Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills : Aesthetic Bodies, Political Subjects 9789738798021

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PARIS CHIC, TEHRAN THRILLS

ZETA SERIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY & SOCIOLOGY VOLUME I

Series Coordinators Vintilă MIHĂILESCU, senior editor Raluca MOISE, junior editor

Scientific Board Pierre BIDART anthropology, Bordeaux 2 Charles-Henri CUIN sociology, Bordeaux 2 Ellen HERTZ anthropology, Universite de Neuchatel Olivier GOSSELAIN anthropology, Universite Libre de Bruxelles R. ZEEBROEK anthropology, Universite Libre de Bruxelles

ALEXANDRU BĂLĂŞESCU

PARIS CHIC, TEHRAN THRILLS AESTHETIC BODIES, POLITICAL SUBJECTS

preface by Vintilă Mihăilescu

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Alexandru Bălăşescu holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine (UCI, 2004). He taught at the UCI, American University in Paris, UC Critical Center in Paris, and RUW Bahrain. His publication appeared in several Academic journals such as Fashion Theory, Gender and History, and the Journal of Material Culture. He also publishes regularly in “IDEA – Arts and Society” and in several other popular culture magazines (ZOO). He is currently in Bucharest, activating as independent researcher, and guest assistant at the National School of Political and Administrative Studies.

¤ www.zetabooks.com

Cover design: Carla Szabo Cover illustration: Fésüs Barna Cover photo: Cornel Lazia Photo backcover: Dragos Tenita Distribution: Owline. Online Book Store www.owline-bookstore.com © 2007 Zeta Books for the present electronic edition All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronical or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. The copyright of the articles in this volume belongs to the author(s). ISBN: 978-973-87980-2-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xi PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 CHAPTER 1: FASHION AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SUBJECT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Body Practices and Subjectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Urban Methods, or How to take the Metro to the field . . . . 37 Objects of (for) Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Trajectories and Mediations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 CHAPTER 2: ON THE TIMELY SUBJECT OF FASHION . 49 The Fabric of Fashion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 License Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Techniques of Fashion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Blaise, or a Brief Presentation of the Process of Production . 55 The Fabric of Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Brand New Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 CHAPTER 3: ORIENTAL FLAVORS. DESIGNING FOR THE MIDDLE EAST IN PARIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Reliable Clients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Orientalism and its discontents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 (A)political representations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Dress: Practice and Representations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Brand Orientalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Inside Out Dress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Visible Subjectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Latent Orientalism and Feminist Critiques: Inside the Modern Middle East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

CHAPTER 4: SPACE, TIME, DRESS, AND AESTHETIC AUTHORITY. FASHION AND MODERNITY IN THE URBAN SPACES OF TEHRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Modern Dressing in Iran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Clothing Reforms in Iran between 1920 and 1940 . . . . . . 128 Moral Dress and the Islamic Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 Urban Spaces in Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Dressing the Muslim Women’s Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Spaces, Dress, Places . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 Fashion, Time, Consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 CHAPTER 5: GENDERED SPACE AND FASHION CATWALKS: PARIS AND TEHRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Lotous Fashion Show. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 Mozaique reflections, 10.14.2003 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 CHAPTER 6: TRADITIONALLY MODERN: THE HAUTE COUTURE IN TEHRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Time for Fashion in Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 Mahla or Fashion as Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Shadi or the Cosmopolitan Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 The Privilege of Exoticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

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CHAPTER 7: AFTER AUTHORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 What Is a Copy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Signature, Mark, Territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 “Everybody Is a Copy” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Art for Designers, Copyrights for Business. . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Authors, Power, Territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 CHAPTER 8: PICTURED BODIES: PHOTOGRAPHING FOR FASHION IN TEHRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260 The Ideal Body of “Modern” Photography . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262 CONCLUSION: MODERNITY IN MOTION . . . . . . . . . 277 Forms of Mobility, Forms of Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282 REFERENCE LIST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1 Fashion Designer Workshop in Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Figure 2.2 Gap Store in Saint Germaine, Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Figure 3.1 Fashion Catwalk at Paris “Grand Mosque” . . . . . . . 83 Figure 3.2 Fashion Fare in Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Figure 3.3 A “chav” at a Parisian Fashion Show . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Figure 4.1 Everyday Scene in Qaem Passage, Tehran . . . . . . . . 146 Figure 4.2 Tehran young chic, Spring 2003 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Figure 4.3 Women on the Street in Northern Tehran . . . . . . . 157 Figure 4.4 Everyday Scene in Golestan Passage, Tehran . . . . . . 160 Figure 4.5 Choosing the Fashionable Headscarf . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Figure 4.6 Shopping Scene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 Figure 4.7 Boutique in Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Figure 4.8 Boutiques during sales period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Figure 5.1 Advertising banner for Lotous Fashion Show . . . . . 180 Figure 5.2 Advertising banners for Samsung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Figure 5.3 Lotous catwalk ready for use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 Figure 6.1 Private Showroom in Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 Figure 6.2 Cover for the Second Issue of Lotous . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Figure 6.3 Shahla’s Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 Figure 6.4 Page of Lotous Journal No.2/ 2003 . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Figure 6.5 Shadi’s Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 Figure 7.1 Luxury-like Boutique in Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Figure 7.2 Brand-name Tags for Sale in Tehran. . . . . . . . . . . . 244 Figure 7.3 Reproduction of a Portrait in an Art Boutique . . . . 247 Figure 7.4 Fashion Journals Inspiration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248 Figure 8.1 Advertising for e-cut brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Figure 8.2 Two fashion boutiques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260

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Figure 8.3 Advertising for Vacuum Cleaner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Figure 8.4 Private Fashion Shot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Figure 8.5 Sofra Posing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 Figure 8.6 Entries in two fashion shops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Figure 8.7 Banner for the Motion Picture “Ghogha” . . . . . . . 276 Figure 9.1 Entry in Wonderland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284 Figure 9.2 Skateboard Simulator in Wonderland . . . . . . . . . . 286

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank to all those directly involved in the making of this work: to Bill Maurer, my advisor to whom I owe more than just endless intellectual debates; to Karen Leonard who critically followed the development of my argument; to James Ferguson who offered me through conversations not only plenty of insights, but also the humor necessary in any endeavor; to Liisa Malkki who inspired the courage to let my mind flow; to Teresa Caldeira for her stylish remarks; to Soheila Shahshahani who facilitated my first visit to Iran, and guided me throughout the fieldwork; to Susan Ossman for inspiration; to Annelies Moors for her comments and encouragements; to Valerie Steele, for her appreciation of my work; to all my colleagues who listened and selflessly gave me their comments on my work; to Andrés and Riccardo; to Jean-Phillipe, Marcia, Shadi, Mark, Rita, Darja, Maryam, Hadi, Atoosa, Mahla, Christian, Pascal and many others, all my interviewees who shared with me part of their world. My deep gratitude goes to Vintila Mihailescu who first showed me the “anthropological way”, and to my parents who understood my desire to follow it. In France I have greatly benefited from the friendship of remarkable persons, and from intellectual interactions with many researchers: Fariba Adelkhah from CERI, who gave me the key to Iran fieldwork; Jean Francois Bayart whose intellectual approach inspired me greatly: this is my hai-ku; Bernard Hourcade, Jean Pierre Digard, and the “Iranian World” team from CNRS Ivry; Nilufer Gole for endless conversations and for the intellectual challenges of her seminars at EHESS; Cecile Debise who took pictures for me at the Grand Mosque of Paris; Julie Thomas and Waddick Doyle, who listened and gave me the chance to continue my work in Paris; Ray Vernon. The mechanics of fieldwork would not have been pos-

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sible without my friends in Paris, who helped me find shelter, both physical and affective: Maria Vivas-Contreras and Gilles, Anne and Stephane, Patrick, Stephanie and Boris, Dani, I wish to thank you in this way. Also, I would like to thank to Isabelle Eshraghi who gave me many addresses in Tehran. I would like to thank in a special way to Ghassideh Golmakani for her assistance during my fieldwork in Iran, and for facilitating, along with Houshang and Forough, my second coming to Tehran. Maurizio, thank you for everything! A “thank you apart” I owe to Janet for her careful reading, editing and commenting of this text and to Jarred for his inspiring and active presence in the last phase of the writing process. Michael Tingay, thank you for final touches of English subtleties. The entire research would not have been possible without financial support. I would like to extend my thanks to: the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; the School of Social Sciences and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine who sustained this project all along my graduate studies; the French Center of Research in Iran, who offered me not only a short term fellowship, but also housing in Tehran; the UC Center in Paris. It is impossible to give a complete list of all the people I met and whose assistance I appreciated during this project. I apologize for my omissions, and I am deeply indebted to all of you, named or un-named above. * Some chapters of this book were previously published under modified forms as follows: CHAPTER 6 appeared as “Haute Couture in Tehran: Two Faces of an Emerging Fashion Scene” in Fashion Theory. The Journal

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of Body and Culture, Volume 11, issue 2/3, pp. 299-318. Oxford: Berg Editions, 2007 CHAPTER 7 appeared as “After Authors: Sign(ify)ing Fashion from Paris to Tehran” in Journal of Material Culture, Volume 10(3): 289–310 London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2005 CHAPTER 8 appeared as “Faces and Bodies: Gendered Modernity and Fashion Photography in Tehran.” in Gender and History. Visual Genders, Visual Histories. pp.219-251 edited by Patricia Hayes, 2006, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

In Memoriam Aurelian Popescu

Preface Undressing the Social Body Buying a dress and writing are somehow a similar bet, one never knows how dress re-creates one’s body, nor how writing reorganizes one’s thinking. And finally this written material, this discursive reorganization of experience takes the place of the fieldwork experience itself, re-evaluates it, along with the time lived through it, as dress takes the place of the bodies that inhabit it…

Doing his fieldwork on three continents, Alexandru was popping up from time to time, here and there, each time carefully dressed in another way. His nomad desire was offending our more sedentary taste, a bunch of wishful-thinking anthropologists, knowing each other intimately for quite a while: Alexandru is showing up, playing the fool, staging himself, well, he’s different! – were the dominant statements. And so he was. But was it really about being differently dressed? Just about clothes? Obviously not. It was rather about what everybody would call a different look – and what the connoisseurs prefer to name style. But how else could it have been? He was doing an anthropological work on fashion, he was getting more and more involved with this fluid community of designers, he was discovering the discourse of fashion and trying to translate it into the description of anthropology; and he was taking all these seriously, meaning that he was sharing our fundamental assumption about anthropology as being first of all a way of living. So he had to be himself a work in

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progress, experiencing fashion in his own body, loving his object as himself – as Zizek would put it. But there is something more in this story: each time we were (also) friendly mocking at him, he was (also…) smiling at us, sometimes embarrassed, sometimes glancing in the blue. As he is largely commenting in this book, fashion is, indeed, a topography of the social space, in-scribing the social body; in our late modernity dress takes indeed the place of bodies, “dressing” being a social agency which has the force of fate. But he was not taking all this as his personal fate too. There is still room for alternatives, for playing with these discursive forces. There still is the possibility of irony! That is why, working on his thesis, he was also playing around with himself… and with us. * As reminded by the author, “fashion has been approached from two perspectives, semiotic or hermeneutic. The latter treats clothing as indicators of social position, thus engaging in an intellectual tradition that starts with Simmel (1971) and Elias (1994), and continues with the works of Hebdige (1979), or Bourdieu (1979)”. Going much beyond the external visibility of fashion, Bălăşescu is personally much closer to the second approach, but with a strong touch of Foucault’s heritage: “my argument – Bălăşescu states – is that fashion constitutes a biotechnology that shapes recognizable bodies and recognized subjects”. The book is thus a discourse about the subject, about himself, about ourselves. Or, in a more detailed and down to the earth description, he declares to be interested in “who makes the clothes and in their fabrication from inception to reception and use. Who makes, and how actually are clothes made? How does the designer decide upon the form and the aesthetic of

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dress, and how will s/he procure the necessary materials to make it? What factors are at play in this decision? What are the channels of distribution of clothing? How do consumers from Tehran gain access to designer clothing made in France (or elsewhere), and who has access to this clothing?” One the way to these topics, Bălăşescu meets a complex new world… But things are not only complex, they seem to be scaring too: Castel, quoted by the author, is thus warning us that “there is, in fact, no longer a relation of immediacy with a subject because there is no longer a subject!” Alexandru Bălăşescu is not going around the bush in this respect, pointing from different perspectives to this danger of dissolution of the classical “subject”. But he does not want to be scaring himself too. He doubts many of the statements he refers to, he is balancing many others. He finally reassures us that “the subject is subjected to new practices and governed in different ways but does not disappear. Rather, what is disappearing is the liberal Lockean subject of property, appropriated and subjected to risk profiling, as Maurer puts it”. He is part of the story – as all of us – but a critic and tonic “subject”, having learned to practice “la bonne distance” when facing this “object” of common concern and desire. This is, probably, the “key” in which this book should be read. * A book about oriental(ist) fashion, about trendiness in a conservative – if not “fundamentalist” – society? Yes, indeed, this is where and how it starts. In order to enter this universe too, one may take a shortcut and start by having a look at the photo on a fashion catwalk at Paris “Grand Mosque”. Many stereotypes and “prêt-a-porter” ideas we all share will be shaken by this image. Then

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the reader can follow the author in Iran, where he tried to order a suit of clothes. The result turned out to be a large dress, floating around his body “in the normal way”. “I felt that my body had lost its shape!” – the author complains. One may remember on this occasion Edward Hall’s “proxemics” stories about the Arab people breaking into each others “personal spaces”, and thus offending the European sense of individuality and intimacy. Just as this kind of recent European dressing that shows the body instead of “dressing” it may offend the local taste. Body, individuality, dress, space and time thus seem to be in a much more complex relation than one could have guessed: “The relationships among architecture, living space, dress, and the bodies that inhabit them are the starting point of my reflections on fashion” – the author confesses. Step by step, he is pointing at and reconstructing for us some of these lines of difference between the two worlds he tries to bridge by his approach. On the other side, all these more or less visible and deep-rooted differences are hard to understand if keeping too close to them, in the space of the local context. Globalisation is not a ghostly word or just a macro-economic reality. You can meet it at any corner – and in fashion maybe even more so than in other realms. For anthropologists, it is what a group of French scholars like to call “contemporary worlds”, meaning that they can not be put any longer on a unidirectional time axis as more or less primitive/ civilized or more or less developed, as all the classical theories of modernity used to do, but have to be perceived and interpreted as co-existing in time and deeply interconnected throughout space – even if still being, maybe, distinct “worlds” in some respects. The ways of modernity have thus to be seen from this different kind of perspective. The present book is regarding France and Iran from this perspective too, revisiting the meaning of modernity in the two societies.

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What will probably surprise some of us is the fact that “the Iranian modernity and its link with the Islamic political organization are revealed not as a contradictory relationship but as an intertwined existence, in which one does not exclude the other.” Even more: “it seems that fashion designers have understood ahead of others that fashion – and thus modernity – does not belong exclusively to the Western hemisphere. Although the idea that real fashion is produced in Western locations is still present, there is a sense of the “equality of individuals” facing fashion. To be more specific, this equality is understood in terms of being modern, and does not apply to other categories/sources of inequality like gender or class. In other words, there exists a series of systemic processes that renders a clothing item “fashionable”, that are found in Paris, New York, London, or Milan, and to a lesser extent Tokyo. In parallel, there is the level of daily social practices lived as “fashion”, present extensively around the world.” One of the benefits of reading this book will thus be the fact that the (Iranian) Muslim world and the European one will not seem any longer to us as opposite – if not conflicting – worlds, but rather as distinct modernities of the same intertwined common world. * But is this book, after all, about fashion or not? – one may wonder after reading these lines. What is it, in fact, all about? What is its object of concern? Good question! Yes, indeed, it is about fashion, but not only, not alone. It could not be. It is about what one could name, in the steps of Marcel Mauss, a total social object, dressing being in this view a “technique du corps”, as suggested by the French ethnolo-

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gist almost one century ago. But “body” may be misleading in this respect, supposing a distinction between the body and something else that would be the subject – a distinction the visionary Mauss already tried to overcome. Or, as reminded by Jean-Pierre Warnier, “a subject does not ‘possess’ a body. It is a body”. This “total object” Bălăşescu is concerned with starts with the body, is concerned by fashion as biotechnology and the ways this is shaping bodies, and ends with the subject – or rather with subjectivation, i.e. an object in motion. In Bălăşescu’s view, fashion is thus “part of the matrix of subjectivation that encompasses both body and subject as an entity”. It is not just this body “out there”, dressed in the “visible” way of fashion, but rather a long chain of mutual implications the anthropologist has to follow and go through: “Fashion practices constitute a map of the social body, expressed by different styles. (…) styles become markers of identity. At the same time they are signifying practices that ultimately refer back to the subject. The social space always already has a multitude of styles from which a person could choose, but the choice of a style is translated in the social imaginary as the expression of the interior self, and it becomes the self. Marketing activities codify the multitude of styles, and the appearance of rebel or contestatary styles is more and more rapidly integrated in the “normality” of fashion, sometimes with a simple word game: “shock is chic”. Initially, a counter-style contests the existing identity-models by repositioning and recontextualizing the commodities, and subverting their conventional uses. They claim an identity position that is not (or not yet) normalized. But, in the process of integration, the new models of rebellious subjects are appropriated and objectified by the system of power.” Norbert Elias has convincingly described the ways and extent to which the “process of civilization” was also a European means of domesticating and finally mastering the “natural” body, this un-

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worthy partner of the spiritual, and “true” subject. From this longue durée perspective, the “subjectivation” (in fact, a recent and reactive re-building of the subject) Bălăşescu is speaking about goes beyond – and even against – this long lasting process of civilization. In this respect, it can be considered as a post-civilization phenomena. Its critical approach has to be welcomed. In return, its excesses, risking to throw out the baby with the bathing water, have to be fought against and prevented as much as possible. Fashion-making in Paris and Tehran, dressing (and un-dressing) the social body on two continents (and worlds), are the means Bălăşescu has chosen to find a way through this labyrinth of selfcritical, late modernity. For most of the Romanian readers it may be a surprising way, but it will become obvious while reading the book that it is also a fertile and fascinating one. * All these links and processes do happen, indeed, in Paris and Teheran, where they are described and questioned by the author. But, like it or dislike it, Tehran – not to speak about Paris – is just next door, so that it should be no surprise that most of these things happen elsewhere too. No surprise either that everything in this book also concerns all of us. Don’t you feel concerned, for instance, by the following general outcome of this particular anthropological journey between Paris and Tehran: “we are facing a form of social organization based on ‘ready-to-wear’ citizenship”? If yes, then look also for the other genuine findings of this rich book!

VINTILĂ MIHĂILESCU

Introduction The (co-)Motion of Aesthetics from France to the Middle East The ideas of exchange, of devaluation, of inflation invaded his book little by little like theories of dress crept into Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus – where they usurped the place of characters. André Gide ()

Hossein Chalayan is a London-based fashion designer who is well known for his avant-garde cutting edge seasonal collections. For the spring 1998 collection seven models presented his creations. While the first model was wearing only an eye mask, those who followed her came on the catwalk gradually covered, starting with the head. The seventh model came out fully covered in black1. Her dress was a clear reference to the Middle Eastern black chador and niqab. This text is a story of the intertwined play of the real and imaginary, of promise and the actual, of desire and fulfillment, of value and over-value. How could it have been otherwise, since fashion and body were the focus of my gaze? If one watched the sun long enough, one would start seeing light-spots of questionable materiality. Does this make them less real, since we do see them, even with our eyes closed? When one watches a person, one first sees the dress. But if a naked model walks on a catwalk (as happened in Hossein Chalayan’s collection), one also sees the dress, or its immaterial promise. Nonetheless, the promise and its fulfillment do not 1

With deep thanks to Jean Philippe Pons for this, and much other, information.

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always coincide. The context of Chalayan’s show prepared the public for a fashion presentation. While the context made it a fashion presentation, the final dress – a ‘simple’ chador – was imaginarily assimilated to a non-modern space, the Islamic Middle East. The process of presentation was part of the fashion’s industry conventions. Was the outcome ‘less’ fashion? The following pages propose an exploration of the world of fashion in two apparently opposite places: Paris, the recognized capital of chic, and Tehran, a city that hardly makes one think of fashion. If anything at all, Tehran and fashion seem to be mutually exclusive. The two-year research, between 2002 and 2004, taught me otherwise. Important ethnographic moments2 in Paris occurred while presenting my research to different people during small conversations. The mention of fashion and Tehran prompted strong reactions. There was the condescending or doubting smile, usually accompanied by “is there such a thing as fashion in Tehran?!” This was the reaction of a significant majority. The juxtaposition of non-western places (Iran) and modern practices (fashion) disturbed what Bourdieu would call the doxa of these persons, their unquestionable, taken for granted, conviction referring to geography, clothing, and modernity. For many, fashion – the herald industry of Paris and the unspoken mark of modernity – could not be conceived as having a significant association with Tehran. The loss of sense is partly linked with the imaginary movement of a practice from one place to another (or to the apparent impossibility of this mental move, for that matter). Clearly, fashion does exist in 2

I use the term “ethnographic moment” in the sense that Marilyn Strathern gives it (personal communication), that is, a moment usually accidental, which may last no more than one second, or the time of a short dialogue exchange, but which has a tremendous explanatory power for the social situation in which one may find herself.

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Tehran, both as a creative practice and as a practice of consumption. As Susan Ossman observes “[m]oving from one world to another might turn the “significant” into “nonsense”, but it could also introduce changes in both. Worlds are constantly in the process of sharing, copying, critiquing, and altering each other’s values and meanings” (Ossman 2002:138-139). These processes are mostly overlooked in the effort to create and emphasize difference, and to accentuate identitary landmarks – prompted in illusory identity discourses (Bayart 1996). Through looking at fashion in Paris and Tehran, this text is less interested in “essential” differences between the two locations, and more in the reciprocal processes of sharing, critiquing, and altering the signification of fashion. It also proposes an analysis of this phenomenon through ethnological eyes, which at the end makes place to politically significant conclusions. Today, while Paris appears in the news only as the site of endless political dispute between a shaky left and a populist right, Tehran is the focus of attention: deemed one of the centers of the Axis of Evil by the US president Bush, and as if to confirm the fear alimented through media channels, Tehran allegedly aims to become a military nuclear power. Iran will surely be a civil nuclear power in shortest delay. In the attempt to export democracy by means of sanctified bullets and blessed bombs, at only two years distance, Bush administration opened fronts both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Any pretext was used to justify military action. I happened to be in Tehran in March-April 2003, when Baghdad fell and Bush declared victory from a US carrier in the Persian Gulf. In Tehran, the feelings where split. Historical enemy, Saddam Hussein was not deplored in Iran. However, many lips whispered in those moments: “we are next”. Ever since, a feeling of helpless expectation transpired in my conversations with friends in Tehran. And in many political and media discourses, beyond the nuclear ambitions of

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INTRODUCTION

a presumed fundamentalist government in Tehran, the ultimate argument for the necessity of military intervention stays women’s black dress, the chador. Simultaneously, dress of fashionable young Iranian women and men are presented as heralds of resistance against Ahmadinejad’s government, and implicitly support of any American or Western action against Tehran. Beyond theories and descriptions, the following pages analyze the roots of this simplified (and erroneous) assumption in an attempt to shed more shades of colour on a black and white picturing of the world. Fashion creates material objects (dress) invested with significations that, in turn, create a certain discursive, always already imaginary, order in the social body; ethnological research creates and objectifies experiences, puts them on a material support (tapes, photography, notes) and reorders them into a more or less coherent theory, advancing hypotheses, reorganizing the discourses in, and about, social space. The fulfillment of desire is the promise of fashion, and the possibility of writing is the promise of fieldwork. A fashion brand name does not secure us against the disappointment that the actual wearing may cause. And any fashionable dress is ultimately disappointing, since it does not magically transport us into the realm of pleasure it promises. The ethnographic material produced during the research cannot possibly guarantee the satisfaction of well-written material. Buying a dress and writing are somehow a similar bet, one never knows how dress re-creates one’s body, nor how writing reorganizes one’s thinking. And finally this written material, this discursive reorganization of experience takes the place of the fieldwork experience itself, re-evaluates it, along with the time lived through it, as dress takes the place of the bodies that inhabit it; in fact, those bodies cannot be read otherwise but through dress, they are made real by their coverings, or rather

INTRODUCTION

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by the value and signification we attach to those coverings. The complex anatomy of the field is knowable only through the written pieces, through the disposition of signs that in their turn re-create the field. During the time of my research, my body moved between two sites, Paris and Tehran, covering a wide range of urban spaces and giving them new significations. It is not without importance that I knew Paris well before my fieldwork, while Tehran was an entirely new discovery. My previous knowledge of Paris was a bodily one; I experienced living in this city at repeated intervals starting 1997. Tehran was for me a story told by members of the Iranian diaspora in Southern California, a story that made me curious and eager to see and explore it. The story was not told only through words, but mostly through bodily expression. The particular elegance and care of the self of Californian Iranians drew my attention ever since I became acquainted with the community. My Iranian friends always had a particular style, fashionable dress, up to date hairstyle, and concern for displaying brand names (on their bodies, or attached to their persona, e.g. designers’ signatures clothes, or car brands). Nothing surprising, maybe, but all these made me want to see the urban landscape in Tehran. With this baggage of a priori knowledge I installed myself in Paris in the summer of 2002, and I alternated between the two cities until the Fall of 2003. Nevertheless, the experience was deeply unbalanced: in Paris I lived a punctual existence, constituted through meeting certain people, listening to their stories, and recording their impression about Middle Eastern clients in the fashion world. I strove to understand the functioning of the fashion industry and its relation to the Middle East. The process of designing along with the channels of communication and distribution of commodities were the focus of my interests. Secrecy proved to be an unbreakable

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INTRODUCTION

barrier, so exact numbers regarding fashion markets are absent. The question of copyright reverberated through almost all the interviews and pushed me to rethink the myth of authorship. On the other hand, Tehran offered me, through fashion practices, the image of the whole. This may be the normal result of my methodological approach: in Paris I looked for specific issues, armed with my targeted gaze, while in Tehran I was open to a variety of experiences. Being directed by my emergent interests I was also trying to understand everything that was happening around me, so I mixed my observations on fashion with the discovery of a previously unknown urban space. In both locations I closely followed the process of clothing creation. I was interested in the techniques of producing the material dress, since dress and body are in a symbiotic relationship. As my own body moved between Paris and Tehran, I was forced to acknowledge changes in conceptions of socially acceptable habits, postures, and, closely related to them, dress. In Paris, considering the density of population and scarcity of space, the body has to be more restrained; in the metro, one has to sit straight, often with legs crossed in order to leave more space for others. People from Tehran have much more space at their disposition. However, gender distinction prescribes bodily postures in Iran: men do not have any social restrictions concerning their body postures, at least in public spaces3. Thus, in Tehran, even if men and women share a small space, e.g. a common taxi, men tend to occupy the entire seat, and leave little space for their female seatmates. In both locations I have observed a striking correspondence between body postures and clothing. Paris ready-to-wear features a large choice of clothing items that are close to the body, centered, 3

For a discussion of public bodily postures, see Shahshahani, in press.

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reducing the space between the textile and the anatomy itself. There is a shift towards this kind of fashion in Tehran’s public spaces that I will discuss later, but the general rule is that clothes tend to be a little larger, for both men and women, obscuring the contours of the body. I was also swept into this bodily dynamic as I moved between Paris and Tehran. Newly arrived in Tehran, I was trying to give others as much space as I could on the seats of public transportation. By the end of my second sojourn I surprised myself trying to occupy more space, spreading rather than restraining myself on the seat of the taxi. During my first sojourn in Tehran I went to a tailor in order to have a pair of trousers made. Although I came with a model, European-made trousers, I was unable to convince the tailor to make the pants tighter than he did. That is, from my perspective, at the seat of the pants the fabric exceeds largely the shape of my anatomy. Ultimately, he argued that this is “the model”, and he could not do anything about it. I felt that my body had lost its shape. This first hand experience made me think about the architecture and the environment. Contours and shapes create our field of visibility, and obviously I experienced a major change between Paris and Tehran. The drabness of the streets in Tehran reminded me of the communist period in Romania, when colors were banned from daily use, and buildings were gray and dirty. I remember the words of some French ethnologists discussing their first impression of Bucharest, in the early nineties. In their account, there was a constant impression of a lack of contours, of defined shapes and separation lines. The poverty in the range of colors was mainly responsible for this sensation. Similarly, my notes on my first arrival in France in the mid-nineties describe the clarity of contours and the visible sepa-

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INTRODUCTION

ration between asphalt and bare ground in the countryside. I had a contrasting impression to France at my arrival in Tehran. I noticed a lack of defined contours, of both buildings and bodies. In fact, some of the middle-aged women whom I interviewed told me that the trend toward weight gain among the Tehranian population dates to after the Islamic Revolution and the imposition of manto or roopoosh (overcoat compulsory for women in Tehran’s exterior spaces, see Chapter 4). The everyday use of large shapeless dresses, I was told, lessens one’s awareness of one’s body shape, thus losing the shape itself. This is not, however, true for everybody, as many young women from Tehran display a refreshing urban style with tight overcoats (manto), and talk about maintaining their weight, the gym halls they frequent, and the diets they try to follow. The relationships among architecture, living space, dress, and the bodies that inhabit them is the starting point of my reflections on fashion. Through the observations summarized above, it came to my attention that the relationships I am talking about are far from being unidirectional. That is, dress (and similarly, architecture) is not designed for a pre-existing type of body, no more than bodies adapt blindly to those designs. Thus, the large clothes worn by women in Tehran were eventually “filled” by the bodies that gained weight and at the same time, newer, tighter styles are coupled with preoccupations with fitness and dieting. In Paris, fit bodies, contained attitudes, and tight dresses are coexistent, but it is hard to say which came first. First chapter of the book positions the theoretical approach on fashion and subject formation. It briefly summarizes previous theoretical approaches on fashion, and it proposes a furthering of analysis with tools provided by anthropological approaches on body and subjectivity. The second part of the chapter is dedicated to the question of methods. This entire theoretical chapter is written for a

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specialized audience, and may be easily skipped without lessening the book’s content. Second chapter describes fashion production as Parisian young designers (createurs) see it. A brief overview of fashion industry opens the chapter, positioning the createur in the political economy of fashion. Fashion production practices point to the creation of the all too changing aesthetics of fashion, and to their underlying canons. Technical constraints such as fabric texture, and standardization of sizes participate actively in the processes of creation. Dress is not necessarily the embodiment of a designer’s unique vision, but the result of a series of procedures that imply the concurrence of multiple agencies. The question of exoticism in fashion appears when categorizations of styles are discussed. Styles borrow names mainly from historical epochs or decades, and from geographic locations. The association of styles with geographic locations gives birth to an aesthetic mapping of the world that borrows from fashion characteristics: seasonal changes and fluidity encounter the relative fixity of aesthetic canons. One may observe how geographical stereotypes emerge and are simultaneously questioned in dress creation dynamic. Fashion appears as space organizer. Time is another dimension discussed in the process of dress production. At first presented as a technological constrain, time appears both as organizer of fashion industry, and as organized by it. Divided into seasons, shared between fashion glamorous presentations and sales period, fashion’s time is both anticipatory and passé, but it never seems to concern the present. Anticipation of trends is a mark of distinction both among designers and among consumers. Access to styles “ahead of time” becomes a mechanism of distinction in the fashion/class system. Chapter 2 finishes with reflections on the relation between fashion, time, and body, which analyze the emergence of a new type of subjectivity: the brand subjectivity.

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INTRODUCTION

Chapter 3 looks at the links between fashion industry and the Middle East in two manners. First, the text presents the mode of construction of Middle Eastern exotic imaginary present in certain fashion trends. After recounting a specific career trajectory of a designer from Paris who proposes “Oriental” collections, the text moves on to designers who have a direct contact with Middle Eastern clients. Their practices of production and sales bring up specific modes of imagining and constructing an “ideal-type” of Middle Eastern fashion customer. Designers and fashion professionals (some of whom are of Middle Eastern origins) have a variety of opinions regarding the Middle Eastern clients. However, these clients’ patterns of buying indicate to fashion professionals a certain mode of relating to brand names. The relation with brand names turns out to have moral undertones, especially if we look at how different uses of prestigious brand names also mark Western subcultures like “the chavs”. Some selling showrooms in Paris are seasonally created to accommodate Middle Eastern clients (see also chapter 5). Descriptions of the “ideal-type” of Middle Eastern client from fashion professionals perspective offers the possibility to revisit Orientalism, and to reflect on the role of dress and fashion in organizing space and creating subjectivities. Taking into account clients’ preferences for conservative or avant-garde fashion, and re-considering stereotypes about Middle East, Parisian fashion designers venture to characterize the mode of spatial organization in the places of clients’ origins. An analysis of space and political organization along the lines of visibility ends this chapter. This analysis reopens the question of public and private, and masculine and feminine from the standpoint of scopic surveillance. Chapter 4 introduces fashion practices in Tehran. The questions of space and time are discussed in a different social setting.

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The chapter opens with a short history of dress reforms in Iran, starting with the beginning of 20th century. The present period is characterized by new forms of spatial segregation introduced or accentuated by the Islamic regime, and their reflection in dress habits. Different dress styles indeed mark different spaces, but not along the simplified line of public and private, a system in which the public would be pervaded by Islamic rules of dress, while the private would be “free”. In fact, the empirical observations show an interlaced structure of different spaces, class organization, ideas of citizenship based on personal empowerment, and the presence of different agents and degrees of surveillance that traverses all urban spaces in Tehran. Women’s spatial mobility rather than an abstract idea of freedom turns out to be a better explanatory category, and a mark of modernity. Advancing the idea that modernity has a specific repertoire reflected by fashion, Tehran appears as an urban space with a specific regime of modernity. This idea is sustained by the last part of the chapter that discusses time and consumption. Fashion’s specific organization of time intersects other timeframes, such as the Iranian New Year, or Islamic Republic’s holidays and celebrations. This gives birth to a particular timeframe that does not opposes a modern (fashion) and a traditional (celebration) time, but constructs a specific calendar, not more nor less modern than let us say a Parisian’s timeframe. A short presentation of the networks of fashion commodities circulation shows the practical way of synchronizing styles between Paris and Tehran. A showroom in Paris and a fashion public presentation in Tehran illustrate the mirroring images that fashion practices construct. A sumptuous fashion show in Tehran offers an image of how Western practices of fashion presentation are re-interpreted in Tehran, and how certain elements of the modern repertoire are critiqued and developed with this occasion. A select Parisian showroom reunites

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INTRODUCTION

twice a year avant-garde designers who show their collections for sale exclusively to Middle Eastern clients. Showroom’s spatial organization and its policies for personnel selection are as many expressions of interpreting spatial and sex segregating practices in Middle East. These images are arranged face to face in chapter 5. Chapter 6 returns to Tehran for a presentation of high-fashion practices in this city. Three designers’ careers illustrate different understanding of fashion. Along these presentations, ideas about modernity, tradition, and the West are reworked along the lines of designers’ aesthetic approaches. In the process of designing, body mobility reappears in the center of these stylists’ preoccupations. The dynamic of class system based on access to fashion becomes evident. The connection between Western sensibilities and high classes in Tehran is re-worked through the observations on the status of Iranian traditional aesthetics. Dress inspired by traditional clothing is at high esteem among the privileged classes in Tehran. Chapter 6 sketches a map of the formation of taste and circulation of desire cross-class and cross-borders. In this dynamic access to Western taste and desires rather than Western dress informs highclass subjectivities in Tehran. Chapter 7 offers an overview of the intersection of fashion practices and legal spaces through the lenses of copyright laws and attitudes towards authorship in the two cities. A short historical background of copyright and licensing practices in Paris reveal the importance of practices that preceded and informed the legal space pertinent to fashion industry. The legal spaces of the two cities differ in the regulations regarding copyrights. Nonetheless, authorship practices reveal similar approaches. Tehran’s designers find themselves in a position of inferiority when competing on the international market. Many times their work is not endowed with authorship qualities, only because it originates in a place that is associated

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with lack of originally-designed dress. Fashion practices in Western hemisphere operate as if an overarching anonymous “tradition” is the “author” of Tehran designed dress. Fashion practices reveal the power relations associated with the meaning of “authorship”. Fashion photography is the focus of the last chapter of this book. Photography is a representation of an ideal type of body; in Tehran, fashion photography, as it is now, meets a series of regulations concerning women’s bodies’ representations. Interviews with fashion photographers in Tehran, and observations in two photography studios reveal the contested meanings of women’s mobility in the specific spatial and social structures of Iran. When compared with historical changes of regulations for women’s bodies’ presence in public, the contemporary requirements of the Islamic regime have a striking similarity with older meanings of a modern woman’s body in Iran. The conclusion reconsiders the way in which fashion practices reflect subject formations in the two sites of the study. The meaning of modernity in Iran and in France is revisited, putting subject formation practices at the center of the analysis. Thus, the Iranian modernity and its link with the Islamic political organization are revealed not as a contradictory relationship but as an intertwined existence, in which one does not exclude the other.

Chapter 1

Fashion and the Ethnographic Subject Body Practices Subjectivation Those who see any difference between body and soul Have neither Oscar Wilde, Complete Works (no year)

In the last chapter of History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault (1990) theorizes “biopower” as the form of power that governs modern society. He describes it in contrast with “sovereign power,” or the power over death that governed during the “classic period.”1 The main expression of sovereign power is the capital sentence, as death is the only way in which the sovereign could express and display his power over his subjects. Foucault argues that along with a series of transformations in everyday practices, and a new conceptualization of the social body, biopower emerges as a new system of regulation for life – both individual and collective: power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of the poles -- the first to be formed it seems -- centered upon the body as a machine [...] ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later focused on the species of body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of social processes: propagation, births and mortality, 1

Foucault identifies the «classic period» as the historical moment that finishes around the French Revolution.

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1: FASHION AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SUBJECT the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population. (Foucault, 1990:139)

The appearance of the anatomo-politics of the human body forms the domain of the microphysics of power, and it is extensively treated in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1979). The point that will be emphasized here is that the constant exercise of power creates its own subject: the individual. Foucault defines discipline as “methods which made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured a constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility” (Foucault 1979:137). At the same time2 as the social body was conceptualized by philosophers as the aggregation of independent, monadic subjects-participants in the “social contract”, discipline was a practice that pervaded various domains of life, in schools as well as in the family, in the army as well as at the working place. Discipline has a major role in the “practical” creation of individuality, while the theoretical role belongs to philosophers: “The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline’” (ibid. p.194). The striking difference between the ‘ideological individual’, and the ‘individual as product of discipline’ is the status of the body. For the former, the body is a possession upon which s/he can exercise the will, while for the later, the body is always already possessed (because of being created) by and through the exercise of micro-power. The exercise of this power forms its own “objectified subject”. In order to operate with the form of power described, it is also necessary to rethink, 2

From the end of seventeenth throughout eighteenth century

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and moreover renounce the idea of separation between subject and object. The focus of any analysis would shift thus from the subject to the practices of subjectivation. Foucault is tracing the genealogy of the individual, the human being as we know it now, from the relations between body and surrounding instruments, tools, spaces both constraining and enabling for the movements, be they physical or mental. He intentionally chooses the example of imprisonment and torture, for reasons both of political engagement and literary effect. Foucault’s examples are strikingly visual, one can easily imagine the torsions of the bodies under the instruments of the executioner, or the confinement of young pupils into their school benches. The double relationship body-object/body-subject is of central significance. Inasmuch as objects directly influence movements, attitudes, and body positions, and subjectivity is the result of bodily motions, one has to reexamine the subject in its relation with surrounding objects. Or, as Jean-Pierre Warnier better formulates the matter: [...] the word “bodily” induces a distinction between the body and something else, that would be the subject. Or a subject does not “possess” a body. It is a body. Talking about the motion conduits [conduites motrices] of a subject we avoid the trap of the dualism hidden behind the vocabulary of body. (Warnier 1999: 10, my translation and italics)

Warnier provides a basis for a theory of the subject, through a rethinking of the very relation between subject and objects. Warnier places the objects (material culture) at the center of this theory, and in their relation with the body – that is, with the subject. The mediators between objects and subject are the “motion conduits”, a term that the author prefers to Mauss’s “body synthesis” (Mauss 1992) for reasons explained above. “Body synthesis” or “motion

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conduits” refer to the integration of movements necessary to operate or use any object; this is not always a conscious process, but it is omnipresent in the dynamic rapport that the body has with the surrounding material world, and with itself. In both cases [motion conduits vs. body synthesis, my note] we deal with the same phenomenon, that is to know the capacity of the subject to memorise or integrate motion conduits perfectly adapted to the dynamic of the relation with the objects and the environment – conduits, meaning the assembly of finalized motion actions. (idem)

In fact it is this very dynamic that interests Warnier. There are two main reasons for this: firstly, the author is able to review anthropological theories regarding human evolution, and secondly because of the relevance that access to and the use of objects have for the socially positioned subject formation. I am interested in exploring this latter implication. The objects one manipulates are different from person to person, depending on the place, class position, career, hobbies and so on that one finds oneself engaged in at a particular moment of one’s lifetime. This observation not only allows an understanding of individual differences, but also of the dynamic character of subjectivity, understood as subjectivation. It would also explain the formation of specific subject similarities of in-group members through the similar motion conduits they develop while manipulating similar objects. These new dynamic lenses allow Warnier to reevaluate the previous analysis of material culture, coming from both the side of semiotics and from the structuralism and analysis that take the object as an indicator of the social condition. Dress and fashion could acquire the analytic capacity if approached with the instruments proposed.

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In other words, I propose a theory of material culture that takes into account everything that constitutes its specificity in relation with all other systems of signs: its materiality that is the essential protagonist of motion conduits as matrix of subjectivation (ibid. p.14).

