threadbared

It's Moving Day!

2010-04-08T10:30:00.007-04:00

Threadbared has moved!

At a our new home on Wordpress, you'll find:

A newly minted URL with a little "love note" embedded in it: http://iheartthreadbared.wordpress.com/. Actually, we had to add that first part because "threadbared" was already used.
A shiny new masthead!
Bigger photos!
More cross-posting information (because everyone likes a bit of context)!
The option to comment directly on blog posts! As you know, for the past few years we've maintained a "no comment" policy for the sake of preserving what little extra time we had. Monitoring and managing comments, we found, was more time-consuming than we thought. However, due to popular demand, we're going to allow commenting on the Wordpress site. Please help us maintain this feature by reading and respecting our new comment policy!

In addition to blog comments, you can still comment on our Facebook page (become a Facebook fan if you aren't already!) and follow us on Bloglovin and Twitter. Our email address remains the same too.

Don't forget to update your bookmark to http://iheartthreadbared.wordpress.com/

Threadbared.blogspot.com will remain, and you may even find that some of the older links will link back to this site, but we will no longer be updating this site.

What is this "Fake" in the Fake Sartorialist?

2010-04-05T09:47:00.011-04:00

All images from The Fake Sartorialist

Part I: Free for All = Free for Some

I have to admit that I barely glanced at the New York Times article, "The Sartorialist Blog is a Victim of Knockoffs" when it was published a few days ago. And I gave it very little thought even after more fashion blog parodies were revealed (here and here). The Sartorialist (the blog and the man who created it, Scott Schuman) is located firmly in the cultural imaginary - by Schuman's own design and with the great help of his throngs of readers and models who provide the bulk of the content for his site. Parodies of The Sartorialist, it seemed to me, was as inevitable as the Times' narrative of "victimization" of the most commercially successful fashion blogger in the world is ludicrous.

But what finally caught my attention was the response of 25 year-old resident of Johannesburg, Eduardo Cachucho, who is the mastermind behind The Fake Sartorialist. Here Cachucho is specifically responding to Schuman's statement that "Now everyone feels the internet is a free-for-all":

I find it odd that Scott sees this as a "now" moment. The internet has always been somewhat of a free-for-all, that is what makes it such an important medium. Without the internet his very own blog (that is renowned for being reposted all over the web) would not be as popular as it is.

One of the strengths of the internet is in the power users have to create new content from existing sources. And though of course I don't condone people just copying images willy nilly, I think there is definitely something to be said for new works created from appropriated sources.

I for one used The Sartorialist's images only as a base and incorporated images from over 100 blogs that I visit every day. It's hardly a free-for-all; more like a long thoughtfull [sic] sifting through gigabytes of content.

For both Sartorialists, the terms of the debate about the cultural and legal legitimacy of fashion blog parodies turn on the phrase, "free-for-all." Interestingly, they both seem to agree that the Internet "free-for-all" has its limits. Schuman told the Times that "he was amused to a point" but had to draw the line at "the unflattering depiction of his subjects." Likewise, Cachucho asserts that free use of digital content should not be available to "people [who] just copy images willy nilly" and that unlike these people, he is doing something more "thoughtful." In other words, their point is that blog and other new media content while accessible to everyone is not equally accessible to everyone.
And in a way, they're right.

As numerous Internet scholars have argued, despite the open access of the Internet (for people who must first have access to a computer and a broadband Internet connection), the Internet is hardly democratic. The operating logic of search engines is such that only the most popular websites are likely to show up in searches. The same websites and blogs appear in the top 3-5 results of every web search; all other sites are, as Jodi Dean put it in an NPR interview discussing her book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, "drowned in the massive flow [of commercialized data]." As such, Internet democracy is not a democracy of equitability but of popularity. To quote Dean further:

Rather than a rhizomatic structure where any one point is as likely to be reached as any other, what we have on the web are situations of massive inequality, massive differentials of scales where some nodes get tons of hits and the vast majority get almost none.

The Internet's uneven distribution of cultural power is clear when we consider that before the controversy, Cachucho's site got 50 hits per day whereas Schuman's site got an estimated 250,000 daily hits - that's 5000 times more than Cachucho. (Thanks to Schuman's objections, Cachucho's online traffic has spiked since the controversy - a point Schuman's detractors are beyond giddy about.)

But in debating the concept of "free-(use)-for-all" Cachucho and Schuman aren't talking about technological or class barriers. Instead, they're referring to the ethical and legal barriers. Schuman actually provides a comment on The Fake Sartorialist post (March 31, 2010) that ominously intones, "Intellectual property beware. Intellectual freedom beware. En garde." I think the en garde is pretty funny - even charming in another context - but I'm not really sure if he's threatening Cachucho or being playful here.

On its face, Schuman's objection to The Fake Sartorialist site - an objection based on his concern for the "unflattering depictions of his subjects" - makes little sense. First of all, Cachucho isn't parodying Schuman's subjects so much as he's parodying fashion blogs in general and The Sartorialist (the exemplar of fashion blogs), in particular. Schuman's protective claims on behalf of his subject seems mislaid at best and disingenuous at worst since they're clearly not the target of the parodies.

Secondly, the idea that Schuman was fine with the parody site until it became "unflattering" is illogical. Parodies are intrinsically unflattering (though their objective is not always or necessarily to offend); otherwise, they'd be homages. Schuman probably just reached his limit with the parody - and this is understandable - but his being fed up with it is not a sound ethical basis for Cachucho or any other parodists to cease and desist. Arguably, this is precisely the moment when the parody is most effective! By the way, I'm no legal expert but it doesn't seem to me that Cachucho is breaking any copyright or intellectual property rights laws either. In 1994, the Supreme Court found in favor of 2 Live Crew in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (yep, a reference to 2 Live freaking Crew found its way into threadbared!) that parodists are protected by fair use doctrines so long as "it is unlikely that the work will act as a substitute for the original." Since Cachucho's website explicitly announces its difference from Schuman's (e.g., The Fake Sartorialist) and since the images are so clearly touched-up (unlike other fashion images - Schuman's included - that disavow or conceal their processes of production and manipulation), no one is likely to mistake Cachucho's work for the original. Indeed, the aesthetic punch and cultural value of Cachucho's site depends on this difference! Anyway, I'm hoping law professor Susan Scafidi of Counterfeit Chic weighs in on her blog.

Finally, Schuman's squabble with users' appropriation of his blog style and images, as Cachucho points out, is more than a little hypocritical. Bloggers, to varying degrees, depend on external Internet users for their content. The higher the number of reader comments, links, and cross-postings a blog can amass, the more likely it is that the blog will achieve top search status and as such, increase the unique hits it gets. Sites with large numbers of unique hits gain the attention of not only more readers but advertisers, editors, literary agents, and designers who are all in the position to monetize the blog. Put another way, blogs and other Web 2.0 domains (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) depend on and, increasingly, profit from the voluntary labors of users. That Schuman's cultural and financial coffers runneth over due in large part to the unpaid digital labors of readers (who are often also fellow bloggers like Cachucho) seems lost on Schuman.

The fashion blogosphere is an inherently referential, associational, and interactive space of cultural production. Typically, readers comb through fashion and style blogs to see what other people are wearing; what they should be buying, wearing, or storing this season and next season; and where to shop for these items. And as part of these consumption practices, they often leave comments on the site that comprise a major part of the digital content of the blog. Fellow bloggers cite, link to, and cross-post each other's posts as well as the fashion images found in an array of digital sites. An exemplar of the fashion blogosphere - are there any print or digital discussions of fashion blogs that don't include at least a mention of The Sartorialist? - Schuman's blog is one of several elite blogs that show up in any Internet search among the hundreds of fashion and style blogs that don't. The digital buzz about his blog is free advertising that helps to maintain and secure his cultural dominance. Cachucho's parody is just another - albeit more creative - mode of productive consumption that does free work benefiting Schuman's blog and blogger profile. Whatever Schuman's personal feelings are about the parody site, it along with the controversy Schuman has helped to manufacture will likely increase his readership as well as secure his position as the reigning fashion blogger. To echo Amy Odell, "We Thought Scott Schuman Understood the Internet Better" too.

To be sure, parody is double-edged: at once confirming and contesting dominant relations of power. The parody site and the controversy has inarguably raised Cachucho's cultural capital as well. How many had even heard about The Fake Sartorialist until this controversy? How sustainable this cultural capital is or whether he will see a financial effect remains to be seen though.

Part II: Legitimate Fakeness vs. Illegitimate Fakeness

I can't end this post without considering this key question: if the Internet's democratic mantra "free-for-all" really means "free-for-some," then what are the conditions for accessing and claiming its freedoms (of communication, knowledge, and artistic expression)?

According to Cachucho, "people just copying images willy nilly" don't count. This is a stunning distinction: here, The Fake Sartorialist is legitimizing his fake art against the illegitimate fakery of so-called willy nilly copycats. Legitimate fakeness vs. illegitimate fakeness? What's the difference? Cachucho explains that his is a "new work created from . . . a long thoughtfull [sic] sifting through gigabytes of content." In other words, his fake art is an original and unique endeavor ("new work") and thus he is a true author of fakes (rather than a real copycat) since he alone produced this new work (a labor-intensive and time-consuming "sifting" of over 100 blogs per day).

By positioning himself as an author of "new work," Cachucho articulates himself as an individual against the masses of "people just copying images willy nilly." This is the definition of an author. According to Martha Woodmansee, the author (a figure that emerged in the 18th century alongside print capitalism and the modern nation-state) is "a unique individual uniquely responsible for a unique product." She also notes that historically the author was never "regarded as distinctly and personally responsible for his creation" but instead was perceived as a master craftsman who was notable for "manipulating traditional materials in order to achieve [desirable] effects." But the cultural, political, economic, and aesthetic value of Cachucho as creative genius also differs from Woodmansee's 18th century example. Rather than a unique or original genius, we might say that he is an ordinary genius - an oxymoron that actually makes sense in the era of the democratization of fashion and communication. Rather than a signification of artifice or derivation, "The Fake Sartorialist" is a brand that signifies democratic expression. This is what Cachucho means when he asserts that the Internet enables users to have "the power . . . to create."

That said, the "fake" in the Fake Sartorialist stands for "the little guy" against the cultural and social giants that the Sartorialist aligns himself with and represents. Fakeness sets right and secures the democratic socioeconomic relations the Internet is supposed to foment (as Cachucho points out).

But it isn't just Web 2.0 technologies that have opened up a space in the fashion world for those outside to enter and occupy it. For the past 8 or 9 years, cheap chic fashion and democratic design have been valorized as enabling non-elite consumers to access and own the look of elite classes. The democratization of fashion ushered in a new cultural politic that values and legitimizes (some) knockoffs. It is against this political economic and cultural backdrop that the real and virtual consumption and circulation of fashion images, objects, and discourses are given new meaning. Cachucho's blog is appealing because its fakeness, like the legitimate knockoffs I mentioned in a previous post, is embedded in and enacts the new cultural dominant of democratic design.

The Fake Sartorialist site is a reminder that the margins, as Stuart Hall, bell hooks, and so many others have shown us, is a productive space. It is the site in which new cultural forms, new social relations, and new identities are imagined and produced against their dominant counterparts to struggle over the meaning of "culture". Thus, "fake" in this new creative economy is not the opposite of "authentic" but rather the other side of the same coin. They mutually constitute each other. Additionally, the fake and the authentic are linked as well by a shared neoliberal logic of the creative economy in which privatized identities ("individuals") are endowed with political economic protections such as intellectual property rights - protections the unindividuated masses are denied. It is as such that Schuman has been shielded from accusations that he's copying Bill Cunningham who's been doing street fashion photography for more than 40 years and that the "ethnic inspired" clothing collections of star Western designers are aesthetically valued in the fashion industry while designer-inspired handbags circulating in underground economies are condemned as "fake."

** My "fake" title is brazenly taken from Stuart Hall's essay, "What is the black in black popular culture?" which inspired key ideas in this post.

LINKAGE: Veiling and "Save the Muslim Girl!"

2010-03-29T17:14:00.004-04:00

Young adult books about the Muslim girl usually feature a veiled adolescent on the cover. Her face is cropped and concealed, usually by her own hands or her veil. Much of her face is covered, including, most significantly, her mouth. Images serve as a shorthand vocabulary. Consider how iconic images—a white or black cowboy hat, a scientist wearing a white lab coat, a princess—set up a stock plot. The repeated images of veiled girls reinforce familiar, mainstream ideas about the confined existence of Muslim women and girls. This is the Muslim girl story we expect to read.

...

Just about every book in this genre features such an image on its cover. These are familiar metaphors for how the Muslim girl’s life will be presented within the novel. The way the girls’ mouths are covered reinforces existing ideas about their silence and suggests that we in the West (conceptualized as “free” and “liberated”) need to help unveil and “give” them voice. The images also invite ideas about girlhood innocence and vulnerability, and invite Western readers to protect, save, and speak for these oppressed girls.
...
The veil or burqa, which has exclusively functioned as the short-hand marker of women’s oppression, is a much more complicated thing. To give you a sense of the range of meaning of the veil, consider for instance that in Turkey—a predominantly Muslim country—the veil (or “religious dress”) is outlawed in public spaces as a means to underline the government’s commitments to Kemalism, a “modern,” secularist stance. In response and as a sign of resistance, some women, especially young university students and those in urban areas, consider the veil to be a marker of protest against government regulation of their bodies and the artificial division of “modern” versus “faithful.” Similar acts of resistance are taken up by feminists in Egypt who wear the veil as a conscious act of resistance against Western imperialism. As another example, before 9/11, the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA) documented the Taliban’s crimes against girls and women by hiding video cameras under their burqas and transformed the burqa from simply a marker of oppression to a tool of resistance.
It is problematic to wholly and simplistically equate women’s oppression with the burqa, just as it would be problematic to claim that once Western women stop using make-up to cover their faces, it will mean an end to domestic violence in the United States and Canada.

-- Özlem Sensoy and Elizabeth Marshall, excerpts from "Save The Muslim Girl!," a series on Muslimah Media Watch on Muslim girls in contemporary young adult fiction

VINTAGE POLITICS: Appadurai, Fashion and Nostalgia

2010-03-23T14:10:00.001-04:00

The "French Explorer" Jacket from "vintage style" retailer J. Peterman (recently discussed here), described thusly: "Remember Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, considered by many to be France's greatest explorer? Some think it was his unique brand of Colonialism.... But I think the secret to his empire-building was this jacket, which he often wore to meetings with tribal chieftans. Historians agree with me."

The problem of patina, which McCracken has recently proposed as a general term to deal with that property of goods in which their age becomes a key index of their high status, disguises a deeper dilemma, the dilemma of distinguishing wear from tear. That is, while is many cases, wear is a sign of the right sort of duration in the social life of things, sheer disrepair or decrepitude is not....

Objects with patina are perpetual reminders of the passage of time as a double-edged sword, which credentials the "right" people, just as it threatens the way they lived. Whenever aristocratic lifestyles are threatened, patina acquires a double meaning, indexing both the special status of its owner and the owner's special relationship to a way of life that is no longer available. The latter is what makes patina a truly scarce resource, for it always indicates the fact that a way of living is now gone forever. Yet, this very fact is a guarantee against the newly arrived, for they can acquire objects with patina, but never the subtly embodied anguish of those who can legitimately bemoan the loss of a way of life. Naturally, good imposters may seek to mimic this nostalgic posture as well. but here both performances and reviews are a more tightly regulated affair. It is harder to pretend to have lost something than it is to actually do so, or to claim to have found it. Here material wear cannot disguise social rupture.

-- Arjun Appadurai, 1993, "Consumption, Duration, and History," in Streams of Cultural Capital, D. Palumbo-Liu and H. U. Gumbrecht (eds.), Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Spring!

2010-03-23T10:24:00.012-04:00

It's Spring, and all I want to do is wear this dress!

Future Classics Abstract Jersey "Peasant" dress.

I just purchased this at a (online) sample sale so I don't actually have this gorgeous dress in my mitts yet. But I keep looking at the photos and it makes me so happy to know that it's winging its way to me that I had to spread the love. The dress is gray, made of soft jersey, and full of surprising details - a more perfect dress it could not be!

Creature Couture

2010-03-17T08:38:00.000-04:00

A Washington D.C. woman adopted an orphaned squirrel in the early 1940s. Dubbed Tommy Tucker, he became her animal companion --accompanying her to the grocery store, for instance-- and model for her designs. LIFE Magazine took photographs and decades later, publishes them online for aspiring animal dress designers as "A Squirrel's Guide to Fashion." Rock on, sassy squirrel!

Abercrombie & Fitch Sales in Steep Decline: YAY!!

2010-03-11T13:57:00.009-05:00

Few retailers or labels make me as cranky as Abercrombie & Fitch which is why I don't feel mean-spirited at all about being happy over the news that their sales are in a steep decline (woo-hoo!!) - see here and here. Not only are their "stale styles" way overpriced but the "American" lifestyle they stand for, promote, valorize, and export in their advertising and hiring practices (detailed in their "Appearance Policy") is shamelessly racist, ableist, Islamophobic, gender normative, and heteronormative. See, for example, A&F chief executive Mike Jeffries' obnoxious rationale of the retailer's marketing strategy:

In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don't belong [in our clothes], and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don't alienate anybody, but you don't excite anybody, either.

By the way, several years ago my intrepid and prolific co-blogger, the lovely Mimi Thi Nguyen, wrote a wonderful article about Abercrombie's "Orientalist Kitsch" for the website, Pop Politics. Read it, read it!

Mimi's addendum: And for more on the "appearance policy," read Dwight McBride's Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality and the second chapter (also called "Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch").

LINKAGE: A Case for Legitimate Knock-offs

2010-03-11T13:16:00.009-05:00

Charles Guislain, (another) teen blogger phenom

While some in the fashion media have been fixating on the growing importance of editorial coverage by young bloggers, relatively little has been said about a broader democratisation that’s happening in the fashion industry overall. For one thing, runway knock-offs — formerly a marginal industry — have become a borderline acceptable business practice, with stores such as Zara and Forever 21 building successful franchises by copycatting high fashion designs. In a sense, fast fashion collaborations such as Jimmy Choo for H&M or Rodarte for Target seem to legitimise this practice.

This is a quote from a recent article on the effects of fashion's democratization from the website The Business of Fashion. Unfortunately, Ken Miller (the writer) doesn't examine the changing meanings of knock-offs in this era of democratization or analyze which knock-offs are acceptable and which aren't (and why) in the context of the emerging creative economy. Nonetheless, I'm intrigued by the relationship he's suggesting between cheap chic fashion retailers like H&M and Target and the industry of legitimate knock-offs. Who authorizes this legitimacy? And what are the conditions of cultural legitimation?

The Incensed Beauty Guru and Pop-Feminism

2010-03-09T15:06:00.012-05:00

Oh, my. A vlogger who was mentioned in a post about the phenomenon of "haul vlogging" in New York magazine's The Cut last week is fighting back against what she perceived as the slandering of her reputation, in particular, and the profession of haul vloggers, in general. To be sure, The Cut's assessment of haul vloggers was rather piquant:

"'[H]aul videos' . . . consist of girls videotaping themselves showing the world what they just bought at the mall. Like, they go home, plop down in front of their webcams, and pull their new purchases out of shopping bags. And discuss each item in way too much detail . . . Haul vloggers seem to be primarily of one species: the girl who flatirons her hair, wears too-thick eye shimmer up to her eyebrows, drowns in eyeliner, and gets her brows waxed regularly. She also wears trendy-but-ugly nail polish and probably gets chemical peels at regular monthly intervals. Haul vloggers seem to favor, typically, cheap stores like Forever 21 and Target. Also, they don't ever seem to wear half the trendy crap they're constantly buying. And to think these people think they need this stuff, when what they need most of all are lives, hobbies, jobs, maybe cats.

As an example of haul vlogging, The Cut offered this popular video - apparently viewed nearly 8,000 times when the post was published.

The haul vlogger ChanelBlueSatin, a 22 year-old "Blogger, Youtuber, teacher, model, and wife!" from Texas, was so incensed by The Cut's characterization of her that she made this response video:

Last week, I posted about the backlash against fashion bloggers and what this backlash might suggest about the shifting meanings of fashion's democratization. The Cut's review of haul vloggers is yet another example of this backlash. But what's particularly interesting about this kerfuffle between ChanelBlueSatin and The Cut (mostly its readers now rather than the blogger Amy Odell who has since issued a mea culpa to the vlogger) is the ways in which the response calls Odell out for the misogynistic tone of her post:

Shouldn't the editor of New York magazine try to be inspiring to women rather than bashing other women? I mean, shouldn't they try to report on factual information rather than accusations based on outward appearances? . . . Bottom line is I respect the editor for having an interest in us beauty gurus on YouTube but I don't respect the fact that she took a negative spin on it. Listen, there's a whole lot of hate in this world so let's just stop hating and start loving again. So keep the peace.

While the vlogger misidentifies Odell as the "editor" of New York magazine (Odell is the magazine's fashion blogger) and misrepresents the blog post as a "featured article," she is right to feel gender bashed by Odell and especially the readers who commented on the blog post. There's a lot of "dumb girl fashion/capitalist victim" talk that dismisses fashion consumerism as feminine stupidity. (Click here for another example of this as well as Susie Bubble's response.) We've posted about the stupidity of this line of logic but for a summation of the significance of fashion that is so spot-on that I wish we had written it, see Good Morning Midnight's post, which Mimi has also cited in a previous post. (See especially the paragraph that begins, "Would the world be a better place without Uggs and Ed Hardy? Probably." - a blogger after my own heart.) Moreover, the classist strain of Odell's evaluation of ChanelBlueSatin and haul vloggers in general is incredibly ugly. Odell seems most bothered not by haul vlogging as such but by the inauthenticity of haul vloggers who shop at down-market stores like Forever21 and "wears too-thick eye shimmer up to her eyebrows, drowns in eyeliner, and . . . wears trendy-but-ugly nail polish."

Yet, how does ChanelBlueSatin's call for peace (among women) square with her self-identification as a "beauty guru"? How is the mastery over one's image and body (the real commodity beauty and style gurus sell) the means and measure of pop-feminist inspiration, according to this vlogger? Put another way, how are material entitlements to Forever21 jewelry and teeth whitening strips coextensive with a moral discourse about love and inspiration among women?

Unfortunately, ChanelBlueSatin's pop-feminism is commodified rather than politicized in consumer culture. It is, as Sarah Banet-Weiser describes postfeminism, a "commodity-driven empowerment." More from Banet-Weiser's essay "What's Your Flava?": "As a contemporary social and political movement, then, feminism has been rescripted (though not necessarily disavowed) so as to allow its smooth incorporation into the world of commerce and corporate culture."

As a self-professed "beauty guru," ChanelBlueSatin as well as the growing cadre of fashion bloggers, vloggers, television personalities, and print media authors of the what-to-wear/what-not-to-wear makeover variety disenables precisely the humanist feminist project she claims to be leading. The relationship between the makeover guru and makeoveree is an inherently hierarchical one that is based not simply on an uneven distribution of skills (shopping, styling, etc.) but rather an uneven distribution of personhood based on the apparent mastery of or incompetence about dominant codes of beauty and behavior. The subject "in need" of the expertise of the lifestyle guru is imagined as a deficient person - a person who lacks self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth - and thus, in need of correction. I've cited Brenda Weber's account of the role of the fashion/beauty guru before and she's useful here again:

A new and improved appearance will not only make the woman more congruent with larger codes of beauty, but will increase her confidence and thus her personal power. In order to gain access to this form of power, however, makeover subjects (often called "victims," "targets," "marks") must submit fully to style authorities."

So while ChanelBlueSatin's self-identification as a "beauty guru" made me giggle, it is worth recalling that being a lifestyle guru is serious economic and cultural political business that is also ideological and disciplinary. The social relationship of lifestyle gurus to their subjects is one of casual, consensual, neoliberal domination. As Tania Lewis, the editor of a wonderful special issue on the topic of makeover television in the journal Continuum (volume 22.4) explains: "As government seeks to devolve responsibility for welfare to individuals, television, and in particular what they term 'life intervention' formats . . . can be seen to play an increasingly central role in inducting viewers into new neoliberal modes of self-governing citizenship."

The Internet, which is quickly surpassing the television as the primary medium of visual and consumer culture, makes "life intervention" ideologies especially appealing. Whereas television is generally understood to be a top-down medium controlled by a handful of profit-seeking corporations, the prevailing logic about the Internet is that it is an inherently democratic form in which ordinary people participate in the structuring and content-building of new cultural publics. And indeed, the celebrity of bloggers and vloggers like Tavi Gevinson and ChanelBlueSatin are particular to the way the Internet works. What is especially appealing about these "gurus" is that they are ordinary people, people whose person and style of modern personhood seem to be easily accessible. As embodiments of the democratization of fashion, the figure of the citizen blogger/vlogger occludes the uneven access to commodities and communication technologies between makeover gurus and makeoverees (both Gevinson and ChanelBlueSatin, for example, are privy to the deep pockets of fashion and media companies) and thus conceals the ways in which the promise of self-invention is shaped and limited by one's successful self-governing and normativizing of body, image, and behavior.

LINKAGE: Emma Tarlo, Lahore Fashion Week, Fashion (Blogging) Matters

2010-03-05T09:43:00.004-05:00

Muslimah Media Watch published an interview with Emma Tarlo upon the release of her new book Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith. I was lucky enough to sit next to Emma Tarlo (and Reina Lewis) about a year ago on a panel at UC Irvine about our separate projects on veiling discourses and practices. I promptly gushed about how much I love to teach her first book Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India in my Politics of Fashion course. Blowing students' minds with Gandhi's carefully calibrated clothing practices against British empire is the best.

