The Fashion Show Goes Live

Exclusive and Mediatized Performance

Rebecca Halliday

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350226371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diseño
• Subtopic: Diseño de moda

Beginning with Alexander McQueen's infamous attempt to live stream his 2009 Plato's Atlantis collection on SHOWStudio, this book traces how digital and social media have disrupted social structures within the field of fashion, and transformed the way it is communicated and consumed. Analysing key case studies, from Chanel, Givenchy, Yeezy and Opening Cermony to interactive social media and 'see now buy now' campaigns from Burberry, Topshop and Tommy Hilfiger, The Fashion Show Goes Live analyses the mode and impact of fashion shows' transmission. Through the rise of experimental film, fashion shows tailored for media transmission and the use of live streaming and social media to render shows 'immediate' to consumers, fashion weeks – and fashion shows – have become not just trend barometers but material sites that demonstrate media's effects. Rebecca Halliday evaluates the performativity of consumer relations to such live streams and other mediatized content. In linking these relations back to fashion show footage, she demonstrates that although intended to communicate fashion to mass audiences, these practices also promote it as exclusive and aspirational. Despite democratized, international access to content, the shows themselves remain elite events; kindling new forms of consumer attention, interaction, immaterial labour and desire. Through the microcosm of the fashion show, The Fashion Show Goes Live asks broader socio-political questions about the effects of the fashion industry's mediatization, challenging the notion that new technology has fostered inclusivity.

1

The fashion show and/as theatre

From its inception in the mid-1800s in industrial modern couture houses, the fashion show has negotiated modes of theatrical representation in order to communicate collections’ aesthetic references and to build consumer fascination around fashion as a fantastical realm. Central to accounts of fashion shows is a timeworn debate as to whether production elements and collections should work in tandem to produce an overall effect (or affect), or whether focus should remain on the clothes.¹ The fashion show’s mode of representation can be considered more or less theatrical depending on the profound or narrative nature of the collection and/or technical features deployed. A fashion show can be rendered theatrical through the use of production elements that represent a distinct conceptual or political theme or that create a simulated space. The terms theatrical and theatre have held an ambivalent status in the fashion press, used, often depending on critics’ mindsets, to deem fashion shows profound, narrational or immersive, or to criticize those in which production elements read as frivolous or superficial or fail to cohere to the collection. This overall ‘ambivalence’ towards such terms has its roots in anti-theatrical discourses in Western art criticism, which, as Shannon Jackson outlines, are predicated on representation’s inferiorities – on ‘the debased condition of artifice’ (2004: 111–26). Critics and consumers have levied similar accusations against fashion itself for its material and semiotic excesses and its doubled and illusive nature (cf. Vinken 2005; Wilson 2005, 2007).

This chapter situates the fashion show in its simultaneous conditions as industrial event and mode of aesthetic performance and provides an overview of fashion shows’ use of theatrical and intermedial elements as a foundation for further discussion of fashion shows as mediatized performances. Compilation of historical research demonstrates the extent to which such elements have, since the first mannequin parades, been intrinsic to the fashion show, which has honed their imaginative possibilities in the production of consumer desire across market echelons. Parisian mannequin parades realized and performed class elitism in couture houses’ intimate presentation environs. Mannequin parades operated in terms of Erving Goffman’s ([1959] 1973) front region to represent the ‘public’ façade of the fashion house and hide evidence of industrial machinations (Evans 2013: 148; Troy 2004: 85). Mannequin parades dramatized class itself rather than incorporate theatrical elements or constructs:

[In these] often sober affairs, models struck dramatic poses and walked sedately, reflecting the social status of their clientele. The show was about buying the fashions on parade. Models sometimes held a small card denoting the model number of the gown they wore, for ease of ordering. Unscripted, often without set pieces or music, their sole purpose was to show the fashions to the clientele.

(Wissinger 2013: 135)

The mannequin parade later incorporated both the rituals and class associations of the professional theatre. Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell describe fashion shows as ‘the theatricalization of fashion marketing’ (1995: 114; cf. also Evans 2001), while Mila Ganeva comments that fashion shows ‘borrowed from theatre pomp and exclusivity in an effort to legitimize their own high cultural status’ (2008: 120). Fashion shows utilized act-based structures and established seasonal repertoires like those of theatre (Troy 2004: 85). Production elements enhanced spectators’ perceptions of clothes and bodies: Chanel used mirrors that replicated the linear bodies of the models in the service of a modernist aesthetic (Evans 2013: 150–60). Nancy J. Troy notes that the model can be considered a theatrical performer insofar as she took on a different role in each dress (2004: 85). The model embodied a host of associations: her form at once eroticized, empowered, commodified, politicized, degraded or disappeared depending on presentational context (Evans 2001, 2003, 2013; M. Schweitzer 2009b; Wissinger 2013, 2015).²