An approach to the materiality of objects and their relation to the body will clarify the range of movements they enable and the constraints they impose upon the body. That is, the researcher will be able to understand the constituents of the motion conduits prescribed into an object; the ethnographic observation would clarify the actual use of the object, and the individual and social variation of this use. Next, the analysis could further explore the way in which the assemblage objects/movements gains social significations, the ways in which they are associated or already inscribed into grids of social lecture in terms of class/gender/age/ethnic identifications. The object closest to the body, surrounding it constantly and making it readable in social space, is clothing. Clothes can be restricting or comfortable, cheap or expensive, and they are judged through eternally changing aesthetic canons. They impose manners of wearing, attitudes, that is motion conduits, and they offer a system of signs readable in the social space. Even a glance at a newspaper demonstrates the way in which people are described through their attire. Nevertheless, fashion (and material culture in general, as Warnier warns us) has been approached from two perspectives, semiotic or hermeneutic. The latter treats clothing as indicators of social position, thus engaging in an intellectual tradition that starts with Simmel (1971) and Elias (1994), and continues with the works of Hebdige (1979), or Bourdieu (1979). From the perspective of fashion socio-analysis, these two tendencies clearly manifest themselves, delimit, and simultaneously transgress one another’s borders. There is first the systemic approach

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to fashion, inspired by linguistics and which draws its origins from Barthes’s analysis (Barthes 1967). The other approach, which may be called the hermeneutics of fashion, concentrates on the social practice of dressing. The English school of Cultural Studies and its followers offer the best examples of such analysis. Evidently, as Davis (1992) has observed, one cannot strictly delimitate or categorize the authors in these two tendencies. The systemic analysis of fashion (and of material culture) approaches fashion as a system of signifiers, and clothes as a textual form as readable as any other text. The gender/class/race structure is read on (the form of ) the garments, on the designer signature, and -- not the least -- on the price tag. The semiotic approach to fashion (and to material culture in general), which emphasizes the phenomena of alienation has its ultimate expression in Baudrillard’s texts (Baudrillard 1993) where ‘the real’ is altogether banished from his analysis (“The Murder of the real” – lecture at University of California, Irvine, Spring 1999). From the semiotic vanishing point, the visible form of the bodies is shaped by the fashion trend and inscribed in their couture, which tells us in a kind of reversed vivisectional manner what is inside the clothes, and what is acceptable to be inside them3. Clothes reflect both the social body and gender and racial body politics. “Clothes make, not man but the image of man [...].” (Hollander 1978: xv), and through this image they create ideal identifiable bodies (see also Kidwell 1989). Thus the signifiers of fashion translate the self, and this idea is traceable directly from the physiognomists – for details, see Joanne Finkelstein (1991). Although both seductive and 3

This idea applies not only to the human body; it showed its utility in computer industry as well. In 1998, Macintosh launched on the market iMac. Even though its technical parameters are not superior to any other computer already existing on the market, its design assured it an unprecedented success.

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productive, the semiotic perspective privileges the sign, sometimes to the point of a complete dissolution of the signifier (as Hollander does in her affirmation). In my opinion clothes do make the man (or woman for that matter), but the question remains: how does the subject emerge through this process? The hermeneutic approach to fashion privileges the perspectives of social stratification and clothing (or objects) as indicators of social position. Georg Simmel ([1904]1971) proposed an interesting type of link between fashion and the modern individual. In “Fashion”, he saw the contradictory desires of the individual both toward separation and recognition of its unique character, and toward assimilation in a social group (or class). Thus the idea of individualization and individuality refines itself in the modern era. Georg Simmel established a direct relationship between “the rhythm” of the changing of fashion and the political organization of society: Segregation by means of differences in clothing, manners, taste, etc., is expedient only where the danger of absorption and obliteration exists, as is the case among highly civilized nations. (Simmel, 1971: 301).

This type of argument is taken up by most of the social thinkers that reflected on fashion (or styles displayed through objects), like Elias (1994), Weiner (1989), Finkelstein (1998), or Hebdige (1979). Bourdieu’s theory of distinction is a structuralist synthesis of this approach (Bourdieu 1979). Simmel pointed out that “[t]he frequent change of fashion represents a tremendous subjugation of the individual and in that respect forms one of the essential complements of the increased social and political freedom.” (ibid.: 318) Thus fashion, responding to the inner desires of individuals, acts as a regulatory practice of segregation and differentiation in a highly democratized and mobile society – the modern society – that offers

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increased (material and symbolic) means to erasing inequalities4. Similarly, Elias shows how the aristocracy’s continuous renewing of customs, objects, or clothing, serve to reintroduce distinction that counterbalances the process of diffusion of those very objects to lower classes. As Warnier observed, those theories of social stratification (and the hermeneutics of fashion that relies on them) consider consumption as the dependent variable of social stratification. In other words, the inherited cultural capital (Bourdieu) is responsible for the patterns of consumption in different social strata. What the social theorists overlooked, but the social intelligence of the actors always already knows, is that consumption, together with production and diffusion, are the mechanisms of social stratification. The elite’s preoccupation of constantly changing, innovating, or modifying the use of objects (to which Elias alludes) is an expression of the fear that the appropriation of these objects will in turn create appropriation of class position itself. Speaking of the court society, Warnier hypothesizes that “social stratification is partly accomplished through aesthetic practices. It is by giving to itself its objects, its background, and its tastes that the court society became what it was” (Warnier ibid.:121). The author further makes the case for studying the very mechanisms of production, diffusion, and consumption as means to understand social stratification and the processes of individual subjectivation. With a similar project in mind, and focusing on fashion, I took my ethnographic inquiry into the world of fashion designers in Paris and Tehran, and consumers in Tehran. Being fashioned is not only the following of desire, but also consenting to the social struc4

Some contemporary thinkers (Lipovetski 1994), disregard the power of differentiation embodied in fashion as practice, and accentuate only on its seemingly democratic and universalistic quality.

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ture that the fashion reflects, and constructing the self in terms of its politics. In fact, today one may speak of the politics of desire and anticipation. My argument is that fashion constitutes a biotechnology that shapes recognizable bodies and recognized subjects. It is as much an anatomo-politic of the body, as it is a bio-politics of the social space, constituting as it does the population in different readable categories (racial, class position, gender, and/or age). The discipline of this technique is applied both upon the body (because wearing different clothes implies different prescribed attitudes), and upon the self (as the manipulation of the signifiers of self constantly creates and actualizes the self ). To revisit Warnier’s thesis, clothes are one of the most visible objectifiers of the subject; most people wear clothes most of the time. Not only do the form, color, and cuts differ from person to person (expression of aesthetic choices), and from one social class to another, but also the very manner of wearing clothes can also differ. As I previously emphasized, the form of dress has a tremendous influence on the body and its motion conduits (i.e. on the matrix of subject formation). Who makes, and how actually are clothes made? How does the designer decide upon the form and the aesthetic of dress, and how will s/he procure the necessary materials to make it? What factors are at play in this decision? What are the channels of distribution of clothing? How do consumers from Tehran gain access to designer clothing made in France (or elsewhere), and who has access to this clothing? In other words, I am interested mainly in the designers of the matrix of subjectivation through the study of fashion practices both on the side of creation and on the side of consumption. Miller (1997) observes the need to explore the articulations between commodity production, advertising, and retail. I chose this angle of approach to study a series of commodities that are closest to the body.

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And since the body is the subject (both of exterior actions, and of the objectifying of the subject), the following pages can be read as a story of subjectivation through fashion. One can thus reevaluate Gide’s affirmation about “dress usurping the place of the characters”. For it is dress, and the character’s objectivation through dress, that makes them what they were. Dress does not take the place of characters, but creates them through the actions of desiring, buying, and wearing that particular garment. As one can observe, the subjectivation, the creation of characters in Gide’s terms, takes place by means of actions upon oneself and upon others’ actions (what Foucault called manifestations of power): actions upon oneself through desiring, actions upon self and another through buying and wearing, not to mention actions upon others’ desire through designing and proposing aesthetic choices. Thus, fashion (and object) designers are in a relatively privileged position, they design the matrix of subjectivation, or at any rate, parts of it. This is why at some point in text I refer to “aesthetic authorities”. I use the word authority void of its implicit agency. One should not conceive of this matrix as a fixed geometrical figure, nor should one think of designers as necessarily conscious of objects’ power to impose motion conduits, and thinking about how they will rule the world through imposing motion conduits to everybody. Rather, just as the body does not completely conform to the form of dress, neither does the dress take the form of the body. As in any form of power, resistance is generated within its own field. But let us not anticipate the argument too much.

Movement This is an ethnography of both subjects in movement and of dress in movement; it is about clothes moving with the body, and of clothing moving from the creation desk to the store and to

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the client’s wardrobe. It is also about the movement between the two cities, and the account may be disrupted at places, as was my experience. Originally I intended to follow the commodity (dress) in its trajectory from the places of inception to the markets in Tehran. Shortly after starting my fieldwork in Paris, however I understood that I was not best positioned for this kind of approach. It would have been much easier to start with the end point of the chain of distribution, that is, with the place of selling. Influenced by the persons I met in Paris, and through early revelations of the field (among which was the discovery that, despite of my best efforts, I did not know anything about fashion creation), my project and the approach soon changed. It seemed more interesting in Paris to explore fashion creation and distribution to Middle Eastern clients in general, while Tehran offered a point of comparison for the social practices of fashion creation, as well as the observation of fashion diffusion in a geographic location that is imagined in the West to be associated with Islamic practices (allegedly mutually exclusive with fashion). My own subject position as an ethographer in movement questioned the association of space and practices in the disciplinary field of anthropology, or the disciplinary creation of the field. All of my fellow students, both in France and in the United States, would ask if I was Iranian upon hearing that the geographic location of my field was Tehran. Because of my accent, I was visibly neither American nor French in the eyes of my colleagues. But what made me Iranian? What prompted this reaction? I will use again my past practice as a student of anthropology in Romania, and my relations with French school. I have observed that in the politics of student exchange between Romania and France, while the French students were studying Romanian topics, Romanian students were

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expected to study Romanian topics (with the notable exception of the Tempra5 exchange program with Rhone-Alps region, 19972000). Further along the way of my studies, during conferences or browsing through references, I noticed that it is often the case that researchers who are not nationals of Western countries tend to study topics linked with the place of their national origin. There is an undeniable hierarchy in this distribution of geographical areas of study among researchers. For example, while an American researcher is seldomly asked if he is Indian because he studies India, an Indian researcher studying, say, Patagonia creates a disturbance in the disciplinary order. It is troubling that, even while arguing for the deconstruction of power discourses, the disciplinary formation of the social sciences perpetuates the very practices that create the relations of power it propounds to challenge. Many fellowships or aid for research are designed specifically in this logic. While they may encourage research coming from the areas in focus, they discourage the complete dissolution of the hierarchical relations (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). In the article “The Shaping of National Anthropologies” Gerholm and Hannerz extensively develop the specifics of the disciplinary formation in anthropology, showing not only the divide between “metropolitan” and “peripheral” anthropology, but also their historical formations (Gerholm and Hannerz 1982). 5

This three-year-long program consisted in an exchange of student at Masters or Ph.D. level between University of Bucharest and University of Lyon II. Each year the French student was expected to develop a research project about a Romanian social reality, while the Romanian student was expected to reflect on a subject at choice from French society. I am deeply indebted to the organizers of this program for the opportunity I had to develop the anthropological tools acquired in my student years in Bucharest.

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This question goes largely unquestioned among young researchers, the students who are directly affected by it. In her article “You Can’t Take the Subway to the Field” Passaro (1996) points to one of the basic (if not the main) assumptions of anthropology as a science: the existence of bounded cultures, with identifiable features. The perpetuation of the “imperial nostalgia” (Rosaldo 1989) of cultural areas has practical import for academics, as it sustains the “legitimation of disciplinary authority.” This “nostalgia” is perpetuated through practices of the type exposed, through which scientific authority is gained, and legitimacy maintained. In my research, I did “take the metro to the field” (just like Passaro took the subway while studying homelessness in New York), and I linked both subjects and areas through a back and forth movement between sites. Movement and mobility between two research sites raises a series of questions: multi-sited ethnography, although recommended by many anthropologists like Gupta and Ferguson (1997), Hannerz (1998) and Appadurai (1986), and practiced by some (Ossman 2002), remains an unorthodox approach in anthropology, with a methodology that remains to be developed. George Marcus proposed a comprehensive analysis of the methodological problems and theoretical implications that multi-sited research raises. Emerging from the collapse of the distinction life-world/ world system, multi-sited ethnography poses three major challenges to the production of ethnographic knowledge: “testing the limits of ethnography”, “attenuating the power of fieldwork”, and the “loss of subaltern”. In my case I have been mainly concerned with the first two aspects of this methodological approach. My fieldwork design closely follows Marcus’s definition of multi-sited research: Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions or juxtapositions of locations in which the eth-

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1: FASHION AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SUBJECT nographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography. (Marcus 2003, p. 105)

The multi-sited approach is present, logically, in the case of topics related to movements of people or commodities. This research is multi-sited not only from a national perspective, but also as an urban experience of following designers, fabrics, or ideas about fashion that traverse neighborhoods, spatial locations, and people’s imaginaries. During a multi-sited research project, one may find it difficult to balance the importance attached to movement between the sites, and that of the sites in itself. This is not a zero sum game. That is, emphasizing the motion of people, or objects does not take away from the importance of places, does not “standardize” the experiences or erase borders. On the contrary, the ethnographic description of places gains the dynamic character of the objects and bodies traversing them, whithout compromising their individuality. Simultaneously, borders become “much more” material, or they materialize through the practices one has to follow in order to cross them. In fact, the moment of crossing the border is much less significant for individuals than the preparation for doing it. Borders are objectified by the practices of the visa, which can be an interesting introduction to the place one is about to visit or live for a period of time. Applying for a visa could also introduce a death moment in one’s research, in that it is a moment of suspension, a liminal stage if you will, that in my case lasted from ten days (my visa for a long sojourn in France) to two months (my first visa for Iran). Producing the necessary papers for obtaining a visa is a process of objectification (mis en objet) of the researcher. The researcher is subjected to international bureaucracy, and this moment is also part of the subjectivation of the researcher. I will discuss this sub-

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jectivation of the researcher, his/her total “mis en objets” in the following section dedicated to methods of research.

Urban Methods or How to Take the Metro to the Field “Means and ends are convertible terms in my philosophy of life. The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree, and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end, as there is between the seed and the tree. They say “means are after all means”. I would say “means are after all everything”. As the means, so the end. There is no wall of separation between means and end. Indeed the creator has given us control over means, none over the end. Realization of the goal is in exact proportion to that of the means. This is a proposition that admits no exception.” (Mahatma Ghandi, Means and Ends, p. 37, undated)

Reading Gandhi in the light of the material culture theory that Warnier proposes sheds a new light on anthropological fieldwork theory. Indeed, one may wonder, what is the importance of methods in the creation of anthropological theory? What is the meaning of the fact that half of my fieldwork I spent on the phone, trying to get appointments, in taxis or on the way to my appointments? What is the significance of the fact that I was not allowed to take pictures in some cases? What is the importance of secrecy for some fashion designers and how does it influence my work? And, most importantly, what were the means used by the author for data production? What were the objects surrounding me, how did they transform me into an urban anthropologist, how did they create the data, how did they play into my interactions in the field?

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Objects of (for) Research The urban fieldwork is quite a challenge, that is, the delimitations are very vague, and one does not know exactly what to consider fieldwork and what not. The contact with the environment is of course continuous, but the environments are multiple, and not necessarily the same for the researcher and the persons in his/her focus. The fieldwork slips through one’s fingers just like (cologne) water, leaving after it a discrete scent, easy to feel but complicated to theoretically grasp as a coherent image.

This is a fragment of a letter I sent to my advisor, Bill Maurer, after my first three weeks of fieldwork in Paris. Fragments taken from my personal journal, notes and letters will punctuate the entire book in order to give the reader a sense of the moment. The fragment above depicts a state of mind quite far from Malinowski’s (1978) experience sitting of on an empty beach with the image of the boat sailing away and leaving the ethnographer all alone with his field (and obsessions). I would say my experience has been quite the opposite of his, because the urban researcher has to find her or his Coral Gardens among billions of activities taking place in the city. First one has to find the urban gardeners and approach them. In my experience, the agreed-upon mode of conversation in the urban space is the interview. The legitimate activity of the researcher in the public eye is the interview. So, for the first appointments I always asked for an interview. However, even this formulation can be problematic for reasons to be explained. Interviewing itself is a method that has been repeatedly discussed and contested by anthropologists. There are two main critiques concerning this method: one is the distance between verbal discourse and action. My objection to this is that verbalisation is an action itself, and may be analyzed as such. The second critique is concerned with the form of interview itself. The interview has a

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meta-communicational level, and it is not presupposed by all the cultures. It institutes arbitrary norms of communication that are not universally recognized, and implies sometimes-unshared backgrounds with direct consequences on an event. Briefly this is the critique that Briggs (1986) makes of the interview. While I agree with most parts of this critique, I would like to point out that simple conversation is something that easily replaces the interview. I prefer the term “interviewees” to “informants”. Informant is reminiscent of a unidirectional relation of power, in which the ethnographer is the passive receiver of the objective information. During my face-to-face encounters I attempted to create a conversational atmosphere; I would not hesitate to give my own opinion on subjects discussed, or to share my experience with the interviewees, in order to create a stress-free environment. I would add these observations to Charles Briggs’ proposed schema for understanding and interpretating the interview, taking thus a wide range of variables into account: social situation, social roles (assumed or not) of interlocutors, message form, channel and code of transmission of the message, and the referent. This proposition is close to Geertz’s methodological “thick description” (Geertz 1974). In his vision ethnography as practice offers the key for understanding anthropology; Geertz maintains that the interpretive character of anthropology is obscured by the way anthropological knowledge is shaped. The fieldwork data “are really our own construction of other’s people constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.” (Geertz 1974: 9) – a fact often obscured in anthropological writing. This effacement gives the false impression that anthropology is an observational more than an interpretive science. Therefore “[a]nalysis[...] is sorting out the structures of signification” (idem), not the identification of actual, real, social structures. At the opposite pole of Geertz one has

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the French circle of pragmatic anthropology, which embodies the extreme form of methodology derived from these critiques. It proposes the complete renunciation of the interview method in favor of direct observation. I would position myself close to Geertz’s (and others’) perspective of understanding anthropology as an interpretative science. While I agree that fieldwork does not allow one to collect raw data, as Willis (1980) also pointed out, but rather to produce data starting from a grid of perception (the methodology) and using specific tools (the methods) I am less sure about the multiple layers of interpretations. That is, that social structures are made visible in the process of subjective interaction, and one can understand social phenomena beyond “structures of signification”. Since I desire theoretical coherence, I will begin with an extensive list of objects that constitute the paraphernalia of the researcher in an urban environment. This constitutes both the indicators of the objectification of the researcher and the materialization of the field experience. The reason why the list appears here and not in the appendix is precisely because of the explanatory importance that objects have in analyzing the subject of research and the subjectivation of the researcher. Along the lines (and shaped by) my theoretical choice, I place tools, objects, and artefacts at the core of my interpretation. In different social context, the objects of an ethnographer play a major role in shaping his/her relation to the field and to the persons s/he interviews. Not everybody relates in the same way to the objects such as the tape recorder. The most telling example among these objects is the photographic camera. It will become obvious how in different situations my findings were shaped by my (mis)use of the camera (see Chapters 4, 5, and 6). These objects may be facilitators as well as obstacles during the fieldwork, depending on the particular configuration of power re-

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lations in the specific moment. Consequently, a better understanding of the methods of urban ethnography is generated through an ethnographer’s tools. In other words, these objects are my fashion. The tape (minidisk) recorder comes first on the list. Considering the fetishism of discourse, from which most anthropologists suffer, this is the first object one is bound to buy. The smaller the better, because the urban researcher has to cover long distances in the same day, keeping different appointments and has to record in places that sometimes do not offer much physical space. Its smallness is also beneficial in interactions with interviewed persons, making its inhibitory presence less apparent. The recorded tapes or minidisks are literally the material expression of fieldwork interview. I had to get used to using the recorder in a most discreet manner, changing the tape in ways that did not disrupt the conversation (although it inevitably did). The most interesting things one hears are after the recorder is off. Batteries are equally important. During my first interview with the manager of Paul Smith showroom in Paris my batteries discharged. I did not have any spare batteries to recharge. Ever since, I always have one set of batteries with me when going to interviews. Similarly, the tapes have to be abundant, since interviews can last longer than one hour (although in the fashion business they are typically shorter, since people are extremely busy). The daily agenda allowed me to make appointments with my interviewees, to take notes, and to make observations on the “regime of time” in the two cities that constituted my focus of research (I will get back to this point). The agenda, after its utilization, is a memento of the field, of the rhythm of the meetings, and of the fragmented character of urban fieldwork. It may become a sort of retrospective temporal chart of the field. The agenda sets the time of the researcher, and marks the territory of the field, through the

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addresses one is supposed to meet the future interviewees. If it is a little bigger, it can substitute for a notebook. A cell phone was indispensable. Even before having a permanent address, the urban ethnographer is pushed to have a fixed cell phone number. It is the object that facilitates the illusion of permanent contact with the field. With the cell phone one can potentially contact future interviewees, the persons that are significant for the research, or just the new friends one is bound to make in the city. The persons I contacted always asked for my cell phone number in order to cancel the appointment if necessary. Also, it may be important to consider that the communication fees are sometimes elevated, and they may be mentioned in the research budget. A photo camera is the second eye of the ethnographer, and the main eye of the field. Like the recorder, it transforms the visual impressions into images on material or virtual support. The use of a camera can create various problems. Many types of camera users, from paparrazi to tourists, populate the urban space. Since the object gives the measure of one’s subjectivity, it is hard to delimit oneself from the other types of users. While tourists are innocent in the eyes of the photographed subject, it is better not to be confused with journalists or paparazzi. Photography is a delicate matter, to which I will often return (see also Susan Sontag, 1977). A detailed plan of the city, with means of transportation is necessary in order to identify the addresses of appointments, and to create a global image of the urban space covered during the research. Along with this, if the city has a good network of public transportation, the weekly or monthly ticket is recommended. In Tehran this was not the case, and I had to try the whole range of transportation, from buses to common taxis. Each of the transportation systems had its unique particularities. For example, the common taxi in Tehran is a town car shared by four to five people of

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both sexes. Considering the relative segregation of the urban spaces in Tehran, I had to figure out the rules of occupation of the interior space of the taxis. That is, in no case may a woman passenger sit between two men. At times, this involved a complicated chess-like movement of the passengers. While in Tehran women generally chose to travel as separate as possible from men, a general gender segregation rule is omnipresent in many aspects of life in Iran. In Paris I preferred ground transportation, as opposed to the metro, because it gave me a sense of the geography of the city. The bicycle was a healthy alternative, and it proved very useful when strikes in public transportation could have interfered with an already agreed upon appointment6. Cities usually have libraries. A library card is something that I have always tried to procure, for many different reasons: libraries, even if do not always have books related to one’s research, always give a space for study that recreates somehow the atmosphere of a campus. Also, I found any book interesting, regardless of the topic; local novels, when they are not means to evasion, gave me the idea of how literary authors look at the same space I was in the process of observing. The literary sensibility may be helpful in constructing an appealing narration of the field. In libraries one is also likely to meet interesting people, who can offer fresh perspectives on one’s approach. Although it did not happen to me, that does not rule out this possibility. A bag for carrying around all these objects, and that offers an easy access to each one of them was essential. I found it better to have a different bag adapted to the chosen mode of transportation. 6

Business cards might be useful, although I have never understood why. It is true, a business card gives one the air of seriousness, although the exchange of business cards may not be appropriate in all of the cases.

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A small backpack is ideal for biking, but in bus or taxi it may cause discomfort each time one needs to take it off or put it on. A suitcase on wheels, not too big, but not too small either was needed because I had the habit of carrying books with me. Also, all the materials listed above, and the papers one is bound to produce during the fieldwork can be particularly heavy. The urban space has the advantage of being accessible to wheeled suitcases. In none of these cases did I find a big backpack useful. A backpack can become really heavy and hard to manoevre in many situations. While it may be useful while visiting remote places, in an urban settings, wether Paris or Tehran, a big backpack is less versatile. It took me some time to figure out all the objects I needed. Field situations (like the one described in the case of batteries) reveal the need for different types of objects. Also, my tendency to lose pens put me in sometimes-awkward situations, when I did not have a pen to take notes or write phone numbers. These tools are not only mediators between the field and the researcher. For, to treat tools as mere mediators would be to imply the existence of an objective reality of the anthropological subject that waits to be recorded. The daily manipulation of these objects in fact creates the anthropological knowing subject (the researcher in the field), and produces data that objectifies the subject of research. The recorded tapes, the photos, the notes are all material expressions of the interactions that lead to the constitution of knowledge, and of the knowing subject. I can say the field has molded me as much as the field has been molded by me. At the same time, one has to keep in mind that tools, both theoretical and material, are as much enabling as they are constricting. The combination of senses and memory is what we are building on, and both of them are tricky. The theoretical tools previously acquired help us organize not only the observation we already made, but also allow us to

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consider the ways in which we are observing. Often the tools act as sure guidance, at other times they push us to create things where there are none, or to overlook highly important details. Collecting and combining the data seems to me more like a process of production, that is, ‘collecting data’ may be an innapropriate term for what we are doing. The theory we are producing is highly dependent on what we are precisely doing in the field. And since I was mainly interviewing people (when I was not running around to catch them) the theory I will be able to abstract from my data combines movement with verbal discourse. There may also be an issue of urban fieldwork. Most of the time people prefer to meet the researcher in neutral places (call them public spaces) like cafes or bistros. This takes away the possibility of observing the process of creation of data itself, but it may gain on the side of analyzing the specific areas or places people chose.

Trajectories and Mediations In contacting possible interviewees, I very seldom, if ever, used a direct means of contact. There was almost always an intermediary, a second level of communication, a secondary path one had to use to arrive to the site of research; the first mediators were the telephone, the e-mail, contact letters, or in my case public relation offices. As underlined above, the material object mediation is of first importance: it facilitates entering into contact and at the same time it preserves the impersonality of the first exchange. I find this an interesting mirror for the impersonality of the urban relations. The ethnologic trajectory reveals the subject/object of research along with its “materiality”: both material objects part of the research, and the visible network of relations established on the field. In keeping with the metaphor of Coral Gardens, one may

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run accross the gardeners in different situations while in the city. In my research, there were three different ways in which I found my interviewees. First, and the most usual, was starting from a person that I already knew, many times a researcher in the field, who pointed me to a series of other people who became thus linked through the object of my research. Also, directly writing a letter of introduction or sending an email was another way of meeting future interviewees. Most of my appointments were generated this way; alternatively, I met some of my interviewees only by frequentations of urban spaces or events. There were moments of direct unexpected contact with relevant persons or situations in which one had to improvise, and approach the ‘urban gardener’ informally. The most telling moment of this nature in my fieldwork was a fashion catwalk I witnessed at the Grand Mosque de Paris. Here is a fragment describing this particular experience: “the field is ‘jumping on you’ when least expected – such is the case of the fashion catwalk organized at the Grande Mosquée of Paris. Suddenly, one feels that the tools at hand are not enough to gather whatever one wants (back to the researcher kit). That evening I was with a couple of friends out for a tea at the Mosquée. I had to run to a bookstore and buy a pen and a notebook. As for the photos, I directly asked a photographer in the hall to send me some pictures. She was kind enough to do it, so I do have images from the show. They are probably not what I would have taken, but they are nevertheless a good document to analyze and to refresh one’s memory.” The third modality, which is less frequent, is ‘to make the field come to you’. That is, by simply mentioning one’s research topic in a gathering, for example, one may encounter people who are interested in it, or who may point to their knowledge of places

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and persons directly linked to the topic. The reason I insist on the dismantling of these trajectories is a methodological one. My fieldwork in Tehran started well before my leaving Paris. I tried to contact persons from the Iranian Diaspora in Paris who may have had contacts in my field of interest. A well-known Parisian photographer, working in Iran on subjects linked to youth and women, proved to be the source of most of my contacts in Tehran. After we have met several times (once with the occasion of her exhibit entitled “Being twenty in Tehran”) I found myself in possession of a well garnished list of phone numbers of artists or stylists from Tehran. Conversations with the photographers, as well as with different persons familiar with Tehran constituted a precious introduction to the field, even in its physical absence. The Internet is also a source of information that contributed to my familiarity with the field, which proved to be useful later in my encounters. An interesting observation is that, while in Tehran the fashion designers are located in a small area of Northern Tehran, the Parisian ateliers are dispersed through the city, and the mobility of links and interactions in the industry is even greater. The network one builds when creating the research became visible to me. While moving between spaces and people, I came into contact with a great variety of persons from different social categories. All of them seemed interested in other interviewees I had met before, or conversely often I had an obligation – almost a moral constraint – to tell them about my previous trajectory; a trajectory which in fact created the knowledge I had about their field of work and their persona. Most of the people I met were introduced to me by others. That is, every call I made would begin with me saying: ‘I am calling you at the recommendation of...’. This clearly shaped the interactions I had with my new interviewees. S/he already placed me in her own network of affiliations and somehow

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formed an idea about who I might be or what I might ask for, what were the fields of my own interest. This happened starting from her previous knowledge of the persons who made the recommendation. This is common sense, but what are its consequences for the data production process?

Chapter 2

On the Timely Subject Fashion POLONIUS : [...] For the apparel oft proclaims the man, And they in France of the best rank and station Are most select and generous, chief in that. William Shakespeare (2002) Hamlet ACT I scene iii, p. 31

Paris remains the imaginary reference for high fashion, the capital of chic among other centers of fashion like London, Tokyo, Milan, or New York. A great quantity of ink has been used, and continues to be used, to describe, characterize, analyze, worship or criticize, Paris fashion. From seasonal critiques to historic accounts or social analysis, literature abounds on the subject. Far from giving an exhaustive description of the fashion industry of Paris, this chapter (re)presents an ethnographic perspective on practices of creation and selling, and those practices’ link with the Middle Eastern clients or with an imaginary linked to them. How does one create a piece of clothing? What kind of creation is a dress? Does the designer imagine different clientele? Does it influence the designing practices? These and a series of other questions will be explored in this chapter. The Fabric of Fashion Today, fashion industry in Paris (and elsewhere) operates with a major distinction between couture and ready-to-wear (prêt-àporter). Couture refers to the luxury dress produced by designers who are more often than not considered also artists, and who lately

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have something of an aura of a superstar attached to their name. (Saillard, 2002 exposition “Le Couturier Superstar” Museum of Fashion, Paris). The houses of couture dress (maisons) bear the name of the designer (e.g. Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, etc.) and they sell their creations to private clients. A tradition started in the 18th century, couture began losing its clients after the First World War (1914-1918), and ever since, couture fashion reorganized its production, expanding its markets and appealing to a more popular clientele (Taylor, 2000). The invention of the prêt-à-porter lines is one of the modalities of adapting to the social changes and securing profits of the Couture Houses in the context of a declining private clientele. Another modality of profit increase is the licensing of different products (e.g. perfumes, cosmetics, accessories) with the name of the house (see also Chapter 7): Until the mid-1990s there was little debate which explained that since the 1970s nearly every couture house in Paris had run at a financial loss. There was little public acknowledgment that the main function of a couturier over the last thirty years has been to create the glamorously seductive house image used to launch the million-dollar global manufacture of over-priced ‘designer’ products. (Taylor 2000: 122)

In between the two world wars the private clientele for fashion houses decreased, and couture houses began reorienting towards more cost effective creations. While French economy encouraged the luxe industry to produce and sell, and equated luxury with French national identity, many fashion houses became more flexible, and adapted their creations. The sumptuous couturiers who could not adapt died away, like Lucile, who identified the new boyish style for women not as an expression of social change but rather of economic scarcity:

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The boyish look was the perfect solution. Rather than seeing the new garconne style as a creative, flexible response to a new mood of feminine modernity sweeping through the world of fine and applied arts, Lucile condemned it dismissively. “No woman…could cost less to clothe.” (ibid. 126) A closer look at the intertwining of consumer patterns, economic context, industry’s strategies, and aesthetic choices reveals the complex relation between subjectivation and material culture. The patterns of consumption of high-end clients changed, causing couture houses loss of private clients. Renouncing excessive ornamentation and accessories, the couturiers simultaneously reduced the costs of production, maintained clients, and created a new aesthetic canon. Maybe Lucile was right. The new clothes created the new liberated woman. Freed from the constriction of excess of fabric, women’s bodies mobility accrued in public space. Trousers for women have, since the nineteenth century, been associated with women’s movement for political and social rights. Women from upper classes engaged in the women’s rights movement had taken up wearing pants as an expression of their political allegiance. Trousers were common among working class women, and this is the way that they came to stand for the right to work and a public presence. The dynamic from the 1920s and 1930s was slightly different. While trousers could have been easily identified with political engagement, light clothing and the reformation of the dress after la belle époque were assimilated with new aesthetic canons, desirable and attainable for more women, now that the clothes were cheaper to produce. These “flexible” clothes potentiates the increased mobility of women in public who became less constrained by the excess of fabric and accessories. Thus, women’s bodies became more “flexible” (just like production), and new spaces of the city became

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more accessible (e.g popular dancing salons). The new clothing style enabled the mingling of high and low classes in Montparnasse famous restaurants and cabarets in the 1920s. One may venture to say that, once the motion conduits acquired new shapes, a new model of femininity imposed itself and became desirable. Aesthetic canons proved to be more powerful than explicit political engagement in the shaping of the new political subject. Associated with desire because produced by prestigious fashion houses, the new women’s clothing formed the new (woman)/subject, characterized by higher mobility and visibility in public, that is, a different use of the public space. License Power At the end of the 1930s, Schiaparelli started licensing clothes and other products, thereby opening new profit bringing paths for famous couture houses (see Chapter 7). The post-war period is characterized by the increased flexibility of the fashion industry. In the context of the development of trade agreements and standardization of ground and sea transport, it became much easier to delocalize production to places were cheaper labor existed, thus creating the sweatshop phenomena (Rosen, 2002, Bender and Greenwald 2003). Based mainly on the exploitation of women’s labor, sweatshop production completely changed the face of the fashion industry. Famous fashion houses could easily open a ready-to-wear line produced through subcontracting work in the sweatshops. The name/ brand license secured the success of the line. Associated with the image of the designer superstar, the couture houses can overprice the ready-to-wear line in order to partially cover the loss of couture clothing. The couture shows have since had the role of creating the desirable brand name.

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Some theorists call the increased accessibility of a larger public to branded products or clothes the “democratization of fashion” (Lipovetski 1994), eclipsing the production moment. Nonetheless, in the mid-1960s, Yves Saint Laurent, then a promising young designer formed by Dior, created a ready-to-wear line, and, breaking with the elitism of the Golden Triangle, opened a boutique on Paris’ Left Bank. The Left Bank was also the site of the emergence of Paris’ student movement, which only a few years later swept the city. Once more fashion “preceded” rather than “reflected” the social mood of its time. Another visible result of the new type of “flexible production” is the appearance of brand-names that are not associated with a famous designer’s name. Brands like Hilfiger or Benetton rely on this system of production and target a large population selling relatively cheap clothing with the air of prestige attached to them (Phizacklea 1990). The success of these brands is not based on the prestige of the designer name, but on the modality of attracting a larger clientele body through aggressive and effective marketing. Their modality of attracting clients is the reversed image of the couture fashion houses strategy. These producers appeal to lower-end clientele, and later try to “move up” (Taylor, ibid.). Recently, pop stars brand their names for clothing and perfume products, a phenomenon already widespread in the United States (e.g. Jay Lo sneakers1). Once the practices of licensing spread widely, fashion houses merged in order to optimize the ratio of investment to profit. The big mergers produced a large variety of fashion articles and accessories keeping the prestigious name of each of the brands part of the group. The most well-known example is the LVMH group that unites more than 50 prestigious names under its label. The letters 1

With thanks to Dimitri Bogasianos for the suggestion.

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stand for Louis Vuitton and Moet Hennessy. Fashion houses prefer to “delegate” the production of branded accessories to these kinds of groups. For example in LVMH group one finds Dior, Kenzo, and Givenchy perfumes, wines and spirits, cosmetics, jewelry, watches, etc. Other fashion houses combine enough name prestige and financial power to create their own group, like Chanel or Armani. They tend to enlarge their production to include accessories and/ or cosmetics, interior design, etc. branding, packaging, and selling lifestyles rather than “just” clothes. Those who attempt to create an independent label form a special category of designer. This type of enterprise is very difficult in the face of the financial power of the big fashion groups. This type of designers, also known as createurs, constitutes the focus of my research in Paris, my port of entry into the field.

Techniques of Fashion Paris was the first location of my fieldwork. It is important to mention that in my account of fashion creation in Tehran, Paris remains the unspoken reference; the techniques used in Paris constitute the benchmark when presenting the techniques of tailoring in Tehran. It is also important that, although Paris is my primary reference, I am not intending to establish a hierarchical relation between the two sites. I do account for the power relation and the symbolic ascendancy Paris has over Tehran in the fashion realm, however. This section will start with an ethnographic description of the process of clothing production in one of the workshops I visited extensively. Afterwards I will concentrate on the process of designing and on the selling strategies, illustrating with examples from the designers I met. They belong to the same type of fashion designer : le créateur, a category of designer that appeared in the 1960s, who

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usually started an independent brand, sometimes with less money than the minimum of $ 250 000 which experts consider necessary for such an enterprise. In many cases, the createurs work in big couture houses to fund their independent venture (see Crane 2000: 144-147). The focus of this chapter is the temporal dimension of production. My interviewees belong to different generations, and their workshops represent different types of spatial and productive organization as well as retailing strategies. Each of the designers sells to, or had past contact with, Middle Eastern clients, thus each is used to the specific practices of creation and selling required by these clients. Creating for fashion in Paris is a stressful and time-pressured activity. I was not able to spend more than one and a half hours (including the interview) in any workshop, there was scarcely any opportunity for a return visit. Brevity characterized the contacts established. Many times my subsequent phone calls went unanswered.

Blaise, or Brief Presentation of the Process of Production Blaise was the first stylist I knew in Paris, and with whom I have been in contact with since the summer of 2000. He is one of the numerous designers of ready-to-wear from the Sentier neighborhood. Sentier is traditionally known as the Paris neighborhood in which the biggest number of ready-to-wear fabricants are concentrated, of all levels or “gammes” : low-end (bas de gamme), middleend (moyen gamme), and high-end (haute de gamme). There is a fourth level of ready-to-wear, produced by luxury fashion houses, which is called “ready-to-wear de luxe”. The combination of clothing quality, prices, and clientele establishes the “level” of the readyto-wear fabricant.

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Blaise’s workshop occupies the ground level and part of the first floor of a building; the entrance is through a bland commercial space, which he uses as depository for rolls of textile, fabrics, wrapping materials, etc. The back of the commercial space is used as storage for the finished clothing. Metallic rails sustain hangers that carry the clothing of the last and the current collections. Each collection has between thirty and fifty models, organized around a generic theme. The clothes are chemically cleaned, covered with the plastic transparent sacs in which they arrive from the manufacturer. They are classified by types, are labeled, and ranged into collections. For the labels, each designers develops her/his own code, but usually the label contain letters indicating the season, the name of the collection, and numbers for the model, size, color, etc. For example S G R 02 (spring, ghetto rose, 2002). An interior staircase brings us to the first floor. On the right side, the big workshop is a room of about 40 square-meters, with a view of the street. This is the workshop for cutting the fabric, which I will describe along with the work procedure. On the left side, two rooms communicate with each other. The first room has a small working table, a lot of tracing paper2 all over the place, small designs on the table and around, and a wooden mannequin at the right side of the room. On the walls, there are plenty of newspapers and magazine clippings of reviews of Blaise’s work, old and new sketches, phone numbers jotted down in a hurry, pieces of fabric, etc. During my other visits in Parisian workshops I had the occasion to see the same practice of using the walls as integrative part of the designing process. Even in the single case of a designer who did not draw sketches, the walls of his workshop were a sort of ambulant notebook, or agenda. I will call this room the modelist 2

Paper of a special quality used in clothing design in the process of modelling (see below), but also in architecture and other industrial design.

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room, since it is here that Jacqueline, Blaise’s modelist3 works. The modelist room and the downstairs room were the places in which I had most of my conversations with Blaise, some of them recorded. The access to the second room on the first floor is secured through the modelist room. The office has a desk, on which one can see the administrative papers, order forms, a fax machine, and a computer. The office belongs to Blaise’s wife. She is in charge of the material side of the business, the buying and selling of orders, the payments to the fabric and accessory suppliers, the deliveries to boutiques. While I was present in the workshop, I was witness to small tensions between Blaise and his wife regarding business practices. She admonished Blaise at one point because he ordered a series of flowers/accessories without consulting her. During one of my first visits, in 2001, I found Blaise brushing faux fur collars and end-sleeves. He explained to me: “I am like a chef of a restaurant. I need to check every plate before it is served to the client.” I find this metaphor, although unusual, quite expressive for the clothing creation process in which Blaise is involved. Further, I will present the stages of “clothing cooking” for Blaise, detailing those that are relevant for my research. There certainly are variations of these stages of production among all the fashion designers. I will comment extensively on Blaise’s practices, and only briefly for the other designers, indicating significant differences when they are relevant. Blaise starts, always, by designing a silhouette, a shape, a body image. He discusses with Jacqueline the model and the possibility of “making it real”. In fashion creation, the modelist is the person whose craft it is to create three-dimensional models of the dress design. S/he is also the person who adapts the model, the prototype 3

See below for the explanation of the modelist’s role in design. Jacqueline is Blaise’s modelist.

