Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics: Past and Present 9781350198531, 9781350198524, 9781350198562, 9781350198548

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Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics

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Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics Past and Present edited by Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Selection, editorial matter, Introductions © Andrea Kollnitz and Louise Wallenberg, 2023 Individual chapters © their Authors, 2023 Andrea Kollnitz and Louise Wallenberg have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xviii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Catherine Wood All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Foreword: Hedonism – Notes during an Epidemic Elizabeth Wilson Acknowledgements Introduction Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz

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Part 1 Producing Aesthetics: Ethical Issues in Contemporary Fashion Production 1

Circular Fashion: Moral Effects and Ethical Implications Herman Stål

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Animals Occupy Vogue Italia: Sustainability, Ethics and the Fashion Media Morna Laing

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Producing Garments, Manufacturing Fashion: On the Globalization of Industry and Disconnection with Craft Göran Sundberg

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The Fashion of the Manifesto Marco Pecorari

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The Cost of Looking Good: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Fashion Industry Louise Wallenberg and Torkild Thanem

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Part 2 Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics: From Past to Present 6

Ragged and Unravelled Marcia Pointon

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The ‘Organic Feminine’: Art Nouveau and Women’s Fashion, Yesterday and Today Lucy Fischer

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Style Politics and the Black Panther Party: Power, Resistance and Community Anna Hanchett

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Fashion is Human: Perspectives on the Aesthetics and Ethics of Contemporary Swedish Fashion Photography Andrea Kollnitz

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Part 3 Aesthetics and Ethics: Philosophical Investigations of Fashion 10 Fashion, Prosthetics, Machines: Being Human and the Body Today Patrizia Calefato

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11 The Missing Juncture: Architecture and Fashion from Schinkel to Le Corbusier Sven-Olov Wallenstein

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12 Fashion Aesthetics, Ethics and Choice Malcolm Barnard

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Bibliography Index

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Illustrations 3.1 Dwarika is cutting Oxford cotton for men’s shirts as part of a cottage industry project in Nepal, 2014. 81 3.2 Pressing facility in a garment factory in Kathmandu, Nepal, 2014. 88 6.1 Francesco Cossa, Detail from Sign of Aries, Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara. Fresco, c. 1470. 126 6.2 Rembrandt van Rijn, Old Beggar Woman with Gourd seen from behind, etching, second state, c. 1630. 7.1 Gustav Klimt and his companion, Emilie Flöge. 142 7.2 Jean-Philippe Worth for House of Worth. Cream silk evening dress, 1902. 145 7.3 Callot Soeurs, French evening dress, 1915–16. 148 7.4 Weeks (French) evening dress, 1910. 152 7.5 Art Nouveau brass, ivory and enamel brooch. 154 7.6 Image from the fantasy film Metempsychosis (Segundo de Chómon, 1907). 155 7.7 House of Worth silk ballgown c. 1892. 156 9.1 Magnus Magnusson, Taylor Warren, Marrakech, 2008. 180 9.2 Cover of Contributor magazine, Issue 12, ‘Nature as Culture’, 2016. 182

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Contributors Malcolm Barnard is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Loughborough University, UK, where he teaches the history and theory of art and design. His background is in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and recent European philosophy, and recent publications include ‘In Touch: Textiles and Communication’, in G. Montagna and C. Carvalho (eds), Textiles, Identity and Innovation: In Touch (2020), ‘Derrida and Photography Theory’, in M. Durden and J. Tormey (eds), The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory, (2020), Fashion Theory: An Introduction, (Routledge 2014), and Fashion as Communication (2002). Patrizia Calefato is Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at Università degli studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy. Her most recent publications include Fashion as Cultural Translation (2021); ‘Sovereign Time’, in C. Evans and A. Vaccari (eds), Time in Fashion; ‘Fashionscapes’, in A. Geczy and V. Karaminas (eds), The End of Fashion (2019); Lusso. Il lato oscuro dell’eccesso (2018); Paesaggi di moda: corpo rivestito e flussi culturali (2016); Fashion Journalism (2015); and Luxury: Fashion, Lifestyles and Excess (2014). Birgit Haase is a clothing technology engineer and holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Since 2009 she has been Professor of Art and Fashion History/Fashion Theory at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Department of Design. Her research interests cover the history of European clothing; the correlation of art and fashion, especially of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; fashion theory; and object-based clothing research. Anna Hanchett is a visual artist and a PhD candidate in Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Anna received a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Art History from Calvin College, and an MA in Fashion Studies from Stockholm University. Through her doctoral research, Anna explores women’s embodied experiences with tailored suits and questions the relationship between gender and the body in the context of the tailor’s shop. Andrea Kollnitz (editor) is Associate Professor in Art History and Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her viii

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PhD in Art History at Stockholm University (2008) was followed by research combining fashion studies and art history/visual culture. Her current research is focused on the self-fashioning of the avant-garde artist; nationalist visual and textual fashion and art discourse; fashion photography; and caricature. She is the co-editor of anthologies on fashion and modernism as well the Cultural History of the Avant-garde in the Nordic Countries 1925–50 (2019). Lucy Fischer is Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, where she directed the Film Studies Program for three decades. Beyond teaching, she has also had film curatorial experience at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Her interests in film studies are wide ranging and include international cinema of both the silent and sound era as well as narrative and experimental film. Among her many publications are Shot/Countershot (1989); Cinematernity (1996); Designing Women (2003); and Cinema by Design (2017). Morna Laing is Assistant Professor in Fashion Studies at The New School, Parsons Paris, France. She holds a PhD from University of the Arts London, where she also lectured from 2011–19. Her first monograph, Picturing the Woman-child was published with Bloomsbury Academic in 2021. She has an interest in feminism and spectatorship and recently co-edited Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking (Bloomsbury 2020). Her writing has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Sexualities, Fashion Theory and Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty. The focus of her current research is sustainability and the fashion media. Marcia Pointon is Professor Emerita of Art History. She trained at the University of Manchester, UK, receiving her PhD there in 1974. She now works as a freelance consultant and researcher. Pointon is a prolific author, widely recognized as one of the leading scholars of British art. Her innovative approach to the subject emerged with her book Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, and developed further with Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. Continuing her exploration of the semiotics of the body, Pointon published Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery, a study of personal adornment in western culture. Marco Pecorari is Assistant Professor and Program Director of the MA in Fashion Studies at The New School, Parsons Paris, France, where he teaches and conducts research on Fashion History and Theory. He is the author of Fashion Remains: Rethinking Fashion Ephemera in the Archive and co-editor (with

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Andrea Kollnitz) of Fashion, Performance and Performativity: The Complex Spaces of Fashion (Bloomsbury, 2021). Pecorari is the co-founder of the festival Printing Fashion (www.printingfashion.fr) and member on the editorial board of Fashion Theory, ZoneModa Journal and Bloomsbury Fashion Central. Herman I. Stål is Associate Professor in Business Administration at the School of Business, Economics and Law in Gothenburg, Sweden. His primary research obsessions are with environmental sustainability, fashion, collaboration, business models and innovation in various shapes and substances. He teaches leadership, ethics and organizational theory. His articles have appeared in such journals as Business Strategy & the Environment, Business & Society, European Management Journal, Journal of Cleaner Production, Scandinavian Journal of Management and Sustainable Development. Göran Sundberg is a fashion designer and educator who is at Beckmans in Stockholm, Sweden, Torkild Thanem is Professor of Management Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden, and at the University of Agder, Norway. Louise Wallenberg (editor) is Professor in Fashion Studies at the Section for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. She holds a PhD in Film Studies from the same university (2002) and she was the founding director of the Centre for Fashion Studies between 2007 and 2013. Among her publications are the co-edited collections MODE (2009); Nordic Fashion Studies (2011); Mode och modernism (2014); Fashion, Film, and the 1960s (2017); Fashion and Modernism (2018); and Ingmar Bergman at the Crossroads between Theory and Practice (2022) and Now about all these women in the Swedish Film Industry (2023); Sven-Olov Wallenstein is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University, Sweden. He is the author of numerous books on philosophy, contemporary art, and architecture. Recent publications include Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture (2009); Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State (co-edited with H. Mattsson, 2010); Nihilism, Art, Technology (2011); Translating Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit and Modern Philosophy (co-edited with B. Manning Delaney, 2012); Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality (co-edited with J. Nilsson, 2013); Madness, Religion, and the Limits of Reason (co-edited with J. Bornemark, 2015); and Architecture, Critique, Ideology (2016).

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Elizabeth Wilson, Professor Emeritus, began writing as a political activist in the 1970s when she contributed to various ‘underground’ and alternative political magazines. After working in the mental health field, she became a university lecturer teaching cultural history. She is the author of a number of books on fashion, aesthetics, artistic subcultures and urban life, including the now classic Adorned in Dreams (1985). Her other publications include The Sphinx in the City (1992); Bohemians (2000); Cultural Passions (2013), Love Game (2014) and Unfolding the Past (2022). She has also had four period crime fiction novels published.

Foreword: Hedonism – Notes During an Epidemic Elizabeth Wilson

It has become a popular truism to say that Western consumer societies are hedonistic. In fact, consumerism is a global phenomenon, with Asia and India scrambling to keep up or surpass the Western ideal. The difference is that many or most of those societies deploy nationalism or religion (or both) as a countervailing ideology. ‘Hedonism’ is deployed as, superficially at least, a neutral term, used simply to describe a world in which shopping and spending is what keeps the economy going, especially in Britain, whose manufacturing infrastructure has largely disappeared. Consumer society is hedonistic, it seems, in its love of the new and the exciting. Shoppers are on a perpetual roundabout of buy, consume, discard. Zygmunt Bauman referred to it as the ‘amusement society’. However, consumption in the consumer society is about more than just acquiring goods. Acquisition has become an index of identity, even a central component of individual identity, built around the concept of ‘choice’. Consumer society is also an entertainment society. The concept of ‘entertainment’ is an essentially modern one. In the United Kingdom, at least, it is customary to talk about ‘entertaining’ children. Children need to be kept amused and distracted. This would have been an alien concept to the Victorians. True, they were busy constructing an entertainment world of theatre, concert and music hall for adults, but children were meant to be taught to be virtuous and obedient, not to have a good time. Their education was intended to train them for a life of work. These days, by contrast, parents want their children to ‘have fun’. As the nature both of work and of education has changed, entertainment has become increasingly central not only to the economy, but also to psychological well-being. There are still, of course, many – doctors, artists, artisans – whose work gives their life meaning, but there also exists a large class of educated individuals whose work is not particularly fulfilling and for these the world of entertainment and spectacle is philosophically, even spiritually, central. Sports, xii

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celebrity culture and fiction provide an alternative imaginative existence, in which to be a fan of Roger Federer, a follower of the Kardashians or an addict of Game of Thrones is about more than superficial amusement. A Harry Potter fan describes her very identity as defined by the J.K. Rowling series. In the most recent UK census, a significant number wrote ‘Jedi’ as their religion and while this might be a joke, at some level it is anything but that. To equate hedonism with the fandom of mass culture may appear frivolous, for it is a philosophy rooted in the ancient Greek world. Far from being a modern concept, hedonism originated around the fourth century BCE. The group known as the Cyrenaics, who came from what is modern Libya, were the first to develop a philosophy of hedonism. Their views were similar to, but also distinct from those of Epicurus, usually credited as the founder of hedonism roughly 100 years later. Almost no works of Epicurus have survived, but they circulated widely in the ancient world and were developed and expressed in the long poem, De Rerum Natura, by the Roman writer, Lucretius. The Cyrenaics, Epicurus and their followers developed hedonism as a philosophy of quietism, tranquillity, prudence and the avoidance of pain, worry and agitation, increasing sensitivity to pleasure and making the best use of available resources. Lucretius, for example, deplored the search for novelty: Often the owner of some stately mansion, bored stiff by staying at home, takes his departure, only to return as speedily when he feels himself no better off out of doors. Off he goes to his country seat, driving his . . . ponies hotfoot, as though rushing to save a house on fire. [But] no sooner has he crossed its doorstep than he starts yawning or retires moodily to sleep . . . or else rushes back to revisit the city. In so doing the individual is really running away from himself.

To an Epicurean, the continual craving for excitement is self-defeating, as is the lust for worldly advancement. Status should be a matter of indifference; a slave and a king will each experience happiness and unhappiness in the same way. Politics should also be avoided as a source of conflict and unpleasure. Nevertheless, the Epicureans argued that pleasure – not virtue, as the Platonists thought – is the chief purpose of life. The life dedicated to pleasure was also contrary to Christian suspicion of pleasure as sensual and indulgent. In that sense then, the contemporary fan of Star Wars is true to the spirit of hedonism in their pursuit of the pleasures of fandom and contemporary consumers do appear as in many ways ideal Epicureans. The hedonists of the ancient world had little interest in religion – the gods might exist, but they were far away and did not intervene in human life – and they believed that interest in

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politics brought only anxiety, tension and displeasure. Then, as today, the search for novelty and entertainment dominated, yet in one crucial way, modern hedonism is the absolute opposite of the ancient ideal, since it is based on the search for continual excitement and stimulus. The modern hedonist demands above all intensity of experience, whereas the ancients sought tranquillity. It has been noted however, that as the nature of consumption has evolved, consumers’ tastes have changed; for example, they have been buying fewer clothes (although they are still buying a lot, especially in the UK) and are now more interested in ‘experiences’ – in travelling, eating out and attending entertainment spectacles. In early 2020, Lucia van der Post of the Financial Times described how the idea of luxury had changed. At the turn of the century, it was still all about champagne and designer labels, cashmere sweaters and holidays at seven-star hotels. Twenty years on, when cashmere was on sale at Uniqlo and champagne at the supermarket, luxury had become intangible. A holiday was no longer just a visit to tropical islands with sandy shores; it had to include – for example – instruction from local artisans in weaving or lessons from a wellknown tennis star. It was no longer about indulging the body; it was about expanding the mind, about learning, about spirituality. Above all, as the late editor of Vogue Italia, Franca Sozzani, claimed, consumers desired ethical purity: purity through consumption. In this way they could use their search for pleasure to define for themselves a virtuous identity. Shortly after Lucia van der Post’s article appeared, the coronavirus radically changed people’s lives. Stay-at-home orders deprived the majority of the visits to restaurants, cinemas, gyms and sports events that constructed the hedonistic society, the pleasures and entertainments that made life worth living. During ‘lockdown’, a new discourse emerged. With no traffic on the roads and therefore much less atmospheric pollution, the populace became aware of birdsong. Butterflies returned to gardens. It was rumoured that fishes were seen once more in Venice’s canals. The sky was actually bluer! These phenomena were used to forge a discourse suggesting that perhaps we might be happier in a less hurried, more restful and contemplative life, with less distracting ’entertainment’ and more reflection. Yet as soon as shops began to open again, there were queues at Ikea, riots at Foot Locker and fashionistas invading Primark to get the latest fashion item. With threats of economic meltdown and mass unemployment as a result of the virus and the measures taken to try to control it, hedonism again became an existential imperative, with families rushing to the seaside and would-be travellers demanding the reopening of the skies. It seemed particularly ironic in

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Britain that an extreme right-wing government and a Tory party previously known for its commitment to ‘austerity’ and fiscal correctitude, implored the population to go out and spend, spend, spend. Hedonism in the modern world has now, however, run up against forces that inexorably work against it. The ever-expanding economy is pitted against a finite environment. Too much tourism destroys the very spectacles that tourists have travelled to enjoy. More and more urgent are the voices of those who warn that the exploitation of natural resources will sooner rather than later lead to their exhaustion and even to human extinction. In any case the global economy is now faltering, casting doubt on the promise of limitless opportunity. This is already resulting, in a number of countries, in threats to social order as tensions and protests mount. So ironically the hedonists now need the politics from which they hitherto distanced themselves if they are to preserve their ‘way of life’ or at least such moral and ethical dimensions of it as can be salvaged. The climate emergency agenda has reached popular consciousness. On all sides we are admonished to change our behaviour, to take fewer flights to distant tourist spots, to eat less meat, to turn off the central heating. This fits with a still significant puritanical strain, suspicious of too much pleasure. At the same time, commoditization has encroached into ever more areas of personal life and we are less able than ever to renounce its social and cultural trappings. ‘The individual’s own gestures are no longer their own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him’, wrote Guy Debord, anticipating social media and the power of influencers. Even so, hedonism is more than a simple lust for pleasure, however commercially manipulated. Through material culture, we express our aspirations for beauty. Further, we invest our personalities in narratives, in idealized individuals and in objects that become symbolic embodiments of our needs and aspirations. *

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Fashion is thoroughly identified with hedonism in today’s consumer world. In particular, the triumph of fast fashion and its relationship to celebrity and influencers has made it seem the literal embodiment of consumer culture and the New. As a result – for this culture, with its lingering, contradictory Christian puritanism is just as censorious as the most religious societies – fashion gets a bad press. Fashion is accused of being the second most polluting industry in the world, ecologically destructive as its cotton uses too much water, while its dyes

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poison the rivers and cheap garments are discarded to swell landfill. The industry is also the worst of employers. Workers are locked into slave-like conditions all over the world – including in Britain – and in Bangladesh unsafe factories have caused fires that proved fatal for hundreds of seamstresses. The fashion world has become aware of its role in damaging the environment. There have been and continue to be efforts to create sustainable fashion. Gucci’s creative director, Alessandro Michele, announced in May 2020 that the brand had decided to abandon the yearly round of shows geared to seasons. There should instead in future be seasonless garments, because clothes should have a longer life. He spoke of the recklessness of fashion, as if humans were separated from nature. The pandemic has meant that working (or not working) at home has diminished the need for fashionable outfits and has further assisted the already dominant trend for casual and athleisure wear. At the same time, celebrity culture ‘seems to have imploded,’ suggests Times journalist, Alice Thomson, no longer looking ‘glamorous or enviable, but bizarre and desperate’. This may be over optimistic, although the court scenes, ongoing at the time of writing, concerning Johnny Depp’s libel case against his ex-wife, certainly border on the surreal. I was always baffled by the way celebrities – most of whom, to me, appeared ugly, stupid and rude – so fascinated and bedazzled their ‘followers’, but wealth and being famous for being famous seemed enough to blindside the public. They vulgarized fashion, I felt, when fashion should have been a serious aspect of the beautification of life and of self-presentation. As the pandemic continues, it is not clear whether or not it will result in permanent alterations in mass behaviour, or what these will be. One danger of a discourse that dismisses fashion altogether as almost superfluous in a Zoomdominated world, is that fashion will then continue to be seen as trivial and unimportant – as it always has been, though for different reasons – when in reality bodies for the most part need to have coverings and those coverings play not only a practical, but also a cultural and symbolic role. The global health crisis has exposed many things about customs and attitudes we had until now taken for granted. In the realm of dress, it has revealed the way in which somehow a strange kind of puritanical hedonism has evolved. This contradictory attitude has allowed us to buy cheap, environmentally destructive fashions and pretend that because they are easy on the pocket, they somehow don’t matter. Expensive clothes would be self-indulgent, or perhaps elitist, whereas cheap garments are just unimportant little ‘treats’ we indulge ourselves with. In whatever way the fashion industry responds to what is an ongoing

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economic as well as medical and environmental crisis, there is an ethical imperative for consumers too to revise and reorient their attitudes. And of course, it may well turn out that, whatever the future of fashion, the future of hedonism will more closely resemble the hedonism of the Cyrenaics and Lucretius than that of the world we have lost – the globalized world of entertainment and intensity.

Acknowledgements We would like to express their sincere thanks to all of the contributors to this volume, the majority of whom took part in the symposium on fashion aesthetics and ethics that we organized at Stockholm University back in December 2017. The production of this collection has been a long process – not least because of the pandemic that has slowed us all down – and we are thankful for your patience. We are also grateful to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and Längmanska Stiftelsen, which granted us funding, the former for organizing the symposium, the latter for financing rights to publish illustrations. Last but not least, we wish to express our gratitude to Frances Arnold, our editor at Bloomsbury. Throughout this process, she has offered us constructive feedback, and her always positive, supportive and professional attitude has been invaluable when putting this book together. Louise and Andrea

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Introduction Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz

In 2006, Catrin Joergens asked whether ethical fashion was a myth or future trend.1 In a similar vein, two years later Hazel Clark would wonder whether slow fashion was an oxymoron – or a promise for the future.2 Some fifteen years on, Joergens’s findings – showing in fact how ethical issues had little, if any, effect on consumers’ fashion purchase behaviour, and that personal needs to buy new garments took precedence over ethical issues – must be altered and partly rebutted.3 And while we may (still) consider slow fashion an oxymoron, the growing awareness of how critical our current situation is, may – or must – lead to making slow fashion possible. At the time of writing, we are faced by so many pressing challenges, ranging from severe changes to our climate, to a pandemic that has paralyzed most parts of the globe since 2020, large migrations forced by climate crisis, famine and war, constant threats of institutionalized terror perpetrated by extremists, xenophobic politics and attacks on democratic systems. The many difficulties we are facing all seem to be connected, each one facilitating the other.4 One of the most notable shifts in lifestyle that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused is a decrease in fashion consumption and the consequent predicaments many fashion brands and houses have been facing. Yet, it remains to be seen if – and to what degree – this situation will initiate long-lasting paradigm shifts. As a contribution to a constantly rising awareness on ethical problems and potential solutions related to fashion, the overall purpose of this collection is to open up a more critical and philosophical engagement with fashion in terms of its aesthetics and ethics. Taking a wide and historically dispersed focus, Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics strives to show how the global fashion industry, which involves many production and consumption practices as well as a variety of structures, markets, positions and marketing media, has important and pertinent aesthetic and ethical consequences. This is an industry characterized by an 1

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increasingly fast production cycle and a relentless exploitation of both the environment and workforces, including underpaid textile workers, retailers working in brutal competition from the mass-merchandise discounters, young designers / seamstresses / curators often working for free, and a vast body of aspiring models. Furthermore, visual fashion representations and fashionrelated aesthetic ideals are becoming more influential than ever in directing consumers’ social and personal identification processes and bodily practices — sometimes with fatal consequences. On the other hand, fashion consumers’ awareness of ethical problems, resistance and activism against unhealthy body ideals, claims for ethnic diversity and body positivism are increasing constantly. Addressing these and related issues, this collection pinpoints how the powerful aesthetic presence of fashion deserves and needs to be discussed in relation to its ethical promises and highly problematic outcomes. It thus sets out to engage and appeal to a vast audience of both scholars and practitioners interested in the values inherent in fashion production, representation and consumption, as well as the interactions between aesthetic and ethical mechanisms that drive phenomena and realities in the fashion system and in theoretical reflections on how to affect real change. Further, our collection has the overarching aim to incite a wider and more engaged study of the status quo as well as historical cases of fashion production, representation and consumption through connecting and aligning it to longstanding questions and matters of ethics and aesthetics. In the twelve chapters that follow, our authors investigate both historical and contemporary relations between aesthetics and ethics in fashion production, consumption and representation, and they do so by taking into consideration both material and immaterial aspects of fashion. They show how aesthetic aspects of fashion interact and often inevitably affect and feed into ethical choices and considerations: the contributions range from discussions on fashion’s highly problematic production and consumption practices to highlighting the aesthetic qualities of fashion representation as related to art forms such as paintings, photography and architecture and their ethical implications; they investigate fashion’s intimate connection with nature and gender, and/or with technology and with the prosthetic. Hence this collection brings together original work by a heterogenic group of scholars in terms of both geography and discipline, including a fashion designer. Based in the Humanities and Social Sciences they jointly investigate ethical and the aesthetic aspects of fashion in a wide and inclusive grip on fashion that is multidisciplinary. Apart from their expertise in fashion studies, the contributors are based in disciplines such as cinema studies, art history, philosophy, history of design, business studies and

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media studies. The book is comprehensive not only in its interdisciplinary approach, but also in its long historical grasp (from antiquity to today) and its wide geographical range (Europe, Asia and the Americas).

Between production and consumption As for the climate situation, the twenty-first century has come to demand of us all that we try to if not stop, then at least slow down or postpone, the detrimental changes that the Earth is facing. Fashion production and consumption play a major part in this. For years, the fashion industry has been known as one of the world’s most polluting and exploitative industries. It is often referred to as the third most polluting industry worldwide, accounting for some 8.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and by some, as the second biggest polluter.5 Outsourcing and untenable production patterns – growing and producing materials in certain parts of the world, then weaving them together in other parts of the world before creating garments out of those components in yet other parts in the world – means a continuous shipping of materials and garments back and forth over the globe. This level of transportation is indefensible. As Giorgio Riello (among many others) has pointed out, we often wear products from several countries and continents in our everyday lives: a sweatshirt from Ecuador, shoes from Italy, denims from China, a t-shirt from Turkey and socks from Vietnam.6 Further, the textiles and the materials from which our clothes are made probably come from other parts of the world.7 With the production of garments comes environmental pollution, the use of dangerous chemicals such as lead and mercury constituting one of the main factors, adding to the overall contamination tied to the fashion industry and its vast internationally regulated transportation systems in the name of free and global trade. A third element of global fashion and textile pollution is consumer and producer waste.8 Large amounts of leftover textiles (i.e. remnants of the cutting and sewing processes) are wasted in the production system and end up in landfill. When it comes to consumption, we are accomplices: our textile and garment waste is increasing steadily in tandem with our escalating consumption patterns. Caught up in what philosopher and journalist Samuel Strauss described as ‘consumptionism’ as early as the 1920s, we are engulfed by a philosophy of life that commits us to the production and consumption of more and more things, ‘more this year than last year, more next year than this year’, which has led to a way of life that places the material standard of living ‘above all other values’. Consumptionism, Strauss

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emphasized, also includes the compulsion to buy what is neither wanted nor needed, a compulsion that he reckoned is forced upon us by business manipulation of public and private life.9 It goes without saying that Strauss’ critique is more valid than ever: despite an increasing awareness amongst consumers about the untenable status quo, and despite our increasing quest for fair and ethically produced fashion, most of us continue to consume fashion and clothing that we do not need. In the last two decades, the textile industry has doubled its production. And in tandem with its increased production, the average global annual consumption of textiles has doubled from 7 to 13 kg per person.10 On the other hand, many of us consume to a lesser degree than hitherto: to a certain extent this is because consumption carries with it a certain shaming, a certain guilt, but perhaps more pertinently we feel solidarity with textile workers are concerned about the environment. Many recent studies show that our consumption habits are indeed changing (and certainly did so over the first two years of the pandemic): consumers tend to think twice before buying a new garment while also trying to buy clothing that is sustainable and/or ‘ethical’. A growing number of consumers is turning to vintage and second-hand clothing and/or to clothing swaps, while others are eschewing new clothes and staying ‘committed’ to what is already in their closets. As the increasing field of consumer culture studies shows, consumer awareness as well as creative, critical and active approaches to the consumption of not least fashion brands, brand cultures and fashion marketing are in constant development, forcing the fashion industry and its marketing strategies to change agendas and practices.11 Increased awareness amongst fashion consumers constitutes a threat to most fashion companies and the poor reputation that unethical fashion production may bring on a fashion house or a brand has prompted many companies to turn to a more sustainable production of clothing.12 Those under most pressure to put on a ‘green face’, and to prove that their production chains and practices are more sustainable than before, are the fast fashion companies. Here, global conglomerates such as ZARA and H&M – whose clothing production and retail are spread over the globe – stand out as discernible examples. While both of these companies originate and are based in Europe (in Spain and in Sweden respectively), their presence extends worldwide. They produce vast quantities of fashion – both present several collections per week in their physical stores and on their websites – that is not supposed to last and which retails at incredibly low prices. And while both companies argue that they are investing money and time in buiding a more sustainable and ethical business and production structure, it is crucial to

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remember that many regard it as a façade that is used to keep consumers continue to buy their products. As the environmental journalist Lucy Siegle puts it: ‘[. . .] almost every brand now expends a large amount of money and time telling us how they are on already sustainable or at least pretty darned close. The trouble is, the numbers don’t stack up. There is no evidence to support the idea that fashion is in a meaningful phase of sustainable transformation.’13 Considering these companies’ greenwashing practices, how can fast fashion production ever be sustainable and ethical? Consumers are kept in the dark, as information about production is often given only in snippets and the overall discourse published on the brands’ websites showcases positive and ethical narratives. Their practices, factories and reports are non-transparent, and consumers are seldom told the entire story about how, where and by whom their garments are made. Anyone who has tried to discuss these issues with representatives of (fast) fashion companies knows that responses (if given at all) are composed of pre-fabricated answers; probe too far and ultimately one will meet a wall of silence.14 What we need is visible and written evidence, not claims made online.

The problems and potentials of fashion media Ethical questions in fashion are not only related to its exploitative production structure and its environmental impact, but they are also significant in the context of fashion’s mediatization, its representations, discourses and visual culture where the links between aesthetics and ethics are often explicitly activated. As one of our primary aesthetic, visual and material attributes and expressive means, clothing and (self-)fashioning strongly affects our physical, mental and social day-to-day life. Fashion and dress serve as a tool via which an individual, as well as broader society, perform, signal and express visual identities. These everyday identity-shaping processes and performances of a self in transformation and on differing social stages are highly dependent on images we see, imitate, follow or react against. As Anne Hollander writes, clothes do not make the man, they make the image of the man.15 Through its strong aesthetical presence and effect since the first depictions of fashion or distinctively dressed bodies in medieval culture, fashion media continues to discursively instigate and reinforce certain ideals and normative identities thus making it a powerful ethical instrument.16 Fashion as well as its discourses construct and differentiate social roles, national and ethnic, individual and collective identities while

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descriptively and prescriptively confirming and affecting body and gender ideals, ideals that make up aesthetic norms for our daily self-perception and physical self-fashioning. The aesthetic qualities and visual representations that have staged and marketed fashion since its beginnings are repeated in the visual appearance and display of human bodies and their changing idealized shapes. From the powerful rhetoric of Renaissance portraiture, which depicted its wealthy sitters in highly stylized bodies with elaborate sartorial creations, or the fashion plates and caricatures of nineteenth-century society, which stressed extreme silhouettes that differentiated male and female bodies like never before, to today’s global presence and limitless dissemination of fashion photography in social media, images of fashion continue to have a huge influence on our selfimage. While garments worn on bodies may be read as images in themselves, their visual representation – oftentimes advertising both fashion, brands, bodies and personal identities all at once – is directed by notions of allure and attractiveness that demand aesthetic idealization which pleases the eyes and imagination and also triggers the desires of contemporary consumers.17 As Roland Barthes stated in his early reflections on the fashion system and the double agenda in representations of fashion: Fashion, like all fashions, depends on a disparity of two consciousnesses, each foreign to the other. In order to blunt the buyer’s calculating consciousness, a veil must be drawn around the object – a veil of images, of reasons, of meanings; a mediate substance of an aperitive order must be elaborated; a simulacrum of the real object must be created. . .18

Jean Baudrillard also warned of the dangerous simulacra of fashion media that blur our relation to reality and replace the real with its representations.19 The fashion system is crucially dependent on the dissemination of such simulacra – seductive (or otherwise), appealing images of fashion – and Eugenie Shinkle sees fashion photography as one of its driving forces.20 Strategically ‘veiling’ or stylizing reality, fashion media bear a profound performative and normative impact on body ideals and their realization and their ethical responsibility cannot be overestimated. The traditional predominance of an objectifying camera gaze in fashion marketing on not least the female body is interlinked with the unhealthy norms and expectations that continue to be upheld by the fashion model industry and its exploitative practices that range from the economic exploitation and health-endangering objectification of young bodies to sexual abuse of models by their photographers and employers.21 Fashion photography and the genre of fashion magazines in print or online remain a predominant domain of

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representation when it comes to racial and ethnic matters, too. The industry, mainstream fashion photography and visual fashion media still rely on a ‘bleached runway’ in order to appeal to a mainstream consumer linked to capitalist societies that are dominated by whiteness.22 At the same time, the increasingly multifaceted arena of fashion media – be it progressive niche magazines, avant-garde films on SHOWstudio or everyday online influencers – also enable ethical interventions and critical disruptions of stereotyping, racist and colonialist structures that make visible who has been ‘othered’, hidden, marginalized and exotified.23 Accelerating developments in fashion advertising show the effect of a growing ‘woke’ movement that has catalyzed the political and ethical correctness of fashion brands like, for example Calvin Klein, where intersectional awareness has led to the introduction of body-positivity and transgender models in places previously dominated by the ‘normality’ of celebrity models and size-zero ideals.24 While such developments may signal greenwashing tactics that use and appropriate the discursive power of political activism and blur persistent problems in the fashion industry and its mega-brands, they nevertheless have significant potential to change schemes of perception and ideals of representation that affect actual physical and social realities.

Aesthetics, ethics and fashion Before presenting the contributions in this collection and how its various parts relate to one another, let us turn to its two main themes, aesthetics and ethics, and discuss not only how they (historically and contemporarily) are related to one another but also how they, both as abstract concepts and in more concrete terms, are of great and immanent interest to fashion as a production and consumption system and to fashion studies as an academic field. Aesthetics has played an important role in the academic field constituted by fashion studies, but it has most often been related to fashion representations and media (through visual analysis), or to phenomena like modernity and capitalism (through a critical theory point of view).25 Further aesthetics in fashion have been connected to identity aspects such as sexuality, class and gender, most of which embrace a feminist (and/or queer) stance.26 There is also a social science approach combining fashion and aesthetics through investigations of aesthetic labour in the fashion industry.27 As explained above analyses of fashion imagery and media, their aesthetical structures and ethical impact make a crucial field of research in fashion studies

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that is constantly updated following the quick developments in its technologies and socio-cultural roles. Originally arising from art history, fashion and dress history have been highly dependent on visual representations, ranging from artworks to popular culture, and aesthetically based empirical studies of garments and sartorial objects. Fashion historians with an interest in art or art historians highlighting the meanings of fashion in figurative paintings and images have investigated the aesthetics of fashion and its imagery in historical periods and contexts, stressing the significance of fashion and accessories in interpretations of not least portraiture.28 Dress and cultural historians return to analysing the interaction and interdependency of fashion with its visual representations.29 Certain genres of fashion imagery such as caricature and fashion plates from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, in their aesthetically inspiring as well as ethical, political and moralizing roles, have gained attention in historical research into art and design.30 In addition, research on modern or contemporary fashion designers continues to examine their creations and the aesthetics of fashion design in terms of their close relationship to image-making and looks at the rise of modern fashion in relation to the spectacle of the fashion show and model culture.31 Recent contributions to the aesthetic and creative impact of modernist fashion with regard to art and artists/ designers also come from the anthology edited by the authors, Fashion and Modernism.32 As related in detail in their aesthetics as well as their collaborative aspects, the relationship between fashion, art and design remains an important discussion point, not least in the growing research on fashion museums, exhibitions and curatorial questions.33 A large and increasing number of publications focusses on fashion photography, fashion media and magazines as well as the role of fashion images in social media and digital culture, with important contributions on the meanings and potentials of fashion photography such as explorations of twentieth-century fashion imagery in the context of morality discourse, and collections like Fashion as Photograph as well as the diverse case studies in Fashion Media: Past and Present.34 Adhering to such discussions and part of this collection are the two chapters by Kollnitz and Wallenberg, which in different ways address the aesthetics and ethical agendas and social impact of contemporary fashion photography and their problematic ambivalent role in the fashion industry. While aesthetics has always been closely connected to fashion as a visual and material phenomenon, many of the above-mentioned contributions inevitably also touch on questions of ethical effects in fashion, and today issues of ethics are becoming more and more pertinent in any analysis related to the social meanings

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of fashion and the fashion system. Hence, the field has seen a palatable growth in publications that deal with ethics in relation to fashion consumption and/or production, not least considering the past years’ strong focus on sustainability in both research and in fashion schools. Here, Kate Fletcher’s Sustainable Fashion and Textiles from 2008 deserves a mention, as does her rich collection with Mathilda Tham, 2016’s Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion. Fashion scholar Sue Thomas’s 2017 work Fashion Ethics, in which she analyses the lifecycle and the supply chain, is also worth mentioning here, as is cultural theorist Efrat Tseëlon’s anthology Fashion and Ethics from 2014.35 There are further many publications by fashion practitioners and journalists that have contributed to the growing body of written work on fashion and sustainability, such as Naked Fashion and Slow Fashion: Aesthetics meets Ethics by Safia Minney, founder of People Tree, and Elizabeth L. Cline’s Overdressed and The Conscious Closet.36 While all of the above engage with issues tied to sustainability and (or) ethics, this intense interest of fashion scholars in ethics is a rather recent one. Yet it should be pointed out that fashion studies as a young academic field, emerging in the 1980s has been keen on discussing and investigating fashion in relation to morality with a prime example being Aileen Ribeiro’s Dress and Morality, first published in 1986.37 Since its medieval beginnings, fashion’s power – both constructive and destructive – to shape and consolidate identities, socially, culturally and physically, not least through its mediatization, has fuelled a continuous ethical discussion and morality discourse that often links aesthetic questions with socio-political and national economic debates. Fashion and fashion consumption have been controlled by sumptuary laws and sartorial legislature and condemned as leading to dangerous vanity, voluptuous over-consumption and godless sexual transgressions. It has been claimed that they have contributed to the confusion of gender and class boundaries, which if turn endangers the stability of societal orders. Playing an important part in – driving as well as following – societal change, the changeability of fashion made it the main topic in the genre of fashion caricature, where its innovations are ridiculed and its socially disruptive impact lamented. Repeatedly fashion has been (and still is) discursively linked to notions of not least femininely connoted ephemeral superficiality versus authenticity and permanence, to deceitful surfaces and outsides covering an empty or treacherous inside. Fashion and its discursive representations have thus consistently raised and negotiated questions of morality, not least concerning the confirmation or breaking of social norms and taboos, questions that are relatable to the ethical

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problematics of today. As Ribeiro points out, ‘morality serves to assure group solidarity, and with regard to dress, to act as a kind of social lubricant, to ease contacts between people in society. . . Clothes are not “immoral” in themselves, but they become so when worn in inappropriate situations’.38 Governed by different authorities and institutions, such as the Church or the State or ideological movements such as the reform movement and environmental activism, and their ethical policies, the moral and ethical values and problems of fashion have changed depending on shifting historical contexts. Today, the immorality of fashion and what Quentin Bell calls our ‘sartorial conscience’ is mainly tied to bad consumption and production – fashion that is detrimental to the environment and that relies on the exploitation of workers enduring nonhuman working conditions and risking their health and their life. For most of us, our continued consumption forces our aesthetical and ethical struggles together: the desire to ‘look good’ comes with a tremendous cost while sparking our remorseful sartorial conscience, as discussed in this collection by Wallenberg and Thanem. Aesthetics has always figured as a central trope or phenomenon within philosophy (since the time of Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers). Both ethics and aesthetics imply the notion of value – ethics is about our actions being good or bad, aesthetics is about artistic or sensory qualities. Aesthetical values and demands can lead to ethical or unethical decisions and ethical values and demands can affect aesthetic choices and developments. The philosophical dwellings on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics have a long history, from Aristotle and Plato, via Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, to Michel Foucault and Christine Battersby. We should at this point give one example of how aesthetics and ethics have been treated as two sides of the same coin: in his 1725 treatise on beauty and morals, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, philosopher Francis Hutcheson described how an outward perception of beauty is impossible without an inner sense of it. He called this a ‘moral sense of beauty’, a sense that, he argues, could be altered by knowledge, information and reasoning.39 But aesthetic and ethical questions have also been put into interaction when it comes to fashion in its symbolical, social, cultural, and economical meanings, functions and consequences, as seen in the works by Thomas Carlyle, Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin.40 For these three thinkers, the aesthetic and ethical conditions of fashion were intimately connected (and not always so in a positive manner). For example, in his Le paintre de la vie moderne from 1863, Baudelaire, when analysing fashion plates, writes that: ‘they are often very beautiful and

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drawn with wit; but what to me is every bit as important, and what I am happy to find in all, or almost all of them, is the moral and aesthetic feeling of their time.’41 And while both ethics and aesthetics have to do with value, ethics is also connected to choice. This specific relationship is being discussed in this book’s contribution by philosopher and fashion scholar Malcolm Barnard. He writes: ‘Consequently, in both fashionable and ethical behaviour, we have no choice but to choose, to make a selection from a finite and conditioned range, rather than from an infinite and unconditioned succession of differences.’ On the most concrete level, choice means that, in terms of fashion consumption, we can choose not to consume un-ethically and that when we choose to consume ethically, we are also choosing to be more solidarian. However, to some thinkers, ethics is not an ultimately positive force. In Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Alain Badiou argues that (contemporary) ethics (which he refers to as ‘ethical ideology’) is intrinsically conservative and closely tied to state authority, and as such, it can only operate in a consensus, and hence, that it is tied to evil.42 Yet, if we turn to other thinkers, such as Baruch Spinoza, ethics may in fact be the only thing saving us from evil. According to Spinoza, the liberating force of ethics lies in its call for a reciprocal, passionate and tolerant engagement with others, with God, and with nature – and in a life of reason.43 Another philosopher who has emphasized the ethical essence in relations between self and the other is of course Emmanuel Levinas. For both, in fact, ethics is the very relationship between the self and other(s). Yet, for Levinas, ethics is one of difference.44 Further, Levinasian ethics is one that is deeply religious and altruistic, whereas Spinozian ethics is highly realist and metaphysical, and hence atheist.45 Another crucial thinker to bring up in relation to the positive force of ethics is Luce Irigaray. While she may be most known for her feminist ethics of sexual difference, her ethics goes beyond that of sex and gender to include all humanity in its plural differences.46 How, then, does the ethics of the self and the other come into play in fashion (consumption and production)? In Profits and Principles: Global Capitalism and Human Rights in China, Michael A. Santoro argues that: consumers are a very big part of the web of moral responsibility for human rights. Ultimately it is consumers who wear the shoes and clothes manufactured in sweatshops, and hence, who help support the unethical structure and economy of the global fashion and garment industries. This is not to say that consumers are evil. What is needed is a real partnership between companies and consumers, based on a very simple moral contract. Companies must agree to manufacture

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Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics products in compliance with human rights codes and consumers must agree to place monetary value on such compliance. Both sides of the compact are necessary to safeguard human rights.47

What he is arguing for is that equity for all must become a universal standard and also, that we all are responsible in making this happen. Again, we all have to act in a solidary manner. If bringing in the other side of the coin, aesthetics, we may argue that only the product that is ethically produced can be truly aesthetic (or beautiful, to speak with Hutchinson). In The Total Beauty of Sustainable Products, Edwin Datschefski in fact asks whether a (design) product can be totally beautiful if made in an ugly, non-sustainable way. He then goes on to advocate for an ‘ethics in design’, and we may understand this ethics as one that intimately combines the aesthetic (product) with the ethical (production).48 Datschefski’s proposition is discussed by Sue Thomas and Anthea Van Kopplen, who, from a fashion design educational perspective, write: Is it possible to be ethical as a fashion designer? The fashion industry has a history, but not all of it proud and ethics are not featured. The beginning of a new century and millennium is a good time to start addressing these issues. It is timely as the environment, the triple bottom line, consumer activism, ethical purchasing and human rights become front-page news, as well as part of the global agenda.49

In the early 2020s, it is no longer just timely – it is a prerequisite for any fashion production and/or design. When Teri Agins investigated how mass-marketing had come to change the fashion industry in the late 1900s, she described the phenomenon as the ‘end of fashion’.50 We have now moved from the end of fashion to the ‘death of fashion’ and to the ‘end of fashion as we know it’, as conveyed by Li Edelkoort in her manifesto ‘Anti-Fashion’ – which is discussed by Marco Pecorari in this collection.51 And although Edelkoort addressed the exploitation and the waste that contemporary fashion builds on, she still was caught up in a believing that ‘good’ fashion should (and can) only be about couture.52

Outline The book opens with a longer foreword authored by Elizabeth Wilson that is entitled ‘Hedonism’. Here, she reflects on the status of consumption, fashion and entertainment in times of an ongoing epidemic, bringing to the fore a sense of

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urgency. Twelve chapters follow this Introduction. These chapters are allocated into three main sections, and each of these sections is structured thematically by different aspects of how aesthetics and/or ethics are intrinsically related or tied to fashion. While some chapters investigate contemporary and pressing issues, others take on a more historical perspective, while never losing their link to our present time. In the first section, ‘Producing Aesthetics: Ethical Issues in Contemporary Fashion Production’, issues of fashion production in relation to ethics are discussed and investigated. These issues include circular economy and greenwashing; the meanings of fashion as aesthetic objects in social and ethically charged situations; the meanings of fashion as part of a discourse on ethical and moral values; and gendered fashion and fashion representations as part of a discourse connecting aesthetic with ethical considerations. The section opens with the chapter on ‘Circular Fashion: Moral Effects and Ethical Implications’, where organizational scholar Herman Stål discusses how a group of Swedish fashion companies engage in what he refers to as ‘maintenance work’ to right fashion’s wrongs and to provide a new narrative of fashion that is morally, as well as economically, meaningful. The organizational effort of maintenance work, then, aims at justifying practice and its meaning. And whereas Stål analyses the industry from a more theoretical perspective, fashion designer and lecturer Göran Sundberg gives us a practitioner’s view on ethical fashion production as connected to aesthetic creativity in his chapter ‘Producing Garments, Manufacturing Fashion: On the globalization of industry and disconnection with craft’. In ‘Fashions of the MANIFESTO’, fashion scholar Marco Pecorari critically engages with the meaning of the fashion manifesto – a phenomenon that has recently surfaced in fashion where it is being adopted, adapted, abused and simplified for commercial gain. And in this section’s final contribution, ‘The Cost of Looking Good: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Fashion Industry’, fashion scholar Louise Wallenberg and organizational scholar Torkild Thanem investigate the mechanisms to why the unethical exploitation of fashion models and textile workers continues to subsist. In the second section, ’Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics: from Past to Present’, issues regarding fashion’s aesthetic and ethical implications in various historical and contemporary contexts are investigated. In this section’s first chapter,‘Ragged and Unravelling’, art historian Marcia Pointon analyses the shifting meaning of rags in artworks and fashion throughout the ages, looking at visual examples ranging from renaissance frescoes to baroque paintings and contemporary fashion design by Martin Margiela. Asking what pictorial conventions are at

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work in the ‘poetry’ of raggedness, she also discusses the ethical, social and historical contexts in which the aesthetic of rags came to play diverse roles. In the following chapter. ‘ “The ‘Organic” Feminine: Art Nouveau and Women’s Fashion, Yesterday and Today’, film scholar Lucy Fischer discusses the aesthetic qualities and moralizing gender-discourse designating art nouveau fashion by investigating a variety of garments, accessories and visual objects in their cultural context as well as in their symbolism, focussing on how the image of women is intricately interwoven with the animalistic and the natural. Animals, not as symbolic and iconographic signs, but in their role as exploited resources for the fashion industry, are in focus when fashion scholar Morna Laing analyses the Vogue Italia Animal Issue from January 2021 in her chapter ‘Animals “Occupy” Vogue Italia: Sustainability, Ethics and the Fashion Media’. Her analysis of the issue’s textual discourse on new sustainable and empathetic approaches to animals, leather, fur etc. raises important questions on shifting attitudes and strategies of greenwashing in the fashion industry when it comes to dealing with a growing consumer awareness and activist engagement in animal rights. A further politically charged view on fashion’s aesthetic and ethical impact comes from fashion scholar Anna Hanchett’s chapter ‘Style Politics and the Black Panther Party: Power, Resistance and Community’, which discusses the Black Panthers’ uniform as an important performative visual signifier and a means of identification for a rising activist movement that had a pivotal socio-political impact on the visibility and empowerment of the Black community in the 1960s and 1970s US. By focusing on the construction, political meanings and legacy of the Panther uniform, Hanchett analyses the Black Panther Party image as challenging American attitudes toward the bodies inhabited by people of colour. Socio-political an ideological contexts in relation to fashion media are brought to the fore in the final chapter of this section, ‘Fashion is Human: Perspectives on Aesthetics and Ethics in Contemporary Swedish Fashion Photography’, where art historian and fashion scholar Andrea Kollnitz addresses aesthetic stylistic ideas and photographic practices as related to ethical choices and agendas in fashion photography. Looking at the case of Swedish fashion photographer Magnus Magnusson and his fashion-magazine Contributor, she demonstrates the possible relation between fashion photography and its ethical as well as aesthetical positioning with national cultures and political ideologies. In our third and final section, ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: Philosophical Investigations of Fashion’, questions of a more philosophical nature in relation to fashion are being raised. The section opens with semiotician Patrizia Calefato’s chapter, ‘Fashion, Prosthetics, Machines: Being Humans and the Body’, which

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offers an investigation of how prostheses and posthumanism can help opening up new questions of ethics and aesthetics. In ‘The Missing Juncture: Architecture and Fashion from Schinkel to Le Corbusier’, philosopher Sven-Olof Wallenstein departs from Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Karl Bötticher and Gottfried Semper to discuss a ‘missing juncture’, revealing a new way to look at the connection between fashion and architecture, and he does so through the constellation of the terms style, tectonics and cladding. In our collection’s very last chapter, ‘Fashion Aesthetics, Ethics and Choice’, philosopher and fashion scholar Malcolm Barnard discusses the meaning of choice in relation to fashion through Jacques Derrida’s work on ethics and choice, showing how ethical behaviour, aesthetical behaviour and fashionable behaviour all are tied to choice – as well as to responsibility. *

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It is our hope that this collection, through its many explorations of fashion’s most pertinent and crucial issues – i.e. its ethics and aesthetics and their mutual interactions and interdependency – will help create a sense of political urgency in our reader. Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz Stockholm, November 2022

Notes 1 See Catrin Joergens, ‘Ethical Fashion: Myth or Future Trend?’, Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal vol. 10, no. 3 (2006): 360–71. 2 Hazel Clark, ‘Slow + Fashion – An Oxymoron – or a Promise for the Future. . .?’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture vol. 12, no. 4 (2008): 427–46. 3 See, for example, Iain Davies and Louise Lundblad, ‘The Values and Motivations behind Sustainable Fashion Consumption’, Journal of Consumer Behaviour vol. 15, no. 2 (2016): 149–62; Anne Peirson-Smith, ‘A Spotlight on: Red Dress: A Case Study of A Sustainable Fashion Initiative Influencing Consumption Practices in Hong Kong and Asia’, in Global Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion, ed. Alison Gwilt, Alice Payne and Evelise Anciet Rüthschilling (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 174–8; Y. Liu, M. Liu Tingchi, A. Pérez, W. Chan, J. Collado and M. Ziying, ‘The Importance of Knowledge and Trust for Ethical Fashion Consumption’, Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing vol. 33, no. 5 (2020): 1175–94. 4 See, for example, Timothy Snyder’s books, Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (New York: Crown, 2020) and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe,

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Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics America (New York: Crown, 2018). See also Nico Stehr, ‘Exceptional Circumstances: Does Climate Change Trump Democracy?’, Issues in Technology and Science vol. 32, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 30–9; and Marcello di Paola and Dale Jamieson, ‘Climate Change and the Challenges to Democracy’, in University of Miami Law Review vol. 72, no. 2 (2018). Available online: https://repository.law.miami.edu/umlr/vol72/iss2/5 See, for example, Glynis Sweeny, ‘Fast Fashion Is the Second Dirtiest Industry in the World, Next to Big Oil’, in Ecowatch. Available online: https://www.ecowatch.com/ fast-fashion-is-the-second-dirtiest- industry-in-the-world-next-to-big--1882083445. html (2015); Quantis, Measuring Fashion: Insights from the Environmental Impact of the Global Apparel and Footwear Industries Study (2018). Available online: https:// quantis-intl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/measuringfashion_ globalimpactstudy_full-report_quantis_cwf_2018a.pdf Giorgio Riello, Back in Fashion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). See, for example, Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of A T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade, 2nd edn (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2014). Consumers throw away garments that are still usable, hence adding to the grotesque textile mountains that increase over time. In addition, not only do fashion producers throw away brand-new garments when there has been over-production but it has been claimed that some fast fashion companies (such as H&M and Zara) burn their unwanted and unsold garments. See Heather Farmbrough, ‘H&M is pushing sustainability hard but not everyone is convinced’, in Forbes, 14 March 2018. See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/heatherfarmbrough/2018/04/14/hm-is-pushingsustainability-hard-but-not-everyone-is-convinced/?sh=4a2be23a7ebd (accessed 13 July 2021). H&M confronts the media on the topic of burning clothes on their website, stating that they never burn usable clothes unless they are infested with mould or do not fulfill their chemical requirements: ‘Products stopped for other reasons than health and safety are either donated to charity organizations or re-used through re-use/recycling companies. Those products in stores that are not sold at full price are sold at a reduced price through our sales. We also actively move garments to stores or markets where we see a greater demand, or store them for the next season. At a last resort, we consider external buyers of our overstock.’ See: https:// about.hm.com/news/general-2017/h-m-does-not-burn-functioning-clothes.html (accessed 13 July 2021). Samuel Strauss, ‘Consumptionism’, [1925] quoted in William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993), 267–8. According to Shirvanimoghaddam et al., more than 60 per cent of those textiles goes to landfill after being discarded and only 15 per cent is recycled. See Kaymar Shirvanimoghaddam et al., ‘Death by Waste: Fashion and Textile Circular Economy

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Case’, in Science of the Total Environment vol. 718 (2020): 137317. Available online: https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0048969720308275?token=F676E028AB2 81E0C3A13D76704BCC26FA7AC2CE680BA8E02D195BCDE30D368A23ED786A EC5371A43F07200263029A559&originRegion=eu-west-1&originCreati on=20211001070404 See for example Celia Lury, Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). We need to draw a distinction between fashion ethics and ethical fashion. According to the V&A, the latter can be defined as ‘an umbrella term to describe ethical fashion design, production, retail, and purchasing. It covers a range of issues such as working conditions, exploitation, fair trade, sustainable production, the environment, and animal welfare’. See: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/w/what-is-ethicalfashion/ (accessed 15 January 2021). Lucy Siegle, ‘Foreword’, in Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, Earth Logic Fashion Action Research Plan (London: The JJ Charitable Trust, 2019), 5–6. Students and journalists alike have experienced this wall of silence: the companies evade any real transparency when asked about their business practices where sustainability is concerned. A vivid example of how this wall functions can be found in the journalist Stacey Dooley’s 2018 BBC documentary, Fashion’s Dirty Secrets. Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993), xv. On the importance of images for reading fashion history and the culture of fashion from the medieval age to the present day, see also Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). A comprehensive analysis of diverse fashion media throughout history is provided in Fashion Media: Past and Present, ed. Djurdja Bartlett, Shaun Cole and Agnès Rocamora (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). See Hollander, xi–xvi; see also Caroline Evans’ discussion of the circulating fashion image and its relation to garments, designers and photographers in Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, cop. 1983, pr. 1990), xi–xii. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (orig. 1981), trans. Paul Foss et al. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). Eugenie Shinkle (ed.), Fashion as Photograph: Viewing and Reviewing Images of Fashion (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 1. A recent contribution on the role of the gaze in fashion media is the anthology Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking, ed. Morna Laing and Jacki Willson (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020): For discussions on the model industry, see Elizabeth Wissinger, ‘Fashion Modelling: Blink Technologies and

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Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics New Imaging Regimes’, in Bartlett et al, Fashion Media: Past and Present; Joanne Entwistle, ‘The Aesthetic Economy: The Production of Value in the Field of Fashion Modelling’, Journal of Consumer Culture vol 2, no. 3 (2002): 317–39; and Louise Wallenberg, ‘Fashion Photography, Phallocentrism, and Feminist Critique’, in Fashion in Popular Culture, ed. Joseph Hancock, Toni Johnson-Woods and Vicki Karaminas (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Publishers, 2013). See Wissinger in Bartlett et al, Fashion Media: Past and Present, 133–143. On discourses of ethnicity in fashion photography see Sarah Cheang, ‘ “To the Ends of the Earth”: Fashion and Ethnicity in the Vogue Fashion Shoot’, in Bartlett et al. Fashion Media: Past and Present, 35–45; see also Agnès Rocamora’s discussion of the potentials of new media in democratizing the field of fashion journalism in ‘How New Are New Media? The Case of Fashion Blogs’, in Bartlett et al, Fashion Media: Past and Present, 155–164. See for example the impact of transgender activist Jari Jones as the model of Calvin Klein’s Summer 2020 swimwear collection, commenting on the importance of visibility for marginalised bodies and gender-identities in diverse social media, See, for example, Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, [1985] 1987); Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz (eds), Fashion and Modernism (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). See, for example, Vicki Karaminas and Adam Geczy, Critical Fashion Practice (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); also Karaminas and Geczy, Fashion and Art (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). See Joanne Entwistle, The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion: Markets and Value in Clothing and Modelling (London: Berg, 2009) and Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissinger, ‘Keeping Up Appearances: Aesthetic Labour in the Fashion Modelling Industries of London and New York’, in Sociological Review vol. 54, no. 4 (2006): 774–94. See, for example, Aileen Ribeiro, Clothing Art: The Visual Culture of Fashion 1600–1914 (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017) and Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); Marcia Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity (London: Reaktion Books, 2012) and Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gemstones and Jewellery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). See, for example, Christopher Breward, Fashion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and The Culture of Fashion. See, for example, Adelheid Rasche und Gundula Wolter (eds), Ridikül! Mode in der Karikatur 1600 bis 1900 (Berlin: SMB-DuMont, 2003); Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017); Peter McNeil, Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Men and the 18th Century Fashion World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); and Andrea Kollnitz, ‘The Devil of Fashion: Women, Fashion and the Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century German and Swedish Cultural

Introduction

31

32 33

34

35

36

37 38 39 40

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Magazines, in Fashion in Popular Culture. Literature, Media and Contemporary Studies, ed. Joseph Hancock, Toni Johnson-Woods and Vicki Karaminas (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Publishers, 2013), and ‘Is Beauty Useless? Fashion, Gender and British Wartime Society in Punch 1915’, in Fashion, Dress, and Society, in Europe during World War I: International Perspectives, ed. Maude Bass-Krueger, Hayley Edwards-Dujardin, Sophie Kurkdjian (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts 2021). Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge and The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the Fashion Show in France and America, 1900–1929 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). Wallenberg and Kollnitz, Fashion and Modernism. See, for example, Karaminas and Geczy, Fashion and Art; Marie Riegels Melchior and Birgitta Svensson (eds), Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice (New York: Bloomsbury 2017); Julia Petrov, Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019); and Marco Pecorari, Fashion Remains: Rethinking Ephemera in the Archive (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021). Rebecca Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the 20th Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001); Eugene Shinkle, Fashion as Photograph (London, New York: I.B. Tauris 2008); Bartlett et al., Fashion Media: Past and Present. See Kate Fletcher, Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys (London: Routledge, 2008); Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion (London: Routledge, 2016); Sue Thomas, Fashion Ethics (London: Routledge, 2017) and Efrat Tseëlon (ed.), Fashion and Ethics (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2014). See also Jennifer Farley Gordon and Colleen Hill, Sustainable Fashion: Past, Present and Future (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). Safia Minney, Naked Fashion: The New Sustainable Fashion Revolution (Oxford: New Internationalist, 2012) and Slow Fashion: Aesthetics meets Ethics (Oxford: New Internationalist, 2016); Elizabeth L. Cline, Overdressed (New York: Portfolio, 2012) and The Conscious Closet (New York: Plume, 2019). Ribeiro, Dress and Morality. See also Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Introduction’, in Adorned in Dreams (orig. 1985), (London: Virago, 1987). Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, 12. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, [1725] 2008). See Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Edinburgh: Canongate Books Ltd., [1833–4] 2002); Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (orig. Le paintre de la vie moderne, 1863), (New York: Phaidon Press, 1995); and Walter Benjamin, The Arcades project (orig. Das passagenwerk, 1925–39), ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999). Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 2.

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42 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso Books, 2002). 43 Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics and Other Works, trans. E. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1677] 1994). 44 See, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other (orig. Le temps et l’autre, 1948), trans. Richard A. Cohen (Duquesne University Press, 1987); Humanism of the Other (orig. Humanisme et l’autre homme, 1972), trans. Nidra Poller (The University of Illinois, 2003); Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other (orig. Entre Nous: sur le penser-àl’autre, 1991), trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Colombia University Press, 1998). 45 Spinoza did believe in a God, surely, but this God was indeed different from Levinas’ God. For Spinoza, God was immanent (as in all living and unliving materia) and could not be tied to a singular and superior unity. In this way, he was aligned to pantheism. See Levinas, Le temps et l’autre and Humanisme et l’autre homme; Dan Arbib, ‘The Two Ways of Spinoza: The Levinasian Interpretation of the Ethics and the Theological-Political Treatise’, in Revue de l’histoire des religions, issue 2 (April 2012): 275–300; Torkild Thanem and Louise Wallenberg, ‘What Can Bodies Do? Reading Spinoza for an Affective Ethics of Organizational Life’, Organization vol. 22, no. 2 (2015): 235–50. 46 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (orig. Éthique de la difference sexuelle, 1983), trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993); Je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference (orig. Je, tu, nous, 1990), trans. Alison Martin (London: Routledge, 1993); Sharing the World (London: Continuum International Publishing Company, 2008). 47 Michael A. Santoro, Profits and Principles: Global Capitalism and Human Rights in China (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000). 48 See Edwin Datschefski, The Total Beauty of Sustainable Products (Brighton: RotoVision, 2001). 49 See Sue Thomas and Anthea van Kopplen, ‘Ethics and Innovation: Is an Ethical Fashion Industry an Oxymoron?’. Available online: http://iffti.org/downloads/ papers-presented/iv-HKPU,%202002/B/386–397.pdf 50 Teri Agins, The End of Fashion: How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business Forever (Duluth: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2000). 51 Li Edelkoort, ‘ANTI_FASHION’, and Marcus Fair’s interview with Edelkoort from March 1, 2015 in Dezeen. Available online: https://www.dezeen.com/2015/03/01/ li-edelkoort-end-of-fashion-as-we-know-it-design-indaba-2015/ (accessed 16 January 2021). 52 She writes: ‘Prices profess that these clothes are to be thrown away, discarded as a condom and forgotten before being loved and savoured, teaching young consumers that fashion has no value. The culture of fashion is thus destroyed.’ See Edelkoort,

Introduction

21

ANTI_FASHION, quoted in Marcus Fair, ‘Li Edelkoort publishes manifesto explaining why “fashion is obsolete” ’, in Dezeen. Available online: https://www. dezeen.com/2015/03/02/li-edelkoort-manifesto-anti-fashion-obsolete/ (accessed 16 January 2021).

22

Part One

Producing Aesthetics: Ethical Issues in Contemporary Fashion Production

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1

Circular Fashion: Moral Effects and Ethical Implications Herman Stål

The section opens with a chapter by organizational scholar Herman Stål, which discusses how a group of Swedish fashion companies engage in what he refers to as ‘maintenance work’ to right fashion’s wrongs and to provide a new narrative of fashion that is morally, as well as economically, meaningful. The organizational effort of maintenance work, then, aims at justifying practice and its meaning.

