Fashioning Memory

Vintage Style and Youth Culture

Heike Jenss

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781474261999
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Antropologia culturale e sociale

The valuing of old clothes as "vintage" and the recollection of the sartorial past, whether through second-hand consumption or the wearing of new old-fashioned clothes, has become a widespread phenomenon. This book illuminates sartorial and bodily engagements with memory and time through the temporal and nostalgic potency of fashion, and what this means for contemporary wearers. Based on in-depth ethnographic research including participant observation and interviews with sixties enthusiasts in Germany, who relocate British mod style into the twenty-first century, Jenss examines the practices and experiences that are part of the sartorial remembering of "the sixties, " from hunting flea markets and eBay, to the affect of material and mediated memories on vintage wearers. Jenss offers unique insights into the fashioning of time, cultural memory, and modernity, tracing the history and current appeal of vintage in fashion and youth culture, and asking: what kind of experiences of temporality and memory are enacted through fashion? How have evaluations of second-hand clothes shifted in the twentieth century? Fashioning Memory provides a unique insight into the diverse use of fashion as a memory mode and asks how style is remembered, performed, transformed, and reinvested across time, place, and generation.

1 Introduction: Fashion and Cultural Memory

Memory is in fashion. The reevaluation of used, aged and discarded clothes, making their way through the second-hand clothing circuits back onto the bodies of new wearers as “vintage,” is an example for the appeal of fashion and clothes as forms of material memory. A century ago the word vintage was used in the context of high fashion to describe last season’s clothes, whose age or “datedness” should ideally be hidden by updating them in fresh combinations or by modifying any season-revealing details. Today, however, the word vintage refers to clothes of a certain age: clothes that are precisely valued for their materialization of time and “datedness” and their capacity as memory modes through which new wearers can feel in touch with a former fashion time.

The rise of old clothes to the rank of vintage and the incorporation of the sartorial past in contemporary appearance making has become one of the major developments across fashion and popular culture in recent decades, tying in with the promotion of ideas of individuality and authenticity. This popularity of the past as vintage occurred alongside an increasing acceleration of fashion production and communication, leading to the global expansion of fast fashion, but yet equally along an expanding memory culture propelled through the accumulation and circulation of the past in material and visual culture. The use and valuing of second-hand clothing as vintage, a kind of reversal of the idea of “newness” in fashion by dressing in outmoded clothes, has been particularly popular among youth, raising questions with regard to the intersections of fashion, time, age/generation and cultural memory. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Germany, this book sets out to explore how these intersections play out in everyday dress and consumption practices—focusing in on youth and young adults, who through clothing and style recollect “the sixties” in the early twenty-first century.

As part of a youth cultural scene that bridges past and present, contemporary sixties enthusiasts form a particularly interesting case study for an exploration of vintage style and cultural memory. They are remembering a decade intricately bound up with ideas of modernity, the expansion of fashion and consumer culture, and the generation of a powerful memory culture. By immersing themselves into the fashion and music of the 1960s, hunting for old clothes and modeling themselves on past styles as closely as possible, “the sixties” are here not distant history but come to enter their own memory, even though they were not even born in the time they now recall with their bodies.

Despite the fashionability of vintage and retro styles in varied youth cultures, the everyday practices and experiences that are part of their use and performance through the material and visual culture of fashion have so far been only little explored. This may be in part due to the conception and expectation of both fashion and youth culture as sites of innovation and eternal renewal. Through its apparent ephemerality and its continuous production or intriguing narration of the “new,” fashion is understood to immerse us in the now by generating distance to the past and a desire to forget: “Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion,” noted Roland Barthes (1990: 273). In this sense fashion has been conceived as a promise of future and modernity, liberating from the past as a cultural burden. This idea of working against the past, the “refusal to inherit,” can be extended to the understanding of youth, or youth culture, as motor and metaphor for modernity. From its conception in the late nineteenth century and even more so with the expansion of consumer culture from the mid-twentieth century onwards, “youth” has been conceptualized as an innovative force (see Savage 2007), feeding into the development of fashion styles, brands and markets. From this perspective, the ongoing aesthetic immersion into the past among younger people may read as a sign of cultural regress or as indicating a lack of, or even inability for, cultural inventiveness. Such a tendency is evident in the discourse that has evolved since the 1970s and 1980s around the meaning, or rather the lack of meaning, associated with “retro” in the context of media and consumer culture, seen as a random, “cannibalistic” or ironic ransacking of history. This perspective has been formulated most forcefully by Fredric Jameson, who argued that “the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture” (see Jameson 1984: 65; see also Baudrillard 1993). This postmodern reading of retro as an all-encompassing phenomenon continues to inform contemporary views of the engagement with the past among youth. Music writer Simon Reynolds reflects in his book Retromania (2011a) on a wide range of examples of “pop culture’s addiction to its own past” and expresses concern about the impact that the expansion of media and its apparently endless storage capacities have on youth:

What seems to have happened is that the place that The Future once occupied in the imagination of young music-makers has been displaced by The Past: that’s where the romance now lies, with the idea of things that have been lost. The accent, today, is not on discovery but on recovery. (Reynolds 2011b)

Reynolds sees a “compulsion to relive and reconsume pop history” as evidence of an “unhealthy fixation on the bygone” (Reynolds 2011b). His worry is that the omnipresence of the past in images, videos and websites suffocates the present, and results only in a “total recall” and exact replication of the past; a process that suppresses in his view any innovativeness, originality or “imaginary reworkings” of the past (Reynolds 2011b). Inherent in these readings is to a certain extent the continuation of a narrative of modernity that idealizes ideas of “newness” and “progress;” promoting a perspective on time or temporality that tends to undermine the dynamic role of the past—for example in the form of cultural memory or remembering—as constitutive to the present, and an integral part in the experience of time or temporality, and identity or subjectivity.

Many scholars have critiqued the postmodern discourse on retro (see Wilson 1990; McRobbie 1994; Evans 2000; Baker 2013), for its generalizing and also essentializing tendencies that overshadow the varied ways in which forms of the past are used in diverse contexts, and with quite different meanings or effects. With a perspective on fashion, Elizabeth Wilson already questioned in 1990 if retro is in fact “exclusively de nos jours” (Wilson 1990: 224), giving examples for a range of preceding style-revivals in the history of fashion (see also Burman-Baines 1981). For Wilson the generalizations inherent in the postmodern discussion of retro across all forms of visual and material culture have more to do with the “creation of a cultural myth about ‘our times’” (1990: 231)—they remain anchored in the “project of defining a Zeitgeist” (1990: 232), “which flattens out the contradictory, refractory nature of contemporary existence and seeks to create a stereotype of the present in the present” (1990: 231).

It is likely due to the stereotyping tendencies and overuse of the term retro as an all-encompassing label to define a particular late-twentieth-century disposition, a “retro-mood” (Horx 1995), that the term vintage started to see more frequent use in the early twenty-first century. According to the statistics of a search in The Vogue Archive on Proquest, which is based on the American edition, the magazine’s use of the term “vintage” almost tripled in the first decade of the twenty-first century, compared to the preceding 1990s (rising from 571 to 1,448 mentions). The term vintage is itself a kind of throwback to the time when the wearing of old, second-hand clothes emerged as an alternative to new fashion in the 1960s, and thus works as a kind of distinction from the word retro, or rather from what the term retro has been associated with, such as cultural regress, lack of innovativeness, pastiche, irony, or an “unsentimental nostalgia for the past” (Guffey 2006: 17; for a discussion see Baker 2013). Yet, as with any label, vintage as well is a term that has attracted negative critique, especially for its “branding” of old clothes, and for inflating their price. However, in what way vintage constructs a certain value around old clothes, and around the idea of age in fashion, is open for further exploration and will be part of the discussion in this book. While I have used the term retro in my previous work, and retro and vintage interchangeably (Jenss 2005a), I am using vintage (and vintage style) in this book because it is the term that has come to name a specific form of using old clothes for their age or anachronism that has emerged as a practice among youth at least since the 1960s (McRobbie 1994). As I will further discuss in this book, it is a term, or concept, that describes a specific value related to or constructed around the age of clothes, including an idea of rarity associated with them. Overall it seems to be a word that has its origin in material culture (as an old word for “antique”), rather than in visual culture (like the word retro, emerging in the context of film).