More adventurous couturiers incorporated mannequin parades within a dramatic narrative or fantastical milieu to position their collections within a more artistic realm. Such endeavours were held in actual theatres built inside couture establishments. These fashion shows infused couture’s commercial elements into the elite cultural representations, but remained for the most part exclusive affairs (Troy 2004: 250–1). As has been documented, Paul Poiret established his literal couture house as an immersive space, where ‘art and interior design functioned both to mask and to promote the business purpose of [his] principal enterprise: selling clothes’ (Troy 2004: 67–70). Its lush environs hosted presentations-cum-costume parties under exoticized themes, and the couturier himself took on on roles. The couturière Lucile asserted her role as a pioneer of theatrical performance in a fashion context, assigning whimsical names to each of her dresses (Kaplan & Stowell 1995: 119; M. Schweitzer 2009b: 197). Lucile’s theatricalized fashion shows used elements of ‘music, lighting, and a luxurious environment’ to harness processes of ‘identification between the audience/shopper and model/actress’ so that female consumers ‘abandoned a sense of difference between their real and ideal self’ (Rappaport 2001: 188). During the First World War, Lucile created Fleurette’s Dream, a relief fundraiser that toured on the vaudeville circuit. This fantastical production doubled as a showcase for American fashion (Lucile’s creations) and featured her most famous cadre of models (M. Schweitzer 2009b: 214–16). Fleurette’s Dream adhered to a convenient narrative, common at that time, constructed around ‘a reverie: a young woman falls asleep and dreams of a fantastical and splendid fashion show’ (Evans 2013: 97–9; cf. also M. Schweitzer 2009b: 214–16; Troy 2004: 99). The production marks a diffusion of Parisian fashion into an American middle-class consciousness and its forums of entertainment and fashion consumption (M. Schweitzer 2009b).

In the United States in the 1900s, the fashion show took on a more democratic function as a theatrical performance that displayed the latest Parisian and, later, American fashions for middle-class consumers. In department stores, fashion shows functioned ‘as spectacle and advertisement in one’: a win-win scenario for retailers and consumers that allowed department stores to ‘circumvent licensing laws’ that forbade producing ‘theatrical events on their premises’ and permitted customers to ‘consummate their consumer desires’ on-site (M. Schweitzer 2009b: 181). Stores collaborated to produce fashion shows that, as William Leach describes, ‘drew thousands of people at a time,’ forming a material footprint not unlike that of the current New York Fashion Week, albeit as a more mass-market event:

[The shows] were so potentially disruptive to the ordinary conduct of city life that police in New York and elsewhere ordered merchants to take out licenses for all shows that employed live models, and, in Manhattan, even threatened to terminate the shows altogether. Merchants, too, worried about the ‘demoralizing’ impact on other store business as customers packed into theatres, tearooms, and restaurants, or lined the promenades.

(2011: 103)

Fashion shows were also held at public arenas such as Madison Square Garden, a location that I return to as the site of Kanye West’s public, multimedia performance spectacular.

Evans’s exhaustive examination of fashion show theatrics documents that, after the Second World War, ‘there did … continue to be spectacular shows,’ but their theatricality was provided through models’ walks as opposed to the earlier shows’ use of ‘mise-en-scènes’ (2001: 291, author’s emphasis).³ In 1947, Christian Dior introduced his infamous New Look via a fashion show in which models performed an ‘extravagant, theatrical’ walk ‘in marked contrast to the austerity of wartime fashion’ that evoked a cultural reinvention (Evans 2001: 291). Pierre Balmain’s couture shows involved opulent and sometimes even ‘orientalist’ entrances that often included the presence of animals (Evans 2001: 291). Balmain incorporated the model, and later the house cabine or retinue, as featured performer, and led the differentiation of modelling styles specific to fashion houses (Evans 2001: 291–5). These shows were nonetheless ‘more sedate’ affairs presented ‘in the couturier’s salon’ with a ‘strict order of presentation’ and audience protocols (Evans 2001: 295).

In the 1960s, the fashion show infused a more upbeat air into its presentations, credited in part to the Youthquake and the addition of designer ready-to-wear to fashion week calendars (Evans 2001: 297). Pioneers of this era include Mary Quant, Courrèges, Ossie Clark, Paco Rabanne, Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche and Pierre Cardin (Evans 2001: 297–300). 1960s fashion shows experimented with audience–performer constructs in more stark, modern spaces and non-traditional locations, and with the speed of presentation, often accompanied by bass-laden or up-tempo music (Evans 2001: 298–9). 1970s ready-to-wear fashion produced more ‘show-stopping modeling techniques’ that preceded the supermodel era (Evans 2001: 299–300). These moments hit a climax at Gianni Versace’s March 1991 show whose finale witnessed Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington link arms and walk to George Michael’s cultural anthem ‘Freedom ’90’, whose music video the foursome had appeared in (Evans 2001: 301; cf. also Blanks 2013; Duggan 2001: 246–7; Wissinger 2015: 79).

