Fashion Theory

A Reader

Malcolm Barnard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351583657
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Fashion & Textile Industry
• Index: Business

This thoroughly revised and updated edition of Fashion Theory: A Reader brings together and presents a wide range of essays on fashion theory that will engage and inform both the general reader and the specialist student of fashion. From apparently simple and accessible theories concerning what fashion is to seemingly more difficult or challenging theories concerning globalisation and new media, this collection contextualises different theoretical approaches to identify, analyse and explain the remarkable diversity, complexity and beauty of what we understand and experience every day as fashion and clothing.

This second edition contains entirely new sections on fashion and sustainability, fashion and globalisation, fashion and digital/social media and fashion and the body/prosthesis. It also contains updated and revised sections on fashion, identity and difference, and on fashion and consumption and fashion as communication. More specifically, the section on identity and difference has been updated to include contemporary theoretical debates surrounding Islam and fashion, and LGBT+ communities and fashion and the section on consumption now includes theories of 'prosumption'. Each section has a specialist and dedicated Editor's Introduction which provides essential conceptual background, theoretical contextualisation and critical summaries of the readings in each section.

Bringing together the most influential and ground breaking writers on fashion and exposing the ideas and theories behind what they say, this unique collection of extracts and essays brings to light the presuppositions involved in the things we all think and say about fashion. This second edition of Fashion Theory: A Reader is a timeless and invaluable resource for both the general reader and undergraduate students across a range of disciplines including sociology, cultural studies and fashion studies.

PART ONE

Fashion and fashion theories

Introduction

THE INTRODUCTION TRIED TO ANSWER the questions ‘what is theory?’, ‘what is fashion?’ and ‘what is fashion theory?’ This section looks in more detail at the relation between fashion and fashion theories.

One of the problems referred to in the Introduction concerned the extent to which the object of study was the product of the theory employed to study it. Standing in a field and asked to describe what they see, the general saw the exposed killing field and the art student saw the pastoral idyll at least partly because they were using different theories. Another problem that arises is the extent to which any explanation that is given using such theories is partial, or reductive: the farmer’s description or explanation of the field as a profitable unit does not exhaust the account that might be given of that field. These problems also affect the ways in which theories describe and explain what fashion is and how it works. There is a sense in which any conception and explanation of fashion is the product of the theory used to describe, explain and understand it. For example, if the theory is that fashion is about the expression of gender identity, then any and all examples of fashion will be constructed and explained in terms of gender and identity. And there is a sense in which any theory used to explain and understand fashion will inevitably reduce the phenomenon of fashion to its own terms. The explanation of fashion as the expression of gender identity, for example, will not be interested in those aspects of fashion that are not about gender identity and to that extent will be open to accusations of reductionism. This section will introduce the relation between fashion and fashion theories by considering the ways in which theories construct and explain fashion.

The artist and art historian, Quentin Bell, writing in 1947, is quite explicit on these matters, devoting an entire chapter of On Human Finery to ‘Theories of Fashion’. At the end of this chapter, he sets out what he believes ‘the facts’ to be and he says that ‘any theory’ of fashion must ‘fit those facts’ (1992: 105). On Bell’s account ‘the facts’ pre-exist the theories that are to explain them, and the force behind his critical review of the four types of theory is based upon them not fitting the facts. The facts, then, exist independently of the theories which are to explain them on Bell’s account, rather than being the products of those theories. The second problem noted earlier concerns reductionism and is to do with the way in which a theory or an explanation of fashion reduces fashion to the terms of that theory and that explanation. All the theories that Bell discusses in this chapter are presented as attempts to answer the following questions: ‘What sets this incredibly powerful evolutionary process [fashion] into motion, what maintains and increases its velocity, gives it its vast strength and accounts for its interconnected phenomena?’ (Ib.: 90).

Bell identifies four types of theory that are proposed in the attempt to explain the changes of fashion. The first sees fashion as the work of individuals. The second proposes fashion as the ‘product’ of human nature. The third explains fashion as the ‘reflection’ of political or spiritual events. And the fourth suggests ‘the intervention of a Higher Power’ (Ib.: 90). What Bell finds, however, is that ‘the facts’ do not fit these theories. Fashion is not the work of individuals because individuals such as Beau Brummel and Paul Poiret were, in fact, often ‘unable to stand against the current of taste’. This form of theory also provides no account of why anyone should wish to ‘obey’ these individuals (Ib.: 93). Fashion is not the product of human nature because ‘as a rule’ men and women have been happy to wear what their parents wore: only recently and only in Europe have people worn ‘fashion’ (Ib.: 94). Neither is fashion the reflection of great historical and political events. Bell cites numerous wars and economic crises in which fashion conspicuously failed to ‘mirror’ events, and he discusses various histories of religion and nationalism in which what people wear also does not reflect events (Ib.: 79–102). Bell uses Heard’s account of evolution in fashion as an example of fashion being explained in terms of a Higher Power. Evolution fails as an explanatory theory because evolution in living things ‘is one in which the fittest survive and the claims of utility are inexorable’ (Ib.: 104). Exactly the opposite is true of fashionable dress, according to Bell, in that utility is often the last thing one thinks of when one thinks of fashion.