S: At MMW, we struggle with not wanting to see hijab as central to Muslim women’s issues, is this something you came across in women?
ET: I was extremely aware of this issue, and didn’t want to perpetuate the idea that the key to understanding Muslim women is “the veil”. I was also very aware that many young Muslim women feel that outsiders are obsessed with the veil. But what interested me was not so much the outsider obsession with covering as the complex internal debates taking place about dress amongst Muslims in Britain and Europe and the USA. With the polarisation of the veiling issue in the media, particularly in the post 9/11 environment, there has been very little space for acknowledgement of the diversity of Muslim perspectives on dress. Instead Muslims are all too frequently blanketed together as if they all think and act alike with the most extreme forms of covering becoming the major point of focus even though face veiling is very much a minority practice which many Muslims oppose. I wanted to bring out this diversity and to show that contemporary Muslim dress practices are not just about religion and politics but also about ethics, aesthetics, identity, fashion, globalisation, community, belonging and so forth. In a way this was also part of larger project for showing how Muslim women, like all women, are juggling with the complexities of what to wear in a context where others project interpretations on them. What is particular in the case of hijabi women is the degree of expectations and potential interpretations and misinterpretations with which they have to engage as they go about their ordinary lives. So I wanted to bring out lived experiences of visibly Muslim women without suggesting the hijab is the most important aspect of their lives or even their appearances.

________________________

Also via Muslimah Media Watch, Cafe Pyala deconstructs the myriad cliches in Western coverage of the Lahore (Pakistan) Fashion Week:

Oh, shoot. Here we go again with coverage of Fashion Week in Pakistan. Can we do anything in Pakistan without it being linked in some way to either appeasing the Taliban or kicking sand in their faces?

I refer of course to the latest “I-spit-on-the-runway-the-Taliban-sashay-down” type of pieces in the American Christian Science Monitor (titled predictably “Lahore Fashion Week Takes on Talibanization in Pakistan”) and in Britain’s The Times about the just concluded Lahore Fashion Week. The latter may be headlined a bit more soberly (”Pakistan Fashion Week Pushes Back Boundaries”), but the prose is nothing less than a deep shade of purple.

________________________

I am terribly impressed with the new spate of fashion/style blogs that are both fun to look at and good to read. A woman after my own punk rock heart, Good Morning Midnight wears a lot of black and bunches of chains and waxes eloquent on why fashion is worth blogging about. This is the tiniest excerpt of a long but immensely readable piece.

Why do we take the costumes and makeup and tattoos of other cultures seriously and consider them interesting (or at least fetishize them as novelties or put them in museums) while dismissing the fact that such things exist within our own society? Why don’t we bother to think about what is going on in the minds of girls wearing Uggs, because let me tell you my combat boots are just as comfortable, so why are they wearing those things on their feet? What statements does it convey within their social groups, what references does it evoke and what does it imply about their economic and social class? There are serious and fascinating social psychology and sociology things going on here — and they deserve to be talked about too. This isn’t “kid stuff” or “stuff for dumb girls” or even “art” (which is equally dismissive in its own way.) This is society, and self-presentation, and economy, and patriarchy, and sociology, and billions and billions of dollars.

Fashion, like music and art and many many more, seems to be a double industry: there’s a lot of old white guys with money taking advantage of oversexed naive teenagers who are thrust into the mainstream as props, chewed up alive and spit back out and cast aside before they hit 20. There are crazed consumers obsessed with owning the latest trends and epic amounts of marketing dollars and energy devoted to turning 12 year olds (and their parents) into little consumption machines. There’s corruption and a glaring wage disparity and sweatshops and eating disorders and probably rape and murder too; everything is about power and sex and aesthetics. But what industry isn’t like that? And furthermore, why is the existence of these problems (and their heightened visibility in fashion due to its focus on the link between appearances and money) continually used as reasoning for a.) ignoring fashion and b.) dismissing it as worthless? We don’t do that with music, film, art, real estate, or finance and I think we’d all agree they are just as messed up — just in more subtle ways.

Would the world be a better place without Uggs and Ed Hardy? Probably. Are there are lot of morons out there talking about fashion, and are there are lot of desperate consumption-driven miserable humans out there doing horrifying things in the name of fashion, and are there a lot of women making absurd sacrifices and dedicating themselves blindly to stereotypes and standards promoted by fashion and fashion media without thinking about why or how? Undoubtedly. Is fashion deeply fucked up, corrupt, riddled with problems, linked to systems of oppression and some of our most problematic social issues? Yes. Which is why it’s stupid to dismiss it. If it’s so messed up and shallow and bad, why push it aside? Why not cut it to pieces and sew it back together in new ways, talk about it and analyze it and get involved and have an opinion and do something about it? (And possibly even have fun and make some friends while we’re at it?)

Educate the State! Defend Public Education!

2010-03-04T11:07:00.009-05:00

March 4 is an international day of action to defend public education against its increasing privatization by state and corporate powers. From Defend Education, a national clearinghouse for many of these efforts:

As people throughout the country struggle under the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, public education from pre-K to higher and adult education is threatened by budget cuts, layoffs, privatization, tuition and fee increases, and other attacks. Budget cuts degrade the quality of public education by decreasing student services and increasing class size, while tuition hikes and layoffs force the cost of the recession onto students and teachers and off of the financial institutions that caused the recession in the first place. Non-unionized charter schools threaten to divide, weaken and privatize the public school system and damage teachers’ unions, which are needed now more than ever. More and more students are going deep into debt to finance their education, while high unemployment forces many students and youth to join the military to receive a higher education. And all of the attacks described above have hit working people and people of color the hardest.

We are also united with friends, students, workers, and colleagues in California who are facing an slew of "local" attacks on marginalized campus populations, including the "Compton Cookout" and noose-hanging at UC San Diego, but also the vandalization of the LGBT Resource Center at UC Davis. We recognize that such incidents do not indict "isolated individuals" but also implicate larger structures of inequity, including the processes of privatization. From Queers For Public Education:

We are not surprised that these actions have erupted in the midst of a financial crisis for the UC system, and for its students, faculty, and workers. We note that most of the students organizing against budget cuts and fee increases do so from marginalized positions, foregrounding broader questions of social justice and calling for the downward distribution of resources. In this context, recent violent acts are best understood as part of a larger backlash against modes of student organizing that threaten the privileges linked to whiteness, wealth, heterosexuality, and citizenship. Such events do not emerge suddenly or unexpectedly, but are intimately linked to more pervasive and naturalized systems of oppression. Focusing responses only on the punishment of individual perpetrators effaces the larger context out of which such actions emerge. Students who are already wary of the presence of armed security forces that have historically targeted people who are queer and/or of color, take the proposed presence of the FBI and increased surveillance of campus as a threat and fundamental misunderstanding of our experiences rather than a solution or a sign of support.

Threadbared says, "Educate the state! Defend public education!"

The Backlash Against Bloggers: What Does It Mean?

2010-03-03T08:03:00.004-05:00

There are some signs that the best days of the fashion blogger phenomenon may be behind us. This isn't to say that fashion bloggers are going away but the public discourse about them and the value of their digital labors seems to have shifted in the past couple of months.

First, Elle editor Anne Slowey described Tavi Gevinson's commissioned column for Harper's Bazaar as "gimmicky" and then Huffington Post's style editor Lesley Blume was quoted as saying that asking adult women to take style cues from young women like the Olsen twins and Gevinson was "insulting." (Read here.)

This month, Barney's Creative Director Simon Doonan told GQ magazine that he wants his front row seats back from the teen/tween bloggers that have overtaken runway shows. He even throws a little snark at 13 year-old blogger: "Since they are all about my height, I am going to impersonate one of them. I am going to wear a doily on my head (Tavi!) and tell everyone I'm a teen blogger."

Late last week, New York Times fashion writer Guy Trebay told WWD that he doesn't really care "whether Bryanboy gets excited by a handbag or something."

The easiest explanation for this backlash is to cite the techno-generational divide: the persnickety old guard vs. the whipper-snapping new guard. And I think that's part of it, but only part of it. Instead of resting the critique of this backlash entirely on the laps of cantankerous sartorial Luddites, I think it's useful to consider the political economy in which this backlash emerges.

Not too long ago, fashion/style bloggers were embraced as the embodiment of fashion's democratization. Along with cheap chic fashion, fashion/style bloggers were heralded as proof that fashion had finally become accessible to everyone despite race, gender, class, physical location, time zone, etc. The free flow of fashion objects and images across socioeconomic differences and fiber optic cable lines (as with the deregulated circuits of trade, capital, and labor) signified, according to numerous fashion editors, writers, and neoliberal politicians, a truly democratic society where everyone has the right to access the commodities that will enable them to practice their freedoms of expression, self-determination, and consumer choices. Free market agency, we were told, is coextensive with political agency.

Drowning out previous celebrations of democratization are anxious cries about the massification of fashion journalism. Consider Trebay's statement: "It sounds like a very Establishment view, but I think that the Establishment is composed, in general, of really skilled people." The inference, of course, is that bloggers (now positioned as a threat to the Establishment rather than as a sign of the Establishment's fairness and openness) are unskilled. But the significance of massification rhetoric has implications that go far beyond a techno-generational divide.

Massification rhetoric has historically secured dominant power relations by producing a category of collective identification called "the masses" and then casting suspicion on them as unruly, unthinking, and uncultured. Moreover, as Andreas Huyssen has pointed out, the categorization of "the masses" carries with it gender inscriptions that imagine the masses (here, the collective of "teen/tween bloggers") as subjective, emotional, and thus feminine. This is evident in the Pulitzer Prize winning fashion writer Robin Givhan's assessment of fashion bloggers: "[T]heir opinions [are] suspect. They're too invested. They're biased. Passion gets in the way of truth-telling." Establishment fashion journalists, we are meant to understand, are dispassionate and objective reporters.

I don't think that the recent backlash against bloggers suggests that the era of fashion's democratization is coming to a close - it's difficult to imagine that fashion, in this economic climate, would risk alienating any potential customers especially customers with as much cultural capital as star bloggers like Gevinson and BryanBoy. However, I think this backlash does signal a shift in the popular understanding of "democracy" in the creative economy, a return to a social theory of apprenticeship in which hierarchies of power are not seen as opposed to democracy and free market societies but rather as opportunities for "paying one's dues" and "earning one's stripes." This is precisely the link Weber observed between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.

Exclusion and exploitation in the forms of higher rates of un- and underemployment and free labor (typical in the new creative economy, in general, and in fashion, in particular), are incorporated and naturalized as part of the cost of democracy. Enduring exploitation becomes a virtue - it demonstrates a faith in and a faithfulness to the meritocracy and magicality of capitalism.

Threadbared, Outfitted (on this joy + ride)

2010-03-01T11:39:00.003-05:00

My awesome denim boots, some cat fur, and a handful of buttons.

We are not in the habit of outfits posts on Threadbared, for multiple reasons. But for this joy + ride, a lovely blog given to creative inspirations and interviews, Minh-Ha and I each shot a series of photographs that reflect quite handily our distinct sartorial personalities.

Minh-Ha's photographs are thoughtfully composed. Her sweetheart (a talented photographer) helped to stage these scenes around their apartment building with careful attention to light and angle to set a reflective mood. She wears clothes expressing her concerns for architectural details and interactions between fabrics and the space around the body, clothes reflecting recent insights into her wardrobe (blacks, steel blues, and grays) and new efforts to broaden her sartorial vocabulary (er, other blues and fuchsia). Any viewer can tell that Minh-Ha took care in these photographs, and that she knows her own mind about what she wants.

Me? I stalled on taking these photographs until the very last minute and then decided that I would be a debauched 1979 New Wave party girl waking up on the toilet after a night out at the Mubahay, or Madame Wong's, getting dressed for her day job reshelving at the public library downtown. I threw together these outfits and took these photographs over the course of fifteen to twenty minutes in my upstairs half-bathroom, which I had stripped of its fucked-up colonial wallpaper (the previous dwellers enjoyed a palm tree-laden map of the "darkest interior" where the "barbarians" lived) without yet scraping off the bits. I didn't think too hard because "New Wave party girl" is a sartorial staple in my wheelhouse, and there's about a million more outfits where these came from. I should have worn fishnets in the photograph I'm pulling on my red leather and suede boots, but I was too lazy to reshoot.

One of the things I love most about collaborating with Minh-Ha is our productive differences -- here, made clear with visuals!

Campus Minstrelsy: On "Compton Cookouts" and More

2010-02-26T17:27:00.021-05:00

Western discourses of beauty as coextensive with humanity, morality, and security bear long and bloody histories of undergirding imperial racial classifications. It is as such that the racial Other has often been found under the sign of the ugly –which is to say, the morally reprehensible, the sexually and spiritually threatening— as the limit of the human and the enemy of beauty. Both beauty and ugliness have civilizational dimensions, dividing and valuing peoples hierarchically.

In this way, the off-campus party, dubbed the "Compton Cookout" and designed as a deliberate mockery of Black History Month at the University of California, San Diego, aptly demonstrates the terrible legacy of this politics of beauty. (If you're not sure what this event and the resulting furor are about, please see here and here.) The Facebook invitation featured detailed instructions to party-goers on how to enact caricatures of black racial deviancy via "ghetto" dress and a performance of ugliness-as-subhumanity:

February marks a very important month in American society. No, i’m not referring to Valentines day or Presidents day. I’m talking about Black History month. As a time to celebrate and in hopes of showing respect, the Regents community cordially invites you to its very first Compton Cookout.

For guys: I expect all males to be rockin Jersey’s, stuntin’ up in ya White T (XXXL smallest size acceptable), anything FUBU, Ecko, Rockawear, High/low top Jordans or Dunks, Chains, Jorts, stunner shades, 59 50 hats, Tats, etc.
For girls: For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks-Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes – they consider Baby Phat to be high class and expensive couture. They also have short, nappy hair, and usually wear cheap weave, usually in bad colors, such as purple or bright red. They look and act similar to Shenaynay, and speak very loudly, while rolling their neck, and waving their finger in your face. Ghetto chicks have a very limited vocabulary, and attempt to make up for it, by forming new words, such as “constipulated”, or simply cursing persistently, or using other types of vulgarities, and making noises, such as “hmmg!”, or smacking their lips, and making other angry noises, grunts, and faces. The objective is for all you lovely ladies to look, act, and essentially take on these “respectable” qualities throughout the day.

The "Compton Cookout" continues in the American theater tradition of blackface minstrelsy. As nineteenth-century free blacks used dress and clothing to distinguish themselves as also human, blackface minstrel performances subjected this self-fashioning black person to ridicule and loathing. In this, and as evidenced by the above, the defamation of black style is absolutely crucial to the racist imagination -- with particular revulsion for black femininity. While the directions "for guys" offer a rote inventory of certain brands or items, the directions "for girls" drip with moralizing language sneeringly directed at an embodiment stereotyped as irrational ("cheap clothes" mistaken for "high class couture," "cheap weaves" in "bad colors"), uncivilized ("limited vocabulary," "cursing persistently"), and animalistic ("smacking their lips," "making other angry, grunts, and faces") -- in other words, ugly.

The statement from UCSD's Ethnic Studies Department explains how such mocking directions are tied to a history of minstrelsy:

This “monstrosity” (as some of the organizers called it) has a violent and racist history that began with blackface minstrel shows in the U.S., starting in the early 19th century, heightening with popularity during the Abolition Movement, and extending into 20th century theater and film. Both blackface minstrel performances and parties such as the “Compton Cookout” reinforce and magnify existing material and discursive structures of Black oppression, while denying Black people any sense of humanity, negating not only the actual lives that exist behind these caricatured performances but the structural conditions that shape Black life in the US. Far from celebrating Black history, events such as this one are marked celebrations of the play of power characteristic of whiteness in general and white minstrelsy in particular: the ability to move in and move out of a racially produced space at will; the capacity to embody a presumed deviance without actually ever becoming or being it; the privilege to revel in this raced and gendered alterity without ever having to question or encounter the systemic and epistemic violence that produces hierarchies of difference in the first place. Moreover, like their blackface minstrel predecessors, the organizers and attendees of the “Compton Cookout” demonstrate the inextricability of performances of white mastery over Black bodies from structures of patriarchy: by instructing their women ‘guests’ on how to dress (“wear cheap clothes”), behave (“start fights and drama”), and speak (“have a very limited vocabulary”), these young men not only paint a degrading and dehumanizing picture of African American women as so-called “ghetto chicks,” but offer a recipe for the objectification of all women—made permissible, once again, through the appropriation of blackness.

Because of this terrible history, the "Compton Cookout" cannot be viewed as an isolated incident. Every year there are more college campus parties that depend upon a dehumanizing politics of dress to enact racist caricatures for entertainment; for instance, the 2006 "Tacos and Tequila" Greek party at the University of Illinois saw sorority sisters in tank tops, hoop earrings,and fake pregnancies, and fraternity brothers dressed as gardeners and agricultural workers. (With regard to the ethics of performance, the statement from the Theater and Dance community is also well worth the read.)

Both dress and beauty bear the weight of much ideological management in its racial classifications of humanity, through which some persons are guaranteed the principle of human dignity and other persons are denied it. In which some are invited to "play" at blackness-as-savagery, blackness-as-degeneracy, and some Others are trapped by this image, this event and others like it foster and perform dehumanization through a frighteningly cruel, and terribly effective, politics of ugliness.

For more background and context, read or listen to this KPBS report about both institutional and "popular" racisms at UCSD, featuring our former classmate (Berkeley Ethnic Studies, represent!) and immensely fierce and formidable colleague Sara Clarke Kaplan, an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies at San Diego.

Queer & Feminist New Media Spaces: A Dynamic (and Smart!) Conversation

2010-02-26T13:02:00.007-05:00

Check out this wonderful discussion on the HASTAC website between academics and new media artists about everything from the complex and contradictory relations between our digital and corporeal bodies; digital and "real" styles of identification; the convergences of queer, digital, and capitalist academic time; queer parenting; gay avatars; Ellen on American Idol; and so much more!

The discussion - which shifts and reconfigures by the minute! - is an absolute must-read for those interested in thinking critically about technoculture, digital media, and, of course, the politics of fashion and style blogging.

VINTAGE POLITICS: The Awl's "White People Clothing and 'Old Money Green'"

2010-02-25T10:39:00.012-05:00

Awl writer Cord Jefferson just penned an incredibly thoughtful piece on the phenomenon of "nu prep" or what passes for "classic Americana" in men's style. In "White People Clothing and 'Old Money Green,'" Jefferson wonders what to make of garments whose appeal is narrated through unsubtle references to histories of racial degradation and economic privilege -- Ralph Lauren Polo's "old money green" chinos, J. Crew's "plantation madras" button-down, and J. Peterman's "owner's hat" (the copy for which reads, "Some of us work on the plantation. Some of us own the plantation").* Jefferson ends his piece:

I like Barbour jackets a lot, and Tod's driving moccasins. I even like "Nantucket red" pants with a crisp white shirt and a blue blazer. But, as a person of color with no family crest of which to speak, I wonder if I should. It would be one thing if the current fashion trends were merely sentimental for grandpa's favorite pair of shoes. But here, amidst the money greens and plantation nostalgia, it seems as if they're also rooted in grandpa's stunted cultural outlooks as well. I now see a sick irony in myself and kids in East New York wearing bow ties and sweater vests. Not new money kids, not old money kids, but no money kids who, apart from the slacks, look nothing like the Take Ivy boys everyone's heralding, copying, designing for and listening to. To paraphrase one of my favorite poets, "I would go out tonight, but my ancestors were crushed under racial oppression for centuries."

The piece is hilariously tagged with: "PLANTATIONS?, SOLID EUROPEAN STOCK, THE NEW NICE RACISM, WHITE PEOPLE THINGS."

Referentiality --or knowing what cluster of ideas we refer to when we say "old money," for instance-- is an unstable thing. Does aestheticization deracinate a plantation history, or merely insist that such a history does not matter? For what might an "owner's hat" be nostalgic, if nostalgia is the modern phenomenon of borrowing a "lost" sentiment or sensibility from the past for present usage? What does it mean to apprehend or be attached to something understood as lost, when the spatial or temproal dimensions of that loss cannot help but include chattel slavery or colonial racial rule? The dead do not stay down while their clothes come forward.

That said, how do we track their ghostly traces across living bodies which may or may not match their original wearers? One commentator suggests that despite the advertising copy, the circuitous routes some blue-blood dress styles take interrupt their straightforward claims to colonial privilege: "Also: can't we say that nu-prep–at least in part–is a possibly unconscious appropriation of a 'black' style, which itself was an appropriation of a 'white' style, which was sorta kinda a different kind of appropriation of a 'white' style, which was originally an appropriation of many many different styles from around the world?"

As black style becomes global style, does the appropriation and revision of fancy clothes produce another historical consciousness, another origin story, for these dress styles? Consider the sartorial performances of the immaculately attired Andre 3000, the calculated precision of the self-fashioning Fonzworth Bentley. We might also recall Monica Miller's Slaves to Fashion, in which she argues black dandyism "makes both subtle and overt challenges and capitulations to authoritative aesthetics." Miller suggests, "Dandies are not always the wealthiest, but they aspire to other things and show that existing hierarchies can be broken. It’s about making something out of nothing."

So does the meaning of a garment emerge from consumers' usage, or from its conditions of manufacture, both ideological and material? In response to a commentator's smart observation that "I would pause before associating Japanese fandom of this look to a deep dream of giving off Landed Class vibes," Jefferson clarifies:

Not to dive even deeper into the rabbit hole, but I suppose what I find problematic about the trad blogs is how whimsical they are about longing for the days of yore. It's very easy for middle aged white guys to romanticize the 50s and 60s (http://www.acontinuouslean.com/2010/02/15/las-vegas/), because then they would have been even freer than they are now. For me to think of the '50s is to consider times of terror, heartbreak and violence.

While these garments' manufacture is new, some of the questions I asked earlier of vintage politics seem relevant here.

What are the vocabularies of vintage clothes and how do these vocabularies produce value for the vintage-clad self? What feelings do vintage clothes and their histories inspire, in whom? What do these feelings do -- to our understanding of the past, other bodies? As I consider these and further possible queries, it would appear that vintage can be about the evaluation and preservation of an item or an ideal --a beautiful dress, a beautiful woman-- against the ruin of time, or vintage can be marshaled to mark ruin as important, as a significant event in the social life of that thing or ideal.

As Jefferson points out, the evaluation and preservation of a beautiful item from another time and place might easily slide into the evaluation and preservation of an associated (terrible, no-good) ideal. Nostalgia for a particular era or its sensibility can become dangerous, especially when such a sensibility might include qualifiers such as "dignity" or "freedom," "classiness" or "old-school glamour," which are also shifting measures of human value. (Consider some of the nostalgic remarks about "respectability" here.) But the adaptation of these dress styles can also fashion defiance, marking the ruin of these eras in these styles' unruly revisions by those once denied their wearing.

Perhaps we must distinguish between the meanings that self-fashioning persons assign their clothes, and the meanings that lend a bloody social life to things like an "owner's hat." They may overlap; they may not. I think that there's no coming down on one side or the other here: it's a "both"/"and more" situation.

* Okay, J. Peterman is crazy nuts. So many of the "men's things" are accompanied by nostalgic remembrances of multiple imperial moments. The "19th-Century British Dhobi Kit" is described thusly: "The British called them 'dhobi' after the 'wash boys' that they hired by the hundreds in Burma, Madras and the Punjab. They became such a necessity that viceroys, governors-general and trade ministers had them handmade in London before heading off to postings in the far reaches of the British Empire.... The perfectly civilized way to start your day – no matter where you find yourself. Imported."

Creativity and Commodity: The Subcultural Style Guide

2010-02-24T09:32:00.001-05:00

Featuring photographs by Jenny Lens and modeling by Belinda Carlisle, this 1977 zine How To Look Punk by Marliz is an amazing gem. (Awww, I remember fondly tearing black paper for zine layouts....) Check this helpful advice for a "neck chain and lock:" "Use an old piece of chain from a dog lead, fence, whatever, or buy approximately 27 inches of heavy gauge chain from the hardware store, join ends with tiny metal lock, to make a necklace."

It's a fascinating document for a number of reasons (besides the photographs of a young pre-Go-Go's Carlisle), including what appears to be Marliz's "note on author," in which she identifies herself as a professional trendspotter: "Marliz is internationally known in the industry for her marketing ability in current-trend perception, and 'how to' help it explode on the scene." This blurb certainly reiterates that just as soon as punk became a "thing" it became a "trend" too. (Consider Malcolm McLaren, for instance, as its self-appointed impresario and earliest, and certainly canniest, entrepreneur.)

This is the phenomenon that Dick Hebdige describes in his 1979 classic Subculture: The Meaning of Style: "Youth cultural styles may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions, by creating new commodities, new industries or rejuvenating old ones." This cyclical movement between creativity and commodity undergirds most histories of modern subcultures -- and certainly their styles. At this juncture, we can either repeat the modernist ideological critique of the shallow costume of commodified subculture (see CRASS's declaration that "Yes that's right, punk is dead! / It's just another cheap product for the consumer's head") or we can try to find some language other than authenticity and its lack to respond to, and perhaps embrace, subcultural mutations over time.

You can download your own PDF of the zine here.

Democratization, Schmocratization

2010-02-22T11:20:00.006-05:00

It's not even 9am where I'm at (in San Francisco) and I'm already feeling like it's getting late in the day for all the things I need to do. No doubt, I'll feel this way all week - just as I felt this way all last week.

