Fashion Statements: On Style, Appearance, and Reality

Fashion Statements

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Fashion Statements On Style, Appearance, and Reality

Edited by Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz

FASHION STATEMENTS

Copyright © Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10542–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fashion statements : on style, appearance, and reality / edited by Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–10542–3 (alk. paper) 1. Fashion design. 2. Fashion—Philosophy. I. Scapp, Ron, 1955– II. Seitz, Brian, 1954– TT507.F35457 2010 746.99201—dc22

2010018766

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CON T E N T S

Introduction: Just Looks Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz

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Part 1 New Look One

Two

You Cannes Come In Here Dressed Like That: A True Story in Two Shoes Erin Norris

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The Head Monkey at Paris: Henry David Thoreau on Fashion David Farrell Krell

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Three

Fashion Statements: Communication and Culture Malcolm Barnard

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Tech Savvy: Technology as the New Fashion Statement Ava Chin

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Five

Fleshing It Out: The Tyranny of the A-Line Skirt bell hooks

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Six

Osh Kosh B’Gosh Mary O’Donoghue

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Seven

The Fungi Dress—A Living Garment: Interview with Donna Franklin ( July 2005) Shannon Bell

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Victimless Leather—A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific “Body” Shannon Bell

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Eight

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Contents

Nine

Is Clothing Art? Jeff Weinstein

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Ten

Fashion Advice from the Anti-Christ Lydia Hartunian

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Eleven

Puro High Life Maythee Rojas

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Twelve

Irony Killed by the Ironic T-shirt and the True Religion of the American Jean Anne O’Neil

Thirteen

Jackie O., Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Chanel Ellen Fridland and Andrew Porter

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Fourteen

The Hat’s the Thing Johanna Wagner

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’Pod Peeps: Why the iPod and Other Gadgets Are Fashion Staples in the ’Hood Lynne d Johnson

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Dressed to Kill: Or, Women’s Right to Bare Arms Kelly Oliver

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Sixteen

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Seventeen The Naked Truth of Antifashion Philosophy Nickolas Pappas

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Eighteen

Vivienne Westwood: Keeping Critique Alive Sinéad Murphy

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Nineteen

Fashion at a Glance Edward S. Casey

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Part 2 Retro Look Twenty

Plato’s Greater Hippias Translated by Albert A. Anderson

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Contributor Biographies

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Index

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I N T RODUC T ION

Just Looks Ron Scap p and B rian S e itz

Sometimes the way things look is just the way things are. Sometimes looks don’t count for much, but sometimes the way a thing or a person looks accounts for just about everything. Sometimes looks are utterly unique, sometimes not—think here of the distinction between fashion and style, not to mention the complicated, if somewhat arbitrary, split between chic and hip? Sometimes, ironically, “tradition” itself is fashionable, that is, of the moment: on the streets of London and Paris, for example, one observes not only vogues for traditional bourgeoisie clothes but also second- and third-generation Anglo-Pakistani and Franco-Algerian youth who were raised in contemporary households but have adopted, with a certain self-conscious swagger, the garb of “traditional” Islam. * *

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What is the difference or connection between fashion designed and fashion worn? What is fashion? Or more precisely, to ask an old question, what is “it” all about? Nothing relative in our opinion; no so-called social constructs at work here. Ontological by design, maybe fashion is simply one way that selfconsciousness addresses or manifests itself, particularly in the modern period.1 But in recent years self-consciousness has acquired a wildly accelerated and fetishistic profile, one draped, as it were, on the glossy armature that fashion displays: not just bodies but billboards, magazines,

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reality TV, films, and others—an entire system, one might say, reinforced and shadowed by the ever increasing legitimacy of popular culture as a domain for serious theoretical investigation and philosophical consideration. Of obvious note, for example, are Gilles Lipovetsky’s The Empire of Fashion, Lars Svendsen’s Fashion: A Philosophy, Malcolm Barnard’s Fashion as Communication,2 and then the staggering array of books published by Valerie Steele alone!3 No longer, for instance, do men and women simply admire, buy, and wear suits, but theoreticians (both men and women) write books about suits,4 and analyses of those who bought them. Meanwhile, just as academia takes up fashion (“fashion studies”), its well-worn disciplines get transformed into brand names for fashion products: Philosophy, Theory, and Anthropologie. No longer do corporations simply market fashion products; they now generate high-profile controversies with their marketing designs rather than the designs of their product. Stated differently, “branding” circumnavigates and simultaneously bridges what was once the difference between marketing and the product, the difference, that is, between showing and wearing. Top female fashion models—supermodels—have been associated with certain looks and have held celebrity status for some time (Twiggy was the “original” waif ). But now there are entire magazines devoted to the models themselves, a celebration not just of what is being worn on the runways, but of the individuals who wear what is being worn. And who in some cases in fact get worn out: career casualties—wearing thin, here, is not just an expression but a state of being. For example, take Kate Moss, who’s had her episodes and recoveries, and yet who now fronts her own collection at Topshop. Here, where the individuality on display in magazines is supposed to really matter, it appears that at the height of fashion, individuality can paradoxically be produced and reproduced ad nauseum and, therefore, erased at the very moment of its appearance. This wildly ambiguous repetition and erasure occurs from the standpoint of the fashion follower as well as of the model whose body gets overexposed (a body that is by definition always apparently just so). There’s Top Model (published by Elle), but then there’s also America’s Next Top Model (hosted by the “fierce” Tyra Banks), and BBC3’s Missing Top Model, a show in which disabled women compete with ambitions of glamor. Neither of these is as interesting as Project Runway, where the focus is on the drama and melodrama of creation. Then, of course, there is the plethora of films about fashion, from The Devil Wears Prada to Valentino: The Last

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Emperor and The September Issue, not to mention the now historically and stylistically trailblazing Unzipped. In the backdrop of this ubiquitous dynamic, one of the fundamental tensions of fashion is generated by the paradox encased in two contrary yet intimately related desires: the will to look special—unique—and the need to look special in a recognizably attractive way (i.e., affirmed as accepted). Or at least this is the case for anyone with fashion anxieties (which we understand, by definition, cannot be universal), and this is a universal fashion conf lict. While designers endeavor to churn out a “look” if not a brand, they themselves will seldom be caught dead (Alexander McQueen notwithstanding) wearing anything a civilian might be able to identify; they want to represent themselves as individuals, a dream ideal of singularity being Adele’s gold dress in Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” (1907). Fashion, of course, continues to ref lect and project a broad range of social values—it ref lects and signals, in our research-driven opinion, the sum total of the aesthetics of social and existential identity: that is, of power, of class, gender, racial and ethnic affiliation, not to mention sex per se. Put another way, fashion ref lects all of work and play, what for many amounts to acts of being dressed down or, preferably, of dressing up. It also seems increasingly more and more about itself, just itself. On one level, it is not “about” anything other than what it is. And yet, insofar as it clings to the surfaces of life, fashion is by necessity about everything else. In a word—and words are cover—fashion pretty much covers everything. In fact, for some, fashion might be everything, pure and simple. Whatever it is, fashion is not a metonym, but the thing itself. It is, after all, the way things look and get looked at, the way things appear. As the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, bolstered by Maurice Merleau-Ponty might put it, we gaze at “the things themselves” precisely because there is nothing else (thanks to Jean-Paul Sartre). Long before phenomenology made its splash and became fashionable, the ridiculously mustachioed Nietzsche eviscerated the opposition between appearance and reality, and there we still are, mask to masks, garment to naked garments (and bodies). Our central philosophical axiom here is that the literal-mindedness of that time-honored opposition between reality and appearance—a product of a confused fantasy—is readily exposed by fashion, itself a product of the play of reality and appearance. To illustrate, consider the following: there was once a cocaine distributor who sometimes wore a fine Italian suit and tied his long hair

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neatly back. When asked about this lifestyle choice, the smartly clad salesman replied, “Hey, I walk into a bank and I wear my Metallica t-shirt, I look like a drug dealer but if I wear a suit, I instantly become a citizen.” No one asked whether he was familiar with Machiavelli’s dictum that “. . . A prudent man must always follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been outstanding.”5 Appear “great,” and it seems that one will be perceived as great: appearances are sometimes the risky armature of effective reality, which runs just as slim as it runs deep. For many contemporary philosophers, “Is that really who you are?” becomes an irrelevant or imprecise metaphysical question—but in the domain of fashion, that same question becomes a profound assertion of one’s state of being: “That’s so you!” Thankfully, some philosophers still see this (and for the record, philosophers tend to dress better than they once did). From modest attempts at being presentable to extravagant endeavors of self-expression cast as style, fashion is thus perhaps the paradigmatic venue by and through which some thing becomes something noticeable or worth noticing, not to mention worth recognizing. And then because of its apparent value—if worn properly—if, in fact, properly signifying, it is how someone becomes noticed by others. But what about being noticed by one’s self? Isn’t that also enmeshed in the dynamics of just being noticed—of possibly, for example, being visually consumed by an other with one eye in the ubiquitous mirror that is life? (Suddenly, Lacan can be understood as part of some full-scale fashion manifesto, maybe the mirror is all that remains of his arcane theoretic acrobatics.) Think for a moment of the convolutions associated with the thought that women “dress” for other women, which, according to some, is to say for themselves—“this is what distinguishes me.” This is why it is always disconcerting or even humiliating to see the woman across the room wearing the same dress as me(!), especially when it is an occasion fueled by fashion, as most are—the surface serving as subtext (vanity of vanities, life does not run very deep). Here, understood within the context of the power of self-presentation, the double appears in the form of replication, and consequently I am simultaneously no longer glowing but merely reilluminated and thus stripped of the visage’s value, and ultimately devastated by this particular fashion disaster. This dynamic is fascinating not only from an anthropological perspective but also reveals much about the constitution of modern subjectivity. Neither the role of recognition in Hegel’s Master/Slave “dialectic” nor the objectification of the Sartrean gaze comes close to capturing the nuances of self-constitution

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and deconstruction embodied in the example of—the still historically valid, however embarrassing, phrase—“women’s relation to other women,” and then to themselves through their looks. Even if devoid of almost all of its old meaning, the exclamation “I could just die” still remains part of the currently vexed lexicon of and about women (there is no symmetrical male analogue for this experience, yet). At the moment of the judgment of the dead depicted toward the end of his Gorgias, Plato’s thinking naked. What if, as Nick Pappas intimates in this volume, the antifashion of nudity is dedicated fashion taken to the extreme, the contours of bare skin being the most advanced, seamless garment, animated truth? *

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Fashion Statements is an attempt to address some of the peculiarities that unfold within the fabric of the domain of appearance(s). At least that’s how it looks to us, as fashionistas and observers of things as yet unaddressed, underdressed, or simply undressed. Take the split that has come to define “west coast versus east coast,” otherwise understood as Hollywood and the rest of the world; but the interesting thing about, for instance, New York City, San Francisco, and Austin is that it really doesn’t matter how you look. Or, rather, it totally matters how you look—a distinction apparently lost on those from Century City (the site where Hollywood produces itself, often in unfortunate garments posing as athletic). As noted here by Erin Norris, ultraurban indulgence means you can look however you want—you can get by with anything—however, you risk the chance that maybe no one will look at you, or see you the way you long to be seen; maybe you might as well be dead. Pushing further, people who neglect their looks are dead people anyway (professionally, romantically, and existentially, or so we are to infer from the numerous style commentators who make such pronouncements in print and on the air waves—radio and TV, and online) everyone is looking now. After all, looks are life. What else could there be? This question might not always have made sense, but it does now, and so does its opposite. That’s because we also know that looks can kill, and these days having killer looks has grown from idiosyncratic obsessions into a zillion dollar enterprise (the price of jeans and the hegemony of detail!). Thanks to, for example, Argentina and plastic surgery,6 individuality has been fashioned and refashioned, reborn and killed off—picture a planet on which everyone has the same, perfect nose, and no one dares

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to look otherwise, or picture a cyberpunk world in which anyone with the desire can look exactly like a favored celebrity, an image of particularity imploding. The question remains: what else could there be, a nation of unstylish people? It’s possible but no longer plausible—the cosmetic knife has already cut that deep. Thanks to television and the Internet, teenagers in Havre, Montana, could pass in Seattle since they wear pretty much the same sneakers, jeans, t-shirts, and hairstyles as teens do in Atlanta or DC (but what does pretty much the same mean?). However, this observation does not work when it comes to Bozeman, since women there—nuanced fusion fashion style—tend to dress with more specific f lare than they do in northern Montana (the same hot jeans as in any big city yet details frequently include western belt buckles, located just above where it all counts). Women in cities generally and elsewhere (actually just about anywhere according to the fashion industry) dress well and look desirable, an observation that typically does not translate for most men—the patriarchal gaze remains short sighted and distorted, misogynistic and homophobic, redundant and reductive. All due respects to GQ, the gender asymmetry in play is stunning. On the one hand, we know a man who broke up with a woman because he didn’t like her taste in shoes. To us, this seems like a very sensible reason, since sensible shoes are not always that enticing. But at the same time—part of the same story—when a women’s footware designer says without hesitation that it doesn’t really matter that much what shoes men wear as long as they’re nice, the world might as well go into a tailspin, particularly since this position is premised implicitly on the condition that men must nevertheless have some sense of style. Yet let’s observe that aside from shifting lapels, buttons, vents, a narrow range of fabrics and the minor yet decisive drama associated with these variations, the basic man’s suit has hardly changed in one hundred and fifty years; check out the pinstripes on Deadwood; again, it’s all in the details, like everything else all there is, details and surfaces. And then when a man wears a tuxedo, he’s a double of every other man there, which no inspired woman ever wants to get caught being. This is one peculiarity of fashion: some are inclined to suggest that fashion has not always been around, that it’s a “modern” phenomenon. Of course, we get the necessary sophistication of that fancy theoretical move, but Foucault—we’re picturing his ghost talking—might oddly enough disagree since this perspective might implode insofar as it is itself ref lective of the necessity of change at the heart of fashion and snags not on a discourse but on a word, “fashion,” everyone always

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having worn something whether they’re pondering it much or not— who has time?—and then on another word, “modern,” which might have appeared many times throughout history. One day people are thinking nothing of wearing sandals made from the skin of stingrays or ostrich by Tony Lamas, the next day Isaac Mizrahi is bitching, “What do they want, a longer short skirt or something? Sorry, we did that last year.”7 If fashion has become a form of self-consciousness, it was always synonymous with specific forms of subjectivity, even before it existed. As soon as people were wearing something, and they have in fact been wearing something ever since, they (we) could choose colors, furs, fabrics, decorations, that is, could recognize seasons (like forever!). The Inuit traditionally had no choice but to wear furs, but they did choose how to decorate and wear them. Then, on the other hand, regarding the distinction between spring and summer lines, Nadia Tarr (Butter by Nadia) says, “same fabric, different silhouette,” and if that’s not nuance who knows what is? *

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Long ago, Hippias showed up at the Olympics clothed, so this story goes, in garments all made by his lovely self: his fabrics woven by him, his chiton stitched by him, his sandals threaded together by him, probably his jewelry too. This is a utopian vision, a beauty clothed by himself—beauty clothes itself—clothed to be seen by all others. They— the others—must have appreciated him since otherwise we wouldn’t today be imagining what he was wearing, wouldn’t be imagining the profile he was cutting that day, that time—not the fashion—a rare revelation of the universal, the glory of the individual busting via style and beauty through the fashion system, neither Elle nor Vogue, that unique note between the expected and the usual dressed best. At that moment, Hippias must have been more beautiful than anything or anyone. Nowadays, the beauties are all just looking at each other, some might call it thieving. But in Tokyo, Milan, Paris, St. Petersburg, London, New York, we have come to expect nothing less of beauty (of beauties). It is not a case of stealing per se, instead it is a question of just looking and of taking images away, knowing full well that others are doing the same. Whether it is stealing a look from across a table or the length of a room, the act of taking is a necessary dynamic: the fashion exchange, the glance. We are guilty of nothing more, and nothing less, than a prurient trespassing, an ocular retrieval of the very make up and fabric of another’s way of being, crossing the threshold.

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So, how do we look today? By 1979 Dick Hebdige had already documented, in his now classic semiology, Subculture: The Meaning of Style,8 the sense in which punk had become “just a look,” one that endures in the twenty-first century in the form of business executives and newscasters globally sporting spiky haircuts—and yet the question remains. For some the question is never really answered—cannot be answered— the result of the very dynamic of fashion itself. We are left with little else than fashion statements. Thus these Fashion Statements are just one more look at the play between the historical interaction of appearance and reality, in this case of the codes and conventions that state just how things look. We hope that the essays included in Fashion Statements provide the reader with yet another look at an intriguing philosophical question, one that refuses to be merely looked at or framed by the traditional oppositions that have adorned the history of philosophy so far. Notes 1. The forms of the self-consciousness of fashion may change, but it should be noted that consciousness of fashion predates modernity and “modernism” by centuries (cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics). 2. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Lars Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), and Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communication (London: Routledge, 2002). 3. In addition to editing the journal, Fashion Theory, Steele has authored and edited, among other books, The Black Dress (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), The Red Dress (New York: Rizzoli, 2001), The Corset (Yale University Press, 2004), The Fan: Fashion and Feminity (New York: Rizzoli, 2003), with Jennifer Park, Gothic: Dark Glamour (Yale, 2008), Shoes: A Lexicon of Style (New York: Rizzoli, 2009), and the three-volume Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion (New York: Scribners, 2004). 4. Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha Globe, 1995). 5. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 9. Cf. also, Nicholas Antongiavanni, The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style (HarperBusiness, 2006). 6. Argentina has the highest per capita rate of cosmetic surgery. 7. Douglas Keeve, dir. Unzipped (1995). 8. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1981).

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New Look

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CH A P T E R

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You Cannes Come In Here Dressed Like That: A True Story in Two Shoes Erin Norris

I Am a Grown Woman, I Cannes Wear What I Want (Ass to crotch zippered leather pants, wife beater, gold shoes, usually.) New York Fucking City. A place where you can follow your own rules and dress like a fool if you so choose. You can wear last week’s threads with a maxi pad on your head and someone might even press a dollar in your palm for doing so. You can choose to pick from fashion magazines or wear whatever happens to be on top of the clean pile. I have never subscribed to the tribe mentality nor did it have anything to do with the nonchalance that comes with every bag of heroin—but it was exactly that attitude that got me a lead role in Amir Naderi’s film “A,B,C . . . Manhattan” and into the 1997 Cannes Film Festival where my lifelong indifference toward fashion was forever sewn up in one red carpet moment. Nice Customs (See-thru child size sleeveless thermal shirt and my most washed pair of jeans and rotten Converse.) I arrived at the Nice airport alone and was beginning to feel the effects of having snorted my last bag of dope in the taxi en route to JFK.

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Copious amounts of airplane booze and an attempt to nap seemed like the only way to forget I would be more than a casual observer in a living edition of Entertainment Tonight. Upon arriving in Nice, I was told I would be picked up upon arrival but was unaware that I was to be whisked away in the offical car of the 1997 Cannes Film Festival; a gold Mercedes Benz, festooned with f lags and a sharply dressed man servant. I, on the other hand, was in my junkie finest: an airplane ride approved threadbare number begging to be put out of its misery. A garish purple hickey and a halo of filth were my only accessories unwittingly jazzing up my Alphabet City Do-I-reallylook-like-I-give-a-fuck?-ness. I needed drugs. Pronto. Along with the f luke of having snagged a lead role in one of the f licks being shown, I was given a few dirty glances but full clearance to slip through customs without a pat down or check. Had I known of this courtesy extended to my decrepit thespian corpse, I certainly would have taken full advantage of being my own mule, ensuring the ensuing big tit comedy of the Cote d’Azur is painless and funny for the full ten days. It was anything but. Croissants and Blisters (One piece tea stained catsuit, most debilitating leopard print heels.) Flaky and painful are two choice words to describe the entire Festival du Cannes. The producers procured us a charming villa atop a hill just about a hair too far from the Croisette where all the action was to take place. We were a dirty dozen of East Village denizens thus taking cars like the A-listers was out of the question and, since you couldn’t get near the center with one, entirely impractical. So we walked. Down the hill, up the hill—dressed to the nines. For. Every. Function. Since the “secretary on the run” look was one I could never work, or work out, I wore heels (strappy ones) and boots (tall ones) and shoes (hurty ones). All crowd pleasers but foot squeezers and this sister got blisters. Agony was my passenger on a torturous ride to Crippledom via Hobbleville. It was bad enough I had to “look presentable” every waking minute but I wasn’t sure how much more I could take before my feet gave out. Hmmm. A little hitlet of dope, the pain would vanish. Scoring was just not going to happen as I was the only junkie in the bunch and I had to figure out how I was going to make it to our premiere a couple more painful days away.

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A Leg and an Armani (Two piece midriff bearing brown number with 8 feet of straps to tie any which way and beige ankle boots.) I decided to check out the fashion emporiums dominating the High Street. Armed only with a barf bag, some credit cards and not much cash, I hobbled along in search of a shoe of some sort that would allow me to walk, not crawl le carpet rouge. I needed something that would strategically slip around the network of raw skin and pus bubbles. Since my once f lawless feet now resembled a topographical map of Good Fucking Luck, bejeweled strappy numbers would leave the crowd horrified, wanting more skin coverage, not less for once. I was beginning to think I was destined to crawl, or crawl under a rock with withdrawal symptoms and skip the whole premiere pomp and circumstance when a wedged angel in pale yellow silk beamed from a low plexi shelf in some nondescript shop. Like that moment out of Cinderella, one slip on and magic happened—except “happily ever after” was more like not “hobble for an hour” in my reality. The slope of this Armani wedge shoe felt gentle and stable, the front strap generous enough to cover bandages, yet soft enough to not chafe any more and apparently Courtney Love had a pair in black, I was told, BFD. Yes, this would work indeed not because of Ms. Love but solely because of the love they showed my grieving peds. Even if they cost 700 fucking dollars. This was an indie film, there was no money in it for me ever but thankfully my Publicist/ dominatrix careers back home allowed me not to care (too much) and plunk down the plastic, even going for the matching bag for an additional 400 fucking dollars. And I wore them out the store. Clothes Make the Man? I Beg to Differ, Mr. Twain, Unless You Are a Celebrity (“Floating” silver velvet dress with fishing line strap by Elisa Jiminez, Yellow silk Armani wedge sandals.) The day of our premiere, the villa was all atwitter with nerves; clothes being put on, clothes being discarded. Some had planned for days what they would be wearing, others panicked and got testy with each other. I couldn’t give a shit. There were only a couple of options left that I had not worn yet that did not reek of yesterday’s boulliabaisse and a night inhaling other peoples’ Galoises. Being a realist, I also knew that this fashion

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thing really didn’t matter—well, at least not to me. Nicole Kidmans we were not, so why kid ourselves like anyone really cares. No one was being hounded by the fashion houses, bribed to wear the latest Dolce or Prada. Not one stylist even knew we existed. Just put something on to cover up your frank and beans and back hair and let’s get a move on. I quietly slipped into my little number wishing this would all be over with already. The easy frock was made for me, on me, by a designer friend who hooked me up with everything nice I had for the week. She knew I preferred comfort over style but she excelled in both and happened to give me a great deal on her handiwork as well, so she won. We were allowed to ride in cars for this evening’s event. A good thing, since there would still be time for the shoes to begin to fail me if we were forced to walk to our gala affair. The crowds would part as our f lagged car came squeezing through to the theater. Onlookers banged on the cars quickly looking away heartbroken as we were most definitely not Catherine Deneuve, Ewan MacGregor, or some other actual person to them. I couldn’t resist giving the finger ever other block. I cackled in the absurdity if it all and I forgot for a moment how much I had been shivering from “the sickness.” Fuck tha (Fashion)Police (Same outfit as above.) We arrive at our corral in front of the theater and are told to wait. Apparently at this point in the carpet hoo-ha, even the Catherine Deneuves and the Ewan MacGregors of the world are told to wait as well. My we have a lot in common! I am getting antsy wondering what the big deal is all about but apparently there is something called “red carpet control,” where, like an enema, the intake f low is regulated, lest too many stars f low in at once. They need to savor their moments, smile for the camera, give the obligatory coy pose, the show of the freebie gown and perhaps a practiced wave before being ushered in by their “people.” This takes time. My feet were beginning to hurt from simply being told to wait on them for too long and I just wanted in so I could sit and shiver in peace. Finally I get closer to Mr. In Control, an overzealous soldier wannabe outfitted more like a crossing guard than a production assistant. As I approach the carpet’s edge, I am given a f lick of a white gloved hand. Now “Billie Jean” is not my lover nor booming out of the ether, and I understand this sign to be something more “Stop in the Name of I Have a Problem with the Likes of You” than

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“Love.” The Carpet Keeper mutters something in French, which I do not understand. Our French-speaking assistant director at my side quietly leans over and informs me that this man, outfitted from a children’s book, has a problem with my shoes and would prefer if I enter around the side. She explains to him that I have a lead role in the film and we all go in together. If the side door were right there and saved me footsteps, I would gladly have done so even if it meant giving in to some warped Cannes version of “authority.” But it was further, much further and fuck it, I’ve come this far, I am pressing on. He gives me a tooth sucking “tsk” and a wag of his finger and points to my selection of footwear. Realizing what this crap town had been all about all week long, I reached down and f licked the shoe off my foot, thrusting it label up into his f lared nostrils, screaming, “They’re fucking armani, asshole!” Convinced that I was going to get beaten with a baguette and escorted to the Hospital for Fashion Faux Pas for my outburst, I was shocked when the reaction was, “Oh, Pardon, Pardon,” as the crossing guard bowed and gestured his gloved hand for me to go right ahead and enjoy my subtitled film. Hastily putting the shoe back on, ripping open earlier wounds, I held my head high (and wished I were) and only slightly hobbled up the red carpet toward our first viewing of our film. Back in the New York Groove (Ass to crotch zippered camouflage pants, wife beater, yellow Armani wedges.) Upon returning home, everyone expected stories of fabulousness, celebrity sightings and shaggings. I could only show them my battle scars on my feet and sum it up with my run in with the Fashion Police. That’s all it was. From time to time, I run into our director, Amir, and being a man in a hurry all of the time, he will rush past me miming a shoe being thrust my way and in his adorable broken English will scream “Fucking Armani!” as he darts off in his comfortable running sneakers looking for his next story. In Cannes, fashion was the law but I fought it with the help of two yellow shoes and continued to proudly wear my heroic foot soldiers here until they died a noble death.

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CH A P T E R

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The Head Monkey at Paris: Henry David Thoreau on Fashion Davi d Farre l l K re l l

Thoreau’s critique of fashion has always been one of my favorite parts of the Walden.1 Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes! he admonishes, and I have always responded fervently to his admonition—by looking like a slob. Correction: philosopher. Yet something has happened to me, or several things. For one, I fell in love with someone who cared about clothes and had exquisite style and taste. She determined to dress me up and take me out. Had I persisted in my slovenliness, she would have dressed me down. The terrible thing is that I myself began to notice what people were wearing, and now I am ashamed. Why? Puritanism. I was raised to feel contempt for fashion, and whereas other portions of the Puritan program did not take with me that one did. Puritanism and an undeniable sexism. I always felt that a man who paid attention to fashion wasn’t much of one. With a woman it was different, of course: a woman could have style—indeed, was expected to have style—along with brains. A woman could have and be everything; indeed, she was expected to be and have it all. She was both object and subject—the philosopher’s dream, if the philosopher was a guy. That has not changed much, in spite of feminism. Yet the number of men who have aesthetic intelligence is growing, an intelligence that shapes their sense of beauty and the beauty of their senses. I fear I will never be one of them. The Puritans will laugh over my grave and try to reclaim all of me, but I’ll see to it I’m laid out in FCUK and not in Land’s End, just to give them a hard time. Do clothes

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make the man? Let us not believe this cliché of the name-designers who profit by it. Yet it seems certain that the power of fashion runs more than skin deep. The suspicions that Henry and I raise against fashion are, therefore, themselves suspect. It is terrible for me nevertheless to have to live in the Epoch of Designer Clothing, in which people feel proud to be wearing a logo on their shirt, granting free advertising to companies that can afford to pay for it. The designer-dressed might as well be wearing sandwich boards. I realize, of course, that it is all about self-advertisement. Hi, I’m wearing a Ralph Lauren Polo Shirt, as you can plainly see by the snobby logo. That’s because I make a lot of money and could play polo if I wanted to and if I could stay on the horse. If you could see my horrid Hilfiger underwear you’d be even more impressed, if only by the logo and the near-miss Mondrian. The long and short of it is that I am entirely ambivalent about this thing called fashion. I am like Brian (not Brian Seitz, one of our two dashing editors, but the Brian who beans no surname, the unwitting founder or one of world’s great religions, Brianism) preaching about the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, suddenly undone by someone in the crowd. ’Ave the birds got jobs?! Leave ‘em alone! They’re pretty! What am I doing anyway, following an injunction of the gospel? It’s a serious breach of trust, an inconsistency. At all events I (finally!) reproduce the following Thoreauvian grump in full, savoring his manly contempt for fashion and wondering for my part whether my jeans are too baggy or not baggy enough, life is so perplexing: When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I

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am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “they,”—“It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.” Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. (17) As a young man my sense of style was shaped by Heidegger’s indictment of the “They,” das Man, the neutral “one” in the expression “one dresses this way now.” In the room the women were coming and going, talking of Paloma Picasso, and it seemed to me essential to express my contempt for all of “Them.” We were all expressing contempt at that time; one simply did so, and that was all there was to it. They made me do it. I recently had occasion to look back into a book called Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy, which I wrote back in the early 1990s.2 To my astonishment, I found there the very passage from Thoreau that I have only now cited. I used it there to demonstrate two different paradoxes: the first, which is Heidegger’s own, is that even when we try to keep our distance from the “they-self ” we wind up being just like all the rest, inasmuch as each member of the “they-self ” is trying to achieve the identical independence; the second paradox, which is not Heidegger’s own but which recoils on him, is that whereas in the 1930s he was constantly bemoaning the vulgarity of pragmatic America, he seems in retrospect to have been closely allied with what one must recognize as puritanical America. Heidegger’s “hard and heavy” rhetoric sometimes seems as American as apple pie, if America is, as Freud famously called it, “God’s own country.” At all events, Daimon Life continues to quote Thoreau as follows: “I sometimes despair of getting any thing quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men.” He is not being sexist in writing “men,” of course; the head monkey at Paris might readily be a female. Isn’t democracy grand? He continues: They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these

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things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy. Thoreau’s turn at the end of this passage is surprising. It is as though the dormant yet fertile kernel of wheat cannot so readily be separated from the destructive maggot, or, rather, that the maggot cannot be extruded from the wheat. In other words, it is difficult to separate the wheat of fashion from the chaff of mere modishness. Heidegger has the same problem in his fundamental ontology of Dasein, even though Heideggerians are usually reluctant to talk about it. Everyone knows about the axis of “authenticity/inauthenticity” in Being and Time, perhaps better translated as “what is one’s own” versus “what is not one’s own.” The important thing about this distinction, however, is that Heidegger himself cannot sustain it: the “proper” and the “inappropriate” are always mixed together for human existence; Heidegger insists over and over again in Being and Time that his analysis of everydayness in the first division is essentially neutral, which is to say that the structures of everydayness are neither altogether appropriate nor entirely inappropriate. We can try as hard as we like to be “authentic,” but the fake will always be mixed in, and what is most our own will prove to be otherwise. This is bad news for ethicians and moralizers, but good news for the rest of us, at least when our Puritanism releases for an instant its stubborn hold. And yet I am assailed by doubts. For by now things with me have plunged to such a nadir that I find myself paying attention to fashion in shoes—the epitome of stupidity, inasmuch as all one needs is a pair of sturdy hiking boots with Vibram soles, boots that will not have been designed by Ralph, Oleg, Kenneth, or Coco. Yet the hard and heavy phrase epitome of stupidity and the catachresis with nadir stick in the throat of my designer pen: I’m growling “Vanity!” from the pulpit and secretly hoping that the head monkey at Paris will approve of my rags. And if I bristle at the thought of that secret hope, once again I hear a voice in the crowd. ’E’s ’avin’ a go at the flowers now! Leave ’em alone! They’re pretty! Notes 1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in Walden and Civil Disobedience: The Variorum Editions, ed. Walter Harding (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968), 1–252. Harding’s notes on the

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text appear at 255–321. I cite Thoreau’s Walden by page numbers in parentheses in the body of my text. 2. D.F. Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 43–44, for this and the following, including the references to Heidegger’ Being and Time and his Marburg lecture courses.

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CH A P T E R

T H R E E

Fashion Statements: Communication and Culture M alcol m Barnard

Introduction Modern, Western people are accustomed to the way in which the clothes they wear begin their lives as “trendy” or “stylish,” but then start to age, become “stale” and are no longer trendy or stylish. We are used to the idea that clothes come, or go, in and out of fashion and the English phrase “old hat” would appear to describe a well-understood drift from literal to metaphorical usage. Thus, fashion, the idea that what people wear may or may not be the current or latest style, is clearly understood in modern and Western cultures. Also, modern, Western people are familiar with the idea that the clothes they and others wear carry certain significance. Clothes are bought and worn according to the meaning we believe them to have, or the messages we believe them to send. A novelty tie or a strappy frock worn for an interview in the city, for example, “sends out all the wrong messages.” The English phrase again appears to give away an entire culture’s implicit understanding of fashion’s communicative function. Both fashion itself and the communicative function of fashion are perceived as being unproblematic and well-understood in modern Western cultures, as evidenced by the title of the current volume. However, while the conception of fashion as a temporal sequence of “looks” or styles that is taken for granted by certain cultures may

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be relatively uncontroversial, the conceptions of meaning and communication that are presupposed in the notion that fashion or clothing are meaningful or communicative phenomena certainly are not. For example, presupposed in the apparently unproblematic and wellunderstood accounts of the sort of meaning that items of fashion and clothing possess is the idea that meaning is a message. Meaning here is conceived as the “sending out,” or expression, of a “message,” which is itself conceived as some form of inner mental content or statement. Similarly, presupposed in the above accounts of the sort of communication that fashion performs is the idea that communication is the conveying or transmission of that message from one place to another. This essay tries to define and explain the nature of fashion statements; it investigates the presuppositions of the conceptions of meaning and communication noted above, outlines what is problematic about them and attempts to suggest a more accurate and productive way of thinking about them. The essay is divided into four sections. The first section outlines a brief definition and explanation of fashion. In this section, fashion and clothing is defined and explained as meaningful and cultural phenomena. The second section considers the notion of meaning that is presupposed by many accounts of fashion and clothing. In this section, meaning is established as a profoundly cultural phenomenon. The third section explains the notion of communication. It argues that communication is not the sending/receiving of messages, but that it is the cultural construction of meaning and thereby identity. The fourth section takes two examples of fashion and clothing and shows how they may be explained in terms of meaning and communication. Fashion I am not proposing a particularly sophisticated, overly technical or calculatedly controversial definition of fashion in this section. However, even to follow Anne Hollander’s deceptively simple definition of fashion as what modern “Western” people wear1 is already to offer an allinclusive definition of fashion, which covers everything that people wear, not just that which is “up to the minute.” It is also to court challenges as to what is to count as “Western” and as “modern.” So, the definition of fashion offered here includes (but is not exhausted by), all instances of what people wear, from catwalk creations, through High Street and Outlet purchases, to police and military uniforms. And it

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insists on both the modernity and “Westernity” of fashion. Indeed, the existence of fashion in a society may be a good test of whether that society is either modern or Western: a society in which there are not different classes, no social structure, and in which upward mobility in a class structure is neither possible nor desirable has no need of fashion and might reasonably be said to be neither modern nor Western. Though fashion may be about bodies, as Joanne Entwistle says,2 it is also, as Entwistle also says, about “fashioned” bodies. And by “fashioned” bodies, I understand produced, cultured bodies, because one of the meanings of fashion (as a verb) is “to make” or “to produce.” The fashioned body is, therefore, a made or produced body. To that extent, there can be no such thing as “the body”: the body is always already a constructed and meaningful body; it is a cultured or cultural body, because differently cultured bodies wear different fashions. Another way of putting this is to say that fashion is meaningful (as was said above), and, therefore, about communication. This is because saying that fashion is meaningful is to say that fashion is a cultural phenomenon. The reason for this, in turn, is that culture is about shared meanings and the communication and understanding of those meanings. Given this, and in the light of what Entwistle says about the fashioned body, we can say that differently cultured bodies communicate different things (meanings), by means of the different things (clothes, fashion) that they wear. Fashion has been established as being meaningful, communicative, and a profoundly cultural entity. Now this chapter explains; (1) what sort of meaning fashion communicates; (2) what sort of communication fashion is; and how fashion as meaningful communication constructs people as members, or nonmembers, of cultural groups because fashion is one of the ways in which people are constructed as members (and/or nonmembers) of cultural groups. The reference to culture is a significant part of the definition or explanation of what fashion is and that definition inevitably refers to culture. To move on to a light-hearted relief, the Roz Chast cartoon “The Girl with the Sensible Shoes” gives some idea of the sort of meanings that fashion does not communicate and illustrates one of the ways in which it does not communicate those meanings. Fashion statements are not like spoken statements, or the speech bubbles in cartoons, and they are not about such things as not forgetting to send your Aunt Hilda a thank-you note. Similarly, meanings are not “messages” in any simple sense and fashion does not communicate messages in terms of a “speaker/listener,” or “sender/receiver” model. These ideas are discussed in detail below.

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What this section requires is a definition of meaning that will be of use in the explanation of fashion and communication. It also needs an account of meaning and communication that will perform the tasks demanded in the explanation and analysis of what has become known as visual culture. It must be said that the account of meaning to be proposed here cannot even pretend to be entirely uncontroversial. There are many people who would argue that it is not entirely convincing. However, I am trying to avoid an account of meaning where meaning is a function of either individual intention (what is going on in someone’s head) or of the item of clothing itself. In the first case meaning is something that is expressed and conveyed and in the second it is something like a natural or inherent property of the item of clothing itself (like color or texture) and neither can be supported. Basically, I have in mind Roland Barthes’ version of connotation, but without the sense that somewhere beneath connotation there is denotation. For Barthes, it will be recalled, denotation is the “literal” or “dictionary” definition of a word and connotation is the set of associations that accrue to it. Denotation can be correct or incorrect, precisely because it is thought of as being “literal” or “natural” in some way. Because it is “cultural” and dependent on an individual’s sociohistorical location, connotation does not admit of being correct or incorrect. This essay tries to make a case for meaning being like connotation because and insofar as Barthes’ version of connotation already refers to the work of culture. That is, meaning here is connotation “all the way down” and not “built” or “based” on anything that is not connotation. This conception of meaning is used because it already and explicitly depends upon culture: Barthes’ connotational meaning is explicitly the product of culture. Meaning on this account is a product of cultural beliefs and values, and different beliefs and values generate different meanings. In his famous account of the “Panzani” advertisement in “Rhetoric of the Image”3 Barthes identifies five connotational meanings, or “connotative signs” and he scrupulously explains each one in terms of the culturally specific knowledges (structures of ideas) needed to understand, or construct, those meanings. One, for example, is “Italianicity” and he says that, in order to be able to understand, or construct that meaning, one needs to be familiar with certain tourist stereotypes: members of a culture that has no tourist industry, or no stereotype of Italians, will not be able to understand that meaning. He also points out that Italians will also have a different take on the ad from non-Italians,

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precisely because they are Italian: membership or nonmembership of the cultural group is here explicitly linked with the production of different meanings. On this account, then, meaning is a product of the interaction between the beliefs and values an individual holds as the member of a particular culture and some example of visual culture. In Barthes’ case, the example of visual culture is the “Panzani” ad and in our case it is fashion. Such an account of meaning is not inconsistent with other (cultural studies type) accounts of meaning in that meaning does not preexist the interaction between an individual member of a culture’s beliefs and values and the example of visual culture. Meaning is sometimes said to be a product either of the item in question or of individual intention: a tweedy jacket may be said to signify “rustic simplicity,” for example, or an individual may say they are wearing a shirt because it means something unique to them. But on this account, a piece of fashion or clothing is not meaningful in itself and a piece of fashion or clothing is not meaningful because of any individual intention. Of course, one may say that one is aware of, or indeed knows, the meaning an item of clothing has. But this formulation is surely a species of shorthand for saying that one knows the meaning an item of clothing has for, or within, a culture; it is, therefore, already to have interacted with that culture’s values and beliefs. So, shared meaning constructs one as member of cultural group. If one does not share the meaning, then one is not constructed as a member of that social group. If you do not share or understand the meaning, then you are not produced or reproduced as a member of the culture. Communication The model of communication that is adopted in this essay is essentially a semiological/cultural studies type one according to which communication is a negotiation of meaning through the interaction between items of visual culture and the values (beliefs and ideas) held by an individual as a member of a cultural group. It is also one with which those who believe that communication is expression, ref lection, or the sending and receiving of a message are likely to disagree. Fashion communication as expression is the idea that something going on inside someone’s head, individual intention, is somehow externalized and made present in a garment or an ensemble. It may also be the idea that entire cultures can express themselves in or through

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what members wear. Joanne Entwistle, for example, says that clothes “can be expressive of identity.”4 She also says that clothing is “part of the expressive culture of a community.”5 Both individuals and cultural communities can use fashion to express or make externally visible what were “internal” and invisible ideas and beliefs. Fashion communication as ref lection is the idea that what people wear is a ref lection or mirroring of something else. That something else may be a society’s social or economic structure, or it may be a culture’s values, for example. On this model of communication, people may claim that Victorian women wear tight corsetry, voluminous bustles and tight-shouldered dresses because they are ref lecting their culture’s idea of women as weak and helpless. Other people may claim that upper-class Victorian women wear expensive dresses and their lower-class servants wear cheap dresses because they are ref lecting their society’s economic structure. However, the communication of gender in fashion is not the ref lection of something else. It is not, for example, the ref lection of a culture’s values, for example. The Victorian women are not ref lecting their culture’s view of them as weak, dependent, and immobile: they are weak, dependent, and immobile. Similarly, upper-class Victorian women are not ref lecting the economic structure: dress is one of the ways in which economic structure is produced and reproduced. On the sender/receiver model of communication, messages are encoded by a sender and sent, or transmitted through a channel to a decoder or receiver. Following this theory’s origins in telecommunications engineering, the paradigm case is that of telephony: the sender (encoder) is the speaking individual, the channel is the telephonic equipment and the receiver is the listener (decoder) on the end of the line. Should the message arrive at the receiver in a form other than that in which it was transmitted, communication theorists will speak of a communication problem or breakdown and appeal to concepts such as “noise” to explain the unexpected form. Insofar as most analysts seem to agree that fashion is not a language in any straightforward sense, they may be taken to agree that a simple version of the sender/receiver model cannot explain fashion. But it is not difficult to find people who are happy to assert that fashion and clothing are used to convey or “send messages.” Elizabeth Rouse, for example, uses this notion in her Understanding Fashion when she writes of fashion “conveying” an impression.6 And Eicher, Evenson, and Lutz suggest that “individuals often select items of dress because of the personal or public meaning that it conveys.” 7

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There is another Roz Chast cartoon that explicitly mocks this conception of fashion communication, claiming to have “decoded” the “fashion statements of Rhonda Perlmutter III.” Fred Davis is more cautious and, while committed to the idea that fashion is some sort of communication, is wary of the idea that it is exactly like spoken or written language. Rather, he prefers to think of it in less “precise” terms, in terms of “aesthetics” or as being more like art or music.8 Such circumspection is to be distinguished from the approach of someone like Alison Lurie in The Language of Clothes, where she becomes so embroiled in a metaphor of clothing as a language that she takes the metaphor literally (if that is possible). I want to argue that if meaning is a cultural construction, in the manner of connotation, then it is not the sort of thing that can be ref lected, expressed, sent, received, conveyed, or transmitted, and communication cannot involve any of these things. So, I want to argue that communication through fashion is not ref lection, nor is it either individual or cultural expression. The points made above also suggest that we need to be a little careful with this notion of expression. This is because the notion of communication as expression involves the idea of simply moving something from “inside” someone’s head, or a cultural community’s “unconscious” (a meaning, intention, or value) to “outside.” Expression, that is, is a metaphor: it is a metaphor of conveying or transmitting something from one place to another. The problem here, of course, is that metaphor is itself a metaphor, and one that is dependent on the notion of “conveying” for any rhetorical power it possesses. The “meta” in “metaphor” means “beyond” or “over” and the “phor” means “to carry.” Communication as a conveying employs a transport metaphor, but metaphor is itself already a figurative use of the notion of transport; it is itself a transport metaphor. As a result, this essay suggests that there are problems involved in believing that meaning is expression and that communication is a transmitting or conveying of a meaning. The notion of meaning that is being followed in this essay suggests that meaning is constructed in the interaction between an individual’s values and beliefs (which they hold as a member of a culture) and the item of visual culture. If meaning works in this way, as an interaction, then it cannot simply be transported or conveyed in communication. Consequently, as the idea of expression uses a metaphor of transportation, neither cultures nor individuals can be said in any simple way to be “expressing” themselves through what is worn; it is more accurate to say that identity is being constructed and reproduced.