Introduction Fashion, and especially fast fashion, is frequently criticized for its poor environmental performance. In other words, fast fashion is subject to ‘problematizations – claims, statistics, arguments and stories’ – that ‘substantiate and dramatize the ineffectiveness and injustice of existing practices’.1 In addition to poor working conditions, commonly mentioned sins of modern fashion include water wastage, chemicals, CO2 emissions and microplastics.2 Recently, the generation of garment waste has been added to these misdemeanours, as the take-make-dispose cycle of fast fashion feeds global landfills and incinerators.3 Organizational institutionalists believe that problematizations constitute a dilemma for businesses, such as fast fashion firms, given that they depend not just on economic efficiency but also on a social mandate to succeed. In other words, how organizations behave needs to be seen, by employees, managers, consumers, regulators and others, as legitimate.4 Problematizations regarding fashion’s unsustainability especially challenge firms’ moral and functional legitimacy. The first refers to opinions of whether companies behave in accordance with widespread 25

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ethical norms, and the latter refers to whether their behaviour is effective in a wider sense.5 To manage challenges to legitimacy, firms engage in maintenance work, a form of organizational effort that aims to justify practice and its meaning.6 In this chapter I take an interest in such maintenance as I examine the efforts of a group of Swedish fashion firms which have embraced the idea that making fashion ‘circular’ can right the industry’s wrongs and provide a new narrative of fashion that is meaningful morally, as well as economically. Circular fashion hinges on the persuasive notion of a radically restructured industry where garment waste is ‘designed away’ and repair, reuse and recycling limit the environmental impact of fashion production.7 I exemplify and discuss fashion firms’ engagement with circularity, seeing it as an attempt to embrace, but also transcend, problematizations of fashion, and thereby provide new hope that fashion can actually be sustainable, despite all evidence to the contrary. As part of that, I find that fashion firms undertake several practical,but somewhat decoupled, enactments of circularity. These enactments include garment collection, limited leasing, care advice and care products, up-cycled collections and ‘sustainability front-runner’ garments, marginal sourcing of recycled polyester but also investments in a Swedish chemical-recycling plant. These examples of maintenance work are theoretically interesting because they show that maintenance is not necessarily a defensive act focused on rejecting or deflecting problematizations.8 Rather fashion firms embrace problematizations and partly admit to their environmental shortcomings, and then promise to try and lead the systemic change towards redemption, into a potentially brighter future of circular fast fashion. In that, maintenance actually involves reform, primarily in the meanings and in some of the activities that make up modern fashion. Such proactive forms of maintenance work are yet to be fully theorized but resemble recent observations that maintaining a practice often entails ‘innovation’ in some of its elements.9 Although of theoretical interest, what I discuss is troublesome ethically, an aspect I return to at the end of this chapter. Maintenance is unethical because it sustains an unethical business model, but reform in the form of circular fashion is also troublesome and ineffective in at least in two additional ways: it does not improve upstream activities where emissions and social problems occur; and it adds to, rather than transforms, fast fashion.

Maintenance work Maintenance work is a form of institutional work, which is defined as ‘the practices of individual and collective actors aimed at creating, maintaining, and

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disrupting institutions’.10 Institutions, in turn, refer to ‘widely diffused practices, technologies, or rules that have become entrenched in the sense that it is costly to choose other practices, technologies, or rules’.11 Fast fashion can be said to represent an institution within the fashion industry and for fashion makers. Fast fashion is an entrenched practice, and although it does not represent the only established fashion practice it is one that, to a great extent, dominates.12 Institutional work is about what actors do to affect institutions, and how they do it. In this context, maintenance work can refer to the more or less purposeful efforts within more or less dramatic processes of trying to ensure that practices remain legitimate.13 The legitimacy of practices is what enables them to diffuse and persist.14 Legitimacy, in turn, comes in different forms: for instance, functional legitimacy is about practices being efficient in reaching their intended goals; instrumental legitimacy is when ‘entities will be judged as legitimate when they are perceived as promoting the material interests of the individual’.15 While sustainability issues are clearly functional, they also concern another type of legitimacy, referred to as moral. Moral legitimacy is about doing the right thing because it is right, not because it serves material interests or simply works well.16 Just as organizations need their practices to be perceived as functionally legitimate, by their employees, managers, shareholders and others, they need them to be viewed as morally legitimate. When moral legitimacy is lacking, it is difficult to hire and retain staff, to win and keep partners, to attract consumers and shareholders, and to avoid litigation.17 Moral legitimacy is essential for winning the hearts and minds of partners and co-workers. Yet contemporary businesses increasingly find that their moral legitimacy is waning, implicated as they are in the acceleration of climate change and other clear transgressions of our planet’s boundaries.18 This situation begs the question of how contemporary firms then seek to maintain and justify the morality and functionality of their practices, and subsequently, themselves. To this end, a stream of recent research has mapped out the processes and types of maintenance work that organizations engage themselves in (see Table 1.1). I note three things in this previous research that speak directly to my aim with this chapter. First, although problematizations are not the only thing that will trigger an organization to engage in maintenance work, there are interesting examples: Steve Maguire and Cynthia Hardy describe how the US chemical industry reacted to Rachel Carson’s widely diffused problematizations of DDT use (in Silent Spring) by authoring and spreading fierce counter-attacks.22 Carson’s problematizations focused on both the functional and moral legitimacy

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Table 1.1 Institutional maintenance work. ANTECEDENTS19

RESPONSES20

OUTCOMES21

For instance iconic scandals, government intervention or problematizations. But also less dramatic, as in the case of incidental behavioural variation.

Defending one’s professional identity and roles or one’s knowledge and beliefs. Policing or deterring deviance. Modifying institutional elements.

No change in institutional elements; the problematized institution stays intact. Change in institutional elements,;new elements are fitted to the old ones, yet most elements stay intact. Deinstitutionalization: both practice and its underpinning institutional elements change fundamentally.

of DDT use, in arguing that DDT was neither safe, effective or necessary. Carson was criticized for being hysterical and emotional, failing to understand the central role of DDT in the fight against hunger. However, eventually the industry had to accept her problematizations, but did so by modifying them to fit their agenda. In the process DDT was outlawed, an indication that the industry’s defensive and aggressive approach was ineffective. Lianne Lefsrud and Renate Meyer provide an example of the importance of maintaining moral legitimacy for professionals, namely engineers who have devoted their lives and careers to working in the Canadian oil industry. What comes through in their study is the emotional intensity in arguments over climate change and scientific expertise as these professionals vigorously defend themselves and their practices against what they perceive to be the ‘science fiction’ of climate change.23 Thus, this leads me to a second observation, that much of previous research has understood maintenance work to be highly defensive in the sense that problematizations are denied, or at least challenged. Deviance, in the form of questioning taken-for-granted practices, can even be policed or deterred, to make troublemakers fall in line.24 Yet, there is also emergent evidence that organizations may take a less defensive route, getting in front of criticisms and seeking to control reform rather than fighting it.25 In these cases practices appear as ‘plastic’, so that elements within them can be molded and updated to better fit with changing circumstances. For instance, I and Karl Bonnedahl showed that when criticism regarding agriculture’s CO2 emissions surfaced in the Swedish political context, the response was to reform not primarily practice but

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29

how farmers thought about and described their practice, in other words, meanings rather than actions.26 In these examples, problematizations are not really denied; rather, they are skillfully nuanced, and even embraced, so that they become part of a new way of thinking about a practice that seemingly preserves its morality. Thus, lastly, through my reading I observe that the ongoing construction of meaning matters greatly for organizations’ ability to maintain what they do. While the importance of meaning is a key tenet of much organizational theory, meaning seems particularly important when moral, rather than instrumental, legitimacy is at stake. The need for meaning extends beyond a narrow focus upon sales, profits and economic efficiency, and assumes that employees, consumers and suppliers need a richer sense of purpose with what they do. In Scandinavia, for contemporary business, it seems that sustainability has come to form an underpinning meta-narrative, a key building block for constructing meaning as to of how corporations, innovation and entrepreneurship proclaim to make the world better. In relation to meaning, maintenance can perhaps be understood as a narrative exercise, involving the piecing together of one’s interpretations into a coherent story that can offer the various stakeholders that one engages with something to believe in.

Method I draw on some previous case-based research to illustrate and push my conceptual ideas and arguments, thereby working in an inductive, qualitative, tradition. As suggested by Kathy Eisenhardt, I (in various projects with colleagues) approached fast fashion cases with theoretical concepts already in mind.27 Yet, I used these concepts for inspiration, while still being careful to trust the knowledgeable accounts of the respondents and seeking to make justice to their own understandings and their meaning. These data collections focused on Swedish fast fashion and physical retail, being the industry segment that was most familiar to me. Thereby the firms discussed below populate typical shopping malls throughout Sweden. These companies are of environmental importance due to the massive amount of garments they put on sale, but visibility also makes them particular susceptible to problematizations, and thereby relevant for the type of maintenance that I wanted to examine. Towards the end of 2010s these firms were increasingly, in media, on their websites and in their sustainability reports, referring to ‘circular fashion’ and ‘circular business models’. Between 2011 and 2019 Mistra Future Fashion, a strategic research program, came to

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involve many of these firms in what was presented as an effort to make fashion circular. In seeking to understand the meaning and relevance of these tendencies, in 2015–16 and again in 2020 I conducted a number of interviews with representatives of the Swedish Fashion Council, the Swedish Trade Federation, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and sustainability managers from firms such as Boomerang, FilippaK, KappAhl, Lindex, Indiska and Gina Tricot. In these interviews I asked about the circular activities they were engaging in and why. More detailed studies of how these firms worked with garment collection were also added.28 Along with interviews I, together with professor Hervé Corvellec, made detailed readings of the many pages featuring headlines such as ‘100% Circular & Renewable’,29 ‘Second love’30 or ‘Having a circular business approach’31 in the sustainability reports of those firms that were identified as most engaged with circular fashion, namely H&M, Lindex, KappAhl, FilippaK, Indiska and Gina Tricot.

Analysis My analysis of interview transcripts and sustainability reports was interpretative, aiming to acknowledge respondents’ efforts and abilities to socially construct their particular professional world, but at the same time to bring forth concepts that ‘speak’ to prior theory. In such an analytical ‘progression’, the analyst recognizes the ‘knowledgeable accounts’ of one’s respondents but still pushes, from the raw data, towards increased theoretical abstraction. The goal is to ‘turn’ these accounts into new concepts that can be generalizable across cases and reach beyond the idiosyncratic.32 I began by in vivo coding texts, that is, using labels from firms’ own language to describe what was going on. Such coding enabled me to keep track of the material and to get a rough first appreciation of emergent patterns. However, I then decided that it was better to operate according to two different analytical principles for, on the one hand, the listings of practical enactments of circularity and the narrations, on the other. That is, I divided the data in terms of: 1) whether it spoke about how actors, practically, engaged with circular fashion as activity; or 2) about why they did it. In that I ended up with two main exhibits, first a joint account of how firms blend together problematizations and their remedies into a circular fashion-narrative – which arguably constitutes a new story about fashion and fashion production with circularity placed front and centre – and second, a list of practical activities that exemplify the actions taken.

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Problematizations and circular remedies Fashion production makes tremendous, and increasingly well understood, environmental impacts in the process of transforming materials into finished garments. Those impacts derive from the use of water, chemicals and fossil fuels in material production, weaving, dyeing and sewing.33 Recently claims about and statistics on these impacts have been related to how fashion has become increasingly treated as disposable, so that clothes are worn just a few times and then end up in landfill or being incinerated to generate heat and energy.34 This link, between on the one hand massive (and increasing) environmental impacts, at a point in time when the earth is particularly ill equipped to sustain these impacts, and products that seem to be of little or no use for people, establishes a powerful and easy-to-understand problematization of modern fashion. It portrays fashion not only as morally bankrupt but also functionally ineffective, using Earth’s resources in a wasteful way: The current system for producing, distributing, and using clothing operates on a predominantly take-make-dispose model. High volumes of non-renewable resources are extracted to produce clothes that are often used for only a short period, after which the materials are largely lost to landfill or incineration. It is estimated that more than half of ‘fast fashion’ produced is disposed of in under a year. This linear system leaves economic opportunities untapped, puts pressure on resources, pollutes and degrades ecosystems, and creates significant societal impacts at local, regional, and global scales.35

In the past, firms in other industries that found themselves and their practices problematized often denied the very existence of problems, or engaged in various deflection tactics.36 However, as contemporary firms have increasingly come to embrace sustainability as a business opportunity, it seems that approaches for dealing with problematizations are also changing.37 Yet embracing problematizations is not without difficulties, as employees, owners, consumers and managers need to believe in ‘their’ firm and its practice. A company cannot simply surrender its prior convictions and confess to the full list of sins; cynicism can be dangerous, and firms need to operate with a ‘logic of confidence’.38 Admitting to one’s faults would amount to saying that all those that have believed in fashion have been mistaken, and have given their time and efforts to a morally corrupt cause. In other words, dealing with problematizations is about balance, and calls for ways of mediating between outsiders’ criticisms and insiders’ need to believe that

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what they have been doing, and will continue to do, has meaning. The theoretical term that institutionalists have used to denote such mediations is translation, referring to how the meaning of problematizations are presented and shaped via written or spoken texts.39 In the following excerpts we meet some examples of how firms translate problematizations, putting them into their own words. For instance, firms can recognize that grave problems exist but nonetheless assign the primary responsibility for them to some other set of actors, such as those in the supply chain: There are many challenges in being part of the textile industry, an industry with long and complex supply chains and one that leaves significant environmental and social footprints. Research say that the textile industry is the second most polluting industry after oil. There are both environmental and social risks within our value chain and those are mainly found beyond our direct control and our own business, or upstreams of our value chain.40 Sustainable fashion means an enormous transition for the entire fashion industry that will require updated business models and changed routes to success [. . .] The fashion and textile industry accounts for a considerable proportion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, above all through emissions in the supply chain.41

An often-observed tendency in other industries is to pass on large parts of the responsibility to one’s consumers, in that one simply sees oneself as responding to what consumers demand.42 Yet, interestingly, fashion firms seem hesitant to do this. What is expressed is rather that consumers and firms share the responsibility for fashion’s current predicament, and thereby also the responsibility for doing something about it: While we need to transform production of fashion, we also need to ensure that consumption is more sustainable, aware and circular. These two aspects are also mutually dependent. Consequently, we want to guide our customers towards more sustainable fashion consumption and inspire them to be a part of the work of transforming the fashion industry.43 We want to empower and enable women to have a sustainable wardrobe and live a sustainable life. And while there is a lot still to do on the journey toward supporting a sustainable lifestyle, we are already making progress through several different initiatives [. . .] As a major player in the fashion industry, we want to take our responsibility and do what we can to have a positive impact. We want everyone to have a wardrobe with clothes that they really love, take good care of and use often. With Your Smart Wardrobe, we want to make it easy for customers to find their own personal style and to build a smart wardrobe.44

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We’re still learning how to promote and reward sustainable actions for the greatest impact, but we must do more in this area. Our customers, colleagues, and suppliers are partners on our journey towards more sustainable business practice, and we’re thinking about new and creative ways to incentivise behaviour change. For example, as well as financial rewards for garment collection, we’re exploring other options for motivating customers to return unwanted items. This includes credits to contribute to positive.45

This makes sense as consumer-oriented firms cannot, and likely do not want to, alienate their consumers by pinning blame on them. That would also run contrary to their business-as-usual approach, as they remain dependent on consumers’ continued support of all the linear products and practices that they still market and engage in. In that sense, the message regarding need for change is balanced against a message that it is also ok to remain the same. A more humble approach, where firms accept responsibility, can also be detected: The fashion industry has had a rude awakening in recent years when it comes to the big climate impact that we are all part of. At Gina Tricot, we are very humble and know that we are a part of the problem, but we also know that we can be a part of the solution.46 We know that the fashion industry has a significant impact on both people and the environment. The challenges that lie ahead will require both passion and commitment. The fashion industry needs to embrace the circular economy and find new innovative solutions.47

Larger firms can approach that responsibility head on, proudly casting themselves in the role of their industry’s change-maker. See this statement from H&M, for example: Currently, more than 70% of clothes purchased globally are estimated to be landfilled or destroyed. This is unacceptable and unsustainable. We are determined to lead the industry towards a new way of doing business, where customers can feel good about their clothes and where no textiles end up as waste.48

Moving on, a key element of meaning-making is about furnishing the remedy to these problematizations – embracing and then overcoming them, providing much-needed hope. As noted, circular fashion embodies that hope. It is a remedy that has an intuitive appeal, as embodied in the allure of the circle.49 One thing is certain: the fashion industry can’t continue to operate in the same way as in past decades. At H&M Group, we believe that an industry-wide shift

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Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics from a linear to a circular business model is the way forward, and our ambition is to become fully circular.50

Even sustainability experts would find it hard to quibble with this as a solution: if recycling and reuse could replace multiple production steps in fashion’s dirty supply chain, several environmental impacts would be tackled in one fell swoop.51 Recycling gives used fabrics a new life as resources rather than being destroyed or landfilled. Recycled fibres reduce consumption of virgin raw materials, and lower the use of chemicals, energy and water. We use many recycled materials including cotton, polyester, wool, nylon, plastic, down and feathers, cashmere, and silver. We are always trying to maximise the recycled content of our collections, and to invest in new technologies to accelerate progress. For example, our ambition is to move away from all virgin polyester and only use recycled polyester by the latest 2030.52 To be able to sell truly sustainable products to our customers, we must close the loop [. . .] The more we use our garments, the less we need to consume and buy new clothes, and this automatically leads to less climate impact. We need to make sure our garments are worn and loved as many times as possible. We are firm believers that our garments have a long life ahead of them, preferably by multiple users. The more the merrier.53

The idea of circular fashion is broad enough to provide a framework for the entirety of a firm’s practice, yet it involves dimensions that are relatively familiar, such as working with issues of quality, of style versus trend, or of material choice: Circular fashion is our internal framework for how to adopt to a circular economy, guiding us on how to move away from traditional linear business models towards circular ones, like nature’s own ecosystem. It encompasses everything we do within our business: from how we design, develop, produce and build longevity into our clothing to reinvigorating our business models.54

In that sense it is a comfortable solution, one that combines familiar elements with ones that are flavoured with the appeal of innovation. It indicates reform as well as revolution: Circular models optimise resources and minimise waste, so that resources stay in use for as long as possible before being recycled or repurposed. We are working to build circularity into every stage of our value chain — from design and production to customer use, reuse and recycling — and to source only sustainable, renewable and recycled resources. Our aim is to become fully

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circular. This is ambitious, but working towards a world without waste is essential for our planet and our business [. . .] We look forward to using the framework and sharing it with others, as we lead the change towards a circular fashion industry.55

Still, circular fashion comes with major challenges for how fashion’s supply chain is organized, and how modern fashion producers have set themselves up: But we have to find a way of getting the material back to our producer countries and that will demand new cooperation in the future. The technology has to be scaled up and become available in our production countries as well, and I think that is definitely possible [. . .] but it is also a matter of logistics. How to get material that is waste from our consumers back to our producers?56

That leads me over to present the next exhibit, the steps that firms take to couple their words to action and to implement circular fashion.

Steps toward circular fashion My impression is that the firms I have studied have, over time, come to construct a loose, but reasonably common, practical definition of what circularity means. Below several practical steps are discussed, including a categorization that suggests the various thematic elements of firms’ attempts to achieve circular fashion (see Figure 1.1). One solution is experimenting with rentals, whereby a limited number of garments are made available for consumers to lease. In 2015, only FilippaK that offered leasing. Leasing fits nicely with the notion of circular fashion as, in principle, it strikes a compromise between consumers’ need for speed, firms’ need to make money and the environmental necessity to reduce cotton and garment (virgin) production. Yet, in practice, leasing has not been a success, as FilippaK had to concede: Although our Lease concept has many followers, it is still on a very small scale and awareness of the program can yet be improved. During 2018 we had an all time low, decreasing the numbers by 78%. We made a strategic decision, however, not to focus on Lease during the coming 5 years, but instead focus on our products, the care and second hand concept as well as transparency.57

However, these experiences have not stopped H&M and Gina Tricot from launching their own rental services:

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Table 1.2 Practical engagements with circular fashion (actions). Practical engagement Warantee Repair Design for longevity Care products Care advise

Circular element Prolonging consumer use

Shopping advice On demand Labels

Shaping shopping

Recycling – technology Recycling – demand Recycling – design

Recycling

Rentals Second sale Used garment collection (internal)

New business models

Used garment collection (outsourced) Innovation labs Collaborations Commitments Certifications

Shape norms

Rent can be a way to make money several times. That is good business for Gina, if we can get Rent to grow. And it is a great service to the consumer, to pay half the prize for your party dress that you only used once anyway [. . .] and it is good for the environment as well, but that does not need to be the primary reason.58

It should be noted that these services are extremely marginal in the sense that the offer is available only for certain garments, in certain stores, or for a limited group of consumers (e.g., club members). Although the intention is to scale, if scaling never happens (as in the case of FilippaK), it exemplifies what institutionalists refer to as ‘decoupling’: actions that are symbolic rather than substantive.59 Another example is that of implementing the collection of used garments, an initiative that some firms began in 2015. While collection has been a success, in terms of quickly becoming available throughout stores and firms, it also seems decoupled from fashion practice, as collection is operated entirely by partners that take care of all donated items.60 Collected garments are mainly downcycled

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or exported, so in that sense these garments replace neither the use of material nor fashion consumption in Sweden. Collection has instead had other effects, such as successfully influencing the political process of deciding what to do with the fashion industry’s waste generation.61 Over the years that I have interviewed sustainability managers about circular fashion, the development of chemical recycling at the Swedish research start-up Re:newcell has attracted much attention. Chemical recycling turns cotton and viscose into a pulp that can then be made into a new type of cellulose-based fabric which in turn forms the basis of new garments. While chemical recycling solves some of the long-standing technical issues with recycling cotton, there are issues with sorting and logistics that have prevented it from reaching scale. Yet, it has attracted much attention from Swedish fashion firms, with several firms supporting technical innovation either by investing in Re:newcell (H&M and KappAhl) or by providing textiles for its research and production: Closing materials loops in order to minimise textiles ending up in landfill or being incinerated is a big challenge which requires new infrastructural solutions. We cannot do it on our own, so we cooperate with other partners to improve the possibilities for recycling textile fibres in the future. We have had an ongoing partnership going with Re:newcell. During 2018 we sent them 6 boxes of fabric waste from one of our jersey suppliers in Portugal to be tried out in the pilot plant.62 In 2018, Gina Tricot started to cooperate and support Re:newcell, pioneers in the recycling industry. Re:newcell uses cotton waste to produce a pure, natural and biodegradable raw material that can then be turned into new clothes of the highest quality – and recycled again and again. Re:newcell opened their first recycling plant in 2017 in Kristinehamn, Sweden. At the plant, they can recycle 7,000 tons of textile waste each year. That’s enough to make 30 million brand new t-shirts!63 We don’t have all the answers ourselves, but by teaming up with – and investing in – pioneering companies that develop ground-breaking technologies, such as Re:newcell or Infinited Fiber Company, we can scale innovations and reinvent fashion together.64

Lastly, although external pressure for circularity is yet to crystallize into more detailed standards and suggestions for best practice – referred to as ‘rational myths’ by institutionalists – some voluntary agreements and commitments have emerged over the past five years.65 Several firms have signed up to the 2020 Circular Commitment of the Global Fashion Agenda:

38

Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics Lindex is committed to the 2020 Circular Fashion System Commitment, an initiative developed by Global Fashion Agenda. The aim of the commitment is to accelerate the transition to a circular fashion system, which is also a core aim of our sustainability promise.66 In line with our circular fashion commitment, we are striving to increase our collection of garments from customers by 50% by the year 2020 through different activities in store. In 2019 we collected 50 tons, which is same amount as collected 2018. Collecting garments for reusing or recycling is a crucial first step in prolonging the product’s useful life or turning them into new raw materials in a never-ending loop.67

Although these commitments are not yet firm enough to dictate or steer action, they still testify to how meanings of circular fashion evolve in the interaction between individual firms and industry-level collectives. The latter comprise consultants, industry representatives and fashion experts, but also researchers, state agencies and politicians.68

Discussion As my findings show, the meaning conveyed through circular talk and activities is one of change. Yet, here I suggest that this talk and activity can also function to maintain fashion practice and its legitimacy. How is that so? For a moment I ask the reader to disregard the goals and aspirations stated in discussions around circular fashion, and simply focus on two things: first. the ‘moral effects’ of all this talk about how fashion can become circular; and second, what is actually being done in the name of circularity. I suggest that the primary moral effect is to restore the legitimacy of fast fashion, in a situation where this legitimacy is threatened by some pretty harsh problematizations. How is that so? Simply by portraying fashion ‘as about to change’ and ‘innovative’ rather than as morally corrupt and fundamentally unsustainable. In other words, circular fashion provides new hope that there is a sustainable fashion solution to be found in the future, one that innovation may allow us to reach. In that sense, circularity provides meaning to all those people that needs to keep believing in fashion, and the paradoxical effect of hope is that things can continue much as they were. Second, when looking at what is actually done in the name of circularity, it has to be compared with all that is being done to keep the business-as-usual running. In other words, the practical engagements need to relate to the totality of fashion practice. As noted, it is then recognized that engagements are primarily

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experiments, and as such, highly decoupled from the business-as-usual. Even activities that have been scaled beyond the experimental phase, such as used garment collection, remain highly decoupled.69 Yet, when put together, these activities are not marginal. In other words, each activity is rather marginal and insignificant when considered in isolation; when activities are undertaken together, however, there is a certain momentum to them. In adding together these two dimensions, it makes sense to think of circular fashion as a ‘bundle’ of experiments and symbolic actions that appear alongside ordinary fast-fashion practice. In other words, it is not about replacing linear action but about adding to it. ‘Maintenance’ means both to retain an original function and to upgrade the machinery needed to perform that function; adding elements to a practice is a way to upgrade and thus to respond to a business context that is increasingly complex, increasingly filled with contradictory and complicated demands.70 I think that it makes sense to think of contemporary fast fashion as a practice that entails a certain duality, living with experiments of a more or less symbolic type, but feeding off the economic perks of fast fashion. We may think of this as linear fashion with a certain, added, circular flavour. This added flavour works to maintain fashion by upgrading it, and for contemporary business upgrading means embracing (un)sustainability and providing perhaps not a clear solution for it, but rather engaging in talk that at least puts hope in play. It is about engaging in functional, but also moral, rationalization that could restore hope and make fashion meaningful again. This particular example of institutional maintenance constituted by fashion seems relevant also for updating the notion of what maintenance means in for the general business context.71 In particular, I find that characteristic of maintenance changes because problematizations are embraced rather than denied. That in turn has a knock-on effect and calls for a wider tinkering with institutional elements. In other words, if problematizations are accepted, meanings cannot stay the same. And if meanings are changed, some corresponding change in practical elements is also to be expected, as talk is performative.72 Nonetheless, as argued, things can at the same time stay the same, because tinkering redirects attention to the elements that are changing, and provides organizational hope and meaning. I do not suggest, however, that this maintenance is without internal consequences: any reframing of meaning matters for one’s employees and actions. The extensive list of timeintensive tasks that firms have to engage with can be a huge drain on resources.73 In that sense, moral legitimacy may come at the price of the

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instrumental one, as firms engage in activities that may not be profitable, at least not in the short term. I made the claim that business is about meaning, and that fashion, like any business, needs to navigate existentially in a world where business, economic development and growth are increasingly recognized as being responsible for misfortune and environmental ruin rather than prosperity and progress. In that context, maintaining one’s operations calls for coming up with new hopeful visions. Circular fashion seems a case in point.

Ethical implications If firms’ embracing of circular fashion has moral consequences, what are the ethical implications of these engagements? My reflections centre around two issues: first, is it ethical to maintain fast fashion; and second, is it ethical to reform it so that it becomes circular fashion? The answer to the first question seems clear cut, in that fast fashion is a practice that is damaging much of our planet, as well as people’s lives and the societal fabric of the developing world. Any benefits of fast fashion, in turn, are felt only by a minority, principally those private equity firms, or wealthy individuals, that own the firms discussed in this chapter. The good fortune enjoyed by the handful of influencers who have found fame and fortune by associating with these firms cannot either right these wrongs. Thus, by definition, any action taken to maintain fast fashion in anything like its current form cannot be ethical, in any of the ways that we tend to think about ethics. Second, to reform fast fashion towards circularity is also problematic. I have already discussed that, in practice, circularity seems to become an add-on to the business-as-usual rather than a genuine reform of fast fashion. Another issue, however, is that circularity does not take into consideration the way in which fashion manufacturers treat their workers, which is a major part of fast fashion’s problem. In addition, as mentioned, circularity targets fashion’s environmental impacts only indirectly, as these all occur in production. Surely it would be more effective to try and tackle them head on, to work with one’s producers and suppliers instead of trying to replace them through the use of recycling and reuse? In that sense, circular fashion is a solution that aims to rid fashion firms of blame for production problems in the developing world, rather than trying to alleviate them. That seems hardly ethical. In conclusion, although circular fashion seems to make firms more legitimate, which is a social judgement, it cannot make them more ethical, which is an absolute judgement.

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Notes 1 Paul Colomy, ‘Neofunctionalism and Neoinstitutionalism: Human Agency and Interest in Institutional Change’, Sociological Forum vol. 13, no 2 (1998): 289. 2 Cotton is a notoriously thirsty crop, and its alternative, polyester, derives from fossil fuels. In addition, spinning, weaving and sewing are powered by carbon-derived energy, which generates massive CO2 emissions. See Julian Allwood et al., ‘An Approach to Scenario Analysis of the Sustainability of an Industrial Sector Applied to Clothing and Textiles in the UK’, Journal of Cleaner Production vol. 16 (2008): 1234–46. 3 Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMAF), ‘A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future’ (2017): 3. 4 John Meyer and Brian Rowan, ‘Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony’, American Journal of Sociology vol. 83 (1977): 340–63; Richard Scott, Institutions and Organizations: Ideas, Interests and Identities (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2013), 72–3. 5 Hengst et al., ‘Toward a Process Theory of Making Sustainability Strategies Legitimate in Action’, Academy of Management Journal vol. 63 (2020): 246–71. 6 Evelyn Micelotta and Marvin Washington, ‘Institutions and Maintenance: The Repair Work of Italian Professions’, Organization Studies vol. 34 (2013): 1137–70. 7 EMAF, ‘A new textiles’, 3–10. 8 For instance, in Steve Maguire and Cynthia Hardy, ‘Discourse and Deinstitutionalization: the Decline of DDT’, Academy of Management Journal vol. 52 (2009): 148–78. 9 Lea Fünfschilling and Herman Stål, ‘Innovation-as-maintenance: A New Perspective on Institutions and Innovations’, Academy of Management Proceedings (2020): 1–20. 10 Tom Lawrence, Roy Suddaby and Bernard Leca, ‘Institutional Work: Refocusing Institutional Studies of Organization’, Journal of Management Inquiry vol. 20 (2010): 52. 11 Tom Lawrence, Cynthia Hardy and Nelson Phillips, ‘Institutional Effects of Interorganizational Collaboration: the Emergence of Proto-Institutions’, Academy of Management Journal vol. 45 (2002): 282. 12 Liz Barnes and Gaynor Lea Greenwood, ‘Fast Fashioning the Supply Chain: Shaping the Research Agenda’, in Journal of Fashion Marketing Management: An International Journal vol. 10 (2006): 259. 13 For examples of less purpose-driven institutional maintenance, see Mia Raynard, Farah Kodeih and Royston Greenwood, ‘Proudly Elitist and Undemocratic? The Distributed Maintenance of Contested Practices’, Organization Studies vol. 42, no. 1 (2021): 7–33, and for dramatic examples see Andrea Herepath and Martin Kitchener,

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14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21

22 23 24 25 26

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Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics ‘When Small Bandages Fail: The Field-Level Repair of Severe and Protracted Institutional Breaches’, Organization Studies vol. 37, no. 8 (2016): 1–27. David Deephouse et al., ‘Organizational Legitimacy’, in Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, ed. Royston Greenwood et al. (London: SAGE 2017), 27–54. Leigh Tost, ‘An Integrative Model of Legitimacy Judgments’, Academy of Management Review vol. 36 (2011): 690. Hengst et al., ‘Toward a Process Theory’, 246–71. Bryan Hudson, ‘Against All Odds: A Consideration of Core-stigmatized Organizations’, Academy of Management Review vol. 33 (2008): 245–78. Christiana Figueres et al., ‘Three Years to Safeguard the Climate’, Nature News vol. 546 (2017): 593. On scandals as antecedents, see Herepath and Kitchener, ‘When Small’, 1–27; on government interventions, see Micelotta and Washington, ‘The Repair Work’, 1137–70; on problematizations, see Maguire and Hardy, ‘Discourse’, 148, or Raynard, Kodeih and Greenwood, ‘Proudly Elitist’; on incidental behavioural variation, see Jaco Lok and Marc de Rond, ‘On the Plasticity of Institutions: Containing and Restoring Practice Breakdowns at the Cambridge University Boat Club’, Academy of Management Journal vol. 56, no. 11 (2013): 185–207. On organizational responses as defending one’s knowledge, see Maguire and Hardy ‘Discourse’, 148–95, and as defending one’s identity, see Lianne Lefsrud and Renate Meyer, ‘Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change’, Organization Studies vol. 33, no. 11 (2012): 1477–1506. On policing deviance, see Lok and de Rond, ‘On the Plasticity’, 185–207, and on modifying institutional elements, see Fünfschilling and Stål, ‘Innovation-as-maintenance’, 1–20. For an example of where the institution remains the same, see Micelotta and Washington, ‘The Repair’, 1137–70; for an example of where elements are modified, see Lok and de Rond, ‘On the Plasticity’, 185–207. Lastly, for an example of deinstitutionalization, see Maguire and Hardy, ‘Discourse’, 148–78. Maguire and Hardy, ‘Discourse’, 148–78. Lefsrud and Meyer, ‘Science’, 1483. Lok and de Rond, ‘On the Plasticity’, 185–207. Herman Stål, ‘Inertia and Change Related to Sustainability: An Institutional Approach’, Journal of Cleaner Production vol. 99 (2015): 354–65. Herman Stål and Karl Bonnedahl, ‘Provision of Climate Advice as a Mechanism for Environmental Governance in Swedish Agriculture’, Environmental Policy and Governance vol. 25 (2015): 359; Herman Stål, Karl Bonnedahl and Jessica Ericsson, ‘Micro-level Translation of Greenhouse Gas Reduction: Policy Meets Industry in the Swedish Agricultural Sector’, Journal of Cleaner Production vol. 103 (2015): 629–39. Kathy Eisenhardt, ‘Building Theories from Case Study Research’, Academy of Management Review vol. 14 (1989): 532–50.

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28 Details of the data collection and methodological considerations are described in more detail in Hervé Corvellec and Herman Stål, ‘Evidencing the Waste Effect of Product-service Systems (PSSs)’, Journal of Cleaner Production vol. 145 (2017): 14–24; Hervé Corvellec and Herman Stål, ‘Qualification as Corporate Activism: How Swedish Apparel Retailers Attach Circular Fashion Qualities to Take-back Systems’, Scandinavian Journal of Management vol. 35, no. 3 (2019): Art #: 101046; Herman Stål and Johan Jansson, ‘Sustainable Consumption and Value Propositions: Exploring Product–service System Practices Among Swedish Fashion Firms’, Sustainable Development vol. 25, no. 6 (2017): 546–58. 29 H&M, Sustainability Report 2018 (2019), 30. 30 GinaTricot, Sustainability (2020), 36. 31 Lindex, Sustainability Report 2019 (2020), 41 32 Our analysis owes much to what Dennis Gioia, Kevin Corley and Aimee Hamilton explain in their ‘Seeking Qualitative Rigor in Inductive Research: Notes on the Gioia Methodology’, Organizational Research Methods vol. 16, no. 1 (2013): 15–31. 33 Sandra Roos has done much to measure these impacts, by using Life Cycle Analyses. See, for example, her work with colleagues in ‘An Approach to Guiding an Industry Sector Towards Sustainability: The Case of the Swedish Fashion Sector’, Journal of Cleaner Production vol. 133 (2015): 691–700. 34 EMAF, ‘A New Textiles’, 3–10. 35 Ibid., 36. 36 Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s description of how Exxon Mobil spent millions of dollars to spread doubt regarding climate change serves as a case in point. Described in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011). 37 Pratima Bansal and Andrew J. Hoffman (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Business and the Natural Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 38 Tammy MacLean and Michael Behnam, ‘The Dangers of Decoupling: The Relationship Between Compliance Programs, Legitimacy Perceptions, and Institutionalized Misconduct’, Academy of Management Journal vol. 53, no. 6 (2010): 1499–1520. 39 Maguire and Hardy, ‘Discourse’, 148–49. 40 FilippaK, FilippaK Sustainability Report 2018 (2019), 10. 41 KappAhl, Annual Report 2019 (2020), 9. 42 Stål, ‘Micro-level Translation’, 634. 43 KappAhl, Annual Report, 30. 44 Lindex, Sustainability, 33. 45 H&M, Sustainability Report 2019 (2020), 23. 46 GinaTricot, Sustainability, 38.

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47 GinaTricot, interview with sustainability manager (2020) 48 H&M, Sustainability Report 2019, 28. 49 Hervé Corvellec spoke about the incantation of the circle in his presentation Sirens of the circular economy at the 6th Degrowth Conference in Malmö, 2018. 50 H&M, Sustainability Report 2019, 35. 51 Under the condition that the environmental impacts of recycling (energy, transport, chemicals) and reuse (energy, transports) do not exceed those production activities they replace. And that they actually replace, rather than add to, production levels, a questionable thesis when all firms are striving to grow their sales. 52 H&M, Sustainability Report 2019, 40. 53 GinaTricot, Sustainability, 35–6. 54 FilippaK, FilippaK, 24. 55 H&M, Sustainability Report 2019, 27. 56 Indiska, interview with sustainability manager (2016). 57 FilippaK, FilippaK, 52. 58 GinaTricot, interview (2020). 59 Herman Stål and Hervé Corvellec, ‘A Decoupling Perspective on Circular Business Model Implementation: Illustrations from Swedish Apparel’, Journal of Cleaner Production vol. 171 (2018): 632; Herman Stål and Hervé Corvellec, ‘Organizing Means–Ends Decoupling: Core–Compartment Separations in Fast Fashion’, Business & Society vol. 61 (2022): 857–85. 60 Stål and Corvellec, ‘A Decoupling’, 633. 61 Corvellec, ‘Qualifying’, 7. 62 FilippaK, FilippaK, 53 63 GinaTricot, Sustainability, 37 64 H&M Sustainability Report 2019, 4. 65 Meyer, ‘Institutionalized Organizations’, 340. 66 Lindex, Sustainability, 14. 67 GinaTricot, Sustainability, 36 68 Stål and Courvellec, ‘A Decoupling’, 636. 69 Ibid., 638. 70 Patricia Bromley and Walter Powell, ‘From Smoke and Mirrors to Walking the Talk: Decoupling in the Contemporary World’, Academy of Management Annals vol. 6, no. 1 (2012): 483–5. 71 Fünfschilling, ‘Innovation-as-maintenance’, 3. 72 Lars Christensen, Mette Morsing and Ole Thyssen, ‘CSR as Aspirational Talk’, Organization vol. 20, no. 3 (2013): 372–5. 73 Bromley, ‘From Smoke’, 25.

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Animals ‘Occupy’ Vogue Italia: Sustainability, Ethics and the Fashion Media Morna Laing

Another aspect of the fashion industry concerns animals as exploited resources. In this chapter, fashion scholar Morna Laing analyses the Vogue Italia ‘Animal’ issue from January 2021, emphasizing how the issue’s textual discourse on new sustainable and empathetic approaches to animals, leather and fur raises important questions about shifting attitudes and strategies of greenwashing in the industry. This discourse has emerged in light of a growing consumer awareness about environmental issues and activist engagement in campaigns for animal rights.

Introduction In the industrial fashion system, animals are treated as ‘raw material’ for the production of commodities, such as shoes, bags and jackets.1 Yet a number of scholars have commented on the relative absence of discussion pertaining to endangered wildlife and animal rights in the field of Fashion Studies.2 This blindspot made the appearance of an issue of Vogue Italia devoted to animals (in January 2021) seem somewhat curious.3 I came across the issue while researching the way sustainability was represented in the fashion media. Building on the work of Else Skjold, I was interested in the role fashion magazines might play in defining the terms of the debate and whether publications that exist in service to the industry and advertisers, could ever play a part in reshaping the fashion system, coaxing it towards more sustainable ideals.4 There is little academic literature on the symbolic production of sustainability since the majority of writing tends to focus on practices of design and material production.5 Yet 45

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discourses – in the form of words and images – provide the means by which fashion becomes desirable, offering potential for the evolution of social mores in relation to consumption practices.6 Animals are implicated in debates about sustainability in at least three ways: there is the animal rights perspective and the moral question of sentience; there is the issue of endangered species and loss of biodiversity; and then there is the environmental impact of producing fashion from animal-based materials.7 In this chapter, I analyse the Animal issue of Vogue Italia and the way editorial values were elaborated therein. I focus on three key themes in the magazine’s discourse: endangered wildlife, leather and fur. I question what can be said and what remains unsayable in a context so closely wedded to the (Italian) fashion system. This also involves evaluating the pedagogical potential of fashion magazines as carriers of information – as well vehicles for taste-making and ‘educating desire’8 – against the backdrop of an ongoing environmental crisis. Given that the Animal issue set out to challenge anthropocentric perspectives, it raises the question as to what it means when a publication like Vogue purports to give voice to the fashion system’s animal ‘other’?

Vogue Italia Vogue Italia holds an important place in the global fashion industry, with Valerie Steele noting in 2003 that the magazine ‘is widely regarded by industry professionals as the best and most beautiful magazine in the world’.9 Franca Sozzani was editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia between 1988 and 2016 and she attributed its success to the fact that ‘we take more risks’.10 Journalist Vanessa Friedman suggests that ‘her genius lay in understanding that to make Italian Vogue matter to anyone who was not Italian, she would have to communicate largely through photographs. She did so, and then added a dollop of activism on top, commissioning shoots that dealt with domestic abuse, plastic surgery and the BP Oil Spill. They were impossible to ignore, and her magazine soon became known as the most visually powerful of all Vogues’.11 Indeed, media scholar Megan Le Masurier explored the magazine’s potential as a space for social commentary, following the publication of Steven Meisel’s ‘Water and Oil’ spread in the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the gulf of Mexico.12 Upon Sozzani’s untimely death in 2016, Emanuele Farneti succeeded her as editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia (as well as L’Uomo Vogue) where he remained in

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place up until 2021.13 His appointment was announced in January 2017, and he worked in collaboration with New York-based creative director, Ferdinando Verderi.14 In an interview with Polimoda, the Florence-based fashion school, Farneti emphasized that the magazine stood ‘outside of the fashion industry’s comfort zone’: ‘I think that our DNA is a big help in this new world because we can be the magazine that pushes the boundaries and brings fresh ideas into the fashion conversation. Being able to connect fashion with different worlds is something that maybe you don’t expect from some of the other Vogues but you surely do expect it from Vogue Italia.’15 Under Farneti’s leadership, the magazine became quite text-heavy, allowing space for thematic issues to be examined from a range of perspectives, with examples including ‘gratitude’ (December 2020) and children as the ‘forgotten victims’ of the pandemic (June 2020).16 Discussing Vogue Italia’s strategy, Farneti locates it in relation to Vogue’s charter of values, co-signed by all twenty-six editors of Vogue’s global editions, with ‘[living] more sustainably’ being chief amongst them.17 To coincide with this declaration, the January 2020 edition of Vogue Italia was created without doing any photo shoots, instead showcasing collections through fashion illustrations to make a point about the environmental impact of publishing a magazine.18 In this way, Vogue Italia sought to demonstrate that you can ‘tell the story of clothes without photographing them’.19 Describing the impact of this decision, Farneti noted: ‘One hundred and fifty people affected. About twenty flights, ten trains. Forty cars on hand. Sixty international dispatches. At least ten hours of non-stop lighting, partly powered by petrol generators. Food waste from caterers. Plastic wrapping for clothes. Electricity for charging phones, cameras. . .’20 This experiment relates to what Farneti described as a process of asking ‘uncomfortable questions’ as to whether ‘fashion, with its obsessive need for novelty and its fetishization of possessions, [can ever] aspire to be truly sustainable?’21

Ethics, sustainability and animals While the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘sustainability’ are often used interchangeably, Sue Thomas suggests that ‘in reality ethics are the structure on which sustainability is built’.22 Ethics, she argues, ‘can be applied in most situations where choices are made. They can provide insights for establishing protocols and strategies for behaving honourably with others in mind’.23 In this way, they refer to

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Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics what is right, just, good, kind and fair for others and us. In fact, it is the acknowledgement of the lack of separation (our ‘interbeing’) between us, and the other person, sentient being, and planet that makes ethics easier to comprehend. It is that desire to help; an empathy, an altruism; to contribute, to give to the other, her or his due.24

The interrelationship between humans, the natural world and its sentient beings, is key to debates about fashion and sustainability. Perhaps the most widely cited definition of sustainability can be found in the Brundtland report, Our Common Future (1987), which states ‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.25 This mainstream definition can be contrasted with more radical discourses on sustainability, grounded in intersectional environmentalism, that pose deeper questions about social justice and the equitable (re)distribution of global resources.26 Sustainability refers not only to the ecological environment but also to people and communities as well as the treatment of animals.27 And in the context of the industrial fashion system which is premised on change and over-consumption, the idea of sustainability has been highlighted as paradoxical, incompatible with the current dictates of endless economic growth.28 Nevertheless, choice and therefore ethics are central to our current relationship to fashion and the way we decide to go forward, since we are at a turning point where the decisions we take now will determine the future of the planet, given the ‘uncompromising deadline of a decade to avert catastrophic climate change’.29 Jennifer Farley Gordon and Colleen Hill note that ‘Of the various topics related to ethics and sustainability in fashion, the use of animal products is perhaps the most polarizing, lacking any sort of middle ground’.30 On the one hand, ‘sustainability in the context of the treatment of animals can refer to the responsible, humane use of animal products. Yet, for some there is no such thing as responsible and humane use of any animal product. In that view, forswearing all animal products is the only true interpretation of sustainability’. John L. Sorenson is a sociologist who adopts the latter position, arguing in 2011 that animal rights have not received enough attention in Fashion Studies (although animals have subsequently been included in some scholarly definitions of sustainable fashion since then).31 Efrat Tseëlon locates animal rights within what she terms ‘peripheral’ ethical issues: those ethical issues which have been ‘culturally repressed’ in the consumer imagination.32 These can be contrasted with ‘mainstream’ fashion ethics, which are those practices that can be easily accommodated within the existing paradigm of industrial fashion, without

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‘[requiring] a change of mindset’.33 And Catherine Kovesi and Lynn Johnson argue for the importance of including wildlife and biodiversity within definitions of sustainability.34 Historically, animals have been used in the fashion industry for both ‘utilitarian and luxury purposes’.35 Animal-based materials can take a number of forms: fibres, such as wool, cashmere, silk and angora; leather, suede and skins; feathers; ivory; tortoiseshell; and so on. Yet, when one thinks of animal rights and fashion, the most visible campaigning in recent years has been related to fur. Writing in 2011, Sorenson notes that ‘fur has become the signifier of animal related ethical issues in fashion’ even if ‘the ethical dilemmas surrounding the exploitation of nonhuman animals extend far beyond fur’.36 It is easy therefore to forget that it was ‘dwindling numbers of many varieties of bird’ that led to protests, campaigning and the founding of associations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) in 1889, when there was a craze for ‘exotic’ feathers in millinery during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.37 When reflecting on the environmental impact of certain materials within fashion supply chains, it must be acknowledged that there is no such thing as an inherently sustainable material. Instead, ‘all materials impact ecological and social systems in some way, but these impacts differ in scale and type between fibres [and materials]’, as Kate Fletcher and Lynda Grose underline.38 Yet, when deriving materials from animals, one has to consider something more, beyond impacts such as energy use, toxicity and waste production: namely, the animal’s sentience. To say animals are sentient beings is to say they ‘[have] the power of perception by the senses’.39 From an animal rights perspective, Sorenson, citing legal scholar Gary Francione, argues that ‘sentience endows animals with moral significance [meaning] they should not be regarded as property, necessitating an abolitionist approach that rejects all exploitation of animals’.40 Yet, according to Thomas, ‘Within our [western] culture, speciesism is endemic; that is, the favouring of the human species above all other creatures in our behaviours and decision-making. Essentially it is regarding animals only from the perspective of their use or interest to our lives and existence’.41 And animal exploitation is of course linked to global capitalism, a system that ‘seeks to extract the maximum profit from every animal’s body’, with factory farming being ‘the norm’.42 The treatment of animals is not a comfortable topic to address, and it is important for me to acknowledge my own subject-position in relation to this subject. In the course of this research, I have found myself further questioning my consumption practices, not only when it comes to food but also leather, particularly in light of issues connected to traceability, as explored below. It

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seems the act of questioning and re-evaluating, as I have myself been doing in the course of this research, speaks to the importance of talking freely about sensitive subjects, particularly those which have been ‘culturally repressed’.43 Writing about fur, Jonathan Faiers notes that ‘Problematic and sensitive subjects deserve as much attention, if not more, as those with which we can establish a comfortable critical distance’.44 However, as will become clear, while the pages of the Animal issue of Vogue Italia were at times very informative, the extent to which truly uncomfortable questions could be broached was somewhat limited, given the magazine’s links to industry. This means there is inevitably a strategic silencing when it comes to certain ethical questions within the debate – particularly those pertaining to sentience and the limits of the circular economy.

Animals ‘Occupy’ Vogue Italia The January 2021 Animal issue was launched under Farneti’s stewardship with seven collectible covers, featuring different species from the animal kingdom.45 In his Editor’s Letter, Farneti spelt out the connection between animals and the environmental emergency, writing: This time we wanted to let animals take over our physical and digital space. It’s a call to refocus on the natural world after months spent at home, bringing our attention back to the environmental emergency that has been made no less urgent by the tragedy of the pandemic, and highlighting a lesson from the year that has just ended; Quite simply, that the world does not revolve around humans.46

He continued, writing that [W]e chose not to offer a consoling and domesticated image of natural life. Instead, our portrayal is as plural as possible, at times unsettling or even threatening. This issue features lambs and wolves, panthers and mice and in so doing it challenges the illusion of an anthropocentric world [. . .] Animals do not exist for our purpose, nor as a function of what we would like them to be.47

In the passage above, Farneti expresses his intention that the issue be ‘as plural as possible’, with this being realized through a rich and varied range of reflections, spanning the use of animals in both material and symbolic production. The magazine succeeds in representing the myriad ways animal symbolism has been

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used to construct the fashion imaginary: in branding (such as Thom Browne, Lacoste, Ralph Lauren); jewellery (such as Bulgari and Cartier); animal prints; mythology; and the current trend for influencer pets on social media. And true to Farneti’s word, at times one is confronted with photography that is indeed ‘unsettling’, as in a spread shot by Anja Rubik (who also modelled for the shoot) and styled by Tom Guinness. In it we see Rubik intimately entwined with a mischief of rats: a provocative case of category confusion – ‘matter out of place’ – as she mingles with creatures ordinarily dismissed as disgust-inducing vermin.48 Yet, I would argue Farneti is somewhat disingenuous in his statements about the magazine ‘[challenging] the illusion of an anthropocentric world’, particularly when it comes to the material production of fashion. To evaluate Farneti’s statement, we need first to unpack the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’. The word refers to ‘the Earth’s geological era since 1800, in which human activity [became] a planetary force’.49 Donna Haraway suggests the term was coined in the early 1980s by Eugene F. Stoermer, an ecologist at the University of Michigan, and later popularized by Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen, who argued that ‘human activities had been of such a kind and magnitude as to merit the use of a new geological term for a new epoch’.50 Yet, listing eight objections to the word, Haraway proposes the ‘Capitalocene’ as a more appropriate term for our current epoch, which she characterises as the product of ‘the great phallic humanizing and modernizing Adventure’.51 It is the culmination of colonialism, slavery, forced migration, the industrial revolution, and the exploitation of human and non-human animals. It is the product of an extractivist mindset which dates back at least as far as the sixteenth century.52 Amongst the reasons for which the term ‘Anthropocene’ is problematic, is the fact that the current climate emergency is not attributable to all of humankind; industrial capitalism and the Global North hold most responsibility for climate change even while the Global South will be disproportionately affected by its impacts.53 There was perhaps a nod to the role played by the fashion industry in creating the Capitalocene, when Farneti stated that ‘the fashion industry, like any other economic activity, must ask itself where the limits lie in the exploitation of natural resources, and what prospects are offered by technological progress’.54 The Animal issue might therefore be read as a set of features that go some way towards carving out or redefining the contours of the magazine’s editorial position on the use of certain animal-based products. Farneti’s comment about the exploitation of natural resources, in the context of an issue devoted to

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animals, leads one to reflect on the position of animals as embodied beings (rather than mere representations) within the fashion system. Commenting on the fashion industry at large, Sorenson argues its ‘use of nonhuman animals is a “theatre of cruelty”, one that hinges on the industrialization of exploitation of animals which essentially turns them from living beings to mere products, or raw materials’.55 We can read this through the lens of Otto von Busch’s work on the psychopolitics of fashion: a series of thought experiments and projects which involved ‘[thinking] about fashion from the perspective of a state’.56 This involved imagining the laws and regulations which would characterize the State of Fashion: who would govern such a state and what kind of violence would be committed in the name of the state? As in any political regime, certain subjectpositions would hold dominance whilst others would find themselves marginalized, oppressed, persecuted, or exploited. When it comes to animals in the fashion industry, it cannot be denied that they occupy the latter position: violence against them is normalized under the ideology of the State; it is perpetuated, justified, in the name of fashion.57 So central are animal-based products to the State of Fashion, that von Busch argued that associating with PETA was enough to make one an enemy of the state, given PETA’s motto that ‘animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, or abuse in any way’.58 In spite of these arrangements, von Busch asserts that ‘a state also produces the room for its negation’.59 It offers the possibility for imagining ‘a countersystem’ and ‘possibilities of resistance and imagining more utopian forms of social organization beyond the model of existing statehood’.60 So maybe the ‘state infrastructure’ – the fashion media – might have a role to play in articulating that resistance.61 Indeed, the issue on Animals, in its opening pages, includes a feature titled ‘Occupy Vogue Italia’ written by Sam J. Miller. In the letter, which reads something like a wake-up call to humanity, the animals (we are not told which ones) acknowledge the creativity and beauty humans are capable of whilst also expressing dismay at the ‘horrific devastation’ left in their wake: Ancient forests razed to the ground. Oceans full of toxic matter. Air polluted by poison. That is why we have occupied Vogue Italia. [. . .] Stop acting as if we’re your property, like the planet exists for you to plunder. [. . .] You can’t live without us; but we can live without you. We had already done so, for 600 million years, before you showed up. [. . .] So we extend to you our hoof, paw, claw, talon, flipper, tentacle, pseudopod – as a sign of friendship. Of creative collaboration.

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This is a peaceful, non-violent occupation. For now. The anarchists in our ranks are open to initial dialogue before rioting on the streets. After all, it’s in everyone’s interest that the planet is not reduced to a pile of ashes. The only alternative to living together is dying together. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Vogue Italia.62

The ‘friendly’ nature of this takeover already indicates that this is not an occupation by force. What we see instead is a gentle foregrounding of a marginalized group, whose rights and welfare have historically been ethically sidelined.63 When it comes to the politics of inclusion and exclusion, von Busch notes that politics functions ‘to make sure the excluded remain invisible and their struggles unarticulated’. As such, building on the work of Jacques Rancière, he argues ‘genuine politics [. . .] is a continuous struggle over whose voice influences the order of things’.64 If politics is about ‘keeping the excluded unintelligible and unseen’, why, then, would you give voice to the oppressed in the system?65 My answer to this question is that the range of voices made intelligible and seen in this issue of Vogue Italia is carefully managed, kept within certain bounds, such that the animals whose exploitation is indispensable to the Italian fashion system remain invisible. Farneti, in his Editor’s Letter, introduces the idea of judgement from the vantage point of animals, stating that: ‘In our decisions affecting the future of the planet, animals will be the first and only judges called on to deliver the verdict.’ In the course of the magazine, the reader is at times invited to look through animal eyes, being invited to imagine ‘How Would You Feel (to be them for a day)’ in a spread photographed by Nigel Shafran and styled by Alice Goddard, in which humans are fashioned as birds, snails and mice. Elsewhere, the reader becomes party to a conversation between a cat and a crow, who muse together on how humans have already forgotten their renewed intentions and the lessons learnt from lockdown. The cat comments sagely that ‘Long before the great quarantine, the souls of humans were sick. But they didn’t seem to notice that their daily, chronic depression was due to the destruction of the Earth’.66 A cat’s perspective is invoked once more in a playful short story by Muriel Barbery, ‘La Musa Inattesa’ (‘The Unexpected Muse’). Being invited to view the world through the eyes of a cat is whimsical, and likely speaks to the experience of many readers during Covid-19 lockdown. Yet while the gaze is de-centred here, it remains comfortably so. The cat is not the animal we most need to hear from if we are taking an honest look at the relationship animals bear to the fashion system. Things would become a lot less

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comfortable if we were to adopt the vantage point of animals in the industrial agriculture system, such as cows, whose hide is routinely used to make shoes, accessories and garments. Thus, while certain animals are given voice and foregrounded in the Animal issue, there are strategic silences and omissions, which betray the extent to which the issue is, predictably, serving the agenda of the Italian fashion system as well as, implicitly, the industrial fashion system more widely. And that system is an anthropocentric one, which contradicts the content of Farneti’s Editor’s Letter. The remaining discussion will be structured under three headings – wildlife, leather and fur – with the discourse on each analysed and linked to questions related to sustainability and the treatment of animals in the global fashion system.

Wildlife and fragility According to Sam J. Miller, author of ‘Occupy Vogue Italia’ (above), the issue marks the beginning of a year-long partnership between the magazine and the World Wildlife Fund Italia.67 The category ‘wildlife’ is defined by Kovesi and Johnson as including ‘all non-domesticated animals. Some of these animals, such as python, crocodiles, and mink, are increasingly “farmed” for their products, but are not domesticated. “Exotic wildlife” is a more subjective category in which the exoticism of the animal depends largely on its distance – geographical as well as chronological – from the daily encounters of the beholder’.68 This collaboration between WWF and Vogue Italia is important because, according to Kovesi and Johnson, ‘wildlife has managed to slip through the interstices of the sustainability discourse in fashion, with often devastating consequences’.69 There are ‘few points of intersection’ between discourses on conservation and those on sustainable fashion.70 This is highly problematic because ‘the sheer scale of the global fashion industry means that even the smallest new use, or trigger of desire, can endanger a whole species’.71 When it comes to the collaboration between WWF and Vogue Italia, the aim was to ‘[spread] greater awareness on the conservation of nature, habitats and endangered species through the print and digital channels of Vogue Italia’.72 In this way, the fashion media has the capacity to serve a consciousness-raising function vis-à-vis issues connected to sustainability. The threat of endangerment is visualized is through a photo spread entitled ‘Guardian Angels’, shot by South African photographer, Pieter Hugo, and styled by Raphael Hirsch. The spread features The Black Mamba Anti-poaching Unit,

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an all-female group of rangers tasked with watching over the Balule Nature Reserve in South Africa. They are pictured confidently surveying the wildlife they protect – in the form of ostriches, cheetahs, giraffes, zebras, a lion and a snake. The spread is combined with an interview with Craig Spencer of Transfrontier Africa NPC, the NGO that manages protected areas and founded the Black Mamba Anti-poaching Unit in 2013. Such animals might once have been used as an exotic ‘backdrop’ in fashion photography for Vogue – something the magazine itself acknowledges in a separate article in the Animal issue.73 There it distances itself from its former practices, stating ‘Our current perspective is oriented towards a more ethical and sustainable vision, meaning the use of animals as a mere scenic element now seems outdated and disrespectful’.74 This reflexive re-evaluation is interesting from the perspective of ethics, as it speaks to an iterative approach to making choices about the environment and about image-making. It seems vital that editors and producers are not afraid to rethink industry practices out loud, in response to a shifting political climate and a deepening environmental crisis. The animals pictured in ‘Guardian Angels’ are the endangered species the WWF is well known for trying to protect. They might also be described as ‘exotic’ wildlife, as the average reader in Italy or the West is unlikely to encounter such animals on a regular basis (building upon the definition outlined by Kovesi and Johnson, above). Yet, as mentioned in another article, ‘Meno 68%’ (‘Minus 68%’), the illegal wildlife trade is only one factor which is currently threatening wildlife.75 The piece references the WWF’s Living Planet Report and the statistic that we have lost 68 per cent of the planet’s fauna population since 1970.76 Marco Galaverni, scientific director of the WWF, was interviewed by Michele Fossi and when asked which human activities most contributed to the decline of biodiversity, he stated: ‘At the top of the list we have deforestation, the illegal wildlife trade and unsustainable agriculture. The same three factors, I would like to point out, which are blamed for the spread of new viruses such as Covid-19.’77 Deforestation is an issue that re-emerges in the context of leather production, as explored in the section that follows.