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to the different sizes that clients order. This model (“la toulle”) is made out of thick, cheap, disposable cotton. The two-dimensional sketch is deconstructed and reconstructed in pieces that will form the three-dimensional model. The pieces thus created are assembled together on a wooden mannequin, with a standard size (between 36 and 38, for women). The modelist and the designer together adjust the pieces. After they agree, the modelist deconstructs the toulle, and transcribes each piece of the garment to be on tracing paper. This forms the patron, and the procedure is called patronage. The tailor or the cutter uses the patrons as models for tailoring the final garment. A first model of the garment is thus produced, in the size 36-38. After Blaise and Jacqueline add the laces, occasional ornamentation, or accessories, the product is ready to be exhibited in showrooms for the clients. Blaise works with a different workshop for the laces or the ornamentation of the garment; the lace design raises interesting questions about the aesthetic imaginary, and authorship. The most famous producer of laces in Paris is the house Le Sage, with which all of the famous Parisian designers of the twentieth century worked, and even had long lasting relationships (e.g. the friendship between Yves Saint Laurent and the later baron Le Sage). Blaise is not part of those designers, and Le Sage laces have prohibitive prices; I will talk in due course about the laces, aesthetics, and authorship. While first models are entirely sewn in Blaise’s workshops, the orders from clients, which can range from ten to several hundreds, are sewn in an outside factory. In all of the cases, Blaise’s workshop cuts the fabric. In the upstairs cutting room, two tailors work, a woman and a man. The woman marks the fabric using the patrons, in order to be cut. Big rolls of fabric of different qualities and colors surround her. She works on a big table, aproximately 4m/6m. She unfolds the fabrics, consults the color codes, arranges the patrons,

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and passes the fabric to the man. Against the wall of the window there is a big cutting table. On one side of the table there are mechanisms that fix the textile on the table. Layers upon layers of fabric can be put on the table, permitting thus a multiple cut. There are fifteen fixation points, and fifteen patrons are fixed on these points, covering the fabric. The man fixes the fabric and the patrons while the table is in a horizontal position. Afterwards, he turns the table into a vertical position, with the fixation points at the top. The cutter cuts following the patron models. The showrooms are the moment in which Blaise receives orders for production, in terms of number of pieces, models to reproduce, and their sizes. New patrons are produced for every ordered size, and for every model. The modelist again has a central role in this stage, as s/he needs to adapt the design to the different dimensions of the clothing. After the patrons are produced, they are multiplied using the fabric for the final dress, numbered in order of their future assemblage, and sent to the tailor or manufacturer to be sewn. After cleaning, the end product arrives back to the workshop, where Blaise checks it for the final touches, and from where it travels to boutiques or clients. Each phase is important, but the focus is on the creation part, the aesthetic choices, the ornaments, and the showroom moment.

The Fabric of Design Visiting the createurs in Paris made me realize the complexity of the process of dress production, in which designing is only one part among others. Nevertheless, designing is the seed from which the clothing springs, and the designer is the person who ideally has a complete vision of the end product. In Blasie’s workshop I could witness the making of an accessory, a flower that should ornament the sleeves and the collars of a

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dress. It was a naïve-styled model, inspired by a drawing he found at the flea market. Here follows an excerpt of my notes: I was though lucky enough to witness in the making of a flower, future embroidery for a new dress model, that will appear in the summer collection. Blaise does two collections per year, winter and summer. The calendar is very tight: collection presentation at the beginning of Fall; beginning the production for the commands they receive; in parallel, the conception and creation of the new collection, and then the cycle starts all over again. Back to the flower: After he designed it, he showed me a poster that inspired him, a cover for some children’s event or book. He first talked to the modelist, Jacqueline, and then he slightly changed the shape of the corolla, and then faxed it to the embroiderist. Blaise winked at me and said: “the phone will ring any minute and he will start telling me that this is impossible, that we cannot do it, that there is no way this will work.” Then, while we were talking about other things, he started taping the phone with his finger: “come on, ring!...” Finally Pascal called, and they had a discussion that exactly fulfilled his expectation. A model never takes the shape of the initial idea, it always changes in the long process of creation. There are a series of people participating in its creation, each making a little contribution, without neglecting the technical constraints in themselves.

In fact, the material side of creation is highly important; what I have called “technical impositions” are the active parts that non-animated objects take in designing procedures. Those objects may be both enablers and constrictors in the dress making process. Fabric qualities give the consistency of any piece of dress, and while designing the createur thinks about the material that will go into the creation. As part of the original design, some designers not only

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carefully choose the fabric, but also create their own. Thus, other two young designers I visited in Paris, Mark and Darja both developed their own fabrics, and their own approach on texture and materials (see also Chapter 7). Like many createurs, Darja does more than one activity. In order to maintain her financial stability, she is the artistic director at the designer house Leonard in Paris. Thus, Darja works an average of ten hours a day, splitting her physical presence between her workshop in the 9th department of Paris, and Leonard in the 6th. She has an important clientele from the Middle East, and I had been referred to her by the organizer of Mozaique, a luxury ready-to-wear showroom from Paris dedicated to Middle Eastern clients. Darja’s workshop is on the first floor of a building, north of Boulevard Strasbourg. I have entered only in the kitchen and in the first room of the workshop, containing a cutting table, textiles, and shelves, as well as hangers for the finished dress. Darja works with five to six interns, students of fashion schools, some of them coming from her natal Berlin. For sewing her clothes, she has a tailor to whom she sends patrons and the already-cut fabrics. During our interview, Darja clearly explained to me the relationship between textiles and design practices. Many other designers whom I talked repeated her description almost verbatim: It depends. Sometimes I have the idea in my head, and I make sketches, sometimes I have the fabric on the table and I see what it gives [qu’est que ça donne], the fabrics act very different, and sometimes they are the sources of inspiration for the design... In this case, I go to the mannequin and see what it gives. I inspire myself like this. Or I put them on myself, and I look what it gives on the body. This gives me ideas.

In this fragment, what interested me the most is the way in which fabrics act. They are not only an integrative part of the

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creation act, but actors, agents, sources of inspiration that “give” something to the designer. They act differently on the mannequin and on the body, because fabrics inter-act with movement. In Rule of Experts, Mitchell (2002) makes a strong critique of the “economic” view of the world, based among others on the following principles regarding agency: all humans are rational agents, and only humans can be agents. Analyzing the transformation in Egypt due to the Aswan barrage construction, Anophaelus invasion, German invasion, and nitrates use in agriculture, the author shows how in economic reports (and social analysis for that matter) a series of non-human agents are obscured or neglected (along with the violence of economic reforms). The non-human agents kept my attention for a number of reasons; at the level of micro-analysis of the design and body I propose, one of these agents resurfaces: the fabric. Fabric, through its texture, creates or inspires the design; also the fabric directly influences the body that will wear the dress and its movements. The fabric is not neutral, if one wears linen; another cotton, or yet another silk, each individual’s movements and attitudes are changed. Also, each texture signifies differently in different social contexts. In this chapter, and throughout the book, I will identify a series of other non-human agents deeply involved in the practices of fashion, and with a strong influence on the dynamic of the industry. Darja has patented, for one of her collections, a fabric of her own creation, which combines textile and fabric in a pattern that varies in thickness, and transparency. She used this fabric for a whole collection, and the fabric itself inspired (if not dictated) the theme of this collection. Mark is a young createur, with ten collections under his name (meaning five years of activity). I contacted him at the recommendation of a curator at the Fashion Museum of Paris, because he was said to have an important Middle Eastern clientele. Mark agreed to

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see me one morning, and I arrived at his workshop after a Metro ride around eleven A.M. At the ground floor of a building on rue Sauffroy, I am invited to wait in the production workshop. Three women work for the orders after the showroom, all in perfect silence. The radio attuned on “French Culture” talks about the midage crisis of men and women. One of the women prepares the fabrics – transparent black and white. On the carton rolls, she marks the quality and the dimension of the piece (e.g. 4,35 m, already ironed). She marks it on a white band of paper she is cutting herself out of A4 printing paper. The room is about 3X5 m, illuminated by fluorescent tubes. The rolls of fabric thus prepared are sent back to the tailor along with the patrons and the production specifications. In the same room, finished clothes are ranged on hangers, and they are marked to be sent to the clients. Each label bears the name of the client, model, and size. After a brief wait in this room I am invited to Mark’s creation room. At the moment of the interview he was wearing jeans and a sailor t-shirt, his long grayish hair in a ponytail. There are two main particularities of Mark’s work: first, he does not design. Mark arranges the fabric directly on the mannequin, and searches for the future form the dress will take. He creates the patrons only after he cuts the material, reversing thus a phase of the classic production pattern. This is not a novelty in itself in fashion creation. Madeleine Vionnet, the early twentieth century designer in love with geometry, did not use sketches; she was known for working directly on small wooden mannequins, or on live mannequins. More recently Nina Ricci followed her example, but these are rather exceptions in the sketch-ruled world of fashion design. The contrast with Tehran createurs is important, as I will discuss in the Chapter 6. The other particularity of Mark’s work, linked with the first one, is his treatment of fabric. Mark does not buy the fabric already

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treated, but prefers to treat it himself. He does so because the fabric, as he explains, is part of the creative process, and therefore, M: I work with a modelist and with people who assist me in the preparation of fabrics. Most of the textiles arrive here in their raw stage. They are cut, but they are neither dyed nor softened, they really are in their raw condition. And we wash them and dye them here. A : Why ? M : It is a way to appropriate the fabric, and to have fabrics that we do not find elsewhere.

For both Mark and Darja, the fabrics created in their own workshops were personal, or individual marks of the each designer. While Darja uses her own-patented fabric only in some cases or for particular collections, the fabric is Mark’s signature. Fashion design is an activity that takes places in the larger social complex and reflects a body of knowledge about the human body. The main referent of the fashion design is the individual, the body, and his/her (imagined) characteristics. Fashion sketches constitute signs that precede the referent (the body), and they a priori shape it, in its absence. In fact the shaping takes place, like in the case of imagining architectural spaces, in the presence of already existing assumptions about the human body. The preconceptions of fashion design impose on the body a set of habits directly linked with the shape of the clothes. But, like buildings, dress is inhabited in various ways, and there is a dialectical, dynamic relation established between vestimentary practices and the a priori of clothing design. Fashion designers do not necessarily have in mind categories of race, culture, or class (although they definitely “think” gender, even in self-consciously gender-subversive designs), but the use of the product in the social context may assign (and subvert for that matter) racial, cultural or class characteristics to certain garments or ap-

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parel, like the segregated inhabiting of certain neighborhoods – as the result of long term social processes – racializes these neighborhoods. Popular knowledge of fashion design may be re-appropriated by designers, recuperated, and reconstructed as typified style, recognizable in terms of race/class/gender (e.g. the ghetto style) or geographic location. Using silks in designs may inspire an oriental collection, while using light pastel textiles may suggest Mediterranean or tropical themes. Designers often classify their collection in geographical terms like “Oriental”, “Indian”, “Afghan”, or “British”. When asked directly, the designers explained that those references are inspired precisely by the quality of fabric, colors, and sources of inspiration for design. This aesthetic nomenclature or categorization is very large, categories cannot be reconstructed, because they change every year. Also, the definitions are fluid, just as fashion is. One piece or design may be as easily named Indian as it may be Oriental. The designer of the Parisian house “Impression” told me in an interview: “I was preparing something ‘Afghan’, and I talked with my lace maker. While talking she came out with something else, and we put it together, and at the end it was more Indian...” Fashion designers develop a whole language that links geographic areas with aesthetic characteristics, without tracing clear borders between those areas. In fashion design the fluidity of these borders allows the construction and reconstruction of these areas through the discursive4 debate (through practice). During the process of design, two apparently contradictory tendencies are developing: first is the aesthetic cartography of the world and the bodies that populate it. 4

Discursive is used here (and throughout the text) in the sense Foucault gives it, that is a practice with effects upon the object of the discourse.

Figure 2.1 Choosing the right color; a fashion designer workshop in Paris, rue de la Garde.

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This may be seen as a way of naturalizing cultural characteristics, or creating cultural/racial traits through aesthetics. Thus, there are the “exotic” elements that add to fashionable dress, and point to an abstract space of otherness, a valuable source of inspiration for modern dress because they are the issue of a non-modern space. Secondly, it seems that fashion designers have understood ahead of others that fashion – and thus modernity – does not belong exclusively to the Western hemisphere. Although the idea that real fashion is produced in Western locations is still present, there is a sense of the “equality of individuals” facing fashion. To be more specific, this equality is understood in terms of being modern, and does not apply to other categories/sources of inequality like gender or class. In other words, there exists a series of systemic processes that renders a clothing item “fashionable”, that are found in Paris, New York, London, or Milan, and to a lesser extent Tokyo. In parallel, there is the level of daily social practices lived as “fashion”, present extensively around the world. Fluidity in creating aesthetic categories also comes from the process of creation itself and leaves a lot of room for innovation. For example, during the visit at maison Le Sage – the most famous Parisian manufacturer of lace – my guide explained to me: “this year Lagerfeld asked for rounds. Result? Black rounds on white fabric.” The “result” of Lagerfeld’s demand has nothing to do with the creative capacity of the famous designer, and everything to do with the human and technical resources of Le Sage. One may only imagine what happened in Le Sage’s workshops, and how the Lagerfeld’s word “rounds” became round pieces of black textile on white fabric (no picture available because of Le Sage’s policy of secrecy of production).

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HAMLET : The time is out of joint. – O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right! Shakespeare (ibid.) ACT I scene iii, p. 33

While fabric participates in design by enabling the creative act, and in consumption through creating brand or name specificity, time is an agent that has an altogether different effect on fashion design activities. Time may thus be considered another technical imposition, maybe the milestone of fashion design. Besides fruit, fashion products are the most perishable on the market. Even fruit may last longer since the invention of freezing technologies. Fashion designers work on a seasonal calendar that marks the period of selling and the period of creation. The seasons are compressed into couples, in order to give the necessary time for creation and production. The Parisian ready-to-wear fashion calendar is the following: One week at the beginning of March, for the presentation of fall/winter collections of the current year, and one week at the end of September for the presentation of spring/summer collections for the following year. In Paris, the seasons for readyto-wear presentations are alternated by seasons of haute couture. Thus, while spring and fall are for ready-to-wear, haute couture collections mark winter and summer. The market logic of this organization is the following: the clients (boutique owners) want to have the collection in stores at the beginning of the season. In order to do so, they need to allow at least three months for the production process, starting with the moment of placing the order (during the fashion week). This is why the collections are presented at least three months before the season.

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Due to this arrangement, fashion designers need to organize their calendar at least six months ahead of time. That is, the collection for the season needs to be conceptualized at least six months in advance. Evidently, it depends. But normally we start (a new collection) immediately after the current one is sold (e.g. after the orders are placed), immediately after the winter is sold we start the summer. But for small enterprises [structure] as mine, this is not possible, because we are first getting busy with the production, and only after we start the new collection. (Darja)

This fragment details not only the time arrangement of a fashion year, but also the difference between a “small structure” – the createur, the type of designer I interviewed – and big fashion houses or multinationals. Thus, a collection has the following trajectory: for the established designers, it is first shown on a catwalk, in a show, that is the kind of fashion presentation the large public is accustomed to. A défilé is the presentation of the collection for press and the public. The invitations are sent early, and the crowd, needless to say, is exclusive. Therefore those who are most likely to be the future clients of the boutiques, if not the boutique owners themselves, are the first to have a sensual contact with the dress. The catwalks take place during fashion week5, and are followed by the showrooms. The showroom is the moment of wholesale collection selling, reserved to clients (usually boutique owners but also private parties). All the prestigious fashion houses have their own showroom, 5

Each season Paris, as well as other capitals of fashion, reserves one week in which all fashion designers present their collection. The season alternates, winter and summer are dedicated to haute-couture collections, while spring and fall are reserved to ready-to-wear.

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but young createurs are sometimes brought together in common showrooms. As Mark said: The sales happen in a second stage (deuxieme temps), in a showroom. I do in Mars and Octobre, the showroom is called “Workshop”. Only haute de gamme, createurs’ collections, international attendance. (Mark)

Usually agencies or private entrepreneurs host this type of showroom, or salon, that reunites a small number or createurs. They rent a space in a prestigious location in Paris – preferably in the Golden Triangle, the name of the space formed by the boulevard Champs Elysées, avenue Montaigne, and avenue George V, that concentrates the most famous fashion houses and retailers in Paris. The showrooms bring together young designers from Europe, Asia, and/or America. Each designer has a space to show her/his collection and proceeds to selling. The space usually has a line of racks with the new collection, approximatelly thirty pieces, and some of the designers also display clothes from the previous collection that have not “fallen out of fashion”. There is also a table with chairs where the clients and the designer may sit and discuss the order. The showroom organizer provides live mannequins to display the dress, and the client chooses the model and the quantity, and then places the order. Usually the organizer of the showroom is the warrant for the good delivery and the timely payment, although the pay may be delayed (see the detailed description of the Mozaique showroom in Chapter 5). Many organizers handpick the designers, as Michelle, the owner of Mozaique showroom, told me: Because our clients always trust us, and immediately that we consider that a product is well finished, original, and out of ordinary, we present it. Then it is up to the designer to prove herself, meaning to make timely deliveries, and mostly to be able to renew herself, not to make the same thing always.

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There are several elements in this fragment that tell us about time arrangement in the fashion industry. First, there is timely delivery. This requirement is strenuous for the createurs. In a small workshop there are no different sections of “artistic production” and “production” itself. That is, most of the time the same personnel, including the designer, needs to organize and participate in production for sale, and only after can s/he start working on the new collection. Sometimes the production may take four months, leaving only two for the preparation of the new collection. A combination of time, financial, and spatial factors contribute to these particular arrangements for createurs. The workshop is small, both as surface and as financial investment, so there is no spatial separation between creation and production; they need to be separated in time. While in big houses production for the current season and creation for the next one are done simultaneously (also accounting partially for market success), in small structures there is less time for creation. This temporal gap may also play in the feeling of déjà vu some small createurs give in their seasonal design. By the time they start the new collection, some prestigious names may be already done with it, and in spite of the secrecy, information may escape. Time plays a role in the diffusion of style not only among the consumers, but also among the producers. Thus, haute couture collections precede the ready-to-wear presentations by three months for the same season: haute couture presents summer clothes in winter, while some ready-to-wear houses present their collections in spring. This brings us to the second temporal element of fashion, generated through market arrangements, and part in the social practices of class distinction: anticipation. A l’Oreal (hair product line) advertisement I saw near the Orly airport displayed five mannequins and the caption: “257 specialists at l’Oreal invent the beauty

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of tomorrow”. The market arrangements previously summarized make that an aesthetic proposition for a season displayed some three to six months in advance. Global synchronization of fashion markets demands a temporal precedence at the moment of creation that would allow the commodities to arrive at the selling points. In parallel, this factor became a mean of distinction between aesthetic canons, between high and low fashion. The distinction emerges from the anticipation, from the capacity to propose a sustainable aesthetic before the time of consumption. For designers, access to early and prestigious salons is more than half of the guarantee to impose their aesthetic (as Michelle observed earlier, the showroom offers them access to clients who are themselves trend-setters in their countries because of their access to these salons). The global circulation of commodities and the capitalist practices of selling creates a disjointed temporal framework. Access to seasonal fashion presentations is reserved to few; this practice creates the aesthetic elite, that is, the high classes who give themselves the means to be high classes (see the introduction). Among the creators of aesthetics (designers) there is a competition in anticipating the trend (or proposing it before others). L’Oreal advertising has two main points of grip: the invention of “tomorrow’s beauty”, and the scientific aura conferred by the 257 specialists. Access to this “tomorrow” may be obtained today, but it is reserved to those with the means to consume l’Oreal products. Science is modern, and a warrant for the truth-value of the proposed beauty. The reverse side of anticipation, the market strategy that accelerates time and devalues commodities, is the period of “sales”, or “soldes”. In the middle of summer and winter seasons, the greater public has broad access to fashion commodities through price lowering and heavy marketing. The “month of sales” is a month that reor-

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ganizes the entire structure of public space. It is a seasonal feast of consumption, lived almost as a moment of potlatch by the public. On the side of the producers, it is a moment of important material and spatial gain. In the fast-moving fashion industry, no matter how big one’s store is, one cannot afford to leave unsold the products of the last collection, and a return to the producer would be un-profitable. It is not by chance that the sales month starts immediately after the haute couture fashion week in Paris. Thus, while the elites, the “beautiful people,” set their attention towards the season to come in six months, the middle class consumer can access something that has been seen three to six months earlier, and worn one to two months in advance by those elites. Sales democratizes for some, but also accelerates, since the trend-setters need to already invent newness, and the elites may not display what it is already in sale without the risk of losing distinction. Sales clear the spatial and the temporal framework for the new collections to come. While clothing and body adornment are general phenomena, fashion is generated by and in relation to the modern order of things. It expresses a special relation with time (anticipatory rather than mnemonic) and a particular conception of the individual (rational, independent and able to re-present and re-invent itself ). As design (including industrial design) anticipates body shapes, or creates new molds for the body, and new matrices of subjectivation, market organization anticipates the social diffusion of beauty canons. Fashion, through its practices, is the moment of encounter between human body and social space. This disjointed dynamic of fashion shows and sales is at the core of the temporal play of fashion, and of the temporal definitions of the modern individual, the liberal subject.

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Brand New Subjects The study of insurance and risk affords a rich perspective for rethinking the liberal subject under the condition of the modern order of things. In “‘Popular life’ and Insurance Technology”, Daniel Defert (1991) analyzed the changes that occurred in the technologies of insurance. He concluded that the insurance technology as we know it today can be considered a strategy of governmentality applied at the level of population that rationalizes the life of the social body. In other words, insurance is a modality of managing life, of stabilizing and rationalizing its variables in terms of risks and compensations. This can be read as a “solution” that biopower “embraces” in order to eliminate the haphazard of death, and implicitly its limitations: “For death as a happy stroke of fortune which liquidates a debt, he [the rentier, using the notion of risk, my note] substitutes a plenitude of life determined by sex, age, hygiene, genealogy and family environment”. (Defert, 1991: 218). “[I]nsurance is like a diagram, a figure of social organization” or “a generalizable technology for rationalizing societies.” (ibid., 215), and its subject, the insured, the entity that populates this diagram, is constituted of the classificatory parameters of his/her life. The individual is no longer subjected to liberal law, but to its own calculated potentialities (both of risk and of success). Robert Castel (1991) undertakes a more detailed analysis in the domain of risk management, from the perspective of the individual. His main argument is that an individual is no longer a subject, but a series of factors and statistical correlations, easier to manage from the statistical point of view. On the other hand, these factors can be normalized, or each of their potential combinations can be rationalized in a manageable category, which form a special type of normality. This governmentality finds its way without the imposition of a particular law.

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There is, in fact, no longer a relation of immediacy with a subject because there is no longer a subject. What the new preventive policies primary address is no longer individuals but factors, statistical correlations of heterogeneous elements. (Castel, 1991: 288).

One cannot impose a law to a series of factors, but can manage them as long as one knows and manages the “natural laws” that govern them. Bill Maurer (1999) has a detailed historical analysis of the system of insurance in the financial system, in his article “Forget Locke? From proprietor to Risk-Bearer in New-Logics of Finance.” He identifies four historical stages in which the conceptualization of risk had successively changed, and these stages represent as many shifts in governmentality. Maurer’s ideas are convergent with the two authors presented above, and he sketches out the temporal inversion in the logic of insurance: risk is foreseen, calculated and predicted using heterogeneous factors that constitute “traces of the future”: Traces of the future help manage risk and control the unpredictability of temporality. The Lockean and Hegelian subject of property takes a back seat to a system of statuses based on one’s investment in that temporality, as ownership itself evaporates into risk profiles. (Maurer, 1999: 67).

Although I do not altogether agree with the “erasure of subject”, I tend to see the creation of anticipatory parameters as a different mode of subjectivation. In the analysis of risk and insurance, one should not forget the daily practices of insurance-making, the material conditions, and even the body movements one makes in order to sign an insurance contract, pay monthly or yearly, contact the agent in different situations, and so on. The subject is subjected to new practices and governed in different ways but does not disappear. Rather, what is disappearing is the liberal Lockean subject of property, appropriated and subjected to risk profiling, as Maurer

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puts it. The subjectivation practices, rather than the subject, should constitute the focus of social analysis. The problematics of risk and insurance policy as forms of governmentality raises the problem of the space of political communality, expressed in each of the three articles above. Defert warns us that the sense of a common share of danger is lost with the individual conceptualization of risk and the factorial dispersion of the individual. Castel depicts the future social space as an already mapped territory in pre-established “circuits laid out in advance, which individuals are invited or encouraged to tackle, depending on their abilities.” (Castel ibid. 295). Similarly, Maurer envisages the social space as a collection of statuses constructed by the traces of future that are preserved, and continuously enhanced by the accumulation of factors. The insurance is a “probabilistic guarantee that, should all else fails, those statuses are insured.” (Maurer ibid.: 67). The sense of political communality is obviously lost in the absence of the liberal subject. Nevertheless, this is a thematic that Foucault also signals in his theorization of biopower: For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence: modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question. (Foucault 1990:143).

At this point, one may wonder what the link is between insurance regulations and the fashion industry. Fashion has been theorized from many perspectives, having been a focus of social science research for a long time. Most of the approaches to fashion treat it in terms of its external visibility. Fashion is a system of signifiers (Barthes, 1967), and clothes constitute a textual form as readable as any other text. The understanding of fashion is generally based on this assumption. The gender/class/race structure is read on (the form of ) the garments, on the designer signature, on the habitus

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(Mauss, 1934, Bourdieu, 1979) of the wearing, and -- not the least -- on the price tag. The visible form of the bodies is shaped by the fashion trend and inscribed in their couture, which tells us in a kind of reversed vivisectional manner what is inside the clothes, and what is acceptable to be inside of them. Fashion as biotechnology shapes recognizable bodies and thus recognized subjects. The operational categories of fashion practices – race, gender, class, age – are not necessarily accurate, but unavoidably real. In a material culture theory reading as proposed in the introduction, fashion is part of the matrix of subjectivation that encompasses both body and subject as an entity. Fashion practices (like insurance) constitute a map of the social body, expressed by different styles. As argued earlier, styles became markers of identity. At the same time they are signifying practices (see Hebdige, 1979) that ultimately refer back to the subject. The social space always already has a multitude of styles from which a person could choose, but the choice of a style is translated in the social imaginary as the expression of the interior self, and it becomes the self. Marketing activities codify the multitude of styles, and the appearance of rebel or contestatary styles is more and more rapidly integrated in the “normality” of fashion, sometimes with a simple word game: “shock is chic”. Initially, a counter-style contests the existing identity-models by repositioning and recontextualizing the commodities, and subverting their conventional uses. They claim an identity position that is not (or not yet) normalized. But, in the process of integration, the new models of rebellious subjects are appropriated and objectified by the system of power. Hebdige treats these ideas from the perspective of the 1970s punk movement in England. In the 1990s, this temporality is reversed (as in the risk industry), and the integration happens first. Contestation is already

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anticipated and conceptualized in the strategy of marketing. In Rolling Stone magazine, (No. 813, May 27, 1999), an article by James Surowiecki presents the sources of inspiration in the creation of styles for teenagers: Teen marketing is predicated upon the idea that real success depends upon capturing the hearts and minds of what Teenage Research Unlimited president Peter Zollo calls “influencers”. These are kids who are hip enough to be cool but mainstream enough to not be scary. The scary kids are known as “edge” kids. They start a trend, but it won’t be actually a trend until the influencers get hold of it. [...] The formula here is simple: pay attention to the edge kids, get the influencer to follow (often with a massive media campaign) and then watch the conformers and the passives fall in line.

This account clarifies the idea of “always already mapped” territory of style as “an activity of expertise [...] serves to label an individual, to constitute for him or her a profile which will place him or her on a career” (Castel ibid. 290). The individual subjects are constituted by their own actions and choices in the field of multiple styles, which already codifies and makes readable, if not imposes, these actions. The body becomes the disembodied support of the signifiers of social structure, the support upon which the marketing strategies display the signs of consumption, and the display of these signs constitutes the self. The subject is a function of the constant flowing of commodities. If in the insurance case the monadic subject explodes in a multitude of statistical factors of risk, in the fashion system the individual is caught in the multitude of clothes, which multiplies the subject. The body/subject is no longer defined by a possessive relation, but is possessed by the marketing. The individuals are interchangeable “parts” of the fashion system, simple bearers of commodities (as a Moschino fashion house advertising

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Figure 2.2 Gap store in Saint Germaine, Paris. The window displays “beheaded” subjects of fashion.

caption asks us: “Are you ready to donate your body to the fashion system?”). The narrative of self in network capitalism6 remains an open question. The consumerist “self ” is not the same “self ” that had to be educated by the ‘discipline’ of the body, any more than it is the wretched soul of the tortured waiting for salvation in the after-life. It is the creation of images in a preconceptualized and normalized field of fashion and styles that informs the subject of governmentality. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of self is imbued with the idea of steady improvement -- made real by the constant flow of signifiers. 6

See Castells

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The consumerist desire is in fact the desire for the actualization of self: [...] the only potentialities an individual can realize are those that are tentatively sketched out in the surrounding world and that an individual actualizes by the virtue of the fact that he or she is interested in them. (Veyne 1997a:163).

The shape of the self is always already anticipated by the new market strategies, in other words by new practises of governmentality. The question of political communality appears forceful in this context: when the sole possibility remaining to a person is to improve him or herself, one says that that person is living the Greek tragedy of Medea, who cried: «Everything has disappeared, but I have one thing left: myself». (see Paul Veyne, ibid., p.231). Yet before this ‘self ’, market strategies, financial ‘opportunities’, risk control, unfold, as it were, as traces, parameters if you like, of futures the self may inform itself within. What we have is no longer a society shared among individuals or governed by laws, but an accumulation of potential selves to chose from, just like the already integrated contestatory fashion styles. In other words we are facing a form of social organization based on “ready-to-wear” citizenship. The interpretation of Medea’s words is that in the overbearing presence of the self, (absent the thing we call ‘society’), the self itself is freed from any constriction except the aesthetic. We live in an era in which the tragedy of Medea is generalized, in which society is constituted by prescribed modalities of actualization of the self, in which numberless aesthetics are fabricated via marketing strategies, and in which the path named choice is marked by readable «traces of future» -- be they factors of risk or signs of a style. In it, the idea of communality, of Aristotelian politics, and of public space have no meaning, not least because the world is governed by mathematical norms and institutionalization of bodies, or better said, of traces of bodies.

Chapter 3

Oriental Flavors Designing (for) the Middle East in Paris On September 6th 2002, Lauren Bush, the fashion model and George W. Bush’s niece, refused to walk for maison Toypes in Barcelona’s fashion week. The reason for the refusal was that the collection’s theme was of Arab world inspiration. When she discovered the large trousers, the tunics, the turbans, and the rugs that were supposed to cover the scene, and also the Arab music for the background, she preferred to renounce her presentation, pressured by her mother Sharon Bush. (Webdeluxe, accessed 09.23.2002 “Mode : la nièce de Bush refuse de défiler avec de la musique arabe”).

Dressed in a black sober-looking robe, she nevertheless accompanied the designer for Toypes at the final walk. The event took place at “Pasarela Gaudi”. The proximity of the event to the anniversary of September 11th was the reason invoked for this refusal. Now, at the time of my writing, this event is almost forgotten, and it was barely commented on in 2002 either, since Barcelona is not one of the premier fashion centers. Nonetheless, this account enumerates elements that are part of the European aesthetic imaginary of the Arab world; we are led to understand that forms of garments and music suggest a geographic and ideological reference; that the same reference can gain different meaning through actors’ actions. A complex of factors (historic events, personal affiliation or nationality, social context) rendered an Orientalist fashion presentation unacceptable in the eyes of one model. Another example

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may be illustrative for the importance of context in the aesthetic creation of meaning. On a sunny autumn afternoon two friends invited me to have a tea at the Paris Mosque. Built in Paris after the First World War in memory of Algerian Muslim combatants, the Grand Mosque of Paris is not only a place for prayer, but a center that attracts visitors, hammam (Turkish bath) aficionados, local intellectuals who find a nice meeting place in the interior court, and so on. The Mosque has a tearoom and a restaurant where one can taste North African cuisine. In the patio, in the shade of fig trees, we took a seat at one of the tables and ordered our teas. While waiting, one of my friends showed me a poster that announced a fashion show taking place that very evening in the Mosque’s restaurant. The designer is Saliha Achourane “creatrice de Paris”, and she is launching her perfume “Sally”, a fig’s fragrance that “sends us towards Middle East” (“qui nous renvoye au Moyen Orient”). The show is announced for 7:30 p.m.; the models will walk in the two halls of the restaurant. Fortunately it is only 6 p.m., and I have the time to run to the newspaper stand in the corner to buy a notebook for the event (I was completely taken by surprise). It was Thursday, October 10th 2002, the middle of the year’s fall fashion week in Paris. We find places inside the restaurant, and wait for the show, observing the public. I ask two photographers if it is possible to have copies of the pictures they’ll take; they agree to send me electronic copies (another instance of urban fieldwork inventiveness). Two big halls in a U shape form the space of the restaurant. The hall at the entrance is the tea and coffee space, while the second hall is the restaurant. The far wall has open arches, so one can see from one space to the other. I have seen the same separation of spaces in traditional houses in Iran, each of the two spaces being reserved for

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men and women respectively. It is a characteristic of the architecture that distinguishes between biruni and andaruni, space for men and for women. Nevertheless, in Paris Mosque’s restaurant this distinction is not operational, as men and women mingle freely. To the background hum of sound-beats that combine pop music, oriental tonalities, and classical music, models enter the scene. They walk through the coffee hall, walk the entire U shape, and then return. The garments are not strikingly creative; they offer a combination of light fabrics (muslin and silk) and vivid colors that are supposed to send one to the imagination of a magic Orient, as the designer herself told me. The show is in fact promotional for the fragrance “Sally” that she wants to launch. The place and the

Figure 3.1 Fashion catwalk at Paris “Grand Mosque”.

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presentation of the show contribute to the desired effect – oriental and yet familiar. It is very difficult to have this at the Mosque, first of all because it is not usual, and also [...] there is the entire organization, the team [...] and it is true that saying you are going to make a show at the Mosque [...] after all a fashion show at the Mosque is [...] really original [...] people do not envisage it easily [...] or envisage it at all. (Sally)

The points of suspension in text mark hesitations from Sally’s part. She is hesitant in explaining what exactly the juxtaposition of a religious (Islamic) space and a modern manifestation, a fashion show, means. The show took place in October 2002, when the “veil affair” was not yet at its height, but talks of war in Iraq were frequent. In France, as elsewhere, Islam is associated with fanatism and tradition, and, more recently, with terrorism. The encounter between fashion and an Islamic space should have produced a lot of commercial buzz. For the preparation of the collection, Sally did not hide the inspiration coming from Orientalist artists or postcards: It took me several months, I had to go to the library, to consult history books [...] there are not many traces about berber costumes. So it is true that I had to inspire myself from Orientalist paintings, from post cards also, old post cards.

Postcards are indeed a technique of creating popular knowledge about the exotic other. A compelling analysis of French colonial postcards, The Colonial Harem Alloula (1986) deals with the central Orientalist fantasies as presented in post card photography. The inaccessible space of the newly conquered territory (Algeria) finds its synthesis in the assumed lasciviousness of the Harem – an inac-

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cessible space as well, but rendered to the public gaze through the artifice(iality) of the photographic studio. Part and vehicle of modernity, the postcards propose a specific mode of knowing based on identification and typification, just like “an illustrated popular encyclopedia” (Alloula, ibid. 29). The postcard frames an otherwise “vagrant and unfomed” reality in its clearly defined terms, in which types are represented by individuals who carry with them an identity (Alloula, ibid. 64) – both operational categories of the ‘modern project’. This procedure pacifies a reality otherwise shaken at its foundation by the French presence, and imposes at the same time a well-defined mode of thinking. In fact, the purified gaze of the camera denies the actual presence of the watcher, presenting to the spectator the ‘natural’ ambiance of Algeria, and its inhabitants: Beyond the ethnographic alibi (folklore), we have a vivisector’s gaze training itself upon Algerian society. It is the very gaze of colonization that defines, through the exclusion of the other (the colonized), a naturalness (the native) that is first circumscribed by the gaze. (Alloula, ibid. 92)

Sally’s fashion presentation was the expression of a postcolonial nostalgia, rather than of a colonial technique. Nevertheless it was far from being devoid of power relations. Sally is, maybe not coincidentally, of Berber descent. Hers is a gaze of a late watcher, cut off from the direct colonial experience, but heavy, I thought, with her own nostalgia for a place to which she feels she has a symbolic link. Sally herself may be considered a result of the colonial French past. In fact, through her aesthetic enterprise Sally masters the narrative of her origin, imposing in the aesthetic realm the image she acquired of a space she knows only through incidental travel. (Her first visit in Algeria took place two years before the show, and inspired the perfume). The way in which she formed and appropriat-

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ed this image is common to the modes and mechanisms of current stereotyping: Orientalist paintings, films maybe, and post cards. Nevertheless, contact with the sources of stereotyping takes place in an entirely different context than the colonial years Alloula describes. She is not the French soldier playing out fantasies, but the young fashion designer searching for inspiration where many other designers do: the “Marché aux Puces”, a weekly flea market in northern Paris, at Porte de Clignancourt: It is true, there is a place in Paris, “The flea market of St Ouen”, were I found many old postcards with old costumes, and it is true that all the designers came at least once in their life at the flea market of St Ouen in order to find old postcards.

For Sally, the fact of going to the St Ouen gives her legitimacy in her professional aspirations, rather than being a search for some essential long forgotten and longed for identity or origins. Frequenting the same space as “all the designers”, places her in the “Pantheon” next to Gaultier or Galliano. The “searching of the past” for inspiration is a recurrent theme among designers, and the practice associated with it – browsing the flea markets – is indeed common. Some aesthetic canons are produced in relation with the past, and in Tehran I found a similar phenomenon with different resorts commented in Chapter 6. It is important to remember that Sally’s searching for images of a colonial past is yet another practice – implying uses of spaces and places – that forms part of her professional trajectory, and to a lesser degree a personal revival of her parents’ origins. In fact, in her own account, her career as a fashion designer started in the United States, when a theatre producer showed an interest in her origins, and prompted her to create costumes for his play. It was rather somebody else’s genealogical obsessions (maybe

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not by chance an American’s) that suggested the idea of creating dress of Orientalist inspiration to Sally. Thus it is not personal nostalgia that triggered Sally’s propensity for Berber or Oriental inspired dress, but the “imperial nostalgia” found in France and elsewhere translated in aesthetic appreciation of an exotic Middle East. A combination of the usual practices of fashion creation, spaces of encounter or legitimation (St. Ouen market), and symbolic capital through descent are the mechanisms of Sally’s Orientalist fashion creation. I suspected her nostalgia was in fact the socially constructed desire of exoticism, spiced up by the French colonial nostalgia. Many designers in Paris, for different reasons, have at some point or another in their career, given in to the temptation of Orientalism. At the same time, my own eyes were somehow skewed towards seeing Orientalism everywhere. During one of my interviews with Philippe, the then-director of the Yves Saint Laurent research center, we were browsing the spring 2003 Lacroix collection when we came across some models displayed trousers with laces at the ankle, to which I pointed out an Ottoman inspiration. Philippe smiled and replied: I would like to underline that you may be tempted to see Orient where it may not be the case. You may know that this style is also the recuperation of a certain sport dressing in ready-to-wear fashion. The Italian sportswear has this characteristic that may be at the basis of Mr. Lacroix’s choice.

This is the expression of many instances in which I, as the ethnographer, gave in to the temptation of seeing something that may not have been there, or rather of seeing what I would have liked to see. Fashion catwalks in the Parisian Mosque, or colorful garments against a background of Arabic music are places of imaginary en-

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counters, aestheticized moments, and stereotyped projections. In France, whose parliament voted the “law of veil” in order to “reinforce secularism”, the image of the veiled woman, or veils used in fashion presentations, are acceptable as long as they are signs of exotic otherness. Once the encounter is taking place in a street, school, or other public space, the situation becomes more delicate, being resented as an affront to the French Republican principles (Khosrokhavar 1995).

Reliable Clients Paris haute couture survives on two factors: the sales of perfumes, and the Middle Eastern clients, who, along with US clients are the most important for the sale of haute couture dress. Designers’ showrooms are privileged spaces of encounter between clients and producers. The ready-to-wear industry also draws significant profits from sales to Middle Eastern clients. My first direct encounter with a boutique owner from Dubai happened in the seasonal ready-to-wear salon in Paris in the Fall 2002. As every year, the salon takes place at Porte de Versailles, in an exhibition park that attracts around 43 000 visitors and buyers each season. In September 2002 the stands only occupied 25 000 square meters, a surface which expands every year. A friend of mine, Christian, who runs a jewelry production studio, arranged for me to be on his stand, to help with sales (since my English is better than his). I was glad to start my first “participant observation” fieldwork experience in this manner. On the first day of the exhibit I took the metro to the Porte de Versailles to meet Christian who handed me a tag which read : “Alex Nicoleu, exhibitor”. Of course, this is not my name, but Christian’s associate made it up, merging the “u” from many Romanian ending words with the name of ex-dictator Ceausescu Nicolae – another anec-

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dote illustrating the mechanisms of the geographical imaginary in everyday life. Theirs was a relatively small stand of about 8 square meters among hundreds of other stands in the exhibition hall. The rent is as high as 2 000 euros ($ 2 600) per square meter for the entire week of the event. I had spent four days in a row at the stand, helping English-speaking clients, and trying to observe the Middle Eastern clients present at the fair. Veiled women coming mainly from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates do not pass unnoticed – or is it just me who watches carefully for these juxtapositions of fashion on fashion? Very elegant, they move with easiness through the stands, regarding the products offered with a critical eye. Voices say they are some of the best clients, but this is not necessarily true. One buyer from Dubai, who came with his mother and sister (both unveiled) explained to me that marriage dress and accessories are in very high demand in Dubai, because: “it is only once in a lifetime, so people spend big money on it, big money”. Christian confirms this, and extends its validity for any market in the world. During their visit to the stand I had the occasion to observe patterns of buying. The mother, Fatima1, presented her daughter to me, Adana, as being a fashion designer and model. I guessed Adana was about nineteen years old. Fatima chose products using Adana as her model, and she tried the accessories on her daughter, throwing glances of complicity to me in the appreciation of one product or another. The particularity I observed at this first visit, confirmed by Christian as a characteristic of Middle Eastern clients, was that Fatima was ordering the complete series of one product. This differs markedly from European clients, who are more measured in their spending, working with smaller budgets. 1

Fatima and Adana are pseudonyms I use in this case

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Pointing to a quite sexy dress with resin applications she said: “this product is not very appreciated, because the silky chador women wear catches in the accessories and destroys itself.” Fatima’s remark points to two important characteristics: the clients of her boutiques, those who buy Parisian-made dress, are of a privileged class if one considers the silky chadors. Second, the chador imposes certain limits in dressing, even if it secures the complete invisibility of the dressed body underneath. In fact, this play of inside/outside, of interior/exterior, public and private for Middle Eastern clients of the fashion industry proved to be a capital factor for fashion production.