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Finally, it is worth noting that there is one problem that is equally relevant to all the conceptions of communication discussed so far. It is that, according to the model of communication as conveying, something has to preexist the conveying or sending. As a passenger on a bus or train, for example, preexists their being conveyed by that train or bus, so meaning on this model preexists communication. Colin Campbell rightly and mercilessly takes issue with this model of communication in his essay “When te Meaning Is Not a Message: A Critique of the Consumption as Communication Thesis.”9 He is correct to critique the model of communication, but the notion of communication in or through fashion need not suppose that communication is the sending and receiving of a message. This essay is committed to arguing that communication through fashion is not a simple sending and receiving of messages. This is because meaning does not preexist the process of communication, the negotiation between an individual’s beliefs and ideas and the example of visual culture. And because meaning does not preexist the members of cultures who are communicating, communication cannot be the sending or receiving of a preexisting message. There is no meaning until the interaction between cultural values and items of fashion. This is why the argument is made here that fashion is not a vehicle for conveying messages. Indeed, in order for any of these phenomena (expression, conveying, or ref lection), to happen, it seems reasonable to suppose that there is something that exists prior to the expression, conveying, or ref lection of that thing. This is the origin of a major, if usually unacknowledged, difference between fashion theorists on these matters. There are those who believe either that something can meaningfully exist prior to representation or that something exists beyond representation and there are those who believe that there can be no such priority or beyond. For the former, such things as “the body,” or “individual intention” play the role of that which exists outside of, or prior to, representation. Taking this position, it is perfectly possible to say that something (a meaning), preexists the ref lection, conveying, or expression of that meaning. For the latter, such things as the body and individual intention literally make no sense unless they are represented. According to the latter position, it is impossible for meaning to preexist the process of communication. For what it is worth, I don’t think that there is a “beyond” to representation. I am with Derrida here: when he says that there is nothing outside the text,10 I take him to mean that, in order for anything to be meaningful, it must necessarily be represented. Similarly, I do not think that anything can preexist expression, or representation, even

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in experience or spoken/thought language. This is a question raised, and some would say answered, by Wittgenstein, when he argues in his Philosophical Investigations11 that there are and can be no private languages. Communication, then, is either not-private (i.e., it is shareable) or it is not communication. Rather, on the account presented in this essay, communication is the negotiation of meaning: it is the result or product of the interaction between cultural values (ideas and beliefs) and the visual. Communication is also the process in which an individual is, or is not, constructed as a member of a cultural group. If I may argue by analogy in order to illustrate what I mean here, when I watch “Sex and the City” or the football on TV, the values and beliefs I hold as a result of my social and cultural positions as a white, middle-class European male generate the meanings of the programmes for me. Meaning is a product of the interaction between culture—cultural values, beliefs, and ideas—and the visual. The meanings that I construct are shared with other white, middle-class European males. We are likely to agree in our interpretation of the show, or the inestimable value of football on TV, for example. It is the sharing of the values (and thus the meanings) that makes us into an identifiable cultural group; it is this sharing, that is, that makes us into an “us.” Members of other cultural groups will construct the meanings differently. Non-European, Muslim, old, or working-class women, for example, will almost certainly construct entirely different meanings for “Sex and the City.” And this is because they will hold different beliefs and values. Those shared meanings are what construct and identify people as members of that group. Therefore, the meaning of items of fashion will be produced through the interaction between cultural values and ideas and the visual appearance of the items of fashion. Case Studies The first case study concerns what President Bush and Prime Minister Blair wore in a press photograph of the meeting of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council in June 2004 and the second concerns “hoodies,” short hooded jackets that have recently acquired demonic status in some parts of the British news media. In this photograph, Bush and Blair are wearing dark suits, light shirts, and red ties. Notwithstanding the fact that this picture has been chosen to support an argument, the case against either man being engaged in

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any form of individualistic self-expression would appear already to be made. What is being claimed here is that neither man is sending a message, or using what they are wearing to convey a message. Both men know perfectly well some of the more dominant meanings that will be constructed by those viewing them and the photograph and they put together an outfit or a “look” accordingly. In the terms of the sender/ receiver model, this is effectively to suggest that the receiver is determining the message to some extent; it is an odd message that is constructed by the receiver, but that is what the proponents of the sender/ receiver model of communication are effectively suggesting. Both Bush and Blair already know that a dark suit, light shirt, and contrasting tie mean “middle class,” “serious,” “authoritative,” “businesslike,” and, for that matter, “masculine” to the people they will be dealing with at the meeting and that is why they have put together such similar outfits. This is not to say that both men know all the meanings of their suits and ties that might be constructed by all cultural groups; they do not necessarily know all of the possible structures of beliefs and values that suits and ties may be interpreted in terms of. For example, given their particular situations in 2004, it is unlikely that either man would wish to offend Christians or Muslims but some Islamic purists consider it haram, or prohibited, to wear ties made entirely of silk12 and the frog (as featured on what is reportedly Blair’s favourite tie), has long been a Christian symbol of uncleanliness. In this example, then, “alternative” or “new” interpretations of items of clothing may be explained as being constructed by people who either (1) know how the structure of cultural beliefs and values extends beyond the limits understood by the wearer or (2) are able to construct other parts of that structure. Someone else who is neither expressing his individuality nor sending a message in the sense assumed by the sender/receiver model is Osama bin Laden. He regularly appears in photographs wearing a combat jacket over white robes with white headgear. He knows very well that fellow Wahhabi Muslims will know that the white robes and headgear mean purity and he knows just as well that Western audiences will know that the combat jacket and AK47 mean a certain level and form of military/ technological threat and also a specific form of masculine identity.13 His outfit is constructed already knowing the different meanings that will in turn be constructed for it by different cultural groups and this, clearly, is not to convey a message in any simple sense. The second case study is that of the “hoodie.” A hoodie is a short hooded jacket, with or without a zipper on the front. Recently in the UK, hoodie has also become the name given to those wearing such

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a jacket and it refers specifically to young people who are perceived by respectable, law-abiding middle-class observers and journalists as lower-class, drug-taking shop-lifters. The meaning communicated by these garments is now so powerful in the UK that hoodie wearers are being denied access to shopping malls because they are perceived as a shop-lifting threat. This constitutes a different kind of example in that here the structures of ideas and beliefs within which members of cultures construct meaning are being “extended”: new and different meanings are being made possible by “continuing” or extending existing patterns of beliefs in order to make new meanings. This may be seen by considering previously existing structures within which hooded garments have been constructed in the past. Hooded garments have a long history and there is nothing about hooded garments that is inherently or naturally lower class, or that inevitably indicates that the wearer is a delinquent and a threat to society. Academics, for example, have long worn hooded garments to communicate their status within the university. Certain religious orders are also in the habit of wearing hooded garments. And the humor in Neil Bennett’s cartoon in which a hoodied-up Christopher Robin suggests to Pooh and Tigger that they go and “hang about on the footbridge” is generated by the realization that when Christopher Robin, the goldenhaired goody-goody of A. A. Milne’s poem “Vespers,” pulls his hood right over his head so that nobody knows he’s there at all, nobody even thinks of him doing it to conceal his identity whilst engaged in a bit of casual vandalism. In these cases, among the meanings constructed by and for certain cultural groups are “learned,” “pious,” and “innocent childhood.” What is happening in the demonization of hoodie wearers is that the (British) print and television media are providing a new application of a set of values and ideas in terms of which certain cultural groups may construct the meaning of a particular garment. Those beliefs and ideas (shop-lifting, young people as threat, for example) are already present in the culture, but they have never been associated with this particular garment. Consequently, the structure of beliefs and ideas is being extended to include this new garment and thus to construct new meanings. And when a particular cultural group (middle-class, middle-aged aff luent consumers, for example) interprets hoodies as the latest evidence of moral decay, it is the result of the interaction between the values and ideas they hold and the garment they are looking at. Again, meaning here is not simply a message being sent to a receiver.

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Malcolm Barnard Conclusion

This essay has attempted to define and explain the nature of fashion statements. In order to do this, it has had to investigate meaning and communication and explain what sort of meaning it might be that fashion has and what sort of communication it can be that fashion accomplishes. Meaning and communication have been explained in terms of culture: neither makes any sense without reference to culture. Culture has been understood as structures of beliefs, ideas, and values and as the communication of those beliefs, ideas and values in the construction (or not) of individuals as members (or not) of cultural groups. The construction of meaning by individuals, then, is one of the ways in which those individuals are themselves constructed as individuals. It is also one of the ways in which different, new, or alternative meanings are constructed. Fashion statements, then, are one of the ways in which cultural structures and individual agency relate and in which they are both constructed and reproduced. Notes 1. Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1994), 11. 2. Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (London: Polity, 2000), 1. 3. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image-Music-Text (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), 43. 4. Entwistle, The Fashioned Body, 112. 5. Ibid., 66. 6. Elizabeth Rouse, Understanding Fashion (Oxford: Blackwell 1989), 24. 7. Joanne B. Eicher, Sandra Lee Evenson, and Hazel A. Lutz, The Visible Self (New York: Fairchild, 2000), 297. 8. Fred Davis, Fashion, Clothing and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 11. 9. Colin Campbell, “When the Meaning Is Not a Message: A Critique of the Consumption as Communication Thesis,” in Mica Nava et al. (eds.), Buy This Book (London: Routledge, 1997). 10. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 158. 11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953). 12. www.pakistanlink.com/religion/97/re05–23–97.html (accessed July 2005). 13. See Philip Mansell, Dressed to Rule (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). See “Postscript” for more on this.

CH A P T E R

FOU R

Tech Savvy: Technology as the New Fashion Statement Ava Ch in

On any given day in coffee houses, taxi cabs, SUVs, ferries, 18-wheeler trucks across the country, we can see evidence of a not-so-subtle revolution in the way that technology has impacted our fashionable lives. Where I live in New York, bike messengers sport the tell-tale white earphones of iPods, cabdrivers take phone calls on bluetooth devices, and businessmen and women broker deals on their iPhones and Blackberries while buying cappuccinos. Technology—what brand of portable computer, f lip-top, itty-bitty cell or smartphone, portable listening device, electronic reader you carry—makes a kind of fashion forward statement about the user that was once the province of combat boots, Fendi handbags, Rolex watches. Fashionistas are no longer afraid to reveal their geeky tech gear—now they flaunt it. At first, the marriage between technology and fashion might seem like an unlikely union. Technology is largely about providing function and ease—a speedier, more efficient way to aid our busy schedules. Fashion, on the other hand, is decidedly more self-conscious and selfreferential (read fashion for fashion’s sake). But with the advent of welldesigned technological products that are now appealing to women, and which have become ultimately wearable, technology has become as conspicuous a statement as fashion itself. Indeed, technology is the fashion. It’s no longer just purses that female consumers tote around—the latest accoutrement are the white iPod earphones, sporty bluetooth devices, all-in-one treos, e-Readers, and the ever-conspicuous Apple logo on

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laptops, listening devices, and touch-screened phones. Plus, there are the fancy cases to house the devices, which with Apple products, usually come with carefully designed cut-outs out so that the all-important logo is still visible. It crosses gender boundaries as well: these days, even the most masculinist men wear their electronic ear-devices like lady operators from the 1930s. The drive for ever better, faster technology, which certainly benefits the pockets of manufacturers and companies, means that updates and new models appear on the market as quickly as fashion is shown on the runways. But whereas even fashion has cycles—hemlines rising or falling, retro patterns paying homage to the past, dramatic makeup of the 1960s versus the “no makeup” look—the fashion of technology is to create product that moves ever forward: faster, sleeker, smaller, more portable. No one is trying to replicate the boxy desktops of the early PCs with their slow start-up booting time for a “feel good” retro appeal. Thorstein Veblen’s notion of “conspicuous consumption”1—where consumerism is largely fueled by the need to advertise class or social status—manifests here as not only a signifier of disposable income, but also of hip-ness, hypermobility and connection, technological savvy, and “forward” thinking. The newest of the personal listening devices and smartphones like iPhones, iPods, Blackberries, and other all-in-ones (with phone, music, Internet capability) nearly scream, “I work & play cool.” It’s no longer Prada shoes and Hermes handbags that signify what kind of fashion-conscious woman you are—these days it’s the kind of technology that you wear. Tech has become as all-important an item in your wardrobe as that little black dress. Technology Shapes Fashion We can see where technology has literally changed the “shape” of our fashion itself, particularly in the area of outerwear. Check the interiors of the newest coats designed for 21–34-year olds—for both men and women—and you will most likely discover several small pockets for cellphones and iPods built into the lining. I do not think it is a stretch to say that the primacy of this type of technology on fashion is unprecedented—as popular as the Sony Walkman of the 1980s was, for example, it never had its own pocket. Nowadays, designers and manufacturers are privileging cellphones and iPods with the equivalent of private parking in the garage of the garment.

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Similarly, inside the latest lady’s purse you may find the addition of a technology pocket snuggled right next to the zipper compartment, usually reserved for money or makeup. The modern woman needs extra pockets for her technological accoutrement, which the bag’s designers seem to suggest, is now just as important as cash or beautification. And if the woman in question is lacking in that area, she might be prompted to purchase some digital accessory to fill that empty nest. Occasionally, these little pockets innocuously crop up on the exterior, changing the actual silhouette of the bag itself. In these instances, it is a testament to the tech savvy woman on the move, confident in her own identity as a card-carrying member of the digiterati. She needs all of her pockets in which to nestle her sleek and blinking peripherals. It’s not just ladies’ handbags that have morphed, but backpacks designed for both sexes from the likes of “traditionalist” companies that generally distain fast fashion, like L.L. Bean, that now accommodate technology as well. A recent online search yielded a crop of bags in traditional styles with one exception—many now come with a top pocket for storage of one’s listening device and a small hole in the fabric through which one’s headphones can connect and disappear. The only thing discrete about it is the fact that you can’t see the device, but the earphones give it all away. In each of these cases—coats, handbags, packpacks—it is possible to follow the tiny headphones of the iPod or iPhone dangling from the wearers’ ears like long white earrings, funneling into the recesses of the bag or garment. Wearers appear as if they are literally plugged into their clothing—as indeed they are, listening to music, holding not-so-private conversations in public, making a big show of sending messages out into the ether. In addition to outerwear and bags, technology has even impacted haute couture. In Hussein Chalayan, who hires MIT tech heads to augment his fashion, hemlines change, zippers uncurl, and models sometimes transform from fully clothed to naked by the time they reach the end of the runway. His luminous Airborne dress incorporates LED technology (often used for digital displays and traffic lights) with Swarovski crystals, while his Reading line is comprised of small red lasers embedding into the clothing that shine from Chalayan’s models like barcode scanners. iPod People In television advertisements and billboards across the country, silhouettes of young people of indeterminate but varied ethnicity dance

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across a solid-color background to British rock-n-roll. Their only distinguishable characteristics are youth, earphones, and the white rectangular object they carry. Clearly defined by their individuality and ability to “rock out” to the music, they are all listening presumably to the same song off the same kind of listening device—the Apple iPod. In the 1950s Cold War–era, plugged in “pod-people” were something to fear. They were a cautionary tale of soul-less conformists following a central alien “Pod” calling (see “Body Snatchers” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”). This trope of the ambiguous, amorphous collective was even reiterated in the 1990s version of “Star Trek” with the deeply disturbing hive-like Borg—similar-looking and sounding clones with nearly comical deadpan vocal delivery (resistance really was futile). Here too, connectivity suggested mindless following. You weren’t an individual so much as an appendage of a greater, collective mind. But Apple has rewritten the script—creating an entire culture industry that has made connectedness on par with individuality and mobility. Universal connectedness is cool. Through creative advertising and innovative, slimmed-down design that makes their products look as if they had been assembled by the hands of aliens and dropped from a space ship, Apple has made it easy to embrace the idea of connectedness while still maintaining a sense of individuality. Screenwriters! Musicians! Graphics designers! These were the early consumers the company marketed to and captured. You too can be a free-thinking individual, it promises. Perhaps since so many of us participate in the network of the World Wide Web, and since the Cold War is over, it is easier to relinquish some of the old pod-people fears. We are no longer worried about being transformed into mindless, communal creatures. Now, consuming and engaging in technology—being transported by the music in one’s iPod, having the ability to communicate and connect across vast distances of space from a café or a train—being “plugged in” denotes individuality and ultimate hipness. The iPod and Its Ever-Increasingly Cuter Permutations The revolution that is the iPod is the very calling card of modernity in design. Its clean lines and pure color palette—snow white, shiny black, and an assortment of seemingly airbrushed colors in between—are suggestive of airports, billboards, the future. That the iPod was fashioned with human beings in mind is clear—ergonomically designed to be

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utilized in one hand, the other is free to hail a cab, drink a caffeinated beverage, or perhaps buy more product? The innovative, circular track pad is designed for the f lexibility of opposable thumbs, reinforcing the primacy of the primate (even King Kong could have scrolled through his playlist while carrying a struggling Fay Wray). Coinciding with forays into nanotechnology, and a movement in the culture where smaller is decidedly better, Apple spun off other even more minute generations. About the size of a stick of gum, the Nano has been marketed to display its glamorous slimness: its book-like packaging reveals in silhouette about a quarter inch thick, like a weight-loss model showing off her “after” figure. Even smaller than the Nano is its tiny cousin, the Shuff le. Barely larger than a postage stamp, and with the ability to clip onto a jeans pocket like the roach clips of the 1970s, it is suggestive of alternative coolness. As if the manufacturers are implying that you could smoke the last ends of your downloaded iTunes music with it. Mobile Connectedness In our technological milieu, a new kind of mobile connectedness has arisen. Through our mobile phones, computers and hand-held devices, we are connected to other tech savants beyond the limitations of space, beyond even the confines of our own office. On the streets and inside coffee houses, everyone it seems is engaged in this public/private technological connectedness. So-called private phone conversations, such as “I’ll be there in five minutes. Do you need anything?” has the importance of a Billboard rendering the speaker a character in their own personal reality television show. Even the dullest supermarket conversation is a moment of memoir: “What’s the difference between yellow and red onions?” We know everyone’s motivations and desires. Each of us within earshot, down the aisle or perusing produce, is willingly or not privy to the narrative. We are all spectators/audience members, and the only way to turn the station or close the book is to walk out of the theater of the phone call. It becomes easier and easier to lose touch with our surroundings— where we’re walking or driving, who is around us or who might be listening in. And as much as we’re talking to someone who could be thousands of miles away, here, on the busy, crowded streets of Manhattan, or as far away as Hong Kong or Tokyo, our new technology enables a strange, new form of solipsism. Like some sort of zen

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koan, technology extends our notion of being neither here nor there and the illusion of being simultaneously in two places at once. We can be internal—focusing on our work or music, connected via Internet or on the phone—while being in a public space. Physically here, but mentally elsewhere. And in public, this new sense of disengagement from our surroundings has created a new form or state of being around others. Only outdated thinkers believe that it’s rude to take a personal phone call while in the presence of a company of others. And if you do become offended, the logical conclusion is that you’re old. Enter the iPhone In recent years, since its unveiling in 2007, the must-have smartphone is Apple’s iPhone with its sans-keyboard, multitouch screen, and affordable applications accessible only through Apple’s App store. In addition to being a cellphone, the iPhone is an Internet-accessible personal listening device, with a calendar, camera, and global positioning system—and a host of other utilities that the consumer may wish to add for as little as 99¢ an app. Just as the iPod’s circular trackpad created a legacy of users showing off the facility of their opposable thumbs, the iPhone’s touch screen allows for certain gestures to be codified as “cool.” Enter the onefingered “swipe” to lock-unlock the phone, to scroll through different pages or advance text; the two-fingered gesture of fingers coming together or moving apart to “resize”; the tilting of the phone to rotate the screen for a larger, landscape view. This kind of facility, which extends to their computers as well (with the exception of the rotation orientation), is unprecedented in a phone—making it a highly portable, tactile object. And the technology is patented, so the gestures themselves signify not only “cool” but solely “Apple.” I first encountered the iPhone a few months after it was released at a monthly technology demo event I belong to, where I witnessed mostly male tech geeks who seemingly couldn’t wait to f lash their phones, showing off their latest apps as their fingers slid across their screens. Fast forward three years, and now it’s mothers whom I see touting iPhones, which aren’t just used for calling to set up playdates anymore—women give them to toddlers to occupy their attention.2 Clearly technology marketing has broken not only the gender barrier—companies are overjoyed they have accessed the female consumer—but with over 1,360 apps tagged for kids3 it’s also a family toy.

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Changing Technological Fashion As I write this, the technological landscape is continuing to morph chameleon-like, with electronic Readers threatening to make the physical object of the book obsolete. Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and now Apple’s iPad are set to revolutionize our lives—rehipsterizing the book and the act of reading. Students and professors no longer have to carry heavy published works on their shoulders—they can tout their single electronic device that can hold volumes of works, available at the click of a button. Indeed the iPad, with its rather unfortunate sounding name, promises to marry reading, surfing the Web, and listening to music into seamless acts with the drag of a finger. All this with the kind of intuitive design and solidly futuristic, forward-looking good looks that we expect from Apple products. Certainly new technology can improve our lives—keeping us interconnected and plugged into culture in ways unimaginable 30 years ago. Total disclosure: I myself am listening to iTunes on my MacBook as I write this, accepting calls on my iPhone. But as technology has become more wearable and more integrated in our daily lives—who can go a day without checking email?—I worry about our inability to focus on the present and our surroundings. Engaging in virtual or digital conversations takes us out of our physical space and into a mental space that is anywhere else but here. As fashion critic Guy Trebay wrote in the New York Times Sunday Magazine lamenting fashion’s future-forward sentimentalities, “We may be so caught up in the solipsism of consuming and in the virtual that we miss the now altogether.”4 I might venture it is also the here that we’re missing: we are so enamored of interfacing with our fashionable technology that one can easily miss what is physically happening right in front of us. A dangerous kind of solipsism and decreasing awareness accentuates and furthers the fracture between what’s going on at the moment and what we’re mentally consumed by. Rather like the equivalent of being engrossed in something while stepping into on-coming traffic, or texting while driving. One can only imagine that our dependence on technology will increase, and that as tech becomes even more visually well-designed that we will continue to wear it—and as evidenced by certain signature iPhone gestures, also act it. So while we’re taking our phone calls, plugged into our music nestled so snugly in our handbags or jackets, e-mailing colleagues continents away, or Googling the latest fads, consider this: will there be enough space inside our coats and jackets for all the new paraphernalia? Will technology take the place of clothing

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itself, just as microfibers have impacted the fabric industry? Indeed, will technology be the new clothing? And is it the case that we still wear and utilize our technology—or does our technology ultimately wear or utilize us? Notes 1. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1902). 2. Elizabeth Regalia, “25 iPhone Apps for Kids.” http://www.parenting.com/gear-gallery/ Gear/25-iPhone-Apps-for-Kids. 3. Warren Buckleitner, “The Best iPhone Apps for Kids,” Gadgetwise, New York Times Online, June 6, 2009. http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/the-best-iphone-apps-forkids/ 4. Guy Trebay, “Whatever Happened to Now?” New York Times, February 4, 2007. Section 6: col., 1, p. 73.

CH A P T E R

F I V E

Fleshing It Out: The Tyranny of the A-Line Skirt be l l h ooks

It’s hard to say when the schoolgirl look came on the fashion scene. Certainly, baby-doll dresses, T-shirts, and teeny-weeny tops that look like oversize clothes for tiny tots, as well as have-no-f lesh-on-yourbones Lycra cigarette pants, have all been part of the fashion mix that says to most women and a helluva lot of girls, “You, too, can starve yourself and look like this.” These fashion trends cannot be blamed on skinny Miss Kate Moss. I, for one, think she looks just fine the way she is. It becomes a problem when the way she looks, and those other folks with bodies just like hers, become “the” norm that everybody must strive for. Surely everyone must know someone, at least casually, who has a string-bean body but eats like a horse. Not everyone has to starve themselves to look like they’re doing just that. Some girls were just born skinny and are gonna stay that way, while the vast majority of females will find that the older we get, the more we put on pounds. It would be fun and life-affirming to live in a culture where that added f lesh could give us a thrill. When I was a girl, there was nothing more exciting to me than watching women get dressed. Even back in the day, when I saw mama pulling on that politically incorrect girdle to keep her soft marshmallow f lesh from spreading everywhere, there was no sense that it was “bad” to be full-figured. The girdle was just a necessary trick for particular outfits. It was not an everyday thing. Today’s grown woman has it drilled into her that any excess f lesh makes her less desirable. Gyms

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are the new replacement for girdles and the like. Through constant exercise, we are told, we can make out bodies tighter, firmer and, or course, young-looking. Healthy exercise is one thing, but “manic if I don’t go to the gym everyday, I have sinned, must not eat and can’t possibly let anyone see me naked” is part of the antif lesh fixation. If only the demand were that we not have meat on our bones, but we are also being told to dress like girls—subjected to the tyranny of the A-line skirt. Undoubtedly, the fashion experts who decided that the schoolgirl look was the only way for women to go never really had to wear those school uniforms with the pleats and plaids. I’ve yet to meet a schoolgirl who thinks these skirts are the source of passion and pleasure. But all over this country, grown women are all too eager to enter the schoolgirl fantasy—and what better way than to wear tiny A-line miniskirts. After all, a friend says, you can’t have hips and thighs if you want to wear those skirts. And let’s not even talk about the way they are the kiss of death for those of us with soft, round bellies. Maybe it’s all about nostalgia. There’s all the new feminist writing reminding us that, for many females, premenstrual girlhood is the only time of passion and power some of us will ever know; the only time our bodies will be free to run with the wolves and unconsciously rough it. Because the moment those bodies start to bleed—starting on that arduous path to womanhood in patriarchal culture—shame about female f lesh threatens to overtake the psyche. And with this shame comes the overriding fear that our f lesh can betray us—make us less loving, less desirable, unable to face our images in the mirror. The more fashion has decided to that being a girl is more exciting than being a grown woman could ever be, the female f lesh is despised and ridiculed. At least filmmaker Atom Egoyan had the guts not only to mock the adult-male patriarchal, pornographic obsession with the “schoolgirl” in the film Exotica, he also let us know that masculine abuse and dysfunction are at the heart of the matter. He daringly shows the sexy beauty of a pregnant adult female body. While it’s not cool these days to act as though feminist politics put into place anything that was awesome and downright inspiring, let the truth be told: for a lot of women, it was the feminist movement that ushered in that rite of passage where we could move past the shame and glory in female f lesh. During the heyday of contemporary feminism, before the vicious backlash and the like, one thing I remember most (being 17 at the time) was the way in which female f lesh was celebrated in all its manifestations. Not only were we all rushing to the

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gynecologist to get that up-close and personal look at our clitorises, delighting in letting the hair on our bodies grow and grow, we were looking at the female body with new eyes. Whatever its shape or form, it was to be celebrated, cherished, and adored. I had come into my teens hating my body with a vengeance because it was just “too thin.” Protein drinks with raw eggs and vitamin supplements were not leading to that f leshly, womanly figure I wanted to have some day. I was living for the day when no one could ever say to me that I could pose for one of those posters of starving children. Feminism came along and I was swept away in a fierce circle of woman power where my body could be accepted and loved without the constant longing to change it, to make it something else. As the years have gone by, it’s been hard going to hold onto the rapture of that time. Yet there is no female alive who is not daily longing for a space where she can glory in the power and pleasure of her f lesh. May we seize that longing, garner it, and make a culture of belonging where we can celebrate female bodies, growing, moving from fierce, powerful girlhood to becoming more fully woman—in all her passion and glory.

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CH A P T E R

SI X

Osh Kosh B’Gosh M ary O’ D onoghue

( for Áine and Trina) We’re all three of us let-outs, little big-shots, would you credit the cut of us, someone had better stop all the lights for us. Lawks, the state of us, kitted out in a gallimaufry of cast-offs from America, bits and bobs from Franciscan grand-aunts, scratchy Yonkers jumpers, nylon slacks from Tenaf ly. In the photograph two of us wear little capes for the opera, rabbit fur saddling our shoulders, trussed to our throats by pom-poms. Harnessed tight, one of us inside checkered dungarees, f lush with her belly and snug to the crotch, like a tiny hucksterish man.

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Mary O’Donoghue The sun-spangled wall behind us in Annie Quinn’s yard is a wall that should itself be a frock, splotched with hand-sized lichen. Mary Quant would like it. These clothes on us might well bring on the bullies. But this morning we swagger our couture, and we’re cool as you please, and we don’t give a damn, for we are. The next. Big thing.

CH A P T E R

SE V E N

The Fungi Dress—A Living Garment: Interview with Donna Franklin (July 2005) S hannon B e l l

Donna Franklin is a designer who has been producing living textiles within the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Laboratories, University of Western Australia, Perth, and constructing clothes that are the result of living processes that transform the cloth into an active site. Her work explores the merging of body and environment, fuses the organic and inorganic, and transforms the textile surface into a site of real biological activity. Franklin developed the fungi dress during her artist residency at SymbioticA: The Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, Department of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, Perth. The fungi dress, titled Fibre Reactive, consists of a silk and pleated organza slip dress, on which is grown the orange bracket fungus, Pycnoporus conoccieus. Shannon Bell is a performance philosopher who lives and writes philosophy-in-action. Her books include Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Indiana University Press 1994), Whore Carnival (Semiotext 1995), Bad Attitude/s on Trial, coauthor (University of Toronto Press, 1997), New Socialisms, coeditor (Routledge 2004), and Fast Feminism (forthcoming). Bell is currently researching “extreme” science and art for FastBodies. This research is funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Bell is an

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associate professor in the York University Political Science Department, Toronto, Canada. If the cloth or garment is alive, it becomes an entity on its own, it will change and grow, it will require care and nutrients like a pet, raising issues of how we interact with these living organisms. Franklin 2005, ii Donna Franklin: The body starts off as a biological base and the garment as a social construction. The fact that it is a biological garment merges the two. Shannon Bell: If identity is created self-consciously through fashion, or culture is inscribed on the body to some extent through fashion, how does the fungi dress change identity? Because you are using a medium that has never been used before, what does this mean in terms of identity? Donna: In terms of the garment being used as a site of social construction, the fact that it is a living garment the aim of doing this is to rupture the idea of garment as a source of identity. The fact that it is alive makes it become more intricate with the body; on a visceral level because it is biological and we are biological it creates a closer affinity with the body. The fact is that it is a dress and it is sealed within an acrylic case, a bit like traditional Snow White themes, and I wanted to create a tension with traditional stereotypes of femininity, as well. Shannon: What about when you are wearing the fungi dress? Donna: It is an unusual experience because I am aware of what it is made of; it feels like suede but it is quite firm in terms of its structure. It is quite fragile and delicate, but it is also like armor at the same time. Shannon: In a sense it is living body armor. Clothing is a way of wearing culture on our body, or acting in relation to culture, or undermining culture, or a way of countering culture. You do come out of a counterculture clothing movement. The fungi dress blows everything apart. It does this from a position of aesthetic beauty. The fungi dress is aesthetically gorgeous, but the material that it is made out is not what is considered beautiful; rather, it is considered grotesque. You have made beauty out of a material that is considered to be grotesque and diseased.

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Donna: I deliberately chose this beauty/grotesque juxtaposition. When people think of fungi they think of mold, skin diseases. I deliberately chose the surface of the garment to look slightly grotesque to bring up the stereotypes of Frankenstein, juxtaposing this with the idea of beauty. On the surface you have sections that are stitched together and raw and you have the softness of it as well. Shannon: Is it possible to look at the fungi dress and see it as grotesque? Donna: Possibly, in the film I have details of it being stitched. The pulling of the thread through the fungi and fiber looks very much like pulling thread through skin. Shannon: It does look like skin being stitched, producing a trace to body modification. Donna: There is the idea of decay. Because it is alive, it will eventually decay. Shan: It has been alive for quite a while now? How long has it been living? Donna: It’s a year old. Shannon: It looks almost the same? Donna: I can see the subtle differences. I can see sections of the dress that are sporing: the body is releasing its spores, its genetic material. Shannon: When you say “genetic material” what do you mean? Donna: Flowers have seeds, fungi has spores. Shannon: Are there new fungi growing on the dress? Donna: It seems to be self-regenerating itself. The dress is in a state of limbo and also in a state of f lux with life and death. Shan: The dress is both life and death, simultaneously. Donna: I can see that it has changed. At one stage there was some penicillin on the dress and that has disappeared. The fungi brought up its own immune system to protect itself and stopped the penicillin from growing; so this indicates that it is still alive. The dress has also had organisms eating it. This indicates that there is some sort of biological interaction going on inside the dress. Shan: What would you call what is going on inside the dress? Donna: A relationship. Shannon: Between the host which is the fungi and parasites that attach to it? What sort of parasites attach to it?

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Donna: What I had in there were little brown museums bugs; these were eaten by the spiders. Shannon: How did the spiders get in the acrylic case? Donna: They must have crept in during construction. It is all part of the living dress system. Shan: I saw the fungi dress at Bio-Difference, BEAP (Biennale of Electronic Art Perth) (September 2004) and then again as part of HATCHED at PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Art) (May 2005). What was the white-greenish mold that was on the orange fungi when the dress showed at PICA? It looked to me like the fungi was acting as a host to a mold. Donna: That was the penicillin. Shannon: I think the fact that clothing can be made from living material that takes on a life of its own means something unique in the fashion industry. What would you say it means? Donna: I hope it challenges the fashion industry in terms of presenting a new way of using fabric. If you were to take it to the extreme and you had a wearable living garment, which is what I am working on in my new research, you would have to maintain that garment, you would have to look after the garment. You would have a responsibility to the garment, something like looking after a pet. The garment might change from season to season, in terms of color. Shannon: You would have a transmuting garment. Donna: Conceptually, it brings in the whole issue of the commodified body in fashion. Shannon: The fungi dress is both critique of the fashion industry and one of the most incredibly beautiful garments I’ve seen. I always thought critique could be beautiful. Donna: Me too. Because it is alive it makes people more aware of their body and what they are wearing, how they wear clothes, why they wear clothes as a cultural object, how we place certain ideologies onto clothing. With the commodified body it is more about the fact that I am using biological material to produce a garment, a dress, which is normally constantly recycled, constantly updated, the whole consumer thing of how fashion is always looking for something new. Shan: But this is as new as it gets, and it constantly rejuvenates itself as new, as well as critiquing new. This almost critiques both the hegemonic and counter cultural critiques of fashion.

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The fungi dress works as a metacritique because it is living and because it is made out of material that is officially considered grotesque but it looks really beautiful. So it sort of destabilizes all the invested identities inscribed in clothing. Was this your intent when you started off? Donna: Previous to this, my work was always about process and practice. I would be looking at the materials and looking at what they could communicate. In producing the fungi dress the intention was to rupture and challenge preconceived traditional notions of relationships between identity, the body and the garment, fungi and textile relationships, taking the latter to a new level. Historically, fungi have been used in textiles to dye; it is no longer living. How my research changes traditional techniques is by producing a living dye and keeping the fungi alive. Shannon: You didn’t dye the fungi? Donna: No, this is the fungi’s original color. It is an orange bracket fungus, Pycnoporus conoccieus. Shannon: How did you get the idea to produce a fungi dress? Donna: Previous to this I grew wheat into cloth and looked at patterns created; I was looking at the ideas of life, death, decay and energy. Then I transferred these patterns into hand embroidery, taking images from the wheat and making hand stitch. I met the bioartist Adam Zaretsky; he gave a talk about his residency at SymbioticA. I, then, did a residency at SymbioticA. I developed the fungi dress during a residency at SymbioticA. The natural progression after learning the techniques of mycology (the growth and study of fungi) and experimenting with different colors, different ways of growing fungi, was to make it into a garment because that is what I have always done. I have always worked with the body and clothing. Shannon: You come out of high femme Goth counterfashion. Donna: “Unconventional conventionists” to take the quote from Rocky Horror Picture Show. Shannon: How has Goth inf luenced your choice in terms of medium and in terms of style? Donna: Well, fungi, the whole issue of decay is a Goth thing; having it quite raw in terms of surface also reminds me of Gothic identities. Gothicism for me was very much about making a statement and challenging the norm; this has something to do with the inf luence of choosing biological material.

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When I was working in the laboratory, I liked the idea of how I had this illusion of control. You have the entity contained, but you don’t have control over what it does entirely even though you choose where it goes and what it consumes food wise, as you are feeding it. The orange bracket fungus feeds on cellulose. There is still the unknown element that you don’t have control over which I find really exciting. Maybe this has something to do with Gothicism because at the time it was unknown to me. I saw Goths on the street and I thought this is intriguing: Why are they doing this? What is their purpose? What are they saying? Having the illusion of control and the unknown with the biological material is really exciting for me. Shannon: Do you foresee a living material fashion show? Donna: I am working on that right now for BEAP works. A fashion show exhibition. Shannon: Are you going to have people wearing them? Donna: Yes. Donna: Wow. Need any models? Donna: Yes. Shannon: Are you serious? When is the show? Donna: July 2006; are you going to be around? Shannon: I’d love to model. I could arrange to be around. Donna: Again, the work is combining the living and the nonliving, the organic and the synthesized. The fungi is grown in the laboratory and I’m combining this with stereotypical fashion ideologies, then challenging the stereotypes of science and art. When people think of biological art, they think Frankenstein and cloning; I want to play with this. Shannon: Yes, count me in. I’ll be back; are you doing any minis? How many garments do you foresee making? Donna: The number has to be significant, either seven or more than seven. Seven references the whole idea of God and Creation. Shannon: There is a spark of the divine in the material because it is a living thing. Donna: I had some problems in terms of how to make the fungi dress wearable so I am working on how to make the new living dresses wearable? Shannon: The fungi dress is so beautifully radical that it is both subtle and right up against the fashion industry, putting it under

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critique. And phenomenally beautiful to look at. You can do much more with beauty as critique and much more with art and installation than you can with words. You can do much more with presentational art—an installation that is presenting something new. Donna: Up until the last two years I have been producing representational work; I am still struggling with the fine line between representational and presentational work; and where I actually sit. I feel that I can’ t do works that are not aesthetically pleasing. Shannon: There is a difference between beauty that is a hegemonic beauty that falls into a status quo, that doesn’t put anything into question, and beauty that is outside of that and is a noncontainable beauty. To employ the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s thinking on art: this kind of beauty is unconcealing; it reveals a different medium and a different process to produce a standard everyday product: clothing. Note Franklin, Donna M., Fibre Reactive a Living Garment. A Synergy of Biological Technology and Art. Masters of Arts Dissertation, The School of Contemporary Arts, Faculty of Communication and Creative Industries, Edith Cowan University, 2004.

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CH A P T E R

EIGH T

Victimless Leather—A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific “Body” S hannon B e l l

Humans, the naked/nude apes, have been covering their fragile bodies/skins to protect themselves from the external environment. This humble act for survival has developed into a complex social ritual that transformed the concept of a “Garment” into an evocative object that cannot be taken on its face value. Garment became an expressive tool to project one’s identity, social class, political stand, and so on. Garments are humans’ fabrication and can be explored as a tangible example of humans’ treatment of the Other. By growing Victimless Leather, the Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A) Project is further problematizing the concept of garment by making it Semiliving. The Victimless Leather is grown out of immortalized cell lines that cultured and form a living layer of tissue supported by a biodegradable polymer matrix in a form of miniature stitch-less coat like shape. The Victimless Leather project concerns with growing living tissue into a leather like material. This artistically grown garment will confront people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and will further confront notions of relationships with living systems manipulated or otherwise. An actualized possibility of wearing “leather” without killing an animal is offered as a starting point for cultural discussion. Our intention is not to provide yet another consumer product but rather to raise questions about our exploitation of other living beings.

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We see our role as artists as one in which we are providing tangible example of possible futures, and research the potential affects of these new forms on our cultural perceptions of life. It is not our role to provide people with goods for their daily use. We would like our work to be seen in this cultural context, and not in a commercial context. As part of the TC&A project we are artistically exploring and provoking notions relating to human conduct with other living systems, or to the Other. It deconstructs our cultural meaning of clothes as a second skin by materializing it and displaying it as an art object. It also presents an ambiguous and somewhat ironic take into the technological price our society will need to pay for achieving “a victimless utopia”. The research and development of “Victimless Leather” has been conducted in SymbioticA: The Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia and in consultation with Professor Arunasalam Dharmarajan from the School of Anatomy and Human Biology as well as Verigen, a Perth-based company that specializes in tissue engineered cartilage for clinical applications. The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through ArtsWA in Association with the Lotteries Commission.1 Oron Catts is a Tissue Engineering Artist. He is cofounder and Artistic Director of SymbioticA, the Art & Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, Perth. Catts, with Ionat Zurr, is the cofounder of the Tissue Culture & Art Project/TC&A (1996). Catts was a research fellow at the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Harvard Medical School (2000–2001). Catts trained in product design and specialized in the future interaction of design and biological derived technologies. Ionat Zurr is a Wet Biology Art Practitioner. She is artist-inresidence/PhD candidate in SymbioticA. Zurr, with Oron Catts, is the cofounder of the TC&A Project. Zurr was a research fellow at the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Harvard Medical School (2000–2001). Zurr studied art history, photography, and media studies, specializing in biological and digital imaging as well as video production. Currently, Zurr is a PhD candidate researching the ethical and epistemological implications of wet biology art practices. Catts and Zurr, Tissue Culture and Art Project,2 have produced a number of semiliving tissue engineered wet biology art works: Pigs Wings Project, Semi-living Worry Dolls, Disembodied Cuisine, The Extra Ear 1/4 Scale, and Victimless Leather. Documentation of these works and

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writings by Catts and Zurr can be viewed on the Tissue Culture and Art website (www.tca.edu.au). Shannon Bell is a performance philosopher who lives and writes philosophy in action. Bell did a three-month artist residency, in 2005, at SymbioticA where she studied the process and techniques of tissue engineering art objects with Catts and Zurr. The residency was part of Bell’s current research in “extreme” science and art for her book FastBodies. This research is funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Bell is an associate professor in the York University Political Science Department, Toronto, Canada. Interview with Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr July 2005 Shannon: How does Victimless Leather change how we see fashion, the industry of fashion, and the fetishization of fashion. How does victimless leather mark a shift in your body of tissue engineered 3 bioart work? I know that your new work is going to be with roadkill. Oron and Ionat: Perhaps we should put Victimless Leather not only in the context of the fashion, but also in the broader context of our work. Victimless Leather4 is part of an ongoing engagement with the notion of the semiliving.5 We decided to look at the notion the victimless utopia, which is mediated by technology. But, as with most of our work, it is somewhat ironic in perspective. We started with victimless meat, which was Disembodied Cuisine. In Disembodied Cuisine,6 we grew frog steak from living frog skeletal muscle cells that were taken as a biopsy. The healing frogs were displayed in the gallery alongside the growing steak. Obviously, it was tongue in cheek and, in fact, a pseudopositivist notion of where society is going with technology and food production. Victimless leather is the second in this series. With the exhibitions we have to find the right and appropriate context to present them. When we are invited to an exhibition it enables us to make the piece. For most of our pieces the first time they are produced is in the gallery. This means that the experimentation is done in

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the gallery. The first time that all the components are coming together are in the gallery situation. Shannon: This is a high-risk exhibition situation. So the first time all the component of Victimless Leather came together was for the Space Between Exhibition at the John Curtain Gallery in Perth. Oron and Ionat: The whole system, yes. We, obviously, did quite a lot of testing. We grew bits of tissue in different layers in the laboratory; however, doing the jacket within the profusion pump was done for the first time in the gallery for this exhibition. It was the same with victimless meat, Disembodied Cuisine. We had done testing for victimless cuisine at Joseph Vacanti’s lab using totally different types of cells. We obviously never ate these because we were not allowed to do it.7 The gallery allows us space for experimentation, which is almost impossible in the laboratory. The gallery gives us the type of freedom to experiment and do things that are much harder to do in a gallery than in a laboratory. For us, showing our work is a continuation of the research rather than the outcome of the research When we reshow the work we show the relics rather than the actual piece. Because our art is so much process based to do the same thing over again is less exciting for us. We are invited to show the Victimless Leather project again in a gallery in Germany. They don’t have the funding or the ability to show any living specimens. The idea, then, is to show just the dead specimen. We put it in such a situation so that it will be similar to the way in which the living garment was grown and shown. We fixed the garment inside the environment in which it was growing before. The garment or specimen and the environment are inactive. The garment is fixed in formaldehyde. It preserves the specimen but it kills everything and breaks down all of the proteins. Formaldehyde fixes the cells to the surface, but they are not the cells anymore in this context. Rather, they are transformed by the formaldehyde; the cells retain their morphological structure but not their chemical structure. Shannon: What was Victimless Leather grown out of? Oron and Ionat: One of the things that came out of the work with victimless meat was that we were later approached to create the ultimate victimless meat by using human tissue. When you look at meat in the context of human tissue you start to touch

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on cannibalism and all the taboos that are associated with it. From our perspective, this would really skew quite a lot of the discourse we are trying to generate. We raised it and discussed it in our writings and talks, but we were not interested in actually doing it because it would take us to places that might be interesting to some, but which for us and our ongoing discourse on the semiliving it might not be appropriate. We use generic terms to describe the tissue that we are working with rather than describe the species the tissue is coming from. This means we only describe the type of tissue: skin, bone, nerve cells. People tend to automatically attribute the tissue to humans. When we say skin, people assume that it is human skin, although this is not necessarily the case. When we talk about leather, in very few cases would the idea of it being human come up. In the context of leather we decided it might be interesting to grow human cells but fuse them with animal cells. When humans started to wear garments, according to all indications it was animal furs. In many cases it was not just protective covering which was the initial use which made humans such a f lexible organism that can survive quite a range of technological issues but also a very symbolic one: by wearing the animal you are the animal. You see by the descriptions of early cultures and the description of their relationship to animals, animal hides were used in a very ritualistic way. Shamans would use them and people would have special hides that they were wearing corresponding to their position in the culture. They became the animal. Then we removed ourselves from animal and most people now tend to forget that leather is an animal product. For them it is not a factor because it is so far removed. By creating the Victimless Leather project one of the intentions was to bring it back to the origin from which the animal hide came by removing it from the origin. By using the victimless technique of culturing leather rather than needing to kill animals. By also fusing it with human cells we were really turning it on its head. Particularly, he whole notion that you are the animal if you wear animal hides. Leather is a very fetishistic and a very symbolic garment more than plant derived garments. By bringing it back to the human and one of the things that came about was a discourse similar to the victimless meat where people were talking about growing human meat. Here we actually spoon-feed them and said we are using human tissue but we are fusing so we are creating this chimerical being which is both human and animal. Bringing people to think about using their own

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skin as a second skin, as a garment, but also talking about the breakdown in barriers between the human and animal through the whole notion of the semiliving which is really breaking down notions of species. Actually wearing this hybrid human animal garment or a symbolic gesture towards wearing something like that. Interestingly, Victimless Leather was one of the most discussed projects that we have ever had. The subtitle of the project is a Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific “Body.” I suppose this was the first time we are referring to the technoscientific body, the environment in which we were growing our sculptures as an artistic intention rather than as a necessary frame of technological context in which our sculpture is growing. The first one was in the Worry Dolls. At the time we called the worry dolls’ piece The Tissue Culture and Art(ificial) Wombs, which was quite strong and appropriate at the time, but now the Worry Dolls warrant enough attention by themselves so the project is now know as The Worry Dolls. Here we are referring to Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific “Body.” This is also the first time that we were custom designing an environment to grow our sculptures. Before we were using ready-made bioreactors. This is a very experimental way of trying to grow three-dimensional tissue structures. It is experimental in one sense, but really goes back to the bases of drip cultures that were done when the first tissue culture experiments were taking place. Also, the actual piece itself uses a fairly archaic profusion pump which is based on the original profusion pump that Alexis Carrel did. There are a number of different layers and levels in which we are dealing with the work. We don’t expect everyone to engage with it on all of those levels. There are quite a lot of different narratives and discourses that are embedded within. People took us quite at face value when we were describing Disembodied Cuisine and Victimless Leather as totally victimless, as utopian projects, which wasn’t really our intention. It was always an ironic look, but obviously we didn’t articulate this enough, but perhaps that was also part of the notion of sucking people into this and describing the fact that it is not totally victimless. Nothing is victimless. By one life form surviving or existing it comes at the expense of something else. There is no limitless resources. Our survival is really dependent on the exploitation of other beings. Scientists got quite pissed off with us because they know that we use serum from cows and they know that some of the chemicals we are

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using in the whole process of tissue culturing are animal derived. It is like going to the supermarket and buying meat rather than going and killing; it is removing the victim from the immediate context but it doesn’t take the victim away; it only removes it from attention. We took it to a very absurd conclusion: devictimizing living beings that are killed for our transportation system. Just for us to move from place to place we are generating quite a bit of death in terms of roadkill. The name of the project is ReLifeing RoadKill—taking bits of fresh roadkill, taking cells from these and growing these cells over miniatures of the animal from which it originated. Shannon: So you two will be looking on the road for roadkill? Oron: This is very much work in very early stages. Conceptually, at least, I think it is important to tie it up with Disembodied Cuisine and Victimless Leather. What it is going to do is create this notion of devictimization. If you take an animal that was killed just for a person to get from A to B, or for delivery of goods from one point to the other and you ReLife it, you create this notion of devictimization. It is obviously a symbolic ritualistic gesture toward the devictimization, although by the end of the exhibition people would rekill it because we have the killing ritual.8 If you can think about the victimless meat and the victimless leather as a fairly utilitarian and we actually were approached by companies that were talking about it as potential for commercial exploitation. The roadkill has no potential for exploitation, it has none what so ever; it doesn’t make sense. It is really confronting all of those capitalistic notions that things have to have a financial utilitarian value in order for them to be worthwhile. What we are doing by ref lecting back on the other two projects is saying that they are as futile as the ReLifeing of RoadKill. We really have to reassess our perception of life, find a totally new structure in which those kind of develops can take place; otherwise it is as useless as ReLifeing RoadKill. Shannon: The fashion industry is a multibillion dollar industry; Victimless Leather is a living send-up of this. Oron and Ionat: We need to describe Victimless Leather. It was in a totally dark room which had two intentions. One was to protect the nutrient solution which is light sensitive. Some people

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Shannon Bell got really scared. In retrospect, I realize the gallery was a bit too dark. People were intimidated by this, which wasn’t our intention, but it kind of worked alright.

