Clothing

Katherine Mansfield

• Imitation: authenticity/inauthenticity
  • Maori costume
    • Didn’t see herself as Kiwi while there
    • Bought costume on trip dad forced her on
    • In England, happy to wear it
  • Is this authentic?
    • Compare to ridicule of artists’ clothing in Bliss
    • Compare to Ottoline Morrell: KM is “authentic” Kiwi?
    • Imitation as a very careful positioning, all relative
  • Clothing as global medium
    • She rejected any one nationality (rejects national basis of character)
    • Personality as fleeting, serial (anti-”pyschology,” anti-pathologizing)

Materialism

• Marx, Capital, on linen production
  • Obsessed about the bolt of linen
  • Treats it as commodity that isn’t very particular
  • Under global capital, linen circulates as “clear” money
  • In modernity, can have signifier of individuality
• Different types of ownership: right and property

Excess

• “All fashion ends in excess” – Paul Poiret (434 Fashion Marketing)
• Lee Miller photograph of English women in uniform gazing at Parisian woman in beautiful garb: “wasteful” use of fabric is political protest against occupation

Patterns

• Sears, Butterick patterns: as a pattern of individuality
  • Imitation as a good thing b/c you actually make it
    • Active, but not original: originality not as basis of individuality
    • cf Walkowitz on Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
  • You have a literally reproduced image, but you create it yourself
  • It’s even on paper!

Potential References

• Main Works
  • Simmel
  • Carlyle
  • Veblen
  • Mail-order ephemera
    • For example the “For the Slim and Not-So-Slim”
    • Many dresses will have multiple pictures suggesting diff materials, trims, and even big design alternatives
    • Each company has its own patented process for printing out the pattern
    • “Russian Costume” in the 1920s Mc Call? pattern 5826
    • Sizes are ages (age 16, 18, etc)
• Random works
  • Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence
  • Michaels’ Shape of the Signifier
  • Burroughs’ essay on the cut-up
  • Ulrich Lemann’s Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity
• Fashion sources
  • Mencken’s critique of Veblen here
  • William Hazlitt “On Fashion”
  • 1919 encyclopedia entry by AE Crawley on “Dress” (Carter 25-6)
• Texts
  • To the Lighthouse, as little boy cuts up catalog photos
  • Lee Miller’s wartime photo
  • In //Calico Chronicles,” graphics on 92, 110, 118
    • 92: insanely complicated palimpsest for pattern (cf London Underground maps, esp Harry Beck 1933)
    • 110: first catalog: the numbers of street names and etc etc show excess
    • 118: corset wording about individuality
    • Text on mail order 168, 85-114
• Criticism
  • Rob Schorman’s Selling Style
  • JSTOR articles: “Catering to Consumerism,” “Privacy and Publicity”
  • MUSE articles: “Too Close to Home,” “Hysterical Remembering”
  • in Charney and Schwartz //Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life,” Alexandra Keller’s “Representations of Modernity” @ early mail-order catalogs

