lost and
meanings may be learned and forgotten (that is what culture, and aging,
is, after all). However, identity as performance is not merely a question of

cosmetics or dressing up. There is a phrase often heard in guitar shops,
which also applies here to those who look the part and have the equipment
but do not know what they are doing with it or what it means. That phrase
is ‘all the gear, no idea’ and both gear and idea are as necessary for
membership of cultural groups as they are for membership of rock groups.
Identity and difference

This section introduces the political nature of fashion. Politics is the relation
of one group or individual to another group or individual. Groups and
individuals are said to have identities – those identities are described as
Goth, feminist, Palestinian or the elderly, for example. These groups relate
to other groups. Goth culture relates to Emo, New Romantic and other
youth cultures; feminists relate to men, women and other gender and
sexuality based groups; Palestinians relate to Israeli and other Arab groups
and so on. The name for those relations is politics. Each of these groups
will use what they wear to negotiate their relations with those other groups.
They will use what they wear to assert their difference from those other
groups; they will use what they wear to argue against or challenge those
other groups; they will use what they wear to show support for other groups.
Some Palestinian groups wear the kaffiyeh or shemagh to differentiate
themselves from Israeli settlers and in solidarity with their Arab heritage:
for a while in the 1980s there was a fashion in the UK for politicized left-
wingers to wear such a garment to show their identification with, and
support for, the Palestinian nationalist cause. The groups will, therefore,
use what they wear to establish a variety of political positions. These
positions include indicating their identity, their identity with other groups,
as well as their difference from, or their opposition to, other groups. There
is thus a politics of clothing and fashion, and this politics depends on
notions of identity and difference. This section, and this chapter, must
explain the politics of fashion, using these ideas of identity and difference.
This section must first discuss whether one first has an identity, which
is then used to differentiate oneself from other different identities or whether
the process of differentiation is what produces one’s identity. It is the
question of whether one is a Goth and then establishes a series of differential
relations to the other youth cultures, or whether one only has an identity
as a Goth because one is visibly different from the other cultures. It is
important because it defines the politics of fashion. Politics was defined
above as the relation of one group or individual to another group or
individual, and how this relation is explained is of interest to us when we
want to investigate how different groups use fashion to negotiate their
relations with other groups.

This question is also related to the question of whether identity is
essence or performance because the idea that identity is essence pre-
disposes one to believe that there can be an essence that does not owe its
existence to a relation to anything else. The relation to anything else, of
course, introduces and privileges the idea of difference because it says that
identity is a product of difference. This section will argue that identity is
ultimately a product of difference. It will argue this because structures or
networks of differences always pre-exist any individual and any individual’s
action or performance. In the 18th Brumaire of 1852, Marx said that ‘men
make their own history . . . but under circumstances directly encountered,
given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx 1968: 96) and he elaborated
these pre-existing conditions in a letter to Bloch, saying that they were
cultural and political, as well as economic (Marx 1968: 682). History and
culture are, therefore, two examples of such pre-existing structures: one
will always be born into a history and a series of traditions, and those
histories and traditions will always be that in relation to which what one
does is meaningful. Any action or performance will, therefore, always take
place in the context of these pre-existing structures. This is not to say that
an individual’s actions do not or cannot change the structure in a variety
of ways, but the structure must pre-exist the individual in order to be changed
by that individual. Strictly, the structure is both brought into existence and
changed by the individual’s actions, but this is a debate too far for this
chapter (see Giddens 1979, chapter 2, for more on this).
So, for example, Goth culture pre-exists my desire to be a Goth and my
entry into Goth culture. The clothes, the make-up and the music all exist
before me and before I make the decision that this is the group for me.
The differences between Goth, Emo, hip-hop and all the other youth cultural
groups also already exist and I must make use of those already existing
differences of attire and musical preference, for example, in order to become
a Goth or assume Goth identity. Consequently, at least two structures – a
history and a culture – of differences pre-exist and condition my identity as
a Goth. Structures of differences (these may be aesthetic and concern dress,
music or cosmetic styles, for example) are already given and my identity is
conditioned by those differences and structures. In this sense, identity is a
product of difference.
Difference and opposition

The various ways in which the things we wear may be used politically, to
oppose, challenge and resist other groups, may now be explained in terms
of meaning and values. Where belonging to a culture, being a member of
a culture, was said to be about the sharing of values, beliefs and knowledges,

differing from and resisting a culture may now be seen as not sharing
values and communicating difference and values through what one wears.
Belonging to hip-hop culture was seen to be partly a matter of sharing the
values in relation to which what one wears is made meaningful. Belonging
to hip-hop culture was thus partly about understanding and sharing the
meaning of chains, for example, as referencing slavery and incarceration.
Opposing a dominant or offensive culture may now be explained in terms
of not sharing the values in terms of which fashion and clothing are mean-
ingful. It may, therefore, be explained in terms of not sharing the meanings
of clothing and displaying clothing that communicates a set of values
different from those of the dominant or offensive group. For example, it is
not impossible that some of the more rebellious NBA players did wear the
chains and the sportswear because it communicated values that were
opposed to the white-dominated family-friendly corporations that they
perceived as running their sport. The conception of consumption as not
sharing the values of the different groups that surround one is dealt with
in more detail in Chapter 9: Mary Douglas’s (1996) account of fashion as
a form of cultural hostility takes the themes of this chapter and explains
them explicitly in terms of consumption.
Case study 1: Comme il Faut

In 2003, Sybil Goldfainer, one of the founders of the Israeli fashion business
Comme il Faut, embarked on a project called ‘Shalom Banot’, which trans-
lates as either ‘Peace Girls’ or, as Comme il Faut have it on their website,
‘Hello Girls’ (supported by the Peres Centre for Peace). Liz Scarff describes
how Goldfainer travelled illegally from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to meet a
Palestinian peace campaigner called Mary (Scarff 2005: 65). Together they
planned a ‘border crossing shirt’, which would be designed by Comme il Faut
designers Maya Arazi and Limor Dianna and decorated by a group of
traditional Palestinian embroiders led by Hanna Salem al-Ama. Dianna said
that the project showed that it is possible for Israelis and Palestinians to work
together in harmony. One of the embroiderers, Erma Babish, said that the
project provides Palestinian women with money and draws on traditions that
are still taught in Palestinian schools. She also said that the joint desire was
for peace between the two countries and for the ‘security wall’ that has been
built along the border between them by the Israeli Government to be brought
down. It is significant that what have been thought to be and are acknow-
ledged as ‘traditionally’ feminine crafts (embroidery), employed by marginalized
people (Palestinian women), are now central to the construction of a fem-
inist and political campaign against what Comme il Faut see as the illegal
occupation of someone else’s country. The use or re-invention of practices,

which have traditionally been used to justify women’s subordinate status,
as revolutionary practices is also found in the ‘Yarn Bombing’ movement,
which aims to humanize sterile public spaces (see Moore and Prain 2009).
Another project, initiated by Comme il Faut and which followed on from
the ‘Shalom Banot’ project, was entitled ‘Women Crossing Borders’. This
was a photographic shoot for the 2004 catalogue and was developed from
an idea from students of the Visual Communications Department of Bezalel
Academy of Arts. The shoot involved photographing the luxurious high-
fashion garments of Comme il Faut against the 8m-high grey concrete
‘security wall’. The intention was to illustrate the contrast between the
lifeless, hard reality of the wall and the colourful aspirations of the fashion
items.
Through these two projects, Comme il Faut use fashion to oppose a
group whom they consider dominant and offensive. That group is the
Government of Israel and its supporters. Comme il Faut can be seen to
argue against the value of separation, or apartheid as some opponents of
the wall call it, by stressing the cooperation that goes into the production
of the garments. Where the dominant group, represented by the Government
in the Knesset, insists that separation is necessary for the security of the
Israeli state, the women of Comme il Faut believe that the values of
cooperation and collaboration can secure peace and a just society. These
are different values from those of the dominant group in the Government
who believe that only the rigorous and forceful separation of Israeli citizens
from Palestinian ‘terrorists’ and suicide bombers will ensure security.
Comme il Faut’s values are opposed to those of the Israeli Government
that pursued this policy. The ‘border crossing shirts’ that the women
produced, which were Western men’s shirts, represent these values and
construct Comme il Faut’s identity as the opposing or resistant group. The
shirts represent the values because they are the products of the cooperation
between the Israeli women and the Palestinian women. To the women and
their supporters, the shirts mean feminist cooperation and resistance to a
dominant order. To others, who do not share Comme il Faut’s values, they
mean something else; an ‘official’ is quoted in Maariv newspaper as saying
that the project is ‘embarrassing’, for example (Vaughan 2004). The
official’s values clearly generate a different meaning and a different political
position from that of the Comme il Faut women.
The photographs and fashions of the ‘Women Crossing Frontiers’
project also represent the values of the women of Comme il Faut. These
values are described on the webpages covering the ethics and code of
practice to be followed by Comme il Faut employees. They say they believe
that they can influence the ‘disputes’ in the region and that they encourage
women to be ‘active in promoting peace’. The meanings of the garments
and photographs are those surrounding a creative, glorious and colourful

Figure 7.2 From Comme il Faut catalogue 2004. (Photographer credits: Women
Crossing Borders: Miri Davidovich; Shalom Banot: Yael Ilan; © Comme il Faut.)
ideal, and they are opposed to the meaning of the wall, the grey, destructive
negativity and the reality of the West Bank. Again, these meanings are the
products of the values held by the members of the groups and it is the
interaction that ensures or prevents membership. As Goldfainer said, ‘I think
the way to solve conflict is not to build walls’ (quoted in Vaughan 2004).
If you believe in the possibility and healing power of the cooperative
work, then the shirts and the shoot will mean one thing: if you believe in
rigid separation and apartheid, then the garments and the set will mean
something else. That the Israeli Government gave it a different meaning,
as a result of their different values, is reported by Goldfainer herself when
she points out that members of the Knesset appeared on radio and television
asking people to ‘boycott’ the catalogue (Scarff 2005: 68). Again, we can
see that the different values generate a different meaning, a different identity
and a different political position; in this case a position that is opposed to
that of the Comme il Faut women.
Case study 2: chav style

The second example is every bit as sensitive and complicated as the first
and it concerns the early twenty-first century UK phenomenon known as
the ‘chav’ or ‘charver’. Just how sensitive may be judged by the fact that,

in merely referring to the twenty-first century, the UK and by saying ‘chav’
or ‘charver’, I have invited damnation from those who argue that the ‘lumpen
proletariat’ or white trash are everywhere that capitalism is, that the
phenomenon may be found in the nineteenth century and that ‘chavs’ are
socially, economically and culturally different from ‘charvers’. However, the
ways in which fashion and clothing are used to mediate the relations between
values and meanings to generate identity, and the ways in which that identity
is opposed to other identities politically, are all illustrated by chavs and the
people who comment on them.
Chavs are routinely portrayed in the UK media and in academic papers
as being in neither education nor employment, whereas Goths and skaters
are commonly reckoned to be in one or the other (Hollingworth and Williams
2009: 470). The failure to engage with education and employment lead to
this group being allied with other groups including the NEETS (Not in
Education, Employment or Training) and Neds, who are a Scottish variant.
Younger chavs are perceived by those living and working alongside them
in school as having no respect for the value of education, being disruptive
and unruly in class, and appearing or professing to be not bothered by their
own lack of engagement with the education system (Hollingworth and
Williams 2009: 475). Older chavs are either unemployed or employed in
‘precarious’ economies and often operate outside or on the margins of the
law. Other values are said to include a lack of respect and self-respect and
a fondness for ‘poor taste’ consumer items (Hollingworth and Williams
2009: 475). Accompanying these characteristics is the chav’s dependence
on benefits and social security. They are also predominantly described as
living on social housing estates; indeed one explanation of the name is that
it stands acronymically for Council House And Violent.
A popular media or press image of the chav is that of a white youth,
usually male (although there are female versions, known as ‘chavettes’),
wearing trainers/sneakers, tracksuit bottoms, hooded top and a baseball
cap. Some accounts (Hollingworth and Williams 2009: 473) suggest that
cheap, bright jewellery in the form of large rings or necklaces are also part
of the visual style. Many accounts stress the use of branded items – Burberry
caps, worn with Kappa, Lacoste, Adidas or other sporting brands are not
uncommon. This account is finessed in some forms by suggesting that the
branded items are in fact cheap fakes. These accounts use consumption
to describe the way that the identity of the group is constructed: chavs are
what they consume. And this is supported, anecdotally, at least, by what
‘Martin (chav)’ says: ‘if someone started wearing weird shit like big baggies
or leather or something, they’d get slagged, probably get kicked out’ (quoted
in McCulloch, Stewart and Lovegreen 2006: 548).
From the predominantly middle-class perspectives that get represented
in the press, the clothing and fashions worn by chavs are simply more

evidence of their fecklessness, otherness and worthlessness. The clothing
is one way in which the middle classes can express their distaste and
disapproval of what they perceive as an undesirable and potentially
dangerous underclass. To the middle classes, the clothes indicate laziness
and a lack of self-respect. Broadsheet journalists, such as Jemima Lewis
and James Delingpole, have used their columns in The Sunday Telegraph
and The Times, respectively, to ridicule and mock chav values and culture
(Tyler 2008: 22–3).
However, according to the account of meaning being followed here, it
must be argued that different groups, with different values, will construct
the meaning of the clothing differently. Writers such as Julie Burchill have
proclaimed themselves to be chavs and to be proud of their chav identity
and heritage (Burchill 2005). Following up these references, Imogen Tyler
argues that ‘some of those interpellated as filthy chavs have now reclaimed
the term as an affirmative sub-cultural identity’ (Tyler 2008: 31). It is not
unlikely that, having been taken in by, or having bought into, the consumerist
dream of a life of leisure and luxury-branded clothing, and having had that
dream broken by unemployment, the clothing is now a way of shoving
that broken dream in the faces of the dominant middle classes. To some
members of this chav culture, the clothing now means ‘you sold us this
consumerist fantasy and you made us unemployed and unable to take part
in it; therefore we will wear this stuff to remind you of that fact and of the
threat that you see us as’. The wearing of expensive ‘designer’ brands, or
cheap facsimiles of those brands, may be understood as an ironic acting
out of the originally attractive and sympathetic lifestyle that was advertised
in the 1980s and 1990s. The aspirations of this group having been dashed
by a series of economic downturns, chavs have only the (faked, knock-off)
signifiers of that lifestyle to fall back on.
It is difficult to dismiss this construction of meaning after the summer
2011 riots in some of England’s major cities, in which young people wearing
all the recognized and stereotypical chav gear were seemingly happy and
unconcerned to be photographed looting ‘Foot Locker’ and other sportswear
shops. One of the rioters interviewed by researchers from the London School
of Economics, in collaboration with The Guardian newspaper said ‘these
fucking shops, like I’ve given them a hundred CVs . . . not one job . . . .
That’s why I left my house’. He continues, saying ‘I feel like I haven’t been
given the same opportunities and chances as other people have’. There is
clearly a perception that the shops he has been out looting are part of a
system that has not supported his aspirations to get a job and buy the
things he has been out looting (Prasad 2011).
Owen Jones, the author of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
(2012a) noted that the looters were quickly identified as chavs in the press
and on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. He also argued that

some of these looters will have done it as showing off, some will have done
it because they had seen MPs getting away with fiddling their expenses
and still others will have done it because they were angry and disillusioned
(Jones 2012b). Jones’s interpretation of their actions in terms of a political
disillusionment suggests that their actions were indeed meaningful and not
the mindless vandalism they were dismissed as at the time. This may
not be quite a ‘reclaiming’ of chavness, in the way that gay culture has
reclaimed some of the terms that were used in a derogatory sense against
gay people or in the ways that hip-hop cultures have reclaimed the chains
and sagging pants of slavery and incarceration, but the interpretation is
possible and plausible.
Case study 3: hijab

The sensitive and complicated theme is continued in our third example,
hijab. Hijab is an Arabic word that derives etymologically from an older word
hajaba. It means ‘to veil, cover, screen, shelter . . . hide . . . to make . . .
invisible . . . or form a separation between’ (Shirazi 2000: 115). In Islam,
hijab concerns the modesty of men and women and it applies to both
behaviour and dress. As the practice and concept of concealment, sheltering
and separating, hijab in dress may take many forms or styles, according to
the Islamic culture in which it takes place and the people who use it. This
section will consider some of the forms that hijab takes in dress and explain
some of the interpretations and political uses that Islamic and non-Islamic
women have made of it.
Faegheh Shirazi describes how the Islamic Republic of Iran imposed
compulsory hijab on women following the fall of the Shah in 1979. There
were political and religious aspects of this veiling. The Constitution of the
Republic indicated that the reason for imposing hijab was to prevent women
from being seen as objects: ‘a woman . . . will no longer be regarded as a
“thing” or a tool, serving consumerism and exploitation’ (Shirazi 2000: 117).
Women are to be protected or sheltered from the exploitation of an economic
system by hijab. Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution,
had a slightly different take on the matter, mixing the religious with a
politicized and anti-globalized position. He said that hijab would ‘distinguish
revolutionary Islamist women from the corrupt (westernized) women from
the previous regime’ (Shirazi 2000: 119). Hijab is here a political separation
of one kind of woman from another, differentiating pre- and post-
revolutionary and Westernized and non-Westernized women.
There are many Muslim women outside the Republic of Iran who
are prepared to explain why they wear the various forms of veiling that
constitute hijab. The women at whyiwearhijab.org explain their beliefs and

practices in terms of religion. One says that she wears hijab because Allah
has told her to and because Allah loves her. She continues by saying that
‘hijab does not limit our freedom! In fact, by wearing it I feel so free.’ She
says that she is free from people judging her solely on her physical beauty,
and this freedom is supported by many of the other contributors. Sarah322
says that her modesty protects her, proclaims her Muslim identity and
provides comfort to her. Yet another says that she is protected from the
leers of ‘lewd men’ and that Allah has protected her from those immodest
men who do not perform hijab by ‘lowering their gaze’. While the use of
the particular form of hijab may originally or ostensibly be religious, these
women are describing a political position that is enabled through their use
of hijab. They are identifiable through their use of veiling and they are using
that identity to relate to others around them, to negotiate their presence in
society and their modesty in front of the members of that society by means
of what they wear.
Other Muslim women are prepared to explain their relation to hijab in
terms of personal and political liberation. One such woman is reported on
islamreligion.com and she presents the matter in terms of religion and
power. She says that in wearing hijab, ‘I am not under duress . . . I’ve been
liberated!’ (islamreligion.com 2012). Nadiya Takolia explicitly argues that
hijab does not have to be uniquely an Islamic or a religious issue: for her
‘the hijab is political, feminist and empowering’ (Takolia 2012). She ‘just
happens’ to come from the Islamic faith, but her motivation to wear hijab
has been ‘explicitly political’ and to do with empowering herself by taking
control of her own femininity and deciding for herself what of it she displays
and to whom, for example. Unsurprisingly, non-Islamic commentators have
their own take on the politics of hijab and many of them take the trouble
to contribute below the line to Takolia’s article. From their Western, un-
Islamic positions, in relation to their Western and un-Islamic values, hijab
has exactly the opposite political function from what all the Muslim women
mentioned so far have said it is. icas, for example, says ‘Whenever I see a
hijab, I think doormat’ and station29 says that the hijab is a ‘symbol of
female oppression’ (Takolia 2012). The commentators are presenting hijab
in political terms but coming to exactly the opposite conclusion to that
reached by the Islamic women: that hijab is oppressive and contributes to
women’s powerlessness.
The women’s values, differing according to whether they are members
or non-members of the Islamic faith, generate the different meanings of
the practice and its garments. The values are modesty and Islamic and
modern conceptions of Western femininity, for example. Those meanings
also generate the women as members or non-members of the various
groups referred to here. One’s take on modesty and femininity either
constructs one as a member of the Islamic community or of a non-Islamic

community. And the identities and meanings that are constructed in the
interplay between values, garments and practices are used politically. They
are used to assert a position in relation to another group and to challenge
or resist those other groups, for example. Consequently, those identities
and meanings are explicitly explained in terms of power: some women
and some practices are seen as empowered and liberating, while others are
seen as powerless and oppressive. These are some of the mechanics (or
economics) of value, meaning, identity and power as they are negotiated
and mediated by what we wear.
The politics of fashion

One of the questions raised above, in the section on identity and difference,
concerned whether we first have identities that are then represented and
related to other, different, people’s identities through what we wear, or
whether our identities are constructed in the process of relating to other
different people through the different things that we wear. It is a subtle but
significant difference and this chapter has argued that the latter is the case.
Identity was argued to be a product of difference in that a structure of
differences always precedes and pre-exists us. We must learn what the
operative differences are and what they mean in order to even represent
our identity to ourselves, and it is engaging with the structures and using
the different elements that make it possible to represent that identity. Those
structures are simply what we know as culture. One is obliged to establish
a relation to something that is not oneself (clothing in this case) and to
relate to an other, to other people and groups, in order to be one at all.
One consequence of this for the politics of fashion is that there is not
a political arena, or a public sphere, which we are free to either enter or
not enter with what we wear. There is not a separate or distinct area of our
lives, called politics, which we are free to choose to enter or not. As this
chapter has shown, all dress and adornment establishes a relation to others
and it thus establishes a politics of fashion. Fashion and what we wear is
one of the ways in which politics and the political are made possible;
consequently, it is not our choice to enter politics or not through what we
wear. Our clothing generates the political. To put this another way: it is not
that we can choose to either engage or not engage with other people and
other groups via what we wear. To wear anything at all is to establish a
relation to someone else and that is to be political. The relating to those
other groups and people via what we wear is what makes the public and
the political spheres ‘in the first place’, as it were. Because all dress and
adornment implies some relation to others (to other people and other
groups) and because politics is nothing other than the relation to another

person or group, then all dress and adornment is always already political.
If this is the case, then all fashion is political and there can be no fashion
that is not political.
Some of the complexities of the situation can be seen in the American
fashion designer Marc Jacobs’ involvement with politics. In 1997, Jacobs
joined the Tibetan Freedom Coalition and he has subsequently produced
a number of items, including tote bags and T-shirts, featuring slogans
supporting the cause of a Tibet free from Chinese interference. In 2012,
Jacobs joined Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s project to raise money for Barack
Obama’s re-election campaign: he contributed a design for a T-shirt, which
was also available in a garment made for dogs. Jacobs is clearly happy with
the idea that fashion can have a political function and is happy to use his
work to support the political causes whose values he shares. He got into
trouble, however, when his work for Louis Vuitton was featured in Shanghai
in 2012. Chinese users of Weibo, which is a version of Facebook, complained
that Jacobs had campaigned against their government’s position on Tibet
and some suggested a boycott of his products.
Responding to the Chinese criticism of his position in an interview
for Women’s Wear Daily at the launch of LV’s ‘Maison’ store in Shanghai,
Jacobs said that the Free Tibet merchandise was ‘short lived’ and no longer
in production (Kaiser 2012: 61). Jacobs also recalled how some people at
Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, the parent company, objected to his political
work in support of Obama and that he had received criticism for his anti-
George W. Bush window designs in 2008. He had, he said, ‘learned a lesson’
(Kaiser 2012: 61). Unfortunately, the lesson he learned seems to have been
that it is desirable and possible to not be political; that it is possible to be
a-political. ‘If you want to avoid controversy’, he said, ‘you just don’t do
[political] things like that’ (Kaiser 2012: 61). Jacobs is happy to make a
political stance and happy to take criticism for it in the United States, but
he is less happy to do so in Shanghai and goes so far as to say that it is
possible to just not do political things in fashion. Clearly, this is mistaken:
all that we wear establishes a relation to other people and it is therefore
political.
Strictly, one need not even wear anything at all in order to establish
a political relation, or to enter political relations. One cannot not adopt a
pose; there is no way of making one’s unclothed body do nothing; and an
unclothed body cannot but appear making some gesture or other. In this
sense the body is its own representation, its own technological tool,
with which it poses itself, composes itself and makes itself meaningful.
This is borne out in art history and photography. Every painting and every
photograph is meaningful and there are no meaningless nudes. The nudes
mean different things to different cultures, but none can appear outside of

culture and consequently none of the nudes means nothing. Insofar as the
photograph or the painting is meaningful, it is political; it is only meaningful
because meaning is the product of a relation between cultural values and
the object. As the result of the interaction or relation between someone’s
cultural values and the item, it is political. These issues will be introduced
and explained in the following chapter on the body.
Conclusion
This chapter has established in what sense it is the case that fashion
represents one’s identity and it has used that explanation to begin the
explanation of the politics of fashion. It has shown that representation is
one thing standing for another thing and that it is necessary for the
construction of one’s self-identity and meaning. Jessica Alba’s common-
sense account of fashion as the representation of personality ‘on the outside’
was examined and found to contain some sense but not all the sense of
the way in which personal identity and cultural difference are established
though what we wear. Fashion stands for, or represents, the values and
beliefs that we have as members of different cultural groups. The chapter
has also demonstrated that the construction of self-identity and meaning
is also the construction of a political position, because even self-identity
and meaning require the relation to other people, and because politics is
simply a series of relations to other people.
Reference has been made to the impossibility of the body (or anything
else) meaning nothing and the following chapter will introduce how the
body relates to our notions of clothing and fashion. We will see one more
aspect of the sense behind Virginia Woolf’s suggestion in chapter 4 of
Orlando that ‘it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make
them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains,
our tongues to their liking’ (Woolf 1928: 187–8). The notion of clothing will
be expanded to include all aspects of culture and this has interesting
consequences for our understanding of the body.
Further reading
Edwards, T. (2010) Fashion in Focus, London, Routledge; chapter 6 on the

politics of dressing up.
Johnson, L. (2010) ‘Pod Peeps: Why the iPod and Other Gadgets Are
Fashion Staples in the “Hood”’, in Scapp, R. and Seitz, B. (eds) Fashion
Statements, New York, Palgrave.

Jones, O. (2012a) Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, London,
Verso.
Tarlo, E. (2010) Visibly Muslim, Oxford, Berg.
Tarlo, E. and Moors, A. (eds) (2013) Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion, Oxford,
Berg.

chapter 8
Fashion, clothes
and the body
Introduction
The fashion industry’s preference for, and dependence on, very thin models
is well known and well documented. Karl Lagerfeld, for example, is famous
for having said in an interview that ‘no-one wants to see round women’
and deriding the ‘fat mummies’ who sit on their sofas eating potato crisps
while saying how ugly the thin models are (Halfhead 2009). And it does
not take long to discover that at least six female fashion models have died
of eating-related disorders since 2006, including the Ramos sisters and
Isabelle Caro, who campaigned against anorexia before her death in
November 2010 aged 28.
Oliviero Toscani is best known for his controversial work for Benetton
in the 1980s and 1990s, which dealt with AIDS, interracial sex and the death
penalty. His work in 2007 for the Italian fashion house Nolita is no less
controversial and is completely opposed to the views of those in the industry,
such as Lagerfeld, using the emaciated body of Caro to illustrate the dangers
of the eating disorder. Doctors believe that UK model Bethaney Wallace
died of a weakened heart caused by the disease in 2012. More rarely, male
models also die of such disorders. Jeremy Gillitzer, for example, suffered
from anorexia and bulimia and died in 2010 aged 38 and weighing 66lb.
There is clearly a predominant fashion for models with thinner, smaller
bodies and until now, with the critical work of photographers such as
Toscani, such bodies have generally been held to be more in fashion and
more desirable than larger or even ‘normal’ sized bodies.
fashion, clothes and the body 109

Figure 8.1 A woman looks at a giant poster showing Isabelle Caro, part of a
campaign against anorexia by Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, in Milan,
Italy, Tuesday, 25 September 2007. The campaign, sponsored by an Italian
clothing firm, came up in Italy just as the Milan fashion shows started.
(AP Photo/Alberto Pellaschiar.)
However, the thing that fashion does best is change, and it is no surprise
to see larger bodies and larger models coming into fashion and being used
in catwalk shows and advertising. These larger bodies are sometimes called
‘real’ bodies, and they are sometimes said to belong to ‘real women’. The
other thing that fashion does well is to profit from change. In 2012, Ben
Barry, the CEO of the Ben Barry model agency, argued that women are more
likely to buy fashion and other clothing items if the models they see in
adverts are the same sizes and shapes as they are. In June 2011, the Italian
edition of Vogue used ‘curvy’ models, including Candice Huffine, Tara Lynn
and Robyn Lawley, in a feature entitled Sogno di Donna and shot by Steven
Meisel. New York has run a ‘Full-Figured Fashion Week’ since 2011. Every
model agency now offers a range of so-called ‘plus sized’ women and
Hughes Models in London represent exclusively ‘plus size’ models, offering
size 10+ and size 14+ women. Bodies are not only there to hang fashion
and clothing from; they are not simply the neutral and a-fashionable carriers
of fashion. Bodies are also fashion; they are themselves fashionable items
and different sizes and styles of body go in and out of vogue as the seasons
change, just like the clothes that adorn them.
110 fashion, clothes and the body

This chapter will begin to identify and explain some of the main
theoretical issues behind these stories. In particular, it will try to take
seriously the suggestion that bodies can themselves be fashionable; that,
as Baudrillard says, the body is now itself an item of fashion, to be consumed
like any other item of fashion (Baudrillard 1998: 129ff). Taking that
suggestion seriously will entail thinking about the body as a fashion item
or an object, and this means thinking about it as a tool or even as a
prosthetic. While we cannot take off our bodies or send them to the charity
shop when we are tired of them, there is a sense in which the body is
something that is not one’s self, that is supposedly exterior to one’s self,
that nevertheless makes the experience of the self possible. This is to
conceive the body as a tool and as a prosthetic, and it follows from one of
the conclusions of the previous chapter, that even the naked or nude body
is already meaningful and thus political. As meaningful and political, the
body is at once a means of communicating what we often like to think of
as ourselves, and the condition for our experience of the world, including
ourselves. The chapter must explain how this is possible and what are its
consequences. Chapter 12, on the image, will follow up some of the issues
introduced here in terms of body image and discuss them in terms of how
fashion relates to the image in more detail.
Theories of fleshy practices

