Abstract
This chapter investigates how bodily interactions with fashion affectively estrange their wearers and viewers from what they know a human body to be. I look closely at how specific fashion designs estrange the status quo, what role the proposed alternatives and their thorough co-optation with capitalism play and how all this relates to the utopian. I argue that—while quite blatantly flawed as utopian in any straightforward way—fashion designs can facilitate an ‘education of utopian desire’.
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Notes
- 1.
I use the term ‘fashion’ to refer to “a geographically specific system for the production and organization of dress”—and the items of clothing produced by it. As such, the notion of ‘fashion’ I explore here began to emerge since the fourteenth century in the European courts, developed particularly at the French court of Louis XIV, and has since crystallized as a novelty-producing system with the rise of capitalism. Lise Skov and Marie Riegels Melchior, “#19 Research Approaches to the Study of Dress and Fashion,” Creative Encounters, Working Paper, 2008. https://openarchive.cbs.dk/bitstream/handle/10398/7766/Creative%20Encounters%20Working%20Papers%2019.pdf?sequence=1. See also Chapter 2, fn 120.
- 2.
By this I mean that I address the previously introduced question what a body can do, in addition to questions of what a body is and can be, on a basic, physical level.
- 3.
Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (1990) (Witney: Peter Lang, 2011), 8.
- 4.
Barbara Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System, trans. Mark Hewson (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005), 3.
- 5.
Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist, 3.
- 6.
Samuel R. Delany’s Triton is a notable exception.
- 7.
Richard Martin, “Dress and Dream: The Utopian Idealism of Clothing,” Arts Magazine (October 1987): 60.
- 8.
Michael Carter, Putting a Face on Things: Studies in Imaginary Materials (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997), 81.
- 9.
Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopian and Other Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 289. In relation to William Morris, see also: Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 113.
- 10.
Aileen Ribeiro, “Utopian Dress,” in Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, eds. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 226.
- 11.
Ribeiro, “Utopian Dress,” 233.
- 12.
For English language accounts of German Freikörperkultur, see Chad Ross, Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005). And Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
- 13.
The association of (opulent) adornment with fakery and (near) nakedness as truth has a rich history. One of many dress historical instances that illustrates this is the shift from the sumptuous dresses of the Ancien Régime to the newly fashionable empire dresses in connection to the French Revolution. The latter simple, white muslin dresses were part of performing bourgeois values such as simplicity, modesty and honesty. Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist, 9–12; Franziska Bork Petersen, “Authenticity and its Contemporary Challenges. On Techniques of Staging Bodies” (PhD diss., Stockholm University and Freie Universität Berlin, 2013), 85–90. See also Miller who makes the argument that a ‘depth ontology’ dominates in the western world: “In both philosophy and everyday life we imagine that there is a real or true self which lies deep within us. On the surface is found the clothing which may represent us and may reveal a truth about ourselves. But it may also lie. It is as though if we peeled off the outer layers we might finally get to the true self within”. Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 13.
- 14.
Annebella Pollen, “Utopian Bodies and Anti-fashion Futures: The Dress Theories and Practices of English Interwar Nudists,” Utopian Studies 28, no. 3 (2017): 457.
- 15.
Pollen, “Utopian Bodies and Anti-fashion Futures,” 458. According to Pollen it was men’s dress (with its stiff collars and hats), in particular, that came under the attack of the English nudists in the 1920s and 1930s. Pollen, “Utopian Bodies and Anti-fashion Futures,” 459. This is somewhat atypical, as the development of the male suit in the nineteenth century is often seen as fundamentally modern and has set the focus of dress reformers on women’s clothing.
- 16.
See, for instance, Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams. Fashion and Modernity [1985] (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 179–206. And, more recently: Ane Lynge-Jorlén and Michael Bank Christoffersen, eds, Clash. Resistance in Fashion—Modstand i moden (exhibition catalogue) (Esbjerg: Rosendahls, 2014); Elke Gaugele, ed., Aesthetic Politics in Fashion (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2014); Hanne Eide and Johan Deurell, ed., Utopian Bodies - Fashion Looks Forward (exhibition catalogue) (Stockholm: Liljevalchs Konsthall, 2015).
- 17.
“The fashion system is”, according to Michael Carter’s account of Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System, “the ‘totality’ of social relations and activities that are required for fashion to come into existence. To isolate just one dimension and then to declare it to be the source, the cause or the essence of fashion would be to fail to grasp the pattern of relationship that constitute fashion as a system”. Michael Carter, Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes (London: Berg, 2003), 145.
- 18.
Claire Wilcox, “Plato’s Atlantis: Anatomy of a Collection,” in Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, ed. Claire Wilcox (London: V&A Publishing, 2015), 83.
- 19.
The show was presented at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy on 6 October 2009 (Wilcox 2015: 86). It was the first fashion show that was recorded and streamed live in this manner.
- 20.