The whole profusion pump, which functioned as a kind of bioreactor, was inside the incubator. The incubator was hidden behind a false wall. What one saw was like a window into the incubator. You couldn’t see the incubator. You were only seeing the profusion pump and jacket. Bubbles came out of the profusion pump bioreactor and the pump made a repetitive mechanical noise. Because we made the profusion pump into the bioreactor we didn’t want the incubator to be shown. It had a diorama sense to it. The living garment appears as a threedimensional object with the profusion pump constantly pumping nutrients all inside an incubator hidden behind a black wall. This was one of the very first times that we didn’t have the laboratory in the gallery. Sometimes you want to expose the technology and sometimes the technology is too fantastic that people can’t seem to see beyond it. We had a light box with three Petri dishes that were backlite from underneath showing the layers of cell as proof of concept that you can actually grow thick layered tissue. The one on the left is human cartridge cells layered, the third dish shows the fusion of human and mouse cells. The Petri dishes, due to the lightening, were glowing. We cured or fixed the cells and dyed them in much the same way as hide tanning is done. The way of staining cells came from the tanning industry, which is bringing it back to its origin. Then we had the video framed in the same size as the window to the incubator. It was a small projection. It consisted of cells growing with subliminal messages that were images of Frankenstein, Alexis Carrel and his profusion pump, and Oron working in the lab. What we wanted, especially in the context of fashion, was that people would think about the monstrosity of it. It was a fairly Frankensteinian piece by itself; we reinforced it. It was shown in the context of a mainstream fashion textile show. Ionat: The thing about the garment in terms of fashion aesthetics is that it grows into shape, there is no stitching. Shannon: So you could grow yourself a minidress that would be growing while you were wearing it. Oron: Only if you are willing to live your life in sterile conditions to keep the garment alive.

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Ionat: Unless, eventually you were able to grow an external layer of skin as a garment. Ionat: In the conclusion of the paper, “Anthropocentric Attitudes towards the Semi-living,” that I am working on for the Animal and Society Conference,9 I ask which is more disturbing: to wear other animals, or to wear yourself or other humans on yourself, or a hybrid of animals, yourself and other humans? Species differentiation is not a conceptual thing, it tends to be a moral thing. We classify species according to a particular type of morality. Which of the three would you find most disturbing? Shannon: I would find the hybrid mix most desirable. Ionat: Would you wear yourself on yourself? Shannon: Absolutely. I would wear myself, my friends, lovers, ex-lovers. Ionat: A combination of all and your pets, too? Shannon: One of the many great things about all your work is that often each piece raises a number of ethical issues without hitting the viewer over the head with these. When someone looks at a victimless garment, they will probably begin thinking about how we are always wearing leather. Oron: At the conference that accompanied the Space Between textile exhibition, which we gave the keynote at, people seems to be quite disturbed ethically with our work while they didn’t find any problems with the traditional ways of creating leather by killing animals. It seemed to be this idea that if it is new and it is confronting your perception of life, then it is unethical. The “yuck factor” is a way in which we can’t articulate our ethical problems with something but we feel it is wrong. There was a paper on this contending that you have to trust your yuck factor in terms of determining what is right and wrong ethically and morally. If it is in terms of species mixing, the yuck factor comes not because we are afraid of animals becoming us; it is more that we are afraid of us being reduced to animals, which is a humancentric position. Our work very much generates the yuck factor, and in many cases deliberately so. People rely on the yuck factor when they have no theory, no other tools to engage with. The reaction is quite visceral because you can’t articulate it in any coherent thought. What it represents, especially in the context of Victimless Leather, is that because this work is confronting people in terms of their relationships to living beings, they feel that it is wrong somehow, but they can’t articulate it.

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On the other hand, they have no problems with the current production of leather because it is so common and it was done for so long that we are desensitized to it. So this is considered morally right. The fact that it has happened for a long time doesn’t make it right. And, the fact that it is new doesn’t make it wrong, in many cases. I think what we are trying to deal with in the new is with all the ways of perceiving the world. Our belief systems and our cultural tools are not adequate to new technologies. Ionat: Artists can play a role in exploring these issues and spawn “philosophy in action.” Using the very same tools and techniques offered by biotechnology for the sole purpose of generating cultural debate. There is a growing discrepancy between our cultural perceptions of life and what we know about life scientifically and what we can do with life technologically. The instrumentalization of living systems through different aspects of biotechnology is of great concern to us, in particular in the context of postcapitalistic forces. Our work deals with the tension between caring for living systems, on the one hand, and instrumentalizing life, on the other hand. We believe that art is best situated to confront such a paradox in ways that constructively raise philosophical and epistemological issues. Notes 1. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Victimless Leather—A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket Grown in a Technoscientific “Body” (www.tca.edu.au/vl/vl/html). 2. The Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A) was set to explore the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression. We are investigating our relationships with the different gradients of life through the construction/growth of a new class of object/being—that of the Semiliving. These are parts of complex organisms that are sustained alive outside of the body and coerced to grow in predetermined shapes. These evocative objects are a tangible example that brings into question deep rooted perceptions of life and identity, concept of self, and the position of the human in regard to other living beings and the environment. We are interested in the new discourses and new ethics/epistemologies that surround issues of partial life and the contestable future scenarios they are offering us. (Short Manifesto, TC&A, www. tca.edu.au). 3. The basic definition of tissue engineering is the combining of tissue cells with biodegradable scaffolding materials to generate functional tissue constructs. 4. Victimless Leather—A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific “Body,” Space Between Exhibition, John Curtain Gallery, Perth, Western Australia, April–June 2004. 5. Semiliving and partial life are terms originated by Catts and Zurr, and until recently used interchangeably, to refer to “tissue culture and tissue engineered entities that can be sustained, grown, function and . . . ‘live’ outside [their] original body.” (Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, “Are the Semi-living Semi-good or Semi-evil?” Technoetic Arts, Issue 1, 2003, www.tca.edu.ca/ atGlance/pubMainFrames.html/, 5.) The tissue construct is nurtured in a technosurrogate

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6. 7.

8.

9.

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body—a bioreactor, which functions as an artificial womb providing a sterile environment with a nutrient solution that sustain life. The bioreactor is necessarily inside an incubator that keeps the cell structure at 37.0 C, or body temperature. More recently, with the growing of the international performance robo-artist Stelarc’s Extra Ear 1/4 Scale, TC&A has made a distinction between semiliving and partial life entities: semilivings are shaped into forms that are not recognizable as part of any body in particular, whereas partial life can be recognized as parts of a whole of a living being, such as the Extra Ear 1/4 Scale. Disembodied Cuisine and The Tissue Culture and Art(ificial) Womb, part of the L’art Biotech group exhibition of biological art, Nantes, France, March 14–May 4, 2003. On the last day of the show the steak was cooked by a chef in a novelle cuisine dinner for six; the frogs, which had been rescued from a frog farm, were released to a pond in a local botanical garden. The semiliving is necessarily killed at the end of every installation because semilivings can’t be transported across borders and require sterile lab conditions to receive the appropriate care to continue life. The killing is “done by taking the semi-living sculpture out of its containment and letting the audience touch (and be touched) by the sculpture.” The fungi and bacteria that exist in the air and on hands contaminate the cells. Animal and Society Conference, Anthropology & Sociology, School of Social and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia, Perth, July 2005.

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CH A P T E R

N I N E

Is Clothing Art? Je f f We in ste in

More than two decades ago, avant-garde clothes designer Rei Kawakubo opened a groundbreaking retail space for her Comme des Garcons line in New York’s Soho, which was then a name still synonymous with the city’s thriving art world. The bright, minimal, polished-cement space signaled “gallery” instead of shop; the store’s design in fact predicted the industrial-luxury look of many galleries to come—galleries, of course, being shops that sell art. The first year Soho’s Comme des Garcons was in business, I saw a shopper take an indigo-black, cotton-and-wool, protean-shaped article off a hanger and walk to the dressing cubicle. A moment later, she called for a saleswoman: “I need help, I can’t see how to put this on.” And soon she and her helper emerged, looking for a waist, a belt, a front, a back, an inside or outside, anything to cue how this fascinating object marketed as clothing was supposed to relate to a woman’s body. Ultimately they did manage, the brave customer bought the item, and early Kawakubo clothing very like it now can be found in museum collections around the world. Some even call Kawakubo’s clothing art—whether she intends it to be or not—and the designer herself an artist. There is no question that since Marcel Duchamp and the maturation of modernism, displaying something in a gallery or museum urges us to consider the something, whatever else we may call it, as art. But clothing arrayed to be seen and not bought leads us to ask a preliminary, crucial question: Why can’t any clothing, made by artists or not, be art?

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The usual answer is the same that has been invoked to keep so-called craft out of the serious Western art club, which is, the more something is meant to be used, the less “art” it can be. So clothing is not art if it’s taken off the wall and worn to a dinner party? A quick historical look at the “Is clothing art?” conundrum throws the utility response into deep doubt. Probably the earliest argument that clothing belongs to the same category as art was made by the late-Victorian English designer and theorist William Morris, who tried to convince his contemporaries that the distinction between the fine and applied arts was bogus because the same principles of creation apply—or should apply—to both. His ideal was an aesthetically unified world in which paintings, furniture, wallpaper, and fabric were produced as far from factories as possible, with paints, dyes, materials, and even patterns and themes derived from preindustrial nature and culture. The resulting Arts and Crafts Movement bungalows, paintings, chairs, books, and even suits or dresses became interconnected artistic equals in what has been called a “style universe.” At the same time, the wider Aesthetic Movement also in Europe and the United States included border-crossing inf luences from Japan, but its practitioners continued to erase boundaries between fine art and clothing, melding all the arts into a “beauty for beauty’s sake” fashion. Ironically, this anti-industry style became personified by a store, Liberty of London, that mass-produced a signature line of increasingly admired printed silk fabrics, to be sewn by those in the know into loose, f lowing, corset-free Aesthetic gowns. Clothing’s tentative invitation to the club of Western art was ratified at the beginning of the next century by a number of revolutionary modernist movements. The “art into life” impulse of Russian Constructivism was realized by the geometric clothing and textile designs of Lyubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, two important artists—and women—of that politically fervent time. The Italian Futurists proposed a complete break with behavioral habits of the past, and manner of dress did not escape their scorn. Giacomo Balla’s Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing (1913) passionately decried as passé suits that were “tight-fitting, colorless, funereal, decadent, boring and unhygienic” and called for the abolition of “wishy-washy, pretty-pretty, gloomy, and neutral colors, along with patterns composed of lines, checks and spots.” So what should his man of the future wear? “Hap-hap-hap-haphappy clothes, daring clothes with brilliant colors and dynamic lines.” Symmetry in tailoring was banished: “The cut must incorporate

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dynamic and asymmetrical lines, with the left-hand sleeve and left side of a jacket in circles and the right in squares.” Balla wanted this sartorial adrenalin to zip in and out of style as fast as the latest locomotive, “in order to encourage industrial activity and to provide constant and novel enjoyment for our bodies.” Although the artist proudly wore examples of his own design (one photo shows colored triangular shapes sewn into a rather droopy jacket), Balla’s pronouncements were never brought into real production; his clothing ideas, the neckties made of wood and embedded with f lashing lights, were intended more to shock, to jump-start an aesthetic of change. The movement’s later art clothing backed away from the edge: vests by Fortunato Depero from the 1920s are surprisingly traditional shapes decorated with high-contrast but symmetrical appliqué. Only a jacket from the 1930s by Tullio Crali, with no lapels, pockets, or buttons, seems to stride Futurist innovation and commercial possibility. Still, the Futurists wore their art on their sleeves unequivocally. The Russian-born, Paris-based modernist who most clearly saw the connection between art and clothing, the “soft Cubist” painter Sonia Delaunay, also divided them, via her commercial fashion success; she was an originator of the concept of prêt-a-porter, or off-the-rack, clothing production and sales. Wearing her zigzag-bordered, early-Deco outfits—made from gem-hued scraps of tulle, f lannel, silk—all around town, Delaunay never doubted that clothing could be art. In 1925, her fashion designs were shown at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs, and she gave a pioneering lecture at the Sorbonne about the inf luence of painting on clothing. The artist also collaborated with the less art-connected designer Coco Chanel; later, Delaunay goods were sold on both sides of the Atlantic, not in galleries, but (surprise!) department stores. As the twentieth century proceeded, it seemed that a piece of handmade clothing could be art either if it belonged to the prevailing artistic style universe, or if the hand that made it was attached to an artist. Does that mean factory-made, ready-to-wear duds can’t be art? Or that great, original couturiers, such as slinky bias-cut innovator Madeleine Vionnet or dramatic architect of fabric volume Charles James, created objects that cannot be considered art because the creators did not call themselves artists? I would like to propose that just as a clay bowl or puzzle cup by turn-of-the-last-century maverick George Ohr (who proclaimed himself “the world’s greatest potter”) can be displayed, priced, collected, and appreciated as art, so may articles of clothing, unique or even

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mass-produced—“multiples,” in the vein of artist Joseph Beuys’ felt suits. To judge whether they are good or bad art remains the task of viewers, critics, and even those who dare to wear the art in question. How is clothing art? It’s a form of soft sculpture. It’s a vessel for the body; the body completes the artwork. It partakes of many mediums— any and all fabrics, leather, paper, rubber, string, chain links, paper clips, you name it. Like all art, clothing acknowledges history, yet at its most ambitious tries to supercede it. Like painting or traditional sculpture, clothing can be abstract or representational—or neither. (How would you fit a pair of Levis into these categories?) All clothing is interactive if worn, communicative if worn in public because it contains codes, which can refer to age, gender, race, income, taste, social aptness, or “suitability.” The clothing we remember often draws its artistic power by reminding us just how striking, how beautiful, created objects can be, and how in clothing’s case that beauty multiplies in motion. In case it isn’t clear, clothing is art mostly because it successfully challenges art-or-not categories. Although museums have collected clothing for years and displayed their homespun smocks and frayed velvet bustles as quaint anthropological artifacts, this began to change about the same time Kawakubo threw her complicated wares up for sale. The Brooklyn Museum displayed Charles James’ pearlescent taffeta gowns on sculptural pedestals; art critics, not fashion writers, were assigned to review them. Longtime art worlder Richard Martin took over the galleries of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and mounted blockbuster shows such as “Fashion and Surrealism,” which brought clothing designer Elsa Schiaparelli and artist Man Ray (who was a fashion photographer too) into the same aesthetic arena; Martin went on to replace Vogue magazine icon Diana Vreeland and run the popular fashion shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even serious art destinations like the Guggenheim Museum attempted to cash in on crossover enthusiasm with a display of Giorgio Armani’s wares that many thought turned the Frank Lloyd Wright fixture into a just another Fifth Avenue boutique. This writer himself had the giddy-making experience of seeing his much-used black winter coat—I won’t bore you with details of who designed it and when—as the very final item, the only male item, in a clothing-as-art museum exhibition a few years back. When the show came down, the coat was returned, nicely cleaned and pressed, and it still sits in the closet, taunting its owner to take it off the hanger, put it on, and walk out into the rain.

CH A P T E R

T E N

Fashion Advice from the Anti-Christ Lydia Hartunian

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murders of all murders, console ourselves?”1 With a complete fashion makeover—an exfoliation of every religious pore, a bonfire for all festering threads! Remove the Christian paint from your nails, the spiritual tonic from your hair, steep yourself in an Dionysian bath to kill all semblances of indecency, and what will you have? The Beautiful Anti-Christ—the proper way to look and feel human. “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”2 While you probably don’t don a ‘habit’ and the black clothes you adorn are probably not the grim frocks of the Amish chances are still good you are a fashion disaster sporting the latest in Christian Design. “One should not embellish or dress up Christianity—it has waged a war to the death against the higher type of man.”3 Take a look at your fashion pile—the heaps of sick clothing, decadent beauty products, cowardly footwear, and weary accessories all of which f latter you only in so far as they destroy you—and ask yourself the following: How many items in your pile were purchased with good will or worse yet, at Good Will? (“I simply won’t buy Nike products.”—“I give my old clothes to charity.”) “What is more harmful than any vice? Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak—(Christianity.)”. “Man is finished when he becomes altruistic.— Instead of saying simply ‘I am no longer worth anything’ the moral lie in the

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mouth of the decadent says, ‘nothing is worth anything—life is not worth anything’. . . .”4 How many items do you wear with deception? (“I look good in this.”—“These pants makes me look slim.”) “[O]ne is deceived about many things in man because many a shell is shabby and sad and altogether too much shell. Much hidden graciousness and strength is never guessed; the most exquisite delicacies find no tasters. Women know this— the most exquisite do: a little fatter, a little slimmer—oh how many destinies lie in so little!”5 How many lies govern your fashion sensibilities? (“Clothes make the man.”—“These clothes are so me!”) “No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is . . . it is absurd to want to hand over [our] nature to some purpose or other.” . . .“I call a lie wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it . . . the most common lie is the lie to oneself.”6 How much weakness does your fashion sense succumb to? (“I wish I could wear that but fear it will be inappropriate.”—“I was so embarrassed by how I looked.”) “To him who has knowledge man himself is ‘the animal with the red cheeks.’ How did this come about? Is it not because man has been ashamed too often? ..[S]hame, shame, shame—that is the history of man.”7 Which items have you purchased without real money or without real purpose? ( “I buy this against money that is not mine and therefore deny myself with this purchase.”—“Botox.”) “A certain sense of cruelty toward oneself and others is Christian . . .”~ . . . “To cultivate out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-viloation, a will to falsehood at any price, an antipathy, a contempt for every good and honest instinct! These are the blessings of Christianity!”8 Just how subservient is your style? (“I’d love to see my wife in this!”— “This outfit would be great for work!”) “I pursued the living; I walked the widest and the narrowest paths that I might know its nature. With a hundredfold mirror I still caught its glance when its mouth was closed so that its eyes might speak to me. And its eyes spoke to me. But wherever I found the living, there I also heard the speech on obedience. Whatever lives, obeys.9 Are you so afraid you feel good in your clothes? (“I feel best in jeans and sneakers.”—“I hate when I have to dress up!”) “But why do I speak where nobody has my ears? And so let me shout it in to all the winds: You are becoming smaller and smaller, you small people! You are crumbling, you comfortable ones. You will perish of your many small virtues, of your many small abstentions, of your many small resignations. Too considerate,

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too yielding is your soil. But that a tree may become great, it must strike hard roots around hard rocks.”10 Do your fashion choices speak with “otherness” in mind? (“I hope people will notice me in this”—“I want to be accepted.”) “There are preachers of death; and the earth is full of those to whom one must preach renunciation of life. The earth is full of the superfluous; life is spoiled by the all-too-many. May they be lured from this life with the ‘eternal life’! Yellow the preachers of death wear, or black. But I want to show them to you in still other colors.”11 Now examine your fashion pile again and this time ask yourself how many items were purchased to make you strong—to make you human and unafraid to be human? To make you overcome and take you beyond all notions of good and evil? “Alas, that you would understand my word: ‘Do whatever you will but first be such as are able to will.’ ”12 What’s hot? “All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.”13 What’s not? “All that proceeds from weakness.”14 Look at yourself in the mirror—the full length mirror. How’s your posture? Do your shoulders roll down toward the ground you are afraid to walk on? “There he lay now, sick miserable, filled with ill-will towards himself; full of hatred for the impulses towards life, full of suspicion of all that was still strong and happy. In short, a ‘Christian.’ ”15 Do you dress to conceal? “I want to speak to the despisers of the body. I would not have them learn and teach differently, but merely say farewell to their own bodies and thus become silent. I want to speak to the despisers of the body. It is their respect that begets their contempt. . . . Even in your contempt, you despisers of the body, you serve yourself. I say unto to you, your self itself wants to die and turns away from life.”16 Women, how much makeup do you wear? “Comparing man and woman generally, one may say that woman would not have the genius for adornment, if she had not the instinct for the secondary role.”17 Men, do you even fit in to your primary role? “To be true—only a few are able! And those who are still lack the will. But the good have this ability least of all. Oh, these good men! Good men never speak the truth; for the spirit, to be good in this way is a disease. They give in, these good men; they give themselves up; their heart repeats and their ground obeys: but whoever heeds commands does not heed himself.”18 What color is your hair—are you afraid to “go blonde”?

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“One may be perfectly justified in being always afraid of the blonde beast that lies at the core of all aristocratic races, and in being on one’s guard: But who would not a hundred times prefer to be afraid, when one at the same time admires, than to be immune from fear, at the cost of being perpetually obsessed with the loathsome spectacle of the distorted, the dwarfed, the stunted, the envenomed?”19 How sanguine are your shoes? “The fear of pain, even infinitely small in pain, cannot end otherwise than in a religion of love.”20 Are you gloveless too often? “[O]ne does well to put gloves on when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do so.”21 Do you blend with the crowd? “No Shephard and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”22 How remembered will you be tomorrow for how you look today? “The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct—all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering, all that holds a guarantee of the future in the instincts henceforth excites mistrust. So to live that there is no longer any meaning in living: that now becomes the meaning of life . . .”23 Just how bacterin is your beauty? “What a monster of falsity modern man must be that he is none the less not ashamed to be called Christian!”24 do you even see yourself?!? “Faith has been at all times . . . only a cloak, a pretext, a screen, behind which the instincts played their game—a shrewd blindness to the dominance of certain instincts.”25 “I give a few examples of what these petty people have taken into their heads, what they have put in to the mouth of their Master: confessions of ‘beautiful souls’ one and all.”26 Are you able to look in the mirror and say, this is the hair I wish to have for all time—this is the ass I can take to my grave, these are the shirts, the shoes, the suits I will wear forever? “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you— all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a grain of dust.’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?”27

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Cast off the nauseating spectacle of your style—make room for those who care of their manner! “My mind and my longing are directed toward the few, the long, the distant; what are your many small miseries to me? You do not yet suffer enough to suit me! For you suffer from yourselves, you have not yet suffered from man.”28 So who amongst us can pave the fashion way? Supermodel as Übermensch? “Obey must woman, and find a depth for her surface. Surface, is woman’s soul, a mobile stormy film on shallow water.”29 Madonna? Brittney? Paris? “Let me speak to [you] of what is most contemptible: but that is the last man . . . . Alas the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold I show you the last man. . . .‘We have invented happiness’ say the last men, and they blink.”30 Pamela Andersen? “When a woman has scholarly inclination there is generally something wrong with her sexual nature.”31 Sean John Diddy Daddy Puff P.? “You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm.”32 The Hollywood Red Carpet? “I walk among these people and I keep my eyes open: they have become smaller and they are becoming smaller and smaller; but this is due to their doctrine of happiness and virtue. For they are modest in virtue, too—because they want contentment. But only a modest virtue gets along with contentment. To be sure, even they learn in their way to stride and to stride forward. I call it their hobbling. Thus they become a stumbling block for everyone who is in a hurry. And many among them walk forward while looking backward with their stiff necks.~ Some of them are genuine, but most of them are all bad actors.”33 The Queer Eye? “For to-day have the petty people become master: they all preach submission and humility and policy and diligence and consideration and the long et cetera of petty virtues. Whatever is of the effeminate type, whatever originates from the servile type, and especially the populace-mishmash:—THAT wisheth now to be master of all human destiny—O disgust! Disgust! Disgust!”34 The Gap? “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”35 The Catholic Church? “Yet the priests are, as is notorious, the worst enemies—why? Because they are the weakest. Their weakness causes their hate to expand into a monstrous

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and sinister shape, a shape which is most crafty and most poisonous. The really great haters in the history of the world have always been priests, who are also the cleverest haters—in comparison with the cleverness of priestly revenge, every other piece of cleverness is practically negligible.”36 Marilyn Manson? “The noble type of man regards himself as a determiner of values; he does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: “What is injurious to me is injurious in itself”; he knows that it is he himself only who confers honor on things; he is a creator of values. He honors whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality is self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of plentitude, of power, which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth which would fain give bestow:—the noble man also helps the unfortunate, but not—or scarcely—out of pity, but rather from an impulse generated by the superabundance of power. The noble man honors in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is sever and hard.”37 Where is your courage when you dress? How brave is your beauty? Just how long is the hour of your fashion contempt? “What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour in which your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.”38 God is dead. God remains dead—and you have killed him. Time to start looking the part, oh marvelous murderer! And be sure to schedule plenty of time for your makeover—plan for at least another 6 million years for your style to evolve. But start now! “In the end one might reasonably ask oneself whether it was really not an aesthetic taste which blinded man for so long: it desired a picturesque effect from truth—it desired especially that the man of knowledge should produce a powerful impression on the senses. It was our modesty that offended their tastes the longest . . . Oh how well they divined that fact—those turkey-cocks of God!”39 That which does not kill you will definitely make you look and feel better.40 Notes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 172. Cf. also Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 134. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 124.

Fashion Advice from the Anti-Christ 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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Ibid., 129. Ibid., 128 and 98–99. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 306. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, 65 and 186. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche,200. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, 143 and 198–99. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 226. Ibid., 283. Ibid., 56–57. Ibid., 284. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 67. See also “Christianity is a revolt of everything that crawls along the ground directed against that which is elevated; the gospel of the lowly makes low . . .” Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, 169. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 147. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 145. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 312. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 63. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ,154. See also “But I say unto you: your love of your neighbor is your bad love of yourselves. You flee to your neighbor from yourselves and would like to make a virtue out of that: but I see through your ‘selflessness,’ ” Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 172. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, 173. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 130. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, 168. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 163. Ibid., 171. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 134. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 400–401. Ibid., 179. Ibid. 129. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,144. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 124. Ibid., 281. Ibid., 399. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ,35. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 63. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,144. See also Marilyn Manson, Open Letter to Fans (http:// www.ncf.carleton.ca/~cd100/letter.htm): To whom it may conform: Hello from the gutters of Fort Lauderhell which are filled with piss, disease and broken toys. Hello from Marilyn Manson. We are your shit. You should be ashamed of what you have eaten. I am writing on behalf of my band, who has adopted my namesake as a mockery of your fixation with the grandiose “stars” that litter your television screens daily. I am the “All American” anti-Christ bathed in talk show—trash, here to help hysterical housewives wallow in their own

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suffering. I have predicted the past. I am the accuser. Marilyn Manson is the harvest of thrown away kids, and America is now afraid to reap what it has sown. You have spoon fed us Saturday Morning mouthfuls of maggots and lies disguised in your sugary breakfast cereals. The plates you made us clean were filled with your fears. These things have hardened in our soft pink bellies. We have grown up watching your television, that you put in your homes. We are a symptom of your Christian America, the biggest Satan of all. It’s too late to take it all back. This is your world in which we grow and we will grow to hate you. Love and I am, Mr. Manson. 38. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 125. 39. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, 135. See also “Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivety rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man—the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined,” Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, 90. 40. “From the military school of life.—What does not kill me makes me stronger,” Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, 33.

CH A P T E R

E L E V E N

Puro High Life M aythe e Rojas

My earliest memory in life involves being baptized. I remember being passed back and forth between several hands and breaking into a fit of tears when a stream of water was poured over my face. The photographs from the event failed to capture my anxiety, however. Instead, they showcased a striking, young couple posed alongside a set of proud godparents and a blank-eyed priest. Although my parents’ expressions betrayed a certain inexperience, their stylish demeanor suggested sophistication beyond their years. Indeed, in each picture, their sharp outfits somehow overshadowed the parental role that they had dressed that day to assume. My mother, in particular, stands out with her white, almost translucent, skin cast against the brilliant shimmer of her tiny gold mini-dress and matching heels. Atop her head, she wears a round, cream-colored, silk hat with gossamer netting. Emboldened by rich green eye shadow, her golden-speckled eyes complete the auric look. The year was 1971 and my mother was the model image of the time’s fashion. She was, in her own words, a ref lection of “puro high life,” an expression she still uses today. Over time, however, my mother’s term has shifted meaning. Puro high life has gone from being code-switching proof of her successful affectation of the fashionable American elite to betraying the envy she feels as images of privilege and status pass her by. I have grown up understanding life and my mother through these same two dimensions: an ascension into an ultra femme, high fashion lifestyle that brings self-confidence, social acceptance, and an overall sense of pride; and the exclusion, doubt, and shame that follow poverty

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and personal downfall. My mother comes from two well-known, wellrespected families in Costa Rica. Both gifted her with an automatic pass into the social elite of her small, liberal-minded country. However, the two also left her a legacy of financial loss. Neither family managed its wealth well; instead, gambling, bad investments, and adultery left most of the heirs with only last names to pawn. My mother fared slightly better as her father’s small plots of land and reputation provided her with good social standing and a solid education. She entered adulthood proud and filled with knowledge about a world she was eager to explore. Her marriage to my working-class father who lived in the United States proved to be a test of both. The level of my mother’s social expectations as an immigrant is easily measured by the chic sense of style she employed when attending events with my father. Her hair, professionally styled into a round bouffant or classic chignon, and then later worn long and ironed straight, showed off soft pleated skirts with matching cardigans, empire lined baby dolls splashed in sequin, and f loor length f loral prints with frilled hems. These beautiful outfits were usually offset by intricate jewelry and small beaded clutches with room enough to hold only a silver cigarette case. Although the outings were often to house parties, or events sponsored by Club Latino, a local cultural organization made up of other Latin American immigrants in the area, my mother treated them all as if she were meeting with the heads of state. Not that she would have been the one to talk to them if she had. Although she knew how to dress the part, my mother was not the leader in the pair. It was my father who did the talking. My father was a charismatic man who also enjoyed looking good. As their only child for several years, I recall watching my parents preen and fuss for hours and then sharing in their pride when we were welcomed into people’s homes. Showered in compliments and approving looks, I knew my parents were an immediate hit whenever they walked in together and it was always a thrill to watch. Yet my parents’ stab at the puro high life in the United States lacked an essential ingredient: financial stability. When the 1980s ushered in a new set of rules for fashion, they brought economic demise to my family. Early into the decade, my father was laid off from his aircraft job and he was never able to regain a firm footing in the workplace. In addition, he discovered he was suffering from colon cancer. The disease took him quickly and his death left my mother, at age 36, a single parent of two young girls with few economic resources between them. I tend to divide my life between before my father’s death and after. However, another way to understand it is how my mother’s social

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mobility deteriorated as mine seemingly evolved. During what most see as the formative years of one’s life, I negotiated the typical wants of a teenage girl with the realities of our limited family income. My mother tried to erase the gap between the two wherever possible. She bought me designer jean knock-offs from the previous season. She made friends at the local bakery to ensure fulfilling birthdays. She scoured the discount stores months in advance to keep each year’s Christmas tree filled with gifts. Each of these things she managed to do by selling off her inherited Costa Rican properties, parcel by parcel. Eventually, the day came when the land was all gone; by then I had started working and was preparing to enroll in college. I was accepted to an elite, private school in southern California that prides itself on maintaining an Ivy League reputation, complete with all the east coast sensibilities. I knew going in that competing with students prepped for this education would prove a challenge, but I was unprepared for the social stratification that followed. Arriving on campus, I found two divergent fashion camps: the transplanted east coasters sporting khakis and striped polos, and the hippie set (some of them also from the East) donning cork-soled shoes and peasant style skirts. I had never seen a pair of Birkenstocks, but I knew polo shirts only extenuated my large breasts. I was also alarmed because despite a significant weight loss over the summer, as I looked around, I realized I was still heavier than most of my female peers. I reasoned that loose voile dresses would hide the differences between us better. Initially, I was also encouraged about fitting in after being told that my frizzy hair would make great dreads. Aptly, I had failed to inherit my mother’s pin-straight locks. That first week, I rushed out and bought a pair of baggy, purple cropped pants with gold trim and paired them with a billowing, long sleeve white top. I don’t think I had any clue how terrible I looked until a high school friend came to visit and I greeted her in this outfit. The look on her face is still mortifying to remember. While I sighed and pushed those clothes to the back of the closet, I continued to try my hand at the loose baggy wear that was worn by other groups I encountered. In particular, the feminists on campus seemed to revel in the long shapeless dresses they wore to the meetings we mutually attended. Oversized tees and ethnic print pants were equally popular. These fashion choices were not necessarily easier to adopt, but I was very drawn to this community. It was during my conversations with other likeminded women that I started to develop a political consciousness and language of my own. It was in feminist-centered classrooms that

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I learned of issues that felt profoundly meaningful. It was also through feminism that I gained a tangible framework for reading the literature to which I was so naturally attracted. I am still quite aware that it was within the pages of ethnic American women’s writing that I finally found myself. Unfortunately, however, our feminist community lacked the same mirror. Except for a few of us, the self-identified feminists on campus were white and often upper middle class. Their general approach to fashion ref lected these facts. Their decisions to reject designer labels, feminine dress, and personal grooming were choices they could make. In essence, their rebellion against patriarchal concepts of beauty still left their markers of ethnicity and class intact. At the time, however, I did not realize that the same did not hold true for me; so, like them, I cut curly hair short and dismissed the need for makeup, convinced we shared the same (body) politics. Fashion also found its way into my love life. Early one fall during college, I took a budding love interest shopping with me. Disguised as a search for a new season coat, the trip was mostly an excuse to spend time alone. A coolly styled, camel hair, mid-length jacket in turn played the intermediary. Slipping the garment on, I enjoyed the rub of the coat’s rich fabric against my skin. It felt expensive. At the same time, I noticed José watching and that made me nervous. I rushed over to a nearby mirror to avert his gaze. As I did, I spotted a man out of the corner of my eye also make a mad dash. As I quickly realized though, the plainclothes officer was less interested in the coat’s fit than where I was going with it. His reaction shook me. I was not a thief. Offended, but speechless, I hung up the coat on a nearby rack and walked out. José followed, both of us shaking our heads at the man’s stupidity, but neither of us comfortable enough to discuss why it happened. Later the event ate away at me. My thoughts remained focused on why we had been singled out. I knew our youth fit the average shoplifter profile but I worried that it had more to do with how he saw us. José was darker than me, his indigenous roots still prominent in his features, but we were both very visibly Latino. Neither of us wore anything that resembled a designer brand. In fact, the store itself was far different from the types of places we frequented prior to college. Did these factors add to the typical suspect qualities? Or were it these alone that made us suspects? The following week I was invited to a college party and I asked José to join me. I emphasized that he should dress nicely. That evening, he showed up at my door wearing a powder blue jacket with navy velvet lapels that I knew was straight out of a former quincañera ceremony.

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I was immediately embarrassed and tried to coax him out of wearing it. He shrugged off all of my suggestions, determined to keep it on. A friend who witnessed the exchange quietly advised me to let it go. I resigned myself to the situation and we left for the party. Once there, however, I took in the hip, white, wealthy guests and knew I could not be comfortable staying near him. His garish outfit screamed out the humiliation that was still lodged in my throat from days earlier. We talked very little that evening. Instead, I wandered in the party, trying to avoid looking like we were a couple, despite his insistence on trailing behind me. A week later, I found it equally difficult to return his calls. My experience in Spain while pursuing my higher studies brought with it a similar disconnect, even as I found a kind of liberation there. Although still thin, Spanish women dressed quite differently from the campus girls I knew. They wore skirts, scarves, silk camisoles, and even heels on a daily basis. They did not necessarily have extensive wardrobes; they just knew how to wear what they owned. They were also sexy. Short shorts with black tights, for example, were an evening must. While in some of them I saw features similar to my own and in others not, often while I was there I was reminded of my mother. In both dress and demeanor, Spanish women exemplified puro high life. In fact, away from home, I too felt a little high. Being in Spain meant getting the opportunity to travel, try new things, and dance early into the morning. In addition, it meant not having to worry about my family. Thousands of miles between us, we were forced to communicate only intermittently. Many things went unsaid and I used the silence to my advantage. I enjoyed my freedom and pushed back any thoughts that my family was being left out. I spent the money I had brought on train tickets, drinks with new Spanish friends, and an occasional sexy outfit of my own. I used the time away as an opportunity to be responsible only for myself. Only later did I learn from my sister that, while I was away, my family had found it difficult to make ends meet. Without my grocery store credit card to supplement their meals, they were often forced to make potatoes their main dish for weeks at a time. This information was kept from me for over a decade. And, when I returned home bearing souvenirs for everyone, my mother examined each piece, proudly, and sometimes a little shyly, noting how expensive everything seemed. Today I am a professor at a state university, which enrolls a diverse student population from largely working-class background. Its urban environment and proximity to Los Angeles make teaching there both

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alluring in terms of the rich cultural opportunities and difficult because of the high cost of living. My work experience is also rewarding but complicated because of my role as a Women’s Studies instructor. I have the pleasure of teaching self-selective students who meet with me regularly to discuss the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Our conversations are often personal and heartfelt. Our shared memories are surprisingly similar. Yet, sometimes, I envy their ability to find themselves so easily ref lected within their surroundings; then, I am reminded of how lucky I was to get the kind of education that allows me to extend that ref lection even further. Moreover, I am struck by the dissonance and similarity that run through our lives. While our ethnic backgrounds and gender draw us together, most of my female students and I now share a broad difference in terms of class. Eating ethnic cuisines other than their own is still foreign to many of them. Visiting distant family members is all the traveling most have done. Participating in the Los Angeles arts scene remains an unusual and distant experience to some. Nevertheless, I stand before them, like them, just not quite. With my doctorate in hand, I appear to have achieved puro high life. I know my mother thinks so. Most learn within minutes of meeting her that her daughter is a doctora. She also uses this fact to justify my purchases when she accompanies me shopping. Expensive leather boots? Well, with all the work I do—¡hay que disfrutar! A designer dress marked down? What a steal—¡no le de gusto al Diablo! Fine tailored pants? Don’t forget who you are—¡sos una profesional! Although several years of sustained financial stability have not erased her own hesitation to overspend, my mother believes it is a right I have earned along with my education. Perhaps she sees it as a recuperation of sorts. Lost to her, but returned to me. Yet, my financial stability is not that secure. How does being puro high life play out if I am forced to live in a cheap apartment, where I have to avoid leaving or walking to my car in high heels for fear of having to break into a run should someone chase me? A friend once reminded me that crossing the threshold into the thirties justifies indulging in expensive shoes and makeup, but doing so means I have to sacrifice something else. Although I make more money than my parents ever did, college loans and the price of living in an expensive city leave my education-achieved middle-class status lacking the financial backing to go along with it. Consequently, I often ask myself what my “fashion statement” is as a college professor. Indeed, what should a feminist wear? In graduate school, I learned that being seen as an authority figure required more than a thorough knowledge of my academic field. Living in Arizona

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without a car, I depended on my bicycle for transportation and a backpack big enough to carry a second set of clothes to look acceptable. Each day, inside the women’s bathroom, I exchanged sweaty tee shirts and jean shorts for dresses and nice shoes. I applied lipstick and perfume and ran gel through my curly hair to smooth back the frizz brought out by the bike ride, all in an attempt to earn a respectability that was effortlessly awarded to my male counterparts in the department. Students looked past their torn jeans, cargo shorts, and shaggy beards and saw authority in my colleagues’ demeanors. They looked at me and wondered how much they could get away with. Although now a professional, I still find myself maneuvering through these issues of visibility. Fashioning my identity as a professor requires me to continually negotiate the formality of my dress in order to maintain authority with how my (adorned) body is read through both its distance and nearness to my students. This is a difficult balance. While I may be able to provide a successful feminist model that does not require the rejection of traditional cultural ideas of femininity, I still run the risk of reinforcing other stereotypes. Similarly, while my education and fashion choices may suggest a perceived middle-class status, I remain distant from being able to fully enjoy its comforts. Instead, my life experiences leave me more aware of the contradictions implicit in reaching for the “high life.” So what do I, a relatively young woman of color professor who grew up poor, represent to students who walk into her classes? I am not sure if they recognize any discrepancies, immediately. Many are just beginning their journey across class lines and they may see me as the end post. Will their crossings echo those that my mother and I took? Will their experiences draw them closer to their families and community? Or, will their successes require them to move further apart? It is difficult to say. Ultimately, I am never sure of what my students think of me. I suspect not that all of my fashion choices appeal to them. I know some of them have never given it any thought. Nevertheless, every semester I receive positive feedback on my choice of footwear. Perhaps this anonymous nod to my fashion sense within the walls of academia by a group of individuals who would have once been my peers means, in fact, that I am finally puro high life. Maybe my mother was right. Note This essay is dedicated to Maria de los Angeles Rojas Volio.

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CH A P T E R

T W E LV E

Irony Killed by the Ironic T-shirt and the True Religion of the American Jean A nne O ’ N e i l

Fashion, while often seen as nothing more than a competition to adorn our bodies in beautiful things, is both a form of expression of individuality and, at the same time, compounded, it is an expression of an entire culture. Person by person, fashion provides a unique form of expression, even as it becomes a subliminal barometer of the political and cultural climate of society. Most people would not deny that trends in art ref lect the intellectual trends of the times. Fashion is little different, and perhaps more immediate because each person’s decision of what to wear is newly made each day. Some people may write off fashion as a frivolous use of disposable income, but in itself, personal style is the most honest form of self-expression because it uses your corporal body and not an external medium to express yourself, and because your body is not only unique and specific to you, but also goes wherever you go with you. From The Parthenon to Piss Christ, Art historians see a direct correlation of art to the artists’ commentary on the current conditions of humanity. If we accept that each person as an individual is making an artistic choice, each day, when they get dressed, we can look at fashion trends as a barometer of a culture’s thinking. For close to a decade I worked as a trend scout in New York City. My job consisted primarily of wandering around New York City and observing what everyone was wearing. Then, depending on for what client (major brands of denim, casual clothing, online shopping, and liquor) I was doing research, I would find people within certain target

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markets whose taste stood out as exceptional. As a testament to the world we live in today, where Urban Outfitters sells a complete and unoriginal “hipster” kit and Banana Republic sells a complete and unoriginal “acceptable corporate attire” kit, sometimes standing out was as simple as not wearing a black coat. Once located, I interviewed these people in depth about their fashion inspirations, where and how they shopped, what magazines they read, the music they listened to, and what they predicted the upcoming trends would be. The job not only provided me with bounds of primary research into what individuals thought their clothes said about them, but what people thought the meaning and purpose of fashion was. I talked to everyone ranging from 14-year-old girls in prep school, to hip-hop teenagers in Harlem, to Soccer Moms with part-time jobs and to retired 65-year-old executives. Although the people were from all income levels, of different races, vastly varied in educational backgrounds and in a wide distance of ages, almost all people agreed that fashion was the one way they got to communicate who they were before they had an opportunity to say anything. It’s remarkable how similarly people express their individuality. Fashion does the same thing for all different kinds of people: it allows us to tell people who we are. The 45-year-old businessman used his sartorial skills to a different end than a 14-year-old art student, but both used their clothes to express their ambitions to the world without having to vocalize them. The businessman chose his clothes based on what would look both appropriate and successful without appearing too trendy or too garish. The teenager did the opposite: she wore things she’d either made herself or bought at a thrift store and altered to be even unique; with the intention of saying she was a singular person, not a reproduction of anything in a mall. She expressed her individuality while he expressed his achievements, but both told the world who they wanted the world to see when the world looked at them. Many people insist that clothes and fashion are meaningless, but denying the messages clothes send does not mean the messages are not there, even unintentional ones. Some men say, “I just wear what’s clean,” or “I don’t buy clothes,” or “I wear what my wife/girlfriend/ mother gets me,” but saying these things, and looking as if you’re wearing clothes your mother bought you, still says something about who you are. If you wear what your mother buys you, and don’t decide for yourself how you look, you are accepting your genetic fate and you don’t care enough about your appearance to have it ref lect yourself. Plus you are willing to still be the person your mom wants you to be.

