The Psychopolitics of Fashion

Conflict and Courage Under the Current State of Fashion

Otto Von Busch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350242814
• eBook ISBN: 9781350102316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

What if fashion was a state? What kind of state would it be? Probably not a democracy. Otto von Busch sees fashion as a totalitarian state, with a population all too eager to enact the decrees of its aesthetic superiority. Peers police each other and deploy acts of judgment, peer-regulation, and micro-violence to uphold the aesthetic order of fashion supremacy. Using four design projects as tools for inquiry, Von Busch explores the seductive desires of envy and violence within fashion drawing on political theories. He proposes that the violent conflicts of fashion happen not only in arid cotton fields or collapsing factories, but in the everyday practice of getting dressed, in the judgments, sneers, and rejections of others. Indeed, he suggests that feelings of inclusion and adoration are what make us feel the pleasure of being fashionable-of being seductive, popular, and powerful. Exploring the conflicting emotions associated with fashion, Von Busch argues that while the current state of fashion is bred out of fear, The Psychopolitics of Fashion can offer constructive modes of mitigation and resistance. Through projects that actively work towards disarming the violent practices of dress, Von Busch suggests paths towards a more engaging and meaningful experience of fashion he calls "deep fashion."

1

Introduction

In 2012, not long after New York Fashion Week, a pop-up embassy appeared at the entrance of Parsons School of Design (Figure 1.1). The embassy for “The Current State of Fashion” allowed people to apply for passports if applicants answered a few questions and agreed to have their photo taken. The questions resembled an ID or visa application with the usual data about name, birthdate, height and such, and the back contained some questions sampled from the US visa form. The questions included were whether the applicant has been arrested, is a drug addict, or has engaged in trafficking. But along the way the questions turned to fashion: had the applicant supported organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) or Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC), or advocated home-made, tie-dyed, patched or mended clothes? That is, was the applicant actually trying to undermine The Current State of Fashion?

It was quite obviously not a real embassy, but as applicants had to identify their skin-color on a pantone scale and were introduced to the border policies of the state, questions were being raised. Connections emerged between the seemingly disparate phenomena of states and fashion: who counts and who can become a full member of the community, where are the borders and how are they controlled, what goods and people are allowed to travel where? What really are the values of fashion if they are spelled out as constitutional documents and enforced through a state-like institution? Who rules in the realm of fashion and by what legitimacy, and are these rulers held accountable? How are the “dictates” of fashion enforced on people, and what rights or obligations do the citizens of fashion have?

The embassy was a starting point for a longer discussion about how to think of fashion as a state, a social system obsessed with who is “in” and who is “out.” Over the coming years a mode of approaching fashion appeared which utilized some basic concepts from political theory. The central themes became power, order, policing, and resistance, all set within a quite cynical framework of state regulation and, ultimately, violence.

Figure 1.1 Embassy of The Current State of Fashion at Parsons, 2012. Courtesy of the author.

Fashion is not alien to violence, as stories of worker abuse and deaths keep appearing in the news cycles on a regular basis. Yet it is important to also recognize that fashion, as a social phenomenon, can be violent. Indeed, fashion harbors and with subtle means even promotes violent social tendencies. Chanel is known for suggesting, “beauty is a weapon.” Anecdotal stories circulate of outraged citizens of Paris attacking Dior models wearing “The New Look” just after the Second World War (Arnold 2001: 4), and even in more recent times, people have been killed for their clothes and what they represent (cf. Schmidt 1990; Hermann 2012). Anxiety and fear affects the way people move in cities and how they dress depends on these contexts (Koskela 1997; 1999).

