Policing Fashion in New York

In New York magazine's Spring Fashion issue, there are six feature stories on clothes, designers, and models including a story on a group of tenderfoot but fresh-faced white male models ("Fashion Week's handsome rookies"), an interview with style icon Kate Moss on her clothing line at the much-anticipated and much delayed opening of TopShop in downtown Manhattan (recent reports have doors opening in April 2009), and a recession-minded article with an increasingly familiar theme, "Everything Here is Under $100"). In addition, there is the usual array of designer label advertisements and celebrity spokesmodels: Posh and Becks for Emporio Armani, Katie Holmes for Miu Miu, Gwyneth Paltrow for Tod's, as well as an anonymous sea of puerile, well-heeled, ivory-faced Gothamites slinging everything from Marc Jacobs handbags to cocktails to lifestyles.

Jessica Lustig's article, "The Fashion Thief," was the only feature story or advertisement in the Fashion Issue that featured a person of color, any color. Lustig follows Kevahn Thorpe, an African American young man from Queensbridge Houses project in Queens, New York, as he is arrested and rearrested for shoplifting from high-end Manhattan shops like Prada, Bergdorf, Barneys, and Saks.

There's a lot about this article that's unsettling. For instance, Kevahn's love of fashion is pathologized and made irrational (he's a "fashion fanatic . . . for whom jail was not too steep a price to pay") as if coveting fashion in New York City is at all unusual. Moreover, Kevahn's "crafting" (his preferred term for shoplifting) is anything but irrational. Part of the "crafting" for Kevahn is his careful study of fashion labels, their histories, designers, and floor arrangements. Also, repeated mentions of his single black mom and hardscrabble life in Queens reifies tired "culture of poverty" theories from the 1970s and 1980s that blamed black mothers, specifically, and black families, generally, for all the problems of the "underclass" rather than, say, systems of institutionalized racism and uneven distributions of material and social resources, power, and wealth that privileged middle and upper-class whites. But most disquieting for me about this article is its inclusion in New York's Fashion Issue during Spring Fashion Week. While all the white models, celebrities, and socialites who crowd the pages of this and so many other magazines are implicitly citizens of the fashion world - their unquestioned rights to fashion's material objects and its privileges substantiate this - the lone trespasser is a black man who is repeatedly surveilled and forcibly removed out of this world's borders. His claims to fashion, self-fashioning, and self-actualization are publicly denounced by the headline which identifies him as a "fashion thief" but also by the numerous, mostly anonymous, readers of the article whose online comments against him rise to the level of vitriol.

The racial logic of this article is not unlike those found in other magazines - some of which have been mentioned in this blog (see Oops, Background Color, Redux, and Background Color, Redux II). African Americans as well as other racial groups, when they're featured at all in fashion and style magazines, are routinely figured as abject, subordinate, or illegitimate bodies that serve to highlight the true white subjects of fashion.

Kevahn catalogued all that he stole on MySpace, adding his own fashion credits and commentary.

Fashion Sprung

It's a phenomenon I've looked forward to every year since moving to New York City - as soon as the mercury bops above freezing, the city begins to shed its winter layers. Puffy coats and scarves are still de rigeur but gone are the attendant sweaters and tights. Exposed flesh becomes a real possibility again! And Spring Fashion Week and the Spring Fashion issues of every magazine seems to herald this possibility - while I'm steadily stressed with all the book chapters, journal articles, and yes, blog posts that I should be writing, that I wish were already written, I've become distracted recently by everything Spring.

Once I figure out the cost-per-wear, a sartorial-economic practice I inherited from my coupon-clipping immigrant mother way before Harper's Bazaar popularized the concept of the "recessionista," I want to live in this McQ by Alexander McQueen tux jumpsuit and these Belle by Sigerson Morrison open-toe booties with the recessed wedge. This outfit is everything I want to be this Spring . . . oh this, and the Preen pantsuit, that is.

Hijab Health

Muslimah Media Watch (a blog about Muslim women in pop and media culture) gives the critical once-over to media coverage of a study claiming that women who wear "traditional clothing" --the hijab, in code-- are prone to lower levels of vitamin D because of less exposure to sunlight. (The title of this post is giggle-inducing: "OH NOES! Hijab will make you sick!") Faith wonders why the study and media reports about it seem to focus only on sunlight as a source of vitamin D, especially when a person can absorb vitamin D in other forms; and why the study necessarily equates hijab with Arab (American) women, even though not all Arabs are Muslim, and vice versa.