One of the more powerful and prevalent objections to fashion theorists and
fashion theories is that they either totally ignore the body or fail to give
enough attention to the place of the body in fashion. Joanne Entwistle and
Elizabeth Wilson claim that fashion theorists sometimes do not give
sufficient recognition to the way in which dress is a ‘fleshy practice involving
the body’ (Entwistle and Wilson 2001: 4). Theoretical preoccupation and
emphasis on the ‘textual and the discursive’, they say, disembodies fashion
and neglects ‘the place and significance of the body’ in fashion (Entwistle
and Wilson 2001: 4). As Entwistle says, fashion is ‘about bodies’ and the
title of her book from which this quote is taken indicates that the body is
a ‘fashioned body’; it is a body upon which work has been done (Entwistle
2000: 1). However, we must take care to explain exactly what the
‘involvement’ of the body with ‘dress’ means: what is the nature of dress’s
involvement with fashion or of fashion’s involvement with dress? Care also
needs to be taken with the sense or presuppositions of the phrase, ‘the
fashioned body’. Two senses are possible. The first sense is that there exists
an original or natural body, which is then fashioned, which subsequently
has work done on, or to it, in order to become the fashioned body. The
second is that the body does not pre-exist the work done on or to it, that

the body is itself the result or product of the work done on or to it. I favour
the second of these positions.
This may sound like the kind of wilfully obscure and overly complicated
theoretical nonsense that was described above in Chapter 2. Unfortunately,
the situation we are dealing with here is complicated; you will have to take
my word that I am not making it more obscure on purpose. And it will be
found that much of what passes for common sense in everyday life and
thinking about fashion is indeed composed of the most appalling conceptual
nonsense: (while little of this present volume is analytical philosophy) some
say it is the task of analytical philosophy to point this nonsense out and
render it less nonsensical and more meaningful (Wittgenstein 1953: section
309, p. 103).
Thankfully, the issues here resolve into two relatively simple ques-
tions. The first is Kate Soper’s question: ‘where does the body end and
the accoutrement or decoration begin?’ (Soper 2001: 24). The second is
Entwistle’s question: ‘does the body have a materiality outside language
and representation?’ (Entwistle 2000: 27). Soper raises her question in the
context of a discussion of such garments as the Pierre Cardin (1986) shoes
that look like men’s feet and of clothing that somehow becomes a ‘residue’
of the living person (Soper 2001: 24). She might also have considered the
question as to whether, or to what extent, musculature is naturally part of
our bodies. Are the developed muscles of a body-builder not something
like a decoration, or an accoutrement? They can be ‘taken off’ by stopping
exercising, after all, and there is nothing that is ‘natural’ about them. It is
not possible to say that the weedy bodies of men and women who do no
exercise are any more, or less, decorated or adorned than the strapping
bodies of trained athletes. My point here is that the adorned/unadorned
dichotomy is insufficient to the task of deciding and describing what is
happening here: that there is no natural point at which the body ends and
decoration, or fashion, begins.
On a different level, there is also the matter of trying to find the natural
or unadorned body. The naked body was referred to in a previous chapter
as always already being dressed. It was argued that even the nakedest of
bodies must appear in some way: in that it must appear in some way, it is
appearing in some style. And clearly to appear in some style is to appear
in some fashion or other. One’s pose, gesture, bodily attitude and so on,
are all the products of the local culture that one finds oneself in. One’s
gestures, poses and so on, are the product of one’s gender, ethnicity, age
and social class. Each of these things will condition a series of appropriate
moves, poses and ways of holding the body. They are not natural but have
been learned from the people around one and the culture one is a member
of. Every little girl learns ‘nice’, ‘ladylike’ ways of sitting; every little boy is
teased by his pals for throwing ‘like a girl’. To this extent, even the nakedest

of bodies is ‘dressed’ in the poses, attitudes and ways of moving that are
part of the muscle memory or the corporal discipline that is part of the
culture in which one finds oneself. Again, there is no point at which the
body is not produced or fashioned by the values of the culture in which it
finds itself.
The possible answers to Entwistle’s question, ‘does the body have a
materiality outside language and representation?’ (Entwistle 2000: 27), bear
on the same issues and lead us into the same areas. Entwistle’s answer is
that, yes, the body does have a material existence outside language and
representation; she says that bodies are not simply representation and
that they have a ‘concrete’ material reality that is ‘determined by nature’,
consequently, bodies exist as ‘natural objects’ (Entwistle 2000: 27). Her
answer means that there is a natural or ‘undressed’ body, one that is not
entirely the product of culture. Her answer also means, therefore, that it is
possible to say where the body ends and decoration and fashion begin:
‘bodies are the product of a dialectic between culture and nature’. And her
answer is that the body exists before or beyond representation. The natural
is what is before or beyond culture. Culture is representation and, therefore,
if the natural body exists, then it must exist beyond representation. This
raises a new set of problems for, as Entwistle says, if there is a natural body
that exists outside representation, then how can our experience and
perception of that body be theorized and explained?
Her answer is to distinguish the body from embodiment and to look
to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The body, as it is theorized by
Michel Foucault, at least, is too representational, it is also too passive and
receptive of discipline. Embodiment, as theorized by Merleau-Ponty,
however, is an activity. Merleau-Ponty also emphasizes the role of perception
and experience, and our bodies are ‘not just the place from which we come
to experience the world, but it is through our bodies that we come to be
seen in the world’ (Entwistle 2000: 28–9). On Entwistle’s account, Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenological explanation of embodiment can grant us access
to our natural bodies, and the experience and perception of embodiment
is, therefore, the way to theorize our experience of the dressed body.
However, even phenomenologically, our experience and perception of
our bodies cannot be simply pre-cultural. There is no non-cultural medium
(or language) in which to represent that experience and perception to our
selves. Those experiences and perceptions of the body must themselves be
the products of cultural values – they are, therefore, already ‘dressed’ and
the body is as much the product of our ‘point of view’ as it is the condition
for that point of view. There can be no pre-cultural representations, words,
ideas or concepts, with which we could identify our perceptions and
experiences, and describe them in any way: any such representations that
we use to identify our experiences and describe them have to come from

language, and language is, obviously, the values and beliefs of our culture
represented in words and thoughts. There may be a ‘materiality’ beyond
representation, but in that it is beyond representation, it must be forever
meaningless and un-perceivable. If experience and perception are repre-
sentation, then anything that is beyond representation must be both
un-perceptible and un-experienceable. As such, they are of no use to us in
the explanation of the dressed body. All our experiences and perceptions
of the dressed body can only take the form of representations, and to that
extent all our experiences and perceptions will be cultural constructions.
Again, there is no undressed or ‘natural’ body. We must be reminded here
of Virginia Woolf’s idea that ‘it is clothes that wear us and not we them’;
the clothing or dressing of culture ‘comes first’ and makes ‘us’ possible.
One important consequence of these arguments is that the ‘textual and
discursive’, which were said to distract or deflect interest in the body and
lead to the neglect of the body in explanations of fashion, are actually
required in order to have any experience, perception or understanding of
the body at all. Were it not for representation, the textual and discursive
concepts, thoughts, ideas, values, words and so on, we would have nothing
with which to identify and describe our bodies or the experiences we have
through and as a result of them. There may be a material body beyond
representation, but insofar as it is beyond representation it is also, by
definition, beyond our perception, experience and understanding. This is
not to deny that aspects of the body that were once beyond representation
may come to be represented and understood and articulated by means of
fashion, but it is to deny that we have any non-cultural access to that body.
And it is not to deny that the body is sometimes neglected by some kinds
of approaches (and some semiotic approaches are as neglectful as can be
imagined), but the neglect is not caused by, or a result of, the part played
by representation, or the discursive and the textual.
Finally, it should be noted that we have also answered the question
raised by Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick, and noted in Karen de
Perthuis’s essay on fashion models, ‘Should dress be regarded as part of
the body or merely as an extension of it?’ (Cavallaro and Warwick 1998: iv,
in de Perthuis 2008: 176). De Perthuis points out that Cavallaro and Warwick
suggest there is no definitive answer to this question, that ‘the boundaries
between self and other . . . are permeable and unfixed’. De Perthuis, however,
wants to suggest something slightly different: that in the examples she
is looking at, the boundary between body and clothing is ‘permanently
dissolved’ and that self and other are fused. One of her examples is Rankin’s
project ‘A Little Bit of Gary’. In this piece, she says that the model does not
wear the garment but is rather ‘constituted by it’. The models wear a ‘maillot
encrusted with onyx crystal beads’ but the fabric of the garment does not
stop at the borders of the maillot, it ‘extends to invade the entire surface

of the model’s body’. It is, she says, akin to Guy Bourdin’s Paris Vogue
cover in which the entire surface of the models’ bodies were covered in tiny
black pearls, each one attached ‘by hand with glue’. De Perthuis suggests
that these examples show that, and how, the boundaries between body
and garment, and between self and other, are removed, and how body and
garment and self and other are fused.
The models are not, of course, ‘constituted by’ the thing they are
wearing, they are in fact wearing it. In each case, the beads or pearls are
stuck onto the body but the body that pre-exists the adornment, the dress,
is already a cultural body and there can be no fusion. The sense of the
identity of body and adornment or of body and dress that this chapter has
tried to explain is entirely different from that suggested by De Perthuis. This
chapter has argued that, because there is, and can be, no natural body,
what we experience and perceive as the natural body is already dressed, it
is already the product of culture. Culture, or dress, is not something added
to the body on this account: rather the body does not exist until it has been
dressed with the values and meanings of culture. However, what I want to
argue is that the body is inconceivable and cannot even be experienced
without or ‘outwith’ (as some Scottish dialects put it slightly better) some
concept: all concepts are culturally located; they are the values that a
culture holds and believes in. Thus there can be no perception, experience
or understanding of the body that is not the product of those concepts
and those values. This is the sense in which the body is always dressed,
it is always the product of, or ‘adorned in’, culturally specific concepts.
Consequently, the body is always already clothed and fashionable; it is always
already dressed; it is ‘dressed’ in the values of the culture it is part of and
without which we can have neither experience nor understanding of it. This
is another example of Derrida’s supplement, where the (cultural) ‘addition’
makes the (natural) thing possible in the first place.
Fashion as adorning the body
Many accounts of fashion suggest that fashion is either adorning or

modifying the body. This section will explore the former and the following
section will explore the latter. As noted above, there are some philosophical
issues as to whether, and to what extent, adorning and modifying are
different, whether the musculature produced by exercise or body-building,
for example, counts as a modification or an adornment. However, for the
most part the distinction will be clear and unproblematical. The following
two sections will outline the theories associated with the two possible ways
in which fashion may relate to the body.

First, adornment is clearly central to the whole matter of fashion and
what we wear. Not for nothing did Elizabeth Wilson use the word in the
title to her classic and ever-pertinent text, Adorned in Dreams. And not for
nothing does she refer us to Georg Simmel in an epigraph which indicates
that adornment makes public the radiance of the personality by means of
style. For Simmel, the personal and the private are made public through
the use of adornment: style in adornment unites the private and the public.
Adornment, decoration or ornament (Simmel’s word, schmuck, also
translates as ‘jewellery’), is the way in which the public and the private are
related or mediated. The public sphere of modernity, with its cities and
rootless crowds, relates to the private, one’s innermost self, via what one
wears. Adornment, what one wears, displays and protects that private self
in and from the public by always taking some style or other.
And indeed, that is exactly what adornment, clothing, does to the body:
the body is displayed and protected or covered by what we wear. The self
and the body, which is not the self, are both displayed and hidden by what
we wear. In this sense all modern and Western fashion ironically performs
the same function that hijab performs in Islam, which many people think
is both un-modern and un-Western. As we saw in Chapter 7, hijab is a way
of ensuring modesty in Islam (for men and women): it is a veiling and a
protecting and a separating. We also saw that some form of hijab is also
used by many Muslim women as a thoroughly acceptable way for them to
negotiate appearing in public. Adornment, like hijab, displays, protects and
separates: self and body are displayed and hidden, at once appearing in
public and protected from the public by adornment.
These points may remind us of Kate Soper’s argument concerning the
‘intimacy of the connection in life between the human body and its garb’
(Soper 2001: 24). She refers to Magritte’s (1966) painting Philosophy in
the Boudoir, in which a woman’s breasts are seen in an otherwise empty
or uninhabited dress hanging in a wardrobe. In turn, her argument is
appropriately reminiscent of Wilson’s in Adorned in Dreams, that ‘there
is something eerie about a museum of costume’ in which the empty ‘frozen’
clothes hint at the bodies and the people that they once clothed (Wilson
1985: 1). Magritte’s surreal visions of disembodied breasts as they appear
in unworn dresses represent Wilson’s dreams or nightmares every bit as
well as well as they do Soper’s intimacy. Our terms ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’
are hardly up to the task of describing the effects of the clothes in these
museums: the dresses are undoubtedly not living but sometimes, Wilson
suggests, they hint at something else, the presence of the bodies and the
living people who once did animate them. The representational dichotomies,
including animate/inanimate, with which thought and language are
constructed, are insufficient to describe the interplay that is brought to mind
by these museums.

And there is the case, familiar to everyone who has ever admired the
curve of a breast or chest beneath a T-shirt, of whether that breast or chest
is being displayed or hidden by the adornment. There is no doubt that the
breast or chest is being hidden, the person would be indecently dressed or
half naked if it were not. But it is no less doubtful that the part is being
displayed, as anyone who has ever put on a tight T-shirt will tell you. The
terms, the concepts that we have to identify and describe our experience
here are proving inadequate to the task of deciding what is going on. Or,
what is going on does not fit into, or correspond to, the words and concepts
with which we try to capture it. There may be a material and bodily reality
that is beyond representation here, but representation is all we have with
which to identify and understand both the body and adornment. What
escapes our representation in this and other cases may become represented
or representable on the development or invention of new words and
concepts or the ‘expansion’ of our cultural reference, but in this case the
phenomenon is undecidable and our dichotomous terms are unable to
decide what is going on.
There is also the question, which has always been in the background
of this debate, of whether things such as breasts and chests are more
properly considered adornments or body parts. On one level, they are
obviously body parts, parts of the body. Bodies come with these parts and
a body without them would be said to be not a whole or complete body.
But both breasts and chests may be enhanced and supplemented, whether
by exercise or implantation of silicon sacs, to become more ideal or more
properly breasts or chests. There is no non-cultural or natural definition
of the ‘ideal’ or the ‘proper’ here. These features can be made larger and
smaller, they can be taken away altogether, and put back again if need be:
in this sense they are nearer to what we might think of as adornments
or decoration. Even un-supplemented, it is not unheard of for them to be
referred to as adornments or as ‘equipment’. Englishmen of a certain
age will remember Raquel Welch’s appearance on Michael Parkinson’s
BBC television chat show in 1972 when she referred to the arrival of ‘the
equipment’ (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqGnwqU0z2U; last accessed
November 2013).
These ideas and arguments question the notion of the body proper or
of the proper body. If even the bodily equipment with which one is born
can be considered an adornment and enhanced, supplemented, enlarged
or reduced, all in the interest of making that part more appropriate or more
proper, then all those parts and the body they make up are prosthetics. If
there is no naturally proper body or body part that cannot be made to more
closely conform to some even more proper and natural ideal, then those
parts and that body are already prostheses. They are already standing in
for something else. To put it another way: if, as Raquel Welch said, everything

one has naturally is already equipment (because there is no non-cultural
experience, perception or account of the natural), then it is already
prosthetic and there can be no natural and proper body to be adorned by
something unnatural and improper.
Second, adornment affects the body in that it either constrains or makes
possible a range of bodily movements, gestures and poses. Lauren Ashwell
and Rae Langton concentrate solely on the constraining aspect, pointing
out that constraint may happen in two ways: first, by ‘literally constraining
physical movement’; and second, by constraining movement by interacting
with ‘other norms of display, beauty or class’ (Ashwell and Langton 2011:
142–3). In the first instance, they suggest that while ‘women’s clothes’ may
make it relatively easy to walk, they make it difficult to cycle. As an example
of the second type of constraint, they propose the ways that miniskirts and
low-cut blouses make it necessary for women to restrict their movements
in order to remain modest. In or by themselves, the skirt and the blouse
do not make any movement impossible, but in conjunction with cultural
norms or values concerning modest female display, they do. Constraint
may also be seen as making possible a range of bodily actions. It is slightly
contentious, but one could argue that the contortions demanded by getting
out of a car while wearing a short skirt and retaining any modesty (which
Ashwell and Langton see as constraining) might also be seen as being made
possible by the particular demands of the situation. Here it is the dichotomy
of constraining/enabling that begins to show its limitations in failing to
describe what adornment does to the body. Any eroticism or paraphilia that
results will also be new developments, novel forms of pleasure made
possible by the situation, which were not made possible by exiting other
forms of transport such as buses or trains.
This introduces the ways in which adornment contributes to, or detracts
from, bodily comfort or pleasure. Theorists and students of fashion noted
quite early that people would pay a relatively high price in terms of discomfort
in order to appear fashionable. At the end of the nineteenth century, for
example, Thorstein Veblen noted how people would rather go without many
of the comforts of life than appear unfashionable; he says they will ‘go ill-
clad’ in inclement weather in order to appear ‘well dressed’ (Veblen 1992:
119). In the twentieth century, the semiologist Umberto Eco describes and
analyses the discomforts of wearing jeans. He starts from the reports of
Luca Goldoni, who writes about the ‘mishaps of those who wear blue jeans
for fashionable reasons and no longer know how to sit down or arrange
the external reproductive apparatus’. He continues by describing his own,
only slightly less extreme, experiences: his jeans ‘impose a demeanour’ on
him and they force him to think about the relation between himself, his
jeans and the society in which he lives (Eco 1998: 191–4). The jeans force

a demeanour; they prevent him ‘sprawling’ and ‘slumping’ and they force
him to consider his testicles at almost every moment (Eco 1998: 191–4).
We can see here that Eco’s jeans constrain, produce or generate his
movements, gait and demeanour. It was noted above, and in Chapter 7,
that a culture’s values produce and generate a woman’s movements, gait
and demeanour. A culture’s conception of femininity will include the values
of modesty and gentility, and those values will be applied to how to walk,
how to sit and so on. In order to be considered properly feminine in that
culture, a woman will have to know those values and she will have to know
how they translate into behaviour. This is part of the sense of saying that
one is dressed in the values of one’s culture: the effect of a so-called ‘external’
force is the same as that of a so-called ‘internal’ force. The ‘external’ force
of the jeans generates the same kinds of effects as the ‘internal’ force
of the values. However, the cultural values defining femininity can change
from culture to culture; it is as though they can be put on and taken off,
like a pair of jeans. The values are, therefore, no more ‘internal’ and no less
‘external’ than the jeans and the sense of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ cannot
be upheld in any simple form. The jeans and the values both dress the body
and condition its movements, and in consequence, the internal/external
dichotomy (raised in Chapter 7) is once again of only limited use and
application here.
At this point, many readers (and not just the male ones) may be
reminded of the Chinese practice of foot-binding. One can only imagine
the pain that was involved but it is not obvious that the practice was ever
fashion. Quite apart from the fact that foot-binding is alleged to have lasted
from the late tenth century T’ang dynasty until the Communist Revolution
of the mid-twentieth century, the context of the practice was neither modern
nor Western. It is also not clear that binding is an adornment. The tiny
shoes, which are an adornment, are required only after the foot has been
broken and constrained. Foot-binding seems rather to be a modification.
Indeed, this example introduces the tension between fashion as a series of
styles or trends that come and go and a modification of the body that, once
performed, is either not, or not easily, unperformed.
Fashion and the disabled body

These arguments have applications and implications for the notion of the
disabled body and for the relation between fashion and the disabled body.
As S. E. Smith (creator of the This Ain’t Livin’ website) points out, finding
any clothes at all is difficult when one is disabled but finding fashionable
clothes verges on the impossible (Smith 2012). Smith identifies two kinds

or types of ‘problem’ here. First, she says that fashion designers make
assumptions about the bodies that they are designing for: they assume that
the bodies will be ‘normal’, ‘thin and ambulatory’. Second, she says that
there is a widespread ‘social perception’ that the disabled body is ‘ugly and
unsightly’ (Smith 2012). Consequently, almost no designer designs for the
disabled body and those that do design tend to produce functional garments
that ‘cover . . . and minimize frightening bodies that don’t belong in the
public eye’ (Smith 2012).
Some people from the fashion world have engaged with the disabled
body. Alexander McQueen is famous for having sent Aimee Mullins on to
the catwalk in 2008 wearing hand-carved wooden prosthetic legs. His work
here is often presented or thought of as a critique of the social perception
that the disabled body is ugly. His use of disabled models challenges the
prevailing view that disability cannot be attractive and beautiful. And
Wayne Hemingway has criticized the way that fashion fails to design for
the disabled body. He has, for example, spoken out against the way that,
where architecture and transport design routinely produce designs that are
sympathetic to the problems of people with disabilities, fashion is different,
being reluctant to design for bodies that are not complete or that are not
completely symmetrical, for example (Masters 2008). Smith appears to be
unconvinced by these kinds of developments. She says that she wants to
see a world in which fashion and fashion designers engage with people
with disabilities, not as a ‘stunt’ but as a ‘genuine integration’ into the
community. She says she also wants to see disabled people ‘involved’ in
the production of fashionable clothing (Smith 2012).
As noted, the arguments above have implications for the conception
of the disabled body in fashion. To put it as simply as possible: if there is
no natural and non-cultural definition of the able body, then there can be
no natural and non-cultural definition of the, or a, disabled body. Therefore,
while we may make judgements as to who is and who is not disabled, these
will always be decisions rather than discoveries. Disability is constructed,
not revealed.
The first implication of these arguments is that there cannot be a natural
cut-off point at which a body becomes ‘ugly’ (or beautiful). If there is no
natural cut-off point, then all arguments that some example or other has
‘gone too far’ are themselves invalid. There is no natural point at which
one has ‘gone too far’ and all such points are simply decisions made by
people at certain times and places. As such, they are all political and not
natural or existing ‘in the structure’. The politics of disability and fashion
start from this point in the argument. The second implication is that if all
bodies are or must be considered as much ‘disabled’ as ‘able’ (because
there is no natural, non-cultural point at which one may correctly say that
‘this body is disabled’), then there can be no special designs for the ‘disabled’

body – the disabled/able body is already involved in fashion. A designer
may tell us that s/he is designing especially or specifically for the disabled
body, but s/he is mistaken: if there is no natural point at which able turns
into disabled, then it is not possible to design especially for the disabled.
Again, it is a political and, therefore, moot point, not a discovery.
Fashion as modifying the body

This tension exists between a conception of fashion as a series of passing
and ephemeral styles and trends and bodily modification, which may be
neither passing nor ephemeral. In the latter, the body itself is the target of
fashionable attention. Clearly, modifications may be more or less permanent:
a tattoo may last a lifetime, while a piercing may be allowed to heal and
a hairstyle will grow out in a matter of weeks. Tattooing, piercing and
hairstyles, however, are all referred to as fashion and it is undeniable that
fashions for tattooing and piercing come and go. Ted Polhemus explores
this point in his (1994) book Streetstyle and uses it to make a point about
the very definition of fashion. Considering the tattoos worn by the Bracknell
Chopper Club, he says that ‘any permanent body decoration like a tattoo
is as anti-fashion as it is possible to get’ because they make any change
difficult if not impossible (Polhemus 1994: 13). Polhemus calls this anti-
fashion, in which a bodily decoration or modification is resistant to change,
‘style’.
This use of the word ‘style’ draws attention to the difference between
it and the word ‘fashion’. Polhemus is making the point that, while some
theorists may use style to say that a particular style may come in and go
out of fashion, he intends it to mean a fixed way of doing something. Style,
he says, is the opposite of fashionable or trendy; it is ‘inherently conservative
and traditional’ (Polhemus 1994: 13). The members of the chopper club,
like many other cultures that feature implants, scarification and other forms
of tattooing, use this form of bodily modification to indicate life membership
of the group, not some passing fad. It should be noted that this sense of
the word style is not inconsistent with the separate idea that permanent
modifications may themselves come in and go out of fashion. It is
significant that all Polhemus’s examples of other cultures that use these
permanent ways of modifying their bodies are those that could plausibly
be called non-Western and non-modern. He refers to societies that are, or
were, non-capitalist, in which class mobility was neither possible nor desired,
such as those of the Maori and other South Pacific cultures and those found
in ‘parts of the Amazon’.
In such societies and cultures, there is commonly no complex class
system, such as is found in capitalist societies, and no possibility of moving

up or down in a class system, as is required for capitalism. In that there is
no possibility of social mobility, the desire to signal or achieve that mobility
through what one wears is also lacking. And, therefore, fashion, as one of
the ways of signalling or achieving that mobility, will also be lacking. That
the favoured modification is such a permanent one is a product of the
cultural value of the permanence of the simple class structure and of
the desire for it not to change. As we saw in Chapter 3, the desire for
fashionable change is allied to the possibility of mobility within a social
structure: it is possible to use fashion to communicate a desire for upward
social mobility only in a social structure where that mobility is desirable
and possible. So far, these things have required a capitalist society and
have not been possible in more traditional societies, such as those identified
by Polhemus. Consequently, while we may quibble with Polhemus’s
idiosyncratic use of the word ‘style’, we can have some sympathy with his
identification and analysis of such permanent modifications as anti-fashion.
While these permanent bodily modifications may be considered style
and not fashion, there are other forms of modification that are less perm-
anent and which may be considered fashion. Where tattoos, cicatrization
and piercing are towards the permanent end of the modification spectrum,
cosmetics of various forms, including dentistry and surgery, hair styling/
cutting and personal grooming, belong at the more ephemeral end. And
all have been considered at some time to be fashionable. More accurately,
the various styles that they use are all said to come in and go out of fashion.
Having or not having teeth or hair are less matters of fashion than having
perfectly spaced or perfectly white teeth, or having a bob or a wedge hair-
style. It may be that the perceived or relative permanence of these things
predispose us to calling them fashion or not fashion. It is difficult to imagine
a European or American fashion for having no teeth at all, or for everyone
to have no hair, but bobs and white teeth are found to go in and out of
fashion on both sides of the Atlantic.
Finally, we must address the question as to whether these bodily
modifications are the same kinds of things as the implants and muscles
mentioned in the previous section. Body building and the various forms
and types of silicon implants were presented above as both decoration and
modification. They were decoration in that they could be added and taken
away from the fashionable body. But they are modification in that they also
become body parts, or parts of the body. There seems no good reason not
to reach the conclusion that was reached above, that the decoration/
modification dichotomy is simply inadequate to the task of deciding which
is which here.
Therefore, while there appears to be a correlation between these more
or less permanent modifications being said to be more or less fashionable,
and while fashionable people may be seen sporting them for a while, there

is another sense in which they are not fashion at all. For a year or two every
celebrity seems to have so many tattoos that it looks as though they are
colouring themselves in, and for a year or two those celebrities may jangle
as they walk, such are their piercings, but it is noticeable that, when the
fashion moves on, they are quick to hide or remove those modifications.
Meanwhile, ‘years later’, the genuinely anti-fashionista members of the
Bracknell Chopper Club still meet and still wear their styles (Polhemus
1994: 13).
Real women and real illness
It was argued above that the body and every body part that one has and
experiences ‘naturally’ is already equipment. That is, bodies and their parts
are already ‘dress’, they are already cultural constructions. This was said to
be because there is no non-cultural experience, perception or account of
the natural, including what we think of as our natural bodies. If that is the
case, then those parts, and one’s body, are already prosthetic constructions
and there can be no natural and proper body to be adorned by something
unnatural and improper, because it is already ‘unnatural’ and ‘improper’.
It is claimed that these statements answer Entwistle’s question concerning
the nature of dress’s involvement with the body. Clearly, the senses of
unnatural and improper have shifted slightly but significantly, as have those
of dressed and undressed. However, we are now left with the problem of
how to account for the real women who are really suffering from real body
dysmorphia issues and dying of real eating disorders. This chapter now
has to reconsider the argument concerning the cultural construction of
the body. Surely these women’s illnesses and deaths indicate that there
is a material body beyond representation that is not a mere cultural
construction?
The simple answer is that, no, they do not. They do not indicate the
existence of a ‘real’, where real people really live and really die, a real that
is beyond mere representation and cultural construction. What they do show
is the irresistible power of cultural construction, meaning and ‘dress’. Again,
the real is a decision, rather than a discovery, and there can be no ‘correct’
definition or image of ‘real women’. There can be what is referred to as
‘politically correct’ images and definitions, but this is the sense behind it:
that it is a decision made in the process of negotiation and communication,
rather than a discovery of an essence or identity. Until the power of that
cultural construction and the role of politics in it is acknowledged and
accounted for, the phenomenon will remain misdiagnosed and the cure
misprescribed.

A quick and unscientific survey of popular websites and newspaper
articles brings the news that many people think that ‘fashion’ is to blame
for the epidemic of eating disorders and unhappy young women. In a lecture
at Harvard University in April 2012, Franca Sozzani, the editor of Italian
Vogue, argued that ‘fashion is one of the causes of eating disorders’ (Sozzana
2012). In 2006, Bryan Lask, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
at the University of London, was reported as saying that ‘the fashion industry’
must take responsibility for the increase in eating disorders (Knight 2006).
Fashion, the fashion industry and the advertising of fashion through the
use of photography are all regularly held responsible for the increase in
eating disorders among young women.
Some fashion and cosmetics companies have proposed their own
solutions to the problem of young women and eating disorders. A common
solution is presented as an attempt to escape from fashion representation
into ‘the real’. In 2012, Lanvin announced to the world that they were
abandoning ‘supermodels’ for their Autumn/Winter campaign in favour of
using a range of ‘real’ women in their photographs (Ferry 2012). The Dove
Company has run its ‘real’ beauty advertising campaign, featuring a range
of ‘real’ women, since 2004 when it launched its ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’
(Dove.us 2012). The Lanvin campaign is photographed by Steven Meisel
(who also shot the 2011 Sogno di Donna feature for Italian Vogue, mentioned
above). In one of the photographs, a ‘real’ woman is shown in fishnets and
red shoes, surrounded by handbags, a scruffy dog sitting on a stool and
rolls of material. The women may be ‘real’ but all are beautiful and all are
photographed in the slightly surreal stage set. Dove’s advertising is known
for its allegedly ‘real’ women, who cavort in their underwear apparently
overjoyed by their own normal-sized beauty. However, as the Huffington
Post pointed out in 2010, the original casting call from Dove had specified
that only real women with ‘flawless skin, no tattoos or scars . . . well groomed
and clean . . . Nice Bodies . . . naturally fit, not too curvy’ need apply. The
Dove spokesperson did not deny that the call was genuine (Huffington Post
2012).
The point here is that there is no real, and there are no real women to
be photographed for campaigns for real beauty. There are photographs and
campaigns that represent women and situations as real but they are no
less constructions than the photographs and campaigns that are being
objected to. The flight to the real cannot work because there is no real to
fly to.
This point is cleverly made by the Spanish artist Yolanda Dominguez,
who discloses and subverts the role of the allegedly ‘real’ in fashion
marketing far more effectively than either Dove or Lanvin in her 2011 Poses
project (www.yolandadominguez.com/en/poses/index.html; last accessed
November 2013). In this project she asks ‘real’ women in everyday situations

Figure 8.2 Yolanda Dominguez 2011 ‘Poses’. (www.yolandadominguez.com/
Poses/index.html August 2012. © Yolanda Dominguez.)
to adopt the poses and make the moves familiar to us from countless
high-fashion supermodel shoots and records them on video. The women
lie ‘artistically’ in parks, to the consternation of the park-keeper. They pose
‘dramatically’ in street markets and fast-food restaurants, to the obvious
concern of shoppers who clearly fear for their mental health.
Dominguez explained her critical strategy in the Poses project by saying
that:
I tried to express what many women feel about women’s magazines

and the image of women in the media – absurd, artificial, a hanger to
wear dresses and bags, only concerned about being skinny, beautiful
. . . . I used the impossible poses to represent this type of woman and
to show how absurd it is in a real context.
(Quoted in Alderson 2011)
By showing the absurdity of the poses in the ‘real’ contexts, which are
as staged as anything found in any fashion shoot, and acknowledged as
such, Dominguez effectively and powerfully deconstructs the real/image
dichotomy and shows the constitutive role of representation in what is
supposedly ‘real’ life. The ‘impossibility’ of the poses in the ‘real’ of the
locations clearly shocks and upsets some of the passers by and amuses
others. This is evidence that they are fully aware of the absurdity and unreality

of their poses, and of the contrast between the ideal of the pose and the
real of the location.
It is also worth drawing attention to the fact that Dominguez’s
‘Livings’, as she calls them, all make effective use of the body. These are
not complicated, wordy arguments in a book; they are living, breathing
people, who interact with other living, breathing people in the streets of
Madrid. However, the embodiment, the living presence of these people in
the street, is not beyond representation and it does not access some material
reality that is beyond any cultural construction. Dominguez is using bodies
to make representations of the body to mock representations of the body,
because there is no outside of representation. What her strategy does is
draw attention to the work of the body in representing the cultural
constructions with which we are so familiar that we no longer notice them
as constructions. Dominguez’s posers draw attention to the ways in which
the body is dressed by culture: they mock and laugh at the absurdities
of those ways. They also draw attention to the role of embodiment in
representing the ideals of the fashion industry. This is done by knowingly
and ironically aping the poses that are used non-ironically in fashion
photography and advertising, thus drawing attention to the role of those
ideals as they are used to construct the bodily poses. And the ‘Livings’ are
also very funny: the role of humour in the mocking of these ideals should
not be underestimated.
The argument here is that what the accounts of eating disorders and
death do show is the irresistible power of cultural constructions of gender
and body ideals and the role of ‘dress’, cultural values, in those construc-
tions. The suggestion above was that, until that power is acknowledged
and accounted for, the phenomenon will remain misdiagnosed and the cure
misprescribed. The disorders and deaths will not be successfully countered
by images of so-called ‘real’ women and ‘real’ beauty in advertising because
there is no real, there is only representation and there are, therefore, only
other cultural constructions with which to counter them.
Advertising and marketing are two of the main sets of media in which
those ideals are constructed and through which they are communicated.
The next chapter will, therefore, introduce the ideas of production and
consumption, and explain their roles in, and relations to, fashion.
Conclusion
This chapter has tried to explain what the body is and how it relates to
fashion and clothing. It started from our everyday common sense and
possibly unnoticed understanding of the body and its relation to the things
we wear, and it tried to show that that everyday understanding was not as

common sense as it is experienced. An everyday and no less alarming
phenomenon (eating disorders) was used to introduce the complexities
surrounding the relation between the body and fashion. Notions of fashion
as a ‘fleshy practice’ were used to investigate the apparently paradoxical
idea that there was no body before clothing. In an attempt to avoid the
suspicion that such philosophical problems had no impact or grasp on the
so-called ‘real world’, real illnesses and real disablements were investigated.
The chapter then returned to the idea that there is, and can be, no natural
body: that we can have no pre-cultural experience or understanding of ‘our’
bodies. This idea is difficult and complex and it was shown to have profound
consequences for our understanding of fashion and clothing. This chapter
has tried to introduce those ideas. The following chapter begins to explore
more traditionally ‘cultural studies’ type concerns – how fashion and clothing
are produced and consumed.
Further reading
Chin, E. (2010) ‘Tech Savvy: Technology as the New Fashion’, in Scapp, R.
and Seitz, B. (eds) Fashion Statements, New York, Palgrave.
Entwistle, J. (2000) The Fashioned Body, London, Polity.
http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/prosthesis/; last
accessed November 2013.
Jain, S. (1999) ‘The Prosthetic Imagination: Enabling and Disabling the
Prosthesis Trope’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 24, 1, Winter:
31–54.
Rabine, L. W. (1994) ‘Woman’s Two Bodies: Fashion Magazines, Con-
sumerism and Feminism’, in Benstock, S. and Ferris, S. (eds) On Fashion,
New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press.
Vincent, S. J. (2009) The Anatomy of Fashion: Dressing the Body from the
Renaissance to Today, Oxford, Berg.
Wurst, K. (2003) ‘Designing the Self: Fashion and The Body’, in Henn, M.
and Pausch, H. A. (eds) Body Dialectics in the Age of Goethe, Amsterdam
and New York, Rodopi.

chapter 9
Fashion production
and consumption
Introduction
In 2012 the anti-poverty charity, War on Want, campaigned against the
exploitation of the factory workers who were producing Adidas sportswear.
Adidas were the highly prestigious ‘official sportswear partner’ of the London
2012 Olympic Games, and their advertising posters and visual projections
were to be found all over the Olympic park in east London.
While individuals such as Tyson Gay, Johan Blake and Jess Ennis, along
with the rest of the UK team, were to be seen competing patriotically in
Adidas kit, War on Want were attaching tags saying ‘34p’ (about 53 US cents)
to clothing items for sale in Adidas outlets. The 34p was to represent
the hourly wage that the predominantly female workers in Indonesia were
allegedly paid to produce the kit worn by these heavily sponsored sports
stars, as well as ordinary customers. War on Want’s point was that this is
not much of a wage. War on Want also claimed that workers making the
UK team’s kit in Bangladesh faced physical and verbal abuse and were forced
to work illegally long hours for their money. Although other sportswear
companies, such as Puma and Nike, were also targeted by War on Want,
Adidas had good reason for wanting to avoid this kind of negative publicity.
Only a year before, dozens of young people wearing Adidas sportswear had
been photographed while looting shops in the London riots; the familiar
three stripes and trefoils were everywhere to be seen amidst the smoke and
debris. Even a quick glance at the press coverage of the 2011 London riots
will indicate that the young people’s riot gear of choice was largely Adidas:
128 fashion production and consumption

Figure 9.1 War on Want action card, 2012. (From: www.waronwant.org)
the press photographs exist to prove it. And only a year after their 2012
campaign, War on Want were drawing attention to the deaths of at
least 1,000 clothing workers when the Rana Plaza factory near Dhaka,
Bangladesh, collapsed in April 2013. The factory produced clothes for
high street labels such as Matalan, Primark and Mango. Two factory owners
and two engineers, who had issued public safety certificates for the factory,
were being held on charges of criminal negligence and War on Want
argued that the workers need not have died had Primark taken seriously
its responsibilities towards its workers (Al-Mahmood 2013).
These brief references to these stories introduce most of the major
issues of this chapter. They raise various problems involved in the
fashion production and consumption 129

production and consumption of fashion and what we wear. Production and
consumption raise questions about the ecological and economic respon-
sibility of continuous and expensive production of throwaway fashionable
items; they ask about the role of gender in employment; they indicate that
globalization is part of the fashion experience; they suggest that brands will
always be used by subcultural groups to construct identity and that brands
will always want to distance themselves from any negative publicity; and
they, therefore, indicate that power relations, political relations, are also at
the heart of fashion production and consumption.
Economic reductionism
The references to the stories above also introduce a debate around fashion
and economics, which this chapter needs to explain and contextualize. The
debate concerns economic reductionism. Economic reductionism is the
argument that a phenomenon, fashion in our case, may be explained
completely in terms of economics – in terms of production and consump-
tion. In the course of an argument against all forms of reductionism,
Elizabeth Wilson says that:
because the origins and rise of fashion were so closely linked with the
development of mercantile capitalism, economic explanations of the
fashion phenomenon have always been popular. It was easy to believe
that the function of fashion stemmed from capitalism’s need for
perpetual expansion, which encouraged consumption.
(Wilson 1985: 49)
What Wilson is objecting to here is the way that some economic

explanations of fashion explain the changes in, and of, fashion as a response
to economics, to capitalism’s demand for more production, which in
turn has to be met by more consumption. This objection is related to the
issues that were discussed in Chapter 4 on what fashion and clothing
do. Chapter 4 investigated the suggestion that discussing fashion and
clothing in terms of its function inevitably led to reductionist accounts,
accounts that depended on one element and simplified the explanation
by including only that element. Fashion change is conceived here as a
simple reaction to an economic phenomenon: more production (of
fashion) demands more consumption (of fashion). If capitalist economy
demands more consumption, then fashion may be explained and
‘explained away’ (as Wilson cleverly has it) as simple and possibly simple-
minded over-consumption.