Six articles on leather Leather occupies a prominent position in the Italian fashion industry, alongside tailoring and textile production.78 For example, commenting on the relationship between the fashion systems in France and Italy, Eugenia Paulicelli discusses

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how a ‘small area of the Veneto region has been selected by Vuitton as a manufacturing center on account of its long-standing tradition and heritage in shoemaking and leather goods’.79 Yet, she also takes care to stress the existence of a ‘plurality of local traditions and knowhow’ in Italy, stressing that Made in Italy – a label launched in the post-war period but which capitalizes on a longer history and heritage – needs to be understood in its transnational, global context.80 While some aspects of production remain small-scale, Simona Segre Reinach reminds us that Made in Italy made its name in the 1980s upon a ‘model of creative industrial fashion’ in the form of Italian prêt-a-porter.81 Made in Italy thus depends on industrial production, which spans beyond its shores to include relations with other countries, such as China even while it is often symbolically produced through the mythology of ‘Renaissance artisan creativity’.82 Thus, when looking at the discourse produced by Vogue Italia, it might sit within the umbrella of Condé Nast as a global publishing house, but it is still closely wedded to its own local context. This involves a particular relationship with Italian fashion houses (and their attendant mythologies) alongside manufacturers and trade unions in the region. The Animal issue features a section devoted to exploring the complexities of leather. It comprises six articles authored by different journalists, featuring interviews with stakeholders in the field. This layering of voices and perspectives can make it difficult to identify where the magazine itself stands on leather, but as I will argue, an editorial position is nevertheless subtly asserted. The section opens with a definition of ‘leather’ and a definition of ‘cruelty-free’, alongside an article by Marco Morello, which provides an overview of the current state of the field. He recognizes that the market for leather will continue to grow by approximately six per cent between now and 2025. This, in spite of the innovation currently underway in lab-grown leather, through companies such as Modern Meadow and Vitrolabs. Such materials have been described as ‘cruelty-free’ since they do not require the slaughter of animals to produce. Furthermore, growing leather in a lab is ‘96% less polluting than livestock farming, which is now responsible for 15% of the planet’s greenhouse gas omissions’ according to a study by the University of Oxford, cited later in the magazine.83 Alongside labgrown leather, there is an expanding range of non-animal-based alternatives, such as Piñatex® and mycelium-based Mylo™. Following this overview, the next article offers an industry perspective, through an interview with Fulvia Bacchi, director general of the national union for the tanning industry in Italy (UNIC).84 The article reports on a recent Italian decree which protects the terms ‘fur’ and ‘leather’, meaning they can be used only

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if the material in question actually derives from animal sources. Bacchi applauds the legislation, suggesting it will create ‘transparency’ for the consumer – a word that later re-appears in an advertorial for animal fur (as discussed below). The importance of transparency has been raised by Fashion Revolution through their annual publication of the Fashion Transparency Index, although they are careful to note that transparency does not necessarily equate to sustainability: an issue I return to, below.85 Bacchi goes on to argue that the leather industry in Italy is a successful example of the circular economy. To support this, she makes the argument that the industry uses waste from the food chain: ‘We recover a by-product that is 100 percent of natural origin that would otherwise have to be disposed of.’86 She then cites a recent report on tanneries in Italy, showing a reduction in energy consumption, chemical use, as well as the practice of purifying and re-using water.87 In response to Bacchi’s claims, Marco Morello, the article author, wryly comments that ‘the sector seems to have developed its own antibodies’ – perhaps a subtle way of questioning the claims about circularity without presenting an overt critique. A more sustained interrogation would have outlined that while it is correct to state that leather production falls within the definition of a circular economy, (with its ambition to reduce waste, recirculate materials and improve resource efficiency) circularity should not be considered a good in and of itself. It is true that this model has been adopted as the preferred solution to the environmental crisis, both in the fashion industry and beyond.88 Yet, Fletcher and Tham argue it has been embraced precisely because ‘it aligns with existing commercial practices, suggesting that business-(almost)-as-usual is possible’.89 Circularity has thus been received ‘as a lifeline by industry reliant on a model of over-production and over-consumption of goods’.90 Once we set aside circularity as a good in and of itself, the ‘by-product’ argument needs to be interrogated. The argument is that the cow hides which serve as the raw material for leather production would otherwise go to waste since they are a by-product of the food industry. The ‘by-product’ argument has long been used to justify the use of leather as more ethical than the use of fur in fashion, as journalist Lucy Siegle has noted; it was also used in the nineteenth century to justify the use of certain bird feathers.91 Yet, this argument assumes that the food industry as it stands is without problem. What this therefore fails to consider is whether we should be eating less meat in the first place (or, as PETA would have it, no meat at all). After all, greenhouse gas emissions from cattle farming, at 62 per cent, are the ‘main contributor’ to global emissions for the livestock sector, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.92 This

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speaks to Fletcher and Tham’s point that ‘The circular economy is optimized to grow the circulation of materials, irrespective of whether this goal supports total systems improvement and the ecological reality of genuine biophysical limits. Situated within the paradigm that created the problems. [. . .] circularity risks circulating norms and worldviews detrimental to earth’.93 On a more positive note, Bacchi is able to guarantee that the tanneries she represents use leather which is not derived from sources linked to deforestation.94 The issue of cattle and deforestation re-emerges later in the series of articles about leather, in a piece entitled ‘how much forest have you eaten, used or worn today?’95 The text explores leather traceability and the difficulty of ensuring that the leather goods one purchases are not linked to deforested land in countries such as Brazil. The situation is made more difficult since ‘To date, there are no internationally recognized certification schemes – not even national ones – that identify the origin of the untanned leather used to make the bag or accessory purchased’, explains Isabella Pratesi, Director of Conservation at WWF Italy.96 Susanna Macchia, the journalist writing the article, proposes some solutions, such as refraining from buying leather altogether. And the Four Paws Shopping Guide for Animal-Friendly Fashion is proposed as a starting point for sourcing leather alternatives. She then notes that ‘It makes a difference to focus on true craftsmanship, especially Made in Italy’.97 This is confirmed by the WWF representative, who states: The hides that come from our farms are all safe. Clearly, a product from a local and virtuous supply chain will have a higher cost. But it’s right that it should be that way. Perhaps we should get used to considering the purchase of a fashion accessory as a special luxury, to be indulged in less frequently but in which we invest more economically, in order to be sure of its quality, provenance and ultimately its impact on the planet.98

Then, overleaf there is an interview with Thom Browne and a full-page image of one of his Animal Icons bags (in the form of a rabbit), which is 100 per cent leather and, of course, Made in Italy. This feels like an editorial ‘full-stop’ to the debate on leather, even after a series of articles that explore substitute materials, such as lab-grown or vegan leather (some examples of which are mentioned above). In response to the suggestion that readers focus on craftsmanship and Made in Italy, it is important to note that while buying leather from local supply chains is one way of ensuring leather does not come from cattle raised on deforested land, this argument fails to take into account the mechanism of fashion diffusion:

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namely, emulation and desire. As Ted Polhemus puts it, ‘It is undoubtedly true that the mass market “mainline” fashion industry continues to take a lead from the more exclusive, highly priced designers’.99 This can also work in the opposite direction, with Polhemus exploring ‘bubble up’ diffusion through the example of the ‘Bronx’ leather motorcycle jacket, which ‘became the symbol of rebellious youth when Marlon Brando wore one in The Wild One’.100 He notes how in the 1980s, the jacket began to appear in the collections of designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier, Pam Hogg and Thierry Mugler.101 It may be the case that some sections of the middle classes can afford to purchase luxury leather goods, like the Thom Browne bag, but for the majority of consumers this is simply not the case. It seems likely that those who cannot afford luxury products will buy cheaper alternatives, whose origin is unknown and which might therefore be derived from cattle raised on deforested land or produced from labour that is exploited or animals that are treated cruelly. One example of this can be found in a recent exposé by PETA, entitled ‘Leather: Hell for Animals and Children in Bangladesh’, fronted by British pop star Leona Lewis in 2015.102 So while Vogue might principally represent luxury brands, they do not exist in a vacuum from the rest of the fashion system. In fact, the use of leather in luxury fashion, with its aura of exclusivity, actually serves to ‘augment’ the desirability of that material more generally, in all of its environmental impacts.103 Thus, we can conclude that while the set of articles on leather is informative, it performs a pedagogical function only up to a point. Concepts such as the ‘circular economy’ need to be contextualized by journalists to help readers unpick the limits of such an approach, since this model should not be taken as sustainable in any intrinsic sense. Furthermore, what remains ‘culturally repressed’104 in the articles on leather is the moral and philosophical question of animal sentience itself. This omission is noteworthy in an issue that expressly sets out to challenge the anthropocentrism of the fashion industry. It might be argued that the question is addressed indirectly, through a short half-page article exploring vegan materials such as the founding of Vegan Fashion Week in 2019 and the launch of the Vegan Fashion Library, a showroom for ethical vegan designers in Los Angeles.105 But given that elsewhere in the magazine the reader is treated to theological and psychoanalytical perspectives on animals,106 it seems possible that sentience of cattle is excluded from the discussion on leather precisely because it would pose too much of a challenge to business as usual. Or perhaps, less cynically, it is left as a question of conscience for the reader.

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‘Future For Fur’ Some of the key words that emerged in the above articles on leather – such as transparency, the circular economy, and the idea of ‘the natural’ – re-emerge in the discourse on fur in the magazine. Buried in the middle of the Animal issue (on pages 70–71) was a double-page advertorial entitled ‘FUTURE FOR FUR’, marking the launch of a new fur certification scheme called FurMark, sponsored by the Italian Fur Association (Associazione Italiana Pellicceria).107 This promotion of fur needs to be understood against the historical backdrop of fur as a material used for both warmth and for social distinction. In his book on the subject, Jonathan Faiers writes that: ‘Fur has built nations, decimated species, subjugated communities and driven fashion. It has inspired great works of art, created fortunes, demarcated society and has been the catalyst for desire and disgust in equal measure.’108 This, he argues, is ‘fur’s dazzling polysemy’.109 In the context of the industrial fashion system, consumer demand for fur has not been consistent; instead Kovesi and Johnson argue that public desire for fur is malleable: diminished by activist campaigns, on the one hand, and augmented by industry-backed marketing campaigns on the other (with the advertorial for Furmark in Vogue Italia clearly an example of the latter).110 The most well-known anti-fur campaign is PETA’s ‘I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur’ series, which began in 1990 and featured celebrities such as Christy Turlington, Eva Mendes and Gillian Anderson.111 Some celebrities who featured in the campaign subsequently changed their mind, such as Naomi Campbell who appeared in a PETA campaign in 1997 only to model for fur designer, Dennis Basso, in his Autumn/Winter 2009–10 advertising campaign.112 Nevertheless, in 2020 PETA announced they would be retiring that campaign after three decades. Dan Mathews, PETA’s Senior Vice President, explained their rationale as follows: ‘Nearly every top designer has shed fur, California has banned it, Queen Elizabeth II has renounced it, Macy’s is closing its fur salons, and now, the largest fur auction house in North America has filed for bankruptcy.’113 Furthermore, in September 2021, Kering’s CEO, François-Henri Pinault, announced its labels would no longer be using fur, arguing such materials have ‘no place in luxury’.114 PETA stated they would instead be focusing their efforts on exposing violence in the trade of leather, wool and exotic skins. While these developments would seem to suggest demand for fur is in decline, statements elsewhere in the media indicate the situation is not so clear-cut. For example, in an article for Vogue Business, entitled ‘The fur industry is fighting

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back’, Annachiara Biondi notes that while 2019 saw a growing number of luxury brands and retailers banning the use of fur materials, fur industry associations were simultaneously promoting it as a ‘sustainable’ and ‘natural’ material.115 When we look at the global sales figures, in 2019 the international trade of fur garments was ‘the largest ever measured in value’ with the retail trade being valued at US$20.1 billion in 2021, according to Henning Otte Hansen, specialist in agribusiness economics.116 Being associated with PETA, and its anti-fur activism, was one thing that could bar one from entry to the hypothetical State of Fashion, imagined by von Busch.117 Yet, in 2017 PETA was ‘singing the praises’ of Vogue Paris for its August issue, which was ‘dedicated to animal-friendly fashion, which [included] a strong statement against fur’. Rather than protesting, PETA was reportedly ‘sending bouquets of flowers to Vogue Paris editor Emmanuelle Alt and model Gisele Bündchen, who is draped in faux fur on the cover’. This marks a contrast with Vogue Italia, which has chosen to adopt a pro-fur editorial position. This is despite the efforts of PETA campaigners, such as actor, Elisabetta Canalis, who wrote to Farneti following his appointment in 2017, ‘[suggesting] that now is the perfect time for the iconic style bible to start a new chapter and embrace the future of fashion by banning fur from its pages’. She asked Farneti to follow the lead of magazines such as British Vogue which have had long-standing no-fur policies.118 The Furmark advertorial can be found mid-way through the Animal issue. In capital letters (and in English) it states ‘FUTURE FOR FUR’ followed by the following in Italian and in large type: ‘Furmark, the international certification of natural fur which focuses on sustainability, safety, and a new consumer sensibility.’ The body of the article then goes on to play on the semiotic ambiguity of ‘sustainability’ as a term: Sustainability. A word with a thousand facets in the fashion system. A slogan to sell for some, a goal to chase for others, certainly a plus for brands that can sometimes be difficult for consumers to evaluate. This is why the fur sector has decided to clarify its position through Furmark, a new international certification scheme for natural furs, which will make its debut in 2021 and provide guidelines for safe purchasing, as the International Fur Federation explains.119

This is not the first time the fur industry has attempted to market itself as good for the environment. For example, Sorenson notes that: ‘In 2007 the Fur Council of Canada bought full-page advertisements in major newspapers, promoting fur as “the ultimate eco-clothing” and asserting that “Fur is Green”.’120

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The rest of the advertorial takes the form of a series of questions and answers, the first of which reads, ‘Why is fur a more sustainable choice?’, to which the advertorial replies, ‘First of all, it is a totally organic and biodegradable material that leaves no waste in the oceans. A product of the circular economy (the creative interplay between recycled and upcycled) designed to last a long time.’121 This sentence alone is incredibly loaded, and uses a cluster of sustainabilityrelated words, which fit what Thomas describes as ‘green blur’ in the environmental discourse of fashion.122 Words such as ‘organic’ and ‘the circular economy’ also appeared in the interview cited earlier with Fulvia Bacchi, director general of the national union for the tanning industry in Italy. The argument presented by Furmark is of course a partial one, which obscures the environmental impacts associated with fur. Amongst these are the energy costs of transforming a living creature into a garment or accessory. According to Sorenson, where the animal lives in the wild, the energy cost of producing a garment is ‘four times higher than using synthetic materials to produce a similar item’ and where the animal is farmed, this rises to 60 times higher.123 The advertorial mentions fur is ‘designed to last a long time’ but its long life span is often due to the ‘toxic chemical preservatives used to prevent animal skins from decaying as they naturally would’.124 The feature states that the consumer is able to trace ‘the type of tanning and dyeing [pelts] have undergone’ with production plants having ‘a low environmental impact’. However, I was unable to find further information about tanning processes on the Furmark website, which raises the question as to how transparent the system really is.125 It is important to note that while most fake fur tends to be produced from petroleum-based acrylic and is therefore neither renewable nor biodegradable, Stella McCartney has recently launched KOBA® fur, which combines plant-based fibres from corn waste with recycled polyester to produce a cruelty-free alternative with a lower impact on the environment.126 In terms of branding, the Furmark logo looks strikingly similar to the Woolmark logo; perhaps the graphic design team were hoping some of wool’s ‘softer’ symbolism would ‘take the edge off ’ fur’s polarizing tendencies (although that is not to say wool is entirely uncontroversial, given industry practices of mulesing and the use of pesticides).127 According to the advertorial, ‘Buying a garment with the Furmark logo provides the certainty that it has been certified at every step of the supply chain, starting in the wild or in breeding programmes, which according to the Welfare Quality project of the European Commission, are required to respect animal welfare through good housing, good nutrition, good health and appropriate treatment’.128 On the website, Mark Oaten, from the International Fur Federation, states that ‘From farmers and trappers to dressers

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and designers, Furmark ensures that everyone is working together to meet exacting practices and standards – for the good of the animal, the environment, and the public’.129 This mention here of the ‘good of the animal’ might represent what Sorenson has described as ‘double-talk’: one of the contradictions of the ‘ethical’ discourse in fashion is the talk of concern for the ‘welfare’ of animals or their ‘humane treatment’ in an industry that is based upon conveyor belt slaughter. Such double-talk which provides the industry with an image of acceptability that is palatable to the consumer, illustrates the alliance between the interests of the fashion industry and the consumers.130

Furthermore, some of the animals farmed by Furmark producers, like mink and fox, are not domesticated animals and thus fall under the definition of wildlife outlined by Kovesi and Johnson, above. They make the point that while farming such animals means they are slaughtered in better conditions than they would have been in the wild (where traps are used), ‘a proper consideration is needed of the ethics of farming wild animals in the first place, especially of predatory species such as mink and fox which naturally roam large territories yet are now confined to small breeding cages in massive fur farms’.131 Furmark promises to empower consumers through the use of QR codes and ChainPoint technology, which ‘[creates] a timestamp proof of any data, file, or process’.132 Blockchain technology can provide an ‘information trail’ when it comes to the production stages in a commodity’s lifecycle thus creating ‘a single source of truth for all associated parties.’133 As such, the scheme cannily taps into current calls from activists for the fashion industry to become more transparent.134 Fashion Revolution is, however, careful to stress that: ‘Transparency does not equal sustainability. Brands may be disclosing a lot of information about their policies and practices but that doesn’t mean they are acting in a sustainable or ethical manner.’135 This new Furmark certification scheme is something that deserves more sustained attention, as this chapter is only beginning to scratch the surface of what is an incredibly complex global supply chain and digital system of monitoring, presented with a gloss of illusionary simplicity in the advertorial’s Q&A. It also raises a further question: if the industry is advancing a traceability and certification scheme for fur, should a similar scheme not be advocated for leather, given concerns about deforestation and the farming of cattle, not to mention exposure to toxic chemicals and the use of child labour?

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Animals, sustainability and the limits of fashion media The Animal issue of Vogue Italia purported to ‘[challenge] the illusion of an anthropocentric world’, in part by exploring the relationship between animals, fashion and the climate emergency.136 Starting with the positives, what this issue demonstrates is the potential for alliances to be built between fashion media platforms and NGOs such as the WWF. This points to a consciousness-raising function of fashion media, reminding readers about the fragile status of endangered species and declining biodiversity – perhaps prompting them to reflect on their own consumption practices or spurring them to action in terms of charitable donations or activism. Featuring the WWF on the pages of Vogue Italia might thus widen the organization’s reach and ultimately help them in their mission. What was also evident in the discussion of wildlife, was the potential for the fashion magazine to function as a space for editorial reflection, allowing journalists and editors to reflexively reposition themselves on issues such as the use of ‘exotic’ wildlife as mere props in fashion editorials. The monthly format of magazines like Vogue leaves them well placed to elaborate sustainable values in an iterative fashion. The set of six articles on leather sought to unravel the complexities of using this material in fashion, representing different stakeholders and interests in the industry. However, what was frustrating was the lack of critical contextualization around the industry’s use of words such as ‘the circular economy’. Without adequate contextualization from reporting journalists, circularity is left to stand as a good in and of itself – a synonym for sustainability. This means that, at best, the debate remains at a surface level and, at worst, it greenwashes unsustainable industry practices. The Furmark advertorial drew on similar language, presenting a complex global supply chain, fraught with ethical complexities, in the form of a Q&A with an illusionary gloss of simplicity. In turn, this raises the question as to whether partial information in magazines like Vogue might actually be more damaging to the environmental agenda than no information at all, not least because it muddies the meaning of terms central to the debate, such as the words ‘circularity’,‘sustainable’ and ‘organic’. This renders them less precise and therefore less productive as critical tools: something Jeanette Orminski et al. have noted in the context of fashion discourse on platforms like Twitter.137 I am here reminded of the activist organization, Extinction Rebellion and its demand that governments ‘Tell the Truth’ about the climate crisis. During the protests in April 2019, that same demand was directed towards media outlets, such as the BBC, which, Extinction Rebellion argued, had

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failed to adequately communicate the urgency and extent of the environmental crisis.138 This demand can and should be extended to journalists in the fashion media because there is a pressing need for brand accountability. Yet this is challenging because mainstream magazines do not have an ‘arm’s length distance from the industry’, as Skjold notes.139 Nevertheless, media discourse remains a site with important potential for bringing about change in consumption practices. Niche fashion magazines might hold part of the solution, offering a more experimental space, yet the question of reach becomes relevant here since the environmental crisis is far from being a niche concern.140 As Kovesi and Johnson argue, ‘more foundational and successful for long-term sustainability in fashion is the education of our desires’.141 Magazines can be considered a space for training desire, and training desire differently:142 this means evaluating and re-evaluating ethical positions as they evolve in light of new information, technological innovation, and a rapidly worsening environmental crisis. In the context of the Animal issue, this could have involved a frank discussion about the hierarchical relationship between human and non-human animals in supply chains and the limits of normative discourses on circularity. Instead, lip service was paid to decentred animal perspectives, with strategic silences and omissions that closed off segments of the debate that would otherwise pose a threat to the logic of the (Italian) fashion system. These are the more radical questions that failed to be voiced in the ostensible ‘occupation’ of Vogue Italia in January 2021.

Notes 1 John Sorenson, ‘Ethical Fashion and the Exploitation of Nonhuman Animals’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty vol. 2, nos.1–2 (2011): 141. 2 Catherine Kovesi and Lynn Johnson, ‘Mammoth Tusk Beads and Vintage Elephant Skin Bags: Wildlife, Conservation, and Rethinking Ethical Fashion’, Fashion Theory vol. 24, no. 7 (2020): 983–1011; Sorenson, ‘Ethical Fashion’; Efrat Tseëlon, ‘Introduction: A critique of the ethical fashion paradigm’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty vol. 2, nos.1–2 (2011): 3–68. 3 I would like to express my thanks to Jérémie Garnier and Nadica Maksimova for their kind and generous assistance with translating the text of the magazine from Italian to English. 4 Else Skjold, ‘Towards Fashion Media for Sustainability’, Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion, ed. Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham (New York: Routledge, 2016), 171–80. For a discussion of the way fashion magazines function,

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Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics see Brian Moeran, ‘More than Just a Fashion Magazine, Current Sociology vol. 54, no. 5: 725–44. Two publications that do consider the role of fashion media in relation to sustainability are Kate Fletcher, Craft of Use: Post-Growth Fashion (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Megan Le Masurier, ‘Like Water & Oil? Fashion photography as journalistic comment’, Journalism vol. 21, no. 6 (2020): 821–37. See also Skjold, ‘Towards Fashion Media for Sustainability’. The following text considers the culture of sustainability, more generally: Jennifer Farley Gordon and Colleen Hill, Sustainable Fashion: Past, Present and Future (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). One might argue that symbolic production precedes the material production of fashion, as Roland Barthes does in The Fashion System. He notes the ‘constitutive’ nature of fashion writing before stating that ‘without discourse there is no total Fashion, no essential Fashion’ (xi). He then justifies his decision to focus his book on linguistic fashion, rather than material fashion, stating: ‘It thus seemed unreasonable to place the reality of clothing before the discourse of Fashion: true reason would in fact have us proceed from the instituting discourse to the reality which it constitutes’ (xi, emphasis in original). See: Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. M. Ward and R. Howard (London: University of California Press, 1990 [1967]). Farley Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion, 131–65. I borrow this term from Kovesi and Johnson, ‘Mammoth Tusk Beads’, 998. Valerie Steele, Fashion, Italian Style (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 117. As cited in Steele, Fashion, Italian Style, 117. Vanessa Friedman, ‘At Italian Vogue, a New Beginning’, The New York Times, 19 September 2017. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/fashion/ emanuele-farneti-italian-vogue-milan-fashion-week.html (accessed 29 May 2021). For discussion of ‘Water and Oil’, the Vogue Italia spread representing the Deep Water Horizon oil spill, see Le Masurier, ‘Like Water & Oil?’. Le Masurier, ‘Like Water & Oil?’ In 2021 it was announced that he would be standing down, as part of Condé Nast’s strategy of global integration. Chantal Fernandez, ‘Vogue Italia Editor Emanuele Farneti Exits Amid Consolidation’, Business of Fashion, 22 July 2021. Available online: https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/media/vogue-italia-editor-emanuelefarneti-exits-amid-consolidation (accessed 18 August 2021). Business of Fashion, ‘Biography: Emanuele Farneti’, Business of Fashion. n.d. Available online: https://www.businessoffashion.com/community/people/emanuelefarneti (accessed 29 May 2021); Polimoda, ‘The Optimistic Emanuele Farneti: The past, present and future of fashion communication’, Polimoda, 2020. Available online: https://www.polimoda.com/emanuele-farneti (accessed 29 May 2021).

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15 Farneti as cited in Polimoda, ‘The Optimistic Emanuele Farneti: The past, present and future of fashion communication’. 16 This emphasis on words was also evident in the 2019 launch of a Vogue Italia podcast, with Emily Wadsworth reporting that ‘Vogue Italia can now be heard, as well as read. Commenting on the podcast series, Farneti stated that ‘This new format uses words rather than images along to narrate the magic of fashion and its protagonists’. See: Emily Wadsworth, ‘Vogue Italia launches a podcast’, Condé Nast, 24 May 2019. Available online: https://www.condenast.com/news/vogue-italia-podcast (accessed 2 June 2021). 17 Vogue US, ‘Letter from the Editor: The Values of Vogue’ in Vogue US, January 2020, 10. 18 Emanuele Farneti, ‘Editor’s Letter’, Vogue Italia, January 2020. Available online: https://www.vogue.it/moda/article/vogue-italia-gennaio-editoriale-direttore (accessed 29 September 2021). 19 ‘Ma la sfida era dimostrare che si può, eccezionalmente, raccontare gli abiti senza fotografarli.’ Farneti, ‘Editor’s Letter’, Vogue Italia, January 2020. 20 ‘Centocinquanta persone coinvolte. Una ventina di voli, una decina di treni. Quaranta macchine a disposizione. Sessanta spedizioni internazionali. Almeno dieci ore di luci accese ininterrottamente, alimentate in parte da generatori a benzina. Scarti alimentari dei catering. Plastica per avvolgere gli abiti. Corrente per ricaricare telefoni, macchine fotografiche. . .’ Farneti, ‘Editor’s Letter’, Vogue Italia, January 2020. 21 ‘La moda, con il suo ossessivo bisogno di novità e il feticcio del possesso, può ambire a essere davvero sostenibile?’ Farneti, ‘Editor’s Letter’, Vogue Italia, January 2020. 22 Sue Thomas, Fashion Ethics (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), 7. 23 Ibid., 5. 24 Ibid., 6. 25 Brundtland Commission, ‘Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future’, 1987. Available online: https:// sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf (accessed 28 June 2021). 26 Geoffrey Craig, Media, Sustainability and Everyday Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 6. See also A. E. Kings, ‘Intersectionality and the Changing Face of Ecofeminism’, Ethics and the Environment vol. 22, no. 1: 71. 27 Farley Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion, 131. 28 For a discussion of the paradox of sustainable fashion, see: Sandy Black, Eco-Chic: The Fashion Paradox. (London: Black Dog, 2008). Hazel Clark, ‘Slow + Fashion – An Oxymoron – or a Promise for the Future. . .?’ Fashion Theory vol. 12, no.4: 427–46. For discussion of sustainable fashion and the logic of economic growth, see Kate

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Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan (London: JJ Charitable Trust, 2019). Fletcher and Tham, Earth Logic, 14. Farley Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion, 158. Sorenson, ‘Ethical Fashion’. For examples of studies that include animals within definitions of sustainability, see Farley Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion; Kovesi and Johnson, ‘Mammoth Tusk Beads’; Lucy Siegle, To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World? (London: HarperCollins, 2011). Thomas, Fashion Ethics. Tseëlon, ‘Introduction’, 4. Ibid., 4. Kovesi and Johnson, ‘Mammoth Tusk Beads’, 983. Sorenson, ‘Ethical Fashion’, 141. Ibid., 140, 141. Farley Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion, 133. Kate Fletcher and Lynda Grose, Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change (London: Laurence King, 2012), 13. Thompson as cited in Thomas, Fashion Ethics, 34. Sorenson, ‘Ethical Fashion’, 141. Thomas, Fashion Ethics, 35–6. Sorenson, ‘Ethical Fashion’, 144. Tseëlon, ‘Introduction’, 4. Jonathan Faiers, Fur: A Sensitive History (New Haven and London: Yale, 2020), 8. Condé Nast, ‘Vogue Italia dedicates its January 2021 issue to animals’, Condé Nast, 6 January 2021. Available online: https://www.condenast.com/news/vogue-italiajanuary-issue-animals (accessed 28 May 2021). ‘Questa volta abbiamo volunto che fossero gli animali a prendere in prestito il nostro spazio fisico e digitale – per costringerci a riportare l;attenzione, dopo I mesi passata in casa, sulla dimensione naturale, sull’emergenza ambientale che il dramma della pandemia non ha certo reso meno urgente, e su quello che ci ha insegnato l’anno che si siamo appena lasciati alle spalle : molto banalmente, che il mondo non gira attorno agli uomini.’ Farneti, Editor’s Letter, Vogue Italia, January 2021, 16. ‘Non abbiamo quindi voluto dare un’immagine consolatoria e domestica della vita naturale, ma il più possibile plurale e se occorre disturbante, o perfino minacciosa. Questo numero di agnelli e lupi, pantere e topi, mette appunto alla prova [. . .] l’illusione di un mondo antropocentrico. Gli animali non esistono in funzione nostra, né di come noi vorremo che fossero.’ Farneti, Editor’s Letter, Vogue Italia, January 2021, 16. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, [1966] 2002), 50. Alice Payne, ‘Fashion Futuring in the Anthropocene: Sustainable Fashion as “Taming” and “Rewilding” ’, Fashion Theory vol. 23, no. 1 (2019): 6.

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50 Donna. J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 44. 51 Ibid., 47. 52 Ibid., 48. 53 A. E. Kings, ‘Intersectionality and the Changing Face of Ecofeminism’, Ethics and the Environment vol. 22, no. 1: 71, 73. 54 The English language version of the letter can be found here: Emanuele Farneti, ‘Vogue Italia January Issue: Letter from the Editor – Dragons and Us’, Vogue Italia, 6 January 2021. Available online: https://www.vogue.it/en/article/vogue-italia-january2021-issue-letter-from-the-editor (accessed 29 September 2021). 55 Sorenson, ‘Ethical Fashion’, 141. 56 Otto von Busch, The Psychopolitics of Fashion: Conflict and Courage under the Current State of Fashion (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 50. 57 Von Busch notes the violence involved in fashion, at the level of production but also on a social level: ‘Fashion is not alien to violence, as stories of worker abuse and deaths keep appearing in the news cycles on a regular basis. Yet it is important to also recognize that fashion, as a social phenomenon, can be violent’. See von Busch, The Psychopolitics of Fashion, 21. 58 This motto is stated on PETA’s website. Available online: https://www.peta.org (accessed 30 June 2021). One thought experiment carried out by Von Busch was a pop-up embassy for the State of Fashion, through which participants were offered visas and passports that would grant them entry to the state. The application form included questions sampled from the US visa form as well as some questions specific to fashion. Amongst them was the question as to whether ‘the applicant [had] supported organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) or Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC)’. See von Busch, The Psychopolitics of Fashion, 1. 59 Ibid., 11. 60 Ibid., 9. 61 Ibid., 5. 62 ‘Antiche foreste rase al suolo. Oceani pieni di materie tossiche. Aria inquinata dai valeni. Ecco perché abbiamo occupato Vogue Italia. [. . .] Smettete di comportarvi come se fossimo di vostra proprietà, come se il pianeta esistesse perché voi possiate depredarlo. [. . .] Senza di noi non potete vivere; ma noi senza di voi, sì. Lo abbiamo già fatto per 600 milioni di anni, prima della vostra comparsa. [. . .] Vi tendiamo quindi la monolo zoccolo, la zampa, l’artiglio, lo sperone, la pinna, il tentacolo, lo pesudopodo – in segno di amicizia. Di collaborazione creativa. Questa è un’occupazione nonviolenta, pacifica. Per adesso. Gli elementi anarchici tra le nostre fila sono aperi al dialogo iniziale, prima di scatenare tumulti nelle strade. In definitiva è interesse di tutti che il pianeta non sia ridotto a un cumulo di ceneri. Se non conviviamo, l’unica

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Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics alternativa è condividere la morte. Ecco. Adesso restuiamo la parola a Vogue Italia.’ Sam J. Miller, ‘Occupy Vogue Italia’, Vogue Italia, January 2021, 18. Tseëlon, ‘Introduction’, 4. Von Busch, The Psychopolitics of Fashion, 19. Ibid., 20. Filelfo, ‘Dopo II Lockdown’. Vogue Italia, January 2021, 30. Miller. ‘Occupy Vogue Italia’. Sam J. Miller 2021. Available online: https://samjmiller. com/stories/occupy-vogue-italia/ (accessed 30 June 2021). Kovesi and Johnson, ‘Mammoth Tusk Beads’, 985. Ibid., 986. Ibid., 993. Ibid. 993. Sam J. Miller. ‘Occupy Vogue Italia’. Samira Larouci, ‘C’Era Una Volta Una Tigre’, Vogue Italia, January 2021, 44–5. This article announces a shift in the magazine’s perspective to the use of exotic animals in fashion photography. ‘Nella prospettiva attuale, orientata a una visione più etica e sostenibile, l’uso degli animali come puro e semplice elemento scenico sembra però obsoleto, oltre che irrispettoso.’ Larouci, ‘C’Era Una Volta Una Tigre, 45. Michele Fossi, ‘Meno 68%’, Vogue Italia, January 2021, 36–7. Ibid. ‘In cima alla lista abbiamo deforestazione, commercio illegale di fauna selvatica e agricoltura non sostenibile. Gli stessi tre fattori – mi preme sottolineare – imputati di favorire la diffusione di nuovi virus come il Covid-19.’ Fossi, ‘Meno 68%’, 37. Steele, Fashion, Italian Style. Eugenia Paulicelli, ‘Fashion: The Cultural Economy of Made in Italy’, Fashion Practice 6 no.2 (2014): 166. Eugenia Paulicelli, ‘Italian Fashion: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies vol. 20 no.1 (2015): 3. Simona Segre Reinach, ‘If You Speak Fashion, You Speak Italian: Notes on Present-day Italian Fashion Identity’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty vol. 1, no.2 (2010): 210. Ibid. ‘Secondo uno studio dell’Università di Oxford, il processo tecnologico è meno inquinante del 96 per cento rispetto all’allevamento del bestiame, oggi responsabile del 15 per cento delle emissioni di gas serra sul pianeta.’ Marco Morello, ‘L’Orizzonte Si Allarga’, Vogue Italia, January 2021: 65. ‘Operazione Trasparenza’, Vogue Italia (January 2021), 62–3. Fashion Revolution, ‘The Fashion Transparency Index 2020’, Fashion Revolution, 2020. Available online: https://www.fashionrevolution.org/about/transparency/ (accessed 30 June 2021).

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86 Fulvia Bacchi as cited in Morello, ‘Operazione Trasparenza’, 63. 87 ‘To support this, [Bacchi] cites data from a recent report published by UNIC, an organization established in 1946. Compared to the first surveys in 2003, water consumption has been reduced by 18 per cent, energy consumption by one-third, and the use of chemicals has fallen by 9 per cent. Furthermore: “Each substance is authorised and regulated at EU level. We meet all the parameters,we aim to power our machines with alternative resources, we purify, clean and reuse water’. Morello, ‘Operazione Trasparenza’, 63, citing Bacchi. 88 Fletcher and Tham, Earth Logic. 89 Ibid., 20. 90 Ibid., 20. 91 Lucy Siegle, ‘Is wearing fur morally worse than wearing leather?’, The Guardian, 15 February 2015. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/ feb/15/is-wearing-leather-less-moral-than-wearing-fur (accessed 7 October 2022). Farley Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion, 155. 92 FAO, Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Model, no date. Available online: http://www.fao.org/gleam/results/en/ (accessed 1 October 2021). 93 Fletcher and Tham, Earth Logic, 21. 94 ‘Ci accusano di essere responsabili dell’abbattimento degli alberi, di favorire gli allevamenti intensivi per nutrire gli animali. Siamo in grado di garantire la provenienza delle pelli da fonti non correlate ad aree deforestate. Collaboriamo con svariate organizzazioni per rendere sempre più controllabile la catena delle forniture.’ Bacchi as cited in Morello, ‘Operazione Trasparenza’, 63. 95 Susanna Macchia, ‘La Foresta Nell’Armadio’, Vogue Italia, January 2021, 66–7. 96 ‘Se dunque contrastare la deforestazione è imprescindibile come farlo non è scontato. «A tutt’oggi, infatti, non esistono certificazioni riconosciute a livello internazionale — ma neppure nazionale — che identifichino la provenienza della pelle non conciata con cui è stata realizzata la borsa o l’accessorio acquistato», dice Pratesi.’ Pratesi as cited in Macchia, ‘La Foresta Nell’Armadio’, 67. 97 ‘Una differenza la fa poi puntare sul vero artigianato, soprattutto Made in Italy.’ Macchia, ‘La Foresta Nell’Armadio’, 67. 98 ‘I pellami che provengono dai nostri allevamenti sono tutti sicuri. Chiaro che un prodotto proveniente da una filiera locale e così virtuosa ha un costo più elevato. Ma è anche giusto che sia così. Forse dovremmo abituarci a considerare l’acquisto di un accessorio di moda come un lusso speciale, da concederci con meno frequenza ma sul quale investire economicamente di più per essere certi della qualità, della provenienza e conseguentemente del suo impatto sul pianeta.’ Pratesi as cited in Macchia, ‘La Foresta Nell’Armadio’, 67. 99 Ted Polhemus, ‘Trickle Down, Bubble Up’ in Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun (eds) The Fashion Reader, 2nd edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 452.

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100 Ibid., 453. 101 Ibid., 454. 102 PETA, ‘Leather: Hell for Animals and Children in Bangladesh’. PETA, no date. Available online : https://support.peta.org/page/2333/action/1?locale=en-US (accessed 7 October 2022). 103 I borrow the term ‘augment’ here from the work of Kovesi and Johnson, who use it when discussing this mechanism of emulation in the context of vintage fashion items made from ‘exotic’ skins. See Kovesi and Johnson, ‘Mammoth Tusk Beads’, 996. 104 Tseëlon, ‘Introduction’, 4. 105 Sofia Mattioli, ‘Yes Ve Gan’, Vogue Italia, January 2021, 67. 106 Sentience is addressed earlier in the magazine in the following articles: Antonio Spadaro, ‘Un Tessuto Di Fili’, Vogue Italia, January 2021, 38–9; Francesco Monico, ‘Ci Vengono A Trovare In Sogno’, Vogue Italia, January 2021, 40–1. 107 Furmark, ‘Sustainable, Natural Fur’, 2021. Available online: https://www.furmark. com/# (accessed 29 May 2021). See also the podcast discussing Furmark’s launch: FurFashion, ‘Fur Talks’, WeAreFur. Available online: https://www.wearefur.es/ iffs-new-global-certification-and-traceability-scheme-furmark/ (accessed 30 June 2021). 108 Faiers, Fur, 7–8. See also Julia V. Emberley, Venus and Furs: The Cultural Politics of Fur (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998). 109 Faiers, Fur, 8. 110 Kovesi and Johnson, ‘Mammoth Tusk Beads’, 998. 111 Farley Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion, 152–154. 112 Lauren Milligan, ‘Fur Flies’ Vogue UK, 6 July 2009. Available online : https://www. vogue.co.uk/article/naomi-campbell-fronts-fur-campaign (accessed 7 October 2022). 113 ‘Designers including John Galliano, Tom Ford, Versace, Gucci, Burberry, and Coach went fur free in the last few years. London Fashion Week has too, and the whole state of California will ban the sale of fur beginning in 2023’ – Dazed Digital, 2020. 114 Sarah Kent, ‘Kering CEO Says Fur Has “No Place in Luxury” ’, Business of Fashion, 24 September 2021. Available online: https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/ sustainability/kering-ceo-says-fur-has-no-place-in-luxury (accessed 29 September 2021). 115 Annachiara Biondi, ‘The fur industry is fighting back’, Vogue Business, 18 December 2019. Available online: https://www.voguebusiness.com/sustainability/materialsfur-industry-faux-vegan-prada-chanel-yoox-net-a-porter-burberry (accessed 29 May 2021).

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116 Henning Otte Hansen, ‘Global fur retail value’, 27 May 2021. Available online: https://www.wearefur.com/global-fur-retail-trade-worth-20–1bn-indicatingstrong-bounce-back-post-pandemic/ (accessed 24 June 2021), 1. 117 Von Busch, The Psychopolitics of Fashion, 1. 118 PETA UK (2017) ‘ “Lose the Fur”: Elisabetta Canalis’ message to New Editor of Vogue Italia’, PETA UK. Available online: https://www.peta.org.uk/media/newsreleases/34657–2/ (accessed 29 May 2021). The letter itself can be found here: https://www.peta.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Elisabetta-Canalis-letter-toVOGUE-Italia-2.pdf (accessed 29 May 2021). 119 ‘Sostenibilità. Una parola dalle mille sfaccettature nel fashion system. Uno slogan da vendere per alcuni, un obiettivo da rincorrere per altri, sicuramente un plus per i brand che a volte risulta difficile valutare per il consumatore. Per questo il settore della pellicceria ha deciso di fare chiarezza con Furmark, una nuova certificazione internazionale per le pellicce naturali, che debutta nel 2021, e che fornisce linee guida per un acquisto in totale sicurezza, come spiega l’international Fur Federation.’ Furmark, ‘FUTURE FOR FUR’, 80. 120 Sorenson, ‘Ethical Fashion’, 151. 121 ‘Perché la pelliccia è una scelta sostenibile più di altre? Innanzitutto si tratta di un materiale totalmente organico e biodegradabile che non lascia rifiuti negli oceani. Un prodotto dell’economia circolare protagonista nel gioco creativo tra recycled e upcycled, progettato per durare a lungo.’ Furmark, ‘FUTURE FOR FUR’, 80. 122 Sue Thomas, ‘From “Green Blur” to EcoFashion: Fashioning an Eco-Lexicon’, Fashion Theory, vol.12, no.4: 527. 123 Sorenson, ‘Ethical Fashion’, 152, citing Smith. 124 Ibid., 153. 125 FurMark, Furmark: Sustainable Natural Fur. Available online: https://www. furmark.com/what-is-furmark/what-it-means (accessed 30 September 2021). 126 Stella McCartney, ‘Fur-Free-Fur’ Stella McCartney, no date. Available online: https://www.stellamccartney.com/fr/fr/sustainability/fur-free-fur.html (accessed 7 October 2022). 127 Wool is a controversial material for some activists on account of the practice of mulesing and the use of pesticides. For a discussion of pesticides, see Farley Gordon and Hill, Sustainable Fashion, 69. For discussion of mulesing, see PETA, ‘Mulesing by the Wool Industry’, PETA, no date. Available online: https://www.peta. org/issues/animals-used-for-clothing/wool-industry/mulesing/ (accessed 7 October 2022). 128 ‘Acquistare un capo con il logo Furmark vuol dire avere la certezza che è stato certificato in tutti gli step della sua catena di fornitura, a partire dal prelievo selvatico o dall’alievamento, che è tenuto a rispettare il benessere animale secondo il Welfare Quality della Commissione europea; buon alloggio, buona

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134 135 136 137

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Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics alimentazione, buona salute e comportamento adeguato.’ Furmark, ‘FUTURE FOR FUR’, 80. Mark Oaten, ‘What is Furmark’, FURMARK, no date. Available online: https://www. furmark.com/what-is-furmark/what-it-means (accessed 7 October 2022). Sorenson, ‘Ethical Fashion’, 148. Kovesi and Johnson, ‘Mammoth Tusk Beads’, 1000. ChainPoint. Available online: https://chainpoint.org (accessed 30 September 2021). Tarun Kumar Agrawal, Vijay Kumar, Rudrajeet Pal, Lichuan Wang and Yan Chen, ‘Blockchain-based framework for supply chain traceability: A case example of textile and clothing industry’, Computers and Industrial Engineering vol. 154 (2021): 1, 4. Fashion Revolution, ‘The Fashion Transparency Index 2020’. Ibid. Farneti, ‘Editor’s Letter’, Vogue Italia, January 2021, 16. Jeanette Orminski, Edson C. Tandoc Jr and Benjamin H. Detenber ‘#sustainablefashion – A Conceptual Framework for Sustainable Fashion Discourse on Twitter’, Environmental Communication, vol.15 no.1 (2021): 115–132. Zoë Blackler, ‘Telling the Truth, A Year On’, Extinction Rebellion, 15 April 2020. Available online: https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2020/04/15/telling-the-truth-ayear-on/ (accessed 30 September 2021). Skjold, ‘Towards Fashion Media for Sustainability’, 174. For a discussion of how niche fashion magazines function, see Ane Lynge-Jorlén, ‘Between Frivolity and Art: Contemporary Niche Fashion Magazines’, Fashion Theory vol. 16, no. 1 (2012): 7–28. Kovesi and Johnson, ‘Mammoth Tusk Beads’, 1004. Ibid.

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Producing Garments, Manufacturing Fashion: On the Globalization of Industry and Disconnection with Craft Göran Sundberg

Whereas Stål and Laing analyse the industry from a more theoretical perspective, fashion designer and educator Göran Sundberg provides a practitioner’s view on ethical fashion production as connected to aesthetic creativity under the challenges of globalization. To spend eight-plus hours at Bahrain International Airport is to watch globalization play out in real time. The timeless limbo of transit between crosscontinental flights is interrupted by flows of international manpower. Herds of long-distance commuters move through the vast expanses of polished white concrete flooring and rows of grey modular seating. You watch as 200 guest workers from Bangladesh pass, dressed in lungis and polyester suits, on their way to Riyadh. Soon after, fifteen or so Saudi businessmen in traditional thawb shirts transit on their way to Shanghai. Later, another 200 guest workers flow through the airport with boxes and plastic bags, this time hurrying home to spend the holidays in Karachi. Now and then, you hear the laughter of twenty young English women in designer jeans, carrying monogrammed canvas bags, presumably on their way to some event. Perhaps the flows of manpower for the global economy have become so apparent because of the trimming and speeding up that have made global logistics into a lean and cost-effective machine. Much of the sophisticated glamour connected with air travel in the late twentieth century is long gone. Today it is more associated with packed-out airports, queues for security checks and flight delays. Fashion workers are parts of this machinery. The last few decades have increased the huge extent to which fashion travels – not just in terms of the 75

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number of garments and tons of textiles churned out of factories and lugged over the world to growing global markets, but also increasingly as the logistics that form and underpin the artistic and cultural aspects of fashion are dependent on global transportation. Fashion professionals perform diverse tasks such as trend-spotting, sourcing, development of materials and samples, working with ateliers and craftspeople who are located in hot spots over the globe from where they influence the colours, surfaces, cuts and shapes of fashions. The globalization of contemporary fashion is therefore no longer just a question of logistics but also of aesthetics.1 Being attuned to this kind of manifestation of global market logistics may also come out of my personal experience as a fashion designer. My observations of commuters in Bahrain International Airport were made en route to Nepal, where I was trying to find ways to collaborate with small, cottage industry units that aim to improve social issues in the country. Exploring alternative ways to navigate a fashion system, seeking to include social enterprise, certainly creates awareness of one’s own role in the industry and of one’s personal characteristics. These include how professionals, like myself, who transit across time zones to operate in the global fashion industry, may be easily spotted by their branded loungewear, large cashmere shawls, outsized bags and iPhones that are permanently connected to the Instagram server. For almost 50 years our routes have been etched increasingly onto the informal global fashion map: the first stop are the metropolitan hubs at which trends are spotted. Next are exhibition centres for sourcing, for fabric and yarn shows. The third stop is southeast Asia in order to set up production lines and manufacturing. And since high street fashion had largely merged with designer fashion by the turn of the last century, the global armada of designers and production managers have trodden much the same paths. Twice per year, the route is repeated: trend-spotting, sourcing, production. I have observed this pattern forming over the years. Soon after leaving fashion school in the early 1980s I had a chance posting in Bangladesh, working with cottage industries to create an atelier collection from local silk. Until I came almost full circle with the cottage industry project in Nepal much later, I observed developments from several vantage points and perspectives. I worked with both small designer labels and global retailers in Stockholm and Paris. Later, I saw how the industry was changing while covering global fashion weeks and markets for magazines and newspapers and editing a trade journal. The bigger picture became more apparent while I was conducting studies for governmental agencies and international organizations, observing in 2005 how

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abolished restrictions in world trade created clear winners and losers on the global fashion market.2 As obstructions were removed to truly globalize fashion, there appeared to be a strong link to the designs and products that defined the era – logo-heavy leisurewear and globally advertised it-bags.3 It seemed that the logistics and aesthetics were highly connected and interdependent. In that way, the tracks made by global commuters have become sharper and deeper with growing fashion output requiring larger amounts of raw materials, resulting in ever greater landfills.4 As industrial logic has been able to play out, the fashion industry has become successively streamlined and is currently allencompassing. It is not only that ever more people globally are invited to participate in fashion culture due to rising incomes and the rise of middle classes in emerging markets:5 the transformation of the fashion industry has occurred parallel to, and at the same time as, a conversion of fashion content itself.6 It is hard to know whether the ‘democratization’ of fashion enabled the progressive domination of global fashion, or vice versa. Perhaps such a process was inevitable once it started, with constant negotiations between eccentricity and accessibility, between high fashion and ‘fashion at the best price’, as fast fashion chain H&M defines its offer.

The role of production in the evolution of fashion Several processes in the fashion industry create that dual progress of growing and adapting to the market, forming something like an evolutionary system. This includes how new participants become established. At their inception, it is not uncommon for new fashion brands to attract attention precisely because of specific aspects that stand out and signify a new proposal: oddities, quirks, eccentricities. These aspects may help new brands to get noticed in a crowded market; radical designs, unusual cuts, original matching of accessories and niche stylings also help to attract the first, more particular, followers. However, as the brand is tweaked to match the demands of the fashion market through critical selection at trade fairs by fashion buyers and by fashion editors for magazine editorials, irregularities are sanded down and less cutting-edge but more saleable clothes are produced. This evolution typically involves levelling up production. From working with small ateliers locally, or even sewing styles in-house, the next step for a start-up brand is usually to work with small factories nearby. As the number of buyers and customers grows, larger factory units further away may be needed. And at

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every step it is crucial to find the appropriate quality grade of production at the adequate price level, to keep production standards in line with the product offering. Production quality cannot of course be measured on a binary scale that ranges from high to low; it also includes cultural and artistic dimensions that border artistic considerations in design. What school of tailoring to use, for instance, is one such regard: British, Italian or American? How traditional or adapted should modern sportswear be?7 Another illustrative example is the trend to leave fabric edges raw, finished with fringing or treated with laser depending on what the product should transmit – rebellious and gothic or high tech and raw? – and the choice of specific fashion segments. From an aesthetic perspective, production is an even more complex balancing act as you want to meet a general demand for clothing without losing brand identity. The more a designer can transform the appearance of a garment without making it complicated to wear, the greater the potential it has to meet demand for wearable clothing. But if a design ends up too simple, resembling too many other basic garments on the market, the potential diminishes correspondingly. The challenge looks different depending on your role in a new fashion company and you even hear about the battles in the boardrooms: the founder or creative director versus the financial directors or the CEO.8 Finding the right tension between commercial and artistic success, respectively, seems to be the challenge; it means balancing on the knife edge of fashion.

A fashion peace treaty In the grand scheme of global fashion, there is an eternal conflict between art and commerce, forces that, in combination, could turn a random idea about a more modern way to dress into a readily available garment. Instead, in the recent history of global fashion, the relationship between art and commerce has resembled a peace treaty. That is how the widely published picture announcing one of the early collaborations between high street and couture fashion, in 2004, reads. The photo taken when Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld met with H&M design director Margareta van den Bosch, resembles just that: leaders of political blocs sitting down at a table, drawing up a ceasefire agreement. Although widely discussed as such, Karl Lagerfeld for H&M was not the first collaboration between a high fashion designer and a mass market retailer: North

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American retailer Target had produced a collection with American designer Isaac Mizrahi9 earlier, and Jean Paul Gaultier followed Yves Saint Laurent and Issey Miyake as a designer of special collections for the French mail order company La Redoute.10 But the Kaiser of haute couture’s project with the relentless fashion powerhouse from Sweden marked a significant breakingdown of barriers, not the least in Lagerfeld’s hometown of Paris.11 In a city where high fashion and couture dresses are serious business and included in governmental culture policies, Lagerfeld’s link-up with a low-brow fast fashion retailer producing millions of five-euro T-shirts in Bangladesh was a major thing. It would be easy to ascribe the amount of disapproval it evoked to French chauvinism or to snobbery inherent to the fashion system. It echoed the critique received by the monochrome, roomy shapes and frayed styles Japanese designers premiered in the French capital in the early 1980s, when severe dismissals were printed in major newspapers. But such reactions were not just products of prejudice. The Parisian system had been built with regulations for proper couture ateliers and production standards to ensure a level of craft and work quality, much in the same way that France has established standards for food and drink. It would therefore be unfair to not regard such concerns also as reasons why French couture houses were eager to safeguard fashion standards.

The magical transformation of fashion ‘I was always quite fascinated by H&M because people who buy Chanel and other expensive things buy there, too. For me, this is fashion today’, Karl Lagerfeld was quoted saying as the joint collection of black-and-white high-collared tailoring was presented in H&M’s stores in 2004 (and sold out within hours).12 13 And indeed that’s what fashion had become. Not only did a string of collaborations between famous designers and globally established clothing brands follow but now, almost two decades later, those pairings and the announcements thereof seem to be par for the course in the fashion industry. But it was not only the French who had sensed that the appreciation of fashion was now different. Just as Lagerfeld promised, it was not longer necessary to buy expensive, atelier-made clothes to participate in fashion culture. In fact, this breakout from the paradigm was the major message in style journalism: a savvy fashionista mixed and (mis-) matched her high fashion treasures with inexpensive chain-store finds. To buy into a total look or, even worse, just buying into one designer, was the sign of a fashion victim. It was much smarter to take advantage of the cheap knockoffs, to

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blend them into an outfit to get the desired ‘fashion’ look without paying a high fashion price. Such wizardry did not seem to have any particular consequence or immanent cost – except for the fashion labels that may have lost sales to high street retailers, that is.14 But any such concern was easy to rationalize for the consumer. Who regards fashion houses that sell expensive clothing as victims or losers, anyhow? The central proposal of this chapter is that the trickery performed by fashion around the time of the millennial shift, when designer culture went truly global, indeed did have a consequence, an inherent cost. This text suggests that the logical spin, where designer fashion suddenly was pronounced to become something else – or at least was declared as needing to be regarded in a different way – created a rupture that is now playing out and which may be contributing to the present state of ‘The End of Fashion’.

Different worlds of production Looking at the aesthetic distinctions of fashion, one might examine fashion objects and their relation to human activity. The production of fashion has changed very little since the invention of sewing machines in the late eighteenth century. Essentially, garment production is still managed around individual machine operators. The last few decades have seen the addition of digitized cutting tools, and automation of some garment details, like collars and pockets, have been around for some time. But still, the skill with which individual operators manipulate the materials and the mechanics of the sewing machine will determine the quality of production and finish. In my journeys between fashion capitals and Asian production hubs, I experienced how the origins of production differentiated in the arrangement of machine operators, both organizationally and geographically. It is, obviously, very different to work in an atelier in Paris, compared to sewing T-shirts in a factory in Bangladesh, although the fundamentals are similar. Besides the obvious differences between post-industrial nations and developing countries, even exempting scale and speed, there is also a large disparity between the number of methods and techniques employed in the respective production units. A Parisian atelier would be contracted for smaller quantities of diverse styles of garments that require proficiency and flexibility, whereas the Bangladeshi factory would receive orders for mainly ‘light apparel’ (tops and shirts, as opposed to ‘heavier’ jackets and outerwear). And whereas the

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Figure 3.1 Dwarika is cutting Oxford cotton for men’s shirts as part of a cottage industry project in Nepal 2014. Photo: Göran Sundberg.

atelier would be expected to help solving technical aspects of experimental designs, for the southeast Asian factory everything would be specified in advance, down to the individual stitch – even down to the number of seconds allowed for each operation. So, expectations are very different: the local atelier is still connected strongly to the artistic process, whereas the more distant factory plays no part in it whatsoever. From the perspective of production strategies, what the democratization and global mass marketing of fashion has tried to pull off, is a depiction of the two as playing equal roles, declaring them to be the same, despite the sharp distinctions between them.

The atelier performance Traditionally, the relation between design and production has been tightly interwoven, derived from the rituals in the couture house and the tailoring shop: the intimate interaction between customer and tailor; the subsequent fittings; the discussions about details and possible alterations. Aesthetic considerations coalesced with technical solutions as suits and dresses were made up.

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As the focus in fashion culture started to transfer from couture and tailoring to ready-to-wear in the mid-twentieth century, aesthetic and technical considerations moved into the design studio. In this somewhat mythical place, the draping, fittings and alterations were carried out but no longer as part of an interaction with a customer, but rather to create innovative fashions that are meant to be communicated as big news. Therefore, the symbolic acts inherent in creating fashion were also elevated. The anonymous machinery of the production line, on the other hand, was relegated to the backstage. Even as those performative acts were turned into entertainment, especially in television shows like Project Runway, fashion-creating processes have stayed fairly consistent and authentic: sketching, draping, cutting, sewing. As the organization of fashion brands changed, the specialized tasks regarded as in the purview of designers were expanded to include conceptualization, research and communication – all to fit in a traditional company structure. Production, on the other hand, was usually delegated to a separate production manager. Still, if you worked with a designer brand in one of the global fashion capitals during the late twentieth century (as I did, along with a generation of designers and assistants), it was not uncommon for garments to be produced in limited quantities in house. Cities like Paris and its surroundings were still home to a number of small workshops and ateliers where small brands in particular produced their stock. The designer or other studio personnel went there with prototypes and patterns to negotiate making and garment solutions in detail. Therefore, the interaction between the person who created fashion and the people who produced it would remain intimate and personal: both aesthetic and technical aspects could – and needed – to be solved as they emerged. New solutions and compromises could be discussed and decided on jointly. Also, perhaps unexpected solutions were allowed to appear and be integrated as new design features. The connection between designer and product was still physical in essence.

The alienation of design and production Another development during this period was the establishment of production and distribution houses, companies that carried out all the ‘backroom activities’ for the new breed of designer brands. Staff International, which handles production and distribution for Maison Margiela, Marni, Cavalli and DSquared2, is one such example. These companies handle the prototyping of new collections,

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the sourcing of materials and accessories, the production of those products that are ordered subsequently by stores all over the world, as well as packing and shipping. One change heralded by this set-up was that more of what earlier consisted of designer studio work was now transferred to a subcontractor (or partner, depending on the arrangement).  Production also became more formal. The designer typically travelled to work with the production and distribution company for a number of weeks at the time, to develop new collections. Later on, samples and prototypes were sent by courier to the designer for comments and final approval.15 In this process, the look and feel of the end products are much more in the hands of the subcontractor. These production companies, which have worked for many well-known designer brands, often located in Italy, have became known for a certain level of quality and finish. As a designer brand, you adopted or ‘bought in to’ the specific production quality rather than to develop it yourself. It was also possible for a buyer or a discerning customer to recognize and familiarize themselves with the work done by a certain production company, even if it was marketed by different designer labels. Perhaps it was inevitable that this shift would make way for further separations of design and production, both geographically and in terms of relation to craft. Designers created lower-priced sub-brands in order to reach wider segments of the market, and partnered with companies who mass-produced apparel in lowcost countries – even recruiting their production managers. The visible label of Made in Italy started to be replaced by (a much more discreet) Made in China, to where machinery and production facilities began to move from Italy.16 Simultaneously, production quality and skill levels increased in countries like China, India and Bangladesh. Before long, stories – sometimes true, sometimes slightly exaggerated – emerged about how garments created for famous fashion brands were produced alongside clothes headed to cheap chain stores. It was at this point that globe-hopping fashion professionals, who crossed continents and time zones on their seasonal routes, were established forever.  In such a way, the mechanics of the globalized market, the constant flow of money and goods, have worked inexorably to optimize production resources in relation to (low) price. At the same time, the separation and specialization of fashion production have lessened the industry’s ability to creatively manipulate the materials and techniques that go into the finished product, to lend a ‘handson’ quality or to create novel ways of sewing and tailoring clothing. The modern way of working means you are confined to a more standard set of product qualities or simple gimmicks.

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Today, when fashion is mediated increasingly through the internet and needs to figuratively stand out on two-dimensional computer screens, the corporatization of design craft is nothing if not enforced.17 This logic mirrors, in its outlines, Marx’s discussion on the separation of labour and capital.18 Here, production and art are discussed primarily as being for the purpose of selfrealization, and how freedom relates to the realms of necessity. However, according to Sayers, it is the influence of Hegel’s work – his notion of creative activity and alienation – that may make the connection to the artefact and consumption.19 I will return to that notion below.

The ethics and aesthetics of fashion products Globalization seems to have accelerated several concerns related to the apparel industry. Manufacturing in low-cost countries, where regulations on working conditions and sustainability aspects are limited, often means that factory personnel are exposed to toxic textile treatments that are emitted straight into the environment. Many of us will have seen images of unprotected textile workers immersed in rivers of black dye as they work on orders from international fast fashion companies. But the geographical distance between these developing economies and the target customer has made it possible to repress those images from the consumers’ minds, at least at the point of purchase. Fast fashion has also contributed to sustainability issues such as landfills created from discarded clothing, bonfires of dead stock and microplastic particles in the oceans released from the polyester fabrics used in cheap, discardable clothing. It is inevitable that those sad realities will influence people’s perception of fashion. Clothing culture may have been an arena for dreams and ideas, and given us the vision of a better or more modern life. But now it is also tainted by the sad states of affairs in the back room. Fashion is an illusion that is no longer as convincing as it used to be. From the experiential aspect, fashion has become a matter of aesthetic distinction, much in the sense in which Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger discussed art and reality. Kant’s reasoning on how aesthetic experience is opposite to logic and cognition plays well into how the mechanisms of the global market have separated, industrialized and magnified the latter (the logic and cognition), while trimming away the more ambiguous qualities. Kant put forward the necessity for incomprehensibility and of being functionally indifferent to an object of beauty, and contemporary fashion would be a prime

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example of how that argument plays out in real life. Even his underlying hypothesis, the requirement of a disinterest for a true experience of beauty, would fit with the idea of couture and avant-garde fashion. These categories of fashion are, at their core, exempted from any prosaic criteria; the clothes may even be very difficult to wear. But that does not matter: the beauty and artistic experience inherent in their creation is everything.20 Even Kant’s categorization of aesthetic properties would be adequate applied to contemporary fashion. In his estimation, ‘the Beautiful’ pleases the viewer whereas ‘the Agreeable’ gratifies. The latter would correspond to fashion which is chosen because it fits well, is cut in accordance with body shape and in colours that suit the wearer, and is well designed from a functional aspect. His third category, ‘the Good’, is by contrast identified through being esteemed and approved – which may be translated into well-regarded designs and hyped-up designers. Although these distinctions do not exist in fashion, Kant’s different judgements are used frequently, for instance in fashion journalism and catwalk show reviews. Collections are assessed intuitively by these different qualities: the Italian brand Prada is judged perhaps on its Agreeableness, how it succeeds to provide clothing for a modern woman. The lauded French label Balenciaga, on the other hand, is frequently esteemed on how Good the collection is; how well it corresponds to contemporary issues and ideas. The Japanese brand Comme des Garçons, however, is applauded for its sheer sublimity, its Beauty and emotion, not its wearability.21 From the designers’ perspective, Heidegger’s ideas may also be used to forward arguments, especially in his formulation of truth in works. His idea of “equipment’ (das Zeug), like shoes, is an intermediate position between nature and art. Equipment may help to reveal the world to us through an artwork that brings forward the equipmental qualities of equipment, what they are in truth. For Heidegger, this entity emerges into ‘the unconcealedness of its being’. He writes: ‘If there occurs in the work a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is, then there is here an occurring, a happening of truth at work.’22 If you accept the premise that a fashion object may disclose the particular being of clothing, accessories, jewellery, then there is also a possibility of ‘a happening of truth at work’. This happening is something that a designer would look for and work towards in the creation of fashion. Without necessarily trying to put a fashion object on the same footing as an artwork, like an artist, the fashion designer needs tools to create the truth. The fashion object needs to have its own specific world, its history, shape, materials, and its place within its world.

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Adjusting it for standardizations and making suitable for reproduction on a global scale will simply diminish it. The way in which an ancient Greek temple ‘gives to things the way to look and to men a way to look on themselves’, is rich and poetic in Heidegger’s words. He describes how the temple rests on rocky ground, how a storm is raging around it, the grace of the sun, the lustre and gleam of the stone, the towers’ distinctive shape contrasting with the surge of the turf, tree and grass etc. For Heidegger, this is how what he refers to as the ‘temple-work’ opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back down on earth. It evokes how someone in fashion design  would describe a dress on a body, the movement of the material, the sheen of the fabric etc. It is possible that fashion designers intuit a similar order of world and objects. That would explain why these creative professionals insist on making up fashion in the most elaborate way – even though the modern industry has been rationalized as discussed above.

Producing a fashion truth In today’s global fashion industry, the established way to design clothes is by sending digital sketches, measurement lists and specifications for material to a producer in southeast Asia. Typically, two prototypes will be made up during the process, which are sent by courier and commented on in turn, before a ‘sealed sample’ is agreed on. The latter functions as a reference for what to produce and distribute in the next stage. A designer, however, would strive to work on the products in real life; to drape fabric on a mannequin to experience a three-dimensional shape, the weight of material and see how it moves, experiment with surfaces and details, sketch print patterns and so on. Being confined to a computer and its two-dimensional screen is therefore frustrating. Hence, many designers (like myself and the colleagues I have met while travelling between sourcing trade shows and production epicentres) try to negotiate access to atelier facilities and craftspeople as part of their contracts. But in the race towards low cost and lower price, that would often be regarded as an unwarranted expenditure.  That cost is nevertheless warranted by couture houses and luxury brands. Indeed, ateliers and skilled workers involved in products are often highlighted on social media channels. YouTube, for instance, is full of films demonstrating how special textile techniques and leather crafts are used. An initial inquiry into

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the logic of such demonstrative exceptions to the global industry may perhaps lead to arguments for charging the much higher prices demanded for luxury fashion. From the aesthetic perspective, the cost of the facilities and the craftspeople are merely the prerequisites for creating the beautiful and for finding the truth in clothing. Still, the principal development of global fashion production seems to be moving in the opposite direction. One of the things that saddened me the most while working with international industry and trade organizations, was witnessing how many ‘designer brands’ now select products in a range made by a manufacturer and request minor brand-specific adjustments. Admittedly, there is an irrefutable industrial logic to this; like how today kitchen appliances and cars from one producer can be marketed under different competing brands, depending on the market and segment. Scale and specialization drive an evolution for fewer and larger producers, while the designer merely is a buyer, or a curator. Although those are solid professions that demand specific know-how and skill, it is the disposing of the design-work altogether, or rather, the pretending of a non-existing design-work, that is so depressing. In Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel writes: The long and complicated connection between needs and work, interests and their satisfaction, is completely developed in all its ramifications, and every individual, losing his independence, is tied down in an endless series of dependencies on others. His own requirements are either not at all or only to a very small extent, his own work.23

Towards another fashion In the late spring of 2020, the global fashion industry’s travelling army was stopped in its tracks. The outbreak of the coronavirus had (at least temporarily) shut down stores and put production on pause, as travel had become unsafe or downright prohibited. The initial mix of fear and elevation that the outbreak induced, the feeling of inexorable change and the need to mobilize creativity to deal with the new situation, has now dissipated. Although digital fashion weeks were announced all over the world, frustration soon took over. To engage with, not to mention create, fashion through a YouTube live feed or a Zoom-conference proved to be unsatisfying, if not impossible. It is obvious that fashion culture, as we used to think about it, needs its stores, its shows and ateliers. The twentieth-century idea of fashion requires the

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experience of the drape of textiles, the movement of fabrics on a figure, the feel of brushed wool, the weight of a coat, the shine of a soft leather. However, ‘the new normal’ has brought further incentives for hastening the development to rationalize and globalize fashion production. Some brands are experimenting with highresolution digital showrooms. Three-dimensional draping, rendering and animation software are quickly becoming more common in design departments. These new tools will not ‘open up a world’ to what fashion used to be, to borrow Heidegger’s formulation, but to something new, depicted in pixels and on backlit screens. Exactly what that is, is for us to discover. Judging from the

Figure 3.2 Pressing facility in a garment factory in Kathmandu, Nepal, 2014. Photo: Göran Sundberg.