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Saying you don’t care about what you wear is like saying you don’t have any art in your soul. Simply wearing whatever you have can express a certain amount of poverty (or distain for consumerism) and sometimes slovenliness. This is why many poor people are the most fastidious about the cleanliness of their shoes and clothes and most likely to wear the neatest looking clothes. Very rich people, who have always had money and do not need validation by advertising their personal success, are the most likely to wear very reasonably priced clothes, while the arrivistes tend to overcompensate for poverty from which they came by wearing dollar signs, sometimes literally, on their body with ostentatious displays of wealth in boldly branded clothing and gold or gemstones jewelry. As long as garments have existed, they must have been used to identify class. Even within tribal communities the most superior have the finest garments. The obvious comparison of the famous self-portraits from the Renaissance of Albrecht Durer and Parmigianino show fashion’s clear class delineation five hundred years ago. In Durer’s 1498 Self-Portrait, he paints himself as a nobleman, complete with the garb of the nobility with the cloches and the gloves worn by the upper class, instead of as a craftsman and a painter. Parmagianino’s 1424 selfportrait shows the opposite: in a convex mirror he features his naked hands in the forefront, as large as his face, because they are the tools he uses to practice his craft of painting. Durer’s promotion of himself from one class to a higher one, through donning fine clothes, is common practice today. It can be seen particularly well in hip-hop culture. Many Rap artists come from poverty, and reinforce the images of their success by wearing expensive furs and diamonds and obviously displayed brand names all to say, “This cost money.” The kids I interviewed in Harlem were no different. Most of them lived in the projects, but they only wore the finest brands. Particularly trendy at the time were authentic basketball jerseys, which ranged in price from $75 to $250, but these were acceptable only with matching Nikes and the properly coordinated baseball cap. They also wore hip-hop brands like Sean Jean, Enyce, and Bathing Ape, which sell sweatshirts for hundreds of dollars. In this way, they showed themselves to be able to afford clothing above their social status. If fashion is normally used to make yourself look as—or more—important than you are, then, the use of fashion in an overtly political manner by looking less important than you are becomes more significant. I’m sure there were incidences before the French Revolution of people intentionally choosing to dress below their class,

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but the Sans-Culottes, particularly because they are named for their sartorial choice, stand out since they catalyzed the wearing of pants— which will later become essential to women’s liberation—but without the popularity of pants, jeans could never become the new God. The Sans-Culottes claimed to be people of the lower classes, men in France in the late eighteenth century who wore pants, not the culottes that were fashionable of the day, but many of them were middle class. If they had behaved as middle classes before them, they should have been using their clothes to rise higher socially, but instead thought that men should not be delineated by their attire. In fact, their wearing of pants was meant to unify all men as equals.1 This idea of dressing down as an act of rebellion—or as solidarity with the common man—continued into the twentieth century with the idealism behind the wearing of white t-shirts and denim. Laborers wear work clothes because the garments are comfortable, durable, and useful, but artists, socialists, and idealists began to wear jeans as homage to the open idea of possibility in the American West, as idealized by the mythology of the cowboy in Western novels, Western movies, and history. Cowboys wore jeans by Levi’s and Wrangler, and so should maverick individuals. This idea of the maverick individual, dressed in a white undershirt and jeans, was indelibly burned in the American Psyche with the images of James Dean in Rebel without a Cause, Marlon Brando in Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild One, and On the Waterfront. Paring jeans with a white t-shirt created the cool uniform; it indicated simplicity and independence. I once interviewed a participant at a focus group who pretended to be appalled that he had been chosen to participate in fashion research because he was wearing a white Hanes’ t-shirt and Levi’s. “But that’s a Calvin Klein t-shirt,” I said. I was right and he was shocked that his statement to the world, “I’m plain, look at my talent not at my clothes,” had been outed: wearing the plain uniform was an act of fashion in itself. It was not until printing on t-shirts became commonplace that t-shirts became useful for a more overt form of political statements. The t-shirt had been designed as to be worn underneath respectable clothing, and wearing it alone resonated with the simple honesty of wearing jeans. But all that white space provided real estate between the shoulders, and this was a perfect place to grow political statements. Although the first printed t-shirts were probably supplied by the U.S. Navy, designating the soldier’s division, and then Champion Athletic embossed t-shirts with names of universities, these were all intended to be undergarments.2 Printed T-shirts as outer garments were first used

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for political statements, particularly Thomas Dewey’s 1948 presidential campaign “Dew It for Dewey” and Dwight Eisenhower’s “I like Ike” t-shirts for the 1952 presidential race.3 It’s not surprising then, considering that t-shirts’ first use was to advertise for universities and politicians, that today most printed t-shirts are imprinted with a brand name like Enyce, Calvin Klein, DKNY, or have a corporate logo like the Adidas three stripes, or say a corporate slogan, like “Just do it.” These t-shirts mean the person wearing them is not only expressing their individuality by showing their support of the brand name or their agreement with the slogan, but they mean that the wearer is now part of the advertising campaign. T-shirts with expressions contrary to the corporate logos became as common as those with them, and the 1960s popularity of Do It Yourself tie-dyes directly combats the walking advertising nature of most t-shirts. Exploring the exception to the rule becomes the most interesting part of the norm. The 1990s began with a def lated idea of possibility: f lower power of the 1960s had lead to nothing more than the disco excesses of the 1970s and the power suit, greed is good—a popular expression on t-shirts—1980s. The disillusioned idealists coming of age in the 1990s gave up trying to say something meaningful on a t-shirt and instead said exactly what we didn’t believe in by wearing used t-shirts with ironic images on them. My personal favorite, as an artist and someone who regularly got arrested for protesting the government, was a heather-red ringer shirt from the FBI Academy, which I found at a thrift store in 1993. The same idea was practiced by stoners in “dare to keep kids off drugs,” skinny unathletic men in t-shirts from sports teams they had never played on, and indie rockers wore concert t-shirts of artists they disliked, like Lionel Ritchie tour shirts from the 1980s. The act of wearing a t-shirt of something you were against, instead of supporting, was a small act of defiance to the corporatization, everything from the stadiums where sports were played down to your own body, and defied the masses who either didn’t notice or didn’t care that not only were they walking billboards, but they were paying to be so. It is Tom Sawyer, getting his friends to pay him to do his chores, come to life without any of the charming picaresque moments. Unfortunately, the ironic t-shirt became a trend and, therefore, it became commodifiable, and more than anything marked the death of irony as a powerful social tool. If I wear a t-shirt to be ironic, that style of t-shirt, or that exact t-shirt, is copied and mass produced by Urban Outfitters, the Gap and Target, then the t-shirt is no longer an ironic individual statement, but a buyable trend and a product that no

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longer has any individual meaning. Although few people before the past decade ever wore them as ironic, nothing is more ironic than the mass production by huge capitalist brands of t-shirts with the image of Che Guevara, the Cuban Communist revolutionary, which are now sold at endless capitalist establishments, from Nordstrom’s to Kmart. Soon “Kiss me I’m Irish” t-shirts worn by Irish-American girls are not ironic, just trendy, and a football player wearing a football t-shirt bought at Abercrombie and Fitch, instead of wearing his own football team’s shirt, doesn’t say anything political other than people will buy what they’re sold. These days, t-shirt corporations selling “ironic” t-shirts are as common as Clear Channel playing “alternative” music. If irony can be bought and sold it becomes useless for personal and political statements and sincerity has to be the new irony. When you put words on a t-shirt that has a statement, from “I like Ike,” through “Mountain Dew” or “I’m with stupid” or “slut,” you are consciously aware of what you say with your clothes because it is clearly printed. But what about all the subliminal things we say with clothes? Each of us individually decides, each day which clothes to put on so that we are dressed properly for the various tasks we have to complete that day, for how we want to feel—both physically and emotionally— and for how we want to be seen. If that’s true, and many people make similar clothing choices, what can we take as a whole from recent trends as a ref lection of culture and politics? We can look at long-term trends in history, about how upper-class clothes used to take hours to put on and needed a servant to do the dressing and how clothes have changed and most things can be put on without anyone’s help, and that there are clothes made for labor versus clothes made for leisure, and how over the centuries clothing has become more androgynous as the work of the sexes has become more similar, but these have been discussed enough by others and aren’t as interesting to me as the minutia of what seasonal trends in the past decade tell me about the emotional climate of society. I’ve already talked about this to some degree with the overt statements made on shirts, now I’m more interested in the hidden meanings in recent fashion trends. I started working as a trend scout in 2000, when the economy was booming due to growth in the technology businesses. The fashion then was lead by Prada and Alexander McQueen, and mass trends were of clothing that looked high tech and like in it, you could move fast. Fabrics were New Materials like Tef lon, nylon, spandex, and Modal. Shoes were rounded and a cross between athletic wear and loafers. Fashion mimicked the economy: new technology was to be trusted and was the

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future. The 1980s fashion, including “greed is good” was exuberantly championed after the drab years of irony and grunge. Garish contrary colors and strong patterns that reminded me of Nagel paintings were all the rage.4 All the young Fashionistas I interviewed combed thrift stores for miniskirts and shoulder-padded blouses, still owning the irony by purchasing clothes that two years before they would have called hideous. Then in 2001, when the designers had planned out their next year’s lines with bright black and red palettes, September 11 happened. New York City was attacked by terrorists and suddenly, in the face of tragedy at home, clashing colors mocked the earnestness of those horrified by both the attack and the thought of war. Irony didn’t seem so funny in the face of real destruction. Before the designers could catch up, women clothed themselves head to toe in white, natural fabrics, and pastoral like f lowing skirts as if they were trying to look like an angel. Other cultures, glorified for their perceived spirituality, were looked to for fashion inspiration, particularly Tibetan clothes, resonating of the Zen of the Dali Lama, and Mexican peasant shirts, implying a closer understanding of nurturing the Earth. Even haircuts, which had trended toward short choppy and severe a-line cuts, returned to Pre-Raphaelite locks of long wavy natural hair. The Earth mother style didn’t last long. Once the shock of the attack passed, people slipped back into unawareness and went back to buying clothes without noticing what they were saying. By the time America declared war on Iraq, the major trend in women’s fashion was for military-inspired clothing. Joie came out with a line of cargo pants made out of silk, which imitated Army pants. The pants, while sympathizing with the armed forces, mocked them, because, for sure, the wearer of those pants was not going to have to fight for anything herself; not only was the fabric too delicate to withstand crawling on the ground or any physical labor but the pants were too sheer to carry anything, certainly not weapons, in the pockets. Anyway, anyone who could afford $200 for a pair of pants wasn’t going to be drafted or have to use the GI bill to go to college. You couldn’t kick a pigeon in New York City in 2002 or 2003 without hitting a fashionista in these pants, or similar pants by Ya-Ya or the hundreds of similar copy-cats that f lew off the shelves. Meanwhile Diesel outfitted Club Kids men with Army-inspired caps and commando style camo pants. The irony of war protesters wearing Army surplus pants was lost in a wave of prowar clothes. While these trends hit the trendy boutiques, the twee mascots arrived to comfort those lost without their ironic t-shirts. If irony was dead,

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something adorable had to replace it. In 2002 it was sparrows, probably instigated by the popularity of Sailor Jerry tattoos. In 2003 unicorns were everywhere, exacerbated by the popularity of the Canadian Indie rock band The Unicorns, celebrated by Vice magazine. By 2004 as a result of the growing aviary fad, Urban Outfitters commoditized birds as a whole and associated a specific bird with each of their American stores. The bird fad could be looked at as a result of the dove being a symbol of peace or perhaps the image of freedom associated with being able to f ly away. By 2005 woodland creatures popped up everywhere, populating clothes, music and art with deer, skunks, chipmunks and birds everywhere you looked. The pack of wolves that surfaced in music—Wolf Parade, Wolf Mother, We are Wolves and Sea Wolf— could have been an attack on the proliferation of fuzzy animals in art, fashion and music—The Dears, the Unicorns, and Panda Bear—but more likely it was just a more manly woodland creature to satisfy the twee needs of the more masculine. By 2006 charming whales were on everything from DYI art posters to JCrew shoes, and Owls peaked out of designer jacket linings. But by 2007 the cute mascots were returning to technology. Adorablized robots were the new sparrows. One of the most striking incidences of cultural reaction, unconsciously hidden within fashion, is in the current craze for designer denim. Religious integrity used to provide armor from the ferocities of American life: if a religious person could not always meet their fiscal needs, or was outdone socially by their neighbor, this person could be secure in her spiritual superiority and her guarantee of a better afterlife. But, as traditional religions wane in importance to metropolitan Americans, some follow fad religions propagated by celebrities—like Tom Cruise with Scientology or Madonna with Kabala—and some follow the religion of Designer Jeans. The divide between those who are religious and those who are not is probably closely correlative to those who would not spend $200 on a pair of jeans and those who would. Sundays that used to be spent in church are now spent buying denim made by True Religion, Blue Cult, and Seven Jeans for all Mankind, and Citizens of Humanity. Possibly the church of jeans is the only spiritual outlet for someone capable and willing to pay $285 for a pair of holy jeans that will be out of style within the year, but like most who join a cult, the consciousness of doing something foolish is overpowered by the appeal of belonging to a club. Calling a garment that costs $200 a garment “For all Mankind” is particularly spiteful, if you are aware that 42 percent of the population has an average income of less than $1000 a year.5 Therefore, that one pair of jeans would be one-fifth

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of their income for the entire year on one garment. The brand name is somewhat disrespectful of who all of mankind is, unless perhaps the namer of the jeans thought that all of mankind is involved with these jeans in a trickle down way that includes consideration that some of the poorest people in the world work in sweatshops where the jeans are made, and some of the middle class people in the world are laborers who grow cotton and dyes used in producing the fabrics, or transport and handle the jeans and deliver them then to the elite population of the world who have disposable income to purchase the pants, and thus cover the breadth of all mankind. But mostly “for all Mankind” was a ref lection of the low-cut, snug fit of these jeans on women’s derrieres, thus providing enjoyment for all the men of mankind. The mania of American Fashionistas for designer denim can be traced back to the 1960s, when Levi’s and Lee began to make tailored jeans to specially fit and f latter women.6 The original ethos of jeans, as I mentioned earlier, was connected with the American spirit and the idea of individualism through Westerns and James Dean. The first designer jean revolution, lead by Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt toward the end of the 1970s, politically changed denim to mean the opposite of what it had meant before. Until then, jeans had been inexpensive and utilitarian; they were made by unions for the people to work. With the introduction of designer jeans, Calvin Klein’s in 1977 for $35 a piece,7 denim was no longer just the fabric of the people. Designer jeans priced themselves, like all high fashion, out of the range of the masses. When the first designer jean fad ebbed in the late 1980s with the decline of Guess jeans, it was replaced by an obsession for vintage denim in the early 1990s. Again, the origin of the infatuation in vintage denim, primary in collectors item Big E and Red Lines, but also with Wranglers, Lee, Landlubber and Smith’s, was rooted in thrift store culture and a nostalgia for both the innocence of the past, unsullied by brand name prices, and a quest for the original quality level of a pant made to withstand work and not just uphold the behind. Like many trends that began with intention, the quest for the integrity of vintage jeans was soon overtaken with the commoditization of them. A pair of Levi’s that was once worn to work, became valued for it’s esoteric elite fashion meaning. What would have been just another pair of dungarees to my father, in the 1990s, I searched for as a coveted pair of a 1950s Big Es, unique for not only the cut, the color of the fabric, the big E instead of little e on the label, the red line salvage cut seams, but for its rarity and, therefore, its price. A pair of Big Es sold at Aardvark’s Odd Ark on Melrose Blvd for $1000. Rumors said that they sold to the Japanese

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for even more than that. Levi’s jeans, which had used to be common in thrift stores, began to disappear, purchased by vintage buyers before they reached Salvation Army and St. Vincent De Paul f loors, and even when you found them there, their prices jumped, for even the usually unfashionable people running charity thrift stores saw the market for these previously owned work pants as a commodity. It was this craze that began the current passion for designer denim. In 1998 I bought my first pair of Earl Jeans. They were like the Levi’s and Wranglers I had altered myself, but had been done more professionally and provided a more attractive fit on a woman. Finally, someone was selling men’s jeans for women, so what if they cost $125? At least I didn’t have to do the work myself. The next few years saw waistbands going lower and lower and the prices going higher and higher. The first brands to the market kept the traditional ethos of denim, the rugged independence of cowboys, and used manly monikers like Earl and Joe’s, but as the trends exploded, and the market was viable for anyone with indigo and a good pocket logo, so denim brands proliferated the meaning of denim changed. Brands like Levi’s, Lee, and Earl no longer mattered, now jeans were mythologized themselves and didn’t need a cowboy to have their back. The new jeans brands expressed a spiritual ethos: Seven Jeans for All Mankind, Citizens of Humanity, True Region, Blue Cult, Earnest Sewn, People’s Liberation, and Rock and Republic. As if somehow spirituality was fulfilled in a good fit, a cool logo on a pocket and that somehow these dungarees, like the Tibetan shirts of 2002, brought the wearer to someplace more honest and meaningful. Clothing is one of the few unifying art forms. Each person is born with one body, which each day they get their own canvas into an art piece. As an individual you can express a mood, an ambition, a political statement, or even an act of love. In your daily life how you use that canvas is important only in relation to how those around you perceive you and understand you. But as a society, what you say as an individual, when combined with what all the other individuals around you are saying, says something about the cultural and political trends in the world. With all the options of attire, fashion is made not really by those doing something unique, but by the trends of people doing the same thing. Commando pants in a time of war say “go kill” and t-shirts that say “Slut” say “don’t respect me,” so looking for spiritually in jeans just seems to be taking the emptiness of today’s American society. With no intellectual icons and no spiritual guidance, perhaps the best thing we have to look forward to in America is a perfect fit.

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Notes 1. Robert Schwartz, “Fact and Fiction of the Sans Culottes Movement,” http://www. mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255/la/sans-culottes.html” 2. Mark Dixon, A T-Shirt History: From Underwear to Outerwear, http://www.markedixon.com/ new_page_10.htm 3. Virginia Linn, “History of the T-shirt,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh, February 13, 2007. 4. Style.com, “Ready to Wear,” Fall 2001, http://www.style.com/fashionshows/powersearch/ results?&ca=search&site=style&event=show362&showCode=show362 5. “Two-Year-Average Median Household Income by State: 2003–2005.” U.S. Census Bureau. Page Last Modified: August 29, 2006. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/ income05/statemhi2.html (last accessed May 14, 2007). 6. James Sullivan, Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Gotham Books, 2006), 160. 7. Ibid., 159.

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CH A P T E R

T H I RT E E N

Jackie O., Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Chanel Elle n Fri dland and A ndrew Porte r

Introduction Fashion suffers from a bad reputation. Despite the fact that a culture’s norms and values are often revealed through its popular, occupational, recreational and religious dress, fashion is considered a petty distraction. One only need glance at modern public and academic culture to observe two boilerplate criticisms of fashion; while one objection deems fashion superficial, the other pronounces it wasteful. The first critic, the ascetic, claims that fashion unduly focuses attention on what is ultimately unimportant, namely, physical appearance. This position locates its origins in an ancient metaphysics that discounts the physical for the spiritual.1 The proper object of human attention, it is claimed, is what lies beyond the surface: the inner life or the life of the intellect. Whereas the ascetic critic judges fashion as trivial, the second critic, the egalitarian, condemns fashion as economically and socially irresponsible.2 According to her, fashion amounts to a squandering of resources. The egalitarian suggests that fashionable individuals ought to focus their attention and resources on improving social welfare rather than on improving their shoe collections.3 Considering the pertinacity of these two criticisms, fashion’s survival seems perplexing: if fashion is so detestable, then why does it survive so persistently and ubiquitously? If fashion is worthless, then

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why does it attract the attention of so many? These questions point to a tension between the propensity to expend mental and financial resources on appearance and the simultaneous proclivity to denounce its importance. Is fashion just aesthetic junk food? Is the tension resolvable only by cutting it out of our diet? Well, the tension reaches into the life of almost every member of a modern society. We are all told, in a pretty deep-seated way, that we must look good and also, that to spend time and money on looking good is a waste. We obey both imperatives: we all want to be attractive and we all want to be authentic. Fashion commands the attention (to a greater or lesser extent) of each and every person about to leave his home to enter a public space.4 The fact remains that it is much easier to stand before other people than it is to stand before a mirror and claim that appearance is unimportant.5 And still, the above criticisms have seeped so deeply into our culture that even unabashedly fashion-driven publications and TV programs self-censor. They reiterate clichés such as “what’s important is what’s on the inside” and “outer beauty is a ref lection of inner beauty,” thus creating not only tension, but also hypocrisy. This attempt to downplay fashion’s importance through both calculated and involuntary deception is evident through public, academic, and religious denouncements. So, what is one to do? In this essay, we resolve this tension by investigating an activity that is shrouded within fashion. Immune to charges of superficiality and excess, this activity is the genuine locus of fashion’s value; this activity, we claim, is personal style. This is fashion, the organic version—it’s good for everyone. In this essay, we demarcate the nature and significance of personal style as an intentionally ref lexive, visually aesthetic and creative activity. Having these features, we claim, makes style remarkably similar to art. By locating style as the locus of value within what has traditionally been understood as fashion, our project defeats the critics through a series of reductio arguments. Section 1: Defining Style (i.e., style seems curiously similar to art) 1.1

Style: Intentional and Reflexive

We begin investigating the phenomenon of style by turning to Jerry Fodor’s “Déjà vu All Over Again: How Danto’s Aesthetics Recapitulates

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Philosophy of Mind.” In this article, Fodor recruits H.P. Grice’s theory of meaning for use in explaining aesthetic discernment and engagement.6 Fodor argues that Gricean ref lexivity is a necessary condition not only for communication, but for art as well. That is, if an art object is to be properly so-called, it must satisfy the conditions of Gricean ref lexivity. Gricean ref lexivity stipulates that the speaker’s awareness of the audience as understanding him as intending to communicate to them is central to successful communication. Grice points out that, in communication, a speaker S utters a proposition p to an audience R, expecting that R come to believe p because R is aware of S as speaking p with the intention of getting R to come to believe p. In communication this is obvious: when I speak to you, I expect that you will come to believe certain things that I say because you interpret my speech as intended for your interpretation.7 In the realm of aesthetic presentation, colloquially, we might put the Gricean condition as follows: “look at me looking at you looking at me.” Fodor argues that for an object to reach the ontological status of “art object,” the artist must create that object with the intention for it to be presented, acknowledging that the audience will view it as intended to be viewed. Although such intentional ref lexivity is not a sufficient condition for art categorization, it is, quite plausibly, a necessary one. So, if we can show that style satisfies the conditions set forth in, from here on, “Fodricean ref lexivity,” then we will have, at the very least, brought style into closer proximity to the realm of art. So, naturally, the first question to ask is: does the styler intentionally present himself to others, expecting that others will recognize him as presenting himself to them? And second, does the audience usually interpret stylers as intending this sort of presentation?8 If we can answer these questions in the affirmative, then it will be clear that styling is, at the very least, communicative,9 and maybe, if it possesses additional features that we discuss below, a unique genre of art. We propose to answer each of the above questions with fairly anecdotal evidence, but we hope that such evidence will sufficiently support our claims. First then, we turn to the styler’s intentions. In order for an individual to meet the conditions of Fodricean ref lexivity, that individual must be aware that she is presenting herself to the public and that the public will react to her as though she is presenting herself to them. Unsurprisingly, this feature of intentional ref lexivity is rather intuitively part of our ordinary judgments about stylish persons.

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Ironically, it is the antistyler or the punk who provides us with the clearest example of this type of intentional ref lexivity. The rebel, whom, while wearing spiked bracelets and dawning a Mohawk, claims to “not care what other’s think” is acutely aware that others will think something. The rebel anticipates attention and denunciation; she knows that people will view her and judge her. She expects that people will understand, through her nontraditional presentation, that she is expressing the fact that she does not care. The antistyler is perfectly inside the style game because it is exactly to say “f*#!*-you” that she wears what she does. If she really didn’t care, she wouldn’t be so concerned to let others know that she didn’t care. This type of not caring is not only a statement but also a scream and, as such, it falls squarely into the satisfaction of Fodricean ref lexivity. This serves as a good example because it is extreme, it magnifies what ordinarily happens in fashion and style: dressing involves intending to present oneself to the world, knowing that the world will be looking and interpreting. Let us now turn to the second question: “Do audiences interpret persons, when they fashion, as presenting something for the audience to interpret?” For many political reasons, most of us will be hesitant to fully endorse the truth of this claim. After all, we’ve all been told a hundred times over never to judge a book by its cover. But often, making judgments of this sort just means being sensitive to the various mediums by which persons communicate. Here we use another extreme example in the hopes that more ordinary cases possess a similar character, but just to a lesser degree. Most persons living in contemporary America will be familiar with the alleged-rape-defense, “she was asking for it.” “She was asking for it” is usually followed by a description of a shockingly short skirt or revealing blouse. We have been taught that such defenses are bogus; and they are. Useful to support our case, however, is what this defense betrays. The “she was asking for it” defense presents us with a clear expression of the fact that we often interpret others as telling us something through their dress. “She was asking for it,” so naively and disturbingly uttered, indicates that it would defy commonsense not to take persons as presenting something for others to interpret by the way they dress.10 And if, by chance, you didn’t know that you told people stuff about yourself through your choice of apparel, fashion magazines will often take the opportunity to remind you: “wear a bright broach, it says “I’m fun.” Style, we have argued, satisfies Fodricean ref lexivity. But there is still much work to do. On Fodricean terms alone, both fashion and

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style qualify as equally communicative. For this reason, we now turn to the distinguishing characteristics of style. We hope to convince the reader that style and fashion are distinct and also that style is, if not art, something very much like it. 1.2

Style: Medium and Content

Now that the similarity between style and ordinary communication has been established, we would like to investigate the differences. We intend to do this by attending to two distinct features of style, the first obvious and the second, less so. First, then, while ordinary communication occurs through speech or writing, via a verbal medium, style communicates visually. That is, like painting, photography, sculpture, picture books, and traffic signs, style does not speak in words, but rather expresses itself through images. Second, not only the medium of style but also the content is visual. Style’s goal is not just to express a thought or a command through an image, like a stop sign would, but rather to communicate a visual sensitivity to the elements of beauty and composition; to express a visual aesthetic. The first point then, that style is visual and not verbal, should be obvious. Unless we count t-shirts with messages like, “I’m with stupid” or “I like to party,” as paradigmatically stylish, this point should be beyond contention. Style does its visual presentation through dress, shoes, hairstyle, accessories, jewelry, and body markings—through personal garb and decoration. Couched in this banal observation, however, is a more subtle claim: a visual image is not merely or necessarily a verbal proposition translated into pictures. That is, visually presented content is not necessarily conceptual or linguistic in nature (much to the disappointment of philosophers everywhere). A similar claim has been widely discussed in the attempts to construct the necessary and sufficient conditions for an art object. It seems to follow that, if all visual art were simply a translation of verbal thoughts into images, then conceptual art would be the paradigm example of visual art.11 However, not only has the centrality of conceptual art been challenged, but some have gone so far as to ban conceptual pieces from the realm of art, altogether. Simply put, it seems that the visual arts are not just “sending a message.” They are doing something different; their content is not conceptual but visual. And this seems right, for it seems quite reasonable to suppose that distinct mediums express distinct contents. We should no more expect that a linguistic statement is expressed through a visual

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art object than we should expect that a sensitivity to color schematics is expressed through this essay. This basic point then should apply to our discussion of style; style communicates but what it communicates is neither essentially words, nor necessarily through words.12 Style not only expresses through a visual medium, but what it expresses is visual as well. “But what is it that gets expressed visually?” one may reasonably ask, expecting a reply to be offered in nothing more than words. The problem is that since the content of a visual medium is not necessarily linguistic, it becomes very difficult to express linguistically.13 How can one answer the question: “what is expressed through painting?” besides replying, “which painting do you mean?” or hesitantly providing a cumbersome and incomplete list of intentional contents?14 We propose the alternative is to simply say the following: all visual or graphic arts share in the activities of choice, discrimination, attention and calculation applied to color, proportion, texture, hue, composition, and the like. That is, to reply by saying that what gets expressed in the visual arts is a visual-aesthetic sensibility. The styler, when he dresses, is clearly involved in this type of attention and discrimination. What makes an ensemble “work,” is the various qualities of the articles chosen along with their relationships to one another. Style then is an aesthetic process expressing a visual content though personal presentation. Like the arts, style is concerned not simply with content, but with the presentation of content. 1.3

Style, Imagination, and Creativity

A third constitutive element of style is creativity. This is a vital characteristic of style and ultimately, the one that distinguishes style from fashion. After all, it seems that fashion is just as intentionally ref lexive as style, maybe even more so. And in terms of aesthetic, visual attention, these two practices are arguably on a par. Where style and fashion differ is in individual creativity; that is, the direction of expression. What this means should become obvious in the following section. The basic claim is this: while the individual styler is engaged in a process of imagination and creativity, the individual fashioner is engaged in the activity of mimesis or copying.15 Creativity involves agency, engagement, and attention of a kind that copying lacks. Think of the difference between tracing paper and character development. Although copying may involve technical skill, it does not contribute to the pool of human and existential meaning. Reproduction may add

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to the quantity of beautiful things in the world, but ultimately, it will never produce an understanding of what it means to be a beautiful thing, or of what it means to live in a world where there is both beauty and misery. Copying adds nothing new to this most fundamental of human goals: meaning. The distinction between style and fashion as the distinction between creating and copying should resonate on a fairly intuitive level. After all, when we speak of fashions, we speak of many persons participating in them. We cannot call a thing fashionable unless it is popular; that is, unless lots of people do it. How odd it would be to say, “oh, that’s really in fashion this season” and then to add “but I haven’t seen anyone wearing it.” One would be justified in responding to this claim with confusion; we should suspect that the speaker is not familiar with the meaning of the word “fashion.” Importantly, it is not by shear chance that all in the crowds display the same look. There is no accident, no miraculous coincidence when all the girls in town are wearing their jeans tucked into their boots. They all exhibit the same fashion because they are all duplicating the same central models. They are all looking at the fashion magazines and TV shows and at each other and trying to get closer and closer to what they see. They see it, like it, and then do it themselves. They copy. It’s that simple. As opposed to fashion, the styler exerts a unique aesthetic sensibility; a look of one’s own. This is not, of course, to say that this sensibility is unrelated to the fashion world. If it were, there would be no reason to confuse the two for so long. Like fashion, style will be fixed and rooted in a particular time and culture of dress and decor. No one would expect that the requirement for being stylish is being ahistorical. However, the stylish individual does not want to wear what everyone else is wearing in the way everyone else is wearing it. The styler will, more often than not, stop displaying a look when too many people partake in it. The styler moves outward, expanding the porousness of a people and of a culture while the fashionista makes these boundaries collapse onto themselves. Whereas the fashionable person presents the trend of the moment, the stylish person creates it. The styler works the vector and momentum of an era’s garb while the fashionable follow suit. We can justifiably assert that style is what makes fashion tick. Style rescues fashion from redundancy. The difference between fashion and style can be understood through this comparison: whereas in pursuing the goal of fashion, one must

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move toward the center,16 making it ever more difficult to allow for variation and innovation, with style, the opposite is the case. Although there is a center, the outward movement of aesthetic sensibilities is toward the perimeters of what has become accepted and unchallenging. Style pushes the limits outward; it works the boundaries of time and location; of era and culture.17 1.4

Style is art or . . .

We conclude this section by reinstating that style is, if not art, something very much like it. That is, we do not claim to have discovered the necessary and sufficient conditions for art and then proven that style meets them. Instead, we have pointed to some central features of art and shown that style exhibits these features. So, the argument goes something like the following: if X meets the conditions of Fodricean ref lexivity and aesthetic expression and creativity, then X is something very much like art. We hope to have shown that style does indeed satisfy these conditions. What we have not done, nor do we seek to do, is enumerate and justify these conditions as the defining characteristics of art. Nor have we claimed that anything that satisfies these conditions is necessarily art. We have stuck to this weaker claim: style is something very much like art in virtue of sharing many features with it. We show in the next section that this commonality should make style subject to similar normative considerations. 2. The Significance and Location of Style 2.1

The Novel Trend in a Public Sphere

The first and most obvious characteristic that separates style from traditionally recognized art forms, such as painting and sculpture, is its presentational features; style is exhibited in personal dress, decoration, and adornment. The implications of this distinction should be fully appreciated: because of having this essentially “in-the-world” quality, style takes on a unique role in the aesthetic game. Style and fashion (fashion, as argued above, being the practice driven by style) live in the public sphere of social participation and expression. The aesthetic sensibility expressed in style is essentially historical, political, and social in attitude and orientation. This does not entail that such attitudes are articulated ideologies or political theories, but it does

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entail that they are necessarily connected to popular culture in virtue of the radically situated and public domain that style gets expressed. Style is not a disconnected universal aesthetic. Style is embedded and embodied; it draws on geographical, cultural, religious, economic, and class conditions. As such, style is a powerful expression of popular attitudes, transitions, and transformations. Just think of the difference between the miniskirt and the hijab. Moreover, in being an activity of imagination and creativity, the styler participates in driving these social practices and attitudes; the styler is not just along for the ride. He is sensitive to popular culture, music, movies, the new generation and its clash with the old, with the folk, the ignorant, the superstitious, the immoral, and the unjust. The stylist must be sensitive to the public dialogue in order to inf luence change and introduce reform. Because the stylist works the perimeters, it is likely that fringe groups and movements are brought into a legitimate public space. Note the rise of Japanese, Indian, Hip-Hop, and Punk designs in modern dress. This sort of familiarization leads to, if nothing more, the recognition that these groups exist. But it can do much more than this. It can also lead to a deepening interest into the history, culture, suffering, and thought of an otherwise unfamiliar people. 2.2

Significant: Yes; Art: No.

We hope that these soliloquies will be read as more than sentiment. We hope that the underlying value of the style practice will be appreciated. However, we anticipate that the reader may be willing to permit the import of style as a social practice while vetoing its invitation into the art world. We would like only to raise the possibility that such an inclination toward rejection may be the result of an overly institutionalized theory of art. Following the Dewian line,18 we would expect that there will be a resistance to judging style to be an artistic process due to the entrenched idea that art and life differ in location.19 Through the institutionalization of art we have come to think that the only things that can be properly called art object are the things displayed outside of life and in the lofty spaces of museums and galleries. However, it is because the process of styling is essentially in the middle of our world that it should be embraced as a unique opportunity to bring an aesthetic, expressive, and intentionally ref lexive activity into our otherwise, all-toopractical routine. It is a way to not only appreciate art, but also to, very

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literally, live artfully. It would not only be chauvinistic but also miserly and prudish to exclude style from the art world on these grounds. 3. Rescuing Style from the Critics 3.1

The Intellectual Criticism: Style Is Superficial

Without denying the Platonic distinction between the imperfect realm of particulars and the eternal perfection of reason, we can answer the ascetic critic. As we have argued, style is in the world, but can only be in the world through the application of reason and intellect. The criteria of style—aesthetic expression, intentional ref lexivity, and creativity—stem from inherently mental and intellectual capacities. So, style cannot be superficial or frivolous; it may find its expression in the physical world, but the practice is very much driven by attention and higher-order cognitive processes. The intelligence at work in aesthetic presentation is not often thought of as intelligence, per se. It may seem that this type of intelligence is intelligence only in the derivative sense of the word. But to believe this would be a mistake. It would be the prejudice of an overly linguistic person to believe that all nonlinguistic expressions, no matter how sophisticated or calculated, are always just second-rate versions of a meaningful proposition. This is simply not true. One should feel very hesitant to, by applying such standards more widely, declare that the works of Picasso, Monet, Degas, and Dali involve less intellectual sophistication than the works of Warhol. Upon ref lection, it should become ever so clear that to manipulate, discriminate, and attend to proportion, ratio, color, historical nuance, and the social psyche requires a high degree of cognitive engagement. As such, the ascetic critic cannot call style superficial or dumb. This activity, although centrally located in the world, is highly cognitive, intelligent, attentive and creative, and as such, a participant in the lofty and respectable world of reason. 3.2

The Egalitarian Criticism: Fashion is Wasteful

The egalitarian who claims that fashion is wasteful cannot declare, with one sweeping motion, that style is wasteful too. By distinguishing fashion from style, it becomes possible to recognize style as an activity living in very close proximity to art. As such, the activity of style possesses cultural, social, and personal value. However, if a critic was

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determined to prove that style is wasteful, then she could proceed in one of two ways: (1) she could attempt to prove that style is not related to art in the relevant way; and (2) she could argue that art is wasteful. We hope that this essay has adequately safeguarded against the first option and, as for the second option, well, it seems simply brutish to claim that art is wasteful. After all, it is widely recognized that the particular value of a human life exists in the distinct activities and capacities of a human being: self-consciousness, language, morality, and art. No other species creates objects that have no immediate or practical use. This should not lead us to say that humans should only create what has function, but instead, lead us to consider what this uniquely human expression is. We should value the meaning and significance-creation that we are capable of, and this means valuing art and ultimately style, too. 4.

Metaphysics, Not Epistemology; Failed Art and the Twins Problem

Just in case it wasn’t clear, the above discussion of style was concerned only with the metaphysics of style and not the epistemology of it.20 Although in aesthetics, most discussions concerning “expression” are concerned with the appropriateness and accuracy of applying mental predicates to art objects, this was not our objective here. Instead, we were looking to present the necessary and sufficient conditions governing the activity of style. We were not engaged in the attempt to determine which final products exhibit such characteristics. In particular, our investigation into the nature of style was concerned with demarcating which conscious, mental phenomena constitute the activity of styling; that is, we were concerned with ascertaining the “intentional etiology”21 of personal style in order to determine how it is distinct from other activities that individuals may participate in. The intentional background is absolutely essential for differentiating between style and fashion and between style, bad style, and no style. In the absence of an intentional background, “the twins problem”22 in aesthetics would become our problem with style. But it does not. Much ink has been spilt in the attempt to locate the substantial difference between Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and the cartons of Brillo displayed on supermarket shelves. After all, their presentational features are indistinguishable. It cannot be the color or the composition that makes one art and the other a household cleaner. Intuitively, it seems that the

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intentional processes involved in the creation of one but not the other are the natural contenders for distinguishing the two.23 Likewise is the case for style. A monkey with enough time in a walk-in closet may come out looking sharp, as sharp as James Brown. But since the monkey (unless it was a very sharp monkey, indeed) cannot satisfy the conditions of style due to her innate limitation for sophisticated intentional processing, the monkey, no matter how well dressed, will never be stylish. This monkey in silk clothes is, alas, only a monkey. 24 We hope that this example makes it clear that the intentional etiology of style is a legitimate area of inquiry and criteria demarcation. But the twins problem is not the only issue that makes it legitimate to look at the intentional etiology of an individual in order to determine whether or not the agent meets the conditions for style. Failed style, or bad style, also justifies the orientation of this endeavor. If we were only to look at the final products of style without considering the intentional processes involved in creating these final products, we would be left having to say that anything that did not qualify, under common consensus, as style, would not be style. Our categories would end up stylish or not stylish. We would find it impossible to differentiate between bad style and no style. But surely, just as how bad art is still art, we should want to be able to distinguish between something that is styled badly and something that is not styled at all. Not all attempts at style will succeed, but this does not seem like a good reason to negate the reasonable distinction in intentional processes between one who is trying to style and just lacking the proper skills to do so and one who is not even participating in the style game. Importantly, that an intentional story is central to this inquiry helps us to define style as an activity of an agent and not as an avolitional phenomenon. By focusing on the intentional process,25 but distinguishing it from the resultant product of the process, we are able to speak of the agent’s mental orientation without committing the intentional fallacy. While the intentional fallacy26 asserts that it is necessary to investigate the psychological orientation of the artist in order to accurately interpret an art work, we say that it is essential to ascertain the intentional characteristics of the style process in order to identify the nature of the activity. Not only should it seem straightforward to speak of an activity that is largely intentional in intentional terms, but it should also be obvious that this commitment to intentionality does not force us to state anything about the proper method for interpreting a style object. It should be clear that what an agent attempts to express through a medium and what sorts of statements are true of the medium and its

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creation are distinct questions. The concern for us is to describe the activity of an agent who exhibits personal style. 5. Conclusion We hope that this discussion of style has elucidated that part of fashion, which we take to be a vital expression of social and personal creativity. We hope that we have encouraged those of you who were partial to the ascetic or egalitarian criticism to ref lect on the justifications of your position. We also hope that in some small way, this discussion may make philosophy departments more beautiful and interesting places to be. We hope that tomorrow you will try something new. We hope that you will consider living stylishly. Notes 1. See Plato, The Republic (in Plato: Complete Work, ed . John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), especially Book 4, for the classic example of disparaging earthly particulars. 2. See Peter Singer, Practical Ethics: Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Chapter Eight. 3. Ever felt a slight pang of guilt when walking by a panhandler while carrying shopping bags filled with a recent purchase? 4. If you consider yourself an exception, we propose that you conduct the following test: leave your house or apartment in the morning wearing no clothing. You may cover yourself, but not with conventional garb. An opaque shower curtain, tablecloth, or cardboard box will do. If you return home in the evening upon completing a full day’s normal activities and find that you have not experienced any indication whatsoever that your behavior was abnormal, then we concede to your objection and retract the claim. However, if there occurs one instance of recognition that you are deviating from social norms—this recognition may be external (including, but not limited to, persons pointing at you while laughing or your decision to take back-alleys in order to reach your destinations) or internal (i.e., feelings of utter embarrassment and/or humiliation)—then you must accept our claim. 5. Admittedly, fashion and appearance are not the same things. However, for the purposes of brevity, we find synonymy not only permissible but also necessary. 6. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 7. Notice the difference between a speaker uttering a command and singing a song. 8. It may seem that it is not necessary to ascertain whether or not the audience actually interprets the styler as styling, but only that the styler believes that the audience will interpret him as such. However, it does seem that if this sort of phenomenon occurs, as we claim it does, then the audience should be expected to respond appropriately and frequently in order to sustain the stylers believing that the audience is interpreting him as such. 9. At the very least style will be communicative because, although “Fodricean ref lexivity” is only a necessary condition for art, it is a sufficient condition for communication. 10. With the rejection of the legitimacy of such a defense, it would be a mistake to also reject the claim that persons often communicate through appearance. What is problematic about this defense is twofold: (1) it assumes that the audience is infallible in interpreting what is

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being communicated and (2) it improperly relegates other forms of communication (e.g., speaking the word “NO”) to an insignificant role. Jerry Fodor, “De ja vu All Over Again,” in The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1995). Fodor argues that because conceptual art does not require “presence” in order to convey its message, it is not only not a paradigm instance of art, but actually an instance of failed art. This is not to say, however, that no stylish individual will be communicating essentially linguistic thoughts or concepts. The antistyler of our last section can easily be translated as saying: “I don’t care about your norms,” but this should not lead us to think that every instance of style communicates in this way. Likewise, we wouldn’t want to say that because Warhol’s are art objects and Warhol’s clearly “say” something, then any art object that does not similarly “say” something, is not really art. Anyone who has had the delight and challenge of describing a visual piece of art knows this to be true. If you haven’t had this opportunity, try it! Please note that the question, “what gets expressed in literature?” is quite difficult to answer as well, despite the linguistic medium and content. The authors are well aware of the fact that, in Ancient Greece, mimesis was the goal, or distinguishing feature, of art. However, we take it that this ancient sensibility is not only naive but obsolete. Too much of what we consider to be art is simply not mimesis and even more importantly, instances of mimesis seem to be lacking an essential feature of art. Mimesis has become something art-like, but not really art in the full-blown modern sense. See Aristotle, Poetics (1447a20–30) (Aristotle. Poetics in J. Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle: Volume 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) and Plato, Republic (392d–397b) for classic texts on mimesis. Though we use “center” here in the singular, this by no means indicates that we are committed to the idea of a singular, unified center of global fashion (despite what us New Yorkers think). The idea of mimicry of a central model does not imply that there is only one model being imitated across classes, communities, and cultures. This should make it doubly clear that style is not concerned with brand names while to be fashionable often requires them. So, wearing Chanel is not required for style, although, of course, it is not ruled out by it either. See John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree Books, 1934). “Many a person who protests against the museum conception of art, still shares the fallacy from which the conception springs. For the popular notion comes from a separation of art from the objects and scenes of ordinary experience that many theorists and critics pride themselves upon holding and even elaborating. The times when select and distinguished objects are closely connected with the usual vocations are the times when appreciation of the former is most rife and most keen. When, because of their remoteness, the objects acknowledged by the cultivated to be works of fine art seem anemic to the mass of people, esthetic hunger is likely to seek the cheap and vulgar. The factors that have glorified fine art by setting it upon a far-off pedestal did not artist within the realm of art nor is their inf luence confined to the arts” (ibid., 4). That is, our discussion was looking at the truth conditions and not the verification conditions of style. For a detailed account of verification conditions, see A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover, 1952). This term is coined in Fodor, “Déjà vu All Over Again: How Danto’s Aesthetics Recapitulates Philosophy of Mind,” in Neill and Ridley, The Philosophy of Art. See George Dickie, “The New Institutional Theory of Art,” in Neill and Ridley, The Philosophy of Art, for detailed discussions of this problem. The institutional theorist of art would disagree, but it seems unlikely that even the institution could walk into a supermarket and baptize the Brillo shelf “Art!” For a detailed

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discussion of the institutional theory of art, see George Dickie, Art and Value (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001). 24. Puerto Rican proverb. 25. Though the private, elusive character of the mental makes it unfashionable to appeal to intentional states when trying to develop an aesthetic theory, we assure you that it is not our intention to look inwards in order to avoid clarity. In fact, it is our belief that even if one is a staunch physicalist, when analyzing the creative process, mentalistic terminology is all but unavoidable. We take mental states such as beliefs, thoughts and desires to be real. To see how real they are, we may, if necessary, think of mental goings on or subjective happenings from a Jamesian perspective: “a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of ‘consciousness’; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known” (See William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism [New York: Dover, 2003], especially, 5–13). In this way we are maximally free to redescribe the ultimate nature of mental states as necessary while remaining committed to their reality. So, regardless of one’s final ontology, it will be the case that something corresponding to these descriptions occurs and because it occurs it has effects; at the very least, mental states or intentional processes are very often the causes of action and behavior and also, very often consciously experienced without necessarily having any publicly verifiable effect. If one speaks of the creation of art objects and the activity of the artist in exclusively behavioristic terms, then one will be stuck, in perpetuity, not only with twins problems, but without recourse to reference to that which makes the human activity of creating aesthetic objects and experiences valuable, unique and meaningful. 26. See W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in Neill and Ridley, The Philosophy of Art for a detailed discussion.