This argument is connected to two further arguments (see Raymond
Williams 1980 for more on these arguments). First, it is connected to the
argument that capitalism makes us consume more, or too much, of the
things that we consume. According to this argument, our consumption of
fashion is simply the result of capitalist pressure (through advertising, for
example), and we would do well to limit our consumption. And second, it
is connected to the argument that capitalism makes us consume things
that we do not need to consume and that we, therefore, should not consume.
According to this argument, fashion is not a necessity and we do not need
it. However, the argument continues that capitalism turns a desire for
fashion into a perceived need for it and makes us think or believe that we
need it.
So, we need water, food and shelter but capitalist advertising persuades
us that we need Perrier water, MacDonalds’ burgers and Scandia-hus
houses. Similarly, we need to protect our bodies from extremes of cold,
wet, sunshine and so on, but capitalist advertising persuades us that we
need Nuptse 2 jackets, Burberry trench-coats and Ray-Bans. Fashion
consumption on these kinds of accounts is a simple response to capitalist
production, created and increased by advertising. There is an added moral
imperative here that, because we do not need fashion, we should not
consume it. This is the argument that we should not be buying luxuries,
such as fashion, while there are roads, schools and hospitals to be built.
The consumption of fashion, which is a response to the consumption that
is encouraged by capitalist production and advertising, is alleged to be
immoral because there are better, more valuable things to be bought. We
should be spending our money on things that really are necessary and which
are social goods, rather than the private luxuries and fripperies of fashion.
However, as was seen in Chapter 4, to discuss fashion and clothing
in terms of function was not inevitably reductionist because each function
has to appear in some cultural form. It cannot appear ‘in itself’ or as pure
function, as it were. Insofar as it has to appear in some cultural form, the
explanation will have to include the culturally specific meanings and values
that were given to items of fashion and clothing by members of the culture
in question. Consequently it cannot be reductionist; if anything it guarantees
that the cultural has to be included in any account of fashion and clothing.
The other three arguments can also be dealt with here. The first is that
capitalism, in the form of advertising, is a bad thing because it makes us
consume more, or too much, of the things that we consume. Advertising
makes us consume too much fashion or more clothes than we need. This
argument makes sense only if it is possible to buy things that are not part
of the fashion system. If everything that is available is part of a Western
and modern fashion system, then it makes no sense to say that we are
buying too much fashion. If everything that we wear is produced within a

Western and modern society, then it will be fashionable. And if everything
is produced within this fashion system, then it makes no sense to criticize
advertising for making us buy too much fashion: there is nothing else to
buy.
The second argument is that advertising is a bad thing because it makes
us consume things that we do not actually need to consume. Advertising
makes us buy fashionable goods ‘in the first place’ and we do not need
those fashionable goods and services. This was illustrated above by saying
that while we need water, food and shelter, advertising persuades us that
we need Perrier water, MacDonalds’ burgers and Scandia-hus houses.
Advertising persuades us that we need fashionable manifestations of those
needed items and the claim is that this is wrong. The problem with this
argument is that in Western and modern societies, water, food and shelter
are simply not available in non- or extra- fashionable forms. One usually
buys one’s water from the water company and while water companies may
not be everyone’s first thought when it comes to fashionable brands, they
are brands, they have brand identities and they try to win our custom in a
competitive market place. To that extent, they are fashionable items and
there is no non- fashionable version of water to be got. Similarly with food;
none of us in Western and modern societies grows, kills and processes
everything we eat. Consequently, there is no non- or extra- fashionable source
of food and there is no option but to buy those brands. And it is the same
with housing: one’s house must be built using products that are purchased
and to that extent they are part of the fashion culture of Western modernity.
Capitalist advertising cannot be chastised on the grounds that it makes us
buy things we do not need (fashion) because the things we ‘need’ cannot
be bought in any form other than the fashionable.
And the third argument is that advertising makes us spend money on
unnecessary goods and services when we should be spending it on things
we really need. So, the argument is that advertising persuades us to spend
our money on new frocks and casual shirts, rather than on schools and
hospitals. This argument is slightly different from the other two arguments
in that the other two are not inescapably moral arguments. This third
argument involves the word ‘should’ and is, therefore, a moral argument.
To the claim that we do not need fashion and fashionable goods and
services, it adds the claim that we should not consume those fashionable
goods and services. Clearly, the first problem here is that any account of
what we should consume will inevitably have to come from some position
or other and it will, therefore, be partial. It will be partial in the sense of
not being complete and it will be partial in the sense of being predisposed
one way rather than another way. So, those on the left will argue that a
society needs schools and hospitals and that these are the things upon
which members of that society should spend its money. Different groups

will have different ideas of what members of a society ‘should’ spend their
money on and there can be no obvious and non-moral ground for identifying
moral priorities. The second problem with this argument is the one noted
above, that the things we really need are not available in non-fashionable
forms. Roads, schools and hospitals come in different forms and to that
extent they are more or less fashionable items, goods and services. Hospitals
are available as foundation trusts, nationalized, community, cottage, private,
public–private co-initiatives and so on. Therefore, ‘what we really need’ is
not available in a value-free and non-fashionable form that can be opposed
to the obviously fashionable forms of frocks and casual shirts. If the neces-
sities of roads and schools cannot be distinguished from the un-necessaries
of frocks and casual shirts, then it makes no sense to say that we should
spend our money on one but not the other.
This section has investigated and rejected the charge that to consider
fashion in terms of economic function is reductionist. It has also considered
and contextualized three arguments concerning fashion’s alleged role in
making us spend our money on too much fashion, on fashion at all or not
on other things that we ‘really need’. The following section will consider
the relation between production and consumption and introduce how they
may be used to illuminate fashion and clothing.
Production and consumption

Elizabeth Wilson’s argument above concerned the prevalence and popularity
of economic explanations of fashion; in particular, the reductionist belief
that ‘the function of fashion stemmed from capitalism’s need for perpetual
expansion, which encouraged consumption’ (Wilson 1985: 49). There are
two things to note here. The first is that without production, there is nothing
to consume and, therefore, no consumption. Were it not for the produc-
tion of items of clothing, which may or may not also be in fashion, there
would be nothing for us fashionable, modern Westerners to consume.
As Karl Marx says, production appears as the ‘point of departure’ of the
economic cycle; production ‘creates the objects’, the commodities, which
are then distributed, exchanged for money and finally consumed (Marx 1973:
88–9). We have already seen that those explanations that Wilson believes
to be reductionist are not simply reductionist, because they are obliged
to include, or to rely upon, cultural values and meanings in order to make
any sense. And if by ‘expansion’ Wilson means ‘production’, then we have
another reason for saying that those explanations are not reductionist: they
have included the often neglected condition of consumption. For, as Marx
also says, production makes consumption possible and consumption makes
production possible. ‘Production mediates consumption; it creates the

latter’s material’ and ‘consumption . . . mediates production’; it creates the
subjects who consume the products (Marx 1973: 91). Production is,
therefore, at least as significant as consumption and cultural studies should
probably spend more time investigating and explaining fashion production.
The section below on production will suggest some ways in which the
balance between production and consumption may be restored in fashion
studies but it might be worth our while spending a little more time on Marx’s
analysis of the economic cycle as it is summarized in Grundrisse. Marx
identifies production, distribution, exchange and consumption as the
elements of that cycle (Marx 1973: 88). If production receives less attention
than consumption in the analysis and explanation of fashion, then the two
terms between production and consumption receive even less than
production. Accounts of distribution and exchange in fashion are vanishingly
rare. Distribution is not simply, or not only, the means of distribution, the
roads, railways, trucks, airports, planes and so on, which physically distribute
and deliver goods all over the world. Distribution also refers to what one
consumes and how much one consumes as a result of being a member of
a particular class. Exchange, similarly, is not simply, or only, to do with the
means of exchange, with cash, credit, banking houses, shops, online stores
and so on. It also has to do with how much or how many of those goods
one demands or can demand as a product of one’s class position. So, as
a working-class woman, one would probably not consume too many tiaras:
distribution of wealth and goods and exchange would see to that. Peter
Braham’s (1997) essay ‘Fashion: Unpacking a Cultural Production’ may be
read as an attempt to analyse and explain fashion in terms of the economics
of production. It uses the institutions and practices of production,
distribution and retailing to account for fashion.
The second thing of note in Wilson’s formulation is that some econ-
omists have questioned the place of consumption in economics at all.
Questions concerning the nature of consumption and the extent to which
it is a proper part of economic explanations are welcome questions. They
ask what happens after one has paid for fashionable commodities, taken
them home and worn them for a while, and they ask whether what happens
then is properly part of an economic explanation of fashion and clothing.
Marx says that for some economists, consumption strictly or ‘actually
belongs outside economics except in so far as it reacts in turn upon the
point of departure and initiates the whole process anew’ (Marx 1973: 89).
As noted, Marx is clear that production and consumption are mutually
conditioning and mutually dependent: ‘Without production, no consump-
tion; without consumption, no production’ (1973: 93). However, the relation,
in fashion at least, is not quite perfectly symmetrical. No sane fashion house
would produce anything for which there is no perceived need or desire,
indicating that consumption may be said, therefore, to drive production (to

infinity). No true fashion consumer would purchase anything that was
produced in either too large or too small quantities (indicating that only a
certain level of production drives fashionable consumption).
And as was also noted above, questioning the limits of a properly
economic explanation, or asking where, precisely, consumption ends, is to
be welcomed. Such questioning makes it possible for us to include our
wearing clothes, and wearing them out in some cases, in our explanations
of fashion and clothing. The consumption of fashion and clothing does not
end when the till receipt is printed or the acknowledgement email is received;
we continue to consume, to enjoy or to be irritated and bored by the things
we wear, for months and years after the receipt has been lost and the email
deleted. We will return to these points when we consider Tim Dant’s account
of consumption below.
Production
Another function performed by production in relation to fashion and clothing
is the ideological one identified by Angela McRobbie in her British Fashion
Design (1998). The ideological function should be conceived as being
performed as part of, not alongside or separate from, the economic function
of production. This is because, as McRobbie says, the economic cannot be
conceived as ‘existing in some pure state, untainted by the cultural and the
symbolic’ (McRobbie 1998: 5). As we saw in Chapter 4, whatever functions
fashion and clothing are said to perform, those functions must always
manifest themselves in some form, at some particular time and place: they
must take some value-based, cultural and, therefore, meaningful form. Value
and, therefore, ideology is already present in economic function. And this
is to establish the ideological function of fashion production as already part
of the economic function.
McRobbie introduces the ideological function of fashion production by
recalling Robin Murray’s characterization of people working in UK design
consultancies in the 1980s as ‘the engineers of designer capitalism’
(McRobbie 1998: 1). She says that she was puzzled by Murray’s equation
between being a designer and ‘designing for capitalism’ and wanted to ask
whether there was not, in the 1990s, a more nuanced relation between
fashion design and capitalism. McRobbie wants to remind us of the
‘beginnings’ of British fashion in the ‘sweaty spaces . . . of raves and night
clubs and in the bedrooms of the groups of girls who designed and made
their own outfits for these events’ (McRobbie 1998: 9). This reminder is
(still) important because these activities were often different from, and at
odds with, the demands and aesthetics of mainstream fashion and because
some of these girls ‘ended up’ selling their products on market stalls or to

small shops (McRobbie 1998: 9). This form of production enables these
cultural groups to mount an ideological challenge to mainstream fashion
and it is this that McRobbie wants to research and support in the rest of
the book. She also argues that these subcultures and the fashion production
that went on in them also generated other employment opportunities, to
the extent that they were ‘more popular and more successful’ than the
government’s own Youth Training Schemes of the time. Membership of
these subcultures could also initiate a process in which members went from
being consumers to being producers: some developed the skills necessary
to design and sell the items that fellow members of the group were wearing
(McRobbie 1998: 9).
Chapter 9 of McRobbie’s book investigates and documents various
aspects and examples of this form of fashion production, identifying
individuals who set up their own fashion design and production businesses
to sell their products. She is interested in the ‘producer side’ of what was,
in the 1980s, a kind of cultural experiment: young women fashion graduates
attempted to create careers and livelihoods from setting up their own fashion
design and production businesses. What is immediately clear is the
instability, insecurity and fluidity of these enterprises. The phenomenon,
which current theory calls ‘precarity’, is everywhere in McRobbie’s account
– the businesses often make little money, surviving from hand to mouth
as she says, and even a couple of weeks of illness would seriously threaten
the future existence of the business. However, there is an identifiable group
of producers who follow this do-it-yourself ethos, sourcing remnants and
cheap fabrics, using minimal equipment and their own skills to insert
themselves into local markets, stalls and shops to make a career out of
fashion production.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, mainstream capitalist companies have shown
much interest in coopting or incorporating this approach to production, or
at least profiting from the needs and desires that gave rise to it. In 2009,
the marketing communications giant J. Walter Thompson issued a work in
progress paper that attempted to identify what mainstream companies could
do to make money out of what they called ‘luxury shame’ and post-2007
recession-induced frugality (JWTwip28_.qxd available from Google Docs
2012). An increase in localized and DIY-based production, partly enabled
by the internet, was seen as the response of many consumers to increasingly
offensive globalization, mass-produced goods and exorbitant prices.
What JWT suggests businesses do to profit from this consumer trend is
to produce items that give the impression of enabling a similar DIY
involvement with products. Global brands should be ‘embracing alternative
venues and encouraging grassroots efforts’, according to JWT: they should
be giving consumers the opportunity to individualize and personalize their
purchases.

In their section on DIY fashion, JWT suggest milking the sense of
‘prestige’ that people get from being ‘frugal’: in recessionary times, when
people are worried about their future, the ‘lavish pretension’ of existing
global fashions seem ‘so showy and . . . well, stupid’. Consequently, those
brands are advised to produce goods that give the consumer some feeling
that they are in control of their own production, that they are in some sense
making the items for themselves. The authors of the JWT report heap praise
upon the UK fashion chain Topshop for managing to ‘embrace a DIY
aesthetic even as it sells the same fashions in outlets round the world’.
Some brands are also using online fashion communities to profit from this
DIY culture. Weardrobe, for example, enables fashion producers to send
clothes to girls and young women whom they have identified as being
influential online ‘authorities’ on what young women want to wear in the
hope and expectation that those girls and young women will wear them,
as they appear online in blogs and Youtube videos. Suzanne Xie of
Weardrobe can hardly contain her excitement at this prospect: ‘Imagine
having a bunch of real girls who like a brand so much that they wear and
style it for free!’, she says. The ‘egoblogging’ phenomenon, in which young
women post pictures of themselves wearing the free clothes that major
fashion companies have sent them is a developing form of marketing that
takes advantage of this new slant on fashion production. As Yolanda
Dominguez says, ‘where once we played with Barbie, now we are Barbie’
(Dominguez personal email 2012). Young girls willingly play dress-up to
turn themselves into Barbie dolls in order to market the goods of global
fashion companies without those companies doing anything more than
sending them a few clothes.
The DIY ethos in production is taken up with less soul-destroying
cynicism by many designers and producers who are interested in sustainable
and ecologically responsible forms of production. Taking its name from UK
Ministry of Information advice given to the British population during the
Second World War, Make-do-and-mend.org is a website set up by Nathalie
Gottschalk. The website explicitly sets out to counter the overly commercial
direction and motivation of the fashion industry by making one’s clothes
last longer and ‘go further’ than we are currently accustomed. The environ-
mental and social costs of over production of clothing and fashion are
countered by ‘re-vamping’ the clothes one already has. As the website says,
we do not throw out our clothes because they are worn out or too tatty to
wear; we throw them out only because they are no longer in fashion. The
website challenges the over-production of fashion by generating a different
form of production: the re-vamp re-produces the garment for a new purpose
or in a new form, thus avoiding the environmental problems involved in
production of garments.

It was noted in the example concerning War on Want’s 2012 campaign
in the introduction to this chapter that fashion production introduced issues
surrounding the politics of globalization and gender. For example, many of
the workers allegedly bullied and exploited by the companies producing the
items worn by many of the athletes at the 2012 London Olympics were
women: the gendered asymmetries of male and female presences in the
production and consumption of fashion need to be noted and explained.
Fashion, beauty and cosmetics have been more closely associated with
women and femininity than with men and masculinity since the beginnings
of fashion. And, as McRobbie has pointed out, the imbalance concerns the
production, as well as the consumption, of fashion and what we wear
(McRobbie 1998; 34–5). The workers producing the Adidas gear were said
by War on Want to be from Bangladesh and Indonesia: it has been clear
for a long time that the production and consumption of fashion items is a
global and globalizing affair (see Chapter 11 of this volume for more on
this). Large companies have found it economically profitable to move
production from Western countries, where wage demands are high, to
developing countries, where wage demands are low, thus maximizing their
profits. So, gender, globalization and politics are all part of the explanations
of fashion production here before we even begin to worry about whether
Nike, Puma, Adidas and the others are sourcing, growing or otherwise
producing their raw materials sustainably and with an eye on their ecological
footprint.
However, in their 2011 essay, ‘Green Fashion Under the Concept of
DIY’, Li Kejing and Zhao Qi are keen to investigate issues surrounding
sustainability and environmental responsibility. They point out that,
according to the UK Government’s Environment Select Committee report
in 2008, textiles and fashion waste is predicted to rise by 30 per cent a
year from 2009 onwards. Their essay is intended to argue that DIY
fashion is becoming a recognized way of countering such environmentally
unsupportable levels of waste. They begin by referring to Tavi, an American
student who makes her own recycled clothes and accessories and shows
them on her blog, ‘style Rookie’. They then go on to consider the case of
China, where they say the recycling of clothes is already ‘very common’,
with families passing clothes down through the generations, for example.
And they investigate what they call ‘multi wear clothing’. This is clothing
that has been reconstituted or refigured so that is has more than one
function. Their example is of a lady’s dress that has been re-cut so that it
may be worn as modest and functional day wear for work and, with a slight
re-arrangement, as slightly more glamorous and revealing evening wear (Li
Kejing and Zhao Qi 2011). While this is only one essay, it represents a serious
proposal that DIY production of fashionable clothing and the recycling of
existing clothing is one way of reducing the environmentally unsustainable

impact of mainstream over-production. Once again, McRobbie provides
further evidence of the development of the second-hand market in her 1989
book, and Alexandra Palmer and Hazel Clark (2004) also deal with this
increasingly fashionable phenomenon.
Consumption
It is probably true to say that most analyses and explanations of fashion,
from cultural studies and sociological perspectives, have concentrated more
on the consumption of fashion than they have on the production of fashion.
The following section will do nothing to correct this tendency but it will
explain a side of consumption that is often neglected. Where most accounts
of consumption and identity will stress the sharing of values that engender
cultural belonging and common identity, this chapter will investigate Mary
Douglas’s account of consumption as hostility. It will then consider Tim
Dant’s account of those aspects of consumption that happen long after
one has clicked the ‘Buy’ button or gotten one’s clothes home; wearing
them out.
Consumption and identity

Chapter 7 began from the observation that fashion represents one’s
identity. Jessica Alba was quoted saying that one’s identity, what or who
we are, is represented by what one wears. This section will translate this
into the statement that identity is a product of consumption; we are what
we consume. Consumption’s relation to identity ensures that consumption
will always be a politically sensitive and highly motivated area. If identity is
constructed on the basis of what one consumes and if identity is the means
by which one relates to, and differs from, others, then the potential for highly
charged and keenly contested political struggles should be clear.
Indeed, from the earliest days of fashion, care has been taken by those
in power to limit and curtail the political pretensions of those with less
power by controlling what they may or may not consume. The Sumptuary
Laws of fourteenth-century England, for example, may be explained as an
attempt on the part of the king, Edward III, to prevent the lower orders
from attaining or pretending to higher status than they were entitled to.
The laws decreed that only members of certain classes could wear certain
items or materials. Henry VIII specified that countesses must wear a
train ‘before and behind’ but that no other rank of women could wear this
form of train (Hurlock 1965: 298). The very word ‘sumptuary’ derives from
the Latin sumptus, meaning ‘expense’ and sumere meaning ‘to spend’;

sumptuary laws are, therefore, an attempt to limit the spending and
consumption of a certain class of people. These laws are, therefore, political
laws. They are political and to do with the exercise of power because one
group of people is negotiating its relations with another group of people
by regulating what they may or may not consume.
Though they would not have known it, those members of the lower
aristocratic orders who dared to wear ermine or white ruffs when they were
forbidden to all but the higher realms of the aristocracy, were practising
what cultural studies calls ‘resistance’. And modern cultural life abounds
in examples of resistance being performed through consumption. The
adbusters organization provides a highly contested example of resistance
through consumption, and people regularly argue whether their anti-brand
of sneaker is a genuine form of resistance or not. Their ‘Black Spot’ sneaker
is made from impeccably sourced, environmentally friendly and coopera-
tively produced canvas and rubber (see www.adbusters.org/campaigns/
blackspot). Its intention is to provide an alternative to the sweated,
polluting, cruel and resource-greedy sneakers produced by the globalized
giants of the leisure fashion markets. And by consuming it, one is entitled
to feel that one is playing one’s part in a green consumer revolution. It is
highly contested because there are those, including Naomi Klein, who believe
that to even have a brand and to sell products for consumption is to ‘sell
out’ (Battista 2004).
Another example of consumption as resistance is provided by Mary
Douglas (1996). Strictly, Douglas’s account is constructed using the ideas
of difference, protest and hostility, rather than resistance; but resistance
may be read here as establishing a synonym for difference, protest and
hostility. On Douglas’s account of consumption, one is not trying or
expecting to establish one’s ‘personal identity’ through what one consumes;
that would simply be ‘too difficult’ to achieve. Rather, consumption is to
do with establishing difference: one is trying or expecting to define ‘what
one is not’ (Douglas 1996: 104). Douglas’s fashionable consumer is trying
to define herself against, and in opposition to, other cultural groups. The
things she chooses to purchase are ways of establishing that she is not a
member of, indeed that she is hostile to, those other cultural groups. Her
consumer uses fashionable items to establish and protest herself as differ-
ent from and hostile to the other groups; to that extent, her consumption
is a form of resistance to those other groups.
Douglas argues that models of fashionable consumption have all
assumed that consumption may be explained in terms of either ‘swings’
or prices (Douglas 1996: 78). Consumers buy what they buy either because
the price is right or because the swing is such that some item or other is
fashionable. For Douglas, this is not much of an explanation because the
decisions are ‘mechanical, not worth further examination’ (Douglas 1996:

78). One might add that this is not an explanation because consumption
is presented as ‘mechanical’ and irrational. If consumption is simply
explained by the price being right, then consumption happens as a matter
of course and is mechanical. If it is simply the result of swings, then it
cannot be explained any further and must be deemed irrational.
Douglas also argues that it is not much of an explanation of fashion-
able consumption to say that change will happen but to be unable to say
what change will happen or when it will happen. Nor is it a satisfactory
explanation of why some things change with the fashions but other things
do not: many of us eat from forks that have remained ‘stable for many
generations’ and require specialist ‘antiquarian expertise to date them’, while
some of us do not use forks at all to eat. Douglas points out that those
supporting this explanation claim in response that only certain choices are
‘subject to swings’, that while we all might need a coat, for example, the
colour and cut of that coat are ‘optional and liable to swings’ (Douglas
1996: 78–9). This is the argument (which we have seen before in Chapter
4 on the function of fashion) that there is a distinction to be made between
what a thing is and the style in which it appears. But Douglas persists with
her argument that this reliance on style (which changes and which is simply
another kind of swing) only ‘waves away possible reasons for consumer
behaviour’ and again ‘brackets off’ fashionable consumption as ‘irrational
and unknowable’ (Douglas 1996: 79–80).
It is at this point that Douglas introduces the idea of cultural hostility.
By arguing that consumer choice in fashion is driven by one’s resistance
or hostility towards other, different cultures, by one’s attempt to differentiate
oneself from other cultural groups, she believes that she has provided a
model of the consumer as a ‘coherent, rational being’ who is making
decisions and choices about what cultural groups she is not part of, rather
than driven by swings and market prices (Douglas 1996: 81). Clearly, this
account of fashionable goods and consumption is significantly different from
the account that Douglas provided with Baron Isherwood (1979). In that
work, goods are explicitly identified as ‘neutral’ (Douglas and Isherwood
1979: 12). Moreover, where goods in Douglas (1996) are all but weapons
to be used in the hostilities between competing cultures, goods in Douglas
and Isherwood may be either ‘fences’ or ‘bridges’ (Douglas and Isherwood
1979: 12). In the earlier work, both consumer goods and their uses are less
combative; bridges are used to join two elements and enable communication
between them, and this cultural function balances the slightly more hostile
and defensive functions of the fence, dividing and protecting elements from
each other.
Douglas’s critical account of fashionable consumption may be applied
to the accounts of fashion, identity and difference as they are presented in
Chapter 7.

Consumption and wearing it out
This section returns to questioning the limits of a properly economic
explanation, which was introduced above, and is the result of asking where
consumption ends. For many accounts of fashion consumption, an account
of the ways in which individual and cultural identities are related to
consumption suffices: one is what one consumes. However, some accounts
of fashion consumption do not stop at the printing of the till receipt;
some accounts expand the view of economics to include and explain what
happens after months or years of wearing or using the items that have been
purchased.
One such expanded account is provided by Tim Dant (1999). He argues
that the meaning of jeans is not produced simply by their place in a fashion
system or by any set of cultural connotations: their meaning and status is
also produced in the interaction between garment and wearer (Dant 1999:
107). Dant considers the materiality of jeans and notes the way that denim,
the material from which jeans are made, eventually takes on the shape of
the body beneath it. One does not buy jeans that already have the exact
shape of one’s body; they come from the factory without anyone having
worn them and they need wearing in. As Dant says, the nature of denim is
such that it will take up some of the shapes of the body that is wearing it:
‘Knees, buttocks, testicles, labia, hips, thighs, all stretch the material,
moulding it in a way that doesn’t fall out when the pressure is released’
(Dant 1999: 106). As each body has differently sized and organized joints
and parts, so each pair of jeans will be stretched slightly differently through
wear. The jeans will also ‘remember’ creases (behind the knees and across
the tops of the legs, for example), which will become more faded than the
non-creased parts. As each body will sit and bend slightly differently, so the
creases will be slightly different as they are produced through constant
wear. The fading and the creasing of any pair of jeans will be unique to the
wearer, therefore, because of the nature of the material and because of
the process of prolonged wear. These phenomena are not present or
apparent immediately after purchase but, as part of the total experience
of consumption, they must be factored in to the economic account of
consumption.
There is another aspect to the folding, creasing and stretching that is
characteristic of jeans and it is one with at least one slightly surprising
consequence. In her (2005) essay ‘The Fingerprint of the Second Skin’, Kitty
Hauser describes how a bank robber in Spokane WA was identified and
convicted on the basis of evidence provided by CCTV footage of his jeans.
The prosecution successfully argued that the patterns of wear, the darker
valleys and lighter ridges of the inside and outside seams of Charles Barbee’s
jeans, were unique and they were enough to prove his presence at the scene

of the crime, despite his face and other bodily features being obscured by
a parka and a balaclava (Hauser 2005: 154–6). Hauser’s account may be
read in terms of both production and consumption. She explains how the
folded and sewn construction of the inner and outer seams of denim jeans
is different and she shows how those differences generate different kinds
of ridges and valleys. It must also be noted that the ways that those different
seams settle down and lie on someone’s body will also be different from
body to body. The location and geometry of my knees will be slightly different
from those of your knees and the folds in the seams around the knees will,
therefore, be slightly different, even if we are wearing the same brand and
model of jeans. As a result, the differences in the folds and fades are as
much the product of the process of consumption and wearing of the jeans
as they are of the production processes used in the manufacture of jeans.
These examples indicate that the account of the meaning, experience
and status of the jeans does not end at the cash register or with the online
transaction. What happens over the course of weeks, months and maybe
years is also part of the experience and phenomenon of consumption.
And what happens in that time may be pleasurable, boring, irritating or
incriminating; it must, however, be accounted for. It should not need
pointing out, but these considerations do not apply only to jeans. While
Dant may be correct to point out that the twill construction of denim is
responsible for the material stretching and creasing in certain characteristic
ways, it is the case that all materials will change over time. The fashionable
garments and other items that are made out of them will also, therefore,
change over time. Like denim, the leather in shoes and boots will also fold,
crease and fade uniquely in response to each unique foot; a crisp Sea Island
cotton shirt will soften and hang differently after a year or so; and tweed
and wool garments will become threadbare or shiny with extended wear.
In each case, the changes will be given a different reception; some will be
welcomed as providing ‘authenticity’, some will be accepted as sadly
inevitable and others will be unnoticed or met with indifference. The point
is that the experience of consumption is not limited to the purchase of the
item but also to the extended use of it – to wearing it out, or wearing it in,
as is appropriate. And it should be noted that in all of these cases, a proper
explanation involves both the production or manufacture of the item and
the consumption or destruction of the item.
Conclusion
This chapter has outlined some of the main theoretical positions available
on the matter of production and consumption in fashion. It has explained
how the production and the consumption of fashion raise political, cultural

and global issues. It is not the case that the production of fashion and
clothing is innocent or outside of the pressing political, cultural and
ecological issues raised by organizations such as War on Want: it is not
the case that these issues arise only in connection with consumption. So,
we have seen that globalization, for example, which will be dealt with in
more detail in Chapter 11, is not only a question for us as consumers but
that it also applies at the level of production. Marx’s argument that
production makes consumption possible and that consumption makes
production possible begins to bite at this precise point, and War on Want
has shown how the relation works and is effective in our everyday lives.
We have seen that there is a sense in which economic reductionism is
impossible. None of the issues surrounding the economic can be raised or
thought about without some element of the political and the cultural being
an essential part of that thought, and there is nothing reductionist about
having always to include the political and the cultural. And we have seen
that what some would see as the ‘expansion’ of the concept of the economic
to include what happens long after the initial purchase of the fashionable
item, provides further interesting and necessary explanations of our
experiences and perceptions of fashion. The next chapter will turn to the
explanation of fashion and clothing as modern and postmodern experiences
and phenomena.
Further reading
Edwards, T. (2010) Fashion in Focus, Routledge; chapter 5 on consumption
and children.
Niessen, S. (2005) ‘The Prism of Fashion: Temptation, Resistance and
Trade’, in Brand, J. and Teunissen, J. (eds) Global Fashion, Local Tradition:
On the Globalisation of Fashion, Arnhem NL, Terra.
Rivoli, P. (2006) The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, Chichester,
John Wiley and Sons.
Veblen, T. (1992) The Theory of The Leisure Class, New York, Transction
Books; classic text on conspicuous consumption.

chapter 10
Modern and
postmodern
fashion
Introduction
In her entry on Martin Margiela for fashionencyclopedia.com (Steel no date),
Valerie Steele says that Margiela is ‘very much’ a postmodern designer.
Included in the list of things that make him a postmodern designer are his
use of ‘frayed threads’ and ‘exposed linings’. These elements draw attention
to the construction and the constructed nature of the clothes we wear; they
illustrate how the parts of the things we wear are cut and joined together.
As Steele says, frayed threads and exposed linings ‘testify to the internal
construction of the garments’ and these practices make Margiela a
postmodernist fashion designer. Features such as these are often included
with other practices, such as distressing, bleaching, slashing and recycling,
to make up a strand of postmodern fashion that has become known as
‘fashion destroy’ or ‘deconstruction fashion’. When this has happened,
Margiela’s name is commonly added to a list of fashion designers that
includes Rei Kawakubo and Hussein Chalayan. Chalayan’s burying of
garments so that they begin the process of decay and decomposition is
taken to be postmodern and ‘deconstructionist’. Kawakubo’s work is often
explained as deconstructionist because of her use of pre-distressed materials
and the ironing in of permanent creases at the production stage. These
practices are described by borrowing the Japanese phrase boro boro, which
is usually translated as ‘worn out’.
modern and postmodern fashion 145

In his essay ‘Modernism and Fashion’, Kurt Back says that one of the
central characteristics of modernism is the display of those parts of
garments that are usually hidden, what he calls the ‘mechanics’ of the piece
(Back in Barnard 2007: 405). Following Foucault (1983) and Greenberg
(1965), he argues that modernism in art and design consists in the use of
the techniques and methods that are characteristic of an art form to explain
and critique that art form. On Back’s account, modernism in fashion delights
in exposing the seams, the threads and other elements of garments in order
to draw attention to the construction of garments and to announce
that ‘This is clothing’ (Back in Barnard 2007: 405). The problem now is that
some allegedly postmodernist work may be included in this account of
modernism. Chalayan has been presented as a postmodern fashion designer
and his ostensibly postmodern use of zips to change the form and structure
of garments could actually also be understood as a modernist practice
because it draws attention to the constructed nature of the garment and
the ways that the garments can be made and re-made by zipping them up
differently.
So the very practices that are the central features of postmodernism
and postmodern fashion on Steele’s account are the central features of
modernism and modern fashion on Back’s account. Steele is using
certain features or practices to stand for, or represent, postmodernism, and
Back is using the same features or practices to stand for, or represent,
modernism. Because the difference between modernism and postmod-
ernism are differences concerning the nature of representation, both of their
positions may be said to beg the question. ‘Begging the question’ is a
technical philosophical term that draws attention to the fact that a statement
is presupposing a certain answer to, or position on, what is at stake in
that statement. Back’s account of modernism in fashion is presented in
the context of it obliterating the distinction between visual and verbal
presentation (Back in Barnard 2007: 405). Steele’s account of postmod-
ernism uses the phrase ‘testify to’ to describe the situation. Both phrases
presuppose that modern or postmodern representation is a certain kind of
thing and it is precisely what kind of thing representation is that is at stake
in the difference between modernism and postmodernism. Back is self-
evidently in the realm of presentation and representation, and to say
that something testifies to something else is to reiterate the presence of
representation and to place one’s faith in the truth or trustworthiness
of that testimony. Both presuppose the existence and trustworthiness of
representation and this is precisely what is at stake in the difference between
modernism and postmodernism in fashion. Consequently, they both beg
the question.
This chapter must explain modernism and postmodernism and it must
show how fashion has been claimed to relate to both. In order to move the
146 modern and postmodern fashion

debates along, it will also try to elucidate the questions that are begged
above by explaining the differences between modernism and postmod-
ernism in fashion as differences in the understanding of what representation
is and how it works. To put it as simply as possible, representation is
one thing standing for (representing) another thing. Images stand for,
or represent, the things they are the images of, and words stand for, or
represent, what we mean or want to say. One way of thinking of repre-
sentation is provided by semiology, which says that the sign is made up of
the signifier and the signified: the signifier stands for, or represents, the
signified. The modernist understanding of representation is that, while it
may be culturally agreed (or ‘arbitrary’ as the semiologists have it), the link
between the signifier and the signified is stable and somehow guaranteed,
usually through a relation to the norms and values of a society. The
postmodernist understanding of representation is that, that stability and
guarantee is mistaken or absent, and some theorists refer to a ‘crisis’
of representation. Signifiers such as clothing and fashion are no longer
guaranteed to have the meanings, or to represent the signifieds, that they
once had and did. Consequently, the lacy blouse that was once believed to
be indecent or common in a woman’s dress, may now be thought of as
refreshingly sexy and empowering. The white shirt and Paisley tie that were
once thought to represent a positive maturity and responsibility in a man’s
dress, may now signify a stifling and negative conservatism. The values or
meanings that were represented or signified by the dress in postmodernity
are not what they were in modernity, and the process of representation
itself is experienced in postmodernity as unreliable and no longer
underwritten by the stable cultural values of modernity.
Modern fashion
I have noted elsewhere that the phrase ‘modern fashion’ is potentially
tautologous (Barnard 2007: 387). If one takes ‘fashion’ to mean the latest
style or look, and if one takes ‘modern’ to mean the most recent events or
period of time, then the phrase ‘modern fashion’ is the simple repetition
of a single idea or meaning; as such it is a tautology. Consequently, if this
chapter is to contribute anything useful, a different sense of ‘modern’ must
be found. That different sense may be found if ‘modern’ and its close relation
‘modernism’ are used to refer to, or indeed represent, a set of ideas.
Eugene Lunn (1985) identifies modernism as a set of five ideas, which
concern aesthetic form and social function. The first concerns aesthetic
self-consciousness or self-reflexiveness and it indicates the ways in which
artists and designers draw attention to the media and materials with which
they work (Lunn 1985: 34). This idea is found in modernist works from Kant’s

first Critique to Foucault’s (1970) account of the age of representation in
The Order of Things and Greenberg’s (1965) essay ‘Modernist Painting’. It
is also found in Giddens’ contention that the modern self is a project,
accomplished through reflexive monitoring (Giddens 1991: 75). And, clearly,
it is found in Back’s essay on modernist fashion, with which this chapter
began (in Barnard 2007). Modernist works informed by this aesthetic idea
often deliberately reveal themselves as ‘construction or artifice’, suggesting
that the wider social world is made and remade by historically and culturally
located human beings, not given in unalterable form (Lunn 1985: 35).
The second idea is that of ‘montage’. Montage is an artistic practice
familiar to us in the collage work of Picasso, Braque, Hannah Hoch and
Kurt Schwitters, for example, who took printed and other visual elements
from a variety of unrelated and disparate sources and combined them into
a single whole. Newsprint, magazine illustrations, wallpaper, textured
plastic coverings and sandpaper, for example, are all used in the work of
these modern artists. Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans argue that
the editing techniques of modernist cinema use montage to represent and
communicate the experience of modernity, which they say is fractured,
disjointed and dislocated (Breward and Evans 2005: 3). Third, Lunn
presents the use and experience of paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty as
the third of his modernist aesthetic ideas (Lunn 1985: 36). In the face of a
perceived lack of objective and stable truths and transcendent meaning,
modernism presents multiple viewpoints or perspectives and encourages
us to enjoy the plurality of vantage points. Lunn’s fourth idea concerns the
identity of the individual and its social function. Where romantic art
presented the individual as a structured and stable product of social
interaction, modern art shows the dehumanization and fragmentation of
the individual, whose character is a stream of sensations and for whom
experience is atomized and lacking in coherence (Lunn 1985: 37).
One would be forgiven for thinking that, rather than enumerating and
analysing the central characteristics of modernism, Lunn has instead
presented us with a handy guide to the key elements of postmodernism.
This development is entirely consistent with the old philosophical
proposition that definitions are either tautologous or incorrect. It was
suggested above that the tautology generated by the presence of the similar
sense of ‘the latest’ in both ‘modern’ and ‘fashion’ meant that the phrase
‘modern fashion’ was a tautology. And it was suggested that the tautology
might be avoided by finding and using a different sense of ‘modern’. It was,
therefore, proposed that ‘modern’ be taken to refer to a set of ideas. Having
explained that set of ideas, it has now become apparent that the tautology
has indeed been avoided but at the expense of providing an apparently
incorrect definition of modern fashion. The definition of modern fashion
that we have ended up with looks like a definition of postmodern fashion.

