Fashion Criticism

An Anthology

Francesca Granata, Francesca Granata

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350058798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

This is the first anthology of fashion criticism, a growing field that has been too long overlooked. Fashion Criticism aims to redress the balance, claiming a place for writing on fashion alongside other more well-established areas of criticism. Exploring the history of fashion criticism in the English language, this essential work takes readers from the writing published in avant-garde modernist magazines at the beginning of the twentieth century to the fashion criticism of Robin Givhan-the first fashion critic to win a Pulitzer Prize-and of Judith Thurman, a National Book Award winner. It covers the shift in newspapers from the so-called "women's pages" to the contemporary style sections, while unearthing the work of cultural critics and writers on fashion including Susan Sontag and Eve Babitz ( Vogue ), Bebe Moore Campbell ( Ebony ), Angela Carter ( New Statesman ) and Hilton Als ( New Yorker). Examining the gender dynamics of the field and its historical association with the feminine, Fashion Criticism demonstrates how fashion has gained ground as a subject of critical analysis, capitalizing on the centrality of dress and clothing in an increasingly visual and digital world. The book argues that fashion criticism occupied a central role in negotiating shifting gender roles as well as shifting understandings of race. Bringing together two centuries of previously uncollected articles and writings, from Oscar Wilde's editorials in The Woman's World to the ground-breaking fashion journalism of the 1980s and today's proliferation of fashion bloggers, it will be an essential resource for students of fashion studies, media and journalism.

PART I

Late Nineteenth Century–1960s

Introduction to PART I

The anthology opens with “Mr. Oscar Wilde on Woman’s Dress,” which Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) published in The Pall Mall Gazette in 1884. The article reiterates Wilde’s philosophy of dress, which he had already articulated in his well-received lecture “Dress.” Prior to his journalistic career, the legendary raconteur had delivered popular lectures mainly for audiences of middle-class women on topics such as “House Beautiful,” “The Decorative Arts,” and dress across the United States and the UK (Fortunato, 2007, 19). The Pall Mall Gazette had covered one of these lectures, inciting significant reader response, which, in turn, prompted Wilde’s article here included (Stokes and Turner, 2013, 228).

Clearly informed by the Dress Reform movement and ideas underpinning the Rational Dress Society, Wilde extols the benefit of simplifying both men’s and women’s dress in the name of greater functionality and advocates for an end to the use of corsetry and heels for women. This discourse is taken up and further explained in the women’s magazine The Woman’s World, which the Irish author edited between 1887 and 1889.

Wilde was ambivalent about fashion, a view perhaps best encapsulated in his November 1887 editorial that included the now-famous dictum: “And after all, what is fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months” (Wilde, 1887, 40). But he clearly understood the importance of fashion and the need to take it seriously, advocating for not only a new fashion for a new woman, but also the importance to closely chronicle it.

As Wilde scholar Paul Fortunato argues, the writer advanced “a consumer modernism,” as his focus on the ephemeral, the feminine, and the ornamental is an attempt at decentering the Western subject:

Wilde takes up these elements, surface, image, and ritual, all as a strategy to force us to reconceptualize our ideas on culture and art. That is, he elevates the marginalized elements—things gendered feminine, considered as bodily rather than rational and often marked as Oriental—in order to de-center the Western rationalist, masculinist subject.(Fortunato, 2007, IX)

Fittingly, the second author included in the anthology is a Wilde acolyte, Louise Norton (1890–1989), who wrote about fashion in Rogue, a Dada-influenced New York avant-garde literary magazine that published in 1915 and 1916. Rogue, with its title a pun on Vogue, was a so-called “little.” As the term suggests, the little magazine was a literary magazine with a small circulation. The genre had its heyday in the 1920s and was known to publish artistic and literary work, often aligned with the avant-garde, and thus deemed too daring for a mass magazine audience (Tebbel and Zuckermann, 1991, 217).¹ Rogue was started by Norton and her husband Allen Norton, and as argued by literary scholar Jay Bochner, it was steeped in the new advances made by women, taking for granted “the voting, smoking and corsetless woman” (Bochner, 2007, 50).

Norton’s witty column “Philosophic Fashions” underlined the importance of fashion, much as Wilde had done. Norton comments on how “Fashion may be to some ‘fickle, frail and flighty.’ But there are those to whom the rise and fall of petticoats is as momentous as the fluctuations of the market” (March 15, 1915, 17). The fact that Norton quotes the Irish author in her column and is undoubtedly influenced by Wilde’s witty writing is evidence of the emergence of a discourse of fashion criticism in the English language.

