Sweatin'

So it appears that PINK asses will become even more ubiquitous on college campuses, with Victoria's Secret partnering with The Collegiate Licensing Company to launch “exclusive” co-branded merchandise. Victoria’s Secret’s PINK's brand iconography and the names and logos of any one of thirty-three universities –most of them public or land-grant universities— will be paired on their apparel. Already, my campus is awash with Victoria’s Secret sweatpants (either paired with Uggs --really? still?-- or flip-flops), which I didn’t even recognize as such until just a few months ago. (I thought the PINK thing was a breast cancer awareness gimmick.) Sartorially, I’m not looking forward to the proliferation of these decorated with the university logo. But sweatpants are a part of the first set of lessons I teach in my fashion course.

Back in my youth, I’m pretty certain that athletes would wear sweatpants to class but no one else did, really (sweatshirts, yes). Meanwhile, I wore dirty black jeans (we called them “vegan leather” because, after a while, all that dirt and grease would turn the denim shiny) and black t-shirts everyday because I was anti-fashion, but that’s another story (up the punx!). And the spread of sweatpants as casual undergraduate apparel escaped my notice as a graduate student at Berkeley (although I have a great story about the time I was in the library cafe and I saw two undergraduates engaged in oral sex --IN THE CROWDED CAFE-- in matching sweats). In the courses I worked for (gender and women’s studies), I didn’t much see a representative cross-section of the campus population. It’s only since I moved to the Midwest that I’ve had daily exposure to the phenomenon of sweats in the classroom, and I’ve been trying to puzzle it out ever since.

My colleagues express a lot of disgust for the sweatpants brigade, and on a purely aesthetic level, I would rather stab myself in the eye than wear PINK, or anything else in sweatpants form, on my ass. They correlate what appears to be a lazy, unserious approach to classroom appearance with a lazy, unserious approach to classroom performance. Or, more generously, they see the spread of sweats as casual collegiate wear as one manifestation of the pressure to appear “not too smart,” to dumb it down in order to fit the campus climate. Without necessarily deciding that any of these explanations is the “right” one, it does interest me that the language in which we praise or denounce clothing is also the language with which we make moral judgments: right, correct, good, unacceptable, faultless, shabby, threadbare, botched, sloppy, careless. (And I’m sure that the students do the same thing to us – if we also showed up in sweats, they’d surely decide that we were lazy and unserious. I'm amazed that it rarely occurs to them that it's a two-way street.)

I try to set aside my sartorial dislike when I discuss sweatpants with my students, though. And because so many of them wear sweatpants, I ask them why. (I try to keep the “eww” out of my voice when I do.) Some claim that "comfort" is their number one priority, but I push them to consider whether comfort is really such an obvious utilitarian value, or is there more to this idea than meets the eye? What is the content of comfort as a measure? Is it physical, emotional, or social, or some combination of these? What kinds of sweatpants count as comfortable ones? No one is wearing, say, their grandma’s tapered and relaxed-seat sweatpants, which I imagine are physically comfortable but might be socially uncomfortable. No one (so far) has copped to being an adherent to the Grey Sweatsuit Revolution, a semi-ironic art practice that parodies the fashion system as well as the anti-fashion response in its push to create a new fashion/anti-fashion uniform. (From their mission statement: "The grey sweatsuit is our Trojan horse. We create a street trend, a visible statement, the system co-opts it without understanding it’s significance and then... BAM! Grey sweatsuits all up in the area! Our symbolism spreads like anthrax across the anorexic bodies of fashionistas everywhere! They look frantically for the next trend but there is nothing. Only grey sweatsuits.") So some decisions are being made to convey a certain sense of self, via the sweatpants. At that point, someone might speculate that some girls wear sweatpants and painstakingly messy ponytails as a calculated flirtation: “This is what I look like when I’ve just gotten out of bed,” or that some others (boys and girls) are presenting an image of careless youth: “Whatever, it’s all good. Let's do a bar crawl!” We talk then about “spheres” of fashionableness, how the college campus produces its own set of sartorial standards and what might be behind those standards – university personalities (e.g., Ivy League versus Big Ten), ideas about what it means to be a certain type of student, practices of differentiation as well as assimilation, and so on.

A part of what I’m trying to do is get them to acknowledge that broader implications are attached through social and cultural discourses to the clothes we wear, or the clothes others wear; that often the “messages” we think we are presenting about ourselves, about our concerns, are ambiguous, and ideologically loaded whether we are conscious of this or not; and that these messages are being conveyed along axes of often uneven power. For instance, when professors read their appearance as indicative of intellectual laziness, or when university staff recognize students by their sweats, and fellow workers by their absence. I’m also hoping to have them think consciously about the reasons they wear the clothes they do – that “comfort” and the desire to seem effortless, or alternately studious (part of a “I’ve been at the library all day” look), are not necessarily obvious values or qualities but are actively constructed and circulated by their everyday dress practices.