For example, the self-reflexiveness found in Lunn’s account of
modernism is also a central and obvious trait of many accounts of
postmodernism, and it is to be found in postmodern fashion design.
Drawing attention to the materials that are being used is arguably a central
feature of the work of designers such as Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo,
for example. Miyake’s 1999 ‘A Piece of Cloth’ project, for example,
exemplifies self-reflexivity in that certain elements of the material will
contract and prevent the item from unravelling when the cloth is cut;
attention is drawn to the materiality of the material itself and to the way it
behaves in making the garment ‘in the first place’ as it were. Kawakubo’s
practice of loosening the screws on the machine that makes the fabric, so
that what look like ‘hand-made mistakes’ or ‘faults’ appear in that fabric,
might also be seen as self-reflexively drawing attention to the constructed
nature of fashionable textiles.
The use of ‘modernist’ montage, or bricolage, is also a feature of
postmodern fashion. Montage, collage and bricolage are all ways of putting
together things that would not routinely or necessarily go together. Montage
is also used to refer to the editing of film: the move or jump from one shot
to the next may be surprising or expected. In all cases, however, it is the
juxtaposition, or placing of something next to something else (temporally
or spatially), which creates an effect. Martin Margiela’s work, for example,
which has used men’s bow-ties to make a woman’s dress or which has
taken gaffer tape to make a jacket, might be presented as using what is at
hand, or what is about, to make a garment. Margiela’s bricolage in these
examples may in turn be taken as examples of montage – the juxtaposing
of disparate elements in a larger whole. All garments feature some form of
this effect but where some are expected and conventional, others will be
unexpected and unconventional: the meaning of the garment will differ
accordingly.
Similarly, one does not have to study postmodern fashion for very long
to understand that it is nothing if it is not ambiguous and uncertain. Where
Lunn identifies the ambiguous and uncertain as essentially modernist,
postmodernism also revels in these things. As noted with regard to
Miyake’s ‘A Piece of Cloth’ project, one roll of complex knitted textile could
be turned into a variety of garments with just a few different cuts from the
scissors that were supplied. Similarly the ‘Xuly Bet’ line of clothing designed
by Lamine Badian Kouyate in the late 1980s re-uses and recycles discarded
sweaters, and Margiela’s unravelling of socks to make the sleeves of his
sweaters are both clear examples of bricolage. In bricolage the identity of
a thing may be changed to become another kind of this, and in collage and
montage elements that are not usually or customarily used together are
juxtaposed and appear in the same garment, rendering their identity and
meaning uncertain and ambiguous.

And it must be said that some examples of postmodern fashion seem
to have been especially constructed or tailored for the atomized, urban
individual who faces the collapse of stable society on a daily basis. The
Vexed Generation Parka, for example, which is discussed in more detail
below, would appear to be absolutely the right garment of choice for exactly
that individual. This account of the allegedly postmodern parka is consistent
with modernism’s interest in the critique and improvement of society, and
it may, therefore, be taken as evidence of a belief in a stable or guaranteed
meaning. Working for a better society makes sense and is possible only on
the basis of a belief in the improvability and continued existence of a stable
society that is worth improving in the first place. A garment that is produced
in order to support this critique and this improvement would be a
thoroughly modern garment, rather than a postmodern garment.
Also, the values shown in the advertising of the late nineteenth century
and the first-half of the twentieth century indicate the distinct absence of
a crisis of representation. The adverts concentrate on the quality of the
products and on the rhetorical promise that they will work and improve
your life. This is not the postmodern selection and construction of a lifestyle
through consumption that can be substituted for a different one by buying
something different next week, it is the belief that one’s purchase is a secure
investment and a reflection of stable identity and enduring values. Leiss,
Kline, Jhally and Botterill (2005) present the history of advertising as a
sequence of four phases, beginning in the 1890s and ending at the present
day, and their first and second phases might be seen to correspond
approximately with what has been called modernity here. Their first phase
is called ‘Idolatry’ because advertisements between 1890 and 1925
concentrate on the properties of the objects or commodities that are being
advertised (Leiss et al. 2005: 205). Their second phase is called ‘Iconology’
because advertisements between 1925 and 1945 emphasize the ‘abstract,
or symbolic qualities and values’ that the objects represent (Leiss et al.
2005: 207).
So, referring to the examples that they use to illustrate their argument,
the adverts for the shoe polish and the combination suits, which were
produced in the first phase, ‘venerate’ the product. The shoe polish is said
to be the ‘best dressing made’ and the combination suit keeps a body
warm but does not encumber it (Leiss et al. 2005: 208–9). The quality of
the product is stressed in both examples, along with its ‘scientific’ and
‘practical’ advantages, and the text in the advertisements adopts an almost
purely descriptive tone. There are no references in these advertisements to
lifestyles, or to how consuming them will make one into a certain kind of
person or establish a relation between the consumer and other people in
the society. These rhetorical tropes and techniques are used in later phases

of advertising and they are more postmodern than modern. They are said
to be more postmodern because they concern the way that social and
cultural identity and perceived status is produced or generated by the
consumption of the products. The advertisements in this phase, the first
of what is being claimed as a modernist phase, are to do with the object
and its qualities, asserting that it is the best, or that it will do the best job,
not that the consumption of it will make the consumer into a different kind
or person or bestow a certain status or identity upon them.
The advertisements that Leiss et al. use to illustrate the second phase,
which are for a cooker, a hat and a car, concentrate on the abstract qualities
and values of beauty, international celebrity and style, respectively. These
latter are abstractions, they are symbolic qualities and values, and they are
what the products stand for or represent. And, it hardly needs saying, the
links between the signifiers and the signifieds, between the cooker and
beauty, between the Stetson and international glamour, and between
the car and style are never in question. The relation between signifier and
signified is stable and trustworthy – that is how the advertisements work
and that stability and reliability is what they rely on in their working. Like
the advertisements that were seen in the first phase, the advertisements in
this second phase do not refer to lifestyles or to the ways that consumption
of the commodities will bestow identity or status upon the consumer.
Leiss et al. are arguing that the advertisements appeal to the sorts of
values and symbols that a culture believes to be important or attractive.
And they are assuming, in that argument, that those values must be
perceived and experienced as stable and enduring in order for the
advertisements to possess any rhetorical power at all. Consequently, the
advertisements use the values of beauty, international glamour and style
to persuade people to buy the products. Lifestyles may be seen in the
advertisements by us later (postmodern?) readers and interpreters but they
are not what is being appealed to, and they are not what is doing the work,
in the advertisements.
The account of modern fashion is therefore complicated. Some
elements have initially been identified as modernism but they have
subsequently turned out to also be central features of some accounts of
postmodernism and of postmodern fashion. Other elements have been
identified as modernism and they have indeed been found to be supported
and represented in the advertising of the first-half of the twentieth century.
It should, therefore, come as no surprise to find that some elements of
postmodernism will turn out to have surprisingly modern sympathies or
tendencies. It is to postmodernism and postmodern fashion that this
chapter now turns.

Postmodern fashion
Postmodernism may be usefully explained as a ‘crisis of representation’.
This is the phrase used by Roy Boyne and Ali Rattansi in their 1990 account,
found in Postmodernism and Society, and it is appropriate here because
representation has been central to many of the other chapters in this book,
those on identity, meaning and communication, as well as the one on the
body, for example. Representation has been used in those chapters to
describe and explain various structures and practices in which one thing is
understood as standing for another thing. The clothes and fashions that
we wear, for example, have been explained as standing for our social, cultural
and other identities: the clothes and fashions are not our social or cultural
identities but they stand for them and represent them. So my striped club
tie is not my masculinity but, in the culture that I am a member of, it stands
for or represents masculinity. My Tommy Hilfiger jacket is not fashion but
it stands for, or represents, fashion. And, like me, my Levi 501s are neither
youthful nor American but they stand for, or represent, those values
or meanings. None of these things is, literally, masculinity or fashion or
America, but the culture and the society I am part of use and understand
these things to signify masculinity and fashion and America. That is what
they mean; that is the value or meaning that they stand for, represent or
signify.
The crisis that Boyne and Rattansi refer to comes about when the
structures of representation begin to break down or lose their certainty. The
crisis happens when the link or the connection between the signifier and
the signified becomes less trustworthy. The argument is that where the link
between signifier and signified (between the thing doing the representing
and the meaning or value that is represented) was once stable, reliable and
predictable (as in modernism), that link is now unstable, unreliable and
unpredictable (postmodernism).
So, for example, where once the sight of exposed female flesh would
have represented indecency or signified that the woman was a prostitute,
it might now represent female empowerment or signify a relaxed and playful
approach to sexual pleasures. And where a striped club tie would once have
represented respectability or have signified a middle-class identity, it might
now be worn ironically or indeed without any knowledge of either clubs or
membership. As Andrew Hill reminds us, ‘clothing is no longer associated
with the type of social hierarchies it once was’ (Hill 2005: 73). Items of
clothing can no longer be trusted to represent or signify the class and cultural
structures and hierarchies they once did: the meanings and values that they
once represented in straightforward and predictable ways are no longer clear,
and entirely different meanings and values may now be represented and
signified.

Where once the relations between items of clothing and the values that
gave them meaning were fixed, and commonly understood or believed in,
the ‘crisis’ means that they are now shifting and either not understood or
not believed in. The stable values and beliefs held by a class or a culture,
which will have included aesthetic, as well as moral or political values, and
in relation to which the world, including the world of clothing and fashion,
was rendered meaningful, are now unstable. Consequently, the meanings
are also unstable and they are no longer guaranteed by those values. The
reliable moral code of a class or culture, for example (in terms of which
exposed female flesh meant prostitution or indecency, for example),
now exists alongside, or has been replaced by, a series of shifting and
different codes, including those to do with gender, pleasure and display.
Consequently, exposed flesh no longer signifies or represents what it once
did. Different values concerning gender, pleasure and display (which are
not necessarily shared by all members of a society), now generate different
meanings or alternative signifieds for exposed female flesh, including those
of an empowered and playful attitude to sexual pleasure noted above.
Exposed flesh no longer represents what it represented before because the
social structures and the values that inhabited them are changing and they
are no longer guaranteed to generate the same meanings as they did before.
The crisis in representation may be understood as having two main
consequences for fashion and fashion design. The first is that fashion is
now interested in the mechanics of how clothing and fashion work, how
garments are put together; fashion designers are now intrigued by how
garments become, or are thought of, or are made into ‘fashion’. An absence
or a lack of meaning in this crisis has forced us to consider how meaning
is made, what the conditions for the possibility of meaning are and designers
are responding to this by showing how clothes are made and how ‘fashion’
comes about. Second, the past is now seen as a dressing-up box, a repository
of styles and looks that may be plundered and dipped into in order to
make a new look. This conception of fashion and the past may be compared
with the idea that, while fashion may have a memory, it has no history,
introduced in Chapter 5 above. Fashion designers’ ‘thinking’ is that, if there
is no longer any stable and guaranteed link between representation and
represented, or between signifier and signified, then signifiers in the form
of clothes may be taken and used in any combination to mean anything
at all.
Streetstyle
Ted Polhemus’s account of contemporary fashion is a good example of this
second aspect of how postmodernism has been understood. In the 2010
second edition of his Streetstyle, he develops and elaborates the idea of

fashion as a ‘supermarket of style’, which he introduced in the 1994 edition
and which he relates to Frederic Jameson’s idea of nostalgia. He says
that present-day fashion cannot resist hitting the ‘nostalgia mode’ button:
rather than concentrating on just one of the styles from the past and dressing
in that style, the supermarket of style presents all of the styles and tastes
from the past, ‘from Zooties to Beatniks, Hippies to Punks, New Romantics
to Ravers’, as though they were cans of soup on a shelf to be sampled
(Polhemus 2010: 211). For Polhemus, the postmodern idea is that the
fashions and visual styles of all the subcultural groups from the past are
available for quotation, sampling and mixing. In the supermarket, one may
take Hippy beads, a Biker belt, a ‘Target’ T-shirt and a safety-pin piercing
to combine them into a single ensemble. These styles and fashions may
be contrasting or even contradictory in the sense that the Bikers who would
have worn the belt would have had little sympathy for the Mods who
would have worn the T-shirt or with the Hippies and their beads. The values
and beliefs of the cultural groups whose styles are being sampled and
mixed, which would have conflicted and possibly have led to physical conflict
between the groups, are either dismissed by, or unknown to, those dressing
up in those styles. As Polhemus says, ‘the looks of yesteryear are strip
mined for any vestige of meaning and . . . pounded into an amalgam’
(Polhemus 2010: 211).
It is not clear, however, that this witless aping of past styles is the same
thing that Jameson refers to as ‘nostalgia’, or indeed that it is nostalgia at
all. To be sure, Jameson presents postmodernism as ‘eclecticism’, and he
explains this eclecticism as the cannibalizing of past styles and the
combination of them into an ensemble. This is clearly the process that
Polhemus is describing in terms of fashion. However, Jameson doubts
whether ‘nostalgia’ is the correct word to describe such an eclecticism and
such a ‘fascination’. More precisely, he doubts whether it is nostalgia, especi-
ally when he compares it with a ‘properly modernist nostalgia’ (Jameson
1994: 18–19). This properly modernist nostalgia involves the ‘pain’ that
comes with the realization that the past is irretrievable, except in some
aesthetic form. The ancient Greek algos means ‘pain’ and it forms the second
part of ‘nost-algia’. Polhemus’s postmodern young people are feeling no
pain as they mix and match the styles on the shelves of the supermarket,
and to that extent they are not being nostalgic. Nostalgia would appear to
be a modernist position, which involves feeling pain in the remembrance
of what is past and lost, and it is modernist precisely because it involves
feeling that pain. Polhemus’s postmodern fashions quote and pastiche the
past but the eclecticism involves no pain and is it not, therefore, nostalgia
at all. Polhemus’s postmodern fashions are all aesthetic form and no painful
content.

The double-page spread over pp. 212–3 in Polhemus’s second edition
shows 26 young people happily mixing and matching styles from all of youth
culture’s past. Converse sneakers, skater gear, ripped tights, rave and nu-
rave, biker jackets, hoodies, hippy and punk hair, sportswear and a bow-tie
can all be found sampled in the photographs on these pages. As Polhemus
says, these people are ‘jumping around’ in history, they are ‘thumbing their
noses’ at history (Polhemus 2010: 211). They are not interested in the values
or the beliefs of the groups who once made those styles their own, and
they are not interested in whether those values and beliefs conflict or
contradict each other: those would be modern concerns. And they are
certainly not pained by the passing or lostness of these styles or the values
and beliefs that went with them. Polhemus is surely right to ventriloquize
them as saying ‘we’ve got our own lives to lead’ and that they take their
heritage with ‘a pinch of salt’ (Polhemus 2010: 211). Again, this is far from
nostalgia.
These examples from Polhemus have been used to illustrate the second
of the consequences of the crisis of representation: the argument that
postmodern fashion is a kind of dressing-up box of equally meaningless
and historically dislocated styles. The following two examples will illustrate
the first consequence of this crisis, the idea that postmodern fashion
is concerned with the ‘mechanics’ or ‘construction’ (and subsequent
‘deconstruction’) of garments and fashion. The next section will show how
Jameson’s insistence that nostalgia is not nostalgia unless it involves pain
and that nostalgia is only ‘properly modernist’ if it feels this pain, comes
into conflict with the central concepts of modernism. Proper modernism,
in the form of the Vexed Generation Parka, will be seen to involve the desire
to improve society and make a better future, not only to feel the pain of a
lost past.
The Vexed Generation 1994 Parka

The misunderstandings, ironies and paradoxes surrounding the alleged
differences between modernist and postmodernist fashions also swirl
around the next example of so-called postmodern fashion, the Vexed
Generation’s Ballistic Parka.
Designed in 1994 by Adam Thorpe and Joe Hunter, and launched in
1995, the parka was made from ballistic nylon and Kevlar and featured a
deep hood and a collar that pulled out to cover the lower part of the face.
It incorporated protective padding around the kidneys and the spine and
it fastened between the wearer’s legs (as did the original M65 US Army
parka from 1965) to protect the groin. The pocket on the left sleeve was
large enough to hold a face-mask and a matching backpack was also
available.

Writing in the New York Times, Penelope Green introduces her analysis
and explanation of the Vexed Generation’s Parka by referring to Ted
Polhemus on the nature of postmodernism. Polhemus’s statement, ‘Post-
modern theorists from Frederic Jameson to Jean Baudrillard see the
elusiveness of authenticity as the fundamental crisis of our age’ (Polhemus
1994: 7), is taken to mean that postmodern fashion is about making it, or
keeping it, real (Green 1998). In support of this, she quotes Adam Thorpe
as saying ‘Our thing initially was to make clothes in reaction to the erosion
of civil liberties in Britain’ (Green 1998). The parka was designed in the
wake of the Conservative Government’s 1994 Criminal Justice and Public
Order Act (UK), which was hugely unpopular with many people who
understood it to be an attack on the various alternative cultures proliferating
in and around London, as well as on civil liberties. The parka’s deep hood,
therefore, was seen as being very useful for keeping surveillance cameras,
as well as the rain, out of one’s face; the ballistic nylon and Kevlar could
protect against small arms fire, as well as the only slightly less unlikely knife
crime, and the padding was seen as protection from police truncheons.
With their face mask in the sleeve pocket and their matching backpack
holding all the other requisites of modern urban life, the postmodern
individual could consider him or her self fashionably equipped.
While the above description tries to be neutral and objective, tries indeed
to be descriptive, the analysis and explanation cannot even pretend to be
neutral or descriptive. Every aspect of the parka is tied to a political or a
politico-functional value. Every aspect of the parka, therefore, is tied to
something that is not very, or not at all, postmodern. There is no crisis of
representation here; the meaning of the parka is entirely generated by its
relations to political values and to the functions of the parka in pursuit of
those values. There is no crisis of authenticity here either, as the parka is
conceived and worn as a response to the ‘real’; every aspect of it exists to
evade, outwit or otherwise protect the wearer from the forces of the ‘real’.
However, in Green’s article, Thorpe is also quoted as saying that ‘We
wanted to parody British police riot gear’ (Green 1998). The look, the style
and the materials of the parka are intended as a ‘parody’ of those of the
British riot police. It is not clear whether he has Jameson’s account of parody
in mind or whether he knows that Jameson’s account trades on the
distinction between parody and pastiche, but ‘parody’ is the word Thorpe
uses to describe the relationship with what the British riot police were
wearing. In that it describes a relationship, it therefore describes the politics
of the parka. In a potentially surprising reversal of the usual dismissive
description of postmodernism as a parody of politics, Thorpe’s parka enacts
a politics of parody. In Jameson’s account, parody has a satirical impulse,
it laughs at the thing it mimics and it has a faith or a conviction in
itself as a ‘healthy’ alternative or ‘normality’ (Jameson 1991: 17). There is

something inevitably modern about parody, whereas the more postmodern
pastiche is a ‘random cannibalization’ of all styles and a ‘random stylistic
allusion’ (Jameson 1991: 18). Pastiche is neutral, blind and blank – it has
no faith in itself as a healthy or valuable alternative (Jameson 1991: 17). It
is clear that the parka is parody rather than pastiche because it performs
its functions in the interests of resisting a dominant and offensive power
and it is explicitly intended to provide a real and workable alternative, not
simply because it has cannibalized a style it likes. To that extent, and for
that reason, it is actually a modern fashion item rather than a postmodern
fashion item.
Hussein Chalayan 2000 ‘Afterwords’

Hussein Chalayan is routinely included in surveys of postmodern and
deconstructive fashion. Nathalie Khan locates him firmly within the
postmodern crisis of representation when she says that the ‘images’ in his
catwalk shows are ‘never given explicit meaning’ and that the ‘spectator’
is left to ‘interpret what they see’ (Khan 2000: 121). Khan also argues that
Chalayan’s Autumn/Winter 2000 ‘Afterwords’ collection ‘created an
unmediated reality’ in which his work was ‘suspended from meaning’ and
which the very idea of the catwalk was ‘turned on its head’ and ‘freed’ from
its own conventions (Khan 2000: 122). Where there is no ‘explicit meaning’
and the spectator is left to interpret what they see, the connection between
signifier and signified is unguaranteed by the designer, and meaning is,
therefore, not determined by authorial or designerly intention. And the idea
of a crisis of representation is surely found in the talk of turning practices
on their heads, of freeing practices from their own rules and conventions,
and of a suspension from meaning. The use of ‘after’ in the very title of the
collection, ‘Afterwords’, suggests the ‘post’ of ‘postmodernity’, and it may
be taken to hint that the collection seeks to investigate or discover
something after or posterior to the sense and meaning of words that we
language-users are familiar with.
Chalayan’s collection was apparently ‘inspired’ (usedmagazine.co.uk
2012) by the plight of refugees having to leave their homes in terror, taking
nothing but what they wore and what of their possessions they could carry.
Global television coverage of the Bosnian and Croatian wars of the 1990s
and the 1999 war in Kosovo was characterized by the sight of thousands
of displaced people, refugees, fleeing their towns and villages. Chalayan’s
own Turkish-Cypriot family was displaced following the Turkish invasion
of Cyprus in 1974, when, according to the UNHCR (United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees), 60,000 Turkish Cypriots moved from
the south of the island to the north and 200,000 Greek Cypriots made the
reverse journey.

Held in the Sadler’s Wells theatre in London, the 2000 show may fairly
be said to have turned the catwalk on its head and freed itself from the
conventions of traditional shows. Set in a stark white room, and in front of
an a cappella choir whose members, dressed in Kosovan costume, were
behind a glass window and whose performance of folk songs was displayed
on a large television screen, ‘Afterwords’ was as much performance art as
it was design show. Four models entered the scene, which was made up
of a central table surrounded by four chairs. The models proceeded to take
the covers off the chairs and wear them as dresses. The chairs were then
folded up into themselves and made to look like suitcases, which the models
walked away with. Finally, a fifth model stepped into the hole in the middle
of the central table, pulled the hole up to her waist and walked off wearing
the skirt that had been thus formed. One may plausibly suggest that the
conventions of traditional fashion shows, according to which the scenery
and the props are clearly understood to be different from the clothes that
the models are wearing, have been comprehensively turned on their heads.
Fashionable clothing and items of furniture have been shown to be, not
different kinds of thing but the same thing. And one may equally plausibly
suggest that the show had freed itself from the convention of the fashion
show according to which models wear clothes and parade out along a
catwalk and then back again. There is no simple temporal syntagm or
sequence here – the show was non-reversible in that the clothes and the
props were transformed by being worn by the models and they did not turn
back, or return, to what they were before.
However, the other claims to postmodernity, that the collection has
‘created’ its own ‘unmediated reality’, and that in the absence of an ‘explicit
meaning’ the spectator is free to construct their own ‘interpretation’, are
much less easy to support. The whole point of the collection, according to
Khan and the other journalists who covered it, was to make a series of
political and humanitarian points about terror, (dis)possession and national
identity. As ‘realities’ go, the experience of being shelled while undergoing
territorial dispossession and having one’s national identity forcibly removed
is probably about as ‘unmediated’ as it is possible to get. The idea that
representing those experiences in a fashion show, held in a London theatre
thousands of miles from the action, is ‘unmediated’, is surely as offensive
as it is mistaken. It is also to fail to understand the concepts of ‘mediation’
and representation. The events of these wars and their effects on people
were represented in the chairs that turned into suitcases and the seat covers
that turned into dresses: they were metaphors for being able to take only
what one wears or can carry. They thus mediate the experiences: they are
not the experiences but they stand for and represent the experiences.
Similarly, if Chalayan’s work was even slightly ‘inspired’ by the experiences
of his family and others in having to leave their homeland, then it seems

either insensitive or idiotic to suggest that the meaning is not made ‘explicit’
but that the spectator is to be left to construct their own ‘interpretation’.
The meaning is perfectly explicit: it is about war, refugees and territorial
dispossession, and it is not up to the spectator to make up their own
meaning.
There is another level on which the matter of the collection’s post-
modern nature may be discussed. This level is also metaphorical in that it
concerns the transformations and translations of the items of furniture into
articles of clothing and fashion. The Table-Skirt in the performance, for
example, begins as a table and becomes a skirt when the hole in it is raised
from the floor to the model’s hips. However, if it is to work as a table, one
must take it off, leaving one naked from the waist down. If one is not to
be left naked from the waist down, one must wear another skirt beneath it
and this, in what some would see as typical postmodern or deconstructive
fashion, negates the entire purpose of the thing in the first place. The chair,
which becomes a suitcase, operates in a similar way. The chair folds up to
look like a suitcase, which may be carried. And the suitcase, which is carried,
unfolds to become a chair, which may be sat on. However, although the
chair folds to become a suitcase, it folds to contain nothing but itself. This
metaphor is itself translated or transformed: this second translation
becomes a metaphor for what some would see as the self-regarding and
empty nature of much so-called deconstructive fashion design.
However, if one is to take postmodernity as a crisis of representation
and then take it seriously or deal with it properly, one must surely under-
stand that that crisis is this apparently endless series of transformations:
the seemingly infinite deferral of meaning into or onto another signifier, is
what one must understand as postmodernity. It is also possible to argue
that what has been presented as a crisis, the idea that the link between
signifier and signified is no longer guaranteed by an aesthetic or a politics,
simply describes the conditions for any meaning at all. If that is the case
then it is neither a crisis nor postmodern, but an account of the situation
that normally obtains in the production of meaning.
Conclusion
The attempts to define modernism and postmodernism and then to use
those definitions to explain fashion have been seen to generate many
problems. First, the definition and central ideas of some people’s accounts
of modernism began to look disturbingly like other people’s accounts of
postmodernism when it came to applying them in the explanation of fashion.
Second, when it came to using those definitions to explain postmodern
garments, the examples of supposedly postmodern fashion proved to have

suspiciously modern allegiances and sympathies. Many of the features or
characteristics that have been proposed as being central to modernism were
shown to be convincingly exemplified by designers and garments that are
routinely paraded as postmodern. What was thought to be modernism
resembled postmodernism in these cases. The Vexed Generation Parka
turned out to be politically committed to critiquing and improving society
and Chalayan’s ‘Afterwords’ turned out to be a simple description and
performance of the way that metaphor and meaning operate, as well as a
representation of the experience of being a refugee. In these cases, what
was thought to be postmodern resembled modernism.
In what some would see as postmodern style, modernist tenets and
principles turn out to be the defining features of what many theorists identify
as postmodern fashion, and what many theorists identify as postmodernism
in fashion turns out to be modernism. What Polhemus identifies as nostalgia
in postmodern fashions turns out to be nothing of the sort and on Jameson’s
account nostalgia turns out, unexpectedly, to be both a properly modernist
mood and not modern at all. The following chapter will explain two aspects
of fashion that also came to postmodern prominence at the end of the
twentieth century: globalization and colonialism.
Further reading
Breward, C. and Evans, C. (eds) (2005) Fashion and Modernity, Oxford, Berg.
Cixous, H. (2009) ‘Sonia Rykiel in Translation’, in Benstock, S. and Ferris,
S. (eds) On Fashion, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press.
Evans, C. (2003) Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness,
New Haven, Yale University Press.
Lehmann, U. (2000) Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity, Cambridge, MA, MIT
Press.

chapter 11
Globalization
and colonialism
Introduction
In 2004, Tommy Hilfiger Apparel was launched in Mumbai, India. The
tommy.com website is happy to describe Hilfiger as a global brand and
says that they produce a range of clothing ‘celebrating’ the ‘essence of
Classical American Cool’ and provide a ‘refreshing twist’ on the ‘preppy
fashion genre’. Mumbai is a city of 12 million people, made up of 70 per
cent Hindu, 20 per cent Muslim and 10 per cent Jewish, Christian and Jain
religious groups, speaking a variety of languages, including Marathai, Hindi,
Gujarati and English. As ‘Tommy’ says in the ‘diversity’ subsection of the
‘social responsibility’ section of the tommy.com website, ‘I create my clothes
for all different types of people, regardless of their race, religious or cultural
background’. Three years later, in November 2007, Hilfiger felt confident
enough to open their first freestanding store in Delhi. In a filmed interview,
the Bollywood film actor and model Arjun Rampal, who is from a Delhi
family, was happy to endorse the brand, posing in front of the store and
saying that he finds Hilfiger’s clothes ‘easy to wear’ and ‘comfortable’. The
store itself is also shown in the interview (on livemint.com), as the camera
pans across the polo shirts and chinos, and takes a tour of Hilfiger’s familiar
blond wood floors, cream walls, stainless steel rails and dark wood fitments.
In 2012, the globaltommy.com website indicates that there are 46 stores
or outlets in 17 Indian cities, from Jaipur in the north to Cochin in the south.
The events described in this brief paragraph introduce many ele-
ments of the difficult and complex debate that surrounds globalization.
globalization and colonialism 161