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CH A P T E R

FOU RT E E N

The Hat’s the Thing Johanna Wagne r

We wear our lids around and we look good. You see our status. We can put it all together. Our hats make our outfits, they match our shoes and it’s a new phat look every day. Our hats are sharp, f lat brimmed, perfectly fine, and worn with style. These caps don’t show allegiance. How I wear the cap is more important than what the cap says. Tomorrow I will wear another, and look twice as good, because I can. The hat doesn’t make me, I make the hat. My hat shows you who I am and what team I love. I won’t go anywhere without it, at least not without a fight. My hat is dirty. My hat has been under my truck, and in my field, on fishing trips and to church. It’s been to the corner store, and out for a walk with the dog. When my son was born, he got one too. My team hasn’t been good for a while, but I love them. I remember them as a kid, and I will watch them when I am too old to see the TV. When they have a good year, I stand taller and walk prouder. When they have a bad one, I stand with them, because that’s who I am, and where I come from. This hat is who I am. *

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How can a cap mean everything and nothing at the same time? Is it race or class? Or just where we come from and what we are taught. These hats fill us with pride, whether we give allegiance to something else or just ourselves. It’s just a hat, right? Wrong. This hat means everything.

CH A P T E R

F I F T E E N

’Pod Peeps: Why the iPod and Other Gadgets Are Fashion Staples in the ’Hood Lynne d Joh n s on

It is 2010, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., announced the launch of the iPad, a tablet PC, set to revolutionize personal computing and make e-book reading more a norm than simply niche activity. The product’s name, a reference to women’s feminine hygiene product notwithstanding, if I had to predict how well it would sell in the inner cities of America, I’d predict that it’s market share would overindex in areas often referred to as the ’hood, particularly with African Americans and Latinos/Hispanics. Of course, I can’t know this for sure, but I can look to history to firm up these predictions a little more solidly. Currently, African Americans and Hispanics/Latinos are the highest users of the mobile Internet, most often accessed via smartphone. The Apple iPhone, along with the Blackberry, practically owns the mobile computing market at this point. And, the 18–34 market overall, are the highest users of both the iTouch and the iPhone. Visit any urban center and you’ll even see 13- and 14-year olds walking around with these devices. But as much as Apple’s success in the ‘hood is all about expanding technology, it’s also about style. Apple’s attention to form factor, and ease of use, has given the company a lead in style adoption amongst inner city youth like no other product before it, except perhaps the Sony Walkman. If I walk over to my local bodega (the corner deli) at the counter, inside the glass, there are colorful MP3 players, presumably iPod

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knockoffs that I’m told sell really well around these parts. It’s no surprise. The array of colors reminds me of the skinny jeans and Nike sneakers I see on the youth in my neighborhood every day. On to Flashback 2007. In My ’Hood For the past three years, I’ve been living in a neighborhood that is undergoing major transition. The neighborhood is at the center of some of Brooklyn, New York’s most aggressive urban renewal development. One block over, condominiums are going up like wildf lowers and upscale restaurants, cafés and bars are moving in. The block over, on the other side, has experienced only minimal residential changes, but the restaurants are becoming exceedingly ethnic. There’s no longer just a Chinese takeout, but there’s an Indian restaurant and a Sushi Bar as well. But as much as the neighborhood’s makeup has changed, so many things about it remain the same. On the block where the new Indian restaurant, Sushi Bar, and even a new upscale Café, are located a street pharmacist could be heard saying, “the block is hot,” as in the police are in the vicinity. There have been shootings with police stationed on the block for 24 hours. There’s drug dealing. There’s violence. And I’ve even heard a white neighbor say she was stuck up. For as much as the neighborhood is in f lux, the reminders of what it used to be hang in the balance like still air. It ain’t all bad though. Although an ever-increasing racial diversity is adding to the neighborhood’s composition, a core group of workingclass and lower-class African American and Latino folk hold onto their blocks, trying to keep things safe and positive for their children. These are the children of hip-hop—born in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These are the youth that I ride on the subway with every day. And as I watch them, I realize that something is both extremely unique and familiar about them at the same time. Black Youth Style Riding on the train to work each day, I know I’m going to be treated to a fashion show. Thirty years ago baggy pants, oversized hoodies, and expensive sneakers became the fashion du jour of hip-hop, and it

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is no different today. There’s a parade of multicolored sweathoods and t-shirts with signature prints and patterns; to the jeans with colorful emblems on their pockets, their fronts, and sometimes found navigating their way down a leg; to the brightly colored, and often customized kicks, from Nike, Adidas, and newer brands like Bape, Ice Cream, and Creative Recreation; and the matching diamonds in the ear—some blue, some yellow, but mostly white, jostling by. At first glance it looks like a uniform, as if they’re all wearing the same thing. But if one would just peer keenly, they’d uncover the individuality. His shoelaces are fat, loose, and untied. Her shoelaces are colorful, thin, and tied. In essence, each one carefully chooses an ensemble, a mashup that they’re hoping they’re the first to sport. They’ve searched far and wide for their gear, often taking trips to Harlem or the Bronx, just to have something that no one else on their block has. Also, each item carries a hefty price tag, and becomes a statement of identity. By wearing Bape, I’m saying I’m like New Orleans rapper Lil’ Wayne and my money is just as long as his. This is the essence of Black style. Black style, as Stuart Hall so aptly states, in Black Popular Culture, “What Is the “Black” in Black Popular Culture?” Black people and black communities and traditions appear and are represented in popular culture, we continue to see, in the figures and the repertoires on which popular culture draws, the experiences that stand behind them. In its expressivity, its musicality, its orality, in its rich, deep and varied attention to speech, in its inf lections toward the vernacular and the local, in its rich production of counternarratives, and above all, in its metaphorical use of the musical vocabulary, black popular culture has enabled the surfacing, inside the mixed and contradictory modes of some mainstream popular culture, of elements of discourse that is different—other forms of life, other traditions of representation . . . But I do believe that these repertoires of black popular culture, which, since we were excluded from the cultural mainstream, were often the only performative spaces we had left, were overdetermined from at least two directions: they were partly determined from their inheritances; but they were also critically determined by the diasporic conditions in which the connections were forged. Selective appropriation, incorporation, and rearticulation of European ideologies, cultures and institutions, alongside an African heritage—led to linguistic

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innovations in rhetorical stylization of the body, forms of occupying an alien space, heightened expressions, hairstyles, ways of walking, standing and talking, and a means of constituting and sustaining camaraderie and community.1 While in these statements Hall is referring to the performance nature of being Black in Black popular culture, in this case, it is being applied to what is Black in Black style. It is a way of being the other, of blending in and standing out at the same time. But as much as I’m intrigued by the clothing and footwear that these youth wear, I’m also captivated by how their fashion sense extends to their gadgets—the handheld technological devices that they use to listen to music, play games, and communicate with one another. Gadget Fashion In almost every train car I enter, coming to and from Brooklyn every day, I find myself surrounded by African American and Latino teenagers and college-aged youth with technological gadgetry in their hands. There are iPods to match their outfits; or the cases holding their iPods, PSPs (Sony handheld gaming devices), PDAs (personal digital assistants) or smartphones, match them. There are headphones of all shapes, sizes, and colors wrapped around their heads, or stuck into their ears. They’re at one with these devices, keying, texting, thumbing, and listening—rapt users, each one of them an alien being. It’s as if they find themselves in the device, even though at first the choice to purchase the device may have been because someone else had one or it matched their style. As an early adopter of new technologies and gadgets, I was at first taken aback by the large numbers of youth owning these devices. Having owned a first generation iPod, before almost anyone found a need for them, I was astounded at the rate by which they were making inroads into the ’hood. Eventually though Black music artists like the rapper 50 Cent and R&B singer Mary J. Blige could be viewed using iPods in their music videos. Then, I was astounded that their popularity caused envy and desperation, the same way that certain sneakers or coats do. Early on, gadgets like iPods and PSPs cost well over $100, and they weren’t all that easy for people to come by—living in the ’hood.

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Unfortunately, in the summer of 2005, a 15-year-old boy was killed during a fight over an iPod. So just why did these technological devices become items to die for? Actually it’s nothing new. It’s simply just another take on how beepers and pagers once permeated the ’hood. At one time, these devices lived only in the realm of businessmen. Drug dealers, seeing themselves as businessmen, started using them to make transactions without having to sit by a phone all day or stay on one corner. The devices became a status symbol, and yet it also became an extension of the human using it enabling him to do things never capable by humans before. He could be reached, at anytime, anywhere. They Further he became a slave to the beeper, and at the same time harnessed its power bidding it to do his will—to make him omnipresent. Eventually the devices moved into Black popular culture, finding itself in its music. As they started mainstreaming, beepers were no longer simply black, clunky devices; they were constructed in a slimmer fashion and became available in a variety of colors. In “What Is Hypersoul?” written by Bat in 2001 for London Hyperdub HQ, he writes: Hypersoul is marked on all levels by antagonism towards soul values. Soul’s religious and spiritual undercurrent is often pushed aside in favour of brazen aspirational materialism (aka the “playa” culture). Many tracks f launt an obsession withhi-tech consumer gadgetry, especially mobile phones. This aspirational materialism has inspired some critics to resurrect/revitalise Marxist concepts of “commodity fetishism” and “false consciousness.”2 Alexander G. Weheliye, associate professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University, explains it further in “Feenin: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music, in Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text: To say that communication and other technologies are leading actors on the stage of contemporary R&B would amount to an understatement of gargantuan proportions; lyrically, hardly a track exists that does not mention cellular phones, beepers, twoway pages, answering machines, various surveillance gadgets, e-mail messages, and the Internet, stressing the interdependence of contemporary interpersonal communication and informational

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technologies. As a result, these technologies appear both as Brechtian “A-effects” and as sonic “cinema verité” that depicts the “reality” of current technologically mediated life worlds.3 In another paper, “Ring, Ring, Ring: Machinic Sensation,” Weheliye writes: “In other words, contemporary black popular culture relishes the synthetic artificiality of cell phones and two-way pagers as much as it makes these an integral part of the performing body by accentuating their tactile provenances.”4 That the music of Black popular culture sets the tone for what is not only style, but also Blackness, in and of itself, is no surprise. Music is an emotional and spiritual experience, that which upon listening, people are at once deeply feel connected to. In rapping to a woman about the end of their relationship, the young adult rapper Bow Wow sings: “I miss the smiling faces in my sidekick/ Outta’ town visits, all the time we spent together makes it hard to get you outta’ my system.” He is disconnected from his desire, the subject of the song, because they are no longer communicating on their Sidekicks (handheld music, instant messaging, texting, and camera phone devices from T-Mobile). He feels alienated from his lover, and his discussion about this alienation is not about face-to-face disconnection, but instead technological disconnection. As much as gadgets’ prevalence in the ’hood is about the coolness factor and style, it’s also about something else. According to Telephia’s Customer Value Metrics report, 2006, cell phone usage is highest among African Americans and Hispanics, and consumers age 18–24 use their cell phones the most. Also, these young adults send and receive text messages and this device caters to more than 25–36-year-old users, or any other demographic. In being members of the always on, always connected, MySpace generation, these youth embody their devices, using them in myriad ways at myriad times of the day, connecting to myriad people. So to understand their attraction to these devices is to understand that they are already the alien other, and that becoming something somewhat posthuman, is not a desire, but a reality. Notes 1. Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (New York: Bay Press, 1983), 27–28.

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2. Bat, “What Is Hypersoul?” (London: Hyperdub HQ 2001), http://ww.hyperdub.com/ softwar/hypersoul.cfm. 3. Alexander G. Weheliye, “ ‘Feenin’ Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music,” in Social Text 71, ed. Alondra Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 33. 4. Alexander Weheliye, “Ring, Ring, Ring: Machinic Sensation,” Talk given at Congress CATH, 2003.

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CH A P T E R

SI X T E E N

Dressed to Kill: Or, Women’s Right to Bare Arms Ke l ly O l ive r

From the rhetoric of liberating “women of cover” to reports of miniskirtclad female interrogators at camp Delta prison in Guantánamo Bay, women’s clothes are playing a major role in the construction of the Western notion of “global freedom.”1 Notions of nation, patriotism, and homeland continue to revolve around “the question of woman,” particularly what she wears. Specifically, the force of the rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and security relies on women’s sexual difference and sexuality defined in terms of wardrobe to construct a free, democratic, and secure West against an enslaved, theocratic, and infirm Islamic Middle East. The current rhetoric continues the oppositional logic of imperialist discourses that pits “West” against “East,” “civilized” against “barbaric,” “backward” against “progress,” and measures these qualities in terms of women’s fashion. The United States’ concern to liberate “women of cover” elsewhere from oppressive religious traditions that are seen as backward works to reassure us about women’s sexual freedom in the West, one the one hand, and to legitimate constraints on women’s sexual agency here and there on the other. This is to say that the focus on “freedom” elsewhere as it is articulated in relation to women’s right to “bare arms,” thinly veils an anxiety about women’s sexual freedom in the United States. The literature is vast on the role of women, gender, and sexuality in Western colonial and imperialistic incursions in the East, and the role of gender in nation building through these incursions. From Gayatri

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Spivak’s seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”2 in which she analyzes ways in which women are silenced in colonialist discourses about India that rely on the rhetoric of white men saving brown women from brown men, to recent discussions of how this same rhetoric was used by the United States to justify the invasion of Afghanistan to save Afghan women from the Taliban, feminist scholars have demonstrated that women have been central to so-called civilizing or democratizing missions (1988).3 Partha Chattererjee’s analysis of how the British used women’s rights in India to undermine Indian men in their power struggle to control their colonies is exemplary.4 Feminist scholars have also shown the ways in which both conservative and reformist movements within the Middle East have engaged the oppositional rhetoric of East versus West focusing on women, their place in domestic and public spheres, and most especially their clothing crystallized in debates over veiling.5 For example, Leila Ahmed argues that from the beginning of the twentieth century the veil becomes a symbol of Muslim resistance and tradition, and hence the concern of the Europeans (1992). The veil (hijab, along with the burka and various forms of chador) continues to be a contested symbol within Western imperialistic discourses and within discourses of resistance to Westernization. Reminiscent of the French occupation of Algeria in the 1950s, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan focused on the plight of Afghan women, whose oppression was seen as epitomized by the veil and the burka (cf. Abu-Lughod 2002, 784; Larzeg 1994). Several articles praised the military campaign for “unveiling” Afghan women and President Bush talked about helping “women of cover” (Safire 2001, 22). And, current efforts to reveil women in Iraq seem to be reactions against U.S. occupation, where Westernization becomes associated with women’s sexual freedom as evidenced in their dress and amount of body covered or revealed. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the veil becomes a symbol of resistance to Western imperialist forces; and the circumscription of women’s movement and dress come to stand in for “traditional” or “authentic” values against modernization, democratization, and Westernization, whose “evil” is epitomized by women’s sexual freedom. The association between the West and women’s sexual freedom has its correlate in Western rhetoric of liberation and freedom that revolves around freeing “women of cover,” who are seen as most oppressed by having to remain under cover. In Western discourses, women uncovering their bodies is a sign of their sexual freedom. Women’s dress and the amount of body bared becomes a sign of their freedom. Women’s freedom is reduced to

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women’s sexual freedom, which in turn is reduced to the freedom to reveal their bodies in public. Whether women’s right to bare arms merely makes them more sexually available to men or allows them to celebrate their own bodies, their agency is circumscribed by social forces that discipline even as they liberate. The “modern” woman is the subject of the free market. Hers is the freedom to shop. It is noteworthy that President Bush introduced the phrase “women of cover”—an analogue to women of color—in relation to the freedom to shop. In a speech before the State Department shortly after September 11, 2001, Bush told “stories of Christian and Jewish women alike helping women of cover, Arab-American women, go shop because they were afraid to leave their home” and in a news conference a week later he again invoked the religious unity of America epitomized in women getting together to shop: “In many cities when Christian and Jewish women learned that Muslim women, women of cover, were afraid of going out of their homes alone . . . they went shopping with them . . . an act that shows the world the true nature of America,” suggesting that true nature of America is the freedom to shop for women of all faiths (Safire 2001, 22). Even if she has a platinum credit card with the maximum credit limit, however, a woman’s freedom to shop is still subject to dress codes governed by class, race, age, ability, profession, and so on. You never saw Laura Bush, Condoleezza Rice, or Hillary Clinton wearing belly-shirts, navel studs, and skin tight low-riding jeans. And while you don’t see Barak wearing low-slung baggy pants that reveal his boxers, women are not only the target consumers of clothes but also defined in terms of them. Clothes may not make the man, but they do make the woman. For example, you didn’t see articles mentioning Alberto Gonzales’s wardrobe, even if they do mention that he is the first Latino Attorney General (maybe his role in finding loopholes to the Geneva Convention regulations on torture detracted from his attire), but a New York Times article on the promotion of Frances Fragos Townsend to homeland security advisor remarked that “she has become the model of decorum with coiffed hair, well-cut suits and toned down public demeanor.”6 Her new job means new clothes and her new persona is described in terms of those clothes—clothes that in this case suggest upward class mobility. In various cultures in various ways, clothes are important markers of class (and race, gender, sexuality), but Western clothes are also associated with modernization and civilization. For example, discussing the twentieth-century unveiling and reveiling campaigns in

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Iran, Afsaneh Najmabadi concludes that “it is highly indicative of the stakes played out on women’s dress code that official government memoranda of the 1930s repeatedly referred to the new dress code as libas-i tajaddud-i nisvan (clothes of modernity of women) and that women’s rights issues were discussed in terms of “clothes of modernity” and “clothes of civilization” associated with Westernization and Western notions of freedom.7 Conversely, Western notions of freedom are essentially linked to women and specifically women’s freedom to uncover their bodies and their right to shop for clothes and makeup. As we have seen in media coverage of the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, women’s freedom becomes the freedom to choose what to wear; and the liberated woman exercises her freedom of choice by shopping. As important as their right to vote is their right to shop. For example, a Time photo-essay entitled “Kabul Unveiled” begins “A woman in a traditional burka walks through the ruined urban sections of Kabul, near the main market. The freedoms denied Afghani women under Taliban rule have been instantly restored by the city’s fall—now it is up to them to make their way . . .” 8 The photo-essay goes on to show burka clad women shopping for burkas, all of which look alike, shopping for makeup and hair-care items, and men shopping for postcards of women and entranced by a hula dancing doll. In the midst of photos of feminist meetings and women in a maternity hospital, half of the photos are of shopping, suggesting that according to Afghan women, liberation is the freedom to shop. In her forceful analysis of the way that these images were used to justify the U.S. invasion, Dana Cloud concludes that the photo-essay “Kabul Unveiled” oscillates between showing women in burkas and women “unveiled,” women in traditional clothes and feminists and a woman news anchor, to visually suggest that women were liberated by U.S. troops. She argues that the essay “condenses this opposition in its sequence of images, defining liberation as the exposure of women to the consumer market and to the mass media . . . shopping becomes a key indicator of modernity” (2004, 295). And vice president of the Afghan Women’s Mission, Sonali Kolhatkar, remarks that “while Oprah Winfrey provides touching vignettes of Afghan women finally able to don high heels and lace dresses, politically Afghan women have been marginalized and promised more Sharia law” (Kolhatkar 2002, 34). As Kolhatkar and other feminists, including the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), have argued, Afghan women’s freedom of wardrobe and right to shop trade on other freedoms and bring with them different disciplinary restrictions (e.g., see

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Kolhatkar 2002, Abu-Lughod 2002, Cloud 2004, Luthra 2006, Franks 2003). Feminist Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has documented the ways in which the current rhetoric of liberating Muslim women echoes earlier colonial and missionary rhetoric that was used not only to justify imperialistic ventures but also resulted in domestic and educational practices and policies that were simultaneously emancipatory and disciplinary (2002). Taking a Foucaultian line of analysis, Abu-Lughod summarizes the articles that she brings together in the collection Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East insofar as they point to the various ways in which women and gender have become the contested symbols of modernity, Westernization, and democracy; moreover, she articulates some of the ways in which they demonstrate that so-called modern or Western forms of dress, marriage, and domestic organization bring with them new disciplinary regimes in the everyday lives of women (ibid.). For example, in Iran and Turkey unveiling and entrance into public spheres required that women produce their bodies as disciplined, chaste, and modest in new ways (9). And, in the words of AbuLughod, “young Bedouin women in Egypt try to resist their elders and the kin-based forms of domination they represent by embracing aspects of a commodified sexuality—buying make-up and negligees— that carry with them both new forms of control and new freedoms” (13). Even recent reports on the so-called tank girl army of Iranian expatriates is described in terms of their dress—“khaki headscarves, combat trouser-suits and boots”—women who thus seem to be fighting for the right to wear lipstick. Once again, freedom is associated with sexual freedom that not only reduces freedom to the free market but also commodifies women’s bodies and sexuality and makes them available on the market in the form of postcards of women now sold in Kabul and familiar images of scantily clad women in Western media. If the liberation of “women of cover” from “backward traditions” results in new forms of discipline and the commodification of sexuality, we might ask what function this rhetoric performs in terms of shoring up images of freedom and privilege for Western women. In what ways do images of oppressed women elsewhere reassure Western women of their own freedom? Indeed, how do these images participate in the construction of Western notions of women’s freedom as sexual freedom that reinscribe women within disciplinary and restrictive economies of gender and sexuality? Certainly images from other countries where women appear completely covered, relegated to the domestic sphere, and denied freedom of expression make women in the West glad to

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live in a society that values women’s freedom. Indeed, these images seem to highlight the value placed on women’s freedom in the West. Moreover, they appear as reminders of a time seemingly now long past when women’s freedom was not valued, when women did not have the right to vote or to hold public office, when women were relegated to the domestic sphere and were considered the property of their fathers or husbands. But it was not so long ago (a matter of decades) that laws were still on the books in several states indicating that women were not persons, that strict dress codes were enforced in all public schools, and women were barred from certain jobs, sports, and public positions. Seeing Muslim women as victims of “backward” traditions helps to construct women’s oppression as a thing of the past for the West and cover over the ways in which women continue to be disadvantaged within the United States and other so-called Western cultures. In her essay “Feminist Encounters,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty suggests that as a result of the evolutionary notion of progress and of history—the notion of time itself as linear and evolutionary—“other civilizations or tribal cultures are seen as ‘contemporary ancestors,’ the past the West has already lived out.”9 The use of the rhetoric of “bringing democracy” to “whole regions of the world” that “simmer in resentment and tyranny” and freedom to “women of cover” continues this colonial legacy that treats other civilizations as “contemporary ancestors” who need to be modernized by Western technologies and ideologies, thereby justifying occupation and warfare.10 Several scholars working in Middle Eastern Studies have discussed the ways in which notion of the modern and modernity, along with notions of the civilized and civilization, play off the supposed backwardness and barbarity of the East that supposedly has been overcome in the West.11 In the words of Lila Abu-Lughod, “notions of modernity have been produced and reproduced through being opposed to the nonmodern in dichotomies ranging from the modern/primitive of philosophy and anthropology to the modern/traditional of Western social theory and modernization theory, not to mention the West/non-West that is implied in most of these dichotomies” (1998, 7). Western democracies can reassure themselves that they are free and that slavery and women’s oppression are in their past by projecting that past onto others who are seen as underdeveloped, primitive, backward or barbaric, all suggesting that they are an initial stage in the evolutionary development of the West. We see this rhetoric at work today when, for example, President Bush in response to questions about the effect on the Muslim world of the photographs of Saddam Hussein in

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his underwear, said “I don’t think a photo inspires murderers. I think they’re inspired by an ideology that’s so barbaric and backwards that its hard for many in the Western world to comprehend how they think.” Bush’s rhetoric suggests the Western world is distanced from not only barbarity and backwardness but also ideology. And, in response to the Amnesty International report that the U.S. torture practices have turned the prison in Guantánamo Bay into a “gulag,” one conservative spokesman called the report “immoral,” not “adult,” and suggested that a “civilized” person would morally approve of using rough tactics in this situation.12 Vice President Dick Cheney said that “the important thing to understand is that the people that are in Guantánamo are bad people.”13 These remarks imply that people in the United States are good, moral, adult, and civilized while people elsewhere, especially those places identified with terrorists, are bad, immoral, childish, or uncivilized. As we have seen, as they gained independence in the Western world, women became symbols of oppression—bad, immoral, childish, or uncivilized cultures—elsewhere. In the United States, conservative women have been put in prominent positions to speak out against the oppression of women and racism elsewhere and thereby in effect to become apologists for wealthy white men who still dominate politics. For example, First Lady Laura Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife Cherie Blair were enlisted to give speeches after the invasion of Afghanistan that spoke of the liberation of Afghan women, and, in the words of Laura Bush, how “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” and “civilized people throughout the world.”14 And the first black secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, reminded Egypt that the United States has “its own history of slavery and racism,” suggesting not only that racism is in the past of the United States but also that Egypt exemplifies a past stage in U.S. development.15 The role of the veiled Muslim woman in the construction and consolidation of the free Western woman continues the ways in which Western notions of emancipation and citizenship for women played off images of Eastern women as slaves to tradition. Anthropologist Jane Collier speculates that the Western notion of consent, particularly women’s consent, and freedom were defined against the image of Islamic women’s lack of consent in arranged marriages and harems at the turn of the century in Europe: . . . images of veiled Islamic women and harems must also have play a role in constructing understandings of Western women’s

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liberties . . . consent emerges as a key difference between ‘oppressed’ Islamic women and ‘free’ Western ones during the nineteenth century, when industrialization was transforming adult women from productive members of family enterprises into economic dependents of wage-earning husbands . . . ..images of oppressed Islamic women, who could neither marry for love nor develop intimate relations with polygamous husbands, must have played a crucial role in constructing images of Western women as consenting to their disempowerment within increasingly privatized and confining homes.16 Today in the United States we are witnessing not only a conservative backlash to feminism in movements such as The Promise Keepers Christian men’s rallies, and the politics of family values, but also, thanks to the internet, an increase in middle-class and professional women working at home in order to raise their children.17 The image of the modern middle-class woman is a “soccer mom” who is expected to manage the family like a CEO. There are great expectations put on middle-class women to get their children into the right schools and to shuttle them from one activity to the next on tight schedules. For example, a recent article in the New York Times series on class features a middle-class white family who regularly relocate for the husband’s career. Kathy Link, the wife, keeps a color-coded itinerary to chart the daily activities of her three daughters and her husband: “Her youngest daughter, Kaleigh, 8, is coded red. With school over this afternoon, she has already been dropped off at her soccer practice blocks from home. Kristina, 11, is dark green, and Kelsey, 13, is yellow. Kristina must get to her soccer practice four miles to the north, and Kelsey to her practice 14 miles to the south . . . After dropping Kelsey and Kristina, Kathy Link had to double back, pick up Kaleigh and take her to golf. She will wait for Kelsey to finish soccer before picking up Kristina and taking her to cheerleader practice. Another mother will have to retrieve Kristina so that Kathy Link can be home when Kaleigh’s math tutor comes.” These “relos” as the article calls them segregate themselves in suburban developments according to class governed by the houses that they can afford: “these families are cut of from the single, the gay and the gray, and except for those tending them, anyone from lower classes.”18 The nineteenth-century professionalization of housewifery and scientizing of child rearing that made women “ministers of the interior” has given way to a business model in which women manage the household to produce future leaders in the global economy.19 Disciplinary

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discourses of science and medicine that governed childrearing have been replaced with new disciplinary practices modeled on business and management.20 As women take their work back home and move their work out of public spaces and back into domestic space, they are expected to run their households like a business; their public interactions center around their children and building the best public environment in the community or at school for them. While this new era of middle-class motherhood seemingly allows women to have it all—family and career—they occupy an increasingly busy space full of expectations that require constant work of one kind or another. We need to ask whether these new possibilities for women, especially the freedom to work from home engendered by the Internet, also produce new coercive norms and new forms of discipline, most especially selfimposed forms, that govern middle-class women’s lives.21 The focus on coercive and disciplinary practices to which women are subjected elsewhere overshadows new forms of coercion and discipline in the United States. Imagining those practices in other places as primitive or backward and, therefore, in our own past, reassures us that we have moved beyond patriarchal oppression of women, which exists there but not here. The projection of oppression outward shores up our sense of ourselves as free from constraints. The constraints of sexism and patriarchy are associated with those other women so that Western women are constructed as free and as the beneficiaries of a democracy that grants equality to all people regardless of sex, race, or religion. In the “war on terrorism,” anxiety over women’s sexual agency is manifest not only in the Western concern to unveil “women of cover,” but also in rhetoric that associates female sexuality with a weapon of war. The most striking example is the use of women interrogators in Guantánamo Bay prison where, reportedly, miniskirts, thong underwear, sexual touching, and fake menstrual blood have been used to “break” recalcitrant Muslim male prisoners. It seems that women’s sexual freedom and agency measured in terms of what they wear has been used as a torture technique by the U.S. military. It is telling that the media coverage of sexual torture at Guantánamo associates women and sex, going so far as to say that female sexuality is a weapon. For example, the headnote of an article in Time magazine reads: “New reports of detainee abuse at Gitmo suggest interrogators used female sexuality as a weapon.”22 As I argue elsewhere, sexualized interrogation tactics become metonymical substitutes for all of female sexuality and women represent sex itself.23 Female sexuality is reduced to a tactic or strategy (again associated with clothing—or lack thereof ), a threatening weapon

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that can be used against even the most resistant men. This conf lation of female sexuality and weapon reveals a long-standing fear of women and female sexuality evidenced in literary, scientific, and popular discourses of Western culture for centuries.24 Now this “threatening power” has been harnessed by the U.S. military to be used in counterterrorism efforts, efforts that have been associated with liberating “women of cover.” Liberated women become “free” to use their barely covered bodies in the service of their country; the freedom to bear arms takes on a new meaning. In the case of prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, the fact that women were involved and some of the abuse was sexual and religious made it difficult at first even for human rights groups to classify;25 and some reactions to reports of the use of miniskirts and sexual touching at Guantánamo prison conjured images of free lap-dances.26 In an article entitled “Torture Chicks Gone Wild,” columnist Maureen Dowd says “it’s like a bad porn movie. ‘The Geneva Monologues.’ All S and no M” (2005). While some prisoners reported being tormented by “prostitutes,” conservative media fueled a corner of popular sentiment that these women interrogators, along with the women involved in torture at Abu Ghraib, must be man-hating lesbians. The idea that women in the military are either dykes or whores is not new. Indeed, the military command at Camp Delta appears to be trading on stereotypes that date back to World War II when the Women’s Army Corp (WAC) was accused of being “a prostitution cadre designed to fulfill the sexual needs of male soldiers.”27 In “ ‘Dykes’ or ‘whores’: Sexuality and the Women’s Army Corps in the United States during World War II,” Michaela Hampf argues that gender and sexuality in the WAC was closely associated with dress. In fact, cross-dressing rather than behavior was taken to be the major sign of lesbianism in women, which was not the case with male homosexuals: “discursive categories for lesbianism in the 1940s were not sodomy but gender disguise and cross-dressing” (2004, 18). The military uniform supposedly made women appear mannish and, therefore, women wearing it were suspected of being “mannish women” or lesbians (16). The WAC leadership worked hard to counteract the image of mannish and/or promiscuous women by presenting a desexualized image “that resembled a boarding school for white middle class daughters” (16). In Rick Bragg’s biography of Pfc. Jessica Lynch—the “beauty” rescued from the “beast” in the first month of fighting in Iraq—we see a similar desexualization (even infantilization at the same time as prissification) when he paints a portrait of Lynch in soft hair ribbons and sweet pastel pinks. She is the good girl, the poster girl whose innocent cheerleader

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smile somehow goes bad on the faces of the girls of Abu Ghraib. In a chapter entitled “Princess,” Bragg describes in detail Lynch’s concern for fashion and her “preoccupation with matching” and makeup.28 He quotes Lynch saying “I would have done more in high school, but I didn’t want to mess up my clothes” (Bragg 2003, 28). As Bragg tells the story, the transition from pleated skirts, princess gowns, and painted nails to army fatigues in camouf lage green was the most difficult part of Lynch’s move from Miss Congeniality at the Wirt County Fair to basic training: “It started with a fashion nightmare. A soldier took her sizes and gave her four uniforms. ‘Well,’ she thought, ‘this is disgusting. At least they match’ ” (41). According to Bragg, Lynch “was a perfect solider, until the hair-bow incident” when the drill sergeant made her do ten push-ups for supposedly wearing the wrong hair-bow, which he says “was perfect” because she wouldn’t mess up on a hair bow (44); the suggestion is that if she knew anything it was about how to dress and wear her hair. The crowning glory of her army wardrobe were military issue eyeglasses, huge black-rimmed model that Bragg says made her look like a cartoon character (42). Bragg quotes Lynch “they called ’em birth control glasses—and they really were. A method of birth control. Ain’t no guy gonna come anywhere near you as long as you are wearing a par of those glasses”; “I am a four-eyed, birth control glasses-wearing geek,” she thought (42). Bragg claims that she didn’t want to see badly enough to wear those glasses. Bragg’s biography tells the story of a sweet shy little girl more concerned about matching her pinks than fighting; she is portrayed as a little girl who keeps her girlish innocence through it all and takes her teddy bear into surgery with her after she is rescued. Through basic training this innocent girl becomes a cartoon character whose fatigues “swallowed her like a big frog” (37) and whose birth control glasses keep the guys away. No longer the girl in pink, her army fatigues protect her from the men around her and from her own sexuality. Jessica Lynch became part of the military’s media campaign; Lynch’s dramatic rescue, complete with night-vision camera footage, was wielded by the press and the Pentagon alike not only to shore up public support for the war but also to rally the troops on the ground (cf. Rich 2003, 1). According to Bragg, rumors of Jessica’s capture and torture made American soldiers “want to kill” and “proud” to do so (2003, 122). Lynch’s story justified the war. We could say that the Jessica Lynch story became part of what, in another context, Rey Chow calls the “King Kong Syndrome,” in which beauty tames the beast and even the most bloodthirsty fall for

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a sweet-faced white woman. In the words of Lynch’s brother “. . . look at that face. Who isn’t going to fall in love with that face?” (154). As Chow says, “herself a victim of patriarchal oppression . . . the white woman becomes the hinge of the narrative of progress, between enlightened instrumental reason and barbarism” associated with the Third World; “The white woman is what the white man ‘produces’ and what the monster falls for.”29 Given her status as a hero, with TV documentaries and books about her, it seems that the monstrous enemy insurgents and their doctors are not the only ones to fall for the helpless white woman; the American public has greedily swallowed her bittersweet story, perhaps as a tonic for war wounds and imperialist guilt. On the book jacket, her biography is touted as “a uniquely American story,” through which we “learn the importance of what its means to be an American.” Pfc. Jessica Lynch comes to stand for what it means to be an American in the context of a nationalism built on war. The American story is the story of beauty against the beast. Gayatri Spivak’s analysis of the role of subaltern women in both the rhetoric of colonization and resistance to it takes a new twist with the propaganda value of Jessica Lynch and the redefinitions of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay prisons where media attention focused on women’s participation. Spivak argues that “the protection of woman (today the ‘third-world woman’) becomes a signifier for the establishment of a good society which must, at such inaugurative moments, transgress mere legality, or equity of legal policy” (1998, 298). In the case of sati, what was a ritual was redefined as a crime. In the case of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay prisons, crime outlawed by Geneva Convention regulations against torture was redefined as “legitimate force” in the war against terrorism. Just as the rhetoric of liberating Afghan women made the invasion more palatable to the American public, highlighting women’s involvement in at Abu Ghraib and Gauntánamo helps redefine torture as abuse, misconduct, perversion, or “pranks” and “letting off steam” as Rush Limbaugh called it. And the capture and rescue of the innocent young beauty Jessica Lynch was used to legitimate the occupation of Iraq and shore up the notion of American courage and freedom. Even as President Bush in his 2004 inaugural address proclaimed that “American will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude,” women were instruments of propaganda and sexualized tools of military interrogations of jailed “detainees,” held without the protections of the Geneva Convention. Perhaps it is telling that this speech that repeats

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the rhetoric of women’s freedom appeared on CNN.com side by side with a Victoria’s Secret advertisement with a provocative photo on a beach of a bikini clad model with pursed lips looking seductively at the camera that reads “Create your perfect bikini . . . suit yourself, any way you like.” Freedom becomes women’s freedom, which becomes women’s sexual freedom, which becomes the commodofication of women’s sexuality reduced to the right to choose any bikini. We might again ask Gayatri Spivak’s question about the rhetoric of bringing free choice to so-called third-world women. She asks since “[i]mperialism’s image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind. How should one examine the dissimulation of patriarchal strategy, which apparently grants the woman free choice as subject?” (99). Within this imperialist discourse, woman is made an object so that she might become a free subject. But, in the words of Lila Abu-Lughod (describing women in the Middle East), this freedom ushers in “new forms of gendered subjection (in the double sense of subject-positions for women and forms of domination) as well as new experiences and possibilities” (1998, 13). As Spivak’s analysis suggests, Western notions of freedom are tied to imperialistic enterprises that are motivated now by the forces of global capital. These forces interpellate women as both objects to be saved and subjects with free choice as defined by the free market: freedom to shop. As we have seen, images of oppressed women elsewhere work to construct the image of women’s freedom and consent to their own circumscription by sexual commodification and management of their agency, particularly their sexual agency, by Western institutions from advertising, entertainment, and pornography, to the military. Women’s sexual freedom is managed, circumscribed, commodified and then secured as free in relation to apparent enslavement of other women, epitomized by their dress taken as a sign of their lack of sexual agency.30 Notes 1. President Bush talked about helping “women of cover” shortly after September 11, 2001 (cf. William Safire, “Coordinates: The New Location Locution,” in New York Times Magazine, October 28, 2001, 22). Notions of nation and homeland have been developed, propagated, and justified through gender, including gendered metaphors of motherland and fatherland, or metaphors that feminized or masculinized countries or territories, and gendered notions of citizens or citizen-soldiers as masculine along with the feminization of those colonized. For example, within U.S. media most recently Afghanistan and Burma have been figured as feminine, as countries in need of liberating or as f ledgling democracies in need

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of protecting (see, e.g., Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990]; Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” American Anthropologist 104, 3, September 2002: 783–90; Lisa Brooten, “The Feminization of Democracy Under Siege: The Media, ‘the Lady’ of Burma, and U.S. Foreign Policy,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 17, 3, 2004). For example, in his 2002 State of the Union Address, President Bush refers to the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan, not only appealing to family but also to an association between Afghanistan itself and women or girls. In other contexts and historical periods (e.g., British colonialism in Egypt and India, French occupation of Algeria, and republican reformers in the Ottoman Empire) feminist scholars have persuasively argued and forcefully demonstrated that gender, sexual difference, and sexuality have been essential elements of nationalism and imperialism. For centuries, liberating women and women’s rights have been used as justif ications for imperialist and colonial missions that shore up notions of nation and homeland or patriotism. These missions also have been associated with the normalization of sexuality against sexual deviance associated with those colonized from the perspective of the colonizers or associated with the colonizers from the perspective of the colonized (especially in Western imperialistic enterprises in countries identif ied with the East—the West views the East as sexually repressive while the East views the West as sexually promiscuous). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Also cf. Dana Cloud, “To Veil the Threat of Terror,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, 3, August, 2003, 285–306; Mariam Cooke, “Saving Brown Women,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, 1, 2002, 468–70; Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?”; Mary Anne Franks, “Obscene Undersides: Women and Evil between the Taliban and the United States,” Hypatia 18, 1, Winter 2003, 135–233; Susan Hawthorne Bronwyn, ed., After Shock: September 11, 2001: Global Feminist Perspectives (Sydney: Spinefex Press, 2003); Katherine Viner, “Feminism as imperialism,” Guardian September 21, 2002; Rashmi Luthra, “Framing Gender in Afghanistan and Iraq: Unveiling the Gaze of Empire,” in Media and Political Violence, ed. S. Sreberny, H. Nossek, and P. Sonwalkar(Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2006). Partha Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women: The Contest in India,” in American Ethnologist 16, 4, 1989, 622–33; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). E.g., Lila Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Marnia Larzeg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question (New York: Routledge, 1994); Yvonne Haddad, and John Esposito, eds., Islam, Gender, and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Mai Yamani, ed., Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1996), among others. New York Times, June 29, 2005, A19. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Moustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexuality Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 40. See www.time.com/time/photoessays/afghanwomen/1.html; 11/24/2001; frame one. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Encounters,” in Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman, Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a more in-depth discussion of Mohanty and time in relation to colonization, see Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

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10. The rhetoric of liberating “women of cover” was used by President George Bush in several speeches after September 11, 2001; and the rhetoric of bringing democracy to “whole regions of the world” that “simmer in resentment and tyranny” was used by Bush to justify the war in Iraq throughout the military campaign, particularly in his 2002 state of the union address and his 2004 inaugural address. 11. E.g., Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women; Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam; Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women”; Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Haddad and Esposito, Islam, Gender, and Social Change; Larzeg, The Eloquence of Silence; Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; and Yamani, Feminism and Islam. 12. Cf. Karen Mcveigh, “Amnesty Dossier Condemns a World of Deepening Brutality,” Scotsman, May 26, 2005, 20. These remarks were made by Reuel Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank in response to the report from Amnesty International given by Amnesty’s secretary general Irene Khan. 13. Paul Richter, “Support for Guantánamo Eroding in Bush’s Circle,” in Nation, June 13, 2005, A10. 14. Laura Bush, “First Lady Laura Bush’s Radio Address to the Nation,” U.S. State Department International Information Programs, November 17, 2001, at usinfo.state.gov/usa/women. 15. It is noteworthy that Rice defines freedom and liberty in terms of economy, asking how the entire region of 22 countries only has a collective economy the size of Spain: “How can that be the case? It certainly isn’t anything about the intelligence of the Arab people. It certainly isn’t anything about their aspirations. It’s about the absence of freedom and the absence of liberty,” Steven Weisman, “Rice urges Egyptians and Saudis to Democratize” New York Times, June 21, 2005, A1. 16. Jane Collier, “Intertwined Histories: Islamic Law and Western Imperialism,” in Contested Polities: Religious Disciplines and Structures of Modernity, ed. Reynolds and Mahmood, special issue of Stanford Humanities Review 5, 1, 1995, 162. 17. For an analysis of the Promise Keepers movement, see Kelly Oliver, Subjectivity without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). Home-based workers are mostly white women who are attracted to this type of labor, made more available with computers and communications, because of family and children (Linda N. Edwards and Elizabeth Field-Hendrey, “Home-Based Workers: Data from the 1990 Census of Population,” Monthly Labor Review Online 119, November, 1996, 11). In addition to the increase in women working at home, “the labor force participation rate for mothers with children under 18 has been declining since 2000” (The Editor’s Desk, Monthly Labor Review Online, June 10, 2005). 18. Peter Kilborn, “ ‘Relos’: America’s Domestic Expatriates,” New York Times, June 2, 2005, A1. 19. In Starting Over: Feminism and the Politics of Cultural Critique (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), literary scholar Judith Newton analyzes how middle-class women moved out of the work force and into a professionalized domestic space modeled on scientific methods of childrearing. She quotes a 1833 essay in the Edinburgh Review in which middle-class women are called “ministers of the interior” who are expected to operate in the household like politicians operate in the public sphere. Newton points out that the rhetoric of politics in the domestic sphere replaces any real political power that women were allowed in the public sphere (Newton [1994], 126). 20. For a discussion of medicine in relation to disciplining the maternal body, see Kelly Oliver, Family Values: Subjects Nature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997). 21. For a sustained discussion of the relation between oppression and depression in middleclass women, see Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

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22. Viveca Novak, “Impure Tactics,” Time 165, 8, February 21, 2005, 33, my emphasis. Also cf. Maureen Dowd, “Torture Chicks Gone Wild,” New York Times, January 30, 2005, A17. 23. Kelly Oliver, “Women: The Secret Weapon of Modern Warfare?” in Just War, ed. Bat Ami Bar-On (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 24. Kelly Oliver (with Trigo), Noir Anxiety: Race, Sex and Maternity in Film Noir (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 25. Cf. Michael Ollove, “Women in Photos of Abuse Intensify the Shock,” South Florida SunSentinel, Fort Lauderdale, May 13, 2004, A18. 26. In an Internet publication, Nkrumah Shabazz Steward said: “Ok, I was getting into it before we got to the menstrual blood. Up until that point it was sounding like a damn lap dance . . . I can’t help it. I am a guy . . . . I guess I have to admit to myself that I am sorta into that whole ‘women with power thing’ because this thing sounds like fun to me” (“Gitmo interrogators reportedly relied on sex humiliation. I’m Juxtaposing,” 2005, by Eightheadz, creator of 8Bmcom. On the Web at 8BM.com.). 27. M. Michaela Hampf, 2004. “ ‘Dykes’ or ‘Whores’: Sexuality and the Women’s Army Corps in the United States during World War II,” Women’s Studies International Forum 27, 2004, 16. 28. Rick Bragg, I Am a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story (New York: Vintage, 2003), 27–28. 29. Rey Chow, “Violence in the Other Country: China as Crisis, Spectacle, and Woman,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 84, my emphasis. 30. It is noteworthy that Sonali Kolhatkar, vice president of Afghan Women’s Mission, criticizes the leader of the Feminist Majority for only being concerned with forced female genital mutilation in Afghanistan (a practice that does not in fact occur) and thereby suggesting that Afghan women’s “oppression stems from not being able to have an orgasm” (Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls, Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence [New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006], 34). Even the leader of the Feminist Majority seems to conf late women’s freedom and sexual freedom.