Newer academic research, and in particular work engaging with the actual forms and practices in which objects of the past are used, has moved beyond the postmodern retro discourse, opening up more nuanced perspectives on how objects, images and styles of the past are used in a variety of practices and contexts ranging from film (Sprengler 2009), fashion (Evans 2000, 2003; Gregson, Brooks and Crewe 2001; DeLong, Heinemann and Reiley 2005; Clark 2008; Aronowsky Cronberg 2009; Granata 2010), to interior design (Baker 2013). Especially the research of scholars working on second-hand markets, both in historic and contemporary contexts, has been invaluable to illuminate the circulation of objects and their investment with new meanings and values in the context of a highly diversified market, that caters to a wide range of consumers (see Hansen 2000; Gregson and Crewe 2003; Palmer and Clark 2005; Hawley 2006; Norris 2012; Lemire 2012; Botticello 2012). Contributing to this body of research are also ethnography and interview based studies that explore the consumption of vintage clothing in the early twenty-first century (DeLong, Heinemann and Reiley 2005; Reiley and DeLong 2011; Cassidy and Bennett 2012). These studies offer insightful explorations contextualizing vintage with wider developments in the fashion market, most notably with a move towards more sustainable practices and ecological awareness among consumers. Building on this work, and to establish a context to understand the use of old clothes with a perspective on youth culture—as well as the values produced around “old” or discarded clothes—it is useful to consider here further how vintage clothes and practices are bound up with the dynamics of fashion and style, consumer culture and the fashioning of memory.

Fashion and/as memory

It is only through our ability to remember that we experience “being” or “becoming” in time, experiences through which we develop a sense of self in time and place and in relation to others (see Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi and Levi 2011: 37). Or in other words, the activating, sharing and shaping of memories together with others is crucial to the formation of identities, the generation of social relationships and our experience of time and change. Memory, engaging with the past in the present, informs our understanding of who we are; it can provide us with feelings of belonging. Although remembering, as Edward Casey notes, is continually going on with “every fiber of our bodies, every cell of our brains,” and even “inanimate objects bear the marks of their past histories upon them” (Casey 2000: xix), remembering is at the same time an exception (Assmann 2011: 334). Because the act of remembering is always ongoing, in constant flux, and the capacity of memory is limited, we tend to forget more than we remember—or as Alaida Assmann notes, there is a “perpetual interaction between remembering and forgetting … forgetting is part of social normality” (2011: 334). Due to its temporariness and its dynamic situatedness in time, remembering is then an inevitably selective process, focusing on what is relevant in a current moment (see Assmann 2011, 2013). Its temporariness and selectiveness mean also that memory produces the past as we engage with it in the now: “There is no past, no present and no future as such; the relation between the past, the present and the future is always made from some point of view and must be expressed or enacted for the past, the present or the future to emerge” (Kontopodis 2009: 6).

This understanding of the past builds on Walter Benjamin’s thesis on the concept of history as “the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time,” but one filled by now-time (Jetztzeit) (Benjamin 1968: 263), highlighting history not as something that is given or fixed (see also Lehmann 1999). Where both terms, history and memory, can be understood to describe processes that are ongoing, continually under construction, methodologically the term memory has come to draw attention to the personal, subjective dimension of the engagement with, or making of, the past (Macdonald 2013: 234). Where history in the sense of the development or narration of events implies a certain chronology, and tends to be oriented towards an establishment of “facts,” even if history is also something that is rewritten (see Lehmann 1999: 298), memory as an ongoing process and practice is not sequentially organized. Memory does not fix events to specific moments of time, but it recalls or engages with time more in a form of snapshots, fragments, and flashes (Kuhn 2000: 190). In this sense, as Annette Kuhn puts it, we can understand memory to be primarily “the language of images” (Kuhn 2000: 188). Kuhn notes in her thesis on the workings of memory, and memory texts such as autobiographies, that there is “a sense of synchrony, as if remembered events are somehow pulled out of a linear time-frame, or refuse to be anchored in real historical time” (Kuhn 2000: 190).