And, as someone who lives in the Midwest, wears a knee-length puffy coat with a hood, scarf, sunglasses (for the glare from the snow), and sunscreen even on cloudy days, and is otherwise regularly deprived of sunlight during the winter (and especially since I'm in the office all day anyway), I'm not sure why this study and its reception should single out hijabis in the first place for being at particular risk, except to reiterate the tired argument that hijab is bad for women with the "objective" authority of parascientific expertise.

Oops, They Did It Again!

Make Fetch Happen caught this photograph in an editorial for the latest Vogue Italia, months after the much-celebrated Black Issue. In this familiar racial distribution of feminine domesticity, the model is of course unnamed in her role as the archetypical mammy figure (a benignly asexual black caretaker who recognizes her innate inferiority and is dedicated to the care of white children). As her counterpart, the blonde references for me the 19th-century "angel of the house" (a designation reserved for bourgeois white womanhood), and in this case the informal title is made literal through the matched metallic patterns of the gown and the tapestry. (She is part of the expensive decor that marks status.) For all that the blonde is totally unremarkable, she is nonetheless meant to be the focus of our attention and awe (after all, she's wearing the dress and the jewels in this editorial).

I'm just going to reference the entries "Background Color" and "Background Color, Redux" for comparison.

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.

Brief Update on Things to Come (Hopefully)

Teaching four days a week and writing the other three is wiping me out, leaving little time (or an unoccupied piece of mind) to write. That said, I do have a draft lined up about what I'm calling the "Indian Fashion Show 2008," about the Smithsonian exhibit of 19th century Native American women's garments that recently opened in New York City. I also received Lookbook 54 from Brooklyn-based artist Emily K. Larned (in collaboration with photographer Roxane Zargham), which features 54 ways to style a plain white t-shirt (which is a wonderful commentary on the tensions between standardization and individuation in fashion discourse), and the gorgeous coffee table book of the textile- and mostly installation-based art of Yinka Shonibare MBE. Amazing! I saw some of his pieces on the campus visit to my university, which I took at the time to be a good, good sign.



Meanwhile, here's some of what I've been reading and thinking about in the fashion blogosphere.

* A fight broke out on Jezebel about "gothic Lolita" fashion, with lots of accusations of infantalization and pedophile-baiting. In response, a Gothic Lolita fan wrote a mini-manifesto, which again sparked an intense argument about fashion and feminism, and whether or not one's sartorial or beauty choices can tell us anything about one's political capacity. I found these discussions fascinating for their conflation of moral and aesthetic judgments with political and intellectual ones. Someday I may write a post about how those who would portray some women as "duped," "irrational," or "passive victims" because of their sartorial or beauty choices must consider how such a stance assumes a "superior" and rational perspective that erases or dismisses other modes of explanation or engagement with these bodily practices. Instead, I'd argue that such choices can also be complicated signs and forms of negotiation or meaning-making that do much more than, say, create legions of pedophiles or otherwise figure as outward manifestations of stunted "maturity." In any case, it did inspire this genius LOLita:



* Counterfeit Chic briefly blogs the Florida judge who determined that a local ordinance against baggy pants are unconstitutional. As she notes, such laws target young black men specifically as this so-called crime. Racial policing thinly disguised as sartorial policing is the new black (and brown, post-9/11).

* Footpath Zeitgeist is back with a couple of useful critiques of hipster-saturated fashion discourses. The first takes on the transnational circulation of "thrifting" as the name not of a practice grounded in local histories, but a style based on a global aesthetic culture. The second examines the problematic valueing, and privileging, of "vintage" as a sartorial practice of distinction and individuation:

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."

This quote goes a long way toward explaining some of my recent fashion blog fatigue (which includes most street style blogs, for sure).

* Lastly, I've been listening to the new punk rock advice show You've Got A Problem, the latest production from Maximumrocknroll Radio. Is it harder for you to find punks to date as you get older? Are you finding it difficult to keep your drink from spilling in the pit? Not sure how many pairs of panties to take with you on tour with your band? This show has got your answers! I'm going to write in with a fashion question for the next one....