CH A P T E R

SE V E N T E E N

The Naked Truth of Antifashion Philosophy Ni ckolas Pap pas

Antifashion “Antifashion” is not merely the wariness about trends that most people feel from time to time. Still less does the term describe such widespread phenomena as failing to know what fashion is or (worse) the bathos of aiming at fashion and missing. There is not much to examine in such lapses of fashion sense and not much philosophical insight to draw from them. Antifashion, on the other hand, presents itself as an alternative to fashion and a voice within fashion’s discourse, and a philosophy that wants to know what fashion is should understand its available alternatives. Any alternative will be an alternative in specific respects, for specific purposes. There can be more than one alternative to a given thing. In one setting the alternative to water is bread; in another it’s wine. Antifashion in the specific sense is an alternative to fashion with respect to fashion’s constant newness. Antifashion would like to be a fashion that does not change. Anne Hollander is one authority on dress who includes antifashion in her history of fashion. In Seeing STETthrough Clothes she suggests an origin for antifashion coeval with the birth of fashion, which began around 13001 or “roughly with the rise of towns and the middle class” (362). As a newly enriched bourgeoisie began marking its financial status with ornate and overdone clothes, the aristocracy that could no longer outspend such commoners pretended not to care about badges

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of status (363). The same old thing would do, no matter how baggy or faded it looked. This was antifashion. One noble known for being sartorially abstemious was Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy (1419–1467), though in his case antifashion emblematized moral seriousness. Philip took disregard for fashion so far as to dress in black for the 48 years of his reign—publicly, privately, in all portraits he sat for.2 Hollander does not mention Philip in connection with antifashion but she ought to, given that she considers black clothing “one steady current in the course of fashion that always gains power . . . from its ancient f lavor of antifashion” (365). Wearing black showed that Philip was continuing to mourn his father and also let him surprise the institution of dress and remain outside any economy or discourse of fashion. During roughly the time of Philip the Good, Baldesar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier endorsed the wearing of black among nobles and for a similar purpose. Written around 1500, Book of the Courtier advises courtiers on character and deportment. When the subject of what to wear comes up, Castiglione’s mouthpiece the Magnifico Giuliano considers the wide range of styles that arise in different countries and urges moderation (paragraphs 26–27).3 Somber colors are better than gaudy ones, he says, being as they are less pointed and specific; black is the best of all. Black refrains from participating in any nationality’s fads. Giuliano is promoting less a fashion than a second-order alternative to fashion, though still very much a presentable alternative. In other words, black clothing is a default. Castiglione’s argument about black has aged so well that it can turn up five hundred years later in an American newspaper article about handbags. Handbags now come in more styles and colors than ever, says the Newsday article (“Gotta Have a Brand New Bag”); nevertheless “some customers at the Coach store said they’d stay with black to avoid the need to switch their stuff from bag to bag every time they changed their outfit.”4 Black again derives its appeal from its power to suspend fashion choices as such. It is not only for handbags that black works as a baseline free of fashion. Black clothing is the dominant antifashion today. It is the uniform of bohemians and other outsiders, for whom it symbolizes their status outside systems of social status. Black clothing presents itself as liberation and token of “individual free will” (Hollander 1978, 365), what one purports to wear for personal reasons and regardless of popular opinion.

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Because black clothing bears a meaning that fashion-as-usual does not, the quest for “the new black” that has been going on since the 1980s is not about supplanting one fashion with another, as common appropriations of that phrase imply. Considered as yet another new style, the new black would mean nothing more than the new skirt does. But as a matter of fact the possibility of a new black implies something weightier than the mere alternation of whims cannot do justice to. The new black if it ever comes will be a style essential. It is a foundational color common to all styles of dress. It will be what people can put on any time for all occasions knowing they will not be wrong: an antifashion. By functioning as a baseline alternative to display clothing and its high price tags, black is democratic. In the final section of his Salon of 1846 review, Baudelaire associates the black tail-coat and frock-coat with the “expression of universal equality.” And even the enemies of modern democracy hail the equality that black symbolizes. The English Fascists under Oswald Mosely put out The Blackshirt as their house organ and touted the color as a universal look for the workingman. The Order’s defining black shirt “brings down one of the great barriers of class by removing differences of dress” (The Blackshirt, November 24–30, 1933, 5; quoted in Harvey 1995, 242). “Isn’t black such a morbid color to wear? Black is for mourning.” Fair enough. The association of black with death and funerals is ancient and long-enduring. Yet almost no Westerners in mourning today indicate their grief with black dress. The funereal symbolism has faded, except in the respect that the old ritualistic meaning of black may be what helps the color stand antifashionwise outside the currents of fashion and conformity. Perhaps a lingering memory of what black once meant and who would wear it prevents the vulgar from turning it into a fashion signifier like all the rest. The example of black thus far suggests some general properties of antifashion. If antifashion is a genre of dress, these might be its prevailing features: (1) It is a socially recognized mode of dress—in this respect itself like a genre of fashion—that is nevertheless not subject to caprice or f luctuation; (2) Antifashion borrows seriousness from its old religious associations, even if the particular mode of dress no longer appears in religious contexts; (3) Antifashion speaks of human equality, perhaps because by remaining fixed it frees its wearer from having to buy the new styles of the season, or even from having to learn what they are. Fashion establishes social criteria for status of both wealth and taste; antifashion calls for neither wealth nor taste.

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If other forms of dress are to be categorized as antifashion, they must first of all be impervious to changes in fashion. There was a time when jeans seemed to be ready to wear that badge. The appearance of expensive designer jeans in the 1990s derailed the promise that blue jeans could become what everyone puts on and looks right in. The huge denim pants that appeared about the same time, hanging off young men’s hips, had the same effect. Jeans are no longer standard or invisible dress. It’s too bad, too, because otherwise jeans would have become an antifashion. They had carried the right democratic meanings. Until the fashionable versions came along they had been inherently conservative, to the point of regularly reintroducing the archaic button-f ly. Does the difference between the fates of jeans and black clothes have something to do with the secularity of jeans? Because they never carried any memory of religious ritual, there was no whiff of impropriety about turning them into a fashion item. Nothing slowed down their appropriation by commerce. On the other hand, the relevant difference may be that women wore jeans. Here is a fourth and more discomfiting feature of antifashion, that it has to be for men. Miners wore jeans at first—that’s the Levi’s legend—then men performing other tasks of rough force. But by the time they entered the population as a possible antifashion for everyone, say in the 1950s or 1960s, jeans were being worn by men and women alike. Women’s jeans in themselves may have been an invitation to fashion manipulation. By contrast, black clothing in widespread modern use was restricted to men for the span of the nineteenth century (Harvey 1995, 195 and 225). Maybe this really is another feature of antifashion. Is it because antifashion works as civilian uniform, and only men are accustomed to wearing uniforms or customarily seen in them? Or something simpler and more obvious, that masculinity presents itself in general as featureless? Whatever the explanation may be, masculinity certainly belongs to another mode of dress, the suit. And Hollander’s Sex and Suits puts the man’s suit into a special category for which “antifashion” again sounds like the best name.5 Men’s suits in true antifashion style have remained unresponsive to capricious change since they first became uniforms of masculinity, unless you count such incidentals as the move from three buttons to two, or the quarter-inch variations between wide and narrow lapels, or the coming and going of the trouser cuff. It might be the masculinity of the suit that wards off thoughts of fashion. It might be that the suit suggests the outfit of a Protestant

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minister (Hollander 1994, 79), another evocation of religion. Whatever the explanation is, the suit has spent over a century as a symbol of standard dress. In business and government meetings, at a restaurant, and still at many social events, a man wears a gray or dark blue suit. He walks into the room and sees a dozen men dressed exactly as he is, or several hundred, and the sight reassures him. Here is human equality again: “the Neo-classical costume was a leveler in its time, and has since remained one” (92; cf. Nunn 2000, 76).6 If it’s not the universal equality of democratic fantasy, then it is the form of equality among masters that one calls a peerage. In America the extreme of the suit is called a tuxedo, and the peerage it represents is so egalitarian that a man at a black-tie event is apt to find himself dressed indistinguishably from every other man there. In a show-biz manner the tuxedo still evokes a kind of religious rite, too, being as it is the uniform of magicians. “Real” magicians—those medieval characters who muttered curses and boiled mandrake roots— wore black robes. For some spells a magician in Roman Egypt stripped naked.7 The tuxedo is more professional looking than those other modes of dress but is, as they are, a mode of male equality. Antifashion Philosophy Philosophers are not priests, and it has been a long time since they pretended to be. This is why the professional philosopher of today feels there is no need to wear a tuxedo or even a suit as a guild uniform. But it might be fair to speak of a caricature of the philosopher as a man wearing black. Johnny Cash’s song “Man in Black” is about dressing that way to acknowledge suffering, which is one way of being philosophical. Nor does the philosopher want to be caught chasing fashions around. Here is another reason to dress in antifashion and stay removed from the rhythms of public opinion. It would be a death for philosophy for it to surrender to conformist tides and eddies. Whether in black clothes or a suit or by some other strategy, philosophy seeks out something other than fashion to present itself in. Thoreau speaks from the perspective of philosophy and representing its drive toward antifashion in those pages of “Economy,” the long first chapter of Walden, that he devotes to clothing.8 Thoreau can hardly believe what people do with their bodies, and then too

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what they say about what they do, treating the costume they have fallen into by the accidents of time and place as the single right garment, and everyone else’s as a “masquerade” (see paragraph 39). “The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same,” he fumes (paragraph 38)—which coincidentally sounds like something American philosophers say today about philosophical fashions. What would it be like not to surrender one’s dignity to fashion? Thoreau says two things about the alternative, both of which sound like invocations of antifashion. First, he specifies a garment that belongs naturally in all cultures and does not change. [O]ur shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark . . . The shirt lets you put your hands on yourself, in a way to know yourself, where fashions have forced their fans not to care about their own natures and only try to guess what everybody else plans to be wearing. The shirt is universal or standard, and it becomes standard by growing on human bodies as if naturally, the way bark grows on a tree. For the same reason the shirt is true. Finishing his sentence, Thoreau makes clear whom he expects to see in a shirt like that. The alternative to fashion in this sense is what a philosopher wears. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. (paragraph 37) Thoreau has already appealed to the figure of the philosopher in the same chapter, writing (paragraph 19) that “The philosopher . . . is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries.” In that paragraph Thoreau does not even insist that the man wear a shirt. Something much less might suffice for a philosopher’s outfit. For a little earlier still Thoreau had observed that “the New Hollander [i.e., the native Australian] goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in

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his clothes” (paragraph 17). Soon he will wonder, when ref lecting on the antifashionist goal of human equality, It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected class? (paragraph 35) The philosopher is a man who might well put on nothing at all. Would that be the ultimate antifashion? Simplifying the wardrobe to nothing is not such a wild idea. It is not even new. Rousseau had said something in the same spirit as Thoreau, beginning Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Part I, paragraph 5) with a distinction between true philosophy and “the title of philosopher,” and proclaiming in the same paragraph that “the good man is an athlete who likes to fight naked [nu].” You will misunderstand Rousseau’s image of the naked philosopher if you take him to be dreaming of a prelapsarian Adam. Edenic nakedness connotes innocence and ignorance, which are not traits that philosophers have aspired to. But Rousseau’s reference to athletes and fighting does not fit the scanty information that survives about Adam and Eve before their fall. What it does fit is the young-man athletic nudity of late archaic and classical Greece. Not only a dress for philosophers, Greek nudity makes a strong bid for the title of antifashion, despite the general assumption that fashion and antifashion begin in early modernity. In fact ancient nudity should even be called the first antifashion. It was a socially contextualized phenomenon and, therefore, a live alternative to fashion. (Going around naked today is an alternative to dressing fashionably but not a live alternative, somewhat as the skirt is not an available option for men.) Only the Greeks used nudity as they did, and only beginning in the eighth century BC. Their nudity was so to speak not the nudity they were born with but a state they came to. Considered as a cultural accomplishment, nudity in Greece distinguishes itself not only from most clothing but also from other absences of clothing. It is not the mythic nudity one finds in art from other ancient nations, which they used for depicting mother goddesses and such powers of fertility; nor is it the mythicohistoric nakedness of Adam and Eve. The unveiling of divinities releases primal forces that a civilization can scarcely absorb, while Adam’s nakedness being infantile is innocent of civilization. Greek naked practices stand neither on

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the borders of nor before the inception of a civilized world but right in the heart of it, even if they imagine a link to a natural underpinning that clothes could never know (unless that is black clothes, maybe, or a philosopher’s shirt). And yet while deriving its legitimacy from social norms for dress nudity laid claim to a justification from outside the domain of the social. The look did not change, for one thing. According to legend, nudity at the Olympics in particular, allegedly its first appearance, began with the fifteenth Olympiad in 720 BC; certainly it must have started sometime around then, during the remarkable eighth century. The Olympics were closed down in the late fourth or fifth century AD; other games outlived them by a century or more, presumably with the athletes still wearing nothing. For 11 or 12 centuries the birthday suit was the uniform of the day. During much of this time the Romans had their suspicions. The public oiling that accompanied athletic nudity particularly struck them as a cause of the Greeks’ “slavery and effeminacy” (Plutarch, Moralia 274d–e; see Poliakoff, 165n12 on other Roman responses).9 Even so, as if free of styles or fashions, nudity was the right presentation of the body in sporting events, and was followed in the visual arts as well. Besides offering itself as a standard and “classic” alternative to usual dress, at least in the gymnasium, wrestling room, and stadium, Greek nudity also meets the other criteria for antifashion: (1) The nudity of adolescent boys had its origins in religious ritual, most likely the initiation rites of early antiquity (see Bonfante 1989;10 see Burkert 1985 on “the festival of stripping” and other appearances of nudity in ancient initiations11); (2) For a long time nudity was exclusively masculine, as black clothing was in the nineteenth century and as the suit continues to be today. Sculptures and paintings of nude males begin before 700; women’s bodies first appear in art after 350, during the Hellenistic era that is so distinct from classical culture in many other respects as well; (3) Nudity represented, if not democracy, at least a selective group of equals. Thucydides describes a simplification of the Spartan wardrobe claiming that the richer citizens dressed in order to be “living in equality [isodiaitoi]” with the majority, the progression culminated in nudity (History of the Peloponnesian War I.6; see below). Clothing ceased to function as a signal of wealth or poverty at the gymnasium, even if not elsewhere. Still, what most says “antifashion” about Greek nudity is the energy with which the Greeks themselves rationalized it. With some insistence they sought to prove that their practice was grounded in more

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than convention or tradition. No ancient source suggests, for example, that nudity might derive from initiation rites. (Bonfante 1989) is the seminal paper about Greek nudity, also the essential source for what she terms the Greeks’ own “rationalizing explanations”). Although their uses of nudity helped the Greeks set themselves apart from barbarians, they refused to say that it might have been invented for that reason or even that it rested on mere custom and conformism. Consider the way Thucydides recounts the origin of nudity. As he sets the stage for the Peloponnesian War with a capsule history of the Greeks (I.6), Thucydides hails his ethnicity’s cultural development along two lines of progress. Greeks and barbarians alike used to practice all-out piracy and violence within their own cities, but the Greeks quieted down into softer ways. Meanwhile, at one time all men went around armed (because of the piracy and violence), but then Spartans and subsequently other Greeks changed into lighter clothes at home, then from clothes displaying social status into moderate dress for all citizens, and then for athletic occasions nothing whatsoever. Nudity is the baseline in this story of human progress. It is the default that the Greeks attained and that barbarians may yet attain one day in their continuing effort to become Greek. Nudity stands at the end of a progressivist teleological process, as if it were the condition all people would eventually come to, naturally. Plato’s Republic likewise describes nudity as a natural development. In Book 5, Socrates even wants to take the development another natural step further and include the new city’s women in the naked gymnastics that men participate in (5.452a–e). The public would be shocked to hear such a proposal, but their shock doesn’t mean anything. Back in the day it seemed comical for men to strip for gymnastics too (as it still appears to many barbarians, Socrates says), but people learned to overlook seeming and seemliness and accepted the practice because it was better (5.452c–d). How was nudity better? Socrates thinks the advantages of naked exercise are natural but he doesn’t say what they are. For Thucydides nudity symbolizes civilization in the sense of the dropped guard of life during peacetime. To be undressed is to be unarmed, as it seems also to have been for the Spartans when their young men and women joined in the gymnopaidiai. On Paul Cartledge’s reading, this initiation rite was preeminently a display of defenselessness in the face of Sparta’s resentful Helot population. The point of being unclothed is that the young Spartans were consequently unarmed.12

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But most authors from classical Athens, and from the later centuries of antiquity, see the naked states fundamentally either as unfettered, so that the body can move with the greatest freedom, or as unveiled, so that the body can be inspected with the greatest accuracy. Of the two accounts of nudity, the appeal to free movement feels like after-the-fact invention. One just-so story appears in various sources, that in the fifteenth Olympiad one sprinter’s loincloth fell off and he won his race (e.g., Pausanias 1.44.1; Dionysios of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 7.72.2–313). Four years later, with that perennial Olympic fight for the winning edge, everyone else arrived at the Games naked too. The power of the other interpretation of nudity, that it made the body visible, can be seen in the way it elbows its way into histories of the Olympics. The Roman-era travel writer Pausanias, apparently not noticing the conf lict between his stories, gives one explanation for the Olympic athletes’ nudity and the other type of explanation for the equally traditional nudity of their trainers. For it seems that in the exercise area neither athletes nor trainers wore anything. What’s the explanation? The trainers’ practice couldn’t be about running faster. Pausanias, who already recounted the tale of the runner’s lucky wardrobe malfunction, now also tells of how a woman once passed as her own son’s trainer and slipped in to watch him, then leapt over a fence to be near her boy after he’d won, catching her clothes on the fence and exposing herself (5.6.7–8). Ever since then, says Pausanias, trainers have had to exhibit their masculinity, lest a woman should slip in among them. Hence the nudity of both athlete and trainer, but for two completely unrelated reasons, so that only coincidence puts naked Olympic competitors together with their naked trainers. It should stand to reason that both stories couldn’t be true, improbably leading to the same naked state for athletes and for their trainers but on completely different grounds. It may be just as obvious that stripping in order to move freely is the more improbable explanation. How cumbersome could ancient loincloths have been, to make nakedness such an improvement? For other reasons also the use of nudity to facilitate inspection must have struck the Greeks themselves as closer to the real reason for stripping. Thus Aelian (varia Historia 14.7) claims that the Spartans inspected their own boys naked, to ensure that they had not been shirking their exercise (quoted in Miller 2004, 18). Plato’s contemporary Xenophon, also writing of the Spartans, reports a more aggressive inspection. In

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his life of the Spartan king, Agesilaus, Xenophon tells of a battle with the Persians, after which Agesilaus ordered his prisoners to be exposed naked (I.28). The Persians’ bodies were soft from indolence and white because they never stripped. Just the thing to raise the Spartans’ morale: this would be like fighting women! In a case like that one, being unveiled is again a matter of being unarmed. Cartledge is right to read gymnos as “unarmed,” as long as defenselessness can be broad enough to encompass openness to the vision of others, which is to say being unveiled. Philosophy and the Naked Truth The most remarkable thing about equating nudity with visibility may be the metaphorical use that Plato puts the idea to. He sets several dialogues in a palaistra “wrestling room”: Lysis, Theaetetus, Charmides, Euthydemus. And nothing seems more natural then than for naked exercise, or nudity as such, to represent philosophy, not because philosophy entails freer and faster movements of the soul—certainly not because philosophy represents peace with no need for armor—but because it facilitates psychic inspection. A scene near the beginning of the Charmides makes the nakedness of philosophy explicitly a matter of inspection. Socrates has just come into the wrestling room. He was away for a long military engagement, and returning now he finds all the young men in town unknown to him. Someone mentions Charmides. Charmides walks in, not yet stripped for exercise. An excitable character named Chaerephon wants to tell Socrates how beautiful this young man is. Socrates narrates. “How does the young man look to you, Socrates? Isn’t his face beautiful?” “Supernaturally,” I said. “But if he chose to strip,” he said, “his face would be nothing. That’s how absolutely beautiful his form is” . . . And I said, “I’ll agree that the man is unsurpassed—if he should happen to have only one more little quality.” “What?” asked Critias. “If his soul happen to be naturally good,” I said . . . “Shouldn’t we undress him in this respect and look at him before we see his shape? For he has matured to a point where he would want to discourse.”

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“Oh yes indeed,” Critias said, “because he is a philosopher.” (154d–e) Given how consistently Plato presents Socratic philosophizing as essentially elenchus, an examination like nothing that nonphilosophers have ever done, and also given the Greek rationalization of nudity as a condition for examination, it is no wonder that the Charmides passage should combine the two ideas to make philosophy a kind of nudity on the inside. In Plato’s Euthydemus wrestling is again a metaphor for philosophical engagement (277d)—this is naked wrestling, being Greek, the nakedness hyperbolically emphasized when one character compares being cross-examined to being f layed (285c). The supernakedness of losing your skin in a conversation reminds you that you’ve already lost your shirt. “Shedding one’s skin,” Sara Rappe writes of this passage, “is a metaphor that continues the wrestling images often associated with paideia [education] in the Platonic dialogues.”14 Philosophy takes place among naked souls. Wrestling is a synecdoche for education again at Meno 94d and Laws 814d; and Plato’s Lysis, as befits its setting in a wrestling room, contains plentiful references to philosophy as wrestling. Most specific of all is the Theaetetus, whose characters speak of stripping for a philosophical wrestle (e.g., 169b). In that dialogue Socrates needles Theodorus into persevering with their philosophical discussion with another image of inspection. If you were in a Spartan palaistra, he asks, would you be allowed to watch the wrestlers if you did not strip and let them judge your body (162b)? The soul-nudity of Platonic philosophy that enhances visibility is not only a side effect of soul-athleticism. Nudity and philosophy also go together in the Gorgias myth of the afterlife, which never mentions wrestling or any other sport. Originally, says Socrates, people were assigned their otherworldly reward or punishment while still alive: they faced living judges on the day before they died. Zeus objected that they were coming for judgment “with their clothes on,” by which he meant their bodies (523c). Strip human beings for their final examination (532e) and the philosopher’s soul, the one ready for inspection, is likely to come off best. The point of nudity is, to reistate, that it permits a more accurate inspection. The point of philosophy is that it prepares for that inspection, which is to say that philosophy brings the nakedness of death to the living soul.

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In the Symposium, finally, Plato gives his character Pausanias (not to be confused with the real-life travel writer centuries later) a patriotic speech about what distinguishes Greeks from barbarians. Those who are accustomed to living under tyranny, that is, the non-Greeks, find the habits of liberal-minded Greeks disgraceful, Pausanias says—which is to say first of all their love of adolescent boys, “and also all training in philosophy and sports [philogymnastia]” (182b–c). The special identity between Platonic philosophy and a man’s love for a boy is widely attested in the dialogues. The appearance of naked exercise on the same short list of distinctively Greek behaviors makes philogymnastia another vision or manifestation of philosophy. Needless to say philogymnastia should not be construed as the love of bodily exercise in general, inasmuch as foreigners were presumably not repelled by physical training; it was the nudity of the exercising, which puts the gymnos into philogymnastia, that barbarians could not abide. As nudity of the soul Platonic philosophy seeks to be an antifashion of human discourse. Like other kinds of discourse it belongs in a culture and exchanges words with its fellow participants in that culture. But it is also incommensurable with the others, for philosophy has an origin that no existing culture can account for. Philosophers in existing cities are self-created (automatoi), as Socrates says in the Republic (7.520b). They owe no public service to their home cities because they appeared out of a philosophical nothing. As the philosopher goes, so goes philosophy in general, a wildf lower in culture’s garden. Plato sensed the antifashion in his culture’s practices of nudity and appropriated nudity as a metaphor for philosophy for this reason, that it shows something about the distinctive place of philosophy among ways of dressing human thoughts. Let the other uses of language change with the times and seek to please the crowd. Tragedy may dress its thoughts in showy diction, and rhetoric like a heavy cosmetic cover may doll up a homely idea to seduce the unwary. Philosophy is the naked body of thought, attractive only when rigorous exercise has sculpted it into shape. Nudity as a Fashion When Plato goes looking for a bodily condition he can import into the soul’s domain to symbolize philosophy, athletic nudity is close at hand, both wholesome and distinctly Greek. This metaphor helps philosophy

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look truer than other discourses. This way of talking will not change. Philosophy has returned itself to nature. The natural effect of soul-nudity means that philosophy sees what the interlocutor is all about, as opposed to existing rhetoric, which has not been grounded in knowledge of souls (Phaedrus 270b, 278c–d) and tragedy whose multiplicity of characters allows the author’s own soul to remain hidden (Laws 719c; cf. Republic 3.393c on the poet’s “hiding himself ”). The image might feel like an unfair advantage for philosophy. Also, it might bring more trouble than Plato had counted on. An antifashion is not merely not a fashion. Antifashions lead a paradoxical existence, engaged in conversation with the culture’s other ways and mores even as they remove themselves from any such conversation. How far any antifashion succeeds in demonstrating its special status is not the question. The point here has been to observe one genre of fashion that is marked by its antagonism to fashion. This is a matter of the intent behind antifashion. What is significant is that, even already in its intent, antifashion’s alternative to fashion is not the eradication of fashion but a gesture toward its transcendence, into once-religious uniforming. Antifashion is not fraudulent by virtue of continuing to be in some respects a custom of dress and thereby something like a fashion. It is not in some way contradictory or doomed. Still this condition for its existence renders it not quite what it thinks it is. It cannot be innocent of fashion when it arises against and after fashion. To the extent that philosophy aims at occupying the place of antifashion among discourses (which was the point of discussing philosophy here), the impossibility of antifashion’s innocence threatens philosophy with embarrassment. Philosophy dreads fashion and specifically dreads the possibility of becoming fashion. For a very recent example of this dread and repulsion see Aaron Preston, “Conformism in Analytic Philosophy,” according to which nothing has constituted analytic philosophy as a movement over the past hundred years—no essence: no one method, no one set of questions, and no unified doctrine.15 As a result, as Preston’s title already announced, analytic philosophy must have constituted itself out of no more than the bare desire to constitute itself somehow, which is really to say that it constituted itself out of analytic philosophers’ desire to be in a group together. Thus Preston speaks of philosophical circles during the first half of the twentieth century, where so-called analytic philosophers pretended they had

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a well-founded view (sort of like the fabled emperor with his clothes, who pretended that he was not walking around naked). (2005, 296) It is a heavy blow, if it lands. The emperor’s new clothes! That may be the most demolitious accusation that philosophers know how to make. Indeed, philosophy’s fondness for a story that blasts all fashion as vanity and folly serves as an indirect sign of how philosophy regards fashion. What philosopher wouldn’t want to be the boy who points and speaks the truth, “The man isn’t wearing anything”? The boy’s success is part of the fantasy—truth trumping fashion; the liar shamed—even though the mass epiphany is the patently incredible part of this story. That an emperor believes in his courtiers’ subtle f lattery is plausible enough, along with the fact that a child would cut through the common illusion. But no one ever heard of such a child being listened to. If philosophers don’t often manage to wake a multitude, it’s not for lack of playing the part of the lone honest boy. Some of the most famous arguments in philosophy’s history have come down to “There’s nothing there.” Aristotle tries to make sense of the relationship between Platonic Forms and individual objects (or pretends he is trying to make sense of it), then throws his hands up. This “sharing” in the Forms is a big nothing. So philosophy honors the story. It may be that everyone’s been wrong, no matter what people have repeated to each other and come to believe. It is agreed on all sides that philosophy specializes (or ought to) in spotting the naked truth. What happens when the nudity that symbolizes philosophy turns out to have been embedded in the back-and-forth of fashion and resistance to fashion? In Larissa Bonfante’s words, Greek nudity is a costume. What now? Philosophy is embarrassed again, though the story’s a little different. In fact, an attack like Preston’s gets the philosophical fantasy of itself exactly backward. Imagine that the emperor has decided to parade naked expressly in order to get away from the old pressures of fashion. This will be a direct and unmediated self-presentation, in the interests of honesty and truth. (Philosophy is a Philip the Good of the mind.) Then an old man points and says, “Why look, he has something on. He’s not just being naked, he’s wearing nakedness.” The emperor is dejected. The costume didn’t take, and now he has no way of going from this costume to something more fundamental and real. As the proverb says (it’s been attributed to different nationalities), a thousand men together can’t undress a naked man.

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1. Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 90. 2. John Harvey, Men in Black (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 52–56. 3. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin Classics, 1978). 4. Becky Aikman, “Gotta Have a Brand New Bag,” Newsday, April 11, 2005, A20. 5. Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York and Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1994). 6. Joan Nunn, Fashion in Costume 1200–2000, 2nd edition (Chicago: New Amsterdam Books, 2000). 7. Fritz Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, trans. Franklin Philip (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 104 and 115. 8. Thoreau Walden, Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 2000). 9. Michael Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 10. Larissa Bonfante, “Nudity as a Costume in Classical Art,” American Journal of Archaeology 93, 1989: 543–70, 551. 11. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 261. 12. Paul Cartledge, Spartan Reflections (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 86 and 177. 13. Cf. Stephen G. Miller, Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources, 3rd edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 17–18. 14. Sara Rappe, “Father of the Dogs? Tracking the Cynics in Plato’s Euthydemus.” Classical Philology 25, 2000: 282–303 [295]. 15. Aaron Preston, “Conformism in Analytic Philosophy: On Shaping Philosophical Boundaries and Prejudices,” Monist 88, 2005: 292–310.

CH A P T E R

EIGH T E E N

Vivienne Westwood: Keeping Critique Alive Sinéad M urphy

1. In his introduction to the collection Mapping Ideology, Žižek describes the challenge posed to critical practice by the recognition that all human practices—including all critical practices—are subject to the effects of human interests.1 Žižek casts the problem in terms of ideology; how, he asks, is critique of ideology possible when critical perspectives are themselves inevitably ideological? For our purposes here, we might broaden the terms of this question and ask more generally: how is critique of historically specific systems, principles, and practices possible when openings for, and modes of, being critical are themselves historically specific? How in this situation—to borrow Žižek’s formulation—are we to “keep critique alive”?2 It is immediately helpful, I think, to take this question as having two, potentially distinct, faces: it is a question concerning the difficulty that arises for critical practice out of its lack of a dependable doctrine to function as a foundation for critique; it is also a question concerning the difficulty that arises for critical practice out of its lack of a promise or hope of Enlightenment or Truth—of some achievement with not merely historical value—which might generate and continue to motivate an enthusiasm for, an attitude of, critique.

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One answer to Žižek’s question is to be found in Foucault’s essay “What is Enlightenment?”3 which offers a reading of Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?”4 written in reply to the Berlinische Monatschrift newspaper’s call, in 1784, for its readers’ thoughts on that topic. Of particular interest to Foucault is that Kant’s essay, far from proposing an abstract, “philosophical” in that sense, ref lection on the essence of enlightenment, rather gives an account of the circumstances of its time—the reign of Frederick II, the threat of revolution, the religiosity of the masses. On Foucault’s interpretation, Kant discovers in these historically contingent circumstances the conditions necessary for enlightenment, and justifies the conditions taken as necessary for enlightenment (not least by Kant in his three critiques) in terms of their emergence from present, historically specific, circumstances. “No doubt,” writes Foucault, it is not the first time that a philosopher has given his reasons for undertaking his work at a particular moment. But it seems to me that it is the first time that a philosopher has connected in this way, closely and from the inside, the significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a ref lection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is writing and because of which he is writing. It is in the ref lection on “today” as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie.5 In short, in Kant’s letter to the editor—a relatively marginal text—Foucault unearths stirrings of a quintessentially modern mode of critique: a mode of critique that relies, not on a doctrine or set of principles to function as a foundation for critical thought, but on an ethos or attitude, which is brought to bear on conditions of the time. “[T]he thread that connects us with the Enlightenment,” Foucault observes, “is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.”6 However, taken as an answer to Žižek’s question about keeping critique alive, there is a sense in which Foucault’s essay achieves too much. For, the capacity for critique that Foucault identifies as our Enlightenment inheritance does not merely survive the recognition that all human practices and their foundations are historically specific, as if

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the historicity of human existence posed a threat, barely kept at bay, to the possibility of critique; as an attitude that is brought to bear on historically specific conditions, and that operates “from the inside,” Foucault’s account of modern critical practice actually thrives on human historicity. In fact, it is the critical ethos that Foucault identifies in Kant’s essay on enlightenment that, in the first place, gives rise to the move—the move that, for Žižek, poses such a challenge to critique—away from traditional foundational philosophy, given the focus on historical conditions precisely as of their time, and, therefore, not a priori, not foundational, and not forgiving of doctrine. Hence, we may observe that Foucault supplies an answer to Žižek’s question actually by obviating the question, and that, in posing the question, Žižek (at least in the introduction to Mapping Ideology) reveals his continuing attachment to doctrine, when philosophy as doctrine has, in fact, had its day, when critique is now kept not only alive but also thriving, as a critical attitude “on the inside.” 3. Let us now look more closely at the nature of this attitude, as Foucault presents it. “What Is Enlightenment?”—Foucault’s essay—identifies Baudelaire, particularly Baudelaire’s commentaries on nineteenth-century French “painters of modern life,”7 as providing “an indispensable example”8 of modern critique. In these commentaries, Baudelaire is scathing of artists who continue to look to the past, to tradition and its truths, as the privileged mode of addressing themes of eternal relevance; he promotes the achievements of those painters who look to their own time, who look to modern life. After all, beauty (according to Baudelaire) consists not solely in a set of timeless values, but also in the current life of those values.9 “In their contemporary attire,” we might say, but only so long as we allow that this register of fashion operates, in this instance, much more than metaphorically: Baudelaire’s central illustration of the nature of beauty is taken from fashion—he compares those painters who continue to attire their models in outdated dress (the togas of Ancient Greece, for example) with those whose models are arraigned in the sober, black morning suit that was the fashion for men at that time;10 but, more than this, for Baudelaire fashion is exemplary, in the sense that its characteristic transience, its frivolity, is ephemerality, make it, on his account, the

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focus par excellence of the modern painter, the porthole to replacing an outdated reverence for tradition with a reverence for the present in all its contingency.11 It is important to note, though, that this latter exemplary operation of fashion relies upon the distinction, drawn by Baudelaire and carefully underlined by Foucault in his essay on enlightenment, between the “ flanêur”—the man who blithely picks and chooses from details of his time, the man merely of fashion—and the “modern man”— the one who perceives in the details of his time something of significance, something heroic, the one who wears or paints a black frock coat not merely because it is in fashion but in such a manner as to give the sense of it as the necessary costume of its day.12 The flanêur merely logs the passing of time and its changes—he is fashion’s victim, we might say, a mere spectator. The modern man adopts an attitude to time’s changes, which succeeds in transforming them; it is an attitude that, for Foucault, exemplifies our modern capacity for critique and that, from nothing other than its focus on the triviality of passing fashions, distils their significance for the eternal themes of human life,13 themes that, without their “fashionable attire,” would, as Baudelaire insists, be “beyond our powers of digestion or appreciation.”14 “And so,” Baudelaire observes of the modern man, away he goes, hurrying, searching. But searching for what? Be very sure that this man, such as I have depicted him—this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert—has an aim loftier than that of a mere flanêur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call “modernity”; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory.15

4. But Foucault is not the only one to recommend to us Baudelaire’s writings on art, and their implications for the significance of fashion. In the very opening paragraph of her Fashion in Art: The Second Empire and Impressionism, Marie Simon hails Baudelaire for having “raised fashion aloft as a symbol of modernity,” for having “ascribed to fashion a value

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it had not hitherto had, and was not to retain in the century to follow.”16 And this, Simon’s first paragraph, crystallizes what I would present here as a deep misreading of Baudelaire, a misreading that immediately undermines Simon’s efforts to portray the diminution of fashion’s importance into the twentieth century as a reversal of fashion’s fortunes and that, I think, must generate misgivings about the enthusiasm with which Foucault hails Baudelaire as an example of modern critique. Yes, Baudelaire chooses fashion as his standard; yes, he ascribes to it a value: but it is his standard of the f leeting, the ephemeral, and the trivial, and has a value precisely to the degree that it is valueless. Far from raising fashion aloft, then, Baudelaire affirms fashion’s insignificance; his move toward fashion is a decided move away from it, in the sense that fashion is both confirmed in its frivolity and, in its frivolity, made unimportant except insofar as it occasions the abstraction of something eternal, as it facilitates a quintessentially modern critique. From Baudelaire’s account, in short, there emerges a peculiar kind of double movement: fashion is confirmed in all its passing triviality, while an attitude—a critical achievement—emerges, which, precisely by focusing on the passing and the trivial, is itself neither passing nor trivial but capable of something more. It is a curious piece of cunning: the frivolity of fashion is incubated in a symbiotic relation between fashion and critique, between the f leeting and the true, between “the eternal and the transitory.” 5. The epilogue to Simon’s book was written by Vivienne Westwood, the British fashion designer famous both for her early days at the vanguard of British Punk and for her later acceptance into the world of haute couture as one of its most inf luential artists. What is, perhaps, Westwood’s defining collection as a fashion designer was shown in the Spring/Summer of 1985. Westwood had, for the previous 15 years or so, been involved in fashion to the extent that she had been designing, manufacturing, and retailing clothing for a series of youth movements aimed at undermining the taboos, most notably sex and sedition, which regulated the British society of that time. In the early 1980s, however, we find Westwood keen to enter the fold of haute couture, and her 1985 collection—finally labelled Mini-Crinis—confirmed her success in this regard.17 The collection featured its models in short, puffed-out skirts, tailored tweed jackets, ringletted hair, and clunky wooden sandals, and

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one of its central reference points is, of course, the Victorian “crinoline,” an originally horsehair petticoat, stiffened with whalebone or, later, steel wire, and intended to support a woman’s skirts so that they might achieve sometimes quite alarming circumferences. It was widely suggested in Victorian times that doorways and staircases would have to be redesigned for the accommodation of the crinoline, and that chairs had already been made for the better comfort of its wearer; and, certainly, the crinoline is most associated, in the popular imagination, with the simultaneous excess and containment of the wealthy, Victorian woman. And yet, it was originally made popular by the Empress Eugènie of France (wife of Louis Napoleon III), famed for her great beauty and elegance; and she continued her relatively strenuous exercise regime with an even greater zest once she adopted the crinoline as her daily attire, for, in spite of its associations with imprisonment (in French, it was called the “cage”), when compared with the manner in which petticoats had previously hung heavily about, and hampered the free movement of, a woman’s legs, the crinoline afforded a new and considerable freedom. One English lady at the time is reported as saying: “In walking it permits a degree of comfort and freedom in movement, to which, before its use, I had been an utter stranger.”18 Though often imagined as the garment of wealthy excess, then, in fact the crinoline was worn also by housemaids and factory hands, who appreciated the space that it granted. Nevertheless, The Rational Dress Society, established in London in the 1880s, was still to name the crinoline in its manifesto, as one of the articles of dress most repressive of women’s health and opportunities. Protesting against “the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure, impedes the movement of the body, or in any way tends to injure the health,” the Society’s call to arms warned against “the wearing of tightly-fitting corsets, of high-heeled shoes, of heavilyweighted skirts . . . , of all tie down cloaks,” and made special mention of “crinolines and crinolettes of any kind as ugly and deforming.”19 But Westwood’s “crinis” also invoke central features of Christian Dior’s “New Look” of the 1950s, which opposed the militaristic rations of the 1940s’ short, slim skirt with the luxuriousness of long, ample folds of material that, at the time, caused outrage in a society still bent on retrenchment.20 And, of course, Westwood’s “crinis” are also “minis,” recalling the skirt that defined the 1960s’ generation of sexual liberation and advancement of women’s equal rights; Westwood describes how much she enjoyed the glimpses of f lesh afforded by such “mini” “crinis,” as her models sashayed down her catwalk.21 All of which would seem to go against the grain of the crinoline’s connections

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with Victorian prudery, when a man could not, even if he would, get near enough to his loved one for even the smallest embrace. And yet, the crinoline, even at its greatest breadth, was also a sexual garment, with its emphasis on the tininess of a woman’s waist when contrasted with the f lare of her hips and her breasts; “There was never a fashion invented that was more sexy, especially in that big Victorian form,” Westwood is quoted as saying.22 But associations either of prudery or of liberation are mingled in this collection with much more childish things. The “mini” refers also to the cartoon character Mini Mouse: hence the polka-dot patterns and ringletted hair. And the tailored coats were inspired, Westwood tells us, by early photographs of Queen Elizabeth and her siblings.23 The latter, incidentally, were fashioned by Westwood from traditional British fabrics, most famously from Harris Tweed, a fabric originally from Scotland and traditionally the stuff for men’s outdoor sports. Of course, we might well go on, had we time, in pursuit of such inspirations and associations; for the single characteristic feature of Westwood’s work by this time is precisely its radical indeterminacy, precisely this near inexhaustibility of its bank of references. In the final paragraph of Fashion in Art, Simon directs our attention to Westwood’s designs and to this collection in particular, which she describes as parading itself “before our astounded eyes, defying logic, time and rationality. For fashion, frivolous and changeable, blithely spins its threads between periods and people.”24 It’s remarkable that, in the final paragraph of a book, where the first paragraph commends Baudelaire for having “raised fashion aloft,” is expressed the view—which I have, however, attributed to Baudelaire—of fashion as frivolous and blithely changeful. But more remarkable still is that, in her epilogue to Simon’s book, Westwood describes what she does, describes haute couture, as offering the “criterion” to fashion: “The existence of couture,” she writes, “guarantees the continuing healthy life of fashion.”25 Given the degree of indefiniteness of Westwood’s collections, given their frivolity and changefulness, it is intriguing to think in what manner they might function as a safeguard to health: What kind of criterion is radically indeterminate? What kind of standard is determinedly unfixed? 6. One, immediate answer: a standard that functions endlessly; a criterion without limit; a permanent critique. In a 1987 interview with

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I-D magazine, on being asked for an account of what it had been like to begin thinking of herself as a fashion designer, Westwood replied: “I realized that I didn’t have to qualify my ideas. I could do anything I liked, it was only a question of how I did it that would make it original. I realized then that I could go on forever.”26 But another, related, answer brings us straight to the history of haute couture, which was first practized by the Englishman Charles Frederick Worth, who, incidentally, came to fame under the patronage of Eugènie of France on whom he made popular the crinoline, and who, in the winter of 1857/1858, established the first house of fashion and, for the first time, presented collections of dresses, collections already designed and manufactured for display to potential customers and set from then on to change with a frequency and regularity that had yet to be seen. Here was a brand new phenomenon, Worth’s biographer tells us: a couture house which stood independent of any particular court, and where fashions were launched solely on the command of the designer. It was a pattern which was to be followed by the couture houses of the future, where the only restriction on innovations was the designer’s own sense of judgment.27 Fashions had changed before Worth, of course; but they had changed with a more unpredictable rhythm that was in tune much more holistically with traditional values and sociocultural developments, and that was determined much more rigorously by the authority of standard dress patterns; and they had changed in much smaller ways—a sleeve had grown longer or a waistline crept higher—that might be effected on garments already owned and often by the owners themselves. From now on, the rhythm of fashion’s changes was normalized and regularized until it became a biannual affair, brought about at fixed dates, determined by criteria developed “in-house,” and executed by specialized groups—the artisan status of the dressmaker and tailor was gradually eclipsed by the couturier-as-artist, with his own institution and labels.28 And the changes grew more and more daring, a new collection acting less as a continuation or modification of its predecessor than its complete obliteration: interestingly, the first renewal of this nature was the relatively sudden dethronement of the crinoline, by Worth, in the late 1860s;29 it was a change that, for reasons of its enormity and apparent randomness, took a long time to be ref lected in the dress of the public at large.

