Staging Fashion

The Fashion Show and Its Spaces

Tiziana Ferrero-Regis, Marissa Lindquist, Tiziana Ferrero-Regis, Marissa Lindquist

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350101852
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Industria tessile e della moda

The fashion show and its spaces are sites of otherness, representing everything from rebellion and excess through to political and social activism. This conceptual and stylistic variety is reflected in the spaces they occupy, whether they are staged in an industrial warehouse, on a city street, or out in the open landscape. Staging Fashion is the first collection of essays about the presentation and staging of fashion in runway shows in the period from the 1960s to the 2010s. It offers a fresh perspective on the many collaborations between artists, architects and interior designers to reinforce their interdisciplinary links. Fashion, architecture and interiors share many elements, including design, history, material culture, aesthetics and trends. The research and ideas underpinning Staging Fashion address how fashion and the spatial fields have collaborated in the creation of the space of the fashion show. The 15 essays are written by fashion, interior, architecture and design scholars focusing on the presentation of fashion within the runway space, from avant-garde practices and collaboration with artists, to the most spectacular and commercial shows of recent years, from Prada to Chanel.

PART ONE

Body and space

Bodies are sites for testing a myriad of qualities such as intimacy, sensibility, gestural expression, gender, emergence, alterity, politics and social relations, which are played out in spaces of privacy and public realms such as the interior stage set or in urban life. Historically, design has shared fundamental roots with the arts and humanities field. The designed artefact thus demands more attention than as merely an entity for consumption, insisting greater reflection upon perceptual, emotional or bodily conditions as is the case with art. They imbue material, and immaterial conditions and inform experiences encountered between.

Part One of the book ventures across the interrelations between body, design and space critical to formations of the fashion show. Ferrero-Regis and Lindquist’s chapter frames all of these elements through a brief history of the fashion show through the lens of its spaces. They employ Foucault’s discourse theory to define this interrelation as the discursive space of the fashion show, proposing that practices, narratives, appraisals, critiques, institutions, rules and disruptions of the fashion show have historically constructed the spatial context of the fashion show. John Potvin looks at Thom Browne as he extends his sartorial and queer agenda across the fashion show interior, appropriating, performing and transforming space and time to dramatize austerity and camp in men’s fashion. Bradley Quinn suggests an integration of technology or performance with fashion, through a survey of Chalayan’s shows. Conceptually driven, Chalayan’s shows exploit a range of bodily states, from sensually revealing and concealing the body to possibilities of techno body hybridizations. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas shift their gaze from the open to the sealed fashion show, where imaginary and constructed realms provide an alternative show experience invoking a posthuman alterity. Justyna Stępień reviews the work of Alexander McQueen, his strange and beautiful garments and shows, reconceptualizing the fashion moment as a site of becoming, engaging in bodily and non-bodily affective transformations. Finally, the Stitchery Collective, Sarah Winter, Madeline Taylor, Kiara Bulley, Anna Hickey and Bianca Bulley, propose a different role of the fashion show as a platform of cultural dialogue, where set design, domesticity, adornment, movement and intimacy are collectively used to share historical stories of domestic and social meaning.

1

The discursive space of the fashion show

Tiziana Ferrero-Regis and Marissa Lindquist

The intersection between dress, body and space produces meanings that can be traced prior to the early Renaissance and have been rewritten since, according to different cultural, social, economic and design contexts. The fashion show has commanded different staging practices in different spaces, represented through diverse media across five hundred years of fashion history. Reading the construction of the fashion show and the meanings that it has generated requires an exploration of the way in which its many manifestations have represented commercial, cultural and social tensions in history. This cumulative reading provides a framework in which the fashion show can be seen as a discursive space which reframes it as a bundle of knowledge that is not homogenous but is made up by intersections, departures and discontinuities within the knowledge itself. Thus, a discourse is also a site for power struggle. The fashion show is a microcosm where rules, and their disruptions, bodies, constructed forms, objects, clothing, practices, time and space come together to create a narrative. The accumulation of these narratives across history, including their appraisal, critiques, imagery and documentation, also correlates with many other disciplines, those of scenography, production design, architecture, interior architecture, the diverse arts, film and cinema, and more expansively urbanism and landscape architecture. As Geczy and Karaminas write (2019: 7), the fashion object is communicated ‘across a network of representations and narrative connotations’, and not in isolation.

Fashion presentations can be organized in a linear way (a central walkway or catwalk with an audience at each side), in a non-linear way, such as shows at the Prada Foundation, or in seemingly indeterminate ways as choregraphed in Yohji Yamamoto’s and Moncler Gamme Rouge’s productions. Shows predominantly occur in controlled environments; there is the catwalk or show space, whether raised or direct to floor, while the more elaborate mise en scène shows are programmed by production or spatial designers in collaboration with the creative director and technical crew. Then there are the event participants, constituted by the backstage creative team, models, the audience (including buyers) and the media who disseminate images from the show. There are those like Martin Margiela who disturbs this approach, orchestrating shows in urban spaces and in outer Parisian suburbs, to comment on the fashion system and equally its controlled spaces.

This chapter offers a brief historical survey of fashion shows and their varied spaces, along with a critical contextualization of the fashion show within social, cultural and spatial contexts. The survey provides examples of how the fashion show has exploded into new platforms and engaged with different sites, from early modern displays in urban and city spaces as precursors of the shift from the couturier’s salon, to alternative spaces in the 1960s and onwards. It underscores the sociocultural, political and technological innovations which repositioned the performance of the fashion show from the Maison to spectacular events for broader consumption, highlighting the rise of the model, media, the mobilization of celebrity, artistic and architectural collaboration, and the use of urban counter-sites to disturb societal and aesthetic conventions. The space of the fashion show reflects the changing space of cities, media and global tastes, and is a rich yet largely untapped field that deserves greater study in both spatial and fashion fields.