I still hate their sweatpants, though.

STYLE ICON: Alice Bag

In 1977, Los Angelenos Alice Armandariz and Patricia Rainone formed The Bags, who went on to become an important (if brief-lived) fixture in the LA punk scene. What little footage I've seen of their live performances still sends shivers up my spine -- Alice is such an indomitable force in stiletto boots and torn t-shirts, blackened eyes and shock of hair (sometimes covered by a paper bag for the band's early performances), all sneer and prowl on stage. In still photographs, Alice is beautiful, tough, defiant and intense, whether she's wearing bondage pants or a '60s femme fatale black sheath dress. Women like Alice Bag were my style references for punk rock feminism when I was a suburban teenager dreaming of escape.

I bring her up because of the new exhibition Vexing: Female Voices from LA Punk at the Claremont Museum, at which Alice Bag performed for the exhibition's opening night gala. (Check out the Los Angeles Times article about the exhibition here.) Here's part of the exhibition's description:

The burgeoning punk rock music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s in East Los Angeles provided an electrically charged, creative climate. This scene created an atmosphere where performance mixed with poetry, and visual culture was defined by an aesthetic and an attitude. Artists and musicians interfaced and blurred the lines of actions, documentation, photography, sound and style. Taking its name from the all-ages music club The Vex, once housed within East Los Angeles’ Self Help Graphics and Art, Vexing is an historical investigation of the women who were at the forefront of this movement of experimentation in music, art, culture and politics, while exploring their lasting legacies and contemporary practices. This documentary-style exhibition will include photo, video and audio archives of the era as well as studio work encompassing painting, installation, writings and performance.

I hope I can get to Los Angeles again (my girlfriend is a dedicated partisan to the early LA punk scene, and we somehow missed the exhibition when we were in town a few weeks ago) before the exhibition closes, but meanwhile, I'm inspired to try to incorporate Alice's amazing presence in the coming months. Check out the rest of her amazing photo gallery at her website. (And for the site --and posts-- that inspired this one, check out No Good For Me's own list of style icons.) (Mimi)

Reason for Revival

I was recently invited to give a paper at the University of California, Irvine, for The Transnational/Transoceanic Networks: Histories and Cultures Project, sponsored by Women's Studies. My panel, called "Fashion, Consumer Cultures and Muslim Diasporas," also featured Reina Lewis, Artscom Centenary Professor of Fashion Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, and Emma Tarlo, Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London and author of Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (University of Chicago Press 1996), a monograph I teach all the time in my fashion course (my students love it).



It was great fun to present some of the work I've been doing over the last year or more on "the biopolitics of beauty," especially to an audience packed with feminist scholars whose work I totally adore (including one of my former advisors, eep!). Reina presented on some of the initial evidence from her new project on emerging Muslim lifestyle magazines, including Alef (Kuwait), Muslim Girl (US), Azizah, Emel (UK), and Pashion (Egypt), and focused on how the editors and stylists approach their fashion editorials (e.g., one made an editorial decision not to show their models' heads to exclude neither Muslim women who veil or those who don't, while another shows both covered and uncovered models) and the challenges they face with magazine production (e.g., getting product in the first place) and reader expectation. Emma also previewed new work, with photographs and interviews with cosmopolitan, college-educated British Muslim young women who choose the hijab, and the ways in which they manage and negotiate their visibly Muslim appearances. (I think her book, Visibly Muslim, is due out soonish.)

We spent all day talking about how "clothing matters" together (Reina and I had a very involved discussion about queer presentation), which inspired me to first, finally post (Minh-ha's been doing all the work so far), and second, vow to post on a regular basis. So stick around for more, hopefully. (Mimi)

FILM: Useless/Wu Yong

Thanks to Selvedge, I've stumbled across the 2007 documentary Useless/Wu Yong from award-winning Chinese director Jia Zhangke about the experimental work of Chinese fashion designer Ma Ke. The documentary follows the preparation and launch of her collection Useless in Paris, and also serves as a meditation on craft and industrial production under late capitalism. From the synopsis:

A hot and humid day in Canton. Amid the thunderous noise of sewing machines, women work quietly under fluorescent lamps in a garment factory. The clothes they make will soon be shipped to unknown customers. Likewise, the future of each face along the assembly line is blurred.

A wintry day in Paris. Chinese designer Ma Ke prepares her newly established brand “Wu Yong” (Useless) to be launched in a spectacular show. An anti-fashion designer, she abhors assembly lines. The trademark of her majestic line is based on first burying the clothes in dirt to allow nature and time to put the finishing touches on her work.