Despite his arguments concerning fashion and natural selection, Bell still wants to think of fashion as an ‘evolutionary process’, and he appears committed to the idea that it can and will be explained in terms of its motive force (Ib.: 89–90). Bell says that fashion is the ‘grand motor force of taste’, and the way in which he explains it turns out to have much in common with Veblen’s concept of consumption, a socialised account of class emulation and class distinction (see Chapter 9 for more on this). Clearly, there are other definitions of fashion (as a sequence of random differences or as the expression of inner psychological states, for example) and there are other questions that could be asked of it (‘What pleasure does it afford?’ or ‘How does it relate to consumption?’, for example). To the extent that other quite legitimate definitions and other entirely appropriate questions exist, Bell’s account may be said to be reductive.

This is essentially Elizabeth Wilson’s thesis in her chapter on fashion theories in Adorned in Dreams, tellingly entitled ‘Explaining It Away’. She looks at economic and anthropological theories of fashion and her argument is that all are reductive, or ‘simplist’, as she puts it (Ib.: 54). While she is not explicitly concerned with the ways in which facts are produced from within theories, rather than existing objectively or independently of them, the ways in which economic and anthropological theories presuppose the nature of the thing they are to explain (fashion) is of concern to her. Baudrillard’s (economic) account of fashion consumption, for example, is said to be ‘over-simplified and over-deterministic’ because it reduces fashion to class emulation through consumerism and ‘grants no role to contradiction … or pleasure’ (Wilson 1992: 53). That is, Baudrillard’s theory, which owes much to Marx and Veblen, presupposes a definition of fashion and it ignores anything that does not ‘fit’ into that definition. The definition of fashion here is that it is about class emulation; contradiction and pleasure are ignored here because they do not fit easily into that definition. It will be noted that this is the same move as that made by Bell when he marshals ‘the facts’ and tries to find a theory that will ‘fit’ them.

Gilles Lipovetsky (1994) provides an argument that sounds as though it is in almost complete disagreement with both Wilson and Bell. Writing from a philosophical perspective, he says that fashion has ‘provoked no serious theoretical dissension’ (1994: 4). This is quite a claim. However, it is not to say that there is no such thing as fashion theory; it is to say that there are theories, but that there is no conflict between them. There exists within fashion theory a profound ‘critical unanimity’ and that unanimity is not produced by accident, but is ‘deeply rooted in the thought process that underlies philosophical reflection itself’ (Ib.: 9). What Lipovetsky is getting at here is that all critics of fashion, all fashion theorists, have agreed that fashion is fickle or superficial and that it may be fully explained in terms of fashion’s role in ‘class rivalries’ and in the ‘competitive struggles for prestige that occur among the various layers and factions of the social body’ (Ib.: 3–4). In this, Lipovetsky is essentially in agreement with Wilson (if not with Bell), who says that ‘fashion writers have never really challenged Veblen’s explanations’ (Wilson 1992: 52). This is because Veblen is one of the first writers to suggest that fashion is to be explained in terms of struggles over prestige between different social classes.

Lipovetsky’s account of the relation between fashion and theory is a version of the argument that theory (in this case western philosophy) produces the phenomenon to be studied. The argument is that since Plato western thought has operated with a conception of truth and knowledge that distrusts and devalues images and surface appearance. In Plato’s cave, humans are misled by the play of shadows on the wall: they do not see and therefore cannot know what actually causes them. Fashion is thought to be like the play of shadows in this argument, and as a result western thought mistrusts fashion, seeing it as distracting and superficial. Consequently, fashion theorists are only following some of the most basic tenets of western thought when they construct fashion as enchanting and condemn it for its triviality and superficiality. This is the ‘ruse of reason’ (Ib.: 9) that operates in all fashion theorising as far as Lipovetsky is concerned. The notion that knowledge is like light in some way and that light may be used as a metaphor for knowledge (as in ‘enlightenment’, for example) is one of the founding metaphors of western thought and it is hardly surprising that it plays a profound role in western theory, including western theories about fashion.

In the light of these considerations (to follow the Platonic metaphor again) it seems insufficient to suggest that if all theory is tied to disciplines and therefore reductive, then as many disciplines and theories as possible should be employed in order to try to escape the charge of reductionism. That is, if any one theory concerning what fashion is and how it should be explained and understood is likely to be reductive, then interdisciplinarity is required to avoid over-simplifying and reducing fashion to the terms of that discipline’s theory. It may sound insufficient, but this interdisciplinarity is precisely what theorists such as Wilson, Tickner and Braudel were seen to suggest in the Introduction. All agreed that fashion, perhaps uniquely, demanded the use of a number of disciplines in order to define, explain and understand it. If it is the nature of disciplinary theory to construct its object (and thus to be reductive), then many disciplines, many theories, many constructions and many different types of explanation and understanding are necessary in order to minimise (if not escape) what might always be misunderstood as the less helpful consequences of fashion theorising.