The fashion show reached an unprecedented level of ostentation during the 1990s, exemplified by the unsettling and politicized shows of designers such as Olivier Theyskens, Maison Martin Margiela, Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen and John Galliano (cf. Evans 2003). Suzy Menkes refers to the ‘creative expressions’ from this period in a nostalgic sense as ‘fashion as theater’ (2010: para. 18, author’s emphasis). Her statement hints that shows exceeded a function as an artistic vessel and transformed into a more complete narrative. Galliano operated as the producer of fashion as spectacle: his productions for Christian Dior installed immaculate interiors within architectural structures such as Paris’s Grand Hotel, the Opera House and the Carrousel du Louvre (Evans 2000, 2003: 67; cf. also Duggan 2001). Ginger Gregg Duggan frames 1990s fashion shows as performance art within the context of multidirectional collaborations in that decade, which saw fashion houses adopt manifestos specific to performance art and political movements (2001: 268).⁴ Examining Hussein Chalayan’s transformational 2000 ‘After Words’ collection, that confronted issues of displacement, Megan Hoffmann (2009) finds that fashion shows’ commercial and retail aims threaten to supersede political intention, but the fashion show nonetheless offers a productive site via which to explore social issues.

Haute couture at the turn of the millennium relied on a more celebrified mode of spectacle. While shows were still presented to invited attendees, the presentations proliferated after-the-fact in photographs, print media and television snippets. Fashion houses used the fashion show to build aspirational fantasies and entice consumers to purchase their lower-priced lines and licensed commodities (L. Taylor 2000: 138). The presence of celebrities was paramount: ‘The concentration of designer brands, fabulous frocks, name models and celebrity guests, all under the glare of publicity and fêted with lavish hospitality, amounts to an irresistible cocktail of all that is desirable in contemporary commercial culture’ (Buckley & Gundle 2000: 38). Into the new millennium, critics commented that fashion shows’ industrial function had diminished, as designers used the platform to display museum pieces and foreground front-row celebrities while retailers purchased the more wearable collection pieces from showrooms (cf. Cartner-Morley 2003).

The international economic recession of the late-2000s prompted companies to strip the fashion show to its most basic structure, as fashion houses faced financial constraints and critics expressed a moral ambivalence towards opulence and excess. In her reviews of 2009’s couture presentations, Mower compliments houses that produced ‘cleaner, minimalist’ shows (2009c: para. 1). Critics complained, however, that fashion shows had become predictable, mechanical and all-too-brief affairs that offered nothing more than models marching up and down runways while ‘throbbing techno-disco-rock blared from a mediocre sound system’ (Isherwood 2010: para. 13). The 2000s also witnessed a more profound use of intermedial elements to enhance the performance.⁵ Intermedial performances combine electronic media interfaces within the frame to explore and experiment with the interconnections between these media and live bodies (Nelson & Bay-Cheng 2010). McQueen’s 2009 ‘Plato’s Atlantis’ model parade happened as ‘premade video footage’ from Nick Knight, of model Raquel Zimmermann ‘lying on sand, naked, with snakes writhing across her body,’ ran on a screen (Mower 2009a: para. 2). For its Fall/Winter 2011 collection, In the Mood for China, Ermenegildo Zegna presented a ‘Live-D’ spectacle in which prerecorded footage of models was ‘projected onto a huge backdrop of the Great Wall of China, simultaneously to their appearing live on the catwalk’ (Uhlirova 2013a: 152–3). Burberry fused the intermedial and the real in a Beijing show in which models interacted with holographs of their own bodies in a ‘hybrid spectacle in which the physical and the virtual could hardly be distinguished’ (Ju 2011: para. 3). Alexander Wang’s Fall/Winter 2014 show had models stand on a rotating platform in black clothing that turned neon when heat was blasted on them through vents at different temperatures (B. Moore 2014: para. 3).⁶