I have reflected on the utopian status of the fashion model in: Franziska Bork Petersen, “Ideal, Imagined, Impossible: Fashion’s Utopian Bodies,” in Utopian Bodies - Fashion Looks Forward (exhibition catalogue), eds. Hanne Eide and Johan Deurell (Stockholm: Liljevalchs Konsthåll, 2015). And: Franziska Bork Petersen, “Fashion Bodies: Swinging between the Animate and the Inanimate,” in Dead or Alive: Tracing the Animation of Matter in Art and Visual Culture, eds. Gunhild Borggreen, Maria Fabricius Hansen, and Rosanna Tindbæk (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2019).
- 21.
Helen Persson, “Walking Out,” in Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, ed. Claire Wilcox (London: V&A Publishing, 2015), 111.
- 22.
Persson, “Walking Out,” 112.
- 23.
What is interesting is that, after watching the show for a while, it is the models not wearing the Armadillo boots whose silhouette and movement patterns appear to stand out in their otherness.
- 24.
‘Technician of the walk’ is a phrase Evans uses in: Caroline Evans, “Modelling McQueen: Hard Grace,” in Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, ed. Claire Wilcox (London: V&A Publishing, 2015), 189.
- 25.
John Carl Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 101.
- 26.
As what Turner called ‘cultural performances’ they both reflect and shape culture. See Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1987), 21–32.
- 27.
Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 527.
- 28.
Karen de Perthuis, “Dying to Be Born Again: Mortality, Immortality and the Fashion Model” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2003), 279.
- 29.
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 339.
- 30.
Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 345. I referenced the notion of ‘building the body’ repeatedly in part 2.
- 31.
de Perthuis, Karen, “The Synthetic Ideal: The Fashion Model and Photographic Manipulation,” Fashion Theory 9, no. 4 (2005): 416.
- 32.
Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 58. See also Bork Petersen, “Fashion Bodies.”
- 33.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 148.
- 34.
Jameson in Tom Moylan, “Making the Present Impossible: On the Vocation of Utopian Science Fiction,” ARENA Journal, no. 31 (2008): 87.
- 35.
Ulrich Lehmann, “Tigersprung: Fashioning History,” Fashion Theory 3, no. 3 (1999): 301, https://doi.org/10.2752/136270499779151379. For the role novelty plays in fashion, see also de Perthuis, “Dying to Be Born Again,” 218ff.
- 36.
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (1863) (London: Phaidon Press, 1995).
- 37.
Bloch, Principle of Hope, 41.
- 38.
Bloch, Principle of Hope, 201.
- 39.
Bloch, Principle of Hope, 201.
- 40.
Jameson, Archaeologies, xiii. This is why failure is, for Jameson, a defining characteristic of utopia.
- 41.
The Deleuzian concept of a ‘body without organs’ articulates this concept. Ian Buchanan, “The Problem of the Body in Deleuze and Guattari, Or, What Can a Body Do?” Body & Society 3, no. 3 (1997): 79.
- 42.
Lucy Sargisson, Fool’s Gold (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 16.
- 43.
Despite the existence and influence of avant-garde and performance art which explore the body’s material properties, there is in the performing arts a strong tradition for bodily depictions of a character’s development in his/her social and emotional world.
- 44.
On having and being a body, see Helmuth Pleßner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1965), 230ff.
- 45.
Isabelle Graw, “Mode und Lebendigkeit. Ein Kommentar zur modelfreien ‘Brigitte’,” Texte zur Kunst 78, (June 2010): 72.
- 46.
In Gabriele Brandstetter, Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes (Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 2015), 294. The social dance Foxtrot or the ballet Swan Lake are other obvious examples where human bodies equally leave aspects of their human movement and appearance behind, and take on non-human traits. See Gabriele Brandstetter, “Dancing the Animal to Open the Human: For a New Poetics of Locomotion,” Dance Research Journal, 41, no. 1 (2010): 2–11.
- 47.
Graw, “Mode,” 67.
- 48.
Jameson, Archaeologies, xiii.
- 49.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum, 1983), 27.
- 50.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 45. Deleuzian ‘difference in itself’ can be further described as stressing “the uniqueness implicit in the particularity of things and the moments of their conception and perception”. Cliff Stagoll, “Difference,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 72–73.
- 51.
Ruth Levitas, “For Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist Society,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3, no. 2–3 (2000): 38, https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230008403311.
- 52.
David M. Bell, Rethinking Utopia. Place, Power, Affect (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 80.
- 53.
The question of the respective roles and entanglement of culture and society are addressed by Marcuse. Jameson comments that the “very distance of culture from its social context which allows it to function as a critique and indictment of the latter also dooms interventions to ineffectuality and relegates art and culture to a frivolous, trivialized space in which such intersections are neutralized in advance”. Jameson, Archaeologies, xv.
- 54.
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 27.
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Bork Petersen, F. (2022). Estrangements of Corporeality. In: Body Utopianism. Palgrave Studies in Utopianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97486-2_9
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