What is this "Fake" in the Fake Sartorialist?

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: A Case for Legitimate Knock-offs

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?

Democratization, Schmocratization

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.

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

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

Fat and Fashion

Again, all apologies for the absence. Minh-ha and I were slammed this last semester with teaching and writing, and had no time for the blog. We're specifically getting together in February, though, to write some collaborative pieces for our upcoming book manuscript on war and fashion (yes, those two things together!), so hopefully we'll pound a few out for this space as well.

In the meanwhile, let me plug Fatshionista, a collaborative blog about fat and fashion that is consistently smart and on point about the discourses and practices that imagine these qualities as perpetually at odds. This last post by Leslie is an extended riff on the fabulous post at Jezebel about fashion writers' proclivity to equate fat with "sloppy" and lazy, and to thereby name fat as the enemy of fashion proper:

Although the sizism of these kinds of pieces — specifically denied by both writers — is easily parsed from the continual references to "tent-size" shirts, "sloppiness," and “XXL polo shirts”, what’s also distressing is their classism. While dressing well needn’t be expensive, what these writers seem to be calling for isn’t merely fashion as fun self-expression, it’s fashion as a system of social representation — the idea that one ought to look good, so that one can be recognized by other good-looking people, and feel mutually reassured in one's tastes.

But it's more than classism, Leslie argues. That, in fact, fat at any price range is never deemed fashionable:

High fashion and the arbiters of style have a built-in fat ceiling beyond which no body past a particular size (an 8? a 10? a - gasp - 12?) may pass; fat people, as a group, simply lack any kind of similar access to stylish and well-fitting clothes in any kind of real selection, not simply because those clothes are expensive - although they are - but because they don’t exist. While some heinously overpriced blahwear for up-to-a-size-24 fats can be found at a premium in the darkest dustiest basement-banished corner of the occasional high-end department store (or, at least, on their website) the selection even among the $400 polyester jersey dresses is - to put it delicately - unimpressive. And there is no such thing as fat haute couture, period.

Soup or Sale

Apologies for our unexpected sabbatical from threadbared! For my part, journal article revisions, rogue or maybe just lost TAs, teaching, and drawn-out faculty meetings about departmental minutiae left me with no time for a lot of things including posting. But the semester is in in its final two weeks! So, taking Mimi's optimistic cue of things to come, I wanted to mention for now that a pop-up retail store called The 1929 (124 Mott St. in Little Italy) is giving away soup and coffee to shoppers.

I haven't visited the store yet (will swing by this week on my way to the Alexander Wang sample sale) but Daily News describes the store this way: "The street level store is decked out with racks of snazzy dresses, pants and tops by independent designers. The basement level has been transformed into an art and performance space by night and a spot where hungry shoppers, or even passersby, can pick up a free bowl of soup and coffee during the day."

The community organizing and activist spirit of this soup kitchen/retail store is intentional - Aaron Genuth, the store's manager, says the owners were inspired by President Elect Obama. Levi Okunov, part owner of The 1929, notes too, "Fashion has always been something for the rich. Who said it can't be for the masses? We want people to come here, have a bowl of soup, try on some clothing and maybe check out the artwork downstairs."

I'll be interested to see how this new incarnation of fashion-as-therapy-for-the-masses develops. It's clearly more grassroots than the recent fashion industry-led "cheap-chic" movements which offered up capsule collections by luxury designers like Vera Wang, Phillip Lim, Doo-ri Chung, and Proenza Schouler at mass retail stores like Kohl's, The Gap, and Uniqlo as a post-9/11 emotional and economic salve. But the idea that The 1929 is "a place where fashionistas and the down-and-out soon could be rubbing shoulders" is too glib. While the recession affects everyone, some of the "down-and-out" are cushioned by their fat assets.

FILM: "Phenomenology of Body"

I just watched Daphne Guinness’ short film “Phenomenology of Body” which premiered on New York Times T Magazine today. Something of a misnomer, “Phenomenology of Body” doesn’t offer a discussion of bodies but rather a broad survey of archetypal women identifiable by her mode of dress or undress, as is the case with Eve and her terribly trite fig leaf. Each celebrated female figure is rotated in and out in rough chronological order—Eve to Joan of Arc to Marie Antoinette and so on. (There’s definitely a Leni Riefenstahl-esque quality to Guinness’ work.) The film’s dramatic end is a Muslim woman in a red burqa who unveils herself. In the feminist logic of the film, this unveiling is necessary so that she can be included in this Western imagined history of women and fashion.