Modern spaces

Informal fashion presentations date back to European Renaissance courts, but especially to Marie Antoinette’s appearances in the gardens and corridors of the Palais de Versailles. The aura and expectation of new fashion started to be established especially when Marie Antoinette travelled to Paris and strolled in open markets, Les Champs Élysées, or the opera, where she was admired by adoring crowds (Weber 2007). New fashion and styles were communicated informally in theatres, at social gatherings and through fashion plates. However, the fashion show in its more formal expression is inseparable from the birth of modernity. Indeed, fashion captured the process of modernization, whose chief characteristic was that of mass consumption and bourgeois aspirations of an expansive middle class. From style spotting within the anonymity of the modern city in the 1800s (Wilson 2003), by the first decade of the 1900s, fashion presentation or the ‘mannequin parade’ (Evans 2005: 125) staged on a constructed platform, sometimes elevated, or accompanied by music and lighting effects, had already been enacted beyond the Maison or salon in alternative and unconventional sites. The use of department stores, the races at Longchamp or Armenonville (McManus [1911] 2002), les midinettes at les Jardin Tuileries (McManus [1911] 2002), the beach pavilions at Chiswick (British Pathé 1927), and even on board of the Cunard Cruise ship during Liverpool Civic week in 1925 (British Pathé 1925) provided settings for fashion and solidified its presence in other spaces. At the same time, the revolution of photography, film, architecture and interior design indelibly enabled a synergy between space, staging and fashion to enrich the fashion show’s spectacle and provide greater exposure to the consuming class.

To this effect, the most revolutionary space for fashion presentation was that of the moving image and the screen. On this matter, Caroline Evans’s (2003) pivotal work has provided multiple and complex readings of the fashion show with its association with modernity and spectacle (2001, 2003, 2008, 2013a, b) suggesting that fashion is the visual expression of capitalism. Evan’s work strides across theories of fashion and modernity that explain contemporary designers’ approach to the fashion show (2003), while also paying attention to the role of the model and of the live show as an essential desire to see the clothes in motion (2005, 2008). The birt h of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century recorded body and time, and the capacity of seeing things and people repeatedly, in an instant and in motion, providing an explicit way to see fashion. Finamore (2013) describes it as ‘displacement of reality onto a screen (that) shares a similar impulse to that of fashion’ (2013: 74).

A close synergy developed between fashion and the film industry, with couturiers designing for film, notably, Lady Duff Gordon, or Lucile, Poiret and later Chanel, and stars wearing famous designers’ clothes. Incidentally, the typical walk of the fashion model, with her pelvis slightly tilted forward, pivoting movement and a slightly ‘sedate’ look (Evans 2005: 126) has been based on the walk of actresses-models in fashion films. In the 1930s, the formal fashion show inserted in the film narrative created the fashion film, a discrete genre whose function was to sell an aesthetic that was then followed up through the designing and manufacturing of similar styles as seen on actresses in films. In 1910, The Moving Picture World wrote,

We have pointed out over and over again in these pages that a very large part of the constituency of the moving picture theater are women and children – especially women – and that anything which tends to please and interest the faire [sic] half of humanity will retain their patronage. (in M. Tolini Finamore 2013: 108)

During the Hollywood Studio period, the space of the catwalk in film was that of the couturier’s salon, made grandiose through a set design that recalled that of nineteenth-century grand palaces. In Fashions of 1934 (Dieterle 1934), one of the fashion shows occurs in Paris, in a fictional couturier salon. In The Women (Cukor 1939), the salon is in Manhattan, in a large salon decorated with art deco props, and is attended by high-class women. The set-up is similar to a theatre, with the audience sitting on chairs in loose rows looking at the stage, and a live orchestra is positioned beside the audience. On the stage, each style is presented with a rotating backdrop that reproduces the context for wearing the style: tennis wear with a tennis court, beachwear with a painted sea scene, daywear in a zoo, leisurewear in the countryside and so on. The display references a cross between the tableaux vivants and installations of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

Fashion films continued after the Second World War, notably with Funny Face (1957) and continued well into the new millennium. There were those films too that parodied the fashion show for directors’ own positional and comedic ends, for example, Fellini’s iconic film Roma (1972). The film presents a ‘clerical fashion show’, where the Pontiff in appropriate regalia enters the main reception room of the papal palace, replete with raised catwalk bounding the perimeter of the room (draped in liturgical red) and overlooked by clergy spectators. As the Pontiff is seated on cascading baroque-styled chairs provided for his eminent guests, a pair of nuns performs staccato music for the show on an organ positioned central to the room and catwalk. The fashion show proceeds in a comical farce, models include nuns bounding along the catwalk with their white veils virtually taking flight, reminiscent of Sally Field’s character in The Flying Nun (1965). Two clerics enter in red silk tunics hands joined and skating along to the accompanying melody, followed by two priests on 1950s-styled biciclette, their tunics custom-designed at the rear for the functioning wheels. A procession of overly elaborate experimental light-emitting costumery for the Pontiff appears, motioned by mechanized mannequins assumedly to avoid soiling by the unsanctified. The finale presents (as with many contemporary fashion shows) a spectacular surreal concoction of atmospherics and a heavenly stage float emanating ecclesiastic light, overcoming the main audience, transfixed in holy ecstasy.

Today, the fashion film has become a ubiquitous form of fashion communication. Uhlirova (2013) assigns a fundamental semiotic presence to what she calls t...