Michael Carter’s Fashion Classics

• Introduction
  • xiii all the big names cared about imitation and differentiation, both collective and individual
  • don’t conflate clothes and fashion
  • fashion: both being a la mode (conformism, one moment in time) and dynamic succession over time
• Thomas Carlyle Sartor Resartus (1833)
  • debt to German philosophy (idealism, Romanticism)
  • Carter argues that it is one (2) though usually ignored, seen as ridicule, or only talked about for the dandy stuff
  • clothes as the grand Tissue of all Tissues, as the seat of the self
  • mechanization and factories stripping weavers and tailors of jobs
  • clothes as alien, disgusting things we put on ourselves in bad modern times
    • yet clothes not bad b/c evidence of humans being spirits, not just a body (7) (they are a safe place for the self to reside snugly)
  • real purpose of fashion is ornament, not modesty
  • chapter on dandies, the dandiacal body (was making fun of Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham, a dandy novel) (as a sect to replace fallen Christianity)
  • style: “the Architectural Idea,” the Esprit de Costumes, as Geist
  • fashion shows humanity b/c it uses “patterning,” constant form
  • Beerbohm made fun of Carlyle for trying to make a philosophy of clothes (10)
  • gives to poor (“Drudgism”) the same thesis Nordau gives to aesthetes: nothing matches, all mixed up (13)
  • the Professor’s title is “Professor of Things-in-General” (see the need for wholeness and unity, via Arnold, in the article in Modernism/modernity about Madox Ford and sociology)
• Herbert Spencer
  • “Manners and Fashion” 1854, “Ceremonial Institutions” in Volume II of Principles of Sociology (1879)
  • synthesis of all knowledge, twined around evolution as the “law of laws,” leading to the “theory of social evolution,” progressivist leading up to the Social State
    • So, dress understood as developing over time from common ancestor, in “stages” with some holdovers, “survivals” from the past
  • like Carlyle, somewhat metaphysical, not the usual British empiricism
    • unlike Carlyle, progressivist, not critical of Industrial Rev
  • Comtean use of science laws for humans and the social
  • the superorganic: the social has its own entity, with unique laws
  • Clothes as ceremony: ceremony as device for collective control comes before the advent of institutions, but it survives after those latter develop (kind of a holdover, then)
  • Clothes as political: once institutions develop, the wrong dress seen as insubordination (28) and the right as signaling your power (29)
    • Notice how whereas Carlyle was decorative (aesthetic), Spencer is about power
  • Imitation as “trickle-down theory” of fashion that so many people use
    • Spencer an early commentator of this theory
    • The lower classes imitate the higher (sumptuary laws)
  • Reverential versus competitive imitation: competitive imitation is “a desire to assert quality” by ruining the higher classes’ special-ism; whereas reverential is copying to be admired
    • So interesting: power meant not being unlike (ie, individual), but being like the powerful
    • Industrial Society allows people to wear what they want, irrespective of class, whereas Militant Societies controlled it
  • Now fashion: whereas clothes were about likeness, fashion is about unlikeness
  • Now, in modern times fashion is a compromise “analogous to constitutional government….a compromise between governmental coercion and individual freedom”
    • Fashion “has ever tended towards towards equalization” and THEREFORE “favoured the growth of individuality” (34) whereas before the ceremonial emphasized you as a class (notice, equal and individual are seen as complementary: unlike the modernist critique of democracy!)
    • People who believe in political equality (Chartists and socialists) will dress funny, all wearing different stuff (34) so that democracy and “personal singularity” come together, while old institutions are conservative in dress
  • How to reconcile the idea of fashion as imitative with individuality?
    • Well, Spencer says individuality is not “personal caprice” (ie, personal taste 36)
    • in his social state, with no laws or institutions, will have no need for “senseless dictates of fashion” (36), but people will still dress carefully b/c they want to be admired (a utopia of good taste, apparently)
    • they will be less irrational, more functional (37), which is the common direction for fashion reform to go (more functional)
• Thornstein Veblen Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
  • Influenced by but surpassed Spencer in theorization of dress
    • Social evolution, the idea of leisure class within Spencer’s Industrial Society
  • More about collective group than the individual: organized as part of a whole (organic?)
  • He’s an economist, a materialist (influenced by Marx, tho’ Veblen about consumption, not production), performs ideology critique
    • Carter: superstructure as “displaced arena” for working out economic competition (43)
  • Analysis of the lawn shows beauty as being something that was formerly useful being now useless: depriving something of its utility makes it beautiful (this is different from just saying that clothing is useless!)
  • “honorific society” means that we rival each other in being the best dressed, earning social status via consumption
    • conspicuous leisure, conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste
  • our society marked by the love of the useless and contempt of the useful
  • evolutionary: we evolve according to our technologies (“the state of the industrial arts” 51), not just the raw environment (this is Marx + Darwin)
    • he gives the four stages of technology: savage, barbarian (war), pre-modern handicraft, modern industrial capitalism
    • growth of industry gives rise to “unnecessary expenditures” (52)
  • Dress is Veblen’s favorite “line of consumption” to investigate (46)
    • always seen in public, it’s universal
    • dress about “surplus,” not about use or protection (the element of clothing oneself is “some sort of afterthought” 53), nor about decoration (it’s not about good-looking clothing)
  • Elegance not only about aesthetics, but about social/economic/psychological world: aesthetics of economics
    • ”No intrinsic beauty” in particular dress characteristics (shine of a hat, etc) (47) very much Saussurian!
    • Often about adverting that you don’t work (ie, no useful labor: proves leisure), “consumes without producing” (47), unlike the patterns
    • dandy is a privileged example of this impulse
    • women go even further to show they don’t work (hats, shoes, skirt, long hair) b/c they prove men’s wealth, so they become men’s surrogates, leaving men to worry about their clothes less