There's also a press kit you can download from the official site, which includes interviews with both the director and designer. Here, Zhangke talks about the many layers of his film:

[Ma Ke's] work went far beyond the image I had of fashion design; to my surprise, I found that her ‘Wu Yong’ collection made me reflect on China’s social realities, not to mention history, memory, consumerism, inter-personal relationships and the rise and fall of industrial production. At the same time, the idea of making her the subject of a film gave me the chance to look at a wide range of social levels as I followed the process from design to manufacture to exhibition in the garment industry.

I hope that we'll get to see this documentary soon -- I can't seem to find any information about screenings or DVD release.

Copy Cats and Cheap Chic

We all know about the raft of allegations and lawsuits for intellectual copyright infringement aimed at Forever 21, Top Shop, H&M, and other discount retailers. (Fashionista regularly features sharp-eyed notes about the proliferation of such copies.) Because these retailers replicate print patterns, dress styles, et cetera, major designers claim cheap manufacturing and mass distribution degrades the "originality" of their creative output.

This is, of course, the rehearsal of what Walter Benjamin called “the aura” in his essay, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction. This "aura," he argued, was first derived from art's original value in religious ceremonies and rituals, and later from the Renaissance's secularization of art as singular works of individual genius. This produced the notion of "art of art's sake," of art as transcendent and of the artist guided by a privileged insight into capital-T truth, in the 1800s, against the rapid industrialization and urbanization of "culture."

We can see this at work in claims by major designers against Forever 21 and its cheap cohort of retailers. At the same time, major designers buying vintage and copying these pieces include Jill Stuart, Anna Sui, Jean Paul Gautier, and of course Marc Jacobs, who is seen browsing vintage stores in New York City for just this purpose in his new documentary. Some of these same designers are part of copyright lawsuits against Forever 21 and other discount retailers – and a few are finding themselves at the other end of such lawsuits.

Famed Belgian deconstructionist designer Martin Margiela was recently dinged for only slightly, --very, very slightly-- modifying a copyrighted t-shirt design featuring an ominous sky full of thundering white horses and a barren mountain cliff. Reproduced on an asymmetrically draped and padded cotton shirt, and sold out at the designer’s Beverly Hills boutique, the almost exact image’s copyright belongs to British artist David Penfound, who sells reproduction rights to the painting for as much as one of Margiela’s shirts.





TOP: Margiela's version from the S/S 08 collection, BOTTOM: Penfound's original from a $20 t-shirt.

Margiela's representatives say the graphic is a "collage of nostalgic images compiled in-house." Nevermind for a moment that there is pretty much no "collage" effect at all in the copy. This invocation of nostalgia is telling because it suggests a fashion-backwardness, a temporal anomaly, brought forward into the future at the behest of the fashion-forward. This nostalgia for a certain set of images, however, is nonetheless contemporaneous; a particular aesthetic imagined to be still alive and, as many observers have noted, representative of a series of degraded cultural touchstones: “Midwestern gas station,” “trailer trash,” and “cheap and ugly souvenir.” (This chain of associations is no accident.) One fashion blog commentator wrote, “I picture the original on someone buying an extra-large order of nachos and a foot-long hot dog.“

These aesthetic judgments of the original design are called upon in both defenses and denunciations of Margiela. In the first, such judgments suggest that the original design was of such poor aesthetic quality that Margiela’s replication of the design only elevated something that was otherwise cultural detritus. Which is to say, Margiela’s transformation of the design (in the details and drape) can and should be regarded as the design’s alienation –not as isolation but as repudiation—of the original. In the second, such judgments argue that the original design is too ugly to redeem, too “cheesy” to rip off.

So what sort of aura is it when major designers copy cheap and derided --in no uncertain terms of economic and cultural capital— thrift store and vintage items? How are discourses of art and originality distributed unevenly, unequally, here? How do certain ideas about other peoples’ styles travel, and inform (or not!) the clothing options and choices for the consumers of these styles? How do these same ideas inform the clothing options and choices for consumers of these styles when they are “transformed” in other contexts – whether Urban Outfitters’s array of vintage reprints for the college crowd, or Martin Margiela’s vintage rip off for the wealthy?

Consider feminist media theorist Judith Williamson’s seminal essay, “No Woman Is an Island:” "It is currently 'in' for the young and well-fed to go around in torn rags, but not for tramps to do so. In other words, the appropriation of other people's dress is fashionable provided it is perfectly clear that you are, in fact, different from whoever would normally wear such clothes." Written in 1986, it seems this still applies.



Meanwhile, 55 year-old Swede, Göran Olofsson, has been compensated an unknown amount for the scarf that Marc Jacobs blatantly plagiarized for Louis Vuitton. The scarf had been designed and created by Olofsson’s father Gosta in the 1950s as part of a line of tourist souvenirs for the Swedish small town of Linsell, and the print on Jacob's silk scarf was a near exact copy. (He replaced the name of the town with the tagline, "Marc Jacobs since 1984.") (Mimi)

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.”