Figure 3.2 Blaise adjusting a dress on a model at the ready-to-wear Parisian fare in September 2002. In the center right of the image, a client from Dubai.

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Orientalism and its discontents While looking at the products, Fatima observed one little tag bearing the mark “France” falling on the floor. She carefully picked it up and said to Christian: “Do not forget this.” I asked her if it is important, and she answered: “of course, very important”. The tag is the mark of the authentication of the merchandise (Warnier 1996). It is the proof that the commodity comes from elsewhere – not from anywhere, but from France – and the material link with the space of inception. It certifies the voyage that the commodity undertook, and it creates the reference to a space of fashion excellence. Some fashion designers confirmed indeed Middle Eastern clients’ propensity for branded products, for well known brandname tags that figure greatly in the buying patterns, but most of all in the creation of a popular image about these clients. Middle Eastern women are supposedly “brand crazy”, looking for consecrated names like Dior or Chanel. Of course, the persons in constant contact with those clients know that this is not entirely true. The manager of Paul Smith’s showroom in Paris (Alain), during an interview, identified two types of Middle Eastern clients as, in his words, “two schools”. “Clients with a certain fashion culture, who are aware of the trends and understand taste” are part of the first current. Alain identifies the others as being “fashion victims, usually nouveau-riche types, who are following the trend, Prada / Gucci style.” He operates a distinction that is valid for all fashion clients regardless of their geographic location, and that juxtaposes a class distinction based on taste. The “followers”, although socioeconomically equal to “tasteful clients”, do not have the aesthetic ability to understand and eventually anticipate the fashion trend. As their name describes, they follow, or “lag behind”, and this is as much a temporal as it is a spatial reference. Both fashion designers

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and sales persons are aware of the general stereotype that makes out of the Middle Eastern clients brand hunters. At this point the theoretical conversation on Orientalism and representations must be introduced. The purpose is to raise the question on how fashion practices reproduce stereotypes, what kind of stereotypes they reproduce, and most important, how studies of fashion practices would allow us to push forward the reflection based on simple dichotomies such as those opposing the modern West to the modernizing non-West. After World War II, or more precisely accompanying the weakening of colonial powers, the discipline of Orientalism slipped under the lens of critical thinkers. It was (and continues to be) a period of reconsideration for many other scholarly disciplines, from philosophy and anthropology to history, scrutinized both in methods and in final scope. The colonial advent has been employed, if not as explanatory device, at least, and rightfully so, as historical context that offered the background for certain theoretical developments in these disciplines: historicism and the idea of progress, or race and racism, to name the most important in their consequences. In 1963, Abdel-Malek (2000) pointed out the crisis in the discipline of Orientalism in an article that methodically analyses three constitutive dimensions of the research in the domain: (1) the general conception of orientalism, (2) the methods of study and research, and (3) the instruments of study and research. The essentialist assumption of Orientalist studies constitutes their main fault and the generative source of the creation of the figure of “the oriental other.” Abdel-Malek distinguishes scholarly knowledge of “traditional orientalism” from the more popular orientalist production insured by “an amalgam of university dons, businessmen, military men, colonial officials, missionaries, publicists and adventurers, whose only objective was to gather intelligence information

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in the area to be occupied, to penetrate the consciousness of the people in order to better assure its enslavement to the European powers.” (Abdel-Malek, ibid. 49). In spite of this separation, the author argues, their scientific conception and methods are similar, and result in the creation of an inferior image of “the Orient” from both historical and socio-economical point of view. At the same time, the constant ignoring of contemporary local scholarship and the gathering of empirical material proved to be harmful in the long run. Important quantities of scholar material belonging to the colonized world have been removed and brought to the colonial centers, out of reach of the local scholars. Only ten years later, at the twenty ninth International Congress of Orientalists which took place in 1973 in Paris, the term “orientalism” applied to the academic discipline have been officially abandoned (Lewis 2000). Edward Said’s well known critique in Orientalism (1978) came thus not as a novelty but more as an accessible synthesis of previous conversations, attempting a problematic methodological marriage to which I will later return. From the start, Said gives a triple definition of orientalism, encompassing: the corpus of academic knowledge produced in Europe or United States about the geographical area known as Middle East; the intellectual production based on a “style of thought” that ontologically distinguishes between the Orient and the rest; the colonial attitude and mode of domination of the Orient. A synthesis of these definitions (and of Said’s book) would lead us to understand orientalism as a set of specific social practices located in the West, oriented towards the production of knowledge about, and the circumscription of a geographical space, which reflected a hegemonic discourse of domination of Western space over the East.

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“Orientalism” had far reaching consequences from both disciplinary and methodological points of view. Maybe the importance of Said’s book lies more in the conversations and critiques that it generated, than in the material analyzed in it. In fact, in one of the most acerbic critiques of Said’s book, Bernard Lewis constantly points out “ Mr. Said’s transmutation of events to fit his thesis” (Lewis, 2000: 259). Although this may be the case, Lewis’ critique does not invalidate the questions that Said raises, nor does it justify the dismissal of the entire thesis that the author of “Orientalism” advances. Orientalism, in Said’s term, is an all-encompassing term that refers to any activities of knowledge production about the East. The author does not – at least not in this work – consider that, in this enterprise, there is a possibility of pursuing the ‘real’, anymore than in any other discursive domain. On the contrary, Orientalism is a mode of domination, and its ‘economy of truth’ enables the endurance of certain socio-economic and political institutions, along with the strength and durability of the discourse itself (Said 1978: 133). In spite of the accent put on the idea of diffuse discursive production, Said insists in the role of agency, and argues from the standpoint of the primacy of political interest. For him, Orientalism is the direct outcome of a political agenda of domination, and in parallel “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts” (Said, ibid, 138). In other words there is a textual hegemonic relation (and by text I understand a wide range of knowledge production techniques), in which the primacy of Western knowledge (and language) insures its dominance. This theoretical position may be genealogically traced from the ‘Nietzschean’ primacy of language (and text) in power relations,

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or what I would call the ‘real’ of language. The (re)organization of the world into language, grammar, and representation is an activity of truth production, in Nietzsche’s sense, that is “truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are”. (Nietzsche in Said, ibid., 142). Naturally, Foucault’s method of discursive analysis comes in handy in Said text, but the author does not succeed in reconciling the profound anti-humanist and critical optimism of Foucault to his own existentialist position of Sartrian influences.

(A)political representations This is in fact the major flow that James Clifford (1988) identifies in Said’s methodology, and at the same time the point of rupture from which certain postmodern disembodied thinking emerges. Aijaz Ahmad (2000), further explores the incongruities in Said’s methodology and in his attempt to present orientalism both in a post-modern paradigm, and as a result of agency. Thus the Orient is only a representation, and every representation is a text that refers only to previous texts, but simultaneously this representation is the result of agency: it is a misrepresentation wilfully produced by the European colonial powers in order to control specific territories. In order to insure a methodological coherence, the question of misrepresentation is thus wrongly brought forward by Said. As Aijaz explains, one cannot talk of misrepresentation with a reference to a pre-existent truth in an analysis following the abovementioned Foucauldian approach, because one can talk only about the effects of truth of a discursive field, and not about the “real” referent. However, despite his own theoretical and methodological

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position, Said identifies a real Orient, knowable through unmediated genuine experience2. Many analyses of colonialism attempted to describe the history of colonial hegemony in terms of disembodied textual domination, and Said’s attempt does not avoid this pitfall in spite of his concern with “the prevalence of hegemonic exploitative relations in the world” (Dallmayr 1996: xvii). On the contrary he seems to be one of the main sources of inspiration for them. Aijaz rightly observes that this approach leads to the peculiar a-political position of some postmodernist writers. Other authors expressed similar concerns about the political disengagement of Orientalism using gender as starting point. In her introduction to Gendering the Middle East, Kandiyoti (1996) emphasizes that privileging textual representation may divert the attention towards the Western space, and, at the same time, it may jeopardize the analysis of the mechanisms of generating gender inequalities in Middle East. Many authors share this perspective and worked effectively in showing the mechanisms of inequality (Keddie 2000, Moors 1995, Abu-Lughod 2001a, Moghadam 2001) The issue of political engagement with Orientalism and the Middle East may be addressed through the lenses of fashion as social practice. Fashion is a mechanism of subjectivation generative of social categories like gender, class, and modern. Approaching representation as pure text disables commentary on the social practices 2

Other authors (e.g. Porter 1994) take issue in the same major methodological flow. Starting from Said’s choice of combining Gramsci’s idea of hegemony with Foucault’s approach on the question of knowledge production and power. A first contradiction that Porter identifies in Said’s position is the non-concordance of the place that Said accords to truth and the ‘real’. While he states the coincidence of knowledge with political – that is there is no truth outside ideology – Said implies the existence of a truth “out there” in the ‘raw reality’.

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of representation, which involves much more than the image itself. Fashion practices are at the core of mechanisms of representation. Nonetheless, it becomes important to point out that the postmodern textual analyses are much more complex in their theoretical approach, and it may be that their perceived a-political nature is a by-product of the disciplinary constraints of the field. Most of the textual analyses come from the literary criticism, and, as argued before, the object of their focus influences what is being said about the theme. The sometimes poignant critiques of these tendencies come from anthropologists, who, through the specificity of their approach, are more sensitive to the social fabric, and thus methodologically attracted by propositions of linking the discourse and the practice, or better said, more prone to understand discourse or text as effective practice. The critique that Thomas makes to Homi Bhabha’s theory of representation and, through it, to the school of Subaltern Studies has to be understood in this context. The reproach “that the allowance made for subversion on the part of the colonized is distinctly gestural, and that this style of theorizing reifies a general structure of colonial dominance” (Thomas, 1994: 40) may be justified, but it may also point out to the author’s own quest for a real outside the discourse, as an ultimate referent. It may be that Thomas fails to see the real consequences of the gesture of mimicry, and thus its discursive quality in a Foucauldian sense. Again in this case, fashion may be illuminating. In “Clothing Matters”, Emma Tarlo (1996) extensively explores the political effects of the dispute on the adoption of English and European style dressing in the colonized India had. In nineteenth century, Tarlo argues, the anxiety among the English created by the adoption among Indian middle and upper classes of European dress was expressed in the journals of the time. The gesture, ridiculed as mimicry, had a long-term impact on

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the colonial relations. The British defined an aesthetic racism, and switched the construction of difference from the form of clothing to the color of the skin. The Indian élite resented the need for search of an “authentic” dress, able to express the Indian national identity about to form. The politics of clothing became even more accentuated with the emergence of Gandhi in the public sphere, and with him the sartorial definition of Indian nationalism.

Dress: Practice and Representations Following Ann Stoler’s (1989) remark “that the attention bestowed by ethnographers upon cultural complexity among the colonized has never been matched by interest or sensitivity to tensions among colonizers” (Thomas, 1994: 13) Thomas proposes an analysis of this heterogeneity, suggesting that the period of colonialism cannot be considered a well-delimited historical period, as the social fabric operates in a cultural complex that preceded and succeeds the period of colonial rule. A way to study cultural continuities is to look at the perpetuation of social practices or at the institutions, in large sense, that do not disappear with the end of colonialism. Various anthropologists have analyzed colonial period in this manner. I would mention the work of Mitchell (1991), Comaroff (1997), or Cohn (1996). Each of them, in different contexts, has shown the importance of the forms of discourses and discourses of form in creating the new colonized world, and in changing the social reality of the place. All of them have carefully approached clothing in their analysis. But maybe the clearest work that links text and social reality is Brinkley Messick’s analysis of British textual dominance in Yemen (Messick 1996). The author recounts the changing character of institutional settings in colonial Yemen

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brought about by, and supported with, the shift in official writing from spiraling calligraphy and page arrangement to the linear left to right authoritative European page format. All these authors are relevant for their method of approaching discourses as social practices, with material consequences. In the case of representations, the choice of the subject of inquiry has a decisive imprint on the way in which one conceptualizes the phenomenon in itself. Thus, fashion practices may be telling in the attempt of going after Orientalism. As shown before, when dealing with representations, most of the authors, if not all, approach either “the culture of representation” or “culture as representation”, tendencies that may overlook the dynamic character of culture. Instead, one may look at culture as practice of representation, rewarding ‘culture’ with the mobility that escapes the exercises of “writing culture”. Or, why not, culture as mechanisms of differentiation displayed through style (Ferguson 1999). In this way, the two impasses regarding Orientalism that have been raised may be pushed forward: First, the essentialized images of cultures, found eventually in a clash moment (Huntington 1996), can be shown as what they are: images produced in processes that have an actual history of making. “East is East, and West is West” only after one does away with these processes, through a kind of selective amnesia that also eliminates the “threatening intimacies” (Paul Gilroy, UCI conference, May 2002) and the “messiness” one encounters in the crucible of everyday life. Second, representations do not have a pure textual form, and systems of domination are based on real practices that create those forms, but they are not reduced exclusively these practices. Using fashion practices I push this analysis further in order to denaturalize the border between interiority and exteriority, self and the other, identity and difference.

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Brand Orientalism Fashion is one of those institutions that traverses colonial and post-colonial periods, and implies a whole set of knowledge production and imaginary of the other. Fashion both produces stereotypes about its clients, and dismantles them through everyday practices. The new Orientalist fantasy is less concerned with bodies of the other, and more concerned with brands. When speaking with a wide variety of persons, from fashion designers to artists to fellow students, one reaction emerged over and over again. This may be summarized as follows: “But is it true that underneath the veil (chador, or what have you) women in Middle East wear designer clothes?” Delacroix’s erotic oriental bodies are readily replaced in the Oriental imaginary with signs of luxurious dress; the erotic of brand or signature replaces the erotic of skin, in the mechanism of identification of the exotic body. This imagery both approaches the Oriental body to the Western one, but at the same time signifies it differently. Because, as in the colonial Orientalist stereotyping, the chador covers the signs replacing the body, and it incites at the same time as it stops the gaze for reaching the sign. Although one may argue that in this identification of Middle Eastern women as fashionable persons there is a tendency of universalism, as in “they are just like us,” in fact a second glance would reveal something that characterizes these representations: excess. Historically in Orientalist paintings one may find an excess of skin (flesh or forms), whereas in most of the new Orientalist views one finds an excess of brand names. One must notice the link between “sign replacing body” phenomenon, and the use of patterns of consumption in order to create distinction. Further inquiry among fashion designers revealed that, while brand consciousness may be elevated among Middle Eastern cli-

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ents, it is not much more elevated than that of the young consumers in the new trend emerging in England: the Chavs. Originating from the Medway town of Chatham in Kent, this trend is formed by young urbanites who express a preference for brand names such as Burberry, and created a specific dress style that combines designer dress with flashy accessories. In some circles they are pejoratively called “Britain’s bourgeoning peasant underclass that are taking over our towns and cities” (www.chavscum.co.uk accessed 13.03.2004). This brief description concentrates the conflictual social representation created by the established bourgeoisie, entitled to occupy the “towns and cities” that feel threatened by the Chavs, or in extenso by the rapid social mobility displayed through consumption of fashion articles. Nevertheless, this type of consumption is described as bad taste, ostentatious, and excessive. It does not correspond to the bourgeois values of restraint, used as arguments and as a mode of distinction by the Chavs’ critics. At the section dedicated to Chavs celebrities on the same site, one description of Daniella Westbrook is telling: Give a Chavster a whole bunch of cash and they’ll piss it up the wall! Danniella was once a staple on Eastenders during the 90’s and was a chavster earning a huge wedge of cash. So what did she do? Buy a house? Invest? Nope, she put a quarter of a million quids worth of coke up her nostrils. [...]she has decided to get a surgeon to implant a couple of cantaloupe halves in her chest! Nice!! (www.chavscum.co.uk, ibid.)

Beyond the violence of the language one may deconstruct the logic of the argument. The bourgeois accepted values of domesticity (buying a house) or enterprise (investing) are presumably neglected by Chavs. They prefer conducts judged as immoral (cocaine sniffing) or aesthetically unpleasing (breast implants). The underlying argument is that of moral distinction, and the reactions to Chavs

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Figure 3.3 A “chav” at a Parisian fashion show. Note the Burberry shoes.

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that can be followed on internet chatrooms are responses to what is perceived as a moral threat. Buying a house or paying for breast implants are both actions of subjectivation, practices that constitute the subject (be it bourgeois or chav). The transparent conflict is between two different subjectivation practices, both underlined by proper moral codes. The imagined excess of brand-consumerism in Middle East is mentally associated with a different, if not dubious, and at the same time fascinating, behavior. Incredible parties, opulence, and private displays of luxury is the way in which many of my interviewees talked about the women fashion consumers from Middle East. These are as many practices that hint to different modes of subjectivation, and the moral and aesthetic codes that underlie them. Nevertheless, this is not always the case. Many times the constant contact with clients contributes to generating a different image. During an interview, Mark expressed his contentment in seeing the Middle Eastern clients liking and buying the same kind of dress that many of his Western clients buy. Two of his oldest clients are from Lebanon, and run a chain of boutiques, IF, with retail spaces both in New York and in Beirut. Clients from Saudi Arabia or the Emirates also visit IF in Beirut. It is amazing that their choice is... in fact they buy for Beirut the same things they buy for New York. This means that they sell in Beirut the same clothes they sell in New York.

The similarity of orders indicates a similarity in taste or in aesthetic choices, which raises questions that challenges the field of usual assumptions regarding Middle Eastern clients. This is precisely the “amazing factor” for Mark. Between radical difference and plain similarity, what could be a balanced view towards the other? Mark continues:

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It is surprising, because it is not at all in conformity with the image: I think here we have a really deformed image about Middle Eastern clients. We immediately imagine Chanel, Dior, evening dress, things very colored and heavily embroidered. In fact, no! They buy the same things, black and white... They could have asked for more colorful things for Lebanon, but in fact no.

In this fragment the “image” of the Middle Eastern clients is clear: excess of brand and colors. The surprise comes from the fact that this imagined “excessive other” is not as different from us as we may have thought. But this observation may have more profound implications. The excess is also a mark of immorality, as it is color. The predominance of black and white in Western urban style is direct issue of a certain moral code prevalent in public spaces. The image of the “more colorful” dress for Middle Eastern women, the flashy style is also a mark of over-erotic stereotyping, which adds to the (imagined or real) brand excess. Mark’s surprise is in a way due to the revelation that similar aesthetic (and maybe moral) codes apply both in New York and in Beirut. Undoubtedly, and as I will show, for women in Tehran for example, the brand is an imaginary link to cosmopolitan fashion locations, like Paris or Milan. The engine of brand consciousness is different, due to different configurations of the signifying space of fashion. The “nouveau-riche” effect is one of the factors to which I have previously referred. Desire, and power relations between the Western “civilized” world and the Middle East may be another. Dorinne Kondo (1997) points to the power laden domain of fashion which imposes universal aesthetics conceived in relation with particular bodies (European) on other bodies (Japanese). In this case, desire is the trigger of one’s own submission or subjectivation to aesthetic rules that claim universality. But in the adoption

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of brand names for the Middle Eastern clients, prestige combines with desire, in a different spatial configuration. As one of the designers working closely with Middle Eastern clients told me: It is very important to be faithful to those clients, because they are fair, everything is going fine with them, and I love the idea that Arab women wear my creations. [...] I love the idea that women who we think are rather submissive in a certain way, wear sophisticated kind of dress I am making, and things that are so new. I find this interestingly funny to imagine.

It would be naive to think that fashion designers necessarily avoid stereotypes. However the enduring contact they have with their clients allows them to construct a more complex image than those provoked by reductive stereotypes. In this fragment one may clearly understand the designer’s implication that consumerism Western sophistication, and taste lead to liberation. Fashion aesthetic appears as a mark of freedom from “submission”, and adopting Western dress comes hand-in-hand with the adoption of Western values. However, the complexity of factors in this adoption may be more intricate than this formulation suggests. It is also transparent in my account that the “moral/ immoral” distinction linked to uses of fashion and practices of subjectivation emerges from the concern of a bourgeois ideal-type of subjectivation, and it indiscriminately applies to “chavs” and Middle Eastern Clients among others. While in the first case the concern is “them taking over our towns and cities”, the attitude towards Middle Eastern Clients’ inscribes in the longterm post-colonial power dynamic. Both of these attitudes express concern and desire of appropriating spaces that are always already gendered (Abu-Lughod 1986; Mernissi 1991; Gole 1996). Bourgeois morality historically defined and constructed the public space as a masculine space (Habermas 1989), the private

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sphere is assimilated with femininity, and the conquest of Orient is always a sexual fantasy (Mutman 1992). The distinction secular modern versus religious non-modern follows similar fantasy contours (Asad 1986). This ethnographic approach on fashion as practice of subjectivation attempts to deconstruct those binaries in problematizing the public/private dichotomy. The following sections propose a vision of “Middle Eastern spatial configuration” as some Parisian designers perceive it, together with an introduction to the problematic of feminist critiques of Orientalism.

Inside Out Dress Astrolabe (www.astrolabe.com, accessed March 2nd 2004), a website/store from United States, offers “Muslim commodities”, including a variety of Barbie dolls, called Razanne. Razanne is a doll outfitted following Islamic rules, and the signification of her name is “Islamic beauty and modesty”. One type of Razanne is featured under the name “Inside & Outside with two outfits”. Razanne is properly covered for the outside outfit, while the inside dress is a more revealing robe, and of course the headscarf appears as optional. This doll is, as any other toy, Islamic or not, an idealized expression of social modes of organization. Razanne has two outfits for two spaces, one outside, a space ideally pervaded by moral rules of conduct and the principle of hijab or modesty. In exterior spaces, following Islamic morality, both the male and female body has to be covered, and for women the headscarf is required, in order to avoid “sexual disorder”. The interior (domestic space) is, ideally, free of moral determinants other than those decided upon by the family, or its patriarchal authoritative figure (usually the eldest man). A complex of factors influences the relations between Middle Eastern clients and haute couture houses in Paris. The person interviewed at Le Sage house briefly explained:

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After the [first] Gulf War the number of clients decreased from 3 000 to 300, so there is not much sustainability for haute couture houses. Ready-to-wear brands like Gucci and Prada are more convenient for clients without big financial resources.

Global politics indeed greatly influence the fashion industry. The Gulf War (1991) marked the decrease of trust among clients from the Middle East buying in Paris. But the major recent event is the September 11 2001 attacks, which took place in the middle of the fashion week in Paris. After the event, many clients both from the U.S. and Middle East cancelled their orders, interrupted their buying week, and returned home. The web-published report on readyto-wear Parisian salon does not give any numbers for the sales of that season, and the next season is generically called “Rebirth” . Mark observes another consequence of the September 11th 2001 events, maybe more to the advantage of Paris’ industry. He points out that clients prefer to travel to Paris or other European locations than to go to New York. Also, new local boutiques like IF in Beirut or Villa Moda in Kuwait offer location alternatives for retail clients. War does mean fluctuation in industry, and even rearrangements in the movement of clients and commodities, but it is not the only reason for the reconfiguration of selling patterns. As the organizer of a showroom dedicated to Middle Eastern clients (Mozaique) observes, “with or without September 11th, clients come and buy clothing”. In the previous fragment on “Le Sage”, one understands that economic status contributes to preference for high-end ready-towear. One can also infer that Prada and Gucci are preference of European clients, since the decrease in Middle Eastern clients meant a decrease in sales for haute couture. While financial power is one of the determinant factors in haute couture sales, there is something more that makes European clients buy high-end ready-to-wear, thus

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distinguishing them from the haute couture preferences of Middle Easterners. Darja is one of the designers selected by the Mozaique showroom dedicated to Middle Eastern clients. These clients are extremely important for her business. The clothes she sells can be easily considered avant-garde, and are strongly appreciated by boutique owners and women from Dubai, Qatar, Kuweit, and Saudi Arabia. While talking with Michelle, the organizer of Mozaique, she agreed on something that may sound surprising: You need to know that the Middle Eastern clients are really in the avant-garde relative to the Europeans. This means that they do not hesitate in choosing strong collections (très fortes), very original, while the Europeans are more classic, more conservative in their choices.

The avant-garde taste applies not only to dress articles but also to perfumes. Michelle continues her examples with the story of a friend of hers, a cosmetics promoter: He told me that once he would have a new perfume, he would launch it in Dubai. Because the people there are really avantgardist, they would always need something new; he told me that there he would see what works and what does not. And only after he would come here.

The conservative attitude is the easiest mode to explain the differences between clients from Europe and the Middle East. However, this may be explained in many different ways. One important factor may be the patterns of sociality in the Middle East. As one Lebanese vendor from D&G explains, “in the Middle East we go out more”. I think in Europe “we go out a lot” also, but there is a particular configuration of space that makes wearing avant-garde possible, and that was not revealed to me until my visit to Tehran.

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One image that circulates among vendors for Middle Eastern clients is that women from the Middle East wear their dress only once. It is a hard to verify statement. Nevertheless, at first glance their sociality seems to take place in spaces less anonymous than that of a regular European client. In the case of Middle Eastern clients, known people populate the places and spaces of displaying one’s haute couture acquisitions (private parties rather than anonymous clubs) so one may assume that showing oneself with the same dress would not be taken very well. At this one may add the type of sociality proper to upper classes that would buy haute couture avant-garde, that is a small circle of known and similar people. Nevertheless, this does not explain why the classic, some would say conservative formulas (Gucci or Prada) are less taken up by these clients. Or rather, why Europeans prefer standardized ready-to-wear formulas, and are more conservative in style? They (the Middle Eastern clients, Darja says) all say “we can’t, we can’t, it’s too much, it’s too much” but afterwards they buy even things completely transparent. So it is weird.

The clients’ statement “we can’t, it’s too much” have to be understood as a public declaration. It is something said in the presence of foreign persons, and it is a mode of declaring one’s morality. The act of buying is the expression of a personal desire, and of daily behavior: it goes without saying that Darja’s avant-garde creations will not be worn in the streets of Ryadh, but in private enclosures. They are not worn in the streets of Paris, either, but it also appears that they are much less worn in the private spaces in Paris. But I think I understand the system. I know that I need to be attentive to big low-necks, for the jewelry display. For some I need to cover the arms, for others the body. For some I need to double

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the entire piece, even the sleeves. For all of them [the dress] is long, except Lebanon.

“The system” Darja describes is a composite of rules and regulations of body exposure that vary in different contexts. Without entering into the details of the covering of the body, for fear of falling into stereotyping (in Lebanon, as opposed to Riyadh, etc.), it is important to remark that body covering is an important prescription; nevertheless, the form of dress, its colors and daring motives are not in the range of concerns of these clients. On the contrary, for Europeans, the choice of dress is centered on the image of sobriety that the clothes would project. The practices of subjectivation that are transparent in the buying habits of European consumers follow a certain morality expressed through aesthetic choices (as in the conflict about the chavs). Same observation is valid for the clients from the Middle East, but the important difference lies in the pervasiveness of those rules in different spaces of life. Just like Razanne with her inside/outside dress, Middle Eastern clients, through their buying habits, send a message about the social organization of space that is marked on dress. It is generally known that the principle of hijab or modesty is a requirement in Islamic morality, and it pertains to the covering of the body both for men and women, in public and/or in the presence of non-kin persons. Nevertheless, as I will show in the next chapter, the degree of covering varies greatly with the space and persons present, and with personal aesthetic (read moral) choice. In his article on the possibility of an anthropology of Islam, Talal Asad (1986) emphasizes that Islamic societies are generally depicted as totalitarian systems that impose shari’a law upon their subjects. The author shows how this position is in fact the outcome of a secularist intellectual position that does not take into account the historicity of secularism, or the role of religion in the formation

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of the secular. Asad argues that Shari‘a is a legal form that is able to regulate only some aspects of social life. He contrasts this with the secular state’s mechanisms of power that are pervasive in all aspects of life, be they public or private. For my purpose it is useful to reflect on the “highly regulated character of social life in modern states” (Asad, 1986:13); “the reach of institutional powers” in a modern secular state is in direct relation with the mode of subject formation in these states, and highly dependent on the spatial organization. I will argue that, with the very conceptualization of a public (political) and a private (religious) sphere, the spatial separation of public and private disappeared; more precisely, the private interiorized, became a mental conception, while the domestic space (traditionally private) became public. It is only in this configuration that “the privatization of public and the publicization of private” is possible. The “institutional powers that constitute, divide up, and govern large stretches of life according to systemic rules” (idem) are effective in this particular mode of spatial organization. To these institutional powers, I would add and emphasize the role of the particular modes of subjectivation and governmentality by means of aesthetics (discussed in the previous chapter). Practices of subjectivation based on aesthetic sensibilities and desire are telling of the spatial pervasiveness of different forms of power, and revealing of the mode of organization of this power. The following section will emphasize architecture and spatial organization as material expressions of modern scopic regimes of power. This mode of power contrasts with the shari’a requirements and shari’a ruled states’ modes of subjectivation. Fashion consumption renders visible this contrast.

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Visible Subjectivation Many have treated not only the spatial organization of modernity, but argued for the conceptualization of the modern as a spatial condition. Many authors directly relate space to capitalist socio-economic relations (Harvey 1985; Clark 1984; Elias 1994), showing how transformations in relations of production were paralleled by the structural transformation of space. Others have related space structuring to the configuration of political categories such as citizenship, human rights, etc. (Caldeira 2000; Holston and Caldeira 1998; Vidler 1978, 1995; Ross 1988; Young 1990). Furthermore, those who study both the imperial center and the colonial enterprise have explored the manner in which ideas about modernity are intimately linked with space formation, and with design procedures (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997); Wright 1991; Mitchell 1991). The emphasis falls on the political potential of design, and in the implications of the social practice of design at the level of individual human self-conception. Vidler (1978) argued that the Renaissance architectural projects for building streets originate in representations of ideal or utopian spaces, particularly theater scenes. Sebastiano Serlio’s projects from the 16th century were re-worked and used for the project of the streets in the later centuries. The invention of perspective implied major changes in the design of streets: “For the laws of perspective were not only those of illusion, of depicting three dimensions in two, but fundamentally the constructive laws of space itself. Thus the street, subject to perspective representation in the ideal theater, was transformed by this technique and shaped by it.” (Vidler 1978: 30).

In order to understand this transformation one has to do away with the Kantian idea of space as a priori. Lived space is a direct

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result of architectural design, and our spatial perceptions are influenced by the rules of this design. The operations of design and the construction of streets following the rules of perspective created the possibility of a vista point, and moreover, it made any point along the street a vista point. The rule of perspective centralized the role of visual perception, and at the same time de-centered the place of the perceiver in the case of transposition of a two-dimensional plan in three-dimensional construction. For instance, while for the representation of a street on paper the vista point is the place of the designer or of the plan viewer, once on a street built on such a plan, every place offers the same overarching perspective, combining the quality of the panoramic observer with the position of equal participation in the landscape-spectacle of the street. “The tragic street was thus the instrument of urban control and regulation, inserted at the will of the planner into a hitherto private realm. The streets of Fontana and the boulevards of Haussmann two and a half centuries later shared this common rule.” (Vidler, idem).

But, before the streets were projected and construed in this manner, architecture, following the advice of philosophers, came to regulate particular aspects or moments of life (e.g. industrial production, or sickness). Vidler follows the political transformation of space in France, starting with the philosophical ideas of the mid 18th Century and ending with the late nineteenth century (in the aftermath of the Paris Commune). A preoccupation with the geometry of space and spatial organization characterized the philosophy of Enlightenment. Diderot showed concern about the adequacy of the form of space to its function, a principle to be applied in the construction of factories. This mode of thinking about space came out of the Encyclopedists’

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concern with rationality and the rationalization of production. It is interesting to remark that in order to explain their concepts about the spatial organization of production, the Encyclopedists gave up the written word and used the rhetoric of images. This procedure of creating and using images that speak through themselves is twofold, once pertinent in order to better illustrate the theory of the space, and second because this new space is based on the idea of complete visibility, required in order to secure a harmonious surveillance of production. It is worth mentioning that the colonial encounter largely impacted the Encyclopedists’ project, orienting it towards the cataloguing of the other. Architecture gave a symbolic code to industrial enterprise, oriented both in the directions of surveillance and of communitarian life. The harmony of a society constituted of citizen/workers was produced in Ledoux’s plans for factories. The salt exploitation at Arc et Salins is maybe the most famous of his industrial projects that came to life. Hospitals and prisons (“therapeutic architecture”) were two other types of edifices to take advantage of the newly setforth precepts of space3. In a famous analysis of social order that has as its departure point the architecture of Bentham, Foucault (1979) seizes on the relation between one common occurrence and one powerful state institution: plague and the juridical apparatus. This relation is one mediated by and constructive of power. The dream of a disciplined society, in which prisons would be ultimately rendered useless, is based on the image of the plagued city, “traversed throughout with 3

Socialist and utopian thinkers of France (Fourier and his Phallanstery, Morelly and the “Code of Nature”) were all interested in the relation between the inhabited space and the habitus developed by people, in their attempt to find the formula for a perfectly organized society. Le Corbousier entirely embraced this idea in his modernist architectural projects.

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hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinctive way over all individual bodies – this is the utopia of a perfectly governed city.” (Foucault 1979: 198). On a small scale this principle is applied in the construction of the panoptical prison. Nevertheless, there are major differences between the plagued-town and the Panopticon. While the first is an exceptional case, the second is the disembodied, timeless principle of the functioning of power. It is a particular model of power that constituted the ulterior model of state organization, with the arrangements of the subjects in a visible constellation, a model that has as its ideal the eradication of dark or invisible spaces. The Panopticon’s functioning “abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.” (Foucault ibid. 205, emphasis mine). In his writings, Foucault always emphasized the relation between the mechanisms of power and the forging of the subject able to feel and resent the action of this specific form of power. Numerous critiques of modernity4 approach the subject of visibility, in both senses, that is the visibility as subject of analysis and the subject emerging from the social organization around optical ideas. This subject is endowed with certain qualities, and has a specific relation with power, that is, it establishes a reciprocity that places it in both a position of power and in the realm of powerless subjectivation. Ledoux’s salt exploitation, an industrial Panopticon, transforms the industrial space into a theater scene, and establishes 4

I have already mentioned most of the authors relevant to my study. I would like to add John Jervis’ name for his exploration of the modern (1999), in which he places the theatrical principle of spectatorship at the core of modernity.

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a relation between workers and the director that reminds Vidler (1995) of Rousseau’s relation of reciprocity in the social contract, expressed in the mechanism of elections. If in the Panoptical prison the relation is unilateral, in Rousseau’s ideal case the sovereign is under continuous scrutiny5 of his/her electors. Vidler traces the genealogy of the optical power and its corollary subject to the project of the Enlightenment, analyzing Locke’s theory of environmental influences on human behavior; Condillac’s and Helvetius’s conversion of this theory into principles of psychology; and Burke’s idea of “the sublime effect”; the author concludes that: The Enlightenment as a whole had placed the onus on the science and art of observation to reveal and instruct, to mediate between object and subject; the instrument of observation was the eye and its commanding quality – the faculty of vision (Vidler 1995: 54).

Since the visibility would secure the knowledge, and knowledge is at the basis of rational organization of communitarian life, the eradication of invisible spaces would ensure the construction of a harmonious society. Logically, this principle extended in architecture beyond the construction of special institutions to the reformation of spaces in the city and its transformation into a public realm, a movement that both invested it with political qualities, and disabled its capacities of political action by making it more accessible to forces of power (Vidler 1987, Ross 1988, Elias 1994) at the same time that it throws the subjects into the apathy of self and reciprocal contemplation (Sennett 1994). 5

It is not far from the truth to claim that the media created a situation closer to this ideal (Debray 1993).

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The mode of subjectivation of the Enlightenment is based on natural laws that apply both in exterior and in the domestic space. Total visibility is the higher principle that ideally governs the spatial organization of the modern institution. As Pamela Karimi (2003) observes: Since the development of new institutions in the late Enlightenment, the private/public spatial dichotomy in the West has broken down; as a result, public and private spaces in Western and Westernized cities have acquired similar spatial characteristics and have even become enmeshed. The prevalent dialectic of private and public allows people to define themselves simultaneously as individuals and as public citizens. In contrast, in some contemporary Muslim societies the division of public/private space is still arguably one of the most important features of spatiality and often centered on female body (Karimi, 2003: 14, emphasis mine)

The “enmeshing” of these spaces is both a condition and a result of the natural (institutional) laws that construct and partially govern the formation of the modern subject. I say partially because the subject formation takes place in a matrix of subjectivation in which the relation (sensorial, affective, cognitive (Warnier 1999)) with objects is its central characteristic. The efforts to create new citizen subjects were directed towards the organization of space and objects conceived to induce rational laws of governing bodies (read subjects). Desire has a central place in consumer culture and in the case of fashion practices in particular. Desire mediates subject construction and relations of governmentality. The 1960s (culminating with ’68 moment) meant the beginning of the emancipation from the “natural” laws – the bourgeois foundation of morality – that gave way to the laws of personal desire. Today’s forms of political orga-

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nization (many secular nation-states and the transnational politicoeconomic conglomerates) operate with a form of governmentality that combines the “natural” laws (of the market), their subject (the “citizen”) and the laws of desire along with their subject (“the good consumer” or “branded subject”). A complete secular citizen is one who has both of those characteristics “enmeshed”, just like the public and private spaces. As in Karimi’s example of space practices, political subjectivation is pervasive and includes (private) desire that has to be morally (publicly) controlled. Fashion practices (body/subject practices) reflect in great measure the spatial and political (in the larger sense) constitution of the social. Buying patterns are relevant for this constitution of social space. While European space is evenly regulated by (political) morality in public and private, in Middle East the separation inside/outside marked on dress (on body) allows the wearing of daring attire, and the survival (and revival) of avant-garde fashion in Europe.

Latent Orientalism and Feminist Critiques: Inside the Modern Middle East Many have argued (Bourdieu 1977; Sennett 1994; 1990; Ross 1988; Rosaldo, Bamberger, and Lamphere 1974) for the complementarity of public and private, and this dichotomy lies at the core of different understandings of the veil (Abu-Lughod 1986, El Guindi 1999). Scholars of colonialism have critically explored the political significance of this dichotomy, as well as its Eurocentric character (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Hirsch and LazarusBlack 1994; Stoler 1995). The scopic regime of power and its action on the reorganization of social and physical space is at the core of the feminist critiques

LATENT ORIENTALISM AND FEMINIST CRITIQUES 119 of Orientalism. The game of interior/exterior, of public and private, of political and civil, plays at the border that separates the two, where their significances are negotiated in terms of visibility. Anthropologists explored the implication of the new political categories that emerged along with the Enlightenment ideologies of separate spheres and their complicated intertwining (Rosaldo 1980; McClintock 1995; Fitzpatrick 1992). The negotiation of the borders between public and private is a social practice that itself informs the structure of this dichotomy. It implies uses of spaces and objects that gradually become socially perceived as borders. One of the best examples of these objects is the women’s veil. Although the veil is not central to my project, it is central to many feminist critiques of Orientalism because of its relation to the scopic regime of power described above. Thus, colonialism and the dichotomies created through a representation of the East are not only political, but also gendered and sexual. Yegenoglu (1998) is one of the voices that points to Said’s absence of engagement with “latent Orientalism”. Described but not analyzed in Said’s book, “latent Orientalism” refers not only to the gendered differences in the Orient and the sexual fantasies revolving around Oriental women, but also to the way in which the difference West/ Orient is represented in gendered terms. Thus in Western colonial narratives, the veiled woman stands for the non-western spaces that should open up to the gaze of the colonizer, and the difference West versus indigenous is imagined and concentrated on the woman’s body and/or its absence (covered by the veil). In this (colonial and post-colonial) discursive configuration, the presence of the veil is equated with the absence of women from public (political) sphere, because women’s bodies were not visible participants in the scopic regime of power. In other words, the veil meant a non-modern social space (Gole 1996), and indicated an otherness against which the Western self is constructed

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(Veer 1999; Mutman 1992; Al-Ali 2000). Up to this point, I have shown how this narrative is both present in, and questioned by, fashion practices in Paris and the Middle Eastern clients of fashion designers. Brand Orientalism is a general mechanism that distinguishes the bourgeois type of moral subjectivation from its others, be they from Middle East or from suburban England. Buying patterns indicate to some designers a similar mode of subjectivation among Middle Eastern and various other clients. Moving towards Tehran, the text will call into question this very type of separation between the modern West and its others. In past two decades, feminist studies of the Middle East have addressed and deconstructed this type of narrative that separates a modern West and a non-modern (Muslim) Middle East. There are two main approaches to this narrative: first, the historical study of “modernizing the region” from women’s perspective. During the colonial period, non-western locations addressed and shaped the modern project, even if they were not directly part of the colonies. Some scholars of the Middle East addressed the way in which new political configurations and new forms of citizenship emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how women were part of this modernizing project (Tekeli 1995; Gole 1996; Keddie 1999; Mitchell 1991). A second way of addressing and blurring the dichotomy between a modern West and a non-Modern other is through studying the recent women’s movement and mobilization in the Middle Eastern region. These movements may take secular or Islamic undertones, but they are all crystallized around the idea of women’s liberation and participation in the public sphere. (Moghadam 2003; Al-Ali 2000; Paidar 1996; Abu-Lughod 2001b; Joseph 2000). Thus, women movements in the Middle East directly re-

LATENT ORIENTALISM AND FEMINIST CRITIQUES 121 late to the modern construction of citizenship and participation, regardless of their (non)religious orientation. Both of these approaches show how developments in women’s political participation engage modern modes of subjectivation in a specific context and configuration of power relations, defined by patriarchy, religious domination, or secular projects. All these authors underline the importance of physical presence of women in different spaces of debate, be they public and literary, political, and scientific. Bodily mobility accompanies and (in)forms this presence. As Najmabadi (1993) underlines, the Iranian modernizing project at the beginning of the twentieth century was accompanied by the physical education curriculum in girls’ schools. The training of the body was a defining part of subject formation. All these critiques help us understand how modernity forms a repertoire of modes of subjectivation, rather than a unique model that is adopted or rejected in “non-western” locations. The intersection of this repertoire with local specificities configures in various “regimes of modernity”6 that emerge rather as rhizomatic occurrences (Deleuze and Guattari 1988) than as genealogic branches from a central modern root situated in the West. While presenting “snapshots of Islamic Modernity” Gole (2000) is aware of the danger of understanding modernity in non-western locations as “simply rejected or readopted”, and insists on an analysis of the critical adaptation of modern discursive and social practices in these contexts. Elsewhere Gole (1997) makes a fine argument concerning the kind of morality that an Islamic public space proposes, and how this may oppose modern ideals. Gole calls this morality a “communitarian morality”, that is, “a trait of societies in which modern individualism, individual conscience, confession, 6

With thanks to Teresa Caldeira for the suggestion

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and public exposure of the self have not dominated the structuring of the individual and social relations.” (p.72). She also observes how the new Islamic movements are not constrained by this very type of morality and combine in their practices and in their public manifestations the modern tools of self expression and individual conscience, which take modern aesthetic forms of manifestation (in her case through the autobiographical novel). Instead of juxtaposing snapshots, I will construct a narrative of social practices of fashion (a modern practice, an aesthetic form of self expression) in Tehran, from producers to consumers. This will highlight particularities of subject formation through fashion practices into a system organized by specific class, cultural, and religious practices. All these categories are arranged into a pecific constellation of power relation from which fashion is a constitutive part. Women movement and participation into the social life will become selfexpressed through the ethnography of fashion and body motions. The following chapter is an introduction to the atmosphere of Tehran’s fashion practices. It constitutes an analytic cartography of Tehran urban spaces and bodies that populate it through the lenses of fashion. It furthermore problematizes the distinction private/public in Tehran’s spaces, through taking in consideration a series of factors such as access to clothing, access to spaces, aesthetic choices, and fashion canons. All of these have a significant role in the configuration of urban spaces in Tehran. Similar approaches have shown various aspects of women’s mobility and power configuration in Islamic public spaces (Afsaruddin 1999). In her study on women wearing headscarves in Istanbul, Anna Secor (2002) emphasizes the role of spatial configuration of power in influencing the choice of veil wearing among specific socially positioned women. She introduces the concept of “regimes of .

