Fashion on Television

Identity and Celebrity Culture

Helen Warner

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472567468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Fashion on Television provides a comprehensive critical examination of the intersection between fashion, television and celebrity culture. The book brings together theoretical approaches to the symbolic force of television and fashion-forward programming on a global scale. Examining case studies such as Sex and the City, Gossip Girl, Ugly Betty and Mad Men, the book examines how TV has made style icons out of leading actresses and fashion-conscious consumers out of audiences. Using a varied methodology, including textual and contextual analysis, this study explores the cultural uses of onscreen fashion at the level of industry, text and intertext. Fashion on Television is essential reading for those seeking to understand the cultural function of costume in a television context. Written accessibly with a multi-disciplinary approach, it will appeal to students and scholars from film and media, fashion and cultural studies, to sociology and women's studies.

1

INTRODUCTION: APPROACHING FASHION, IDENTITY AND CELEBRITY CULTURE

Pilot episode Sex and the City, June 1998:

The camera reveals Carrie. Seated at her writing desk, in a pale-blue casual shirt, she welcomes viewers to the ‘age of un-innocence’. Cut to the busy streets of Manhattan, Carrie—dressed in an oversized raincoat—is surrounded only by well-dressed New York women and observes that: ‘There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of women like this in the city. We all know them and we all agree they’re great. They travel, they pay taxes, they’ll spend four hundred dollars on a pair of Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals. And they’re alone.’?

In his pilot script, Darren Star imagines his quirky protagonist Carrie Bradshaw as ‘Heather Locklear gorgeous cursed with the brain of Dorothy Parker’ (Star 1996: 6). Bradshaw is vivified by Sarah Jessica Parker and the pilot’s costume designer, Ellen Lutter. Parker’s star body gives existence to her costuming, and together the character is made to mean. Star’s adaptation of Candace Bushnell’s popular newspaper column would become a landmark series within television history, noted for its unique sartorial display. His pilot script hints at the importance of fashion, not only as costume but also as an independent ‘aesthetic discourse’ (Gaines 1990). The specific namecheck of Manolo Blahnik in the prologue signals, to a self-selecting fan base, the premium which would ultimately be placed on fashion within the narrative.

Following the success of Sex and the City (1998–2004), the number of shows with fashion at their centres has grown considerably and led to the development of a discursive category identified in the trade press as ‘fashion programming’.¹ This category of programming marks a departure from so-called traditional Hollywood costuming in which wardrobe serves character and narrative. While the costumer must interpret and translate the script, there is no unequal relationship where fashion is subservient to narrative demands. The clothes are given meaning and audiences are encouraged to take pleasure in deciphering and appropriating that meaning. This book is about that process.

Using a number of case studies (including Sex and the City, Ugly Betty (2006–2010), Gossip Girl (2007–2012), The O.C. (2003–2007), Mad Men (2007– ) and Boardwalk Empire (2010– )), this book considers the following: first, it examines the ways in which certain meanings become attached to the texts and the fashion on display within them. Second, it explores the role of cultural workers—in the form of costume designers and celebrities—in securing these meanings. Finally, it traces the representative trajectory of those meanings from beyond the text into wider contextual apparatuses (in the form of celebrity and fashion inter-text). Thus, the impetus behind this book is to respond to calls for academic enquiry into costume in television programming (Street 2002) and to gain an understanding of the precise ways in which onscreen fashion develops into a semiotic language that audiences and consumers may assimilate and appropriate in order to express and negotiate cultural identities.

Such an endeavour demands a truly interdisciplinary approach; thus this introductory chapter pursues the related work of contextualizing this book within relevant academic debate and outlining its parameters. What follows, then, is a brief outline of key debates within fashion theory, media/cultural studies and celebrity studies. Since the majority of existing scholarship regarding onscreen clothing is informed to some degree by fashion theory, it provides a useful starting point for thinking through the complex relationship between fashion and costume.

Fashion and Popular Culture

Most introductory anthologies on fashion begin with an attempt to answer the following question: what is fashion? This seemingly simple question lacks a simple answer. The meaning and significance of the term has altered over time, and therefore it can be difficult to offer an exact definition. This is compounded by the fact that certain terms are often used interchangeably: e.g. clothing and fashion. This project adheres to the school of thought which, to put it simply, conceives of fashion as a symbolic product, as opposed to a material one (Kawamura 2005). This distinction is important because it reminds us that fashion is imbued with meaning that is absent from clothes (the raw materials). For Deborah Nadoolman Landis this distinction is crucial and has implications for the way in which we define fashion and costume—which she also considers to be separate. For Landis (2003: 8), ‘Fashion and costumes are not synonymous; they are antithetical.’ However, such taxonomy does not stand up to intense scrutiny, particularly if one is to comprehend the use of fashion as costume in a show like Sex and the City or its contemporaries. Within the texts examined here, garments are invested within meaning that exists both within and outside of the diegetic context, and therefore it is necessary to employ a more fluid definition.