Globalization is sometimes presented as the process in which cultures are
enabled to buy and enjoy Western goods, such as fashion, that were once
unavailable to them. Should we, therefore, praise and support socially
responsible ‘Tommy’ for his inclusive and tolerant approach to different
cultures and religions? Hilfiger could be seen as welcoming and embracing
other cultures by enabling them to buy and buy into this attractive global
vision. Globalization is also sometimes presented as a process in which
local cultures are subsumed or incorporated into more powerful Western
cultures. So should we rather censure cultural imperialist ‘Tommy’ for
forcing or encouraging all the members of those different local cultures to
wear exactly the same clothes as dominant Western cultures? Is this not a
form of American ‘colonialism’? After all, Hilfiger could also be seen as
forcing a ‘one style suits all’ approach on the varied and different cultures
that make up the fashion world.
And should we feel sorry for Rampal for the loss of his heritage and
cultural roots: should we chastise him for becoming a local corporate shill
for Hilfiger’s homogenized globo-fashion; or should we envy him for his
relaxed and charming cosmopolitanism? Are we to welcome the fact that
a new group of consumers has been given the chance to become fashionable
global citizens by owning these attractive and sexy clothes, or are we to
question the morality of encouraging Jains and Muslims to consume
immodest and materialist ‘preppy’ styles? And, finally, who is this ‘we’ on
behalf of whom I am claiming to speak? I am white, male, middle class
and European: what would I know of how black Muslim women in India
might respond to Hilfiger’s enticements? And who or what could give me
authority to speak and write on their behalf? Who, then, are ‘we’ to ask or
answer these questions?
This apparently simple story about Tommy Hilfiger opening a fashion
store in Mumbai has turned out to be a very complicated story about cultural
identity, cultural politics and colonialism, which begins to question even
the identity and moral position of the author. This chapter must begin to
address these issues and answer these questions that have complicated
the original and apparently simple story.
What is globalization?
One may characterize globalization very simply as the sense that wherever
one goes in the world one is in the same place. Roland Robertson, for
example, says that globalization is the ‘crystallization of the entire world as
a single place’ (Robertson, quoted in Arnason 1990: 220). This means that,
wherever one is, one sees the same shops selling the same products as
one sees ‘at home’. It also means that one sees the same advertisements
162 globalization and colonialism

and marketing for those products. In turn, seeing the same products and
the same advertisements indicates that one is in the same economic system,
that capitalism still surrounds one. However, more significantly, this
characterization suggests that one encounters the same values, ideas
and beliefs wherever one goes in the world. Given that one is allegedly
encountering the same products, the same economic system and the same
beliefs and values when one is ‘away’ as one does at ‘home’, one is also
likely to be taking part in the same practices. Those practices may be
economic (one’s credit card still works, for example) or cultural (one is
still able to display one’s body in the night club, for example) or political
(as affluent consumer, one is still king or queen). Ultimately, this char-
acterization of globalization, as the sense that wherever one goes one is in
the same place, is the idea that the culture, economics and politics that
one encounters are the same everywhere one goes.
There is a less simple characterization of globalization, which adds the
idea that this allegedly global cultural, economic and political phenomenon
is actually always in relation to something that is not the same as it. This
is the idea that globalized culture is not a monolithic or omnipresent
phenomenon but there are elements within the world that are not part of
that globalizing culture. It is argued that globalizing culture always and only
exists in relation to local cultures, which are everywhere and which are
different from globalizing culture. Les Back’s account of globalization, for
example, makes room for cultural, economic and political difference when
he argues that globalism is not inevitably only about making all places the
same; homogenization is not the complete story. He argues that ‘global
interconnection cannot completely integrate human societies that remain
spatially dispersed’. Even within the ‘global circuits of capital and culture’,
he says, ‘something distinctly local remains . . . or may even be being
fostered’ (Back 1998: 64). On Back’s account, local cultures will always
exist as different from the globalizing culture. This must mean that they
will represent values, and provide practices and objects that are not the
same as those of the globalizing culture. Those practices will, or may, be
economic, political or cultural in other ways. These local cultures will, there-
fore, exist politically, as different from, and as alternative to, globalizing
culture. They will exist economically, as units and identities that are not
simply those provided or imposed by global capital. And they will exist in
other cultural forms; as resisting or refusing the items that global culture
has to offer and dealing with their own cultural forms, practices and objects.
One may argue about the priority of the economic, the political and the
cultural (see Giddens 1990: 69, for example) but, as we have seen in previous
chapters, an account of the economic makes little sense without the political,
the political account always has need of an economic aspect and culture

affects, and is affected by, both the political and the economic. Priority is
the least of our worries.
Back’s example of this is the weather-vane in the form of a ship that
sits on the tower of Deptford Town Hall in south-east London. He begins
by describing the way that such ships originally connoted the globalizing
and colonializing ambitions of Tudor England and then the imperialism of
the UK’s role in the slave trade. He then introduces the way that such ships,
and the Thames on which they were built and sailed, are the gateways to
an alternative history of London and the Thames. This alternative history
includes the history of slavery, and it includes the ways in which people
such as Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano changed the perception of
black people in the eighteenth century, ultimately making it possible for
Caribbean intellectuals such as C. L. R. James to use the city to transform
the history of empire and challenge the very (globalized) forms of knowledge
that were produced there (Back 1998: 64–70). Edward Said describes this
interweaving of local and global elements in the histories of supposedly
monolithically imperialist Western cities by asking us to perform the
impossible task of separating out the Algerian and Indian influences from
Paris and London (Said 1993: 15). Other versions of this more complex
conception of the relation between local and global are found in the work
of Arjun Appadurai and Homi Bhabha. Appadurai says that ‘global/local’
cannot be understood in terms of ‘centre/periphery’ models; he argues that
there is a ‘disjunctive order’, which ensures that globalization is not the
same everywhere in relation to the local and that must be taken into account
(Appadurai 1990: 296). Bhabha’s notion of cultural ‘hybridization’ and his
argument that supposedly resistance-free globalization must always ‘deal
with the difference within’, the problems of diversity at the local level, also
complicate the relation between the global and the local (Bhabha 1994:
xv and 277).
What is colonialism?
Colonialism is related to globalization in that it, too, concerns the
domination of one group of people by another group of people. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, powerful European nations, such as
Great Britain, Spain and Holland, scoured the globe seeking out new
products and new markets. Simplifying and generalizing, British traders went
to Africa, Spanish traders went to the Americas and the Dutch went to
Indonesia. Local cultures experienced the power of, and were forced to adapt
to, these Western countries. Colonialism is related to globalization in that
it, too, is thoroughly political; it concerns the economic and cultural ways
in which those colonized cultures resisted and escaped the domination of

the Western countries. The theory becomes post-colonial theory when
we consider more recent history and we are obliged to explain how the
‘original’ and local cultures relate to the invading cultures: do we speak of
hybrid cultures, of glocalized cultures or of local cultures? These issues are
complicated and the global/local debates map partially onto the colonizing/
colonized debates. These issues are manifested in the second example
below: the safari jacket. Their country’s colonial past, its domination and
exploitation by Great Britain, is represented by the jacket for many Zambians.
They argue, therefore, that it should not be in the national coat of arms.
For other Zambians, the jacket represents national identity and they argue
that it should remain.
Globalization and fashion

Many theorists agree that globalization is as old as capitalism and many
also agree that fashion begins with capitalism. Marx and Engels, for example,
describe modern capitalists chasing all over the globe in search of new
markets and new consumers for their commodities (Marx and Engels 1985:
83–4). And Elizabeth Wilson argues that early capitalism encouraged the
rapid consumption of changing styles or fashion (Wilson 1985: 22). Some
people claim to see the beginnings of globalization as early as the Han
Dynasty of second-century BCE China or in the way the Roman Empire
dominated and colonized the Middle East and Europe. Others propose the
economic consequences of Marco Polo’s explorations in the late thirteenth
century as the start of globalization. However, more people see the
beginnings of globalization in the early days of European capitalism in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is a similar story with the beginnings
of fashion. The changing styles in draped cloth and hairstyles in Ancient
Greece and Rome are sometimes cited as the beginnings of fashion, as are
the differences between French and English clothing styles illustrated in the
Bayeux Tapestry. Again, however, more theorists and historians are agreed
that fashion first appeared alongside early capitalism, when new socio-
economic class structures came into existence and mobility between those
classes became possible. Fashion is, therefore, more closely related to
globalization than might be suspected and we should not be surprised that
asking when fashion and globalization began is actually quite like asking
when capitalism began.
One may read John Flügel’s account of the difference between fashion
and anti-fashion, or modish and fixed forms of dress as he has it, in terms
of local and global. As we noted in Chapter 3, modish dress or fashion
changes little in space but changes rapidly in time, and fixed dress changes
little in time but varies widely from place to place. Flügel’s fixed dress may,

therefore, be thought of as an example of local culture, providing difference
from, and resistance to, globalizing culture, which takes the form of fashion.
His account includes the idea that modish dress, fashion, is homogeneous
and differs little in space and it includes the idea that fixed dress, anti-
fashion, differs widely in space and thus bears comparison with Back’s
account of the local and the global. Clearly, what Flügel’s argument lacks
is an account of the cultural values and beliefs, and the practices that
accompany those values and beliefs. His account also lacks any reference
to the politics that Back identifies, but basically, and in essence, it is not
incompatible with an account of the global and the local.
Flügel’s account of fashion as fixed and modish may also be read in
the light of Giddens’ account of globalizing modernism. Giddens says that
globalization may be defined as ‘the intensification of worldwide social
relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings
are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’ (Giddens
1990: 64). Globalization is the way in which different and distant places
affect one another; events in a prosperous Singapore neighbourhood
may cause the impoverishment of a community in Pittsburgh whose ‘local
products’ become uncompetitive (Giddens 1990: 64–5). If one imagines
a community in India, for example, wearing what Flügel would call fixed
dress suddenly being inundated with fashionable items because Tommy
Hilfiger, say, had opened a store locally, one would see exactly the process
described by Giddens taking place. Flügel’s fixed-dress wearing community
is affected by globalization, by things happening a long way away and it
starts to wear fashion, which changes quickly in time and little in space.
It is slightly more difficult to imagine how the ‘vice versa’ element of
Giddens’ account might work in this example, but it is not inconceivable
that local religious groups would object to the immodesty of some of the
garments and cause Hilfiger to re-cut or remove the offending items. To
this extent, the monolithic model of globalization is seen to be inadequate
to any explanation of fashion.
Margaret Maynard also questions the simple nature of fashion’s role
in globalization conceived as the ‘crystallization of the entire world as a
single place’ (Robertson, quoted in Arnason 1990: 220). She begins chapter
2 of her Dress and Globalisation by presenting what ‘appears on the surface
to be the overarching uniformity of clothing’ around the world (Maynard
2004: 32). Her illustrations show young men in Kathmandu in Nepal and
Winchester in England wearing items that are pretty much indistinguishable.
She also cites Jennifer Craik’s account of ‘everyday fashion’ as a ‘dominant
system’ and Naomi Klein’s argument that globalization ‘does not want
diversity’ as evidence of the plausibility of this position (Maynard 2004:
33–4). Also contributing to this perception are the advertising and marketing
rhetorics of transnational companies such as Nike, Benetton, Diesel and

Gap, with their ‘United Colors’, ‘Nike World’ and ‘Diesel Planet’ sloganizing.
The connotation of these slogans is that there is one Diesel planet, and
one Nike world and that we are all united in Benetton’s colors. There is no
plurality of cultures and no coexistence of different worlds or different planets
in the globalizing slogans of contemporary fashion.
However, Maynard claims that what appears as a globalized generality
and sameness in what people around the world wear is an illusion or the
result of insufficiently critical and discerning analysis. We need to look again
and more closely at what people actually make of the things they wear.
When we do this, we find that there is difference and diversity in local
markets. Despite globalized production (see below), Mexicans understand
Nike as an American brand, even when the items are made in Mexico
(Maynard 2004: 38). In terms of consumption, what appears as homog-
enization when people from sub-Saharan Africa are seen wearing Western
fashions turns out to be the result of discerning choices made from second-
hand markets and of alterations made ‘to match their own personal style
and local sartorial conventions’ (Maynard 2004: 40). The uniformity is
superficial, and different meanings and identities are being constructed
constantly through the use of these clothes.
So, while ‘global clothing may appear to be largely undifferentiated
. . . its wearing certainly is not’ and the fact that people all over the world
appear to be wearing much the same thing does not mean that global-
ized clothing is in any way ‘egalitarian’. There are many ways in which
increased globalization has in fact led to increased differentiation and
to increased hierarchization of consumption (Maynard 2004: 41–2). The
same digital technology that makes online purchasing of items so easy,
also makes it possible for the unique customization of styles and the
DIY creation of individual style. The situation described here bears
resemblances to that described by Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man
in the nineteenth century, where the more men appeared to be uniformly
dressed in their machine-made suits, the more attention was paid to
the tiny details whereby difference and individuality could be signified and
discerned (Sennett 1986: 165).
Indeed, it is to suits and jeans that Maynard turns next in her critique
of global sameness. The Western men’s suit has come to signify commercial
credibility, management status and, precisely, Western masculinity in all
corners of the globe. It is this ubiquity and apparent homogeneity that gives
any local inflection such power. When diplomats and businessmen from
some Arab countries wear the suit without a tie, or when Jewish men wear
it with the yarmulke, the local difference is noticed instantly by those
Westerners who are familiar with its usual form; the global connotations
are shifted slightly away from the dominant meanings towards a local
significance. And if someone from Upper Egypt wears the suit, he is likely

to be suspected by other Egyptians of immaturity or even unmanliness
(Maynard 2004: 46). Jeans, similarly, give the appearance of being uniformly
worn by everyone everywhere all the time, signifying the same globalized
generic meaning. However, Maynard refers to Tim Dant’s work (see also
Chapter 9 in this volume), which she says shows how the very absence of
‘intrinsic meaning’ in jeans makes them available for any and all meanings
to be imposed on them (Maynard 2004: 47).
What seems to be going on here is that the different cultural groups
who use these garments are negotiating different meanings for those
garments on the basis of the different values that they have, precisely as a
result of being members of different cultural groups. Global values are
ultimately impossible on this account because there will always be a local
take on them, and non-global, localized meanings will be constructed and
communicated. This is to conceive of globalization in fashion in terms of
communication, to which we will now turn.
Globalization, fashion and communication
It is possible to conceive of globalization and potentially globalized fashion

as examples of communication (see, for example, Back’s definition of the
local, 1998: 76 and Maynard’s chapter on style and communication, 2004:
87ff). The nature of communication, and the way that fashion and what we
wear are forms of communication, can provide a way of explaining what is
happening when fashion is described as globalized or globalizing. What we
wear is communication not because it is the sending and receiving of
messages, but because meaning is constructed and shared in the interaction
between the cultural values that we hold and the object we are looking at
or wearing: different values generate different meanings. This is one of the
lessons of the chapter on communication. So, globalization as communica-
tion is not the reception of a dominant meaning by a subordinate culture:
it is rather the construction of meaning in the interaction between values
and the object.
Globalization may be conceived as a problem of communication.
Communication requires the overcoming of difference (cultural differences
based on different values) and the sharing of meanings based on a sharing
of values. This is conceived as a ‘good’ thing and, insofar as globalization
involves this kind of sharing, it too might be conceived as a ‘good’ thing.
Yet too much of this overcoming of difference is seen as the dominance
of one set of values (or culture) over another set of values (or culture) and
this is experienced or conceived as a ‘bad’ thing, because it leads to an
homogenized global culture where all the values are those of the dominant

culture. Insofar as this description applies to fashion and globalization,
fashion that is globalized is also conceived as a ‘bad’ thing.
The local may be understood as a set of values and beliefs held by a
group of people that inform and make meaningful those people’s practices
and objects and that are not those of the globalizing and dominant culture.
These local values and beliefs are different from, and stand in opposition
to, the values and beliefs of the dominant globalizing culture. Consequently,
in the negotiation between objects, practices and values that constructs
meaning, they construct a series of meanings that is different from those
constructed by the values of the dominant and globalizing culture. To the
extent that the meanings constructed by local cultures are different from
those of the potentially globalizing culture, they offer the possibility of
resistance to those would-be dominant and globalizing meanings. And,
given that the meanings are the product of the relation between the object
and the values, the local values also represent opposition and resistance
to the values of the globalizing culture.
This problem may be approached from the opposite direction, as it
were. The negotiation and surmounting of cultural difference is held to be
a good thing when it leads to communication; nobody objects to members
of different cultures sharing values and understanding each other. But it is
held to be a bad thing when there are no longer two separate and distinct
cultures, when there is one shared culture. This is the, or a, paradox of
globalization: shared values are necessary for communication to happen
but if all, or too many, values are shared, then cultural difference disappears
or is reduced and people begin to fear globalization. In this sense there is
no such thing as globalization. There is no separate and distinct thing that
can be called globalization: there is one process of communication and
fashion as communication is explained as the interaction of different cultural
values and the fashion item.
Case study 1: the safari jacket
The Zambian coat of arms may be the only national coat of arms that
features recognizable fashion garments. Dating from 1964, when the
Republic of Zambia gained independence from the British Empire, the arms
depict a man standing to the viewer’s left of the escutcheon, or shield, and
supporting it. He is wearing a safari jacket and shorts. To the right is a
Zambian woman in what Wikipedia calls ‘traditional garb’. In September
2012, the Zambian Post Online reported that Professor Michelo Hansungule
had argued in a lecture that the coat of arms should be changed because
it was ‘outdated’. Professor Hansungule also objected to what the people

on the coat of arms were wearing: while not mentioning the jacket, he felt
that the shorts worn by the man were ‘undignified’ and that the clothes
‘represent the colonial era’. In reply, General Malimba Masheke argued that
the coat of arms contained a lot of material that referred to the ‘rich history
of the genesis of our nation’ and he objected to any changes that would
distort the political history of the country (Chanda 2012 online).
The local and global connotations of the jacket are probably as
complicated and contradictory as any we could hope or fear to find. The
man in the Zambian coat of arms is wearing the kind of safari jacket often
worn by Dr Kenneth Kaunda, the first President of Zambia. Indeed, in some
Figure 11.1 Zambian Coat of Arms. (Uploaded to Wikimedia by FXXX:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coat_of_Arms_of_Zambia.svg)

quarters, the jacket is called a ‘Kaunda’, precisely because the President
was so often seen wearing one. The Lusaka Times for 10 March 2009 shows
Kaunda wearing a dark-coloured safari jacket to the funeral of General
Christon Tembo, for example. The jacket was also worn by Ernest
Hemingway, the American journalist and writer, throughout the 1940s and
1950s. Yves Saint Laurent is famous for having designed a version of the
safari suit in 1968 and for wearing it throughout the 1970s. Historically, the
jacket is a version of military jackets worn by British and American troops
since the Second World War. Known as the M65 field jacket in military
surplus circles, it features four bellows or cargo pockets on the front,
epaulettes and sometimes a belt or drawstring at the waist. And the jacket
has been made into art. In 2009, for example, Micah Silver’s installation
at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts (MassMoCA) at North
Adams included a reference to it. Silver’s installation was called ‘End of
Safari’ and it used the jacket to critically investigate the relation between
colonialism and fashion. In a simulated ‘jungle’ the ‘voice’ of Yves Saint
Laurent narrated a fantasy of distant lands and exoticism.
So, depending on one’s cultural location, one’s cultural identity and
the values and beliefs that one possesses as a result of that location and
identity, the safari jacket means a number of things. To proud Zambians,
such as General Masheke and President Kaunda, the jacket represents
independent national identity and a hard fought heritage. To a modern lawyer
such as Professor Hansungule the jacket harks back to an undignified
colonial subordinacy, and it may well remind him of the foreign military
power with which that subordinacy was maintained and that dignity
destroyed. To the fashionable Yves Saint Laurent, the jacket may well have
been the epitome of casual luxury, available in masculine and feminine
versions and well on the way to being considered the design ‘classic’ with
which we are so familiar. And to Micah Silver, it is almost an object of
ridicule, to be placed in a faked ‘jungle’ setting and given a voice over from
a ‘fake’ Yves Saint Laurent in the interests of revealing the offensive and
exploitative colonial fantasy of exoticism upon which much Western tourist
and fashion consumption is based.
It is not the case that the jacket is decidedly or demonstrably any one
of these things. It is not simply an instrument of colonialism or of
globalization. And it is not simply a symbol of local independence and
nationhood. What is being communicated by the jacket differs according
to who is communicating and with whom they are communicating. To Micah
Silver, the jacket means or represents a patronizing exoticism and col-
onialism; these are the values in relation to which the jacket is meaningful
to him. The jacket represents how the globalizing West has dominated
the local non-Western cultures and he is critical of this valuation, hoping
that his audience will understand the values and ideas he is trying to

communicate. To President Kaunda and General Masheke, the jacket is
meaningful because it exists in relation to the values of ‘nation’ and
‘independence’. To these men, the jacket represents local, Zambian, values
as forms of resistance and opposition to the values of the cultures that
would dominate them. And to Professor Hansungule the jacket is meaning-
ful because it exists in relation to the values of an embarrassing colonial
history and of cultural subordinacy. The same values of the local and the
dominant global are represented but they are given different valuations –
they are here the occasion of negative meanings, rather than positive ones.
None of the interpretations is correct in the sense of a once and for all
account of the meaning and all are absolutely valid in that they are the
result of the negotiation between members of cultures, objects and values.
Case study 2: the qipau

In his essay on globalization and cultural identity, John Tomlinson uses the
Chinese qipau to investigate the complex cultural, political and economic
relations between global and local in fashionable dress (Tomlinson 2003).
A qipau is a shortened version of a cheongsam, which is a printed or brocaded
satin dress worn by women, edged with piping and fastened with ornate
looped and knotted cords. Tomlinson describes how, in the Dong An
shopping centre in the Wang Fu Jing district of Beijing, young upwardly
mobile Beijingers visit the Mu Zhen Liao boutique to buy qipaus, cheongsams
and other ‘classic’ Chinese clothes. Tomlinson points out that these clothes
possess ‘all the detail and finesse of the fashions favoured by the wealthy
Manchurian elite in the Qing dynasty of the seventeenth to nineteenth
centuries’ (Tomlinson 2003: 275).
However, as he also points out, these are not ‘traditional’ clothes
in any simple sense and local Beijingers will be as surprised as Western
tourists to see young women wearing them. This is because the qipau is a
Manchurian, rather than a Han, or ‘Chinese’, style or form of dress. Indeed,
what constitutes ‘Chineseness’ in dress is precisely what is at stake here.
The ‘Mao Jacket’ that was devised in 1912 by the revolutionary leader Sun
Yat-sen at the beginning of the first Chinese Republic, and which many in
the West would believe to be traditional Chinese dress, was in fact a mix
of traditional Chinese styles from the Tang dynasty and modern Western
dress styles. The jacket was designed to construct and communicate
both an ‘“authentic” Chineseness’ and a modern republicanism, in direct
opposition to the hated Manchu rulers of the fading Qing dynasty
(Tomlinson 2003: 276). This is why the local Beijingers may be surprised
to see fashionable young women wearing the qipau and it suggests that
those young women are not necessarily aware of this level of meaning, that

they are not necessarily intending to construct or communicate Manchu
identity.
So, the Mu Zhen Liao boutique, from which fashionable young women
buy their qipaus, would not exist were it not for the liberalization of China’s
economy by Deng Xiao Ping in the 1980s, which opened up China to the
globalizing influences of Western capitalism and allowed an influx of luxury
Western brands (Tomlinson 2003: 275). And those fashionable young
women eschew the luxury Western fashion brands, the Mao Jacket and
the ‘bland . . . conservative’ versions of Western style that characterize
mainstream Beijing style, in favour of a style that was popular with a hated
and alien (un-‘Chinese’) regime from two centuries ago. Tomlinson argues
that globalization here ‘does not so much directly challenge, as promote,
new and complex versions of national identity’ and he concludes that
political subjects ‘can now experience and express, without contradiction,
both attachments to the nation, multi-ethnic allegiances and cosmopolitan
sensibilities’ (Tomlinson 2003: 276).
The situation regarding national identity and fashion is certainly
complex in the case of the qipau, which sees the production and consump-
tion of a fashion that originates in a non-Han, non-‘Chinese’ and hated
dynasty being used to construct a young and fashionable ‘Chinese’ identity.
This happens, moreover, in the economic context of a fashion boutique in
a shopping centre that is the result of an opening up of hitherto communist
Chinese markets to globalizing and Western capitalist practices. There is a
case for arguing that these complexities are contradictions or the products
of contradictions. And there is a demand, therefore, to explain how it is
that those young women, the ‘political subjects’ of Tomlinson’s essay, do
not experience those contradictions. The contradictions clearly exist; how
is it that they are not experienced by the young people, the political subjects,
whom Tomlinson identifies?
As in the examples above, it may be suggested that the contradictions
and the failure to experience those contradictions can be explained by
considering the global and the local in terms of communication. Tomlinson
begins to explain the situation in terms of communication when he says
that ‘It is doubtful, of course, that any of the young women purchasing
qipaus consciously wish to express a Manchu identity’ (Tomlinson 2003:
276). However, the notion of communication as expression is, as ever,
unhelpful here. First, unless we are those young Chinese women, how could
we know what is in the minds of those young Chinese women? And, second,
the notion of ‘expression’ inevitably presupposes that some already existing
identity or essence is being expressed: that essence or identity is precisely
what we cannot assume in this case. Consequently, we are better off thinking
of communication as the interaction between the object and the values held
by members of different cultural groups. In this way we can argue that the

values that are associated with alien-ness and a hated dynasty are simply
not part of these young women’s culture. These values are not understood,
or possessed by the young women: that is why the qipau does not mean
‘Manchu identity’ to them. The values of ‘fashion’ and of a different, modern,
indeed ‘cosmopolitan’ Chineseness clearly are understood by the young
women; that is what the qipau means to them and that is why they buy the
qipau. Again, there is no final, once and for all account of the meaning of
the qipau. Meanings are the product of the relation between the values held
by the individual member of the culture and the object: different values will
generate different meanings.
Case study 3: Adidas and War

on Want
The case studies above both concern globalization and consumption.
They both investigate how the purchase or wearing of garments relates to
the political, economic and cultural processes of globalization and they
tend to stress the cultural or the meaningful aspects of globalization and
consumption. This section will try to emphasize the ways in which
globalization in fashion relates to production. As we saw in Chapter 9, there
is no consumption without production and no production without
consumption, but the attempt must be made to isolate production and
relate it to globalization. The involvement of Adidas and War on Want in
debates surrounding globalization was also hinted at in that chapter but
that involvement can be dealt with in more detail here. Adidas produce
specialist sportswear and fashionable leisure wear that is worn by elite
athletes, park joggers and the urban underclasses.
As we saw in Chapter 9, the charity War on Want campaigned against
the sportswear manufacturer Adidas throughout the 2012 London Olympic
Games. War on Want’s case against Adidas was that they were exploiting
their workers in Cambodia, Bangladesh and Indonesia by paying them the
equivalent of 34p (about 53 US cents) an hour. War on Want printed ‘price
tags’ saying ‘34p’ and fixed them to Adidas merchandise in London stores
to make the point that the workers producing the garments were paid that
amount. The price tags and posters cleverly combined the three stripes
of the Adidas logo and some of the stripes from the British Union Jack to
make what they saw as the complicity between the company and the UK
Government graphically present. War on Want also produced a video in
which white English-speaking actors sitting in various London locations
spoke the words of the workers in Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia
describing the abuses they had suffered. The video concentrated on the
economic exploitation of the workers by the company in the production of

the garments, and the point of the English-speaking actors and the London
locations was that economic exploitation is ‘not OK here, not OK anywhere’.
Both the Daily Telegraph and the Mail Online reported that Adidas were
allegedly in breach of the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic
Games’ (LOCOG) agreement that official sponsors would pay their workers
a sustainable living wage (Mail Online 2012).
One of the debates involving globalization and production in this case
concerns whether paying people in developing countries to produce
fashionable sportswear items represents progress or profiteering. Since
the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory near Dhaka in April 2013 and the
deaths of over 1,000 workers, War on Want have been tirelessly pursuing
the globalizing case against the Western companies who had an interest
in the factory. Adidas would clearly claim that their involvement in
Bangladesh’s textiles and fashion industry represents progress. Adidas
would claim that they are providing employment for Cambodians,
Bangladeshis and Indonesians that they would not otherwise have. They
would claim that they are, therefore, providing these workers with the
opportunity to earn more money and buy more luxury items than they would
otherwise be able to afford.
And they would claim that this is one of the benefits of globalizing
capitalism – that it brings industrialization, prosperity and increased
standards of living to hitherto pre-industrial, unprosperous and poor
countries. War on Want, however, would claim that Adidas are profiteering.
War on Want would argue that Adidas have moved production out of
Western countries, out of Germany and the UK, for example, to the East in
order to benefit from the lower wages and poorer labour relations laws that
exist there. They, therefore, make higher profits because they are paying
lower wages, while still charging the same prices for the goods that are on
sale in Western stores. War on Want would argue that Adidas have caused
unemployment and lower standards of living for many in Europe by taking
jobs and, therefore, income away from European workers.
This is one of the debates that surround the production of fashionable
sportswear in an increasingly globalized capitalist economy. It seems to be
a different kind of debate from those that surround consumption. Where
the debates surrounding consumption concerned the negotiation of
meaning and values, and where there was no obvious point at which the
perceived benefits of increased communication turned into the perceived
damage of cultural domination and homogenization, the arguments
concerning production seem more clear-cut. The economic exploitation of
local, non-Western economic groups does not seem to be the same kind
of phenomenon. There does seem to be a point at which being low-paid
but fairly paid turns into the worst kind of exploitation and profiteering. In
the Mail Online article that was quoted, the workers themselves claimed to

be paid $61 a month, working for six days a week and eight hours a day
(Mail Online 2012). The War on Want video also provided details of sexual
abuse, beatings and unsanitary living conditions. This does not seem to be
the product of any kind of negotiation and it appears to be quite simply
unfair. However, while it is a difficult and unpopular argument, it is one
that has to be made: these economic conditions are the result of negotiation
and values and there is no obvious point at which tolerable poor conditions
turn into unjustifiable profiteering.
Apart from the factual matter of whether the Adidas spokesman or
the workers are simply lying or not, it has to be acknowledged that the
phenomenon is identifiable and meaningful only because of the values that
are being used to construct and describe it. In the Mail Online article, a
spokesman for Adidas may or may not have been lying when he said that
the conditions of the Cambodian factory workers producing Olympic
merchandise were not in breach of LOCOG’s standards and that they
were paid $130 a month on average, ‘well above the minimum wage’.
And the workers may or may not have been lying when they said they
were paid much less than this (Mail Online 2012). However, there is no
economic phenomenon that is not described in cultural or meaningful
terms. As we saw in Chapter 4, it is not possible to describe fashion or
clothing purely or simply in terms of economic function: each example will
inevitably have to be a specific example and to take some fashionable,
cultural and historically located, form. Consequently, it is not possible to
take the economic arguments concerning production (or consumption) on
their own, as the cultural and the historically specific will always be there.
In that the cultural and the historically specific will be there, the question
will be a question about meanings and it will, therefore, be the product of
different cultural values.
So, apart, or away, from the factual accuracy or otherwise of the
competing claims, it could be argued that giving factory workers in Phnom
Penh a job making Adidas shirts is both profiting from their labour and
giving them a wage that they would not otherwise have. It is both of these
things at the same time and there is no non-cultural or ‘purely economic’
point at which one turns into the other. It is only if one shares the capitalist
values of Adidas that one sees the phenomenon simply as providing work
and a higher standard of living. And it is only if one shares the anti-capitalist
values of War on Want that one sees the phenomenon as simply profiteer-
ing. Again, the negotiation between the values and the practice generates
the meaning: different values generate different meanings. The economic
phenomenon is not describable in purely economic terms: or, the economic
terms used to identify and describe something inevitably bring cultural
interpretations with them. These interpretations are where the negotiation

‘gets in’ and they mean that the economic debates surrounding fashion
production in globalizing capitalism are the same kinds of debate as those
concerning consumption.
Conclusion
This chapter has introduced the matter of globalization and fashion. It has
provided a simple account of globalization, as homogenization and
uniformity, and described the various ways in which that model or account
is inadequate. The chapter has also provided a more complex account of
globalization, in which the global is always in relation to that which is
different from it – the local. And it has argued that globalization is usefully
approached as communication, in terms of the different values held by
different groups around the world to generate or negotiate different
meanings. Consequently, the objects and commodities in the case studies
could be seen to mean different things to different cultural groups,
according to the different values and beliefs held by those groups. Local
cultures are said to possess different values from globalizing culture(s) and,
consequently, the meanings of the garments and practices are different for
the members of the different cultures.
Further reading
Paulicelli, E. and Clark, H. (eds) The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity and
Globalization, London, Routledge.
Ramamurthy, A. (2004) ‘Spectacles and Illusions: Photography and
Commodity Culture’, in Wells, L. (ed.) Photography: A Critical Introduction,
Third Edition, London, Routledge; see pp. 220–35 on fashion photography
and colonialism.
van Beek, G. (2005) ‘Culture in Shreds’, in Brand, J. and Teunissen, J. (eds)
Global Fashion, Local Tradition: On the Globalisation of Fashion, Arnhem
NL, Terra.

chapter 12
Fashion and
(the) image
Introduction
In a 2011 interview, the British fashion designer Giles Deacon said that the
fashion industry presented an ‘unrealistic’ image of women (in Finnigan
and Sawer 2011). The headline for the article in which the interview appeared
suggested that the fashion industry ‘forced’ an ‘unrealistic’ image on women
through its obsession with ‘skinny models’. The article went on to report
the deaths of models Luisel and Eliana Ramos and Ana Carolina Reston
from heart failure following a ‘starvation diet’ and anorexia, respectively
(see Chapter 8 in this volume for theories of how these issues relate fashion
to the body). It also went on to imply that the ‘image’ of women that the
fashion industry created and promoted was responsible for the deaths.
The image, and the fashion industry that created and promoted it, are held
responsible for those deaths because the industry promotes the image and
‘forces’ it onto women. This story introduces some of the themes of this
chapter: an image, a representation of femininity, is generated in and by
the fashion industry and it is deemed so powerful that some women will
die in their attempt to attain it.
This story uses one sense of ‘image’, the sense intended by ‘fashion
and image’ in the chapter title. The sense of image here is that of a model
or ideal of femininity. It is the sense of image as an ideal or desired look,
shape, size or kind of body. It also refers to the self-image that women in
this case have of themselves and to the power that that image has in
controlling or influencing what they eat, how they exercise and how they
178 fashion and (the) image

ultimately live their lives. Image here can mean something like identity; one’s
image may or may not be one’s identity. The dissatisfaction that some
women experience with regard to their body image and their identity is held
to be so powerful that it causes women to change their behaviour and their
eating habits in order to conform to an ideal image. In this respect ‘image’
relates closely to identity and to self-identity, to the ‘appearance’ one
presents to the world and to the sense or image one has of one’s self. This
is clearly a sense of ‘image’ that involves a lot of power and it refers to an
immensely powerful kind of image.
Fashion also employs and exploits another sense of image. This is the
sense in which we talk of images as pictures or likenesses. It is the sense
intended by Roland Barthes at the very beginning of The Fashion System,
when he distinguishes ‘image-clothing’, the garment as it is presented in
photography or drawings, from the ‘written garment’ with which he will be
concerned (Barthes 1990: 3). Fashionable items and fashion itself are
pictured or represented in images and it is this sense that is intended by
‘fashion and the image’ in the chapter title. Fashion and the image refers
to the work of illustrators, graphic designers and photographers, for
example, who represent and portray items of fashion, fashion models, people
wearing fashionable items and so on, in their work. This sense is trying to
get at the idea that it is through imagery that fashion most commonly or
routinely appears in society. It is through the use of photographic or hand-
drawn images in magazines, websites and other visual media that fashion
is most often seen by most people. Combining the two senses of ‘image’,
those illustrators, graphic designers and photographers may also be said
to represent fashion itself, to give an image to fashion in their images of
fashionable items and fashionable people.
Consequently, this chapter will explain these two senses. It will consider
the work of fashion photographers and illustrators in representing fashion
garments and it will explain the role that the fashion image plays in people’s
lives. At the same time as explaining these elements of fashion and image,
the chapter will also try to show that, and how, fashion theory is always
already playing a constitutive role in those elements. Any conception of
‘image’ as a representation of personal identity, for example, or of how
what one wears constructs that image or identity, presupposes some theory
of the nature of the ‘image’ and of ‘identity’, as well as of the relation between
the ‘image’ and ‘identity’. Similarly, any account of how photography or
graphic design relates to fashion through the image will presuppose a set
of more or less sophisticated theories. Again, these will be theories about
the nature of representation, meaning and identity. This chapter will explain
the two directions in which connotational meaning may be said to operate.
First, Barthes’ account of the structures that generate the most common
connotational meanings will be explained. Second, the ways in which fashion
fashion and (the) image 179

photographers already know the connotational meanings that are generated
by their use of technology will be explained. Finally, the relation of image
to tools and the theory of prosthesis will be investigated.
Fashion and the image