Briefly, though, I wanted to link this article on Jezebel, "Fewer Models of Color Work New York Fashion Week." There is nothing surprising or provocative about the findings of this article (unfortunately). But I do think the points it makes are worth bearing in mind as the rhetoric about "the democratization of fashion" becomes more and more a part of our cultural common sense. Recall, for instance, all the feature stories on amateur bloggers - this new young creative class of enterprising techno-savvy dynamos - breaking through to the front rows of illustrious fashion runway shows, edging out traditional media and journalists on their way up.

What this article evidences is how popular narratives about democratization actively obscure a persistent reality: race and gender difference continue to organize the labor market of fashion.

Don't let's get that twisted.

GENDER/QUEER: "Butch/Femme Crip"

2010-02-16T08:07:00.000-05:00

Crip Wheels, a blog composed by a black queer "wheelchair dancer," features thoughtful observations on disability and dance, among other things. This brilliant essay, "Butch/Femme Crip," addresses the tangle of queer sexuality and gender presentation (including but not exclusive to the way clothes interact) with corporeal bodies in general, and disabled bodies in particular. The importance here lies in the uneven distribution of gender and sexuality to certain forms of physical presence -- to muscles, to movements -- and in her challenge to those qualities problematically assigned as distinct to those embodiments. For all that the following excerpt is quite long, it is nonetheless just a taste of the intellectually provocative writing about moving the body here.

When we got into it, the last two women with whom I almost had sexual relationships told me that they read me as butch. Theoretically speaking, it is a little perverse to argue from the point of view of how someone reads me rather than saying I explicitly identify as butch (or not). But I choose to do so because this particular approach shows how disability complicates what we think we know about possible identities.

Behind that word for them was my fascination with my own body, with its muscles, and with its physical strengths. That's something a lot of queer women notice about me, and it is the source of many jokes among my friends. I say queer women, because the straight ones in my life are usually too shy to comment on it. But also behind that word for the two women in question was my active enjoyment of my physicality. I love the power of my body; I flex my muscles, I pat them in public (sorry peeps, I really do; I love them). Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, it's sexy. But for the purposes of this conversation, I wonder about that understanding.

To say that it is "butch" to somehow forefront muscularity and physicality strikes me as an interesting insight into how we approach understanding conventional femininity. It is to say that somehow conventional femininity does not explicitly prioritize the tendons, sinews, muscles, and bones of its female bodies. But how can you have breasts, vaginas, tummies, and asses without the underlying structure of your body? Is it to say that somehow conventional femininity is only the visible surface of the body. Is it to say that femme is the performance of the hyper surface -- the explicit recognition and enhancement of aspects of conventional femininity? And that butch is somehow the recognition and acceptance of the deeper muscular structures of the body?

If this is what it means to be butch, then, I suppose, that even in my 5 inch heels, even in my see-through mesh dresses, I am butch. But I also think that disability skews -- I almost wrote queers; I so wanted to write queers -- disability skews that particular assessment of these aspects of my butchness.

Scenes from my life.

You see me on the street. I'm wearing a low cut tank top. Your attention is caught by my ripped back muscles. I turn towards you, flex my arms, and push away. You think:
Oh, what an athlete. Wow! Sexy.
It's a pity that she's in that chair. Such a strong upper body must compensate for her legs.
She should cover herself up a bit.
Ugh, and you look in other direction.
You see me in the cafe. I'm wearing the same low cut tank top. I admire my arms. Sip my coffee. Look at my arms again, stroke them, and smile a long smile at you. You
Smile back and ask if I need help or anything?
Panic. Fuck. Did she just ... flirt with me? Shit.
Pretend you didn't see, turn, and leave.
Smile and come right over.
You see me in the audience at a dance performance. I'm wearing a mesh dress, pointy heeled boots, and something in between to make it decent. Every muscle in my arms and back is visible; the curve of my breasts rises out of the baggy over-dress; my body gleams through the sheen of the blue mesh. Wizard pushes me into the space. You
Wonder if I feel sad watching all those beautiful dancers, given that I can't move.
Wonder if I am for real. Disabled people don't dress or look like THAT.
Wonder about what Wizard is doing with a woman like me.
Wonder what it would be like to fuck me.
OK. So, I am imagining the viewer's responses. But these are moments from my life of last week. No, you don't get to ask what happened next. And in each vignette, I really think that the question of whether you see me as butch or femme doesn't really happen unless you integrate or get past the disability question. And what about my choices and my perspectives?

My muscles are as they are because I use a chair and because I dance. Because they are a direct consequence of my disabled life, I would argue that you would have to think twice before you interpret them and my enjoyment of them as part of a butch identity.

My decision to wear impractical shoes is as much a consequence of me not having to walk in them as it is a decision to participate in a particular understanding of femininity. But what do you see? A sad attempt to look normal? A pair of high heels on a woman? Or something so over the top that it slides into the devotee/fetish view of disabled female sexuality? Note that this is a risk that is only present for disabled women. It's a long way for nondisableds to go through femme to fetish. Merely presenting certain aspects of traditional femme for a queer disabled woman puts her at risk of becoming a usually straight object of the devotee community.

Would you recognize it if I made a pass at you? To see it, you would have to acknowledge an awful lot. You would have to understand that disabled people have sexuality, that it can be a queer sexuality, and that I am looking at YOU.

Searching Looks, Music Messages

2010-02-08T09:01:00.003-05:00

As mentioned previously, my schedule is overstuffed this academic semester. Between finishing my manuscript and traveling for a series of talks and roundtables, I'm not sure I'll be able to spare much time for original material for Threadbared. Thus, from me you'll see a series of annotated links (on vintage, on gender presentation) for a while.

In the next month, my East Coast mini-tour will bring me to "Searching Looks: Asian American Visual Cultures", at the Slought Foundation, supported in part by the University of Pennesylvania, and "The Message Is In The Music: Hip Hop Feminism, Riot Grrrl, Latina Music, and More", at Sarah Lawrence College for Women's History Month. I'll also be speaking at another conference in the Bay Area, and several colleges in Chicago. Both "Searching Looks" (February 25-26) and "The Message Is In The Music" (March 5-6) are free and open to the public.

Fashion Projects #3 Out Now!

2010-02-06T08:46:00.003-05:00

I'm super thrilled about the newest issue of Fashion Projects: On Fashion, Art, and Visual Culture, themed "On Fashion and Memory." From the editorial letter:

In thinking of clothes as passing fashions, we repeat less than half-truth. Bodies come and go; the clothes which have received those bodies survive. They circulate though secondhand shops, through rummage sales, through the Salvation Army; or they are transmitted from parent to child, from sister to sister, from brother to brother, from sister to brother, from lover to lover, from friend to friend. (Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things” The Yale Review 1993 vol. 81. no. 2, pp. 35-50)

The idea of dedicating an issue of Fashion Projects to the topic of fashion and memory started while reading Peter Stallybrass’s “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things,” an engaging and lyrical essay on the author’s remembrance of his late colleague Allon White through the garments White wore.

Stallybrass’s piece elucidates people’s intimate relations with clothes—i.e. their materiality, their smell and creases—and the inextricable relations between clothes and memory. It traces the way in which clothes retain “the history of our bodies.” Wearing White’s jacket at a conference, the author describes the way clothes are able to trigger strong and vivid memories: “He was there in the wrinkles of the elbows, wrinkles that in the technical jargon of sewing are called ‘memory’; he was there in the stains at the very bottom of the jacket; he was there in the smell of the armpits.”
...
This issue’s focus on clothes and memory dovetails with attempts to promote sustainability within the fashion industry. It invokes a counter-tendency in contemporary fashion which reinstates the importance of materiality and emotional connections to our garments in the hope to slow down the accelerated cycles of consumption and discard promoted by current fashion models. As Stallybrass points out, moments of emotional connections with clothes and cloth become, in fact, rare in the accelerated rhythm of contemporary societies: “I think this is because, for all our talk of the ‘materialism’ of modern life, attention to material is precisely what is absent. Surrounded by an extraordinary abundance of materials, their value is to be endlessly devalued and replaced.”

Check here for more information about this third issue, including its table of contents. You can order your copy online from Fashion Projects (with PayPal). I already did!

GENDER/QUEER: "Dressed To Kill, Fight to Win"

2010-02-05T15:11:00.012-05:00

Dean Spade is a genius activist lawyer and legal scholar. (For instance, he is the founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. And just look at this photograph! In other words: CRUSH-WORTHY.)

In his essay "Dressed To Kill, Fight To Win," published in the first issue of feminist genderqueer collaborative arts zine LTTR, Spade challenges the notion that undergoing or adopting certain bodily practices preclude a person from a "rational" or radical political position.

Against discourses of the authentic, real, or natural, he challenges the notion that persons who change their appearances, their bodies --with commodities, with clothes, with surgeries-- are necessarily duped or self-hating; he further argues that there is no necessary or singular correlation between one's aesthetic practices and political commitments. (In the most familiar "dilemma" of this sort, can a feminist wear heels? In another, does a femme have to? And yet another, can a feminist wear hijab? Answers: Yes, no, yes. You get the drift.)

Although Spade writes about trans surgeries in particular, his analytic cautions are useful for thinking through other bodily practices in general and --yes, this again-- the unreliable stories these tell about our psychic interiors or political convictions.

Does it matter what I’m wearing, what I look like, how I wear my body? All our lives, we receive conflicting commands to ignore appearances and not judge books by covers, and to work incessantly to conform our appearances to rigid norms. The result, I think, is that as we come to reject and unlearn the ways we’ve been taught to view our bodies (fatphobia, racism, sexism, gender rigidity, consumerism, ableism) we become rightfully suspicious of appearance norms and fashions and seek to form resistant practices. But what should those resistant practices be?
I think sometimes being anti-fashion leads to a false notion that we can be in bodies that aren’t modified, and that any intentional modification or decoration of your body is politically undesirable because it somehow buys into the pitfalls of reliance on appearances. This critique is true, lots of times what we mean to be resistant aesthetic practices become new regulatory regimes. Certain aspects of activist, queer, punk fashions have fallen victim to hierarchies of coolness that in the end revolve around judging people based on what they own, how their bodies are shaped, how they occupy a narrow gender category, etc. Perhaps it is inevitable that the systems in which we are so embroiled, which shape our very existence, should rear parts of their ugly heads even in our attempts at resistance. But does this mean we should give up resistant aesthetics? Isn’t all activism imperfect, constantly under revision, and isn’t that why we continue doing it? In my view, there is no "outside"-none of us can stand fully outside capitalism, racism, sexism and see what is going on. Instead we stand within. and are constituted by these practices and forces, and we form our resistance there, always having to struggle against forces within ourselves, correcting our blindspots, learning from one another. So of course, our aesthetic resistance should do the same.

More importantly, when we appeal to some notion of an unmodified or undecorated body, we participate in the adoption of a false neutrality. We pretend, in those moments, that there is a natural body or fashion, a way of dressing or wearing yourself that is not a product of culture. Norms always masquerade as non-choices, and when we suggest that for example, resisting sexism means everyone should look androgynous, or resisting racism means no one should modify the texture of their hair, we foreclose people’s abilities to expose the workings of fucked up systems on their bodies as they see fit.
(Read more at LTTR.)

I love this last paragraph, in which Spade is critical of perspectives that assign to bodies "natural" qualities or "real" characteristics that are proper to them, which assumes a fiction of "whole" or "neutral" body as a disciplinary and normative ideal. He instead asks us to consider how such a stance assumes a "superior" perspective that erases or dismisses other modes of explanation or engagement with these bodily practices.

(For example, Kathleen Zane writes in her essay on certain cosmetic surgeries: "Understanding how, for non-privileged classes of women, forms of personal power or ways to manipulate disadvantageous social circumstances can be creatively engaged, we may confront the power and privilege that accrue from our espousal of our particular oppositional strategies." From “Reflections on a Yellow Eye: Asian I (\Eye/)Cons and Cosmetic Surgery,” in Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, edited by Ella Shohat.)

Instead of condemning cosmetic or trans surgeries, straightened hair, hijab or high heels as "unnatural," we would be better served as feminist theorists of culture to ask: Which kinds of bodily practices are normalized as "appropriate" to feminine persons, and to masculine persons, and how? What values (of race, nation, gender, economic status) do these practices normalize? What ideologies are embedded in these often-literal inscriptions upon differentiated bodies? How have these discourses and practices changed in historically and culturally specific ways?

Spade ends his essay with this utopian note about the look of radical possibility:

So a part of this fashioning we’re doing needs to be about diversifying the set of aesthetic practices we’re open to seeing, and promoting a possibility of us all looking very very different from one another while we fight together for a new world.

Vintage Politics, Interrupted

2010-02-04T13:24:00.010-05:00

I do mean to return to questions of vintage in the future --beyond that one great conversation I had with Minh-Ha-- but I find right now I'm unable to devote much time or thought to its multidimensional, multifunctional phenomena. (More on my overstuffed schedule later.) However, I do want to address the aftermath to those first posts on the "color" of the vintage imaginary, as well as its feminist potential. These were republished on Racialicious and picked up by Jezebel, and a good portion of the reactions suggestively point to the continued refusal to take fashion seriously -- whether as a political or a feminist matter. Here's one:

I think vintage clothing is just that - vintage clothing. I don't feel that wearing it idealizes a certain time period, I think we wear what we think is flattering on ourselves. I most definitely consider myself a feminist but sometimes it is possible to overthink stuff. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

This is a constant refrain, still: "It's just clothes," "Fashion is supposed to be frivolous," "Fashion is art, it's not political," "Fashion is commerce, it's not meaningful." I teach a semester-long course addressed to these cursory dismissals --and of course, this blog's reason for being is to argue otherwise-- and it can be difficult to dismantle these easy denunciations. I start the first day of class with the guest editors' introduction to a special issue of the journal positions: east asia cultures critique, in which Tina Mai Chen and Paola Zamperini write: "Why, how, and why people wear clothing is a daily matter, a constant concern that affects and determines every aspect of one's life. But it is also a matter of concern, control, and anxiety for the individual, society, and government. The body, its apparel, and the identity it conveys or disguises are the stuff of which fashion is made."

Clothing matters because it is through clothing that persons are understood to matter, or not. Consider the Sartorialist's captions for the presumably homeless man, or his driver, which attribute to these anonymous figures qualities of human dignity and pride because of what they are wearing. Consider the hijab, and all the histories and conflicts that hinge upon the presence of absence of the veil as a sign of civilization and modernity or its opposite. Consider legislation throughout the centuries to regulate what might be worn by whom: European medieval sumptuary laws forbidding the conspicuous consumption of the bourgeoisie; Dutch colonial missionaries insisting that African "converts" abandon their "heathen" clothes in order to reform their bodies and souls; World War II-era rationing bans on the material extravagance of the "zoot suit," the informal uniform of black and Chicano youth, as "unpatriotic;" and contemporary legislation across cities in the United States criminalizing black male youth in sagging jeans.

And these are a scant few examples -- there is so much more evidence that taking clothes seriously is no silly intellectual exercise. (And what's wrong with intellectual exercise? Who wants a weakling brain?)

The strange, changing category of vintage is no exception. Vintage is a commercial designation (what signals the distinctions between vintage, thrift, secondhand, and plain ol' used as qualifiers?) and an aesthetic and industrial evaluation (which fashions pass muster as aesthetically salvageable? how much do a garment's conditions of manufacture contribute to its aesthetic or commercial value?). For instance, what new hierarchies between used clothes does vintage create? What marks an item of clothing as "vintage" or as simply "outdated"? Is it the body that activates its meaning as either positive or negative? On whose bodies does vintage appear "authentic," or "period-appropriate," or alternately unfamiliar and unknown? How did the market for vintage emerge? What are the differing retail and commercial forms (from expos to eBay) for vintage markets? What clothes, whose clothes, are dealers and buyers looking for? As Footpath Zeitgeist notes in her new investigation of vintage sizing and clothing fit, "What did fat chicks used to wear?" What are the vocabularies of vintage clothes (e.g., "individual style," "uniqueness," "quirky," "original," "one of a kind") and how do these vocabularies produce value for the vintage-clad self? What feelings do vintage clothes and their histories inspire, in whom? What do these feelings do -- to our understanding of the past, other bodies? As I consider these and further possible queries, it would appear that vintage can be about the evaluation and preservation of an item or an ideal --a beautiful dress, a beautiful woman-- against the ruin of time, or vintage can be marshaled to mark ruin as important, as a significant event in the social life of that thing or ideal.

So yes, I do mean to return to questions of vintage, but for right now I want to offer some other responses to the recent kerfuffle, including Renegade Bean's latest installment of "vintage" Taiwanese photographs:

I was surprised by some of the comments on Racialicious (which I am a fan of) and Jezebel -- many were dismissive of the issues that the other bloggers and I raised. Many commenters basically said, "what's the big deal?" or "I like vintage because it's pretty and I don't think it's worth politicizing."

I feel those responses missed the point of our posts.... The main reason I enjoy vintage clothing is because it is pretty and different from what I can find in mainstream stores. It's not like race and identity politics are foremost on my mind when I go vintage shopping. But being able to take pleasure in the lush folds of a 1950s dress or a shimmery 1960s evening sheath doesn't mean I can't also devote brain space to thinking about the more difficult issues vintage collecting brings up. The two aren't mutually exclusive. In my case, I'm taking advantage of the opportunity to be mindful about the injustices dealt to Asian Americans and other minorities in the US during the last century, as well the more difficult aspects of Taiwan's social and political history.

I am absolutely not saying vintage enthusiasts who don't think about those issues are shallow; my passion for vintage fashion and design just happens to intersect with my interest in social history. I'm grateful for that because it makes the past come alive in a very immediate way.

And Julie from the fabulous (new!) feminist fashion blog a 'allure garconniere jumps into the fray with a brilliant and thoughtful response that recounts her own discovery of thrift and vintage as a working-class teenager.

i think what we need to remember at the heart of this debate is the fact that every person has a different relationship to clothing and fashion (not just vintage), depending on their gender, sex, size, culture, race, ability, sexuality and age, but more often than not that relationship is one that is filled with conundrums and contradictions. one of my favourite things to do is shock people by wearing vintage dresses, but never fussing with my hair, rarely wearing makeup, and flaunting my hairy armpits. fucking up these ideas that i am wearing something that imposes such a specific, rigid, and reductive idea of femininity and challenging that in my own little way. you would not believe how many people have made comments to me like, "you just shouldn't wear a dress like that if you aren't going to shave."

_______________________

The lovely Tricia of Bits and Bobbins brings to our attention Derick Melander's secondhand-clothing sculptures, and asks us, "i love to ponder where my clothing has been, where it came from, who made it, who wore it, what they did in that clothing, why they decided to part with it....what about you? do you ponder where your things have been? is that aspect of wearing secondhand clothing attractive to you? why or why not?"

From Melander's statement:

I create large geometric configurations from carefully folded and stacked second-hand clothing. These structures take the form of wedges, columns, walls and enclosures, typically weighing between five hundred pounds and two tons. Smaller pieces directly interact with the surrounding architecture. Larger works create discrete environments.

As clothing wears, fades, stains and stretches it becomes an intimate record of our physical presence. It traces the edge of the body, defining the boundary between the individual and the outside world.

(The above photograph features Anna May Wong in her awesome bathing suit.)

Bloggers and Ann Taylor's Bottom Line

2010-02-03T15:38:00.016-05:00

As a postscript to my previous post about the implications of the corporatization of the fashion blogosphere, I just wanted to share this bit of hubbub over Ann Taylor LOFT's recent invitation to bloggers to "come take a sneak peek at LOFT's Spring 2010 Collection before anyone else."

The invitation, according to Jezebel and the Los Angeles Times (threadbared was not invited), promised "a special gift to all attendees and entry into a 'mystery gift card drawing.'" So far, okay, right? The cause of the controversy is LOFT's fine print stipulation that "all bloggers must post coverage from our event to their blog within 24 hours in order to be eligible" for the gift card drawing. (The amount of the gift card to be revealed after the submission of this blog coverage.)

Jenna of Jezebel admonishes those "editors and bloggers [who attended the event for being] too excited by the opportunities for graft to notice that it's precisely this kind of constriction of editorial judgment that atrophies creativity, and which is turning the fashion media -- women's media -- into a lowest common denominator whirl of focus-grouped, product-placed bullshit. The internet was supposed to be different." (Click here to read one blogger's response to this post.)

While LOFT's terms of inclusion are no doubt unseemly, my point in the previous post is that creative digital labor, while represented as free from market relations, is actually deeply entrenched in capitalist relations and logics. Moreover, the capitalization of creativity is rooted in a much longer history of art and commerce dating back to the late 18th century, when writers and other artists labored under what cultural economic scholars call a "regime of patronage." What's shocking about the LOFT's invitation is not that it invites bloggers into a matrix of market relations -- let's be honest, this happens all the time! -- but that it does so so openly.

Recall, for instance, that in 2007 the Chanel Company invited 12 bloggers to Paris for a weekend of discovering "the history and iconic places of Chanel." Susie Bubble stresses on her blog that "there was no obligation to do blog reportage but for me along with most of the bloggers I think, it would have been criminal not to blog about the wonderful experiences we had." While there may have been no formal agreement to post (positive) comments about Chanel's traditions, products, and largesse, Bubble clearly understands that there is an unspoken social-economic contract conditioning bloggers' access to the fashion industry. It was precisely New York Times fashion writer and blogger Cathy Horyn's perceived breach of this contract that led legendary designer Giorgio Armani (and before him, Helmut Lang, Carolina Herrera, and Dolce & Gabbana) to ban her from their shows.

GENDER/QUEER: "The oldest queer girl story in the book"

2010-02-02T15:12:00.009-05:00

"Clothes are more than a little fraught for me," writes Krista Benson in the preface to a post that addresses some provocative, pertinent absences in fashionable discourses in new media (or what might cringingly be called the blogosphere). Bringing up two of the most troubling problems for the study of style as "self-expression," so often understood as a substantive good in and of itself, Benson continues:

They always have been. Unlike my academic-fashionista kin, I have not always loved clothes. I wasn't someone who was really clever with pairings or daring with how I dressed. I just ... wore clothes. The history of my discomfort with fashion is bifold and it's the oldest queer girl story in the book (or one of them, at least); it's about gender presentation and body dysmorphia.

Her post points suggestively to a link between deviant bodies and sexual and gender anxieties that goes for the most part unremarked in fashion and style blogs, with some notable exceptions. (Fatshionista and lipstickeater, for instance, and some of the blogs I will be linking and excerpting in this series.) She notes that she often doesn't understand how clothes are supposed to fit her body --let alone clothes for professional purposes-- and explains further the trouble that gender makes:

Which leads to the second point of discomfort. As much as I love the aforementioned blogs, they're all variations upon femininity and femme-ness. Which is great, but it's not necessarily me. Occasionally, sure, I'm interested in some kind of queered femininity, often pairing something softer with some kick-ass boots or something, but in an average day, I'm not comfortable being that girly. I'm not masculine-presenting, exactly, but I am uncomfortable with compulsory femininity and, in a lot of ways, I'm not feminine.

This is, of course, complicated by being an out, queer woman who is partnered with a woman. Even in the notoriously liberal higher education field, assumptions are laid upon both of us in terms of presentation and expectations.

It is absolutely true that most fashion blogs --including those blogs dedicated to "professionals/academics," and this one at times-- tend to paint a rosy portrait of a happy relation to clothes. And this bothers me too, because there are so many times I hate this thing Fashion for its complicities, both mundane and avant-garde, with colonial racial classifications, predatory capital, class stratification and class slumming, able-bodiedness and rehabilitation imperatives, gender and sexual norms, biopolitical measures of health and beauty, militarism and imperial statecraft. (And as many times that I wish I could roll out everyday in my old punk rock uniform, which is partially nostalgia for sure.) And because I am also an "out, queer woman who is partnered with a woman," and whose gender presentation does appear to be femme --however unresolved I may be with such a designation, especially since this presentation was a conscious, and certainly troublingly expedient, decision I made to "professionalize"-- I want to echo Benson in the spirit of her questions.

So I wanted to start this series of scattered thoughts and excerpted selections on "queer feelings, gender presentations" with Krista Benson and her provocative musings on the problems of deviant bodies and gender and sexual anxieties. Especially because of the increasingly pervasive cultural authority of fashion and style bloggers --on both individual and industrial registers-- it's critical that ideological categories as well as corporeal configurations of race, gender, sexuality, et cetera, are subject to ongoing contestation at these sites. What other sartorial experiments and experiences demonstrate to us that such categories and configurations are not simple, singular, or self-evident? For whom is "self-expression" through clothes or style difficult, unavailable, or even undesirable? What other gender presentations, sexual identities, and embodied states can point us suggestively toward alternative ways of inhabiting our clothes and the uncertain stories they tell?

(Image from Queer Action Figures, 1994)

RuPaul as Style Guru to Baby Drag Queens and Everyone Else

2010-02-01T09:18:00.010-05:00

Tonight's the Season 2 premiere of RuPaul's Drag Race (9pm on Logo TV or Logo Online)! Among reality contest shows about fashion, style, and beauty, this is my favorite. Hands down. Drag Race has the most diverse group of contestants - in race, gender, sexuality, and likely, class. Last season, three of my favorite contestants were from outside of the U.S.: Bebe Zahara Benet (Camaroon), Ongina (Philippines), and Nina Flowers (Puerto Rico). Also, one of the guest judges last season was Jenny Shimizu (who I adore even if she looked like she was on an Asian American literature panel at MLA)! The photo of Shimizu below (circa her Calvin Klein days) has little to do with this post but it's there because: I. love. Jenny. Shimizu.