In a Women’s Wear Daily article, Guinness has this to say about her film: “It’s about the body and the soul, concealing and revealing, empowerment; clothing has always been so political. The message is that we all have the power to choose.”

Mimi and I have been working on companion essays that examine the discursive and ideological operations of fashion and beauty in an age of terrorism. I won’t rehearse our entire arguments here—we’ll let you know when/where the papers are published!—but I do want to say that Guinness’ description eerily echoes the mission statements of other programs and campaigns of “empowerment” that aim to unveil Muslim women and democratize fashion for middle and working class American women by linking fashion and beauty to the language of human rights and civil rights. (I hope Mimi will expand on this in a later post or in the comments!) Of course, “empowerment,” as we see in “Phenomenology of Body,” is wielded in patronizing and imperialist ways that suggest the masses of unfashionably oppressed and oppressively unfashionable women are in need of saving.

Fashion's Social Consciousness

To add to the discussion in previous posts regarding the emergent social consciousness of the fashion industry in this post-September 11^th moment, I wanted to mention these three events. While cynics have sneered about Designers for Darfur that “Like AIDS before it, Darfur as become the shibboleth one clueless celebrity whispers to another to assure themselves that they aren’t shallow and callous,” I’m abstaining from any judgment. Whatever the intention is, if there is a real political and material effect, I applaud these efforts. So far, though, there’s no report (that I can find) on how much money was raised and to what use it has been put. I’ll keep looking . . .

Designers for Darfur, a fashion show and auction created by Malcolm Harris, designer of Mal Sirrah Inc. and model Lydia Hearst and sponsored by Steve Madden raises awareness and funds that will end the genocide in Darfur, a small region in Sudan where 400,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million have been displaced by the Sudanese government in an attempt to quash rebel groups like the Sudanese Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) that are challenging decades of governmental neglect and oppression. All of the clothing created for the event on February 9, 2007 featured Africa’s colors: red, green, black, and yellow.

Fashion for Relief is a fashion show and auction created by super model Naomi Campbell. Proceeds from ticket sales and the auction will be donated to Americares for the purpose of aiding the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The fashion show, which closed New York Fall Fashion Week 2007 on September 16 featured celebrities on the catwalk wearing two looks by top designers like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Zac Posen, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Dolce & Gabbana, and Donna Karan.

Closing London Fall Fashion Week 2007 on September 22, Campbell’s Fashion for Relief raised money for the Rotary Flood Disaster Appeal that will assist English communities affected by this summer’s floods, damages which are estimated to be 3 billion pounds ($6.1 billion).

Politics of Fashion or Fashionable Politics?

On the cover of the current issue of Time Out New York (September 13-19, 2007) is a rather undecorous image of a black calf-hair round-toed stiletto stamping out the September issue of Vogue magazine as if it were a stale cigarette butt. The subheading beneath the image reads: “How to master this season’s style without selling your soul to the devils wearing Prada.” For those who venerate this monthly bible of fashion, TONY’s cover will no doubt ignite a probably not so deep seated contempt for the 20 and 30-something hipsters of lower Manhattan and the outer boroughs who are too cool for establishment fashion and who seem to be TONY’s target demographic. But they are in the shrinking majority.

Recent print and online comments regarding the publication of the mammoth September issue of Vogue has described the magazine as “useless,” “a sad joke [with which] the racism and elitist mentality of Vogue is astonishing,” “an old bitch gone in the teeth,” and “a dead magazine.”

While it’s doubtful that the visual and verbal grousing against Vogue will have a real material impact on its reputation in the world of fashion—to the contrary, singling out Vogue reinforces its power as the publication to beat (up on)—such discontent underscores a point made in a previous posting about the increasing attention to and concern for fashion’s democratization. (See “Right to Bare Arms” in the August 2007 archives.)