  • Also refer to his “The Economic Theory of Women’s Dress,” an earlier essay
  • Fashion: requires novelty, which requires “conspicuous waste”
    • but if you imitate, how can there be change and new clothes? rivalry among your own set (impress friends) and newcomers (set yourself apart from nouveau riche)
    • requires “progressively nicer discrimination” (50) more and more differentiation
  • Clothes are index of your wealth
  • Clothes versus dress: clothing protects, whereas dress ornaments and proves wealth (“dress” overwhelms “clothes”)
  • Veblen himself dressed from mail-order from Sears and Roebuck!! (54) because they are rugged and utilitarian (hmmm; mail order is beyond fashion in a way)
  • Confident about machines b/c they don’t respect class (“can make no use of worth,” “knows neither manners nor breeding” 54)
  • How to solve the problem of aesthetic distortion and crazy dress over rational clothing? “instinct of workmanship” (seen in savage cultures and expected to be found in the future 55) that yet understands the beautiful
    • “an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end” “distaste for futile effort” not waste (55)
    • will include adornment for innovation purposes, as a progression moving towards a telos of “effectiveness” and “acceptable form” so it’s “relatively stable” (56) not changing all the time
    • Why the past and the future?
  • Influenced by Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel Looking Backwards
• Georg Simmel
  • David Frisby: Simmel’s aesthetic lens on social life
  • “the essence of aesthetic observation and interpretation lies in the fact that the typical is to be found in what is unique, the law-like in what is fortuitious, the essence and significance of things in the superficial and transitory” (60, originally in “The Problem of Style”)
  • Also agrees with distinction between fashion and clothes (fashion not just about clothes: fashions in religion, science, politics, etc)
    • Clothes: “objectively adapted to our needs” (77) but fashion “not a trace of expediency”
    • ”The break with the past which….civilized human kind has been labouring unceasingly to bring about, concentrates consciousness more and more upon the present…so to that degree it will turn to fashion in all fields” even “moral foundations of life” (68), so our culture is making everything a fashion (this is the significance of the paper)
  • “Adornment,” a short essay: dressing for two opposing tendencies, to please others and to gain recognition and esteem from others, the “debt to pleasure” (I would call this an economy of fashion, where you do work to receive goods in return)
    • People need inferiors to show off to
    • They extend their power over others through dress
  • ”What is really elegant avoids pointing to the specifically individual; it always lays a more general, stylized, almost abstract sphere around men” (64)
    • Whereas old clothes do reveal the “particularity” of the wearer
    • Elegance is the impersonal, the abstract, the stylized
  • Clothing as “the material means of its social purpose” (65)
  • “The Philosophy of Fashion” (1905), pretty long, about the two tendencies: looking like the group, and differentiating yourself from it
    • Unity and equality versus particularity and uniqueness (you can have categories, for example, subcultures)
    • Both must be there for Simmel, or there will be no fashion (either just uniforms or just scattered instances)
  • Fashion as a “set of relations” beyond change in particular styles, for “not the slightest reason can be found for its creations” (67)
  • Simmel’s famous elucidation of the already existing but inadequately theorized “trickle-down” theory, where lower classes emulate higher ones, who immediately ditch that style (69)
  • His “inner articulation:” the relations between imitation and differentiation
    • Imitation and differentiation can be seen within the same object!
  • Accepting the mode isn’t necessarily slavish; it can show strength b/c the wearers don’t assume their individuality will disappear underneath common clothing (70)
  • Gender
    • Women like fashion b/c they can be visible and conspicuous without being criticized (not “responsible” for fashion but do garner attention and individualization)
    • Men have a near-uniform because their inside being is so many-sided (73), so that we see outside imitation signaling inside individuality (doesn’t need to excel in fashion b/c can excel in public sphere)
    • Carlyle, Baudelaire, and Simmel say similar things about the dandy, who Simmel says is the slave of fashion, the best follower; whereas Simmel puts the bohemian on the opposite end, the opponent of fashion
      • Unfortunately, bohemian hasn’t truly individuated b/c only negates existing fashion; so really just follows fashion too (Simmel deconstructs the bohemian)
  • Philosophy of Money says capitalism responsible for “accelerating the pace of changes in fashion” (75) (helpful!) b/c less extravagant and faster
    • Shows modern conception of time, says Carter: newness, the present, Baudelairean “now-ness”
  • Carter: fashion “striving to overcome the spatial divide between classes” (76)
  • Not all is fashionable merely: Simmel believes in a “classic” beauty that transcends time

Organization

• Thesis: something about fashion reveals something about modernity
• First, nonfiction
• Second, cultural movement
• Third, the literary

Potential Topics

• Excess
• (Mail order) Patterns: utility, active creation
  • Patterns from mail-order: a distinctly modernist style
  • Pattern following as modernist art-form
  • Ulysses is a mail-order novel about Dublin from Paris (mythic method is patterning)
  • It’s imitation elsewhere (it’s displaced spatially, it’s distributed: global networks of flow of goods) (center/periphery)
  • Antiproduction and women’s work
  • Active work done on the same pattern
  • Outsourcing…
  • KM only adopting the costume outside of NZ (whereas Ottoline no space difference, too rich)
  • It’s anti-urban (interesting), more rural
  • Dissemination
  • Suggests semiotic play
  • Imitation isn’t making yourself a carbon-copy, but starting with one and then making it your own (literally)
  • Where consumption and production meet, indiscernible
  • Mail-order catalogs and patterns are a privileged site for examining the dialectic of imitation and differentiation so important to fashion theory.
• Political inflection
• Useful and useless
• Workmanship (Veblen’s solution, Arts and Crafts too)
• Bergsonian time and social Darwinian fashion
• Tension between imitation and individuality (or equality and individuality)