I'm looking forward to this season but I'm also a little nervous. The guest judges that have been announced for this season are Kathy Griffin, Cloris Leachman, and Debbie Reynolds. I can't honestly say any of them excite me much. Another reason to be apprehensive about Season 2 is precisely because it's Season 2. Reality shows are always best the first time around. In proceeding seasons, contestants seem too versed and too ready to manufacture drama in order to stand out as a "personality." Ru seems to be hinting at this when she says:

The biggest change in this season is the contestants are actually a bit more - how can I put this? They're more tenacious. In the first season, they were a bit more diplomatic because they were representing drag for the first time in a decade. This time around, though, the kids have seen the first show, they know what the prize is, and they know what's at stake, so they have taken the gloves off.

Still, can't wait to watch! If you missed Season 1, you can catch up online.

________________________

In related news, RuPaul hates fashion people. She tells W Magazine why she has nothing to do with New York's Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week: "I think the fashion people are so nasty and so pretentious."

Also, she's got a new book out called, Workin' It! RuPaul's Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style (Harper Collins 2010). Both the TV show and the book firmly position Ru within the increasingly familiar trope of the lifestyle specialist/style guru. In Drag Race, she plays (wonderfully!) the matriarch/mentor to baby drag queens (Nina Flowers even calls Ru, "mother," during their private lunch together).

With Workin' It! (totally judging said book by its cover here), Ru expands her domain of influence, to "provide helpful and provocative tips on fashion, beauty, style, and confidence for girls and boys, straight and gay - and everyone in between!" The neoliberal makeover logic at work in the book is, by now a pretty trite one. As Brenda Weber explains the logic in her essay, "Makeover as Takeover" - see also her new book, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Duke UP 2009):

A new and improved appearance will not only make the woman more congruent with larger codes of beauty, but will increase her confidence and thus her personal power. In order to gain access to this form of power, however, makeover subjects (often called "victims," "targets," "marks") must submit fully to style authorities . . .

RuPaul's embracing of her role as neoliberal style guru is evident in the title and description of the book. In articulating style in the language of democracy (here. the Declaration of Independence), RuPaul's book connects the consumption of resources like fashion, beauty, and style commodities to political acts. Workin' It! suggests that "girls and boys, straight and gay - and everyone in between" who wants to be free (and who doesn't want to be free?) needs her style expertise. This is a central tenet of neoliberalism's lifestyle politics: consumer power is political power.

What is different about RuPaul as style guru is the difference of race, gender, and sexuality. And while this is a significant difference, it isn't a radical one. Instead, the book (maybe more than the TV show) is a function of what Lisa Duggan has called "the new homonormativity" of neoliberal sexual politics:

[I]t is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them . . . [through] a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.

I love RuPaul. I think she looks amazing and will never be outclassed by any of the contestants on her show. And basically, I can get behind her general message. But her book nonetheless illustrates the power and pervasiveness of neoliberalism as this era's cultural logic.

New Wave/New Look

2010-01-29T11:39:00.005-05:00

The staples of my graduate student wardrobe were striped t-shirts, black skate shoes, a red Members Only jacket, and a haircut given to me by a middle-aged Korean lady who didn't much flinch when I asked to look like a boy. But, as The Stains snarled, "Do you wanna be a professional?" And can you appear to be one if you are costumed as a post-punk No Wave/New Wave androgyne?

From the classic Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, The Stains perform "Join the Porfessionals."

Formed in 1976, the legendary X-Ray Spex featured the amazing Poly Styrene on vocals. Here's "Identity."

Mo-Dettes were an all-female punk band formed in 1979 by Kate Korris, an original member of The Slits and brief member of The Raincoats. Here they perform their first single "White Mice."

Formed in early 1978, check out Swiss band Mother Ruin, and their video for "Dreamy Teeny." (For more like this, check out the truly awesome archival resource for women in punk called Dear Diary.)

Why I feel guilty when I don't blog

2010-01-28T12:30:00.020-05:00

There are buckets of reasons why I'm glad Mimi is my on/offline writing collaborator and dear friend - but surely top among them is her capacity to deliver much-needed kick-in-the-ass motivation from thousands of miles away. At least that was the effect of her two previous blog posts for me this morning.

I've had a bit of blogger's block lately -- but it isn't for a lack of topics to write about. For example, I've been following the news and campaigns about fashion philanthropy (specifically, the Fashion Delivers campaign for Haiti and the LA Times' piece on Dress for Success) and wondering how much the overstatements about fashion's capacity to "empower" and "save," while no doubt commensurate with the prevailing lifestyle politics of neoliberalism in which consumer power is made co-extensive with political power, is also a kind of false bravado that betrays fashion's own inferiority complex about its social significance.

Add to that, Angela McRobbie's admonition (also bouncing around in my head lately) that fashion "colludes in its own trivialization." Here's the full quote from the essay, "Fashion Culture: Creative Work, Female Individualization":

In the absence of a lobby of policy-makers arguing vociferously on behalf of this autonomous sector, and for them to have access to low-rent urban retail spaces such as market stalls, lanes, corridors, and other cheap locations, when designers do find themselves in difficulty they are judged by a model which deems them simply unviable and the fashion press fatalistically announces another fashion label going out of business. Despite the profusion of fashion magazines, the expansion of the fashion media including television, and the appearance of academic journals devoted to fashion, there seems to be no coherent map of the field, which in turn encourages government to rely on simplistic accounts. In this sense, fashion lets itself down and colludes in its own trivialization.

In 2002 when McRobbie wrote "Fashion Culture," fashion bloggers weren't nearly as visible as they are today, so she didn't mention them or any other members of the "creative proletariat," like online and print magazine editors who finance their own publications. But like independent fashion designers, many bloggers and editors are being edged out by the corporatization of the cultural economy as well. It is increasingly difficult -- almost untenable -- for independent designers, bloggers, and editors to sustain their cultural projects without some form of material or immaterial corporate sponsorship (i.e., a feature story in a giant media outlet like the New York Times, affiliate marketing, direct ad sales, banner advertising, etc.). All of the social media outreach events planned for the upcoming Fall 2010 New York Fashion Week which, as Mimi puts it, are "aimed at cultivating new contacts and nurturing existing collaborations between fashion bloggers and captains of industry" attest to this.

Fashion and style bloggers understand that the support (material and immaterial) of fashion giants like the Chanel company, Marc Jacobs, or Vogue brings with it an enormous amount of cultural capital that can launch them into the stratosphere of fashion/media. And I certainly don't begrudge the fashion blog elite the corporate love they've received -- we've considered and continue to consider different strategies of monetization like speaking gigs, consulting, and commissioned articles. (Though we're not opposed to advertising, the opportunities we've been presented with haven't been right for us yet.)

Fashion bloggers and social media discourse celebrate -- quite automatically now -- the independent, DIY, and democratic spirit of blogging. Consider this quote about blogging from Jennine Tamm Jacob (The Coveted) in the video Mimi re-posted:

It was something that I could do. I could just set up a blog myself and I could write about whatever I wanted . . . it was just me doing my own thing and I found that to be really liberating.

But in understanding the cultural and political economies of the fashion blogosphere, it's important not to gloss over the fact that computer-mediated communication technologies and digital labor are deeply embedded in capitalist logics.

My 3-part blog post on the state of the fashion blogosphere has had many iterations -- a pocket-sized and abbreviated version appears in Style Sample Magazine, issue 5, and there's a revised and expanded academic essay I've been working on as well. In the expanded essay, I point out that the new digital work order in which fashion bloggers labor is shaped and limited by capitalist logics. For example, the structures of digital temporality (i.e., timestamps, the organization and archiving of posts in reverse chronological order, etc.) continue to naturalize and positively secure capitalist valuations of productivity, punctuality, and accumulation (of symbolic, cultural, and material capital). Working overtime (if we can still use that concept in the "flexitime" of digital temporality) is de rigeur for fashion bloggers, especially because their productivity must keep pace with the accelerated rhythms of the fashion-beauty complex organized and driven by the capitalist logic of the New/Now. In other words, the spirit of capitalism and its ethic of dogged and steadfast productivity permeate the digital creative labor of fashion blogs even when that labor is "free" (that is, both free from the 9-to-5 workday/workplace and also unpaid).

So while digital technoculture scholars and fashion bloggers alike celebrate the Internet for enabling the flexibility of work and work hours, it may be that we no longer need the external regulatory mechanisms of the Industrial Age (i.e., factory clocks, etc.) because in the Digital Age, we are self-monitoring and highly multi-tasking subjects whose body, image, and time -- commodified as cultural goods -- are produced, distributed, and consumed in a global cultural economy that is unprecedented in its pace and efficiency.

It's little wonder, then, why I've been feeling guilty about not posting! And I'm hardly alone -- consider how many and how often bloggers apologize for their lapses in posting. Such guilt illustrates the affective economies of digital capitalism as well!

As a salve for this capitalist guilt, I have to remind myself that I've been highly productive offline -- writing chapters at a maddening pace (for me) and loving (most) every minute of it. All free creative labor, but nevertheless . . .

I have to admit, though, it hasn't been all work for me. I've also been quite distracted and all dreamy about Julie Wilkins' London-based label, Future Classics, which I've only just discovered! (How did I not know about their deconstructed jersey deliciousness and their diaphanous silken wonders until now??) Now, should they want to collaborate on some affiliate marketing . . .

Queer Feelings, Gender Presentations

2010-01-28T09:30:00.002-05:00

Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting links and excerpts from other blogs on questions of queer and non-normative gender presentations. I've mentioned before some of my own concerns about the unreliable stories clothes tell, and in recent sweeps of the interwebs, I've stumbled across some usefully provocative ruminations and truly engaging conversations about bodies and clothes from queer quarters that I'd like to share. (This, as I contemplate a new haircut I can make into a pompadour.)

VIDEO: Fashion Blogs

2010-01-26T00:47:00.006-05:00

This has been making the rounds of late, and it seems like a good moment to revisit Minh-Ha's three-part series on the phenomenon of the fashion blog (which begins with this introduction). Presented at the PREMIUM Exhibitions panel on fashion blogs, the video features Suzy Menkes, Yvan Rodic (Facehunter), Jennie Tamm (The Coveted) and Julia Knolle and Jessi Weiss (LesMads) each providing their own perspectives on the rising influence of the fashion blogosphere.

Fashion Week in New York City is going to be puh-acked with events aimed at cultivating new contacts and nurturing existing collaborations between fashion bloggers and captains of industry. The Chictopia 10 Social Influence Summit suggests something of these efforts to woo the on-line set: "The Chictopia 10 Social Influence Summit is where global online taste makers meet executives from premium brands. This half day conference and cocktail party will feature CEO presentations and high level discussions on what forces are most influential in online brand image."

Is everyone either looking for, or hoping to become, the next Fashion Toast or Sea of Shoes with their design collaborations with corporate sponsors, or the next designers' muse, like Bryan Boy and Style Rookie? What should we make of the increasingly intimate and immediate address between consumer and corporation? I cannot wait to hear from Minh-Ha what she thinks. Meanwhile, Independent Fashion Bloggers is hosting its own fashion blogger conference, called "Evolving Influence."

_______________________

I am saddened by the news that radical historian Howard Zinn (1922-2010) has passed away. A People's History of the United States (1980) should be required reading for all high school students, and I take to heart his words on being a teacher: "From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than 'objectivity'; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble." He will be missed terribly.

LINKAGE: "Fear of a Black Venus"

2010-01-25T18:02:00.009-05:00

I'm thrilled that my friend and colleague Isabel Molina Guzman has entered the blogosphere with Color (Re)adjustment, an extension of her valuable scholarship on race and representational politics. In her words, Color (Re)Adjustment (an homage to the late great filmmaker and educator Marlon Riggs) hopes "to disrupt the burden of representation by stepping outside of a commitment to respectability; to move conversations outside of the confining dichotomy of the positive and negative image debate."

Her thoughts on the mind-boggling controversy over Venus Williams' tennis shorts at the Australian Open are absolutely right-on. That some commentators might believe or suggest that Venus Williams would perform without underwear in a global arena --examining closely, and inviting others to do the same, photographs of Venus's backside to try to discern exactly what they might (or might not) be seeing-- seems continuous with long histories of discourses and practices of scrutiny and surveillance aimed at black female bodies.

In Spectacle of the Other Stuart Hall writes, "Representation is a complex business and, especially when dealing with 'difference', it engages feelings, attitudes and emotions and it mobilizes fears and anxieties in the viewer, at deeper levels than we can explain in a simple, common-sense way." So I ask you, in a world where women tennis stars are paid millions to wear as little as possible on the courts, what is underlying the public hysteria surrounding Venus Williams 2010 Australian Open outfit, an outfit that she designed for herself under her label?

It appears that the spectacle of the black female bootie threatens the spectra of upper-class respectability surrounding the predominantly white sport of tennis, a sport that has only had two black elite female stars in the last 20 years -- Venus and Serena Williams. What I find truly humorous and troubling is that tennis fans and the mainstream media find it plausible that one of the world's best women's athlete would actually go on international television flashing her butt and vagina. What does this say about the contemporary representational status of black urban femininity and sexuality?

LINKAGE: Healthy Nails, Ethical Fashion

2010-01-20T09:03:00.002-05:00

Beauty is so often classified as a health concern --consider the layout of drugstore aisles, after all-- but just as often there is little to no awareness of unhealthy conditions for the industry's laborers. That's where the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative breaks new ground. Literally a collaboration between nail salon workers and owners, non-profit and community organizations focused on labor and environmental and reproductive health and justice, the Collaborative "uses policy advocacy, research, industry advocacy outreach, and education strategies to address health and safety concerns facing these communities [nail salon workers and owners, cosmetologists and their clients]. Our mission is to advance a preventative environmental health agenda for the nail salon sector in California."

The Collaborative offers loads of information about their campaigns for environmental and labor justice. Here's more about the health and safety risks for the beauty industry's labor forces, who are mostly women of color:

In California and throughout the United States, the beauty industry is booming. “Mani and pedis” are all the rage as customers want to be pampered with the latest nail designs, colors, and styles. Over the last twenty years, nail salon services have tripled and cosmetology is now the fastest growing profession in California.
Currently there are approximately 115,000 nail salon technicians in California, and most are women of color. Of these women, 59-80% are estimated to be Vietnamese immigrants, and more than 50% are of childbearing age. Many nail salon workers can earn less than $18,200 a year and work in conditions that can be hazardous to their health.

On a daily basis, nail salon workers handle numerous solvents, glues, and other nail care products. These contain many chemicals known to and suspected of causing acute and chronic illnesses including cancer, respiratory problems, skin problems and reproductive harm. There is very little state and federal government regulation of the chemicals used in these products. Also, little research has been done on the health issues that nail salon workers experience from long-term exposure to these chemicals. In fact, there are over 10,000 chemicals used in personal care and nail products and yet 89% have not been tested independently for their impacts on human health. Nail salon workers and other cosmetologists are at greater risk for health issues related to their work because of various challenges such as language and cultural barriers, and lack of access to health care. In addition, there is not enough culturally and linguistically appropriate education and outreach to this diverse population.

Through the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, advocates are working together at the intersection of workers rights, women’s rights, environmental and reproductive health/justice, and Asian American community health to advance greater worker health and safety for this sector.

And I only recently stumbled across Fashioning an Ethical Industry (FEI), a UK-based education project of garment workers' rights organization Labour Behind the Label targeting the "next generation" of the fashion industry: "The project works with tutors and students of fashion-related courses to give an overview of how the fashion industry positively and negatively impacts on working conditions in garment manufacture and to inspire students - as the next generation of industry players - to raise standards in the for garment workers in the fashion industry of the future. We run students workshops, organise tutor training events, provide teaching resources and work with tutors to integrate ethical issues related to garment manufacture into their teaching." What makes FEI even better is the amazingly extensive teaching resources available on their site -- books, films, reports, factsheets, exhibitions, and more. I'll definitely make use of this site the next time I teach Politics of Fashion.

ART: Pillowig (Joo Youn Paek)

2010-01-19T08:17:00.001-05:00

“Pillowig” is hand made wearable pillow comforting tireness of people in daily lives, enabling users to sleep comfortably whenever and whenever they’d like. When user test is done in public spaces - subway, airplane, library, class room and laundromat, viewers commented: “I would like to have it for my trip.”, “Very funny.” “This is practical, but a laugh, too.” I made 50 limited editions and sold 47 pieces at the exhibition of the work and gained “Pillowig” fans. Two months later fans did a group performance piece at the Old Palace, Seoul. -- Joo Youn Paek

The Lady Loves A Tramp

2010-01-18T21:45:00.015-05:00

Loads more photos at Project Rungay.

Dear Vivienne Westwood,

Have you not been reading Threadbared? (You should, because one of us is an old punk.) I just read that your menswear collection for Milan Fashion Week is inspired by tramp chic, of all things. Here a mind-boggling excerpt from your press release:

“Perhaps the oddest of heroes to emerge this season, Vivienne Westwood found inspiration in the roving vagrant whose daily get-up is a battle gear for the harsh weather conditions . . . Quilted bombers and snug hoodies also work well in keeping the vagrant warm.”

Your catwalk was covered in flattened cardboard boxes and your models carried bed rolls, their hair silvered with artificial frost from their outdoor travails. What the fuck, Vivienne? Look, I know that between your past as an art-school punk rocker and as a longtime member of the bourgeois avant-garde, it is almost required that you romanticize the poor. (Vivienne, don't deny it. I've seen your past collections and attended your retrospective at the de Young last year.) But it's been done! A lot! So not only is it not original --in recent memory, John Galliano, Erin Wasson, Ke$ha, and W Magazine did it, proving again and again Rosalind Krauss's argument that originality is a myth of the avant-garde-- it is stupid. Such runway homelessness, this tramp chic, just becomes the occasion for you and your audiences to praise your own aesthetic judgment (in this language, finding beauty in ugliness) and moral sensitivity (and in this, magnanimously granting to the indigent Other a sense of humanity through their aestheticization).

Try harder.

Love,

Mimi

ART: "Personnes"

2010-01-18T14:59:00.013-05:00

I am stunned (as was Susie Bubble, from whom I snatched these) by these photographs' intimation of the tremendous physical scope of French artist Christian Boltanski's "Personnes," an Monumenta installation in the Grand Palais in Paris. (Monumenta is an annual installation series in which a leading international contemporary artist is invited by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication to create a new work for the Nave of the Grand Palais).

Susie confesses to feeling teary, and it's easy to see why. These clothes conjure the specters of the persons who wore them in some unspecified "before" --perhaps before growth, before divorce, before illness, before death-- which the project's description would appear to confirm: "Conceived as a work in sound and vision, Personnes takes up a new theme in Boltanski's work, building on his earlier explorations of the limits of human existence and the vital dimension of memory : the question of fate, and the ineluctability of death."

The two parts of the installation that I can see from these photographs suggest both memorials in the carefully measured, uniformly spaced rectangles laid with a single layer of clothes --calling to my mind the sheer physical expanse of the iconic AIDS Memorial Quilt-- and a garbage dump in the giant heaping pile of assorted garments at the other end of the Nave. The installation thus suggests something about the seemingly arbitrary nature of human classification between those we treasure and those we discard. (The same classification that the AIDS Memorial Quilt once challenged, but arguably now reinforces.) Or, as Judith Butler writes, "Certain lives are grievable, and others not, and this works to sanctify the violence we inflict, and to disavow any conception of our own precarity."

(Images borrowed from Style Bubble, who borrowed from a Flickr selection)

Emergency Alert: Haiti

2010-01-16T13:52:00.003-05:00

Consider checking out some of these progressive links on the Haitian earthquake, including social justice and aid organizations, smart political and historical analyses of Haiti's situation in particular and on the disturbing concept of "natural disaster" in general (e.g., the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was both "natural" but also racial-historical).

Red Suede Love

2010-01-16T12:58:00.011-05:00

What I might love most about thrifting is the fortuitous find -- that thing that you weren't looking for or that you had never even imagined existed, but upon stumbling across it on a rack filled with duller possibilities, fills you with pure awe and wonder. Witness these heart-themed red suede lederhosen shorts with white suede piping and pockets, made to be worn with suspenders (which are tragically missing). I found these shopping with Yutian at the Buffalo Exchange on Haight Street for five dollars, marked down by half because apparently no one else wanted them. That someone somewhere thought to make a sexy Bavarian milkmaid pair of love-lorn lederhosen shorts for some no doubt momentous occasion -- a Miss Oktoberfest competition, perhaps? these are no hastily hand-sewn, cheaply-manufactured Halloween costume, I tell you!-- and that this someone would match my own measurements so perfectly, suggests to me some cosmic alignment that I could hardly ignore just because these shorts are wholly impractical and wildly inappropriate to my daily life. Such random chance and bizarre fortune appeals to me.

The other amazing thing is that I already own a pair of suede lederhosen knee-breeches, though I had forgotten about them until now.

Shopping with Threadbared: A Conversation

2010-01-11T09:48:00.021-05:00

The "shiny things" rack in the office that is Mimi's closet. There is a '60s gold brocade dress, a vintage Missoni mini dress with sequins and cascading shades of gold mesh, a '70s black disco dress with gold thread, a wintry silver and white '60s minishift, a black metallic crop top, two sequined butterfly tops, the gold pseudo-brocade 3.1 Philip Lim I bought for Minh-Ha's wedding, and several '70s and '80s sweaters.

Inspired by Meggy and Jenny at Fashion for Writers, Minh-Ha and I decided to hold a "conversation" about how we shop differently, which turned into a long and somewhat theory-heavy discussion about capital, time, moralism, and our different reactions to patterns! It was loads of fun to explicitly compare our consumption habits and clothing aesthetics, and sparked a lot of self-reflection for the both of us.

THIS MAY BE OUR LONGEST POST YET.

"Strategies for Thrifting with Non-thrifters"

More from the other end of the rack in Mimi's closet, including an elastic harness from Norwegian Wood, purses galore, a white seersucker '80s blazer and a Ben Sherman striped blazer.

Mimi: So Minh-Ha, the other day you generously drove me to some (I have many more...) of my regular thrifting scores in the East Bay. You've never been with me during my favored mode of shopping before, though we've done the retail rounds together at H&M to Philip Lim during my visits with you in New York City. (Within a very small radius!) How was that for you?

Minh-Ha: It was fine! I was once told (by you!) that I may not have thrifting stamina - and admittedly, I've been worn out before by Brian - but actually it was fine this time. You didn't spend more than 30 minutes or so at any one place - were you rushing for me?

Mimi: Yes, I have developed strategies for thrifting with non-thrifters! These include looking at the clothes as they hang on the rack with a sort of focusing filter for patterns or visible details (solids are easier for me to pass up if pressed for time); also running my hands quickly across the clothes to check their fabric quality (I try to avoid polyester, although today I bought an entirely flammable nurse's uniform from the 1960s!); skipping the more time-consuming sections (I will skip pants, since these are the hardest for me to gauge what they'll look like without trying them on); and so on. Although I did buy some amazing Levi's Sta-Prest pants once without testing the fit!

I enjoy the chaos, though much of what remains in actual thrift stores now are the "faster fashions" of H&M, Forever 21, Target (which actually donates much of its unsold merchandise to thrift stores), et cetera. I'm not sure to what degree these clothes are qualitatively distinct from earlier eras of mass clothing --though I do suspect that the disco-petro polyester of the past will outlast the flimsy screenprinted cotton blends of the present-- but I think it's safe to say that the rate of production is much, much more sped up (patterns being pre-cut and sent to manufacturing sites via computers and interwebs, the wave of the future!), as is the passing of each garment's "moment" (consider how quickly the clothes are cycled on and off the racks at F21). These accelerated conditions are rapidly transforming the secondhand clot hing industry (un-resellable, textiles are the fastest-growing waste product in the UK, and probably in the US) as well as the categories through which we understand it.

The Politics of Thrift

Minh-Ha: Your observation about the increasing occurrence of so-called fast fashion in thrift stores raises an important point about the difficulty of drawing discrete boundaries around different spheres of fashion. The meanings of sartorial categories like vintage, retro, luxury, couture, mass, sustainable, and fast fashion signify less and less, I think, the actual fashion commodity (the content of its textiles, its modes of production, or its sites of consumption) and reveal more about the particular consumer politics of its wearer.

For example, people who make conscious choices to buy sustainable fashions are saying something about their concerns for the environment. Consumers who reject so-called fast fashion often do so based on their political-ethical distaste for clothes made in poor labor conditions, disposable clothes that are bad for environment, or legally suspect clothes that are sometimes "knocked off" designs from luxury labels. One of the most fervent defenses of vintage or thrifted clothes (overlapping but not, as you point out, synonymous sartorial categories) is made by Kaja Silverman. She argues that "thrift-shop dressing" is a postmodern gesture that disavows "the binary logic through which fashion distinguishes 'this year's look' from 'last year's look,' a logic that turns upon the opposition between 'the new' and 'the old' and works to transform one season's treasures in to the next season's trash." She goes on to celebrate "vintage clothing [as] a mechanism for crossing vestimentary, sexual, and historical boundaries." There's a lot that goes unsaid in each of these sartorial-ideological positions. For example, eco-conscious consumers forget that oftentimes the processes for producing sustainable fabrics like bamboo require heavily toxic chemicals that are decidedly environmentally un-friendly or that thrift stores are full of mass or fast fashions from past sartorial eras.