Another theme that transpires in Norton’s column and harks back to Wilde’s fashion writing is a call for the end of corsetry and for a unisex fashion. While Wilde had predicted that fashion in the twentieth century would “emphasise distinctions of occupations, not distinctions of sex” (Wilde, 1887, 40), Norton, going a step further, advocates for an “undoing” of gendered fashion:

But how charming after all, when men grow dainty and women daring! To-day might and to-morrow will bring such miracles to pass. Definitions are losing something of their definiteness. Sex is a technicality […] There are men who wear their hair long; there are women who wear their hair short; and yet there are those who still say, ‘a man’s a man for a’ that!’ Trousers and other things I hold to be mere arbitrary symbols of sex which I, for one, think obsolete. (Norton, 1915, 18)

Joy Bochner, writing about Norton’s column, defines its nature as “essentially feminine and, for the period, feminist” (Bochner, 2007, 54). Counteracting what he sees as a lack of serious engagement with her work, he claims that in the pages of Rogue, one finds “a modernism almost entirely produced by women and perhaps their very ability to be modern was sufficiently doubted as to make their commitment appear without great value” (Bochner, 2007, 49).

Less radical, but equally witty is the fashion criticism penned by Lois Long (1901–1974) in the pages of The New Yorker. Long was one of The New Yorker’s original staff members, and as early as 1925 wrote a column on nightlife in New York titled “Table for Two” under the pseudonym “Lipstick,” as well as one focused on fashion, beauty, and shopping titled “Feminine Fashions,” which was signed with her initials. Long epitomized the humorous tone that characterized The New Yorker of the 1920s while advancing the discourse on fashion in journalism. In the words of the influential New Yorker editor William Shawn, Long “was the first American fashion critic to approach fashion as an art and to criticize women’s clothes with independence, humor and literary style” (The New York Times, 1974).

Long wrote her column in a user-friendly manner, most often reviewing the French collections only once they arrived in American stores. She did not shy away from criticizing well-known designers in her witty tone, which belied a true understanding of fashion and clothing constructions through a detailed analysis. Writing about the French collections in the Fall of 1927, she did not spare criticism for two of the best-known designers of the time, Coco Chanel and Jean Patou:

In the first place, I was disappointed in most of the Patous. The little sweater with three colored stripes around the bottom […] is all very well, but not very new. The same is true of the Chanel daytime things […]. Having made a success last year with boleros, belts, pleatings low in the skirts, and tuckings, Mme. Chanel apparently has decided to let well enough alone […]. My advice is to go slow before paying exorbitant prices for copies, when you undoubtedly have something a good deal like them already at home. (Long, 1927, 60)

Like her predecessors, she often writes about fashion in the context of women’s lives, bemoaning the impracticality for working women like her to get custom-fitted clothes which require a great deal of time for repeated fittings, lauding instead the ready-made (March 11, 1933, 48). Long did not regularly travel to Paris to cover the collections. In fact, for a short time in the late 1920s Elizabeth Hawes (1903–1971), later renowned as an innovative American designer, would actually file occasional articles about the Paris fashion shows for The New Yorker under the pseudonym “Parasite.”

This anthology includes excerpts from Hawes’s later writings published in her 1938 collection Fashion Is Spinach. Part ethnography, part memoir, the book includes a humorous first-person account of her work as a copyist for a Parisian copy house and of her work as a fashion critic for US publications in Paris, where she had moved shortly after graduating from college. The latter article provided a self-reflective account of what it meant to be a fashion critic in the 1920s and of the difficulties in delivering unvarnished criticism. Singling out The New Yorker, Hawes writes: “Anyone who has ever written fashions will, I am sure, appreciate what it means to be allowed to write with no embroidery just what you think about them.” To which she adds more explicitly, “The advertising department never raised its ugly head and said that if I thought Patou was no designer, I’d better keep still about it or someone would withdraw its advertising” (Hawes, 1938, 77).

An equally unsparing critical voice was that of Eugenia Sheppard (1900–1984), who started covering fashion in 1940 for The New York Herald Tribune (renamed The World Journal Tribune in 1966) until the paper folded in 1967. Her column “Inside Fashion” was widely read and highly influential. An outspoken chronicler of post-war fashion, Sheppard provided unsparing accounts of the period’s fashion, which in her user-friendly language and descriptive details are reminiscent of Long’s criticism.

Further highlighting the existence of a thriving fashion media discourse, Sheppard discusses Elizabeth Hawes’s work and her views on fashion in connection to an exhibition of Rudi Gernreich and Hawes at the Brooklyn Museum. Written in 1967, the article, titled “A Mini for Men,” praises Hawes’s prescient views on women’s fashion, which she introduced through her writing and collections in the 1930s, while commenting on the changes to come in menswear.