But picking on Vogue seems unfair—Fashion (with a capital F) has long relied on uneven relationships of power while either ignoring them (by making invisible the circuits of domestic immigrant and transnational cheap labor that produces it) or romanticizing them (by using nostalgic backdrops of colonial fantasies or by appropriating “ethnic” trends and textiles to market a white upper-class metropolitan globe-trotting lifestyle). Before Kate Moss graced Roberto Cavalli’s safari-lite ads and before “The Chronicles of Keira [Knightley]” in which we see her documenting her East African trip in a leather-bound Louis Vuitton journal while wearing a creamy Marc Jacobs ruffled smock dress, there was Donna Karan’s advertising campaign set in Viet Nam.

In March 2001, Donna Karan introduced her Spring 2001 Donna Karan Collection line with a series of photographs depicting a love story between Jeremy Irons and Milla Jovovich set in Ho Chi Minh City. Karan described the narrative as “an adventurous, romantic journey where East meets West.” But the “meeting” comes across as more of an “occupation.” The steely-jawed Irons and the doe-eyed Jovovich, (along with their heterosexual entanglements, idealized White bodies, and melancholic love story) occupy the foreground of each photograph while the people and landscape of Ho Chi Minh City blur together to form one indiscernible backdrop, there only to buttress the fantasy Karan’s Spring 2001 line is meant to embody. Nearly identical versions of this fantasy have been rehearsed in Western cultural productions like Out of Africa (1985) an adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s book by the same name published in 1937, in the 1885 publication of Joseph Thomson’s Through Maasailand, and throughout American history beginning with the founding fathers’ desire for Chinese tea, porcelain, and the genteel culture these “Oriental” products conveyed.

Given this long and expansive history, why bash Vogue and why now? As previously mentioned in “Right to Bare Arms,” the fashion industry’s heightened concerns for democratizing its industry which, in a post 9/11 reality, was at risk of seeming hopelessly out of touch with the more immediate concerns of everyday people has everything to do with the heightened awareness of Americans’ collective vulnerability in relation to our national (in)security. Today, the superficial elitism that Vogue represents and reproduces (but certainly does not own) and which was once taken for granted as intrinsic to haute couture registers as highhanded and outdated. Sartorial icons like Sarah Jessica Parker have declared fashion “not a luxury but a right” and iconic designers like Vera Wang and Karl Lagerfeld are selling their wares at price points that are affordable even on a mall rat’s allowance. What has been conventionally perceived as the province of moneyed skinny girls who were about as deep as their Vincent Longo Lip and Cheek Gel Stain and other like-minded trustafarians is today being refigured as every(wo)man’s domain. Miuccia Prada explains, “Even when people don’t have anything, they have their bodies and their clothes.”

Rather than jump on the Vogue haters’ bandwagon (I look forward to reading the elegant prose of André Leon Talley’s “Life with André” too much to give up my subscription), I want to draw attention to the many semantic sleights of hand that are undergirding Fashion’s emergent humanitarianism. In the above quote, when asked about fashion, Miuccia Prada, the matriarch of Italian fashion and one of the most respected designers in the world, dresses it down by calling it “clothes”; once polarized and polarizing, “fashion” and “clothes” are conflated as if they were synonymous terms.

This conflation, though, elides and distracts from the discursive and material differences that constitute the fashion industry and a socially stratified society like ours. The fashion industry depends on change and difference. The planned obsolescence inherent in trends guarantees that consumers continue to rid their closets of “(unfashionable) clothes” and replenish them with the latest “fashions”. If fashion and clothes were actually synonymous terms—in other words, if all clothes were equally fashionable (in that all sartorial choices fashion identities equally)—a multibillion dollar industry which includes apparel and textile manufacturers, advertising agencies, modeling agencies, cosmetics companies, and printers would grind to a halt because status would no longer be conferred through fashion and therefore fashion would be meaningless. And not even the most egalitarian of fashionistas want that.

On the other hand, the rigid distinction or polarization between The Fashionable and The Clothed often produces egregiously classist and racist notions of human value. A person wearing a Chanel suit inhabits a kinder world than a person wearing “Mom jeans” and an ill-fitting rugby shirt. Likewise, the ao dai that the faceless Vietnamese woman carting the languorous Jovovich around is wearing and the red robes of the Maasai men who are symbolically and literally positioned below Knightley, in the Western imaginary that is reflected in Karan’s ads, is not “fashion” but “traditional garb” or worse, “ethnic costume.”