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world where the new fashion needs to appear, this new category may be image based, fast, full of exaggerated emoji-emotions, constantly moving and always changing. It will definitely be another fashion in its own right.

Notes 1 For a discussion on the role of aesthetics, and specifically Heidegger’s micro-paradigms, see the following encyclopedia entry: Iain Thomson, ‘Heidegger’s Aesthetics’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Available online: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/heidegger-aesthetics. 2 Richard P. Appelbaum, Edna Bonacich and Katie Quan, The End of Apparel Quotas: A Faster Race to the Bottom? (UC Santa Barbara: Global and International Studies, 2005). Available online: https://escholarshio.org/uc/Item/0q40t681 https:// escholarship.org/uc/item/40f8w19g 3 Olivier Nicklaus, Fashion: Go Global, Lalala Productions (Strasbourg: Arte France, 2012). 4 Elizabeth L. Cline, Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion (New York: Portfolio, 2013). 5 Valerie Steele, ‘Fashion Futures’, in The End of Fashion, ed. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 11. 6 Simonetta Carbonaro and Christian Votava, ‘The Function of Fashion? The Design of New Styles . . . of Thought’, The Nordic Textile Journal Issue 1 (2009): 30–45. 7 Frances Ross, ‘Refashioning London’s Bespoke and Demi-bespoke Tailors: New Textiles, Technology and Design in Contemporary Menswear’, Journal of the Textile Institute, vol. 98, no 3 (2007): 281–8. 8 Vanessa Friedman, ‘Lanvin and Alber Elbaz: The Story of a Breakup’, in New York Times, 17 December 2015. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/ fashion/lanvin-alber-elbaz-fired.html 9 Target, Target: 20 Years of Design for All: How Target Revolutionized Accessible Design, Foreword by Kim Hastreiter (New York: Rizzoli, 2019). 10 ‘Jean-Paul Gaultier lends his talents to La Redoute’, Hello Magazine, 17 November 2004. Available online: https://www.hellomagazine.com/fashion/2004/11/17/ jeanpaulgaultier/ (accessed 7 October 2022). 11 Miles Socha, Seminal Moment: ‘When Karl Lagerfeld Embraced H&M’, in Women’s Wear Daily, 12 May 2020. Available online: https://wwd.com/fashion-news/ fashion-features/how-karl-hm-collaboration-changed-fashion-1203632077/ 12 Cathy Horyn, ‘Front Row; Off-the-Rack Lagerfeld, at H&M’, in New York Times, 22 June 2004. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/nyregion/ front-row-off-the-rack-lagerfeld-at-h-m.html

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13 ‘Truly Fast Fashion: H&M’s Lagerfeld Line Sells Out in Hours’, Women’s Wear Daily, 15 November 2004. 14 The logic of the collaboration strategy has been debated widely in marketing literature, but mainly from a business perspective. 15 Luisa Zargani, ‘Designer Brands Lift OTB Performance in 2016’, in Women’s Wear Daily, 17 March 2017. Available online: https://wwd.com/business-news/financial/ designer-brands-lift-otb-performance-10846851/ 16 Nebahat Tokatli, ‘ “Made in Italy? Who cares” Prada’s New Economic Geography’, Geoforum vol. 54 July (2014): 1–9. Available online: https://www.sciencedirect.com/ science/article/abs/pii/S0016718514000608 17 Jean-Noël Kapferer, ‘Why Luxury Should not Delocalize: A Critique of a Growing Tendency’, The European Business Review, March–April 2012. Available online: https://www.webssa.net/files/cas_1_-_les_frontieres_de_lentreprise.pdf 18 Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’, in Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975e), 279–400. 19 Sean Sayers, Marx and Alienation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 30. 20 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing 1987), 14. 21 Ibid., 44–53. 22 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York, Harper & Row, 1971), 32–48. 23 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975), 260.

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The Fashion of the Manifesto Marco Pecorari

Looking at the communicative tools and self-understanding of the fashion industry, fashion scholar Marco Pecorari here engages critically with the meaning of the fashion manifesto – although a relatively new phenomenon in the industry, it is being adopted, adapted, abused and simplified for commercial gain.

Introduction This chapter starts from a sceptical view on the ways the manifesto, as a literary genre, has been adopted, adapted, abused and simplified in contemporary commercial practices and specifically within the fashion industry. Such scepticism took root in my teaching and research practice while observing the different roles, uses and meanings that the manifesto has recently assumed in the fashion system, in fashion design research and vestimentary practices. Emerging as a political – and later artistic – tool for propaganda and subversion, the manifesto has been recently employed within creative industries – especially in fashion – as communication tool to present ideas, collections or special projects. As also observed by Karen de Perthuis, the manifesto is becoming more and more in fashion and this is in conjunction with an increasing attention in the public media discourse on issues such as identity politics and sustainability.1 While Prada spells out their manifesto on their website defining themselves as ‘drivers of change’, Louis Vuitton’s Spring/Summer 2021 menswear collection was entitled ‘A Manifesto According to Virgil Abloah’. At the same time, the growing field of fashion thinking and activism against normative practices in the fashion industry has also been characterized by the emergence of different collectives, independent designers, image-makers, citizens and thinkers, that use 91

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the manifesto as a ultimate form of resistance.2 This is the case of the collective ‘Craftivism’ which aims to rework the idea of craft and homemade as way to empower women’s rights via the manifesto; or the collective ‘The Rational Dress Society’ which presented a manifesto of the jumpsuit to battle conspicuous consumption and ‘replace all clothes in perpetuity’. Not least, fashion academics have also embraced the idea of manifesto to comment on the current situation of fashion pedagogy.3 Following a critique towards the fashion industry and its capitalistic mechanics, these agents often stand in opposition to the luxury fashion industry and adopt the genre of the manifesto as a political and critical instrument proposing an alternative system of production and consumption, while evoking avant-garde artistic movements in their aesthetics. This chapter explores different approaches to the manifesto and observes an emerging politicization of fashion, or I should say, an increasing adoption of contemporary politics – from identity politics to issues of sustainability and the environment – both inside and outside the luxury fashion system.4 Questions of transparency and change govern these manifestos but with very different applications. In luxury brands, the manifesto is increasingly used to present values and state awareness and accountability for social matters. At the same time, similar principles are claimed in manifestos produced by activists, collectives or independent designers who denounce the practices of the fashion system. Despite this attention to both the term and genre of the manifesto, little has been done to theorize on its scope for the fashion industry. This seems to be a common lack in other academic fields like avant-garde art or design. As explained by Janet Lyon, manifestos have been at the attention of different studies on the avant-garde, but little has been done to theorize this genre ‘in the catalogue of modern discursive forms’ – and this is also true for manifestos related to fashion.5 While some historical studies on renown artistic movements like Futurism have been exploring the ways in which these artistic currents have discoursed fashion in their manifestos,6 only recently a few publications have been dedicated directly to the study of this genre.7 Despite the popularization of the format and the term manifesto in – and about – fashion, there is no deep analysis of the characters and shifting meanings that the manifesto as a discursive tool has assumed in relation to fashion practices of today. In this chapter, I will enter this terrain, pointing out briefly some cases of manifesto or series of statements that employ the graphic layout or rhetorical language of the manifesto. These seem to instigate an interesting reflection on a sort of fashionability of the manifesto as tool, able to perform an approach to an anti- or dissident practice within a system of

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fashion, while also highlighting the ways in which this use has been performative at a moment of economic crisis and political protests against inequality.

The death of the manifesto? When we think of a manifesto, we immediately identify this word with a political and activist action – consisting of a series or lists of written rules or statements. Emerging during the seventeenth century in England as a war pamphlet, the genre rises with the ‘emergence of the bourgeois and plebeian public spheres in the West’ and marks ‘the point of impact where the idea of radical egalitarianism runs up against the entrenchment of an ancient régime’.8 The manifesto, since its inception, has been a tool ‘mixing hortatory political rhetoric with righteous rage’, soon becoming a genre adopted in both avant-garde artistic movements in the early twentieth century and, in the 1960s, by political movements like feminism.9 In all these adoptions, the manifesto ‘functioned to circumvent ordinary parliamentarian avenues of public redress, and to challenge the ostensible universalism that underpins modern democratic cultural formations’.10 The reactionary nature of the manifesto as genre of resistance and subversion can be seen mirrored in fashion,11 especially during the early twentieth century, with the writing of manifestos like ‘The Tyranny of Clothes’ by dancer Hellen Moore in 1918, in which she denounced the restrictions of corsets while inviting women to more liberating sartorial choices;12 or with ‘Le Suffragettes Manifesto’ that sought to promote better working conditions (also) in the couture industry. At the same time, it is important to notice how the rhetoric and writing style of manifestos was also adopted in statements and declarations by private or public fashion associations aiming to dictate, both legally and in public discourse, the conditions for belonging (or not) to governmental or industrial groups. The formation of political institutions, especially in the late nineteenth century, has been characterized by the dictation of rules and corollaries that have resembled the role of manifesto in verbalizing orders and instructions. If we look at the formation of the Chambre Syndicale, we can see the necessity to embrace legislative acts and tracts that characterized a political formation based on protectionism and control. While these acts were not declared as manifesto, they flirt with the written format and the politicized nature of the manifesto; and this already begins to create a mixture of genre that, I argue, will influence the easiness in adopting the manifesto as a commercial tool in the fashion industry.

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In this sense, it is relevant to look into in the etymology of the word ‘manifesto’ and its use in Italian language where we can see the ambivalence that the manifesto seems to instigate once related to the fashion industry. The term ‘manifesto’, in Italian, can be both verb – and precisely the past of the verb ‘manifestare’ (to be manifested) – noun and adjective, used to qualify the proof for an action. This double meaning is a central one when we look at the case of manifesto developed in the fashion industry and the possibility to observe the uses of manifesto as both the action of combatting (the verb) but also the possibility to attribute or qualify to an action (the adjective). Fashion manifestos seems to live in this double nature as they may emerge from a more social demand but also may be initiated by a rhetorical strategy attempting to affirm the quality of a specific statement as politically engaged or as subversive to the dominant industry. A clear contemporary example is probably ‘Anti_Fashion. A manifesto for the next decade’ by trend forecaster Li Edelkoort: it shows the contemporary trend of using the manifesto in fashion but also gives evidence to fashion’s capacity to unsettle the ideologies of the manifesto as political tool. Written in 2015 and sold by Edelkoort’s Trend Tablet agency for a fifty-euro fee, the manifesto compiles a series of critiques toward the current system of fashion: from the star-system of designers, to the incapacity of academia to unpack their hagiographies for students; from exploitation of labour to consumption practices. The manifesto presents ‘ten reasons why the fashion system is obsolete’ discussing the current problems in twelve sections/sectors: ‘education’, ‘materialization’, ‘manufacturing’, ‘designers’, ‘marketing’, ‘presentation’, ‘advertising’, ‘press & blogging’, ‘retailing’, ‘consumers’, ‘all about men’, ‘after thought’. Edelkoort states the current problems of the fashion system: how school and industry are still ‘celebrating the individual’ or training ‘catwalk designers’. The manifesto finishes with a final note, titled ‘Epilogue’, where Edelkoort suggests a return to couture as ‘a laboratory of this labor of love’ and concludes with a final exhortation: ‘ENGAGE!’ The aim, as declared, is to connect past, present and ‘possible futures’ as a declaration of the end of a system, showing how the language here adopted recalls what Lyon has defined as the capacity of the manifesto to ‘legitimate its revised historical perspectives, its insistence on new hierarchies of power, and its newly invigorated metaphors that help to create new enunciative positions within ideology’.13 While the definition of manifestos varies through time and space, this quote shows how it is intrinsic of manifesto to position against a specific historical period while subverting normative practice in the present. In this sense, Lyon’s quote is a good entry to understand a potential pitfall of the use

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of the manifesto by the fashion industry and its actors – or at least, its capacity to manifest a short-circuit in discourses on activism and counter-discourses in – and about – fashion. As Christopher Breward has stressed, Edelkoort’s manifesto is yet another example of what he defines as an ‘age of manifesto’ to identify a certain ‘list-oriented’ way to discourse fashion in the twenty-first century.14 Yet, I would like to add that this is the perfect case to analyse the adoption of the manifesto as an instrument of current monetization of political ideologies and/ or as form of legitimation for commercial practices in the fashion industry. Edelkoort’s manifesto problematically follows the ideological binary rhetoric of political manifestos where an oppressive system – the current fashion system – is put at odds with a progressive and liberal system – the one proposed by Edelkoort: and this dichotomy is what mostly stages how the manifesto promulgates the very discourse it critiques. Not only could we argue that the maker of the ‘Anti_Fashion Manifesto’ has participated in the making of the systems ‘under attack’ in the manifesto, but also that the very distribution of the manifesto still conforms to rules and structures (being distributed by a trend forecasting agency, for example) that brought about the collapse of the very fashion system that is criticized. The decision to sell the manifesto at the price of fifty euros via the trend forecasting agency makes clear how it was transformed into a commodity. The problem is not the fact that the manifesto can be bought – many others are – or the fact that Edelkoort criticized the educational and industry approach as ‘no longer [having] time to transcend dominant trends’, while partaking in both systems. The contradictions lie in the nature of the institution issuing the manifesto and the ways in which it is then marketed as another trend: being dissident. The manifesto functions as another trend analysis, it becomes the product of a trend agency individualizing politics and dissident acts as a new trend. Thus, I would argue provocatively that it is this example, rather than a death of the fashion system, seem to epitomize a death of the manifesto as tool of ideological subversion or, at least, performatively stages how the status of manifesto has been weakened by an agglomeration of antiheroic gestures by its creators.

Paradoxes and fashion revolutions The contradictions that are present in Edelkoort’s manifesto are paradoxically mirroring the nature of the manifesto in the twentieth century. As Lyon argues, the modernist avant-garde has in fact exalted the paradox of the genre, its

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capacity to promulgate ‘the very discourses it critiques’.15 Referring to the different approaches to manifestos, Lyon stresses this oxymoron as a result of the ‘rigid hierarchical binaries’ that are at play in the manifesto. It creates ‘audiences through a rhetoric of exclusivity, parcelling out political identities across a polarized discursive field, claiming for “us” the moral high ground of revolutionary idealism, and constructing “them” as ideological tyrants, bankrupt usurpers, or corrupt fouls”.’16 This dichotomic nature perfectly plays into Edelkoort’s manifesto where the ‘them’ changes depending on the section of the manifesto. The criticized ‘them’ are diverse, from ‘educators’ and ‘manufacturers’ to ‘journalists’ and ‘consumers’. For example, when addressing the issue of ‘materialization’, Edelkoort accuses journalists of a lack of knowledge: ‘This ignorance of textiles is also rampant amongst journalists [. . .] Ladies! Do your homework.’ When discussing the role of designers today, the trend forecaster addresses them in negative terms: ‘They are market savvy designers and reign supreme over the fashion world, beloved and admired even by their peers.’ The rhetoric of the denunciation is integral to the manifesto as genre but, in this case, there is a lack of clarity due to a generalization: the same figures are both criticized and identified as examples of ‘good practice’. But the unclear approach to the oppositional rhetoric of the manifesto is not exclusive to Edelkoort’s manifesto as it seems to crop up in a variety of manifestos, especially those tackling questions of sustainability and inclusion. The positioning and a rhetoric of ‘us-against-them’ also characterized the manifesto created in 2013 by the UK-based collective Fashion Revolution after the Rana Plaza disaster. The collective emerged to combat injustice in the fashion industry, mainly addressing work precarity and rights, sustainability and later gender and race discrimination. The collective’s aim is to support ‘a global fashion industry that conserves and restores the environment and values over growth and profit’. As the collective states, the ‘we’ here is, once again, inclusive: ‘We are designers, academics, writers, business leaders, policymakers, brands, retailers, marketers, producers, makers, workers and fashion lovers. We are the industry and we are the public. We are world citizens. We are Fashion Revolution.’ As emerges from this self-definition, the collective aims to attract a variety of figures amongst the sphere of fashion, immediately creating a difficulty in identifying what actors, what sectors and what segments of the industry are at the centre of the collective. This blurry identification is expanded in the manifesto where the ‘we’ becomes associated with the reader of the manifesto (‘we are you’) which is structured around ten points presenting a potential definition of fashion. The manifesto moves from more civil rights and humanitarian aspects, like ‘fashion does not enslave’ or

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‘fashion lifts out of poverty’, which recall exploitation in mass production markets to statements about sustainability like ‘fashion conserves and restores the environment’ (which appears twice in statement #7 and #9) to ‘fashion is transparent and accountable’. The manifesto can still be signed (it had 13,430 signatures as of 5 July 2021) by the reader who is invited to embrace and become part of the ‘we’ of the manifesto. What is central in the manifesto are the ideas of ‘revolution’ and ‘change’, as readers are asked to identify an alternative to the current dominant system. The idea of change is achieved via a call for responsibility that happens mainly through digital events such as in the social media campaign ‘Who made my clothes?’. One action that is identified as change for the citizens consists of the opportunity to use the website to email a brand and flag up concerns about production processes and sustainability like fabric production and raw materials. Amongst the brands listed there are Puma and H&M but also high-end fashion brands like Hugo Boss and Ralph Lauren. These brands – and others – are also evaluated in the ‘Fashion Transparency Index’, which is an annual report where the collective evaluates the information disclosed by brands with an annual turnover of four hundred million dollars and that represent a variety of the market: from high street to luxury worldwide. While Fashion Revolution has played an enormous role in advancing the public media discourse on questions of human rights and inclusivity, the practice of the manifesto still remains on a generalist level. Rather than actively involving the readers, involvement is mainly performed by a digital association taking the shape of a hashtag, an email or an Instagram post – also showing a shift in both the meaning and practice of systemic change and revolution at the time of the digital era. Differently from the other activities of analysis like the Transparency Index produced by Fashion Revolution, the manifesto seems to be at odds with the deep work made by the Collective while displaying what Lyon defined as the ‘conflictive imperatives of universalism’ that characterize the genre of the manifesto. The association with the revolution remains at a level of trust and belief which is, as Lyon reminds us, a central character in the effectiveness of the manifesto and its almost dogmatic scope. The Manifesto aims to challenge false conciliation in the name of a truth that fills the hearts and minds of its putative constituents. And it seeks to assure its audience – both adherents and foes – that those constituents can and will be mobilized into the living incarnation of the unruly, furious expression implied in the text.17

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What Lyon stresses is the assertive nature of the manifesto and the consequent associative role that it entails. In reading a manifesto, we are asked to agree or disagree, to believe or not believe which, in the case of a fashion manifesto like Edelkoort’s or Fashion Revolution, becomes a way to discursively participate in a change without necessarily actively fulfilling the dictations of the manifesto. The fashion manifesto, in this sense, shows how manifestos may remain trapped in the complexity of the practice it is attempting to combat. Here I am hinting at a sort of neutralization or deactivation of the manifesto in fashion industry; and this is also what the idea – or at least the title – of Edelkoort’s ‘Anti-Fashion’ Manifesto brings back. Concepts like ‘anti-’ or ‘change’ or ‘revolution’ become archetypes able to insinuate a political stance that seems to live discursively in a constant paradox or aporia. If a new attention to this format may help to unpack a more politicized approach to the fashion system, these examples inevitably reduce a globalized system into imaginative statements that concur to the very immaterialization and generalization of systems of production and consumption that they attack. Thus, fashion manifestos may show clearly how this genre rather preludes and pretends change than doing it.

The manifesto as a commodity Forms of vampirization by the fashion industry are of course not completely new but we could say that critical theory, ideologies, manifestos and activism have never been so fashionable as they are now. Dior is employing feminist activists to contextualize their creations. Gucci artistic director Alessandro Michele not only quoted Michel Foucault and his theory of subjectivation but, for his Spring/Summer 2018 press releases, he uses the title ‘The Act of Creation as an Act of Resistance’, borrowing paradoxically from Gilles Deleuze who, in this famous lecture, battled against this very practice of commercialized communication stressing how an ‘act of resistance is never information or counter-information’.18 If Deleuze’s lecture stated the impossibility to associate a commercial form of information with political resistance, Gucci employs it and makes it into the ultimate form of commercial communication: the press release. These paradoxes, according to Caroline Evans, show how both cultural producers and consumers of fashion today seem to acknowledge how they can ‘be seduced and entranced by the spectacle even if they understand they are being manipulated by it’.19

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These forms of contradiction seem to perfectly apply to the use of the manifesto as communication by luxury brands. If communicational and commercial practices have been used harnessed in the production and distribution of the manifesto since its early forms in the seventeenth century, the fashion industry seems to stage a contemporary intensification of these contradictions and paradoxes. Communication practices like press releases can harness the form of the manifesto as they function ontologically via precise and decisive statements. Created to present a collection to press and buyers, press releases are direct declarative tools using succinct and direct registers. As I have explained elsewhere, these communicative devices, in the case of a certain strand of fashion designers and brands, have often been inspired by artistic and avantgarde practices like Dada writings or Futurist manifestos.20 Their artistic dialogues have been performative in the sense that they help to position a specific category of fashion designers in relation to mainstream fashion practices. These strategies of field-positioning in the fashion system are perpetuated with the adoption of the manifesto and/or its rhetoric. As Lyon stresses: ‘to write a manifesto is to participate symbolically in a history of struggle against dominant forces; it is to link one’s voice to the countless voices of previous revolutionary conflicts.’21 Thus, the decision to adopt this form is itself an act of association with political engagement and struggle. This is an interesting aspect when we look at the ways fashion designers and brands have adopted the manifesto genre. Here I think of Raf Simons’ Spring/Summer 2003 press release on consumerism. By appealing to a sort of resistance to consumerism, the press release manifests the ease with which ideas and ideologies may be adopted in ways that are simplistic, uncritical or even contradictory, and then attached to materials and garments. Printed on A4 with a classical 12 point San Serif font, the press release begins with a title ‘Consumed – Summer 2003. A reflection on consumerism’. The following text lists some arguments about the intention of the collection, without making any attempt to explain the transformation of these concepts into garments. Furthermore, the press release does not define consumerism or the ways consumerism may be combatted through the creation of a collection. Quite symbolic of this neutralization of ideologies is the first sentence of the press release – ‘Without taking any side. . . .’ – while the following text portrays an apocalyptic and futuristic scenario, ‘turning resistance and antifeelings into hands-on creativity and positive fragmentation’. Textual and graphical rhetoric are therefore necessary registers adopted in the making of a fashion manifesto and are ‘thermometers’ that help to measure this tendency to politicize fashion. It is interesting to see how activist designer

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duo Medham Kirchoff denounced this trend in their own manifesto, ‘A Manifesto for a Modern Fashion Industry’, produced for their Spring/Summer 2015 collection. As the designers stress in their statement to the press, fashion is focusing increasingly on ‘shallow ideas of political expression: fleeting, ephemeral gestures towards feminism, issues of gender, even its association with art and artists; fashion, in its own lack of self-belief and insecurity, trying to gain some validation and some semblance of credibility’. This sort of ‘politicization’ of fashion is, according to Djurdja Bartlett, a way to ‘participate in the traumas of the other, keeping instead a safe distance in order not to alienate its well-off customers’.22 Similarly, the logic of ‘distance-proximity’ is a mechanism used to perform a social involvement and commitment that is put in action through the adoption of the manifesto. This process is expanding even in more mainstream strands of the industry where we see a diffusion of manifestos even in luxury companies, especially in relation to questions of social justice and sustainability. A clear example is ‘The Made to Last Manifesto’, launched by Mulberry in the form of a campaign on the occasion of the Earth Day 2021 and the brand’s fiftieth anniversary. Titled ‘Can a bag save the world?’, the manifesto presents six statements that propose to transform the making of leather goods into a sustainable, carbon-free emission product. The piece begins by discussing the brand in the context of its early years, the 1970s. As it says: ‘We were born into the fevered atmosphere of the early seventies, a decade when artists, designers and musicians emerged as activists.’ A final reference is also made to Marvin Gaye’s song, ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’. While the manifesto does not define the founder Roger Saul as an activist, the association with an historical period characterized by activism confirms an awareness of the scope of the manifesto as a tool of subversion. The manifesto continues with questions: ‘Can leather ever be sustainable?’, ‘Can you make a blue bag green?’, ‘Who needs a new bag?’, ‘Can you teach an old bag new tricks?’ and ‘Can a bag save the world?’. Rather than a series of statements, the manifesto is actually working on a rhetoric of doubts, asking questions that sound more like universalism rather than concrete enquiries into the way a/the luxury brand can become sustainable. The manifesto hints at contemporary practices like DYI culture and repair culture without, however, explaining how these questions can be answered. The manifesto is here employed as an instrument of commitment and social engagement while still used within techniques of marketing and communication. The manifesto is not only launched as a promotional campaign filled with future promises, but it also evokes the necessity (and tendency) in fashion to materialize

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this commitment within specific aesthetical references recalling the genre of the political manifesto. Being printed on a newspaper format, the Mulberry manifesto invokes the physicality of the engagement, the format and the channel of distribution that should make the manifesto (and its principles) ‘real’, while mainly being distributed via digital communicational press. The nature of the manifesto and its textual and written rhetoric show its capacity to fully embrace the commercial purposes of fashion communication – especially in the digital era where short sentences, slogans and statements seem to guarantee a suitable form of dissemination of fashion, as via social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram. Not only does Mulberry’s manifesto fall into the necessity to ‘adorn’ a political commitment, it also represents an example of the ways in which fashion is commodifying the manifesto as an ultimate form of social exchange. From a Marxist perspective, what is exchanged here is a promise of political commitment and engagement, and the manifesto reinforces this. What we witness is how brands are not only transforming the commodity into a spectacle, an image, but the commodification of the manifesto – as both term and practice. The writing of manifestos is becoming a common strategy of communication even in massproduction fashion. Today we do not only see brands stimulating massconsumption adopting the name of manifesto as brands like ‘manifestowoman’, but also brands spelling out their manifesto of values without any sort of possibility to be accountable for the statements made. For example, the British brand Vildnis publishes, on their blog, their manifesto made of eight points: ‘break the norm’, ‘stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves’, ‘Create epic fashion’, never compromise on style’, ‘fight for the planet’, ‘defend your independence’, ‘be honest’, ‘stay authentic’.23 Each point is a very general statement without any sort of reference to the ways it may relate to production processes, supply chains and distribution of their product. No references are made to their activities, but the manifesto is a simple guide of behaviour. What these adoptions of the manifesto as discourse alerts us to is a diffused symptom of commercializing not only ideologies but also their vehicles of diffusion. As Guy Debord reminds us ‘ideology is legitimized by universal abstraction, [. . .] ideological pretensions take on a sort of flat, positivistic precision: they no longer represent historical choices, they are assertions of undeniable facts’.24 This is what we see in this sort of mass-produced manifesto where ideas of ‘honesty’, ‘transparency’, ‘social commitment’ and ‘authenticity’ become positivistic statement undressed of any sort of materialistic context and implication. It is here that, following Debord, we can say that ‘the particular

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names of ideologies tend to disappear’.25 This paradox resonates in the words of Angela McRobbie who stresses that recently we see a ‘resurgence of activism’ which shows an unexpected shift. She stresses that “what has been unexpected is the way in which cultural studies have become the privileged conduit for this double and paradoxical movement of instrumentalization and politicization”.26 Manifestos in the fashion industry are indeed evidence of this transformation, ironically giving a new derive to this genre, distorting its scope. This is probably most evident in the YSL Manifesto, an A3 size grey card box containing different folios dedicated to different decades of fashion history. The word ‘manifesto’ is here employed and used to identify a series of visions from different fashion photographers on different decades. The term manifesto is here becoming an allusion to a vision rather than a practice. It becomes synonymous of performance rather than action.

Manifesto against These performative gestures through the adoption of manifestos may also function, in the fashion industry, as an ultimate form of self-legitimization, especially in the definition of research and design practices, recalling the inevitable positioning at play in the adoption of the manifesto as genre. Here I am not only referring to the well-known examples of Vivienne Westwood or Hussein Chalayan’s manifestos but also of the recent example of Rei Kawakubo – who published via System Magazine first and then via Business of Fashion the ‘Rei Kawakubo’s Creative Manifesto’. Being produced after an unsuccessful interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, the manifesto aimed to present the personal and subjective research process of the founder of Comme des Garçons. Once again, the manifesto adopts the codes of the political and avant-garde manifesto, placing a distance with a normative practice of doing research in fashion, while positioning Kawakubo’s practice against-the-norm. More than the previously discussed cases, this manifesto seems to follow the capacity of the manifesto to legitimize the artistic action or even becoming an artistic action per se. But, at the same time, as often has happened in manifestos by fashion designers within a more traditional fashion systems, it betrays the manifesto’s participative and inclusive nature which is also what we could call its social responsiveness. While fashion scholar Karen de Perthuis has recently advocated for the capacity of this manifesto to follow Kawakubo’s unstable relation with the fashion system and her capacity to literally ‘break the idea of clothes’, here Kawakubo seems to

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exercise that self-reflexive nature and creating a distance between the audience and the maker of the manifesto. The ‘domesticated’ versions of the manifesto in fashion seem to fortify the structural and moral critiques advanced by a more radical design system that has used, in the past, manifestos to propose alternatives and to critique an elitist and author-centric view on fashion. On the contrary, these other forms of manifestos emerged from discriminated groups or larger communities actively engaging with new forms of production, dissemination and consumption of fashion. To some extent, it could be argued that these forms follow a shift from a fashion manifesto to a clothing manifesto due to their idea of an alternative form of fashion system, more focus on individual agency rather hierarchical power. Otto von Busch has contextualized this approach explaining how we live in “a crisis of power in fashion, affecting how sustainable practices can be implemented across industry and users”.27 (von Busch 2019: 303). The crisis to which von Busch refers is connected to the necessity to rethink hierarchies and the ways in which change and innovation may occur. This attention to the ‘social’ and reorientation of the discourse seems to move from a system of fashion and producers to a system of clothing and users which has adopted manifestos, rejuvenating its social and subversive impact and function. A clear example is the ‘Craftvism Manifesto’ which emerges from a collective of women and was written by Mary Callahan Baumstark, Ele Carpenter, Joanna Davies, Tamara Gooderham, Betsy Greer, Bridget Harvey, Rebecca Marsh, Manna Marvel, Ari Miller, Iris Nectar, Abi Nielsen, Elin Poppelin and Cat Varvis. The manifesto is published online and consist of twenty statements written one after the other as a unique text. Each sentence is coloured in a different way performing the multiplicity of the voices behind the manifesto. The manifesto presents a list of definitions and intentions of the craftivist who is defined in the first line of the manifesto as ‘anyone who uses their craft to help the greater good’. This sentence is then followed by the scope of this collection and craftivism which ‘is about raising consciousness, creating a better world stitch by stitch, and things made by hand, by a person. It’s also about sharing ideas with others in a way that is welcoming, not dividing, and celebrating traditional skills’. As it emerges from these lines, the manifesto Craftivism strives for a shift from hierarchism to collectivism, from exclusion to social inclusion, from industrial mass production to craft and handmade. The manifesto is not existing as a simple text online, but it is followed by a series of events and workshops created by the collective where women are gathered in knitting sessions and readings. Both the manifesto and

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the activism of the group are built around multiple forms of recuperation: from the word ‘craft’ to the practice of knitting as a form of female empowerment. Historical and societal recuperation becomes central in the case of the strand of political movements and manifestos as is also evidenced by The Rational Dress Society collective. The project was created by Maura Brewer and Abigail Glaum-Lathbury and proposed the use of the jumpsuit as a ‘ungendered, multiuse monogarment to replace all clothes in perpetuity’, as declared in the Society’s manifesto. The creation of a personal sizing method, as explained on their website, allows for the creation of a made-to-measure jumpsuit, while raising issues of uniformity of beauty ideals and size. A crucial interest for this collective is the possibility to combat the current fashion industry and its values, enlarging a discourse on mass-production to more mainstream fashion and media. This is evidenced by the extreme decision to fundraise in order to buy an advertisement on Vogue magazine. This action must not, however, be understood as a way to flirt with the industry but as an ultimate form of provocation. As they explain on their website: ‘A percentage of all JUMPSUIT sales will go into a fund to purchase a full-page advertisement in American Vogue. The purchase of the ad will mark the end of JUMPSUIT.’ This sort of self-destruction mirrors the activist and militant nature of the Society’s members. The manifesto’s terminology, and the attention paid to the jumpsuit as a solution for waste and uniformity, are clearly reminiscent of the work of the futurist Thayat; a focus on utopian thinking and the future is stressed in the manifesto via the use of quotations from the work of Sir Thomas More as a foundation for a counter-fashion. The manifesto stresses The Society’s political standing, which also traces a specific historical trajectory of their work in three types of clothing systems: ‘anti-fashion’, ‘folk costume’ and ‘counterfashion’. The manifesto lists and defines these categories as following: ‘1. Antifashion, which suggests a continuous engagement with, and rejection of prevailing tastes. 2. Folk costume, which is enmeshed in a particular community or geographical location 3. Counter-fashion which designates a particular sociopolitical context. Counter-fashion occurs when members of a subculture sharing the same political, social or other agenda, choose to dress in a political manner in order to symbolize their goals – Anat Helmut.’ While the following extract from the Rational Dress Society’s manifesto identifies the scope of the project, it also shows the necessity of placing their work within an historical trajectory and context. This manifesto, like the previous examples, are in fact inserted in a specific historical trajectory that demands, as architecture critics Michael Holt and Marissa Looby argue, an historical revision

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in order to really grasp what a manifesto may be – or look like – in the systems of fashion but also what it represents today. It would seem that if manifestos as historical revisions are now only debated rather than produced, then the contemporary manifesto is experiencing its own revision in the form of alternate or reactionary manifestos, anti-manifestos and built manifestos. But does this deviation actually move it away from that which a manifesto was intended?28

In this historical process, manifestos like the ones made by Craftivism and the Rational Dress Society are outspokenly presenting a specific tradition of manifesto-writing which include ideological values and political activism. By doing so, they use the manifesto to position themselves against the fashion system and here the action of concealment and appropriation seem to regulate a specific discourse on – and through – the manifesto. An ultimate example of these blurring roles and positionings thorough the manifesto can be seen in Maison Martin Margiela’s A Magazine Curated by, a publication where designers and artistic directors are invited to curate an issue for the magazine, and are given carte blanche to produce the magazine. Published in 2004, the magazine is presented as a brand manifesto and opens with the statement ‘The past is what bonds us, the future leads us’: a slogan recalling the Belgian brand’s constant attempts to subvert the logic of fashion and the system’s obsession with the new. Contrary to the idea of the magazine to host the voice of a designer, the Maison Martin Margiela’s issue gives voice to the brand’s collaborators and closes with a project entitled ‘One to make at home’. Here, the brand shows the reader how to build a sweater out of socks, giving instructions on the ways to cut and assemble this garment. Working through the idea of DIY design, the project seems to fall inbetween the examples discussed before now. Without defining this as a manifesto, the A Magazine Curated by shows a more complex examples on the ways fashion may employ both the manifesto and an historical design approach connected to that. In fact, the ‘One to make at home’ project, and its relation to DIY culture (and I would say Maison Martin Margiela’s approach) recalls the ‘Vestirsi è Semplice’ (Dressing is Easy) manifesto created by the Italian collective Archizoom Associati, a Florentine architectural studio whose members – Andrea Branzi, Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, Massimo Morozzi, Dario Bartolini and Lucia Bartolini – graduated from the University of Florence in 1966. Dressing Is Easy was a sartorial manifesto published in the seminal design and architecture magazine Casabella in 1973, and was also presented in the form

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of a stop-motion animation at the Milan Triennal XV. The manifesto outlined a ‘do-it-yourself system’ to produce essential and neutral items of clothing based on a piece of fabric measuring 70 x 70 cm, stitched together with coloured thread. The object itself came in the form of a kit, or ‘domestic assembly case’, containing an instruction manual, squares of fabric, scissors, needles and thread. As one of the members, Andrea Branzi, explains, the aim was to ‘look at fashion as material culture’ and as ‘a theoretical model for a new kind of production and consumption of clothing. It was no longer society that must resemble the factory in every way, but the factory that had to try to adapt to society’29 (Fava 2018). As historian Elena Fava stresses in her book Vestirsi Contro (Dressing Against), this project was an opportunity to invent a ‘different way of using clothing’ that no longer followed the rules and shapes that constrain and discipline the body, but instead aimed at inviting a new paradigm based on simplicity, basic cuts and freedom for the human body.30 As Fava stresses, the manifesto was developed via a specific language (words, images and moving images) that was a also crucial vector for conveying this accessibility. The box and the manual created a visual rhetoric and presented bilingual Italian and English explanatory captions that detailed the process of buying, making and wearing. Traditional fashion technical terms were replaced by Archizoom’s lexicon, including words such as ‘problems’, ‘complexities’, ‘industrial’, ‘waste versus facilitate’, ‘possibility’ and ‘elementary’. Dressing Is Easy represented an opportunity to abolish the institutional boundaries between art and other domains of social activity by means of the identification of a series of values – freedom, accessibility – that could combat the idea of fashion as an irrational and immoral form of production and consumption. Similarly to Achizoom’s Dressing Is Easy, ‘One to make at home’ from Maison Martin Margiela outlines possible collaborative and subversive strategies for a manifesto in fashion. It also brings back some characteristics that the fashion system tends to overlook, like for example its pedagogical nature that coincides with both the position of the artist/designer as pedagogue, and with the playfulness of this political device, its being a tool of access and its being a tool able to subvert the scheme of hierarchical authorship in design practices. This attention resonates in the Belgian brand’s philosophy, showing a surprising parallel between Archizoom and Maison Martin Margiela as is evident in their respective communication materials. The white cut-outs used by Margiela to represent the different people involved in the Maison evoking the press material produced in Archizoom Associati’s ‘Global Tools’, the first bulletin of Edition L’Uomo e l’arte, published in June 1974. This correspondence both alerts us to,

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and demands that we apply ‘historical revisionism’ to manifestos as required by Holt and Looby in order to question how the adoption of manifestos in fashion may reveal how the subversion or creation of an ‘anti-fashion system’ project like Archizoom may sometimes be absorbed in projects that have carried the values and principles of an anti-radicalism within the system of fashion itself.

Notes 1 Karen De Perthuis, ‘Breaking the Idea of Clothes: Rei Kawakubo’s Fashion Manifesto’, Fashion Theory vol. 24, no. 5 (2020): 659–77. 2 See, for example, Natalie W. Nixon and Johanna Blakley, ‘Fashion Thinking: Towards an Actionable Methodology, Fashion Practice, vol. 4, no. 2 (2012): 153–75; Otto von Busch, ‘A Crisis of Power in Fashion: Is there Agency for Change?’, Fashion Practice vol. 11, no. 3 (2019): 302–08. 3 See Timo Rissanen, ‘Possibility in Fashion Design Education – A Manifesto’, Utopian Studies vol. 28, no. 3 (2017): 528–46; Ben Barry, ‘How to Transform Fashion Education: A Manifesto for Equity, Inclusion and Decolonization’, International Journal of Fashion Studies vol. 8, no. 1 (2021): 123–30. 4 I would like also to thank Morna Laing and Caroline Stevenson for starting a discussion on manifestos with me. The idea of this chapter also emerged from discussions with my colleagues Morna Laing, Djurdja Bartlett and Caroline Stevenson, with whom I started a series of seminars titled ‘Fashion & Politics’, which focused initially on the ‘manifesto’. The seminar is a joint collaboration between The New School, Parsons Paris, and The University of Arts of London. 5 Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1. 6 See Enrico Crispoldi, Il Futurismo e la Moda. Balla e gli altri (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1986); Eugenia Paulicelli, ‘Fashion and Futurism: Performing Dress, Annali d’Italianistica vol. 27 (2009): 187–207; Patrizia Calefato, La Moda Oltre la Moda (Bologna: Lupetti Editore, 2011). 7 See de Perthuis, 2020; Maria Luisa Frisa, ‘Editorial’, in Dune: Writings on Fashion, Design and Visual Culture vol. 1, no. 2: (2020): 7–8. 8 Lyon, Manifestoes, 1–2. 9 Ibid., 2 10 Ibid. 11 Radu Stern, Against Fashion. Clothing as Art, 1850–1930 (New York: MIT Press, 2003). 12 Annemarie Strassel, ‘Designing Women: Feminist Methodologies in American Fashion’, Women’s Studies Quarterly vol. 41, no. 1/2 (2012): 52.

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13 Lyon, Manifestoes, 15. 14 Christopher Breward, ‘Foreword’, in Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites and Practices, ed. Heike Jenss (London and New York: Bloomsbury: 2016), 1–3. 15 Lyon, Manifestoes, 3. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 14. 18 Gilles Deleuze, Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création, 1987. Available online: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=2OyuMJMrCRw 19 Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 85. 20 Marco Pecorari, Fashion Remains: Rethinking Ephemera in the Archive (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021). 21 Lyon, Manifestoes, 4. 22 Djurdja Bartlett, ‘Can Fashion Be Defended?’, in Fashion and Politics, ed. Djurdja Bartlett (New Haven. CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2019), 39. 23 https://vildnis.co.uk/pages/manifesto 24 Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle (orig. La société du spectacle, 1967), trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (London: Zone Books, 1994), 114. 25 Ibid. 26 Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity 2016), 8. 27 Otto von Busch, ‘A Crisis of Power in Fashion: Is there Agency for Change?’, Fashion Practice vol. 11, no. 3 (2019): 303. 28 Michael Holt and Marissa Looby, ‘What Happened to the Architectural Manifesto?’, Domus, 1 December 2011. 29 Elena Fava, Vestire Contro (Milan and Turin: Bruno Mondadori 2018), 67. 30 Ibid.

5

The Cost of Looking Good: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Fashion Industry Louise Wallenberg and Torkild Thanem

Departing from two dreadful – and fatal – catastrophes in the textile industry, this chapter discusses the structure of an industry that is in need of extensive change. At the heart of its critical inquiry into how it is possible – still – for Western consumers to ‘look good’, are two of the fashion industry’s most exploited industries: the textile industry and the modelling industry.

Introduction Two catastrophes, which led to the death of hundreds of textile workers, in two different parts of the world, over a century apart, constitute the primary impetus behind this chapter. Anyone who has followed discussions about the exploitation of garment and textile workers in the Global South is familiar with the Rana Plaza disaster in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013, and anyone even slightly interested in the working conditions of textile and garments workers in previous eras, is most certainly familiar with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that took place in New York, USA, in 1911.1 More than 100 years separate these two events, yet they are intimately connected, not least through the many casualties among textile and garment workers that they caused – but also through the greed, negligence and cynicism that made them possible.2 In this chapter we want to bring together two realities and sectors of ‘fashion work’, two sectors that at first may seem next to incomparable: textile and garment production and fashion modelling. While we may think of them as fashion’s opposites – the former is often characterized by hard labour, unsafe working conditions and underpayment, the latter by glamour, money and allure 109

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– they have a lot in common. Both – in most of their existent practices and arrangements – are structured and made possible by exploitation. And although the awareness of how these sectors function, and the many inhumane atrocities they make possible, has been communicated to everyone, everywhere, they both continue to exists in pretty much the same way, with little, if any, change on the horizon. Notwithstanding this awareness (an awareness that now is built on decades and years of knowing what is going on), it is business as usual. And we are all implicated: as long as we continue to consume the textile workers and the models’ hard labour, we continue to feed back into, and help sustain, their exploitation.

Looking good? Negligence and exploitation It has never been so cheap to look good. In 1900, the average US household spent 15 per cent of its income on clothing. In 2010, they spent 2.8 per cent. In 1997, British women on average bought nineteen pieces of clothing per year. In 2007 they bought thirty-four34.3 The economic equation is a simple one: as clothes get cheaper, we consume more – and we throw away more. While this move from a ‘wear and tear’ culture to a ‘wear and waste’ culture means that the fashion industry is one of the biggest and most detrimental polluters worldwide, it also raises a number of other questions – about the fashion industry, and about the nature of fashion: what makes it possible for Western consumers to look good at this seemingly low cost? If every year we pay less to look good, who is footing the bill? Who makes it possible for the cost of looking good to be reduced so drastically while the importance of looking good remains high? Whereas fashion in its early days was exclusively for members of the social and economic elites, it has become increasingly accessible to the middle classes as well as to an increasing proportion of the working classes in Western and Westernized countries. So, how is the value of looking good sustained? What makes it possible for fashion to maintain its appeal and attraction despite its wide accessibility, its cheapness, and the costs it incurs? The answers to this first raft of questions may appear simple. An increasing amount of the fashionable clothes that enable us to look good are manufactured in low-cost countries such as China, Vietnam and Bangladesh, where millions of workers are forced to work long hours, for extremely low wages, under unsafe conditions, to churn out ready-made garments at ever-increasing production rates. We know this. But have we forgotten what this means for the people who work

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under such conditions? We must have. Otherwise how would anybody continue to act like we have, or never knew about these conditions in the first place? However pointless it might be to find an excuse for our ruthless pursuit of looking good over doing good, the nature of fashion itself may offer an explanation: Diana Vreeland once named it as ‘allure’, that magnetic force of attraction by which fashion draws us to its new styles and garments; its promise that we will look good (or great, even) if only we buy this new dress or coat, these new pairs of trousers or leggings, this new lipstick or mascara. While ending the allure of fashion is a monumental task, one that would involve ending fashion itself, let’s at least try and make a dent in fashion’s alluring surface. In this chapter, we will try and do so by way of some simple memory work. First, we will revisit the Rana Plaza incident, one of the deadliest catastrophes in the modern history of fashion production; second, we will revisit a case of widespread sexual abuse in the fashion modelling industry – the abuse allegedly committed by former president of the Elite Europe modelling agency, Gérald Marie. It is all too easy to think of fashion modelling and the mass-production of garments as being diametrically opposed. One is visual and symbolic, the other tangible and crude. One is replete with money and glamour, the other with gruelling, unsafe and underpaid labour. But as our two case studies will illustrate, both are involved in the material and symbolic mechanisms (i.e. material, ideological and hyper-visual mechanisms) that create the allure of fashion, enable the continued exploitation of garment workers and fashion models, and realize an aestheticization of ethics which, in the most crude and banal sense, turns the distinction between good and evil into a matter of individual taste and perspective.

Fashion disasters One would have thought that the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City would have changed things permanently, but 102 years later, a very similar incident occurred on the outskirts of Bangladesh’s capital city, Dhaka. On Wednesday 24 April 2013 the eight-storey Rana Plaza building collapsed, killing more than 1,100 garment workers and injuring some 2,600 workers – the majority of them women. Rana Plaza housed five factories run by subcontractors making clothes for Western fashion brands including Benetton, Primark, H&M and Mango. The collapse should have come as no surprise: the shops on the lower floors had been already closed down due to the fact that cracks had been detected one building. Still, warnings were ignored by the subcontractors on the

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higher floors, and workers – under threats of being fired, or having their salaries reduced – had been commanded to return to work.4 We want to point out that the minimum wage for Bangladeshi garment workers – many of whom work up to sixteen hours per day – is still one of the lowest in the world, even if it was being doubled shortly after the catastrophe.5 Besides the long hours, and the low pay, workers runs the constant risk of not being paid at all. In addition, they are often victims of physical and verbal assault and, at times, of sexual harassment. According to Human Rights Watch, factory owners sometimes engage criminal gangs to beat up workers and union organizers.6 Interestingly, if a company like H&M were to pay Bangladeshi textile workers a living wage, the price of an H&M shirt would only have to increase by 5kr, from 174kr to 179kr.7 5 kr – equivalent to 40 UK pence or 50 US cents – could make a huge difference for the workers, whereas most of the consumers who buy the garments they make would not be affected in the slightest.

Making things look good As the second largest exporter of ready-made garments worldwide, and facing increasing demands for improving the working conditions for its 4 million textile workers, an association like The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) is keen to come across as a caring organization and to address the opprobrium that arose after the Rana Plaza collapse.8 The Association, in fact, prides itself on providing jobs for a large number of physically disabled employees.9 Its slogan is ‘Towards a sustainable garment industry’ – and it claims that Bangladesh is home to the world’s highest number of green garment factories.10 Critics within the social sciences have argued previously that such corporate social responsibility efforts amount to nothing more to impression management, window-dressing and whitewashing.11 Indeed, the BGMEA’s activities make things look good. They claim that things have improved since the horrific disaster at Rana Plaza, and that the fashion industry and its suppliers have started to care about and take responsibility for the health, safety and working conditions of their workers. Rather than reflecting on the constantly cheap price that we pay for the garments that we buy just as constantly, we express concern about what would happen to these workers if we stopped buying the clothes they make, or claim that we keep buying cheap fashion because we cannot afford more expensive alternatives.12

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But who said we needed all these garments in the first place? Who said we needed to buy heaps of ostensibly fashionable but undoubtedly cheap clothes, many of which are only worn a few times, and some of which are never worn at all? According to a six-year-old survey of 2,000 women, participants declared that they owned ‘66 items of clothing’ on average, including ‘at least 10 items of clothing that will never be worn again’; ‘most clothes are worn just seven times’, and about one third of participants ‘went off clothes after wearing them a couple of times’.13 Sixty-six items of clothing? That is hardly representative of our friends, regardless of gender – and definitively not representative of us: between the two of us we probably have some 500 items of clothing stacked in closets and drawers. These items will last us what is left of our lifetime, and beyond. The survey referred to above – together with the reference to our own overfilled wardrobes – show that at least two of the three mechanisms mentioned in our introduction are at work here, all of which serve to enable the continued production and consumption of fashionable good looks. The material mechanism is still steadily at work: we continue to consume garments that are made by underpaid workers although we know that it is unethical and that our consumption help sustain and facilitate the continuous exploitation of workers. A bright-white new T-shirt is materially a small and pure object, and as we see it in the store, purchase it and bring it home, any awareness of the conditions in which it was made is entirely absent. The object and its materiality do not show the blood and sweat that stain it. There is also an ideological mechanism at play here. Enabling the production and consumption of fashionable ‘good looks’ is the industry’s ideological management and manipulation of impressions through CSR initiatives and sustainability programmes. The same white T-shirt – now with the addition of a small tag that says that it is produced with ‘ecological’ cotton, or that it is the product of ‘fair trade’, makes us think that our purchase is if not ‘good’, than at least ‘better’ in relation to the hurt that its production is causing textile workers and the environment. Even though the price may be the very same as a T-shirt without that tag, we are letting ourselves be manipulated into thinking (believing) that this is a better purchase, and that we therefore can indulge in buying an ‘ethical’ T-shirt. Buying fashion marked and marketed as ethical and sustainable minimizes any pangs of conscience that we may have in relation to our consumption – while increasing the risk of a continuation to that overconsumption. This ideological mechanism makes us as consumers ‘look good’ (in more than one way), just as it makes the fashion industry look good; indeed, look much better than it is, so that it can continue to cut costs and swamp us with

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fashion at cheap prices. Connected to this mechanism is the old claim that fashion’s democratizes: the availability of products that everyone can afford to buy is often, in various kinds of media discourses and debates, promoted as a way of providing access to fashion for all. This rhetoric is, as Graeme Turner has pointed out, a means of persuading consumers to buy in to content, products, and services.14 This is also echoed in Helen Warner’s critique of how media institutions use democratization when referring to changing conditions in the fashion industry, be them industrial, cultural or economic: she describes how the idea or the notion of the ‘democratization of fashion is employed within popular discourse whenever a shift occurs that results in fashion becoming in some way accessible to, or influenced by, the “masses” ’. Here, various forms of media play a crucial role in promoting fashion as ‘democratic’.15

Allure – What lies behind the image? So, what about the third mechanism referred to in our introduction, the one that is hyper-visual? Diana Vreeland, long time editor of Harper’s Bazaar and then Vogue, was infamous for her ability to blurt out one-liners faster than the average person can spell ‘fashion’. Towards the end of her career, she readily claimed that her job as a fashion editor was to give the public ‘what they never knew they wanted’.16 She managed to do so like few others, but she also knew what it took to seduce people to develop these wants in the first place. According to Vreeland, fashion is allure, and Vreeland created that allure through the striking images she printed on the glossy pages of her fashion magazines – as have many editors, stylists and photographers before and since.17 Fashion media – in all its forms – is about alluring us as consumers to desire and to want (that which we never knew we wanted). The aesthetization of fashion via its visual representations makes us want the very latest (even when the latest is just an updated version of the old). Fashion, then, is an ideal case of what political philosopher Samuel Strauss referred to in the 1920s as ‘consumptionism’, stressing that it was becoming a ‘philosophy of life’, and one that ‘commit[ed] human beings to the production of more and more things – “more this year than last year, more next year than this year” ’.18 It would not be farfetched to understand fashion the ideal case of consumptionism: its visual representation, together with its physical availability, drive us to buy, to dispose of, and to buy again. Fashion, then, is, as Roland Barthes once claimed, characterized by neo-mania through its demand of constant change.19

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And fashion’s allure – that which fundamentally drives us to want more and new fashion – would be non-existent if it were not for its visual representation. Fashion, in many ways, is image. And the fashion image is tightly connected with a certain body, and with a certain sex: a young, slender, beautiful female body. This body has traditionally been Eurocentric and white, but in recent years has come to be slightly more diverse in terms of ethnicity. It has also been heteronormative, although the last two decades have seen a certain representation of queer (and trans) bodies. We may also add that while ‘older’ (more mature) bodies, as well as fuller bodies, have come to enter fashion’s imagery, it is still the white, young and straight ideal that dominates.20 This imagery offers ideally fashionable bodies, airbrushed and made up to perfection, and presented as desirable objects. Behind a fashionable body on display, however, is a real subject – and just as its image, this subject is young. The modelling industry has always thrived on young bodies. Over the years, quite a bit has been revealed about the ugly reality that underpins and enables the good looks of fashion in terms of its imagery. When journalist Michael Gross published his book Model in 1995, he outed the modelling industry as being tainted by abuse, drugs and sexual exploitation.21 Yet, his revelations – based on interviews with people working in the industry – would have come as no surprise: young girls and women are in front of the camera, as employees, and older men are on the other side, as agents or as photographers, and as their employers or ‘handlers’. One would have to be completely naïve to believe that this set-up is not open to a variety of misconduct, including sexual abuse. After Gross’s book, several revelations about the industry’s malaises have been presented to the public. Indeed, the modelling industry was ‘outed’ in two film documentaries: Picture Me (Ole Schnell and Sarah Ziff, 2009) and Girl Model (Ashley Sabin and David Redmon, 2011) both served to show how the industry thrives on girls and (very) young women. One even earlier example is found in the BBC series MacIntyre Undercover (which ran between 1999 and 2003) when Donal MacIntyre posed as a fashion photographer to gain access to the Milan office of the fashion agency Elite Models Management in order to uncover how girls in the early teens were being drugged and sexually abused. As a consequence, two of the company’s key male executives – Gérald Marie, President of Elite Europe, and Xavier Moreau, President of Elite Model Look – resigned. Gérald Marie, a man now in his 70s, got caught on MacIntyre tape saying that he planned to ‘fuck’ the finalists in the Elite Model Look contest (most of whom were in their mid-teens). Yet, Marie returned as President of

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Elite Paris shortly thereafter, and stayed on in that role until 2010 – and on his linkedin.com profile there was no mention of any career gap for years (at the time of writing, his linkedin.com profile has been removed).22 In 2011, Marie’s predatory behaviour was further confirmed by top model Carré Otis (now Sutton) in her biography Beauty, Disrupted, where she describes how he raped her repeatedly when she first came to Paris as a sixteen-year old.23 In August 2021, Sutton filed a lawsuit against Marie for rape and sexual misconduct, including using her for sexual trafficking.24 Between her memoir and the lawsuit, that is, between 2011 and 2020, there were few public remarks about Marie’s predatory behaviour – which is peculiar taken that the #MeToo movement kicked off a tsunami of allegations in so many professional areas. In late 2020, however, a flood of accusations against him surfaced as a group of women who had worked for or near him in the 1980s and 1990s decided to verbalize their experiences of sexual abuse.25 Not surprisingly, Marie is now – more than twenty years after the first MacIntyre revelation – known as the ‘Weinstein of fashion’.26 Why, we ask, did this kind of dreadful misconduct for such a long time failed to taint the reputation of key male figures in the fashion (modelling) industry? Is it because allure obscures the relation between the fashionable image and the reality it purports to represent? As with most alluring (and aesthetically pleasing) representations, we simply consume the image, ignoring and forgetting how that image – that representation – came into being in the first place. Remember that it would take many years for fashion photographer Terry Richardson – widely known in the industry for sexually exploiting his models – would be outed and critiqued.27 One should think that the blatant misogyny that underpins the fetishizing of female victims as well as the cynical exploitation of poorly paid garment workers are profound insults. Yet, we keep duping ourselves that fashionable images look good even when they clearly do not, that even when they bear no relation to reality, they are harmless. But images are not just images: they not only reflect reality but also stage and shape it.28 And, as is often pointed out, clothes are never just clothes: as we get dressed, we put on garments that are the products of other people’s labour: the labour of cotton-pickers, weavers, cutters, packers and seamstresses.

Conclusion In summary, then, three mechanisms enable the continued production and consumption of fashionable good looks: a material mechanism, an ideological

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mechanism and a hyper-visual mechanism. First, it is produced materially by millions of precariously employed workers who make the fashionable garments that we wear to look good. This makes us look good in a most basic and obvious way, at a low economic cost. Second, it is facilitated by the fashion industry’s ideological management and manipulation of impressions through CSR initiatives and sustainability programmes. This makes the fashion industry look good – indeed, much better than it is – so that it can continue to push costs and swamp us with splendid fashion at low prices. Third, we come to crave these garments in the first place because the hyper-visual allure of fashion and its imagery obstructs any connection to the ugly material reality under which garment workers and fashion models work. That things are ostensibly good as long as they look good suggests that the aestheticization of ethics has been realized, and postmodernized, in the most crude and banal sense, turning the distinction between good and evil into a matter of individual taste and perspective.

Notes 1 See e.g. David von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America (New York: Grove Press, 2003) and Brenda Lange, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009). 2 This chapter departs from two previous essays that we have authored. See Louise Wallenberg, ‘Fashion Photography, Phallocentrism, and Feminist Critique’, in Fashion in Popular Culture, ed. Joseph Hancock, Toni Johnson-Woods and Vicki Karaminas (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Publishers, 2013) and Louise Wallenberg and Torkild Thanem, ‘Beyond Fashion’s Alluring Surface: Connecting the Fashion Image and the Lived Realities of Female Workers in the Fashion Industry’, in Bodies, Symbols and Organizational Practice: The Gendered Dynamics of Powers, ed. Agnes Bolsoe et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2018). 3 The Guardian, 2014. 4 As we have discussed, the catastrophe provoked demands that working conditions be improved and safety standards reviewed. However, progress has been very slow: as of 2015, the victims had still not been compensated by the fashion brands and retailers that were connected to the Rana Plaza disaster. See ‘Bangladesh garment workers suffer poor conditions two years after reform vows’, in The Guardian (22 April 2015). Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/22/ garment-workers-in-bangladesh-still-suffering-two-years-after-factory-collapse; see also Wallenberg and Thanem, ‘Beyond Fashion’s Alluring Surface’. In August 2021, a

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new ‘health and safety accord in the textile and garment industry’ was signed between fashion brands (including H&M and Zara) and the trade union in Bangladesh. See ‘Major High Street Players are Committing to Protect Garment Workers in a Vital New Agreement’, in Vogue. Available online: https://www.vogue. com/article/bangladesh-accord-renewed-garment-worker-safety (accessed 30 September 2021). It was then doubled to US$68 US per month. See LA Times, 2015. According to one labour group, ‘Many are forced to work 14-16 hours a day seven days a week, with some workers finishing at 3am only to start again the same morning at 7.30am’ (War on Want, 2017). We wish to point out that Bangladesh is the world’s second-largest exporter of ready-made garments and that the industry employs approximately 4 million people, most of them women. In the financial year 2014–15, the Bangladeshi garment industry’s exports amounted to US$25.49 billion, which accounted for more than 80 per cent of the country’s exports. See BGMEA (2017), ‘About garment industry of Bangladesh (Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and ExportersAssociation)’, Available online: http://www.bgmea.com.bd/home/about/ AboutGarmentsIndustry See Human Rights Watch, ‘ “Whoever raises their head suffers the most”: Workers’ Rights in Bangladesh’s Garment Factories’ (April 2015), 31–5. Report 978-1-623131746. Available online: http://features.hrw.org/features/HRW_2015_reports/ Bangladesh_Garment_Factories/assets/pdf/bangladesh0415_web.pdf According to calculations made by the Swedish bank Nordea, in Veckans Affärer, as of 1 June 2017, a livable salary would be 2083 SEK/month compared to the current 750 SEK/month. See e.g. Clean Clothes Campaign, ‘Who needs to pay up?’, 2015. Available online: https://cleanclothes.org/safety/ranaplaza/who-needs-to-pay-up, and Clean Clothes Campaign, ‘CCC condemns escalating repression of unionists amid wage strikes Bangladesh’, 24 December 2016. Available online: https://cleanclothes.org/ news/2016/12/24/ccc-condemns-escalating-repression-of-unionists-amid-wagestrikes-bangladesh. See also ‘We belong, we care’, BGMEA. Available online: http:// www.bgmea.com.bd/page/Sustainability_Wellbeing_Safety (accessed 15 September 2021). See BGMEA (2017), Seminar on employment of physically challenged people. Available online: http://www.bgmea.com.bd/home/activity/Seminar_on_ employment_of_physically_challenged_people_held See BGMEA website: https://www.bgmea.com.bd/page/Sustainability_Environment (accessed 15 September 2021). See also their ‘Sustainability Report 2020’ on the same website. See, for example: Bobby Banerjee, Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2007); Mollie Painter-Morland, ‘Triple

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Bottom-line Reporting as Social Grammar: Integrating Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Codes of Conduct’, Business Ethics: A European Review vol. 15, no. 4 (2006): 352–64; Gerard Hanlon and Peter Fleming, ‘Updating the Critical Perspective on Corporate Social Responsibility’, Sociology Compass vol. 3, no. 6 (2009): 937–48. See also Carl Rhodes and Alison Pullen, ‘Critical Business Ethics: From Corporate Self-Interest to the Glorification of the Sovereign Pater’, International Journal of Management Reviews vol. 20, no. 2 (2017): 483–99. The Guardian, 2014. Daily Mail, 2015. Graeme Turner, Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009), 85. Helen Warner, Fashion on Television: Identity and Celebrity Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 32. Diana Vreeland, D.V., ed. George Plimpton and Christopher Hemphill (New York: Knoph, 1984). Diana Vreeland, Allure (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, [1980] 2012). Samuel Strauss, quoted in William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993), 267–8. Strauss writes defined consumptionism as the ‘compulsion to buy what [is] not wanted, nor needed, a compulsion that . . . [is] forced upon consumers by business manipulation of public and private life’, 267–8. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, [1957] 1972). See, for example, Elizabeth Wissinger, ‘Fashion Modeling Work in Contemporary Society’, Journal of Consumer Culture vol. 2, no. 3 (2002): 325–47; and Ashley Mears, ‘Size Zero High-end Ethnic: Cultural Production and the Reproduction of Culture in Fashion Modeling’, Poetics vol. 38, no. 1 (2010): 21–46. Michael Gross, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (New York: It Books, 1995), 2. Since 2012, Marie has been the chairman and the major stakeholder of Oui Management, a Paris modelling agency. Carré Otis, Beauty, Disrupted: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins/It Book, 2011). See ‘Former model Carré Sutton sues Gérald Marie over rape accusation’, in The Guardian (13 August 2021). Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2021/aug/13/carre-sutton-gerald-marie-lawsuit. In October 2020, new accusations about Marie’s sexual misconduct were launched by eight women who had worked as models in the 1980s and 1990s; in November of the same year, another seven women stepped forward. See Lucy Osborn, ‘ “He wanted to control me completely”: the models who accuse Gérald Marie of sexual assault’, in The Guardian, 17 October 2020. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/

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fashion/2020/oct/17/he-wanted-to-control-me-completely-the-models-who-accusegerald-marie-of-sexual-assault; and ‘ “What he was doing was in plain sight”: more ex-models accuse Gérald Marie for sexual assault’, in The Guardian, 20 November 2020. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/nov/20/ plain-sight-more-models-accuse-gerald-marie-sexual-assault-elite (last accessed 2 February 2021). 26 See Dipanita Nath, ‘Explained: Who is Gerald Marie, the modelling mogul accused of being the Harvey Weinstein of fashion?’, The Indian Express, 1 December 2020. Available online: https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/who-is-gerald-mariethe-modelling-mogul-accused-of-being-the-harvey-weinstein-of-fashion-7074177/ (last accessed 2 February 2021). 27 It is interesting to note that Richardson outed himself in public via his photos, but was not caught until much later, when models dared to speak up. The image, then, is difficult to see as evidence – even when it obviously is that. See Terry Richardson, Terryworld: Welcome to Terryworld, the Land Restraint Forgot (Cologne: Taschen, 2004). See also Jamie Peck, ‘Terry Richardson Is Really Creepy: One Model’s Story’ (2010). Available online: http://thegloss.com/fashion/terry-richardson-is-reallycreepy-one-models-story/ 28 See, for example, Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) and Ricard Dyer, The Matter of Images (London: Routledge, 1993).