Smooth, crepe-y, nubby, sparkly blacks and grays,
Minh-Ha's very focused color palette is full of differences

I'm not saying that fashion consumers are "fashion victims" (a sexist and anti-feminist description that implies irrational consumerism); I'm just suggesting that fashion consumers are not only political-sartorial actors but are also market actors whose range of consumer choices are embedded in a larger ethical-economic system that has long produced and managed consumer citizens by moralizing consumption. To celebrate sustainable fashion or inversely to denigrate fast fashion (the term itself inherits all the negative classist associations of fast food) is to forget that these sartorial spheres are stratified across class differences. Eco-fashion is expensive! So are the most coveted "vintage" fashions. Moralizing consumption often has the effect of reproducing and securing what Lauren Berlant describes in a different context as "the dominant order of feeling, virtue, and ideology." The moralization of consumption tends to reserve moral values such as good, responsible (in relation to eco-fashion or vegan dress), honest (especially with regard to so-called counterfeit fashions), and even creative for the elite. This is one reason why fast fashion manufacturers are accused of "counterfeiting" designs (a legal and moral condemnation) while luxury designers are celebrated for their worldly "inspirations."

Witness the chaos in Mimi's closet: multiple eras, multiple textures, multiple patterns, multiple styles.

Mimi: I guess in approaching these issues I would want to start with how clothes are distinguished by fabric or cut or manufacture because this has very much to do with how these clothes circulate through categories of value (like secondhand or vintage) over time. For instance, I doubt that H&M or Forever 21 garments will pass into the realm of vintage, though these clothes may well hold temporary resale value for secondhand sellers; not only did mass production not "democratize" fashion, it did in fact create new hierarchies of value and meaning along lines of class distinctions (e.g., shoddier construction, flimsier fabrics) that I do believe haunt these clothes past their initial purchase.

I understand what Kaja Silverman meant with her defense of thrifting (as excerpted briefly in your comments), because Fashion (with a capital F) is understood as a realm of Change and the Modern (also in capital letters) and as such Fashion is also inextricable from how we understand time and its distribution. Furthermore, the temporal register of categories of clothes --traditional costume or classic investment or modern trend-- is necessarily circumscribed by capital. In fact, Fashion is an exemplary site for realizing the disciplinary forms of time --ranging from the notion of seasons and the sort of temporal distancing at work in the utterance, "That's so last season!" to the highly disciplinary regimentation of labor's time in the sweatshop or factory-- that are also capital's doing.

At the same time, it is because Fashion is distinctly modernist that it is not just about the new -- it is also incredibly nostalgic and obsessively periodizing. (Here “modernity” refers to a substantive range of sociohistorical phenomena –capitalism, bureaucracy, technological development, the rise of the social sciences and categorization, and so on—but also to particular though often contradictory experiences of temporality and historical consciousness.) So perhaps thrift and vintage do challenge the fashion industry's rule of seasonal lines, but these categories are not necessarily apart from that industry's own nostalgic tendencies (which are also a part of its capital production, not entirely unlike Hollywood's love for the remake and certain properties' assumed built-in audiences).

I absolutely agree with you that clothes and their differentiated consumption --"fast fashion," eco-fashion, counterfeit, vintage-- are often the objects of moralizing discourses. But I would further parse a distinction between discourses of consumption and consumers themselves, since the former can be understood to "recruit" and "transform" individuals into particular kinds or classes of people --as consumers, in this instance-- but cannot describe the latter absolutely. Certainly these discourses produce and reproduce the meanings and values which represent the relationships we imagine we have to our real conditions of existence, and which might take the form of the moral decision-making you note above. But moralism (which Wendy Brown actually distinguishes from morality and dubs anti-politics) is not the same as ethical or political inquiry. And I would further caution against conflating moral and aesthetic judgments with political and psychological ones -- and against blurring consumption practices and their consequences for the logic of capital or homogeneous time with the feelings or politics of individuals who engage in these practices. This is to say that it is not necessarily false to make this connection, but not necessarily true either.

Minh-Ha: I get that the temporal trajectory and logics of thrift/vintage aren't the same as Fashion but I'm not convinced that thrift/vintage is the feminist answer to fashion consumption and adornment that Silverman makes it out to be. That view presumes that Fashion is inherently anti-feminist; it also demands that we have a nostalgic relation to the past. Here, I'm thinking about her assertion that retro "provides a means of salvaging the images that have traditionally sustained female subjectivity, images that have been consigned to the wastebasket not only by fashion but by 'orthodox' feminism." But for which female subjects are these past images and past fashions sustaining? And which thrifted fashions enable this? Certainly not the H&M, F21, or Old Navy cast-offs! This idealized past is a distinctly whitewashed past as you so aptly point out in In Vintage Color. And while I love your idea that women of color in vintage styles can enable us to correct this historical absence and "imagine otherwise," we can only correct "the past" by establishing a different relation to it from "the present." This isn't historical-temporal borderlessness; it's a position that's firmly situated within (even if or rather because it's in dialectic opposition to) the dominant logic of linear progressive time. The valorization of vintage as postmodern historical borderlessness doesn't take into account that borderlessness is a privilege only white bodies enjoy - even in vintage and thrifted fashions.

Even the light dresses in Minh-Ha's closet (and this is pretty much
all of them) are full of pleats, draping, fans, and shiny detail goodness.
The first dress looks as guileless as a shift dress but it's the infamous "geisha."

Mimi: I haven't read Silverman's "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse" in several years, but I want to point out that it was published in 1986, and was one of the first essays to attempt to craft a feminist fashion studies, so I would approach its theoretical project on its own speculative terms. Furthermore, secondhand clothing as a whole circulated at a much more subterranean level of the market at that time (as Angela McRobbie documents, secondhand clothed the poor but also the weirdos), so I can't fault Silverman for failing to predict the incorporation of one aspect of secondhand clothing as vintage into Fashion's industrial self-replication.

As such, I read her more generously as encouraging the critical recognition that we need not adhere to linear progressive time and consign the past to the wastebasket as useless or worse, which is a form of historical consciousness that both Fashion and some of our critical discourses often demand. This recognition need not be nostalgic --and I don't believe that nostalgia is necessarily a conservative impulse-- let alone idealizing, for either Silverman in particular (at least in the above excerpts) or secondhand clothing in general. Again, the backwards glance can be conservative in some instances --witness some of the comments at the Sartorialist's photograph of his besuited black driver-- but it can also be something else. So it seems to me that the vintage-loving women of color at Fashion for Writers, b. vikki, and Renegade Bean are not just salvaging the past as historical object, but also creating alternate and possibly antichronological images about that past that allow it cohabit with us in the present. I'm thinking also of Lipstickeater Joon Oluchi Lee's "maternamorphosis," in which he considers how he might honor his mother's complex personhood through a reconsideration of her personal style with his.

There is no reason to assume that there is a singular temporal sensibility to thrifting, or to vintage -- let alone one set of practices, values or feelings attached to them. (And here I want to reemphasize that while thrift and vintage are not discrete categories, they are definitely not the same.) Silverman's secondhand salvaging is one possible approach that might allow us to revisit the past for its pleasures, or to transform that past into something other than waste or debris. For instance, when I read about those "images that have traditionally sustained female subjectivity," I think of queer femmes revisioning the past's femininities. But the essay does not claim (it acknowledges that it is a series of "fragments") that this is all there is.

Fashion and style bloggers featuring young women who triumphantly thrift, sometimes pairing their finds with Chloe shoes and Alexander Wang tanks, are a tiny, eensy-weensy minority of thrift shoppers. Thrifting is also a rational form of consumption as reproductive labor --clothing families, for instance-- or as class performance. Secondhand Ann Taylor can still project a "professional" look, or H&M a trendy one. But it's important to note that thrift also still does bear economic and social stigma because it is used, or otherwise perceived as trash, even in the age of Goodwill on-line auctions and the occasional recession news piece on "smart shopping." Furthermore, its social and economic significance extends to the geopolitical -- our so-called trash is conceived as good enough for global Others. Thrift is the backbone of an enormous secondhand clothing export industry that clothes the Global South in the throwaways of the Global North, and furthers the decline of local textile and clothing manufacturing; but it can also fuel local practices of creative reuse in those same places. In any case, we shouldn't limit an analysis of thrifting or vintage to its radical potential or lack thereof. Of course we cannot escape capital (or its disciplinary time) through thrift -- thrift is possible because of capital and the production of surplus. (It even produces new forms of labor, from professional sellers to exporters and so on!) But not all relations to capital are the same.

Minh-Ha: I totally agree that there's no singular temporal sensibility to thrifting, or to vintage - and that's actually my point. I have no problem with thrifting or vintage as such (obviously!) - my problem is with the easy and sometimes automatic celebrations of thrifting as a superior, more innovative, and more progressive mode of consumerism. I'd feel the same way about any form of moralizing when it comes to consumerism! And we've certainly talked about this before - only some thrifting bodies and styles are read as creative, hip, modern, innovative. Others are perceived as "tacky," "ghetto," and "cheap." These designations don't always cut across race and class differences but neither do they transcend them.

Mimi: Yes, absolutely thrift does not cohere as a set of practices and discourses! As one of my students --Roseanne O.-- demonstrated in her thrift store ethnography this last semester, even in the same town, at the same chain there are clear distinctions between the different locations that imagine distinct consumers and needs. At the Salvation Army closest to campus, there is an "ugly sweater" rack for all the students purchasing these as novelties for themed parties. Similar sweaters are not separated at the store that serves the non-students, and that is located in the same building that provides other services to low-income or homeless persons. And because bodies and clothes interact and activate certain ideas about each the other, the same sweater on a college student going to a themed party is funny because it is outdated, and on a young fashion blogger pairing it with leggings is innovative because it is renewed, and on an older woman imagined as its appropriate owner the sweater will be "just" unfashionable because (supposedly) so is its wearer.

Sorting Out Our Wardrobes

Mimi: Okay, I want to segue into talking about your shopping for a bit here. When we hung out with the amazingly lovely Joony Schecter, you mentioned that you love the frenzy of the sample sale (in contrast to the frenzy of a thrift store). To me it sounds like a nightmare! All the yelling from Thuy Linh! And I feel like I would be the hapless fit model slash load-bearing boyfriend for you both in this scenario. (Don't deny it, Minh-Ha!) I'm too thrifty to want to spend even that much at a discount, or maybe because I think about how I could buy ten different dresses for the price of one. As a general rule, spending more than a hundred dollars on one garment still freaks me out. Though I gladly did it for the puffy coat I'm now forced to wear in Midwestern winters, and I'm learning that warm winter boots are going to cost me.

But this is also about how I get dressed in the morning, because sometimes I want to become a 1958 Girl Scout summer camp arts and crafts teacher, or a 1976 Lower East Side dissolute rock n' roller, or a 1983 Midwestern professional lady newscaster. And sometimes my sartorial moods are cinematic or televisual, and I want to capture a particular character or production's sensibility: Nicki in Time Square, Diana Prince in second or third season Wonder Woman, Billie Jean in The Legend of Billie Jean. The more options I have for putting these personas and their accompanying narratives together the better! This potential is just one part of the appeal of secondhand clothes for me. Another related part is my punk past, populated with awesome and creative persons who were unafraid to play with their clothes to create a mood or a confrontation. And on a purely sensual level I love certain patterns and textures that I can't otherwise find (like '50s abstract expressionism on a full skirt) or couldn't otherwise afford (what with all the so-called legit designers liberally plundering those archives themselves). Therefore, my grass-green scratchy burlap shift dress with the kelly-green piping and rolled neckline, which seems so genius to me.

The dress I love (with pockets at the lower upside down "v"), clashing with a thrifted print in my office-closet -- which is painted the green in the print.

So how do you understand your own preferences -- shopping-wise, and in terms of how you get dressed in the morning? Is there a politics to the sample sale, the sample as both limited supply but also surplus?

Minh-Ha: Yes! Thrift stores often, but not always, feel like a labyrinth of hyper and multi-sensory hodgepodge to me. You mentioned once that you thought my unease in thrift stores had to do with the various prints and textures -- and I think you're probably right. Whether I'm shopping online (more and more these days) or in a brick-and-mortar shop, my eye is always drawn to solid blacks, grays, and what I'd describe as steel blue or bluish gray. Just thinking about that color - such a perfect color! I mostly wear dresses because they're all-in-one -- this is the same reason I've grown to love jumpsuits and rompers. And dresses with some architectural detail are my soft spot. I have a black Alexander Wang dress that I got at a sample sale with Thuy (who else?) that has futuristic shoulders and has a "poof" between the shoulder blades. Interesting and complicated pleats are also a favorite for me. While I don't dress in "personas," like you do, my style isn't quite utilitarian either. There's a 3.1 Phillip Lim dress I bought from LaGarconne.com that's only good for standing (the website makes me feel as warm and fuzzy as the Phillip Lim store on Mercer in NYC). The tulip-shaped skirt on this dress is so narrow that when I walk, I'm "doing the geisha" -- so NOT my stylo! That's not to say I don't wear the dress - but when I do, I'm pre-scheduling the pace of my life that day. So rather than channeling any persona, I'm making decisions about how I want to move through my day and what kind of attitude I want to project. Harder or not so hard. (I don't do "soft" -- which I associate with pastels.) And it's all probably too subtle for anyone to notice -- I mean, my color palette is really focused at this point. But it's all in the details, baby!

I want to just say a little something about price tolerance - and I think this connects to a couple of different points we've already raised about the overlapping spheres of fashion and the politics of sample sales. I don't know anyone who is completely faithful to any single mode of shopping. I love the rush and sociality of sample sales (strangers being each other's eyes when there's only one full-length mirror; snagging the only dress in your size, having a dress that may never see the light of retail, etc.) so if I HAD to choose only one mode of consumption, it would probably be sample sale shopping. Still, there are things that I'd prefer to buy at mass market/cheap chic sites (the classist dimension of "fast fashion" puts me off that term). Tops and jeans, for example! Why I'm psychologically incapable of spending more than $40 on a top is something I'm still working out. And who needs to spend $150 on denim when Uniqlo carries great denim for $30 ($19 on sale!).

On the politics of sample sales - god, this should be it's own post! To start, though, the term is becoming an increasingly elastic one for retailers. "Sample sale" can mean a pop-up sale that a designer has to gauge the interest in particular designs before they're released to mass retailers. For instance, I remember going to the Nieves Lavi sample sale a couple of years ago. It was held for one night in the designer's girlfriend's apartment in Chelsea. The designer and his partner were there too. These are the kinds of sample sales I prefer. The stock is limited - sometimes only 1 or 2 items in any size are available - but it's edited, intimate, and manageable unlike corporate multi-designer sample sales like Billion Dollar Babes or the Barney's Warehouse Sale which seems to be more about discarding excess product, is scheduled a couple of times every year, is open to industry insiders (or those willing to pay a cover charge) for the first 1 or 2 days, and is something like a mosh pit of frantic shoppers and anxious sales staff. The pop-up ephemeral scheduling (and online sample sales like Gilt use this model too) certainly capitalize on consumers' desire for distinction -- but I would argue that this form of distinction isn't only about class pretensions but also about the social capital of insider knowledge, informed consumption, and sometimes just the luck of being in the right place at the right time. That said, sample sales also commodify ephemerality. And this connects up to our earlier conversation about the politics and disciplinary function of fashion's temporalities. There's so much more to say than this! Your question's inspired me though - I think this could be another chapter in my book!

Mimi: Lady, don't front! I know about your exception for florals! And I see now that you hate separates, and it's absolutely true that when I think of your well-edited wardrobe, I remember best your dresses and one-pieces and no tops (except for that one sweater you also bought at Forever 21 after you saw me in it). Also, I just want you to know that the 3.1 Philip Lim dress I bought for your wedding hobbles me too! (And I confess that it deeply freaked me out to drop several hundred dollars on that dress; I kept thinking about all the things I could buy with that cash.)

My shopping has changed since I moved to my isolated college town, which has terrible thrift so I could not be faithful even if I wanted to. Previously, I was almost entirely wardrobed for the Midwest --and for professorial labor-- by thrift stores in Western Michigan. But since living here I started shopping on-line, which fueled a brief frenzy for buying denim -- specifically, high-waisted and wide-legged denim from Dittos and 18th Amendment. I attribute this to our screening of the 2001 refugee camp melodrama Green Dragon, Minh-Ha, and my sudden seizure with the sartorial sensibility of what we dubbed "teenage refugee mom." I thought of it as a semi-playful pursuit of a different stance toward my personal history. Our personal histories! So perhaps we could end this installment with some thoughts about how refugeeness might inform our sartorial sensibilities.

Two floor-length dresses and a button-down top:
literally all the florals in Minh-Ha's closet.
The black dress is from the Nieves Lavi sample sale.

Refugee Sensibilities

Minh-Ha: I have a lot of your tops or tops that I got after seeing you in them because I'm no good at shopping for them! I can't "see" tops. I can't imagine how they look on me. Pants, I get. Dresses, I get. Tops, not so much . . . But I can't believe you outed me on the florals!! Is NOTHING sacred? Ok, so the thing about florals (and by the way, we're talking about big splashy hi-res almost graphic florals, not calico) is that I really do love them but it's a complex and nuanced love! I don't actually wear them (much) . . . they mostly make my closet (and bed) happy . . .

As for the role of our refugee past on our sartorial and consumption practices . . . some context: Mimi and I were both born in Sai Gon, Viet Nam, during the war. We left Viet Nam after Sai Gon's collapse in 1975 and we both lived the first part of our American lives in Camp Pendleton, a refugee camp near San Diego, California. We were there at the same time! We like to think that we crossed paths but in Mimi's version of events, I'm always stealing her broken but cherished toy or something because I'm a year older and I was a big refugee baby. So, really, our friendship was destined!

It's interesting to me that our experience as refugees has produced different effects with regard to our consumer practices. We obviously had very little disposable money growing up - it's the reason a lot of my clothes were homemade - shopping trips to the flea market (what we called the" swap meet"), buying furniture by collecting green stamps (this was a fun game to me), and window-shopping comprised the bulk of my consumption history. I also remember having to endure a lot of delayed or more often denied sartorial gratification. My mom loved clothes, shoes, and handbags. She still does today but her intensity was even greater back then. And she always took me on shopping trips with her - not so much my sister but always me. But my mom could be satisfied with just looking and appreciating. This was an intolerable and infuriating character quality to me - even as a young child.

One of my favorite books growing up was Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. There's a scene in that book when the young Francie Nolan, who comes from a working class Irish family, pours her coffee down the sink. She said it made her feel extravagant to be able to waste. This is a wonderful example of Sau-ling Wong's observation that Extravagance and Necessity are "contrasting positions on a continuum rather than mutually exclusive categories" -- I also never finish a meal or a drink, always leaving something on my plate or in my cup. This was entirely an unconscious act for me until my dad pointed it out. He thinks I inherited that desire for lavishness from my northern Vietnamese side (my mom's side). Anyway, I don't remember when, but I'm sure there was a moment maybe after college that I made a conscious decision that I would not deny myself clothes that I really loved - that I permitted myself to embrace extravagance. But this extravagance is circumscribed for me too - like I said, I'm thrifty about a lot of things. Tops, jeans, personal technology, car accessories - and a lot of my big purchases (big for me): Phillip Lim dresses, Alexander McQueen tuxedo jumpsuit, Frye boots, and my Fiorentini and Baker oxfords were all bought at sample sales or at sample sale prices.

Mimi: As a refugee, secondhand clothing has been a part of my life since arrival! So perhaps I have a perverse attachment to it. From the donations distributed at the refugee camps and through the religious charities that later sponsored my family to our first home in cold, cold Minnesota, and still later from local church sales, almost everything I wore as a child was used, discarded or, alternately, made by my mother. Some of my most vivid childhood sense-memories are defined by this secondhand: burying my arms up to my elbows in a giant pile of clothes in the basement of a church, for instance. And I remember deciding (in an inarticulate fashion) that being poor and being different would not be sources of shame. If my clothes were odd --because they were ill-fitting, outdated, used-- I would become more odd to match these clothes. This wasn't that hard, frankly. I was a weird kid! I clashed colors and patterns, I dressed "like a boy." So I drifted toward clothes as a form of confrontation early. I loved punks before I ever thought that I could become one too -- that they were always the "bad guys" on television (CHiPS, Quincy, Hunter, all had episodes with punks as the villains of the week) was part of the attraction for me.

We seem to have covered the bases, and it's clear we're very different shoppers with very different aesthetics --the photos tell all-- and still great friends! And that's quite enough from the both of us!

Some of the gladiators, military boots, oxfords, stacked heels, wedges,
peep-toe ankle boots, and mid-top sneakers that is Minh-Ha's shoe collection

At Minh-Ha's wedding, in Double (Phillip Lim) Happiness!

Kleenex

2010-01-09T13:41:00.003-05:00

I am sick in bed with a cold. Unfortunately, I ran out of tissue and have had to resort to a roll of toilet paper tucked besides my pillow. To illustrate my lack, here is a video from Kleenex (later forced to change their name LiLiPUT due to threatened legal action), a Swiss all-girl punk band from the late '70s and early '80s.

Minh-Ha and I have a number of big posts planned, so stay tuned!

RIP: Eunice Johnson

2010-01-07T21:41:00.003-05:00

Sad news. Eunice Johnson, the legendary co-founder of Ebony magazine and creator of the Ebony Fashion Fair, died this past weekend. From the AP, the Fashion Fair was a "traveling high fashion charity event that showcases black designers and models is staged in nearly 200 cities each year. Ads for the show have featured singer Aretha Franklin, and actor Richard Roundtree made his debut as a model with the show." More than half a century ago, she created the Fashion Fair Cosmetics line which was designed specifically for the complexions of women of color, advocated for models of color, and discovered Pat Cleveland who is considered the first black supermodel.

NPR just had a short interview with Andre Leon Talley, editor-at-large for Vogue magazine, on his memories of Mrs. Johnson. You can read the transcript here.

RIP Mrs. Eunice Johnson.

And Then There Were Three

2010-01-05T09:40:00.014-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, threadbared kicked off the new year by meeting up with Joon Oluchi Lee a.k.a Joony Schecter of the elegantly fabulous blog, lipstickeater! (To read Mimi's earlier post on lipstickeater, click here.) We had a lovely time talking, laughing, and scheming over coffee and avocado sandwiches in Hayes Valley in San Francisco. We'll keep this post brief but in the future, look forward to cross-blog collaborations in the form of ethnographic posts about our observations of each other's consumption patterns and strategies and updates about conference panels on digital media, fashion, beauty, consumer cultures, and a sundry of other delicious topics!

We ♥ you Joony Schecter!

"You Are Her"

2009-12-30T09:01:00.000-05:00

Sometimes old punks with archival tendencies can be a force for good! Former Outpunk zinester and record mogul Matt Wobensmith now runs an amazing zine store called Goteblud in the Mission District of San Francisco. He recently curated an exhibit called "You Are Her: Riot Grrrl and Underground Female Zines of the 1990s," featuring over a thousand zines (including a few of mine). Videos of the panel discussion are now up on YouTube, with Maximumrocknroll's Layla Gibbons, Bianca Ortiz (whose zines like Mamasita and Messtiza were a fucking revelation), and my beloved sister-friend Iraya Robles. There are five videos of the entire discussion; here's the first.

LINKAGE/VINTAGE: Thunderhorse Vintage

2009-12-21T16:53:00.008-05:00

I'm leaving town in a couple days, so the series of posts on politics of vintage continues here with an excerpt from an interview with Sacramento's Thunderhorse Vintage co-owners and twin sisters Marilyn and Jen Ayres, published in the UC Davis Women's Resources and Research Center newsletter in May 2009 (read the full interview here). Jen began her graduate work in Textiles at Cornell University this fall with an eye toward theorizing thrifting via feminist cultural studies. Awesome!

Kohgadai (UC Davis Women's Resources and Research Center): What were your majors and minors?
Jen: We transferred as design majors, before we really knew that we were feminists or into critical cultural studies, and attempted to take design classes and it was a shock. There was complete aesthetics divorced from theory, from accountability, any kind of critical analysis. That’s when we got out the registrar of classes and decided to do Women/Feminist Cultural studies 103, not realizing that at UC Davis you really have to take Women’s Studies 50 before getting into 103. So, it was very challenging. It was very challenging, very stressful but very mentally stimulating. It was this crazy, rigorous world that we hadn’t been exposed to.

Kohgadai: How has your experience with your education influenced your shop and what you stand for?
Mar: The disconnection between ideology and the production of images of art and design were completely antithetical to what we were about. So we went completely a different route. We decided to make ethical decisions, to know where things come from, and understand the meaning and, importantly: acknowledge where things came from — something so basic and simple. Being disingenuous, appropriating, and making a buck off of other people’s artwork, that’s what we didn’t want to do. That’s just the easy way out, that’s not critical thinking, that’s not special.
Jen: The Women and Gender Studies Program really helped us become who we are, and helped us open and run the shop because it has those ties to intersectional feminist ethical principles that let us remain true to who we are and do business— without compromising, without exploiting. And it’s crazy because shopping today is all about what maquilladora your handbag came from in accordance with what’s in fashion at this very instant. And I think what we’re doing is complete in the opposite direction of that.

Kohgadai: I noticed someone brought over clothes, do you do trade-ins?
Jen: We emphasize to our friends: Please, we really want to circulate goods, to trade and swap things between us. If you want something that’s in here, please bring us some of your cute clothes because we like seeing goods go, and go to our friends. The thing about a good transaction is that it’s fair on both sides.
Mar: Because there’s a lot of places you could go, and you won’t be paid a fair amount.

Kohgadai: How did you first get interested in vintage clothing?
Mar: We just love thrift shopping. When we were little, the first thing we would do when our parents would take us to a new town, was look up the thrift stores and just go there. We love seeing unique art, unique design from previous periods of time. Cultural oddities that were no longer valued because they were no longer “in vogue,” or whatever. Having the discarded stuff, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Suspenders, the stuff that no body else thought was awesome, and kind of reclaiming that. Now, its just coincidence that vintage is very much at the height of being in fashionable.