Slogans that universalize fashion as everyone’s right and sound bites that rhapsodize clothing as a collective ritual of humanity has done very little to disrupt the neocolonial relationship that haute monde fantasies are still built on. At the same time, I worry that the increased conscientiousness of consumers to the politics of fashion is little more than the posturing of fashionable politics.

Let’s hope that “Save Darfur” doesn’t go the way of “Free Tibet.”

Chloe Sees Red over Topshop's Yellow Dress

Should there be any doubt as to which direction fashion’s democratic impulses flow, one need only consider See By Chloé’s recent legal victory over Topshop to know that our inalienable “right” to fashion (to paraphrase Sarah Jessica Parker) has its limits and certainly does not extend to Chloé’s yellow over-all dress (on sale now for $205 at Net-a-Porter.com, http://www.net-a-porter.com/product/19187) which they argue the British mass market retailer copied from their cruise collection (and sold for about $70).

For this misstep, Topshop agreed to pay the Paris house £12,000 (roughly $24,000) in damages and legal costs and destroy the remaining 2,000 dresses (744 dresses were already sold).

I have to admit that I find this a curious decision for an industry that is constantly recycling, referencing, reinscribing, and reworking fashions from other cultures, eras, and social groups.

I wonder how much the Harajuku street kids will get from their settlement against Gwen Stefani . . .

Jailbirds Want to Break into Fashion

It used to be that ex-cons would have to broker a record deal before starting their own designer line of fashion but the female inmates at San Vittore prison are cutting out the middle man. A recent article in The New Zealand Herald called “Jailbirds Want to Break into Fashion” (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10454767) and reports that this Milan based prison that has in its past housed fascists, terrorists, and murderers is now the home to emerging designers. The cultural arts programs which include courses in film editing, theater, poetry, and tailoring are giving inmates more than “survival” skills, they are helping them discover their passion and talents in an effort to decrease recidivism rates. Two t-shirt labels from the prison called “Made in Jail” (established in 2001 by Mirko Prochilo, a 17 year-old arrested for robbery) and “Jail Cats” (more recently established) have successfully launched. Clients of San Vittore designers include television shows, posh boutiques, and Milan’s famous La Scala opera house.

I love that the democratization of fashion is happening from the bottom up rather than the top down. While the sartorial sensibilities of Kate Moss, Vera Wang, and other fashionistas are transmitted to the masses with their budget-conscious lines—leaving intact couture fashion as an elite world in which little people with thinner bank accounts emulate, the San Vittore inmates are changing what it means to be a couturier by injecting themselves and their sensibilities into it.

The Right to Bare Arms (for a fraction of the cost!)

One of the earliest memories I have of shopping is also one of the first memories I have in the United States. It is the one of me and my family strolling around the Arcade Shopping Center in Ojai, California, a lethargic small town just southeast of Santa Barbara. At the shopping center, as with any public space in those days, my dad, a former Air Force pilot, laid down a very firm chain of command: my older brother was responsible for me, I was responsible for my little sister, and my little sister—barely 2 years old then—was just responsible for trying to keep up. Her little feet barely skimmed the sidewalk as one of us dragged her along at a clipped pace. On those weekends, my parents contented themselves with window shopping, a term I learned early on and a concept I found impossibly dissatisfying even as a 3 year old. (That's me with the zaftig cheeks, on the far left, with my brother and sister on a snack break at The Arcade Shopping Center -- if I can't shop, at least I can eat!)

While the frozen mannequins with the blank faces and deadened eyes frightened me, the clothes were always exciting. My mom, an amazing dressmaker in her own right who made most of her clothes and almost all of ours until we reached middle school age, studied the blouses and dresses that she would later make for herself. I never learned how to sew but what I did learn from those early “shopping” trips was an appreciation for fashion that has grown exponentially now that I live in New York City.