There is one discipline that has not been thematised as yet but which is presupposed by all the discussions so far and in which interest has developed significantly since the first edition: that discipline is philosophy. In 2006 Lars Svendsen’s Fashion: A Philosophy was published; this was followed by Wolfendale and Kennett’s (2011) edited collection, Fashion Philosophy for Everyone, and by Matteucci and Marino’s (2017) edited collection Philosophical Perspectives on Fashion. While not explicitly concerned with fashion, Anne-Marie Willis’s (2019) edited collection of essays in The Design Philosophy Reader does contain a few references to fashion and provides ample context for further exploration of the discipline and how fashion and clothing might be explained. Svensen’s monograph has chapters on many of the subjects covered in the present collection, including the nature of fashion, the body, fashion as/and art and fashion and consumption. Wolfendale and Kennett’s collection contains a number of essays central to the concerns of this volume. Andy Hamilton’s essay, ‘The Aesthetics of Design’, takes up the concerns of Nancy Troy in this volume as to whether fashion is art or not. Samantha Brennan’s essay provides an alternative perspective on the matter of sexual identity, and Part Four of Wolfendale and Kennett’s collection is dedicated to questions of philosophical ethics as they relate to the production of fashion items.

The readings extracted here from Barbara Vinken and Pierre Bourdieu also follow up these concerns. Vinken’s chapter relates fashion to art and to history and temporality, arguing that fashion completes the task that art set itself, of expressing the zeitgeist in visible form, thus eliminating the difference between fashion and history or, more accurately, effectively being or becoming the identity of fashion and history. Modernist theoreticians such as Baudelaire and Benjamin are marshalled and used to discuss the work of Chanel and explaining the flash-like moment of fashion. Bourdieu’s chapter explores the apparently jokey but actually very serious relationship between the production of haute couture and the production of haute culture. The idea that fashion, even the high-status versions of it known as haute couture, might be the equivalent of culture, let alone high culture, might seem preposterous to some, but Bourdieu argues the case via the concepts of magic, cultural struggle and revolution and the surprisingly likely comparability of Coco Chanel and President de Gaulle on the matter of ‘succession’ in fashion and politics. The extracts in this section illustrate some of the range of possible and potential forms that theorising the nature, production and consumption of fashion can take.

Bibliography/further reading

• Bell, Q. (1992) On Human Finery, London: Allison and Busby.
• Bourdieu, P. (1993) ‘Haute Couture and Haute Culture’, in P. Bourdieu (ed.), Sociology in Question, London: Sage.
• Lipovetsky, G. (1994) The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Matteucci, G. and Marino, S. (eds.) (2017) Philosophical Perspectives on Fashion, London: Bloomsbury.
• Svendsen, L. (2006) Fashion: A Philosophy, London: Reaktion Books.
• Tseëlon, E. (2001) ‘Fashion Research and Its Discontents’, Fashion Theory, 5(4): 435–452.
• Vinken, B. (2005) Chapter Three ‘High and Low: The End of a Century of Fashion’, in Fashion Zeitgeist, London: Berg.
• Willis, A.-M. (ed.) (2019) The Design Philosophy Reader, London, Bloomsbury.
• Wilson, E. (1992) Adorned in Dreams, London, Virago and I.B. Tauris.
• Wolfendale, J. and Kennett, J. (eds.) (2011) Fashion Philosophy for Everyone, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell.

Chapter 1

EXPLAINING IT AWAY

Elizabeth Wilson

BECAUSE FASHION is constantly denigrated, the serious study of fashion has had repeatedly to justify itself. Almost every fashion writer, whether journalist or art historian, insists anew on the importance of fashion both as cultural barometer and as expressive art form. Repeatedly we read that adornment of the body pre-dates all other known forms of decoration; that clothes express the mood of each succeeding age; that what we do with our bodies expresses the Zeitgeist. Too often, though, the relationship that of course exists between social change and styles of dress is drawn out in a superficial and cliché-ridden way. The twenties flapper becomes the instant symbol of a revolution in manners and morals after the First World War; the New Look symbolizes women’s return to the home (which anyway didn’t happen) after the Second World War; the disappearance of the top hat signals the arrival of democracy. Such statements are too obvious to be entirely true, and the history they misrepresent is more complex.

The serious study of fashion has traditionally been a branch of art history and has followed its methods of attention to detail. As with furniture, painting and ceramics, a major part of its project has been accurate dating of costume, assignment in some cases of ‘authorship’ and an understanding of the actual process of the making of the garment, all of which are valid activities.¹ But fashion history has also too often been locked into the conservative ideologies of art history as a whole.

The mid-twentieth century was a prolific period for the investigation of fashion. Doris Langley Moore, one of the few women then known for her writings on the subject, commented that the subject matter was women, the writers almost exclusively men.² Their acceptance of prevailing conservative attitudes towards women led to a tone sometimes coy, sometimes amusedly patronizing, sometimes downright offensive, and itself fundamentally unserious, as if the writer’s conviction, often stated, of the transcendent importance of his subject matter was subverted from within by his relegation of women to a denigrated sub-caste. Because fashion has been associated with all that is feminine, these writers wrote about it as they would write about women; indeed, Cecil Willett Cunnington, author of many books about dress, even contributed a book to a series called ‘Ple...