FASHION THEORY

Fashion Theory

When all that is Solid Melts into Fashion

Fashion's flirt with modernity

“From 'heroin chic' to Alexander McQueen, the distressed body of much 1990s fashion exhibited the symptoms of trauma, the fashion show muted into performance and a new kind of conceptual fashion designer evolved.” (Craik 2010 p. 89)

In her article “The Greatest Show on Earth”, (Wilson 2003 p. 3) Ginger Gregg Duggan argues that avant-garde fashion in the 1990's has a strong similarity with performance art in the 1960's. One of the characteristics of this type of per formative or theatrical fashion is that it appropriates the techniques of conceptual 1960's art performances. One thing to bear in mind however, is that fashion, no matter how artistic it may seem, is a commercial affair. True, it is often hard to differentiate between fashion and art, but we must separate the artistic staging of fashion from the clothes and apparel sold in the shops. It is precisely the staging, the acting out, the performance or the artistic branding that I will discuss in the following.

As Charlotte Andersen points out in her book about fashion photography Elsa Schiaparelli's unconventional and conceptual fashion from the 1930's can be interpreted as a way of inscribing the body in the symbolic language of culture. Thus it is not a question of fitting the clothes to the “natural” body, but fitting the “body” to the clothes (Duggan 2001 p.27). Put differently, the modern perception of self and identity is strongly connected to visual conceptualization and stylization of the self. From a theoretical point of view then, we can approach fashion as a material matter that sculpts the body and set of ideas that shape the self.

Accordingly, in the current interpretation I do not interpret the body from a biological and physiological point of view, but rather view it on a more abstract and metaphorical level. Although clothes cannot talk, they carry stories and memories in the form of traces and shapes that are to be unfolded and reshaped by the contemporary interpreter. Hence, the conceptualization of the cultured body becomes central for the understanding of the ways that we shape our identities. Art historian Caroline Evans has published extensively on the theme, and I will draw on her work in the following. (Counsell 2001 p. 91)

Modernity

“To be modern, I said, is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air.” (Wilson 2004 p. 64)

In her book “Fashion at the Edge” Caroline Evans unveils the liaison between images of illness, decay and death in contemporary fashion and the underlying cultural anxieties. As the title suggests, Evans addresses not only the positive sides of modernism, but also the downsides and traumatic aspects. One of the key figures in the book is that of the scavenger, which theoretically is comparable with the German philosopher Walter ...