In its nonlinearity, partiality and revisionary capacity the workings of memory, or remembering, not only share similarity with the visual and material culture of clothing and fashion, but clothing and fashion can be understood as constitutive components of personal and cultural memory, or remembering. The costume book of Matthäus Schwarz (1496–1564), in which the Renaissance man documented his personal clothing history in 137 portraits from age 19 (and retrospectively from his birth) until close to his death, is a manifest of the importance of clothing in biography, not only as a mnemonic device but also as a tool for exploring or making sense of time (see the discussion in Mentges 2002; also Rublack 2010). Emma Tarlo has used the term “sartorial biography,” which highlights the prominent role of dress in personal memory, which Tarlo draws on as a methodology to explore in her study of three Muslim women living in London, “the complexity and transformative potential of personal experience in the creative and symbiotic relationship between people and their clothes” (Tarlo 2007: 145). In her ethnographic study on women’s relationships to clothing, Sophie Woodward has also closely investigated the role of clothing as a bearer of memory. She describes how in its “physical sensuality and tactility … clothing is able to hold former aspects of the self” and conceives for example of the wardrobe sort-out as a form of editing memory, through the disposal of former sartorial selves (Woodward 2007: 57). The wearing of a retro-look or vintage style is a further example of the relation between fashion and memory: they are fashioned by recalling, or remembering, fashion styles from the past, such as the sixties. The remembering through wearing or seeing vintage styles may here not necessarily be connected to one’s own experienced past, or “lived” memory of wearing these clothes, but they are usually more widely connected to fashion as a form or part of cultural memory. When worn and enacted in one’s appearance, vintage clothes or styles come to embody and perform memory, and can also stimulate memories of others. Yet they recall a past not “exactly,” like memory they are situated in time: the contemporary context and (wearer) shapes or revises the past style in the sartorial recollection.

Ulrich Lehmann, in his analysis of Walter Benjamin’s engagement with fashion, discussed the capacity of fashion to reference and quote as a form of “sartorial remembrance—an ability to create an intricate temporal relation as well as chart a metaphysical experience” (Lehmann 1999: 308). Further utilizing the perspectives of Benjamin in the exploration of 1990s experimental fashion design Caroline Evans (2000, 2003) has shown that, while the history of fashion has a vast repertoire of forms and styles, the recall in fashion revivals is not random but something of the past must resonate with the present—it must be recognized. She argues that “contemporary fashion has an unerring eye for the topical in its choice of historical imagery” (Evans 2000: 99). Or in the words of Benjamin: “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Benjamin 1968: 257). This emphasis on the timeliness of memory also informs the way Alaida Assmann refers to memory as exception, as an effort, necessitated by its limited capacity: not everything has a place in memory, only what is meaningful, that is what resonates with recalling subjects in the now (Assmann 2011).

Building on Maurice Halbwachs’ (1992) research on “collective memory” in the 1920s, in which he highlights that memory—even if it feels deeply personal and intimate—is never solely individual but always shaped in and through social relationships with others, the term “cultural memory” has come to refer more broadly to the “interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts” (Erll 2010: 2). Scholars in the field of memory studies use it as an “operative metaphor,” where “the concept of ‘remembering’ (as a cognitive process which takes place in individual brains) is metaphorically transferred to the level of culture” (Erll 2010: 2). As such the term “cultural memory” is used to highlight that “much of what is done to reconstruct a shared past bears some resemblance to the processes of individual memory, such as the selectivity and perspectivity inherent in the creation of versions of the past according to present knowledge and needs” (Erll 2010: 5).

In a broader sense the engagement with the past, or cultural memory, must not be focused on the past, or make sense of the past, but cultural memory opens up an avenue to explore how the past forms a part of meaning-making in and of the present. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney describe this with an emphasis on the dynamics of memory as “remembering,” conceived as an “active engagement with the past, as performative rather than reproductive. It is as much a matter of acting out a relationship to the past from a particular point in the present as it is a matter of preserving and retrieving earlier stories” (Erll and Rigney 2009: 2). The emphasis here is not only on what is remembered, but also on the how, opening up perspectives on the varied modes of remembering in culture, including more implicit, non-narrative ways that include visual, material and bodily practices (see Erll 2010: 2). The term cultural memory includes the material dimension of memory in objects, or things, in images and practices. This is based on an understanding that images and objects take on a constitutive role in the formation of or engagement with memory. As pointedly noted by Marius Kwint, in the introduction to the edited volume Material Memories, “human memory has undergone a mutual evolution with the objects that inform it; … in other words, the relationship between them is dialectical” (Kwint 1999: 4). He highlights the interrelations of material objects and memory by referring to Susan Stewart’s emphasis on the sensation of touch that bridges the threshold between self and other or subject and object, since the “act of touching, she observes, exerts pressure on both toucher and touched” (Kwint 1999: 5–6). Or as Sherry Turkle puts it: “Objects help us make our minds, reaching out to us to form active partnerships” (Turkle 2007: 308). This is perhaps nowhere more evident t...