LATENT ORIENTALISM AND FEMINIST CRITIQUES 123 veiling” which designates different modes of power configurations that contributes to the way in which women wear their veil. [W]e can best understand the socio-spatial experience of veiling and not-veiling if we consider the city to be comprised of different regimes of veiling, that is, different, spatially realized sets of hegemonic rules and norms regarding women’s veiling, which are themselves produced by different constellations of power. (Secor, 2002: 8)

While engaging Secor’s suggestion, in my ethnographic approach I discuss regimes of dress, rather than focusing solely on veil. I also consider that different social positions of women greatly influence the configuration of different “regimes of dress”, in Tehran and elsewhere. Thus, I would like to complicate the idea of choice, and to emphasize the dyamic character of subjectivation. That is, subjectivity emerges during the process of bodily engagement with these spaces, a process that transforms the regimes of dress, and the body/subject itself, through questioning and transforming the spatial hegemonic rules. All regimes of dress are part of the same matrix of subjectivation in urban Tehran. In the long run, I emphasize the mode in which fashion practices create the modern subject in Tehran. The meaning of modernity is differently used in processes of class distinction, and in discourses mirroring the post-colonial domination of Western representations of the other that I will call “self-othering”. Self-othering is the discourse employed to distinguish “Western other” from “non-Western us,”in which modernity is used as a divide line. I prefer this term to that of othering of the West, because the primary reference in the process is the West, against which a self that “lacks (modernity)” is constructed.

Chapter 4

Fashion and Aesthetic Authority in the Urban Spaces of Tehran Fashion is a nomadic phenomenon; clothing and designs circulate from place to place following internal rules of aesthetic and economic consideration that vary with the location. This field constitutes the intersection of a designated urban space with a general urban phenomenon (Simmel 1971), once again pointing to the tension between geographic and anthropological locations (Gupta 1997). As Laya, a Tehran designer, explains, fashion is del haste, that is “desire”; everything else is just clothing. Desire has many faces, and many of the modern industries are geared towards it. Fashion industry is linked to capitalist forms of production, and entails a series of social practices that organize body, time, space, and desire. Fashion is historically linked to modernity, and sartorial changes modernizing processes (both voluntary and unintended). In an attempt to read the social spaces of Tehran through the lens of fashion, I will describe the spatial configuration of modernity in Iran. This chapter focuses on the practices linked to clothing and fashion consumption, and the emergence of a particular conception of, and mode of relation with clothing and dress. While clothing is an eternal matter, fashion is a differently charged concept. Fashion and the modern individual are linked through a symbiotic relationship. The social practices of fashion constitute a source of authority in Tehran’s various social contexts, an aesthetic authority that organizes bodies, movements, time, and spaces.

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Fashion consumption has two major aspects constituted through social practices: first, the actual buying of the articles of dress, that is the procuring of the desired clothes; second, the storing and wearing of those. Economic regulations intervene in the process of dress importation, with direct implications in the social practices of buying (or obtaining) the sought-for commodity. At the level of wearing, fashion consumption in Tehran comes up against specific Islamic religious regulations of behavior and body exposure. Many rules of conduct in the public space of Tehran draw from Muslim principles of modesty, or hidjab, and they refer also to the separation of sexes and the restriction of body exposure. In Iran those rules are reinforced by the moral police – “pasdarha” – and by a form of pervasive social control analyzed in this chapter. Thus, the fashioning of oneself in public as well as in private work to combine different sources of aesthetic inspiration and authority in different ways, resulting in a specific set of body practices.

Modern Dressing in Iran “Dress matters”, as Tarlo (1996) has shown in detail, and during the period of colonialism it became the instrument of modernization policies, as well as a form of anti-colonial struggle and the affirmation of national identity. Iran, although not directly colonized, was no exception. It is difficult to write about Iran without waking up the ghosts of a variety of “isms”, from Orientalism to Modernism, passing through and obsessively lingering on in Islamism. The popular perspective on Iran is that after its period of modernization under the Reza dynasty, the Islamic Revolution gave way to a regime that attempted to crush its previous social “achievements.” This new regime marked the coming to power of yet another sumptuary law derived from shari’a, which specially targeted women: the imposition of headscarf - and/or chador -

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wearing in public spaces. For many Western eyes this meant the blocking of their own vision, blinding them to the social dynamics and transformations taking place beyond this visible obstacle (Adelkhah 1991). Iran, like any other place, has a long term dynamic that needs to be assessed to provide a background for contextualizing later developments. Dress regulations have been a central part of that dynamic. In the nineteenth century Qajar period, men’s headwear, believed to express allegiance to the Khalifat, was an object of dispute between the shi’a ulama and the dynasty in power (Baker 1997). The Khalifat was the religious/administrative authority based in Istanbul that represented the interest of the sunni Muslims. Iranian Shi’a clergy thought of the Qajar dynasty as subservient to the Khalif ’s interest, as the Qajar family was of Turkish origin. The twentieth century was one of a sustained polity of modernization understood as Westernization, and the Reza dynasty was its exponent. The Constitutional Revolution in 1904-1906 and the formation of the first Iranian parliament were the signs of the new era to come for Iran. The commercial classes from the bazaar and the shi’a clergy were the main actors in this movement that forced the Qajar shah to ratify the first Constitution of Iran in 1906. The adoption of the Constitution created a new political landscape. The political class’s desires to construct a modern society brought about a series of reforms designed to give a modern aspect to Iranian society: a key to this aim was sumptuary laws that targeted men’s attire. From the beginning of the early 1920s to the mid 1930s, Iran was swept up by a series of cabinet degrees, or parliamentary laws meant to regulate men’s dress. I will present these new regulations and their effect on the population and will continue discussing the effect on clothing of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, in order to in-

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troduce the ethnographic account of the emerging fashion industry in the early part of the the twenty-first century.

Clothing Reforms in Iran between 1920 and 1940 29 Bahman 1301 S./ 18 February 1923, the Iranian Parliament ratified a bill calling for “all civil servants, cabinet members, and parliamentary deputies” to wear Persian-made clothing during business hours. Seven month later, on 1 Mizan 1302 S./23 September 1923 the Minister of War (later to become Reza Shah) extended this reform to military personnel as well. Urbanites favoring modernization started wearing Western style clothes. The reforms in dress intensified after the coming to power of Reza Shah, in 1926. He promulgated a series of dress reforms that accompanied his policy of modernization, which created increased discontent in the population at large for various reasons (Yarshater 1992). On 4 Mehr 1307 S./ 26 September 1928 a cabinet bill stipulated that Persian men should wear Western style clothes. This law was part of the project of Iranian national identity construction. The uniform dress, in the Shah’s opinion, should have forged a feeling of national unity beyond the regional and tribal divide (Baker 1997; Chehabi 1993). A very important part of this law stipulated the replacement of the headdress with a uniform cylindric hat with a bill for government workers and schoolboys. Clergymen and leaders of other officially recognized religions were exempted. This new hat came to be known as Pahlavi’s hat, or kulah-e Pahlavi. The British ambassador of the period gave an expressive description of this hat: The Pahlavi cap is not prepossessing. It is nothing more than the round ‘Kola’ [kulah: a brimless cap] with the addition of a straight peak and, worn with a short coat, it makes the wearer look like a railway porter (Baker 1997).

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The law became effective in towns on 1 Farvardin 1308 S. /21 March 1929 (the first day of the Persian year.) One year later it became effective in villages. This reform met opposition from various social strata, not only from the religious authorities. Each group viewed the issue from a different perspective. The traditionalists, the clergy, and the tribesmen identified the Pahlavi’s hat as a source of discord; for the traditionalists, the turban was a sign of distinction. Moreover, the clergymen argued that the peak of the hat impeded the normal course of the prayer (Baker, ibid.). This is an important point, since it touches directly on the idea of body conduits: the Islamic prayer requires the believer to bow a series of times bringing the forehead in contact with the ground. While a turban is perfectly adapted to this procedure, a peaked-hat would interfere, unless one turns the bill backward. Praying five times a day is part of what constitutes being a Muslim, and in Iran prayers are often performed publicly (breaks in working day are reserved for prayer times). One could say that the kulah-e Pahlavi, unintentionnally turning the prayer ritual into an act of ridicule, could contribute to the creation of a different kind of (religious) subject, or even to the abandonment of prayer altogether. Clergymen expressed this specific worry. Nor did tribesmen welcome the new reform. The head-dress played, and still plays, an important role in the differentiation of a number of tribes and population groups in Iran1. Another serious complaint against the 1929 law came from the textile producers, who saw their trade threatened. The importation of ready-made clothing or the use of foreign materials had disastrous effects on the local producers. 1

In the Kurdish region of Iran I visited, in the town of Ourumieh, I was refused service in the Bazaar because I was wearing a headgear that identified me as a Kurd from Iraq. I was also stopped by the police on the same grounds.

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Some intellectuals and educated people rallied against these measures. On political grounds, they saw in these laws a new mode of limiting individual rights newly acquired through the Constitutional Revolution, and its modernization drive. They were against the system of fines and imprisonment that they thought of as unconstitutional, thus opposing a constitutional model of modernization to an autocratic pedagogical one. In spite of concerted opposition, on 6 Day 1307 S./ 27 December 1928, the Parliament ratified the law and made “the clothing regulations both legal and compulsory” (Yarshater, ibid. 809). Around the same period, Reza Shah felt his power sufficiently consolidated, and began limiting the autonomy to the religious authorities in an attempt to enforce his own cabinet’s power over the legislative apparatus. This tendency was displayed publicly through actions of the royal family meant to show how little control clergy had over the public space. In 1928, during a visit to the religious shrines in Qom, Reza’s wife appeared unveiled. One Ayatollah Bafqi, present at the Shrine, sent a message to the Queen: ‘If you are not Muslim why did you come to the shrine? If you are then why are you not veiled?’ When his message was ignored, Bafqi delivered a sermon denouncing the shah and inciting the crowd. In response, Reza Shah personally went to Qom, entered the shrine in his boots, horsewhipped Bafqi and had him arrested. (Zubaida 2003: 187, my italics)

One sees in this passage how the overt confrontation between the clergy and the new power was publicly displayed through dress and bodily attitudes. Not only had the Queen appeared unveiled, but the Shah horsewhipped the ayatollah and disregarded the religious codes by himself entering the shrine wearing boots. Despite increased public discontent Reza Shah continued his policies. After he visited Turkey in 1934, and met Kemal Ataturk,

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he became determined to accelerate his reforms towards modernization, and to generalize the Western-attire. On 16 Tir 1334 S./8 July 1935 a cabinet decree replaced the kulah-e Pahlavi with the full brim hat for all Persian workers. This caused new and serious upheavals in the population. In the same month, a resistance movement lead by Shaik Taqi Bohlul found refuge in Gowharsad Mosque in Mashhad. The authorities responded with arms, and between four and five hundred people were killed (Baker, 1997: 193). Although brimmed hats continued to be worn until the last years of Reza Shah’s reign, Persian men gradually gave up wearing headgear altogether, despite the traditional Persian view that it is unseemly to appear in public uncovered. (Yarshater, ibid. 809)

Up to that moment and despite the fashions that came from Europe, women were not the focus of Reza’s policies. Women in high classes or at the court were already wearing European hats and were participating in public gatherings. On 17 Day 1314 S./ 8 January 1936 at the graduation ceremony at the Normal Governmental School, Reza came with his wife and daughters unveiled and gave a speech about the necessity of women being unveiled. This gesture was preceded by a decree (1935) that forbade the veil in schools for both students and educators. Also in “summer 1935 women wishing to renew their identity documents had to report unveiled to the police” (Baker, ibid. 185) After the speech at the graduation ceremony, Reza promulgated a law forbidding veil-wearing in public spaces, with disastrous effects for a large part of the population. For many women, this law meant confinement to their homes for the rest of their lives. The law was followed by sustained repression:

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The great majority of Persian women had been brought up to consider the veil indispensable and to believe that exposing the head and neck was a sin. Furthermore, Persian men considered abandonment of the veil outright evidence of unchastity. [...] Women were beaten [by the police], their chadors and head scarves torn off, and even their homes forcibly searched. (Yarshater ibid. 809)

After the forced abdication of Reza Shah, in Shahrivar 1320 S./ September 1941, many women resumed veiling. Under the pressure of ulama that partially regained influence, Muhammad Reza, the new Shah, abrogated the law concerning the veil. Nevertheless, the years of forced unveiling left a deep mark in the society: veiling habits became not only indicators of education and class difference, but modalities of construction of those differences, through the motion conduits they imposed. For the entire period, access to education was practically impossible for women coming from traditional social environments. The veil as object, or better said, its imposed absence, greatly contributed to the perpetuation of illiteracy among lower-class women. It also created a divide between Westernized high classes and the rest of the population.

Moral Dress and the Islamic Revolution It has been argued that practices of modernization put in place since the Westernizing economic and cultural reforms of Reza Shah in the 1920s created persisting binaries at the level of the social dynamic, opposing the reformist liberal Westernized class to the conservative traditionalist classes. Modernization creates not only a dual economy but also a dual society, in which the wealthier Westernized classes speak a different language from the traditional or popular classes and have a very different lifestyle and cultural values (Keddie 1981:16).

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Developing this observation I will argue that there is a continous dynamic in terms of class distinction along the aesthetic definition of Western style. The Islamic Revolution introduced new forms of social mobility, creating access to superior education and jobs for women from traditionalist classes. That is, although a divide based on lifestyle and cultural values exists in Iran today (especially in the urban settings), Western style is appropriated and reworked by people in different class position, with different political orientation. This divide is the expression of different modes of engagement with the modern repertoire in Iran, rather than a reflection of a society constituted out of modern and non-modern polarized populations. However, media and journalistic political discourses picked up this dual image that presents the Iranian society in this manner, rather than accounting for the complex social reality within the country. After the Islamic Revolution political commentaries and new documentaries (e.g. Georges Thiery “Under the veil”) have the tendency to equate Iranian disenfranchised classes with excessive Islamic religiosity, while they present an allegedly secular (in Western terms) Westernized and reformist young student population. However, it is important to emphasize that even during the wave of modernization at the beginning of the twentieth century, the opposition to the forced modernization displayed on the body came from a variety of different social actors, including pro-modernization intellectuals. The Islamic Revolution emerged from a long term dynamic that reunited a variety of social classes in the struggle against the Shah’s despotic regime. The emerging educated classes, leftist intellectuals among them, linked their interests with the commercial class of the Bazaar (bazaari) who acted under the leadership of the religious authorities. The ulama were unhappy with the form of

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monarchic government with modern tones, and one of the main sources of conflict concerned the regulation of property. While shari’a required non-intervention of the state in land, property and contractual clauses, the Shah’s government introduced an agrarian land reform and also regulated the urban property in the 1960s. Also, contracts were regulated by public policies, which were not in agreement with the shari’a (or with the private interests of the wellto-do clergymen and bazaari) (Zubaida 2003). Leftist ideas were also disseminated to newly educated persons, in a context in which Muhammad Reza Shah was encouraging industrial modernization with the help of foreign specialists. The employment of foreign experts meant that the local universities, while offering higher education and training, could not ensure jobs to new alumni. (Digard, Hourcade, and Richard 1996). In this context, the Islamic Revolution erupted in the late 1970s as civil unrest; the Shah’s policies were associated with westernization, including dress regulations. After the first violent repression of the regime’s opponents on 8 September 1978, wearing nonwestern style clothing meant resistance to the Shah. For over a year the word kravati (tie-wearer) had come to be the fashionable term for disparagement for any intellectual and smart, clean clothing was seen as estekbar (ostentation) and thus unfitting to devout Muslim men, in revolutionary circles. The chador was rapidly becoming and acknowledgement symbol of rebellion against the established political order, although it did not necessarily imply support for the establisment of an Islamic state. Thus, after veiled women had been refused entry into university in 1977, it was symbolically donned as a sign of protest (against Pahlavi regime) by most female demonstrators in the following year. (Baker, ibid. my italics)

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With the installation of the new government led by Ayatollah Khomeini, women working in governmental positions were required to wear a form of dress cover. In the spring of 1980 big demonstrations against head coverings swept Tehran. A period of unrest followed. On March 13 1980 the Ayatollah announced publicly that women should consider it a moral duty to wear chador, and on the 5th of July all women in public and governmental employment were required to wear the headscarf. [T]he legal reform programme of 30 May 1981 (restoring Shari’a law), the wearing of hijab [...] was declared compulsory for all women over the age of 12, whether Muslim or not, non-compliance being punishable by one year’s imprisonment. (Baker, ibid. 188)

For the period that follows, studies about women’s dress in Iran are scarce; the subject itself is a delicate one. There are few serious studies on the subject in this period. Notable is Fariba Adelkhah book, Revolution Under the Veil (Adelkhah 1991) that shows how the veiling policy was a mode of empowering a large number of women, who were able to attend schools and became educated without the pressure of the family regarding their mobility outside home. This increased the social mobility among lower classes, and helped the formation of a new middle class, attuned to Islamic sensibilities. This is the period of the “normalization” of the Islamic Revolution, characterized by the professionalization of the Revolutionary class. The establishment of shari’a in Iran meant also the regulation of conduct in public spaces, a fact to which I will constantly return in the text. Among these regulations, here called Islamic, those that refer to bodily attitudes and to photographic representations are most important for our purposes Besides the dress code for women, the representation of an uncovered woman’s body in public is

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formally forbidden. A man’s body also needs to be covered, short pants being considered inappropriate. After the election of President Khatami in 1998, with widespread support from the young generation, the imposition of the dress code became more relaxed. Western media took up this subject and presented it as a sign of liberalization of Iranian society, more clearly its secularisation. Documentary films show the divide between the Westernized class and all others, and the recurrent theme is the attitude towards dress, veiling, and ultimately consumption that would indicate the divorce of an upper middle Iranian class from the Islamic “traditional” values. In the overwhelming majority of journalistic accounts, this divide (westernized/traditional) has the spatial expression of public/private space, where in private people (women of the upper classes) behave “freely” (read non-Islamic) while in public they would fall under oppressive traditionalism. The following account strives to undo this binary while approaching fashion practices in terms of their relation with bodies, spaces, places, and times of fashion in Tehran. While there is a clear difference between the Westernized population and the traditional one, their relationship can perhaps best be understood as a common continuum, with the difference most related to access to fashion objects and aesthetic choices, and economic discrepancies. It is therefore less related to “different cultural values” than to different practices that shape distinct subjectivities in the same overarching Islamic context. Beyond these aesthetic choices, issues of male dominance, sexuality, segregation of gender in exterior spaces may remain common concerns among a greater part of the population and cut across Westernised/ traditionalist separated categories. In my interviewees’ accounts, the term modernity appears both linked to clothing and to behavior. The two are not always coincident, that is, wearing modern clothes does not necessarily make

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you “modern”, and “being modern in Iran” (Adelkhah 1999) may have a completely different meaning than modernity in the West. Fashion practices are intertwined with other subjectivation practices in the complex social field of Tehran. Before proceeding it is necessary to mention that all of my interviewees were part of the upper middle classes and high classes of Tehran, which puts them in the “Westernized” pole of the continuum. Nevertheless, my fieldwork took me to a variety of Tehran’s districts, which will also appear described in the text.

Urban Spaces in Tehran Tehran is a metropolis of about 8 million intramural inhabitants, with greater Tehran accounting for as many as 12 million people. With no building older than one hundred and fifty years old, this city has a modern infrastructure of freeways, and its urban planning has been often characterized as chaotic. The modernization of the city accelerated after the oil boom in the 1970s, and many of the modern constructions have been accomplished in the last ten years, constituting the pride of the Islamic Republic. Spread on a great surface, Tehran offers a discontinuous space for the visitor. That is, not unlike Los Angeles or other city built primarily for car-users, Tehran has numerous locations for pedestrians (e.g. parks, shopping galleries, boulevards, plazas) separated by residential areas, and accessible only by car, due to the considerable distance between them, and to the particular construction style – often there are no sidewalks at all. This particularity turns out to be essential in the observations on fashion practices. Not being completely comfortable with the distinction of public/private (see Chapter 3), I will describe the variety of urban spaces in Tehran through dress practices, and only afterwards will I categorize these spaces. For the time being I will use the term

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“exterior spaces” will be used for all spaces outside private homes. It is broadly assumed that public and private spaces in Iran are two clearly separate spaces, demarcated by religious considerations: while in public the Islamic rules apply, in private we meet a different world – of the genre “Under the Chador, Chanel” (Sciolino 2000). Leaving aside the fact that the separation public/private is itself a problematic one, both of these spaces are pervaded by practices resulting from the combination of aesthetic, economic, and religious considerations, many times not separated from one another, thus rendering the border itself questionable. The public sphere (in the common acceptation of the term) of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a moral space. This space is not tolerant to manifestations of affection between a man and a woman (although it is common to see men holding hands together). (In an odd manner this reminded me of the little tolerance my Californian students have for what they call PDA -- Public Display of Affection). A strict regulation concerning exposure of body in photography for publicity requires that female bodies should not be displayed uncovered, and the headscarf must be worn. This type of morality is not reserved to exterior spaces, but also pervades private spheres. Its presence is directly dependent on the religious convictions of the persons implied, and their class position. For example, many times I have noticed women keeping their headscarf on in the interior of their own house, or even while sleeping. Thus, the border public/private in Iran may not be as easily traced (as some would have it) by simply asserting that public is dominated by religious impositions, while a sort of laic behavior characterizes the private realm. On the contrary, a morality that pervades both public and private is disputed, contested and rearranged in different context of class belonging, religious affiliation, or aesthetic convictions.

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It is important to contrast, if only briefly, practices of the Islamic Republic public space with other public spaces. For example, the “veil dispute” in France reveals the organizing principles of the Republican public sphere. The French principle of laicity requires the separation of politics and religion, and constructs public sphere as a religiously neutral space. Laicism manifests visibly in the public sphere, through the interdiction of religious symbols worn on the body. While most of the exterior spaces in France do not enforce the removal of the headscarf, the spaces-emblem for the Republic (schools, or the ID photos) requires that no religious symbols be displayed on the body, as a mark of individual neutrality in educational or political realms. At the same time, body exposure in itself is not as restricted as in the Islamic Republican space, which follows the principle of hidjab or modesty. Other Western spaces, that claim the principle of multiculturalism, as in England or the United States, are less restrictive concerning the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in public spaces such as schools. Other moral principles are more strongly enforced through a diversity of forms of social or police control. The non-smoking requirement in certain public spaces in California may be an example along these lines. A recent legal proposition in Louisiana seeks to forbid low-slung jean because, it has been argued, they expose adolescent’s underwear. The initiator of this bill, a Louisiana Republican Senator, seeks legal grounds in the law concerning the interdiction of public obscenity2 (www.bharattextile.com, accessed 05.01.2004). Following the explicit model of French Republican space, in the 1920s Turkey had undertaken reforms meant to secularize the public sphere in the effort to modernize the country. While the secular2

With thanks to Maurizio for pointing this out to me.

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ization of politics has not been completely successful, the Turkish authorities imposed a secular form of the public sphere through banishing the religious symbols displayed on the body. The Islamic political movements in Turkey that started in the 1980s are reshaping the definition of the public sphere, introducing new forms of expression, and revendications of religious identities (Gole 1997).

Dressing the Muslim Women’s bodies Dress is one of the strong markers of the Islamic morality. As a general rule, both male and female bodies are required to be integrally covered, but even though many men do wear long sleeves during hot summer days, the rule is most uniformly and strongly enforced for women3. Thus, there are some specific dress articles that one can find in any woman’s wardrobe in Tehran: 1. the chador – big piece of fabric that covers the head and falls around the body all the way to the ankles. Cut in a specific way, it is held in place around the body with the left hand, underarm, or even (though less commonly) in one’s mouth. Because of its need to be held in place by its wearer, the chador is highly restrictive to body movements. One imaginative and highly prolific fashion designer created a “chador – evening dress” to lessen this restriction: Look, look, just now! When my children came in (the students4), I see again the chador. Immediately I told them “ I have to make a chador for you not to put it here, not to do it like this (gestures of keeping the chador in place underneath the arm)”. I designed 3

4

For a detailed discussion on human body, movements, and dress rules in Iran, see Shahshahani’s article “Body as a means of non-verbal communication in Iran” (in press). During the visit at her home, two of her women students were present looking at the new dress models. Although in interior, they were wearing chadors, with beautiful floral designs.

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a chador... for example in Iran women have to wrap, they have to cover, when they are together with men and women [sic!]. I designed a chador, when you are together it is properly wrapped. But when you are going with the ladies and you can take it off, when you open it, it becomes a naked dress, evening dress. (laughs) ... (Mahla)

The secret of this model is simple. Instead of one piece of fabric, the “evening chador” has sleeves. This makes it a lot easier to keep it in place, to have one’s body movements less restricted, and to let it fall down on one’s back, in order to reveal the shoulders and the evening dress. The urban Tehran chador is black, but it should be noted that throughout Iran there is a variety of colors and patterns for this clothing item. Thus one can find beautiful flowery chadors as one descends from Tehran towards the South of Iran, in Esfahan or Shiraz. The black color is in fact the outcome of dress uniformization characteristic of urban conglomerations. While the chador is omni-present in South Tehran, populated by lower classes, it is seldom visible once one goes up towards the heights of Northern Tehran. 2. the maqnae – piece of fabric , usually black, brown or dark blue, sewn underneath the chin, and covering the head and the shoulders. It is the mandatory headdress for women working in the governmental or public institutions (e.g. bureaucrats, education personnel, professors, clerks). It is also mandatory for the TV speakers, as well as in the photograph on women’s identity pieces, including the passport. Schoolgirls and students also have to wear it during course hours, and on the campus. 3. the russari – is the equivalent of the foulard, the headscarf worn by many Muslim women, and which became the specific marker of Islamic women. Worn to cover the head, it is manda-

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tory in the absence of the maqnae. Fabric and colors vary. There are very different ways of wearing the russari. With or without knot, wrapped round the neck or loosely hanging on the sides of it, tightly closed around the head, covering the hair, or pushed back hanging only on the pony-tail, it is the minimum requirement for women’s head dress. Scarf ? now they wear it tied around the neck like this, from colored cotton... I think that with the scarves, as with the manteaux, when fashion comes in, and it is like a fashion to them, you see ALL the girls the same. (Neda, 28 years old, film scenograph)

Two days before my second visit to Tehran, on 17 June 2003, there had been a women’s march against wearing the headscarf. For two hours the participants did not wear their russari. It was a manifestation among others in the same period, which could be characterized as exercises of democratic forms of public expression of discontent. Although of no great consequence in the short term, these manifestations are elements of the local form of modernity, as it has been described by Fariba Adelkhah (1999) 4. the roopoosh or manto – compulsory in all exterior spaces in the absence of the chador, it varies substantially in color, form, or fabric quality. The mantoha (for plural) are a substitute of the chador, initially meant to hide the form of the body, just as the chador does. The most usual mantoha are black, brown or beige. Nevertheless, colors greatly vary, and they constitute distinctive markers of style. The extensive classification of mantoha shows their great variety, and their importance in the aesthetic organization of clothing. The mantoha are first classified by the cut of their collar (iaqhe). I could register six types of iaqhe, corresponding to six different forms: a) Iaqhe inglisi – “English style collar”, that is double collar.

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b) iaghe akhundi – “akhund style collar”, that is no collar. Akhund is the religious authority, also known as mullah. They wear the abba, a large over-cloth with no collar. The manto’s name is a direct reference to the abba. c) iaghe pirhani – “shirt style collar” , as the name tells us, it is the manto with small collar cut straight. d) iaghe shekari – “hunter style collar”, it looks like the shirt style collar, only it is bigger. The name is a direct reference to Safari style clothing. e) iaghe istade – “standing up collar”, is a straight collar that reaches all the way under the chin, like a turtle-neck collar of sweaters. f ) iaghe khargushi – “bunny style collar”, is a past fashion of manto, with long collars fallen on the chest. A second classification, in three categories, is made by the specific cut: a) tank (straight and tight), it follows the line of the body, and it is in fashion at the time of writing; b) kammar corseti that is tight waist, corset style, the name says it all ; c) goshad or the large mantos, which hide the body allure. Other important details follow as principles of classification, such as the place where the leg cut is made (chak): chake posht (cut on the back) or chake baqal (cut on the sides); the length: bolan (long) or cutak (short); or the belt (kammar): kammar dar (with belt) or bikammar (without belt). The above features may be freely combined, for example one may search for manto corseti, iaghe inglisi, bolan, bikammar. A special way of classification defines three types of manto by one word:

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a) Khofashi (bat style) made of a big piece of fabric, with no sleeves, but covering the hands, no collar. In fashion twelve years ago, it being then forbidden to wear anything but large mantos, it gives the wearer the allure of a bat. b) googooshi – manto kammar corseti, long or short, with the sleeves cut towards the wrist and attached with one butterfly knot. It borrowed the name of a famous Iranian singer of the 1970s, Googoosh, now living in Los Angeles. c) chini – meaning Chinese style, cut straight, collar mullah style, of an average length. In this extended classification one may find a variety of diverse references, ranging from geographic areas to famous entertainers. An interesting case is the iaqhe inglisi. Although the manto is a postrevolution acquirement, the English style collar is a form familiar to Iranian urban fashion, applied to the winter-coats, for example. Its familiarity is explained by the significant British presence in Iran before the Islamic Revolution. A certain aesthetic is attached to a particular geographic provenance, same as in the case of chini manto. The way in which the familiarity with the remote space is created differs from case to case. While the British had a physical presence in Iran, carrying on their bodies the particular aesthetic, the Chinese aesthetic is known mainly through movies or through commodities of this provenance. Immediately after the Islamic Revolution, the chador became a compulsory dress element. Gradually the manto appeared as an accepted alternative to the chador. In the first years of its social life, the manto was large and somewhat formless. In the following interview excerpt, Azadeh, a fashion designer from Tehran, remembers the gradual transformation of the chador to manto. The first years after the revolution it was almost the same [as before]. In parallel with the changing to Islamic political domi-

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nation, they launched the chador for women. Who? The new regime. But not all the women agreed with the chador. Some of them created a sort of chador with sleeves. It was really funny, it looked like a penguin... It was not practical, nor nice. After this I do not know, I was in prison for two years.

Azadeh continues her story and explains her surprise at the new aesthetic forms that entered the Iranian public space after the first years of the Islamic Revolution. At its appearance, the manto was a rather odd piece of dress, proposing a new aesthetic that combines the requirements of Islamic covering of the body with the modern urban life style; the mobility of the body for working women is a ‘must’ not attainable with the chador. Nevertheless, for Azadeh the new form of the clothes seemed rather odd, but the manto has been quickly adopted because of its practical character. When I entered in prison, I was wearing a normal dress for cold weather. In prison I was compelled to wear chador. When I came out, I saw that women were wearing a sort of manteau, black, long to the ankles, with a black russari. I was more used with the chador, because my mother always wore one, even before the Revolution. I was used to look at the women on the streets wearing chador, but not with manto. I did not know what it was. Something new for me. (Azadeh)

Although the large manto has been a requirement from the moment it replaced the chador, in the last three or four years shorter mantoha, tight, are becoming more popular among the young people: It is easier to wear tighter mantos nowadays. Before, we used to wear long and very large, but now you can see, outside in the streets girls wearing short mantos and very tight. (Neda)

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Thus, today one finds in exterior spaces of Tehran a ‘cohabitation’ of different mantos, and a large variety of dress manners, ranging from the black chador to the tight manto wore with brand name headscarves. Although the russari is, in European eyes, the significant element of dress in an Islamic context, in Tehran the manto is a more important site of political revendications. For the simple fact that the manto is a big piece of dress, it allows more variation in terms of cut, color, and fabric. Each of these modifications contributed to, and marked changes in the political landscape in Iran. The short, tight mantoha are simultaneous with the period of “liberalization” of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, coincident with the presidency of Mr. Khatami. Although the headscarf has a stronger meaning

Figure 4.1 Everyday scene in Qaem passage, one of the popular commercial centers in Tehran.

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in the European imaginary of Islam, the manto is equally, if not more, restrictive dress item. It is notable that during the abovementioned demonstrations of women against the wearing of the headscarves, women did not set aside the manto, in spite of the unbearable heat. The rusari is one of the elements that attract one’s attention, but may divert from other, more restrictive dress pieces like the manto or the chador. Either the very tight mantos, either the pataf trousers5, I think that is significant that we have learned how to live with all the existent imposition. I don’t know concerning the headscarf, but I think we are so used to it that we forget it. (Saba, Iranian student in Paris.)

Each of the small details counts enormously for the people who wear manto, and for those around. Nevertheless, some may question, as one of the interviewees, the limited possibilities offered by the dress code in Tehran. Saba continues her explanations: The stores became more intelligent, maybe because there is more attention to the way of dressing; they are waiting a little to see what is the tendency in fashion, and than hop! They make all the same things. I am really looking forward to seeing what will they invent next year. How can you manage with only two pieces, the manto and the foulard? We have had the fashion of very large manto, than the short and tight ones, what more can one do?

5

Fashionable trousers with a generous cut at the lower part of the leg, hence the name “patte d’elephant” or “pataf ”, meaning elephant foot.

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Spaces, Dress, Places In Iran, as in other parts of the world6, sartorial changes are political markers, and since the beginning of the Reza Shah modernization, each change in regime has been marked by changes in dress requirements. While before the active modernizing policy the infusion western clothing in Iran happened by way of traveling, and was sanctioned on religious grounds, after coming to power Reza Shah imposed a strict dress code for men and women alike, which included forced unveiling for women, and wearing of western suits and hats for men.Chehabi (1993) identifies this process with modern nation building in Iran. After 1981, the victory of the Islamic Revolution has been quickly marked by the imposition of the Islamic dress code in exterior spaces, the veil becoming compulsory for women. The people in Tehran do not equally invest in these spaces, and women’s dress is a sensitive marker of the different use of spaces. In fact, generally speaking, clothes are the physical bound between the body and the social space; they are a prime mediator of human relations; they construct a link between architectural context and the bodies that populate it. The feeling that one is “out of place” is mainly born out of the anxieties provoked by dress and style that is, by self-fashioning. Thus, “place” is a network of relations7 rather than a simple space and dress is one main element in the formation of a place. 6

7

Turkey’s politics of voluntary modernization in the XXth Century was marked by strict impositions of western dress codes. A century before, Europe marked the passage to the burgeois discipline of work with men’s three pieces suit. Mbembe defines a similar concept of place drawing from Michel de Certeau : “In fact, a place is the order according to which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. A place, as Michel de Certeau points out, is an instantaneous configuration of positions.” (Mbembe 2002: 260).

Figure 4.2 Tehran young chic, Spring 2003

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In the multitude of exterior spaces of Tehran, the wearing of headscarf and manto is compulsory, but there is a continuous negotiation concerning the “permissiveness” of dressing, negotiation that is definitory of a place. There is a relation between the space (home, the street, a commercial gallery, a coffee shop, or an art gallery), the dress, the company in which one may find herself, the moment of the day, and the bodily postures. This assemblage forms different regimes of dress. The street is the place most exposed to the gaze of others, and to undesired control. It is interesting to note that, while usually one thinks about the sidewalk of a big city as a space where one’s presence passes unacknowledged, in Tehran it is not the case. While walking in the city, one is surprised, if not disturbed, by the insistence of the gaze in others’ eyes. Both some of my Iranian women interviewees, and my French women colleagues talked about the unpleasant pressure they feel on the street, even if they are dressed completely in conformity with the rules. The multitude of glancing eyes on the sidewalk transforms it in a diffusely controlled space. I wondered many times about the emphasis on the expression of others’ eyes, and I have to recognize how I, on more than one occasion, found myself bothered by the insistent looks on others faces, in spite of my efforts to ignore them. In her book on Beauty Salons, Ossman (2002) observes how reciprocal control through gaze functions as an organizing principle of the public spaces she studied. The look on others’ faces is a source of constant control of one’s own appearance and actions. According to Shahshahani (in press), concern about others’ judgments is an emotion that explains social behavior in Iran, and it constitutes a strong control mechanism with political consequences. Hamid Naficy argues along the same lines, stating that in Iran and other non-Western locations the construction of self is “not fully individuated or unified as it

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is purported to be in the West, but is thought to be familial and communal” (Naficy 2003: 139) (See also Chapter 5). He pushes forward the analysis, concentrating on the grammar of looks. The author argues that, in Iran, a particular mode of self-constitution, which revolves around the question of modesty as social practice, accounts for a dynamic of averted looks in gender interactions. Due to the sexual tension present in any gendered interaction, direct gazes are avoided, securing thus gender segregation even in un-segregated spaces. It also constitutes a system of reciprocal surveillance based on “controlling the look and being controlled by the look”(Naficy ibid. 140). The author argues that the specific difference of this type of control from that imagined by Bentham and explained by Foucault is the reciprocity implied in the exchange of glances. While Naficy basis his analysis on gender dynamic in film representations, the exterior space of the street in Tehran engages a similar dynamic, with an emphasis on surveillance and control of women’s bodies. This emphasis, I will argue, is the result of new forms of political subjectivation in the Islamic Republic. This point is exemplified with a series of ethnographic observations. A woman in her late twenties (Mahtab) explained to me the way in which the dress code was imposed in exterior spaces immediately after the Islamic Revolution. Because during the first years of the revolution, people my age, or maybe older, would come out on the street and surveyed other people, really strong. If you would have little hair out of your rusari, or red painted nails, they would arrest you. If we are thinking now, we do not know how we could live this way. We forgot. And there was a very strong propaganda: anybody could impose the Islamic code on the street. “Do good deeds, and stop the evil”, or “Commit the right and Forbid the Wrong”.

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In this passage one can see the strictness of the code; each sign of feminine aesthetic (painted nails, hair) was considered an offense to the new established order and its good morals. The repressive apparatus just in place would appeal to the new sense of citizenship in order to enforce and maintain the order. The appeal addressed to all citizens “Do good deeds and stop the evil” is a subtle mode of empowering the people through their participation in the control apparatus. In this manner power is diffused into the social body, a power that, at the same time as it represses certain habits, produces its very subjects: new types of citizens. Further on, Mahtab talks about the new apparatus in place, the official patrols that survey public spaces: There were night patrols of the committee, with cars painted around in green. Or [there were] three women with chador, arresting women, or men to arrest men. We all lived through this, and the propaganda really entered in the head of the people, that today we do not know where this is coming from, but it really entered in the morality of people that now are used to judge others. We became accustomed to judge others all the time. There has been only five years since this has stopped .

There are some interesting elements showing the complexity of the ways in which the new order was established: the cars with green insignia, signs with direct reference to Islam, green being the color that signifies goodness and life8; the segregation of sexes during the process of surveying and arresting, a proof of the generalization of this segregation in all sectors of life. The modern panoptical mode of surveillance, impersonal and embodied by the new moral police systematically actualized and integrated modesty and reciprocal surveillance into its own body. The new morals and the 8

See below for a discussion on the color significations.