Like fashion itself, the image and the use of imagery is associated with
deception, falsehood and triviality by many Western cultures. One of the
most convincing and quickest ways of creating a false identity or disguise
is to change one’s clothing. One creates a new and different image or identity
simply by changing what one wears, and it is this power of clothing to deceive
and disguise that is so strongly objected to. It is not surprising, then, that
some of the common phrases used by English speakers to indicate
deception employ fashion and clothing. We speak of ‘pulling the wool over’
someone’s eyes, for example, which appears to derive from the eighteenth
century and refers to actually pulling a man’s wig over his face so that he
could not see you doing something you shouldn’t be doing. We also speak
of someone, usually a woman, as ‘mutton dressed as lamb’, indicating that
they are trying to deceive us as to their true age. And we tell our children
the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, in which non-existent clothes are
used to fool the Emperor in the commission of a fraud. Finally, some
theorists analyse and explicitly celebrate fashion as a form of performance
or masquerade (see Tseëlon 2001: 4–5). Valerie Steele dates this tradition
of using fashion and clothing to indicate deceit or falsehood from the
eighteenth century (Steele 2001: 73), while Gilles Lipovetsky takes it back
to Plato’s Republic, written around 400 BCE (Lipovetsky 1994).
It will be recalled how, in Book VII of the Republic, Plato is elaborating
a story or metaphor about human knowledge. We are asked to imagine a
scene where chained prisoners in a cave can see the shadows of people
and things cast onto the wall in front of them but not the things themselves
and not the fire that is the source of the shadows. They also cannot see
the cave entrance or the world outside the cave (Republic VII: 514, Hamilton
and Cairns 1961: 747). Echoing the story of Dibutades, who drew the out-
line of her lover’s face from a shadow, and describing the structure of
photography, in which light itself performs the drawing, Plato’s story
presents knowledge as the shadows cast onto the wall of a cave. Human
knowledge is represented here as a series of images, mere shadows, and
it is inferior to seeing the real things and vastly inferior to knowing the
Forms or Ideas of which the things and people are themselves copies or
representations. The image here is a metaphor for the lack or absence of
true knowledge, a fraud or a deception that is the condition of human
knowledge. And it is this tradition that fashion is inserted into and from

which it gains its status when it is derided as mere image, or as deception.
The image is a metaphor for deceit and lack of knowledge, and when fashion
is described as an image, it takes on these negative and unwelcome
connotations.
In On Photography (1971), Susan Sontag suggests that Plato’s account
of knowledge is made in the interest of ‘evoking . . . an image-free way of
apprehending the real’ (Sontag 1971: 153). Plato’s ideal of knowledge is the
knowledge of the Forms, which are not images or representations at all but
rather something like the eternal essences of the things that are understood
by the mind, while not being the products of the mind. Quoting Feuerbach,
her argument is that the times in which we live are so far from Plato’s ideal
of image-free knowledge that we actually ‘prefer the image to the thing, the
copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being’.
She says that Feuerbach’s claim, which was made in 1843 (only a few years
after the invention of the photographic camera), anticipates the impact that
photography and the photographic image will have on our modern world.
Feuerbach is almost predicting that we will become obsessed with the
production and consumption of images.
Caroline Evans takes up and develops these thoughts in her essay ‘A
Shop of Images and Signs’. She argues that fashion designers such as
Hussein Chalayan and Martin Margiela deal with the differences between
image and reality in such a way that fashion generates not so much the
question of whether we are looking at the image or reality, but rather an
experience of both image and reality. As evidence of this she cites Chalayan’s
Autumn/Winter 1998/99 show, entitled ‘Panoramic’, and Margiela’s
Spring/Summer 1999 show. Chalayan’s show took place in a set made of
mirrors and the models ‘wove mesmerizingly in and out of the set,
appearing to disappear into walls and emerge from mirrors’ (Evans 2008:
23). It seems to have become impossible to tell whether one was looking
at the reflection of a model or the model herself and consequently one was
‘as good’ as the other. In Margiela’s show a sandwich-board man walked
the catwalk with a photograph of the garment on his board.
The board also provided details of the series and product number, the
colours in which it was available and the material the garment was made
from. Evans’ argument seems to account for Chalyan’s show – if there is
nowhere to go outside of the show, if there is no place from which we might
be able to tell which is representation, which is reflection and which is the
‘real’ ‘model’, then it is fair to say that there is no difference between an
experience of the image and an experience of the reality. But it is less
successful as an account of Margiela’s show. This latter example is not the
mesmeric blurring or effacing of a difference, and it is not the slippage
between image and reality: it is rather the simple and straightforward
replacement of the thing, the reality, by the representation or the image of

Figure 12.1 Maison Martin Margiela show, Spring/Summer 1999. (Photographer
Niall McInerney © Bloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive.)
it. The actual garment is nowhere to be seen and the use of a photograph
of the garment on the sandwich board suggests that Feuerbach is correct
and we have indeed developed a preference for the representation over the
real thing.
These thoughts may be developed a little if we take another look at
Sontag’s account of photography. She suggests that Plato’s account of
knowledge is made with the intention or in the interest of an ‘image-free’
knowledge and an image-free way of understanding the real. Plato’s point
is that all the humans in his story are compelled to look at shadows and
images: one could argue that anyone outside the cave, anyone who was
able to comprehend the forms in their eternal and essential truth would

not be human. Indeed, there is the suggestion in Plato’s work that only the
gods apprehend the Forms. Consequently, human knowledge is represen-
tational; it works in and as images and ‘shadows’. If this is the case,
then we have no ground whatever for subordinating or decrying fashion
because it too works deceptively in and as images. If, as Chalayan’s 1998/99
show suggests, all human knowledge and experience is deceptive and
untrustworthy because it is representation and image, then it makes no
sense to criticize fashion for being deceptive and untrustworthy because it
too is representation and image: as Chalayan shows us in an image, there
is nowhere else, there is nowhere outside the show. Fashion may create an
image and what we wear may be used to create a deceptive image for
ourselves, but neither fashion nor what we wear is especially deceptive, and
there is no way of not creating and using images and representation. As
we have seen, this is as true when applied to fashion as it is when applied
to human knowledge. To this extent it is unjustified and irrational to decry
fashion and what we wear as a fraud or deceptive on the grounds that they
are images and representation.
Fashion and photography

In her editor’s ‘Introduction’ to Fashion as Photograph, Eugénie Shinkle says
that the history of fashion photography is ‘inseparable from that of fashion
itself’. There are two reasons for this. First, because they are both ‘linked
to the growth of capitalist economies and the development of mass markets’
(Shinkle 2008: 2). And, second, because fashion depends on ‘image and
advertising spectacles’ (Shinkle 2008: 3). However, the first explanation is
slightly shaky for the reason that, while fashion may be said strictly to predate
capitalism, like photography it really only takes off and begins to achieve
global prominence with the advent of mercantile capitalism and mass
markets around the end of the nineteenth century. And while photography
is becoming more popular at the end of the nineteenth century, as Shinkle
herself points out, it is not until the 1920s and 1930s that photography
replaces hand-made drawings as the magazine editor’s choice of fashion
illustration (Shinkle 2008: 3). The second explanation rests on firmer ground:
as we have seen, fashion may be introduced and explained as image and
as the image. Fashion uses the image – it uses, precisely, the image as it
is produced in photography. And fashion is used to create an image – it
creates an image of gender, age and class, for example, as well as of luxury
or of elegance.
In her essay, ‘The Avedon Eye’, Susan Sontag says that ‘The greatest
fashion photography is more than the photography of fashion’ (Sontag,
quoted in Craik 1994: 93). She expands the point by saying that fashion

photography’s ‘complexity’ derives from the ways that it negotiates or
mediates the classic and timeless on the one hand and the dated on the
other hand. Strictly this makes little or no fashion sense. Fashion is nothing
if it is not dated: the fact that it is dated and of the moment, different from
the previous moment and different from whatever the next moment will
bring is fashion’s one and only point. As was argued in Chapter 5 in this
volume, the classic, that which is alleged to exist outside of time, cannot
exist except as a disguise for the illegitimately imposed prejudices of class
and status and it is the very opposite of a fashionable garment or style.
Sontag’s argument is meaningful only on the proviso that we understand
the falseness and illegitimacy of fashion and fashion photography’s claims
to timelessness or the perfect. Photography may represent the current
fashion as though it were perfect and capable of lasting forever but fashion
would not be fashion if it were not replaced by the next fashionable item
or style. We can also make sense of Sontag’s statement if we say that the
‘photography of fashion’ refers to the image; the image of fashion photo-
graphed is the unchanging documentary or record of the garment. The
‘more’ that Sontag refers to is image; it is the changing and desirable image
of oneself or the wearer of the garment in an advertisement – as attractively
young, modern, moneyed, leisured and so on.
Roland Barthes’ account of fashion photography may be read as an
account of the ways in which image is constructed, and Erica Lennard’s
account of the photography of fashion may be read as an account of how
the image is produced. However, the way that image turns into the image
and the way that the image turns into image should also be noted. Barthes’
account of image as connotation is dependent on denotation, what is in
the image. And it is clear from Lennard’s account of how she produces her
images that her production of images is thoroughly dependent on knowing
the connotational effects of those technical processes that she uses to
produce the image.
The first thing that Barthes does in The Fashion System is to distinguish
image-clothing from written clothing. Image-clothing is the garment pre-
sented to us as photographed or drawn and written clothing is the same
garment as it is described by or transformed into language (Barthes 1990:
3). While his book is ‘exclusively’ about written clothing, Barthes sketches
out the place and a potential explanation for image-clothing (Barthes 1990:
12). He says that the fashion photograph is ‘not just any photograph’ but
that it has its own ‘language’, which in turn has its own units and rules, its
own turns of phrase and its own lexicon and syntax (Barthes 1990: 4). In
order to understand what Barthes says about fashion photography, we must
first understand a few things about written clothing.
According to Barthes, there are two ways of writing about clothing found
in fashion magazines. The first way is exemplified in sentences like the

following: ‘this long cardigan is discreet when unlined and amusing when
reversible’. This kind of sentence relates clothing to the world, or to
something in the world. In this case the clothing is ‘cardigan’, ‘unlined’ and
the things in the world are ‘discreet’ and ‘amusing’. As Barthes says, on
the side of clothing are forms, fabrics and colours: on the side of the world
are ‘situations, occupations, states [and] moods’ (Barthes 1990: 20). These
are Type A statements or what Barthes will call later Type A ensembles. The
second way of writing about clothing is found in sentences such as ‘a waist-
length bolero for a turquoise Shetland suit cut high at the neck’ or ‘a halter
top buttoned down the back, its collar tied like a little scarf’. This kind of
sentence relates clothing to Fashion or to the mechanism of Fashion. There
is no reference to anything in the world; but ‘buttoning down the back’ or
having a ‘high neck’ is Fashion, where ‘buttoning at the front’ or featuring
a ‘low neck’ would be unfashionable. These are Type B statements as they
refer only to the world and mechanisms of fashion and Barthes will later
refer to Type B ensembles.
The first function of written words when they appear as the captions
to fashion photographs will be familiar to Barthes’ scholars as ‘anchorage’,
although he does not use that term in this book. ‘Anchorage’ appears in
the essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, written in 1964, and The Fashion System
was completed in 1963 (Barthes 1990: ix). As Barthes says, ‘the meaning
of an image is never certain’; a viewer may come up with any number of
possible interpretations of an image and none of them has any claim to
be the correct one. The captions, the written words, ‘determine a single
certainty’; they say what the image means and they fix a meaning for the
image. Barthes says that language or a written text (the caption) eliminates
the freedom of the viewer to come up with a variety of different interpre-
tations, but it also ends the uncertainty as to what the image means (Barthes
1990: 13). The second function of the written text accompanying the
photographic image is that of supplying information: it can tell us the colour
of a garment in a black and white photograph and it can tell us that the
stitching we do not recognize is a pearl stitch, for example (Barthes 1990:
13). Third, the written text serves to emphasize elements of the image, which
might otherwise assume equal importance. A caption containing the phrase
‘an absence of buttons’, for example, can even emphasize something that
is not in the photograph.
We can now turn to what Barthes says about fashion photography. He
begins by pointing out that Fashion photographs its signifiers (the garment)
as well as its signifieds, insofar as they are drawn from ‘the world’. Fashion
cannot be photographed because, as we saw above, it is simply the
alternative or difference between buttoning down the back or at the front
or the difference between the suit cut high or low at the neck. Consequently,
it is Type A ensembles and Type A statements that Barthes is concerned

with in his account of fashion photography. Barthes sets out to classify the
ways in which the world appears in fashion photography.
Barthes argues that the world appears as ‘a theatre’ in fashion
photography. He means that the world exists as a backdrop, or the scenery,
to the fashion photograph. This theatre always follows a theme. Barthes’
quite random example concerns Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe as the
theme, or the ‘concept’, behind a fashion shoot – the decor or the backdrop
to the photographs would therefore involve ruined Scottish castles, tartan
and various other romantic and medieval elements. This theatre can assume
either a ‘poetic’ tone or a ‘humorous’ tone. If the theme of the shoot is
‘autumn, the country weekend’, then the poetic tone will be established
through the use of ‘knitwear, flocks of sheep and the wood of a farm cart’.
There is what Barthes calls a ‘plastic or coenesthetic equivalence’ between
the theme and the things used to establish it (Barthes 1990: 301).
Coenesthetic refers to the way a general sense of something arises from
the perception of many parts. If the tone is humorous, then the things used
to establish that tone might take the form of ‘simple wordplay’. Barthes’
example is possibly more simple-minded than simple; he says that if the
line of clothing is the ‘Trapeze’ line, then the models in the photograph
could be ‘put on trapezes’ (Barthes 1990: 301).
The model, the woman who is modelling the clothing, seems to live
and act in the decor or the backdrop that is the theatre of the fashion
photograph; a scene in which the woman can be active is constructed.
According to Barthes, there are three styles in which this scene can be
presented. The first style is ‘objective’ or ‘literal’. If the theme is travel, then
the active version of the scene could be a woman with her elbows on the
map she is reading; if the theme is motherhood, then the activity could be
picking up a little girl. The second style is ‘romantic’ and relies on a certain
understanding of ‘Art’. If the theme is ‘festival of white’ then romantic style
might be the model wearing white in front of a lake on which float ‘two
white swans’. Finally, the third style is ‘mockery’ and Barthes imagines
fashion shoots in which the woman is photographed with six hats on
her head, or ‘miming astonishment to the point of childishness’ (Barthes
1990: 302).
Barthes’ account of the fashion photograph can be read as the most
painstaking dissection of connotation and of the ways in which connotations
are constructed in fashion photographs. The themes are not literally
present in the photographs but the elements that are chosen and the styles
in which they are presented are the ways in which they are connoted. The
Ivanhoe shoot does not need a literal, written title – the associations and
feelings evoked by the ruined Scottish castles in the photograph will connote
it. The ‘festival of white’ does not use robots or futuristic scenes – the
connotations of the photograph would be all wrong. Although he does not

explicitly say so, the connotations are traced back in detail to the allegedly
denotative content of the photograph.
It could be said that Erica Lennard’s account of her practice works ‘in
the opposite direction’ from that taken by Barthes’ account. Where Barthes
works from connotative theme to what is in the photograph, Lennard enables
us to work from the technology that produces what is in the photograph
to its connotative effect. Lennard begins her account by writing about how
the models are often insecure, uncomfortable or even doubtful of their own
beauty and she tells us how she reassures them. Sometimes it takes only
a suggestion concerning what to do with their hands or their feet to make
them relax and get into a successful pose. In effect, she is controlling what
Barthes would call the denotation of the image: the poses, the positions of
hands and feet are what will connote elegance, sophistication and so on,
in the finished photograph. The model’s bodies are functioning as tools or
pieces of technology here. However, she soon moves on to what people
might think of as more properly technical and technological details, starting
by telling us that she likes to use natural light and will shoot in whatever
light is available, making the appropriate allowances in the camera settings.
She says:
I exposed for her face and overexposed because I wanted it bleached

out. I diffuse black and white prints in the enlarger, with a diffusion
disc attached to the lens.
(Lennard, in di Grappa 1981: 92)
The technical details here are signified by words such as ‘exposed’,

‘overexposed’, ‘enlarger’, ‘diffusion disc’ and ‘lens’. If one knows about
photography, then these words will be well understood and hardly ‘technical’
at all, but to someone who does not know the jargon, they will be poorly
understood, if they are understood at all, and they will sound very ‘technical’
indeed. What we can see Lennard doing, however, is explaining how the
technological apparatus and settings will produce certain meaningful
effects in the photograph. She knows that if you take a light reading for the
face and then ‘overexpose’ the film, you will get a ‘bleached out’ effect with
lots of white and the photograph will connote ‘harsh’ and the feel of ‘too
much’ or ‘painful’ sunlight. As she says later, she used to diffuse all her
photographs but the reproduction in magazines is often
very bad. When there are details on a black dress they melt away because
the ink isn’t controlled in the printing. I like the blending effect but
editors sometimes worry about seeing detail on clothes.
(Lennard in di Grappa 1981: 93)

The diffusion disk is a piece of semi-transparent material with a
distressed surface or embossed markings that produces a soft-focus effect,
reduces contrast or makes colours appear to bleed into one another.
Photographs using these techniques are said to have romantic connotations,
or to be more or less ‘graphic’. Lennard knows that fashion editors do not
always like these connotations and atmospheres because they do not show
the tiny details making up the garment.
However, when compared to David Bailey’s or Arthur Elgort’s essays
in the same collection, Lennard’s account of the technology is relatively
restrained. Flicking through Bailey’s entry, one reads:
The light is tungsten, a Mole Richardson 1000 scoop on the front and
four lamps on the back . . . everything was shot on Tri-X rated ASA 800
for a grainy effect . . . . Later I went through an FP-4 phase.
(Bailey in di Grappa 1981: 7)
To many people this quote will be baffling and meaningless. Saying

that the light is tungsten indicates the ‘temperature’, what photographers
call the ‘warmth’ or otherwise, of the light: the higher the temperature, the
bluer the light and the lower the temperature, the redder the light. These
are clearly connotative effects and they are clearly driven by the choice of
the technology, the kind of lamp used to light the photograph. A Mole
Richardson 1000 scoop is basically the lightshade that the light bulb (the
‘tungsten’) sits in. The reference to 1000 indicates the wattage of the bulb
and this particular ‘scoop’ is reckoned to produce a ‘soft fill light’, smooth
diffused illumination and few shadows. Again, it is clear that knowing these
technical details will enable the photographer to produce predictable, known
and familiar connotational effects. If you are looking for gentle, smooth,
shadow-free pictures, for your wedding photographs or for your new baby,
for example, these would be the bits of kit to use.
FP-4 is a kind of black and white film made by the Ilford company.
Ilford describe it as being ‘fine grain’ and producing ‘high sharpness’.
Bailey’s reference to it indicates that he went through a phase of using it
knowing that the photographs he shot while using it would connote feelings
and ideas such as precise, smooth, clean and sharp. These would be
photographs that did not draw attention to themselves as photographs that
had been taken at all. His reference to using Tri-X at ASA 800 indicates
that he is playing around with the film. Tri-X is a Kodak black and white
film and Kodak recommend using it at ASA 200. Using the film at ASA 800
will indeed produce grainy results and Bailey knows the connotations of
this: the images will be gritty and raw, they will not be the smooth or flawless
images produced by more conventional speeds and exposures. Again, we
are deriving the connotations from the denotational or technical details that

are used to produce the image. Therefore, it is clear from Lennard’s and
Bailey’s accounts of how they produce their images that their production
of images is thoroughly dependent on knowing the connotational effects
of those technical processes that are used to produce the image.
Fashion and image

Fashion’s connection or association with triviality and deception that was
noted above in the discussion of fashion and the image is also found when
we think about fashion and image. The image we create of ourselves with
what we wear can deceive just as much as the drawn or photographed image.
However, it should be pointed out that, as the drawn or photographed
image must inevitably document and record, so the image that we create for
ourselves with what we wear is also inevitably a representation of our selves.
Image is about meaning and identity. The image we have of ourselves
is another way of describing our identity. The image we represent to the
world through what we wear is a way of representing what we think of as
our identity. In both cases, image and identity are what we mean. In the
first case, self-image is what we mean to ourselves, the kind of person we
think of ourselves as being. We may think of ourselves as being young,
female, kind, middle class, animal lover and so on. In the second case,
image is how we represent that meaning in public, to other people. We
wear what we wear in order to communicate that femaleness, the qualities
of animal-loving and kindness and so on, to the world. Both cases are also
ways of communicating meaning. We are using what we wear to com-
municate meanings (gender, class, personal qualities and so on) to those
around us. So image is identity, it is what we mean to ourselves and what
we hope to communicate to those around us in order that they may
understand what we mean or who we are.
Reference has just been made to femaleness, animal-loving and middle-
classness. These are some of the things that one may think of when one
thinks of one’s identity, of who one is. We may be male or female, old or
young, straight, gay or bisexual: we may be middle class or working class,
sporty or not sporty and so on. The identity we choose to represent through
what we wear will be a mixture of all of these elements. It will probably
involve the mixture of many more elements, which it would be tiresome to
list. It will probably also involve the selection of, and the emphasis on,
different elements. For one person, their bisexuality may be more important
to them than their middle-classness, but for another it may be the other
way around. For one person, sportiness may be more significant to them
than their Britishness and for another the priority may be reversed.
Consequently, which elements each chooses to represent through what they

wear will be different. One person may be keen to communicate their
bisexuality rather than their class status, while the other will be keen to
identify themselves as middle class before they represent their bisexuality.
The complexity of this situation can be imagined, as every different person
makes a different decision regarding which elements of their identity are
most important to them and which, consequently, they want to identify and
represent both to themselves and to other people. The complexity also
indicates that image is a complicated business. There is not a simple one-
to-one correspondence between what people wear and identity. One cannot
simply assume that image or meaning may be easily or straightforwardly
read from what a person is wearing.
The paragraphs above have tried to describe and explain the process
in which we choose items of fashion and clothing to communicate an image
of what we think of as ourselves, as our identity. But this process also works
in the opposite direction: it may sound odd, but there is a sense in which
fashion constructs us. We do not choose the time or the place in fashion
into which we are born or into which we grow. There is a sense in which
we find ourselves thrown into a fashionable context and whatever we choose
from that context will communicate certain images and meanings to those
around us whether we like it or not. We are constrained to select from the
existing items, ranges, styles and so on that are present and fashionable
at the time. These items, ranges and styles have histories and are already
meaningful to the various cultural groups that also exist at the times and
in the places that we are born or grow into. What we do as members of
cultures is to learn those histories and those already existing meanings,
and the identities and images that they at once enable and constrain us to
adopt. Consequently, the meanings and identities that are available to us
are not of our choosing and to that extent fashion chooses or constructs
our image for us.
Finally, fashion itself may be said to have an image. It is not a self-
image but rather an image constructed and communicated for fashion by
all who are involved in it, from everyone on the street, to models and
designers through to journalists, academics and fashion editors. At one
end of a spectrum there is the positive image of fashion as a pleasurable,
luxurious and glamorous activity. At the other end of that spectrum is a
negative image of fashion, which involves eating disorders, sweated labour,
dangerous factories and death. Again, as image is to do with identity and
meaning, this is what fashion is and what it means to the cultures in which
it is found. It is the identity of fashion as constructed by all those involved
in it. And it is the meaning of fashion, as communicated and understood
by all those involved in it.
Journalism is one way in which the image of fashion is constructed and
communicated. Print, TV and online journalism all use words and images

to construct an image for fashion. At the time of writing in May 2013 the
death toll following the collapse of the Rana Plaza clothing factory in Dhaka,
Bangladesh, is over 1,000 and the world’s press, TV and online media are
showing photographs of the ruined building. The BBC News webpages
report that Bangladesh’s 4 million clothing and textiles workers routinely
complain about poor working conditions and low pay, while the industry
represents 80 per cent of the country’s exports (bbc.co.uk 2013). As noted
in Chapter 9, War on Want have added this case to their list of examples
of the fashion industry exploiting workers from developing countries and
endangering their lives: the image of fashion here is one of greed, corruption
and squalor. At the same time, the Huffington Post online fashion pages
are showing photographs of celebrities attending the recent Met Gala in
New York and of Vera Wang bridal gowns. Wang, whose bridal gowns may
be bought in London for between $5,000 and $20,000, is quoted as saying
that she likes to ‘do bridal with a fashion edge’ and that a few years ago
she produced a range of bridal gowns that had been ‘dipped in tea’ (Han
2013). Fashion’s image here is much more attractive in the sense that it
represents optimistic, lighthearted and luxurious frivolity. The differences
between the positive and the negative images that fashion may represent
are clearly illustrated in the words and photographs of the journalism in
these examples.
Fashion and illustration

Fashion illustration may be hand-drawn or hand-produced, or it may be
mechanically produced. Pens, pencils and paintbrushes are the traditional
tools used to produce handmade illustrations and analogue and digital
cameras are examples of machines that can produce images. The various
drawing and painting applications, such as those available for the iPad, for
example, may be thought to represent a challenge to such a simple binary
classification, in that they enable hand movements and gestures to be
captured, stored and manipulated digitally. However, as pens, pencils and
paintbrushes are only very simple machines and as it was always possible
to move the camera by hand while an exposure was being made, it could
be argued that the simple dichotomy has never existed in any simple form
and that the simple binary was always challenged. The levels of meaning
produced in and by photography have been discussed above, and this
section will investigate the rhetorical and documentary functions of fashion
illustration.
Graphic design uses handmade and machine-made illustrations, along
with shape, line, colour, texture, text, typeface and layout to construct
identities for fashion designers, brands and retail outlets. It makes use of

all of these elements to communicate a meaning for a designer, a brand
or a retail outlet. Graphic design thus communicates the image of that
designer, brand or retail outlet. For example, the popular budget store
TK Maxx uses a bold, red sans serif typeface, while the luxury up-market
store Brooks Brothers uses a dark blue calligraphic face. TK Maxx’s red may
remind people of MacDonalds’ identity; the connotations of fast moving,
youthful, cheap and disposable products are common to both. The
calligraphy used by Brooks Brothers connotes a slower, much less youthful,
more expensive experience; handwriting requires specialist products, it takes
time and care and it is altogether different from texting. These colours and
styles are present throughout the stores: these connotations, these
meanings, are communicated repeatedly from the delivery trucks, through
the store fronts and webpages, to the till receipts and carriers. Consequently,
the identity of each store is clear and clearly different from the other stores
on the street or online. The graphic designs create the identities and
communicate them to the market. Those in the market who understand
Figure 12.2 TK Maxx logo. (Copyright © TK Maxx: www.tkmaxx.presscentre.com/

Image-Library/TKM-Logo-bd5.aspx)
Figure 12.3 Brooks Brothers logo. (Copyright © Brooks Brothers Group Ltd:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brooks_Brothers_Logo.png)

the signifiers of colour, shape and so on will understand the up- or down-
market connotations and make their shopping decisions accordingly.
J. Abbott Miller’s (2007) essay on the use of typography in fashion
magazines and branding begins by investigating the use of the Optima
typeface to create and communicate an image and an identity by a number
of different brands. He reports the type designer, Tobias Frere-Jones, saying
that Almay, L’Oreal, Revlon, Cover Girl and Maybelline all used ‘an almost
uniform typographic code’. Frere-Jones means that they all used slight
variations on the Optima typeface (Abbott Miller in Barnard 2012: 123). What
puzzles and intrigues Frere-Jones is that he, too, has been asked to design
a typeface to connote femininity in a recent brief. He wonders ‘What is so
feminine about Optima?’. What is happening here is that femininity is being
given an identity; femininity is the meaning that cultures give to sexual
difference and this culture is using typefaces with pronounced thicks and
thins to give an identity to that meaning. Consequently, when the typeface
is used it communicates femininity to members of that culture: members
of the culture see the typeface and understand its distinct thicks and thins
as meaning that this is a feminine product or publication.
Abbott Miller goes on to explore the use of the ‘modern’ typefaces
designed by Giambattista Bodoni and Firmin Didot in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. They are called modern because they
introduced this extreme contrast between thick and thin lines noted above
(Abbott Miller in Barnard 2012: 124). He says that, having fallen out of
fashion in the nineteenth century, Didot and Bodoni faces were resurrected
in the early twentieth century. After 1955, Didone-style lettering was used
almost exclusively by Vogue magazine and, ‘apart from minor details . . .
has remained absolutely fixed since then’. Having been used by Alexey
Brodovitch in his role as art director of Harper’s Bazaar between 1934 and
1958, Didot was ‘powerfully resuscitated’ by Fabien Baron in 1992 to create
‘a kind of super-Didot’, which enabled it to be presented in very large sizes
while retaining its ‘razor-thin lines’. When challenged by Abbott Miller, who
asked Baron whether he was referring to the Brodovitch era, Baron replied
‘No . . . we used Didot because it’s very feminine’ (Abbott Miller in Barnard
2012: 125). What is happening here is slightly different. Femininity and
fashion are being given an identity: the cultural groups that produce and
consume the magazines are using these specific typefaces, with their
characteristically pronounced thicks and thins, to communicate the meaning
that fashion and femininity have for them. The thicks and thins of the
typefaces connote both fashion and femininity to these groups and they,
therefore, use them to give a visual identity to the magazines.
Chanel’s use of a Sans Serif typeface (faces without the little lines or
projections at the ends of strokes, such as Helvetica, Arial and Calibri), to
construct and communicate its brand identity is also commented on by

Abbott Miller. He says that this Sans Serif face, in black, against a white
field and the use of a number, along with the cubic bottle, connotes the
industrial avant-gardism of Le Corbusier and exists as a ‘refutation’ of the
romanticism that had ‘dominated women’s fashion’. This industrial, almost
masculine aesthetic is set against the ‘loopy and voluptuous scripts’ used
by other perfume and fashion houses. And this aesthetic is taken up by
many other fashion designers. Abbott Miller notes that Rei Kawakubo,
Comme des Garçons, Jil Sander and Helmut Lang also employ the severe,
undecorated look generated by Sans Serif faces (Abbott Miller in Barnard
2012: 126). All of these fashion houses believe that the meaning connoted
by these typefaces is appropriate to them and to their designs. The iden-
tities that are constructed for these designers by these faces are a little
like the identities constructed by the clothes that we wear: they com-
municate what the designers think their brand means to their market as
the things we wear communicate our identity, what we think we mean,
to those around us.
Image, tool and prosthesis

One’s image, the image or identity that one constructs and presents to the
outside world through what one wears, reminds us of the matter of the
prosthetic, which was introduced in Chapter 8. If one’s image is thought
of as a tool with which one communicates an identity, then it is possible
to change one’s image, use a different tool, to communicate a different
identity. The problem arises that it is not possible not to communicate an
identity, to not use a tool. This is because one cannot appear without
assuming or taking on some identity, without using some tool or other. As
the letters and words in the examples above cannot appear (even in our
imaginations) except in some form (whether written or in some typeface
or other), so we cannot appear without some form of dress (even when
naked, I have argued in Chapter 9 that we are dressed in culture insofar as
we build, move, pose, hold and gesture with our bodies according to
culturally learned and therefore not-natural values). We cannot appear
without presenting ourselves in some way or other and this sense of image
is, therefore, inevitable. Consequently, our understanding of the tool must
change: we can no longer think of the tool as something that is added to
us, that we take up as an addition to an already existing identity. Were it
not for the tool, there would be no identity.
This thought takes us into the realm of the prosthesis. A tool is usually
thought of as adding to, or supplementing, our bodies by doing something
that out bodies cannot. And a prosthetic is usually explained as something
that is added to a body and which replaces and acts in the place of a missing

part of that body. My argument here is that the natural body is all missing
and that all clothing and fashion act as a prosthetic and an image to make
one present ‘in the first place’ as it were. It is not ‘literally’ missing, of course,
but any meaningful experience and understanding of it is missing without
the representation of it and representation is only made using something
that is not the (natural) body itself but which is a cultural ‘adornment’ of
it. Before the clothing and the fashion (the tools, the things that stand for
us and represent us as image), there is nothing. If the image is a prosthetic
– in the sense that image is not oneself but stands for or represents oneself,
and must therefore be a cultural construction – then prosthesis is inevitable.
Hussein Chalayan and Martin Margiela’s work, which was explained
above, may be used to illustrate this difficult argument. Their 1998 and
1999 shows used mirrors and images in ways that were not so much a
blurring of a difference between the thing and its image as a replacement
of the thing with an image of the thing. Caroline Evans argued that the
difference between experiencing reality and experiencing the image was
‘effaced’ in these shows (Evans 2008: 22). In Chalayan’s mirrors, reality
and image generate the same experience and they are meaningful in the
same way: if reality is available to us only in the form of representation or
image, then these designers, and fashion generally, are not blurring the
distinction and they are not replacing the thing with the representation.
One must say that the thing is only available to us as representation. The
thing and the reality (in fashion as well as elsewhere) can only be experienced
and made meaningful in and as representation. There is no natural reality
that is supplemented by the image or added to by the prosthetic of fashion:
fashion as the ‘prosthetic’ and the ‘image’ are what make ‘reality’ in the
first place.
Conclusion
This chapter has introduced various ways in which fashion and clothing
relate to (the) image. The allegedly deceptive and deceitful aspects of fashion
and clothing were traced back to Plato’s epistemological story of the cave:
this story was explained as an early account of how images are not true
knowledge but untrustworthy and the source, according to Lipovetsky, of
our mistrust of fashion and its images. Fashion’s use of imagery, in
photography, for example, was also introduced. Some of the common
structures and patterns of connotational meaning were identified and
analysed by Barthes’ brief but fecund account of fashion photography. And,
moving in the opposite direction from Barthes, it was argued that
connotation, cultural meaning, could be ‘read’ from fashion photographer’s
descriptions of the technology they favoured. Finally, the customary

understanding of fashion, dress and the image as something like a ‘tool’
with which we communicate our identity was shown to be mistaken. Fashion
and clothing are not simply something added to ourselves and our bodies;
without some form of cultural dressing, there are no selves and no
identities. The next chapter will consider the fetish and enumerate the ways
in which fashion exists as a fetish, providing and enabling what we often
perceive to be pleasure.
Further reading
Brookes, R. (1992) ‘Fashion Photography’, in Ash, J. and Wilson, E. (eds)
Chic Thrills, London, Pandora.
Craik, J. (1994) The Face of Fashion, London, Routledge; chapter 5 on fashion
photography.
Jobling, P. (1999) Fashion Spreads: Word and Image in Fashion Photography
Since 1980, Oxford, Berg.
Ramamurthy, A. (2004) ‘Spectacles and Illusions: Photography and
Commodity Culture’, in Wells, L. (ed.) Photography: A Critical Introduction,
Third Edition, London, Routledge; see pp. 220–35 on fashion photography
and colonialism.
Shinkle, E. (ed.) (2008) Fashion as Photograph, London, I.B. Tauris.

chapter 13
Fashion, fetish
and the erotic
Introduction
In December 2010, the Mail Online website reported that ‘bondage’ is ‘this
season’s dominant lingerie trend’ (Mail Online 2010). Not a website to miss
an opportunity to show Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Cheryl Cole cavorting on
stage in their underwear, the article quotes Helen Attwood, Selfridges’ Head
Buyer for Lingerie, as saying ‘This winter S&M has gone couture’ and points
out that ‘This season, Selfridges’ average lingerie spend is up by 20 per
cent on risqué brands including Agent Provocateur and Myla’. Selfridges’
customers looking for Nichole de Carle London lingerie are apparently
‘fighting’ to pay £220 for the ‘Dream Catcher’ stretch silk bra in order to
enjoy the ‘erotic look’ made famous by Rihanna and Lady Gaga. Apparently
unaware of the pun, the article connects what it calls ‘dominant’ fashion
to such fetishized activities as S&M via the medium of fashionable lingerie,
thus neatly and economically introducing all the concerns of this chapter.
What the Mail Online so enthusiastically mixes up in its pursuit of
readers and click-throughs, this chapter must separate and identify in the
pursuit of analysis and explanation. The fetish of S&M and the erotic charge
of the lingerie are said to be the solution to shoppers’ problems concerning
how to ‘add some spice in the bedroom’. The erotic and the fetish are both
presented here as the answer to a question about how best to arouse sexual
desire, and the consumption of expensive fashionable underwear is
presented here as the natural and unquestioned means of achieving this.
The notions of fashion, fetish and the erotic, and the relations between
fashion, fetish and the erotic 197