Historian Timothy Patrick Campbell (2018: 619) states, “In the long run of modernity, dress is the dark matter of aesthetic life—underconceptualized, difficult to fully see, yet always exerting its pull on us.” The “pull” of fashion is there, whether we want it or not. Fashion is a conflict, and it drags the wearers with it. With its wide spectrum of expressions, fashion is no longer a monoculture broadcast like decrees from Paris. But this does not mean it has lost its power over its subjects. Even if fashion is more diverse and global, it does not mean “anything goes.” Instead, fashion today consists of micro-cultural multitudes of varying intensity, while still containing concerted trend expressions. Fashion is still “ephemeral, dangerous and unfair,” as Karl Lagerfeld (2007) argues, and it is a phenomenon most of us have to relate to as we are pulled into its orbit as soon as we get dressed.

As will become obvious, there is a narrative “we” apparent throughout this text. The book’s general assumption is that everybody is always already engaged in fashion, whether we think of it or not, or want to or not. All cultures engage in some form of modification of looks, and these practices are stratified and shift over time. But specifically in this text, as a rhetorical gesture, the “we” points towards a consumer subjectivity, where most consumers have some agency to assemble personal expressions from ready-made components and affect their look. Yet, as will be highlighted along the way, fashion is not equally distributed but takes place in a continuous conflict where the possibility of participation differs radically between abilities, races, sizes, attitudes, privilege, and is embodied into items of dress. Even if fractured, dispersed and unequal, there is still a paradoxical “we” of fashion consumers; those addressed by the system as potential consumers—people who better keep up and stay ahead. “We” are the subjects of fashion, the general population addressed in the advertising, even those who are not even considered citizens of The Current State of Fashion.

The general “we” in fashion points to this position of subjecthood; we do not choose fashion; it is inflicted on us. It imposes itself onto our lives with a certain force. Fashion scholar Susan Kaiser (2012: 30) argues we are all “forced to appear” and thus being perceived and judged for this appearance. There is no unmediated way of appearing, Kaiser highlights, and even if we may feel in control over our consumption, we have little say in the reception of our appearance. To “appear” before someone else means to be cognitively coded, to be socially determined, to appear “legible” to the means of aesthetic communication. To appear is not a neutral event, but is caught in a struggle on many levels; who is seen, by whom, coded with what signification, and in what form of appearance. To appear is a struggle over an unevenly distributed sensible field, where attention is sparse, coded with bias and charged with status and passions. Parallel to philosopher Jacques Ranciere’s (2010) notion of a politics of aesthetics, fashion is a struggle over expression as much as over sensation and participation in civic life; and these aspects are caught in struggles that entangle the decisions of the everyday fashion users.

The projects in this book turn to the playful yet very useful definition of fashion made by Swedish fashion journalist Suzanne Pagold (2000: 8) where fashion is “to dress like everyone else, but before everyone else.” The strength of this simple definition is that it suggests an everydayness of fashion, but also highlights the inherent conflicts in this notion; how fashion includes and excludes at the same time. But thinking of fashion as inflicted upon its users can also be taken more literally. Infliction, from the Latin fligere, “to strike,” means something hits the body like the strike of a whip, a whiplash. Like a passion, that which is inflicted upon the subject is something uncontrollable that must be suffered. It may be sought out, even desired, but is not entirely chosen. It is embodied, affecting the wearer who is socially embedded in a power-dynamic not under their control. This is the psychopolitics of fashion; the conflicts of desire and power, competition and rivalry, inner struggles as well as social gambles over positions and domination. The psychopolitics of fashion is about courting desires close to social dangers (von Busch & Hwang 2018).

As will be argued throughout this text, the notion of psychopolitics helps highlight the conflicts within the social enactment of fashion. Basing the analysis on the processes of social regulation, psychopolitics put emphasis on emotions such as envy and jealousy. As emphasized by French neuropsychiatric Jean-Michel Oughourlian (2012), there is more to the formation of the self than individual psychology. To Oughourlian, the formation and experience of the self is always affected by inter-dividual struggles and any understanding of the psyche must be seen as emerging from a conflict between peers. Thus we are all drawn into what Oughourlian calls “psychopolitics,” and many aspects of the self, which may be experienced as emerging from within, are heavily influenced by relationships to peers and rivals. Another perspective on psychopolitics derives from the ideas of cultural critic Byung-Chul Han (2017) who connects such politics to today’s auto-exploitation of the psyche. To Han, the biopolitics of Foucault’s discipline society have leveled up to push for a full inversion of freedom into a “positive violence” of ubiquitous self-entrepreneurship and competitive achievements, which are continuously quantified and compared through the transparency of social media. What both Oughourlian and Han highlight is that the psyche is a battlefield for inter-dividual and political power struggles, and this book unpacks how fashion is one of the theaters of war.