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This is, quite clearly, a rather crude sketch of the beginnings of an institution, and a detailed history of couture would, I believe, throw up much of significance for our concerns here. But at least one important aspect of that history would certainly be the change that had occurred in the nature and status of couture by the latter decades of the twentieth century, by which time the connection between couture and what the public buys to wear had become so tenuous that fashion houses had ceased to place commercial obligations on their couture activities. This merits our close consideration. To a large extent, couture was originally defined by its severance of the ties that had previously existed, on the one hand, between dress and authority or tradition, and on the other hand, between dress and craft or technique: taste in dress had been corralled in-house, where design emerged as of far greater importance than manufacture and became a matter for art, and not craft. But now, having constituted itself on those terms, couture’s ties to the way people dress were finally, and almost completely, dissolved. Even its cult of constant renewal faded from public behavior, in that it became increasingly acceptable to reference and wear fashions from all periods and for all occasions; Lipovetsky, in The Empire of Fashion, describes contemporary fashion—contemporary dress practices—as operating “à la carte.”30 But the question now arises as to the fate of both the criteria and the skill required to select from that menu, given that taste and technique were colonized by couture and utterly changed from their previous operation as achievements, respectively, of tradition and technique, of embedded purposes and craftsmanship. 7. And so we find Westwood, in 1985, marvelling at her discovery that she can do what she likes and go on forever doing what she likes, and claiming that, in endlessly doing what she likes, she offers the criterion to fashion and keeps fashion healthy. Like Baudelaire’s “modern man,” she describes the link that connects all her clothes as her capacity to identify “the heroic” in the historically contingent. 31 Like Baudelaire’s “modern man,” she is always hurrying, always searching, taking up and putting down historically specific details precisely because they can be used so, because they are interchangeable, because they are frivolous, transient, grains of sand in the desert of human life. Westwood’s work, then, is truly Baudelaire’s child: as fashion, it operates outside of traditions, authority, purposes, and craft, technique,

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skill—it is mere triviality; as critique—as couture—it is destined to a career of hurrying and searching, increasingly removed in significance and emptied of substance (one who began by making punk clothes to, as she thought, change the world, now designs clothes that no one will wear). On both sides, there occurs an impoverishment. Critique as couture consists of little more than a ranging across, without purpose or skill, the history of changing human fashions; which activity incubates the frivolity, the weakness, of fashion for the sake of an attitude that claims to keep it healthy: the modern symbiosis of the trivial and the true. At the very least, we can say that there is a deep contradiction between the two ways in which Baudelaire has been recommended to us: by Simon, as having ascribed to fashion a value; and by Foucault, as an example of modern critique. 8. But this is not all. In the early days of her work, and previous to entering the world of haute couture, Westwood, with her then partner Malcolm MacLaren, ran a shop at 430 King’s Road in London. This establishment went through a number of reincarnations, but its most memorable was probably as SEX, which sold fetish wear for the street, designed and manufactured by Westwood herself, and advertized more than effectively by her shop assistant, Jordan, who turned heads and raised eyebrows on her daily commute to work dressed, without compromise, in the stock of her trade. But, indistinctly visible behind the bold S-E-X above the door of the premises was a mess of graffiti-style lettering, which read: “Craft must have clothes, but Truth loves to go naked,” an epigram attributed to the seventeenth-century English orator, Thomas Fuller, which manages, in one fell swoop, to oppose clothes, and the technical skill that designs, makes, and wears them, to Truth in all of its purity. Which brings us, at last, back to Baudelaire, who describes the triviality of historical contingencies—for which fashion in dress is, on his account, exemplary—as indispensable to the extent that it affords cover to the nakedness of that which is abstract or True: This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of an abstract

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and indeterminable beauty, like that of the first woman before the fall of man.32 There is a painful irony in concluding this ref lection, on the problem of “keeping critique alive” in the context of a recognition of human historicity, with the old distinction between naked truth and the trappings of mere appearances. It is part of a very old doctrine, after all. That it survives, nay, that it sustains, the modern “attitude” of critique may indicate that the question of how to keep critique alive continues, in a manner of which we ought not to remain unaware, to receive the same old reply. Notes 1. Slavoj Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Žižek (London and New York: Verso, 1994). 2. Ibid., 17. 3. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007). 4. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 5. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 104–5. 6. Ibid., 109. 7. See Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964). 8. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 105. 9. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 3. 10. Ibid., 12–13. 11. Ibid., 13. 12. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 107–9. 13. Ibid., 108. 14. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 3. 15. Ibid., 12. 16. Marie Simon, Fashion in Art: The Second Empire and Impressionism (London: Zwemmer, 1995), 9. 17. For images from this and other Westwood collections, see www.viviennewestwood.com. 18. Quoted in De Marly, Worth: Father of Haute Couture (London: Elm Tree Books, 1980), 77. 19. Consuelo Marie Rockliff-Steiin, “Pre-Raphaelite Ideals and Artistic Dress,” http://www. glily.com/preraphs.html, 13/01/2010. 20. For images from this collection, see www.diorcouture.com. 21. Claire Wilcox, Vivienne Westwood (London: V&A, 2004), 20. 22. Ibid., 20. 23. Ibid., 20. 24. Simon, Fashion in Art: The Second Empire and Impressionism, 235. 25. Vivienne Westwood, epilogue to Fashion in Art: The Second Empire and Impressionism, 238–39. 26. Quoted in Wilcox, Vivienne Westwood, 17.

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27. De Marly, Worth: Father of Haute Couture, 131. 28. Of Worth, de Marly writes: “the man whose gowns where called works of art need not think of himself as a dressmaker, but as an artist. He was applying the standards and principles of fine art to dress design, and elevating the subject to a higher plane. It was not simply a craft; it was part of aesthetics . . . Worth began to stop dressing like a gentleman, and transformed himself into an artist proper, modelled after Rembrandt, with a velvet beret which he wore all the time, a f lowing coat edged with fur at the neck, and with a f loppy silk scarf knotted at his throat instead of a cravat. This was accepted artistic dress of the period; Wagner wore a velvet beret, and Tennyson favoured f lowing cloaks, while the f loppy bow was an immediate signal that the wearer was above the pretension of being a gentleman” (110). 29. In 1868, Worth dared to abolish crinolines altogether. “It was a dangerous step,” de Marly tells us, “for crinolines had been in fashion for thirteen years, and fullness had been normal in skirts since the late 1820s. To the eyes of 1868, conditioned all their lives to full skirts, a return to natural shape and slimness could only seem like indecent exposure—a revelation of fundamental feminine shape which had been concealed for generations.” Indeed, without the support of one Pauline von Metternich, a socialite with remarkable bravado, who wore Worth’s designs when others would not, de Marly judges that “Worth would have found it difficult to introduce some of his fashions” (91). 30. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 120. 31. Wilcox, Vivienne Westwood, 33 32. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 13.

CH A P T E R

N I N ET E E N

Fashion at a Glance Edward S. Casey

I Fashion is fit for the glance—and the glance for fashion. “Fashion shows”: the public scene in which fashions are first seen. But also fashion shows—it shows itself to the glance: it gives itself to it; it is devoted to it. And the glance, seeking the new, loves fashion: not so much to be fashionable as to find the fashionable as it first arises. In fashion shows, models parade before buyers and critics, exposing themselves just long enough to be taken in at a glance (or several such at the most). If the model pauses, it is only in order to be seen in a single look. A game of glances, an intrigue of looks. Or take fashion ads in newspapers and journals: they are equally there for the looking. Even if striking, they do not hold our attention. Once noted, the reader turns the page restlessly—searching for something more substantive. (Unless one designs or makes it, one does not attend to fashion; one grasps it in passing.) Even in the case of fashion journals or catalogues, inundating the reader with fashion images, the impulse is to move quickly from one image to another, skipping through them rather than looking at them intently. Their sheer multiplicity only calls for a more rapid turnover of the glances that are turned on them. Fashion on television is remarkably infrequent, even though the virtuality of the medium would seem to favor its appearance—given that televised images hurtle on in relentless succession. But when presented there—say, in a news account of a fashion show in London—it has

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the character of something having already happened: brief ly brought to existence and just as curtly vanished from it. The same goes for the place of fashion in movies, where it seems more documentary than contemporary: just part of the setting, a symptom of the historical moment in which the action of the film transpires. What of fashion set out in a display window—the newest dress style, the most up-to-date man’s sport jacket? In contrast with movies and television, which we tend to watch in sedentary torpor, now we are walking by the window, taking an active role ourselves. The result is that we cast a sidewise glance at the window, catching the display out of the corner of our eye: in a passing glance rather than in a lingering look. Walter Benjamin captured this circumstance in his Arcades Project, describing the stroll-through of the classical European passages, those predecessors of suburban malls. He emphasized the importance of the vitrine, the outer glass or “window” through which one sees the display: hence the phrase faire les vitrines, “to go window shopping.” Such shopping, in such conditions, is an exercise in spontaneous glancing. Benjamin emphasized the “now of recognizability” (das Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit) in which the display leaps into one’s look, suddenly appearing as in a f lash. Not even the metal frame of the display window is sturdy enough to contain this look, which is never fully stabilized in the shopping world of passing pedestrians. As in the flâneur’s promenade on the grands boulevards outside the arcades, there is nothing but a dispersion of glances, a disaspora of looks. In contrast with this highly socialized scene, there is the moment of isolated self-attiring and of applying makeup. These, too, are occasions of the glance. I glance at how the new suit looks in the full-length mirror, and she peeks at herself in the hand mirror she holds up to her face as she puts on blue mascara. In neither of these circumstances do I scrutinize myself: I do not gaze, I glance at myself, so as to catch a glimmer of just this aspect of my torso or my face, and in a second glance I seek another aspect of myself. A full-scale study of either part of my body would be the task of the chest doctor or the dermatologist—who must gaze at their subjects, in keeping with their methodical medical education. As Foucault shows in The Birth of the Clinic, modern clinical medicine requires a special training of the gaze as it focuses on particular pathognomic parts of the body. The act of disrobing before the doctor’s all-knowing look dramatizes this circumstance of scrutiny, and the deliberately drab jersey one wears before denuding symbolizes a situation in which fashion has no part to play. One bares one’s body to the gaze; one dresses it up for the glance.

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II This is not even to mention the mutability of fashion itself—not just in clothing styles and popular labels but also in automobile makes, computer models, favored foods, and so on. In late capitalism, the change-over of fashion is intense and unremitting, and just because of this amusing effects arise, the ties in fashion a while ago suddenly reemerge eight years later, sporting the same cut and length, bikinis go in and out of style. (There are, after all, only a limited number of sizes and shapes sustainable by any given item of clothing.) The turnover of fashionable styles, changing not just every year but every season, mimicks the glance that escorts a given style into prominence in the first place—a glance that, in its sheer visual greed, comes to recognize and support another style soon after. One basic reason for the close alliance of fashion and the glance is the endemic fickleness of both—their proneness to mutate, to exchange their intentional objects and modes of presentation as often as the human subject desires (and desire itself continuously changes course). Which is to say: each phenomenon, Fashion or Glance, is a creature of Speed. Each is dromocentric, in love with velocity for its own sake—the sheer speed of things and of oneself in acts of tracking them. No wonder they are so often paired, being brothers of speed under the f lesh. Their exemplary form of temporality is the moment—not so much the punctiform instant as the Augenblick whose philosophical significance was first singled out by Kierkegaard. As the roots of the German word signify, the moment is enacted in the look (Blick) of the eyes (Augen)—in that brief interval that takes no more time than it takes an eye to blink or to twinkle. That is time enough to seize the structure of a situation, the character of a person, the direction of events. It is the time of the glance, which leaps out from the eyes to the things seen in what seems like no time at all and brings back from these things their gist if not their outright essence. The quasisimultaneous two-beat temporality of the glance is, once again, ideally suited to the world of fashion, which delivers itself to its spectators in short and speedy spurts. The high velocity of the visual rays on which the glance is propelled is matched only by the celerity of the world’s rays that bear the content of the world to our sight. In this case, the ancient competition between intromissionist and extramissionist models of vision—the former arguing that sight proceeds from the external world inwards, the latter the converse—here reaches resolution in the partnership between glance and fashion: in this partnership, both models are true, and true at once.

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Contrast this convergence of the swiftly moving with the characteristic temporality of the gaze (which I here take as exemplary of any studied look, be it careful observation, concerted scrutiny, or intense inspection). Here the more time taken, the better—the better to become clearly cognizant of manifest features of something or to lay bare its concealed structures. In the case of the penetrating gaze, time must be taken to work through occlusive layers in order to discern “the thing itself.” The proper temporal modality of the gaze is not infinite time—which is really too much time to accomplish any finite goal—but enough time, the open time of continuance and repetition: aidion (the perduring) rather than aion (the eternal) in the distinction first made in Plato’s Timaeus. The perduring fits the laboratory and the study, the operating room and the observatory—each a world of deliberate action or ref lection, legions distant from the world of fashion, with its quick changes and mercurial motions; each a world of cursory actions and curtailed looks. Rapid eye movement is not restricted to REM sleep cycles. It occurs any time we glance, and it arises all the time when we are in the presence of fashion. It is the very antithesis of the focussed look that is at the core of the gaze. The quick motions of the eyelids, their being open and closed in a tempo so fast we can barely detect it in ourselves, contravenes the lidless eye of the gaze: the imperturbable looking outward of the Sphinx across whole deserts and many millenia. We can say of the Sphinx what Shelley said of the ruined statue of Ozymandias: “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”1 III “The surface is where most of the action is.”2 This pronouncement of J.J. Gibson’s about the character of perception in general is all the more true of that form of apperception called “the glance.”3 The glance lives from the surface of things—whether from a love of adorning and decorating them or merely from noting their bare surface features as such, their configurations and lines of force: that is, from a distinct pleasure in complicating surface structures or from an equally definite pleasure in witnessing existing complications by following the folds. Much the same is true of the life of fashion, where surfaces count enormously, both for their own sake (i.e., their color and shape and texture) and for their pleasing effects. No wonder that the term “fashion plate” has

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arisen so spontaneously in English: a fashion plate, who always wears the latest style of dress, and habitually (and usually successfully) draws attention to the surface of the cloth that encloses his or her bodily surface underneath. (The “plate” of “fashion plate” connotes “f lat,” a feature of a placid surface. Originally, a fashion plate was an illustration showing new or dominant styles of clothing.) An intrinsic aspect of any surface is its edge—where it runs out and what figure it cuts there. Both glance and fashion are enterprises of the edge. The merest glance travels to the edge of the surface on which it alights as if impelled by the visual equivalent of a magnetic force. An item of fashion often builds from the edge of the fabric of which it is composed, finding there the site of the “cut” it wishes to present to the world. Both glance and fashion are easily bored with the central field of vision—the grey intermediacy of the unconfigured mass, the indifferent middle, the protected area, the unending stretch. Each seeks to move out into the excess of the edge, where the extent and character of a surface are defined. The edge is also the place where that surface is most exposed, most vulnerable—where it is truly ec-centric, other than itself, moving into its own margins as a source of strength. Moving, too, into the wings of desire wherein the extraordinary arises in the very midst of the ordinary: “The setting-into-work of truth [in art] thrusts up the unfamiliar and extraordinary [within what is otherwise ordinary].”4 As when fashion thrusts up female f lesh, making it visible at the low-cut edges of a blouse—edges to which the greedy glance is voraciously drawn. Fashion and the glance alike make a virtue of coming to the edge—a phenomenon that furnishes the larger context of edge-work. The challenge and temptation of this coming is considerable, drawing out unusual energies. Haute couture, we can say, wishes always and only to be on the edge—the avant-garde, the cutting edge (materialized in the “cutting room” of the fashion house where crucial decisions are made in the determination of new styles). Not to be on this edge, no longer to come to it, is to be dead fashion, the decidedly unfashionable remnant of yesteryear—to be so much mere cloth falling unattractive and useless from the body. So too the glance wants always to be on the outlook. As the attentive apperceptual scout of perception, it continually seeks the new in the form of the surprising and the sudden—in short, the unexpected. The likely evolution of the glance in hominids from the need to be on constant alert for possible predators lurking in the savannah or forest made the saccadic eye movements on which the glance is based immensely

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adaptive. Such speedy shifts of foveated attention—so quick that we are not even aware of them in daily life—are handy not only when on the lookout for wild animals but also in art, as E.H. Gombrich has argued.5 It is but a short leap to the utility of saccadic swings in the experience of fashion, where we are asked to be alert to what is unexpected and not yet à la mode. To have an “eye out for fashion” is to be ready to leap (saccadus means “leap” in Latin) to an appreciation of the new in the form of the sudden and surprising, to be captivated by it in the moment: “sur-prise,” after all, signifies to be “taken over.” The glance takes us to the edge of things where surfaces lapse: it takes us to just where fashion likes to take off. In both cases, we come to the edge, we go right up to it, challenged and inspired by it—by what it conceals and what it reveals, both at once, both together. IV The reader will have noticed how often French words have come up in this brief analysis of fashion and the glance: for example, à la mode, haute couture, vitrine. Others that might just as easily have been employed include vogue, décoletté, déshabillé, grand couturier, and others. The prominence of these French terms of fashion is not accidental, given that France (especially its metropole Paris) has been for at least a century “the capitol of fashion,” and still is in certain major ways. Why is this so? I would propose that it has to do with the French passion for style: Le style c’est l’homme même is a virtual axiom of the cultural life of France since the eighteenth century. It is not a matter of what is stylized but of the elegantly adventuresome: what has life and verve but only within certain formal limits. It is as if Gallic culture could be characterized by the title of Henri Focillon’s classical book in aesthetics: La vie des formes. To be a form of any kind is to have a surface and an edge, and among the forms especially valorized by the French are those that are outré, extreme or exaggerated—those that push the envelope to its outer limit. But the most pervasive form one takes up is the figure one cuts in society, one’s profile: one’s personal style, supported by styles of fashion.6 It is not that other cultures are not style-conscious and preoccupied with what is stylish: in fact every human society is, each in its own way. The point is just that the modern and late-modern French have a special sensitivity to style, and thus for fashion: hence their exquisitely detailed vocabulary for it. Other European and other

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world cultures have borrowed this vocabulary and, with it, an entire way of thinking that is formalist in essence. In so doing, however, they are only pursuing the logic of the glance as it arises in any cultural setting. It is this logic that I have been tracing out brief ly in this essay and that I have suggested is deeply affine with the structure of fashion as it has emerged in the Western world of the past two hundred years. V “Fashion, smashion,” as it was said in the Kansas of my youth in a moralistic dismissal of high fashion. The brunt of the sarcasm bore on the conviction that fashion is somehow superficial—that it is concerned only with the trivial and the transient. In this my Kansas forebears were more right than they knew: literally so. For fashion is indeed concerned with the superficial, which means in root “on or over the surface” (i.e., via super + facies). Leaving aside other serious critiques of fashion—such as that it stems from a collective narcissism that itself derives from the perverse logic of late capitalism (whereby commodity fetishism, cosmetics, and consumer culture are intrinsically linked)—we can valorize the Kansans’ complaint and see in it a certain saving grace. When not idolized (which was the point of the complaint), fashion can be regarded as a grace note in human lives. It addresses the pleasure that human beings take in dressing up before and with each other on festive occasions—including making up one’s face and other bodily parts, putting on costumes (and taking them off in tantalizing ways), dancing and feasting, and the like. This is valid when it is not done primarily for the sake of gaining power over others—or for the sake of ceremony alone. In other words, when it is not undertaken in the Spirit of Gravity but with an allégresse or joyful lightening of the spirit, a certain deliberate lightness of being that still leaves room for the spontaneous. Taken in this spirit, fashion rejoins the glance, which has its own alleviating power—a deballasting of “the burdensome character of Dasein,”7 a deconstruction of the Spirit of Gravity. The latter is the proper province of the gaze, which allies itself with the serious and the sedimented—with what requires concentration and effort: indeed, an entire “disciplinary practice.” Rather than sticking to a single privileged thing or region (where Meaning or Structure is presumed to dwell), the glance glides from surface to surface, like a butterf ly f litting on the edges of a glacier.8

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We are left with several closely related questions: Should we stay in fashion? Should we stay up with it? Should we even put up with it? Of course not. To respect “the dictates of fashion” is to submit uncritically to the forces of late capitalism; it is to claim the privilege of the privileged. But without dressing in literal mimesis to current (much less “high”) fashion, we can glean crucial clues from the phenomenon of fashion. These include valorizing the superficial instead of dismissing it altogether, and respecting the transitory, indeed the transitional (as in D.W. Winnicott: “transitional space” as the scene of creative play). We have come to see that the superficial and the transitory/ transitional together form the spatiotemporal medium of the glance as it darts between surfaces and their edges in a special saltatory freedom from which we have much to learn in an Age of the Gaze—where sober visual scanning prevails and an ideal of complete knowledge reigns, albeit only in a strictly informational format. In a time of such need—in this dürftiger Zeit (in Hölderlin’s phrase)—we need to become attuned to the subtleties of the glance as it interacts with the modalities of fashion, each bearing the other forward into nuances of vision and comportment not otherwise possible. The collaboration of glance and fashion is entrancing, yet it is not a folie à deux; each brings the other to new reaches in a pattern of crisscrossing collusion that is unique in human experience. As I suggested in opening this essay, the glance and fashion belong together: indeed, they call for each other as close coconspirators. Each shares a passion for speed and surface and edge. Each thrives on showing—showing itself or seeing something shown. This is not to claim that they are somehow the same; instead, they are complementary in their very differences. The glance belongs properly to an individuated person, while fashion is inherently institutional, indeed historical. I can only glance out from my own face, from the very core of my being—while fashion stems from many others in massively convergent actions. In this way the subjective and the collective conjoin to enable the glance and fashion to form an unlikely, yet not altogether odd, couple—an indefinite dyad, as Plato might call it. It is indefinite and not dichotomous or divisive insofar as each member partakes of certain qualities normally characteristic of the other member. Each ref lects something of the other. Thus we seek to individualize fashion—to make it our own, to translate it into our own terms—and for this the glance proves

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invaluable, as we check out our innovations in the mirror or ask for friends to offer their appraisal. Conversely, the glance itself is more than idiosyncratic: there are whole styles of glancing that are culturally specific, as we cannot help but notice in comparing Moslem sociality with Western European: what is taken for granted in one case is forbidden in the other. An entire dialectic of taboo and permission is always at stake. This is not to say, however, that there is a fashion of the glance as such: the glance is finally an act of denuded eyes, whereas fashion requires the presence of clothing of some sort, however minimal. In the end, there are only more or less acceptable or excluded ways of looking at one another, and these in very particular places and situations (e.g., the subway versus the street, the mosque versus the stadium, the family room versus the public library). “It’s all in a glance”—this familiar phrase holds true nowhere more than in the experience of fashion. Fashion is something we take in at a glance—and cannot experience otherwise. Glancing, for its part, takes note of fashion; but it also apprehends many other things, some of which have nothing to do with fashion: passages of intense poetry, the sky and the earth, other human and animal bodies, the sun. We take in whole worlds at a glance. Fashion is among them, and is one of the most instructive. Nevertheless, despite the intimate alliances I have described, the glance eclipses fashion—while fashion, for its part, f lies from the net of its look until it meets another glance. Notes 1. The full poem is as follows: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.” 2. J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1986), p. 23.

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3. I am using “apperception” in a sense consistent with the one employed by Leibniz, for whom every robust perception is built up from myriad apperceptions or “petites perceptions.” 4. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry Language Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), p. 72. 5. “Saccades” are “the series of small, jerky movements of the eye when changing focus from one point to another” (Random House Dictionary, 2nd ed., newly revised [1993]). I have treated saccades at length in chapter six of my book, the World at a Glance (forthcoming, Indiana University Press), where I also discuss E.H. Gombrich’s thesis about the ingredients of saccades to the perception of art. 6. The word “style” derives from stylus, any instrument for making marks in a surface, typically those of articulate language. 7. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 173. 8. Curiously, “glacier” is a linguistic cousin of “glance” via the intermediate terms glaichier Old French for “to slip, slide” and glace, modern French for “ice,” as well as lancher, Old Norman English for “to launch.”

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CH A P T E R

T W E N T Y

Plato’s Greater Hippias Translate d by A l be rt A . A nde r s on

(unabridged) Copyright ©2006 AGORA PUBLICATIONS, INC. 17 Dean Street Millis, MA 02054 All rights reserved This is an unabridged translation of Plato’s Greater Hippias. Numbers in brackets are the universal Greek text pages. PLATO’S Greater Hippias Characters Socrates Hippias [281] Socrates: Beautiful and wise Hippias, it has been a long time since you have landed in Athens. Hippias: My time is not my own, Socrates! Whenever Elis needs to do business with another republic, I am the first citizen they choose to be their ambassador. They think I am the one who is most capable to judge and interpret messages from any other republic. I have led delegations to many republics, but I have gone most often to Sparta where I have handled the most important matters. That explains why I come here so seldom.

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Socrates: Hippias, that’s how it is to be a truly wise and talented man! In your private life, you are able to earn a lot of money from the young and provide them with even greater benefits. And as a public servant, you are able to do a lot of good in your republic, as one must who wants to be honored rather than ignored by the people. But Hippias, why is it that men from earlier times who are famous for their wisdom—I mean Pitticus and Bias, Thales from Miletus and his followers, and later ones up to the time of Anaxagoras—clearly avoided political life? Hippias: Socrates, is it not because they were powerless to apply their wisdom both to the public and private realms? Socrates: Then, by the gods, your craft is just like the ones in which the skill of the earlier craftsmen is poor when compared to those of today. In the same way, can we say that your skill as a sophist far surpasses the inferior ability of the ancients? Hippias: That’s exactly right, Socrates. [282] Socrates: So, Hippias, if Bias came back to life today, his wisdom would be a joke when compared to yours—in the same way that sculptors say Daedalus would be ridiculous if he were reborn and produced works like the ones that made him famous. Hippias: What you say is true, Socrates. However, I usually praise the ancients and others who came before us more than I do the current generation. Although I fear the jealousy of the living, I fear the anger of the dead even more. Socrates: You are putting beautiful thoughts into beautiful words, Hippias, if you ask me, and I affirm the truth of what you say. The skill that you sophists have developed in managing both public and private affairs has definitely increased over the years. Consider Gorgias, the sophist from Leontini, who came here as ambassador because he was best qualified to deal with public matters. He became famous as the best speaker in the legislature. In private he gave demonstrations to young people, earning him a lot of money in this city. Or, if you prefer, take our friend Prodicus who has come here often on official business. During his most recent visit from Ceos, he became famous by speaking before the Athenian Council of 500; and he gave private demonstrations and instruction to the young that provided him with amazing wealth. But none of the famous men from earlier times thought it was appropriate to collect money in payment for public service or for giving demonstrations of their

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wisdom to the people. They were so simpleminded that they never realized the enormous value of money. But other than Protagoras, Gorgias and Prodicus have made more money with their wisdom than any master of any other skill. Hippias: Socrates, you have no idea how beautiful this really is. You would be amazed if you knew how much money I have made. I will give you just one example. Once I went to Sicily when Protagoras was staying there. Although he was older and more famous, in a short time I, so much younger, had earned more than a hundred and fifty minas, and in one tiny place named Inycus, I made more than twenty minas. When I came home and gave that money to my father, he and all the other citizens were astonished. I believe that I have made more money than any two sophists put together. Socrates: What you say really is beautiful, Hippias, and it is powerful evidence of your own wisdom and that of other people of today when compared to wisdom of the past. [283] Based on what you say, in earlier times people must have been quite ignorant. What people say about Anaxagoras is the opposite of what happened to you. He inherited a lot of money but neglected it, and it all vanished. His wisdom lacked reason! They tell similar stories about other so-called wise men from the past. So, as I said, this seems to be proof for the skill of the present generation in contrast with those who came before. Everyone agrees that above all wise people must be wise for themselves, and the best sign of success is making the most money. That’s all we need to say about that. Now tell me, Hippias, in which city you have visited did you make the most money? I suppose it was in Sparta where you have traveled most often. Hippias: Heavens no, Socrates! Socrates: What? Is that where you made the least? Hippias: I have never made any money there. Socrates: That’s amazing and hard to believe, Hippias! But tell me, isn’t your skill the kind that promotes excellence and improves those who learn it? Hippias: It makes them a lot better, Socrates. Socrates: Were you able to improve the sons of the Inycenes but lacked the ability to make the sons of the Spartans better? Hippias: Not at all. Socrates: Then do the Sicilians want to improve, and the Spartans do not?

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Hippias: No, the Spartans also want to become better. Socrates: So they avoided your company because they lack money? Hippias: No. They have plenty of money. Socrates: Then what could be the reason, Hippias? If they had the money and you had the ability to provide them with the greatest benefits, why did they not send you away loaded with cash? Oh! Could it be that the Spartans are able to educate their children better than you would? Is that how we can explain it? Would you agree with that? Hippias: Definitely not. Socrates: Then were you unable to persuade the young Spartans that they would make greater progress toward excellence by studying with you rather than with their own instructors? Or perhaps you were unable to convince their fathers that if they care for their sons they should hand them over to you rather than doing the teaching themselves. Surely they did not resent having their sons become as excellent as possible. Hippias: No, I don’t think they resented it. Socrates: Sparta is famous for having good laws. Hippias: It is. [284] Socrates: And in a republic with good laws, excellence is valued above all else. Hippias: That’s true. Socrates: And you of all people know best how to transmit excellence to others. Hippias: Yes, Socrates, the best by far. Socrates: Would you agree that a person who knows best how to teach the skill of training and riding horses would be more honored and rewarded in Thessaly than in any other part of Greece? And would it not also be true of any place outside of Greece that zealously pursues that skill? Hippias: I do agree. Socrates: Would Sparta or any other place in Greece that has good laws honor the person who can transmit the knowledge most important for excellence, and would a person who wants to make the most money be able to do so in that kind of place? Or do you think that kind of teacher would do better in Sicily or Inycus? Is that what we should think, Hippias? If you say so, we must believe it.

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Hippias: Socrates, the Spartans have inherited a tradition that forbids them to change their laws or educate their sons in any way that departs from longstanding custom. Socrates: What are you saying? Is it not the tradition in Sparta to do what is right rather than make mistakes? Hippias: Socrates, I would not put it that way. Socrates: Would they not do what is right by educating young people better rather than worse? Hippias: They would, but education by foreigners is against the law. Rest assured that if anyone ever made money there for educating, I would have made the most by far. They are always delighted to hear me speak and reward me with applause. But, as I said, it would be unlawful for me to teach their young people. Socrates: Hippias, would you say that law harms a republic or benefits it? Hippias: I think that law is intended to benefit the republic, but sometimes it is badly made and turns out to be harmful. Socrates: Then you agree that those who make the laws do so seeking the greatest good for their republic. Would you also agree that without good laws it is impossible to have a good republic? Hippias: Yes, I would agree. Socrates: Therefore, when lawmakers fail to achieve what is good, they have also failed to attain what is right and lawful. Hippias: Socrates, strictly speaking that is true—but people are not used to seeing it that way. Socrates: Those who know, Hippias, or those who do not know? Hippias: The majority. Socrates: Are those people—the majority—the ones who know the truth? Hippias: Of course not. Socrates: But I suppose those who know think that what is beneficial—not what is harmful—is what is truly lawful for all people. Do you agree? Hippias: Yes, I agree that they think that is how it is. Socrates: But it really is as those who know think it is. Hippias: Certainly. Socrates: As I recall, you said that it is more beneficial for the Spartans to receive your education—which is foreign—than to be taught by native Spartans. [285]

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Hippias: I did say that, and it is true. Socrates: Hippias, did you also say that what is beneficial is also more lawful? Hippias: Yes, I did say that. Socrates: Then, according to you, it is more lawful for the Spartans to be educated by Hippias and unlawful to be educated by their fathers—assuming they will benefit more from you. Hippias: Socrates, they certainly would benefit more from me. Socrates: Then the Spartans are violating the law by not entrusting their sons to you and by not paying you to educate them. Hippias: I agree, because you are arguing on my side, and there is no reason for me to oppose what you say. Socrates: So, my friend, we find that the Spartans, who are considered to be the most law abiding of all people, really break the law concerning the most important matter. But by the gods, Hippias, tell me what topic they have heard from you that delights them so much and causes them to applaud. It must be a subject you know well—such as the stars and celestial motion. Hippias: Definitely not! They want nothing to do with such things. Socrates: Well, are they eager to hear about geometry? Hippias: On the contrary. To be blunt, many of them hardly know how to count. Socrates: Then they must be even less interested in hearing your lectures on arithmetic. Hippias: Far less. Socrates: What about the topic you know better than anyone else—how to make precise linguistic distinctions concerning the power of letters, syllables, rhythm, and harmony? Hippias: Harmony and letters? You must be joking! Socrates: Hippias, what are the topics that give them so much pleasure and generate so much applause? You will have to tell me, because I cannot seem to find them by myself. Hippias: Socrates, when they hear about human genealogies, especially of heroes, as well as stories about the founding of ancient republics or anything else relating to antiquity, they adore it. Because of them, I have been forced to study and memorize such stories and rehearse them many times. Socrates: Good heavens, Hippias, you are lucky the Spartans don’t crave hearing you recite the list of all the Athenian leaders since the time of Solon. You would have a hard time memorizing that!

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Hippias: What do you mean? I can remember fifty names, even if I hear them only once. Socrates: Of course, I forgot about your phenomenal memory! [286] That helps explain why you delight the Spartans so much and why they use you the way children use old women who entertain them with all kinds of stories. Hippias: Yes, by Zeus, and recently they honored me greatly for talking in detail about the finest and most praiseworthy subjects and activities to which young people should devote themselves. I composed an extremely beautiful speech on that topic—one that is remarkable for its choice of words as well as its overall style. The introduction and outline of my speech went something like this: After Troy was conquered, my speech begins, Neoptolemus asked Nestor about the best practices young people should follow to become truly famous. Then it is Nestor’s turn to speak, and he presents several rules to follow for achieving the best life. I gave that speech in Sparta. Eudicus, the son of Apemantus, asked me to repeat it here in Athens, so I plan to give it the day after tomorrow in the schoolroom of Pheidostratus, along with several other things worth hearing. Socrates, you should attend and bring along some others who can assess the merit of such presentations. Socrates: I’ll be there, Hippias, if the gods are willing. But just now you have reminded me of a small question on this very topic. Recently I was thrown into a state of great embarrassment when I was criticizing aspects of some speeches for being ugly and praising other aspects for being beautiful, when someone challenged me in an insolent way. He said something like this: “You, Socrates, how do you know what kinds of things are beautiful and ugly? Come on, can you tell me what beauty is?” I’m not worth much when it comes to answering such questions, so I was completely at a loss. When I left that conversation, I was angry and blamed myself, vowing that the next time I meet one of you who know, I would listen and learn from you; then once I had learned and practiced what I needed to know, I would go back to my attacker and resume the verbal battle. Hippias, you have come along at just the right time to teach me about the nature of beauty itself. Please speak as precisely as possible so that I might avoid looking ridiculous for a second time—because you have a clear understanding of such things, and this is but a small portion of your vast knowledge.

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Hippias: Yes, Socrates, it is small and hardly worth mentioning. Socrates: Then I will be able to learn it quickly, and nobody will ever be able to refute me again. Hippias: Nobody at all, or what I do would be crude and unprofessional. [287] Socrates: Those are good words, Hippias, especially if we can defeat my opponent. Now would it bother you if I were to take his side and when you respond I would disagree with what you say? That would provide excellent training for me as I practice raising his kind of objections—although I have some experience with raising objections. If it is not a problem for you, I will play the part of the critic so I can learn more effectively. Hippias: Go ahead and pose your objections. As I just said, this is not a difficult question. Actually, I could teach you to answer much more challenging ones so that no human being could refute you. Socrates: Ah, Hippias, those are more wonderful promises! Well, then, since you encourage me to do so, I will assume the role of the man who posed the questions and play his part as well as I can by interrogating you. Now if you presented that speech you mentioned to him—the one about the finest activities for young men—he would let you finish and then, as if by habit, would immediately pose his question about beauty. He would ask: “Stranger from Elis, is it not because of justice that people are just?” Hippias, please answer as if he were questioning you. Hippias: I answer that it is definitely because of justice. Socrates: So, would you agree that justice is something? Hippias: Certainly. Socrates: And because of wisdom wise people are wise and because of goodness every good thing is good. Hippias: No doubt. Socrates: And this is true because they are real. Surely it could not be because they are unreal. Hippias: Yes, they must be real. Socrates: Can we also say that beauty makes all beautiful things beautiful? Hippias: Yes, beauty. Socrates: And beauty really exists? Hippias: Yes, it really exists. How could it be otherwise? Socrates: Then he will say: “Tell me, stranger, what is beauty?”

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Hippias: Socrates, does this man want to know anything other than what is beautiful? Socrates: Hippias, I think he wants to know what beauty is. Hippias: What is the difference between those two questions? Socrates: Don’t you think there is a difference? Hippias: No, there is no difference. Socrates: I’m sure you know best, Hippias. But please think again. He asked not about what is beautiful but about what beauty is. Hippias: My good friend, I understand, and I will give him an answer that he cannot refute. The truth is that a beautiful virgin is beautiful. Socrates: You have answered beautifully and eloquently, Hippias! If I answer him that way, will I have answered correctly, and will he be unable to refute me? [288] Hippias: Socrates, how could he refute you if you say what everyone believes and if everyone who hears your answer will swear that your answer is correct? Socrates: Well, then, let me rehearse the answer that I should give him. He will examine me like this: “Come on, Socrates, let’s hear your answer. Given all these things you say are beautiful, what must beauty itself be to justify calling them beautiful?” And I will respond by saying: “The reason is that a beautiful virgin is beautiful.” Hippias: Do you think he will still dare to refute you? Could he attack you by saying that this example is not beautiful? If he does, he is the one who will look ridiculous. Socrates: I am sure he will attack me, but whether he will look ridiculous remains to be seen. Let me tell you what he will say. Hippias: Please do. Socrates: “You are amusing, Socrates,” he will say. “But isn’t a beautiful mare also beautiful? Even the god praised mares in an oracle.” How should we reply, Hippias? Shouldn’t we say that a fine mare is beautiful? How could we be so bold as to deny that a beautiful thing is beautiful? Hippias: That’s right, Socrates. And what the god said is also true; we breed beautiful mares in our country! Socrates: “Well,” he will say, “and what about a beautiful [musical instrument such as a] lyre? Is that not beautiful?” Should we agree with him, Hippias? Hippias: Yes.

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Socrates: I know his ways, Hippias, so I am sure he will next ask this: “My good friend, what about a fine pot? Is that not also beautiful?” Hippias: Socrates, who is this man? He must be coarse and uneducated to dare bring such vulgar and common things into a serious discussion? Socrates: Yes, Hippias, that’s the kind of person he is—not elegant but crude—always concerned only about the truth. But even so, we must answer him. Here is what first comes to my mind: What if the pot were made by a good potter, were smooth, round, and skillfully fired—like some beautiful ones I have seen with two handles that hold more than seventeen quarts? If that were the kind of pot he was asking about, would we not have to say that it is beautiful? How could we deny that such a beautiful thing is beautiful? Hippias: Socrates, we could not deny it. Socrates: He will persist: “A fine pot is beautiful, is it not? Answer!” Hippias: I suppose it is, when it is beautifully made. But, on the whole, it is not worthy of being judged as beautiful when compared with a mare, a virgin, and all other beautiful things. [289] Socrates: Well, Hippias, now I understand how I should reply to him. “My good man, you do not seem to realize that what Heraclitus says is true: The most beautiful ape is ugly when compared to the human race! By the same token, the most beautiful pot is ugly when compared with virgins—so says Hippias the wise.” Is that not right, Hippias? Hippias: Yes, Socrates, you gave the right answer. Socrates: Now listen to this, because I know what he will say next. “But, Socrates, if we compare virgins to gods, will we not get the same result as when we compared pots to virgins? The most beautiful virgin will seem to be ugly! Heraclitus, whom you just quoted, also says that if we compare the wisest people with the gods, they will seem to be apes in wisdom, beauty, and everything else. Hippias, should we agree that the most beautiful virgin is ugly when compared with the gods? Hippias: Nobody would deny that, Socrates. Socrates: Well, if we admit that, he will laugh and say: “Socrates, do you recall the original question?” And I will answer that it was about the nature of beauty itself. And then he will point out that my response provided something that is no more beautiful

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than ugly. And I agree with him. Hippias, my friend, what would you advise me to say? Hippias: That is what I would recommend. It is true that human beings are not beautiful when compared to the gods. Socrates: He will point out that if he had asked about what is both beautiful and ugly, I would have answered correctly. He will then ask: “Do you still think that beauty itself—the form that arranges and adorns everything that is beautiful and brings it to light—is a virgin, a mare, or a lyre?” Hippias: Socrates, if that is what he wants, it is easy to tell him what the beautiful is—that by which all things can be adorned and by which, when it is added, makes everything appear to be beautiful. He must really be simpleminded, knowing nothing about beautiful things. Here is how you should reply to him: “This beauty you are seeking is nothing other than gold.” He will be at a total loss and will be unable to refute you. Everyone knows that when it is adorned with gold, even what previously appeared to be ugly becomes beautiful. Socrates: Hippias, you have no idea how ruthless this man is. It is not easy to get him to accept anything. [290] Hippias: What do you mean, Socrates? He must accept what is true, or he will look ridiculous. Socrates: My friend, he will not only reject that reply, but he will mock me brutally: “Socrates, are you out of your mind? Do you think that Phidias is a bad sculptor?” And I will reply: “Not at all!” Hippias: And you will be right, Socrates! Socrates: Of course I am. But once I affirm that Phidias is a good sculptor, he will ask this: “Do you think that Phidias did not know this beauty you are talking about?” Then I will ask: “What is the point of your question?” And he will say: “The point is that Phidias did not make Athena’s eyes out of gold, nor the rest of her face, nor her hands or feet, which he would have done if they would be most beautiful that way. Instead, he made them out of ivory. I suppose he made this mistake out of ignorance, because he did not know that adding gold makes everything beautiful.” Hippias, how should we reply when he says that? Hippias: That is not hard. We should say that Phidias did the right thing; ivory is also beautiful. Socrates: Then he will ask: “Why did he not make the middle part of the eyes out of ivory? Instead he made it out of stone,

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acquiring stone that resembles ivory as much as possible.” Perhaps we should tell him that fine stone is also beautiful. Is that how we should reply, Hippias? Hippias: We should definitely say that—as long as it is appropriate. Socrates: And it is ugly when it is not appropriate. Shall I say that? Hippias: Yes, say that—when it is not appropriate. Socrates: Now he will say: “Then is it true, Wise One, that gold and ivory make things beautiful when they are appropriate and ugly when they are not appropriate?” Shall we deny that or agree with him? Hippias: We should at least agree that whatever is appropriate to a particular thing makes that thing beautiful. Socrates: He is not finished: “When someone is boiling a beautiful pea soup in the beautiful pot of which we were just speaking, is a golden spoon or a fig-wood spoon the appropriate one?” Hippias: Heracles! Who is this man, Socrates? Socrates: You wouldn’t know him even if I were to tell you his name. Hippias: At least I know that he is an ignorant blockhead! Socrates: He is certainly a pest, Hippias, but what shall we say to him? Which of the two spoons is appropriate for that soup and that pot? Clearly it is the one made of fig-wood. It is more fragrant and would make the soup taste better and, at the same time, it is not likely to break the pot, spilling the soup, putting out the fire, and depriving the guests of their excellent treat. But the golden spoon might do all of those things. So, it appears that we should say that the fig-wood spoon is more appropriate than the golden one. Or do you disagree? Hippias: No, it is more appropriate. But, personally, I would not continue speaking with a person who asks such questions! [291] Socrates: That’s right, my friend, it would not be appropriate for you to be contaminated by that kind of language—not you with such beautiful clothes, beautiful shoes, and your fame for wisdom throughout Greece. But it does not matter if I associate with such a person, so please teach me how to deal with him. “Now if the fig-wood spoon is more appropriate,” he will say, “does that not mean it will be the more beautiful? Socrates, you said that the more appropriate is the more beautiful.” Hippias, should we agree that the fig-wood spoon is more beautiful than the golden one?

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Hippias: Socrates, would you like me to give you a definition of beauty that will free you from this endless conversation? Socrates: Of course I would. But first tell me which spoon is more appropriate and, therefore, more beautiful. Hippias: Well, if you really want to continue talking to him, tell him that it is the one made of fig-wood. Socrates: Now go ahead and say what you were going to say, because if I insist that the beautiful is gold, it seems that gold will turn out to be no more beautiful than fig-wood. So, what is your new definition of beauty? Hippias: Here it is. I think you are looking for something that will never appear to be ugly anywhere to anyone. Socrates: Hippias, that is exactly what I have in mind. Hippias: Then listen to this. If anyone can refute this, then I know nothing at all. Socrates: I can’t wait. Hippias: I say that for everyone everywhere it is most beautiful to be rich, healthy, honored by the Greeks, to provide a beautiful funeral for his parents, and, after reaching a ripe old age, to receive a magnificent burial by his own children. Socrates: Bravo, Hippias! You have given a wonderful and powerful response, one that is worthy of you. I really appreciate your helping me as much as you can. But I’m sorry to say that this volley did not hit the target. Now I’m sure he will laugh at us more than ever. Hippias: That will be misplaced laughter, Socrates! When he has nothing better to say, he laughs at us, but he will really be laughing at himself; and everyone present will laugh at him. [292] Socrates: That is possible; but after I give that answer, I predict that he will do more than just laugh at me. Hippias: What do you mean? Socrates: I mean that if he happens to have a walking stick, and if I don’t escape by running away, he will try to beat me. Hippias: What are you saying, Socrates? Does he think he owns you? Would he not be arrested and punished for doing that? Or does Athens ignore justice and allow the citizens to beat each other without cause? Socrates: That is absolutely forbidden. Hippias: Then he will be punished for attacking you unjustly. Socrates: I don’t think so, Hippias. If I were to give that answer, I think the beating would be justified.

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Hippias: Socrates, if that is what you believe, then I agree with you. Socrates: Would you like to hear why I think the beating would be justified if I gave that reply? Or will you, too, beat me without a hearing? Hippias: It would be appalling for me not to hear your case, so what do you have to say? Socrates: I will portray him as I did before, but I will not use the same kind of harsh and hostile language he uses in attacking me. You can be sure he will say something like this: “Socrates, do you think it would be unjust for anyone to receive a beating who sings such a long and unmusical dithyramb, does so out of tune, and is a long way from answering the question that was asked?” I will ask him: “What do you mean?” He will respond: “What do I mean? Do you not remember that I asked you about beauty itself? I am seeking that which when added makes everything beautiful, including what is stone, wood, human, or divine as well as every action and every truth. I asked you this: What is beauty itself? But you seem to be unable to hear my question, as if you were a stone—actually, a millstone—sitting next to me, without ears and lacking a brain.” Hippias, would it bother you if I become frightened of him and answer this way: “But Hippias said that this is the beautiful when I asked him, as you asked me, about what is always beautiful to everyone.” What do you say, Hippias, will you be annoyed if I say that? Hippias: Socrates, I am certain that what I said really is beautiful to everyone—nobody will deny that! Socrates: Then he will ask: “Will it be beautiful in the future as well, because beauty is always beautiful.” Hippias: Certainly. Socrates: “And it was beautiful in the past.” Hippias: It was. Socrates: Then he will ask: “Did this stranger from Elis also say that it would have been beautiful for Achilles to be buried after his parents and after Aeacus, his grandfather—and everyone who is descended from the gods? And is this also true for the gods themselves?” [293] Hippias: What? Tell him to go hang himself! This person’s questions are blasphemous! Socrates: But when someone else asks that question, perhaps it is not blasphemous to say that these things are so.

