The Clothed Body

1
The Clothed Body

• Patrizia Calefato

2
Fashion theory between semiotics and cultural
studies

• The term fashion theory refers to an
  interdisciplinary field that sees fashion as a
  meaning system within which cultural and
  aesthetic portrayals of the clothed body are
  produced.

3

• The use of the term fashion theory points to a
  transverse theoretical approach which, in advance
  of any professional know-how, constructs
  favourable conditions and theoretical filters by
  selecting from among the human and social
  sciences (including literature, philosophy and
  art) the fashion system understood as a special
  dimension of material culture, the history of the
  body, the theory of sensibility.

4

• Fashion Theory is also the title of an
  international quarterly edited by Valerie Steele
  and published by Berg (Oxford) since 1997

5
(No Transcript)
6
Antecedents and fundamentals

• Georg Simmel
• Thorstein Veblen
• Werner Sombart
• Walter Benjamin
• Linguistic structuralism

7
Georg Simmel (1858-1918)

• Georg Simmels 1895 essay on fashion defines it
  as a system of social cohesion that allows the
  individuals membership of a group to be
  dialectically reconciled with his relative
  spiritual independence. Fashion, says Simmel, is
  governed by motives of imitation and distinction,
  which are transmitted vertically to the community
  by a particular social circle. They are
  accompanied by the stimulating, piquant charm
  that fashion conveys through what Simmel
  describes as the contrast between its broad,
  all-pervading dissemination and its rapid,
  fundamental evanescence and as the right to be
  unfaithful to it

8
Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)

• Thorstein Veblens The Theory of the Leisure
  Class (1899) includes spending on clothing as
  part of conspicuous consumption by the upper
  middle classes

9
Werner Sombart (1863-1941)

• Sombart (1913) takes the view that spending
  (especially by women) on luxuries, of which
  clothing and cocotteries are a significant part,
  has been a key feature of capitalism ever since
  its original accumulation phase.

10
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

• Fashion is the sex appeal of the inorganic.
• Fashion represents the triumph of the commodity
  form, in which the body has become a cadaver, a
  fetish. In fashion, in an exemplary manner, the
  relationships between the living and the
  inorganic are Marxistically inverted and
  duplicated the (female) body displays the charm
  of a devitalised, estranged nature, and remains
  as an envelope, an adornment, a cadaveric support
  for clothing.

11
Ferdinand de Saussure(1857-1913)

• Course of general linguistics
• fashion, unlike language, is not a completely
  arbitrary system, since the obsession with
  clothing that fashion implies can only move so
  far beyond the conditions dictated by the human
  body.
• The mechanism of imitation concerns both the
  phenomenon of fashion and the phonetic changes in
  language, but its origin, says the Course,
  remains a mystery in both cases.

12
Nikolaj Trubeckoj (1890-1938)

• There is a homologous relationship between the
  system of language and the system of clothing,
  between phonology and study of costumes,

13
Pëtr Bogatyrëv (1893-1971)

• Analysis of the folk costume of Moravian
  Slovakia, using a functionalist approach that
  identified a hierarchy of functions in the
  costume, including practical, aesthetic, magical
  and ritual functions
• practical
• aestetical
• magical
• ritual

14
Edward Sapir (1884-1939)

• He wrote the fashion entry in the Encyclopaedia
  of the Social Sciences, in which he established
  the differences between fashion and taste and
  between fashion and costume, in that the latter
  is a relatively stable type of social behaviour,
  whereas the former is subject to constant change.

15
Clothing, fashion, identity
16
Roland Barthes (1915-1980),The Fashion System,
1967

• Fashion as a social discourse
• Barthes does not deal here with real fashion, but
  with fashion as described in magazines
• The garment is completely converted into language
  
• Even image is merely used in order to be
  transposed into words

17

• Barthes lesson, which thus goes beyond actual
  semiology, is that fashion only exists through
  the apparatus, technologies and communication
  systems that construct its meaning.
• The post-modern context makes clear that a whole
  series of social discourses from film to music,
  the new media and advertising, are the places
  where fashion exists as a syncretic, intertextual
  system, as a reticular reference between the
  signs of the clothed body and as a constant
  construction and deconstruction of the subjects
  that negotiate, interpret or receive its meaning.

18
Dick Hebdige Subculture (1979)

• style as a form of aesthetic and ethical group
  membership in mass society with emerging in crowd
  cultures made up of blocks that include ways of
  dressing, music, literature, film and daily
  habits a pop universe that is expressed in
  street styles ranging from rockers to punks,
  which Hebdige contrasts with fashion seen as one
  of the pre-eminent forms of discourse.

19
(No Transcript)
20
(No Transcript)
21
(No Transcript)
22
(No Transcript)
23
M. Mc Laren V. Westwood, end 70s
24
The Wild Ones, Peter Lindbergh 1991
25
From trickle-down to bubble-up,

• Trickle-down is turned into bubble-up, as is
  clearly shown by the history of two garments that
  are emblematic of the twentieth century jeans
  and the mini-skirt.

26
Carnaby Street, 1967
27
Fashion as mass fashion

• The place where a complexity of tensions,
  meanings and values and not only in relation to
  clothing is manifested.
• This complexity is centred on the body and the
  ways in which it exists in the world, is
  represented, is masked, disguised and measured,
  and clashes with stereotypes and mythologies.

28
The clothed body

• is the physico-cultural territory in which the
  visible, perceivable performance of our outward
  identity takes place. This composite cultural
  text-fabric provides opportunities for the
  manifestation of individual and social traits
  that draw on such elements as gender, taste,
  ethnicity, sexuality, sense of belonging to a
  social group or, conversely, transgression.

29
Gender identity and clothing

• gender identity through fashion plays with the
  canonic, stereotyped ways of portraying male and
  female on the one hand, and the challenges to the
  dominant discourse that are conveyed by the signs
  of the body on the other.

30
Rita Hayworth, Gilda
31
Humphrey Bogart, 1953
32
Young Dinkas, Sudan
33
Etudes détoffes, G. de Clérambault, 1918-34,
Marocco
34
Etudes détoffes, G. de Clérambault, 1918-34,
Marocco
35
Coco Chanel, 1929
36
(No Transcript)
37
Burberry, coll. 2000-2001
38
Young Japanese man
39
Windowlicker, 1999
40
Pubblicità Ferré jeans
41
Dal film The Full Monty, P. Cattaneo, 1997
42
Dal film Priscilla la regina del deserto, S.
Elliot, 1994
43
From sidewalk (or street) to catwalk

• the places of everyday culture are those that
  determine fashions even before style research has
  produced the actual artefact as a luxury
  commodity sign.

44
Narrativity

• Every fashion effectively contains within it a
  narrative, or story, that explains its uses and
  determines its rhythms

45
Spatiality

• The street, the catwalk, the whole world become
  spaces, territories in which objects come to life
  and bodies interact.

46
Myth

• Fashions take constructions of meaning and
  figures of imagination which are reproduced in
  the social sphere and make them emblematically
  natural and eternal, even if transient.

47
Sensoriness

• Human senses, in their complexity and
  reciprocity, are at work in the reproduction and
  communication of fashions
• There are stereotypes of feeling, but there are
  also forms of excessive sensoriness which can use
  the intrinsic fetishism of fashion, the living
  power of objects and garments, to invert and
  humanise their meaning.