As will be argued later, the psychopolitics of fashion affect the formation of consumer subjectivity, a process that requires a perspective of rivalry, competition and struggle. The meanings and signs of expression are ambiguous and socially negotiated, and often appear with ambivalent claims about identity. Yet appearance still makes claims about who I am, who I am not, who I may become, etc. People not only appear before others, Kaiser (2001) posits, but have to engage, to some degree, in a struggle to “mind” the social through their appearance, through the interface of dress. Some can care much or care less, yet most find it hard to totally ignore the social responses they face from our peers based on appearance. As Kaiser puts it, “few individuals are immune to fashion in contemporary society” (2001: 80).

The struggles over who and how one “minds,” appearing as much as being seen by others, take place under a system of distribution and an ideology of values. Attention, as well as minding, is distributed across the social realm in ways that manifests social power. The distribution of goods paired with the codes of interpretation take place within a state of infrastructure. This is obvious when it comes to access to clothes and brands, but also media and images, social platforms and attention algorithms. All these aspects affect the distribution of sensibilities and aesthetic as well as ethical discourse. The state of infrastructure, as much as the distribution of fashion sensibilities, is caught in a continuous struggle over influence and control, among institutions and invested interests just as much as by individuals. Yet, fashion consumption is not easily divided into the caricature victims versus subversive heroes that so often is portrayed in the media. That is, consumers are neither mindless fashion slaves duped by capitalist propaganda, nor stylish resistors and rebels disconnected from any influence or market. Instead, most are stuck in the many-faceted conflict zones somewhere in-between, doing their best to find a place that makes sense to them in relation to their peers.

Like any other state, the people who are within it only take notice of it when in conflict with it. States appear to our senses at borders or in the confrontations that produce victims of exclusion or violence. But it is also within its means that fashion becomes a struggle between peers and rivals, between in-groups and out-groups, between those who are “in” and those who are “out.” Fashion is a continuous struggle, and it often takes its most concrete form in school bullying, where clothes often act as an excuse for judgments, rejection and violence (von Busch & Bjereld 2016). The conflict of fashion does not finish after school though, but the same mechanisms continue to play out throughout life in the aesthetic “social combat” of fashion.

The projects throughout this book take as their point of departure The Current State of Fashion—meaning the condition of fashion as it currently manifests in consumer society, that is, the circumstances under which fashion appears in its everyday form. The projects play with the concept of “state” to approach the present condition of the fashion system, but also as parallel to a sovereign state, or a nation state. With a twist, examining fashion through the lens of the state echoes the way anthropologist James C. Scott (1998) suggests readers understand politics by “seeing like a state,” yet here we will instead see fashion in the light of statehood, policing, identity-production and resistance. Not only are modern sovereign states, as we know them today, a relatively recent invention, appearing over the last four hundred years, but as Scott (2009: 40) highlights, states continuously struggle to project their power beyond the palace walls, out towards what he calls “state space.” This state space is the controlled environment through which it can extract taxes, energy and manpower. Yet, the state continuously needs to reproduce its self-image as the central agent and upholder of order in this “state space” in order to continue existing. For fashion to be influential, it also needs to project power into the world, not unlike state space. These mechanisms constitute the “state space” of The Current State of Fashion.