Kohgadai: Did you always want to become clothing shop owners?
Jen: To us this wasn’t a business decision. Getting to share our clothes with people that we love and cherish and having them wear it is the most enjoyable art.
Mar: The whole idea of idea of collecting and accumulating crap, this whole American notion of getting as much material goods and just hoarding it, what happens with that is it just sits there unappreciated and unloved. It’s just something you go to once a couple months when you go through your attic.
Jen: We want to have amazing stuff that the right person will come in and pick up. We want to be accessible. We don’t want a museum that you can’t touch, and engage with and love. (Like high priced vintage stores). We want to be able to display it, and have that right person come in and have something click for them. To us, clothing is a huge part of how you express your personality and its kind of an unrecognized art form.

Kohgadai: Where did you two accumulate your clothing?
Mar: We’ve been collecting since we were 14 (laugh). Jen was always very good at getting things from thrift stores, but what did she do with them? There wasn’t anything you could with it.
Jen: It started out as a tie to my friends. I’m like “Oh, so and so will love it, and I’ll just hold on to it for her. Because I know she won’t be here at this thrift store, on this day to pick it up. And it’d be perfect for her.” I’m a giver. That’s how I express my love, I burden people with lots of crap (laugh). That’s how it started out. Having an eye with other people in mind.

Kohgadai: Do you two share a wardrobe?
Jen: NO. We’re identical twins so we have insane identity issues. For the longest time we had big hurdles to overcome about clothing because the way we perform our identity is through clothing. The way we perform a lot of things is through clothing: Gender, identity, sexuality, class, all these things. For our personal identity, when we are already genetic clones of each other, hell no we’re not going to be okay with sharing, because those are our individual signifiers. Then people might confuse one of us for the other, which would be crazy because we are *SO different (*sarcasm). I have been the one most afflicted with these insecurities, however. Mar has always been confident in her identity-in-relation-to-me.

Kohgadai: Did you always want to be clothing shop owners?
Mar: It sounds cliché to say we were inspired by Buffalo Exchange, but, we were really inspired by Buffalo Exchange on Height Street. When we went there as teenagers, it was like this crazy, eccentric collection of one-of-a-kind stuff. Vintage stuff, new stuff, but it was all crazy and unique. There was weird old stuff old punk and metal shirts from the 80’s and it was all very affordable. And we thought this is exactly what we want to do: to have a shop of weird stuff you can’t get anywhere else.

Books For Necks

2009-12-20T09:34:00.001-05:00

If you are a nerd for both vinyl records and books like me, you might consider putting them together into some declarative form. But if you have no jewelry-making skills, Canadian designer Aroha Silhouettes has got you covered.

Fashionable Securities

2009-12-19T16:42:00.003-05:00

AFP/Getty Images

In few days ago All Things Considered suggested that the presence of fashion (narrowly and problematically defined as "Western" clothes) might act as a political barometer in the report "In Baghdad, Hemlines Rise as Violence Falls." Here NPR follows a path well-trod by other American news media in the initial aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan, and by The New York Times earlier this year in "What Not To Wear, Badghad-Style," which featured "before invasion" and "after invasion" photographs side by side, like a makeover show might, to create a story of progress as the gift of fashion.

As I said elsewhere about the political claims invested and invoked through clothing the civic body, and particularly the Muslim feminine civic body, "What is often lost in translation here is that unveiling does not always signal freedom, democracy, modernity, women's rights, whatever -- even if it might gesture toward these things in this particular moment. And there is no reason to believe that 'freedom' and 'democracy' should necessarily --or even ideally-- look identical to Western discourses or practices of them."

But in this brief report there is a telling refusal to examine other possible causes and consequences. Consider this seemingly simple statement: "Since the 2003 invasion, the classic look for Baghdad ladies — at least on the street — has been hijab, the Islamic expression of modesty that requires a woman to cover her shape and her hair."

Does this opening scene-setter inadvertently admit that the most recent wave of reveiling was a consequence of the American invasion that toppled the pragmatically secular regime of Saddam Hussein, thereby upending a precarious balancing act and sparking a counterinsurgency as well as an internal struggle for governance? Oddly, though "since the 2003 invasion" would seem to suggest as much, the rest of this sentence --and the sentiment of the report itself-- would lay the impetus of this loss of freedom at the feet of "Islamic expression," as if this were a stable or coherent category of being apart from the violent occasion of unlawful invasion.

It is so strange to read this report from Baghdad that nowhere names the United States as an occupying presence. Reading between the lines, it is clear that the American war in Iraq is not the solution to insecurity but at least one of its origins.

Grading, Delaying

2009-12-15T16:45:00.009-05:00

Pictured are Emily Larned's Lookbook 54 and Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious --which my girlfriend puts under her head to reset her back-- as well as the '60s silver-and-white lace shift dress I wore to our multi-departmental, end-of-the-semester party this weekend.

Unfortunately, a mountain of grading awaits me before I can begin to post (as promised) on the politics of vintage. (Meanwhile, Jenny at Fashion for Writers continues to be one step ahead of me! Curses, foiled again!) Fortunately, this mountain includes papers and other final projects from this semester's Politics of Fashion course, which include a thrift store ethnography mapped onto a demography of neighboring locations; a hairstyling portfolio that ponders the politics of the updo as "formal" hair; and a poster presentation on the ultra creepy Old Navy supermodelquins (shades of Andrew McCarthy and Kim Cattrall in, of course, Mannequin).

There are also papers on military habitus (humorously --to me at least-- titled "Hooah!"); the politics of breasts (with particular attention to the attribution of class --in its multiple permutations-- to some breasts); British skinhead subcultures and a film analysis of This Is England (dir. Shane Meadows, 2006); the temporal attitudes of the hipster figure who mines the past for the present; the differential distribution of leisure wear (whose leisure is understood as "normal" and whose is targeted as "deviant," and how does clothing factor into the boundaries drawn between appropriate labor and inappropriate leisure); high school dress codes in a moment during which youth are increasingly gender-questioning; and that's just what lies on top on this mountain before me.

So there's a wrench --a delightful but delaying wrench-- in the schedule. Hopefully I'll post in the next week or so with some thoughts on the politics of vintage as a cultural imaginary, as specialized knowledge, as a market designation, as an aesthetic of individuation versus standardization, as a historical sedimentation of race, nation, gender, and sexuality -- as well as a performative possibility for rearranging these anew.

Fuck Yeah James Franco

2009-12-12T13:21:00.006-05:00

Fuck yeah, James Franco. My girlfriend and I are both in love with him. She thinks this particular photograph means he'll be portraying jazz trumpeter Chet Baker sometime in the future -- another reason to swoon. (I should mention here that my girlfriend is often styled like a mid-century jazz trumpeter, so "it's a thing.") That is all.

On The Politics of Vintage, Starting With a Series of Thoughtful Epigraphs Before I Begin My Own Ruminations on The Topic

2009-12-08T12:01:00.007-05:00

The following paragraphs are excerpts, authored by others, which might offer us (a collective us) an initial entry point into weighing the politics of vintage. The first comes to us from Catherine and her blog Renegade Bean, from a post called "Surrogate Memories From A Time Long Ago:"

I recently discovered a couple shops here in Taipei that sell vintage found photos. This topic really deserves a longer blog entry (and hopefully I'll have time to write one soon), but I find it very moving to see people who look like me doing normal things in time periods that I enjoy from a historical and aesthetic standpoint.

It's a rare thing. For example, I only recall Asian Americans being featured three times on as many seasons of "Mad Men": the "Oriental family" in Pete's office when he returned from his honeymoon, the waitress in a tight qipao and the (off-screen) Chinese driver that made Sally giggle. The series is one of my favorite TV shows, but it also reminds me that Asian Americans were marginalized (or worse) during the era it depicts. And, of course, depictions of Asians and Asian Americans in actual vintage US films are also problematic, to say the least.

I often find myself feeling very conflicted about my interest in vintage style. How can I enjoy things from an era when Asian Americans were repressed, socially and legally (as with the Japanese internment camps and the Chinese Exclusion Act), and when many Asian countries suffered sociopolitical violence that traumatized millions of people, including members of my family? But secondhand and vintage items have had an emotional resonance for me since I was very young and, though it's hard to explain, I can't imagine my life without them. This is more than a hobby for me -- it's part of my identity.

____________________

These questions and comments come from Gertie's New Blog For Better Vintage Sewing, on "Vintage Sewing and Gender Politics:"

I am a modern feminist gal who likes fashions from the fifties, a time period which [...] is not exactly known for being woman-friendly. How do I reconcile these contradictions?

Well, thinking this over brought up more questions than answers for me. For example:

Is wearing a fashion from an oppressive time period indeed a symbol of that oppression?
Is there such a thing as "reclaiming" these fashions so that they are symbols of power rather than domination?
Should we only make patterns from the eras that were the least oppressive to women?
If wiggle skirts and the like are offensive to those with feminist sensibilities, what is the alternative? I mean, what could we possibly wear that would establish us as feminists to those who view us?
Are 50’s wiggle skirts really that different from modern pencil skirts?
What about current fashions that are restrictive? Stilettos, Spanx, etc? Skinny jeans? Are these symbols of oppression towards women?

So, to try to answer these questions, I thought about my relationship with vintage patterns. First of all, I like to sew 50's fashions so that I can make them wearable for me, in 2009. I shorten hemlines so they're more practical and modern. I make the waists wider so that they don't have to be worn with a girdle. I lower the bust darts so an unpadded bra can be worn. I mix current ready-to-wear blouses and shoes with vintage-style skirts. In other words, I don't dress as though I'm wearing a happy housewife costume. I think to most people, I look like a woman who is inspired by vintage fashion, but does not feel the need to look like Dita Von Teese or Betty Draper every day.

But why do I like these looks? I hope it’s not some sort of self-loathing that makes me want to wear a symbol of women’s oppression. I simply prefer the silhouette of vintage fashions as opposed to the current styles offered by pattern companies. I think the design is better and the lines are more flattering. If you want to oppress me, try to make me wear a pair of skinny jeans!

I should also note that I like vintage patterns because I’m interested in the historical and archival aspect of it. I think that sewing my way through Vogue's New Book for Better Sewing is connecting me to women of the past. Doing this project, and researching the evolution of home sewing (women's work, no doubt), is a way for me to honor the lives of women past (however painful) rather than pretending they didn't exist.

____________________

Footpath Zeitgeist is a rigorously critical fashion blog with a particular focus on hipsters and the phenomenon of what Mel calls stylism, "the belief that having a coherent and identifiable 'personal style' is the yardstick of chic." Mel doesn't hold back here as she deconstructs vintage as a practice of individuation and as a category of specialized consumption:

But within mainstream fashion systems, "vintage" styles are re-worked and brought back in a way that highlights their retro-styling and general 'old-schoolness'; according to this logic, there's no point wearing second-hand clothing if it could pass for something you bought new. (There are "designer recycle boutiques" that do specialise in second-hand clothing that looks new, but they tend to privilege 'designer labels' and 'pristine condition' rather than an overtly anachronistic look.) And 'vintage' transmutes the rituals and skills of personalisation that surround clothing in the second-hand fashion system into a hazier idea of "personal creativity." This happens both in the retail environment and in fashion journalism.

We all know that "vintage" is a much-abused term because it enables shops to ask large amounts of money for garments that are simply pre-worn - or even merely retro-styled. Owners of "vintage stores" openly buy up bulk clothing from flea markets, op-shops, garage sales and estate sales, carefully curating them and then marking the prices up vastly. These are the people who rock up at your Camberwell Market stall at 7am and go through your car boot with a torch before you've even unpacked. You'll also see them at Savers with shopping trolleys piled high.

This is starting to happen in high-street retailers too as they realise the market for 'vintage'. For instance, Sportsgirl is currently selling second-hand cowboy boots for something like $150, but rather than the motley collection of items you fossick through at a second-hand store, they've been carefully picked to look similar. What's more, they're displayed alongside a rack of dresses that are marked "vintage" but, similarly, have a look of extreme curatorship in order to make them 'match' both each other and the new goods elsewhere in the store.

It's easy to scorn people as dumb bunnies for buying their clothes this way, but while it's definitely a move away from the skill set that's required to fossick through heaps of old clothes and choose the right garments (the vintage clothing dealer has done all the hard sifting for you), there is still a certain feeling of pride and creativity that comes from saying, "It's vintage" when someone asks you where you got something. Here, "vintage" means, "I'm too individual to settle for mass-produced new clothes", even though the 'vintage' garment was almost certainly worn on a mass scale whenever it was new. More subtly, it also means, "I'm sophisticated enough to redeploy the styles of the past, not just wear whatever's new" and of course, "No, you cannot buy this item yourself, it's all mine."

I guess for me the question right now is: "How do we make clothing our own?"

The Truth of Lagerfeld's Idea of China

2009-12-07T13:38:00.018-05:00

Several days ago, Karl Lagerfeld, head designer and creative director at Chanel, debuted Paris-Shanghai: A Fantasy, a short film made to accompany the Chanel pre-Fall runway show. The 22-minute short was projected on an outdoor screen amid the Shanghai cityscape. (The film clip is below.)

Cross-overs between fashion and film are nothing new. Indeed, Paris-Shanghai isn't Lagerfeld's first foray into filmmaking either. Last year, he made his directorial debut with a 10-minute silent film called Paris-Moscow. Another designer/filmmaker is Tom Ford who just released his first film, A Single Man, a feature-length adaptation of a novel (with the same name) by Christopher Isherwood. And while The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover was not produced or directed by a fashion designer, Jean-Paul Gaultier's contribution to the 1989 acerbic comedy film on the pleasures and perils of (all manner of) consumption undeniably exceeded his role as head costume designer.

Lagerfeld's latest film has Lithuanian model Edita Vilkeviciute playing a very tightly-wound Coco Chanel who travels to 1960s Shanghai in her dreams. (Vilkeviciute also played Chanel in Paris-Moscow.) There, she meets two "Chinese" youth in Mao-style suits, played by Danish supermodel Freja Beha and Lagerfeld's French male muse, Baptiste Giabiconi. Both are adorned with Mao-style outfits and heavy kohl-lined eyes. While the Beha character admits that she doesn't "know much about Western designers," she admires Chanel's jacket and is soon invited to try it on. Chanel then offers the Giabiconi character a men's jacket to try on. As Beha and Giabiconi happily embrace each other in their new jackets and hurry to admire themselves in the mirror (speaking fake Chinese), Chanel beams smugly at the camera, "You see, everyone in the whole world can wear Chanel."

As with French Vogue's earlier blackface editorial featuring Dutch model Lara Stone, yellowface and other dominant forms of racial masquerade highlight and reaffirm white thin female bodies as the signification of universal beauty. Despite defensive assertions by, among many others, Carine Roitfeld (with regard to the French Vogue editorial), Tyra Banks (in her "apology" for the racial drag photo shoot on America's Top Model), and now Lagerfeld that racial performances by white models/actors is "avant-garde" and "post-racial," such performances are ridiculously retrograde and reproduce historical racial hierarchies in which white bodies (imagined as racially-unmarked and thus universal) are superior to racially-marked bodies. It is from this location of universality -- what Nirmal Puwar calls "the universal empty point" -- that white female bodies like Beha's and Stone's "can play with the assigned particularity of ethnicized dress without suffering the violence of revulsion."

Lagerfeld seems to anticipate this critique when he argues that his short film represents "the idea of China, not the reality. It has the spirit of, and is inspired by, but is unrelated to China." Without meaning to, Lagerfeld describes precisely one of the core truths of Orientalism (a system of Western knowledge that, as Edward Said explains, "had since antiquity [imagined the Orient as] a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences"). Lagerfeld's China, like the Orient Said discusses, is a European/American invention.

More from Said's groundbreaking book, Orientalism:

"[The] Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture."

In the example of Lagerfeld's film and its accompanying runway show, the material effects of the cultural enterprise of Orientalism is clear. Lagerfeld's production of an idea about China, articulated through Western epistemologies and white bodies, sells both Chanel fashions and the Chanel brand. As Vilkeviciute/Chanel puts it: "You see, everyone in the whole world can wear Chanel." The implication being that if "Chinese" people who are imagined as located in a time, place, and culture so far removed from (and thus alien to) fashion's modern Western cosmopolitan center can desire Chanel fashions then anyone can. Thus, Chanel's dream is the neoliberal dream of increased global markets for Western commodities.

Orientalism is distinctive in the Western cultural archive of racial projects because it operates not simply through the hatred of but also the fantasies about the other. Orientalist objects -- and this includes Oriental people like the yellowfaced characters in Lagerfeld's film and those in so many of Hollywood's classic films -- are, to quote Homi Bhabha, "at once an object of desire and derision." The writers Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan have also described this racial ambivalence in terms of "racist love" and "racist hate." The desire for the other and the desire to consume otherness are subtle forms of "genteel racism" that have become preferred modes of cultural representation in this multicultural or post-racial historical moment. I want to note that while genteel racism is specific to this historical moment, it emerges from a legacy of patrician Orientalism (the production of otherness through its exoticization and eroticization) that has always been an integral part of U.S. history. Jack Tchen observes in his book, New York Before Chinatown, that George Washington and other founding figures sought distinction and respectability through the consumption and display of Chinese and Chinese-style goods like porcelain, tea, and silk.

It may be difficult for Lagerfeld and others in fashion who practice and endorse blackfacing or yellowfacing (as well as their supporters) to accept that these cultural modes emerge from and reproduce histories of racism, Orientalism, and xenophobia because Lagerfeld does not fit our image of the virulent racists we remember from sensationalist talk shows like Jerry Springer. Also, aesthetic practices seem far afield from more recognizably racist practices like cross-burning, for example. And it is not my contention that genteel racism and overt racism are the same thing.

What we have been seeing in fashion magazines and on runways are cultural practices of "boutique multiculturalists," to borrow a phrase from Vijay Prashad: "boutique multiculturalists like the faddishness of difference . . . they reduce different ways of life to superficial tokens that they can harness as style, but refuse to engage with those parts of difference with which they disagree." Prashad argues (and I would agree) that boutique multiculturalism is more pernicious than overt racism because it covers over or "occludes the structures and practices of actually existing racism" by aestheticizing their histories.

While Lagerfeld stumbles upon the truth of Orientalism, it is clear that he doesn't understand its material and political effects. Locating Paris-Shanghai among classic Orientalist productions like The Good Earth (in which Luise Ranier won an Oscar for her yellowface portrayal of O-Lan) and Madame Butterfly (Mary Pickford famously played the Japanese geisha Cho-Cho San in the 1915 silent film), Lagerfeld explains, "People around the world like to dress up as different nationalities."

What Lagerfeld misses, though, is that yellowfacing (as with blackfacing) is not simply about playing at difference but about reaffirming and securing traditional meanings about racial difference that are constituted by their asymmetrical and contrasting relationship to the universal ideal of whiteness.

Radio Silence + Some Noise

2009-11-27T18:10:00.016-05:00

Apologies for the recent radio silence -- I'm suffering a terrific head cold as well as ever-anxious anticipation for my manuscript workshop this week. Being ill has been something of a relief, quite frankly, as it feels like a legitimate reason to stop working for at least a little while. (Or to do other work, though I have my cat Morton to do my laundry for me!) I've actually taken a bit of a break from the Internets --except for vintage shopping on Etsy!-- but here are a few things I've enjoyed reading in the last week or so, while Minh-Ha has been on a research trip.

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Queer novelist and performer Michelle Tea is blogging for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art now, and in her latest missive she ponders the return of possibly regrettable fashions past:

I don’t know if I am ready for creepers to make a comeback, even in the form of a boot, even if the boot comes with a leather faux-sock poking over the top, even and especially if it comes hung with a couple of decorative boot-belts. And even if they are designed by Alexander Wang. But you know, even as I type this, looking at the boots in their buttery lighting at Barneys, where they live, I am starting to have second thoughts. Maybe they are actually the greatest things I’ve ever seen. Sometimes being repulsed by a piece of fashion is a signal that I’m about to be obsessed with it.

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It seems that the Internets is spitting up reflections on the impact of fashion bloggers these days (we're no exception), especially with Style Rookie Tavi's skyrocketing interplanetary profile as both model and muse. Imran Amed from The Business of Fashion offers this new social media reality check to industry insiders, while Evil Monito's Lindsey Ibarra chimes in with some thoughts on the increasingly blurred divisions between insider/outsider status, as well as shifting measures of expertise, especially apparent as amateur fashion bloggers appear to replace professional stylists:

As the fashion blogosphere has grown it’s become packed with new voices, talents and faces. Through its evolution it has become clear that in order to be a valid blogger one must be a visible blogger and in turn the World Wide Web has been flooded with boys and girls eager to show themselves off to the rest of the world. No longer is it just about the clothing; suddenly it’s also about a face wearing the clothing, and yet I suppose in some ways it always has been. When supermodels ruled the world their faces were just as important (if not more so) as the clothing they were modeling but the added element of worldwide exposure at the click of a button has created an entire generation of “I’m famous on the Internet” icons.

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Next, there be black dandies all over! Jezebel covers the recent release of photographer Daniele Tamagni's Gentlemen of Bacongo, documenting the phenomenon of sapeurs, or the Congolese subculture of dandies. I'd been worrying at this postcolonial knot of politics and desires since I read a few months earlier Patty Chang's review at Fashion Projects of George Amponsah and Cosima Spender’s documentary The Importance of Being Elegant. Chang's comments are insightful:

Watching this documentary, it’s unavoidable to draw parallels to the image of ‘bling-bling’ culture propagated by new school hip hop. The projection of cool by emulating the conspicuous consumption of elites, and the impersonation of success and fashionability, rather than the projection of a sense of depravation are traits shared by both subcultures. Indeed, Amponsah and Spender seem more inclined to portray the phenomenon of la Sape in a similar vein to the glorification of material excess found in hip hop culture. The inherent paradoxes of poor unemployed urban youths who hustle to be able to wear designer duds or footage of Papa Wemba trying on garish fur coats by Cavalli, all seem to confirm this.

Yet, la Sape has a history that is far older than this documentary suggests. Originating in Congo-Brazzaville in the 1930s, the movement’s inspiration (though often disputed) draws reference from the archetypal dandies of modernity as well as Western films of the 1940s and 1950s, especially those of mobster, black and white thrillers, and the Three Musketeers. The sapeurs of Brazzaville were mainly composed of lower middle class young men, high school drop outs, and later, disenfranchised youths. Observing a strict three color rule, their austere elegance became a method to cope with colonialist hegemony and assimilation policies, as well as a way of subversion and resistance. In addition, the acronym la Sape plays on the French term for clothing and points to the fascination with their colonizers. The sapeurs of Brazzaville preached a conservative style that focused on cleanliness and absence from using hard drugs. Through the cultivation of clothes, they sought to define their social distinctiveness while deriving pleasure in admiring themselves, somewhat akin to what Pierre Bourdieu has called a ‘strategy of self-representation’. Fashion became a symbolic gesture of reclaiming power in times of economic deprivation and attempts at political dominance. In some instances, it proved a man could be a master of his own fate. Some authors have remarked that the sapeurs concealed their social failure through the presentation of self and the transformation of it into an apparent victory.

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And finally, Fashion for Writers is on some kind of posting roll with wonderful prose and lovely photographs. I'm inspired, though not enough to get dressed in something besides yoga pants and my old Maximumrocknroll t-shirt right now. Damn this cold! I will just have to heal in the warm glow of the Kate Bush Dance Troupe!

FILM: Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags (HBO)

2009-11-23T06:04:00.004-05:00

Set your DVRs for tomorrow morning when HBO will be showing a new film on the rise and fall of the New York City garment industry called, Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags. From HBO's description:

For generations of New Yorkers, the Garment District was the lifeblood of the city. But with the increased globalization of clothing manufacturing, this once-thriving area continues to shrink. This documentary looks at the vibrant, unexpected history of the Garment District and features interviews with workers, labor organizers, designers and fashion executives who look back at their careers in an area that was a doorway to the American Dream for thousands of immigrants. These stories provide an intimate portrait of an industry in decline--and give a timely look at how American manufacturing has changed, perhaps forever.

If you miss it on Tuesday, November 24, you can find it on HBO On Demand through December 6, 2009.

In Vintage Color

2009-11-11T12:00:00.008-05:00

Image blatantly stolen from Fashion for Writers.

There is a lot to appreciate about Fashion for Writers's Meggy Wang, like her recent conversation with her new collaborator Jenny Z on "overdressing." But one of the things I appreciate the most is how her outfit posts might be alternately imagined as a series of “found” photographs of some glamorous mid-century Asian American starlet, scholar, or secretary -- figures of both ordinary and extraordinary womanhood. Elegantly coiffed and impeccably dressed, Meggy poses most often in the familiar fashions of the 1930s, '40s and '50s, but with a significant difference.

As an archival imaginary, the sartorial or style category of "vintage" is often whitewashed in those forms of visual culture that comprise so much of its popular inspiration, e.g., fashion illustrations, film stars, advertising photographs. Against the glaring absence of similar images featuring other bodies, Meggy's photographs permit us to see what we have not been allowed to see. To me, it feels like Meggy renders visible the historical absence of Asians and Asian Americans in American popular culture as fashionable bodies --and through fashion as contemporaneous bodies-- and also corrects this absence in creating another archive through which we might imagine otherwise.