Figure 13.1 Dreamcatcher bra by Nichole de Carle London. (Photograph by
Richard Stow.)
those notions, have become so muddled in contemporary popular and mass

culture that they are used, as in this article, as synonyms of each other, as
though they mean almost exactly the same thing and can, therefore, be
substituted for each other without a problem.
Significantly, the commodities, the items of lingerie, are claimed to have
magical powers (they will restore the missing excitement or ‘spice’ to our
sex lives) and they are made to stand for a certain social and economic
status (the Mail Online mentions ‘mainstream’ customers but £1,000
($1,500) is probably a lot of money for a jewelled bra, and the price will
certainly prohibit some consumers from purchasing the objects). As we will
see below, the magical properties claimed for the objects provide precisely
the definition of fetish that is found in anthropology and the representation
of status is exactly what is claimed for the fetishized commodity in Marxist
198 fashion, fetish and the erotic

economics. It could also, therefore, be argued that Rihanna, Lady Gaga and
Cheryl Cole are themselves fetishized by the Mail Online – they are
represented as powerfully erotic objects in very similar photographs. It
cannot be denied for very long that they are also presented for the sexual
pleasure of their readers. Of course, the Mail Online website is not the only
source of this confusion or this fetishization, and it is not the website’s job
to explain and account for the use and sense of critical terms. But, whatever
the source, it is the job of this chapter to try to dispel the confusion, and
to explain and account for the use of these central and critical terms.
Consequently, this chapter will first define the terms ‘fetish’ and ‘erotic’
and show how the former relates very closely to ‘fashion’. It will then consider
the main theorists who have concerned themselves with the fetish in fashion
and explain their positions. The psychoanalytically grounded work of
Sigmund Freud, James Laver, John Flügel and René Koenig will be examined
before looking at the more Marxist account of fetishism found in the work
of Jean Baudrillard. Roland Barthes’ semiological account of the fetish as
it appears in photography will be dealt with. And finally, the question of
whether the fetish is gendered and whether a specifically female, or
feminine, form of fetishism is possible will be raised.
Definitions and etymologies

The muddle in which fashion, fetish and the erotic were said to exist above,
may perhaps be partly excused if it is understood that the terms are actually
quite closely related etymologically. Etymology relates to the origins and
developments of words, and fashion and fetish share a common origin, if
not a common development, which may begin to explain the confusion.
The erotic and the fetish have probably become confused as a result of
developing a shared or ‘overlapping’ meaning rather than sharing a
common origin.
Both ‘fashion’ and ‘fetish’ share a Latin root – facticium. Facticium means
‘artificial’ and derives in its turn from another Latin word, facere, which
means ‘to make’ or ‘to do’. Do not be misled by the presence of ‘fact’ in
facticium; it has nothing to do with being true (and, therefore, neither artificial
nor deceptive) and is the same ‘fact’ as is found in ‘manufacture’, which
means ‘make by hand’. Fashion and fetish are both things that are made,
then, and this gives them entry into the academic disciplines of economics,
anthropology and psychoanalysis, where they are taken up, provided with
various senses and used to explain human behaviour.
In anthropology, the term ‘fetish’ refers to an object that is believed to
possess, or grant, the owner or holder of the object access to divine or
other powers. The paws, feathers and bones of animals or birds, for example,

are believed to possess or grant access to the powers of those animals and
birds. One might gain the sight of an eagle, or the cunning of a fox, by
wearing or holding the feathers or skin of those creatures. For a long time,
anthropologists believed that fetishism distinguished what ‘they’ did from
what ‘we’ did: ‘savages’ used fetish objects and believed in their magical
powers but we ‘civilized’ people did not.
More recently, however, cultural studies has acknowledged that ‘we’
modern and civilized Westerners also believe in something like these things
if, or when, we wear fur, leather or feathers. The belief is that there is some
animal or avian quality that we share in, or take on, when we wear these
things. The beauty or grace or power of the bird or animal is believed to
somehow ‘rub off’ onto the wearer of those furs, leathers and feathers. For
example, every season or so it is declared that animal prints are back in
fashion and magazine and newspaper fashion pages are full of women
wearing leopard-print trousers and cheetah-print tops. One can only assume
that something of the elegance or feline grace of these animals is sought
by those wearing such prints. Inevitably, the Mail Online website provides
an example of this belief: in an article for 22 March 2013, the ‘wild, wild’
footballer’s wife and ‘Liverpudlian model’ Abbey Crouch is said to be
showing her ‘animal magnetism’ by wearing a $500 Kooples’ leopard print
blazer and trouser ensemble (Mail Online 2013). The magic is so strong
here that even when the skin is represented in a print, the wildness,
magnetism and attractiveness of the animal is believed to be present and
effective. The fashion items consumed by us civilized Westerners are
routinely treated fetishistically; therefore, however ‘light-heartedly’, they are
believed to grant the wearer powers that they may not have possessed before.
In economics, the term ‘fetish’ is used to indicate and explain an aspect
of the nature of the object or commodity as it is found in capitalist
economies. A capitalist economy is one in which men and women work at
different jobs, producing commodities in the forms of goods and services,
and in which those commodities are exchanged for money in a competitive
market. Karl Marx argues that the commodity, which at first glance seems
to be ‘an extremely obvious, trivial thing’, is actually ‘a very strange thing’
(Marx 1976: 163). The commodity appears obvious because we see people
taking raw materials, such as wool and cotton, and making coats and shirts
out of them; the coats and shirts are commodities and they are bought and
sold (exchanged for money) in a market and then they are taken away and
used. However, as Marx says, as soon as we start to analyse the commodity
it becomes clear that it abounds in ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological
niceties’ (Marx 1976: 163).
There is nothing mysterious about the commodity considered as ‘use-
value’; raw materials such as cotton are made into things such as shirts
that are of use and Marx says that this is not strange at all. Strangeness

starts with the exchanging of the commodity for money. The actual origin
of the value of the thing in human labour is obscured by the assigning of
a monetary value to the thing and people start to believe that value inheres
in the thing itself. As Marx has it, ‘the definite social relation between men
themselves . . . assumes . . . the fantastic form of a relation between things’
(Marx 1976: 165). The origin of value is in the social relation between the
worker’s labour and the capitalist’s wage, but the exchange of the commodity
for money (one thing for another thing) obscures that origin and people
believe that the commodity is valuable in and by itself.
What this means is that commodities are experienced as valuable
in themselves, rather than as the product of human labour. They are thus
free to stand for, or represent, social differences and a high-priced coat
or piece of lingerie is understood as actually being worth that high price
and, therefore, appropriate to a certain class of consumer, rather than as
the product of a specific amount of labour and skill being expended and a
profit margin being applied by an employer. The expensive coat or lingerie
can henceforth be used by high-income and high-status consumers to
construct and communicate that status. Nichole de Carle London’s ‘Dream
Catcher’ silk structured bra will probably not represent £220 worth of silk
and labour power, but that fact that it is now exchangeable for money
means that it is available to affluent Selfridges’ customers to set themselves
apart from those less affluent consumers who buy their underwear from
M&S. The fetishism of commodities thus obscures the true origins of the
value of fashion items in exploitative labour relations, while enabling those
commodities to represent and reproduce social and economic differences.
In this sense, the fetish fashion object has an almost magical power of
representing the status of the person wearing it. It is as though the fetishism
obscures one set of social relations (those obtaining in the production of
the commodity) in order to represent another set of social relations (those
obtaining in the consumption of the commodity).
Finally, in psychoanalysis, the fetish is associated with a particular
episode in someone’s psycho-sexual history and is a prime source or
condition of subsequent pleasure. In his ‘Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality’, written in 1905, Sigmund Freud tells us that the ‘normal’ sexual
aim is ‘the union of the genitals in the act known as copulation’ and he
indicates that a fetish is one of the ‘deviations in respect of the sexual aim’
(Freud 1953: 149). These deviations exist in two forms: we may call them
‘extending’ and ‘lingering’ (or ‘fixation’). The first form of perversion, extend-
ing, consists in ‘extending in an anatomical sense’ beyond those parts of
the body that are ‘designed’ for sexual union. The sexual use of the anus,
and of the lips and mouth, are examples of such perversions. The second
form or perversion, lingering over or fixating upon some or any of the
‘intermediate stages’ on the way to normal sexual union, includes touching

and looking, and the sadism and masochism with which the Mail Online
website (2010) is so familiar. Unlike sadism and masochism, touching and
looking are scarcely perversions at all, Freud says, as long as the sexual act
is carried further ‘in the long run’ (Freud 1953: 156).
However, Freud also says that fetishism is a deviation in which an
‘unsuitable substitute’ for the sexual object is made (Freud 1953: 153). These
inappropriate substitutes also take two forms. They may be metonyms, in
which some part of the body (Freud suggests feet and hair) replaces the
sexual object. Or they may be synechdoches, in which an inanimate object
(Freud suggests clothing or underwear) bearing some relation to the person
replaces the sexual object. An element of fetishism may be present in ‘normal
love’ (who has not treasured a lock of hair or some personal belonging
from their sweetheart?), and some degree of fetishism may be the condition
for any sexual desire or pleasure at all. However, it is always possible that
the fetish can pass beyond the point at which it is a condition for any, and
all, sexual desire and pleasure to become pathological. When the fetish
‘takes the place of the normal aim’ and when the fetish is ‘detached from
the particular individual’ to become the sole object, then fetishism
becomes an ‘aberration’ (Freud 1953: 154). The fetish is, therefore, especially
interesting to Freud because of the way in which it can pass beyond being
a condition for the possibility of obtaining pleasure from the sexual object
to taking the place of the aim of copulation and becoming itself the sexual
object (Freud 1953: 154).
(It should be noted, parenthetically, that Freud changed his mind slightly
on the matter of the fetish in his 1927 essay ‘Fetishism’ (Freud 1964).
Following Alfred Binet, who stressed the idea that early childhood was
important in the formation of the fetish, Freud argued in the later essay
that the fetish is ‘a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that
the little boy once believed in and . . . now does not want to give up’ (Freud
1964: 152–3). However, even on this later account, the fetish is still a method
of negotiating or coming to terms with the unpleasant experience of that
absence, thereby enabling sexual activity and allowing pleasure to continue.)
The references to bondage and ‘S&M’ in the Mail Online article may
now be placed and understood in their psychoanalytic context. These
practices would be understood as that form of fetish that is a lingering or
a fixation upon any of the preliminary stages of what Freud calls the normal
sexual aim. While it would be fair to assume from the tone of the piece that
the Mail Online believes itself to be only half serious, or to be mentioning
these practices as a ‘bit of harmless fun’, Freud argues that the course of
all true love necessarily involves elements of aggression and submission
(Freud 1953: 158). Calling it a harmless bit of fun, or assuming a light-hearted
tone, does not exempt the content from human sexuality or from Freud’s

account of it. Similarly, although Freud associates aggression with male
sexuality (Freud 1953: 157), it seems pointless to deny that it is also a part
of female sexuality, and aggressiveness is simply a part of the normal sexual
aim, or ‘wooing’ as Freud’s translator has it, whether it is a man or a woman
doing the wooing. Accordingly, submission to another person’s charms
(what Freud calls masochism) must also be a part of everyone’s sexuality
and, therefore, part of the normal sexual aim. Consequently, there can be
no such thing as ‘harmless fun’: harm (in the forms of aggression and
submission) is both a part of and a condition for the fun. The Mail Online’s
references to bondage and S&M are, therefore, not jokes or trivial
entertainment; psychoanalytically, they are both constitutive of and effective
in the role of fashion in human sexuality.
And the treatment of Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Cheryl Cole (indeed,
arguably all women) by the Mail Online may also be placed in its
psychoanalytic context and recognized as an example of fetishism. First,
and with our tongue only slightly in contact with our mucous membrane
(Freud 1953: 151), we might reasonably suggest that the Mail Online is
lingering over, or even fixated on, looking at the women’s bodies, at the
expense of moving on, or adopting a more mature attitude towards the
normal sexual aim. It is easy to argue that all women in the Mail Online
website are simply and only there to be looked at; the vertical column on
the right-hand side of the webpage usually consists entirely of photographs
of women. They are simply and only there for the pleasure of the readers
of the articles. Second, all three women in the article considered here are
photographed wearing very similar leather, or leather-look boots. This is
consistent with Freud’s definition of fetish as synechdoche, in which an
inanimate object that bears some relation to the sexual object potentially
or actually replaces or stands in for that person. Further investigation and
analysis would be necessary to determine whether the boots were a
condition for the pleasure or whether they were the sole (as it were) object
of the pleasure, but is seems clear that the boots are the cause of pleasure
and they are found or repeated here three times. The psychoanalytic account
of the fetish thus also applies to this apparently simple story about
fashionable underwear appearing on the Mail Online website.
Fashion and fetish

With these introductions to the various senses of ‘fetish’, which we have
gained from the three disciplines that have taken the idea, we may now
look at how various theorists have used the word to explain fashion. James
Laver’s account of fetishism in fashion develops some ideas from John

Flügel’s account of erogenous zones, which in turn is a development of
Bernard Rudovsky’s ideas concerning clothing and sexual selection. The
following section will pursue the links in this order back to Rudovsky.
Laver’s 1969 book, Modesty in Dress, relies on Freud’s earlier account
of fetishism, from the 1905 essays, to explain fetishism in fashion and
develops Flügel’s idea of the ‘shifting erogenous zone’. Quoting Binet, Laver
is interested in fetishism as ‘the tendency whereby sexual attraction is unduly
exerted by some special part or peculiarity of the body or by some inanimate
object which has become associated with it’ (Laver 1969a: 112). Referring
to Henry Havelock Ellis, Laver also presents fetishism in terms of an object
or a process that lies apart from the central focus of attraction, in the
margins, or even outside ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ human sexuality. Both of
these characteristics (the role of a part or element in the fetish and the idea
that the fetish is a deviation from the normal sexual aim), are clearly the
products of Freud’s 1905 account.
The examples that Laver uses to illustrate his account of fetishism are
also indebted to Freud’s account. We find the examples of shoes, tight-
lacing and underwear in Laver’s account of fetishism in women’s fashion
and clothing. Although he follows Freud’s account closely, Laver does not
explicitly analyse the examples in the exact terms that Freud uses. So, while
he does not say so, the feet are obviously intended as parts of the body
that are ‘lingered over’ for too long or at the expense of the normal sexual
aim, to use Freud’s account of fetish. And, although it is not spelled out,
the tight-lacing and underwear are clearly elements associated with parts
of the body, which are similarly lingered over or concentrated on at the
expense of progressing to what Freud calls the normal sexual aim. Laver
also considers the part played by fetishism in men’s fashion and dress. It
is here that we find the examples of hats and neck-ties. Again, he does not
explicitly analyse the examples of fetishism in men’s clothes in the terms
used by Freud, preferring to drift into talk of symbolism.
For example, he begins the account of men’s hats by saying that Freud
implies the wearing of hats is a ‘phallic gesture’ but immediately dilutes
the argument for fetishism by saying that they are ‘symbolic of potent
masculinity’ (Laver 1969a: 121). The king’s crown is symbolic of a marriage
to the body politic and the Puritan’s ‘high hat’ is symbolic of masculine
dominance, for example, but neither is accounted for in terms of the ‘pure’
fetish that we find in Freud. There is no sense that they are a tarrying over
some element or stage of pleasure. It is as if Laver is pulling his
psychoanalytic punches here. He begins what could have been the most
outrageous account of hat fetishism ever written by imagining an ‘Indian
Yogi’ flying over a crowd of men wearing Trilby hats, looking down, and
believing that they represent the ‘yoni on top’. But, rather than develop the
idea that the hat fetishizes the female vagina by looking like one and

pondering what it means for men to wear them on their heads, he contents
himself by saying simply that the form of the Trilby is the ‘symbol’ of
femininity (Laver 1969a: 122).
It is much the same with his account of men’s neck-ties. He says that
it is well known that ‘youths express their growing consciousness of virility
by wearing a loud tie’ and he recounts the story of the Paris night club at
which the forfeit for a male guest not singing a song was to have one of
the girls cut off his tie with scissors (Laver 1969a: 124). But modern Western
culture’s fixation on the penis, and on representations of it, as well as the
repetition of those representations throughout the culture, are all ignored
by Laver. Rather he concentrates on what he again calls the ‘symbolism’ of
the tie: he reduces what he calls the ‘Freudian significance’ of the garment
to a series of unconscious symbolic representations. The symbolism of the
tie is a simple product of where the tie is (‘it falls down the middle of the
chest’) and of what it ‘resembles’. The complexities of Freud’s account, the
deviation and the tarrying, the ways that the garment may be used to
negotiate sexuality and make pleasure possible, are all ignored or played
down in Laver’s account. The idea that immature males of all ages wear
loud ties, and thereby remain obsessed by the size, shape and colour of
their ties, could have been developed in terms of lingering over an element
that has a part and a function to play but that is only a part and merely an
element in a larger sexual or seductive process. The explanation of women’s
fetishization of ties, in the way that the boots and underwear are fetishized
in the Mail Online (2010) article, never quite gets off the ground and is
reduced to the symbolism of power and masculinity with which we are now
familiar.
Laver also suggests that his definition and explanation of fetishized
fashion supports the idea that ‘clothes themselves are a function of
fetishism’ (Laver 1969a: 112). This is the argument that it is not that there
is fashion and clothing, and that some items and styles may be fetishized,
but that fashion and clothing only exist at all because of fetishism. He
indicates that this is the only proper way of understanding Flügel’s account
of shifting erogenous zones and it is to these zones that we must now turn
our attention. The word ‘erogenous’ is a contraction of ‘erotogenous’; both
words are made up from two ancient Greek words which mean ‘productive
of erotic excitement’ when put together like this. In popular psychology and
sexual self-help books, the word tends to refer to areas of the body that are
sensitive to sexual stimulation and which produce pleasurable feelings when
touched. In most fashion theory, the word is used to indicate clothes that
generate erotic desire or cause sexual interest.
In his chapter on ‘The Exploitation of Immodesty’, Laver traces the idea
of the shifting erogenous zone through Flügel’s account to Havelock Ellis
who he says first used the term in English in 1903 (Laver 1969a: 96). Flügel’s

account refers explicitly to women’s fashion. He says that fashion is not
much more than a series of emphases on different parts of the woman’s
body, as a series of fashionable clothes draws attention to them and then
moves on to a different area. As one garment or style passes out of fashion,
the area of the body to which it drew attention is no longer the object of
attention. This area becomes a ‘sterile’ zone, according to Flügel, and loses
any seductiveness it had. As another garment or style, which draws
attention to a different area of the body, comes into fashion, that area of
the body becomes the new site of interest and excitement. This area becomes
the new ‘erogenous’ zone and is highly seductive. As the fashion changes,
so the areas of the female body that are emphasized by the garments and
styles making up the fashion also change, and the seductive and exciting,
or ‘erogenous’ zones, are said to ‘shift’. Laver summarizes Flügel saying
that ‘old gentlemen’ would faint at the sight of a lady’s ankle in 1900, but
that young gentlemen are left unmoved by the sight of entire legs in the
1930s. Legs also had a ‘short outing in the 1830s’ but were no longer of
interest in the 1840s when they were inevitably replaced by some other area
of interest (Laver 1969a: 39): that other area became fashionable and the
new bearer of ‘erotic capital’, pleasurably generating interest through the
consumption of it (Laver 1969a: 97).
This is what little sense exists behind such headlines as ‘Are Legs the
New Boobs?’, which regularly appear in the fashion press. This one actually
appeared on the ivillage.com website on 24 June 2010. Featuring pictures
of Lady Gaga (again), Beyonce and Miley Cyrus baring their legs onstage,
the website suggests that legs are the new object of seductive interest and
implies that boobs are ‘a bit last year’ (ivillage.com 2010). It is also the
sense behind the fashion headlines declaring that pencil skirts are back or
that tight tops are here for the winter. Pencil skirts draw attention to a
woman’s hips and thighs, and those areas will be the new erogenous zones
for the season, replacing whatever body parts the outgoing fashion
emphasized. Tight tops will perform exactly the same function for a different
part of the body, emphasizing breasts and tummy, perhaps, where the
previous fashion may have concentrated on the bottom. The body parts
that the fashions emphasize will be different for different styles and
garments, and the interesting and seductive areas, the erogenous zones,
will therefore be different from season to season. The changes characteristic
of fashion on this account are driven by the changes in erogenous zones,
the changes in the parts of the female body that are highlighted by the
succession of different clothes and styles. Those changes are made
necessary because people (men) get ‘used to’ a style and the body part(s)
that it emphasizes, lose interest and require something new to look at.
Flügel’s account of the young gentlemen no longer getting excited by
sights that would have had their fathers fainting thirty years earlier, and of

modern men contemplating women’s legs without any emotion, introduces
two important aspects of the theory of erogenous zones that must be
dealt with. The first is the relation between fashion and sexual selection
presupposed by the theory, and the second is the built-in male and
heterosexual bias, if not explicit homophobia, that is the logical consequence
of that relation. Drawing attention to this male and heterosexual bias is the
condition for wondering whether critical and alternative positions are
possible, and the following sections will consider the possibility of a female
or feminist form of fetishism and whether other forms of sexuality may
engage with fetishism.
The relation between Laver’s and Flügel’s accounts of fashion as shifting
erogenous zones and sexual selection is admitted by Laver when he argues
that women’s clothing is driven by the ‘Seduction Principle’ (Laver 1969a:
14). Following Bernard Rudovsky and Edmund Bergler, he is arguing that
the explanation of women’s clothing must be made in terms of seduction,
and seduction reduces to sexual selection in his account. Rudovsky’s theory
is that where male animals and birds have striking and beautiful coats and
feathers with which to attract female sexual partners, in human culture it
is the women who use beautiful clothes and hairstyles to attract male sexual
partners (see Rouse 1989: 11). Laver’s and Flügel’s accounts follow and
reproduce this basic pattern in which the changes in fashion are driven
by the need to keep sexual interest alive in order that seduction and
heterosexual selection may take place.
Seduction in Laver’s and Flügel’s accounts is presented with the express
and single aim of attracting a man and becoming married to him. Laver
says that throughout ‘history and prehistory men have chosen their partners
in life by their attractiveness as women’ (Laver 1969a: 14). Consequently,
women’s dress exists only to attract husbands. As we have just seen, the
problem is that men tire of garments and styles that emphasize a particular
body part and are no longer interested in women wearing those garments
and styles. Women’s fashions and clothing exist only to attract a male
husband according to this theory; any and all changes in styles and garments
(that is, fashion) exist only to relieve the boredom experienced by men who
are assessing the attractiveness of potential wives. Consequently, their
interest must be re-awakened by new styles and garments that emphasize
different body parts and re-attract them to the women wearing those styles
and garments. It is easy to see how this account of shifting erogenous zones
functions as an explanation of fashion: the novelty of fashion is driven by
the need for women to sexually attract men to be their husbands. It should
be clear that this precise relation between fashion and sexual selection is
presupposed by Flügel’s theory of shifting erogenous zones.
It should also not be difficult to see how this relation has a built-in
male and heterosexual bias, if not a homophobic tendency. There is also

no mention of lesbianism, or any other forms of sexuality apart from hetero-
sexuality, except when the predictable prevalence of tie-wearing lesbians is
duly noted in the chapter on fetishism (Laver 1969a: 124). Men’s fashions
and clothing are not bound up with seduction or sexual selection, but rather
with social status and they are subject to the Hierarchy Principle (Laver
1969a: 14). No mention is made of changes or of those changes being driven
by a cycle of novelty–boredom–novelty. In sum, fashions exist to please
heterosexual men in the interest of sexual selection according to the theory
of shifting erogenous zones and any other forms of sexuality are deviations
and not served by proper fashion.
Having examined the main psychoanalytic theories of the fetish and of
how the fetish is used (and arguably diluted as symbolism) in the theory
of shifting erogenous zones, this section will return to the economic account
of the fetish. The following paragraphs will investigate how the economic
idea of the fetish has been used since its appearance in Marx’s Capital to
explain fashion. This, it will be recalled, is the sense of the fetish as
commodity fetish, as thinking of the object or commodity, not as a use-
value or as the product of people’s labour and skills, but as the equivalent
of an amount of money and then as a signifier of social status. Fashion
objects are fetishized on the Marxist account in that they stand for, or
represent, a person’s status rather than the labour that went into making
them. Jean Baudrillard’s account of fashion as commodity fetish in his 1981
book is a clear and compelling critique of Marx’s position.
Baudrillard’s argument may be said to start from the idea that the
Marxist’s account of commodity fetishism is itself fetishistic – that it
presupposes and relies on something (use-value, the labour power of the
worker, non-alienated consciousness, for example) that is held to be ‘true’
or outside of the economy of exchange and difference that Baudrillard
believes generates meaning and value (Baudrillard 1981: 89). His argument
may also be understood as a radicalization of the insight that Marx began
in Capital. He says that the fetishization of the commodity is ‘the
fetishization of a product emptied of its concrete substance of labor and
subjected to another type of labor, a labor of signification’ (Baudrillard 1981:
93). The commodity is now to be thought of as a sign, or a ‘sign object’ as
Baudrillard has it; it is a marker of difference in a whole system, or economy,
of objects whose only meaning and value is a product of their differences
from and relations to other sign objects. Baudrillard’s fetishized commodity
is an object that has been drained or relieved of its ‘substance and history’
and is simply the marker of difference.
What this means is that the fetishized fashion commodity is no longer
to be critically explained in terms of its use-value, or the labour power of
the worker that went into making it, or in terms of the social status that it

communicates. Nor is it to be explained in terms of the beauty or elegance
of the garment, or in terms of the way that it relates to the natural body.
All of these things are themselves only the fetishized products of this ‘other’
type of labour, the labour of difference and signification. On Baudrillard’s
account, even beauty is a product of the economy of difference; in a bizarre
echo and radicalization of the theory of shifting erogenous zones, this
garment is considered beautiful only because it is different from the previous
thing that was considered beautiful. Similarly, there is no ‘natural’ body
that pre-exists the commodity; all the accoutrements of fashion (Baudrillard
lists eyeshadow, bracelets, collars and accessories) inscribe culture on the
body – ‘weaving the body from signs’ as he puts it (Baudrillard 1981: 94–5).
And it is certainly not use-value or labour power that ultimately accounts
for the value of the commodity: in this economy of exchange and difference,
‘use value becomes obscure and almost unintelligible’, while labour power
is itself fetishized by being taken out of that economy of exchange and
difference and used as the measure of value. Indeed, use-value is said to
be a ‘function derived from exchange value’: even the use to which a
commodity is put is a product of its place in the economy of different
commodities (Baudrillard 1981: 93).
Baudrillard’s example of women’s long and short skirts may be used
to illustrate these points. Baudrillard says that neither the long skirt nor the
short skirt has any meaning or value ‘in itself’. The skirts are not beautiful,
ugly, chic, sexually liberated or sexually conservative by themselves; only in
relation to each other are they meaningful or do they represent the values
that they are said to represent. It is only the difference between them, the
relation that exists between them that generates any meaning or value. What
Baudrillard calls the ‘voyage’ from the mini- to the maxi-skirt (creating any
and all effects of beauty and fashionableness) is entirely reversible and will
‘precipitate the same effects’ (Baudrillard 1981: 79). As such, the skirts are
sign objects, liberated from the logics of use-value, labour power and other
forms of social and economic symbolism with which Marx and Marxists
would want to explain the fetishism of commodities. On Baudrillard’s
acount, the objects of these logics are themselves fetishized, held to be
outside of, and immune to, the effects of the economy of significative and
differential labour.
We must now consider the alternatives to, and the critiques of, the
account of fashion that is based on fetishism and shifting erogenous
zones. As noted above, the main problems concerned gender and hetero-
sexuality: according to the theories of shifting erogenous zones and the
fetish considered in them, fashion exists only to enable women to seduce
men in the interests of securing a husband. Freud tends to assume that
fetishism is a uniquely male pursuit, and although he is reported to have

said that ‘all women are clothing fetishists’ (in Gamman and Makinen
1994: 60), it remains unclear in what sense or in what ways women can be
clothing fetishists. Freud says that the fetish is an extending, a lingering or
a substitute. It may extend the range of objects, body parts and activities
that would usually lead to the fulfilment of what he calls the ‘normal sexual
aim’; it may involve a lingering over one of the body parts or intermediate
stages on the way to that normal sexual aim; or it may substitute an object
or an activity for the object of that aim. Lorrain Gamman and Merja
Makinen’s Female Fetishism: A New Look may be read as an attempt to
provide some idea of how women can be fetishists and some of their
examples concern fashion and clothing.
Gamman and Makinen say that they ‘aim to establish the existence of
certain types of behaviour which constitute sexual fetishism by women’
(Gamman and Makinen 1994: 80). They are looking for evidence of women
being fetishists and doing fetishism, rather than being the objects of other
people’s fetishism or having it done to them. In short, they are looking for
evidence of an active female fetishism, rather than of women being the
passive objects of men’s fetishism. It would not be unfair to say that there
is not much evidence in their book of such active female fetishism in the
area of fashion and clothing. The main examples they explore, of food
fetishism (and its effects on body shape), cross-dressing and tight-lacing,
are not unambiguous ways in which women construct and enjoy their own
fetishes. Anorexia and bulimia may be an extending or a substitute for what
Freud calls the normal sexual aim, but they are not obviously positive ways
in which women are able actively to control and enjoy their own sexuality
and their body images as they relate to clothes and fashion (Gamman and
Makinen 1994: 159). Cross-dressing may appeal to Freud’s account of
aggression and activity in sexuality (Freud 1953: 158), but it is surely only
on the condition that women impersonate men or disguise themselves as
men, rather than pursue a specifically or properly feminine or female form
of the fetish (Gamman and Makinen 1994: 67). Similarly, tight-lacing always
runs the risk of being understood as a passive submission to male-
dominated cultural codes of female attractiveness (the visible corset, as
opposed to Elizabeth Wilson’s ‘invisible corset’ of dieting as Gamman and
Makinen point out, 1994: 159). As seen in the Mail Online website with
which this chapter began, tight-lacing and other aspects of S&M activity
are not necessarily the resistant and active path to feminine pleasure that
commentators such as David Kunzle often present them as (Gamman and
Makinen 1994: 204–5). It is worth noting at this point that some commen-
tators, including Alison Bancroft, for example, argue that the term ‘fetish’
is being stretched far from its psychoanalytic origins by writers such as
Kunzle (Bancroft 2012: 63).

The erotic
It is probably worth noting that only in psychoanalysis does the fetish object
have erotic functions and connotations; in economics and anthropology, it
has neither. We must now investigate the erotic. The English word ‘erotic’
means ‘pertaining to sexual love or passion’. It derives from an ancient
Greek word eros, which meant sexual desire: it also derives from ‘Eros’,
which was the name of the Greek god of love and sexual desire. In his
version of psychoanalysis, Freud presents eros as a universal animating force,
which is both creative and productive. It may be contrasted in his later work
with thanatos, which is an equally universal desire for death or oblivion.
Freud himself relates his ‘enlarged’ conception of eros, which concerns a
wider range of activities and interests than merely sexual passion, to that
found in the work of Plato (Freud 1953: 134). Platonic eros may be thought
of as a universal motivational force. It is an aesthetic and erotic energy that
suffuses one’s body, intellect and soul and which, handled correctly, leads
one to the correct understanding of the good, the beautiful and the true.
While most fashion theorists understand René Koenig’s work The
Restless Image (1973) as sociology, as concerned with class and social
structures, for example, he is very interesting as a psychoanalyst and has
written about both scopophilia and exhibitionism, which he links to auto-
eroticism and to the body. In the section entitled ‘To See and To Be Seen’,
he is concerned to explain how the erotic manifests itself in the desires to
see and to be looked at: in psychoanalysis, the desire to see is called
‘scopophilia’ and the desire to be seen is labelled ‘exhibitionism’. Koenig
argues that the desire to see and the desire to be seen ‘grow from the same
erotic root’; that root is the body (Koenig 1973: 81). The subject’s own body
is originally the source of visual pleasure. What is happening is, therefore,
both scopophilic and exhibitionist as the subject is displaying their own
body to themselves and getting pleasure from it. After this initial stage, the
desire to see develops into the desire to see the bodies of other people and
this is more obviously scopophilia. As Koenig says, ‘only afterwards is the
desire to see directed towards another body for comparison’. And after this
stage, the scopophilic activities are themselves abandoned in favour of
purely exhibitionist passivity. As Koenig says, ‘In the end, this object too
[scopophilia] is abandoned and . . . the activity of looking is transformed
into passivity and the establishment of a new goal, that of being seen’
(Koenig 1973: 82).
It is tempting, if ultimately unsatisfying and unconvincing, to suggest
that scopophilia in fashion and clothing is an immature form of obtaining
pleasure from looking and that exhibitionism is the mature form. Koenig’s
account may be accused of being overly complicated. It would seem

sufficient to say that people get pleasure from looking at the bodies and
clothes of other people, and that people get pleasure from having their own
bodies and clothes looked at, without complicating the account with a
narrative and a development. This is enough to begin the explanation of
the existence and appearance of fashion, as well as the existence of all the
media that are concerned with representing and communicating fashion.
The existence of all the illustrative, photographic, film and other visual forms
in which fashion and clothing are recorded and promoted at every moment
and in every corner of the world, may be at least partly explained by reference
to the pleasure that people gain from looking and being looked at. If we
did not get these pleasures, we would neither exhibit ourselves nor look at
others exhibiting themselves. Fashion as image and as the image, which
were investigated in the previous chapter, would not exist were it not for
the presence of scopophilic and exhibitionist tendencies and pleasures in
all of us.
The talk of pleasures leads this chapter seamlessly towards Roland
Barthes’ writing on the erotic and to how it may be used to explain fashion
and clothing. Barthes provides a clear definition of the erotic and an account
of the difference between the erotic and the pornographic in his Camera
Lucida (1984) on photography. A more nuanced account, in which he also
explains the ‘foolishness’ of the idea of erogenous zones, may be found in
his The Pleasure of the Text (1975) on literature. In Camera Lucida, he explains
the difference between the erotic and the pornographic in terms of
photographs. Basically, the erotic photograph is a pornographic photograph
that has been ‘fissured’ or ‘disturbed’ in some way. The pornographic photo-
graph, like the news photograph, is a ‘unary’ photograph: it is homogenous,
banal and ‘exhibits a unity of composition’. The pornographic photograph
is like a shop window displaying only ‘one illuminated piece of jewelry’. As
a fissured photograph, the erotic photograph is full of delay, distraction
and disturbance; it contains secondary or ‘untimely’ objects and things that
are half concealed and which misdirect one’s attention (Barthes 1984: 41).
Barthes cites Robert Mapplethorpe’s close-up photographs of genitalia
as examples of the erotic. More accurately, they are illustrations of the way
that a photograph may shift or slide from the unary and pornographic to
the dualistic and erotic. If one recalls the photograph of Patrice wearing
the double-buckle belt, the leather jacket and the jersey posing pouch, one
sees that the detail of the jersey fabric provides the photograph with the
fissure, the distraction and the delay. Had the penis within the pouch been
naked, the photograph would be unary, pornographic, like the shop window
with one illuminated jewel. As it is, Barthes says he is distracted by the
texture of the fabric and the photograph erotically misdirects and delays
one’s pleasures. The photograph thus offers proof a contrario, it shows how
the shift from pornographic to erotic works.