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“habit of judging others” appeared in the population, and diffused through daily practices, thus giving birth to a new type of control, legitimated through the modern form of participant citizenship. While this may be more satisfactory than a only culturalist explanation which would emphasize solely the tradition of modesty in Muslim contexts, it should be understood as an element within a larger context. As many studies point out the question of gender and citizenship in the Middle East is traversed by the overarching patriarchal hegemony (Joseph 2000). The Islamic Revolution in Iran gives the patriarchal domination in Iran the modern form of citizenship. Through the family code, Hoodfar (2000) argues, women are relegated the place of second class citizens, impeding thus their empowerment by means of other achievements (i.e. education and social mobility). However, through its very modernity, the Islamic regime in Iran gives women an array of forms of contestation of the hegemonical patriarchy (Paidar 1996). The different dress regimes in Tehran are partially expressions of the patriarchal power dynamic with regard to women’s empowerement. The intensity of this control varies in different regions of the city. For example, in the streets of Northern Tehran, or around the commercial galleries frequented by middle and upper classes, one may expect that the pressure of another’s gaze be less intense or differently charged. People may look at each other to “check out” the new fashionable styles, not to mention the search for a suitable partner. Once one moves towards the South, in the residential areas of lower classes, chador-wearing is rather the norm, and the gaze is heavy and insistent. Incidentally, in the South the religious observance is more frequent. The imposed segregation between women and men may also contribute to the persistent insistence of looking. And it is notable that in the north this segregation is less

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enforced, one may find more spaces to mingle, such as shopping galleries and cafés. On my first visit to Shah Abdel Azim (a famous neighborhood in the South), a friend residing in Northern Tehran accompanied me. We were supposed to meet up with her sister (Sybil) and some of her colleagues. My friend was wearing a light-colored though large, manto, and sandals. At the moment we descended from the taxi the deprecatory gaze of men and women alike struck me. Although I somehow expected this, her sister’s reaction at the moment we met took me by complete by surprise. After she glared in awe for three seconds, Sybil started admonishing her sister at length for her manner of dressing: “how can you come like this in Shah Abdel Azim?! Are you out of your mind?!” Sybil acted in concordance with the specificity of the space. Had we been anywhere in the North of the City, she would have rather admired the clothes of her sister. Sybil and her friends were themselves dressed in rather large and colorless mantos, brown cotton pants, and sport shoes. The most scandalous fact about my friend’s dress was the naked feet, and the visible painted toenails. Feet are one of the single visible parts of the body once one wears a chador, hence they are invested with erotic signification. One may note the similarity with the Romantic period in Europe, when thin ankles were symbols of beauty and eroticism, while long elaborate dress covered the rest of the body. The degree of body-covering varies with location but also with the company present. Each time I have met one of my future interviewees, mainly in cafés, she was making a gesture of rearranging the russari, taking it off for a second or two, time enough for me to admire her hairstyle. The gesture was repeated along the conversation. I have observed the same manner among other women sitting in coffee shops, and restaurants. An episode that took me by surprise occurred during an outing with several friends in Tehran,

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Radis a young man, and Irandokht a young woman. Radis was driving, and we listened to his choice of music: Iron Maiden; while on the freeway, Irandokht let her rusari fall on her shoulders; Radis discreetly but firmly asked her to put the headscarf back on. At first blush I wondered if there were more than a friendship relation between them, but found out that there was not. On later occasions, I have again seen Irandokht uncovering her hair in taxis but in these instances the driver did not react in the same way as Radis. One may give many interpretations to Radis’s gesture. The most obvious being that he was afraid of, or rather that he was trying to protect his friend from, a possibly unpleasant encounter with pasdarha. I later came to understand that that was not the whole story. It is interesting to think about Irandokht’s gesture in terms of the particular contexts in which it had been repeated. One is Radis’s car, a private bubble moving on a public freeway. The second is a taxi, a “place” that offers the same privacy as a private owned car, but with the added anonymity of relations within. Radis acted as a source of male authority in a familiar place, while the diffuse authority in the exterior spaces of Tehran was less present in the relative isolation of a taxi moving 70 km per hour. Although the taxi driver may have glanced with reproach in the rear-view mirror, once or twice, his gaze does not have the same weight as that of the hundreds of eyes one confronts on the street. It must be noted that Radis has no objection to Irandokht’s unveiling in private homes. But I have also noted that in similar situations, familiar men alert their women friends or relatives in the event that the veil fall off9. At the same time, I have met individuals who, in my presence, 9

In a study on veiling of Tuareg men, (Murphy 1994) observes how in situations of relative anonymity the veil is worn very loosely, while it is strictly enforced among the in-groups. As in the case exposed here, the ingroup authority is easier to exercise.

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would keep on their rusari, regardless of whether the space was exterior or interior (e.g. homes). One notable case is a student I have seen on successive occasions. After we had seen each other three or four times in different contexts, she stopped wearing her rusari when with me, but kept her manto on. She later confessed that she does not consider her body beautiful enough to be shown. Space and company are thus important elements in the way women dress, and, differently from men, the control of their bodies through dress is stricter. As Neda said, attention to others is what defines one’s mode of behavior and dress. While talking about dressing, as she explained to me regretfully, she was unable to wear all she wants at all time. My tentative question was tellingly interrupted: A : Are there any places in which you can... Neda : Be free ? I suppose you can in your own community. I mean I have some good friends, and they have been abroad, and they have similar thinking, I mean ... We meet at our places, we have gatherings, not parties, I am not one of those partying all time, we just like to seat around, and talk, yeah... good people.

Dressing and freedom are many times associated in discourse, but not in the simplistic formulation that “fashionable Western dress equals freedom”. Instead, for example, freedom of movement for women in exterior spaces may mean dressing for invisibility, as Adelkhah (1991) shows in her exploration of veiling practices after the Islamic Revolution: veiling offers women the possibility to move rather freely in the exterior spaces. It thus gave a lot of them the possibility to take up jobs outside their homes, since the male authority figure of the family could not object anymore to their leaving the house. The issue of being invisible as a means to be free in exterior places came out repeatedly in connection with clothes throughout my conversations. “Dressing down”, in faded colors, or

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in conformity with the Islamic moral rules, grants women the liberty of passing through places without being noticed, receiving impolite comments from passers-by, or the risk of being stopped and questioned by the pasdarha. Thus, invisibility gives a general feeling of security, necessary to the freedom of movement for women in different regimes of dress in Tehran. It is important to observe that police checks for dress-code enforcement have decreased compared to the years immediately after the Islamic Revolution. The structure of different dress regimes is characterized by a diffuse set of norms of proper dressing emerging from the practices of each place in the city, unique to the particular people occupying that space, their class position, moral concerns, and aesthetic convictions. In fact each place has its own (moral)

Figure 4.3 Women on the street in Northern Tehran.

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definition of what is appropriate, and “freedom” is constructed in direct relation with this definition. Even more so than the moral police, the daily practices engrained in every place constitute a tool for surveilling women’s dressing habits, which is cast as the ultimate expression of the place’s morality. Desires for the freedom to move about freely and to wear what one desires often come into direct conflict in a context where the freedom to move is bound up with the necessity of dressing against one’s desire. Dress, morality, and space are thus intertwined in the definition of a place. Due to the diffuse control of exterior spaces, and to the desire for mobility that is achieved through invisibility, women’s dress colors are reduced in their specter. Saba: Here we prefer faded colors, because there are many restrictions, and we are wearing a lot of black because it is less in the gaze of others, it is less visible. Anyway, in the last years this changed. A : Yes, I have seen colored things. Saba : Not really colored, but rather brown, beige, crème, greengray... you do not really see colors.

While my first sojourn in Tehran began at the end of the winter, my second one started in full summer. In spite of this I have been surprised by the limited, if any, variation in the colors of women’s dress on the street, from season to season. However, oher regimes of dress permitted seasonal changes marked on dress’s color. In Tehran trendy boutiques, commercial spaces, restaurants and coffee shops are closed spaces, mall-like constructions called pasaj (from the French term). These are exterior spaces with a specific dress regime. While on the busy streets of Tehran it is less common to see broad color variation in women’s dress, such variety is often encountered in the pasajha. The moral police rarely enters these

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spaces. Some commercial galleries developed their own system of surveillance/protection. Women (and seldom men) employees of the gallery, dressed “in civvies”, may approach other women who may be too “daring” in exposing their hair or legs. Without the threat of arrestat, they recommend a rearrangement of the garment and a lowering of voices, if this is the case. This “light” form of surveillance protects the space for undesirable moral police controls that may end up in closing off of the commercial space. The pattern of clothing and dress’s colors can be understood in light of urbanization in Tehran. Most people who tend to frequent these spaces are part of the middle or upper classes of Tehran, and generally own a car, or can easily afford a private taxi. The ability to move from, and through private enclosures (apartment, car) to the desired destination, allows one to avoid more restrictive regimes of dress, and thus to experiment more freely with ones clothing. Like the Parisian arcades project that created spaces for the projection of the bourgeois fantasy, and for the subjectivation of the emerging bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century (Benjamin et. al, 1994; Buck-Moors, 1991), the commercial galleries in Tehran are spaces of subjectivation for middle and upper classes through the exercise of consumption and attitudes associated with Western style. They are also spaces for exploration of the margins of the overarching patriarchal state project, within the same modern project of the Islamic Republic. Mitra, a young woman in her late twenties, complained about the impossibility of wearing her nice blue manto while going alone through Azadi Square, because there are many “workers” (amalleh). I asked her what does she meant by “workers”, and she answered: “you know, somebody can be a doctor, but still be an amalleh in his mind”, thus implying the degree to which class is seen as engrained and consequently, the necessary correspondence of social attitude

Figure 4.4 Everyday scene in Golestan passage. Note the replacing of headscarves with hats, and that of the roopoosh with a poncho.

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to social class. Class, taste, and tolerance to women’s clothing style are intermingled. In the summer of 2003, the fashionable color for manto was beige, while next summer white and light blue mantoha were popular. To this point the intertwining of human relations, space, and class in the construction of a place marked by women’s dressing comes into view. Based on an acknowledgement of this dynamic, a classification of spaces is possible. Four exterior regimes of dress define four categories of exterior spaces: the exterior spaces of effective surveillance, in which most of the women prefer to dress for invisibility (i.e. streets, shared taxis, public transportation, and parks). Secondly, and somewhat in opposition to these, are the

Figure 4.5 Choosing the fashionable headscarf. Note the contrast between different colors and style of the roopoosh

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spaces of relative decreased surveillance such as private taxis, coffee shops, commercial galleries, or cinemas. Circulation through these enclosures partially protects one both from the pasdarha surveillance and from the diffused social control. Third, institutional environments (school campuses, banks, tribunal, television, etc.) which usually have a special dress requirement, as previously discussed. The fourth type of exterior space is a special category of segregated space, or venues reserved exclusively for women: women’s gym halls, swimming pools, etc. In addition to these, I have identified three types of interior dress regimes definitory of interior spaces, such as private fashion

Figure 4.6 Shopping scene; note different headscarf positions of the women in the picture.

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showrooms, private parties or reunions, and the everyday inside life. The categorization of spaces chosen reveals the different levels of tolerance towards women’s dress, and the multiplicity of factors informing women’s choices regarding their dress. The degree of familiarity with others sharing a space often shapes the women’s revealing or covering of the body. Familiarity does not however always function in a straightforward way, but rather depends on the context within which it exists. For example while in an interior space familiarity may contribute to taking off the rusari and mantoha, in exterior spaces a familiar male authority may impose the “correct” dress. Obversely, the presence of unfamiliar figures in private spaces may oblige covering, while at the same time the absence of familiar persons in an exterior space may allow more freedom of movement (e.g. less imposed restriction). It is also notable that exterior spaces of relatively decreased surveillance are also generally spaces of consumption. Urban culture, as it was first defined and described by Simmel (1971) is characterized by annonymity and consumption. Consumption in Tehran carries the message of modernity, and dress is the material link with a cosmopolitan imaginary. All spaces of decreased surveillance are not however necessarily also spaces of consumption, and reversely, not all spaces of consumption are spaces of relatively decreased surveillance or anonimity. On the Tehran’s North-South axis, the intensity of diffuse patriarchal social control varies. In the South of Tehran, the diffuse surveillance and patriarchal social control increases greatly (i.e. the Bazaar, albeit a commercial space towards the South, has a regime of dress similar to the busy streets rather than to shopping galleries of the North). Class, religious attitude, taste, location, company are some of the many elements that re-organize space, thus challenging any attempt

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to clearly demarcate and contrast exterior spaces as “controlled” and the interior as “free”. That is because the rules against which this “freedom” defines itself discursively do not exclusively apply to exterior spaces nor are they inapplicable to interior spaces. Rather, the notion of “freedom” cuts transversally through these spaces; because the modalities of surveillance and control within the spaces vary; and persons incessantly traverse these spaces, cutting across the imaginary and material borders, carrying on their bodies both the expression and the subversion of the patriarchal domination that claim legitimacy from Islamic Republican citizenship. While driving with a woman friend for the first time, she showed me the backseat of her car. I saw three different headcovers, a maqnae, a dark headscarf, and a light one. She explained to me that in the same day she has to be in different places and she prefers to be prepared for each of them. These dynamic regimes of dress described above, definitory of Tehran’s urban spaces that combine different types of surveillance and control, are all expression of the intersection between a repertoire of modernity (fashion practices as aesthetic forms of self-expression) and a specific configuration of power that combines patriarchy and state control. This can be conceptualized as the matrix of subjectivation in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Fashion, Time, Consumption While still in Paris, my friends and colleagues were almost always surprised hearing about myresearch subject: “fashion in Tehran!? Is there such a thing?” Once I arrived in Tehran, some of my interviewees had similar reactions. A young designer (Said) told me he is working in a domain that does not exist. Said insisted that, because of the restrictions in place, one may not talk about “real” fashion here. And what is fashion after all? In the words of my interviewees, fashion is often equated with modernity:

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Fashion! Means fresh, means new! Something different from the past. Means modern. Many different meanings. (Mahla, designer), or in a more pragmatic definition : Fashion ? Great ! (laughs) Love it ! You know, Johnny Galliano, I like his style... Or Vivienne Westwood, I like her and her work. Some other ones, I cannot just think now. Victoria Secrets (laughs). Underwear, I just love underwear... (Neda, scenograph).

In this excerpt there is a sum of characteristics that link fashion and modernity. First, there is the temporal quality of fashion, as expressed above: “something different from the past”. Mahla opposes the modern present and its ever-refreshing fashion to the “traditional” past. Another characteristic of fashion implied is a diversification of styles. In this formulation, fashion requires a variety of forms of expression, all catalogued and labeled in a system of categories, not unlike the modern modes of scientific classification. It is very likely that the seeming monotony in exterior dress (e.g. the seeming uniform aspect of the mantoha, and the uniformity in colors imposed mainly by the urban culture in Tehran) contributed to my interviewees doubts about the existence of “fashion” in their city. This doubt can however also be considered in the light of the equation of fashion with modernity (both in theory and in everyday discourse), and the confinement of “modernity” to Western spaces. This is the type of discourse that falls in the category of “self-othering”. A widespread argument in fashion theory links the creation of the modern individual with the emergence of a new social phenomenon that later became known as fashion. The historical process of modernization, as exposed by Elias (1994), and the creation of the public space as a scene (Jervis 1999), brought about a new form of the individual, characterized by, among other things, the use of fashion as an expression of individuality (Sennett 1994; Simmel

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1971). The switch from dress to fashion is both simultaneous and intimately linked with new ideas about the modern individual. The modern individual being a person able to participate in public life, frees her/himself from the constrictions of traditions, and live in the present, oriented toward the ‘progressive’ future. This particular relation with time, anticipatory that is, is present both in the processes of creation and consumption. Creation anticipates desire, while consumption searches to anticipate creation; generally speaking, the fashion-oriented individual is aware about what will be a new trend, and through consumption s/he expresses this anticipation. For the argument here, it is important to emphasize two aspects of fashion: its historical and discursive link with modernity, and its capacity (and necessity) to introduce a specific practical calendar, which expresses an anticipatory relation with time and desire. In Tehran the obligation of observance of hijab, or modesty, is constantly reminded in exterior spaces, with banners, stickers, bearing inscriptions reading “hidjab is dignity”. One of the most poetic of these inscriptions hangs on the wall of a chic coffee shop near the Vanak commercial center: “the veil on a woman’s face is like the drops of water on a rose”. However, Tehran is a cosmopolitan, interconnected city, part of the global scircuit of images ad commodities. Satellite TV broadcasts, the internet, travel abroad, and the seasonal visits back and forth to relatives from the Iranian Diaspora make up some of the innumerable sources of desirable images of dress, fashion, and body aesthetics. The clothing market in Tehran both creates and adapts to the desire of its consumers. For ready-to-wear clothes there are about twelve chic shopping galleries (pasajha) in Tehran, each with a variety of boutiques carrying a range of brand names, from: Esprit, Mango, Zara, and Levi’s, to Armani, Yves Saint Laurent, and Pierre Cardin (!). Local brands are in less demand by women shoppers. There are five main local

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brand names for women’s ready-to-wear, listed in order of their quality (as conceived by the owner of an Esprit boutique): Yakend, Golchineh, Aryan Jeans, Iran cotton, Iran tafteh. Besides fashionably cut mantoha, these brands also offer various clothing articles, from trousers to tops and jackets. For men, the two famous local brands are e-cut and Hakoupian. Foreign brand name boutiques have a special status among shoppers. Untill March 2002, Iranian economic laws, conceived for the protection of internal producers, forbid the importation of any finished clothing product for commercial purposes. The quasitotality of ready-to-wear bearing foreign names (mostly produced in Turkey), are introduced on the internal market in a clandestine way. The two main ports-sources of foreign clothing are Istanbul and Dubai. While window-shopping in the Tajrish passage, I entered a store that had on display, besides the usual roopoosh and jeans, some turkeman fabrics and a handmade bag similar to those I have seen in the Joomeh Bazaar (the Friday Flee Market). The boutique owner recognized me. I was surprised, because I did not remember our meeting. Even more surprising was that, as he explained “we were in the same airplane coming from Istanbul”, a trip which took place six months prior to this meeting. The recognition prompted our conversation about my project, his business (which he was eager to discuss), and a pair of trousers I was interested in buying. He (Reza) was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, two hip rings on his fingers, and remains the only person I have seen in Tehran to have his eyebrow pierced. Since Reza opened his business six years ago, he has gone to Istanbul on a regular base, every three to four months, in order to choose the clothing he wants for his boutique. Besides the usual jeans, t-shirts and tops, he buys a number of mantoha. Reza (and the other vendors) have to give special orders for the

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mantoha, so to fit Iranian standards. “The Turkish mantoha have shorter sleeves, and we cannot sell them here. So we order special for Iran, with long sleeves.” It is interesting to remark the similarity with the policy of Parisian designers, who have to adapt their creations to fit the standards of their Middle Eastern clients, with regards to the degree of body covering. All the roopoosh Reza sells are made in Turkey, including the ones that display the brands Mango and Zara. But, as he further explains “the Zara Mango mantoha are kare batchahaye irani” that is “Iranian kid’s work”. He means that the models are ordered by and for Iranians to the Mango and Zara workshops. For this reason, the prices are quite high, comparable to Western prices, and they cannot therefore afford to order too many. While the Turkish brands offer discounts for buying large quantities, the two Western brands do not offer wholesale pricing. The time period between purchasing the clothing to their arrival in Tehran is approximately three weeks. Having been given the restrictions on clothing importation, there are two methods used to purchase and import clothing. The first is to personally buy the clothes, and give the packages to persons in transportation networks in Istanbul. From there, the clothes are loaded into buses or trucks, and brought to the Iranian border. Caravans of donkeys transport them across the porous border (through the mountains) where they are received by the Iranian counterparts, and brought into Tehran. The price of this transportation makes up 35 % of the value of the clothing at the time of purchasing. This modality is risky, and not Reza’s preference. The risk of having the clothes seized by the border authorities is quite high, and, although Reza was “very lucky” up to now, a neighboring store had their transport seized four times in the last two years. A way to reduce this risk is to rely on the transportation network for the actual buying of the clothes. Although this increases the costs of the order, it does not

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endanger the buyer’s capital in the case of transport seizing. For this alternative method, Reza goes to Istanbul, chooses the clothing he wants to bring, and gives the order to one of the persons in the transportation network. They buy the clothes at their own expense, and bring them to Tehran. At the moment of the arrival, Reza pays the value of the order, plus 45-50 % of this value. In this way, Reza, and other boutique owners, manage the risk by adding 10-15% to the cost of their order. A young man is bringing us hot water in plastic disposable glasses and two tea bags with some pieces of hard sugar in a plastic bag. We sip the tea, and watch the clients entering the store. The times I passed in different boutiques revealed a common shopping pattern among women clients. Women come in groups of two or three, sometimes larger; mother-daughter couples are very common, and in these instances, it is usually the daughter who chooses the clothes. The client-vendor interaction seems to be quite standard: the woman asks for a model; the vendor shows her a variety of models, and if she chooses one, she asks for the price. After she has tried on the clothing (and if she is interested in purchasing) she again asks for the price, thus entering in the informal price negotiation. The vendor asks another vendor or the buyer herself “chi goftam?” He recalls the initial price, and then offers a reduced new price. I tried on the trousers I had asked for, and asked their price. Reza said “1 200”, the equivalent of $ 15 (it was the sales period). I said I would buy them, even though they were a little too long. His helper immediately rolled the pants on the right size and took them away. Every commercial gallery has some spaces, usually hidden from the public circuits, where two or three workshops make the necessary modification to the ready-to-wear clothing, shortening sleeves or trousers; all this work is included in the selling price.

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While the trousers were being altered, we continued our conversation. Reza told me about the rules that are in place for opening a boutique. One of them is to not display an English name (that is a name written with Latin alphabet10). “Here in this passage, they closed three stores because of their name.” Police presence is usual, and the agents check for the complying of the dress to the existing codes (which are mostly contextual and arbitrary). Thus, Reza explains, in the beginning of the summer (when students commemorated the 1999 riots in Tehran through street manifestations) police came and said that white mantoha are forbidden. The vendors were required to remove the white mantoha displayed from their stores or risk having their boutique closed. Later in the summer, the political tension decreased, as did the rules, and the white mantoha reappeared in boutiques and on the street. We finished our tea by the time the trousers were completed. I put them on to find that they fit perfectly. I asked again for the price. Reza asked his partner “chi goftam?” and turned to me and said, “for you 10 000” (about $ 12). I payed, we exchange phone numbers, and arrange for a trip in the Turkmen region in order to buy traditional textiles. He likes them a lot, and they sell well in Tehran. Reza says that he is somewhat bored by the saturation of the market with Turkish ready-to-wear. He considers changing his focus towards Thailand, to import clothes from there. They are less expensive, and the offer a different, more exotic style. This would be an interesting development to follow, since it would somehow mirror the diffusion of taste from high classes preferences for 10 One remarkable thing, among others, is that the Latin alphabet is called English; in the popular imaginary, English language is the standard of any foreign country, and I was asked not only once if in Romania (my country of origin) the official language is English. Many times this question refered to the alphabet we used, the Latin alphabet in fact.

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Indian styles, to the middle classes, ready-to-wear European-stylevia-Turkey taste (see Chapter 6). While one imports the Turkish made ready-to-wear from Istanbul, European products are imported from Dubai. As another boutique owner confirmed, from Turkey the borders are crossed by land. The bags carrying the desired clothing I have seen can each accommodate around fifty kilograms (about 100 pounds) of clothing, and they are made of yellow plastic fabric. Turkey is the most important source of women’s clothing, especially because they produce brand-name manto, e.g. Esprit, Zara, etc. Women are therefore able to aquire clothes with both fashionable cut and prestigious brand names while maintaining their conformity with the Tehran regimes of dresses. Turkish made Zara mantoha on the Tehran clothing market are a perfect example of prestige and fashionability added to Islamic dress.

Figure 4.7 Boutique displaying together the two marks of prestige in Tehran

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From Dubai, dress travels by sea, in containers carrying other commodities as well. The two important ready-to-wear European clothing lines in Tehran are transported in this way. Mango and Zara, Spanish brands that conquered the European market with their relative accessibility and their policy of following closely the fashion proposed by prestigious designers, became luxury products in Tehran. Two factors contribute to their status: the dust of the road and the salt of the Persian Gulf ’s waters leave their imprints on the price tags; the route Paris/Dubai/Tehran adds some sixty to eighty percent to their initial price. The clothing articles are less accessible, and thus more prestigious. Second, and probably most importantly, this dress comes from Europe, that is, the geographic space in which fashion originates. For many of the people I have talked to, Europe is the place of reference for everything “mod-

Figure 4.8 Boutiques during sales period, February-March 2003

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ern”, from clothing style to models of behavior. The term kharegie, meaning foreign or foreigner, is usually employed to designate the European provenance of a product. It is also sometimes ironically used to point to persons or behaviors adopting an Occidental style perceived as overt ostentation, hilarious, or inappropriate (e.g. insisting in eating with a fork and knife, while usually one uses a fork and spoon). The “fashion following” process induces everyday practices that follow a specific calendar. Thus, for fashion, the year is divided into two collections for the four seasons: spring/summer and fall/winter collections. These moments are alternated by the periods of sales, in Europe taking place in summer (July) and in winter (January). In Tehran, the same seasonal calendar is followed by the ready-towear boutiques, with one and a half month difference: summer sales start in mid September and winter sales in mid February. The fashion calendar in Tehran intersects with the lunar calendar that establishes the religious events, influencing the practices of fashion. For example, during the week of ashoora (the mourning for Imam Hossein), wearing red on the street is completely forbidden. Colors are invested with strong meanings in the shi’a imaginary. Due to the principle of modesty or hidjab, full bodied or bright colors are not recommended for clothes. Faded colors, and black are most common, and considered in conformity with the above mentioned principle. Green is also a “good” color, signifying life. Generally speaking, red is not a good color to wear, because it stands opposed to what is good in shi’a imaginary. It mostly signifies the blood of the martyrs, and during the ashoora it is readily associated with Imam Hossein’s blood. More so, the murderer of Hossein is always dressed in red, while Hossein in green. So red magically disappears from clothing on the streets during that period. Also, any other expression of joy, like celebrations or parties, is

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postponed during the week of ashoora. People avoid buying clothes during this period. Shopping galleries and boutiques in Tehran offer a relative synchronization of styles with the world fashion, perceived both by my interviewees and by myself. While still in Paris, Isabelle (a photographer who often travels to Tehran) told me about her amazement when she saw the exact model of her coat which she bought in Paris for her travel on the streets of Tehran. Outside... If you go to Paris with trousers, a manto and a headscarf the effect is... You know, if you are wearing large coats in Paris, we do it also here... I don’t know, there is a moment we wore mid-length trousers in Paris, and at the same time we had them here... First in the parties, and than on the street... (Saba)

The synchronization of ready-to-wear styles is made possible by the commodity circuit explained above, doubled by the images of body aesthetics traveling through media channels, and on the bodies of those who move between Tehran and other locations. For the consumers of fashion, in Tehran or anywhere else, timely acquisition of dress and style means tuning to the rhythm of modern life. Fashion is the temporal indicator of “modernity”, of being “up to date”. In Tehran, modernity has a variety of meanings, expressed in daily practices, and the temporal synchronization with Europe for those who follow fashion is highly important. One is modern if one displays the lifestyle of a modern person, that is, a certain type of clothing, car, places of frequentation, subjects of conversation, mode of relating with others, etc. It is interesting to observe that this type of modernity, defined by daily practices, does not necessarily have a local reference, but rather evokes an imaginary cosmopolitan space, in spite of the cosmopolitan aspect of Tehran itself. The association of modernity and clothing is strong in Tehran, displaying one’s fashionability is equated with one’s modern way of

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thinking, or with his/her connection with cosmopolitan locations. Modernity has its material expression in fashionable clothing, and time is at the core of class distinction displayed through clothing, the source of a feeling of being “in” or “out”. In relation to commodities and fashioning oneself, there is a pervasive feeling of inferiority with regards to Europe: I think to follow fashion here is very very difficult, I mean to buy stuff in Iran is very difficult, because there aren’t many shops and fashion design. There is only one Mango, do you know MNG Mango and Diesel11? But I do not buy anything from here. Every time I go traveling, I just buy stuff. It is very very hard to buy, but my opinion is because we do not see a lot of good stuff here, we see on MTV or Fashion TV, and we do not have fashion designers, all the girls and boys I think they copy. They copy too much. They have to [buy] they do not have a choice. It is very sad, actually. (Neda)

Nevertheless, this feeling is counterbalanced, among those who lived in Europe for sometime, by a consciousness of increased care for style and appearance of women in Iran. Many of my interviewees told me about the way in which their clothing habits change when they visit Tehran. Nafiseh, a clothing designer who lived in Paris and came back confessed an increased care for clothing since she has been back. Roxanne, a divorced woman of 40, who runs an of interior design business, lived in Bruxelles before she came back to Tehran eight years ago, explains: I did not have a big wardrobe there. Since I am here, I feminize more. The feminine parts of myself come out, and here we party more, we go out more.

In direct reference to fashion, Saba said: 11 Mango and Diesel – European ready-to-wear brands.

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Sometimes when I am in Paris I do not understand what fashion is. When I come back to Tehran, I go to the showrooms, and I understand what fashion is. In Paris it depends on the status of the family, not everybody lives with Dior. But here if you have a middle level, you know the people, you go to showrooms and you understand that the girls know very well what fashion is.

One can understand in this fragment the relative shift of class position that Saba experiences in accordance to her movement from Paris to Tehran. The question of accessibility comes into play, and the perception of “what counts as fashion” is directly linked with her shifting status. While glamorous Paris is closed for an Iranian student, Tehran offers her a wider accessibility to dress, to chic reunions and spaces, or to the designers of clothing themselves. The particularity of Tehran urban spaces engender a series of adaptation of dress practices, among which the most telling one is the consumption of manto with brand names, and the continuous changing in style, form, and colors of this piece of clothing. Urban Tehran undeniably developed a proper clothing style, a fashion that combines Islamic moral requirements with consideration linked with a modern lifestyle – in the sense that is given by the inhabitants of this city. Thus, wearing a manto and russari may not be opposed in a meaningful way to being fashionable, just as following Islamic moral precepts may not be opposed to being modern. The meaning of “modern” needs a deeper exploration, and the mode in which it constructs itself as an exclusive category in relation to Islam is a question that requires further analysis. As suggested earlier in Chapter 3, all public spaces, regardless of geographical location, are pervaded by tacit or explicit moral concerns; however, if they are located in “the West” the morality is obscured by the discourse on freedom and modernity. Simply, it seems that the geographic location function as a decisive criteria in establishing the

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degree of modernity of a place within the social imaginary. Less concern is given to social practices, such as fashion, that may be indicators of modern forms of social organization and self-expression. The concept “repertoire of modernity” designates social organizations on modern basis outside Western hemisphere. While modernity is historically linked with European development in the last two to three hundred years, its social practices are generalized. Modernity is a rhyzomatic occurence, people engaging with it in different degrees and creating various “regimes of modernity” in different areas of the world. In Tehran, both fashion designers and the ready-to-wear boutiques introduce a sense of seasonal time marked by changes in the form and colors of clothing. The private fashion presentations offer the occasion to meet, see, and discuss the latest modes of fashioning ones body. Shopping for clothing also serves as an important passtime for Iranian women of all classes. Periodic shopping trips to renew ones wardrobe is a must. Traditionally in Iran this happened once a year, around norouz, the spring celebration of the New Year; a time for rejuvenation. Through the seasonal collection and periodical sales, fashion multiplies the times of renewal, setting a canon of understanding oneself differently in relation to time. The accelerated renovation of the self through dress necessarily entails a particular conception of the self, always changing and yet the same. Forms and colors of dress are synchronized with the canons of Western fashion that arrive through various channels of communication: media, fashion journals, or directly carried on the bodies of the Iranians residing outside the country. These constitute the many sources of aesthetic authority that contribute to giving the desired shape to the bodies in Tehran social spaces. As fashion’s time intersects the religious calendar, aesthetic canons meet and intertwine with other sources for body and clothing discipline in Tehran. At their intersection we may observe the redefinition of various spaces in new terms. Thus,

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exterior spaces of consumption (pasaj) are more permissive to aesthetic extravaganzas than other exterior spaces. In Tehran the degrees of state surveilling and difuse social control are related to consumption spaces and patterns. Streets and parks are spaces of total visibility, more prone to diffuse surveillance and social control that decrease the feeling of anonymity. The presence or absence of familiar figures may change the shape of space and regulations of dress, especially for women. While always a valid separation, the categories of “inside” and “outside” do not necessarily define spaces of liberty in dress for women. Other factors, such as social position, spatial structure, and the presence of certain persons can contribute to the shaping of the regimes of dress. The borders between “in” and “out” are porous, and people embody the messages of an aesthetic modernity, with deep echoes in the reorganization of daily life. The aesthetic cartography of the world and its imaginary separation along the lines of modern/non-modern (Balasescu 2003) are profoundly questioned by the social practice of fashion in the non-western world. Next chapter constitutes an analysis of gendering of spaces in one specific fashion practice: fashion shows. Starting from the ethnographic description of two fashion events in Tehran and respectively in Paris, it will explore the similarities and the differences between the two approaches on gender segregation. The following comparative description constitutes an illustration of the porous borders between modern and non-modern as revealed by the spatial structuration in the two cases. The chapter is also an introduction to the world of fashion design in Tehran.

Chapter 5

Gendered Space and Fashion Catwalks: Paris and Tehran Fashion shows and showrooms are specific moments that briefly invest time and space with the characteristics of fashion. Fashion is usually associated with femininity, as are the spaces (and persons) that revolve around fashion activities. Yet, in Paris and in Tehran both fashion and femininity encounter two different modes of relating to gender. Gender segregation is a general requirement of Muslim morality. The headscarf is also an expression of this segregation, many times a mode of introducing a private area around one’s body, as Karimi (2003) has observed. In Tehran, locally organized fashion showrooms both enforce and transgress this requirement. On the other hand, in Paris, some fashion houses and retailers who acquire Middle Eastern shoppers create a gender-segregated space in order to accommodate their perception of their clients’ sensibilities. Every fashion season Paris is the host of a showroom specially organized for Middle Eastern clients – Mozaique. Every fashion season, private fashion presentations take place in Tehran, in the designers’ own quarters (see Chapter 6). The second public fashion show in post-revolutionary Iran took place on October 1-3, 2003 and was organized by Mahla, a Tehran fashion designer. Mahla also initiated and organized the first public show in January 2001. This time, in 2003, the three daily shows spread over three days sold out their total capacity of 18 000 seats. This chapter will explore the similarities and the differences between the two approaches on gender segregation and questions the imagined separation of modern and non-modern along the lines of gender segregation practises.

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Lotous Fashion Show I closely followed the preparations of the 2003 Lotous fashion show in Tehran, up to the day of the event. I was not however allowed to attend any of the shows, as they were exclusively reserved to women. With the occasion of the show, various urban spaces of Tehran have been differently invested through advertising. The event venue was “Hijab Basketball Hall”, a women’s sport center located near Hotel Laleh. Samsung was the main sponsor of the event, followed by Parsol (an eyewear brand) and Guerlain. Lotous House advertised the show through newspapers advertisements, posters around the city, and in the ticket vending points.

Figure 5.1 Advertising banner for Lotous Fashion Show, Tehran, September 2003

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On the streets of Tehran there were two big banners, both on Vali Asr boulevard, one not far from Tajrish square in the North of Tehran, the other one placed near the Jaam e Jam food court, where I spent many hours of observation. The posters at various ticket vending points were of standard A3 size, displaying a model in Lotous designed dress, with her head covered by a turban, alongside the necessary information for the show. The tickets cost 50 000 Figure 5.2 Advertising banners for rials (about $ 7, a relatively ex- Samsung at the Hijab Basketball pensive price for a middle income Hall. September 2003 person whose monthly income is averaged around $ 100). The relative flexibility of fashion time in Tehran was also expressed in the scheduling of this event. Lotous fashion show had been originally scheduled for August 18th-20th, but was postponed due to the death of Mahla’s father. A month before the show Mahla was practically unreachable. She was preoccupied with securing necessary approvals for the show, the site, and the banners to advertise for the event. The advertising banner was taken from the cover of Lotous magazine no.1, with text to describe the event, time, venue, and cost. The graphic presentation required the approval of the censorship commission for cultural events. Although the banners were already posted in two exterior locations in Tehran, Mahla only obtained the final signatures necessary at the eve of the show itself.

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The interior venue was prepared accordingly. For the show, the local Samsung advertising team prepared a series of special banners and designed the catwalk. Photos for the banners had been taken at Mahla’s place two evenings before the show. The photographic session lasted about two hours. At ten in the morning of the first show, the venue was in full preparation for the event. Six enormous banners with Samsung telephones photographed against a Figure 5.3 Lotous catwalk ready background of textile and jewelry for use. Tehran September 2003 covered the basket hoops, three on each side of the court. The banners also happened to covers the framed photographs of the two leaders of the revolution, the Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei. A twenty-five meter long catwalk was installed in the middle of the court. At my arrival, the stage was covered with old kilims (Iranian traditional carpets); two men came and rolled on a big carpet, and I wondered if this will be the final design for the catwalk. The whole setting was finally covered by a white plastic surface, on which the Samsung staff stuck two Samsung logos, one on each side of the catwalk. The kilims underneath secured a smooth surface for the models to walk on, while the white Samsung branded surface gave the stage a modern allure. The hard surface of Parisian catwalks evokes an image of purity in which the model is completely separated and autonomous from the environment, the representation of the monadic individual,

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walking on a stage that is completely separate from its own body. Walking on a white surface doubled by a carpet obscures the contoured the border between the feet (or the shoes) and the stage. The contours of the model are blurred (the various layers of dress adds to this impression), and the steps are amortized by the smoothness of the kilims underneath. A model walking on a hard surface needs to be light, to give the impression of legerity and separation from the stage. The past is absent, the individual is distinct from it, the contact between its feet and the catwalk marks this separation. The model is the ideal representation of a “[…wo]man touched by Enlightenment and European civilization, [a wo]man who has ‘cut himself [herself ] off from the soil and the roots among his [her] people’ as they say nowadays.” (Dostoyevsky, 1982) The soft surface of the Samsung branded catwalk contains both the signs of a desired modernity (branded by Samsung), and the underlying tradition represented by the invisible kilims. The separation from the “traditional past” is not complete (but where is it ever complete?), but it is rendered invisible. When I asked an Iranian friend if she thought that Tehran is modern, she answered me with a firm “no”, explaining that people live in constant awareness of the judgments of others – an awareness which shapes actions, and social interactions. The prioritizing of social pressure over one’s own will is at the core of her formulation; as she put it, Tehran’s un-modernity expressed through peoples’ following others’ will rather than their own. In her description, the “un-separated selves” render modernity impossible. Individuals are not separated from one another, nor are they separated from the past, which contrasts the logic of modern perpetual recreation that supposes a break with the past. On the catwalk, models’ bodies are

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not separated from the catwalk’s surface, but are rather accommodated by the carpet underneath. The basketball hall was gradually transformed into a space adapted to the fashion show presentation: the exits for models have been ornamented with big heavy kilims, the catwalk was in place, the lights checked, and the advertising banners displayed. Particularly interesting in the setup were the Parsol banners of models (headshot only) without headscarves – an image which is forbidden for advertising in Iran’s public spaces (see the following discussion on photography). Although a special commission is charged with surveying and approving the banners on public display, the space of Hejab Basketball Hall as an exclusive feminine space (for the show) is able to bypass the effects of this surveillance. During the preparations I asked a male photographer if he would be allowed to attend the show. He regretfully said “No, it is only for women. Jomhouri Eslami... (Islamic Republic)”. The ‘public’ of this space is exclusively feminine; the hall thus became a segregated space, allowing the display of unveiled women models. Lighting is another resource used for separating spaces. As in most public events the public is in the shadow of the light that illuminates the event actors (in our case models). For the Lotous fashion show, the lights also accomplished another important task. Since the event takes place into a relatively small basketball hall, the public seats are not separated in sections, and do not therefore offer the intimacy of, for example, a VIP lounge. Nevertheless, as Mahla told me, important persons (i.e. persons from the political echelon or who are linked through kinship relations with important clerics, and who constitute a part of Lotous House’s clientele) have a special seating area with feeble lighting. This secures their desire of invisibility among the public.

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Spatial segregation was also in operation before the show. A special moment constituted the arrival of the models, about four hours before the first défilé was scheduled. Among them, Mahla’s daughter arrived, carrying a plastic bag with the make-up kit. After being introduced to the president of Gas Jeans, an Italian brand, who was present for some fifteen minutes in the hall, the models went directly behind the kilim curtains, in the changing room. The space was prepared accordingly. There was one hall that had a large room on the left hand side, with a closed door, in which the entire collection of dress has been already arranged on hangers. On the other side of the hall there is the restroom. A staircase just in front, stuck to the windowed wall. A bench was setup near the staircase, and two big mirrors were set against the hall’s wall near the exit on the “arena”. On one of the mirrors read (written with lipstick, in English): “Smiling is the second best thing you can do with your lips”. A young man and I accompanied the models to the space behind the curtain. I did not enter the room with the collection, since it was reserved as the models’ changing room. The young man seated in the hall talked to one of the young women who was not participating in the show because her nose was bandaged – sign of a recent surgical aesthetic intervention, fashionable among young Tehranians. Although the first show was not scheduled until 4pm, the make-up operation started by 1pm. There were no professional make-up artists, and the cosmetics used belonged to the models. Female friends of the models, with sporadic interventions of the models, who offered their own suggestions and active modifications, did make-up application. With permission, I began photographing the models in the “make-up hall”. One young woman who was part of the organizing team told me not to take pictures. When I explained to her that

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Mahla had given me permission to do so, she left, and returned quickly, telling me that Mahla asked that I refrain from photographing in that area, since it was a space reserved for the models. I stopped, though not without regret. Although the space was not entirely forbidden to men at that point in the day, images of it were not supposed to circulate publicly. I encountered a similar type of gendered space segregation, and an even stricter policy regarding photography, in a Paris showroom specially conceived for Middle Eastern clients.