Part Two

Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics: From Past to Present

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Ragged and Unravelled Marcia Pointon

In this section’s first chapter, art historian Marcia Pointon analyses the shifting meaning of rags in art works and fashion throughout the ages, looking at visual examples ranging from Renaissance frescoes to Baroque paintings and contemporary fashion design by Martin Margiela. Discussing the pictorial conventions at work in the ‘poetry’ of raggedness, she also considers the ethical, social and historical contexts in which the aesthetic of rags came to play diverse roles.

Introduction At first sight, rags appear inimical both to fashion and to ethics. And yet ragged and unravelling (the process whereby what was whole becomes ragged), they have a connection to each. At the very least we might note the apparent oppositional relationship between the rule-based approach of ethics and the disorderly essence of raggedness, or between fashion’s orderly in-time sequences and unravelling’s chaotic never-ending character. A ragged garment or, in a further stage of dissolution a rag of no longer recognizable origin, continues to evoke the category of clothing to which, like fashion, they belong. While longevity is a characteristic of rags, fashion (even with today’s mantra of sustainability) is marked by brevity. Rags are invariable but fashion must offer variety and novelty. They are two poles of the same dynamic, existing in an undeclared and uneasy relationship. For how would we read the punctum of novelty that greets a new season’s fashion without the uneasy complicity in its inevitable senescence, as fashions of past seasons succumb to moths, damp, adaptation, laundering and other indignities?1 Rags are fashion’s ‘other’, its repressed which – from time to time erupts from the unconscious with a stylistic flourish in a carefully frayed 123

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hem.2 Moreover, as rags and raggedness, through their very amorphous lack of individuality, connote the underbelly of society, they never fail to make us feel that those of us who are not down-at-heel should bear some responsibility towards the less fortunate in society. Thus, it is not only those who will never afford a Dior gown but those for whom a clean pair of jeans might be a step too far who lurk like ghosts in the wings of any discussion of fashion and ethics. However, it is also true that ragged and unravelling things are visually fascinating quite independently of any social messages they may carry. In this chapter, therefore, I explore two historical moments in pre-modern times when raggedness was not only a fact of life but also an object of fascination, a kind of aesthetic, generated in images on flat surfaces by artists who, when freed from the moral imperatives that drive later nineteenth-century imagery, give free rein to a kind of visual analysis of how ragged and unravelled works. I ask what we can learn about the category of ragged and unravelling from a sixteenth-century Italian artist and a seventeenth-century Dutch engraver, both of whom convey the visually seductive possibilities of rags. By observing how raggedness is represented within an imaginative register, we can learn something of why it is so compelling and so alarmingly chaotic. First, however, some thought about our own time and how we got here. Remnants of clothing have immense importance to archaeologists and historians. Examples excavated are, by their nature, ragged, whether through wear and tear or through natural degradation. The value of organic materials for reconstructing economic history has been increasingly recognized.3 Witness the UK-based Deliberately Concealed Garments Project, in which are recorded extraordinary items revealed generally by building restoration, including a seventeenth-century doublet discovered in 1990 concealed between the ground and first floors in a shop belonging to an undertaker in Reigate, Surrey.4 At the same time raggedness as a condition lays bare human agency and its limitations. It is this that lies behind the attraction of so many contemporary artists to garments that have apparently been discarded or lost: we think, for example, of Christian Boltanski’s fifty-ton mountain of clothes at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2010 and Anselm Kiefer’s installation Walhalla in 2016.5 Arte Povera artists, including Michelangelo Pistoletto, have also worked with actual rags and with the idea of raggedness.6 These works involve distressed garments on the road to rags but not yet ready for conversion into ‘shoddy’, the low-grade cloth made from recycled wool.7 Somewhere between what is perfect and what is fit only for the rag bag lies the unravelling garment, the holes and fraying of which seem to enact a punishment, distressing emotionally as well as materially, representing a break-down of the

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relationship between body and covering that allows the two to hang in together come what may. Accordingly, this intrigued French post-structuralist Michel Serres, who elided artists’ canvases, tattooed skins, writers’ parchments and papers with ‘Bits of rag, marked, tattered and torn, heavily embossed, on display for all to see, feeble confessions or occupational stigmata’, asking ‘are we really anything but these rags? Are we anything more than these ghosts?’8 To be sure, some unravelling is intentional and managed; in ‘drizzling’ (or parfilage), metal threads were removed from worn-out clothes to be melted down or re-used in new garments, and in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (as well as more recently) ‘dagging’ and ‘slashing’ for decorative ends was a feature of fashionable dress.9 However, when it is a case of accidental loss of substance, the unravelling of threads may expose the inadequacy of human defences in a hostile world while simultaneously offering a faint but tangible hope of survival. It is precisely this ambiguity that endows with pathos the tattered regimental flag hanging ceremonially in the nave of a parish church, and what enriches the poetic and metaphorical potential of ragged and unravelling, as we will observe. *

*

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A dark-skinned, black-haired man of powerful build, with an expression that might be angry, perplexed or both, stands with right hand on hip, the left gesturing outward, index finger pointing (see Figure 6.1). At the same time, he grasps the frayed end of a cord that is tied round his waist and knotted in a particular way so that the other end (also frayed) falls vertically between his legs. Apart from the rope, the only thing holding his garment together is one fastening, which leaves exposed his chest, his neck and part of his shoulders. His tunic and ankle-length hose are cream with grey areas in the shadows. His shoes are remarkably sound, given the rest of his garb. The work of which this is a part was completed in 1469 and it is hard to say what the original colour might have been but, against a background that would have been uniformly blue, he must always have been a visually arresting figure. The remnants of his clothes correspond to no recognized male fashion of the period: his tunic seems too long for a doublet. What remains is frayed and tattered (with ribbons of cloth hanging below his knees). His hose has large holes at the knee, the right leg is rolled up and at the crotch barely sufficient cloth remains for decency. However, there is nothing abject about this ragged man and, while the un-wholeness of his fraying hole-ness might invoke the soughtafter raggedness of a pair of fashionable jeans, the hem of his tunic with its ragged appendages flickers and flutters as though charged with cosmic energy in a way that is quite different from chic cool of the twenty-first century.

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Figure 6.1 Francesco Cossa, Detail from Sign of Aries, Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara, fresco, c. 1470, Bridgeman Images, DGA754391. https://www.bridgemanimages.co.uk/en/

This ‘stern and pensive man’ stands alone but he has company nearby.10 He is part of a fresco depicting the astrological period March/April under the sign of Aries, a section of the murals in the room of the months at Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara. In this complicated programme of imagery, each compartment is divided horizontally: the upper section shows Olympian divinities in triumphal carriages, the middle section depicts signs of the zodiac accompanied by mysterious emblematic personages of which the ragged man is one, and the

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lower section famously shows scenes from life at the Ferrara court with imaginary architecture, the activities due to take place at certain times of the year, and courtiers in their fashionable finery.11 The artist responsible for this marvel was Francesco Cossa (1430–77). Cossa’s ragged man (Figure 6.1) has a special position in the historiography of Art History: he was the subject of Aby Warburg’s first major presentation (in Rome in 1912), an event considered as marking the birth of Iconology as a hermeneutic methodology.12 Warburg traced this figure to an Indian source transmitted through a ninth-century Arabic scholar and ultimately back to classical Antiquity and the figure of the mythological adventurer Perseus in disguise. For him, it was proof of the survival of Greek tradition across diverse migrations and of its presence re-born in Renaissance culture.13 The ragged man, he argued, emblematized the oscillating movement between demoniac medieval forces and the Renaissance revival of Antique rationality. Others have remarked that the crucial central sections of the murals present not merely a problem in the history of ideas but a means of accessing the mentality of this period, a time in which logic, in the form of astronomy, and magic, in the form of astrology, remained reconcilable.14 Despite the centrality of this figure in historiography, I have been unable to find in the extensive literature any discussion of his appearance, or of raggedness as a visual trope. The figure’s mysterious and assumed mythological status has, at the same time, excluded it from interrogation in the secondary literature on European imagery of beggars.15 I have dwelt on this image as a way of highlighting the complexity of clothing in a state of disintegration in relation to the body that it (however partially) covers, a state of exposure and occlusion, hints of flesh, partial veilings. Historians have been notably deficient at recognizing raggedness as a visual idiom, often seizing on an image to illustrate actual poverty.16 Caution is needed, not least because we know that impersonating and dressing up as a beggar was not uncommon. As Tom Nichol points out, the fluidity of the beggar identity allowed it to operate as a means of facilitating cultural communication. A prominent example of this was when a group of leading Dutch noblemen styled themselves ‘Les Gueux’ in their petition to Margaret of Austria, Governor of the Netherlands, requesting the repeal of religious ordinances against Protestants.17 When Jacques Callot (1622–70) ironically used the term ‘Baroni’ for his 1622 suite of twentyfive etchings of Les Gueux, it was part of the same sophisticated take on mendicants as free spirits, street actors and manipulators of identity. In my account, the ragged man in Palazzo Schifanoia and other images of beggars are not part of any social history but are rather a means to try to

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disentangle the ‘textility’ of ragged and unravelling textiles. By ‘textile’ I refer to fabric resulting from weaving, knitting or similar; by ‘text’, I mean an act of communication registered in some medium that can be thereby semantically analysed. One simple proposition might be that because ragged is almost invariably associated with poverty, it serves as a moral prompt, an ethical reminder of a world where fashion and its exigencies have no sway. But that would be to simplify grossly. Just think how the very word catches us out. A rag might be used for cleaning but ‘clad in rags’ indicates a plurality, a layering perhaps, a cumulative abundance of probably smelly and dirty textiles. Nineteenth-century observers in particular were fascinated by the visual relationship between bodies and their ragged coverings: Hippolyte Taine in Italy (1866) comments, for example, on ‘droll characters’ at the Colosseum, their bare knees shining through their rags.18 From the end of the Napoleonic Wars through the nineteenth century, raggedness was an aesthetic category as well as a sociological description: artists including Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet in France painted ragged subjects, Henry Mayhew recorded the ragged appearance of subjects on London’s streets, and ‘ragged schools’ was the name given to educational establishments set up in England to educate the poor.19 ‘Ragged’ as a prefix to beggar became in this period so habitual that it has normalized the relationship between body and covering and made it harder to deconstruct raggedness as a condition or as an image. It has also made it harder to recognize historical contingencies. As Ellen Harlizius-Klück has pointed out, textiles in Antiquity commenced with a woven border (a pre-text) that in the end frames the whole piece that might be draped as a body-covering but might equally well be a wall-hanging or a tent. These textiles do not ‘rag out’ the way constructed garments do. She has suggested therefore that Cossa’s ragged man might be a critique of the ‘scaffolding’ architectural function of Renaissance clothing.20 Moreover, it has been pointed out that from the very beginning of textile representation in antiquity rags (old, used, shredded cloths) were included in the history of visual symbols, hierarchies and social stigmata, not least in the theatre. Rags were, and still are, used in cult practices of Jewish, Christian and Muslim populations of the Near East.21 They are also potentially gendered. In the Book of Isaiah, for example, rags are ‘filthy’, probably meaning used ‘menstrual cloths’: ‘But we are all like an unclean thing / and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags.’ 22 Traces remain in the phrase ‘on the rag’ that was, at least until recently, a commonplace euphemism for menstruation. With the process of modern industrialization rags came to designate social failure and were often, though not always, specific to the urban beggar. I am not

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attempting here to contribute to these narratives. Nor do I address either the many images of charity invoking social relations or the widespread nineteenthcentury interest in rag pickers and recycling. Instead, I want to focus on the theoretical problem of where ragged stands conceptually in relation to notions of the clothing and textiles in which such material originates. My overdetermined image of ragged as a formless, undifferentiated mass is based less on observation of life than on the encoded forms of representation in which the shapeless ragged beggar has a special place – particularly in the etchings of Jacques Callot (1592–1635) and Rembrandt (1606–69). One way of measuring the pared-down distinctive rags of Francesco Cossa’s ragged man is in relation to the undifferentiated mass of raggedness that characterizes the work of these two masters of the ragged, albeit 150 years later. The ‘angry man’ on display in the Palazzo Schifanoia is the antithesis of his garments. While his physique is coherently powerful, his dress tells us that ragged is the unmaking of something previously put together. Unravelling decomposes textiles; it draws attention to threads, confuses boundaries (hems and seams) that were the markers of successful construction, and generates holes, on the one hand and patches (or superimpositions), on the other that challenge the coherence of both material and style. Perhaps this is why Rembrandt, as an artist who explored boundaries of medium and material his entire life, found them so interesting. Ragged is a counterpoint to the positive of human creativity and a reminder that textility is a means of managing flux. The locus classicus would be Penelope awaiting the return of Ulysses, weaving in the day and then unravelling her work at night in order to deter her persistent suitors. What Penelope engages in, as Derrida points out, is an undoing that is not the diminution he observed as his aunts cast off stitches in their knitting. Undoing leaves uncertainty in its wake ‘without knowing if what remains to come will still deserve the name of text, especially in the figure of a textile’.23 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari draw attention to the important relationship between what is planar and what is woven: the latter they term ‘striated space’, pointing out that a woven (striated) fabric can be infinite in length but not in width as the latter is determined by the frame of the warp. They go on to discuss ‘anti-fabric’ and its relations of variables and constants: felt, embroidery, and patchwork, which they describe as ‘an amorphous collection of juxtaposed pieces that can be joined together in an infinite number of ways’.24 Although extrapolating from such generalizations is problematic, I find this notion helpful in trying to work out how we might define the textility of raggedness. Only the body endows rags with form, serving to remind the viewer of drapery as a pre-

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constructed (and perhaps even pre-discursive) textile. On their own, rags are a shapeless mass, a pathetic heap. The controlling elements of weft and warp evidenced in the selvedge (self-edge), the ‘closed space’ implied by the back and forth motion of the loom, are therefore annihilated in ragged cloth.25 The most eloquent signifier of this conflict between making and undoing is the frayed edge, exposing the technological origins of stuff. The frayed borders of the ragged man’s rags remind us of the weft and warp that are fundamental to spatial relations (see Figure 6.1). Along with holey-ness, fraying is the most dynamic aspect of unravelling textile. It is striking that the disintegrating clothing of the angry man is held together with a rope, the ends of which fray but which in its entirety looks remarkably robust. A very distinctive knot joins the end; this slip knot invites speculation as to who is being asked to pull it. It centres the image like an umbilical trace. Knots are intrinsic to weaving as well as to other ways of producing textiles like knitting and crocheting. Gottfried Semper believed that string was ‘probably the oldest artistic product’, reminding us that thread is the pre-requisite of textile and the knot perhaps the oldest technical symbol.26 More recently Michel Serres proposed the knot or tangle as a central figure in our understanding of relations between things that appear separate.27 So our ragged man exhibits, we might say, in and on his person, both the process of unravelling and the means of re-making. Moreover, since the textility of the knot is fundamental to ideas of travel by water, might we not conclude Cossa’s angry man is, or has been a sailor rather than a traveller by magic steed as posited by Warburg? And what better candidate than Odysseus himself, the man of powerful physique but dressed in rags. Here he is as he prepares unrecognized to fight the beggar Irus at the threshold of his occupied palace: They all shouted approval of the prince [ie Telemachus who had assured him of fair play] as Odysseus belted up, roping his rags around his loins, baring his big rippling thighs – his boxer’s broad shoulders, his massive chest and burly arms on full display as Athena stood beside him fleshing out the limbs of the great commander . . . .28

The holes in garments that are a characteristic of Odysseus on his return from his travels and of Cossa’s ragged man are, like holes in houses, symptomatic of a return to nature, a de-civilizing. No one describes this de-civilizing more movingly than Shakespeare’s King Lear when he stands on the heath aged, alone and abandoned by all but his Fool and addresses all poverty-stricken people,

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describing their raggedness as ‘looped’ and ‘windowed’, that is, as unravelling and full of holes, or windows: Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you?29

Tim Ingold’s assertion that ‘makers have to work in a world that does not stand still until the job is completed, and with materials that have properties of their own and are not necessarily predisposed to fall into the shapes required of them, let alone stay in them indefinitely’ is, I suggest, illuminating for a consideration of the ragged which is, if you like, the return of the repressed of ‘civilization’.30 But his rejection of what he terms the hylomorphic leaves little space for the wearer. The consonance between skin and rags is present in the fascination in Western culture with the flayed body.31 Thinking about Ingold’s reversal of the established model of invention and the imposition of form on matter, I find myself wondering whether part of the aesthetic fascination with raggedness (of which designers like Martin Margiela are examples), might be identified as material that repudiates a call to order, that breaks free and animates itself.32 Leon Battista Alberti advised artists in 1435 on representing the movement of inanimate things and reminded them that if draperies were blowing, it was a good idea to add an indication that there was a wind.33 Cloth is heavy, he points out, and falls to the ground. But the rags of the angry man in Ferrara (see above) have a vitality all of their own, as indeed do all the mythological personages in the Palazzo Schifanoia murals; they appear animated by invisible forces, by contrast with the courtiers constrained in their structured clothing. Writing about this figure, Warburg does not allude to this self-animating textility though it was he who, later, inspired by observations made by Hippolyte Taine 34 became deeply preoccupied with the figure now known (after Warburg) as the nympha from Ghirlandaio’s fresco in the Tornabuoni chapel (1486–90) in Santa Maria Novella in Florence.35 The undulating hemlines of the fruit-bearing nymph were not entirely without precedent since they are notable features of certain schools of medieval manuscript illumination (as for example in the Winchester Bible) but they animate this figure with an energy seemingly generated from within.36 According to Semper, a hem is a frame: ‘it satisfies the principle of planimetric regularity in that its units or members arrange themselves around what is framed as the only centre of reference.’37 Like fraying, this wild disregard for stasis is, then, a further disruption to the striated ordering function of textiles.

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The tension between material creativity and the elemental (a return to cosmogonic chaos) that I have identified in the ragged man at Ferrara inspired Callot and Rembrandt in the seventeenth century to study raggedness not as in subsequent centuries as part of a debate about poverty, and not as in the sixteenth century as part of religious or mythological iconography, but seemingly for its own sake, and above all through the graphic medium of etching. In conclusion, therefore, I want to bring together two ideas: Ingold’s vexed relationship of maker and material, and Semper’s idea of the hem as a frame serving as a centring device, in order to try to understand what is going on in Rembrandt’s etchings of beggars.

Figure 6.2 Rembrandt van Rijn, Old Beggar Woman with Gourd seen from behind, etching, second state, c. 1630, 104 x 47 mm. British Museum, 1829,0415.14 © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Etching – neither painting nor drawing – offers the potential for erasure, scraping, burnishing, altering, re-coating with ground, re-drawing and re-etching. Looked at closely, Rembrandt’s etchings often seem like a rehearsal for the definitive gesture.38 At the same time, etching might be said to be a medium in which the maker yields control since the grooves in the plate, which are ultimately going to produce the ink lines on paper, depend on the agency of acid eating away the metal plate. The medium offers the artist freedom as he or she draws directly with a needle onto a wax surface that has been laid on a metal plate. When this is placed in an acid bath, the acid ‘eats’ lines into the plate where the wax has been penetrated by the etching needle. When the rest of the wax ground is cleaned off, the plate is ready to be inked and placed in the printing press. What emerges is, of course, in reverse. It is a print. The artist exploits the unpredictable element that is part also of raggedness and unravelling. The medium therefore replicates the natural processes whereby time eats away at fabric until what was terminated or framed by hems and seams transforms into rags. It shares the accidental quality of raggedness since in etching ‘foul bites’ are left to stand in all their expressiveness.39 Just as the weft and warp of fabric is made up of so many threads or strings, so line in these etchings is the animating force that renders into its own unique state of equilibrium what is – qua subject – incoherent. It is a characteristic of Rembrandt’s etchings of beggars that in general faces and hands – and to an extent also feet – are obscured in shadow, subsumed within the ragged mass. Once we set aside the instinctive desire to locate a human subject, we recognize this old woman with her gourd slung from a cord over her back is a mass of remarkably closely observed and disintegrating textiles. While her back and her shadowy profile are marked out by a defining contour, her front, her arm and the lower edge of her garments are jagged approximations. The etching needle has strayed (especially down the left side), creating uncertainty about where we should understand material margins to be. There is something not only assertive but also incipiently aggressive about the layering of textile and the meandering lower edges. This unevenness of hem – perhaps we should call it border? – is what above all defines raggedness as a visual trope in graphic art. In an era when dress was constructed in an almost architectural way, the disintegration of textiles becomes an arena of visual poetics to be represented by scratchy lines and harshly jagged contours. And in case we were in any doubt that Rembrandt is engaging with textiles, there is a large patch on this old woman’s back with the stitches readily discernible even when little else is. If we consider Cossa’s ragged man alongside another of Rembrandt’s beggar etchings, it becomes clear that ragged can never be a single category. Francesco

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Cossa’s figure, standing at ease on muscular legs, is an image of inner vitality, his ragged coat and unravelling sleeves so dynamic he almost seems to steady or steer the whole ensemble like a boatswain with a rudder. By contrast, Rembrandt’s beggar with a stick and a patch on his elbow is a bundle of rags: they cover him all, over leaving only his face exposed. Bristles of hair and beard echo the jagged edges of his rags and the scratching of the etching tool. Although, like the Ferrarese figure, there are strings dangling from his clothes, here they fall sadly earthwards without the least suggestion of vitality. Art historians might argue that these differences can be explained by reference to the development of naturalism and an interest in subjects from the lower echelons of seventeenthcentury society, whereas Cossa was working with a visual vocabulary rooted in astrology and mythology and fostered at the d’Este court. And, of course, there is truth in that, but it is not the full story. In both images the viewer is drawn into an engagement with something in process, an organic undoing of the artifice that constitutes a garment. And, furthermore, what both images have in common is a sense of how fundamental that process is to being-in-the-world upon which our ideas of what it is to be an individual rest.

Acknowledgements A special thank you to Victoria and John Mitchell for urging me to visit the Palazzo Schifanoia and for encouraging me to write about the ragged man, to Paolo Palladino for his as always insightful criticisms, to Edwina Ehrman for coming up with such helpful suggestions and to Carl Rowe for his advice on print-making. Thanks also to colleagues at Stockholm University where this paper was first aired in 2017 and to those attending the Association for Art History conference in London in 2018 who offered me all sorts of helpful leads.

Notes 1 The term ‘punctum’ is used by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1980; published in translation 1981) to describe the poignancy of an accidental detail that bruises the viewer. 2 In the work of Sigmund Freud, repression is a mechanism of psychical defence but what is repressed as part of the unconscious, can resurface under certain stimuli like seemingly lost memories.

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3 See John Peter Wild, Textiles in Archaeology (London: Bloomsbury, [1988] 2003). 4 http://www.concealedgarments.org/ 5 The Kiefer show was held at White Cube, Bermondsey, London. The garments may of course have been purpose-made and subsequently distressed. 6 This is discussed by Mateusz Kapustka in his wide-ranging paper ‘Rags’, in Anika Reineke, Anne Röhl and Tristan Weddigen, Textile Terms: A Glossary, Textile Studies, March 2017, p. 14. 7 On ‘shoddy’, see Madeleine Ginsburg, ‘Rags to Riches: The Second-Hand Clothes Trade 1700-1978’, Costume vol. 14 (1980): 121–35, 128; Hanna Rose Shell, From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020). 8 Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (1985), trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2008,), 76. 9 Thanks to Edwina Ehrman, Senior Curator, Victoria and Albert Museum, for information on the respectable ladies’ occupation of drizzling. On dagging and slashing, see https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/dagging/. 10 Paolo D’Ancona, The Schifanoia Months at Ferrara, trans. Lucia Karsnik (Milan: Ed del Milione, 1954), 17. 11 According to Ranieri di Varese, the costumes shown are faithful to contemporary life and the head gear and clothing of the symbolic personages in the central sections are so realistic and precise as to suggest familiarity with old inventions perhaps through designs for theatre or spectacle, Ranieri di Varese, Atlante di Schifanoia (Modena: Ed. Panini, 1989), 229. This book contains an essay by the dress historian Stella Mary Newton, ‘Gli Abiti negli affreschi di Palazzo Schifanoia’, 229–33, but it makes no mention of Cossa’s ragged man. 12 Cinzia Fratucello and Christina Knorr (eds), Il Cosmo incantato di Schifanoia: Aby Warburg e la storia delle immagini astrologiche (Ferrara: Palazzo Schifanoia 1998), 11–12, 15–21, 54, 64; E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, 1970). See also Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), ch. 1, ‘Botticelli Rediscovered’. Warburg argued that the strange symbolic figurations that accompany the signs of the zodiac in groups of three are very remote echoes of symbols belonging to GrecoAlexandrine astrology, and allude to Virtues and influences of planets on men. Alexandria drew on its Egypt heritage to follow the ancient system of dividing astronomical years not according to the twelve signs and zones of the zodiac, but rather according to the thirty-six decani that corresponded to various constellations. This system was then blended with the Greek one. See Paolo D’Ancona, op. cit., 16. 13 For a full explanation, see Cinzia Fratucello and Christina Knorr , op. cit., 11–12; 64. It is now generally accepted that Warburg’s conclusions were ‘unsustainable’; see Kristen Lippincott, ‘Between Text and Image: Incident and Accident in the History of

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Astronomical and Astrological Illustration’, in L’Art de la Renaissance entre Science et Magie, ed. Philippe Morel (Rome: Académie de France, 2006), 3–34. Lippincott discusses figures of Perseus and their sources, 3–5. Marco Bertozzi, ‘Schifanoia: Il Salone dei dipinti perduti con un appendice su Aby Warburg: lo stile del paganesimo antico’, in Lo Zodiaco del Principe, ed. Maurizio Bonora (Ferrara: Maurizio Tosi, 1992), 23–33, 24. On the relevance of the iconographical scheme to the intellectual interests of the court of Ferrara, see Kristen Lippincott, ‘The Iconography of the Salone dei mesi and the Study of Latin Grammar in Fifteenth-century Ferrara’, in La Corte di Ferrara e il Suo Mercantismo 1441–1598, Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Copenhagen. 1987), 93–110. Tom Nichol’s The Art of Poverty: Irony and Ideal in Sixteenth-century Beggar Imagery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) also focuses on the century prior to the Schifanoia figure. Pace John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007). In Chapter 3 of his book, Styles offers evidence for the use the term ‘ragged’ in relation to the administration of the poor law. However, the images with which he illustrates this chapter are assumed unproblematically to represent raggedness as a condition. Nichol, The Art of Poverty, 239. Hippolyte Taine, Italy: Rome and Naples, Florence and Venice (orig. 1866) trans. John Durand, 3rd edn, 1 vol (London: Williams and Norgate, 1871), 129, ‘Types of Real Life’. Edouard Manet, The Old Beggar, 1865–70, Norton Simon Museum; Gustav Courbet, The Charity of a Beggar at Ornans, 1868, The Burrell Collection, Glasgow; Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, published in serial form in the 1840s and in three volumes in London in 1851 by George Woodfall and Sons. Personal communication, 10 April 2018. For Dr. Harlizius-Klück, see https://www. deutsches-museum.de/en/research/wissenschaftl-mitarbeiter/dr-ellen-harliziusklueck/. I am much indebted in this paragraph to Mateusz Kapustka, ‘Rags’, 191. I thank Victoria Mitchell for drawing this work to my attention. Isaiah 64:6, New King James Bible. Hélene Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1998] 2002), 21–2, 24. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘The Smooth and the Striated’, in A Thousand Plateaus (orig. 1980), trans. Brian Massumi (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 553–4. Ibid., 553. Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in der technischen und tektonischen Kunsten (orig. 1860–2) Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, Or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004), 113,

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

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219. My observation on knots has been informed by the plates in P. R. Hodge [pseudonym Tom Bowling], The Book of Knots (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1866). Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (orig. 1985), trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), 78. Homer, The Odyssey Book 18, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking Books, 1996), 76–9. William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 3, Scene 4. Tim Ingold, ‘The Textility of Making’, in Cambridge Journal of Economics vol. 34 (2010): 93. Downloaded from http://cje.oxfordjournals.org/ advance access July 2009. See Serres, The Five Senses. See Tamsin Blanchard, ‘From old rags to couture’, Independent, 3 July 1993, Indy/Life. Leon Battista Alberti, Della Pittura (On Painting), Book II, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press), 80–1. Taine, Italy , 129. See https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/panel-image/panel-45-image-3; This is discussed also by Mateusz Kapustka, ‘Rags’, 192. 1150–75, Winchester Cathedral. Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in der technischen und tektonischen Kunsten, 161. I owe this phrase to print-maker Carl Rowe. A ‘foul bite’ occurs when acid attacks the plate indiscriminately.

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The ‘Organic’ Feminine: Art Nouveau and Women’s Fashion, Yesterday and Today Lucy Fischer

In this chapter, film scholar Lucy Fischer discusses the aesthetic qualities and moralizing gender-discourse that characterizes Art Nouveau fashion by investigating a variety of garments, accessories and visual objects in their cultural context as well as in their symbolism, much of which is not only often based on animals and nature but also intricately interwoven with the image of women. This chapter will consider the relation between a particular style of women’s fashion (existing from the 1900s until the present) and the aesthetics of an international design movement – Art Nouveau. This is an unusual type of association since one does not speak, for instance, of a Bauhaus or Surrealist mode of dress. As Clare Rose has noted, one of the most distinctive aspects of Art Nouveau was its respect for couture and its move toward the ‘integration of fashionable clothing into the decorative arts’ – thereby raising the former’s profile and prestige.1 The chapter will also consider a variety of ethical/ideological issues arising from this fashion trend. First among these is the movement’s vision of Woman, which involved the masculinist view that females were associated selectively with Nature (both vegetative and animal), rendering them somehow more ‘primitive’ and less human. Second is the movement’s preference for a slim female body type, seen as flattering to its flowing, draped clothing (an unhealthy trend that continues in standards for women today). Third is the movement’s high-toned association with elite haute couture. Fourth is the style’s devotion to ornamentation, a feature tied ideologically to formulaic conceptions of the ‘feminine’ and to notions of moral excess and decadence. (Walter Benjamin, for instance, asserted that Art Nouveau entailed a ‘motif of perversion’.)2 Fifth, from 139

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a production standpoint, such ornamented artifacts were complicated to manufacture and involved a great deal of artisan labour, which was often underpaid or exploited. As Adolf Loos stated in a 1908 essay provocatively titled ‘Ornament and Crime’, ‘The ornament is wasted labor power and hence wasted health’.3 But to examine these topics in depth, it is first necessary to broadly characterize Art Nouveau. It was a European trend in the applied arts that germinated in England, burgeoned in many other nations, and flourished in France.4 Some have marked the date of its ascendancy as 1895 with a group that coalesced around Parisian art dealer and connoisseur Siegfried Bing, whose shop was called L’Art Nouveau.5 The movement peaked between 1900 and 1905 but thrived until the start of the First World War. Its influence, however, continued to be felt quite strongly through the 1920s and continues to inspire design today. While the term derives from its French incarnation (and was used in Belgium as well), the movement had different names in other countries. In Germany and Austria, it was known as Jugendstil; in England and Italy, the Liberty Style; in Scotland, the Glasgow Style, and in Spain, Modernisme. Despite its various national iterations, as Dolf Sternberger remarks, it was ‘a single formal universe that [was] continuous and interwoven’.6 Though unified, the movement bracketed numerous contradictions – having both ‘positive and negative aspects . . . a fertile ambiguity that both attracts and disturbs us’.7 Thus, its appearance was often met with hostility. In the style’s devotion to aesthetic display, visual excess, and sensory gratification, it was frequently considered decadent and the bête noire of high modernism – making it the trend one loved to hate. Perhaps attendant to this antagonism was Art Nouveau’s association with the ‘feminine’, problematic in masculinist culture, but a feature that made it ripe for affiliations with fashion. For that very reason, the style was attached to women’s clothing and not to men’s.

Art Nouveau Fashion: 1900s–1920s While numerous Art Nouveau crafts have received copious attention (glassware, pottery, architecture and metalwork), fashion has not. This may be because no brand of couture officially bore Art Nouveau’s name. Nonetheless, scholars have associated the movement with certain types of female dress from the era. Clare Rose of the Royal School of Needlework, for instance, has created a website connecting fashion to Art Nouveau.8 Moreover, in 2014, she published an entire

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book on the subject, the first of its kind. In it, she takes a wide-ranging approach, focusing not only on clothing but on accessories, the promotion of the style, its patrons, its favoured body type, and its representation in painting.9 Among the design firms that she highlights are several influential ones in France and England: Maison Paquin, Maison Poiret, Callot Soeurs, The House of Worth and Lucile Ltd. Beyond those, a major Italian couture company was run by Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, who was ‘renowned for his Art Nouveau textiles that included fine-pleated silk gowns, lustrous silk and velvet scarves’.10 His influence was felt strongly in France, as is clear from Marcel Proust’s mention of him in A Remembrance of Things Past (1913). As one source asserts: In 1907, Fortuny created his most spectacular Art Nouveau dress: the ‘Delphos robe’ in pleated silk, which was made famous by theatrical legends Isadora Duncan and Sarah Bernhardt. Designed in a revolutionary shape, inspired by ancient Grecian gown, the long dresses were simple and loose, artistic and functional; their borders were usually finished with Venetian colored glass beads, which were both ornamental and functional.11

While many of the Delphos dresses were monotone, Fortuny also utilized prints decorated with pomegranate, lotus, palmette or tree-of-life motifs.12 Significantly, England’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) also labels several outfits ‘Art Nouveau’, for instance a purple ‘Mantle’ designed by Jean-Philippe Worth in 1909, decorated with large gold flowers. As regards the connection between fashion and painting, Gustav Klimt’s life partner, Emilie Louise Flöge, was a clothing designer who was pictured wearing one of her own modern creations in the painter’s 1902 portrait of her.13 She and her sister Helene opened a salon in 1904 known as Schwestern Flöge (Flöge Sisters) in one of Vienna’s busiest thoroughfares. The shop was designed by Josef Hoffmann, a prominent figure in the Wiener Werkstätte movement, which itself had evolved from the Vienna Secession, related to Art Nouveau (see Figure 7.1). Furthermore, in this era, London’s Liberty department store (founded in 1875) was associated with Art Nouveau. It ‘registered “Art Fabrics” as a trademark . . . [and] had its own artistic . . . costume studio, specialising in freeflowing . . . gowns in dusky colours’.14 One such floral decorated dress (dated 1916–18) is now part of the V&A’s collection. Furthermore, a book on the Liberty style shows a fabric pattern (ostensibly for clothing) that is covered in abstract flowers and leaves.15 The mention of the Liberty emporium signals that, while primarily pitched at the rich, Art Nouveau fashion eventually trickled down to

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Figure 7.1 Austrian painter Gustav Klimt and his companion, Emilie Flöge. She is depicted wearing a modernist kaftan. DeA Picture Library, Art Resource, New York.

the middle-class consumer. As noted previously, in both England and Italy, the mode came to be known as the Liberty Style. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts has characterized the Art Nouveau look as follows: The flowing lines and organic forms of the . . . style [in general] are reflected in the clothes of the era, especially in ladies’ dresses, the skirts of which were full and bell shaped, flowing out like blossoming flowers. The early Art Nouveau silhouette in some ways echoed the fussy and decorative look of the early Romantic period . . . [However] [b]y the 1900s, the style relaxed and the silhouette changed . . . The materials became softer and gauzier, with lace decoration and were very lightweight. The sinuous lines and soft materials and colours were consistent with the Art Nouveau style.16

In fact, many late Art Nouveau frocks were so airy and lightweight that, in contrast to stiffer, heavier dresses, they could be crumpled up into a ball.

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However, the Art Nouveau fashion style evinced contradictory ethical, ideological and aesthetic implications. As opposed to more mainstream clothing, it shunned highly restrictive corsetry, that unnatural and oppressive containment of the female body. Instead, it appeared free-flowing, as compared with figurehugging garments of the era. But, on another level, corset-free women were often considered to have loose morals and it did not help that many women (like Flöge) who eschewed such undergarments were considered bohemian and outside the normal social conventions of the time.17 Certainly, Art Nouveau’s respect for couture was noteworthy among the applied arts.18 And many Art Nouveau fashion houses exhibited at the influential Paris Exposition of 1900, one primarily aimed at the decorative arts.19 What was also extraordinary was that some Art Nouveau practitioners voiced opinions on the relation between fashion and their crafts. For instance, with some of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s plans for Scottish interior décor, he ‘indicated the design and colour of the gowns to be worn, so that no disturbing element might mar the unity of the conception’.20 Similarly, when Belgian architect Henry van de Velde built his home, he created dresses for his wife Marie Sèthe to wear that coordinated with the furnishings. As Andrea Kollnitz and Louise Wallenberg have written: ‘Fashion from its origins inseparably linked to change, plays an important role in the modern avant-garde fascination for transgression and revolution . . .Through the advocators and practicioners of the Gesamtkunsterk, the total artwork, fashion is uplifted to an art form of the same gravity as the traditional arts’.21

Nature and the ‘feminine’ It is telling that several of the Art Nouveau fashion items cited thus far were conceived according to organic motifs – for instance, outfits patterned with flowers, leaves, trees or fruit. This is no accident, since Nature was a major theme of the movement. Many have seen this orientation as a reaction against the growing industrialization of the urban world in the nineteenth century, which was often viewed as ugly, soulless and threatening. As Walter Benjamin wrote: ‘Jugendstil is . . . [an] attempt on the part of art to come to terms with technology.’22 For him, the movement offered organic imagery as an antidote to the mechanical; thus, he writes that it ‘found expression in the mediumistic language of line, in the flower as symbol of the naked, vegetable Nature that confronted the technologically armed environment’.23 Obviously, however, there was nothing

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essentially ‘natural’ about the works crafted in the Art Nouveau mode; rather they were highly synthetic objects that merely mimicked Nature in their iconography. Thus, they always registered a tension between two opposing poles: the organic and the artificial. Nonetheless, the movement stands in contrast to others like Futurism or Constructivism which openly valorized the machine. But Art Nouveau’s stance on Nature was not ideologically neutral; rather it was relentlessly linked to the female in highly stereotypical ways. Thus, it is not surprising that we find the figure of Woman herself another dominant motif of the mode. Here, Art Nouveau showed the influence of the romanticized, otherworldly, pictorial style of Pre-Raphaelite painters like Dante Gabriel Rossetti (for instance, in Bocca Baciata [1859], Beata Beatrix [1864–70] or Lady Lilith [1867]). Beyond this, Art Nouveau’s focus on Woman was an aspect of its invocation of eroticism. Some have even argued that the rounded lines and volumes that characterized the major trope of the style (the so-called ‘whiplash curve’) had broad sexual overtones. While they ‘might appear to be based on plants and landscapes . . . they often also resonated with the profile of limbs, breasts, [and] buttocks’.24 Clearly, in Art Nouveau’s vision of Woman, her sensuous, oft-nude figuration was a contrast to prim Victorian representations; however, this liberatory move did not negate the movement’s exploitation of the ‘visual pleasure’ she presented to the male viewer. Perhaps another reason that Art Nouveau had ‘feminine’ associations was its link to ornamentation. Given this clichéd view, it seems no accident that one of Art Nouveau’s most cherished women’s fashion accessories was jewellery, a common means of adorning women. As Alexandre Circi notes: ‘Historically, woman is denoted by her richly ornamental costume, it establishes her as the personification of beauty and worldly riches.’25 But let us examine the particular organic motifs that attached to Art Nouveau fashion and accessories.

The plant world As Jason Farago has noted: ‘Between flowers and sex there has long been an enduring link’. The connection has had gendered implications: ‘You need only think of the names Rose, Lily, Daisy, Violet . . . Women’s names, all of them.’26 As Farago continues, in the nineteenth century: [. . .] both in England and in France, floral metaphors for women’s genitals started to, well, blossom. In Manet’s Olympia, one of the signal paintings of the nineteenth century, the titular prostitute covers her genitals with her left hand.

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But she has a pink camellia in her hair – a stand-in for her covered sex – and indeed her servant comes in from the side of the composition bearing a bouquet of flowers.27

Hence, floral imagery comes with considerable semiological baggage, tying it to Woman and the erotic. Within Art Nouveau women’s fashion, countless items sported floral patterns, thereby invoking metaphors of female sexuality. Indicative of this is a cream silk and lace waisted dress of 1902 that has a tight-fitting bodice, puffy short sleeves and a bell-shaped skirt. It is highlighted with blue silk satin, metallic thread and rhinestones. From waist to hem, its surface is decked with a riot of quasi-threedimensional flowers and vines. It was designed by Jean-Philippe Worth (1856– 1926) of the Parisian House of Worth which was in business from 1858 to 1956 and was one of the foremost Art Nouveau couturiers. (See Figure 7.2.) Bold

Figure 7.2 Jean-Philippe Worth for House of Worth. Cream silk evening dress, 1902. The gown is embellished with huge flowers that illustrate the Art Nouveau movement’s love of Nature. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Art Resource, New York.

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floral prints (often in daring colours) were, in fact, one of the company’s hallmarks. For instance, pictured in a book about their work, is a 1912 evening gown of printed silk mousseline whose ‘skirt [is] composed of diagonal bands of striped silk alternating with bands printed with huge sunflower heads. The caption tells us that the sunflowers are in blue!’.28 The firm was founded by Jean-Philippe’s father, the British-born Charles Frederick Worth, and has been credited with several ‘firsts’ in fashion history: the use of live models, the pioneering of seasonal collections, the attachment of a designer’s label to garments, and apparel produced to a client’s specific measurements. While most of the stitching was done by hand, long seams were sewn on machines. Worth’s garments were produced in the most luxe fabrics – silks, velvets, satins, chiffon, tulle, linens and cottons. In fact, in the Gilded Age (where wealthy women might change outfits four times a day), having clothing designed by Worth was a sign of having arrived in the highest tier of society. This is because the company dressed royalty, aristocrats and celebrities like Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanor Duse and Jenny Lind. Mary Frances Gormally asks: ‘What did possessing a Worth wardrobe bestow?’ [A] Worth gown was the ‘ultimate in luxury dress and the most expensive at the time. In a socially regulated year, garments custom made with a Worth label provided women with total reassurance, whatever the season, time of day or occasion, setting them apart as members of the ‘Best Circles’ dressed in luxurious, fashionable and always appropriate attire. The woman with a Worth wardrobe was a woman of elegance, lineage, status, extreme wealth and faultless taste.29

As for fashion ethics, there was a huge chasm between the lives of Worth’s customers (the ‘idle rich’) and those of his workers. As Adolf Loos wrote in 1908 in his manifesto against the ornament: ‘The criminally low wages paid to the embroiderers and the lacemaker are well known.’30 A 2014 book published on the House of Worth allows us to understand the workings of its atelier.31 In the 1920s (the apogee of Parisian haute couture) it employed 200 permanent and 1,000 temporary workers (hired at peak times). Those on contract were given one meal a day on the premises (cooked by kitchen staff ), the cost of which was deducted from their pay. According to Gormally (based on research by Amy De La Haye and Valerie Helene Mendes): There is physical discomfort for the atelier workers. The House of Worth has a hierarchy in forms of seating. In the tailoring atelier the 16 women sit on wooden stools with no back support. In the dressmaking atelier they sit on slatted-back wooden chairs which prove uncomfortable after a few hours. However, the

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women typists and bookkeepers are provided with wicker-backed chairs and cushions.32

The company also employed skilled embroiderers and trimmers who embellished gowns with pearls, jet, lace, tassels and artificial flowers. It took a three-to-fiveyear apprenticeship to become a flower maker, during which time workers would risk skin diseases from handling certain dyes (especially the green ones used for leaves and stems).33 Gormally also references the labor of the salon’s staff: Sales assistants have to stand around . . . In the boutique there are three assistants – one is engaged with a client and one is leaning against a display table, poised to spring into service. Anyone who has worked in fashion retail recognizes that stance when, after hours of standing, the lower back aches, and a moment of supported leaning brings some relief.34

A second floral dress (designed by Callot Soeurs of Paris, another important fashion house) elaborates the imagery in a far more restrained fashion, perhaps because it is from a decade later: 1915–16. It is also made from silk with metallic accents. Peach coloured and almost trapezoidal in shape, it definitely offers a more modern outline than the Worth gown. Though waisted, it is far more loosefitting than the former (allowing the female body more freedom), and the squared-off neckline dips lower. The bodice seems to be crocheted in antique brass thread, which is carried out in the gauzy under-slip which hangs below the hem. The dress’s surface is patterned quite subtly with metallic flowers and a three-dimensional bloom gathers up part of the hem, making it uneven. This is a far more contemporary looking frock than the Worth garment and seems to pave the way for the brand of couture we associate with the Roaring Twenties. (See Figure 7.3.) The Callot Soeurs (a team of sisters) produced edgy couture for the period and were praised by Proust in A Remembrance of Things Past.35 A propos, a New York Times article of 1914 states that there has ‘never been a collection of gowns shown at the house of Callot without a sensational costume that caused shocks or laughter’. Such outfits make ‘everyone talk and that is what Callot wishes’.36 The designers are credited with being among the first to abandon the corset for less constrictive silhouettes.37 One of their evening dresses from 1915–16 is truly remarkable for its shape: a modified chemise cut that we associate with later eras, not to mention its rather risqué bodice, displaying more skin than most outfits of the time. Again, its persimmon-coloured skirt is decorated with flowers made of gold metallic thread. A Callot Soeurs evening coat from 1916–17 has a

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Figure 7.3 Callot Soeurs, French silk evening dress, 1915–16. The loose shape of this flower-patterned dress is quite modern for the era, prefiguring those of the 1920s. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Art Resource, New York.

similarly relaxed fit and is made of silk, metallic thread and fur, while being adorned with large flowers. Finally, one of their evening gowns from the tail end of Art Nouveau’s reign (1920–1), seems a full out flapper outfit; quite bare on the top, with a black silk skirt embellished with a floral design in multicoloured metallic thread. The four Callot sisters first opened their shop in 1895. They had the decided advantage of hailing from a family of art and textile dealers. Moreover, their mother was an expert lace-maker and many of their garments utilized such intricate work (often refashioned from eighteenth-century samples). In many respects, they were highly innovative; for instance, they were one of the first to employ gold and silver lame.38 In particular, the oldest sister, Marie Gerber, was a talented innovator: ‘Inspired by the oriental and avant-garde arts, she eventually designed dresses reminiscent of Cubist influences, made of laces and embroideries resembling collages.’39

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In 1900, Callot Soeurs was represented at the prestigious Paris World’s Fair. At that time, they employed 200 people and saw two million francs in sales. By 1901, their workforce had tripled and their sales had doubled.40 In 1916 American Vogue dubbed the women the ‘Three Fates’, and declared them ‘foremost among the powers that rule the destinies of a woman’s life’.41 Their firm remained in business until 1927. In addition to couture, Art Nouveau accessories of the era were also marked strongly by floral patterns. A New York Times ‘In the Shops’ column from 1902, for instance, mentions ladies’ handkerchiefs decorated with flowers and stems.42 Furthermore a hair ornament produced by Phillipe Wolfers in Belgium around 1905–07 bears the figure of an orchid (a particularly sensual bloom), and a René Lalique tiara of 1903–04 displays a curvilinear arrangement of flowers to encircle a woman’s crown. But it was jewellery that revealed, in a tour de force manner, vegetative motifs, as is clear from such pieces as a floral necklace and a hair ornament, produced by Louis Comfort Tiffany in America in 1904. Likewise, in France, Lalique utilized floral patterns in the jewellery he crafted with gold, enamel, precious jewels and frosted glass. If we turn to the theatrical realm, we find that floral imagery appeared in Art Nouveau-age cinema in the form of outfits worn by chorus girls. Such costumes are prevalent in the magic films of the Spaniard Segundo de Chomón, who worked for a period at Pathé in Paris. This iconography is present in The Living Flowers (1908), in which soubrettes morph into flowers and dance.

The animal world As we have noted, Woman has often been seen, within a masculine framework, as closer to Nature. Thus, it is not surprising that she has sometimes been viewed as nearer to the bestial world than Man, clearly an aspect of misogynistic thinking. In their book Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan make specific note of this association and its ethical implications.43 As they write: ‘Historically, the ideological justification for women’s alleged inferiority has been made by appropriating them to animals.’44 Moreover, Joan Dunayer (a contributor to their volume) writes: Applying images of denigrated nonhuman species to women labels women inferior and available for abuse; attaching images of the aggrandized human

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species to men designates them superior and entitled to exploit. Language is a powerful agent in assigning the imagery of animal vs. human. Feminists have long objected to ‘animal’ pejoratives for women and the pseudogenerics of man and mankind.45

Dunayer goes on to point out a variety of negative or sexist animal-derived terms that have been applied to women, for instance, catty, bitch, queen bee, old crow, sow, dog, social butterfly, chick and cow. Furthermore, a group of women may be deemed a hen party, and when a man is scolded by a woman, he is henpecked.46 If language can have a deleterious effect on social conceptions of Woman, clearly so can images. Interestingly, a recent psychological study found that ‘when women are objectified by a focus on their sexual features (sexual objectification) they were perceived as lacking uniquely human attributes (i.e. animalistic dehumanization)’. For these researchers, the ‘uniquely human dimension is defined as that which separates humans from other animals’ and involves such ‘socially constructed’ qualities as ‘rationality, morality, and higher-order cognitive functioning’ – precisely those elements we associated with Culture.47 So, conceiving women as ‘less than human’ has perverse ethical implications, marking them as open to abuse. Thus, when Art Nouveau utilizes animal iconography in women’s attire, it has strong negative ideological overtones that associate them with the subhuman or ‘primitive’. Given the difficulties of incorporating animal imagery into clothing design, it appeared less frequently than plants in Art Nouveau fashion. One rather novel item of this type, however, is a pair of snake-adorned stockings made in Paris in 1900 that exhibit Art Nouveau’s interest in disturbing as well as enchanting creatures. There was, of course, the traditional use of fur in some items, mostly capes and coats. Then, as now, this has troubling ethical implications since it entails the sacrifice of animals in the name of allure or status. However, at the House of Worth, consumers were able to purchase items with fur sans fur (or ‘fake fur’ as we would now call it).48 Though animal patterning was rare in clothing, fashion magazine illustrations of the period often posed models next to birds, establishing an equivalence between the two. We find this, for instance, in advertisements for the designs of Paul Poiret or Jacques Doucet.49 In Art Nouveau jewellery, however, animal iconography is everywhere. There is, for example, a ‘cat choker’ crafted by Lalique (1906–08) which alternates square panels of felines and foliage etched in rock crystal, bringing plants and animals together in one item. There are also several pieces that depict birds. A 1900 gold and plique-à-jour enamel watch pin by the American Riker Brothers

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(studded with diamonds, rubies and pearls) portrays what looks like a flamingo, and a Lalique necklace from 1897–9 (made of gold, enamel, opal and amethyst) features nine pendants picturing long-necked foul. Portraying a mythical animal, the Riker Brothers produced a gold dragon bracelet in 1900. Insects were also represented in jewellery, especially the elegant dragonfly (e.g. a famous Lalique brooch of the era that gives the creature female breasts and head). Some pieces depicted less romantic insects, though. In France, for example, Gaillard created pieces portraying beetles and moths (as in a pendant and a necklace from 1900). Similarly, French designer Georges Fouquet created a brooch in 1901 that featured a hornet, a stinging insect that one generally avoids. There was also a very large serpent bracelet and hand decoration made for Sarah Bernhardt by Alphonse Mucha and Fouquet in 1899, and a serpent pectoral crafted by Lalique around the same time.50 Not all unsettling creatures pictured in Art Nouveau accessories were insects. For instance, an ‘In the Shops’ column from the New York Times of 1904 talks of women’s belt buckles decorated with bats.51 What is significant about all these items is that rather than link Woman to benign or beautiful creatures (e.g. birds), they tie her to malign ones, evincing the antithetical ideological vision of the female that Art Nouveau embraces. If we turn again to film costuming, we find insects galore in Segundo de Chomón’s trick films of the era, many of which evince Art Nouveau miseen-scène. Two depict women as gorgeous, colourful butterflies: Metempsychosis (1907) and Japanese Butterflies (1907). Other insects are portrayed as well in The Bee and the Rose (1908), and in The Golden Beetle (1907). However, one particular animal left a vivid mark on the era’s fashion: the peacock, as is evident in a Lalique pectoral (1898–1900) and two pendants (one by Lalique [1901] and another [also made in France] by Lucien Gautrait [1900]). The bird’s popularity is significant because, as an icon, the peacock has resonant ideological associations. According to Inga Fraser, the peacock was seen in this era as an animal with a ‘complex symbolism’ that included fertility, rebirth and beauty – features often linked to Woman.52 But the trope also smacks of Orientalism, so prevalent in the era of rampant colonialism. As Christine E. Jackson writes: ‘Japanese wares, pottery, ivory and bronzes had been shown at the Paris Exhibition of 1862, after which the peacock became the symbol of fashionable and conspicuous opulence, the perfect motif for. . . Art Nouveau.’53 For Charles Darwin, the peacock feather was the prime example of the stunning plumage with which male birds attracted females. Yet, in Art Nouveau, they are used to adorn females. But, of course, in the human world, Woman is deemed the

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more spectacular gender, historically aided by artificial means of beautification (jewellery, make-up, clothing, etc.) to serve as sexual enticements.54 It is for this reason that when the Waldorf Astoria hotel opened in New York City in 1893, the colonnade between the two parts of the building was known as Peacock Alley – a place where people paraded, showing off their couture and membership among the elite. Not surprisingly, an illustration of the Alley in its heyday primarily depicts fashionably dressed women. Peacock iconography is rampant in Art Nouveau couture: just one example is a 1910 dress made in France by Weeks (Figure 7.4). A small peacock is depicted on the dress’s gauzy bodice, and a very large one decorates its floor-length skirt. Its short sleeves are also adorned with a peacock feather pattern. Interestingly, this imagery is carried out on the back of the garment which mirrors the front. The dress is made with a black silk chiffon base that is embroidered in turquoise,

Figure 7.4 Weeks (French) evening dress, 1910. Black silk chiffon printed and embroidered with peacock imagery. The gorgeous peacock was popular in Art Nouveau iconography, indicating the movement’s love of ornament and Nature. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Art Resource, New York.

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green and blue polychrome silk and metallic gold thread, suggesting the coloration of the bird. Beyond this dress, there is a Liberty fabric that displays a peacock pattern,55 and a 1912 cover illustration for the fashion magazine Les Modes (entitled ‘Chez Poiret’) that shows a woman in a peacock cloak.56 As for theatrical costuming, there is a famous peacock costume (designed by Pachaud of Paris) worn by ‘Dolores’ in the 1919 edition Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic, and one donned by Ruth St Denis in her 1914 dance, ‘The Peacock’. When it comes to film costuming, we think immediately of a work starring Alla Nazimova that advances the peacock theme. In Madame Peacock (1920), she plays Jane Goring, a vain and selfish actress, who is associated with the bird throughout the narrative. She is a cruel femme fatale, which reminds us that Inga Fraser saw the peacock as the ‘preferred guise of the vamp’.57 Jane has a portrait of herself in her house wearing a peacock cape (done in the manner of Aubrey Beardsley), as well as a three-panelled graphic whose design is inspired by the bird’s plumage. Furthermore, the headboard of her bed features a peacock design, and the proscenium and boxes of the theatre in which she performs are awash with such imagery. Here, peacock iconography attaches to her character and signals danger, narcissism and extravagance. A more threatening animal – the octopus – is referenced in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Affairs of Anatol (1921), decorating the cape, headdress and gown of a seductress. It reminds us that this sea creature (with its suggestion of strangulation) was sometimes figured in Art Nouveau jewellery as well, as in brooches by Wilhelm Lucas von Cranach and Louis Aucoc, both from around 1900.

Woman as icon Women were not only the primary consumers of Art Nouveau fashion; they were also one of its favoured pictorial figurations. This is not surprising since, as Rosalind Galt has noted, through the ages, females have been associated with ornamentation (a keynote of the style). But more importantly, on a cultural level, they have been devalued for that connection (as superficial, corporeal or excessive).58 A New York Times article from 1901 talks of an umbrella handle with ‘graceful damsels in draperies of two colors’ and a ‘head of [a]. . . maiden . . . in . . . tones of gold and . . . silver’.59 But the preponderance of such imagery appears in jewellery.

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Some pieces depict the entire female body, as in a pendant made by EmmanuelJules-Joseph (Joé) Descomps in Paris around 1900 (fashioned of gold, ‘plique-àjour’ enamel, peridot and multi-coloured diamonds), but most items portray only the female head. Thus, a New York Times column of 1902 speaks of brooches adorned with ‘art nouveau [women’s] heads’.60 Lalique fashioned numerous such jewellery pieces. In one (made of opalescent glass and silver), a woman’s face is enclosed in a bunch of flowers. In a second from 1900, a woman’s face (in enamel and gold) constitutes part of a bower of leaves and berries. Here, we also think of a brooch (specific date and maker unknown) that pictures a female face of ivory with wild (Medusa-like) locks of brass hair flowing beyond the borders of the pin, all set against an enamel background ornamented with brass flowers. (See Figure 7.5.) All these items display the female head versus the entire body. In all, the woman’s face seems entirely opaque – a kind of mask – tuning into stereotypes of Woman as Mystery. Furthermore, these portrayals smack of decapitation, since the head is repeatedly separated from the torso, reminding us of Sigmund Freud’s essay on the Medusa – a figure that he sees as bespeaking the male fear of castration as well as the dread of female genitalia.61 Here, we recall Simone de Beauvoir’s highlighting ‘the ambivalent feelings’ that Woman generally ‘inspires in man’ in her canonical feminist text The Second Sex.62

Figure 7.5 Art Nouveau brass, ivory and enamel brooch. Beyond the female body, the female face was an omnipresent element of Art Nouveau jewellery design. Image: Universal Images Group. Source: Art Resource, New York.

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Figure 7.6 In the fantasy film Metempsychosis (Segundo de Chómon, 1907), Woman is part human and part insect.

Finally, what is so interesting about Art Nouveau’s conception of Woman is not simply that it associates her with plants and animals in elements of clothing, jewellery and accessories – but that it also merges her with them. Here, we think of Chomón’s flower- and insect females, as well as Lalique’s dragonfly- and plant women (See Figure 7.6). This vision of Woman as a bizarre hybrid creature (blending human, vegetal and bestial traits) makes her not only an emblem of Nature, but a ‘freak of Nature’.

Nature vs culture As we have shown, during the Art Nouveau era, women’s fashion drew upon the movement’s fascination with the Organic – clothing women in outfits decorated with pictures of the floral and animal world. Beyond this, there is even a dress by the House of Worth that takes the female association with Nature one step further by creating a gown (c. 1890) of pastel and gold silk, satin and chiffon that depicts the entire sky. Thus, it is ‘embroidered with [a] shimmering sunburst through cumulus clouds’ (see Figure 7.7).63

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Figure 7.7 House of Worth silk ballgown c. 1892. The dress seeks to represent the entire sky, including sunburst and clouds. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Art Resource, New York.

Given that the third iconographic obsession of the mode was the female herself, it becomes even clearer that the theme of Nature is linked, selectively, to Woman. On one level, this is no surprise since traditional societies have always made that connection – though perhaps, not as emphatically as in Art Nouveau. The dichotomy at the base of this notion was analysed eloquently by de Beauvoir. As she observes: ‘Man seeks in woman the Other as Nature and his fellow being. But we know what ambivalent feelings Nature inspires in man. . . Nature is a vein of gross material, in which the soul is imprisoned . . . she is what opposes the Spirit . . . Now ally, now enemy, she appears as the dark chaos from whence life wells up . . . Woman sums up Nature.’64 As late as the 1970s, at the birth of second wave feminism, activists once more felt the need to foreground this fundamental dichotomy. As Sherry B. Ortner asks in the title of a groundbreaking article: ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’65 Clearly, her answer to that query (in the context of the dominant

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culture) is yes and opines that ‘the secondary status of woman in society is one of the true universals, a pan-cultural fact’.66 As she inquires: What could there be in the generalized structure and conditions of existence, common to every culture, that would lead every culture to place a lower value upon women? Specifically, my thesis is that woman is identified with – or . . . seems to be a symbol of – something culture devalues . . . as being a lower order of existence . . . Now it seems that there is only one thing that would fit that description, and that is ‘nature’.67

As for why this vision of Woman as ‘primitive’ occurs, she asserts: ‘It all begins of course with the body and the natural procreative functions specific to women alone. . . [W]oman’s body and its functions [seem] more involved . . . with ‘species life’, and seem to place her closer to nature.’68 Among the bodily processes that lead to this characterization are such things as childbirth, lactation and menstruation. Furthermore, due to them, women are often confined to the domestic sphere, seen as a ‘lower order of social/cultural organization’.69 While this vision of woman clearly no longer dominates most contemporary societies, it has historical validity, and, unfortunately, still obtains in some cultures around the world. While beliefs concerning reproduction and maternity might well be at the root of the classical Nature/Culture divide, it is interesting that Walter Benjamin saw the figure of the Art Nouveau female as rejecting such a characterization – as rather constituting an ‘unnatural mother’. As he wrote, disparagingly: ‘The fundamental motif of Jugendstil is the transfiguration of infertility.’70 Perhaps the bifurcated stance of the Art Nouveau female is due to the movement straddling two eras. While, at the turn of the twentieth century, the position of women was still highly delimited, within a few decades, the force of the New Woman would begin to be felt. Thus, there is a contradiction in how the image of Woman is articulated in Art Nouveau. Some may sense an idealization of her, given that her stunning image appears on so many paintings and artifacts. But, as de Beauvoir and Ortner point out, such ennoblement comes at a cost: depreciation and mystification, as well as societal exclusion and constraint. Clearly, all of these have strong negative ethical implications. What is especially provocative about Art Nouveau fashion is its hyperbolic insistence on the linkage of Woman and Nature. If, in common parlance, an emotional woman is said to ‘wear her heart on her sleeve’, we might say that the Art Nouveau woman ‘wore’ patriarchal ideology on her body through the clothing and accessories that adorned it. Thus, Art Nouveau fashion took the

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feminist notion of the “masquerade” to new heights – urging women to ‘perform femininity’ through the epoch’s chic, but cliché-ridden, couture.