Figure 13.2 Patrice, 1977. (© Copyright The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
Courtesy Art + Commerce.)
Following Barthes’ account, we can probably now think of all clothing

as erotic. We can probably now think of all clothing as fetish, even on Freud’s
strict definition of the fetish. All clothing, and therefore all fashion, serves
to delay, to distract and to misdirect our attention. It is, therefore, erotic
on Barthes’ account and fetish on Freud’s account. All clothing and fashion
serves to deflect our attention from the body for example, which, if it were
to be displayed on its own, would be merely pornographic. Our problem
now is that for these accounts to work, we have to think of the body as the
‘real’ subject, or as the ‘usual’ or ‘normal’ aim, from which the erotic and
the fetish distract us. This is not unacceptable: it is what both Barthes and
Freud do, for example. But it is not the only way of conceiving the relation
between clothing and the body. One might also claim, with Baudrillard and
Derrida, for example, that the body only exists ‘in the first place’ because
of the distraction from it that clothing and fashion provide. As noted in

Chapter 8, if there is no natural body existing outside the trappings of culture,
then there is no body until it has been dressed and it takes the distraction
and delay of fashion and clothing for the body to exist at all.
Conclusion
This chapter has explained what the fetish and the erotic are, and it has
explained how fashion and clothing may be explained as fetish and erotic
items. The economic, psychoanalytic and anthropological senses of the word
fetish were all defined and explained, and they were all used to make sense
of the ideas of fashion and clothing. The economic and the psychoanalytic
were the most heuristically fruitful; the notion of fashion as a series of
fetishized commodities, and the notion of fashion as a series of eroticized
and pleasurable items, were seen to be highly productive and entertaining.
Further reading
Arnold, R. (2001) Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the
Twentieth Century, London, I. B. Tauris; chapter 3: The Eroticised Body.
Bancroft, A. (2012) Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self, London,
I. B. Tauris.
Barthes, R. (2006) ‘Fashion: A Strategy of Desire’, in The Language of Fashion,
Translated by Andy Stafford, Oxford, Berg.
Caws, Mary Ann (1994) ‘An Erotics of Representation: Fashioning the
Icon with Man Ray’, in Benstock, S. and Ferris, S. (eds) On Fashion,
New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press.

chapter 14
Conclusion
One of the arguments that was presented in the Introduction and followed
up in Chapter 2 was that it is impossible to escape theory when we are
talking and thinking about fashion. Everyone, from little girls in the play-
ground to venerable professors in the Senior Common Room, presupposes
and makes use of some theoretical element when they express their
preference for a pink pencil case or for a psychoanalytical explanation of
pleasure. Somehow, little girls know that the construction of a culturally
correct gender identity depends upon their consumption of as many pink
commodities as possible and venerable professors know that psychoanalysis
offers a true, entertaining and educationally profitable account of pleasure.
It was argued that theory, and fashion theory, is inevitably both productive
and supportive of every statement made about fashion and clothing, whether
that statement is some anecdotal schoolyard trivia or part of one’s PhD
defence. Each chapter in this book has tried to begin from some innocent-
looking or common-sense account of some fashion event or phenomenon,
and it has attempted to show that, and how, those accounts are in fact
anything but innocent or common sense, but that they are the products of,
and laden with, all kinds of theories.
Another argument that has appeared regularly throughout this book is
that style is inescapable and that fashion is, therefore, also unavoidable
and always present. In Chapter 4 it was argued that even the most apparently
‘basic’ or functional aspects of clothing could not be accomplished without
appearing in some style or other. If even these most functional aspects (of
keeping one warm or dry, for example) could not be performed without
the garment taking on one style as opposed to another different style,
then fashion is present. As soon as there is difference, or the possibility of
difference, then there is culture and meaning, and as soon as there is culture
conclusion 215
and meaning, then we have fashion. Difference and meaning being present
in even the most basic and ‘anthropological’ aspects of what we wear, then
fashion is also present.
In Chapter 8, it was argued that the body could not be experienced or
perceived without using representation – even thinking ‘to oneself’, one is
obliged to use representation in the form of words and concepts. The claim
was that if the body cannot be experienced or perceived without using
representation, then it is already fashionable. The argument is complicated
but it starts from the idea that an experience that cannot be described, even
(or especially) to oneself, is incomprehensible: an experience is either
meaningful or it is not an experience. This is because it is not possible to
undergo an experience that means nothing (if there is no meaning, then
there is no experience and nothing to undergo). It was also argued that
there was no way of moving, posing, holding or otherwise being in one’s
body that was not thoroughly cultural and cultured: this was developed into
the argument that even the musculature or the body was cultural in that
there can be no non-cultural (and, therefore, ‘natural’) account of what an
appropriate musculature would be. Consequently, it was claimed that the
body is always already ‘dressed’; the body is always already clothed and
made meaningful by culture, in the form of representation. The experience,
perception and even the appropriate shape, size and musculature of the
body, were the result of cultural dressing and the body was, therefore, said
to be always either in or out of fashion. To put the argument another way:
if even the perception and experience of the body is made possible by
this cultural dressing of words and concepts, then insofar as those
representations are cultural, they will always be subject to variations in style.
Variation in style is another way of describing the operation of fashion and
the body will, therefore, be either in or out of fashion.
And in Chapter 12, it was argued that we cannot appear without some
‘image’ or other and that, image being another pseudonym or alias for
fashion and style, fashion and style were once again inescapable. This
argument may remind some people of the claim that someone or something
‘has no style’: it is a common insult to say of someone that they have ‘no
style’. Clearly, everyone and everything must appear in some way or another.
This is to say that they must appear in some style or another. To see the
mistake involved in saying that someone or something has no style, contrast
the statement ‘X has no style’ with the statement ‘X has (or appears in) no
way’. The manifest idiocy of the latter is only the hidden idiocy of the former.
If we must appear in some style or by presenting some image or other,
then we must appear in some way that is related to fashion, either by being
in fashion or by being out of fashion. Image here is a way of representing
one’s identity by means of what we wear and, given that there is no way of
appearing without representing some image or other, we are always either
216 conclusion
in or out of fashion. In this sense, image once again determines that fashion
is inescapable.
So, both fashion and theory are inescapable. One is always in theory
and one is always in fashion. One is always in fashion, not in the sense
that one’s clothes are always guaranteed to be in the latest fashion but
in the sense that one is always in what Barthes and Baudrillard call the
system or economy of fashion. And one is always in theory, not in the sense
that one is out of practice, but in the sense that everything one says
and thinks will be produced and supported by some explanatory and analy-
tical construct, some conceptual economy, or other. And what links these
economies is representation; they are both forms of representation. As noted
in Chapter 4, representation is simply one thing standing for another. Our
clothes stand for, or represent, our selves and our written, spoken and
thought words stand for, or represent, our concepts and ideas. Each of the
examples in this conclusion has centred around the notion of representation.
And as I have tried to argue throughout this book, there is no outside of
representation. Fashion as communication is possible only in the form of
representation. The body is unavailable to us except as representation. We
cannot appear without appearing as image, and image is nothing if it is
not one thing standing for another thing. As Derrida says, ‘all experience
is the experience of meaning’ and all meaning is the differed and deferred
product of representation (Derrida 1981: 30). We can conclude that theory
is representation and fashion is representation and if there is no outside
of representation, then there is no outside of either theory or fashion. There
is no escaping either theory or fashion and neither theory nor fashion would
make any sense were they not both thoroughly representational.
conclusion 217
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Index
Page numbers in italics indicate figures.
‘A Little Bit of Gary’ (Rankin) 114–15 Back, Les 163–4

Adbusters 140 Bailey, David 188–9
Adidas 7, 128–9, 129, 138, 174–7 Bangladesh 128, 129, 174–7, 191
Adorned in Dreams (Wilson) 20, 23, 116, Barry, Ben 110
130, 133 Barthes, Roland 55, 71, 79, 82–5, 179,
adornment 16–17, 52–3, 105–6, 112–19 184–7, 212–13
see also bodies Baudrillard, Jean 16, 30, 50, 66–8, 111,
advertising 63, 83–5, 124, 131–2, 150–1, 208–9
162–3 see also brands Baxter, Vern Kenneth 88
aesthetics 10, 12, 147–8 Benetton 63, 109, 166–7
‘Aesthetics of Design, The’ (Hamilton) Benjamin, Walter 30
47–8, 49 Bergé, Pierre 27–8
‘Afterwords’ (Chalayan) 157–9, 160 ‘Beyond Perfection: The Fashion Model in
Age of Extremes: 1914–1991 (Hobsbawm) 58 the Age of Digital Manipulation’ (de
Alba, Jessica 91–2, 92, 94, 107 Perthuis) 114–15
anchorage 185 Bhabha, Homi 164
anorexia 109, 110, 178 see also eating Blahnik, Manolo 47, 48
disorders Blair, Tony 85–7, 85
anti-fashion 33–8, 121–3, 165–6 bodies: disabled 119–21; fetish and the
Appadurai, Arjun 164 erotic 204–8, 211–14; modification 117,
‘Are Legs the New Boobs?’ 206 119, 121–3; natural or adorned 111–19,
art 27–31, 39–40, 41–2, 47 see also 123, 216; and politics 106–7; as
postmodernism prosthesis 39, 111, 117–18, 194–6; size
art and design 8–11, 32–3 109–10, 110, 124–7 see also adornment
art history 20, 84 Body Dressing (Entwistle and Wilson) 111
Ashwell, Lauren 118 Boyne, Roy 152
aura 30–1 Bracknell Chopper Club 121, 123
‘Avedon Eye, The’ (Sontag) 183–4 Braham, Peter 134
brands 128–30, 132, 137, 161–2, 166–7,
Babish, Erma 98 192–4 see also named brands
Back, Kurt 146, 148 Braudel, Fernand 19
228 index
Breward, Christopher 148 colonialism 17–18, 161–2, 164–5, 169–72
bricolage 149 Comme il Faut (company) 98–100, 100
British Fashion Design (McRobbie) 135–6, communication: and cultural values
138 51–3, 82–90; and globalization
Brooks Brothers 192, 192 168–9, 172–4, 177; and representation
Burchill, Julie 102 6, 26–7, 53–6, 217; semiotic models
Bush, George 85, 86 78–82; sender/receiver models
73–8
Cambodia 174–5, 176 complementary studies 8–9
Camera Lucida (Barthes) 212 complex societies 17–18, 34–6, 121–2
Campbell, Colin 78, 81 connotation: and image 184, 186–9; and
Capital, Volume One (Marx) 200–1, 208 meaning 79–80, 82–6, 95, 179–80;
capitalism: and class 18, 121–2; and typeface 192–4
commodity fetishism 200–1, 208; and Consequences of Modernity, The (Giddens)
consumption 130–3; and globalization 166
163, 165, 175–6, 183; and production constraint 118–19
135–6 consumption: conspicuous 32, 50;
Carlyle, Thomas 42–4 cultural hostility 98, 139–41; and
Caro, Isabelle 109, 110 feminism 61–2; and globalization 167;
Cartner-Morley, Jess 2–3, 2 and identity 101–2; and morality 131–3;
case studies: chav style 100–3; Comme il post-purchase 142–3; and production
Faut 98–100, 100; hijab 103–5; hip-hop 128–30, 133–5, 138, 143–4
fashion 87–9; qipau 172–4; safari context 22, 59–65, 190
jackets 169–72, 170; Tony Blair’s tie Costume and Fashion (Laver) 59, 60
85–7 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act
‘Catwalk Politics’ (Khan) 63–4, 157 (1994) 156
Cavallaro, Dani 114 crinolines 60
Chalayan, Hussein 145–6, 157–9, 160, 181, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty 1
183, 195 ‘Cultural Meaning and Hip-Hop Fashion
Chanel 61, 72, 193–4 in the African-American Youth
change see difference; society Subculture of New Orleans’ (Baxter
Charles, Prince of Wales 37–8 and Marina) 88
‘Chav Mum, Chav Scum: Class Disgust in cultural values: and the body 39, 113–15,
Contemporary Britain’ (Tyler) 102 119–21, 123–6, 216; and
chavs 100–3 communication 21–2, 42, 51–6, 169;
Chavs: The Demonization of the Working and connotation 82–7; globalization
Class (Jones) 102 and colonialism 162–8, 171–4; and the
China 106, 119, 138, 165, 172–4 meaning of fashion 64–5, 68–9,
class: and classic fashion 32, 71–2; and 79–82, 93, 95, 176–7; modesty and
consumption 134, 139–40; and gender protection 43, 44–5, 51–2, 104, 116;
61–2; hostility 100–3; mobility 37, and politics 98–107; resistance 140–1;
121–2, 165; theory 10, 18, 34 subcultures 32, 87–9, 97–8
classic fashion 32, 70–2, 184 Culture and Consumption (McCracken)
clothing: boundary with the body 114–15; 77
and communication 73–82; and
constraint 118–19; and fashion 29, 33, Dant, Tim 142, 168
41–2; functions 38, 42–5, 50–5, 215–16; ‘David Bailey’ (Bailey) 188–9
sustainability 137–9, 140; written de Perthuis, Karen 114–15
184–5 see also case studies; fetish Deacon, Giles 178
Coldstream Reports 8, 59 deception 180–3, 189, 195
Cole, Cheryl 197, 199, 203 Derrida, Jacques 55, 115, 217
index 229
design: art and design 8–11; and Entwistle, Joanne 16–17, 18, 50, 54,
capitalism 135–6; and fashion 31–3, 111–12, 113
39–40; form and function 45–9 ephemerality 32, 63–4, 122
Design Museum 47, 61 ‘Erica Lennard’ (Lennard) 187–9
designers: anonymity 32–3; as artists erogenous zones 204, 205–8
27–8; modern and postmodern 145–6, eroticism 197–9, 198, 211–14, 213 see also
149, 153; target market 76 see also fetish
brands; named designers Evans, Caroline 148, 181–2, 195
desire 3, 197–8, 201–2, 205–8, 211–14 see exhibitionism 211–12
also seduction
Dianna, Limor 98 Facebook 25, 26
difference: and commodity fetishism Fall of Public Man, The (Sennett) 167
208–9; and fashion 36–7, 59; and fashion: and art 27–31; and capitalism
globalization 167–9; and identity 165; and communication 51–6, 73–82;
96–7, 105–6, 107, 140–1; and meaning cultural function 32, 43–5; definition
66–8, 93, 215–16; and opposition 13–17, 25–7, 39–40; derivation of word
97–105 7, 199; and design 31–3; icons 37–8;
Dior, Christian 36, 37 image of 190–1; inescapability 217;
disability 119–21 and social complexity 17–18, 34–7 see
‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global also clothing; postmodernism; style;
Cultural Economy’ (Appadurai) 164 theories of fashion
display 52–3, 116–17 see also modesty Fashion & Anti-Fashion: An Anthropology
DIY fashion 136–7, 138 of Clothing and Adornment (Polhemus
Dominguez, Yolanda 124–6, 125, 137 and Procter) 16, 34
Douglas, Mary 98, 140–1 Fashion & Anti-Fashion: Exploring Adornment
Dove (company) 124 and Dress from an Anthropological
dreamcatcher bra 197, 198, 201 Perspective (Polhemus) 36–7
Dress and Globalisation (Maynard) 166–8 Fashion and Modernity (Breward and
‘Dress in History: Reflections on a Evans) 148
Contested Terrain’ (Styles) 61–2 Fashion as Photograph (Shinkle) 183
‘Dress Needs: Reflections on the Clothed ‘Fashion’ (Sapir) 60
Body, Selfhood and Consumption’ ‘Fashion’ (Simmel) 34–5
(Soper) 112, 116 Fashion System, The (Barthes) 179, 184–7
Duchess of Cambridge 37–8 Fashion Theory 1, 27, 28
Dyson, James 47 ‘Fashion: Unpacking a Cultural
Production’ (Braham) 134
eating disorders 109, 110, 123–7, 178–9 Fashioned Body, The (Entwistle) 16, 50, 54,
Eco, Umberto 118–19 111, 112, 113
economics: commodity fetishism 200–1, Female Fetishism: A New Look (Gamman
208–9; economic reductionism 130–3, and Makinen) 210
144; exchange and distribution 134; femininity 9–10, 22, 62, 104, 119, 193
and globalization 162–4; significance feminism 61–2, 98–9
of fashion 4, 32 see also consumption; Ferleger Brades, Susan 14, 28
production fetish: definition 199–200; and
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, economics 200–1, 208; and fashion 7,
The (Marx) 97 203–8, 213–14; and gender 209–10;
Elizabeth II (queen) 36–7 psychoanalysis 201–3
Ellis, Henry Havelock 204, 205–6 ‘Fetishism’ (Freud) 202
embodiment 54–5, 113–14, 126 Feuerbach, Ludwig 181
empiricism 20–1 Fifty Dresses that Changed the World
‘End of Safari’ (Silver) 171 (Design Museum) 61
230 index
‘Fingerprint of the Second Skin, The’ Harper’s Bazaar 193
(Hauser) 142–3 Hartmann, Margaret 73–4, 80–1
Fiske, John 79 hats 204–5
fixed and modish costume 35–6, 165–6 Hauser, Kitty 142–3
flapper dress 61 Hazlitt, William 14
Fleming, E. McClung 20–1 Hemingway, Wayne 120
Flügel, John 17–18, 35–6, 44, 165–6, 204, hijab 44, 51–2, 103–5, 116
205–7 Hill, Andrew 152
foot-binding 119 hip-hop fashion 87–9, 95, 98
For a Critique of the Political Economy of history: as a backdrop to fashion 58–9; as
the Sign (Baudrillard) 66–8, 208–9 a context for fashion 59–61;
form: and content 15–16; and function temporality and fashion 57–8, 70–2;
45–9 transformed by fashion 60–2;
Foucault, Michel 113, 148 unaffected by fashion 63–5; and
Frere-Jones, Tobias 193 understanding fashion 68–70;
Freud, Sigmund 201–5, 209–10, 211, 213 unrelated to fashion 65–8
frivolity of fashion 4, 15, 47–9 Hobsbawm, Eric 58
function: of art 47; of clothing 38, 42–5, Hollander, Anne 17, 18
50–5, 215–16; differentiates art and Huffington Post 124, 191
design 28–32, 33, 40; of fashion 36, Hunter, Joe 155
41–2, 45–7, 131, 133, 135; and form
45–9 see also prostheses identity: communicated by fashion 26–7,
32, 80; and consumption 6–7, 139–41;
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 69 and difference 96–105; gender 62, 65;
Gamman, Lorrain 210 and image 178–80, 189–90, 192–4;
gender: cultural constructions 54, 60, national 158–9, 170–4; as performance
61–2, 126; and fetishism 209–10; and 95–6, 97; representation 53–5, 91–4,
globalization 138; theories 3, 9–11 see 92, 107, 216–17 see also politics of
also femininity; feminism fashion
Giddens, Anthony 148, 166 illustration 191–4 see also photography
Gillitzer, Jeremy 109 image: of fashion 190–1; and identity 7,
globalization: and colonialism 7, 161–2, 92, 178–80, 189–90, 192–4, 216–17;
164–5, 169–72; and cultural identity illustration and photography 83–5,
172–4; definition 162–4; and fashion 179, 183–7, 191–4; and prosthesis
17–18, 35–6, 128–30, 165–9; and 194–6; reality and deception 123–6,
history 69–70; and production 136–8, 180–3, 195
144, 174–7 India 161–2
‘Globalization and Cultural Identity’ Indonesia 128, 174–5
(Tomlinson) 172–3 International Journal of Fashion Design,
Goldfainer, Sybil 98, 100 Technology and Education 1
goths 80, 81–2, 96, 97 Introduction to Communication Studies, An
graphic design 191–4, 192 (Fiske) 79
‘Green Fashion Under the Concept of Iran 103
DIY’ (Li Kejing and Zhao Qi) 138 ‘Is Ann Romney Sending Secret
Green, Penelope 156 Messages With Her Clothing?’
Grundrisse (Marx) 133–5 (Hartmann) 73–4, 80–1
Guardian 2–3, 2, 37 ‘Is Fashion A True Art Form?’
(Rawsthorn) 28–9, 41–2, 45–7
Hamilton, Andy 47–8, 49, 70 ‘Is Fashion A True Art Form?’ (Rhodes)
Hamnett, Katherine 63–4 29
Hansungule, Michelo 169–70, 171, 172 Isherwood, Baron 141
index 231
‘Islamic Religion and Women’s Dress make-do-and-mend.org 137
Code: The Islamic Republic of Iran’ Makinen, Merja 210
(Shirazi) 103 Mapplethorpe, Robert 212, 213
islamreligion.com 104 Margiela, Martin 145, 149, 181–2, 182, 195
Israel 98–100 Marina, Peter 88
Iverson, Allen 88, 89 Martin, Richard 28
ivillage.com 206 Marx, Karl 97, 133–5, 165, 200–1, 208
Marxism and Modernism (Lunn) 147–8
J. Walter Thompson (company) 136–7 Masheke, Malimba 170, 172
Jacobs, Marc 106 Material Culture in the Social World (Dant)
Jameson, Frederic 154, 156–7 142
Jarvis, Anthea 57 Maynard, Margaret 166–8
jeans 118–19, 142–3, 168 meaning: connotational 79–80, 82–6,
Jones, Ann Rosalind 68–9 179–80, 184, 186–9, 192–4; cultural
Jones, Owen 102–3 55–6, 81–2, 87–9, 93, 95, 189–90; and
difference 66–8, 97–105, 215–16; and
Kaunda, Kenneth 170–2 ephemerality 64; and metaphor 158–9,
Kawakubo, Rei 145, 149 160; negotiation of 80, 89–90; and
Khan, Nathalie 63–4, 157 politics 105–7, 176–7; and semiotics
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah 103 78–9 see also representation
Klein, Naomi 140, 166 Meisel, Steven 110, 124
König, René 211 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 113
Kouyaté, Lamine Badian 149 messages 73–8, 80–2
metaphor 23, 158–9, 160, 180–1
Lady Gaga 197, 199, 203, 206 Miller, J. Abbott 193–4
Lagerfeld, Karl 27, 109 ‘Mind in Matter: An Introduction to
Langton, Rae 118 Material Culture Theory and Method’
language 16–17, 21–2, 66, 77–8, 80–1 (Prown) 20
Language of Clothes, The (Lurie) 77 Miyake, Issey 149
Lanvin 124 models 63, 109–10, 124–6, 178
Lask, Bryan 124 modernism 146–51, 154–7, 159–60
Laver, James 14, 50, 59, 60, 203–6, 207–8 ‘Modernism and Fashion’ (Back) 146,
Leiss, William 150–1 148
Lennard, Erica 184, 187–9 modesty 43, 44, 51–2, 104, 116
Leonard, David J. 88 Modesty in Dress (Laver) 203–6, 207–8
Li Kejing 138 montage 148, 149
lingerie 197–8, 198, 201 morality 131–3, 153, 162
Lipovetsky, Gilles 19–20, 180 Morris, William 33
local cultures 35–6, 162–9, 177 see also Murray, Robin 135
globalization musculature 39, 112, 216
‘Local/Global’ (Back) 163–4 ‘Museum of Fashion is More Than A
Location of Culture, The (Bhabha) 164 Clothes Bag, A’ (Steele) 20–1
Louis Vuitton (LV) 106
Lunn, Eugene 147–9 nakedness 18, 111, 112–13
Lurie, Alison 77 National Basketball Association (NBA)
88–9, 95
McCracken, Grant 77 nature: and culture 33, 113; and history
McQueen, Alexander 120 71–2
McRobbie, Angela 135–6, 138, 139 New Look 37, 62
Magritte, René 116 New York Times 156
Mail Online 175–6, 197–9, 200, 202–3 Nichole de Carle London 197, 198, 201
232 index
Nolita 109, 110 Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of
nostalgia 154–5, 160 Late Capitalism (Jameson) 154, 156–7
Procter, Lynn 16, 34
Obama, Barack 106 production: and consumption 133–5,
Olympic Games: Athens (2004) 88; 143–4; and exploitation 128–30, 138,
London (2012) 7, 128, 138, 174–7 174–7, 191; ideological function 135–6;
On Photography (Sontag) 181, 182 localized and DIY-based 136–7, 138;
Orlando (Woolf) 107 sustainable 137–9, 140
ornament 43 see also adornment prostheses: Carlyle on 43; description 27,
33, 38–9; and disability 120; and
Palestine 96, 98–100 identity 79, 194–6; and the natural
‘Panoramic’ (Chalayan) 181, 195 body 117–18
Panzani advertisement 83–5, 84 protection 43–5, 55, 104, 116
parody and pastiche 156–7 Prown, Jules 20
Partington, Angela 62 Psychology of Clothes, The (Flügel) 35–6,
‘Patrice’ (Mapplethorpe) 212, 213 165–6
‘People Dress so Badly Nowadays:
Fashion and Late Modernity’ (Hill) 152 qipau 172–4
personality 91–4 see also identity
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Ramos, Eliana and Luisel 109, 178
Animals) 63 Rampal, Arjun 161, 162
Philosophy in the Boudoir (Magritte) 116 Rana Plaza factory 129, 175, 191
photography 179, 181–9, 212 Rankin 114–15
‘Piece of Cloth, A’ (Miyake) 149 Rattansi, Ali 152
piercings 121–3 Rawsthorn, Alice 28–9, 41–2, 45–7
Plato 180–1, 182–3, 211 ‘real’ women 110, 123–6, 125
Pleasure of the Text, The (Barthes) 212 reductionism 50–1, 53, 55, 130–3, 144
Polhemus, Ted 16, 34, 36–7, 121–2, 153–5, Reed-Krakoff blouse 73–4, 80–1, 95
156 refugees 157–9
politics of fashion: Chalayan’s religion 44–5, 51–2, 86–7, 103–5
‘Afterwords’ 157–9; chav style 100–3; Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of
Comme il Faut case study 98–100, Memory (Jones and Stallybrass) 68–9
100; consumption 139–41, 143–4; representation: and the body 106, 113–14,
disability 120–1; effectiveness 63–4, 117, 125–6, 216; and communication 6,
72; hijab 103–5; identity and difference 53–6; crisis of 150, 152–9; of identity
32, 93–4, 96–8; ubiquity 105–7; Vexed 38, 91–4, 92, 107, 216–17; image and
Generation Parka 156–7 see also reality 181–3, 195; inescapability 217;
globalization; society modernism and postmodernism 7,
Poll, Solomon 44–5 146–7
‘Popular Fashion and Working Class reproducibility 30–1
Affluence’ (Partington) 62 Republic (Plato) 180–1, 182–3
pornography 212–13 resistance 88, 140–1, 169, 172
Poses (Dominguez) 124–6, 125 Restless Image, The (König) 211
Positions (Derrida) 217 Reston, Ana Carolina 178
positivism 21 retro fashion 70–1
postmodernism: crisis of representation ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ (Barthes) 55, 79,
152–3, 157–9; deconstructionist 145, 82–5, 185
155; eclecticism 153–5; and modernism Rhodes, Zandra 28, 29
146–51, 155–7, 159–60 Rihanna 197, 199, 203
Postmodernism and Society (Boyne and riots, London (summer 2011) 102–3,
Rattansi) 152 128–9
index 233
Roach-Higgins, Mary Ellen 44–5 Spry, Constance 47, 48
Robertson, Roland 162 Stallybrass, Peter 68–9
Romney, Ann 73–4, 80–1, 95 Starck, Philippe 32
Rosen, Andrea 64 Steele, Valerie 20–1, 27, 145, 146, 180
Rudovsky, Bernard 3, 4, 204, 207 stereotypes 61, 62
Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk
safari jackets 7, 165, 169–72, 170 (Polhemus) 121, 156
Said, Edward 164 Streetstyle (Polhemus) 153–5
Saint Laurent, Yves 171 see also Yves Saint structuralism 16, 19, 78–9 see also
Laurent (company) semiotics
Sapir, Edward 60 Structures of Everyday Life, The: Civilization
Sartor Resartus (Carlyle) 42–4 and Capitalism 15th–18th Century
Saussure, Ferdinand de 16, 66 (Braudel) 19
science fiction 57, 58 Study of Dress History, The (Taylor) 57–8
sciences, natural and social 12–13, 19–21, style: definition 17; and design 47–9; and
22–4 fashion 57, 121–3, 165, 215–16; and
scopophilia 211–12 form 15–16; and postmodernism
seduction 52–3, 60, 206–8 see also desire 153–5
Selfridges 197, 201 Styles, John 61–2
semiotics 78–82, 147 see also signs subcultures 87–9, 95, 96–8, 100–3, 135–6
Sennett, Richard 167 suits 65, 167–8
Sex and Suits (Hollander) 17 Sullivan, Louis 46, 49
sexuality 201–5, 207–8, 209–10 sumptuary laws 139–40
Shannon, Claude Elwood 75 Sunday Telegraph 102
Shinkle, Eugénie 183 Sung Bok Kim 28
Shirazi, Faegheh 103 sustainability 137–9, 140
‘Shop of Images and Signs, A’ (Evans) symbolism 36, 67–8, 151, 204–5 see also
181–2, 195 fetish
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 14–15
signs: differentiation 66–8; semiotic Takolia, Nadiyah 104
models 78–82; sign objects 208–9; tattoos 121–3
signifier and signified 83–4, 86, 147, Taylor, Lou 20, 57–8, 61
151, 152–3, 159 technology, photographic 187–9, 195
Silver, Micah 7, 171 Telegraph 37–8, 102, 175
Simmel, Georg 17–18, 34–5, 50, 71, 116 Thatcher, Margaret 63
skirt length 59, 66–7, 118, 209 theories of fashion: academic studies
slavery 87, 95, 164 8–9; and cultural values 21–2; multi-
‘Slaves to Fashion?’ (Ashwell and disciplinary 19–21, 22–4; nature and
Langton) 118 role of 1–5, 215, 217; Rudovsky 3, 4,
Smith, S.E. 119–20 207
Social Communication in Advertising (Leiss theory: and cultural values 21–2;
et al.) 150–1 definition 10–13; form and content
society: change and fashion 61–5, 150, 15–16; inescapability 24, 217;
156–7; functions of clothing 32, 43–5, ladenness 12, 20
201; simple and complex 17–18, 34–6; Theory of the Leisure Class, The (Veblen)
social mobility 37, 71–2, 121–2, 165 see 59, 118
also cultural values Thorpe, Adam 155, 156
‘Sogno di Donna’ (Meisel) 110 Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good
Sontag, Susan 181, 182, 183–4 Taste (Douglas) 140–1
Soper, Kate 112, 116 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Sozzani, Franca 124 (Freud) 201–3
234 index
‘Through Thick and Thin: Fashion and ivillage.com 206; Mail Online 175–6,
Type’ (Miller) 193–4 197–9, 200, 202–3; make-do-and-
Tibet 106 mend.org 137; stackexchange.com 70;
Tickner, Lisa 19, 58 Weibo 106; wetfeet.com 76;
ties 85–7, 205 whyiwearhijab.org 103–4
time: and anti-fashion 35–7; fashion and Welch, Raquel 117–18
history 57–8, 70–2; and social Wells, H. G. 13–14
complexity 34–5 Western and non-Western fashion 17–18,
Times 102 116, 121–2, 131–2, 167–8, 173 see also
TK Maxx 192, 192 cultural values
Tomlinson, John 172–3 Westwood, Vivienne 50–1
Tommy Hilfiger Apparel 161–2 wetfeet.com 76
tools see prostheses ‘When the Meaning is Not a Message’
Topshop 137 (Campbell) 78, 81
Toscani, Oliviero 109, 110 ‘Why “Chavs” Were the Riots’
‘tulip-line’ dress 36, 37 Scapegoats’ (Jones) 102–3
Tyler, Imogen 102 whyiwearhijab.org 103–4
typefaces 192–4, 192 Wilson, Elizabeth 19–20, 23, 111, 116, 130,
tzniut 44, 51 133, 165
women see femininity; feminism; gender;
Utility styles 62 ‘real’ women
Women and Trousers (Tickner) 19
values see cultural values Women’s Wear Daily 106
Veblen, Thorstein 32, 47, 50, 59, 118 Woolf, Virginia 107, 114
Vexed Generation Parka 150, 155–7, 160 ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Viktor and Rolf 28, 29 Reproduction, The’ (Benjamin) 30
Vogue 91–2, 92, 110, 115, 193 World of Goods, The: Towards an
Vreeland, Diana 28 Anthropology of Consumption (Douglas
and Isherwood) 141
Wallace, Bethaney 109
Wang, Vera 191 Xuly Bet 149
War on Want 7, 128–9, 129, 138, 144,
174–7 ‘Yes, People With Physical Disabilities
Warwick, Alexandra 114 Can Like Fashion Too’ (Smith) 119–20
Weardrobe 137 Yves Saint Laurent (company) 7 see also
Weaver, Warren 75 Saint Laurent, Yves
websites: ‘below the line’ comment 1–4,
104; Facebook 25, 26; Guardian 2–3, Zambia 165, 169–72, 170
2, 119–20; islamreligion.com 104; Zhao Qi 138
index 235

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Fashion theory

• fashion and clothing in history

This book will be an invaluable resource for students of cultural studies,

Malcolm Barnard is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Loughborough

‘Malcolm Barnard’s Fashion Theory: an introduction is the most compre-

ISBN: 978-0-415-49620-9 (hbk)

Typeset in ScalaSans and Frutiger

8 fashion and fashion theories

fashion and fashion theories 9

10 fashion and fashion theories

fashion and fashion theories 11

12 fashion and fashion theories

fashion and fashion theories 13

14 fashion and fashion theories

fashion and fashion theories 15

16 fashion and fashion theories

fashion and fashion theories 17

18 fashion and fashion theories

fashion and fashion theories 19

analysis proceeds from description, recording the internal evidence

On this account, the object ‘itself’ is available and it may be ‘described’

1 Identification (factual description).

The possibility of ‘factual description’ and the distinction between that

20 fashion and fashion theories

fashion and fashion theories 21

22 fashion and fashion theories

The attempt to view fashion through several different pairs of spectacles

This metaphorical use of spectacles is entirely appropriate, given the

fashion and fashion theories 23

24 fashion and fashion theories

what fashion is and is not 25

26 what fashion is and is not

Fashion and art

what fashion is and is not 27

28 what fashion is and is not

what fashion is and is not 29

30 what fashion is and is not

Fashion and design

what fashion is and is not 31

32 what fashion is and is not

Fashion and anti-fashion

what fashion is and is not 33

34 what fashion is and is not

what fashion is and is not 35

36 what fashion is and is not

what fashion is and is not 37

38 what fashion is and is not

what fashion is and is not 39

40 what fashion is and is not

Fashion and clothing and function

what fashion and clothing do 41

42 what fashion and clothing do

what fashion and clothing do 43

44 what fashion and clothing do

Form and function

what fashion and clothing do 45

Sullivan believes that ‘form follows function’ applies to all human

46 what fashion and clothing do

what fashion and clothing do 47

48 what fashion and clothing do