Mozaique reflections, 14.10.2003 My last day of fieldwork in Paris culminated in an unhappy incident, largely due to my naive, and almost careless approach to a field situation. During Fashion week in Paris (Oct 7-15), I planned to attend the Mozaique showroom reserved to Middle Eastern clients (see Chapter 3). Mozaique was located on the fifth (last) floor of an opulent building on avenue Montagne, not far from the Christian Dior boutique; the entry had a simple paper notice announcing Mozaique Showroom. Michele, the organizer, does not advertise the event too broadly, as she is sufficiently well known among her potential clients. The door gave into a little entrée simply ornamented with a black evening dress, creation of one of the present designers. The large salon in which Michelle greeted me is bare save for the table placed in its centre. I was invited to look around the showroom but not to take pictures. The apartment had five little rooms (approx. 2.5 m by 4 m) each of which accommodated the collections of one to two designers. The clothes hang on both sides of the rooms, separated by a table with four to five chairs placed in the middle of each room. Among the names of the designers (some rooms were still empty at the time of my visit), besides Darja Richter, there were Francesca

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Miranda, Rosemary Jennings, Araba Morelli, Amarilis, and Rita Lagune. I met Rita Lagune in her showroom, and she invited me to seat. A woman dressed in a black skirt and green sweater served us coffee. As we drank coffee I began to explain the nature of my work, the same woman who brought us coffee (Mozaique assistant) announced the first client of the day – a boutique owner from Kuwait. A woman in her late forties, dressed in black and wearing a Moschino headscarf, entered, followed by a tall man with gray hair carrying a laptop that he immediately installed on the table. I asked Rita if I should go, and she said no. The woman instantly distinguished the old collection from the new pieces, and asked to begin by viewing the older clothes. The Mozaique assistant who served coffee to the clients, acted also as a translator and inter-mediator between the clients and the stylist. Once the client selected a piece, she would remove it from the rack and take it away. A moment later, a model would enter the room dressed in the chosen piece. I retreated to the farthest corner of the room, near the window, to observe the scene. To allow the clients to order pieces for purchase, the model held a yellow “post it” with numbers written on it. At some point, Rita asked the man if he liked the clothing on one of the models. He deferred to his female companion: “Don’t ask me, she is the boss, I am only organizing.” The dynamic of the showroom, both in terms of exchanges between persons and the ordering process, created a completely different atmosphere to that of big ready-to-wear sales salons (see Chapter 3). The atmosphere is relaxed and the clients are treated on an individual basis. At one point in Rita’s showroom, the man begins taking pictures of the models with a digital camera. Encouraged, I do the same, but after some shots, Michele passed by to see how the sale is going, and she became suddenly distressed because of my camera. She explained

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that she did not want me to take pictures – that only clients were permitted to do so. I quickly apologized, and reassured her that the photos will not be published. Nonetheless, Michele asked me to leave. On the way out, she justified her reaction by explaining: “You have to understand that this is a question of mentality. You are a man, and your presence disturbs my clients; they do not feel comfortable while you are here.” It was only at this point that I realized that all the showroom personnel were women. The only men present, from what I understood from previous conversations and my observations at the ready-to-wear salon, were those linked to the buyers through kinship relations. This “ethnographic moment” is highly significant because it revealed a series of different themes I encountered in my research. The transformation of a space into an exclusively feminine domain is a practice I have also encountered in the organization of showrooms in Tehran, culminating with Lotous’ public show (see Chapter 7). My own gender did not allow me full access to those spaces. Photography is a disruption of this segregation, because it carries with it the possibility of transporting the gender-segregated space (or its two-dimensional representation) into a non-segregated context. Nevertheless, upon further reflection, the incident brought home to me the issue of copyright, which stamps the fashion milieu in Paris and elsewhere and remains a prominent concern for designers. As Michele and I did not have the time to build a trusting ethnographic relationship, she could have easily suspected me of working for a company that practices copying on small or an industrial scale. Today, copying is facilitated by electronic technology; a photographer can easily take pictures in one city and almost instantly send the photos through email to a fashion house on the other side of the world where it could be copied. The secrecy sur-

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rounding fashion industry renders exterior presences almost undesirable. The difficulties I faced throughout my fieldwork period can be understood within this discursive logic of the protection of the author and the products. In fact, photography was always a delicate issue during my fieldwork experience. Public visibility, and the circulation of images (not intended to be public) through non-controlled independent channels has consistently been a point of contention as my experience at the Mozaique showroom in Paris put in sharp focus. Showroom spaces have a specific regime of dress, in the sense explained in Chapter 3. Gender segregation is a shaping force in fashion design. The following chapter explores the characteristics of fashion design in Tehran as they emerged from my ethnography. The categories “modern” and “traditional” are again at the center of the analysis, as they are expressed through aesthetics and practices of design. It will become obvious how time, class and body mobility intertwine in their relation to these categories.

Chapter 

Traditionally Modern: the Haute Couture in Tehran This chapter describes the practice of fashion creation in Tehran, the local haute couture as observed during my ethnographic inquiry. The access to designers’ workshops was easier than in Paris, since the elegant Paris, the Golden Triangle, is almost closed to the ethnographic eye, hidden behind the practice of secrecy. In Tehran I was fortunate enough to meet many of the most famous local designers. Chance played a major role in my meetings with them. In total, I interviewed seven designers and I built significant ethnographic relations with five. I spent an extended amount of time in two workshops, those of Mahla and Shadi. A Parisian photographer gave me Mahla’s phone number in Tehran, and I met Shadi through the contacts I made at the French Embassy in Tehran, on the occasion of France’s National Holiday (14th July). All the designers I interviewed in Tehran can be considered part of a cosmopolitan network, with links in capital cities of the world, such as Paris and London. They are part of the “Westernized Iranian class” (Keddie 1981). According to the designers’ own accounts, and to opinions of some of their clients, there are no more than ten to twelve well known designers in Tehran. Following a brief overview of the industry, outlining the main characteristics of haute couture in Tehran, the chapter describes the designer’s workshops, and the production strategies in ethnographic detail. References to the categories “tradition” and “modern” will appear throughout this chapter, as the interviewees used them. The text will point out how these categories refer to a specific aesthetic

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and mode of clothing use, a use significant in the system of class distinction in the urban environment of Tehran. Modern also signifies a specific mode of subjectivation, of body mobility. The aesthetics of the modern body is that of mobility, but it does not necessarily embrace “Western style” clothing, for various reasons that will be further discussed. As the argument will show, there are “modern” ways of looking at tradition, such as modern uses of “traditional clothes”; simultaneously, there are “not so modern” ways of using modern clothes (read Western aesthetics), or “modern things” that become “traditional”. As will become evident, being modern means being attuned to a certain sensibility and the aesthetic preferences of the upper classes.

Time for Fashion in Tehran In Tehran, one may easily find tailors ready to cut clothes to measure. Enghelab street between its intersection with Vali Asr and the Ferdousi Square displays a long series of tailor shops for men. Zaratousht Street, West of Vali Asr is the well known textile quarter, and there are also tailors for both men and women in this neighborhood. These shops usually offer their clients suits and dresses, cut to measure, copied directly from Western fashion magazines. They are open to the public all year around and are not considered to be cut-off of the realm of fashion design by the general public. There is a special category of fashion designers, who can be considered, along with the ready-to-wear boutiques, as the generators of aesthetic canons in Tehran’s urban style. It is hard to speak of a well-established fashion industry in Tehran, although there are constitutive elements that form its basis, such as production in the workshops belonging to local designers, and the brand names of local designers. An incipient fashion advertising, and – implicitly –

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fashion photography (see Chapter 8) may also be considered part of the emerging fashion industry of Tehran. I first met a local fashion designer in my first week in Tehran, on the occasion of her private collection show. It was early March, just before norouz (the Iranian New Year); This is the time when all of the designers in Tehran present their spring/summer collection, because it is traditionally the period in which people buy clothes and renew their wardrobes. I called Azadeh (the designer) to confirm my attendance and was told not to arrive earlier than eight – as the first part of the presentation (starting at 3 pm) was reserved exclusively for women. Azadeh imposed a sort of temporal segregation of men and women, in order to offer the needed comfort to her female clients. For them, I would have been a doubly uncomfortable presence, both as man, and as foreigner. In spite of the fact that the apartment is not very spacious, the temporal gender segregation makes that the clients are able to try the dresses on, without too much formality. The bulk of her clients were supposed to come between 3 and 8 in the evening. Not all of the clients are intimate with Azadeh, and many come without knowing the designer at all, even though the sale takes place at her house. Situated in a block of flats with architecture specific to the 1970s, Azadeh’s apartment was transformed for the occasion. The living room was emptied of excess furniture (e.g. a big table and some armchairs, which I had the occasion to see back in place on a second visit), thus offering a space of about 25 square meters. One corner of the room was occupied by a couch upon which a white panel was installed. On it, a series of jewelry items (necklace, bracelets), and accessories (e.g. handmade bags) were displayed with price tags attached. They belonged to a friend of Azadeh, who was invited to display her work on this occasion.

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In Azadeh’s living room there were five women sitting on chairs, elegantly dressed. They were drinking tea and talking to each other. They all looked at us with overt curiosity. On both sides of the room, two rows of hangers presented the dresses. Two wooden mannequins completed the display. In the right side of the room, a TV attuned on Fashion TV was discreetly broadcasting the Moscow fashion week. On these occasions, the house of the designer becomes an adhoc showroom offering an informal atmosphere for clients. With Fashion TV on, one can virtually browse the cosmopolitan places of fashion (Moscow entered the circuit not long ago), while at the same time feeling the touch of local fabrics, lines of design, and clothing proportions. Different aesthetic proposals mix in the space of the same room and create an odd feeling of body dislocation, of

Figure 6.1Private showroom in Tehran, March 2003. Fashion TV is tuned on.

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the relocation of desire, from the screen to the clothes, and back. The two localities (Moscow and Tehran) are linked in the imaginary, the two aesthetics (the actual and the virtual) are brought together by the clients’ gestures, their eyes moving from the TV screen to the clothes on the hangers. We start browsing the pieces on the hangers. They are mainly mantoha, constructed as a mix of modern and traditional (these are her own terms, but one can also see the fabrics with modern touch, and the old type imprints or laces, introduced smartly into the garments). It is clearly a style, her own. This type of seasonal presentation of collections is an element specific to the fashion industry in Tehran, where each designer organizes between two and four collection shows each year. One particularity of the seasonal presentation is that the catwalks are privately organized. The presentations take place in the more or less spacious houses belonging to the designers, and publicity is mainly through “word-of-mouth”. The single exception among Tehran’s designer is Mahla, who organized a public fashion show in January 2001, and who was working for a second one, scheduled for 1822 August 2003; a death in her family two weeks before the show caused her to postpone the event to 30 September (see Chapter 5). This detail suggests (and was also confirmed in conversations with other designers) that the fashion calendar is not strictly followed. Most of the designers try to offer collections every season, but this is never guaranteed. Different reasons, often personal, may prevent a designer from presenting a collection. The shows usually start in the early afternoon and last late into the night. As a general rule, the first part of the presentation is reserved to women, and only later are men invited as guests. Sometimes live models may present the dress; usually chosen from among the friends or relatives of the designer.

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Mahla, because of the particularity of her enterprise, has a permanent strategy of model recruitment. She recruits her models by herself, among her daughters’ friends, and on the street. If she sees somebody she likes, she introduces herself and her work, and invites the potential model to come by her workshop with a guardian, usually the mother. Over a cup of tea in her workshop, Mahla explains the nature of the employment, presents her journal, and asks if the girl would be available for modeling. Every designer I talked to told me that they did not have a fixed date for their presentations. The answers were rather along the lines with Parissa’s approach; when asked about the schedule of her presentations, she answered: No, no... whenever I am ready... sometimes with lucky numbers... One month difference, sometime. Last year I thought I would not have any show anymore. I just work in the house, people come and go, Sundays I am always open...

Time, the spice and the regulator of fashion, has a different dimension in Tehran’s landscape. Less constrained by competition, by the capitalist acceleration of production, by the fever of the “newest, hottest, hippest” look, the designers organize their creations and their sales in a less rigid time framework. Family events or religious celebrations play a major role in scheduling the event. All of the designers I spoke to offered two to three collections a year. Working in this flexible timeframe, the designers of Tehran construct each individualistic approaches to an emerging industry

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Mahla, or Fashion as Business I visited Mahla for first time at her place, in the north of Tehran, not far from Tajrish Square. I arrived around eight o’clock in the evening along with a young woman photographer (informal visits in Tehran are always around this time, people having dinner very late, usually around or after ten). I entered through a big garden, covered with patches of snow, somehow desolate (it was raining heavily). Her apartment occupies the first floor of a three storey building. I was invited to the living room, a vast space of some seventy square meters, decorated in baroque style, juxtaposing faux Louis XVI furniture, wonderful miniatures, and paintings dating from the Qajar period. There was also a display of thirteen dressed dolls (museum pieces) from the beginning of the twentieth century, presenting the specific costumes of different regions of Iran. They are arranged on a window case, in which one can see textiles and fabrics from the same Qajar period. On the big dining table there were flowers, and a number of evening dresses. Two young women, covered with flowery chadors were looking at the dresses. They were sisters, students of Mahla, who came from Kerman (a city about 1 000 km South-East of Tehran) for a short visit accompanied by their mother. Two small events during my visit are worth mentioning, in the effort to understand the complicated question of veiling. While the three visitors were covered with chadors, Mahla and the photographer who accompanied me did not wear any head cover. Upon obtaining permission to do so, I began photographing the scene. At one point, I took a photograph of Mahla and one of her students. After the flash went off, Mahla angrily told me “look, look, I don’t have a headscarf.” I looked surprised, after which she remembered “Oh, you are not a journalist, it’s OK.”

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At some point in our conversation, one of Mahla’s two daughters entered the room and greeted us, after which she asked permission to “go out.” I had been surprised to recognize her as one of the models in the photographs of the Tehran fashion show in 2001. She was dressed in a nicely cut, gray overcoat, pateff trousers, and a white scarf over her shoulders. I asked permission to take a picture of her before she left. She asked me, “would you like it with or without my scarf on my head?” I answered “Anyway you feel comfortable.” “I don’t care” she replied. Mahla had a strong reaction: “You should care, dear, you should care, because you are Muslim”. I did not know how to interpret these events that marked our first conversation. I speculated at length in my journal about the sources of authority in imposing a sartorial discipline for women. In the further meetings I had with Mahla, I realized that she is not somebody who strongly advocates russari (headscarf ) wearing. Another incident, while at her studio, confirmed this impression. While carrying some dresses to her car, she forgot to put her scarf on. She came back laughing radiantly at this incident. In fact, her reaction to my photo shot and her insistence on her daughter wearing the russari may be explained through the contextual conditions of these incidents. My camera represented a possible exposure to a larger public view, creating a different regime of dress in the context of our private meeting (see Chapter 4). The social position of Mahla (public fashion designer) would not allow her to expose herself publicly other than in conformity with the Islamic rules of dressing. At that time, her fashion journal was still under the survey of the censorship commission. In addition, she was trying to receive approval from the Commission of Islamic Guidance for a new public fashion show. The practical contextual position in which she was (is) allowed her only a certain degree of

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public exposure of her ideas, and only according to these general conditions. Hirschman’s (2002) analysis of liberty through the practices of veiling offers the necessary tools to understand Mahla’s (and other Tehranian women’s) position. Hirschman (in Switzer 2003) argues that liberty is a three-leveled social construction. On the first level we have the ideological misrepresentation of reality as an instrument of male power. The second level is constituted by the effects that these ideological rules have on reality itself, the way they create a new reality, what one may call “the effects of truth” of ideological construction. The third level corresponds to desires and self-definition, the structures that enable us to define reality itself, that is, “the discursive construction of social meanings.” Mahla, acting in a predefined field of forces, is constrained by the ideological definition of reality (the public as a shari’a ruled sphere), and by her own self-definition, and becomes a source of authority in suggesting (or imposing) those rules on her daughter, or applying them to herself (e.g. her reaction to being photographed unveiled). Nevertheless, her own exposure unveiled in the parking lot does not have the same weight in her “discursive construction of social meanings”, since the event is very local, and the image cannot travel without Mahla’s direct control (in fact it does not travel at all, except in the memory of the persons who were present). While visiting Mahla for the first time, she showed me “Lotous, the first Persian fashion magazine”. Edited by her own fashion house, it mainly presents “Lotous Fashion House” designs.The first issue of Lotous, which I saw in her apartment, appeared in January 2003. The second issue of the journal was scheduled to appear in March. Due to ashoora1, which took place in March of 2003, the 1

Public manifestation, and national holiday, mourning the death of Imam Hossein, one of the important religious figures in shi’a Islam.

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journal appeared three months later, in the beginning of June. The second issue contains three articles, (as opposed to the one editorial present in the first issue) but is mainly dedicated to presenting the origin of Lotous house. Lotous fashion magazine compensates for the lack of advertising for women’s clothing. In fact, although there are billboards all over Tehran advertising various products, clothing is almost never in their focus. Officially, following shari’a moral rules, bodies are not to be shown in their entirety, especially women’s bodies. Thus, advertising for commodities uses photos of the object itself, accompanied by bilingual texts (Farsi and English, an interesting detail in itself ), and sometimes parts of the body, like eyes, or hands manipulating the commodity. Due to these regulations, “Lotous” has had a difficult birth. In order to be able to publish this locally produced fashion magazine, Mahla needed to develop a strategy. The journal is registered for professional use – that is, Lotous is officially addressed to the people who are involved in the fashion industry. Nevertheless, it is the first post-Revolution magazine showing the faces of Iranian models: Because we could not show the face of the person, the original person in the photo. And even now, I was thinking they may not accept it (my magazine) [...] and this is the first magazine that comes out with the original faces of the models. Some years ago they were like invisible masks. Sometimes it was a painting instead of the face.

Likewise, the plastic women mannequins in the shopping windows lack facial features, or the upper half of their head altogether. On the contrary, the male mannequins have distinctly traced features, painted eyes and hair, each with a specific expression (see Chapter 8). During our first extended conversation, Mahla introduced me with her manner of working. At a first it seemed strange to me that

Figure 6.2 Cover for the second issue of Lotous

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she did not feel the need to draw. She explained to me that she does not feel the need to draw, but rather cuts straight into the fabric. After being accustomed to the standards I have met in Paris couture, this procedure seemed particular to me (only few designers use it in Paris, see Chapter 2). Later on, all of the designers I have met in Tehran told me they use both procedures, that is they sometimes draw, but often just cut straight into the fabric. Mahla, like all the other designers, has employees, tailors that sew the clothing. She works with fifteen employees, most of them students in the art and design faculty at the University of Tehran. Mahla’s main workshop and office is on Bahar street, not far from the intersection with Enghelab boulevard, in downtown Tehran. I was in her office many times, but was not allowed to spend too much

Figure 6.3 In Mahla’s workshop, some sources of inspiration.

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time in the workshop itself. Looking to the windows of Mahla’s office, one can see the multicolored drapes of Sahla’s workshop, a rather unusual contrast to the generally gray exteriors of Tehran’s downtown buildings. Mahla’s schedule is regular: she arrives at the office around 2 pm, and she leaves after 6, depending on the volume of her work. However, her work extends well beyond the four hours she spends at the workshop. The office/workshop is in a three room apartment. A young woman (about twenty), wearing a yellow headscarf and manto, opened the door for me. The main door wads directly into a room of about 8 square meters, that has four other doors, one for the kitchen, the bathroom, and each of the other two rooms. I will call this first room the main room. The office is placed in the first small room, with a big opening towards the main room. In the main room there is a big table, chairs, a bookshelf and a TV set, turned off. In the bookshelf there is a complete collection of Escada journal, and some random volumes of the French edition of Vogue magazine. On the table, opened, one can see the spring/ summer 2003 Escada, and a Rosa Clara2 catalogue for bridal wear. The office room is furnished with a small tea table, a working table for Mahla’s accountant, with a phone, a vertical mirror and a window display for fabrics, similar to the one I have seen in her house. Between my first and last visit to the office, the interior arrangement was substantially modified, with the actual workshop extended to the office room. The bookshelf and the TV set disappeared from the main room, their place being taken by the small tea table, its chairs, and the vertical mirror. The working table had also been moved to the main room, Mahla transformed the office room into an annex to the workshop. On the walls of the main were neatly framed old fabrics. 2

Escada and Rosa Clara are catalogues for two fashion houses with the same name.

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I briefly entered Mahla’s workshop, which was equipped with five sewing machines, one ironing table, and one big table for cutting the fabric. There were no mannequins or patrons, and the walls were bare. Mahla told me that normally she forbidds outsiders from seeing her workshop, and limited my visit to a brief viewing. At the moment of my observation, there were only two persons in the workshop, one young woman ironing, and one elderly man sewing at a machine. The incomplete dresses, fabrics, and fabrics were spread on the cutting table. There were no paintings on any of the walls or the pieces and bits of paper or fashion posters that one often finds in Parisian fashion designers’ workshops. Besides ready-to-wear collections, Lotous house also provides uniforms for air hostesses, Universities, Hotel Dariush in Kish Island3, schoolteachers, and schoolgirls. In this respect, Lotous house is unique in Tehran, being the only design house that produces for clientele of this scale, and that is in the process of constructing a public image. It also beneficiates of occasional international press coverage; the public show in January 2001 was heavily commented on in European press, and the second issue of “Lotous” magazine has been covered in Financial Times Europe, on 17 March 2003. The usual journalistic approach produced an article in which the Iranian fashion is presented as being in its “Dark Ages”. Temporal and historical references are often used to depict non-western countries as lacking, or lagging behind, modernity. Same mode of distinction is used in the process of 3

Kish is a free trade Island in the Persian Gulf, annexed to Iran by Mohammad Reza Shah. The free trade status (Azadeh), allows the development of commerce and exchange with Dubai, and makes the Island a main touristic target for Iranians. Dariush Hotel is a project finished in 2003. Constructed by a multimillionaire Iranian from Germany, it reproduces at scale the city of Persepolis in a Las Vegas-like manner.

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“self-othering”, explained in Chapter 3, and that is definitory for the class dynamic in Tehran. Other designers in Tehran characterize Mahla’s manner of work as industrial. For example, while talking about Mahla, Parissa says, “I like her, I know her, but she is a business woman, not a designer.” This distinction, to which I will return in Chapter 7, reflects a series of factors and changes in the Iranian economic landscape and their corresponding effects in the international fashion industry. The big industrial groups like Chanel or LVMH are the result of this economic globalization. Their effect on fashion creation is visible both in terms of the standardization of aesthetics, as well as the disappearance of, or economic difficulties faced by individual designers or small design houses. The case of “Le Sage”, the Parisian house producing laces for the haute couture that has been bought by Chanel, is a telling one. On a small scale, the distinction between “business woman” and “designer” reflects this tendency in Tehran. The new economic conditions, partly determined by the global networks in which local designers are embedded, creates a distinction between designers who prefer to keep their craft to a small size (often explained, as a reclamation from an artistic perspective), and those dedicated to business – Mahla’s case belonging to the later category. During my stay in Tehran, I had not seen the actual process of creation in which Mahla is involved. I did not see her drawing, nor did I see any of her sketches. The dresses I saw, and the ones that appear in Lotous magazine, are adaptation of regional or historical dresses, (the Turkmen style4 and Qajar period are the favorite sources of inspiration). The main products are tunics and overcoats, with embroidered borders around the collar and at the end of the sleeves. Mahla also 4

Turkmen dress is identified as a tribal costume from the Turkmenistan region, that « until the 1970s [...] formed the most elaborate tribal costume still used in Persia » (Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. V, clothing XXVI)

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produces evening dresses, (I have seen only one sample on a hanger, a black robe with pearls sewn on the chest, bras, and a low cut on the back.) While I cannot generalize, the style of her evening dress is rather conventional, with not many artifices or any innovative design. When I asked her if she considers herself a fashion creator she answered: Actually... my government ... Iran is an old, old country. And it has old and many different designs. I am telling you, when I have a great history in the dress, you have to do something for your country. This is the reason I mix my culture with modern. Because I am a Muslim and the government wants us to be covered. This is the reason I mix cultural dress with modern dress.

In relating to the public at large, Mahla legitimates her work through national history. I asked her about the name of her brand. Mahla said: Lotous. Lotous is the name of the magazine, and Lotus is a flower, and it is Iranian. It is a symbol of the ancient religion, the Zoroastrian. It is the symbol of the three precepts: Good deeds, good talking, and good thinking.

The name of Mahla’s brand is one of the multiple instances in which tradition, and precisely pre-Islamic history, is invoked as an underlying principle of the contemporary stylist. The first issue of her magazine starts with an editorial entitled “Dress is the living museum of the country”. Modern dress is, in her vision, something that must be conceived in direct relation to traditional dress, maybe as modernity itself must be integrated into the “old, old” national history. The governmental restrictions are also taken into account in this equation. It is interesting that, in her discourse, national identity and the Islamic religion are separate from one another. History and na-

Figure 6.4 Page of Lotous journal No. 2/ 2003 The modern/ traditional juxtaposition is visible in the interplay between pupil’s uniforms and the “Barbie” handbag they carry. Note also the reference to Kandinsky on the background.

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tional identity belong to the pre-Islamic era, while Islam is identified with the current governmental political orientation. Many authors observe that, for Iranian diasporic identity construction and among the upper classes in Iran, Zoroastrianism is used as the referent in their claim to both national history and modern secularism. The historic roots of this phenomenon are deep, dating from the period of the Islamic conquest of Persia (Tavakoli-Targhi 2001). In modern Iran, during the Constitutional Revolution (1906) and in the post-constitutional period Zoroastrian intellectuals shaped the secular current of thought in Iran, and created a form of opposition to ulama clerics (Bayat-Philipp 1981). The shi’a officials responded with a discourse that identified Zoroastrianism with the Western negative influence. The two poles of identity construction are constantly used in different configurations of power, depending on the historic moment. While during the Pahlavi dynasty the Zoroastrianism became the sole official landmark of national identity, the post-Islamic Revolution Iran officials tend to emphasize Islamism over the Zoroastrianism. But stalking the Islamic Republic’s rigid enforcement of the rules and mores of Shiism is the reality that the Iranian’s cultural duality always poses the Iran of the ancient Persians against the Iran of Islam, the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda against the Muslim god Allah, Persepolis against Mecca. (Mackey 1996: 377-378)

In this dialectical dynamic, many who left Iran during or after the Islamic Revolution are likely to reorient themselves towards Zoroastrianism in their claims to Iranian national identity. Also, local forms of resistance are expressed through the recuperation of Zoroastrianism5. 5

The Zoroastrian minority remains nonetheless at the margin of the contemporary Iranian society (Keddie 1995).

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Mahla’s aesthetic and commercial strategies are now easier to understand. The choice of Lotous (a Zoroastrian symbol) as the brand of the fashion house somehow separates it from the Islamic regulation, while the products in themselves (at least the ones destined to the public) meet the requirements of the government. “Mixing culture with modernity” is both responding to the requirements of the Islamic government and meeting the consumers’ desires for fashion, elegance, and “modern dress”. In her discourse, “culture” refers both to Muslim and to Zoroastrian traditions, depending on the context. Mahla calls her evening dress “modern dress” or “Western dress” interchangeably, using thus the generally accepted symbolic geography that equates the West with modernity.

Shadi, or the Cosmopolitan Approach Just off of Kolahdouz Blvd., in the same area of Northern Tehran as Mahla’s apartment, I was invited to visit Shadi’s house. Upon my arrival a woman domestic showed me to the main salon. There, and for a long while, I was kept company by one of Shadi’s clients, a single woman in her early forties, Tanaz. Tanaz works at the American Consular Mission of the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, and she is one of the current clients and close friends of Shadi. Repeatedly, at the beginning of our conversation, Tanaz talked about her experiences at “the Mission”, and the misunderstandings she faces while dealing with young American students in Tehran; only after I asked for an explanation did I find out that “the Mission” referred to the Consular Office of the United States in Tehran. I was thus initiated into the exclusive language of a certain class segment of Tehran. Shadi studied marketing in Paris and worked in New York for three years, at the end of the 1980s, in a publicity company. She returned to Tehran and continued her mother’s business. Her

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mother had been a well-known couturier during the shah’s period. National Geographic has selected Shadi for the film “Global Young Hot Shots”, in order to illustrate Tehran. While she considers her mother “only a tailor”, Shadi describes herself as a designer. She traces the distinction line based on the mode in which she structures her work, and in reference to her approach to brand name (see Chapter 7). Shadi has both a haute-couture line, and a readyto-wear line for women. Her workshop is on the ground level of her house and employs about twelve people. Shadi’s salon was furnished with one couch, two armchairs, a low coffee table, and a dress rack on the opposite wall. The current issue of French edition of Vogue was placed on the coffee table, and on another small table lays Officielle de la Mode, a journal edited in Paris. The walls and floor were plaqued with marble. The exterior wall gave into the garden, through a large glass door. The right hand-side wall (with the couch) had a door, open, leading into Shadi’s office. The left hand-side wall separated the salon from the workshop. Near the exit in the garden, there was a “fake room”, furnished with two chests of drawers, a big mirror, and a clothes rack, and stand for the fitting room. Under the stairs there was a door giving into the kitchen. It was through this door that a young woman (a domestic) came and brought to me the sharbet, a refreshing plant-based drink. The salon communicated with the workshop, which was in the next large section of the ground floor, sharing the garden wall and the view over the swimming pool. From the salon one could pass into the workshop through the garden, or through a hall behind the interior stairs. The workshop is about 50 square meters, and it is separated into two by a middle wall that leaves a passage space on both sides. Against this wall there is a chest drawer used for depositing zippers, buttons, and other parts and pieces that contribute to

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the making of a dress. Their provenance is various, as Shadi pointed out to me. She thus has zippers from Germany, Korea, Iran, France, etc. She told me she does not choose by the country of production, but by aesthetic and quality considerations. Same goes for the buttons. “If I see something I like, I buy it”. The chest drawers in the fitting room are filled up with these types of accessories. Only the half of the workshop side with the garden view was fully equipped and functional, the other half being used (over the period of my visits) for storing old furniture, and for storing works in-progress and finished clothing. This later space also has a working table, which Shadi uses for designing and cutting textiles. Shadi projected to reorganize and integrate the “storage area” in the functional workshop. Shadi’s workshop has six sewing machines, one big pressing mechanism, one small ironing table, a big working table in the middle, and a chest-drawer with shelves. Four of the sewing machines face the windows of the piece, three of them overlooking the garden. The daylight is highly appreciated by the tailors and offers them a comfortable working environment. Around the working table there were six women and one man. This is Shadi’s working team, and they were present during all of my visits. Each works on a different item of clothing, mostly finishing up, or manually sewing together pieces of fabrics already cut. Only one of the women working here was wearing a headscarf. On the working table there was a pair of scissors, a tailor meter, and five different light colors of sewing wire, in five big cylindric wire tapes. On one of the walls there is a panel with one hundred and four wire-tapes supports, carrying different colored wires. Shadi divides her time between the workshop and the salon. In the salon she receives her clients, assists them in fitting dress, and finalizes plans for eventual retouches. Normally, the fitting room is

Figure 6.5 Shadi’s workshop: the sewing wires on the wall.

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a private space when occupied. Since this room is a “fake room”, there is no door that separates it from the salon. This space particularity poses no problems, since the clients and their company are mostly women. One ethnographic moment that revealed to me the reorganization of space around social position and gender occured during one of my visits in the workshop. I was sitting at the working table watching the making of a pearl decorated lace, when a friend of Shadi, Sharona, came and told me not to come into the salon because there were important people there for a fitting session. A minute later, Shadi herself came out smiling and said: “there are some hotshots here, I will call you to see the dresses”. After five minutes she came and gestured to me to follow her. I passed through the garden, and entered the salon from the side of the essay room. Facing the mirror, a 16 year old girl was looking at her two piece evening dress, pink colored, mid-length, with the top cut in an oblique manner such that the navel was visible. She smiled at me, and I made a compliment, directed rather to Shadi, because I was deeply embarrassed. I greeted the two women sitting (I guessed the mother and a friend) over a sharbet glass. The contrast with the young client was amazing: the two women sitting were wearing their roopoosh and kept their headscarves on, even though they were in the intimacy of Shadi’s salon. They did not seem deeply disturbed by my presence. Afterwards, Shadi told me the women were nieces of an Iranian political figure, she was not really sure which one (or did not want to tell me). Some elements of this encounter point to the ways in which space is conceived in terms of access and in relation with the people populating it. Sharona came and told me not to go “in there” in order to protect me and the women present from an eventual misunderstanding. Shadi probably negotiated my presence, and created the access for me in a close quarter. It is worth men-

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tioning however, that while previously Tanaz was trying her dress on, I was not asked to leave the salon, on the contrary, Tanaz immediately wanted my opinion on her dress. Two different regimes of dress (Tanaz and the “important clients”) successively instated in the same space in different moments. A series of elements created the interdiction of my access there. First, I was not acquainted with the clients (as opposed to Tanaz). Second, they were “important clients” who may have been disturbed by my presence. Third, and most important, they were all women – one may speculated that if I were a woman it would have not been the case. The fact that the young woman’s company was wearing the scarf and the russari indicated to me their observance of Islamic moeurs. I understood from Shadi that this happens regardless of my presence. Nevertheless, in the dressing room a young woman of their family was displaying Shadi’s creation for my eyes, without traces of prudishness, and without visibly disturbing her mother. Sharona’s first reaction was to protect the entire place6 from my presence, but I understood that what primarily worried her was the social position of the clients and their possible reaction to my disturbance of that specific regime of dress (of course related to the fact that I was a young man). Sharona herself is a relatively liberal woman, and the owner and manager of a big Industrial Transportation Company. In my opinion, my access was mainly a function of my special status as a “foreign student/researcher”, rather than as a “young man interested in fashion”. Shadi told me that her husband never comes into this room of the house when she has clients over.

6

See Chapter 4 for a definition of “place”.

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The Privilege of Exoticism At the opposite pole, Parissa cuts almost exclusively “Iranian style” clothing. She does not use a label or a brand name because “everybody knows me”. In fact, at my first arrival she advised me to take a particular taxi service and to ask them to bring me to her, because her house is well known to them. Parissa lives in the same area of Northern Tehran where Mahla and Shadi live, and I first visited her on a Sunday afternoon, her designated day for receiving clients. Her house is at the ground level of an apartment-building, and the first thing that surprised me was the color of her walls. While in every house I have entered in Tehran the walls are painted conventionally white, Parissa chose a beautiful saffron color to decorate her walls. A kitchen-bar separates the living room and the kitchen; the living room is furnished with an old small round table with the portrait of the Qajar king Nasr-e Din, a corner low couch covered with hand made fabric from the North of Iran (shomal), a round dinner table, and two bookshelves. Parissa’s favorite sitting place is a round cushion-armchair opposite to the couch, around the coffee table. The wall opposite to the couch is decorated with four framed pieces of calligraphy. Parissa has a number of Indian wooden statues of different sizes, representing various gods, displayed in the living room. The other room is Parissa’s showroom. It is furnished only with a rectangular coffee table and a small couch. The rack for clothing spreads on the right hand wall, with clothes arranged on hangers; on the far side of the room is a paravanne that masks the doors of a wardrobe, creating thus a space for trying on clothes. On the walls one can see photographs of Parissa dressed in her own creations, dating from ten to fifteen years ago. Friends of hers took the pictures in the garden of the house in which Parissa previously lived.

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Although now divorced, Parissa started designing while she was still married: The first year of the revolution. Twenty-two twenty-three years ago. When I decided to start, first of all it was because my husband was broke with the revolution. I am not educated in fashion, nor designing, it just came out.

In fact, her own manner of dressing has been the source of her inspiration. She used to wear, and she still does, clothes inspired by traditional designs from different regions of Iran. Following her own account, this tendency was triggered by the beginning of the restrictions imposed on clothes, and by the uniformization of colors in the urban setting, that is, the generalization of black and dark brown for outside dress. I used to wear a little bit of rustic things. And everybody was telling, “oh, how beautiful it is!” I mean every village woman was wearing them, but wearing them out in the street [...] was very unusual. They were quite Islamic, long skirts, and covers, and these first few years (of the revolution) you did not have to wear anything. But colorful you know, like the village women, full of colors and everything.

The “fashion effect” of her clothing was based on the dislocation of the geographic and symbolic borders between rural and urban, lived as a class privilege. In Tehran the terms “village” (dahat) and “villager” (dahatie) are used in order to designate an inferior social position, along with the term amalleh (worker) discussed in Chapter 4. There is a significant difference between the two terms. Amalleh designates a low class person, living and dwelling in urban area; dahatie is a social actor that “naturally” belongs to rural settings. While in the villages their presence is “natural” (“every village woman was wearing them”), and thus justified, in the urban setting the villagers

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constitute an illegitimate presence (“wearing them on the streets was very unusual”, see also Sciolino (2000). The privilege of the upper class resides in disregarding these symbolic hierarchies, by appropriation and dissimulation of the primary use of objects, commodities, and dress7. Same dynamic grammar of class distinction, spatial location, and taste is present in London and in Tehran. For Tehranian dahatie the judgment of legitimate presence in the urban space is based on aesthetic considerations of one’s dress, just as the case of chavs in London reveals (see Chapter 3). In Tehran, the result of this appropriation, and the parallel diffusion in the lower social classes of modern taste, is the progressive outmoding of things previously modern (that is Western inspired commodities). While visiting the house of a young owner of a readyto-wear boutique in Tehran (Said), in a suburb of Tehran not far from Karaj, I was accompanied by Irandokht. The house was furnished in Western style, with a couch, armchairs, dining table, and a window display of crystal wears. Mitra, Said’s wife, gave Irandokht a beautiful handmade Turkeman purse (likely bought at the Jomeh Bazar) as a gift. Irandokht explained the siginificance of the gift to me: “See, these things are becoming modern now. Before those kind of things were modern (she gestures towards the furniture), but now they are traditional. Do you understand?” 7

During my first visit to Bahar’s house (a sucessful interior designer from Tehran), I had the pleasure to admire her interior decoration; objects and furniture mainly from India and Thailand were arranged in a minimalist decor, surrounded by the jazz album played on a Bang and Olufsen music set. Near a coffee table there was a rectangular wooden piece on the floor, with a low border on one side, and a kind of pillow on the adjacent side. Bahar said: “Ah, you like that? It is a Philipino woman’s bed. I don’t use it myself (laughs), but I like it.” Similarly, while the “villager” is discursively stuck in its social and geographic position, and at best laughed at in urban settings, the appropriation of rural clothing in high-class circles is a privilege of power.

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Uses of language related to fashion products mark this distinction in a similar way. While women from the middle classes, and many young fashionable women prefer to use the French-inspired term manto, the intellectuals and the upper classes employ roopoosh for the same piece of dress. The recuperation of tradition among higher classes in Tehran maybe interpreted at the first moment as a nationalist reflex, combined with a revendication of pre-Islamic origins. While Mahla explicitly describes this tendency in her Lotous editorials, the role of aesthetic models and taste should not be underestimated. As mentioned before, all of these designers are close to European expatriates in Iran (mostly working at the Embassies). I arrived to them through the intermediary of the July 14th celebration at the French Embassy. For the European expatriates, Joomeh Bazaar, the Friday Flee Market where one can find, among other handicrafts, Turkeman textiles, is one of the main centers of attraction. Their taste is also appropriated by their local friends. I do not mean to imply that the designers I talked to make traditionally inspired dress solely because their foreign friends like them. But it should not be overlooked that many of their clients began to like and appreciate those clothes once foreigners (Europeans) showed interest in them. Joomeh Bazaar is one of the few public spaces in Tehran (alongside with hotels and fashionable restaurants) where one can hear foreign languages spoken, and frequently see foreigners. In other words, Joomeh Bazaar provides a cosmopolitan flavor for the all too homogenous Tehran, where taste is displayed and difused. There is a similarity in the power relation and social hierarchy established between rural areas and urban centers and the global relation between center and periphery, in which categories of class and ethnicity are intertwined and expressed through clothing or aesthetic choices. Exotic or rural inspired clothing (e.g. the 2002 “savage tendency” in fashion) styled in Paris and signed by famous

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fashion houses place their wearers at the avant-garde of style, but that does not necessarily mark the consumers in ethnic terms. Without the brand name, the same kind of clothing, which may have been the source of inspiration for the stylist, worn in an ethnically marked neighborhood of Paris identifies the wearer in ethnic terms. Many times it places him or her in a socially non-privileged position, de-legitimizing his or her presence in the public space (see the previously discussed case of the veil in French Public Schools). Michele, the owner of Mozaique (see Chapter 5) describes the same mechanism in her own terms and on a global scale. Speaking of her Middle Eastern clients, she says: Everything that has an Indian connotation, they do not like it. Because... For example your blouse, for them... we love this here, but they don’t like it. Because in their souk there are arrivals of Indian embroideries (it is not far from India and Dubai), and what is very fashionable here, for them it is “cheap”.

At the time of this interview, I was wearing a black blouse with embroidery, a gift from a friend from Tehran. The taste and the hierarchies are somehow reversed. On the one hand “we” can love the Indian embroideries because they are far from “us”, and “we” run a lesser risk of being ethnically identified with the dress. “For them it is cheap” because they feel they run the risk of being aesthetically classified in the same category as the producers of the textiles. At the same time, in Dubai for example, Pakistani, Indian or Indonesian women who are likely to wear “Indian style” dress are those that generally perform the maid services, and the class distinction would be blurred. And of course, “for them”, the Middle Eastern clients, the added value of prestige attached to a dress made in Paris is not unimportant. In this play of spaces and contexts, it is interesting to observe how geography and aesthetics combine and create hierarchic cat-

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egories in terms of class and ethnic belonging. From rural to urban sites, dress is successively devaluated, re-appropriated, and reevaluated. Urban upper classes reinvest rural aesthetics with prestige, but the ability to construct this artifice remains exclusively their privilege. Similarly, in European fashion centers like Paris, “ethnic dress” forms a style in itself, fashionable, but an aesthetic choice that is not accessible to those who actually live and feel their own ethnic categorization created through this dress. Parissa’s “ethnic dress” has a particular relation with the fashion phenomena, humorously evoked by her in the first interview. I asked her what fashion is in her opinion, and she answered What I am not doing. I am not up to date with fashion, I mean I make some clothes and things like this, which is never up to date, and never out of date, you know [...] Fashion for me is something that is changing all the time [...] something that in two-three years you cannot wear it anymore.