The ambiguity of the term ‘fashion’ has had not only implications for its study, and the ways in which it has developed as a discipline, but also implications for the discourses of value attached to the term. Fashion, as Pierre Bourdieu (1993b: 185) notes, ‘is a very prestigious subject in the sociological tradition, at the same time as being apparently rather frivolous’. Similarly, in their introduction to Fashion Cultures, Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (2000: 2) posit that ‘[p]art of the perceived problem with fashion has been that academics in particular have not always known with what tone to approach and write about it—it’s too trivial to theorise, too serious to ignore.’ Indeed, this understanding emerges out of a longstanding reluctance to take popular culture (particularly that which is coded as ‘feminine’) seriously. As such, scholars have attempted to ‘explain away’ Western culture’s preoccupation with fashion from two very different academic perspectives (E. Wilson 1985: 47).

Art historians initially called for the legitimization of fashion as an area of study. However, their interest was limited to haute couture, and consequently work on fashion within an art history tradition focused exclusively on the conservative (and inherently masculine) notions of production and authorship.² Given that the notion of the author was, and remains still, central to the construction of value judgements within art and culture more generally, high fashion (that which has a designated author) was accepted within the field of art history as a serious object of study.³ This resulted in a division between academic approaches to high fashion and ‘everyday’ fashion. Mass-produced everyday fashion (often perceived as ‘feminine’) was not considered a legitimate area of study in its own right, but rather served as evidence of mass culture’s manipulation of ‘passive’ consumers within moralist critiques of consumer capitalism. In her influential book Adorned in Dreams, Elizabeth Wilson comments on this development and notes that ‘[i]t was easy to believe that the function of fashion stemmed from capitalism’s need for perpetual expansion, which encouraged consumption. At its crudest, this kind of explanation assumes that changes in fashion are foisted upon us, especially women, in a conspiracy to consume far more than we “need” to’ (1985: 4). As such, fashion was (and in some cases is) viewed as excessive and unnecessary, and those (women) who participated in its consumption were perceived as cultural dupes.⁴ This negative view of fashion (as wasteful, trivial and narcissistic) informed early feminist writing on fashion consumption and the performance of femininity. For example in the 1850s, American women’s rights advocate Amelia Bloomer considered certain apparel such as the corset as a form of ‘bondage’, responsible for the physical incapacitation of women (Bloomer 1895/1975). Similarly, feminists in the 1970s and 1980s struggled to view fashion as anything other than a tool in the oppression and exploitation of women (see Baker 1984; Brownmiller 1984; Coward 1984; Oakley 1981). Joanne Hollows (2000) observes that this ‘functionalist’ feminist critique of fashion generated two anti-fashion responses. While some rejected feminine clothes in favour of ‘masculine’ apparel, others favoured the ‘natural’ self. However, in rejecting feminine dress, anti-fashion feminists were arguably privileging masculinity and masculine values over femininity and feminine values. Similarly, those seeking to reclaim the ‘natural’ self privileged the ‘natural’ over the ‘artificial’. Not only does this dichotomy fail to acknowledge the constructedness of a ‘natural’ identity, thereby confusing the term ‘natural’ with ‘authentic’, but it also problematically associates ‘artifice’ and ‘performativity’ with ‘passivity’.