Arguably one of the most fashionable cities in the world, New York City is also a city fashioned by its sartorial culture. (Lost in the city? Take a look at who’s wearing what and how, and you’ll have a good idea of where you are.) After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in lower Manhattan, the relationship between the city and its sartorialists became much more acute. Of course 9/11 rocked the entire country but it had an especially profound impact for New Yorkers as well as the industry that is so central to the city’s identity. As the nation’s attention was wrenched by issues of foreign policy, national security, and terrorism, the fashion industry felt compelled to justify the relevance of its existence. Fashion magazine editors defended their industry against charges of self absorption and social irrelevance by asserting fashion’s relationship to a national identity. Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour asserted that “Fashion is essential in these difficult times, paradoxically, to keep us in touch with our dreamy, fanciful, self-pleasing natures” and Amy Spindler declared in New York Times Magazine, “[F]rivolous fashion is itself a patriotic symbol of America: You may never be able to afford that shredded Georgette Givenchy gown, but at least you aren’t forced to live underneath a burqa.”

Blue jeans, once symbolic of American practicality and working-class industriousness, now had lofty names like Citizens of Humanity, Melting Pot, True Religion, and Sacred Blue—all established post-9/11—that echoed the industry’s awareness (and anxiety) about the need to appeal to consumers who have been incontrovertibly changed by the realities and rhetoric of global and domestic terrorism. And footwear titan Manolo Blahnik, concerned about national security, scrapped his ideas for a 3.5-inch titanium-heeled stiletto that he worried might be brandished as a weapon or erroneously picked up by airport security machines.

The social consciousness that seeped into the fashion industry six years ago seems to have saturated it today. The “manifesto” of Sarah Jessica Parker’s affordable clothing line “Bitten,” introduced early this summer (no single item is over $20!), is that “fashion is not a luxury, it’s a right.” And SJP is not the only or even the first to bring fashion to the masses.

1982: Halston designed a line for JC Penny (that failed miserably and irrevocably damaged his reputation as a couturier).

2003: Isaac Mizrahi was much more successful with his fashion sportswear line at Target which has recently expanded to include affordable wedding dresses.

2005: Stella McCartney debuted her collection at H&M, the trendy Swedish megachain.

2006: Luella Bartley launched an affordable collection for the GO International line at Target, followed by Behnaz Sarafpour and Proenza Schouler.

2006: Viktor & Rolf brought their high concept fashion to H&M.

2007: Doo-Ri Chung, Thakoon, and Rodarte were commissioned by the Gap in partnership with the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund to redesign the classic white shirt.

2007: Kate Moss’s iconic style was reproduced and made available for TopShop online and in-store customers.

2007: Alice Roi and Philip Lim had NYC shoppers lining up at dawn for their limited collections at Uniqlo’s flagship store in Soho.

Later this year: Vera Wang has teamed up with Kohl’s department store to offer an affordable line called “Very Vera” that will cost a fraction of the price of her elite line. This collection will is available this Fall.

So what does all of this mean? Perhaps the democratization of fashion underscores the veracity of the recently deceased English eccentric Isabella Blow’s perspective on fashion, as eulogized by Adrian Gill in New York magazine (23 July 2007): “People think that fashion is all frivolity and done by people who can’t do proper jobs but Issie understood that it is very, very serious business in terms of civilization and culture. It’s the one piece of culture that every single person in the world participates in. Not everybody reads poetry or listens to music, but every single person in the world gets up in the morning and puts on something, and whether you like it or not, that’s a statement about who you are.”

While we might agree, very broadly speaking, that clothes are the external expressions of a person’s interiority, that it’s “a statement about who you are” (at least in that moment given specific constraints of time, stress, and mood) THREADBARED would qualify the notion that “[fashion] is the one piece of culture that every single person in the world participates in” by asking, to what degree do people “get” to participate in fashion? How do race, class, gender identification, sexuality, and body type determine your level of “participation”? These questions aren’t intended to over-think fashion or to sap anyone’s (especially not our own!) pleasure for shopping or sitting down to the latest issue of Vogue or recent postings on Flickr’s “Wardrobe_Remix.” Just the opposite, really—we take fashion seriously because it’s an amazingly powerful cultural force that does more than just reflect our moods. Fashion has the power to forecast the future, remind us of the past, and as the Gap (PRODUCT) RED^TM campaign shows us, can even help to change lives today. We hope you’ll join us at THREADBARED in our respect for Fashion and our love of trapeze dresses, playsuits, and high-waisted shorts. And whenever possible, we'll help you get your hands on the season’s obsessions on the cheap so look out for announcements about sample sales, coupons, and special online discounts!