According to Scott (2017), the evolution of states is connected to the late history of the human species and its environment, and state history is a history of accumulations of domestications. Humans domesticate fire and plants, and later livestock and subjects, and the state continues to domesticate slaves and women in the patriarchal family and hierarchical order in its control of subjects. State domestication means making subjects “legible” for state extraction, especially by establishing dependency between state and subjects, as manifest in nutrition and livelihoods, which are “best suited to concentrated production, tax assessment, appropriation, cadastral surveys, storage, and rationing” (Scott 2017: 21). That is, for the state to survive, it needs to make its subjects dependent on it. As Scott has it, states emerge from what is extractable by the “tax man,” as much as from state hegemony, ideology and its “dispositifs.” It is in the double-action of these opposing jaws that subjects can be caught and pressured to work for the function of the state. And as we will see later, parallels can be drawn to fashion, between the local “policing” of fashion, and the ideology rationalizing the legitimacy of state power and the legibility of its subjects. Forces of statehood turn people into subjects, but also into willing and competing consumers where compliance translates into status. In fashion, it is aesthetic meritocracy that allows for social advancement.

As Scott (2017: 87) points out, domestication works both ways; humans make plants and livestocks their subjects, but also humans become dependent on this relationship for their own survival. The state is caught in a similar bind, and also fashion with its producers and consumers, leaders and followers. Statehood is a set of practical extractive functions, Scott argues, but also a narrative told about itself to make the state seem natural to its subjects, establishing a state-sanctioned worldview. Such stories change with time and context. In much of the current condition, state narratives have merged with consumerism: the state as a guarantee not only of modernity, but of shopping-as-usual. As Guy Debord (1983: 5) writes about the society of the spectacle, “The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified.” The state of fashion is a vision of the world materialized through the enactment of fashion on the terms suggested and promoted throughout the statehood of the fashion ideology and its infrastructure.

A political perspective on fashion

There have been a series of studies examining the connection between politics and fashion, not least historical surveys of how clothing has been affected by state dictates (Guenther 2004; Paulicelli 2004). There is also an emerging fascination with the representation of state power, diplomacy and international affairs as part of an “aesthetic turn” in political theory (Behnke 2017). A common thread is that fashion and dress express political issues, not only in everyday individual and group identity, but also in matters of state politics. To understand international politics, unpacking aesthetics can help reveal the mechanisms of states as much as constitutions, institutions and speech acts can. Also cultural theorists have approached fashion from an angle of politics to highlight the connection between fashion and democracy. French theorist Gilles Lipovetsky (1994) argues for how virtuous fashion can be due to its fluidity of social references and mobility. Here, fashion is a blessing for democracy, mitigating social conflict as it “pacifies and neutralises antagonisms” (1994: 150). Under the reign of fashion, we can “take greater charge of our own lives, to assume more self-mastery, to achieve self-determination in relationships with others, to live more for ourselves” (1994: 148f.). It is the true independent subject of democracy, as fashion promotes “an ego that is more fully in charge of itself” (1994: 190).

Political theorist Joshua Miller (2005) partly aligns with Lipovetsky and argues that an overlap between democratic ideals, such as personal freedom, equality, mutual respect, and common action can be expressed in clothing, even if they also are in tension with one another. “The pursuit of perpetual change in fashion is destructive to tradition and common ties,” Miller argues (2005: 9), “but fashion in the broader sense can also be useful to democratic movements.” Miller examines how fashion is part of free political expressions, negotiating messages, solidarity and provocations. At its best, fashion can foster respect for different dress and through this relationships that help manifest democratic ideals.

On one hand, Miller sees democratic potential in the expression dress and fashion allows. On the other hand, h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Fashion is Conflict
• 3 Metaphor and Mask
• 4 The Current State of Fashion—the Supremacy of Style
• 5 The Fashion Police—Micro-Regulating Everyday Style
• 6 The Fashion Safehouse—Counter-Capabilities and Com-passions
• 7 Beyond the State: Towards Deep Fashion
• Appendix—The Fashion Police Manual FM 1–15
• References
• Index
• Copyright