While second-wave feminism sought to condemn fashion as trivial and inconsequential, more recent feminist criticism seeks to rescue fashion from this status and to consider its pleasures and radical potential. This book reflects the more recent feminist agenda and adopts the position put forth by Elizabeth Wilson (1985), that fashion should be considered as a ‘performance art’. Traditionally, those who privilege the ‘natural’ form of dress argue that fashion should—as Llewellyn Negrin (1999: 99) observes—‘reveal the body for what it [is]’. However, as Joanne Entwistle (2000) has argued, there are problems with the notion that fashion can be used to simply ‘interpret’ a person’s identity. She writes: ‘On the one hand the clothes we choose to wear can be expressive of identity, telling others something about our gender, class status and so on; on the other, our clothes cannot always be “read”, since they do not straightforwardly “speak” and can therefore be open to misinterpretation’ (112). Therefore Entwistle and Wilson, along with other postmodern fashion theorists, have rejected the notion of a ‘natural’ form of dress, adopting the post-structuralist position that the ‘natural’ is a cultural construct (see Mascia-Lees and Sharpe 1992). They contend that the functionalist rejection of ‘ornate’ clothing has ‘denied the legitimacy of the aesthetic pleasures derived from dress’ (Negrin 1999: 107). Such a position disturbs second-wave feminism’s disparaging understandings of ‘artifice’ and ‘performativity’. Indeed, Wilson’s and others’ work can be regarded as part of a broader shift in which consumers are viewed as more ‘active’ than in previous accounts. For example Angela Partington’s (1992: 156) study of fashion in post-war Britain presents the construction of the ‘artificial’ feminine identity as that which requires ‘an active gaze to decode, utilize and identify with those images’ (my emphasis). According to Partington’s research, women demonstrated increasingly sophisticated consumer competences and appropriated fashion in order to articulate class identities, thereby challenging early feminist writing which relied on the assumption that fashion (and culture in general) was ‘a mere expression of socio-economic relations rather than as a site of the active production of consumers’ (149). Indeed, this process required a specific set of consumer competences in order to create and disrupt class identities. Significantly, as Partington acknowledges, this reveals a resistance to ‘proper’ consumer practices supposedly imposed upon women through advertising and, perhaps most importantly, through cinema and the ‘woman’s film’.⁵

The women’s films of the 1940s sought to address women as consumers in order to regulate and secure the economy (previously jeopardized by the Great Depression). That is the woman’s film was intended to educate women in consumer competences and to encourage the consumption of fashion and beauty products (see Doane 1987; LaPlace 1987; Partington 1992; Stacey 1994). Thus, it is my contention that parallels can be drawn between these texts and fashion programming, as I argue that one of its primary functions is to educate and to allow viewers to practice sophisticated consumer competences in reading fashion.

In The Desire to Desire, Mary Ann Doane (1987: 26) suggests that the 1940s woman’s film was designed to position the female spectator as consumer. In a rather bleak account of women’s relationship with film, she describes how cinema marketed ‘a certain feminine self-image’, achieved through the consumption of the fashion and beauty products advertised onscreen. In so doing, she argues that the female spectator is encouraged to consume and commodify herself (i.e. become a desirable object for a man). She argues that when presented with the image of a glamorous female star, the female spectator is ‘invited to witness her own commodification and, furthermore to buy an image of herself insofar as the female star is proposed as the ideal for feminine beauty’ (24). I would argue that Doane’s work is underpinned by a view of fashion that is homogenous and simplistic, and as such discounts the myriad ways in which audiences could engage with onscreen fashion and consumer practices. This somewhat pessimistic view of the audience is typical of psychoanalytic theory which suggests that, within patriarchal society, all female desires and pleasures are ultimately passive. However, it is important not to dismiss psychoanalytic film theory entirely. For one thing, it has a great purchase on some of the early writing on costume and cinema.

Informed by psychoanalytic theory, Jane Gaines’s (1990: 181) influential article ‘Costume and Narrative’, argues, in relation to classical realist cinema, that all aspects of mise en scène were designed to serve ‘the higher purpose of narrative’. She claims that costume in the classical era was motivated by characterization, and was essentially required to remain ‘subservient’ to narrative demands. Failure to do so could ‘distract the viewer from the narrative’ (193). Underpinning this argument is Laura Mulvey’s well-known concept of ‘the gaze’. Just as Mulvey (1975/1989: 19) has argued that ‘[t]he presence of woman [onscreen] … tends to work against the development of a story-line [and] freeze the flow of action’, Gaines (1990: 193) asserts that costume which is not adequately motivated by character could also result in a disruption of narrative, ‘breaking the illusion and the spell of realism’. Within this formulation, fashion acts primarily as ‘spectacle’ and a ‘distraction’, thus disrupting the economy of narrative flow.

For the most part then, Gaines’s article is guided by more traditional screen hierarchies which privilege narrative over mise en scène. Other studies of classical cinema and costume are also informed, to some extent, by this assumption, including Sarah Berry’s (2000) Screen Style, Sue Harper’s (1987) ‘Historical Pleasures: Gainsborough Costume Melodrama’ and Pam Cook’s (1996) Fashioning the Nation;⁶ and subsequent enquiries into the function of costume in contemporary cinema, such as Sarah Street’s (2002) examination of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and The Matrix (1999) in her book Costume and Cinema, and Peter Wollen’s (1995) analysis of Prêt a Porter (1994) in his article ‘Strike a Pose’. While these studies have offered invaluable ins...