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Hippias: Perhaps. Socrates: Then he will say: “Perhaps you are the one who says that it is always beautiful for everyone to be buried by their children and to bury their parents. Or did you not include Heracles and the others we just mentioned when you said everyone”? Hippias: I did not say it applies to the gods! Socrates: “Evidently it does not apply to heroes either.” Hippias: Not those who were children of the gods. Socrates: “What about those who were not?” Hippias: It certainly does apply to them. Socrates: “So, based on what you said, it is blasphemous and ugly for heroes such as Tantalus, Dardanus, and Zethus, but it is beautiful for Pelops because of the way he was born.” Hippias: Yes, that’s what I think. Socrates: He will continue: “What you think now is the opposite of what you said before—that to bury your parents and be buried by your children is sometimes ugly for some people. It seems impossible for this always to be beautiful for everyone. This definition of beauty has encountered the same difficulty as the ones we discussed before—the ones with the virgin and the pot—but the answer that it is beautiful to some but not to others is even more ridiculous.” Then the man will say, “Socrates, you are still unable to answer the question I asked: What is beauty itself?” Hippias, if I reply as you propose, he will rebuke me with such words. That is how he usually talks to me. But sometimes he seems to feel sorry for me because of my immaturity and lack of education, and he makes a suggestion, asking whether I think beauty is this or that—whatever we happen to be talking about at the time. Hippias: What do you mean, Socrates? Socrates: I will explain. “Poor Socrates,” he might say, “don’t give answers of that kind and in that way, because they are simpleminded and easy to refute. Consider an idea that we encountered in an earlier discussion. We said that gold is beautiful when it is appropriate, but it is not beautiful when it is inappropriate; and all other things are beautiful when they are appropriate. So, let us analyze the nature of appropriateness to see if it is beauty.” Hippias, I am always tempted to agree with such proposals, because I don’t know what else to say. But what about you—do you think that the appropriate is beauty?

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Hippias: That is entirely right, Socrates. Socrates: Let’s examine it to make sure we are not being deceived. Hippias: Yes, we should examine it. Socrates: Let’s see, are we saying that appropriateness, when it is present, makes things appear to be beautiful, to be beautiful, or neither of these alternatives? [294] Hippias: I think it is what makes them appear beautiful. For example, even if people are unattractive, whenever they put on clothes or shoes that fit well, they will appear to be more beautiful. Socrates: But if the appropriate makes them appear more beautiful than they really are, then it would be a kind of trick that deceives us about beauty. Certainly that is not what we are seeking, is it Hippias? We are seeking that which makes all things beautiful, which is analogous to what makes all big things big—by exceeding. It is by going beyond other things that big things are big, even if they do not appear to be big. Similarly, we want to say that beauty is what makes beautiful things beautiful, whether or not they appear to be so. Beauty could not be what is appropriate, because—according to you— that makes things appear to be more beautiful than they are, rather than letting them appear as they are. But we are trying to identify what causes things to be beautiful, whether they seem to be or not. That is what we are seeking when we search for beauty. Hippias: But Socrates, the appropriate makes things both appear and be beautiful. Socrates: Then it would be impossible for things that are beautiful not to appear to be beautiful if what causes them to be beautiful pervades them. Hippias: Yes, it would be impossible. Socrates: Then, Hippias, can we agree that laws and practices and everything else that is beautiful appears to be beautiful to everyone and that they believe it to be beautiful? Or should we say the opposite—that most people are ignorant about such things, and that their ignorance causes the greatest conf lict and disagreement in private among individuals and in public among communities? Hippias: We can agree on the second alternative, Socrates, that people are ignorant about such things.

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Socrates: People would not be ignorant if the appearance of beauty were present to them, and it would be present if the appropriate were the same as the beautiful—if it both made things appear to be beautiful and also caused them to be beautiful. Then the appropriate, by making things actually beautiful would be the beauty we are seeking—that which actually causes things to be beautiful but not what only makes them appear beautiful. If, on the contrary, the appropriate only makes things appear to be beautiful, it would not be the beauty we are seeking, because it does not cause them to be beautiful. The same cause cannot make things both appear and be beauty or anything else. So let us choose: Which of the two is the appropriate—that which makes things appear to be beautiful or that which is beautiful? Hippias: Socrates, in my opinion the appropriate is that which makes things appear beautiful. Socrates: Oh no, Hippias! Because appropriateness has turned out to be something other than beauty, the true nature of beauty has once again escaped our grasp. Hippias: By the gods, Socrates! I find that quite odd! [295] Socrates: My friend, let’s not give up yet! I still hope that the nature of the beautiful will become clear. Hippias: Of course, Socrates, it’s not that hard to find. I’m sure that if I were left alone to consider this matter by myself I would be able to tell you precisely what it is. Socrates: Don’t brag, Hippias. You know how difficult this has already been. I’m afraid it may become angry with us and try even harder to escape. But I’m talking nonsense, because I’m sure you will find the answer as soon as you are alone. But I would appreciate your looking for it in my presence, or even better that we try to discover it together as we have been doing. It will be wonderful if we find it, but if not, I will accept my fate and you will go away and easily uncover it. But if we do find it together, then I will not have to bother you by asking about what you found on your own. So, once again let’s consider the idea of beauty. Please give me your full attention and make sure I am not just babbling. I propose that we say this: whatever is useful is beautiful. Here is why I suggest this: We do not say that eyes are beautiful when they are unable to see but, rather, when they are useful for seeing. Do you agree? Hippias: Yes.

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Socrates: We speak the same way about the whole body— sometimes it is beautiful for running and sometimes for wrestling. The same is true of all animals—a beautiful horse, rooster, or quail. And this also applies to things such as tools, to vehicles on land and sea—such as cargo ships and battleships—and to all musical and other artistic instruments, and even to laws and customs. We call all of them beautiful in much the same way, considering how each of them is formed either by art or by nature. Whatever is useful we call beautiful, and we mean that it is beautiful to the extent and on the occasion that it is useful for its unique purpose. We call ugly whatever has no such use. Hippias, do you share this opinion? Hippias: Yes, Socrates, I do. Socrates: Then we are correct in saying that the useful, more than anything else, is beautiful. Hippias: Yes, Socrates, we are right about that. Socrates: Then whatever is able to achieve its particular purpose is useful, and whatever lacks such power is useless. Hippias: Certainly. Socrates: So, power is beautiful, and lack of power is ugly. Hippias: That is absolutely right! [296] Socrates, we have strong support for that in many aspects of life, but especially in politics. Having political power in our own republic is the most beautiful of all things, and the lack of such power is the most ugly. Socrates: Well said. But then it would seem to follow that wisdom is the most beautiful and ignorance is the most shameful of all things. Hippias: What is on your mind, Socrates? Socrates: Wait a minute, my friend! I just had an alarming thought about what we are saying. Hippias: What could possibly worry you now, Socrates? Our discussion just took a magnificent leap forward. Socrates: I wish that were so, Hippias, but let’s examine this issue together. Would it be possible to do something if you did not know how to do it and lacked the power to carry it out? Hippias: Of course not! How could you do what you lack the power to do? Socrates: Then people who make mistakes and do something wrong that they did not intend to do would never do such things if they lacked the power to do them? Do you agree? Hippias: Obviously.

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Socrates: And people who have the power to do something do it through ability, not through the lack of power. Hippias: Certainly. Socrates: Everyone who does anything has the power to do it. Hippias: Yes. Socrates: But beginning in childhood, people perform many more bad actions than good ones; and they make a lot of mistakes they do not intend. Hippias: That’s true. Socrates: Hippias, do we really want to say that the power to perform useful but evil actions is beautiful? Or is the opposite true? Hippias: Socrates, in my opinion the opposite is true. Socrates: Well, Hippias, then it appears that the beauty we are seeking is not the powerful and the useful. Hippias: But Socrates, they are beautiful if they are powerful and useful for what is good. Socrates: Then our claim that the powerful and the useful are beauty itself has vanished. Hippias, perhaps we really meant to say that power and usefulness for achieving what is good is beauty. Hippias: Yes, I believe that is what we were trying to say. Socrates: Then it is beneficial. Or is that not so? Hippias: I agree with you, Socrates. Socrates: That means beautiful bodies, beautiful laws and customs, wisdom, and all the other things we have been talking about are beautiful because they are beneficial. Hippias: That’s clear. Socrates: Hippias, then it seems that the beneficial is the beautiful. Hippias: Definitely. Socrates: And the beneficial is what brings about the good. Hippias: Definitely. Socrates: Now what brings something about is its cause. Is that right? Hippias: It is. Socrates: Then the beautiful is the cause of the good. Hippias: It is. [297] Socrates: But Hippias, surely the cause and what it causes are different. The cause could not be the cause of itself. Think about it this way. Did we not say that the cause is that which brings something about?

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Hippias: We did. Socrates: So the cause only brings about something that comes into being; it does not bring about what causes it to come into being. Is that right? Hippias: Yes, you are right. Socrates: Therefore what comes into being and what brings it about are two different things. Hippias: Yes. Socrates: Then the cause does not cause itself but what comes into being through it. Hippias: Of course. Socrates: Then if beauty is the cause of goodness, the good comes into being through beauty. That is why we fervently pursue thinking and all other beautiful things—because their offspring, the good, is worthy of our zeal. Based on what we are discovering, the beautiful is a kind of father to the good. Hippias: That’s right, Socrates. And you said it beautifully. Socrates: But the father is not the son, and the son is not the father. Is that also well said? Hippias: Yes, that, too. Socrates: The cause is not what comes into being, and what comes into being is not the cause. Hippias: What you say is true. Socrates: By the gods, my friend, then beauty is not good and goodness is not beautiful. In light of what we have just said, do you think that is possible? Hippias: No, it definitely does not seem possible. Socrates: Are we satisfied with that outcome? Are we willing to say that beauty is not good and goodness is not beautiful? Hippias: No, Socrates, I am not at all satisfied. Socrates: I agree with you, Hippias. I am less satisfied with this than with any of the other things we have said. Hippias: You are probably right. Socrates: Then it is also probable that we were wrong in believing, as we did before, that the best explanation is that what is beneficial and useful is the same as beauty. Nor is the power to bring about something good the same as beauty. Perhaps it is even more ridiculous than our earlier answers when we equated beauty with virgins and all those other things. Hippias: So it seems.

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Socrates: Hippias, I don’t know where to turn; I am at a complete loss. Do you have anything to say? Hippias: Not right now, but as I said earlier, I’m sure I will figure it out after I have a chance think it through. Socrates: Hippias, I have such a strong desire to know about this that I can’t wait for you to do that. Besides, I think I may have found the way. What if we say that whatever delights us is the beautiful? I don’t mean every pleasure but only what we enjoy through the senses of seeing and hearing. Would that help us in our quest? [298] Are we not delighted when we see beautiful human beings and works of art such as paintings and sculpture? What about music and all other beautiful sounds, speeches, and myths? Don’t they also delight us? Perhaps this is how we should answer that brash man who has been questioning us: “My good man, beauty is whatever delights us through seeing and hearing.” Do you think that will bring an end to his attacks? Hippias: Socrates, in my opinion we have now explained what beauty is. Socrates: Not so fast, Hippias. What should we say about laws and customs? Are they beautiful because they please us through seeing and hearing, or are they another kind of beauty? Hippias: Perhaps those things might escape his attention, Socrates. Socrates: By dog, Hippias, they will definitely not escape the man in whose presence I would be most ashamed of pretending to talk sense when I was really talking nonsense. Hippias: Who is that? Socrates: The son of Sophroniscus.1 He would be no more willing to let me accept such things without examining them than he would allow me to pretend to know what I do not know. Hippias: Well, now that you bring it up, I think that the laws are an entirely different matter. Socrates: Hold on, Hippias. Even though we think we have found a solution to our problem about beauty, we may be caught in the same trap as before. Hippias: What do you mean, Socrates? Socrates: I’ll tell you what now occurs to me. See if you think there is something to it. Even if it might be possible to show that the matter of law and customs does lie within what delights us through seeing and hearing, let’s confine ourselves to the

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claim that what gives pleasure through seeing and hearing is beautiful and ignore laws and customs. How would we respond if we were asked the following question by the man I was talking about or by anyone else? “Hippias and Socrates, why have you selected from what is delightful only the pleasures that arise from seeing and hearing and designated them as beautiful, ignoring the pleasures that come from the other senses? What about the perceptions related to food, drink, sexual intercourse, and similar things? Are you saying that these things do not delight us and that they provide no pleasure? Does pleasure come only from seeing and hearing?” How shall we answer, Hippias? Hippias: Obviously we should say that these other things provide great pleasure. Socrates: But then he will ask: “Then if they are no less pleasures than the others, why do you separate them from beauty and refuse to call them beautiful?” [299] We will answer: “Because people would laugh at us if we said that eating is not pleasurable but it is beautiful or that a delightful odor is not pleasant but beautiful. And as far as sexual intercourse is concerned, everyone would disagree and insist that it is most pleasant but that it should be enjoyed in private where nobody can see, because it is really quite ugly to look at.” Well, Hippias, if we say that, he will probably reply this way: “I realize that from the beginning you have been ashamed to say that these pleasures are beautiful because that is not what most people believe. But I asked you about beauty, not about public opinion.” Then I suppose we should respond by repeating what we said before: “Beauty is that part of what delights us that comes through seeing and hearing.” Hippias, do you think that reply is adequate, or would you like to suggest something else? Hippias: Given what we have already said, this is all we should say. Socrates: “Splendid,” he will say, “and if only what delights us through seeing and hearing is beautiful, anything that gives pleasure and does not come to us in that way would not be beautiful.” Hippias, should we agree with that? Hippias: Yes.

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Socrates: He will continue. “Would you say that what pleases through seeing also pleases through hearing? And does what pleases through hearing also please through seeing?” We will respond: “No, what pleases through one of these senses does not please through both—if that is what you mean. What we said is that each of these sources of pleasure is beautiful by itself. But we call both of them beautiful.” Is that how we should answer? Hippias: Certainly. Socrates: “Does one delightful thing differ from another delightful thing because it gives pleasure? I’m not asking whether a specific pleasure is more or less pleasant or pleases to a greater or less extent, but whether one is more or less a pleasure.” We don’t think that, do we Hippias? Hippias: Definitely not. Socrates: He is not finished. “Then you evidently selected these particular pleasures for some reason other than that they are pleasures. There must be some difference between these pleasures and all other pleasures, so you must have discovered some quality in both of them that justifies calling them beautiful. I assume that the pleasure that comes through seeing is not beautiful only because it comes through seeing. If that were so, the pleasure that comes through hearing could never be beautiful, because the pleasure it gives obviously does not come through seeing.” Shall we affirm that what he says is true? Hippias: Yes, Socrates, it is true. [300] Socrates: “Nor is the pleasure that hearing provides beautiful because it comes through hearing. If that were so, the pleasure provided through seeing could not be beautiful because it clearly does not come through hearing.” Does the man who says that speak the truth? Hippias: He does. Socrates: We do say that both are beautiful, don’t we? Hippias: We do. Socrates: Then they must have something in common that makes them beautiful. This common quality would have to apply to both of them jointly and to each one separately. Otherwise they could not both be beautiful. Hippias, answer as if you were answering him. Hippias: My answer to him is that what you just said is right.

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Socrates: So you would say that if these pleasures were both formed by this quality, but each one, when considered separately, is not made in that way, then this could not be the quality that makes them beautiful. Hippias: Socrates, how could it be that both together are formed in a way that neither has been formed individually? Socrates: Do you think that is impossible? Hippias: Yes. I have vast experience with investigating the nature of this subject and talking about it. Socrates: Those are nice words, Hippias, but I think I see a possible example of what you say is impossible. On the other hand, I might be wrong. Hippias: Socrates, there is no doubt about it. You are surely wrong in thinking you see such an example. Socrates: Actually, many such examples come to mind, but I don’t trust them, because they are not visible to you—you, the man who has made more money from such wisdom than anyone else alive—and they are only visible to me, one who has never made a cent. I suspect you are making fun of me and trying to trick me by pretending that you do not see what I see so clearly. Hippias: No one will know better than you whether or not I am making fun of you as soon as you try to produce these examples you say you see so clearly. Then it will be obvious that you are talking nonsense. You will never discover anything in both of us that is not in each of us separately. Socrates: I’m not sure what you mean, Hippias, but perhaps you are right and I simply don’t understand. Listen carefully to what I am trying to say. It seems to me that what does not and cannot belong to me or you separately can belong to both of us together. And something that belongs to us together might not belong to us separately. Hippias: Socrates, what you are saying now is even stranger than what you said before. Think about this: If you and I are both just, are we not individually just? [301] And if we are each unjust, are we not both unjust? If both of us are healthy, are we not healthy as individuals? Again, if each of us were sick, wounded, beaten, or suffered in any other way, would we not both suffer in that same way? If both of us were made of gold, silver, or ivory—or, if you prefer, were noble, wise, honored, old, young, or had any other human quality—would it not be necessary for each of us individually to have that same quality?

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Socrates: Certainly. Hippias: See, Socrates, you fail to consider things as a whole. That is also true of the people you usually talk to. You attack beauty by examining its separate parts and dissecting it with words. As a result, the unity of great and essential things escapes you. And now you were careless enough to think that a quality or essence could belong to both things together but not to each separately, or to each separately but not to both together. This is how oblivious and unwise and simpleminded and thoughtless you are. Socrates: That is our fate, Hippias. As the old saying goes, “we do what we can, not what we wish.” But your admonitions are a great help. Just now—before your scolding about my simplemindedness—I had some additional thoughts. Should I share those ideas or keep silent? Hippias: Socrates, I already know what you are going to say, because I am familiar with the mentality of everyone who gives speeches. But go ahead if it pleases you. Socrates: It does please me. My friend, before you said what you just did, we were so stupid that we had the opinion that each of us—you and I—is one and that we are not both what each of us is singly, because we thought that together we are not one but two. That’s how silly we were. But now you have taught us that if we are both two, then each of us must also be two; and that if each of us is one, then together we must both be one. According to the unified account of reality presented by Hippias, it could never be otherwise: Whatever both are together, each is also individually; and whatever each one is, both are. Here I sit, Hippias, persuaded by you on this point. But please tell me again: Are you and I both only one, or is each of us two? Hippias: What exactly do you mean, Socrates? Socrates: Precisely what I say. But I’m afraid to speak clearly, because you become angry with me when you think you are right. [302] Let me try again. Is not each one of us made as one? Hippias: Of course. Socrates: Then each of us, being one, would be an odd number. You do think one is an odd number, don’t you? Hippias: I do. Socrates: Taken together, we are two. Is that an odd number? Hippias: Definitely not. Socrates: Together we are an even number.

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Hippias: Certainly. Socrates: Now if both taken together are even, does that mean each of us individually is even? Hippias: Certainly not. Socrates: Then contrary to what you said before, it is not necessary that each taken separately is what both are together—and that both are what each is individually. Hippias: Well, not with things of this kind, but it is true of the things I mentioned before. Socrates: That’s good enough for me, Hippias. I would be happy to say that it applies sometimes but not every time. You may remember that when we started this discussion, I said that what pleases through seeing and hearing is beautiful not because it pertains only to each of them and not both of them. Nor are they beautiful because both together are beautiful and not each of them separately. They are beautiful because of something that is common to both together and to each separately. At that time you agreed that both together are beautiful and each individually is beautiful. That is why I thought that if they are both beautiful it is because of what is intrinsic to both, rather than something lacking in one of them. I still think that is true. So, let’s start from the beginning. If what pleases through seeing and what pleases through hearing are both beautiful together and also individually, must we not conclude that what makes them beautiful is intrinsic to both of them and also to each of them? Hippias: Certainly. Socrates: Then they are beautiful because each of them individually and both together are pleasures. If so, then all other pleasures would be equally beautiful. Do you do remember that we said they are all pleasures? Hippias: Yes, I remember. Socrates: But it was said that these particular pleasures are beautiful because they come through seeing and hearing. Hippias: Yes, that is what was said. Socrates: Tell me if this is true: If I recall correctly, it was also said that only this pleasant is beautiful, not everything that pleases but what pleases through seeing and hearing. Hippias: Yes, that’s right. Socrates: Now this pleasure belongs to both, not to each separately. Is that also right? Each one separately does not come through both seeing and hearing. What do you say?

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Hippias: True. Socrates: Then beauty does not belong to each singly; what belongs to both does not come from each individually. So we can also say that both are beautiful, but we cannot say that each individually is beautiful. Is that true? [303] Hippias: So it seems. Socrates: Then it is safe to say that both together are beautiful but not each separately. Hippias: What could prevent us from saying that? Socrates: I believe this prevents us, my friend: A while ago you said that what intrinsically belongs to both must also belong to each individually, and if it belongs to each individually then it belongs to both. Hippias: Yes. Socrates: But what I said was different. It includes the concepts each and both. Is that so? Hippias: It is. Socrates: Now, Hippias, to which of these does beauty belong? Does it belong to the examples you mentioned, such as when I am strong and you are strong, then we are both strong; when I am just and you are just, then we are both just; and when we are both just, then we are each just? Similarly, if I am beautiful and you are beautiful, we are both beautiful; and if we are both beautiful, we are each beautiful. Or is beauty more like the examples I mentioned that included even numbers whose factors may individually be odd—or they may be even. Think also of numbers that are not to be mentioned when considered separately but which may be either spoken or unspeakable when taken together.2 As I said before, I can think of countless other examples of this kind. Where do we place beauty, Hippias? Do you hold the same view as I do? It seems to me that it is absurd to say that if both of us together are beautiful neither of us is beautiful individually; or to say that we are each beautiful but not both beautiful. Do you choose my view or some other one? Hippias: I choose your view, Socrates. Socrates: That is a good choice, Hippias, if you want to avoid another long inquiry. If beauty belongs to your set of examples, then what pleases us through seeing and hearing is not the beautiful itself. To say that it is “what comes through seeing and hearing” would make both together beautiful, but it would

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exclude each individually. I think you and I now agree that is impossible. Hippias: Yes, we do agree. Socrates: So it is impossible for what pleases through seeing and hearing to be beauty itself, since that would produce an absurd conclusion. Hippias: True. Socrates: Now that man who questions me will say: “Since you missed the target once again, you need to start from the beginning. What is this beauty that belongs to both of these pleasures and justifies you to honor them above all others and call them beautiful?” Hippias, I suppose that these harmless pleasures are the best ones, both considered together and each taken separately. Can you suggest some other reason why we should say they surpass all the others? Hippias: No, Socrates, I can think of no other reasons. They really are the best. Socrates: Then he will say: “Beneficial pleasure—is that your definition of beauty?” I will say: “That seems right.” What will you say Hippias? Hippias: I agree. Socrates: He will persist. “Then does the beneficial create the good? We already saw that what creates differs from what is created, so we have arrived at the same place in the argument where we were before: The good cannot be beauty, and beauty cannot be the good if each is different from the other.” [304] Well, if we are reasonable, we will have to agree with him. How can we disagree with someone who speaks the truth? Hippias: But Socrates, what do you really think is the value of all this? As I said earlier, what we have for our effort are only clippings and shavings of discourse cut up into tiny pieces. What is truly great and beautiful is the ability to make a persuasive and beautiful speech to a court of law, a legislature, or some other public meeting, to convince an audience and win the greatest prize of all—your own wellbeing, the protection of your property, and the security of your friends. Such activity is worth our effort, and it provides great delight. But we should avoid frivolous and petty arguments like the ones we have just heard. Otherwise we run the risk of looking like fools. Socrates: Hippias, my friend, you are extremely fortunate! Clearly you know the kinds of activities in which a person ought to

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engage, and you have successfully performed them in your own life. But I seem to have been cursed by bad luck so that I am always wandering around at a loss. But when I display my state of perplexity before you wise men, you confront me with speeches filled with foul abuse. You all say what I just heard from you—that I occupy myself with trivial matters of no value. But when you persuade me and I repeat exactly what you tell me—that the best kind of activity is making beautiful speeches in a law court or some other public assembly—I am treated with contempt, and someone who hears me accuses me of every kind of evil. This is especially true of that man who continually cross-examines me and refutes me. He is a member of my own family and lives in the same house. So when I go home and he hears me express such ideas, he immediately attacks and asks whether I am not ashamed to be talking about beautiful actions when it is so clear from my confusion that I do not even know what beauty is. He will ask: “How do you know which speech, or any other activity, is beautiful and which is not if you do not even know about beauty itself? When you are in such a predicament, what makes you think it is better for you to live rather than die?” The result is that all of you attack and abuse me. But perhaps it is worth enduring if I might benefit from it. Hippias, I do think I have profited from this conversation with the two of you, because I believe I have learned the meaning of the proverb that says: “All beautiful things are difficult.” Notes 1. Socrates’ father was named Sophroniscus. 2. Socrates here seems to refer to the problem of irrational numbers discovered by the Pythagoreans. Hippasus of Metapontum in the fifth century BC is said to have discovered the irrationality of the square root of two. According to legend, Hippasus was put to death by other Pythagoreans when he disclosed the unspeakable fact that some numbers are irrational.

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CON T R I BU TOR

BIOGR A PH I E S

Albert A. Anderson, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Babson College in Massachusetts, where he held an endowed chair as Murata Professor of Ethics from 1995 to 2003. He has also held tenured faculty appointments in philosophy at Clark University in Massachusetts and Albion College in Michigan and full-time positions at Bates College in Maine and Rhode Island School of Design. He was a founding member of the International Society for Universal Dialogue and served as its president from 1996 to 2001. Scholarly work centers on ancient Greek philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. His latest book, Reality and the Arts: A Philosophical Guide (forthcoming). In 2004 he jointly edited a book called Mythos and Logos: How to Regain the Love of Wisdom published by Editions Rodopi, which also published his book Universal Justice: A Dialectical Approach in 1997. Dr. Anderson is president of Agora Publications, Inc., which specializes in translating and adapting classical philosophical texts into contemporary American English. Current projects include revising translations of Plato’s dialogues from Greek and adapting them for dramatic performance in audio format as well as performing versions of philosophical texts that include works by Aristotle, Kant, Mill, and Hume. Plato’s Greater Hippias is reprinted by permission of Agora Publications. Malcolm Barnard is a lecturer in visual culture at Loughborough University (UK), where he teaches the history and theory of art and design. His background is in philosophy and sociology and he is the author of Fashion as Communication (Routledge, 2002), Art, Design and Visual Culture (Macmillan, 1998), Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2001) and Graphic Design as Communication (Routledge, 2005). He is also the editor of Fashion Theory (Routledge, 2007).

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Contributor Biographies

Shannon Bell is a performance philosopher/fast filosopher, who lives and writes philosophy-in-action. Her five books include Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Indiana University Press, 1994, Japanese trans. 2000), Whore Carnival (Semiotext, 1995), Bad Attitude/s on Trial, coauthor (University of Toronto Press, 1997), New Socialisms coeditor (Routledge, 2004), and Fast Feminism (forthcoming). Bell is currently researching “extreme” science and art for a book Fast Bodies; this research is funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Bell is an Associate Professor in the York University Political Science Department, Toronto, Canada. She teaches postcontemporary theory, fast feminism, sexual politics, cyber politics, identity politics, and violent philosophy. Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, The World at a Glance (Indiana University Press, 2007), Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape (Minnesota Press, 2005), and Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minnesota Press, 2002). Ava Chin is the “Urban Forager” columnist for the Local section of the New York Times online—a bimonthly column about wild edibles. In addition to writing for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and the Village Voice, she has upcoming articles in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and Saveur magazine. She is an Assistant Professor at the College of Staten Island-CUNY. http://fort-greene. thelocal.nytimes.com/author/ava-chin/ Ellen Fridland is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the Graduate Center at CUNY. She specializes in philosophy of mind and epistemology. Lydia Hartunian, Anti-Christ guru, fashions herself in Iowa City, Iowa, and teaches at Kirkwood Community College. Dr. Hartunian is the founder and director of the great american god-out!—a day of learning and celebration and serves as the president of Atheists United for a Rational America (http://www.godout.org). Her guerilla theater group, ATNOW provides opportunity for the “good news” about dead gods, delusion, and other forms of magical thinking to be taken to the streets. When not activating, Dr. Hartunian studies neurotheology, transgenic humans and cats. Her book The Great American God-Out!: The Ultimate American Experiment is forthcoming.

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bell hooks is currently distinguished scholar in residence at Berea College in Kentucky. She is an internationally renowned writer and critic. She has published over 25 books of criticism, poetry, children’s books, and memoirs. Lynne d Johnson is SVP, Social Media for the Advertising Research Foundation, where she is responsible for content, brand and social media development and strategy, as well as developing consumer insights, market research, and true metrics for the industry at large via the ARF Social Media Council. As a consultant, Lynne works with Web and media properties on content, brand, and social media development and strategy. She’s also a sought after speaker, and has presented keynotes and moderated panels around the world about the future of media, web 2.0, women in tech, African Americans in tech, hip-hop and tech, and the intersection of music and technology. A widely published author and blogger, Lynne holds a BA in Journalism, an advanced certificate in multicultural studies, and an MBA in Media Management. David Farrell Krell is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago and the founding director of the DePaul Humanities Center. He has written 11 scholarly books, translated 6 volumes of philosophy, and published 3 novels. Among his books are The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Indiana University Press, 2005), The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida (Penn State Press, 2000), Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Indiana University Press, 1998), and The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word and Image, with Donald L. Bates (University of Chicago Press, 1997). His most recent work is an annotated translation of Hölderlin’s mourning-play, The Death of Empedocles, forthcoming with SUNY Press. Sinéad Murphy holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from University College Cork and currently works at Newcastle University. In her research, she addresses questions on the theme of judgment within history, and is increasingly interested in the practice of philosophical genealogy. She has published on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, on the work of Gadamer and Lyotard, and on themes in the philosophy of art; her first monograph—Effective History: On Critical Practice Under Historical Conditions (forthcoming). Erin Norris is a restauranteur in Brooklyn, New York and her career has span the wholesome gamut of the entertainment and service industry.

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Contributor Biographies

Mary O’Donoghue is the author of poetry collections Tulle (Salmon Poetry, 2001) and Among These Winters (Dedalus Press, 2007). Her novel Before the House Burns is published by the Lilliput Press in 2010. She teaches in the Arts and Humanities division at Babson College, Massachusetts. This poem is reprinted by permission of Dedalus Press. Anne O’Neil has degrees in Art and Art History from UCLA and an MFA from the New School in writing. She was a professional talent scout for 10 years and lives in Brooklyn, where she does not have enough closet space. Kelly Oliver is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of over 70 articles and 9 books, including Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (Columbia University Press, 2009); Woman as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media (Columbia University Press, 2007); The Colonization of Psychic Space: Toward a Psychoanalytic Social Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Also, she has edited several books, including Recent French Feminism (Oxford University Press, 2004), and The Portable Kristeva (Columbia University Press, 1998, 2nd edition 2002). Nickolas Pappas is Professor of Philosophy at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Routledge Guidebook to Plato and the Republic and The Nietzsche Disappointment, and is at work on a book on Plato’s Menexenus. Andrew Porter is currently serving as an Infantry Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He received his Masters Degree from the Graduate Center at CUNY with a specialization in metaethics. Maythee Rojas is an Associate Professor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at California State University, Long Beach. She received her Ph.D. in English from Arizona State University and her BA from Pomona College. Her research specializations include Chicana/o and Latina/o literature and issues of race and sexuality. She is the author of Women of Color and Feminism (Seal Press, 2009). She is currently completing a manuscript on the uses of the erotic in Chicana literature entitled, Following the Flesh: Embodied Transgressions in Chicana Literature. Her work has appeared in Frontiers, MELUS, Women’s Studies Quarterly and reference books such Notable American Women, Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture, and Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. She also sits on the Board of Directors for the National Association of Ethnic Studies (NAES).

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Ron Scapp is the founding director of the Graduate Program of Urban and Multicultural Education at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx where he is Professor of humanities and teacher education. He is currently the director of program development at the College. He has written on a variety of topics—from popular culture to education, from social and political philosophy to art criticism. His recent books include Managing to Be Different: Educational Leadership as Critical Practice (Routledge, 2006) and Etiquette: Reflections on Contemporary Comportment, coedited with Brian Seitz (SUNY Press, 2007). He has collaborated with others on different projects, most notably with cultural critic and author bell hooks. He is currently working on a book titled Street Noise: An Urban Notebook. Along with Brian Seitz, he is a founding member of Group Thought, a philosophy collective based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Brian Seitz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Babson College. He is the author of The Trace of Political Representation, co-author of The Iroquois and Athenians: A Politology, and co-editor of Eating Culture, Etiquette, and Fashion Statements. He is a founding member of Group Thought, a philosophy collective based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Johanna Wagner is the author of The View from the Stands: A Season with America’s Baseball Fans about her year traveling to each Major League Baseball stadium. She currently teaches at New York University’s Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management and writes for LoveMyTeam.com. Johanna grew up in Dayton, Ohio, but has made Brooklyn, NY, her home for the past 15 years. Jeff Weinstein, deputy director of the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program, writes the “Out There” essay blog at artsjournal. com. He has been a columnist, critic, and senior editor at the Village Voice; managing editor of Artforum magazine; fine arts editor and popular culture columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and most recently arts and culture editor at Bloomberg News, New York. Author of Life in San Diego and Learning To Eat, he has written about the arts, gay issues, food, and style for the New Yorker, Art in America, Los Angeles magazine, and many other publications. His short story “A Jean-Marie Cookbook” was awarded a Pushcart Prize in 1982. This essay is a version of one that was part of the 2005 catalogue for “Pattern Language: Clothing as Communicator,” at Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, Massachusetts.

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I N DE X

A, B, C…Manhattan, 11 Abu Ghraib prison, 136–38 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 131–32, 139 Adidas, 93, 121 Aelian, 152 Aesthetic Movement, 70 aesthetics, 3, 17, 29, 50, 55, 57, 64, 70–72, 78, 102–103, 105–11, 170, 176 Agesilaus, 153 Ahmed, Leila, 128 Algeria, 1, 128, 141 America’s Next Top Model, 2 Anderson, Albert A., 183–211, 213 antifashion, 5, 143–57 Apple, 35–36, 37–38, 40–41, 119 Arcades Project (Benjamin), 172 Argentina, 5, 8 Armani, 13, 15, 72 Art Deco, 71 Arts and Crafts Movement, 70 authenticity, 20, 102, 128 Balla, Giacomo, 70–71 Banana Republic, 90 Banks, Tyra, 2 Bape, 121 Barnard, Malcolm, 2, 23–31, 213 Barthes, Roland, 26–27 Bat, 123 Bathing Ape, 91 Baudelaire, 145, 161–63, 165, 167–68 beepers, 123

Being and Time (Heidegger), 20 Bell, Shannon, 49–55, 57–66, 214 Benjamin, Walter, 172 Bennett, Neil, 33 Big E, 97 bin Laden, Osama, 32 birds, 96 Birth of the Clinic, The (Foucault), 172 Black youth style, 120–22 Blackberry, 35, 36, 119 Blackshirt, The (Mosely), 145 Blair, Cherie, 133 Blair, Tony, 31–32, 133 Blige, Mary J., 122 Blue Cult, 96, 98 bluetooth devices, 35 Book of the Courtier (Castiglione), 144 Bragg, Rick, 136–37 branding, 2 Brando, Marlon, 92 Brillo Boxes (Warhol), 111 burkas, 128, 130 Bush, George W., 31–32, 128–29, 132–33, 138, 141 Bush, Laura, 129, 133 Calvin Klein, 92, 93, 97 Campbell, Colin, 30 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak), 128 Cannes Film Festival, 11–15 caps, 95, 117 Cartledge, Paul, 151, 153

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Index

Casey, Edward S., 171–79, 214 Cash, Johnny, 147 Castiglione, Baltdesar, 144 Catholic Church, 77–78 Catts, Oron, 58–66 Chalayan, Hussein, 37 Chanel, Coco, 20, 71 Charmides (Plato), 153–54 Chast, Roz, 25, 29 Chattererjee, Partha, 128 Cheney, Dick, 133 Chin, Ava, 35–42, 214 Chow, Rey, 137–38 Christian Fashion, 73–78 Clinton, Hillary, 129 Cloud, Dana, 130 Collier, Jane, 133 “Conformism in Analytic Philosophy” (Preston), 156 conspicuous consumption, 36 cosmetics, see makeup Crali, Tullio, 71 Creative Recreation, 121 Cubism, 71 Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Krell), 19 Davis, Fred, 29 Dean, James, 92, 97 Delaunay, 71 denim, designer, 89, 92, 96–98, 146 see also jeans denotation, defined, 26 Depero, Fortunato, 71 Derrida, Jacques, 30 Devil Wears Prada, The, 2 Dewey, John, 109 Dewey, Thomas, 93 Dharmarajan, Arunasalam, 58 Diesel, 95 Dior, Christian, 164 Disembodied Cuisine, 58–60, 62, 63 DKNY, 93 Dolce, 14 Dowd, Maureen, 136

dressing down, 91–92 Duchamp, Marcel, 69 Durer, Albrecht, 91 Earl Jeans, 98 Egoyan, Atom, 44 Eicher, Joanne B., 28 Elle magazine, 2, 7 Empire of Fashion, The (Lipovetsky), 2, 167 Entwistle, Joanne, 25, 28 Enyce, 91, 93 e-Readers, 35, 41 Eugènie of France, 164, 166 Euthydemus (Plato), 153, 154 Evenson, Sandra Lee, 28 Fashion as Communication (Barnard), 2, 213 Fashion in Art: The Second Empire and Impressionism (Simon), 162 fashion communication, defined, 27–31 fashion, defined, 24–25 “Feminist Encounters” (Mohanty), 132 Fendi, 35 Foucault, Michel, 6, 131, 160–63, 168, 172 Franklin, Donna, 49–55 French Revolution, 91–92 Fridland, Ellen, 101–14, 214 fungi dress, 49–55 Futurism, 70–71 Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing (Balla), 70 gadget fashion, 122–24 see also technology, fashion and Gap, 77, 93 Gibson, J.J., 174 Giuliano, Magnifico, 144 glance, 7, 171–79 Gombrich, E.H., 176 Gonzales, Alberto, 129 Gorgias (Plato), 5, 154, 184–85 Gothicism, 53–54

Index Guantánamo Bay prison, 127, 133, 135–36, 138 Guess, 97 Guevara, Che, 94 gyms, 43–44, 150–51 Hall, Stuart, 121–22 Hampf, Michaela, 136 handbags, 35–37, 41, 144 Hartunian, Lydia, 73–78, 214 hats, 117 haute couture, 37, 163, 165–66, 168, 175–76 Hebdige, Dick, 8 Hegel, G.W.F., 4 Heidegger, Martin, 19–20, 55 Hermes, 36 Hilfiger, Tommy, 18 Hippias, 183–211 hipster fashion, 41, 90 Hollander, 24, 143–44, 146–47 hoodies, 31, 32–33 hooks, bell, 43–45, 215, 217 Hussein, Saddam, 132 Ice Cream, 121 individuality, 2, 5, 32, 38, 89–90, 93, 121 intentional etiology, 111–12 iPhones, 35–37, 39, 40, 41, 119 iPods, 35–38, 40, 119, 122 Islam, 1, 31–32, 127–29, 132–35 James, Ralph, 71–72 jeans, 5–6, 11, 18, 74, 83, 87, 91–92, 96–98, 120–21, 129, 146 see also denim, designer JCrew, 96 Jobs, Steve, 119 Johnson, Lynne d, 119–24, 215 “Kabul Unveiled” photo essay, 130 Kant, Immanuel, 160–61 Kawakubo, Rei, 69, 72 Kenneth Cole, 20

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Klimt, Gustav, 3 Kolhatkar, Sonali, 130–31, 142 Krell, David Farrell, 17–20, 215 Lacan, Jacques, 4 Lamas, Tony, 7 Language of Clothes, The (Lurie), 29 Lee, 97–98 Levi’s, 92, 97–98, 146 Limbaugh, Rush, 138 Link, Kathy, 134 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 2, 167 L.L. Bean, 37 logos, 18, 35–36, 93, 98 Lurie, Alison, 29 Lutz, Hazel A., 28 Lynch, Jessica, 136–38 Lysis (Plato), 153, 154 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 4 Madonna, 77, 96 makeup, 36–37, 75, 84, 86, 120, 130, 137, 172 Man Ray, 72 Manson, Marily, 78, 80 Mapping Ideology (Žižek), 159 Martin, Richard, 72 McQueen, Alexander, 3, 94 meaning, defined, 26–27 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 3 Minnie Mouse, 165 Missing Top Model, 2 Mizrahi, Isaac, 7 mobile connectedness, 39–40 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 132 Morris, William, 70 Mosley, Oswald, 145 Moss, Kate, 2, 43 Murphy, Sinéad, 159–69, 215 Naderi, Amir, 11 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 130 “New Look,” 164 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 80 Nike, 73, 91, 120–21

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Norris, Erin, 5, 11–15, 215 nudity, 5, 147–55, 157 Obama, Barack, 129 O’Donoghue, Mary, 47–48, 216 Ohr, George, 71 Oliver, Kelly, 127–39, 216 Olympics, 7, 150, 152 O’Neil, Anne, 89–98, 216 “Panzani” advertisement, 26–27 Pappas, Nickolas, 5, 143–57, 216 Parmagianino, 91 Pausanias, 152, 155 PDAs, 122 Philip the Good, 144, 157 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 31 Philosophy, A (Svendsen), 2 physical appearance, 101–102 physical fitness, 43–45 Picasso, Pablo, 110 plastic surgery, 5–6, 8 Plato, 5, 110, 151–57, 174, 178, 183–211, 213 Polo, 18 Popova, Lyubov, 70 Porter, Andrew, 101–14, 216 “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” (Klimt), 3 Prada, 14, 94 Preston, Aaron, 156–57 Project Runway, 2 Promise Keepers, 134 PSPs, 122 Puritanism, 17, 19–20 puro high life, 81–87 Queen Elizabeth, 165 Ralph Lauren, 18, 20 Rappe, Sara, 154 Rational Dress Society, 164 Red Lines, 97 ReLifeing RoadKill, 63 religion, 18, 96, 135, 147

Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Abu-Lughod), 131 Republic (Plato), 151 Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), 130 “Rhetoric of the Image” (Barthes), 26 Rice, Condoleezza, 129 robots, 96 Rojas, Maythee, 81–87, 216 Rolex, 35 Rouse, Elizabeth, 28 Russian Constructivism, 70 Salvation Army stores, 98 Sans-Culottes, 92 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 4 Scapp, Ron, 1–8, 217 Schiaparelli, Elsa, 72 Sean John, 77, 91 Seeing through Clothes (Hollander), 143 Seitz, Brian, 1–8, 217 Self-Portrait (Durer), 91 September 11, 95, 129, 141 Seven Jeans for all Mankind, 96–97 Sex and Suits (Hollander), 146 Sex and the City, 31 sexism, 17, 19, 135 sexuality, 86, 127, 129, 131, 135–37, 139 Simon, Marie, 162–63, 165, 168 Socrates, 151, 153–55, 183–211 Sony, 36, 119, 122 see also Walkman Space Between Exhibition, 160, 166 Sparta, 150–54, 183, 185–89 Spirit of Gravity, 177 Spivak, Gaytari, 127–28, 138–39, 140 Stepanova, Varvara, 70 style art vs., 102–108, 109–10 creativity and, 106–108 critics and, 110–11 egalitarian criticism, 110–11 intellectual criticism, 110 international and ref lexive, 102–105 medium and content, 105–106

Index presentational features, 108–109 significance and location of, 108–10 twins problem, 111–13 Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Hebdige), 8 supermodels, 2, 77 Svendsen, Lars, 2 SymbioticA, 49, 53, 58 Symposium (Plato), 155 Taliban, 128, 130 Target, 93 Tarr, Nadia, 7 technology, fashion and changing technological fashion, 41–42 iPhones, 40 iPods, 37–39 mobile connectedness, 39–40 overview, 35–36 shaping of fashion, 36–37 see also gadget fashion television, 2, 5–6, 31, 33, 37, 39, 79–80, 120, 107, 117, 138, 171 they-self, 19 Thoreau, Henry David, 17–20, 147–49 thrift stores, 90, 93, 95, 97–98 Thucydides, 150–51 Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A) Project, 57–58, 66, 67 Top Model, 2 Topshop, 2 Townsend, Frances Fragos, 129 Trebay, Guy, 41 True Religion, 96 t-shirts, 6, 43, 89–98, 105, 121 twins problem, 111–13 Understanding Fashion (Rouse), 28 unicorns, 96 Urban Outfitters, 90, 93, 96

223

Valentino: The Last Emperor, 2–3 Vanderbilt, Gloria, 97 Veblen, Thorstein, 36 veils, 128–31, 133, 135 Verigen, 58 Victimless Leather, 57–66 Victorian era, 28, 70, 164–65 Vionnet, Madeleine, 71 Vogue magazine, 7, 72 Vreeland, Diana, 72 Wagner, Johanna, 117, 217 Walden (Thoreau), 17, 147 Walkman, 36, 119 see also Sony war on terrorism, 135–36, 138 Warhol, Andy, 110, 111, 114 Weheliye, Alexander, 123–24 Weinstein, Jeff, 69–72, 217 Westernization, 128–31 Westwood, Vivienne, 163–69 “What Is Enlightenment?” (Foucault), 160, 161 “What Is Hypersoul?” (Bat), 123 “When the Meaning Is Not a Message” (Campbell), 30 Winfrey, Oprah, 130 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 31 wolves, 96 “women of cover,” 127–29, 131–32, 135, 139, 141 Women’s Army Corp (WAC), 136 Wrangler, 92, 97–98 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 72 Xenophon, 152–53 Zaretsky, Adam, 53 Žižek, Slavoj, 159–61 Zurr, Ionat, 58–66