The last critic to be included in this section of the anthology is Eleni Epstein (1926–1991), the fashion editor for the now-defunct Washington Evening Star. Another important chronicler of American post-war fashion, she became the fashion editor at The Star in 1948, where she remained in the role until the paper’s closing in 1981 (Levy, 1991). Epstein turned being based in Washington, and thus away from New York—America’s undisputed fashion center—into an asset, as she covered the local fashion scene alongside the dress of politicians and their spouses (Voss and Speere, 2013). An early awareness of the importance of dress to politics is evident in Epstein’s work: a short article she wrote on occasion of the 1968 presidential election describes the most effective ties candidates should wear for various campaign events. An early articulation of the increasing mediatization of fashion and politics, which will inform fashion criticism in the twenty-first century, the article goes as far as discussing the need for accounting for the persistence of black-and-white TV sets in the late 1960s in the choice of candidate’s ties.

Bibliography and Further Readings

Best, Kate Nelson. The History of Fashion Journalism. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Bochner, Jay. “The Marriage of Rogue and The Soil.” In Little Magazines and Modernism. Edited by Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible. New York and London: Routledge, 2007.

Fortunato, Paul L. Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde. New York and London: Routledge, 2007.

Granata, Francesca. “Fashioning Cultural Criticism: An Inquiry into Fashion Criticism and Its Delay in Legitimization.” Fashion Theory, vol. 23, no. 4–5 (2019): 553–70.

Hawes, Elizabeth. Fashion Is Spinach. New York: Random House, 1938.

Levy, Claudia. “Eleni Sakes Epstein, Star Fashion Editor, Dies.” The Washington Post, January 29, 1991.

“Lois Long Is Dead, Fashion Editor.” The New York Times, July 31, 1974: 36.

Long, Lois. “Feminine Fashions. The New Yorker, September 10, 1927: 60–22. McNeil, Peter and Sanda Miller. Fashion Writing and Criticism: History, Theory and Practice. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Norton, Louise [Dame Rogue]. “Philosophic Fashions: Trouser Talk.” Rogue, April 15, 1915: 15–18.Stokes, John and Mark Turner. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Tebbel, John and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America 1741–1990. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Voss, Kimberly Wilmot and Lance Speere. “Fashion as Washington Journalism History: Eleni Epstein and Her Three Decades at the Washington Star.” Media History Monographs, vol. 16, no. 3 (2013–2014): 1–22.

Wilde, Oscar. “Literary and Other Notes.” The Woman’s World, November 1887.Zeitz, Joshua. Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern. New York: Broadway Books, 2006.

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¹ Tebbel and Zuckermann argue that The New Yorker in part proved that these qualities could eventually be found beyond the little, 219.

1

Mr. Oscar Wilde on Woman’s Dress

Oscar Wilde

The Pall Mall Gazette, 1884

Mr. Oscar Wilde, who asks us to permit him “that most charming of all pleasures, the pleasure of answering one’s critics,” sends us the following remarks:-

The “Girl Graduate” must of course have precedence, not merely for her sex, but for her sanity; her letter is extremely sensible. She makes two points: that high heels are a necessity for any lady who wishes to keep her dress clean from the Stygian mud of our streets, and that without a tight corset “the ordinary number of petticoats and etceteras” cannot be properly or conveniently held up. Now it is quite true that as long as the lower garments are suspended from the hips, a corset is an absolute necessity; the mistake lies in not suspending all apparel from the shoulders. In the latter case a corset becomes useless, the body is left free and unconfined for respiration and motion, there is more health, and consequently more beauty. Indeed, all the most ungainly and uncomfortable articles of dress that fashion has ever in her folly prescribed, not the tight corset merely, but the farthingale, the vertugadin, the hoop, the crinoline, and that modern monstrosity the so-called “dress improver” also, all of them have owed their origin to the same error, the error of not seeing that it is from the shoulders, and from the shoulders only, that all garments should be hung.

And as regards high heels, I quite admit that some additional height to the shoe or boot is necessary if long gowns are to be worn in the street; but what I object to is that the height should be given to the heel only, and not to the sole of the foot also. The modern high-heeled boot is, in fact, merely the clog of the time of Henry VI., with the front prop left out, and its inevitable effect is to throw the body forward, to shorten the steps, and consequently to produce that want of grace which always follows want of freedom. Why should clogs be despised.? Much art has been expended on clogs. They have been made of lovely woods, and delicately inlaid with ivory, and with mother of pearl. A clog might be a dream of beauty, and, if not too high or too heavy, most comfortable also. But if there be any who do not like clogs, let them try some adaptation of the trouser of the Turkish lady, which is loose round the limb, and tight at the ankle. The “Girl Graduate,” with a pathos to which I am not insensible, entreats me not to apotheosize “that awful, befringed, beflounced, and bekilted divided skirt.” Well, I will acknowledge that the fringes, the flounces, and the kilting do certainly defeat the whole object of the dress, which is that of ease and liberty; but I regard these things as mere wicked superfluities, tragic proofs that th...