Art Nouveau Fashion Redux: 1960s–present In 2009, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris launched a show entitled Art Nouveau Revival, curated by Philippe Thiébaut. The blurb for the exhibition stated that ‘while forgotten – discredited even – for many decades, Art Nouveau was rehabilitated in the 1960s in a way that affected the history of art and the art market as much as contemporary creative work (design and graphics)’.71 The Museum gave several reasons for this resurgence – some dating back to decades earlier than the sixties: ‘tributes paid by the Surrealists in the 1930s, the Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition organized by the MoMA in 1940, as well as major exhibitions put on in New York (Art Nouveau. Art and Design at the Turn of the Century, MoMA, 1959), and in Paris (Les sources du XXe siècle, Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1960).’72 The goal of the Museum’s exhibition was not so much to catalog the causes of Art Nouveau’s renaissance but to ‘compar[e] Art Nouveau creations with creative output from 1950 to 1970, in order to highlight the influences expressed in very varied and sometimes unexpected areas, such as furnishings, fashion, advertising, films and even the psychedelic aesthetic’.73 Clearly, writers in the heyday of the resurrection were aware of this trend. A Time magazine ‘Graphics’ column from 7 April 1967 states: Like a butterfly bombarded by gamma rays, art nouveau is mutating, intermarrying with the eye-jarring color schemes of op and the gaudy commercialism of pop. A naked woman, body-painted like a Tiffany lamp shade, decorates the latest ads for Casino Royale; dust jackets for Madame Sarah and Louis Auchincloss’ Tales of Manhattan look like so much leftover Alfons Mucha.74

A Vogue advertisement for Albert Weiss jewellery from its September 1961 issue is evidence of this revival.75 At the top of the page are the words ‘Art Nouveau’ and below a picture of flower- and leaf-shaped brooches on a psychedelic print featuring a female face. What is most intriguing about the movement’s reawakening is the different valence that Art Nouveau held in the 1960s as compared to the turn of the twentieth century. While at the fin de siècle the movement was considered by many as dissolute and threatening, in the 1960s its associations with licentiousness

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met the celebratory liberation of a counter-culture. While in early modernity, Art Nouveau’s eroticism was viewed as quasi-immoral, in the 1960s it supported the nascent sexual revolution – as exemplified in the 1967 ‘Summer of Love’. As part of the zeitgeist of the era, clothing indirectly revealed an Art Nouveau influence. While in its earlier incarnation, women’s clothing was often emblazoned with icons of Nature, this was not largely the case in its later incarnations (except for the ubiquitous flower). Thus, in its new iteration, it was somewhat relieved of the pernicious female stereotypes that characterized its earlier appearance. Rather, designers often embraced Art Nouveau’s organicism in a more abstract manner, in the form of its long, loose flowing lines (echoing the whiplash curve), its exoticism and its bold, colourful palette. Interestingly, such attire was not limited to women; rather flamboyant outfits were also worn by men (especially rock stars). We can see this new ‘androgyny’ in Milton Glaser’s famous psychedelic poster of Bob Dylan in which the singer’s head is surrounded by endless, multihued swirling lines (an updated version of the flowing hair of the Art Nouveau Woman). As Clare Rose notes, in this period, young designers returned to the Art Nouveau style ‘through travel on the “hippie trail” to Africa, India and the Far East or through historic documents’. For instance, ‘Zandra Rhodes used Max Tilke’s 1920s volume Costume Patterns and Designs as an inspiration for both the cut and decoration of her delicate chiffon smokes and kaftans’.76 Rose also cites the sinuous, graceful lines of evening wear by Yuki in the 1970s. Furthermore, she remarks on how the boom in antique/vintage clothing sales in this period augmented the embrace of an Art Nouveau aesthetic. Other contemporary fashion notables were affected by the mode. Anna Sui describes how she learned about the movement in the 1960s. As she writes: The Victoria and Albert Museum devoted a big exhibition to the Victorian illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, showing his pictures alongside the burgeoning psychedelic art of the time. An older kid at school used to bring me psychedelic art nouveau posters from the famous Grande Ballroom of Detroit’s Fillmore. And I found a Beardsley poster at the Head Shoppe in Ann Arbor . . . My Beardsley bedroom had pale gray walls. I lacquered everything black – the peacock rattan headboard, the vanity I bought downtown.

Significantly, when Sui moved to New York City and set up her bedroom there, she ‘imported the Aubrey Beardsley aesthetic from Detroit’.77 We can see the mark of Art Nouveau in the branch of Sui’s couture that favours long, flowing, multicoloured dresses (classified in one book under the headings ‘Hippie’ and ‘La Vie Boheme’). As Andrew Bolton writes, ‘Historicism, the impulse to be of the

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past but in the present . . . is one of the defining features of Sui’s work’. In line with this, she ‘relaxed the silhouettes’ of her outfits.78 He also notes how aspects of her 2002 Autumn/Winter collection were inspired by the costumes of the Russian artist and Art Nouveau designer Leon Bakst, and how elements of her Spring/ Summer 2006 collection were influenced by the styles of Poiret, Worth, Paquin and Doucet.79 Furthermore, he mentions that her 2008 Autumn/Winter collection drew upon the decor of the Veterans Room of the New York Armory, which featured elements created by Louis Comfort Tiffany.80 Aspects of Pierre Cardin’s design style also hark back to Art Nouveau. Both his white Wedding Gown of 1997 and his red Parabolic Evening Dress of 2012 – with their insistent swirls of organza or jersey – remind us of the skirt dances of Loïe Fuller at the turn of the century, known for producing spirals in the performer’s fluid folds of dress fabric. The linkage of Cardin’s couture with Art Nouveau is no accident, as he was a dedicated collector of the movement’s artifacts and the owner of Maxim’s restaurant in Paris, an architectural landmark of the style.81 One can tour the upper floors of the establishment to view Cardin’s assemblage of period objects. Alexander McQueen is another artist with debts to Art Nouveau. A dress in his Sarabande collection from Spring/Summer 2007 quotes (in an excessive and ironic manner) Art Nouveau’s love of nature by being embellished with both silk and real three-dimensional flowers (the latter of which lose their petals as the blooms wilt). A common form of Art Nouveau citation in the fashion world comes in the form of homages to the painter Gustav Klimt. Starting the trend, in September 1965, dresses by Cardin were pictured in Vogue,82 posed in front of two paintings by the artist (Hygieia [1901] and Death and Life [1908–15]). Another Vogue article of 1969 about Fall looks touts an evening dress reminiscent of Klimt and ‘Art Nou’ – with its ‘packed together print pattern against pattern, color against color . . . peacock eye to confetti, swirls swelling to arabesques . . . a transparent shimmer of gold washing over it’.83 Similarly, in Vogue of July 1976, an ad for the store Sakowitz displays a Mary McFadden dress that looks straight out of the 1900s, described as bearing a ‘pastel Klimt design’.84 Rounding out these references in Vogue, a piece from 1997 describes a John Galliano Dior ensemble that resembles one depicted in Klimt’s The Kiss, the painter being one of his major influences.85 Citations of Klimt continue into the new century. An article in Vogue from September 2006 mentions a gold sequined tunic dress by Yves Saint Laurent that suggests the artist’s sense of colour.86 Then, harking back to Cardin’s layout in 1965, a Vogue article (entitled ‘Golden Lady: How Gustav Klimt’s Gilded

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Paintings Influence the Runway’), juxtaposes a McQueen outfit (of black and gold) with the painter’s Fulfillment (1905), portraying a man and a woman whose overlapping coats bear a similar hue.87 (A second article from the same year also makes a connection between McQueen and Klimt.)88 According to Josh Sims, still other designers have felt the impact of the painter: Nina Ricci, Givenchy, Valentino, Aquilano Rimondi, Christian Dior and Matthew Williamson.89 As he notes: Klimt lends himself most obviously to inspiring maximalist fashion design perhaps simply because so much of his work was based around the figure and focused attention on elaborate decoration, especially the tunic-like swathes of fabric his figures were draped in – in keeping with the art nouveau period’s rebellion against restrictive womenswear. Klimt painted in a period in which decadence and opulence was celebrated and his work was perhaps an especially artful form of proto-fashion illustration.90

Similarly, Esther Adams Achara sees the heritage of Klimt in the work of Rick Owens. As she comments: The bohemian smock Klimt often wore himself, along with the Art Nouveau-era tunics worn by the society ladies in his portraits – a rebellion against the considerably restrictive corsets of the time – appear to be the thought behind Rick Owens’ voluminous, floor-length silhouettes for spring.91

Finally, an article from 2015 finds a Klimtian touch in fashion by Tory Burch and L’Wren Scott.92 Clearly, for many of today’s famous couturiers, the aura of Art Nouveau (whether it be the heritage of Klimt or the style’s broader discourse) is still alive – functioning as a potent and resonant stimulus for their imaginations. Although they draw upon the movement’s sense of organicism and freedom, their work is largely devoid of the pernicious female stereotypes that haunted it. Thus, while Art Nouveau may have waned by the mid-1920s, for contemporary designers, there are still valuable lessons to be learned from it, demonstrating once more that the past is often prologue.

Notes 1 Clare Rose, Art Nouveau Fashion (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), 9. 2 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 557.

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3 Adolph Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998). 4 Patrick Bade, Mucha (New York: Parkstone Press, 2011), 88. 5 Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 8. 6 Dolf Sternberger, quoted in Umberto Eco, ed. History of Beauty (New York: Rizzoli, 2004), 369. 7 Ibid. 8 Clare Rose, ‘Art Nouveau Fashion 1890–1914’, pdf. Available online: https://www. academia.edu/6106331/Art_Nouveau_Fashion_1890_1914 (accessed January 2021). 9 Clare Rose, Art Nouveau Fashion (London: V&A Publishing, 2014). 10 Senses: Art Nouveau Brussels. Available online: http://www.senses-artnouveau.com/ biography.php?artist=FOR (accessed January 2021). 11 Senses: Art Nouveau Brussels. 12 Anne Marie Deschodt, Fortuny (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 97, 141, 152, 73. 13 Anna Furman, ‘Before Coco Chanel There Was Emilie Flöge: A Designer the Fashion Industry Forgot’, in Bazaar (19 September, 2017). Available online: https://www. harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a12241915/klimt-muse-emilie-flogeforgotten-fashion-designer/ (accessed January 2021). 14 Fiona McCarthy. ‘The Aesthetic Movement’, in The Guardian (25 March 2001). Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/mar/26/ aestheticism-exhibition-victoria-albert-museum accessed 30 September 2022, 15 Victor Arwas, The Liberty Style (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), 16. 16 Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, http://www.scva.ac.uk/education/resources/ pdfs/13.pdf. Unfortunately, this website is no longer active. 17 Sainsbury Centre. 18 Rose, Art Nouveau Fashion, 9. 19 Ibid., 10. 20 Quoted in Rose, Art Nouveau Fashion, 11. 21 Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz (eds), Fashion and Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 6. 22 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 557. 23 Benjamin, ‘Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, Perspecta vol. 12 (1969): 169. 24 Exhibition wall text, exhibit at Pinocathèque Paris entitled ‘L’Art Nouveau – La Révolution Décorative’, June 2013. 25 Alexandre Circi, 1900 en Barcelona (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 1967), 42. 26 Jason Farago, ‘Erotic Blooms: The Sex Appeal of Flowers, 6 March 2016. BBC Culture. Available online: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160303-eroticblooms-the-sex-appeal-of-flowers (accessed January 2021). 27 Ibid.

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28 Mary Frances Gormally, ‘The House of Worth: Portrait of an Archive’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, vol. 21, no. 1 (2017): 109–26, 117. 29 Ibid., 117. 30 Adolph Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’, in Ulrich Conrad’s Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture (Boston, MA: The MIT Press, 1975), 22. 31 Amy De La Haye and Valerie Helene Mendes, The House of Worth: Portrait of an Archive – 1890–1914 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2015). 32 Gormally, 123. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 ‘Callot Soeurs: A Female Fashion Family Affair’. Europeana Foundation, 6 March 2020. Available online: https://www.europeana.eu/en/blog/callot-soeurs-a-femalefashion-family-affair (accessed 1 October 2022). 36 ‘Callot and Turkish Trousers’, in New York Times (29 March 1914), 70. 37 ‘Callot Soeurs: A Female Fashion Family Affair’. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 ‘Callot Soeurs’, Wikipedia 41 ‘Callot Soeurs’, Wikipedia. 42 ‘In the Shops’, in The New York Times (29 April 1902), 7. 43 Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, eds, Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 2. 44 Ibid. 45 Joan Dunayer, ‘Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots’, in Adams and Donovan, 11, my emphasis. 46 Ibid., 12. 47 Kasey Lynn Morris, Jamie Goldenberg and Patrick Boyd ‘Women as Animals, Women as Objects: Evidence for Two Forms of Objectification’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin vol. 4 (2018): 1–2. 48 Gormally, 115. 49 April Calahan and Cassidy Zachary, Fashion and the Art of Pochoir: The Golden Age of Illustration in Paris (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015), 47, 50, 156. (Sometimes it is only a bird cage that is seen.) 50 Rose, Art Nouveau Fashion, 102., 51 ‘In the Shops’, The New York Times (26 July 26 1904), 7. For a picture of the Tiffany bat table lamp, see the Sotheby’s website: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ ecatalogue/2013/tiffany-n09061/lot.326.html (accessed 1 October 2022). 52 Inga Fraser, ‘Born Fully Clothed: The Significance of Costume for the Silent Cinema Vamp’, in Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle, ed. Marketa Uhlirova (Cologne: Walther König, 2014), 179–201, 190.

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53 Christine E. Jackson, Peacock (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 162. 54 Diana Donald and Jane Munro, eds, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 237, 266, 276. 55 Arwas, Liberty, 13. 56 Ibid. Plate #5. 57 Fraser, 179–201, 190. 58 Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 99. 59 ‘In the Shops’, in The New York Times (30 October 1910), 9. 60 ‘In the Shops’, in The New York Times (19 April 1902), 7. 61 Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, [1922] 1975), 273–4. 62 Simone de Beauvoir, quoted in Maureen Devine, Woman and Nature, Literary Reconceptualizations (Metuchen, NJ, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1992). 63 Elizabeth Ann Coleman, The Opulent Era: Fashions of Worth, Doucet, and Pingat (New York: Brooklyn Museum and Thames and Hudson, 1990), 54–5. 64 de Beauvoir, quoted in Devine, 8–9. 65 Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture, and Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 68–87. 66 Ibid. 68. 67 Ibid. 71–2. 68 Ibid. 73. 69 Ibid. 79. 70 Benjamin, Arcades. 71 Musée d’Orsay: Art Nouveau Revival 1900 . 1933 . 1966 . 1974 (20 October 2009–4 February 2010). Available online: https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/whats-on/ exhibitions/art-nouveau-revival-1900-1933-1966-1974 (accessed 1 October 2022). 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 ‘Graphics: Nouveau Frisco’, in Time (7 April 1967). 75 Vogue, New York Vol. 138, Issue 5 (15 September 1961), 15. 76 Rose, Art Nouveau Fashion, 122. 77 Tim Blanks, The World of Anna Sui (New York: Abrams, 2017), 9, 10. 80 Andrew Bolton, Anna Sui (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2010). 79 Bolton, 167, 220. 80 Ibid., 265. 81 See Maxim’s website: https://maxims-de-paris.com/en/maxims-de-parisdepuis-1893 (accessed 1 October 2022).

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82 Vogue, September 1965. This was most likely from British Vogue, which does not have a searchable online index. This article was displayed as part of an exhibit of Pierre Cardin fashion at the Brooklyn Museum – ‘Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion’ – which ran from 20 July 2019–5 January 2020. 83 ‘Vogue’s Eye View: Fall Fashion Forecast’, in Vogue, New York, vol. 154, issue 1 (1 July 1969), 67–8. 84 Ibid. 85 ‘Vogue’s View: Nouveau Couture’, in Vogue, New York, vol. 187, issue 9 (1 September 1997): 252; ‘John Galliano/Patrick Kinmonth’, in Vogue, New York, vol. 199, issue 3 (1 March 2009): 244, 248, 244. 86 ‘Fashion: The Last Waltz’, in Vogue, New York, vol. 196, issue 9 (1 September 2006): 608, 609, 610, 611, 612, 613, 614, 615, 616, 617, 618, 619, 620, 621, 622, 623, 624, 625, 612-613. 87 Esther Adams Achara, ‘Golden Lady: How Gustav Klimt’s Gilded Paintings Influence the Runway’, in Vogue, 5 November 2012. Available online: https://www.vogue.com/ article/golden-lady-how-gustav-klimts-gilded-paintings-influence-the-runway (accessed January 2021). 88 Josh Sims, ‘Gustav Klimt: The Designer’s Muse’, 1 May 2013. Available online: https:// www.globalblue.com/destinations/austria/gustav-klimt-designers-muse/#slide3 (accessed January 2021). 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Achara. 92 ‘Painted Ladies: Six Runway Looks Inspired by the Works of Gustav Klimt’ by Style. com. Vogue/Culture, 29 March 2015. Available online: https://en.vogue.me/archive/ culture/gustav-klimt-inspired-runway-looks/ (accessed January 2021).

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Style Politics and the Black Panther Party: Power, Resistance and Community Anna Hanchett

In this chapter, American fashion scholar Anna Hanchett examines the role of the Black Panther Party image by focusing on the construction, political meanings and legacy of the Panther uniform. Her investigation reveals that while the Panther image has functioned as an attempt to affirm blackness and transform society in the continued fight for black liberation, it has, at the same time, too easily been reduced to its fashionability.

Introduction In 2016, Beyoncé appeared at the Super Bowl LI half-time show accompanied by thirty black female dancers, all dressed uniformly in black leather bodysuits, leather harnesses, fishnet stockings, black leather boots and black berets topped over full afros. The performance, entitled ‘Formation’, took place at the height of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and made obvious references in terms of aesthetics and political meaning to the Black Power movement, during which African Americans gathered to demand their rights and fight for racial freedom. Moreover, the Super Bowl performers embodied a look that was distinctive to the Black Panther Party throughout the late 1960s and 1970s which, to this day, continues to pose a challenge to American attitudes toward the black body. But why has the Panther look remained so captivating to American audiences over the past fifty years, how did the Black Panther Party make use of aesthetics to challenge and transform American conceptions of the black body, and how have those aesthetics evolved to maintain political relevance in contemporary society? In this chapter, I discuss the Black Panther Party image 167

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by focusing on the construction, political meanings and legacy of the Panther uniform. To do so, I reference speeches and texts written by leaders of the Black Panther Party, photographs and documentary footage of the Panthers, and various sources of contemporary visual culture that make direct stylistic reference to the Panther uniform.

Theory and practice of the Black Panther Party Huey Newton and Bobby Seale co-founded the Black Panther Party for SelfDefense in 1966 in Oakland, California, as a revolutionary response to the conditions of working-class black Americans – conditions that included racebased housing discrimination, poverty, education inequities, lack of access to healthcare and persistent police brutality within urban black communities. Seeking to address these conditions, the Party initiated practices of self-defence to help keep the black community safe and established a Ten-Point Platform program which indicated the basic intentions of the Party, including demands for social and legal rights for African Americans. At the time of the Party’s inception, both Newton and Seale were students enrolled in community college engaging in political theory and both were employees at a local War on Poverty programme office.1 Further, both men had previously spent time in either the military or prison and had faced physical and psychological violence. They had, consequently, lived experience with the complexity of day-to-day realities of working-class America and sought through their education and activism a viable solution for transforming the struggles of African Americans in urban California. While Newton’s political thinking fuelled the Party’s organizational theory, a central tenant of the Party’s activism was affirming the black community and addressing the practical needs of those living in oppression. To address these survival needs, the Party launched community service programmes such as free breakfasts for children, community health clinics, clothing drives and black history educational services, among others.2 While the organization of these programmes was a response to the discrimination experienced by working-class black Americans specifically, the Party believed that their provision of community-based support would serve as a model relevant for all oppressed persons. As historian Robyn Spencer comments,‘[The Black Panther Party] tried to hold America accountable to its most democratic promises and dared to suggest that justice for black people would be the beginning of a revolutionary overhaul that would free

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everyone at the bottom of society’.3 Eventually, the Black Panther Party would expand across the nation and build meaningful alliances with several American freedom movements such as the gay and lesbian movement, the women’s liberation movement, and those representing the diverse politics of Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, working-class white Americans and various others.4 For the Black Panther Party, building alliances with other freedom movements as well as establishing community service programs went hand-in-hand, and those activities set the groundwork for the Party’s revolutionary vision of a transformed, non-oppressive society. Newton and Seale believed that in order to realize a future that is non-oppressive, all people experiencing oppression firsthand must gather among themselves and generate collective power. In a speech delivered at Boston College in 1970, Newton remarks on the role of the Party’s survival programs in relation to its community development: We must not regard our survival programs as an answer to the whole problem of oppression. We don’t even claim it to be a revolutionary program. Revolutions are made of sterner stuff. We do say that if the people are not here revolution cannot be achieved, for the people and only the people make revolutions.5

In addition to providing survival programs and building alliances with other freedom movements, the Black Panther Party sought to generate collective power by celebrating blackness and asserting self-worth among black communities. This prospect of generating collective power as a means for transformation was propelled by Newton, who served as the Party’s main theorist. In his theorizing, Newton was influenced by Marxist-Leninist thinking, seeking to make it relevant to the conditions of African Americans in the United States, and he believed that in order for societal change to occur oppressed people must work together to manifest their collective power as a contradiction to the dominating system.6 In-depth description and analysis of Newton’s ideological development has been the subject of various scholarly studies, and I shall not provide another detailed discussion here.7 But I believe that noting the Marxist influence on Newton’s social and organizational theory helps shed light on the ideology that influenced the establishment of the Party’s unique Panther aesthetics. According to Newton, ‘[t]he Black Panther Party is a Marxist-Leninist party because we follow the dialectical method and we also integrate theory with practice’.8 The framework of dialectical materialism was particularly interesting to Newton because it seemed to provide a viable means for empowering African

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Americans living in a racist society. If African Americans could gather and assume collective power through unity, Newton believed, they would create a contradiction in a society dominated by whiteness and thereby become free from racial oppression. For the Panthers, therefore, amplifying black pride and engaging in practices of self-love that would affirm blackness and thereby challenge the supremacy of whiteness was necessary for the realization of a nonoppressive future. Newton understood that self-love and celebrating blackness needed to be at the heart of the Party’s ideology in order for revolution to take place. Indeed, self-love as revolution was not a novel idea in the 1960s political context, as it was a prospect emulated by other freedom movements of the period. But embracing black pride – particularly the notion that black is beautiful – in a society that privileges and celebrates whiteness (and thereby debases all people who are non-white) would help displace prevailing ideologies that maintain that structural race-based discrimination remains intact. As bell hooks claims in her 1992 essay ‘Loving Blackness as Political Resistance’: Collectively, black people and our allies in struggle are empowered when we practice self-love as a revolutionary intervention that undermines practices of domination. Loving blackness as political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life.9

In the same vein, the Black Panther Party took on the political task of creating an image that was both attainable and desirable to working-class African Americans. This image included the establishment of a Party uniform that would assert the beauty of blackness – an undeniably integral component to the Party’s fight for racial freedom.

The Black Panther Party uniform The Black Panther Party adopted a distinctive uniform that was worn by all members. With some variations, it consisted of a black leather jacket, a collared shirt or a black turtleneck sweater, black trousers and work boots, and was worn with a full, natural afro or a black beret. Accounts from the Party leaders reveal that the uniform was selected mindfully and central to the Party’s activism. Reflecting on the moment the Party leaders decided on the Panther uniform, Seale reveals that

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. . . our uniform came about because one day Huey happened to be dressed in a sports-style leather jacket, black slacks and a blue shirt. I stepped back and looked at him in the California sunshine, and said, ‘Hey, Huey, wait a minute. That should be our uniform the way you’re dressed now, with the black shoes nice and shiny.’ The next evening we were watching an old movie about the French underground resistance to Hitler’s occupation. The characters in the film were wearing berets. I said, ‘Huey, let’s wear berets, man.’ The uniform was an important part of our image. Huey and I understood that good visuals [. . .] were part of how we could successfully communicate and capture the imagination of the people.10

The outfit described by Seale consists of ordinary articles of clothing that were widely available to working-class Americans, and the account further reveals that the uniform was not merely meant to be utilitarian but to represent something desirable to African Americans living in urban California. For many male members, the Panther image triggered identification and a deep sense of longing for personal transformation; it was simultaneously a response to violence enacted on the black body and a source of pleasure unique to African Americans in urban environments. Cultural studies scholar Carolyn Cooper has argued that as the black body has historically borne generations of physical and psychological punishment clothing has at the same time served as a means for black people to re-aestheticize the black body and reclaim their humanity.11 In the context of the Black Panthers, such emotional striving toward freedom and corporeal autonomy through clothing is apparent in various reflections from former Party members and civil rights leaders. Notably, Stanley Nelson’s 2015 documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution includes a clip of Julian Bond, former cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, recalling the Black Panthers with admiration: ‘if you were a young black man living in the city anywhere, you wanted to be like this. You wanted to dress like this, you wanted to act like this, you wanted to talk like this; you wanted to be this.’ Similarly, Party leader Eldridge Cleaver has described his initial encounter with the Panther image as ‘love at first sight’ and ‘the most beautiful sight I had ever seen [. . .] four black men wearing black berets, powder blue shirts, black leather jackets, black trousers and shiny black shoes – and each with a gun! [. . .] Where was my mind? . . . blown’.12 Yet, scholars have emphasized the militant masculinity inherent in the Black Panther image, which was initially created by the all-male Party membership and which assumed masculinist notions of self-defence that fetishized guns and placed men as protectors of the black community.13 However, women’s increasing

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involvement in the Party and their commitment to its politics resulted in the broadening of the Party image and ideology, especially as black women sought to fight race-based sexism in the political context of the growing women’s movement. In her study on black women’s contribution to the creation of a ‘soul style’ during the Black Power era, cultural historian Tanisha C. Ford has argued that for the women of the Black Panther Party, re-aestheticizing the black female body by embodying and expanding the Panther image was both a response to sex- and race-based violence and a significant source of pleasure that enabled black women to reform their subjectivities as well as assume sexual freedom and upwards social mobility.14 Notably, Tarika Lewis was the first woman to officially join the Black Panther Party at the age of sixteen in 1967. Historian Robyn Spencer has pointed out that Lewis was the first student involved in the Party to advocate for education in black history and to proudly wear her hair in an afro.15 Alongside Lewis, Elendar Barnes, Judy Hart and Janice Garrett-Forte joined the Panthers during the same year. All of these young women were students in their late teens or early twenties who responded to the Party’s activism; politically conscious about the public dialogue around women’s equality, rights and liberation, they believed that the intersections of gender politics and racial politics could be addressed within the Party. As Spencer claims: ‘They understood the commitment to armed self-defense as a marker of strength and determination exemplified not just by men but by women.’16 It is no coincidence, then, that the Panther image would intersect with the sartorial aesthetics embodied by the growing women’s movement taking place at the same time. Women standing up in the face of patriarchal power by marching to demand equal legal rights between the sexes informally donned a uniform made up primarily of unisex workwear garments such as loose-fitting sweaters and T-shirts, denim trousers and work boots; their hair was untied and natural. This politically charged, unfeminized appearance of the women’s movement was in keeping with second-wave feminist protest against feminine beauty norms that many women felt were patriarchally forced onto them and which turned women into sexual objects. In this context, women understood themselves to be resisting feminine beauty stereotypes through their adoption of androgynous forms of dressing that neutralized gendered roles. Hence, although the Panther uniform may have initially been selected by and for black men, it was not necessarily meant to disempower black women or exclude women’s interests and dressing preferences. One significant component to the Panther image is its connection to the city. While the Panthers sought to convey through their uniform the transformative

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idea that ‘black is beautiful’, it was important for the Party to connect the slogan to the black body in urban contexts as a direct on-site response to practices of power and domination enacted by the police through routine patrols of black neighbourhoods and the violence they enabled. Responding to the Panthers’ self-presentation on the street, former Party leader Jamal Joseph comments in Nelson’s 2015 documentary: ‘The Panthers didn’t invent the idea of ‘black is beautiful’ . . . But one of the things the Panthers did [invent] was that “urban black is beautiful”. And that look just blew people away.’ Cultural theorist Janice Cheddie has suggested that the Panthers’ stylistic sartorial choices may be directly referencing the male gangster (through the incorporation of leather jackets and guns) and famous jazz musicians (by donning collared blue shirts, turtleneck sweaters, black trousers and dress shoes). While the associations to the hipster may have granted the Panthers a sense of dominion during their encounters with the police, the association was also a source of criticism used against the Panthers as they became increasingly perceived and represented in white media as violent. On the other hand, the stylistic associations to the coolness of jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock may have offered the Panthers opportunities for attracting and transforming the white gaze. Ford has argued that as black ‘cool’ was being attributed to the masculinity of black jazzmen specifically, women jazz musicians such as Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln and Odetta were equally influential to the fashioning of the black body in urban contexts throughout the 1960s and 1970s.17 Simone in particular served as an important popular figure within the landscape of the Black Power movement as she famously used her music performances as forms of anti-racist political protest. Moreover, all three women performers were frequently photographed donning unisex garments and wearing their hair natural – albeit eventually adopting Africana garments that helped establish an American ‘soul style’. But such stylistic associations to jazz musicians and performers ought not be overlooked as important components to the Party’s strategy in re-aestheticizing the black body within black and mainstream culture.

Black Panther style legacy As has become evident, the Black Panther uniform served as a significant resource for donning and affirming blackness at both personal and political levels. At the same time, however, the striking appeal of the Black Panther image

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has also led to an impairment in mainstream media, confusing a politics of liberation with a politics of style. This is especially evident in the case of scholaractivist Angela Davis, who has served as a notable spokesperson and representative of the Black Liberation movement since the late-1960s. During her early involvement in the Party’s activism, Davis was frequently depicted in the media as a figure active in the Black Power movement; she dressed in the Panther uniform and wore her hair as an afro. Her image during the 1960s and 1970s was linked to rebellion, protest against police violence and advocacy for political prisoners. Yet, in her 1994 essay ‘Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia’, Davis describes a recent encounter she had with a young boy who identified her with her hair: ‘ “Oh”, he said, “Angela Davis – the Afro.” ’18 Responding to this encounter, Davis reflects critically over the effect of the widely disseminated photographs of the Black Liberation movement and what they have come to represent. Davis describes the risks and implications of creating a powerful and desirable image that is meant to help transform society but is at the same time decontextualized through popular culture. Davis writes: . . . it is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo. It is humiliating because it reduces a politics of liberation into a politics of fashion; it is humbling because such encounters with the younger generation demonstrate the fragility and mutability of historical images, particularly those associated with African American history.19

Davis laments that an image that has served to represent the complexity of what it means to be African American fighting for freedom in the United States easily becomes reduced to its fashionability. In the essay, she further comments on the irony of popularizing her image as distinctively an image of Angela Davis because, ‘in actuality’, Davis writes, ‘I was emulating a whole host of women – both public figures and women I encountered in my daily life’.20 Interestingly, Davis later reflects on her 1973 meeting with portrait photographer Philippe Halsman to have her portrait taken for the book cover of her autobiography. According to Davis, Halsman was expecting to re-create a mainstream image of black militancy: afro, leather jacket and a raised fist. Davis admits that she eventually persuaded Halsman to photograph her in a less militant posture – one that did not perpetuate stereotypes of African Americans that often become associated with criminality and violence, and which consequently dismisses the revolutionary political meanings of the Black Liberation movement’s style

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politics. In a similar vein, in a 1972 interview with The Black Scholar journal, Seale emphasized that the Panther uniform, while aesthetically captivating, ‘represented a heck of a lot more to the community than just a uniform. It represented organization . . . It’s a safety valve for developed consciousness . . . But at the same time, it gave us a chance to talk with people about the ten point platform and program really what we are about’.21 Hence, it would be inappropriate – indeed, unethical – to dismiss (and forget) the organizational aspect of the Panther uniform which, since its inception, was meant to correlate practices of self-love and black pride with politics and social change.22 Although the Black Panther Party eventually dissolved, it has left a lasting and significant imprint on black visual culture in the United States. In 2017, for instance, GQ Magazine listed American football player Colin Kaepernick as its 2017 Citizen of the Year for taking a knee at the start of a match during the American national anthem to protest the police’s continued violence against black people. Kaepernick is featured on the cover of the magazine wearing a full afro, a black jacket and a black turtleneck. According to GQ, Kaepernick was recognized for being ‘a lightning rod and a powerful symbol of activism and resistance’.23 Similarly, the March 2018 issue of British GQ features American actor Michael B. Jordan on the cover, donning a black beret, and a black turtleneck sweater underneath his black leather jacket, with text that reads ‘RISE UP. Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan fights power’. The issue was published just weeks after the release of the highly acclaimed film Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018), in which Jordan plays a leading role. The British GQ issue includes a several-page spread of Jordan photographed by Gavin Bond of which one photograph displays Jordan in an all-black uniform and black sunglasses, sitting in a seemingly ordinary chair but posing as if he were on a throne. Coincidentally, in a Marvel Studios promotional poster of the same film, leading actor Chadwick Boseman is featured as the Black Panther character, seated on a throne, and donned in the all-black costume. The sci-fi action film envisions an Afro-futurist utopia in which the characters have overcome the aesthetic demands that Western society has prescribed onto black bodies, and the characters instead don garments inspired by African and African American visual culture. The two images of Jordan and Boseman alike resemble the infamous ‘warrior’ portrait of Huey Newton; yet these latter versions are free from any violent symbols or connotations (particularly weapons) that mainstream media repeatedly emphasized during the Black Power era to discredit the movement. The legacy of the Black Panther image has influenced contemporary black femininities as well. One way in which this is made visible is through Beyoncé’s

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emulation of black pride during her performance at the 2016 Super Bowl LI half-time show. According to stylist Marni Senofont, who collaborated with Beyoncé on the Super Bowl performance costumes, Beyoncé expressed deliberate interest in referencing the women of the Black Panther Party through the performance’s stylization: It was important to [Beyoncé] to honor the beauty of strong Black women and celebrate the unity that fuels their power. One of the best examples of that is the image of the female Black Panther. The women of the Black Panther Party created a sisterhood and worked right alongside their men fighting police brutality and creating community social programs. [. . .] They made a fashion statement with natural afros, black leather jackets and black pant suits. That image of women in leadership roles, believing they are a vital part of the struggle, is undeniably provocative and served as reference and reality.24

Beyoncé’s version of the Panther image is hyper-feminized, as dancers wore leather bodysuits, fishnet stockings, high-heeled leather boots and leather harnesses. Such feminization of the Panther uniform expands the Black Panther visual legacy into one that includes and celebrates black femininity as much as it affirms conceptions of black masculinity. More generally, these more recent representations of black celebrities embodying a look that blossomed during the Black Power era, and which became associated with black freedom, demonstrate the lasting political relevance of the Black Panther Party’s project in reaestheticizing the black body, as the fight for black liberation continues. Yet, while these contemporary popular culture appropriations of the Black Panther Party image and uniform may be captivating aesthetically, they raise an important question: to what degree are we validating a politics of liberation on the grounds of its stylistic appeal and ‘fashionability’?

Notes 1 Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2. 2 Elaine Brown, ‘Foreword’ from To Die for the People, ed. Toni Morrison (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009), xiii–xxiii. 3 Spencer, The Revolution Has Come, 3. 4 Brown, xvi–xvii. 5 Huey Newton, ‘Speech Delivered at Boston College’, in To Die for the People, 21. 6 Ibid., 20–38.

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7 See, for instance, Joshua Anderson, ‘A Tension in the Political Thought of Huey P. Newton’, Journal of African American Studies vol. 16 (2012): 249–67; Judson L. Jeffries, Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002). 8 Newton, 25. 9 bell hooks, ‘Loving Blackness as Political Resistance’, in Black Looks: Race and Representation, 2nd edn (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, [1992] 2005), 20. 10 Bobby Seale quoted in Stephen Shames, The Black Panthers: Photographs by Stephen Shames (New York: Aperture 2006), 11. 11 Carolyn Cooper, ‘Caribbean Fashion Week: Remodelling Beauty in “Out of Many One” Jamaica’, Fashion Theory, vol. 14, no. 3 (2015): 389. 12 Eldridge Cleaver, Post-Prison Writings and Speeches (New York: Vintage, 1969), 19; Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), xx. 13 Spencer, The Revolution Has Come, 41; Cheddie, ‘Troubling Subcultural Theories’, Fashion Theory vol. 14, issue 3 (2010), 331–53. 14 Tanisha Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 5–7. 15 Spencer, 47. 16 Ibid., 46. 17 Ford, Liberated Threads, 28–9. 18 Angela Davis, ‘Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia’, Critical Inquiry vol. 21, no. 1 (Autumn: 1994): 37. 19 Ibid. 20 Davis, 36. 21 Bobby Seale, ‘The Black Scholar interviews: Bobby Seale’, The Black Scholar, vol. 4, no. 1 (1972): 13. 22 Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 62. 23 Editors of GQ, ‘Colin Kaepernick Is GQ’s 2017 Citizen of the Year’ in GQ, (November 13, 2017). Available online: https://www.gq.com/story/colin-kaepernick-cover-menof-the-year (accessed 13 September 2021). 24 Marni Senofont, ‘Super Bowl 50: Wardrobe’. Interview by Yolanda Sangweni. Beyoncé, (16 February 2016). Available online: https://www.beyonce.com/article/super-bowl50-wardrobe/ (accessed 23 September 2021).

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Fashion is Human: Perspectives on the Aesthetics and Ethics of Contemporary Swedish Fashion Photography Andrea Kollnitz

Socio-political contexts in relation to fashion media are brought to the fore in the final chapter of this section, where art historian and fashion scholar Andrea Kollnitz addresses aesthetic stylistic ideas and photographic practices interacting with ethical choices and agendas in fashion photography. Looking at the case of Swedish fashion photographer Magnus Magnusson, she demonstrates the possible relation between fashion photography and its ethical as well as aesthetical positioning within national cultures and political ideologies.

Introduction ‘This is a picture I like a lot,’ says the Swedish fashion photographer Magnus Magnusson, pointing at one of his photographs depicting a glamorously dressed long-haired model holding a cigarette, standing on the rooftop of a bright but dusty and shabby Mediterranean building, beneath a blue and sunlit sky.1 (See Figure 9.1.) The model’s glossy long silver-grey gloves, her elegant dress, her luxurious grey fur and glittering brooch – combined with her long, coiffured hair, coquettishly thrown to one side, the big sunglasses and the brilliant red lips – make a striking contrast to the raw environment, suggesting a natural, unstaged real-life scenario from Marrakech where the photo was taken. No artificial lighting has been applied; the photo has been taken like a snapshot, making use of the glaring sunlight, at a seemingly quite spontaneously chosen place, with a hand-held camera. The image is full of dynamism, coming from the model’s 179

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Figure 9.1 Magnus Magnusson, Taylor Warren, Marrakech, 2008. Photography by Magnus Magnusson, styling by Robert Rydberg. Model; Taylor Warren. Copyright: Magnus Magnusson.

relaxed pose and facial expression, the movement of her hair, the unexpected and alienating everyday background and the highlight effects created by the dance of the sunlight on the shimmering fabrics. It exudes natural warmth and glossy glamorous coolness simultaneously. Magnusson likes his picture because it shows some of his main ideas and practices as a fashion photographer: he prefers – and uses almost exclusively – daylight. As he says: ‘Our eyes are the best camera.’2 The photographer avoids the studio and is inspired by simple, un-staged spaces from daily life. While he does not need props, at the same time he likes to create cinematic effects and bring out exciting live characters. He wants his models to relax, to be themselves, act naturally and feel comfortable and coequal to the photographer, while rarely retouching his photos of them. He loves fashion and the aesthetics of fashion, yet sees it as always connected to people, to human beings, human life. In line with the natural behaviour and expressivity of his models, he wants the spectator to experience closeness, to feel included and present in the picture.

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Through examining the aesthetic and ethical intentions and practices of Magnus Magnusson in connection with his internationally known niche fashion magazine Contributor, I will look at contemporary Swedish fashion photography from a practitioner’s angle and reflect on its aesthetics and ethical implications in terms of national identity and Swedish fashion at large. Having met and interviewed Magnusson several times – not least as a recurring guest lecturer at my university course in Fashion Studies, Contemporary fashion – practice and theory – I realized that Magnusson as well as Contributor show and aim for characteristics that go beyond a specific aesthetic style, beyond a search for technical perfection. The aesthetics of his photographic work, the ideals related to his role as a photographer and the composition and policies of Contributor express, perform and manifest ethical values, a notion of overarching humanity and a social agenda that recalls a larger Swedish cultural context.3

Staging the natural While the initial example shows a glamorously dressed model in a simple, raw environment as an almost ironic reference to the glossy fashion aesthetics linked to the world of high fashion and high fashion magazines such as Vogue, another example (Figure 9.2) might be taken from an issue of Contributor with the title ‘Nature as Culture’.4 One of the three different covers for the printed version of the November 2016 issue shows the Polish model Ola Rudnicka sitting in cross-legged yoga position on a green lawn covered with withered autumn leaves and surrounded by the branches of bright green leafy trees. She is photographed at the location of Hagaparken, a quiet park in Stockholm, in backlight, seemingly at dawn. Sunbeams highlight her feathery blonde hair, which moves freely in the light breeze. Her make-up looks natural and she shows calm and certainty as she quietly, yet with a straightforward and firm gaze, looks at the spectator. While her slightly opened mouth recalls conventional and not unproblematic tropes of a ‘male gaze’ on seductive female models, all too typical in fashion photography, these are countered by her straightforward, direct and sincere gaze.5 Notions of strength and inner balance are reinforced by the frontal symmetrical position she is photographed in. Her loose sweater, in a natural dark red and earthy colour, held together by a waist belt and worn over tight leggings and socks in other shades of red, suggests physical liberty and – though representative of fashion in 2016 and worn at yoga practice – has a timeless character. Together

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Figure 9.2 Contributor Issue no. 12, 2016, ‘Nature as Culture’. Photography by Magnus Magnusson, styling by Robert Rydberg. Model: Ola Rudnicka @ IMG Paris. Copyright: Magnus Magnusson.

with the wreath of flowers she is wearing, the young woman recalls figures linked to Swedish national romanticism such as mystic forest elves and fairy-tale characters as painted by the symbolist painter Richard Bergh in the late nineteenth century.6 Furthermore her styling may refer to the anti-fashion clothing style of bohemian artists from the same period, such as the painter and illustrator of fairy tales, Ivar Arosenius, in his ascetic and natural, one might say minimalist garments, combined with his personal signature, the flower wreath.7 Another Swedish national romantic reference may be found in the watercolours

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of Carl Larsson whose light, skilfully drawn and coloured paintings have gained international recognition, not least for the naturalness and intimate feeling with which he depicted his own family. The connections between Magnusson’s ideals of natural light and natural posing in natural urban or rural environments and the ideals of Swedish national romantic open-air painting by artists such as Carl Larsson, Richard Bergh or Bruno Liljefors, that I have established hypothetically, were confirmed in my interview with Magnusson who definitely sees links to the love for Nordic light and naturalism of, for example, Carl Larsson: ‘Light is crucial for us here in the North, there is so much of it in summer and almost nothing in winter. I think daylight is a very important aspect in Swedish fashion photography.’8 Apart from a preference for open-air scenarios and daylight, Magnusson recognizes himself not least in Larsson’s way of portraying his models in a natural and intimate mode, catching them in movement, in daily life, and bridging the distance between the painter and model through the latter’s direct gaze. Tellingly, Larsson’s watercolours of his family life have been compared to photographic snapshots that take a step away from the idealizing and objectifying painterly styles that dominated late eighteenth-century bourgeois society portraiture. Similarly, Magnusson can be interpreted as trying to bridge the distance between the photographer and his model, and consequently between the model and the spectator, by consciously avoiding objectifying photographic compositions and constructions. He emphasizes the importance of expressiveness and agency with his models and may be seen as deliberately performing and activating his models as subjects. Comparing his fashion photographs to portraits, he keeps looking for individuality, natural expression and authenticity, not least in their faces. These are often depicted in a frontal centralized position and symmetrical composition that creates a strong notion of direct and equal eye contact. Thus, Magnusson seems to deliberately reject what Laura Mulvey has identified as a male objectifying gaze in her groundbreaking and now classic essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, where she writes: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact, so that they can be said to connote to be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle, . . . she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire.9

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While Magnusson is aware of the necessary allure of fashion imagery – a notion closely connected to the cinematic pleasure of looking analysed by Mulvey – and does not deny the unavoidable function of fashion photography as a marketing tool aiming at attracting consumers and selling garments, he explicitly follows certain feminist and artistic rules and intentions when creating his images and magazine. He allows no photographing of nude female bodies by male photographers and attempts to portray his models as subjects, through directing their performance and interacting with them in a deliberately non-hierarchical way and in his avoidance of retouching. Tellingly, Magnusson’s stylistic inspiration comes from photographers of the German school such as Wolfgang Tillmans and Juergen Teller, London documentary raw style as by Corinne Day and art and fashion photographers such as Nan Goldin – photographers capturing real life in individual faces and personalities.10 As Kate Rhodes writes: Such imagery posits everyday people and their plain, clumsy, chubby, wrinkly or dysmorphic bodies against the commodity ideal. As a result, their appearance prompts a range of psychic, voyeuristic and fetishistic effects that re-route the intricately orchestrated spectatorial desire associated with the expected subjects of fashion photography.11

While Magnusson’s pictorial language hardly looks for an explicitly anti-aesthetic display of norm-breaking bodies, it may be considered to ‘re-route spectatorial desire’ through its natural, non-artificial, relaxed and intimate portrayal of the model’s subjectivity. Recalling the initially described example image by Magnusson, it seems to be a contemporary expression of Cecil Beaton’s now famous quote from 1938: ‘I want to make photographs of very elegant women taking grit out of their eyes, or blowing their noses, or taking lipstick off their teeth. Being like human beings in other words. . . But naturally that would be forbidden.’12 Ideas such as Beaton’s have become more the rule than the exception in today’s fashion photography, in the words of Gilles Lipovetzky ‘allowing greater openness to intimate sensations, inner feelings, unusual fantasies, physical suffering, and individual imperfections’.13

Individualism and equality Turning back to the above-mentioned cover of Contributor, the significance of the fashion model portrayed as an individual personality, beyond the objectifying

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mechanisms of an exploitative model industry, is expressed even in her printed name. The cover not only gives Ola Rudnicka a central and strong position in the image, but even through mentioning her name very clearly: it is the only text printed on the cover apart from the magazine’s title and the theme of the issue in question. This further confirms a characterization of Magnusson’s work beyond its aesthetic specificity and leads us to what I want to call the social and democratic intentions of Contributor. The title of the magazine is already highly significant in the way in which is symbolizes its mission, message and policy: the magazine is meant to be a site where a variety of talented creators equally contribute to a common cause: that of a fashion magazine which sets out to introduce new young talents in fashion design, photography, styling and writing and to encourage deepening perspectives on fashion as an essential cultural phenomenon. The magazine explains its goals on its website’s home page: Exploring fashion through art and photography since 2008, Contributor invites the viewer into a three-dimensional world of inspiration and creativity. In bringing together some of the most interesting artists today, we highlight experimental approaches to photography. At its best, fashion imagery can be an agent for change and we want to arouse a more general interest in new ways of looking at everyday situations and the making of pictures.14

While the notion of creative and equal innovative collaboration is not a unique approach for niche fashion magazines to take as they try to consciously differentiate themselves from more commercial mainstream fashion publications, it seems to be expressed even more explicitly in the rhetoric of Contributor and the narrative of its original intentions.15 Initially published online, its digital platform is updated daily and provides a hub for new young fashion photographers, predominantly female, displaying an abundance of new photographs and fashion stories.16 Yet it is also produced in print form, as an artefact to be looked at, held, touched, sensed and used – it may literally be taken apart in order to provide printed art posters and postcards for lovers of fashion photography. It exemplifies what Ane Lynge-Jorlén classifies as the hybrid genre of the art fashion magazine, presenting an overlap of art and fashion photography and philosophic essayist texts or interviews that reflect on theoretical aspects of fashion.17 Furthermore, far from being an unavailable and exclusive object of art and expensive collector’s item such as V-magazine, it costs only about £8; it is supposed to be achievable for ‘everybody’ and thus opens up the art of fashion photography to a non-wealthy audience with a passion for fashion/image.

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Besides providing equal access to all kinds of audiences, also the actual ‘contributors’ are treated according to deliberate policies of equality. As mentioned earlier, Issue 12, 2016, is called ‘Nature as Culture’ and here are the stated editorial aims for the issue: Introducing the latest issue of Contributor featuring cover stars Pamela Anderson, Hana Jirickova and Ola Rudnicka. In our twelfth print issue we focus on sustainability and delve into the theme of ‘nature as culture’ through the art and photography of Anders Edström, Camilla Åkrans, [long list, including as many women as men]. With great writing from [authors with partly academic background.] As for the fashion in this issue, editor-in-chief Robert Rydberg and his teams asked themselves: where are the clothes? In recognition of the desperate situation we find ourselves in, we started out with the intention to make the most organic, PETA-approved and sustainable editorials possible. [. . .] Hopefully we won’t even have to separate between what is organic and what is not in the future, when all textile production has to answer to the environmentally friendly norm. In the meantime, buy less and with greater care, support designers who are respecting the climate – we all know what steps to take, and we’re all hypocrites, but now is the time to act.18

The idea behind this issue as formulated above emphasizes the equal importance of all contributors listed: for example, all of the cover models are referred to as ‘stars’, a celebrity like Pamela Anderson on equal terms with young fashion models. Furthermore, it stresses a ‘we’: initially this refers to the team who have created the magazine together, following a common vision – in this case promoting sustainable fashion – but goes on to extend the plural pronoun of the creative team to encompass producers and consumers, senders and recipients, creators and audience.

The aesthetics of social democracy Not only in the above example of an ethically relevant issue theme, but in general, Contributor magazine might be regarded as manifesting a close to political and social democratic spirit when it comes to its makers, structural composition, ways of communication and audiences. Such a democratic spirit is reinforced by the aesthetics of the photographers that dominate its visual identity. Magnusson – as well as the other photographers he chooses with his co-editor, the stylist Robert Rydberg, for editorials and fashion stories – speak a photographic

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language based on aspects of ‘the natural’ and ‘human’ or ‘humane’. Thus, the issue’s fashion stories are accompanied by photo stories that do not feature literal fashion garments, but metaphorically reinforcing its connection to nature, such as the nature photographs taken by Andreas Ackerup and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg or photographs from Anders Edström’s book on Tokyo’s Hanezawa Garden.19 Bringing together the issue’s focus on nature as culture and the artistic ideals that permeate the work of Magnusson and several other Swedish fashion photographers, in the Contributor interview Edström states: ‘When I edit pictures, I try to be as dry as I can. I want to resist the temptation to allure.’20 The same might be said of Magnusson who, apart from embracing natural light, in his own projects consistently avoids retouching. Edström, who Rhodes mentions as the only Swedish representative of the emerging realist trend in fashion photography in the 1990s with his ‘images of dumpy models in ill-fitting garments and with wind-mussed hair, recruited via an advertisement posted at a Swedish supermarket for Purple, 2001’,21 further explains his view on fashion photography, a view close to Magnusson’s intentions: When I first started to take fashion pictures, I thought they had to be glamorous, but after a while I felt that I wasn’t being true to myself. I set up some rules to deal with clothes in the same way as I was dealing with other subjects. I wanted the camera to record what I saw, without emotional commitment or complicated angles. Perhaps it wasn’t the most spectacular pictures, but that was never my intention. On the contrary, I have always been more intrigued by the ordinary.

Rebecca Arnold explains the rising sympathy during the 1990s for the ordinary, the everyday and the real in fashion photography, expressed not least in the conventions of the so-called ‘heroin chic’ in the work of, for example Juergen Teller: ‘[T]hey express the 1990s obsession with images that are “real”, that are harshly lit, exposing the skin as mottled and tired, showing up bruises and flaws rather than smoothing away any sign of the living/dying flesh.’22 Rhodes writes that: ‘[w]hile based on a kind or realism, heroin chic and other ‘anti-fashion’ fashion trends were in part a backlash against society’s stereotypes, an excessiveness characterized by the 1980s and the dominance of the supermodel.’23 Yet, while clearly relatable to a global trend in fashion photography searching for connotations of real life, I interpret Edström and Magnusson’s photographs as also belonging to a Swedish twentieth-century tradition of artist photographers creating ‘subjective documentary photography’.24 This was first established through a seminal figure of Nordic photography, Christer Strömholm, who came

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to be an inspiration for Nan Goldin, and was known for (amongst others things) a personal and harsh version of street photography with his revealing, unromantic portraiture of Paris and his transsexual friends at Place Blanche.25 While the documentary school evolving from Strömholm promoted the photojournalist’s responsibility and subjective choices as giving the image authenticity and veracity, contemporary Swedish photographers continue notions of responsibility through a more artistic approach. Rather than ‘depicting reality’ they turn to [. . .] critical reflections on the politics of representation and how photography is used in various contexts to create realities, but also to arouse dreams and desires, not least in fashion, advertising and pornography. The perspective was both critical and liberating, and involved the deconstruction of established notions of sex, gender, ethnicity and nationality. Power and identity were at the heart, and the topics that were represented in and through the works often related to issues of the gaze and desire.26

Read through such a lens and in spite of their unavoidable interaction with the commercial mechanisms of the fashion industry, Magnusson’s and his colleagues’ fashion-photographic practices and representational politics may also appear as self-reflective in a deconstructive postmodernist Swedish development within art photography, combining ‘the documentary power of photography with fiction’s potential to create narratives that reveal actual conditions while giving free reign to imagination’ and following a cinematic vision as found in the group of mainly female contemporary Swedish photographers introduced in the exhibition and catalogue The Visible. Contemporary Swedish Photography at Stockholm Artipelag in 2014.27 One of the photographers Magnusson feels closest to is Sweden’s Camilla Åkrans, who contributed what we might call fashion portraits of the Sami singer Maxida Märak, in Issue 11, 2016, on ‘Casting and Collections’. Her photographic style brings out beauty through an intimate and authentic approach to the photographed object or rather subject, as shown in the portrait of Märak’s face; her powerful presence fills the cover. The choice of the Sami singer as cover model for the above issue is in itself another political choice, making a strong statement in a decolonial cultural debate proclaiming the rights of marginalized ethnic minorities in North Sweden. Confirming an artistic and anti-normative experimental as well as a selfreflective approach to fashion photography, on its homepage Contributor states its photographic vision in a formulation that recalls postmodern critical theory,

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while in simple words addressing a broad, image-savvy, yet non-academic audience: Fashion photography has a dimension that is unconcerned with the chronology of history. Together with the stylist, the photographer can lend fashion meaning and a timeless modernity – sought-after qualities that simultaneously contradict the constant cycle of change that is emblematic of fashion. Photography can recreate reality according to the escapist and imaginative conditions of the fashion world, provoking thought and feelings that move beyond the realm of what’s visible in the image. [. . .] But sometimes we forget that it isn’t reality that becomes available through photography, but rather representation. Today we know that fashion photography per definition lies. With computer-generated imagery you can create something really extraordinary that challenges conceptions of truth, time and nature. But despite the infinite possibilities facilitated by the digital lie, looking at fashion photography is still often a process of identification with images of fetishized artificial femininity and masculinity. Today, too much editorial work is driven by a kind of regime of clarity; it’s all centered on straightforwardness, control and a focus on specific garments. The boundary between the fashion establishment and the experimental seems to become more and more defined. At Contributor, we have a hard time seeing the point of crystal clear messages. For us, antitheses to the stripped and rational are very important. [. . .] Fashion photography is an ongoing process. It’s about exploration and continuous questioning of boundaries, norms and established truths. You never know what’s going to happen next. Soon you’re already on your way to another story.28

I want to propose that Magnusson and his chosen ‘contributors’ may be seen as striving boldly to find a humane and ethical way of presenting and promoting fashion while at the same time artistically enhancing its aesthetics and the art of fashion photography. Those agendas can be followed in Magnusson’s own photographic work and in the overall expression of Contributor. As I further argue, they may be related not only to similar styles in (fashion) photography, but also to other phenomena in contemporary Swedish fashion such as the liberatory design ideals and brand identity at brands like Acne, Weekday and Hope, which promote gender neutral, democratic and functional wear according to natural body ideals with an avant-garde touch. While Magnusson has not collaborated explicitly with the above brands, he is happy about his work for & Other Stories, a relatively young brand in the H&M group, where his natural photographic style merges with its ideals and looks, as explained below:

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& Other Stories is a fashion brand offering women a wide range of shoes, bags, accessories, beauty and ready-to-wear to create their personal style, or story. Our creative ateliers in Paris and Stockholm design diversified fashion collections with great attention to detail and quality at an affordable price. We believe that the manufacturing of clothes, shoes, accessories and beauty products should be done in a responsible way. Our aim is to create collections, with well thought-out solutions, that give people the opportunity to express their personality.29

Although the brand’s intentions to help women to dress in their individual style, creating their own personal stories and expressing themselves ‘just as they are’, might appear to be quite common in an individualist postmodern society, they still express ideals that fit well with Magnusson’s visual language and its focus on natural beauty, daily life experiences and personal expression. Yet in both their stylistic minimalism and simplicity as well as in their democratic spirit, these ideals – found at several Swedish contemporary fashion brands as well as the internationally predominant Swedish fashion photographers of today, such as Mikael Jansson, Magnus Magnusson, Camilla Åkrans, Johan Sandberg and others – also continue a Swedish design identity discourse that emerged during the early twentieth century. Being part of an international development of everyday aesthetics and realism in fashion photography, as discussed by Rhodes, and of a Swedish development in art photography, their photographic tendencies may also be placed beyond the question of photographic style and within the context of national fashion and design discourse.30 Photographers like Magnusson may be discussed in their possible closeness to historically established ideals on Swedish design aesthetics and the early twentieth-century concept of ‘beauty for all’– early modernist and functionalist ideas that today have become iconic as the main qualities internationally related to Swedish design, ranging from architecture and interior design to fashion. The Swedish philosopher, pedagogue and design theorist Ellen Key’s 1899 feminist essay collection, Beauty for All (Skönhet för alla), was one of several manifestos that claimed the importance of innovating Swedish living for all classes through beauty and functionality in the home. Her writing played an important role, not least in establishing the aesthetic ideals promoted by the earlier mentioned Carl Larsson through the total design he and his wife Karin displayed in their own house.31 It thus promoted an aesthetic of lightness and Nordic simplicity in colours and shapes, with useful objects of high quality but at the same time available for all parts of society. In another important book of hers, Individualism och socialism. Några tankar om de få och de många (Individualism and Socialism. Some Thoughts on the Few and the Many, 1895), Key ‘insisted that social justice

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be combined with personal self-expression and creativity’.32 According to Peter Reed, politically and aesthetically engaged authors such as Key and the Swedish art historian Gregor Paulsson who, inspired by Key, published his seminal book Better things for everyday life (Vackrare Vardagsvara) in 1919, served as ‘effective advocates for progressive social and artistic reform’ sharing a ‘belief in the transformative power of a well-designed environment’, were convinced that ‘when the aesthetic realm is attuned to contemporary realities, an environment will be catalyst for necessary social, cultural and economic improvement’.33 Those ideals, and not least the promotion of ‘the everyday’ as an important site of aesthetic improvement, were clearly linked to and supporting the political rise of the Swedish social democracy and its welfare system. They were manifested in a number of ground breaking exhibitions such as the internationally appraised Stockholm Exhibition in 1930 and came further on to merge with the characteristics of functionalism.34 As Sweden’s dominant modernist architectural style, established from the 1930s onward, it is still reflected in the values and aesthetic signatures of national Swedish design and fashion brands of today, from IKEA and H&M – high-quality design simplified and adapted to the everyday consumer’s economy – to the minimalist avant-gardism in a number of other designers.

Fashion is human – a conclusion Still today – and perhaps well represented by an internationally successful brand like Filippa K, known for its combination of classical style and modernity as well as its progressiveness in sustainable and ethical fashion production – Swedish design and fashion identity is generally based on notions of modernity and functionality as well as democratic values, achievable by all, yet inspired by high quality arts and crafts, promoting the belief in a natural, sustainable and beautiful style for a truly ‘humane’ Swedish society. It would of course be too simplistic to directly connect Magnusson’s and Contributor’s style and intentions to a Swedish social democratically influenced aesthetic identity, shaped during late nineteenthand early twentieth-century modernism. Yet as the architect and historian Kenneth Frampton claims: ‘Indeed, the origin of today’s sustainable approach to the mediation and furnishing of the built environment [and, as I would add, in Swedish design at large] may be said to date back to the last half of the nineteenth century, when the bourgeois ideal of a total, all-encompassing artwork came to be given a broader, more inclusive social dimension.’35 Accordingly, the implicitly political

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and socialist ethical attitude promoted and enacted in the organization of Contributor magazine makes it an artistic and one might say programmatic landmark in the ever more commercialized and expanding field of fashion media. Further, the humane values permeating Magnusson’s artistic photographic programme, which is aimed at creating a non-objectifying, individualizing and naturalistic fashion imagery leaning on portrait photography, gain significant meaning in the light of their cultural context in a Nordic periphery. According to Eugénie Shinkle, fashion photography can or, as I would claim, should be interpreted in the light of cultural politics, as a situated practice, comprising complex forms of ideological address.36 As such it has the power to change definitions of identity, norms and values. Seen from this perspective – and however utopian or idealist such a notion might appear – Magnusson and Contributor, through both their visual aesthetics, their practices and their social agenda, can be considered as leaving a democratic and humane mark on a global fashion system with problematic hierarchical, objectifying and exploitative structures. Magnusson’s final ideas on possible ‘Swedish’ social-politically inspired values combined with an openminded global perspective in his work might be seen as partly triggered by my questions, but they are nevertheless significant: MM: Collaboration is extremely important. Maybe that’s something we in Sweden learned from being all equal, being given equal chances, that it helps to collaborate, it makes things easier and better. AK: And that’s even what the title of the magazine expresses? MM: Exactly. We are exclusively building on collaboration. We have all equal value, doing our different things. Contributors from all over the world.

Notes 1 This quote comes from a lecture given by Magnusson on my university course Contemporary Fashion – Practice and Theory, in November 2016, at the Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University. 2 Author’s interview with Magnus Magnusson in November 2016. All of Magnusson’s statements quoted here were made during this interview. 3 My discussion on Magnusson’s fashion photographs is further developed in a chapter analysing their semiotic meanings and visual rhetoric, to be published in ‘Mellan konst och kommers: Om modefotografiets retorik’, in Semiotik: teoretiska tillämpningar i konstvetenskap, ed. Sonya Petersson and Malin Hedlin Hayden (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2022).