While producers must now consider how fashion shows will read from multiple camera angles and across various-sized screens, most companies’ use of innovative technical elements, opulent theatrics and set pieces has not increased overall. Productions that can be called theatrical or spectacle operate in a more self-referential manner than their predecessors, even as the terms continue to be sprinkled over reviews and on the covers of coffee table books that archive fashion show photographs and reflections (cf. Browne 2016). For several companies the complete transmission, with its behind-the-scenes access and attendee arrivals, has become the performance, with the runway show as but one albeit crucial component. Critics lament that fashion weeks’ multimedia affairs occlude the point of the clothes: ‘The clothes on the catwalk have become overshadowed by the circus of celebrity, models, gossip and street style that wraps around them. The actual show has become the excuse for the party, rather than the party itself’ (Cartner-Morley 2014: para. 1). Companies that want to earn notice must either produce shows that provoke online discussion, circulate viral content or implement innovative digital initiatives to focus consumer attention onto presentations. Since its inception, the fashion show has utilized performance and theatrical repertoires and intermedial elements to communicate the creative intent behind a collection and to construct a consumer attraction to fashion houses and the elite realms that their fantasies epitomize. Concern towards the superficial nature of the mediatized fashion show recalls concerns over the theatrical artifice: hinting that without its virtual decorations, the fashion show could be exposed as an informational event – a revelation that, as in fashion’s artifice (cf. Barnard 2002: 3), the Emperor has no clothes, or, in the fashion show, that the Emperor has just clothes.

100% Lost Cotton, Opening Ceremony Spring/Summer 2015

For its Spring/Summer 2015 New York Fashion Week presentation, held on 7 September 2014, New York-founded clothing brand (and at the time brick-and-mortar retailer) Opening Ceremony produced a new one-act play, titled 100% Lost Cotton, at the Metropolitan Opera House. The use of theatre with or as a fashion show – promotional materials termed it a ‘fashion show-play hybrid’ (Hines 2014: para. 1) – combined the rehearsed enactment of a prewritten dramatic text with the appearance of fashion models standing behind the actors wearing pieces from the collection. 100% Lost Cotton was directed by Oscar-winning film director and screenwriter Spike Jonze, a close friend of brand founders Humberto Leon and Carol Lim. Jonze co-wrote the script with film actor Jonah Hill, and the brand acquired sponsorship from the likes of Coca-Cola and Grandlife Hotels to rent the venue (Friedman 2014: para. 16). The script fictionalized in a darkly comedic manner Opening Ceremony’s process of casting and last-minute alterations for its upcoming fashion show; the clothes were those of the real collection debuted. The production cast included model, actress and socialite Dree Hemingway; Internet-era supermodel Karlie Kloss; theatre, television and film actor/director John Cameron Mitchell; actor Bobby Cannavale; and film and television actresses Elle Fanning, Rashida Jones, Catherine Keener and Alia Shawkat. The cast of models appeared in behind the dramatic action, wearing pieces from the collection proper, while, during the showroom scenes, the models enacted the somewhat metatheatrical roles of the models at the fictional casting. While the creative team chose to produce a play as a one-off creative endeavour rather than a communicative platform, the press nonetheless read the exclusive theatre event as a refreshing antidote to fashion’s media-saturated condition. The use of theatre as a forum refocused press attention onto the fashion show’s function as event, while the brand’s decision to produce the play in a famous performance venue became the press hook.

I situate 100% Lost Cotton as an historical successor to a genre of commercial theatre made popular 100 years prior, fashion-themed millinery plays, produced in the professional theatres of London and Paris in the 1910s. While 100% Lost Cotton was intended as a one-time chance for Jonze and Hill to dip their toes into the medium, its thematic content nonetheless strikingly echoes that of these modern-era productions. The critical material on 100% Lost Cotton is scant, and no full-length textual or video records of the performance have been made public; press reports, reviews and interviews offer no evidence that Jonze and Hill researched any historical connections between fashion and theatre (based on the brief timeline between script development, rehearsal and production, this is unlikely). Still, one can position 100% Lost Cotton within the history of fashion-themed theatre, as well as its collaborations with theatre and film actresses of some renown. A comparison of the material reveals that fashion remains embroiled in concerns of class, commercialism and labour; ultimately, however, fashion uses its status as an artistic medium as justification for its continuance and as a defence for companies’ inabilities to find or implement solutions. In both periods, the social semiotics and audience expectations of upper-class theatre help to bolster fashion’s artistic claim. 100% Lost Cotton’s collaboration with Hollywood celebrities and associations with contemporary film, however, aligned with its more commercial purposes. The show provides a useful example of contemporary fashion shows because it was not live-streamed, or, rather, it exposes the degree of mediatization that consumers had come to expect, while its status as theatre incited continuing discourse as to how much producers should direct audiences’ focus to the clothes in relation to other elements.

Historical confluences between fashion and theatre

In the 1910s, the realms of fashion and professional theatre intersected in collaborations between theatre producers and couturiers and in the use of the professional theatre as a forum to showcase the latest fashions, cross-promotions that assumed a scale comparable to later interconnection...