That's also why I can't stop looking at the new style blog b. vikki vintage by Rebecca Victoria O'Neal, "a 22-year-old, African-American young woman from Chicago with gigantic curly hair, and an affinity for books, knitting, and antique malls." (Thanks, Black Nerds Network!) Featuring a librarian's thorough excavation of the sights and sounds of black style, b. vikki is a wonderful archive for reimagining mid-century fashion design in color:

This blog features advertising campaigns and fashion editorials from Black/African-American publications, video clips and found photographs featuring people of color from the 1950s-1960s....

I've loved vintage fashion for some time (and traditional jazz and pop standards, old movies, Doris Day, et al), and did lots of research before deciding to open a vintage etsy shop and start this blog, because I wanted to do it right. Something I noticed during my research, something that helped me to cement my decision, was the lack of women of color in the online vintage community.

She's right about this absence and, like Meggy (if differently), hopes to fill in the blanks.

Mai's Mighty Closet

2009-11-09T10:56:00.001-05:00

All photos by Maggie Mason, Mighty Girl!

Fashioni.st by Mai Le is my favorite street style blog by far. Browsing her photographs, I'm reminded that I miss the Bay Area immensely (bulky vintage sweaters, scuffed boots, '60s day dresses, colorful headwraps, and multisubcultural people of color!). Plus, Mai makes and delivers banh mi on her bicycle, actions of delicious goodness that demand I declare Vietnamese solidarity.

But I don't know that I'd ever seen her own style before Maggie Mason at Mighty Girl featured her as part of her Mighty Closet series -- and I'm pretty much the most envious girl on the block right now. Mai is a girl after my own sartorial heart --how much does she rock this denim jumpsuit with multiple leather belts and crocheted fishnets?-- but with much, much better shoes, dammit.

OF/SB, part III: Blog Ambition

2009-11-06T10:25:00.004-05:00

Despite the pessimism of Part II, there are plenty of things to be excited about with regard to fashion/style blogging. Although real and constructed divisions remain between what counts as legitimate/professional writing and amateur blathering, the lines between them are increasingly blurred. Bloggers do produce knowledge and opinions about fashion, style, design, and modes of consumption that the fashion industry, independent designers, retail firms, and advertisers have good reason to heed especially since some blogs get as many as 15,000-20,000 hits per day. It is due to the industry’s recognition of bloggers’ informal but no less powerful influence and insight that fashion and design firms are turning to bloggers as knowledgeable fashion enthusiasts. In this way, bloggers play a crucial role in producing and shaping culture.

Further, the burgeoning numbers of academic fashion/style blogs—blogs maintained by cultural and social theorists—demonstrate the blurring of lines between academic and public discourse. Threadbared, as with some of our favorite academic fashion/style blogs such as LipstickEater, Fashion Projects, and Fashion for Writers intends to bring intellectual praxis out of academia and into everyday sites of culture, feelings, and sociality. Simultaneously, as we discussed in an earlier post focusing on the uneasy relationship between fashion and academia, academics who blog about fashion or other arenas of popular culture, demonstrate the diversity and heterogeneity of scholarly modes of production as well as reveal how the personal and the informal (i.e., feelings and fixations) constitute rather than inhibit intellectual engagements. Unfortunately, research on the politics of blogging and the blogosphere rarely attend to blogs about fashion and instead focus on political blogs, first and foremost. Blogging during the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions is an especially popular subject. Because mainstream political blogs are predominantly maintained by men, these scholars skew the actual picture of the blogosphere making it seem male-dominated when we know from demographics research that slightly more women have blogs than men (though most researchers agree that the difference is so small that it is statistically insignificant) and most female-run blogs are maintained for longer periods of time.

A narrow understanding of political participation misses the heterogeneous and informal modes of cultural politics that many people who feel disenfranchised from formal politics participate in as well as denies the organizational and mobilizing power of blogs for youth, artists, and diasporic communities. Moreover, it tacitly reinscribes a “separate spheres” division between consumption/production and culture/politics that have historically been organized in gendered terms. In these studies, the blogger is a politically efficacious subject—if they are granted political consciousness at all—only when they are blogging about “formal” politics (electoral politics, etc.). The ideal blogger is imagined in relation and resemblance to the ideal (male) political worker. Not only is the political work of culture unintelligible in this framework, culture is implicitly connected to (women’s) mass deception and mass consumption. For example, Jodi Dean argues that bloggers “[believe] in the importance of their contributions, presuming that there are readers for their blogs” and that this communication makes a difference when in fact, such practices, though pleasurable, “displace political energy from the hard work of organizing and struggle.” While Dean believes that pleasure and politics are mutually exclusive, Nan Enstad’s fabulous study of the ways in which 19th century working women used cultural practices like dressing fashionably and reading romance novels “to lay claim to dignified identities as workers . . . [and] to claim formal political status” is exemplary of how cultural practices and political praxis have long been intertwined.

Blogging about fashion and style, like fashion itself, can be (and absolutely has been for us) an immensely joyful endeavor because we get to think about fashion and engage with both academic and nonacademic linkers and thinkers across the globe whose intellectual curiosities fuel ours. These pleasures and cultural practices are not insignificant even while they are circumscribed and clipped by the hierarchical and capitalist structures of the internet outlined by Dean. The question may not be whether blogging and the internet is democratic but rather how have fashion/style bloggers, even within difficult and anti-democratic conditions, produced meanings and practices about political action, self-construction, material and immaterial consumption in a context of global neoliberal capitalism, and the politics of sociality that change or clarify dominant systems of race, gender, sexuality, and class?

Return to On the Fashion/Style Blog: Intro
Return to OF/SB, part I: Going Postal
Return to OF/SB, part II: Blog in the Machine of Democracy

OF/SB, part II: Blog in the Machine of Democracy

2009-11-06T10:05:00.002-05:00

While the form, function, and meanings of blogs vary widely, most operate through horizontal communication or what is sometimes called "distributed conversation" between bloggers and readers. Indeed, these categories are mutually constitutive rather than dialectic. Bloggers read other blogs and readers typically have their own blogs or are inspired to begin them in short time. Reader commentary, linkages, blogrolls, and cross-posts maintain the open, participatory, and dialogic nature of blogging that, for many, exemplify the internet's democratization of knowledge and communication. In our other world of academia, we have seen and benefited from the collaborative capacity of blogs as virtual research centers hosting renowned scholars via podcast and webcast as well as digital and public research journals where colleagues can share and discuss new research while sitting in offices, living rooms, airports, and cafes hundreds of miles apart from each other. Such online scholarly communications can sometimes be much easier to maintain and more constructive than the "real" and often frenzied meetings and interactions we have within our departments, our classrooms, or at our annual association conferences.

In fashion, democratization has emerged in unstable fits and bursts since its inception. In 1675, the invention and popularization of the "manteau" or "mantua" (a loose-fitting housedress) inaugurated the sartorial trend of "dressing down" which allowed women to break with sumptuary laws that had for centuries maintained and secured class distinctions by dictating who could wear what. As Joan DeJean explains in her book, The Essence of Style, "The mantua meant that for the first time a woman's outfit did not function as an absolute class marker: from then on, it was far less easy to know at a glance who belonged where on the social spectrum." Other democratizing moments in fashion include the invention of the mechanical sewing machine and standardized dress patterns that facilitated the production of clothes for middle class women's mass consumption; the introduction of pret-a-porter fashion or ready-to-wear clothing by Charles Fredrick Worth, the "father of haute couture" and -- following him -- prestigious designers such as Jeanne Paquin, Paul Poiret, Madeleine Vionnet, and Coco Chanel; Mary Quant's invention of the miniskirt in the 1960s that incorporated the "low" aesthetic sensitibilities of go-go dancers into high fashion designs produced for mass consumption; as well as the "anti-fashion" ethos of hippies, punks, neo-punks, and cyber punks in the 1970s and 1980s that leaked into fashion's mainstream through designers like Yves Saint Laurent. So-called masstige partnerships (in which a celebrity or celebrity designer teams up with a mass market retailer to create a designer collection) like Jaclyn Smith for Kmart (1985), Martha Stewart for Kmart (1997), Randolph Duke for the Home Shopping Network (1998), and Mossimo for Target (2000) are also recognized as significant moments in the democratization of fashion and design. Michelle Obama's preference for emergent designers and mass-market fashion has helped to institutionalize the narrative of fashion's democratization most recently.

Too often, though, the democratization narrative is an overly celebratory and uncritical explanation of the social and economic configurations and effects of new media forms. The tendency to invest new technologies with revolutionary potential and to articulate them in the language of democracy obscures and sometimes entirely misses the ways in which these technologies are integrated into existing capitalist and cultural structures for the profit of giant corporations and elite classes and as such, can continue or even strengthen racial, gender, and classed hierarchies of aesthetics, tastes, and knowledge. For example, when the radio became a common American household good (in the 1930s), people celebrated radio's democratization of communication yet much of what was being communicated through the radio to a now much wider audience were sexist and patriarchal views of women and racist and xenophobic ideas about ethnic and racial minorities. (Consider, for instance, the puns, insults, and wordplay in popular radio programs like The Burns and Allen Show. For more on the history of radio, see Susan J. Douglas' book, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination.)

Similarly, what is left out in the celebration of fashion/style blogging as a democratizing phenomenon are the processes of what political scientist Jodi Dean describes as "communicative capitalism" and its related "animating fantasies of abundance, participation, and wholeness." Such fantasies -- all fundamental to the discourses that articulate and validate claims of democratization with regard to blogging in particular and the internet in general -- occlude or cover up the anti-democratic processes are inherent to internet network structures. For example, the fantasy of abundance is the idea that "everything you want to know is out there on the internet." But the way the internet works is that only the most popular websites and weblogs (the ones that get the most hits) are likely to show up in web searches. The problem with this structuring of the internet, as Dean explains on the NPR radio program Against the Grain, is "[w]hatever view is the most extreme o rte newest at one time among the abundance--that will be what seems to matter. That's a logic of capitalism, not democracy." She goes on, "Each little specific voice is drowned in the massive flow [of commercialized data]" so that "the underside of massive expression is the devaluation of any specific view." One of the consequences, then, of democratization by popularity rather than by equitability is the concentration of the same websites and blogs in the top 3-5 results of every web search. "Rather than a rhizomatic structure where any one point is likely to be reached as any other," Dean asserts, "what we have on the web are situations of massive inequality, massive differentials of scales where some nodes get tons of hits and the vast majority get almost none . . . The very structure of communication networks goes against [democracy]."

An article posted on the website, The Business of Fashion, expresses just this concern about the homogeneous content and message of so many blogs. "Are these bloggers really offering any unique expertise or vantage point that adds to the fashion dialogue? Some (though not all) of these bloggers appear to be more focused on themselves and on the celebrities in the front row than on the fashions on the runway. Unique opinions are few and far between." In this way, blogs are not entirely the independent space of knowledge production and equal access imagined by the term "democratization." Instead, they exemplify the integration and saturation of dominant culture into the private spaces of home offices, bedrooms, and neighborhood cafes from whence bloggers post and read. Another anti-democratic reality of fashion blogging and to a lesser degree, style blogging, is the fact that a large majority of bloggers post about major fashion events and prominent designers without receiving any compensation or professional recognition from the multi-billion dollar global fashion industry whose material and cultural power it helps to secure. Bloggers produce free labor for the fashion industry without any material benefit and often at a personally-absorbed cost of time and energy to themselves.

But fashion and blogging (and blogging about fashion) remain popular activities because they both contain and promise the allure of transformation through the care and management of one's body and one's image. It is in this way that fashion and fashion blogging are "technologies of the self," a term Foucault uses to describe the everyday processes and practices that individuals engage in to constitute themselves as particular kinds of subjects--here, fashionable, cosmopolitan, modern, innovative, and attractive subjects. Fashion and blogging are especially appealing technologies of the self because of their democratizing promise that anyone (but especially women, in the context of fashion) can be "someone," that a fashion outsider can be a fashion insider, and that prestige and privilege are available to and accessible by everyone. We see this discourse operating in the now all-too familiar narrative of the awkward but eccentrically dressed geek turned star blogger. These technologies, Foucault tells us, are interlinked with the control and governmentalization of bodies within dominant systems of power like capitalism which operates through commodity accumulation and the desire for the good life which commodities are imagined to bring.

[Enough of this gloom and doom! Read OF/SB, part III: Blog Ambition for what's wonderful in and about the fashion and style blogosphere.]

Return to On the Fashion/Style Blog: Intro
Return to OF/SB, part I: Going Postal

OF/SB, part I: Going Postal

2009-11-04T09:00:00.006-05:00

One estimate suggests that there are 100 million blogs worldwide. the tiniest fraction of these blogs--about 800--are dedicated to celebrity, street, couture, luxury, indie, mass-produced, masstige, vintage, and eco fashion and style. But these are only estimates. There are no precise numbers because there's no single-accepted definition of the form and function of blogs. Blogs might be personal, informal, public, referential, and participatory (through link trackbacks and reader commentary), or they might be commercial devices of promotion and marketing and information clearinghouses that are restricted to registered users or they might incorporate several of these qualities. Also, surveys of blogs usually miss those that don't use "host" systems like blogspot or LiveJournal while accidentally counting abandoned blogs (as many as 45% of blogs are "static, abandoned web pages") and spam blogs (so-called splogs account for about 9% of the blogosphere).

Classificatory distinctions between fashion blogs and style blogs are also unclear--many bloggers and readers use the terms interchangeably. For our purposes, we understand these genres as overlapping but also recognize that there are significant distinctions between their focus and form. Fashion blogs report on and often celebrate fashion commodities, the fashion industry, and fashion celebrities; style blogs celebrate, critique, and at times criticize the aesthetic, cultural, political, and economic style or mode by which fashion forms are produced, expressed, and circulated across a wide range of industry and everyday sites.

Despite the relatively small number of fashion/style blogs, their impact on the fashion scene is undeniable. This is illustrated most clearly in the incorporation of bloggers into the fashion industry. Today, many bloggers are also credentialed journalists. Eighty bloggers received invitations for New York Fashion Week in September 2009--up from 40 in 2006. The fashion press has also embraced bloggers, featuring them as editorial subjects (i.e., Harper's Bazaar September 2007; Elle UK September 2009; Sketchbook October 2009) as well as hiring them as photographers and writers. Schuman's illustrious blog, The Sartorialist, has led to numerous jobs for GQ and Esquire, for example, and "the reigning queen of the fashion blogosphere," Lau was recruited by Dazed Digital to be their commissioning editor. Meanwhile, fashion and design companies are turning more and more to bloggers as insightful and discerning trend forecasters, cool aggregators, and unofficial promoters. In 2007, the Chanel Company invited 12 bloggers to Paris for a weekend of discovering "the history and iconic places of Chanel." Lau stresses on her blog "that there was no obligation to do blog reportage but for me along with most of the bloggers I think, it would have been criminal not to blog about the wonderful experiences we had." No doubt, the executives at Chanel were counting on this unspoken social contract . Young and popular bloggers posting about this institution of fashion both lends Chanel hipster credibility as well as garners relatively inexpensive and global marketing.

Some, like Tyler Laswell, disparage the fashion/style blogging phenomenon: "It's really sad that the fashion business has turned into a world of bloggers . . . everyone has become so taken up with living in a world of immediate satisfaction. Nobody wants to wait for the beauty in the magazines . . . where the editors truly do their homework and fact-check everything." The perspective that bloggers are sloppy with the facts and are more interested in self-promotion and "mass exhibitionism" leads Andrew Keen to blame bloggers for "transforming culture into cacophony" in his book, The Cult of the Amateur. Keen's description of blogging as cacophony hints at the conservative gender politics of blogging. Detractors denigrate blogging and their practitioners for not embodying the "seriousness of purpose, sensibility, and rational self-directedness" that are perceived by the patriarchal and masculinist mainstream to be indicators of intelligence and proper forms of journalistic work. That is to say, bloggers (imagined as self-absorbed, gossipy, and superficial) are silly because they are feminine. A 2003 study done by Perseus Development, a research firm and maker of software for surveys, diminishes the cultural and social import of blogs by describing "the typical blog [as] written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends." Perseus' snide dismissal of bloggers demonstrates a blatant disregard for recent history. In 2002, it was bloggers that forced Trent Lott to be taken to task for praising Strom Thurmond's segregationist history when too many politicians wanted to forgive and forget and in 2004, bloggers would again transform public discourse by discovering and making public the forged Air National Guard documents that launched Rathergate. And in 2006, gossip bloggers would take credit and be credited for the demise of Tom Cruise's star power and the transformation of Hollywood's system of star production altogether.

According to R. Scott Hall, blog-curmudgeonry is just a case of status quo maintenance. "The true reactionaries are those who want to stick to the old business model, and keep plugging in the new and popular artists to feed that old hungry beast. The true revolutionaries are hurtling over the legal and financial barriers that have always protected the Old Guard, armed with technological sophistication that the Old Guard had long ago decided it did not need." Like Hall, many others view "the rise of the fashion blogger" in positive terms. The presence of "citizen journalists," they argue, reflect "a democratization of fashion criticism," in particular, and the democratization of the fashion industry, in general. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion writer, Robin Givhan puts it in an article in Harper's Bazaar, the internet and weblog have enabled "the average person, too often estranged from fashion, [to take] ownership of it." Pernet echoes Givhan when she tells Grashina Gabelmann in her interview in Sketchbook magazine, "Blogging has democratized fashion . . . the Internet makes fashion available to anyone with a computer. It does not matter where you live; it is available to you instantly."

Democratization is probably the most widely shared interpretation of the fashion/style blogging phenomenon. But does fashion/style blogging really signal a uniquely radical moment in fashion history? And is democratization really democratic? Does it matter?

To read our answers to these questions, click on OF/SB, part II: Blog in the Machine of Democracy.
To jump to OF/SB, Part III: Blog Ambition, click here.
To go back to On the Fashion/Style Blog: Intro, click here.

On the Fashion/Style Blog: Intro

2009-11-04T08:50:00.004-05:00

As Stanley Kowalski tells Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, "We've had this date with each other from the beginning." And so it is with us and this specific post on the what and why of the fashion and style blog.

Even before we began threadbared in 2007, we wondered why everyone (it seemed, to us) had a fashion and/or style blog. Diane Pernet, renowned fashion icon, designer, and photographer, has a blog. But so too does Valerie Steele, the prolific fashion historian and Director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and 13 year-old Tavi Gevinson, a veteran in the fashion blogosphere and a fixture at New York Fashion Week. Among the regular staff at major news companies including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal is a fashion blogger - or two. (Robin Givhan of Washington Post is a Pulitzer Prize winner.) The prevalence of Asian fashion and style bloggers in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and Asia (that continent of over 4 billion people and more than 2100 languages) also did not escape our notice.*

We have ruminated privately and informally on the fashion/style blogging phenomenon--its trends, effects, and problems--even while posting about the moralism of anti-counterfeit discourses, the cultural politics and colonial histories of fashion photography and fashion editorials, postcolonial aesthetics in Africa, racial-sartorial profiling in the US, and our divergent but equally impassioned modes of consumerism and sartorial philosophies.

But right now is a particularly opportune time to consider what is really going on with fashion and style blogging. In the last few weeks, we have seen the anticipation levels for one fashion blogger's book tour rise to rock concert pitch (namely, Scott Schuman's for the print version of The Sartorialist); the release of London-based Sketchbook Magazine's inaugural issue (a double issue on "The Fashion Blogger") with Susie "Style Bubble" Lau as its cover girl; and numerous "Best of" lists for fashion and style blogs compiled by media giants like Telegraph and The Chicago Sun-Times as well as by peer fashion/style bloggers such as FashionHippo and The Sunday Best. Fashion/style blogging seems to be having a moment but what kind of moment is it? In this three-part series called On the Fashion/Style Blog (OF/SB), we explore fashion blogging--what it is, what it was, and what it might be.

Click here for OF/SB, part I: Going Postal
Click here for OF/SB, part II: Blog in the Machine of Democracy
Click here for OF/SB, part III: Blog Ambition

* The question about the prevalence of Asian fashion/style bloggers is a complicated one that surely deserves its own post and requires much more research. However, one answer might begin with our good friend and super-smart colleague Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu's theory of the incidence of Asian Americans as fashion designers. In her forthcoming book, The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans, Fashion Design, and the Cultural Economy of Asian Chic, she persuasively argues that Asian American designers are embedded within a "broader history of labor and migration."

An excerpt from her manuscript:
Without those crucial experiences and social connections [forged in fashion school], designers lacking a formal education have had to rely on other paths of skills acquisition and social networking. For many Asian Americans the knowledges passed around and handed down [from parents, who often worked on the lowest rungs of the clothing industry] were at least in the beginning quite crucial, for it fostered in them a sense of ease and familiarity with the craft of fashion that made it possible for them to experiment with its forms even while, Tu incisively notes, this education was . . . a part of a larger effort to situate women appropriately with the family and the state--not to enable them to pursue creative interests or entrepreneurial profits.

Without more quantitative data and ethnographic research (e.g., are there really a disproportionately larger number of Asian fashion/style bloggers? how are we defining "Asian"?), Tu's answer helps to contextualize some of the roots and routes of Asians in fashion.

Five Minutes in Heaven

2009-11-02T12:58:00.003-05:00

Recently launched Sketchbook Magazine opened big with the thematically timely "Fashion Blogger" issue, featuring none other than Susie Bubble as lushly illustrated cover girl. A London-based quarterly addressed to "established and emerging creative talents in fashion, design and culture with a focus on features, photography and illustration," Sketchbook is a welcome addition to fashion's publishing world.

So of course, it was wonderful to be interviewed by Sketchbook for their blog! Check it out here. We sound like big nerds!

More About Us

2009-11-02T09:00:00.018-05:00

Threadbared is an evolving collaboration between two clotheshorse academics to discuss the politics, aesthetics, histories, theories, cultures and subcultures that go by the names "fashion" and "beauty." With commentary on how clothes matter, as well as book and exhibit reviews and interviews with scholars and artists, Threadbared considers the critical importance of taking clothes --and the bodies that design, manufacture, disseminate, and wear them-- seriously as an entry point into dialogue about the world around us.

We welcome queries relating to public comments, invited talks, commissioned essays, and books, films, and videos for review on threadbared! Please email us at threadbared dot 75 at gmail dot com.

You can become a fan on Facebook and get all the latest updates and news. You can also follow us on Twitter.

FIND US ELSEWHERE

Commenting on everything from blackface fashion editorials to the politics of hijab, Threadbared has appeared on a wide range of other new media from Salon, Racialicious, Jezebel, Muslimah Media Watch, Sociological Images and Women's News Network to fashion-focused outlets like No Good for Me, Style Sample and Sketchbook magazines. Here's some of the nice things that have been said about us:

"stylish brainiacs" No Good For Me

"Academics and fashion seem as far apart as Rush Limbaugh and the NFL (sports-reference to prove my manliness), but this blog makes it work." The Sunday Best

"...a great fashion blog run by two 'clotheshorse academics,' Minh-ha Pham and Mimi Thi Nguyen (one of the smartest people I know). It's a great mix of exuberance and analysis that takes seriously the larger, oft-ignored forces that always mediate our sense of 'style,' whether we care to acknowledge them or not." Hua Hsu, The Atlantic

Even scientists love us! "Threadbared is a blog by two junior faculty ladies with teaching and research interests in the politics of fashion and beauty. They are pretty much spot-on about everything, particularly representations of race and class." Atoms Arranged

"Also! Threadbared blog is BANANAS AWESOME. This blog is equally #1 on our fiancé/es list, because we are totally pomo like that." The Rejectionist

THREADBARED COLLABORATORS

Mimi Thi Nguyen, based outside of Chicago, scours thrift and vintage stores with reckless abandon. Nguyen situates her work within transnational feminist cultural studies, with an emphasis on neoliberalism and humanitarianism, war and empire. A former zinester, Punk Planet columnist and Maximumrocknroll shitworker, she has also published on punk and queer subcultures and is co-editor (with Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu) of Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007).

Minh-Ha T. Pham, based in New York City and San Francisco, shops sample sales with a keen and discerning eye. She writes about the ways in which national publics and polities are organized around traditional and new media that are increasingly shaped and limited by neoliberal discourses and policies. Focusing on the fashion media and the Vietnamese American media, both her projects are concerned with the complex and contradictory relations of communication technologies, consumerism, and capitalism. Pham also writes and speaks at academic and popular forums across the country. Below are some of the topics she addresses:

Fashion consumerism campaigns (e.g., Fashion for America) and democracy
Gender, politics, and blog studies
The cultural politics of fashion/style blogs (focusing on the blogs of Asian Americans and British Asians)
Asian American designers in a period of multinational capitalism and multiculturalism
The shifting relations of labor and capital in network television programs about fashion
Sound, consumerism, and citizenship on Vietnamese American radio

GET TO KNOW US

Here is a rundown of our favorite, and probably most representative, posts thus far:

+ PICTURING POLITICS: On "Pride In His Work"
+ Blackface, and the Violence of Revulsion
+ ART: Sneakers and Borders
+ TEACHING: Brief Notes on the Unreliable Stories Clothes Tell
+ Tramp Chic and the Photograph
+ My Madras Brings All the Boys to the Yard
+ Mind over Malls, or Does Academia Hate Fashion?
+ STYLE ICON: Billie Jean (From the Archives)
+ You Say You Want a Revolution (In a Loose Headscarf)
+ History and the Harem Pant
+ Background Color
+ Policing Fashion in New York
+ Black is the New Black
+ The Truth of Lagerfeld's Idea of China
+ Shopping with Threadbared: A Conversation
+ Why I feel guilty when I don't blog

NO COMMENT

Unfortunately, our day jobs are such that we can't spare the time or presence of mind to either monitor or respond to comments. Frankly, we probably shouldn't expend this much energy on-line in the first place!