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4 For a survey of different genres in fashion press and the difference between mainstream and niche fashion magazines, see Kate Nelson-Best: The History of Fashion Journalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) and Ane Lynge-Jorlén, ‘Between Frivolity and Art: Contemporary Niche Fashion Magazines’, Fashion Theory, vol 16, no. 1 (2012). 5 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones, (London and New York: Routledge, [1975] 2003). 6 For an overview of Swedish National Romanticism and its relation to Northern light, see Kirk Varnedoe, Northern Light: Nordic Art at the Turn of the Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 7 The self-fashioning of the bohemian artist during the late nineteenth century in different styles is explored in Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000). 8 Interview, November 2016. The importance of and identification with light in Swedish and Nordic fashion photography as part of framing a Northern aesthetic identity is also discussed in Christine Sjöberg, ‘A Different Kind of Light. Exploring Light and Shadow in the Work of Hetta and Hoogland Ivanov’, in Fashioned in the North. Nordic Histories, Agents, and Images of Fashion Photography, ed. Anna Dahlgren (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2020), 49–68. 9 Mulvey, 47f. 10 For a survey on the development of realist fashion photography, see Kate Rhodes, ‘The Elegance of the Everyday: Nobodies in Contemporary Fashion Photography’, in Fashion as Photograph. Viewing and Reviewing Images of Fashion, ed. Eugénie Shinkle (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 200–13. 11 Ibid., 205. 12 Nancy Hall-Duncan, The History of Fashion Photography (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1979, p. 202, quoted in Rhodes, 2008), 205. 13 Quoted in Rhodes, 205. 14 https://www.contributormagazine.com 15 Regarding the role of niche fashion-magazines, see Ane Lynge-Jorlén, Niche Fashion Magazines (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2017); Kate Nelson-Best, The History of Fashion Journalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Anna Dahlgren, Travelling Images: Looking across the Borderlands of Art, Media and Visual Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 16 On the digital version and layout of Contributor, as well as the scenography of its fashion stories, see Christine Sjöberg, ‘Scenographic Events: Interfacing with Digital Fashion Stories’, in Scenography and Art History, ed. Astrid von Rosen and Viveka Kjellmer (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021), 183–98. 17 Lynge-Jorlén, 2012. 18 Contributor Magazine, ‘Nature as Culture’ issue, November 2016.

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28 29 30 31

32 33 34

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Anders Edström, Hanezawa Garden (London: Mack, 2015). Contributor Magazine, ‘Nature as Culture’ issue, November 2016. Rhodes, 201. Rebecca Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2001), 82. Rhodes, 204. Jessica Höglund, Magnus Jensner and Niclas Östling (eds), The Visible: Contemporary Swedish Photography (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Arena, 2014), 11. Anna Tellgren, A Way of Life: Swedish Photography from Christer Strömholm until Today (Malmö: Moderna Museet Malmö, 2014), 18, 26. Höglund et al., 13f. Ibid., 15f. The artists featured in the catalogue are: Marie Andersson, Lotta Antonsson, Stina Brockman, Miriam Bäckström, Trinidad Carrillo, Aida Chehrehgosha, Dawid, Catharina Gotby, Denise Grünstein, Annika von Hauswolff, Maria Hedlund, Linda Hofvander, Annica Karlsson Rixon, Jenny Källman, Tuija Lindström, Maria Miesenberger, Tova Mozard, Julia Peirone, Eva Stenram, Anna Strand and Pernilla Zetterman. https://www.contributormagazine.com Declaration of brand values on the brand’s home page during spring 2018. Rhodes in Shinkle, 2008. The first translation of Ellen Key’s text into English has partly been published as ‘Beauty in the Home’, in the book Modern Swedish Design. Three Founding Texts, by Uno Åhrén, Gunnar Asplund, Wolter Gahn, Ellen Key, Sven Markelius, Gregor Paulsson, and Eskil Sundahl, ed. Lucy Creagh, Helena Kåberg, and Barbara Miller Lane (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008). Here Barbara Miller Lane shows the important inspiration Key gained from the art, crafts and home of Carl and Karin Larsson. She describes a home ‘furnished with colourful, simple, and somewhat rustic-looking pieces [. . .] inspired by traditional crafts’ and where ‘perpetual sunlight seemed to illuminate the life of the home’. Miller Lane in ‘An Introduction to Ellen Key’s “Beauty in the Home” ’, in Modern Swedish Design, 23. Miller Lane, in Modern Swedish Design, 20. Peter Reed, ‘Preface’, in Modern Swedish Design, 7f. For a comprehensive overview of the Stockholm exhibition and its significance for Swedish modernism, see Eva Rudberg, The Stockholm Exhibition 1930: Modernism’s Breakthrough in Swedish Architecture, trans. Paul Britten Austin and Frances Lucas (Stockholm: Stockholmia, 1999). Kenneth Frampton, ‘The Untimely Timeliness of Swedish Modernism’, in Modern Swedish Design, 15. Eugénie Shinkle (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Fashion as Photograph (London and New York: I.B. Tauris), 6.

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Aesthetics and Ethics: Philosophical Investigations of Fashion

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Fashion, Prosthetics, Machines: Being Human and the Body Today Patrizia Calefato

In this chapter, Italian semiotician Patrizia Calefato focuses on the relationships between the ‘clothed’ body and its technological, communicative and substitutive prosthesis, a concept that has been extensively and broadly analysed by social sciences in relation both to the physical and the communicative enhancing of the human body. The prosthetic body, Calefato argues, involves aspects concerning fashion, human rights, aesthetics and law, as well as knowledge and cultural matters. In fact, the substitutive function of the prosthesis cannot be separated from both its aesthetic and communicative functions, which means that fashion has to work with a sort of ‘second nature’ of the body.

Introduction The terms ‘prosthesis’ and ‘prosthetics’ are both used in the field of medicine to indicate the substitution of an organ (or part of it) or of a limb with an artificial structure restoring its functionality. In Linguistics, ‘prothesis’, or more commonly ‘prosthesis’, is the name of the phonetic phenomenon which occurs when a nonetymological item appears at the beginning of a word just for euphonic reasons. Both terms have the same origin from the Greek word πρόϑεσις, from προτίϑημι, meaning ‘to lay something to the fore’. The term ‘prothesis’ in Latin describes also a space typical of the first Christian churches, a small square-shaped room on the left of the apse where churchgoers left offerings and prepared for Mass. This linguistic hint is an introductive suggestion for a reflection on the universe included in the concept of prosthesis, which surpasses the mere word and 197

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involves its social and connotative meanings. Both etymologically and in everyday language, prostheses have actually many functions: substitution, addition, development, extension, improvement. All the aforementioned three meanings of the term ‘prosthesis’, even the most literal meaning, evoke the idea of the addition, extension or expansion of an element, be it the human body, a word or a church. All these functions hint, therefore, at an addition to a base, or a substitution to parts of it, because it cannot function as it is or because prosthetics can increase its performance.

Prosthetics This classic interpretation of the concept of ‘prosthesis’ guided many theoretical formulations of human social sciences. Leroi-Gourhan (1994) analysed the ‘projective’ role of prostheses, starting from the human hand, as an element which executes and actualizes the projects of the human mind by externalizing them. McLuhan (1994), while never explicitly mentioning the concept of prosthesis, highlighted the extensive aspect of media in relation to the human central nervous system. Since the last two decades of the twentieth century, these two perspectives, combining a cognitive approach in Leroi-Gourhan and a media approach in McLuhan with an evolutionary context, have been perfected and improved, especially in the depiction of prosthetics as an addition to a pre-existing form.1 A definition and a possible classification of prosthetics in this wide range of meanings comes from Umberto Eco’s essay, ‘Kant and the Platypus’. Here Eco exposes a distinction between the different prosthetic functions: substitutive, extensive, intrusive and magnifying.2 The latter aspect in particular expresses, according to Eco, the desire of ‘do[ing] something that our body had perhaps dreamed of doing but without ever succeeding’, and it seems more significant today.3 In fact, this aspect does not limit prosthetics to the ‘additive’ dimension, but opens up a universe in which involves knowledge, communication, aesthetics and ethics are performative elements. The role of prosthetics as means to expand knowledge is also reflected in Tomás Maldonado’s essay, ‘Critique of IT Reason’, where he states that ‘the prosthetic body is today also a wonderful instrument for expanding our knowledge of reality in all of its articulations’.4 According to Maldonado prosthetics are an artifact, an actual product of techné. Prosthetics today not only aim to substitute or improve parts of the human body functionally, but also integrate some forms of communication among

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bodies and inside the body. The human body is full of prosthetics, according to Maldonado: those artifacts linked to motion, perception, knowledge or a combination of the three.5 In this sense a prosthesis is both an actual one (for example the substitution of a missing limb or a missing function such as sight or hearing), and the ‘machines’, the technologies and gadgets with which the body is covered not only for communicative purposes. Prostheses are inorganic elements technically or technologically engineered in order to modify and deeply improve organic functionality. Through the body, on the body, with the body, the prostheses live, become organic and let live the body itself, quite literally in some cases (as for pace-makers). Prostheses incorporate, as a second nature, the technological dimension and the sensory/ aesthetic one. The human body is today a mixture of nature, culture, technique, and technology. In the 1980s many authors of the cyberpunk genre – W. Gibson, B. Sterling, P. Cadigan and others, influencing also human and social sciences, developed the metaphorical image of the cyborg (introduced by science-fiction in the 1960s), in order to show the mingling of organic and inorganic on and in the body starting from the diffusion of the power of technology on life itself.

Some remarks on cyberpunk and the grotesque The prototype of cyberpunk is to be found in novels and films from the 1980s and 1990s. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the characters Cowboy Case and Molly are living examples of the interaction between the human and artificialtechnological body.6 Case’s temples, for example, are connected directly to the computer through two electrodes. So, he lives in simulated places and has simulated experiences that, nevertheless, for him are completely real. Molly has scalpel fingers, like robotic hands, and her thoughts are able to produce threedimensional images. In David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome (1983), a man is transformed into a living video recorder: he can insert video cassettes into his body, which then act as though they were alive. In the short story ‘Death of Reason’, by the cyberpunk writer Tony Daniel, the main character wears ‘op-ed’ computer glasses that are activated simply by blinking.7 Cyberpunk culture is an expression of the wired condition, that is, being perpetually part of a machine interface, or connected to a communications network that uses the human body as a support in a vaster ‘nervous system’ of cables, optic fibres and information technology in general.

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Nicholas Negroponte (1995) defined this phenomenon as the transformation of atoms into bits, that is, the transformation of matter into electronic impulses.8 Bakhtin’s semiotic analysis helps us identify the grotesque features of the cyberpunk genre. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque is concerned with everything that bursts, protrudes and surfaces from the body, everything that seeks to escape the body’s limits.9 Bakhtin focuses on Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel and the popular Carnival between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: he admirably describes the grotesque body as a body in the making, never given or defined, which goes beyond itself outside the pre-established limits.10 Through these traits, the grotesque transforms the body, opening it to intercorporeity. An example of this is the description of a body in the cyberpunk short story ‘Fool to Believe’ by techno-feminist writer Pat Cadigan.11 The character’s disguise (a policewoman hunting for criminals) is devised by an ‘urban camouflage’ computer program that makes it impossible for her to be recognized in the virtual slums. The transformation of her facial features has all the distinctive signs of a grotesque mask: cross-eyed, with idiotic eyebrows, a broken nose, punk-like hair and so on. The result is that she looks like an anonymous slumdweller, yet for the reader her disguise has a surprisingly comic effect. Even the sound of the rasping voice and the gurgling over the aspirates constitute grotesque features, just like the defects in pronunciation typical of comic masques. Indeed, this defective pronunciation issues from a body that seems to want to unburden itself, to give birth, so to speak, like the character who stutters in the Commedia dell’Arte and physically labours over his attempts to pronounce a certain word, until Harlequin thumps him on the stomach and out pops the recalcitrant word, like a new-born babe. When a tension is set up between filling and emptying the body, the grotesque either maintains that tension or brings about its paradoxical resolution. In cyberspace, filling and emptying are not just a matter of ‘atoms’, of gorging and evacuating the body as in Rabelais, but also of ‘bits’.

A new humanism In the early 1990s, American theorist Donna Haraway gave a definition of cyborg as ‘our ontology’, ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’.12 Haraway saw the cyborg as the actual product of social reality, but also as a challenge to this reality, to its

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separation of classes, genders, and nations. The concept of the cyborg relied in the fulfilment of the science-fictional dream of the human-machine hybrid in its actualization. Cyborg theory was intended to be a new post-humanism meant as a critique to the incorrect and yet historically actual juxtaposition of humanism and ethnocentrism, humanism and domination of men on men. More than three decades on from the emergence of these theories, we are less naïve about the interaction between body and machine, which changed over that time, and now includes some new elements in relation to the cyborg. In fact, the cyborg did not include the sensorial dimension, a typically human trait shown today by technology in relation to aesthetics. ‘Post-humanism’ has been replaced by a return to humanism, which does not mean that humanity has retained its dominance over the world. The dark cyborg of past decades has faded into a more ethically engaged concept, bound to the dimension of the senses. Here fashion has a fundamental role. Fashion has a double characterization: it connects the body to clothing, and therefore relates to how the body ‘feels’ that clothing; it also places the individual body into the social body, institutionalizing the senses and urges into an ‘average’ taste dictated by common sense. Of these two aspects, the former opens new horizons for the concept of fashion itself today: it redefines it not only as a form of social cohesion, not only stereotypical repetition, but also, increasingly, a form of feeling that focuses on an open, hybrid, constantly changing, responsible and multiple body. Prosthetics are today sentient parts of this body. Today’s ubiquitous means of communication should be considered as prostheses, too, and are also an integral part of the fashion system – smartphones, tablets, smartwatches; the same goes for the innovative new materials for textiles and accessories that function as ‘machines’ for communication between the bodies and into the body and which present more and more as sensory organs. And of course we need to consider the actual prosthetics that substitute for limbs or other parts of the body, which have endured an aesthetic process across fashion, art and visual culture. In the essay ‘The Right of Having Rights’, Italian jurist Stefano Rodotà discusses a case where some prostheses surpassed their merely functional dimension. He refers to Aimée Mullins, a paralympic athlete, actress, model and activist who, having had to undergo the amputation of her lower legs as an infant, modelled in 1999 in London for Alexander McQueen using two handcrafted wooden prostheses. ‘As some may say, those prostheses allow her a particular walk which cannot be repeated by any other model’, Rodotà writes.13 In this case ethics – as for the dignity and the rights of the body – and aesthetics are both

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involved. Mullins strutted the catwalk better than a four-limbed model, while revealing both the ‘mechanical’ and artificial nature of the ideal catwalk strut, the beauty of her artificial limbs and the rest of her body. Her performance perfectly showed the condition our bodies undergo every day: some of our postures and our movements are deeply connected to the relationship between our bodies and the ‘prosthetics’ that we commonly use and wear. Our fingers can zoom in on and out of pictures on a display, our thumbs rapidly tap on a phone screen; using a computer for work can cause back pain, and using a smartphone while walking can cause accidents. In day-to-day life, our prostheses-machines, as well as our organs, can strengthen or weaken; they can improve the body but are subject to its limits.

‘Second nature’ ‘The clothed body’ has never been more exposed to the transformations introduced by our machine-prostheses, which are integrated on clothing, on textiles, on accessories, as well as on the body itself. Prosthetics and machines are an integral part of our knowledge, communication and technology, as well as of the fashion system, being deeply related to our ‘second nature’, both mythological and technological. However, wearable technology is not only aimed at communication, as depicted by the utopia of the wired body in the 1990s. Technology and fashion are related to a new sense of wellbeing, deep and ethical, and create a new idea of uniqueness of clothing. Nanotechnologies can now create tissues and new synthetic hypoallergenic or healing materials, clothes that can take blood pressure, measure blood sugar level and heart rates, and even release small doses of drugs. British artist, researcher and self-proclaimed sensory designer Jenny Tillotson highlights the relationship between fashion, new technologies and human senses – especially smell – through her work. Applying nanotechnologies to clothing, she is able to create textiles which trick the brain receptors into perceiving some smells. Her aim with this research is not only communicative or functional: the new frontier of ‘wearable tech’ is deeply connected to synesthesia, wellness, pleasure and a harmonic communication as opposed to a quick or effective one. The increased need of a ‘spiritual’ dimension of fashion leads to the rediscovery and refurbishment of objects according to their experience or sentimental value, as in the clothing and accessories of Japanese firm Kansei Engineering, which was founded in the 1970s. In Japanese, ‘kansei’ means ‘sentimental’: the firm’s

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technique is built on needs, emotions and sensations, via which the final product is designed. The translation from emotions into object is embodied by a digital design of the clothing, later released for actual fabrication. Fashion is a fundamental paradigm through which we understand both the relationship between art and technology, and the one between nature and technique today. The 2016 show Coded Culture at New York’s Pratt Manhattan Gallery (and later in many other places across the United States) focused on how technology can create clothing as a customized work of art based on the individual body of its owner or wearer. For example, designer Rebecca PailesFriedman’s feather shrug (Biowear shrug) incorporates a number of sensors monitoring the wearer’s heart rate, in order to ruffle the feathers when it increases. Melissa Coleman’s Holy Dress is a sort of armour of sensors which mimic a polygraph; when the emotional reaction to a lie is detected, it releases a small electric charge. The dress is, according to its designer, ‘a dystopian design imagining electronically enhanced clothing as a way to help people become the best version of themselves’.14 Even medical prosthetics, substituting or extending physical attributes, as already mentioned, are made of new materials and use new technologies interlacing them with art, fashion and design. For example, design atelier Fuseproject, directed by Yves Béhar, collaborated with the robotics firm Superflex to create the Aura Powered Clothing collection, targeted mostly towards elderly people. It is composed by braces made of hexagonal capsule working as ‘electronics muscles’, aiding the movements and enhancing the wearer’s strength. The designer deliberately avoided a ‘medical’ look, preferring a ‘futuristic’ fashionable aesthetic. UNYQ, a multinational corporation of prosthetics, bases its marketing campaigns on the motto ‘Stigma to Style’, and designs customized pieces that combines utility and beauty for bodies that have additional needs Among these, some 3D-printed back braces for scoliosis harmonize the relationship between the brace and its wearer, in this case young people aged between ten and fifteen, especially girls, who may already be finding it difficult to accept their own body. Substitutional prosthetics are based on ergonomics, on new materials and on new technologies. Some of them were introduced in the early 1990s: for example, the research on connecting the nervous system to the prosthetics, such as TMR research. This means not only that organic parts can be substituted and have their functionality extended, but that they are also very beautiful objects in themselves as far as possible: these prostheses are the result of artistic and design-led experimentation, and therefore are as unique and precious as

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jewellery or couture, as those created by the Israeli designer Avya Serfati demonstrate. Some sportswear firms such as Nike and Adidas produce and advertise artificial limbs for adaptive athletes, and the range’s style conforms to the firm’s general design, colours and lines. Sometimes prosthetics imitate the colour of athletes’ skin so as not to stand out; sometimes they highlight their very artificiality. Sometimes fashion is also inspired by prosthetics: an example for this are Vietnamese designer LanVi Nguyen’s Dragon shoes, created for her responsible fashion brand Fashion4Freedom. Their handcrafted soles and heels mirror the ancient Vietnamese Imperial and Pagoda wood art and recall Alexander McQueen’s wooden prostheses for Aimée Mullins. Perhaps it is not intentional, but the coincidence is interesting.

Bodies The ‘sex appeal of the inorganic’, mentioned by Walter Benjamin, is not only a paradigm through which the fashionable body is no longer considered as a ‘corpse’, but instead takes on elements of physical ‘liveliness’.15 This eerie and fascinating image can be reinterpreted today. The ‘sex appeal of the inorganic’ does indeed have a ‘double’ definition, meaning both the deathly fascination of the body covered by of inorganic objects – fashion items – and, on the other hand, the sex appeal of these objects, which embody a live power, and are almost animated by themselves, regardless of their wearer. Today body and prosthetics are perfectly integrated in terms of their aesthetics and sex appeal and from a fashion point of view: they aim to stir the senses, and not to the inorganic. The body is again completely human by including artifacts, prosthetics, clothing, machines, decorations, signs. This return to humanity is not neutral: this sensuality includes ethical principles and responsibilities, which are now part of the entire fashion system, and how they relate both to both wider society and production. What are those principles? First of all, activism, inside and outside the fashion system, aimed at moving away from the stereotypically average idea of the body. Aspects of this include prevailing concepts of size – very small, in particular – as a universal measure of body, both feminine and masculine; eternal youth; eternal leanness; eternal health; and bodily integrity. These must be recognized as destructive, sexist and totalitarian values. In opposition to these we must reject this non-existent ideal ‘nature’ of the body in favour of its semiotic, technologic and aesthetic complexity, including its different abilities.

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Aimée Mullins has a large number of fashionable prostheses and she is a testament for her experience and her life: for example, by working on a L’Oréal advertising campaign, the brand’s famous slogan – ‘Because I’m worth it’ – gets a new ethical meaning, targeting everyone. Fashion shows with high symbolic value repropose this perspective: the marathon runner Amy Palmiero-Winters, a below-knee amputee, participated in the Toronto Fashion Week, using a leg prosthesis designed by Sunny Fong in collaboration with Canadian atelier for prosthetics The Alleles. The latter is one among many centres researching a way to overcome the idea of disability as deprivation, making it, as much as possible, an element of cultural and human growth for the entire social body and for the individual.16 In summer 2014 Alta Roma fashion shows included non-professional models, some of whom were people with disabilities; at 2016’s New York Fashion Week, model Rebekah Marine, born without a forearm, walked using her ‘bionic’ prosthetics, together with model Leslie Irby, who uses a wheelchair. A 2010 social advertising campaign, Fashion Meets Disability, treats the theme of the body’s identity through fashion simply and interestingly. Fashion Theory thus studies the ethical role of fashion in many fields, including those related to social inclusion and additional needs. Young Italian fencer Beatrice Vio, born in 1997, has been fencing since the age of five. Unfortunately, at the age of eleven, she was struck by a violent form of meningitis, which required the amputation of both her arms and both her legs. After a year of physical therapy and rehabilitation, Vio resumed fencing thanks to a special prosthesis designed to hold and move the foil, and became so adept at its use that she won the gold medal at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Usually called Bebe, Vio is a fan favourite in Italy, and hosts the TV show La Vita è una Figata (Life is Cool). She also promotes public debates around social engagement on social networks, and has a special relationship with fashion, as became clear when, in October 2016, she was invited to a dinner at the White House as part of a delegation headed by Matteo Renzi, then prime minister of Italy. On the run-up to that occasion, she posted a Facebook status describing her first reaction as ‘What am I going to wear?!’ She then asked for help from Maria Grazia Chiuri, who works for Dior, and showed the result on the social media, asking for opinions. During the dinner, she also ‘stole’ a selfie with President Obama. For Vio, fashion is activism, pleasure, testimony. In this sense, she shows the public how her clothing and accessories are important signs of how it is possible to build or re-build ‘pieces’ of one’s self and of one’s own identity even in the most difficult situations.

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Multiple fashionable bodies Mullins and Vio are two women of two different generations who, in addition to being athletes and activists, are also defined as ‘models’. Mullins was the first female amputee woman to enter this Olympus. If we think of fashion in its ‘classic’ form, as Barthes studied it in the 1950s, things were very different. The ideal fashionable body in the magazines was then that of a ‘paper-woman’: the cover girl, as Barthes called her in The Fashion System. In his opinion, the cover girl’s body represents a paradox because it is both an abstract and an individual body: ‘Structurally, the cover girl represents a rare paradox: on the one hand, her body has the value of an abstract institution, and on the other hand, this body is individual.’17 Hegel – Barthes writes – had suggested that the human body is in a relationship of signification with clothing: ‘as pure sentience, the body cannot signify; clothing guarantees the passage from sentience to meaning.’18 The cover girl’s body is a particular body within this general condition: it is an ‘inappropriate’ body, one ‘deformed’ by the necessity to create a generality, that is, the dress. However, the cover girl’s body ‘means’ the dress in a particular sense, since it is not a specific dress, but a very general class of meanings, all related to the main meaning, which is ‘being fashionable’. The referent of Barthes’ analysis in The Fashion System was fashion as it was described in magazines between the 1950s and the 1960s, in the age of the technical reproducibility of the bodies through photography and journalism.19 In this period, fashion transformed fully into a mass communication system – namely, one which does not limit itself to using other communication systems (i.e. magazines, photography and cinema), but rather one which is itself a space for the production and reproduction of meaning. According to Julia Kristeva, Barthes intuitively sensed an aspect of fashion as ‘ideologeme’, a term taken up by the Russian formalist linguist P.N. Medvedev.20 The ideologeme is conceived as the function of linking translinguistic practices in a society by compressing and concentrating the dominant mode of thought. According to Toril Moi, the ideologeme grasps ‘the inherent ideological value of the sign as constitutive of its meaning, and not simply as an “ideological” addition to the linguistic analysis’.21 Therefore, the cover girl’s body has an inherent meaning both in the structure of the fashion text (the magazine) and in the society in which fashion reproduces itself as a sign system. Today, this body no longer resides only in fashion magazines because the clothed body is represented by different social and digital media. In addition, the

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subject of fashion has become multiple, just as real life is. There are many possible shapes that fashionable bodies take in relation to age, gender, sizes, colours, skills. A semiotic transition from the cover girl’s ‘ideal body’ to an ‘everyday model’ has been achieved in the social imaginary. This transition produces the fashionable body as worldliness and popular culture, as unique yet universal language: the body as constructed and in construction, product and process of representations and self-representations. The supermodel has transformed into a pop model, in an always potential and, at the same time, constantly ongoing metamorphosis. Her/his body can be anyone and anywhere. In this scenario, women like Aimée Mullins and Bebe Vio take on the role of emblematic figures for a body culture that represents a form of resistance to any ‘cage’, either real or symbolic, . as fashion writer Sara Kaufman writes in a recent issue of Vestoj magazine.22 Today, young children with Down’s Syndrome can see Ellie Goldstein looking regal on the cover of Glamour and know that they could too. When Aaron Philip is shot for Moschino like a sexy pixie, the alluring attitude of models is suddenly taken to the next level. And I find Debbie van der Putten’s glamour shots refreshing even after decades of women being photographed naked. Why? Because inclusive representation is liberating, and it’s the only way for disability to stop being the main feature.23 Although visual culture cannot avoid commodifying the body of a model who has undergone amputation (as it does all women), as Burton and Melkumova-Reynolds argue, nevertheless this body resists in its otherness and produces alternative representations that cannot be reduced to stereotypes.24 Mullins played the role of the most perfect model in McQueen fashion show, but she also staged a possible ‘parody’ of perfection. The semiotic concept of the grotesque helps us once again to understand this both parodic and critical dimension. Mullins, in fact, exaggerates and amplifies the classic model’s ‘mechanical’ movements, walking on high heels, posture erect. Exaggeration, hyperbole and amplification are typical traits of the grotesque which produce semantic reversals of social meanings.25 As Vivien Sobchak writes: ‘Here, with Aimee Mullins’ legs (both onscreen and off ), we have both – and simultaneously – incorporation and projection, an overcoming and a resistance, an unstoppable “difference” that is not about negation, but about the alterity of “becoming”.’26 So, Mullins’ fashionable body overturns and destabilizes the ideologeme – to use Kristeva’s concept – of the model’s body. During a panel hosted by Fashion Institute of Technology in 2018, Mullins said: ‘When I do wear prosthetics that really play with the aesthetic function, it changes the conversation. It changes

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how I feel about my body, it changes how people interact with me. . . Fashion is a perfect arena to explore these larger societal conversations around inclusivity.’27 Bebe Vio embodies values such as youth, sport and vivacity. As a member of Generation Z, she seems to be playing with fashion rather than taking it seriously. Some elements of the grotesque are also present in her character, especially those related to metamorphosis, transformation and laughter. The following quote from Bakhtin seems to describe the playfulness and vitality that her body expresses: ‘[The grotesque body] is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and create another body.’28 During the coronavirus pandemic, Bebe Vio publicly expressed her thanks to doctors, nurses and medical staff, starting from her positionality as a person who has had to spend a lot of time in the hospital since she was a child: ‘A huge thank you. Anyone who has spent a lot of time in hospital, as I and many Paralympians have, know how important doctors, nurses, therapists are. I think of Lorena, mother of one of the “art4sport” boys and nurse in a hospital in Lodi, her double or triple shifts in recent weeks. I admire them deeply.’29 COVID-19 has introduced a greater attention to bodies in their ‘fragility’ in fashion communication, too. The pandemic exposes men and women to their bodily limits, to the awareness that they can get sick, fail, fall, heal or die, regardless of how they live their life, in a condition of basic ‘nakedness’ of life that we all share. Compared to the image of the beautiful, healthy, young, athletic body, the pandemic has reminded us that bodies are subject to limits, and that these limits are part of life. Fashion cannot hide them. This awareness may have been the impetus behind the presence of models of different physical abilities and sizes at the London Fashion Week in Autumn 2020. Zoe Proctor and Laura Johnson, founders of the London model agency Zebedee Management, said in an interview with Vogue Italia, that ‘there is a strong desire in the air to put aside stale aesthetic stereotypes and promote less obvious beauties’.30

Conclusion The relationship between the body, prosthetics, machines and fashion prizes increasingly the value of ‘being human’: ‘being’ is here a verb, because it highlights the sense of humanity implied by the era of the new technologies. ‘Machines’ are ever more sensorial and sensitive prostheses, their ethical and aesthetical value

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invested in and motivating their communicative functions. Fashion embodies truthfully this ethical and aesthetical value by describing itself as a system that no longer relies on stereotypical figures of the ‘technological body’. Technology and handcrafting, design and fashion, in this sense, do not imply a suffocating and conforming appearance, but rather exemplify the traits of a new sense of things related to the body and its complexity.31

Notes 1 Antonio Caronia, Tecnologie: dalle protesi al mondo. Available online: https://www. academia.edu/305496/Tecnologie_dalla_protesi_al_mondo (originally published in Tutto da capo, 1 November 2003; last accessed 16 November 2020). 2 Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, trans. Alastair McEwen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000), 361–2. 3 Ibid., 362. 4 Tomás Maldonado, Critica della ragione informatica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997), 141. 5 Ibid. 6 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984). 7 Tony Daniel, ‘Death of Reason’, in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 1992. Trans. Luciano Lorenzin, ‘Morte della ragione’, in Cyberpunk, ed. Pier Giorgio Nicolazzini (Milan: Nord, 1994), 210–62. 8 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 11–31. 9 Michail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 320. 10 Ibid., 26. 11 Pat Cadigan, ‘Fool to Believe’, in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1990. Trans. Anna Dal Dan, ‘Chi ti credi di essere?’, in Cyberpunk, ed. Pier Giorgio Nicolazzini (Milan: Nord, 1994), 116–79. 12 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–50. 13 Stefano Rodotà, Il diritto di avere diritti (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2012), 342 (translation mine). 14 https://melissacoleman.nl/holydress 15 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1999), 79. 16 Graham Pullin, Design Meets Disability (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), 13–38. 17 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 258–9. 18 Ibid., 258.

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19 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 20 Julia Kristeva, Σημειωτιχη: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969). Trans. Piero Ricci, Σημειωτιχη. Ricerche per una semanalisi, (Milan: Feltrinelli), 56. 21 Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 62. 22 Sara Kaufman, ‘Living with Disability’ (Vestoj. The Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion). Available online: http://vestoj.com/living-with-disability/ (accessed 22 September 2022). 23 Kaufman quotes three contemporary models: Ellie Goldstein, the model with Down’s Syndrome who was chosen by Gucci in 2020 for the ‘Gucci Beauty Glitch’ project; Aaron Philip, the first black and transgender disabled model; and Debbie van der Putten, the amputee model who posed nude on Playboy in 2007. 24 Laini Burton and Lana Melkumova-Reynolds, ‘ “My leg is a giant stiletto-heel”: Fashioning the Prosthetised Body’, Fashion Theory vol. 23, no. 12 (2019): 207. 25 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 303. 26 Vivian Sobchak, ‘A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality’, in The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, ed. Marquand Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 38. 27 Whitney Bauck, Aimée Mullins on disability, design and becoming an Alexander McQueen muse. Available online: https://fashionista.com/2018/02/aimee-mullinsfashion-disability-fit-symposium (accessed 12 February 2021). 28 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World: 317. 29 Bebe Vio, Giocare di squadra per ripartire. Available online: https://www.raisport.rai. it/articoli/2020/04/Bebe-Vio-paese-unito-coronavirus-87569d7c-5c2b-4710-8fd9dc8ede1e22e5.html (translation mine; accessed 12 February 2021). 30 Michele Fossi, ‘Anti stigma. Intervista a Laura Johnson e Zoe Proctor di Zebedee Management’ (Vogue Italia, November 2020). Available online: https://www.vogue.it/ moda/article/anti-stigma-intervista-laura-johnson-zoe-proctor-zebedeemanagement (accessed 25 April 2021). 31 This chapter was translated by Sveva Scaramuzzi (except for paragraphs 2: Some remarks on…, and 6: Multiple…).

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The Missing Juncture: Architecture and Fashion from Schinkel to Le Corbusier Sven-Olov Wallenstein

In this chapter, Swedish philosopher Sven-Olov Wallenstein traces a series of versions of nineteenth-century anxiety connected to industrialism and mobility, an anxiety that continued into early twentieth-century modernism, and one which may be understood as the acute question of what could be accepted as the organic expression of the contemporary moment. Fashion here appears both as the very image of a severing of form and content, of an undoing of the ‘juncture’ between the architectural body and its outward appearance, but also, as in Le Corbusier, as the model for a new and more flexible ‘fit’ between body and movement.

Introduction The link between architecture and fashion may seem well established. It is obvious that architecture has become increasingly fashionable as an object of desire and fantasy; it participates in a culture of images, it produces starchitects and signature works that brand cities and regions, or, at a more everyday level, it feeds a culture of home styling, of aestheticizing of living spaces, which forms and integral part of what we could call a more general commodification of space. My entry into this complex setting is, however, somewhat different. I will take a step back to an earlier historical phase where a certain idea of fashion enters into the very substance of architecture, as a problem of style, and of the relation between inner structure and outer form, which engages a whole vocabulary of textiles, garments and shells, as well as skeletons, bodies and ligaments. My title proposes something like a ‘missing juncture’, and I will approach this within a 211

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constellation of three other terms, the first more general, the second and third more specific to the architecture, i.e., style, tectonics and cladding.

Style and the loss of place The link between architecture and fashion is firmly established in the first stages of twentieth-century modernism, even though many of its early historians tended to focus on formal features more easily associated with technology, instrumentality and rationality. Fashion, because of its unavoidable connection to style, in turn perceived as a subjective moment, for these historians belonged to the ephemeral and even morally depraved eclectic sensibilities of the eighteenth century. In this perspective, the ethical imperative of modernism was truth, truth to function, material, structure, technology, whereas the historicizing draperies of the former century were nothing but lies, smoke screens, and rhetorical flourishes devised to conceal a lack of inner substance. But in fact, modernism was from the outset permeated by style, in its many attempts to project a look of modernity, to convince us at the level of corporeal impulses, fantasies and desires, that a new mode of life or new ways of organizing our everyday behaviour were inevitable if we were to live fully in the present. In this sense, the emphasis on formal purity was inseparable from a moment of packaging, marketing and publicity; the ethics of truth was always deeply implicated in an aesthetic of persuasion. Now, while architecture, together with the other arts, no doubt has always been connected to fashion in a broad sense of the term, I would like to enter into this tangled history at one of those crucial places, before the onset of modernism in the proper sense, where the loss of the classical tradition imposes itself as a question of precisely what is at stake in the present. This question emerges in Karl Friedrich Schinkel, when he asks how it might be possible for our own time to attain a style of its own, how it could express a unique experience while still not renouncing the demands for a grand style bequeathed by the tradition. The risk he perceives is that the emphasis on speed and novelty that characterizes the present – and which he, like Baudelaire two decades later, links to fashion – also entails a loss of place and order, and thus of the very defining features of architecture.1 In 1826, returning to Berlin from his journey to England, where he had encountered the technological marvels of industrialism, Schinkel writes that this is a time ‘in which everything becomes mobile, even that which was supposed to

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be most durable, namely the art of building, a time in which the word fashion becomes widespread in architecture, where forms, materials, and every tool can be understood as a plaything to be treated as one wants, where one is prone to try everything since nothing is in its place (weil nichts an seinem Orte steht), and nothing seems required’.2 But if nothing particular seems required and the very place of architecture is lost, what could then be accepted as the organic expression of the contemporary moment? Must we not simply give in to the imminent threat of fashion as a severing of form and content, and as a loss of substance? The solution that gradually dawned on Schinkel was to reconnect to the legacy of German Idealism, drawing both on Fichte and recent theories of the unconscious as a source of artistic form, which later would become instrumental in the liberation from the classical references, or rather in their re-inscription in a more encompassing process.3 Schinkel finds himself at the crossroads, at the end of a classical tradition that he attempts to resuscitate through an idealist philosophy equally approaching its end, at the same time that he acutely perceives the demands imposed by the industrial civilization for new forms grounded in technology. The makeshift quality of the successive solutions that he proposes can thus be taken as paradigmatic for the insecurity of this historical moment. He gradually abandons the classical models and aspires to autonomous forms based in the universality of reason inherited from the Enlightenment, which itself must allow for the radicalism of a beginning that yet somehow preserves and transcends the past: ‘The consequence that follows from art history’, he states in one of his most visionary statements, ‘is not a copy of the past, but something entirely new, a departure from history: every work of art is the beginning of a history.’4 It is from this perspective that we might read the battle in Germany over the meaning of style, sparked publically two years after Schinkel’s letter, by the question posed by Heinrich Hübsch in 1828: ‘In welchem Style sollen wir bauen?’5 Just as in the case of Schinkel, the question points to a historical crisis, this time without referencing fashion, but focusing explicitly on the idea of style. In the wake of the symbolic split between the Académie de l’Architecture and the École Polytechnique in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where the latter institution, under the direction of Durand, formulated a new proto-functionalist program, one must ask to what extent the formal language of architecture (with its Vitriuvian legacy) might at all be able to incorporate the innovations in engineering and industry, the use of iron and new building techniques.

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For Hübsch, the problem of style was essentially related to the material components and construction, to the ‘technostatic experience’, whereas the aesthetic aspect was largely disregarded, since it requires us to ‘speak too much of feelings’ that unavoidably introduce a ‘too subjective, an thus too vulnerable, an aspect’,6 ‘inessential elements’ where ‘the artists talent and taste are mainly called upon’.7 But what these merely negative gestures indicate is that the emergence of the new problem of style, across the arts, from architecture to painting, from literature to music, signals an uncoupling of form from content: style now appears as a subjective decision dependent on the author rather than on the authority of tradition. The ‘grand style’, Paul Valéry would later suggest, looking back at the place of Delacroix in the history of painting,8 here loses its pertinence, and what emerges is style as a necessarily plural phenomenon that no longer expresses of a substantial core, but rather unfolds as a series of signatures – which in turn opens another question, i.e. whether the unity of such a grand style ever existed, or if it is not projected back in time as an imaginary solution to a current state of crisis.9

Tectonics: Order lost and regained The idea of tectonics emerges as one of the decisive moments in the debate on architecture. Beginning with a discussion on the classical orders and the role of ornaments, and with a largely backward-looking perspective, it subsequently came to detach itself from the reference to ancient models, or rather to reinvent this reference so that it no longer pointed to a specific moment in history, but instead to the meaning of the classical, which as such would be able to retain its authority for the future, beyond any specific morphology. The search for the essence of tectonics thus begins as a defensive concept, in opposition to the irruption of the machine age, and in this sense it has many similarities to the discourse of the ‘painterly’, which aspires to preserve the qualities of touch and gesture against the onset of photography.10 But just in the case of painting, it would also liberate a new discourse on form, one that would eventually usher in modern conceptions of abstraction that on the surface had little or nothing to do with the tradition, and yet in many cases aspired to carry it further, or even bring it to completion, although with new outward means.11 Common to both from the outset was that the underlying reference is that of the body as a basis for aesthetic experience, which to be sure can be traced back all the way to antiquity, but here acquires a particularly acute sense: beginning as a model that appeared

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to be grounded in nature, the body would become an increasingly tenuous model, as the relation between inner and outer began to waver, and the priority of the inner became more of a functional variation than a substantial truth. The question posed by Schinkel and Hübsch was developed further by Karl Bötticher (who also succeeded Schinkel as professor in Berlin), first in his programmatic lecture ‘Das Prinzip der hellenischen und germanischen Bauweise hinsichtlich der Übertragung in die Bauweise unserer Tage’(1846).12 For Bötticher, the key issue for contemporary architecture is how to grasp the interplay between a Kernform, the ‘core form’ of technology, and the Kunstform, the ‘art form’ that looks back to the tradition, and his clam is that a viable future style can only be attained in the form of a synthesis between the classical and the modern that does justice to both.13 Iron will no doubt produce new and hitherto unknown structural core systems, Bötticher suggests, which no longer have their base in the Greek or Germanic-Gothic system; and yet the art form, the aesthetic moment of style, must still come from Greece: the acceptance and continuation of the tradition, not its negation, is the only correct way ahead for art of it want to achieve a new tenable style. Walter Benjamin’s later comments capture this predicament in a precise manner, when he in the first draft for the Passagen-Werk, ‘Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts’ (1935), reads it as an interpenetration of old and new, but also as a decisive gap between the different forms, their essential nonsynchronicity, for which the Parisian arcades becomes a condensed image.14 Benjamin quotes Bötticher’s 1846 lecture and notes that here, just as in the arcades, we find ourselves trapped in a passage in several senses: from dream to awakening, from the past to the future, and from the classical tradition to modern industrial technology; what Bötticher shows us on the theoretical level is what the arcades show as a concrete ‘dialectical image’. For Benjamin, this image is characterized by an interior distance and difference between two temporal layers, in the case of the arcades the engineer confronting and displacing the architect in the same way that the new commodity form displaces the dignity of previous commodities, while at the same producing another magic, ‘phantasmagoric’ and mixed forms that will subsequently move onto yet another level when presented in the open and transparent displays of the new department stores. But if Bötticher still believed it possible to reconcile the old and the new, Benjamin sees a dialectical contradiction in which the sundering of the two forms point to something new that wants to break forth and take on an adequate shape, and yet refuses to be born. In architecture this means that construction, the bearer of the new, is thwarted and overlaid by a bygone art form, and can

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only come to the fore in opposition to the visibility of the surface, as a hidden core. The future is prepared subterraneously, and the dialectical gaze must read the dialectical images as ‘puzzle-pictures’ that require a particular kind of interpretation in order for them to release the utopian energy pent up inside. In Bötticher, this passage toward the new is still blocked by a reference the Greeks, and in his main work, Die Tektonik der Hellenen (1844–52), the investigation focuses on the relation between the constructive statics in Greek temples and their outer form. For Bötticher, Greek architecture is a language that expresses the forces of loads, tensions and encounters between parts in an aesthetic mode. So for instance the fluting of the column, which he reads as the way in which the art form signifies that which at first is only a function (loadbearing), so that the integral structure becomes reflected in itself.15 The same reflexive move occurs in the encounter between load-bearing and borne elements, where the confrontation between the two forces is signified by inserted forms (capitals of all kinds). From these two basic principles, Bötticher proceeds to derive the different orders and their elements as a grammar of form with its inflections.16 His aim is however not to provide a historical account of a particular architecture, but rather, just as was sketched in the 1846 lecture, to overcome the division between style and construction in the present. The crucial concept is that of ‘juncture’ (Junktur), an inner bond between ‘envelope’ (Hülle) and core that makes style into an organic expression of the whole. Following Winckelmann, but also drawing on a long tradition that extends via Vitruvius back to Plato, Bötticher grounds the architectural image in the ‘body image’ (Körperbild); the body offers itself as natural image of the organic bond.17 And yet the body and its various extensions have already begun to, if not dissolve, that at least slacken this bond, in a movement that pits the metaphor against itself: the inner constructive core-form is like a naked body, divested of decorative attributes, fully capable of expressing all architectural functions, and it does not as such need a dressed-up art form, or any architecturally superfluous aesthetic expression; and yet the art form is what declares – signifies, renders visible or readable – the core as architecture; indeed, ‘explains’ it. The tension in these formulas were probably not obvious to Bötticher, who confidently can determine tectonics, the art of juncture, as that which elevates construction to the level of art, which is exactly what he deems our present to be lacking: the two sides of architecture have drifted apart, breaking up the con-juncture that brings inside and outside together in a supplementary movement, in which that which as such is, or should have been, complete (architecture’s core form, itself capable of expressing all architectural function), comes to be supplanted by an addition, an

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envelope that it requires in order to become architecture in the full sense of the term.18 This supplementary structure might then be taken as the condition for a new definition of artistic truth: a truthfulness in relation to structure, materiality, technique etc., which does not conceal the constituents of the work, but renders them expressive in their own right. This was the proposal with by Adolf Göller, in a lecture from 1887, ‘Was ist Wahrheit in der Architektur?’19 The task of the outer ‘style shell’ (Stilhülse), he suggest, is to express an inner core, to render it phenomenally sensible and palpable, and what we call truth is the harmonious relation between the core and shell, depth and surface. What comes to the fore in Göller is a twist in aesthetics that would become decisive: truth is no longer defined through a system of representation, but as an immediate fidelity that shows the structural elements of art, in the case of architecture the relations between forces, the texture of materials, in the case of painting the canvas as a kind of limit, and then everything that is made to cover it in the form of brushwork, pigments etc. – all of which had earlier been seen as subordinate to the forms of representation and its hierarchies of style, but now rise up to the surface and become expressive in its own right. And yet the suspicion recurs over and over, that his honesty and material expressivity is just as much a rhetorical move as its predecessors – that truth, regardless of whether is framed in a system or representation or assumed to emerge out of the materiality of the construction, cannot be disentangled from the interplay of visible and the invisible, neither of which can be understood without reference to the other; the meaning of the core form is a result of the signifying force of the shell which is taken to merely explicate something that was already there.

Cladding: Surface and depth In Gottfried Semper’s writings the basic concepts of tectonics were worked out in much greater detail, and the concepts drawn from clothing and garment that in previous writers might have been more of incidental metaphors are now treated as fully operative terms.20 The term ‘tectonics’ appears in the title of his magnum opus from 1860–3, where it is connected to style: Der Stil in den technischen oder tektonischen Künsten, but for Semper the true problem of tectonics is however no longer the classical orders as a normative legacy, or style as a threatening decoupling of an outside from an inside, but rather the origin of architecture in a structural sense that no longer regards a particular past as its

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ultimate model. In this way, Semper provides us with a new take on the Vitruvian myth of the origin of architecture, as well as on the different version of the primitive hut dear to eighteenth-century theorists from Abbé Laugier onwards, but now supported by a wealth of archeological and ethnographic material, scattered across space and time, without any privilege given to antiquity. Architecture, he suggests, can generally be understood as the art of enclosing space, to understand and handle enclosures as meaningful totalities, and it is only within such totalities that the material elements acquire their sense.21 ‘The wall’, Semper writes in Der Stil, ‘is the element that formally represents and renders visible the enclosed space as such’.22 The enclosure is what produces a particular space, and earlier, in Die vier Elemente der Baukunst (1851), he had distinguished four basic elements, which all derive from pre- or extraarchitectural techniques: hearth (metallurgy, ceramics), roof (carpentry), enclosure (textile, weaving) and mound (earthwork). The elements can be taken in different order, with varying subdivisions: on one level, which is the one most pertinent here, the enclosure takes priority; it not only produces demarcation, but later on also ‘cladding’ (Bekleidung), and the wall (Wand) is developed out of the ‘dress’ (Gewand), so that textiles in fact constitute the proto-architectural paradigm for the element ‘wall’, rather than its proper tectonic role as loadbearer, which Semper ascribes to the solid wall (Mauer) made of stones, bricks or other compressed elements. The lightweight frame with filling textile element is the origin of the wall, which is why Semper can declare the knot to be the first structural element of building. On another level, the mound is the essential part, anchoring but also setting the edifice apart from the earth. The hearth, in turn, is what brings together and produces warmth (thus echoing the role of fire in the Vitruvian myth), acting like a nucleus of the social order. Frames and textiles that form the first divisions in the laterality of space are grounded in the earth, while this grounding becomes architectural by way of supporting divisions, so that none of the elements have absolute priority, but rather constitute each other in a mutual exchange. The reference to bearing and load has the body as a model, while this model requires an earth-ground that it in turn explicates; the body, without being named as such, is (as it were) in the virtual centre of these lateral and vertical vectors, not entirely dissimilar to the famous suggestions in Vitruvius that place the body as reflecting centre of the world.23 For our purposes here, it is crucial that this virtual body is no longer the naked body that we find in the tradition of variously illustrated editions of the Vitruvian text from the Renaissance onward, but rather a dressed body, mediated through a system of textiles and garments, which for Semper offer themselves as natural analogies to

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architecture. Buildings, Mark Wigley writes in his analysis of these and similar passages in Semper, ‘are worn rather than simply occupied’.24 Generally, Semper’s project aims to redefine the question of the origin of architecture, showing that it is bound up with the evolution of technologies that are multiple and without any specific point of origin, rather than with a conception of ideal forms. Thus, the conception of ‘orders’ and the whole philosophical and architectural culture of which it is an integral part, and that still retained an authority (precarious to be sure) for someone like Bötticher, is now removed from the agenda. But as we have seen, the image of clothing is also profoundly linked to Semper’s own time, and perhaps we can say that he uses it as tool, in order to defuse the anxiety that once beset Schinkel and his followers, for whom the link between inner and outer, core and shell, seemed more tenuous than ever before because classical language was losing its hold. If nothing today remains in its original place, then Semper wants to produce a new structural but also fluid model that is able to contain all these inflections as so many morphogenetic twists in a technological chain that knows only transformations of transformations, but neither the original nor final link. And yet these worries would, in their turn, also become productive. As Fritz Neumeyer has pointed out, as a normative claim tectonics is always suspended between what we see and what we know, and seeing has its own irreducible legitimacy, a history of its own that does not move in lockstep with the evolution of technology. In many cases, ‘tectonics’ means an image of construction rather than construction as such, and when this image begins to cut loose from its ‘juncture’, it gains a new freedom proportionate to the weakening of the referential bond to the truth of the underlying body.25 The tectonic interstice – the missing juncture not as a threat, but as the opening of form – becomes a new type of space filled up with all kinds of fantasies, projections and rhetorical devices, both rejected as a source of untruth and a condition for truth to appear at all. This becomes evident in the work of Otto Wagner, who was one of the first to transfer Semper’s theories to modern architecture, and emphatically claimed that the art form must be developed out of construction, while he in his architectural practice granted the surface a far-reaching autonomy that seemed to largely suspend the first credo, or better, to fuse the two sides in a densely paradoxical twist: a rhetorical power to signify truth, which truth does not possess on its own. The aluminum plates that constitute one of the layers of shell in his Vienna Postsparkasse are not attached to their support by the large and highly visible bolts that, according to the architect, are the outcome of the formula

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‘Time—cost—utility—performance’ (a formula that upset his contemporaries by its seeming brutality and insensitivity), but instead meticulously fastened by small screws invisible at first sight. Here construction has itself become a rhetorical device – ornamental, a ‘packaging’, as one interpreter puts it: ‘The primary purpose of the bolts is propaganda. Each of the 15.000 bolts in the Postsparkasse has the quality of a memorial. The old historical clothes of noble architectural forms have been cast off, and are symbolized by the naked construction, and the precision of construction is the ornament attached to Wagner’s new clothes.’26 Depth is no longer the truth of construction that comes to be expressed in the outer art form; the latter is instead like a simulation of the core, the fiction of a modernity that unswervingly would necessitate the sacrifice of traditional aesthetic and expressive orders – but in fact operates more as the projection of underlying body, which is not there to be expressed, but comes to be in the movement of signification. Adolf Loos takes these ideas to a radical conclusion, when he in ‘Das Prinzip der Bekleidung’ (1898) states without further ado: ‘In the beginning there was cladding.’27 This principle demands that we should preserve the difference: the painted, dressed-up surface must not be confused with the underlying support; wood must be not covered with a paint that looks like wood, nor metal with paint that looks like metal. If a person’s cladding is skin, and a tree’s is bark, then, Loos states, the skin of a building is entirely different, since its outside is wholly separate from its inside, the latter being a sphere of intimacy to be sheltered from public view—which, one must add, does not exclude, but rather seems to necessitate, that this interior itself be made up differences that introject and multiply the inside-outside distinction, as if domestic intimacy were itself an effect of mirrors, sightlines and a system of directed gazes.28 From Semper to Wagner and Loss, there is a line that can be followed; sinuous, to be sure, with many twist and turns, it dissociates and splits the outsides and insides of tectonics, truth and appearance, core and shell. It sets up a dialectic tension between all such pairs, all of which a certain strand of early modernist theory in its demands for sincerity and honesty with respect to construction and material would spend considerable effort to deny.

Which fashion? When Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos declared that the architect is ‘the fashion designer of the future’, they were in fact drawing on one of the key motifs of the

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early modern masters, even though this legacy was for a long time obscured by a historiography that focused on formal aspects.29 In fact, fashion discourse was a decisive element in early modernism, as has been shown by Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina, among others.30 Perhaps we could say that the debate initiated in Schinkel’s anxious remarks on a threatening loss of permanence and stability here comes full circle. If fashion in its ephemeral shifts, in its acceptance of that which comes and goes like ripples on a surface, once could be perceived as an external force, it now belongs to the inside of architecture: the question is no longer if architecture is linked to fashion, and if so, whether this link poses a threat or not, but rather which fashion it should follow. For Loos, as he often stresses, men’s fashion is the ideal: the suit that does not impose itself, but allows the bearer to remain detached and serene beneath his invisible outward shell. Le Corbusier, on the other hand, looks to women’s fashion, as when he in Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (1930) praises the modern woman for having ‘reformed her clothing’, ‘cut her hair, her skirt, and the sleeves’, to the effect that she ‘seduces us with her charming features’, which the ‘fashion designer obviously has made the most of ’, whereas men with their starched collars still remain in a ‘deplorable state’.31 The analogy to the modern architectural style that Corbusier had promoted three years earlier in Vers une architecture is obvious: the modern body, shaped by sports and suffused by the esprit nouveau, requires new clothes just as much as a new architecture. But if we read the analogy in the other direction, the body is still there in order to ensure that there is a natural reference, a ground, and the two sides are caught in an oscillating exchange. But what is this body? The alternative between seeing it as shaped by its external envelope, or reducing the envelope to a mere circumstantial veiling of an inner, naked truth, seems insufficient. Rather, the two sides co-exist in a mimetic relation so that none of them is without the other, but mutually reflect, express, and shape each other. Loos and Corbusier at first seem diametrically opposed: for Loos, the interior and exterior are wholly separated, and their dissociation is a fundamental requisite for the modernity of clothing as well as that of architecture, while Corbusier appears to demands a thoroughgoing expressivity, so that the inner structure should be restlessly expressed in the outer shell. But even though this at one level is true, in both there is constant concern that the very sense of an underlying body that is to be either expressed or safeguarded in its autonomy results from the clothing, so that veiling – precisely by how it is worn, the way in which it falls, twists, and folds – creates the very idea of an underlying pristine substrate, without this simply being a lie or an illusion. The anxieties of Schinkel, Hübsch and Bötticher, the missing

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juncture that a century earlier had called for a whole series of more or less contorted answers attempting to supplement the lack in form, have here been transformed into a productive imaginary to be explored.

Notes 1 The link between fashion, modernity and the idea of constant change is established by Baudelaire in Le pientre de la vie moderne (1859), and then becomes a key topic in the emerging social sciences in the latter half on the nineteenth century; see my discussion in ‘Tarde, Simmel and the Logic of Fashion’, in Fashion and Modernism, ed. Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 2 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, cited in Fritz Neumeyer, ‘Tektonik: Das Schauspiel der Objektivität und die Wahrheit des Architekturschauspiels’, in Über Tektonik in der Baukunst, ed. Hans Kollhoff (Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1993), 59. 3 For a discussion of Schinkel and German Idealism, see Scott C. Wolf, ‘The Metaphysical Foundations of Schinkel’s Tectonics: Eine Spinne im eigenen Netz’, Any vol. 14 (1996): 44–7. 4 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Das arkitektonische Lehrbuch, ed. Goerd Peschken (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1979), 148. 5 Trans. Wolfgang Herrmann, in In What Style Should We Build?, ed. Wolfgang Herrmann (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1992). For details of this debate, and the various positions assumed in the wake of Heinrich Hübsch’s first intervention, see Hermann’s Introduction. 6 Heinrich Hübsch, ‘In What Style Should We Build?’, 84. 7 Ibid., 65. 8 ‘The transition from the earlier grandeur of Painting to its present state appears in the works and writings of Eugène Delacroix. Unrest and the sense of impotence is what tears apart this modern artist, so full of ideas, at each moment running up against the limits of his own means in his attempts to equal the masters of the past.’ Delacroix, Valéry continues, is ‘fighting with himself, and he engages feverishly in the last battle of the grand style in art’. Paul Valéry, ‘Autour de Corot’, in Pièces sur l’art, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1984), II: 1323. 9 The unity the preceded modernity, if we perceive the latter to begin with the emptying out of the Vitruvian vocabulary and the uncoupling of style, was from the late Renaissance to the end of the Enlightenment, based largely a hierarchical order articulated in rhetorical categories. For a detailed analysis of the discursive networks that held the classical paradigm together, see Werner Szambien, Symétrie, goût, caractère: Théorie et terminologie de l’architecture à l’âge classique 1550–1800 (Paris: Picard, 1986).

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10 See, for instance, the rich material assembled in section ‘Die Photographie’, in Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1991), V/2: 825–46. 11 So, for instance, in the theory of ‘significant form’ proposed by Clive Bell and Roger Fry, or, more dramatically, by Wassily Kandinsky, who views modernism as the New Testament that completes the Old; see Wassily Kandinsky, Rückblicke (Bern: Benteli, 1977). 12 Translated by Wolfgang Herrmann, in Herrmann, In What Style Should We Build? 13 For an analysis of the evolution of these two terms, see Werner Oechslin, Stilhülse und Kern: Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos und der evolutionäre Weg zur modernen Architektur (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1994). 14 Benjamin, ‘Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts’, in Gesammelte Schriften [= GS] (Frankfurt am Main. Suhrkamp, 1991), V/1. The inspiration for a great deal comes from Sigfried Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich (1928). Benjamin excerpts several passages from Giedion’s book in his studies for the Arcades project, not only in the section on ‘iron constructions’, but also in the important ‘epistemological’ notes; cf. Das Passagen-Werk, GS V: 215f and 572. In the essay ‘Bücher, die lebendig geblieben sind’, Benjamin also praises A. G. Meyers Eisenbauten (1907), and claims that these two books constitute the ‘prolegomena to any future historical-materialist theory of architecture’ (GS 3: 170). For the relation between Benjamin and Giedion, see Detlef Mertins, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Tectonic Unconscious’, Any vol. 14 (1996): 28–35, and ‘The Enticing and Threatening Face of Prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the Utopia of Glass’, Assemblage vol. 29 (1996): 7–23. 15 This idea is spelled out clearly in Hegel’s comments on the Greek temple. The self-reflection taking place in the column is what separates it from a mere support attached to the earth and to that which it supports, so that its limits are only negative and external cessations. In the column, on the other hand, beginning and ending are its ‘proper moments’, and in them the column signifies its own function; it encloses this function within itself as a totality: ‘This reflection on the intentionally made beginning and end provides the really deeper reason for having a pedestal and a capital.’ Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, in Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 14: 311. 16 For a discussion of Bötticher in this respect, see Manfred Klinkott, ‘Die Tektonik det Hellenen als Sprachlehre und Fessel der klassizistischen Baukunst’, in Kollhoff, Über Tektonik, and Hartmut Mayer, Die Tektonik der Hellenen: Kontext und Wirkung der Architekturtheorie von Karl Bötticher (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2004). 17 Kenneth Frampton points to a proximity between Bötticher and Schelling, since the former believes that only a organic form can carry sense; see Frampton, ‘Rappel à l’ordre: The Case for the Tectonic’, in Labour, Work, Architecture: Collected Essays on Architecture and Design (London: Phaidon, 2002), 96. Hegel would however be a

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more likely source (see note 13 above). The comments by Winckelmann that appear to be the immediate source are expounded in his Anmerkungen über die Baukunst der Alten (1762), I borrow the idea of ‘supplementarity’ from Jacques Derrida’s reading of Rousseau in De la grammatologie (Paris: Seuil, 1967), which has many bearings on the concept of nature that underlies eighteenth-century architectural theory, but also on the inside-outside divisions of the following century. For someone like Abbé Laugier, the mimesis of architecture no longer bears on particular object erected as models, but on a sequence of actions binding together nature and culture in a way that does not relate to pre-existing things. It allows both to become what they will have been: on the one hand art imitates nature, but on the other hand also completes it, supplements it. A century later, nature appears as body, understood as an analogy for a natural bond between technology and art. See Adolf Göller, Zur Aesthetik der Architektur: Vorträge und Studien (Stuttgart: K. Wittwer, 1887). For a general study of Semper and his sources, see Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Not space as such, it must be noted, which is a concept that would emerge in architectural theory only in the 1890s, in the writings of August Schmarsow; see Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1994). Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen oder tektonischen Künsten (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurt Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1860), 1: 254. See De architectura, Book 3 and 9. The body in fact has multiple senses and functions in Vitruvius, beginning with the repeated claim that he wants to presents the corpus architecturae, normally translated as ‘the integrality of architecture’ or ‘a complete survey’, but which, as Indra Kagis McEwen suggests, must be understood in its biomorphic aspect. The metaphor of a ‘body of the work’ was not commonplace in Vitruvius’s time; indeed he may have been the first to use it, and it is disseminated throughout the text in a wide variety of senses. See Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002). When Alberti later suggests, at the moment when he presents the structure of De re aedificitoria, that one of basic axioms of the theory of architecture is that ‘every building is a body’ (aedificium quidem corpus quoddam), he once more draws together all the threads of this tradition and projects it into the future; countless versions will follow, although they will be inflected by new versions of the body that follow in the wake of Cartesianism and the new analysis of sensibility and the passions, especially in the eighteenth century. Curiously, for Alberti, it does not seem to be the human body that provides the model, but the body of the horse, with its

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union of speed and grace, as he suggest in Chapter III of De re aedificatoria, as well as in his earlier and rarely noticed treatise De equo animante; see Françoise Choay, La Règle et le Modèle: Sur la théorie de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 120f and note. Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 12. When Fritz Neumeyer discusses the extent to which the body can be retained as a grounding reference in architecture, he formulates the present task of tectonics in a defensive fashion: ‘Not to once more have the disappearing body appear, but to prevent it from completely disappearing’ (Neumeyer, ‘Tektonik’, in Kollhoff, Über Tektonik in der Baukunst, 59). Similarly, Kenneth Frampton claims that tectonics today should form a resistance, an arrière-garde slowing down the development and returning to a grounding reference that threatens to be lost; see Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983). Otto Kapfinger, ‘Glanz des Ornats – Glamour der Verpackung’, in Kollhoff, Über Tektonik in der Baukunst, 80. Peter Haiko in the same way speaks of a ‘metaphorical functionalism’ , in ‘Otto Wagner, die Postsparkasse und die Kirche am Steinhof: Des Architekten Traum und des Baukünstlers Wirklichkeit’, in Traum und Wirklichkeit: Wien 1870–1930 (Vienna: Museen der Stadt Wien, 1985). Adolf Loos, ‘Das Prinzip Kleidung’, in Adolf Loos, Sämtliche Schriften in zwei Bänden, ed. Franz Glück (Vienna: Herold, 1962 ), 1: 105. See here Beatriz Colomina’s reading of Loos’ interiors in Privacy and Publicity. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996) Ben van Berkel, Caroline Bos and UN Studio, Move (Amsterdam: UN Studio & Goose Press, 1999), 27. See Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996) and Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses. Le Corbusier, Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Paris: Crès, 1930), 106.

