Re-presentation Policies of the Fashion Industry

Discourse, Apparatus and Power

Eleni Mouratidou

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781786305916
• eBook ISBN: 9781119779469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Modedesign

The book studies the way the luxurious fashion develops re-presentational politics by reinvesting symbolic fields such as art and culture, religion and the sacred as well as politics, in other words fields that represent a certain common pattern of life and a common interest. I develop a semiotic approach of the way art exhibitions, print and audiovisual advertising, publishing and distribution politics as well as special ready to wear collaborations with arts such as Jeff Koons reveal the fashion industrys gesture of pretending being a non-commercial structure especially in order to cover up its industrialisation and banalization process

Part 1
Re-presentations and Artifices

Introduction to Part 1

The re-presentation policies appropriating the field of art and culture are studied throughout this part 1 as artifices. This term has a dual dimension in that it designates both a technique of deception and an art of doing. As a technique of deception, artifice refers to its very first use, a “skillful and more or less deceptive means”¹.

We will see throughout the analyses carried out how the fashion industry’s re-presentation policies propose particularly clever but also misleading product and strategy staging. As an art of doing, the notion of artifice allows us to link the field of art and culture with the re-presentation policies of luxury fashion. By art, I mean the ability to design and realize commercial staging as much as the ability to appropriate forms specific to art and, by extension, culture. Behind the link between re-presentation and artifice lies the process of artificiality in the fashion industry, an artificiality that affects products as much as the strategies that accompany them. These policies will be captured both as “unadvertizing” processes (Marti 2015) and as extensions of “advertising artifacts” (de Iulio 2016). It will therefore be a question of reporting on the way in which elements determining an interdisciplinary promotion policy, working as much on market goods as on their promotion and distribution methods, are staged as a cultural and artistic offer rather than as a management strategy.

The fashion industry’s re-presentational policies studied throughout this section will also be approached as a figuration, i.e. “a representation of the communication process that is not a matter of explanation, as is the case with promise, but is due to the interplay of mobilized forms, within media productions and textualities” (Jeanneret 2014, p. 74, author’s translation). The choice to treat the set of practices and strategies studied as re-presentations instead of figurations resides in the desire to emphasize the spectacular dimension that structures the figurations and that allows us to observe them as forms enriched by a dual representational aura without omitting the ideological and dialogical contributions that organize the same forms. This part will therefore present the interdisciplinarity and the splintering of the fashion industry’s re-presentational policies that occupy the fields of art and culture in a generalized manner.

Note

1. 1 Le Robert, Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (2000, p. 221).

1
Re-presentation as a Form of Artistic and Cultural Legitimization

In 2003, fashion designer Alexander McQueen presented a fashion show explicitly inspired by the film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?². Presented as a dance competition, the show was particularly critical of the capitalist system, which structures the fashion and luxury industry. Asked backstage by a journalist who asked him “whether [he thought his show] was fashion or entertainment”, McQueen answered without hesitation: “It was art”³. In another interview, however, McQueen said, in reference to his brand, that “everything is for sale; everything”⁴, a statement that underscores the commercial dimension of his previously artistic activity. Although some fashion designers develop an indisputable esthetic, often celebrated as a work of art through media discourse, the economic models and goals that determine a fashion brand can compromise this dimension and the possible artistically oriented values that may result from it.

While fashion has regularly rubbed shoulders with the world of art, in various forms and practices, it remains nonetheless and even essentially a creative industry. Before becoming a couturier, Christian Dior was a great lover of art, visiting many of the artists of his time; one of Yves Saint Laurent’s most successful collections dates from 1965 and features motifs inspired by the paintings of Piet Mondrian. In Paris, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs is an institutional space dedicated to fashion,⁵ among other things, while the Palais Galliera is the Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris⁶. In her article on the possible link between fashion and art, Diana Crane underlines the many partnerships set up between couturiers and artists but also the desire of men and women involved in fashion to be perceived as artists:

From the end of the 19th Century and again in the 20th Century, fashion designers like Worth claimed an artist status. [...] In the 1930s, Italian seamstress Elsa Schiaparelli collaborated with artists such as Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau and designed clothes that conformed to the esthetic principles of the Surrealist movement. (Crane 2012, p. 242, author’s translation)

Today, the industrialization of luxury fashion is accentuating the serial dimension of the sector’s goods, which is the antithesis of the aforementioned narratives and practices, linking couturiers to artists and artists to couturiers. Yet, from an obvious point of view, art and culture are particularly present in the discourses and objects of the fashion industry. This presence emanates from the need to make up the industrial or semi-industrial and also serial dimension of certain luxury products – such as purses – as well as the hypervisibility and hyperexposure of fashion brands on social networks. The result of this constraint is the trivialization of the sector, which is supposed to promote rarity, selectivity and craftsmanship.

This is where the sector’s strategies come into play, strategies that often consist of disguising the promotional discourse implemented by the various luxury houses and, above all, proposing a new positioning that is likely to reintroduce the original characteristics and values of this industry. While the selectivity and rarity of luxury goods are disappearing, communication and marketing strategies are developing discourses and products that tend toward a movement in line with these characteristics. This movement corresponds, on the one hand, and from a theoretical point of view, to that of artification; in other words, to this “transformation process of non-art into art, the result of a complex work that generates a change in the definition and status of people, objects and activities” (Shapiro 2012, p. 20, author’s translation).

On the other hand, it corresponds to the culturization process, a process in which “products that are not initially cultural and artistic in nature are nevertheless given some of the symbolic attributes of culture and art” (Bouquillion et al. 2013, p. 11, author’s translation).

Throughout this first chapter, I will try to account for the way in which both luxury fashion products and their traditional enhancement processes, such as media advertising or modes of distribution, are determined by re-presentational characteristics emanating from the two movements mentioned above: artification, affecting more the actors and fashion brands, and culturization, affecting the industry products in question.

1.1. The work of art and its reproducibility at the service of the fashion industry

In April 2017, the French brand Louis Vuitton, a member of the LVMH group, celebrated an exclusive and ephemeral collaboration with contemporary artist Jeff Koons. The collaboration focused on the creation of a collection of purses and some accessories, entitled “Masters LV x Koons”, materialized in two special editions, launched, respectively, in April and October 2017. In both cases, the work of the artist Jeff Koons and his creative studio focused on presenting the purses and accessories with motifs from pictorial works such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa for the first edition or Claude Monet’s⁷ Water Lilies for the second. The launch of the first collection was celebrated at the Louvre Museum in Paris, while the launch of the second collection was celebrated at Koons’ studio in New York.

Founded in 1854 as a company specializing in the creation of luxury trunks, Louis Vuitton expanded its business activities into ready-to-wear in 1997. It owns 95 commercial spaces, including boutiques and corners in department stores and airports. Firmly established in the luxury sector, the company offers products at fairly high prices, ranging from 250 euros for a small leather goods item to 35,000 euros for a crocodile leather purse.

The collaboration between the contemporary artist Jeff Koons and Louis Vuitton was not an original or innovative strategy within the framework of what is called co-branding⁸. On the contrary, with a view to novelty and also as part of the search for notoriety other than commercial fame, luxury brands – and from time to time those of other segments as well⁹ – produce so-called “capsule” collectio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Part 1: Re-presentations and Artifices
• Part 2: Re-presentations and Forms of Life: The Religious and the Political
• Part 3: The Power of the Fashion Industry’s Re-presentational Apparatus
• References
• Index
• Other titles from ISTE in Science, Society and New Technologies
• End User License Agreement