Updated: January 2010

Things I've Learned From Students #47: Sorority Struggles

2009-11-01T11:09:00.000-05:00

The sorority girls in my fashion course are incredibly articulate when discussing the paradox of fashion as an individuating –but standardizing— cultural formation. (Something I discuss in Uniform vs. Detail.) From them I learned that during rush, the houses ask the women "auditioning" (I actually have no idea what the actual word for this is) to wear a kind of uniform of tee-shirts and jeans and give them all the same bags to carry their things -- because their own handbags are ruled too distinctive, too much of an indicator of economic status, in an effort to "be fair."

This brings up all sorts of questions about what, exactly, can be measured about a person by the bag she carries. And of course, they noted, girls still make an effort to demonstrate their cultural (and economic) capital in other ways -- their accessories, their shoes-- in order to better differentiate themselves from the other girls. Still, I find the effort to try to receive each girl as an individual because she is in a uniform a great example of the ongoing struggle between particularity and abstraction, individuation and standardization, that defines liberal humanism but also modern capitalism -- and how both these regimes underwrite the discourse and practice of fashion.

Ladies of the Night, What a Fright!

2009-10-31T20:51:00.005-04:00

It's a Halloween treat! Enjoy this early '80s footage from New Wave Theatre of Hollywood all-girl punk band Castration Squad, featuring (among others) Shannon Wilhelm and Mary Bat-Thing, who later became Dinah Cancer, lead singer of 45 Grave. (One of my style icons, Alice Bag reminisces about Castration Squad here.)

PICTURING POLITICS: On "Pride In His Work"

2009-10-29T12:06:00.036-04:00

This past Monday, in what brings nothing less than Driving Miss Daisy most prominently to mind, the Sartorialist posted a photograph from his book tour, featuring his (unnamed) driver in San Francisco. In his commentary, the Sartorialist remarks: "As you can see he was very elegant and practically oozed self-confidence, dignity and pride in his work. I love people who show pride in their work, regardless of the job."

Seemingly unaware that service workers labor under constant public scrutiny, he continues: "This man's car was spotless, his shoes were shined and he knew exactly where he was going. He wasn't dressed like that for me, he had no idea who I was, this was just another day and just another ride done in his own stylish way."

My first reaction was, What the fuck.

I've written about this before with regard to the Sartorialist's photograph of a presumably (but not assuredly) homeless black man and the commentary in which he imputes a quality of dignity to the man on the evidence of his well-matched accessories. This quality reappears here in the suit and smile, now matched with "pride in his work." Those structures of privilege or social realities that might mediate the encounter are nowhere accounted for. Instead, we are presented with what appears to be the snapshot of an individual who has risen above those unnamed social structures (only apparent in the condescension of "regardless of the job") to attain self-confidence and dignity, but who (in this story the Sartorialist tells) does not challenge those structures at all.

I want to quote again the brilliant Lauren Berlant on the icky sentimentalism of such regard:

The humanization strategies of sentimentality always traffic in cliché, the reproduction of a person as a thing, and thus indulge in the confirmation of the marginal subject’s embodiment of inhumanity on the way to providing the privileged with heroic occasions of recognition, rescue, and inclusion.

As before, the Sartorialist's rhetoric is the affective symptom of this world-view that first expresses amazement at the other's dignity ("he wasn't dressed like that for me"/"he is communicating his sense of pride and self-worth") and second expresses self-satisfaction at his own willingness to recognize that dignity -- without ever confronting the conditions or ideologies that enable such assumptions as its absence in the first place.

The comments perform this same economy of affirmation and forgetting -- this is the conditional affirmation of the other's dignity in so far as he appears to be "like us," and this is the selective forgetting of the histories of labor and race that continue to exclude the other from the measure of humanity. Especially here, because conceptions of labor are always interpolated with considerations of race, gender, sexuality, and nation, the figure of the black driver signifies in all these at once.

That is, in the following comments we see certain conceptions of contracted and service labor as they intersect with forms of racism and racialization (about black masculinity through prisms of racialized threat and its "domestication" in particular), material privileges and class comfort (consider the remarks about "trust" and "politeness"), and rules of gender stylization:

I immediately thought of Marshall (Ossie Davis) the limo driver in Joe vs the Volcano. Very nice.

He looks clean, and he looks proud of his job!

Pure style indeed. Could you post his contact information? I am in the Bay Area every few months and would like to book him.

VERY well put. everyone should take such pride in their jobs, regardless of the profession.

What a nice-looking man! You're right; taking care in one's appearance definitely inspires confidence. I'd definitely trust him to drive me anywhere.

Echoed repeatedly is the notion that "pride in one's work" is an important but increasingly rare quality. (This leads many commentators to wax nostalgic for an idealized image of the past, which carries its own historical racial connotations.) But what sort of attitude is this about those forms of labor that are comprised of economic vulnerability and racial exploitation? To emphasize, indeed to belabor, "pride in his work" as such is thus merely to raise a rather conventional attitude about the other's compliance with capitalism's often violent inequities.

That is, when does "pride in his work" slide seamlessly into "knows his place"? Such comments as "I would like to book him," "He looks proud of his job," express pleasure at what is presented as the scene of a black man proud to be at the service of others.

Thus the violence of historical servitude disappears, and it occurs to only a very few in his audience (of the commentators) that perhaps this performance is less pride and more prudence. In an uncertain economy, an individual employed in the service sector --especially as a driver or some other position requiring also affective labor (e.g., smiling, nodding, chuckling at terrible jokes)-- must perform satisfaction with their position in order to ensure their continued employment.

Showing this post to my students, many of them understood this immediately: that doing service work is a careful negotiation of bodily and sartorial performativity informed by race, gender, sexuality, and nation, under unequal conditions of labor and capital.

Meanwhile, I want to believe that this comment is the work of a minion at The Onion, because the final bit about his teeth seems so ludicrous it must be satire lampooning the racism of above-mentioned observations about the driver's cleanliness: "Well put, Sart! Regardless of one's job, even if it's just to drive people around, one should always look nice, as this gentleman certainly does. We can't see his shoes, so we'll have to take your word that they are shined, but we can see his teeth, and they are well brushed indeed, further proof of his self-esteem."

A few comments do protest ("The fact that he is a driver doesn't mean he has a personal sound track which consists of 'It's a Hard-Knock Life'......"), and Stephanie writes at length:

You write all of this as though the fact that someone with a lower-class service job actually cares about themselves and has self-confidence and "dignity" is remarkable. He might not have been dressed like this specifically for you, but who knows why he dresses like this...could very well have something to do with wanting to get ahead in a service industry. As a friend of mine said,

"Additionally, the post, especially in remarks to politeness and "self-worth" makes me think of Richard Wright's novels, and specifically of Bigger Thomas in "Native Son," or of generations of black porters who learned to smile at every white person, or of cooks, drivers, and other employment groups of subservient Negroes that have faded into cultural memory."

Not that there is anything wrong with that on his part, just that I feel like you are romanticizing/aestheticizing away a lot of the more gruesome aspects of class, labor, and race in America. Which is potentially dangerous, and not in a good way. (Or, at least not in a good way for those of us who care about changing those conditions for the better.)

While allowing other comments --notably, the more obviously fucked-up ones expressing surprise and pleasure at the driver's cleanliness-- go unremarked, the Sartorialist did respond to Stephanie with a few disproportionate sentiments, including: "The problem is not me ....it's you! you try to scare people with your hyper-political correctness so everyone is scared to say anything.... Next time read what i wrote and not what you think you can twist around to fit your daily pc rant." (Oh, cliche*!) After Stephanie gently pointed out that she was just one comment among many --most of which are uniformly fawning-- and had no actual power to censor anyone on his blog, the Sartorialist apologized, sort of ("we were too harsh on each other").

* From this post: "Underlying every complaint of 'PC' is the absurd notion that members of dominant mainstream society have been victimized by an arbitrarily hypersensitive prohibition against linguistic and cultural constructions that are considered historical manifestations of bigotry." And furthermore, from Racialicious: "Berg explains that in its original context, PC was a pejorative term used by people who felt they were losing something. Exactly what they were losing is very hard to describe, especially to them. But many sociologists and historians today have come to a consensus on what they call it: it’s a loss of privilege—and in terms of race, a loss of white privilege."

PICTURING POLITICS: T-Shirt Imperatives

2009-10-22T14:08:00.007-04:00

There is just so much wrong with American Apparel issuing a t-shirt imperative to "Free Iran." I am powerfully reminded of Michel Foucault's thesis that the discourse of freedom is constantly produced through the practice of security, and of Inderpal Grewal's remark that humanitarianism is the name of American empire's condition of possibility. (Thanks, Golnar, for the creepy image.)

LINKAGE: The Sunday Best and Liminally Minded

2009-10-20T01:19:00.007-04:00

Look at this lovely badge declaring our newfound pride! For other fabulous blogs that made Thom Wong's list of Best Style Writing, see his own wonderful style blog The Sunday Best.

Also, we only just discovered that fellow traveler Hua Hsu, possibly the coolest academic and Atlantic Monthy correspondent, has been reading us on the politics of style (with this generous mention) even as we've been reading him on the promise of culture and music.

PODCAST: Addicted to Race

2009-10-19T19:21:00.013-04:00

If you missed hearing Minh-Ha co-hosting Racialicious.com's weekly podcast called "Addicted to Race" with Tami Winfrey Harris (of Love Isn't Enough) and Lisa Wade (of Sociological Images) last Sunday afternoon, click here to listen.

FYI: The discussion on the French Vogue blackfacing fiasco we posted on begins at around 39:30 on the time counter. Also, there were a few moments of technical difficulty so expect some dead air.

PUBLICATION: Monica Miller on Slaves To Fashion

2009-10-19T12:03:00.007-04:00

Duke University Press's new release, Monica Miller's Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, promises to appear on all my future syllabi, no matter the course. Read Miller's illuminating essay about the book's core concepts and their development at Rorotoko, an online venue for engaging authors and ideas in intellectual nonfiction. Below is a long excerpt to whet your appetite:

Slaves to Fashion began with a footnote I encountered in graduate school. While auditing a class on W.E.B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, I came across a troubling reference to the fact that the revered Du Bois had been caricatured as a black dandy. In the class, we spent even weeks in detailed analysis of Du Bois’s skill as a rhetorician and lyricist. In order to appreciate the truly interdisciplinary nature of his talents, we took very seriously his training as a philosopher, historian and sociologist. The image of Du Bois that emerged was that of an erudite, punctilious, quintessential “race man.” None of this prepared me for the footnote and accompanying illustration from a political cartoon of Du Bois as a degraded buffoon, overly dressed and poorly comported, whose erudition had been turned into what the cartoon called “ebucation.”

Only when I began to research the history of dandyism and, in particular, the racialization of the dandy figure, did I realize the complex strategy and history behind that caricature. Dandyism has been used by Africans and blacks to project images of themselves as dignified and distinguished, it has also been used by the majority culture (and blacks) to denigrate and ridicule black aspirations. Slaves to Fashion examines the interrelatedness of these impulses and what the deployment of one strategy or the other says about the state of black people and culture at different moments in history.

Although dandyism is often considered a mode of extremely frivolous behavior attentive only to surfaces or facades and a practice of the white, European elite and effete, I argue that it is a creative and subtle mode of critique, regardless of who is deploying it. Though often considered fools, hopelessly caught up in the world of fashion, dandies actually appear in periods of social, political and cultural transition, telling us much about cultural politics through their attitude and appearance. Particularly during times when social mores shift, style and charisma allow these primarily male figures to distinguish themselves when previously established privileges of birth and wealth, or ways of measuring social standing might be absent or uncertain. Style—both sartorial and behavioral— affords dandies the ability and power to set new fashions, to create or imagine worlds more suited to their often avant-garde tastes. Dandyism is thus not just a practice of dress, but also a visible form of investigating and questioning cultural realities.

...

Anyone can be in vogue without apparent strategy, but dandies commit to a study of the fashions that define them and an examination of the trends around—which they can continually re-define themselves. Therefore, when racialized, the dandy’s affectations (fancy dress, arch attitude, fey and fierce gesture) signify well beyond obsessive self-fashioning—rather, the figure embodies the importance of the struggle to control representation and self- and cultural-expression.

Manipulations of dress and dandyism have been particularly important modes of self-expression and social commentary for Africans before contact with Europeans and especially afterwards. In fact, in order to endure the attempted erasure or reordering of black identity in the slave trade and its aftermath, those Africans arriving in England, America, or the West Indies had to fashion new identities, to make the most out of the little that they were given. Whether luxury slaves or field hands, their new lives nearly always began with the issuance of new clothes.

Enslaved people, however, frequently modified these garments in order to indicate their own ideas about the relationship between slavery, servitude, and subjectivity. For example, there are documented cases of slaves saving single buttons and ribbons to add to their standard issue coarse clothing, examples of slaves stealing or “borrowing” clothing, especially garments made from fine fabrics, from their masters for special occasions. Slaves created underground second-hand clothing markets in major cities to augment their wardrobes and to exchange clothing that identified them when they wanted to escape. In fact, many slaves “dressed up” or “cross-dressed” literally when they absconded, wearing clothing beyond their station or of the other gender in efforts to appear free and be mobile. The black dandy’s style thus communicates simultaneously self-worth, cultural regard, a knowingness about how blackness is represented and seen. Black dandyism has been an important part of and visualization of the negotiation between slavery and freedom.

Things I've Learned From Students #34: Nontsikelelo Veleko

2009-10-19T09:17:00.024-04:00

One of my former students, Janel B., sent me to this post called "Don't Sleep on Africa" on the fashionable Livejournal community called black cigarette, and thereby introducing me to, among others, South African photographer Nontsikelelo Veleko and her amazing portraits of Johannesburg stylish street denizens.

The entire post at black cigarette begins with this brief intervention into the problematically differential distribution of "style:"

Stockholm. Paris. London. New York. Helsinki. Milan. Tokyo.

These seem to be to go-to places when it comes to "street-style" and what's hot in general on most fashion blogs, but I just wanted to share some of the street-style you'll find on the African continent.... South African street style is rarely sleek and chic - it's irreverent, vibrant and daring. It mixes patterns and textures, with echoes of mid 70s style (and just a splash of "geek chic").

(Consider too the fact that Feedshion, which collects "the best street fashion photos from all the greatest street style blogs for your viewing pleasure," happens to feature only street style blogs from the usual suspects and none from South America or Africa. Of course, street style blogs are never accurate snapshots of this construct called "the street" anyway, but that's another post.)

The photo-heavy post, featuring also African designers, is a wonderful contrast to those editorials in American and European fashion magazines whose visual vocabularies for "Africa" are unbelievably narrow and alienating (Galliano, I'm looking at you and your "tribal" fetish figure shoes). The continued refusal to see the African other as coeval (that is, contemporaneous) with the so-called modern observer, most obviously manifested in the designation "tribal chic," betrays the still-haunting presence of colonial aesthetics in Western art and design.

In the photographs found at "Don't Sleep On Africa," we see a much more nuanced postcolonial aesthetics reflecting multiple modernities as well as unalterable histories: these include the multiple imperial enterprises of the "scramble for Africa," but also the circuits of what Paul Gilroy called the "black Atlantic," through which we might look again at these photographs, their performativity and politics of consumption. In doing so, we might find in some of these images a subtle critique of the West's cultural realities, through which those familiar fashionable markers of "tribal chic" (zebra stripes, for instance), when they do appear, are rendered insistently, assuredly modern.

Edited to add additional links supplied by Sociological Images and Racialicious, by way of the LJ community Debunking White.

LINKAGE: IFB Network and Links a la Mode

2009-10-17T14:06:00.002-04:00

Ethics and Morality in Fashion City

Edited by Ashe Mischief

This week’s Links á la Mode covers the gambit in regards to the ethical and moral questions surrounding fashion right now…. we have Confessions of a Fashion Editor’s take on fashion blogging & paid posts, and Oranges and Apples reports on a German magazine’s ban of professional models. threadbared talks about Lara Stone, French Vogue, and the controversial use of blackface in recent issue, while Hong Kong Fashion Geek revisits the argument about fashion, price discrimination, and designer knock-offs as Alexander McQueen sues Steve Madden.

As usual, there was a spectacular round-up of links in the forum as well, all worthy of checking out!

Links à la Mode : October 15th

Confessions of a Fashion Editor – Morality, the law, and fashion blogging
Denimaniac: – Best Denim Shops | Q&A with LA’s Mister Freedom
dramatis personae – Costumes from Holidays Past…
ferOHHHsh: – Champagne from a shoe?? J’Taime Le Rituel!
From Betsy With Love – Bringing some Lynchian Style to the Web!
Grit and Glamour – Manscaping 101: Guys should groom, not preen. A little chest hair never hurt (but a shaved chest does).
Hong Kong Fashion Geek – What’s the harm in Steve Madden doing an Alexander McQueen knockoff? Is it really sue-worthy?
idiosyncratic style: – Idiosyncratic Style: Dare to put your legs center stage this season.
Independent Fashion Bloggers – Poll : How do you feel about Sponsored Posts?
Large Black Diary: – Austie has a beautiful collection of hair accessories
Oranges and Apples: – German magazines bans professional models – an in-depth disussion
Prom Mafia – Betsey Johnson does DC.
Rags to Reverie: – Five tips for shopping at an American Apparel Flea Market
Retro Chick – Lusious Lingerie: Vintage Style from Fred & Ginger
sweetarchivia: – Review of Man Shops Globe event held at the San Francisco Anthropologie store
The Art of Accessories: – The Art of Accessories shows you how to accessorize your winter wardrobe with tights.
THE COVETED – SPUN Around: Integrating organic basics in your wardrobe.
The Curvy Fashionista – The Business of Plus Size Fashion: Blogger turned boutique owner Marie Denee discusses the growth of plus size fashion.
The Working Wardrobe – Virtual Dress Code: How Professionalism is Working its Way into the Avatar Wardrobe
the3st: – The First EVER Philadelphia Fashion Week is this week. Interview with the directors of the week.
threadbared: – We react to the recent Lara Stone editorial in French Vogue in “Blackface, and the Violence of Revulsion.”
|mode.ulation|: – Mode-ulation is back from hiatus..we bring you a quick glance through Paris fashion week with the cutest trend – the updated toga.

Blackface, and the Violence of Revulsion

2009-10-12T16:38:00.010-04:00

This post is supposed to be about the latest occurrences of blackface in fashion -- specifically, the 14-page editorial featuring Lara Stone, a white Dutch model, painted black and shot by Steven Klein for the October 2009 issue of French Vogue and also Carlos Diez's show at Madrid Fashion Week (September 22, 2009) in which models walked in blackface and, at times, with bared breasts.

There is indeed quite a lot to say about both events. To begin, fashion's seeming ineptness for dealing with race in ways that do not accommodate and/or supplement the already too long histories of racial objectification and commodification. We've discussed much of this history on Threadbared (see especially here, here, here, here, and here) already and will no doubt continue to, as there seems to be an inexhaustible amount of material. Second, these events (and others like it) are revealing of the ways in which multiculturalism and multiracialism --under the guise of postracialism, postmodernism, or just artistic edginess-- enables the continuation of white supremacy. For example, some are defending French Vogue for its provocativeness ("creative images . . . can sometimes [be] off-putting") and for its postracialism (arguing that it is "sort of beautiful in that having a person of one ethnic background look convincingly like she might be of another race shows the interconnectedness of us all"). But what is on display in French Vogue and on Diez's runway is not beautiful black bodies, but what Nirmal Puwar describes as "the universal empty point" that white female bodies are able to occupy precisely because their bodies are racially unmarked: "[Thus] they can play with the assigned particularity of ethnicized dress without suffering the 'violence of revulsion.'"

The "violence of revulsion" that women of color generally, and black women particularly in the cases of this issue of French Vogue and Diez's show, experience is not mediated by these "edgy" acts of "postracialism". In fact, the violence of revulsion is redoubled here. Blackface highlights the privileged universal empty point that white bodies continue to occupy even in this so-called postracial moment, and in so doing, it positions racial difference against whiteness, as the other to whiteness. Moreover, blackface and other performances of racial commodification produce a different kind of "violence of revulsion" -- an everyday violence of revulsion like I experienced when I discovered Klein's editorial and Diez's fashion show.

By this second order of "violence of revulsion," I mean the assault of racism and the assault of colonialism's traces on what was for me, until that moment of violence, a relatively mundane workday at home. Violently interrupting this scene of banality is not simply these images of racial arrogance, but my own visceral response of anger, exasperation, disappointment, and a feeling I can only describe as racism fatigue. Such images and their inevitable postmodern, postracial, freedom-of-artistic-expression discourses and apologists are not only tired, today they are tiring.

Life-Saving Fashion

2009-10-08T14:57:00.009-04:00

Yesterday, we posted on Alyce Santoro's repurposed audio cassette tape ties which are constituted at the intersection of the sartorial and the sonic (as well as the visual and the aural). Today, we learned (from the FIT Facebook feed!) about Dr. Elena Bodnar's sartorial-scientific invention, the bra/gas mask, and a bulletproof hair weave.

From the New Zealand Herald: "Bodnar, a Ukraine native who now lives in Chicago, started her medical career studying the effects of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster." According to Bodnar, "If people had had cheap, readily available gas masks in the first hours after the disaster, they may have avoided breathing in Iodine-131, which causes radiation sickness . . . [Moreover,] the bra-turned-gas masks could have also been useful during the September 11 terrorist attacks, and for women caught outside during the dust storms that recently enveloped Sydney."

For these life-saving bras, Bodnar earned an Ig Nobel prize from the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

The bulletproof hair weave is an older story but nonetheless relevant to this admittedly silly post. Last February, Briana Bonds of Kansas City, Missouri survived what would have been a fatal gun shot wound from her jilted boyfriend because her hair weave stopped the bullet. See the video below.

ART: Sonic Fabric Ties

2009-10-07T15:19:00.004-04:00

Fashion and music share a long and complex history. The conceptual artist Alyce Santoro is intertwining these histories in intriguingly material ways by repurposing audiocassette tapes into mixed media eco-fashionable ties (from $90 - $140). Most fabulous is the synaesthetic component of the sonic fabric. From a description on Ecouterre's website: the ties are "'playable' when you run a tape head across the surface." Fashion you can both see and hear!

The Issue on Black Models

2009-10-05T14:12:00.011-04:00

While the much-ballyhooed Italian Vogue's "All Black" issue last July 2008 was an overwhelming disappointment, it apparently succeeded in awakening the fashion industry to the fact that industries of beauty culture produce, circulate, and secure very limited ideas of beauty especially in relation to race and size. Unfortunately, a lot of the response from American Vogue has been of the "some of my best friends are black" variety. Consider, for example, the editorial Vogue ran called, "Is Fashion Racist?" Recounting the hard luck stories of three young (and working) black models, Chanel Iman, Jourdan Dunn, and Arlenis Sosa, the article seems to conclude that the answer to racism is for models to keep a "strenuously positive" attitude. Iman offers this advice: "Nobody likes to work with someone negative." And further, that the real problem in the fashion industry is not racism but the supermodel's fall from power.

The latest issue of Teen Vogue, however, presents a much more honest portrayal of the politics of race and beauty in fashion. And again, Iman and Dunn are featured. Rather than glossing over the institutional structures of fashion's racism, they rightly point out that the lack of opportunities for black models reproduces racial alienation. On this issue, a journalist at Jezebel is also astute when she asserts that "black" can be a homogenizing category of identity that misrecognizes the ethnic and racial diversity of non-white models. "Selina Khan is from the French-speaking Caribbean island of Martinique and swears she's not black, but 'Indian, mixed with Arabic and Creole, and Vietnamese.'"

Actually what Khan really says is: "My mom's Indian, mixed with Arabic and Creole, and my dad is Vietnamese. Yep, Indian and Chinese." When the interviewer asks Khan to clarify--"I thought you said Vietnamese"--Khan explains knowingly, "It's ethnically the same thing. Just a different country."

Now, if only we could get Khan to stop misrecognizing all Asians as being the same.

PUBLICATION: The Woman in the Zoot Suit

2009-10-05T08:04:00.004-04:00

La Bloga, a collective blog on Chicana/o and Latina/o arts and culture, has a fascinating interview with Catherine Ramirez, an associate professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (just out this year on Duke University Press).

I was especially gratified to find this interview as I was teaching one of Ramirez's earlier essays, "Crimes of Fashion: The Pachuca and Chicana Style Politics," in my fashion course under the rubric of "subcultures and style police," alongside Kobena Mercer, Angela Davis (on her "afro image"), and a handful of news clippings and current editorials about the creeping spread of "baggy pants" ordinances -- that form of sartorial profiling that is also racial profiling, operationalizing (as Foucault put it in Abnormal) the categorization of individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it."

Writing for La Bloga, Olga Garcia Echeverria prefaces the must-read interview with this lovely series of ruminations :

When I wasn't highlighting passages in Catherine Ramirez' book, I found myself staring at the cover. The featured picture, printed in the Los Angeles Times in 1942, is both intriguing and haunting. It captures three young Chicana women being taken into police custody for allegedly being members of a pachuca gang, the Black Widows. One woman is gazing directly into the camera. I can't look at her without wondering who she is and what she's thinking. In fact, she inspires a litany of questions...

Who are these young women in baggy pants and huaraches entering a police car? What are their stories? Why have they and other women like them of the World War II era been so largely ignored by scholars and historians? And how is it that el pachuco (once demonized as a social menace, effeminate dresser and clueless pocho) got re-envisioned into history as an icon of masculinity, resistance, and cultural pride, whereas his female counterpart, la pachuca, dwindled into erasure?