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Fashion Aesthetics, Ethics and Choice Malcolm Barnard

In the final chapter of this section and of this collection, English media scholar Malcolm Barnard investigates the similarities and differences, as well as the symmetries and asymmetries, which appear when trying to make simple any analogies between the role of choice in our understanding of fashionable and ethical behaviour, showing that choice is what makes both fashionable and ethical behaviour possible, if not inevitable, and impossible.

Introduction This chapter will develop some ideas I first proposed at the 2017 ‘Fashion Aesthetics/Fashion Ethics’ symposium in Stockholm to which I was generously invited and since which these ideas have grown, in order to identify something that is common to aesthetics, ethics and fashion but which I believe has not been investigated satisfactorily in the literature of fashion theory. This thing that has been neglected – choice – appears to be very simple but turns out to be more complicated and more interesting than might be suggested by the everyday act of standing in front of a rack of clothes trying to make our minds up as to which we will buy. I will introduce and explain the role and consequences of choice in aesthetics as the choices offered between the infinite range of shapes, lines colours, textures and so on, and then explain the consequences for fashion aesthetics, understood as a similar range of choices. This chapter will concentrate on the role and consequences of choice in fashionable and ethical behaviour. The premisses and the main conclusions of the argument regarding aesthetic behaviour and choice will be laid out and then the development of those premisses and arguments will be made in terms of fashion and ethical choice. 227

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I want to suggest that what fashionable behaviour, aesthetic behaviour and ethical behaviour have in common, that which makes them all both possible and impossible, is choice. This simultaneous possibility and impossibility is a paradox and it is generated by the role of choice in our aesthetic, ethical and fashionable lives. This chapter will show how choice makes aesthetic and ethical behaviour possible and impossible and then explain in more detail how the arguments may be used to explain fashionable behaviour. The chapter will first explain the everyday or received understanding of the nature and role of choice in aesthetic, ethical and fashionable behaviour. It will then show how Derrida’s arguments concerning hospitality can be used to recast or re-think our understanding of the nature and role of choice in ethical behaviour and in fashionable behaviour. The chapter will identify and unpack the paradox noted above. And finally, the chapter will outline some of the consequences of this re-casting or re-thinking of the nature and role of choice through a reading of the work Mary Douglas and Franklin Foer on fashion consumption. The consequences of choice making fashion both possible and impossible for the notion of free will and for the use of algorithms in predicting or managing choice will be clarified.

Choice The conception of choice I wish ultimately to pursue and investigate, however, is not an everyday, routine or received conception of choice. It is not, for example, the conception of choice found in such books as Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice from 2004, which it turns out concerns neither choice nor paradox in the senses intended in this chapter. Schwartz is interested in how more choice ‘is not necessarily better’ and may actually ‘have negative features’.1 This chapter will not be concerned with the ‘paradox’ of what appears to be a good thing (more choice) but which turns out to be a bad thing (too much choice). Rather, the suggestion concerning choice that I wish to develop here derives from Jacques Derrida’s arguments around hospitality and the gift.2 And I am wondering here whether Derrida’s arguments about unconditional and absolute hospitality and the absolute and unconditioned gift may be adapted or turned to choice and applied or used to think about the role of choice in fashion. My argument will be that neither fashion, nor aesthetic, nor ethical behaviour is possible without choice but that, because there is no such thing as unconditioned or absolute choice, both fashion and ethics are impossible. Fashion is understood

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and intended here in the sense used by Anne Hollander in her definition of fashion as what we put on in the morning to go about our daily business.3 Fashion here is the clothes we wear, the garments we buy in shops, and as noted above I have in mind the finite and infinite ranges of shapes, lines, colours, textures and so on from which we make our choices every morning, or in online or ‘real life’ shops. Ethics is understood and intended in the analogous sense in which we all make choices in our daily lives from a range of actions as to the right thing to do: ethics here is simply indicating this area of our lives. Consequently, in this respect fashion and ethics are not essentially different, that they are not essentially different kinds of thing. I will argue that both are made possible, (indeed inevitable), and impossible, by the same thing – choice: the impossibility of unconditioned choice and the inevitability of conditioned choice. However, the implications or consequences of these arguments are entirely different in fashionable, aesthetic and ethical behaviour. The difference is simply that choice is understood and experienced as the condition for ethical, aesthetic and fashionable behaviour, but where the absence or limitation of choice is understood as mitigating circumstances in ethical behaviour, and as limitation in aesthetic behaviour there is no such equivalent in fashionable behaviour. They are not different in that they share the same condition of possibility (choice), but there is a difference in the way that we experience and understand the nature and role of choice in and through them.

Choice and ethical behaviour We are familiar with the role of choice in ethical theory: choice is the condition for ethical behaviour. Choice, in the form of freedom of choice, is the condition for our making ethical decisions. At least, the perception of freedom of choice, the experience or knowledge that we have a choice, is the condition for our feeling or experience of free will and thus for our feeling that we are able to make a properly ethical decision. The perception, experience or knowledge of choice, as it relates to free will, is also central to all the arguments around diminished responsibility. So, for example, we are happy to agree that if someone has little or no choice but to perform some wrong action or unethical behaviour, then they are not fully responsible for that action or behaviour and cannot be fully or properly blamed or punished for it. However, it is worth noting that this agreement or argument does not always, or indeed ever, work so automatically in the other direction. For example, nobody’s breathtaking performance of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata is

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diminished or held in less regard because of their middle-class background and expensive piano lessons which made that performance possible or less unlikely. There is an asymmetry or non-reversibility here to which we will return. We say that there are ‘mitigating circumstances’, which means that the wrong action or unethical behaviour is not chosen freely and thus that the person performing or committing it is less than fully responsible, and thus not fully punishable. Choice here is the necessary condition for our saying that someone is ethically responsible: choice is the condition for the possibility of ethical behaviour. And absence or limitation of choice is sufficient condition for our saying that there are mitigating circumstances for the behaviour. These are the basic elements of our everyday or routine understanding of the nature and role of choice in ethical behaviour and this chapter will reconsider them later.

Choice and aesthetic behaviour We are familiar with the role of choice in aesthetic theory, too: choice is also the condition for aesthetic behaviour. Freedom of choice – or, at least, the perception of our having freedom of choice – is the condition for our making aesthetic decisions; the experience that we have a choice, is the condition for our feeling or experience of free will and thus for our feeling that we are able to make a properly aesthetic decision. The idea that the choices we make, in fashion for example, but also in painting, architecture, interior design and so on, are not free, is preposterous. The aesthetic decisions made by Alexander McQueen, or Pablo Picasso or Frank Lloyd Wright as to which colour, texture, shape and so on to use in their designs must be thought of and experienced as freely chosen. If they are not thought of and experienced as freely chosen, then they are meaningless. If, for example, we knew that the only two colours of yarn or a cloth available to a designer were a light and a dark blue, then we might be less effusive about their mastery of or sure touch with colour. We might also criticize them for not using greens or reds. It seems that, only on condition that the full, or at least a wider, spectrum of colours were available to the designer and that the designer had a choice to make from that infinite or wider spectrum, would we feel completely comfortable pointing out the creative or genius use of colour. Ernst Gombrich debates exactly these issues in his Meditations on a Hobby Horse from 1963. He points out that the loudest sounds made by a string quartet are likely to be quieter than many of even the quieter sounds made by a full

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orchestra.4 The string quartet has a smaller range of volumes available to it and from which to choose than the orchestra and cannot make as loud a noise as the larger ensemble but we do not judge the quartet to be inferior or lacking in creativity because of that. The matter of the different choices and the different ranges of choice available to the different groups of musicians is understood as ‘mitigating’ in some sense any judgements regarding their creativity or expressivity. These aesthetic considerations regarding choice bear comparison to those above concerning ‘mitigating circumstances’ in ethical behaviour and we shall return to them in the section entitled ‘Possible and Impossible’ below. Where the mitigating circumstances encourage us to think of the person committing a crime as being less responsible for their actions and thus less blameworthy, the mitigating circumstances in aesthetic behaviour (in the form of the limitation of choice) do not encourage us to think of the designer as less responsible for their actions and thus less worthy of our admiration.

Choice and fashionable behaviour There is also an everyday or routine understanding of the nature and role of choice in fashionable behaviour. An everyday and commonplace conception of choice is also accepted as the condition for the possibility of fashionable behaviour and it will be seen in this section to overlap with the role of choice in aesthetics. In fashion theory, choice is well understood as being necessary in order for there to be what we understand and experience as fashion. Lars Svendsen, for example, places variation, and the choices to be made between those variations, at the heart of his account of ‘the principle of fashion’.5 The possibility of choosing between the various items and styles of clothing is what makes fashion possible and, as he says, the absence of it makes fashion impossible. Svendsen recalls the usual argument that we cannot talk about fashion ‘in Greek and Roman antiquity’ because although there may have been variation, there was no individual choice to be made between those variations.6 It is worth noting here that this form of choice relates to or appears in the form of free will, and we shall also return to this topic later, in connection with the thought of Mary Douglas. Assuming that, as far as we are concerned here, style means the same as fashion, we are justified therefore in also assuming that choice is the condition for style as it is for fashion. Fashion and style are not always exactly synonymous but for our purposes here they are. Consequently, this section will consider various accounts in which choice is presented as the condition for the possibility of style and thus of aesthetic behaviour.

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In his essay, ‘Style is the Man’, James Corby presents four theorists who believe that choice between styles is both possible and necessary in order for fashion to exist.7 He begins with Stephen Ullman, who asserts that ‘There can be no question of style unless the speaker or writer has the possibility of choosing between alternative forms of expression’.8 Although Ullman is writing about style in French novels, it is clear that style in fashion and in what we wear generally is also made possible by the possibility of choosing between these alternative forms of expression. While the idea that fashion and clothing are simple or simply forms of expression is not fully convincing or to everyone’s taste, the idea that choice is essential to having a style, or having a fashion, is inescapable. Corby goes on to quote Ernst Gombrich, who says that ‘style exists against a “background of alternative choices” ’.9 This is a version of Gombrich’s structuralist and also anti-expressionist argument in his essay‘Expression and Communication’, where he says that in order for meaning and communication to exist, difference in the form of a structure of differences from which a choice is made, also needs to exist.10 On Gombrich’s account, style in typography, music and painting requires differences (between bold and regular, between loud and quiet and between colours) to exist in a structure (a paradigm) from which choices are made and put together (a syntagm).11 This ‘background of alternative choices’ is the structure of different items or elements from which the selections are made, and it is the condition for style, whether it be in music, typography or clothing and fashion. The third theorist of style and choice is Berel Lang, who argues that ‘style presupposes choice’ and that choice is the condition for the possibility of style.12 Lang is also concerned with literary and painterly style in his search for what he calls the ‘styleme’, or the basic unit of style, and he identifies the painterly brushstroke in Vincent van Gogh and the full stops and sentence breaks in Ernest Hemingway as such basic units. However, it should be clear that what he says applies equally to fashion and clothing: it makes no sense to think of a style unless there is a choice between at least two. Indeed, Lang suggests that two styles are all that is needed in order for there to be a choice and thus, strictly, style at all. Finally, and from the same collection as the Lang essay, Leonard Meyer is quoted as saying that style ‘results from a series of choices made from within some set of constraints’.13 The idea, which should now be familiar, that a set or what structuralists call a paradigm of differences is the condition for choice and thus makes style and fashion possible. Echoing both Gombrich and Lang, Meyer mentions ‘music, painting and the other arts’ and I suggest that we may cheerfully

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include clothing and fashion among those ‘other arts’. Indeed Meyer includes styles of behaviour ‘in all realms’ of human behaviour – ‘in the arts and sciences, business and technology, religion and military tactics’, choice and thus style are to be found, with the former acting as the condition of the latter.14 In all these activities, choice is the condition for style: without a set or paradigm of different elements from which a choice or selection can be made, all these theorists agree that style and therefore fashion would be impossible. It may not need emphasizing but I have assumed that style is synonymous with fashion here. It makes as little sense to talk of someone following a fashion if they have no choice in what they wear as it does to talk of someone having a style if they also have no choice in what they wear. For these reasons, I have argued that choice is generally understood as the condition for the possibility of fashion and style.

Possible and impossible The argument so far has been that there is an everyday or routine understanding of the nature and role of choice that makes both ethical behaviour and fashionable behaviour possible. The previous two sections have outlined that routine conception and explained how it is held to operate in our everyday lives and experiences of fashionable and ethical behaviour. However, this is where Derrida’s arguments concerning hospitality and the gift and their possible ‘extension’ or drift over to the matter of choice comes in. This section will explore Derrida’s account of hospitality. His accounts of the gift in such essays as Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (1992), The Gift of Death (2008) and so on, have the same structure as those concerning hospitality but there is no space to outline and explain them here.15 The argument here will be that Derrida’s account of unconditional and conditional hospitality enable or oblige us to re-cast and rethink the notion of choice and to thus to re-cast and re-think our understanding and experience of fashionable and ethical behaviour. This section will present Derrida’s account of hospitality and explain what it means for our notions of choice. Derrida’s argument concerning hospitality is that if there is any hospitality it must be ‘absolute’, that is it must be unconditioned and unconditional.16 What Derrida calls the ‘law of hospitality’ demands that one welcomes anyone at all into one’s house at any time, for any time, with no conditions whatsoever, for example. Any condition, or limit, to hospitality represents the opposite of it.17

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What Derrida means by a condition is any identification (of host and guest, for example), any setting up of rules, laws, time limits or of a threshold, even, across which the guest would or could be welcomed. Clearly, there is a conflict or antinomy, as Derrida has it, between the law of hospitality and the laws of hospitality. Any and all actual examples of what we practice or experience as hospitality will inevitably be conditioned: I have to identify myself as host, what is my house, where its threshold lies, and you as guest in order to invite you in. As soon as one identifies as host or guest, and as soon as a threshold or (a fortiori, perhaps) a property is identified then there is a relation and the relationship becomes a contract, an exchange and a bargain. All of these things represent conditions and as such the opposite of hospitality. This conception of absolute and unconditional hospitality is impossible because as soon as a host or a threshold is identified hospitality has been conditioned and is no longer absolute. Any existing hospitality is made possible by unconditioned and absolute hospitality, but any existing hospitality demands a property, a property owner and a guest to be invited over that threshold. It thus involves conditions and is essentially a contract. Derrida’s point is that if it is a contract, it is an exchange and cannot be hospitality. Absolute and unconditioned hospitality is necessary because, as unconditioned and absolute, it is the condition for any existing hospitality: hospitality makes no sense without this absolute and unconditioned conception of it. It is impossible because as soon as it exists it is no longer unconditioned or absolute. The suggestion in this chapter is that the structure or form of the argument concerning hospitality also works with, or may be applied to, fashion: the argument about hospitality may be adapted or moved over into the realm of fashion if, instead of hospitality, we think about choice. There is an argument to be made about the nature and role of choice in fashion that is analogous to, or which shares its form with, Derrida’s arguments about hospitality. We have already established that choice has a central and indeed even conditioning role in fashion; choice was seen above to be the uncontroversial and accepted condition necessary in order for there to be fashion. The previous section argued that choice is at the heart of most theories of style and therefore fashion. Now we need to try to think about choice in fashion as absolute and unconditioned choice, as Derrida suggested we think about hospitality. This new argument has to begin by saying that if there is any choice, it must be ‘absolute’, that is it must be unconditioned and unconditional. Any choice worth the name must be presented without limitation, identification, coercion or purpose. This unconditioned and unconditional choice would be the impossible

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but necessary condition for any existing fashion choice. Absolute or unconditioned choice is the condition for the possibility of fashion. There has to be choice and the only choice worth the name is absolute or unconditioned choice. To say ‘here is a limited range from which to make your choice’ is not offering a choice; it is offering a limited range of alternatives. Similarly, to say that this selection is age-appropriate, or gender-appropriate, or that it will make you more desirable to others, or that it will protect you from cold or heat, are all limitations to absolute or unconditioned choice. Even if only in practical terms, a clothing or fashion store could not stock an infinite range: an infinite range of colours in only one garment would not be possible, let alone an infinite range of garments. This is fundamental and central and explains the relation between the arguments about choice in fashion and hospitality in ethics. Every range from which we make a choice in any store will be limited and conditioned range, just as any hospitality we offer or accept will be a limited and therefore contractual and conditioned form of hospitality. As such I suspect that I am obliged to argue that these examples represent the opposite of choice and perhaps even the opposite of fashion, (as Derrida does in his argument about hospitality), but this is a topic for another chapter. As noted in the previous section, the role of choice is fully recognized in ethics and moral philosophy, where if someone’s actions are compromised or limited, (by coercion or illness, for example), then they are held to be less than fully responsible for those actions and any blame or punishment are reduced as a result. To every limited range of alternatives, one more choice may always be added and to every limited range of alternatives one later choice may be added. Choice proper, if one can put it like that (and the point would be that one cannot), would not involve any limitation on or any end to the potential choices. However, there can be no absolute or unconditioned choice; we have no experience of such a choice and strictly, therefore, there is and can be no fashion. Paradoxically, choice is both necessary and impossible. Everything that goes by the name of fashion is a limitation or a contracting of absolute choice and as such it is strictly neither choice nor fashion, as these concepts are understood on the standard or everyday model or conception of both those things. The (double) condition is that we have no choice but to choose, and that we have to choose from a limited and finite range or structure. This paradox is where a genuine paradox concerning choice enters the world of fashion, and indeed all consumption, insofar as all consumption involves making a choice between competing commodities. In the same way that every act of hospitality is ultimately a contract and a limitation (and thus not hospitality), every fashion is

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ultimately constrained, a contract with and within the limited range or structure of differences that exists at any given moment (and thus, strictly, not fashion). There is and can be no unconditioned or absolute choice – in either fashionable or ethical behaviour. For there to be fashion or ethics ‘proper’, in an unconditioned and absolute sense, we would have to have unconditioned and infinite choice and this is clearly both logically and practically impossible. Given that we do not have such a choice then we have no proper, in the sense of unconditioned, fashionable or ethical behaviour. The problem, and the paradox, here is that there can be no unconditioned choice. It is tempting to want to call unconditioned choice ‘proper’ or even ‘real’ choice. But, because the unconditioned is precisely that which has no proper or real, the temptation must be resisted, or at least understood as paradoxical – as possible and impossible. The only ‘proper’ choice in ‘reality’ is the conditioned choice with which we are all familiar – on the high street and in our moral universe. But because whatever is to count as proper or appropriate is and cannot be decided in the unconditioned, it must be deemed impossible. Consequently, in both fashionable and ethical behaviour, we have no choice but to choose, to make a selection from a finite and conditioned range, rather than from an infinite and unconditioned succession of differences. Choice therefore makes fashion and ethics both possible and impossible: and this possibility and impossibility are understood and experienced differently and asymmetrically in ethics and fashion. We never experience, and we are never presented with, an infinite and unconditioned set of choices in ethical behaviour. This constraint or limiting of choice defines what we are prepared to call ethical behaviour and is understood as mitigating circumstances. Where a person’s choice is constrained or conditioned, we say that they are not completely responsible for their behaviour and that there are mitigating or extenuating circumstances. The truth of these arguments may be gauged by trying to reverse the terms: if there were no limits or constraints, we would have no need or call for mitigating or extenuating circumstances. Given that we do need and use mitigating circumstances, it must be because we realize that we do not have perfect or unconditioned choice in these or any other (fashionable) matters. However, this mitigation doesn’t always, or ever, work so automatically in the other direction; there is a certain asymmetry or non-reversibility of the elements here. First, as noted above, nobody’s magnificent performance of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata is seen, or heard, to be less worthy or held in less regard because of their middle-class background and expensive childhood piano

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lessons which encouraged and made that performance possible. While it is always possible to argue that they are wider or that there are simply more of them, a middle-class child’s choices and options are not unconstrained or infinite. But that limited and constrained set of choices is not used to ‘mitigate’ that performance in the way that a working-class child’s similarly limited set of choices might be used to mitigate a theft or a criminal damage. Second, we are also never presented with an infinite and unconditioned set of choices with regard to style and fashion but this limitation, this set of conditioned choices, is treated quite differently. As Meyer points out above, style ‘results from a series of choices made from within some set of constraints’.18 These ‘constraints’ are the conditioned and limited sets of choices, what semiology calls ‘paradigms’, from which selections are made and combinations (‘syntagms’ or ensembles in fashion) are constructed. Although, (as I have noted above in relation to aesthetic choice), Gombrich makes use of exactly the same argument elsewhere, Meyer is the only one of the theorists identified by Corby who notices or points out that the choices are made from within a limited set or paradigm and uses the word ‘constraint’.19 Having said this, Gombrich makes reference to the ranges of volumes, or the ranges of pigments, that are ‘available’ to a string quartet or a full orchestra and to different artists and it clear that what is available is not unlimited or unconditional. As he says, ‘the fortissimo of a string quartet may have fewer decibels than the pianissimo of a large symphony orchestra’: there is a set of volumes available to both and these aesthetic choices are indeed limited and constrained.20 Style and fashion, therefore, are made possible by the limiting and limited sets of aesthetic elements from which a choice is made. This constraint or limiting of choice defines and makes possible what we are prepared to call fashion and what we are happy to experience as fashion, but it is not understood as mitigating or extenuating circumstances. Despite general agreement that all our fashion choices are finite, constrained and conditioned, nobody ever talks or thinks about anyone’s fashionable behaviour in terms of there being mitigating circumstances for it. Fashionable behaviour is not justified or vindicated (or even understood and explained, although this might be different) by the presentation of the limited circumstances in which or from which a selection and an outfit is made. Where one’s crimes against property or the person are to varying degrees excused in law by mitigating circumstances, one’s crimes against taste or fashion are not. What I am presenting here as crimes against taste or fashion are also called fashion mistakes, or misjudgements. Adolf Loos uses the term in what appears to be a similar sense when he writes about ornament or decoration

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being a ‘crime’.21 And on this point, it can only be noted here that what we wear, whether it counts as fashion or clothing, is inevitably a form of ornament and decoration and thus that fashion and clothing are in themselves always already criminal activities on Loos’s account. If decoration is always inevitably a crime, then doubt is cast on the appropriateness of the word ‘crime’ itself, but that is also an issue for another chapter. Apart from this, wearing something inappropriate, or something that is not fashionable at that moment would be among these ‘crimes’. Inappropriateness can take many forms: wearing garments that are too old, or too young for you, wearing garments that do not suit your skin tone or complexion, wearing formal items to casual events and vice versa would all count as crime or deviance here. However, it is not common for such crimes or deviance to be provided with, and thus excused by, mitigating or extenuating circumstances. We may say that someone is ‘too young to understand’ the importance of wearing appropriately formal wear to formal occasions. Or we might say that they were unaware of the connotations of some garment or style. But these circumstances are about culture, knowledge and understanding and they feel and sound different from the kinds of extenuating and mitigating circumstances with which other forms of crime and deviance are met. They are also much rarer than those other forms of extenuation and mitigation. More often people are simply vilified and abused in the media and social media for their ‘crimes of fashion’. Developing this point further might involve this vilification and abuse being explained as a form of punishment for those crimes, in Foucauldian fashion. It might also involve those media being understood and explained as Foucauldian surveillance techniques.22 This is just the first of the asymmetries in the ways we respond to or understand the role of choice in fashion aesthetics and ethics. There are other differences, which also make a difference, and this section will investigate them. First, choice is the condition for both the possibility, or indeed inevitability, and the impossibility of fashion and style but it is once again not clear that or how choice is the condition for both the possibility and the impossibility of ethical behaviour. Second, choice appears as the condition of free will in ethical behaviour and it is not clear that choice is related to free will in the same way in fashionable behaviour. And third, free will and choice in ethical behaviour are intimately connected to our knowledge of the surrounding and potentially ‘mitigating’ circumstances in ethical behaviour and it is not immediately clear that or how they are linked to any similar form of circumstantial knowledge in fashionable behaviour. The following paragraphs will make this clear.

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We accept the limitations on choice in ethical behaviour and we call them mitigating circumstances. Someone’s upbringing or mental health is held to reduce the amount of choice they have: as a result, we say they have diminished responsibility and the possibility or extent of punishment is adjusted accordingly. This limitation of choice does not work in quite the same way in fashionable behaviour. We do not seriously and routinely (or ever, possibly) look at someone’s fashion selections and excuse them by saying that there are mitigating circumstances. The impossibility of our possessing a complete knowledge or understanding of any given situation (because every situation is infinitely complicated and there will always be one more possible future understanding of it) generates our sense of free will and thus ensures that we are making what appear and are experienced by us as genuine and non-bad-faith decisions concerning our ethical behaviour within that situation. The matter of free will is discussed below and it is probably worth explaining the argument concerning the relation between the possibility of understanding infinitely complex situations and our experience of free will and their relation to fashion before moving on. Complete understanding or knowledge of a situation is sometimes argued to be the condition for the absence of free will: it is a major component of arguments surrounding determinism, for example.23 This is because if we understood a situation fully and completely, then we could predict with certainty what was going to happen next and there would be no ‘room’ for or possibility of free will. However, even if we managed to identify and isolate a ‘moment’ or a situation, if every moment and every situation is infinitely complex then we will never achieve complete understanding of it – there will always be one more element or one more aspect to be understood. If we can never achieve complete understanding of a moment or a situation or a situation, then we will never be able to predict with certainty what will happen next and there will be room for free will. Free will is thus experienced by us: this is why we have experience of free will. To all intents and purposes, there is free will and we have it. However, it seems that the impossibility of our comprehending the infinite complexity of a situation, or being offered an infinite choice of items in any given fashion situation, is simply not experienced or understood by us as the condition for fashionable behaviour. Rather, the limited and definitely not-infinite choice that we are offered is experienced and understood as the condition for our fashionable behaviour. Thus, a finite and limited choice, what would be described as mitigating circumstances in law and ethical behaviour is experienced and understood, (if it is understood at all), as the very condition of fashion

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and fashionable behaviour. The relation between these conditioned and unconditioned choices is the source of the irreversibility or asymmetry noted above, that we do not feel obliged to offer extenuating or mitigating circumstances for the fashion crimes and mistakes, even to the extent that we do not label them as ‘crimes’.

Consequences and implications There are some interesting consequences or implications of these thoughts and arguments. The first set of implications are raised by Mary Douglas and they concern the notion of free will, mentioned above. In her 1996 essay ‘On Not Being Seen Dead: Shopping as Protest’, Douglas is concerned with the relations between explanations of consumption and style.24 Style, as she points out, is usually conceived as a distinction between essence (the what) and appearance (the how, or the style), where the what, the essence or reality, is hidden or inaccessible and not immediately revealed.25 She argues that this conception of style has the effect of disabling our understanding of fashion, and of therefore rendering unknowable the possible reasons for consumption. If the what, the essence, is always hidden, then it is unknowable and unavailable for use in explanation. Consequently, on this account, one’s inner essence or being (our what) will always be unavailable as an explanation for the styles and fashions we wear. Douglas develops this argument in the direction of culture, and I do not wish to follow it here, but I am interested in the way that her argument raises the matter of one’s individual behaviour as the product of an absence of free will in fashion choices. This conception of style relates fashion choice to free will and inner essence. As part of her argument against this conception of style, Douglas encourages us to ask, ‘how could a person restrain his inmost being from influencing his regular choices?’ and ‘why should people adopt a style that has nothing to do with their inmost being?’.26 Choice here is directly related to inmost being, that which is supposedly always hidden and unavailable as part of the explanation of the styles we choose. The implication is that we could not or would not ‘adopt a style that has nothing to do with our inmost being’ and that we could not restrain that ‘inmost being from influencing our regular choices’. Both choice and therefore free will are essential to Douglas’s account of the rational consumer and fashion. However, the real paradox here, contra Schwartz, is that we have no choice but to choose – Douglas’s argument that we cannot

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restrain our inmost being from influencing our regular choices surely means that we have no choice but to choose. This is not inconsistent with the conclusion reached regarding the nature and the role of choice noted above, although for quite different reasons. The second set of implications of this conception of the nature and role of choice in fashion relates to the arguments concerning algorithms in Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. One of Foer’s arguments is that ‘There’s no equation to suggest a dress to wear, but an algorithm could easily be written for that – it will work its way through a series of either/or questions (morning or night, winter or summer, sun or rain), with each choice pushing to the next’.27 Ignoring for the moment the question whether there is any qualitative, meaningful or effective difference between an equation and an algorithm here, fashion is reduced to a series of simple and even apparently binary choices. The role of choice is once again central to the matter of fashion. In a closely related argument on the relation between algorithms and free will, he claims that ‘algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction’.28 Not surprisingly, the matter of choice is seen to have an effect on free will or, as I would argue, our experience of free will. Wherever the ‘meant’ intention of the algorithm comes from (and this is not at all clear), Foer argues that the intention is to erode or diminish free will by encouraging the consumer ‘in the right direction’. What the ‘right direction’ might be and where it might come from are just as unclear as the meaning of ‘meant’ above. However, Foer is clear that the role of the algorithm is to diminish free will, or our experience of it, by reducing our choice. Foer is thus linking our experience of fashion to both choice and free will and he argues that algorithms will or can erode free will by making our choices for us or by beginning to nudge or encourage us in certain directions. Given the arguments I have proposed above, I think I am obliged to argue that an algorithm both could and could not be written to decide, to make our choices, about what to wear. And given this, I am obliged to argue that we both do and do not have free will in the matter of what to wear – we have no choice but to choose. These issues are related in complicated ways and I will try to explain them as simply as I can before examining them in more detail. First, an algorithm could not be written to ‘suggest a dress to wear’ in a given situation because every situation is infinitely complex. In Foer’s formulation, the algorithm will work through a series of either/or questions. Foer seems to assume that this series is finite and will come to a natural end. However, the argument here is that there can be no natural end: any end that is reached will be

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a decision, and it will thus be a cultural curtailment of what is an infinite series. This is because each situation is infinitely complex and each situation would therefore represent or be made up of an infinite series of choices, and a single algorithm cannot account for an infinitely complex situation. This infinite complexity can be expressed in two ways: there will either always be an infinite number of algorithms to be written, or there will always be one more algorithm to be written. This infinite complexity is also the condition of our experience of free will, it is necessary for our experience of choosing freely. Unless we have this experience of free will, the matter and the concept of free will are meaningless. And until we have some way of reaching the end of this infinite sequence, and of knowing that this is the end, we are obliged to experience free will: the infinite sequence is the condition of our experience of free will in this sense. It should be noted that I do not say the condition of our free will, but the condition of our experience of free will; this is not quite the same, but the difference makes all the difference. Our experience of fashionable and ethical behaviour is such that we believe we are acting with free will, making our choices freely: as we have seen above, this belief is central to all aspects of that experience. Examining Foer’s suggestions in a little more detail, there is the question of when or where to decide that it is day or night, sunny or rainy, for example, in order to make a fashion or clothing selection. We might expand these apparently simple and binary decisions to include decisions concerning whether the occasion, or our attire, is or should be formal or informal, smart or casual and so on. And if the complexities and infinities are not clear enough in these examples, then there are the decisions concerning gender, sexuality and all the other kinds of identity and how they are best represented in or, more accurately, constructed by what we wear. To start with what might appear to be the most simple example: when exactly does day end and night begin? There are at least three different definitions of twilight – nautical, astronomical and civil – even before we start to think about our own, differently cultural, definitions and experiences of it getting darker or lighter. There is a choice to be made here already. If there is an infinity of shades of lightness/darkness, then there will be an infinite number of places at which the decision or choice could be made. Matters are surely only made more complicated, if not more infinite, when we consider formal/informal or masculine/feminine. There is also the choice of when to decide to stop, when to decide to end, constrain or limit the infinite complexity of any decision-making process. This may be the same decision in a practical, chronological or effective sense, but it is

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a different decision in a logical sense. The supposedly more or less ‘rational’ process of the attempt to make the decision must be brought to an end and, as Derrida points out, there can be no rational source or form of this decision.29 Following Søren Kierkegaard, he argues that the decision is by definition a moment of madness, of irrationality.30 There is and can be no algorithm for the decision to end the decision-making process and thus the process is infinite unless irrationally curtailed. We may legitimately wonder at this point whether the algorithm is an attempt to clothe the irrationality of the ending of the process in the disguise of reason. Consequently, to take the second of the claims made above – that we have no choice but to choose – I am also and equally obliged to argue that an algorithm could be written because we have no choice but to choose. We have to make a decision and a decision is always going to be expressible in the form of an either/ or choice – what Foer and others call an algorithm. There is no end to these decisions and choices but in the end we must make a decision, a choice. This is the real ‘paradox’ of choice and it is the one that conditions all of our fashion and all of our ethical experiences.

Conclusion The conclusion must be therefore that fashion is both possible, inevitable even, and impossible – because of the way that choice works and because of the ways in which we understand and experience that choice. The conditions for the possibility of fashion (our experience of free will and thus choice) are therefore also the conditions for the possibility of our ethics. Fashion behaviour, aesthetic behaviour and ethical behaviour are, as the title of the symposium and of this collection suggest, closely related: all are made possible and impossible by the same conditions which, paradoxically, are themselves made possible by the unconditioned and thus render both impossible. This chapter has argued that fashion behaviour, aesthetic behaviour and ethical behaviour are made both possible and impossible by the nature and role of choice. The notion of ethical fashion choices represent a complication too far for this chapter, although it is certainly not irrelevant. This paradox is generated by the role of choice in our ethical, aesthetic and fashionable lives. The everyday or received understanding of the nature and role of choice in all of these forms of behaviour was outlined – how choice and the experience of free will are seen as necessary for both fashion, aesthetics and ethics. Derrida’s arguments

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concerning hospitality were then presented and used to re-cast or re-think our understanding of the nature and role of choice in these forms of behaviour. The paradoxical necessity and the impossibility of unconditioned choice as the condition for our everyday experience and understanding of fashion, aesthetics and ethics were explained along with the consequences and asymmetries of that paradox. Finally, the chapter outlined some of the consequences of this re-casting or re-thinking of the nature and role of choice through a reading of the work Mary Douglas and Franklin Foer on fashion and thus aesthetic choice in consumption. The consequences of choice making fashion both possible and impossible for the notion of free will, and for the use of algorithms in predicting or managing choice, are both unsettling and exciting and will surely repay further investigation.

Notes 1 Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (New York: Harper Collins 2004), 3, 222 et passim. 2 Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 3 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1993), 11. 4 Ernest Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse (London: Phaidon 1963), 62. 5 Lars Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 21. 6 Ibid. 7 James Corby, ‘Style is the Man’, in Style in Theory, ed. I. Callus, J. Corby and G. Lauri-Lucente (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 163–86. 8 Stephen Ullman, Style in the French Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 6, quoted in Corby ‘Style is the Man’, 170. 9 Ernest Gombrich ‘Style’, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 15, (1968), 353, quoted in Corby, ‘Style is the Man’, 170. 10 Ernest Gombrich, ‘Expression and Communication’, in Gomrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse (London: Phaidon 1963), 62. 11 See Malcolm Barnard, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (Basingstoke, Palgrave 2001), 70–3, for example. 12 Berel Lang, ‘Looking for the Styleme’, in The Concept of Style, ed. B. Lang (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 178, quoted in James Corby, ‘Style is the Man’, 170. 13 Leonard Meyer, ‘Toward a Theory of Style’, in The Concept of Style, 21, quoted in Corby, ‘Style is the Man’, 170.

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14 Meyer, ‘Toward a Theory of Style’ in The Concept of Style, 25. 15 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 16 Derrida, Of Hospitality, 75. 17 Ibid., 79. 18 Meyer, ‘Toward a Theory of Style’ in The Concept of Style, 21, quoted in Corby, ‘Style is the Man’, 170. 19 Gombrich, ‘Expression and Communication’, in Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse (London: Phaidon 1963), 60ff. 20 Gombrich, ‘Expression and Communication’, Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. F. Frascina and C. Harrison (London: Open University/Paul Chapman Publishing 1982), 182. 21 Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’, in Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998). 22 See the work of Anne Burns, ‘Selfies Self(ie)-Discipline: Social Regulation as Enacted Through the Discussion of Photographic Practice’, in International Journal of Communication vol. 9 (2015). See https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3138 for more on this. 23 See Julian Baggini, Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will (London: Granta, 2015), 13ff, for more on this. 24 Mary Douglas, ‘On Not Being Seen Dead: Shopping as Protest’, in Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good Taste (London: Sage, 1996). 25 Ibid., 79. 26 Ibid., 80. 27 Franklin Foer, ‘The Long Read: Facebook’s War on Free Will’. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/19/facebooks-war-on-free-will (accessed 29 September 2022). 28 Ibid. 29 Derrida, The Gift of Death, 70. 30 Derrida, Writing and Difference. trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 31.

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Index A Magazine Curated by (Maison Martin Margiela) 105 ‘A Manifesto According to Virgil Abloah’ (Louis Vuitton) 91 ‘A Manifesto for a Modern Fashion Industry’ (Medham Kirchoff ) 100 A Remembrance of Things Past (Proust) 141, 147 Académie de l’Architecture, France 213 Achara, Esther Adams 161 Ackerup, Andreas 187 Acne 189 ‘The Act of Creation as an Act of Resistance’ (Michele) 98 Adams, Carol J. 149 Adidas 204 Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Hegel) 87 The Affairs of Anatol (film) 153 African Americans 168–171, 174 ‘Afro Images: Politics Fashion, and Nostalgia’ (Davis) 174 Agins, Teri 12 Åkrans, Camilla 188 Albert Weiss jewellery 158 Alberti, Leon Battista 131 The Alleles 205 Alt, Emmanuelle 61 Alta Roma fashion shows 205 American Vogue 104, 149 An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Hutcheson) 10 and& Other Stories 189–190 Anderson, Gillian 60 Anderson, Pamela 186 animals ethics and sustainability 47–50 introduction 45–46 leather 55–59 sustainability 64–65 and Vogue Italia 50–54 wildlife and fragility 54–55

Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Adams/Donovan) 149 Anthropocene Era 51 anti-fashion 104 ‘Anti-Fashion’ (Edelkoort) 12, 94–98 architecture cladding 217–220, 224n.21 fashion 220–222 introduction 211–212 style 212–214, 222n.9 tectonics 214–217, 219, 222n.18 Archizoom Associati 105–106 Arnold, Rebecca 187 Arosenius, Ivar 182 ‘Art Fabrics’ 141 Art Nouveau 1960s–present 158–161 animal world 149–153 fashion (1900s–1920s) 140–143 introduction 139–140 Nature and the ‘feminine’ 143–144 nature vs culture 155–158 plant world 144–149 woman as icon 153–155 Art Nouveau Revival (Thiébaut) 158 art4sport 208 ateliers 81–82, 86–87 Aucoc, Louis 153 Aura Powered Clothing collection 203 Bacchi, Fulvia 56–58, 62, 71n.87 Badiou, Alain 11 Bakhtin, Mikhail 200, 208 Bakst, Leon 160 Balenciaga 85 Balule Nature Reserve, South Africa 55 Bangladesh 76, 79–80, 83, 109–110 Barbery, Muriel 53 Barnes, Elendar 172 Barthes, Roland 6, 46, 66n.6, 114, 206 Bartlett, Djurdja 100

271

272 Basso, Dennis 60 Baudelaire, Charles 10–11 Baudrillard, Jean 6 Baumstark, Mary Callahan 103 Beardsley, Aubrey 159 Beaton, Cecil 184 Beauty for All (Key) 190 Beauty, Disrupted (Otis) 116 ‘Because I’m worth it’ (slogan) 205 Béhar, Yves 203 Bell, Quentin 10 Benetton 111 Benjamin, Walter 10, 139, 143, 157, 204, 215 Bergh, Richard 182–183 Bernhardt, Sarah 151 Better things for everyday life (Paulsson) 191 Beyoncé 167, 175–176 BGMEA (Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association) 112 Bing, Siegfried 140 Biondi, Annachiara 61 birds 150–153 Black Liberation movement 174 Black Lives Matter (movement) 167 Black Mamba Anti-poaching Unit 54–55 Black Panther (film) 175 Black Panther Party introduction 167–168 style legacy 173–176 theory and practice of 168–170 uniform 170–173 The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (Nelson) 171, 173 Black Power (movement) 167 The Black Scholar (journal) 175 Blockchain technology 63 Boltanski, Christian 124 Bolton, Andrew 159–160 Bond, Gavin 175 Bond, Julian 171 Bonnedahl, Karl 28 Bos, Caroline 220–221 Boseman, Chadwick 175 Bötticher, Karl 215–216, 219, 221–222 Brando, Marlon 59

Index Branzi, Andrea 105–106 Brazil 58 Breward, Christopher 95 Brewer, Maura 104 British GQ (magazine) 175 British Vogue (magazine) 61 Browne, Thom 58 Bündchen, Gisele 61 Burch, Tory 161 Business of Fashion 102 Cadigan, Pat 199–200 Callot, Jacques 127, 129, 132 Callot Soeurs 147–149 Calvin Klein 7 Campbell, Naomi 60 ‘Can a bag save the world?’ (Mulberry) 100–101 Canalis, Elisabetta 61 capitalism 7, 49, 51 ‘Capitalocene’ Era 51 Cardin, Pierre 160–161 Carlyle, Thomas 10 Carson, Rachel 27 Casabella (magazine) 105–106 ‘cat choker’ (Lalique) 150 cattle 58–59, 63 Cavalli 82 ChainPoint technology 63 Chalayan, Hussein 102 Chambre Syndicale 93 Chanel 79 Cheddie, Janice 173 chemical recycling 36–37 China 56, 83, 110 Chiuri, Maria Grazia 205 choice and aesthetic behaviour 230–231 conception of 228–229 conclusion 243–244 consequences/implications 240–243 and ethical behaviour 229–230 and fashionable behaviour 231–233 introduction 227–228 possible/impossible 233–240 Circi, Alexandre 144 ‘circular economy’ 59–60, 62, 64 Circular Fashion System Commitment (2020) 37

Index circular remedies a lifeline 57 steps toward circular fashion 35–40 understanding 30–35, 43–44n.51 Clark, Hazel 1 Cleaver, Eldridge 171 climate change and fashion pollution 2, 16nn.8, 10, 12, 14 greenhouse gas emissions 57 recycling 33–34 Coded Culture (show) 203 Coleman, Melissa 203 Colomina, Beatriz 221 Comme des Garçons 85, 102 Condé Nast 56 Constructivism 143 ‘Consumed–Summer 2003. A reflection on consumerism’ (Simons) 99 consumptionism 3–4, 114 Contemporary fashion – practice and theory (course) 181 Contributor Magazine 181, 184–188, 191–192 Cooper, Carolyn 171 Corby, James 232, 237 Coronavirus pandemic 1, 53, 55, 87, 208 Corvellec, Hervé 30 Cossa, Francesco 126–130, 133–134 Costume Patterns and Designs (Tilke) 159 cotton 25, 37, 40–41n.2 counter-fashion 104 Courbet, Gustave 128 couture 78–82 Covid 19 see Coronavirus pandemic cow hides 57 ‘Craftivism Manifesto’ 92, 103–105 ‘Critique of IT Reason’ (Maldonado) 198 crocodiles 54 Cronenberg, David 199 Crutzen, Paul J. 51 CSR 113, 117 Cubists 148 cyberpunk 199–200 cyborgs 200–201 Dada writings 99 ‘dagging’ 125 Daniel, Tony 199

273

Darwin, Charles 151 Das Prinzip der Bekleidung (Loos) 220 Datschefski, Edwin 12 Davis, Angela 174 Davis, Miles 173 Day, Corinne 184 DDT 27–28 de Beauvoir, Simone 154 de Chomón, Segundo 149, 151 de Perthuis, Karen 91, 102–103 Death and Life (Klimt) 160 ‘Death of Reason’ (Daniel) 199 Debord, Guy 101–102 decoration 237–238 decoupling 36, 38, 217 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (2010) 46 deforestation 55, 58 Delacroix, Eugène 214, 222n.8 Deleuze, Gilles 98, 129 Deliberately Concealed Garments Project 124 Delphos dresses 141 DeMille, Cecil B. 153 Der Stil in den technischen oder tektonischen Künsten (Semper) 217–218 Derrida, Jacques 129, 228–229, 233–234, 243–244 Descomps, Emmanuel-Jules-Joseph (Joé) 154 designer brands 82–83, 87 ‘Detail from Sign of Aries’ (Cossa) 125–128, 130, 132–134 determinism 239 Die Tektonik der Hellenen (Bötticher) 216 Die vier Elemente der Baukunst (Semper) 218 Dior 98, 160 ‘distance-proximity’ 100 ‘Dolores’ (Midnight Frolic) 153 Donovan, Josephine 149 Doucet, Jacques 150, 160 Douglas, Mary 228, 231, 240–241, 244 Down’s Syndrome 207 Dragon shoes (Fashion4Freedom) 204 Dressing Against see Vestirsi Contro (Fava) Dressing Is Easy manifesto see ‘Vestirsi è Semplice’ manifesto DS Passagen-Werk (Benjamin) 215

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Index

DSquared2 82 Dunayer, Joan 149–150 Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis 213 Dylan, Bob 159 Earth Day (2021) 100 Eco, Umberto 198 École Polytechnique, France 213 Edelkoort, Li 12, 20–21n.52, 94–96, 98 Edition L’Uomo e l’arte 106 Edström, Anders 187 Eisenhardt, Kathy 29 Elite Europe (modelling agency) 111, 115 Elite Model Look (fashion agency) 115 Elite Models Management (model agency) 115 Elite Paris (model agency) 115–116 Elizabeth II, Queen 60 Enlightenment 213 etching 132–133 Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Badiou) 11 Evans, Caroline 98 ‘Expression and Communication’ (Gombrich) 232 Extinction Rebellion 64–65 factory farming 49 Faiers, Jonathan 50, 60 Farago, Jason 144–145 Farneti, Emanuele 46–47, 50–51, 53–54, 61, 66nn.13, 16 Fashion Institute of Technology 207 fashion media 5–7 Fashion Meets Disability (campaign) 205 Fashion and Modernism (Wallenberg/ Kollnitz) 8 Fashion photography 6–7 Fashion Revolution (manifesto) 57, 63, 96–98 The Fashion System (Barthes) 206 ‘Fashion Transparency Index’ (annual report) 57, 97 Fashion4Freedom 204 Fava, Elena 106 feather shrug (Friedman) 203 feminism 93, 100, 156 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 213 Filippa K 36, 191

Fletcher, Kate 49, 57–58 Flöge, Emilie Louise 141 Flöge, Helene 141 Foer, Franklin 228, 241–242, 244 Fong, Sunny 205 ‘Fool to Believe’ (Cadigan) 200 Ford, Tanisha C. 172–173 ‘Formation’ (performance) 167 Fortuny y Madrazo, Mariano 141 Fossi, Michele 55 Foucault, Michel 98, 238 Fouquet, Georges 151 Four Paws Shopping Guide 58 Frampton, Kenneth 191 Francione, Gary 49 Fraser, Inga 151, 153 fraying 124–125, 130–131 free will 228–231, 238–242 Freud, Sigmund 154 Friedman, Vanessa 46 Fulfillment (Klimt) 161 fur 49–50, 60–61 Fur Council of Canada 61 FurMark (fur certification scheme) 60, 62–64 Fuseproject (Béhar) 203 ‘FUTURE FOR FUR’ (advertorial) 60–61 Futurism 92, 144 Gaillard 151 Galaverni, Marco 55 Galliano, John 160 Galt, Rosalind 153 Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais) 200 Garrett-Forte, Janice 172 Gaultier, Jean Paul 59, 79 Gautrait, Lucien 151 Gaye, Marvin 100 Gerber, Marie 148 Gesamtkunsterk 143 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 131 Gibson, William 199 The Gift of Death (Derrida) 233 Gilded Age 146 Gina Tricot 33, 36–37 Ginsberg, Alexandra Daisy 187 Girl Model (documentary) 115 Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (Derrida) 233

Index Glamour (magazine) 207 Glaser, Milton 159 Glasgow Style 140 Glaum-Lathbury, Abigail 104 global fashion 37, 75–76, 78, 83–84, 88, 96 ‘Global Tools’ (Archizoom Associati) 106 Goddard, Alice 53 Goldin, Nan 184, 188 Goldstein, Ellie 207 Göller, Adolf 217 Gombrich, Ernst 230–233, 237 Gordon, Jennifer Farley 48 Goring, Jane 153 GQ Magazine 175 Grose, Lynda 49 Gross, Michael 115 ‘Guardian Angels’ (Hugo) 54–55 Guattari, Félix 129 Gucci 98 Guinness, Tom 51 H&M 4, 33, 36, 78–79, 97, 111–112, 191 Hagaparken park, Stockholm 181 Halsman, Philippe 174 Hancock, Herbie 173 Hanezawa Garden (Edström) 187 Hansen, Henning Otte 61 Haraway, Donna 51, 200–201 Hardy, Cynthia 27 Harlizius-Klück, Ellen 128 Harper’s Bazaar 114 Hart, Judy 172 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 84, 206, 216, 223n.15 Heidegger, Martin 84–85, 88 Helmut, Anat 104 Hemingway, Ernest 232 Hill, Colleen 48 Hirsch, Raphael 54 historicism 159–160 Hoffmann, Josef 141 Hogg, Pam 59 Hollander, Anne 5, 229 Holt, Michael 104–105, 107 Holy Dress (Coleman) 203 hooks, bell 170 Hope 189 hospitality 228, 233–234 House of Worth 145–147, 150, 155

275

Hübsch, Heinrich 213–215, 220–221 Hugo Boss 97 Hugo, Pieter 54 Human Rights Watch 112 Hutcheson, Francis 10 Hygieia (Klimt) 160 ‘I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur’ (PETA) 60 ‘ideologeme’ (Barthes) 206 IKEA 191 India 83 Individualism and Socialism (K. Larsson) 190–191 Infinited Fiber Company 377 influencers 7, 40 Ingold, Tim 131–132 International Fur Federation 62–63 Irby, Leslie 205 Irigaray, Luce 11 ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ (Ortner) 156 Isaiah, Book of 128 Italian Fur Association 60 Italy 55–57, 83, 94 Italy (Taine) 128 Jackson, Christine E. 151 Joergens, Catrin 1 Johnson, Laura 208 Johnson, Lynn 49, 54–55, 60, 63, 65 Jordan, Michael B. 175 Joseph, Jamal 173 Jugendstil 140, 143, 157 jumpsuits 104 Kaepernick, Colin 175 Kansei Engineering 202–203 Kant, Immanuel 84–85 ‘Kant and the Platypus’ (Eco) 198 Kaufman, Sara 207 Kawakubo, Rei 102–103 Kernform/Kunstform 215 Key, Ellen 190–191 Kiefer, Anselm 124, 135n.5 Kierkegaard, Søren 243 King Lear (Shakespeare) 130–131 The Kiss (Klimt) 160 Klimt, Gustav 141, 160–161

276

Index

knots 130 Kollnitz, Andrea 143 Kopplen, Anthea Van 11 Kovesi, Catherine 49, 54–55, 60, 63, 65 Kristeva, Julia 206–207 ‘La Musa Inattesa’ (Barbery) 53 La Redoute 79 ‘La Vita è una Figata’ (TV show) 205 Lagerfeld, Karl 78–79 Lalique 149, 151, 154–155 Lang, Berel 232–233 LanVi Nguyen 204 Larsson, Carl 183, 190 Larsson, Karin 190 L’Art Nouveau (shop) 140 Laugier, Abbé 218 Le Corbusier 221 Le Masurier, Megan 46 Le paintre de la vie moderne from 1863 (Baudelaire) 10–11 leasing 26, 36 leather 49, 55–59, 63–64, 72n.103 ‘Leather: Hell for Animals and Children in Bangladesh’ (PETA) 59 Lefsrud, Lianne 28 Leroi-Gourhan, André 198 ‘Les Gueux’ 127 Les Modes 153 Levinas, Emmanuel 11 Lewis, Leona 59 Lewis, Tarika 172 Liberty department store 141 Liberty Style 140–142 Liljefors, Bruno 183 Lincoln, Abbey 173 linear fashion 39 Lipovetzky, Gilles 184 ‘The Living Flowers’ (de Chomón) 149 Living Planet Report (WWF) 55 London Fashion Week (2020) 208 Looby, Marissa 104–105, 107 looking good allure 114–116, 119–120nn.25, 27 conclusions 116–117 fashion disasters 111–112 introduction 109–110 negligence and exploitation 110–111 production and consumption 112–114

Loos, Adolf 140, 146, 220–221, 237–238 L’Oréal 205 Louis Vuitton 91 ‘Loving Blackness as Political Resistance’ (hooks) 170 Lynge-Jorlén, Ane 185 Lyon, Janet 92, 94–99 McCartney, Stella 62 Macchia, Susanna 58 McFadden, Mary 160 MacIntyre, Donal 115 MacIntyre Undercover (tv series) 115 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie 143 McLuhan, Marshall 198 McQueen, Alexander 160–161, 201, 204, 230 McRobbie, Angela 102 Madame Peacock (film) 153 Made in Italy (label) 56, 58 ‘The Made to Last Manifesto’ (Mulberry) 100 Magnusson, Magnus 179–192 Maguire, Steve 27 maintenance 26–29, 39 Maison Martin Margiela 105–106 Maldonado, Tomás 198–199 Manet, Edouard 128 Mango 111 manifestos against 102–107 as a commodity 98–102 death of 93–95 introduction 91–93 paradoxes/fashion revolutions 95–98 Märak, Maxida 188 Margiela, Martin 123, 131 Marie, Gérald 111, 115–116, 119–120n.25 Marine, Rebekah 205 Marni 82 Marx, Karl 84, 101 Marxist-Leninism 169 Mathews, Dan 60 Maxim’s restaurant, Paris 160 Mayhew, Henry 128 Medham Kirchoff 100 Meditations on a Hobby Horse (Gombrich) 230–231

Index ‘Medusa’s Head’ (Freud) 154 Medvedev, P.N. 206 Meisel, Steven 46 Mendes, Eva 60 ‘Meno 68%’ (article) 55 ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’ (song) 100 #MeToo movement 116 Meyer, Leonard 232–233, 237 Meyer, Renate 28 Michele, Alessandro 98 Midnight Frolic (Ziegfeld) 153 Milan Triennal XV 106 Miller, Sam J. 52, 54 mink 54, 63 Mistra Future Fashion 29 Miyake, Issey 79 Mizrahi, Isaac 79 Model (Gross) 115 Modern Meadow 56 modernism 7, 140, 191, 211–212, 222n.1 Modernisme 140 Moi, Toril 206 Moore, Hellen 93 moral legitimacy 27 More, Sir Thomas 104 Moreau, Xavier 115 Morello, Marco 56–57 Mucha, Alphonse 151 Mugler, Thierry 59 Mullins, Aimée 201–202, 204–208 Mulvey, Laura 183–184 Musée d’Orsay, Paris 158 Mylo 56 nanotechnology 202 Nature 156–157, 159 Nazimova, Alla 153 Negroponte, Nicholas 200 Nelson, Stanley 171, 173 Nepal 76 Neumeyer, Fritz 219, 225n.25 Neuromancer (Gibson) 199 New Woman 157 Newton, Huey 168–171, 175 Nichol, Tom 127 Nike 204 nympha (Ghirlandaio) 131

277

Oaten, Mark 62–63 Obrist, Hans Ulrich 102 ‘Occupy Vogue Italia’ (Miller) 52–54 octopuses 153 Odetta 173 Odysseus 130 ‘On Not Being Seen Dead: Shopping as Protest’ (Douglas) 240 ‘One to make at home’ project 105 organic motifs 143 Orientalism 151 Orminski, Jeanette 64 ornament 237–238 ‘Ornament and Crime’ (Loos) 140 Ortner, Sherry B. 156–157 Our Common Future (Brundtland report) 48 Owens, Rick 161 Pagoda wood art 204 Pailes-Friedman, Rebecca 203 Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara 126–127, 129, 131 Palmiero-Winters, Amy 205 ‘paradigms’ 237 The Paradox of Choice (Schwartz) 228 Paris Exposition (1900) 143 Passagen-Werk (Benjamin) 215 Paulicelli, Eugenia 55–56 Paulsson, Gregor 191 Peacock Alley 152 ‘The Peacock’ (dance) 153 peacocks 151–153 Penelope 129 Perseus 127 PETA 52, 57, 59–61, 69n.58 Philip, Aaron 207 Picasso, Pablo 230 Picture Me (documentary) 115 Piñatex 56 Pinault, François-Henri 60 Pistoletto, Michelangelo 124 Pointon, Marcia 123 Poiret, Paul 150, 160 Polhemus, Ted 59 Polimoda (fashion school) 47 polyester 34 Postsparkasse, Vienna 219–220 Prada 85, 91

278 Pratesi, Isabella 58 ‘Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme’ (Le Corbusier) 221 press releases 99 Primark 111 problematization 25–30, 30–35, 38–39 Proctor, Zoe 208 production 77–78, 80–81, 83 Profits and Principles: Global Capitalism and Human Rights in China (Santoro) 11 Project Runway (tv show) 82 prosthetics bodies 204–205 conclusion 208–209 cyberpunk/grotesque 199–200 introduction 197–199 multiple fashionable bodies 206–208, 210n.23 new humanism 200–202 second nature 202–204 Proust, Marcel 141, 147 Puma 97 Purple 2001 187 pythons 54 Rabelais, François 200 ragged man see ‘Detail from Sign of Aries’ (Cossa) ‘ragged schools’ 128 ragged/unravelled 123–134, 134nn.1-2, 136n.16 Ralph Lauren 97 Rana Plaza, disaster (Bangladesh) 96, 109, 111–112, 117–118nn.4-5, 7 Rancière, Jacques 53 Rational Dress Society 92, 104–105 ready-to-wear 82, 190 Reed, Peter 191 ‘Rei Kawakubo’s Creative Manifesto’ 102 Reinach, Simona Segre 56 Rembrandt 129, 132–134 Renaissance 6, 125–126, 128 Re:newcell 36–37 Renzi, Matteo 205 Rhodes, Kate 184, 187, 190 Rhodes, Zandra 159 Ribeiro, Aileen 10

Index Richardson, Terry 116, 120n.27 ‘The Right of Having Rights’ (Rodotà) 201 Riker Brothers 150–151 Roaring Twenties 147 Rodotà, Stefano 201 Rose, Clare 140–141, 159 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 144 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) 49 Rubik, Anja 51 Rudnicka, Ola 181–182, 185 Rydberg, Robert 186–187 Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts 142 St Denis, Ruth 153 Saint Laurent, Yves 79, 160 Sakowitz (store) 160 Santoro, Michael A. 11–12 Sarabande collection (McQueen) 160 ‘sartorial conscience’ 10 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 212–213, 215, 219, 221–222 Schwartz, Barry 228, 240–241 Schwestern Flöge (shop) 141 Scott, L’Wren 161 Seale, Bobby 168–171 The Second Sex (Beauvoir) 154 Semper, Gottfried 130–132, 217–219 Senofont, Marni 175 Serfati, Avya 204 Serres, Michel 125, 130 Sèthe, Marie 143 sex appeal 204 Shafran, Nigel 53 Shinkle, Eugénie 6, 192 Siegle, Lucy 5, 57 Simone, Nina 173 Simons, Raf 99 Sims, Josh 161 Skjold, Else 45, 65 ‘slashing’ 125 Sobchak, Vivien 207 Sorenson, John L. 48–49, 52, 61–63 Sozzani, Franca 46 Spencer, Craig 55 Spencer, Robyn 168, 172 Spinoza, Baruch 11, 20n.45 Staff International 82 State of Fashion 52, 61

Index Steele, Valerie 46 Sterling, B. 199 Sternberger, Dolf 140 ‘Stigma to Style’ (motto) 203 Stockholm Exhibition (1930) 191 Stoermer, Eugene F. 51 Strauss, Samuel 3–4, 114 Strömholm, Christer 187–188 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 171 ‘Style is the Man’ (Corby) 232 ‘styleme’ 232 subjectivation 98 ‘Le Suffragettes Manifesto’ 93 Sui, Anna 159–160 ‘Summer of Love’ (1967) 159 Superflex 203 Sutton, Carré (née Otis) 116 Svendsen, Lars 231 Sweden 29–30, 36–37 Swedish fashion photography conclusion 191–192 individualism and equality 184–186 introduction 179–181 social democracy 186–191 staging the natural 181–184 System Magazine 102 Taine, Hippolyte 128, 131 Target 79 techné 198 Teller, Juergen 184, 187 Tham, Mathilda 57–58 ‘The Rational Dress Society collective’ 104 Thiébaut, Philippe 158 Thom Browne bag 59 Thomas, Sue 12, 49, 62 ‘Three Fates’ see Callot Soeurs Tiffany, Louis Comfort 149, 160 Tilke, Max 159 Tillmans, Wolfgang 184 Tillotson, Jenny 202 Time magazine 158 TMR research 203 Tornabuoni chapel, Florence 131 The Total Beauty of Sustainable Products (Datschefski) 11 Transfrontier Africa NPC 55 Trend Tablet agency 94

279

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, New York 109, 111 Tseëlon, Efrat 48 Turlington, Christy 60 Turner, Graeme 114 ‘The Tyranny of Clothes’ (Moore) 93 Ullman, Stephen 232 Ulysses 129 UN Food and Agriculture Organization 57 UNIC 56 UNYQ 203 used garments 34, 36, 38 V-magazine 185 Valéry, Paul 214 van Berkel, Ben 220–221 van de Velde, Henry 143 van den Bosch, Margareta 78 van der Putten, Debbie 207 van Gogh, Vincent 232 Vegan Fashion Library 59 Vegan Fashion Week (2019) 59 Verderi, Ferdinando 47 ‘Vers une architecture’ (Le Corbusier) 221 Vestirsi Contro (Fava) 106 ‘Vestirsi è Semplice’ manifesto 105 Vestoj magazine 207 Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) 141 Videodrome (Cronenberg) 199 Vienna Secession 141 Vietnam 110 Vietnamese Imperial art 204 Vildnis 101 Vio, Beatrice 205–208 The visible – Swedish contemporary photography (2014) 188 ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (Mulvey) 183 Vitrolabs 56 Vitruvius 218, 224–225n.23 Vogue Business 60–61 Vogue Italia 45–47, 50–56, 59–61, 64–65 Vogue magazine 104, 114, 158, 160–161, 165n.82, 181 Vogue Paris 61 von Busch, Otto 52, 61, 69n.57, 103 von Cranach, Wilhelm Lucas 153

280 Vreeland, Diana 111, 114 Vuitton 56 Wagner, Otto 219–220 Waldorf Astoria hotel 152 Walhalla (Kiefer) 124 Wallenberg, Louise 143 Warburg, Aby 127, 130–131, 135nn.11-12 Warner, Helen 114 ‘Was ist Wahrheit in der Architektur?’ (Göller) 217 ‘Water and Oil’ (Meisel) 46 Weekday 189 Weeks 152 Welfare Quality project (EU) 62 Westwood, Vivienne 102 Wiener Werkstätte movement 141 Wigley, Mark 219, 221 The Wild One (film) 59

Index Winckelmann, Johann 216 Wolfers, Phillipe 149 women 143, 153–158, 171–172 wool 62, 73n.127 World Fair 1900 (Paris) 149 World Wildlife Fund Italia 54–55, 58 ‘World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech’(Foer) 241 Worth, Charles Frederick 146 Worth, Jean-Philippe 141, 145–146, 160 Wright, Frank Lloyd 230 WWF 64 YouTube 86–87 YSL Manifesto 102 Yuki 159 ZARA 4 Zebedee Management (model agency) 208

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