Temporal references are at the core of distinction between fashion and apparently unchanged dress. In fact, Parissa’s dress gradually changes style, form and colors alike, but not with the speed of the fashion seasons in Paris. While browsing her portfolio, I could see the reworking of styles over the two decades of her work. The style of Parissa’s creations closely follows the forms and cuts of the nineteenth century Qajar period, merged with a series of modifications she brings in order to make them more “wearable”, or practical. That means, in her own terms, reducing the quantity of the fabric used for one dress, closing the usual holes that dress used to have at the underarms and at the level of genitalia, in a word making the clothes adapted to a mobile body that needs to move continuously, a modern body populating an urban environment.

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They were wearing so much trousers (sic!), and the skirt was what, 15 meters. It’s not so practical to drive and to walk around, not with this life now... So I make them thinner, fifteen meters came to three meters...

The strength of Parissa’s style resides in her ability to combine colors and motifs that suggest the “Iranian tradition”, while making them appealing to a certain type of clientele. The formulation of “Iranian tradition” in her design is of particular interest to my research. Parissa takes bi-annual trips to India, Delhi or Karachi, where she buys saris en gross from local producers. The retail price is very low. Parissa takes only the laces and borders of the saris, and brings them back to Tehran. In Tehran she buys fabric of foreign provenance, European or Asian, from vendors on Zartoosht Street. She chooses by the quality and colors, not by their place of production. Once at home, she combines colors, fabric types, and borders, and decides on the model of dress that she will make (for example a tunic, a two pieces Turkeman style cut, an evening dress, etc.) Once a week, her tailor comes by her house, discusses the models with Parissa, and together they cut the material according to Parissa’s measurements. He [the tailor] is living downtown, he comes once a week here, and I put the materials on each other, and the borders ... usually he gets what I want, after twenty years working together. If he does not than I will draw it for him. But actually I have to tell him; I put the material on myself and tell him what exactly I want, with drawing he does not get it.

This type of practice has its correspondence in Parisian couture practices. In Paris I met only one designer who would not usually draw. But, of course, he did make exceptions:

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There are no drawings, only there you can see little things like this I am drawing to show them to the people I am working with what are we talking about. Only when it is difficult to visualize. (Mark)

One can see, from this example and from the entire perspective that analyzing fashion in the two cities provides, the different approaches to the practices of visibility and representation in Tehran and in Paris, expression of the same system of fashion. Parissa takes away the cut fabric and the borders, and produces the dress. In this process of creation, there are no designs, no standard patrons, no tracing paper involved. The combination of Indian borders, European or Asian fabrics, and innovative cuts and color mixing, gives birth to the Iranian style clothing for which Parissa is so well known. But where, or among what people rather is she well known? During my second visit to Parissa’s place, I was invited to lunch. When I arrived, her daughter (residing in England, on a visit in Tehran), one of her sisters (living in Indonesia), a sister in law (who studied social sciences in Paris and now runs an interior design business in Tehran), and Parissa herself were present. They effortlessly switched the conversation to English. I was invited to enjoy her home-cooked baghali polo, a speciality of lima bean and dill rice, served with veal shank. The taste of the dish is far richer than words could ever describe. Around the table we talked about life in general, and the hardships that Parissa’s children are experiencing in their lives abroad (in London and Southern California). One of the difficulties they both continuosly face (along with many others experiencing displacement) is homesickness. Long phone conversations and occasional reciprocal family visit are artifices to reducing this symptom of migration.

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There is another way of coping with the nostalgic feelings: dress. And this is mirrored in the preferences of Parissa’s clients. Many among them are part of the Iranian diaspora from Southern California. August is a popular month for visiting the home city, and an occasion for renewing one’s wardrobe: “Well, they usually come in the summer to see their families, and when they go back they buy 2-3 dresses...” Parissa is not the only designer who has an overseas Iranian clientele. Shadi also receives orders from members of the Iranian diaspora, sometimes even through intermediaries. During the summer she produces more clothes for the diaspora rather than for Tehran-based clients. Shadi quickly accounts for this: The same product you buy here, it would be ten times more abroad. So it is interesting for people come and make it here. The service is nice, and they come for both reasons: for some there is the price, for other the service and design.

While Shadi’s clients try to find products similar to those on the Western markets, Parissa’s clients have a rather different approach. What attracts them to her work is the symbolic link that her designs create with their homeland. But they like my colors because they are a little unusual, and the styles are Iranian, so when they are living outside and they feel a little nostalgic, they wear it, they like to be a little more Iranian.

Fabric, color, and form may be simultaneously erasers of memory, as is the case with fashionable ready-to-wear part of the amnesiac fashion system, carriers of messages of modernity, or material support for conservation or creation of memories. For ready-towear fashionable clothes, the constantly changing seasonal styles carry little if any temporal referent. In most cases, when this reference exists, it sends one to the self-reflective idea of modernity as it has been represented in a particular decade, for example, in 1970s

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vintage clothing. In the case of Parissa’s creations, memory is actualized and supported through the dress, which is both a-temporal and “never out-dated”. Thus, dress is a prompter for times past, and spaces lost, but always preserved in the forms and colors of a newly produced piece of clothing (and in spite of the fact that the materials are coming from various other geographic locations). The mythological dimension of memory projects its own material support (the dress) into a-temporality or immemoriality. Mahla’s motto, “dress is a living Museum”, comes alive in the consumer habits of Parissa’s clients from the diaspora. What makes her dress “Iranian” is the intersection between the style, the place of production, and the use and meanings that the clients attach to it. Used as a mnemonic device, invested with the power of the evocation of geographic spaces, Parissa’s clothing creations traverse untouched the ephemera of fashion, becoming ageless in spite of the necessary modifications Parissa brings to her designing style each year. Although emotionally invested in by the clients, this style sets Parissa at a commercial disadvantage, since the clothes she makes do not meet the commercial logic of fashion. On the contrary, she says: [Fashion] it is something that in two-three years you cannot wear anymore. You have to throw it out, or leave it for another twenty years [and] maybe it comes back again. But my clothes are always there. And this is the problem with them. Because it never gets out of fashion so people don’t buy them anymore. If they have four or five dresses, they can wear them all their life. It hurts my pocket.

While in Paris or other Western locations, “ethnic” styles are incorporated into the fashion system, following the rhythm of going in and out of fashion, the clients’ use of Parissa’s creations, even in Western locations, removes them from this logic. For example, at Paris’ Fall 2002 ready-to-wear was swept under the “bohemian

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trend”, and fashion reinvested in Eastern European clothing style. The 2003 summer clothing suggested Oriental embroideries, including those of Iranian provenance. But Parissa’s clothes escape the ephemera of fashion system through their use as a depository of memory among the Iranian diaspora. The question is delicate, and one should not give in to the temptation of characterizing her clothes as “traditional”. They combine the class privilege of reinvesting rural aesthetic styles, with contexts of use (diaspora), and with characteristics and adaptations of the clothes to what I called a modern subjectivity (“walking around and driving cars”) in order to define a particular type of elegance. The timelessness of her style is contradictory, at least partially, to commercial logic. The seemingly un-renewed collections may not address a variety of clients looking for the promise of continuous change that fashion carries. Nevertheless, Parissa’s elevated prices compensate for this commercial disadvantage. As a consequence (of her prices and style of design), Parissa has a well-defined category of clients: high class elderly ladies from Tehran or the diaspora, young actors, and various artists from Tehran. But all the Iranians in Europe, they know me. Because if they feel like having an old Iranian dress, they have to come to me. And because I am expensive, they remember me (laughs).

Nostalgia and the a-temporal aesthetics combine in the taste of Parissa’s clients from across the borders. However, the local clients’ preference for the “ethnic style” obviously has different explanations than those of diasporic nostalgia. I will present a brief ethnographic account to re-present the mechanism of aesthetic choices among clients from Tehran. Before the Lotous public fashion show, I visited Mahla again. I saw her house at the same time as the Samsung personnel who came to take pictures for the advertising banners. I arrived around nine in the evening; in her living room there were

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three young persons, one woman and two men, arranging the setting for the advertising pictures. Four different colored portable phones, of two models, and the richness of Mahla’s fabrics made the background for the future banners. The two men were designers and acted also as photographers, while the woman was the general manager of Samsung in Iran (Maryam). She set the stage; in the beginning, she explained to them that the fabrics add a value of prestige to the product. They were supposed to find fashionable fabrics that are classic but not outmoded in Mahla’s collection; she emphasized the two photographers to be attentive in their selection. I asked Maryam what is the difference between outmoded and classic fashion. Her answer was: You know that there are old things that are outmoded, and there are old things that are very fashionable. For example these (she shows me an arrangement of bronze statues in Mahla’s living room) are nice, and old, but out of fashion. And these (turquoise jewelry from Qajar period) are very fashionable.

I insisted on getting a full explanation of why some old things are fashionable and others are not. Maryam told me she couldn’t explain exactly why; nevertheless, one element was the role of consumers in this process. “The avant-garde people dare to wear this. And because they have the courage to break the time bringing old into the new, these things become fashionable.” Playing with time, as well as playing with geographical locations (as Parissa does with her “rustic style”) is the privilege of a few, and adds prestige to the object, be it dress or other commodities; thus it brings a timeless added value to it. Nevertheless, in her discourse, Parissa makes a clear distinction between fashionable and eternal elegance, while Maryam speaks about avant-garde (that is, being before one’s time, anticipating) through the artifice of disjointed time. It is likely that

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the young artists or actors, clients of Parissa, falls into the latter category, that of the “avant-garde”. Easily and light-heartedly bringing the past into the present also affirms one’s separation from it, one’s ability to play easily with those categories without feeling linked to them more than through a privileged relation. Conversely, too much “fashion” (as London chavs display), an overeager look, may mean “too great” a desire of breaking with one’s past (mostly class position), bringing heaviness into the necessarily light act of fashion. In any case, the “meaning” does not take away the fact of practicing fashion itself, and the desire to renew one’s appearance (and through it one’s self ). Willingly following a sartorial discipline in the rhythm of fashion, regardless of the style, is what makes the phenomenon more important. Signature and brand name is another practice associated with fashion industry and design. Some Tehrani fashion designers distinguish themselves from tailors by means of branding their creations. Some others rely solely on their fame. The next chapter will compare Parisian and Tehrani designers’ attitudes towards brand, signature, and copying. The inter-relations among legal space, economic concerns, and daily practices of branding shape the engagement of both cities in the modern repertoire, each creating its own modern regime.

Chapter 

After Authors When I returned from my second sojourn in Tehran, I went to see some of my “stylists-became-friends” in Paris. I was curious to see their reaction to the pictures I brought from Tehran, displaying stylists, models, and street scenes. While visiting Maria, we talked again about making copies. She saw the photo displaying a drawing taken by an Iranian stylist from a European fashion magazine. I told her copying is current in Tehran, to which she replied: “Everywhere is the same. Here we also copy. It is normal, you cannot create out of nothing.” Maria was preparing a line for an outside contract, and some of her drawings were on her working table. She browsed through more of the photos and put aside a couple of them. After finishing, she looked at me, smiling, and said: “speaking about copies... I like this model, it is very nice, I shall draw it. Don’t worry, anyway it will never look the same, but I like the form of it.” She looked for a white piece of paper, and drew a dressing vaguely inspired by the photo. This chapter will explore the articulations among copyright law (as understood in France), copying as a practice employed or condemned by fashion designers (sometimes both at the same time), and the meaning that copyright has for the capitalist mode of production.

What Is a Copy? In the world of fashion, the issue of copying is a sensitive one. It is hard to define what stands for a copy; and what a copy is anyway? From a legal point of view, in France, fashion creation is

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potentially protected under the incidence of two different rights: the right of authorship and the protection of designs and models. Among fashion designers in Paris, copying is a matter-of-fact issue, it is something that exists and one has to deal with it. For many, counterfeiting is an engine of creativity: If you call yourself a “designer”(créateur) and you do not renew yourself, you cannot hold the line., you cannot resist. If you have one idea and you rework it every year, you will find your jewelry and your bags at Monoprix1. The force of the designer is to renew oneself.” (Gaby, Paris designer)

There are two major types of counterfeits closely related to the legal definition of the counterfeit. One refers to the reproduction and commercialization of a model or design under a different name. This is what Gaby is complaining about. In these cases, it is very hard to establish, legally, what a counterfeit is. In legal language, a counterfeit is an object that “does not differ in a significant manner” from another product, already registered. This defines the “proper character” of an object, recognizable, in legal terms, by a well-informed observer. Beyond the discussion of what a “wellinformed observer” might be (Duchemin 2002), fashion is in a delicate position regarding the “proper character” because both designers and lawyers agree that in the fashion industry there is no ex nihilo creation. As opposed to other industries, in fashion-related production it is more difficult to determine the proper character of an object. Thus, in the last decade one could see brands that precisely “follow fashion”, like Zara or H&M (sometimes pejoratively called “IKEA of fashion”). These brands do not have a creative department, but they produce the same designs as well-known fash1

French chain of supermarkets that offers a large variety of commodities, from office tools to clothes, passing through food.

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ion brands every season at significantly lower prices. Zara has in its budget an allocation for settling potential legal disputes involving copyrights. The second case of legally defined copyright breech is the use of the brand name, logo, or designer’s name on a product of different fabrication. This can be put under the category of the authorship rights. In fashion industry, famous brand names and logos are used to mark clothes and accessories that are not product of the brand they wear. In the years after the Second World War, the house Dior introduced the idea of licensing other products under their name. By the 1970s licensing became one of the main sources of profit for big fashion houses (Crane 2000). It is likely that the worries of protecting one’s name or signature on fashion industrial products, and the laws protecting it came in vigor after the “discovery” of the economic utility that the use of name may bring. Practices of licensing gave birth to the necessity of protecting the brand name under a copyright law. If one follows the chronology of the principle of the “unity of art” specific to French law of copyright, one may observe a certain correspondence. French law of copyright is based on the “unity of art”, meaning that “there is no dichotomy between pure art and art applied to industry and commerce.” (Benhamou 2002: 38). Although the distinction was active in a law promulgated in 1793, the law suffered a series of modifications which finally erased this distinction (cf. Benhamou). The july 14th 1909 law regarding copyright referred solely to art applied in industry and commerce; in March 1957 (Dior started name licensing by that time) a new text unified the two forms of protection (pure art and art applied to industry and commerce). The last modification took place in 1992. Under the incidence of the code of intellectual property from 1992, intellectual property and industrial property came under the same pro-

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tection. Every product with an identifiable author can be claimed under the right of authorship, or intellectual property, and under the right of design protection, in a cumulative manner. The standardization of laws in the European Union fuels current debates because some fear the “unity of art” principle will not be recognized in the new laws. Without entering into detail here, it is necessary to mention that fashion designers rely on the right of authorship for practical reasons. Every season, a fashion house produces a great number of designs, ranging anywhere from fifty to five hundred; if each of these models had to be registered for copyright, the costs would be detrimental to the profitability of the enterprise. More important, the time frame of fashion calendars is very tight. The bureaucratic time required for the registration of designs would be too long, and the models would already be out on the market (and out of fashion) by the time registration was complete. Thence, fashion designers prefer to rely almost exclusively on authorship rights. The “field reality” of copying is much greater and it combines the two infringements. There are fashion products that copy the design and the signature, there are those that use the signature without worrying about design, and there are those that reproduce the model under a different name. Theorists and law researchers agree upon the fact that the object of protection is an “immaterial” one. The “object” of protection is the form, the appearance, or the design. But even this definition is a problematic one, as Vivant observes: Take the example of the authorship rights and the particularly interesting case of the rights over a title. We know very well [...] that the owner of the rights cannot forbid the descriptive use of the title. (Vivant 2003: 9)

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Following this reasoning, Vivant argues that the protection of copyrights addresses only the “economic utility” of the object. A copy is defined as such only after the registration of the model or brand name establishes something as “original”. The object of protection is the one defined in the legal act of registration. The design protection is thus an a posteriori fact, justified through a “natural” law that attributes rights to an individual assumed to be the sole generator of an immaterial object, be it form, sign, or invention. The rights of authorship give to the author the possibility to claim ownership of the object before the model has been registered. This difference between authorship rights and design and model protection is another source of endless debate, but is not central to our current inquiry. The copyright establishes an ascendancy of the author over the object of her/his creation. This is not, however the entire story. The ascendancy is over the field of potential and actual profit that the object may generate. The act of counterfeiting, in legal terms, constitutes a use of this ascendancy by another individual. Vivant identifies thus the copyrights with territorial rights. In legal terms, the counterfeiter trespasses the intellectual territory of an author, and uses, for economic purposes, the ascendancy over the territory thus defined. For the purposes of this chapter, I will concentrate on the territorial aspect of authorship, and on the way in which an individual becomes an author, that is on the myth of authorship.

Signature, Mark, Territory For an anthropological approach to the link between intellectual property and potentiality, see Marilyn Strathern (1996). Her argument links a dispersed field of intellectual property rights in order to rethink the disembodiment of life (as form) from the body

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(as vehicle). Legal discourses place form under the category of ownership rights, while the vehicle is non-legislated. Thus, assemblies of independently created forms may constitute new possible legal incorporations. The argument of this chapter is that the author him- or herself is the cumulus of legal forms that are economically sanctioned. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, a hat maker from Paris had clients returning to him asking to repair hats allegedly bought from his shop. The hat maker was not sure if they had indeed originated in his workshop. To avoid further confusion, he embroidered a distinctive mark on the hats he produced. In other words, he signed the fashion accessories, thus giving birth to a practice that today stands at the heart of copyright disputes. Today, the form of the object is central to these disputes; its character of “novelty and originality” demanded by law. In a way, in the fashion industry today the signature is the warrant of the originality of an object (especially in terms of a well known signature). If the fashion designer invokes the authorship rights, the signature is indeed the mark of originality and unicity of the object; prestige is the word that expresses the cumulative qualities of a sign, and licensing is the artifice that adds economic utility to prestige. Nevertheless, it is imperative to observe that, for a variety of reasons, our hat maker was interested in distinguishing his products from (similar) others, rather than establishing his models as new and original. He was more concerned with having hats returned to him that he never made (but could not distinguish from his own) than with being copied or establishing his claim on a model or design. During the same period, Charles Frederick Worth, an English designer living and working in Paris, transformed the role of fashion designers and couturiers.

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Worth’s position was above that of a dressmaker or tailor in that he was not expected to copy designs created by others. He hired artisans and helpers to assist in the creation and realization of his styles. He sold designs that epitomized the fashionable styles of the period. He invented the idea of seasonal collections containing his latest ideas and displayed in the couture house by models. (Crane, 2002: 136, my italics)

It is important to remark that he was one of the only persons not expected to copy, even though copying was a legitimate practice. It was significant that copy was oriented towards styles, because the practice of signature was not current in the nineteenth century. In this sense, styles were a-temporal. Although changing with years (and, following Worth, with the seasons), they did not belong to an easily-identifiable person (designer) or fashion house for that matter. It was thus hard to say to whom a certain model belonged, and this was not a primary concern for tailors or dressmakers. Also, at that time the principle of unity of art did not apply, and a signed dress would not be considered under the cumulative authorship and industrial model protection rights. At that time, the concern of being copied was much less present than today. In fact, since Paris was the center of fashion for the Western world, all other couturiers from Europe and the United States directly copied styles from Paris. With the interruption of the Second World War, and with few exceptions, this tendency continued until the 1960s, when the explosion of media and visibility of alternative styles introduced a great variety in fashion (cf. Crane, 2002). When taking this context into consideration, we can perhaps better understand the famous Madame Coco Chanel’s attitude on copying, who declared herself delighted if her models were copied, because it was measure of her prestige. Interestingly, while this statement may hold little meaning for most of the fashion designers I met in Paris, it seems sen-

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sible to designers encountered in Tehran, for reasons I shall explore shortly. Contrary to Madame Chanel’s position, today copying is not only unappreciated, but it is even condemned. At the individual level, an anecdote from maison Le Sage, a lace producer that made laces for all famous Parisian fashion designers beginning with the nineteenth century, is telling about the rivalries and accusations that circulate in the world of Parisian fashion. While visiting Le Sage workshops, I was invited to admire a robe carrying the signature of a famous contemporary fashion designer. At the same time, my guide pulled out from the archival drawers a lace ordered and used by Elsa Schiaparelli for a robe in between the two World Wars. The lace was almost identical with the one used for the robe of the current design. My guide told me that, in fact, the robe I was admiring was not the first one inspired by Shiaparelli’s work, but that there had been another designer who had more recently accused the creator of the model I was seeing of copying. Nevertheless, both of them passed by Le Sage’s archives... At the legal level, commentators on copying equate it with acts of banditry, international criminal networks, or even financing for terrorism. There is always need to remember that the counterfeit is a delinquent act, an attack to the public order, but also to economic order (eluded charges and taxes), and to the social order. (Benhamou, ibid. 39).

Beyond the interesting jump the author makes from economic to social order (as if a “good society” is based on economic laws) it is worth mentioning that counterfeit is a constructed delinquent act. This became important because of practices such as licensing, which brought benefit to the use of a name or mark of prestige. This was not the case fifty years ago, before the practice was in

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place. The economic order and legal spaces create their own categories of legitimate gain and illegitimate actions. In the above summary, one can observe how the idea of copyright has been transformed in the fashion industry, and how it transformed practices in the industry. It has shifted from an open definition of creation and copy as a mode of diffusion of models and popularity to today’s closed legal system, in which signs, signatures, marks or models are defined as intellectual territories that bring potential profit and that engender specific profitable practices like licensing. This tendency emerged after the Second World War and resulted from the convergence of several factors: the increased importance of the figure of the designer (Steele 1998) to its transformation into a superstar, the practices of signing and licensing fashion products (first clothing license in 1940 by Schiaparelli), a practice later generalized by Dior’s house (Crane, ibid.), and the legal unification of pure art and art applied to industry in 1957 which created a legal frame for this practice and subsequently constructed the illicit counterfeit as we know it today. All these elements introduce the historicity necessary to understanding the counterfeit in fashion not as an inherently delinquent act, but rather as a historical product of social, legal, and economic transformations. We can conclude this section with the observation that the author is created through the legal process of patent deposit, and that the author is a posteriori rationalized as the agent of creation. That is, even in the case of non-registered models, the author is assumed to be the person “naturally” entitled to undertake the legal process of patent acquisition. The roots of this assumption can be found in the theory of possessive individualism as Locke formulated it. The “natural law” of possession of one’s products of labor (that is, anything that bears the mark of one’s labor becomes one’s property) stands as the unquestioned basis of authorship rights. This concept

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is of course complicated by further developments. An overview of the attitudes of Tehran designers towards copy and of the dynamic of the copyright laws in Iran help to clarify the multitude of factors and their interaction that concur in the creation of a naturalized legal territory.

“Everybody Is a Copy” The practice of copying and the issue of copyrights, while undeniably linked, must be treated separately. As I have shown earlier, copyright refers to the legal construction of an author, of an intellectual territory, and of an illegitimate actor who copies, while the practices of copying are multiple and sometimes hard to define. I will venture to hypothesize that the practice of copying is a “natural” practice, unavoidable in any practice of creation, especially in

Figure 7.1 Luxury-like boutique in Tehran.

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fashion creation, while counterfeit is a category emerged from its legalization for economic (and political) reasons. Foreign enterprises (and local ones) may register their mark in Iran. Nevertheless, the brand copyright law has never been really applied. Iran is not a member of OMC, and it did not ratify all the international acts regarding intellectual property. Consequently there is no juridical procedure effective to stop the selling of counterfeits on the market. (Felizia, 2003).

Tehran offers a great variety of fashionable boutiques in which one can find clothing produced locally or in Turkey, Taiwan, or Thailand. Many of the boutiques bear Western brand names, without being necessarily (or at all) authorized distributors of the brand name in Tehran. Thus one can find Levi’s boutiques, Mango, Zara, Esprit, or Armani (sometimes written in the Arabic script, as in the picture below). These boutiques however seldom offer the commodities produced by the brand displayed. The usual brand names are prestigious among Tehranian clients because of the private circuits that bring products in small number, and sell them at private occasions. The original products also arrive from France or other occidental locations via Dubai, through parallel commercial circuits (see Chapter 4). Nevertheless, before the counterfeits arrive on the market, they need to be produced somehow, somewhere. Although the issue of copyright in Tehran is much greater, and it includes the market for counterfeits, for my purposes here I will focus on designers’ practices regarding copying and brand-signature in Tehran, with brief references to their Parisian counterparts. What does it mean to copy? Is it legitimate to talk about illegitimate copying in the age of mechanical reproduction? For the purpose of writing this text, I constantly use the command copy/paste, not to mention the fact that the format of my writing (the immate-

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rial object of copyright laws) is itself the property of Microsoft, and it is only licensed to me as a legal user of Word software. As my friends in Tehran remarked, one can copy not only dress, but also ways of moving, attitudes, language, and entire styles. While hesitant to use the word “copy”, I will do so because it is used by the persons I interviewed and there is no more accurate word (as of yet). There are three different practices associated with copying to which my friends in Tehran pointed. First, there is the copying of a style, of a mode of behavior, of a kind of dress on the part of consumers. As Saba, a young Iranian woman observed in an interview: “Here if something becomes fashionable, everybody copies it. This is not really fashion.” In slightly different formulations, this statement was present among all the people I interviewed who knew Tehran’s fashionable urban environment. While walking in the chic locations of the city one has the sensation of seeing again and again of the same kind of dress or styles. In Paris and other Western location, this type of behavior is known as “fashion victimization”, and it is many times used in a derogatory manner for those who do not feel daring enough to experiment with clothing. As a Paris designer observes: [T]here are panoplies in the spirit of a stylist, and this is not really interesting; the most interesting thing is what people are doing with the clothing, how they appropriate it... make it exist, creating its history, but using it in a different manner.

In Paris, Japanese consumers are stereotypically associated with fashion victimization. In an article on fashion in Japan, McVeigh (1997) makes the argument that the conservatism of Japanese society does not encourages innovation with dress, but rather the direct copying of prestigious Western designers. The researcher argues that fashion in Tokyo is the expression of a hierarchical rigid system, rather than of the social mobility and democratic fashion

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uses in Europe. Although not completely confortable with this type of explanation, I found it interesting to think about the unity of style among the Tehranian young people who can afford to be fashionable. There may be a multitude of explanations for the style copying in Tehran. “It is very very hard to buy, but my opinion is because we do not see a lot of good stuff here, we see on Mtv or Fashion TV, and we do not have fashion designers, all the girls and boys I think they copy. They copy too much. They have to, they do not have a choice. It is very sad, actually...” (Neda, scenograph)

Indeed, styles in Tehran are mainly diffused through satellite TV channels like MTV or Fashion TV. While Fashion TV mainly offers high-end fashion product imagery, MTV displays the counterculture style, recuperated and filtered for the mainstream youth culture. Neda additionally explains in her interview that there is a lack of fashion designers in Tehran. While fashion designers exist in Tehran, there are not widely known, because they are not mediated, and thus out of reach for most potential consumers. The sources of inspiration for creating a style are thus limited. Nevertheless, TV fashion styles are wide-spread among the population: Everybody in the street sees what is going on, try to copy, makeup wise. I think everybody wants to follow, with Fashion TV. Even my employees, very Southern Tehran (low class part of the city, my note), they can have fashion TV. So they follow. (Shadi)

It is important to observe in this quote that the sense of copying is somehow reversed in relation to designers in Paris. Street styles are sources of inspiration for many Western designers, while in this case the “street” is inspired by mainstream fashion. The circuit is closed.

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A further limitation for style creation in Tehran may be the scarcity of the options, in terms of variety of clothing. I think you have a choice in Europe, you can go to fashion stores and buy something you like, or you just can construct your own style. You can create by yourself and just wear it. But here you do not see young people being creative, like have their own style. They wear all the same short mantos, same make up, everyone !, jeans, scarves, I don’t like this. (Neda)

Nevertheless, there is something else which induces an absence of creative spirit. Most of my interviewees identified it with the conservatism that characterizes social relations in Tehran. While I partially agree with this argument – especially when it concerns male consumers – I think there is another important factor that plays into the widespread “style copying” in Tehran. The social pressure and the complicated surveillance system in public spaces (see Chapter 4) create a context in which experimentation with clothing is gradual and prudent. Beyond the “natural” tendency of feeling part of the group through clothing identification, there is the step-by-step experimentation with space and social relations specific to the place. This experimentation may include Parissa’s story of her copying the abba, the overcoat specific to the mullah. She said she made her first abba in the years immediately succeeding the imposition of dress codes and Islamic morals on Iranian public space. The style eventually caught up, but she humorously evokes the moments of experimentation with the new style. I mean I started from outside, I copied the mullahs, what they were wearing (nobody was wearing them), the first thing I started to make was abba. And I wear it myself first. And everywhere I went they catch me and they stopped me” What is this, why are you copying the mullahs”, because I put the scarf around my head in the same way. They did not like it at all. I told them

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“don’t you tell us everytime to copy them? They are the best, what’s wrong then? I am copying them!?” “No, no, we were talking to the men, not the women!” (laughs)...

There are several elements that emerge in this fragment: first is the widespread idea of identification with a group through imitation of its clothing style. Parissa used the abba ironically, but she also proposed it to the public as a practical way of dressing under the new regime. Copying dress and “copying” behavior is automatically linked and ironically used in this case. Her first remark, “I started from outside” marks the locus of inspiration exterior from the designer’s realm, that is somehow not in her “pure creative territory”. Nevertheless, as I remarked further in the interview, Parissa does not seem to see copying as illegitimate as long as the artist puts a personal touch in the creation (an opinion shared to a certain degree by all the designers I met in both Paris and Tehran). On the contrary, she has a rather open opinion about copying, resting assured that the designer’s or artist’s touch will always mark an original dress. But she, as well as many others I interviewed in Iran, complained about a sort of “national character” in Iran that makes copying widespread: We, Iranians, are the best copymakers in the world! (laughs) We copy everything, you know. But what to do? Everybody copies everybody. It has always been like this, and it will always be. Not everybody has the brain to bring out something new [...]. So everybody is a copy!

Art for Designers, Copyrights for Business The second level of copying is industrial copying, the large scale production of fashion commodities bearing prestige names like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, or Dior. While important and not without

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Figure 7.2 Brand-name tags for sale on Sa’adi street in Tehran.

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significant impact on the market, it is not the purpose of this chapter to analyze this phenomenon. The third kind of copying refers to the clothing production by tailors and designers and the use of a prestigious name to increase the value of clothes. One of my first days in Tehran I went to Sa’adi street, in the center of the city, where many low-end tailors are concentrated. In the window of one store, I saw big rolls of brand names like Nike, Boss or Ralph Laurent, that could be bought, cut, and applied to locally-produced clothing. In the same store one could find a variety of branded buttons, zippers, and so on. I later found out that there are many such stores, and that in the Great Bazar there is a special section dedicated to them. It is a common practice among tailors in Tehran to offer to their clients not only copycats from fashion magazines but branded copies of the client’s choice. In contrast, fashion designers of Tehran refuse to provide such services. As Shadi once told me: I had this request from some man who wanted me just to copy an Armani jacket, I said : ‘I am sorry I will not do this’. I don’t accept when a customer comes to me and says : « I want to have this »... well, no!

This fact constitutes the main distinction designers make between themselves and the large number of tailors active in Tehran. While one may go to a tailor and order a dress directly copied from a Western journal (French Vogue is the most widespread but I have also seen various other journals, or just pages cut from fashion magazines), a designer will always propose a particular style of his own (see Chapter 6). Shadi does not deny that she is inspired by Western fashion magazines:

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I definitely do not copy. I do get inspired by magazines and everything to see what the trend is, to see what has been done, what has not been done... But I really do not copy.

Shadi signs her dresses with her name, hand-embroidered with golden letters on a black tag. In pre-Revolutionary times, her mother was a well-known dressmaker for high-class women. Shadi started her work by helping her mother and eventually took up the business. While she kept some of her mother’s clients, she formed a younger clientele of her own. It was at that point that she invented her signature. I asked if her mother had a signature, and a friend of Shadi present during our conversation responded “she didn’t need one”. The implication was that she was so well known that she did not need to sign her creations. Although Shadi is also well known, she has a signature. I will argue that there is a series of other factors that play into the presence of a signature, not only in Shadi’s case, but in that of other designers in Tehran. For the moment, it is important to remember that Shadi has a large clientele from Tehran and from the Iranian diaspora. She sometimes receives orders by mail or phone from clients in Paris or London; the clients usually ask her to duplicate a piece in a different size, for a friend or relative. At the same time, Shadi has what she calls a ready-to-wear small line, dresses made for daytime use that she produces. During the 1990s, Shadi worked in a publicity production firm in New York. From previous interview excerpts, one can see Shadi’s discursive rejection of copying linked to her practice. The issue of copyright seems to be a new concern among fashion designers in Tehran. Consequently, not all of them had developed brand names. In general, the idea of copy and copying does not seem illegitimate in itself; the many opinions expressed on the topic ranged from considering the copy as a stimulatant to imagination, to the copy as inoffensive “because everybody knows me and my dress”.

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Copying is also present in other domains, for example, in the market of art reproduction in Tehran. In the same commercial spaces where one finds counterfeit clothing, one may also find painting reproductions. The reproduction of famous or even lesser known paintings on different backings (from canvas to carpets) is also a common practice in Tehran, and there are boutiques in which one can watch the entire process of copying. But having one’s own signature and not accepting client’s requests for copies are mechanisms of distinction among Tehran designers. The idea that “everybody copies” in one way or another is however regularly invoked. While designers and stylist in Tehran generally maintain that they do not copy when asked in interviews, in practice they

Figure 7.3 Reproduction of a portrait in an art boutique in Tehran.

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are clearly inspired (and in some cases more than just inspired) by Western journals like Vogue, and professional catalogues (Secada) at least for the clothes designed for evening use. Other designers I met produced clothing in larger numbers and created their own brand. While Shadi uses her own name hand-embroidered in golden letters on black or dark brown, Nafisseh brands all of her products with the label Z.A.N., accompanied by the logo sign for femininity (the circle and the little +); zan in Figure 7.4 Farsi means woman. Nafisseh Fashion journals offer inspiration. forms a working team with Roxanne, which may explain why the brand is an abstract name. Nafisseh also told me, showing me the label on her own manto : “It makes more mark, more like a fashionable occidental logo.” The labels are produced locally, and Nafisseh brands her “Islamic mantos” that she sells in a series of small boutiques in Tehran. Not all designers have a brand name. For example, Azadeh makes only one piece of every creation, and she does not feel the need to brand her products. Nonetheless, Azadeh brands the bags in which she packs her clients clothing with her signature and phone number. This idea was greatly appreciated by a Parisian designer I visited after my return to Tehran, and it may appear in Paris in the near future. By

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labeling her bags, Azadeh essentially engages in the same practice that a ready-to-wear or a prestigious fashion house does. In many parts of the world shopping bags wear the sign, signature, or logo of the store or designer2. Azadeh’s approach to her work, in her own terms, is an artistic one. She explained to me she does not sign her clothes because everyone knows her style and because she is very inspired by traditional clothing. Azadeh differentiates between her creative work and her businessoriented work, giving the example of Mahla as a business oriented designer. Mahla is the creator of “Lotous” dress brand, of the Iranian fashion journal with the same name, and the organizer of the only two public fashion shows held after the Islamic Revolution as of now. Among the designers in Tehran she is the synonym of big business and of the differentiation of dress-making from art. When we touched on the issue of copyrights, she shared with me her opinion that copy is a stimulus for creation and that being copied also means being well known. When I asked her if somebody had copied her models, she answered: They did not copy it yet. (Laughs) They did not do it, yet. But they cannot. Do you know why? Because I applied for copyrights. It is a very new office. In a special place they give us a number, and than we put that number on our brand. Nobody else can use it. But as you know, all around the world is the same...

From a legal point of view, Iran offers complete protection to brand names and patents. Nevertheless, there is no regulation regarding designs and dress models protection, because they do not 2

Branded bags from Europe like Zara, Gap, or Mango are used daily by wealthy women in Tehran as mark of distinction, while shopping or simply visiting friends. Imitation luxury boutiques also use Western branded bags in order to decorate the shop-windows.

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enter under the incidence of Industrial Property law. The authorship rights have won recent recognition, and only in 1971 did Iran adopt a law regarding authorship and copyrights. Although Iran signed the convention of the World Organization for Protection of Industrial Property, it did not ratify the Bern convention, meaning that designs and models are not protected. It is likely that Mahla registered the brand name for the Industrial Property protection. This did not however stop the circulation of the first issue of Lotous magazine on the internet. On circuits of email among friends, just two weeks after its commercialization (March 2003), the journal, scanned in its entirety, arrived in electronic mailboxes. Of all the designers I spoke with, only Mahla had her brand name registered. There may be many reasons for this. Except for Mahla, who is a public figure, most designers prefer to keep their visibility in public and in legal spaces as low as possible. The main reason for this appears to be the delicate nature of their craft, and its intersection with Islamic regulation. Nevertheless, fiscal considerations may also be at the basis of the desire of invisibility. In any cases, besides Mahla, the designers who have a brand name seem to ignore even the existence of the patent office. Shadi was sincerely amazed when I asked her about registering her brand. It is important to remark that the use of a brand name precedes the registration of the mark, and is a practice independent from the legal space conferred to it. This is completely unlike the young designers I have met in Paris, who mark their existence as such from the moment of brand name registration. From the perspective of the dynamic of brand name practices in Tehran, Parissa is the designer who epitomizes the transformations in this craft with regards to copyright and branding in Tehran. Although professionally active for more than twenty years, Parissa

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never signed her clothes. Her opinion on copying is liberal, and she is persuaded that there is no real ex nihilo creation. So I start first with copying these things which they wear in the village, mixing them a little with the Western style, and slowly they start to come out of my own brain, you know, not copying anymore... Well, altogether, I have the ideas from Ottomans, Ismaili, you know the turks, all these... Turkeman colors, things like this, and all Qajar style. Copying a little, but making them a little different...

As Parissa goes on to explain in the interview, her originality comes from the artistic “touch” she confers to her dresses; she does not even present herself as a clothing designer, but rather as somebody with a special gift for colors, and their inspired combination. Her clients come from the upper Tehran classes, as well as from the Iranian Diaspora, mainly from Los Angeles. When I asked her about branding her clothes, she told me that “everybody knows me”, and therefore there is no need for her to do so. Later in our conversation, Parissa shared the details of her current dilemma. She never claimed rights of property over her designs. She told me she could always recognize her clothes by her personal “touch”, as could her clients. Nevertheless, recently she received phone calls from Los Angeles, from clients turned friends, who urged her to tune her TV to an LA Iranian channel in order to see her own clothes presented by somebody else as her own work. Following her account, supported by other friends I met later, the clothes she made and sold to members of the Iranian diaspora were apparently re-bought and presented under a different signature by an Iranian designer from Los Angeles. Parissa told me: If my head was made for business, I could sue her and make a lot of money, because I have pictures with these clothes on me taken ten years ago. But I am not like this. And this is my problem.

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She explained to me that now she is intending to make up her own brand, but not in Iran. She does not want to make it under her own name, either, for the reasons I mentioned before. Parissa is invited to an international show that will take place in London in 2004. “Because of this, now I have to think about a name, about a brand, maybe a website. Now I have to look for a photographer to make a portfolio.” Thinking about a portfolio, a brand name, and a (commercial) website in fact is the recognition from her part of the necessity of embracing new practices linked to fashion as business. All the three elements she mentioned are in fact part of the creation of a territory, a brand territory that would ideally bring economic gain, and the possibility of exploitation of a name, or signature. From Parissa’s perspective, these “things” are far away from her artistic preoccupation and approach on fashion. The incident of her creations being resold under a different name does not stir in her the desire to recuperate what is “naturally” hers. The distinction between artist and business-person is a valid and operative one in Tehran, among the designers I interviewed. On the contrary, in Paris the designers (créateurs) I interviewed operate in the logic of the unity of art and industry, talking about their work as both an artistic creation and a legally regulated source of economic gain. Being copied is a constant concern for my interviewees in Paris, and to a lesser degree in Tehran. It becomes evident that in Tehran the preoccupations with copyright started in the later period, along with two important mutations: firstly, the changing of status of dress-makers from tailors to couturier, and their entry into the logic of market. It is notable that three out of four designers that I have met and who have a brand name belong to a younger generation (between 35 and 50 years old), and all of them studied or worked abroad in Europe or in the United States. As previously mentioned, Shadi transformed

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her mother’s tailor-shop into a fashion design workshop upon her return from New York. Unlike her mother who relied on her prestige among her frequent clients, Shadi created a name, marked thus the dress, and gave birth to a recognizable brand beyond the network of familiarity. Nafisseh (Z.A.N.) produces mantoha on a large scale, and developed her brand in order to differentiate herself among the industrial producers. Z.A.N. is presented as a ready-to-wear deluxe line. Lotous also started as a commercial brand (Mahla, the owner, studied banking in Holland). Lotous is a special case to which I will give more space. The development of internal textile production, due to a protectionist economy (importations were forbidden up until March 2002), created a very concurential internal market. The stylists distinguish themselves through their name, prices and the clientele they developed (mainly persons from the same privileged class position). Second, the increased diffusion of locally produced designer clothing threatened those very designers’ economic gain. The clients from the Iranian Diaspora buy and bring clothing from Tehran to their homes in London, Paris, or Los Angeles. Some of the designers I have met were warned by their clients about being copied by Iranian stylists from abroad (as was the case for Parissa, as described earlier). The movement of clothes outside Iranian borders (or rather outside the small “controlled” area of Northern Tehran) and their exposition to a larger public made poignant the issue of distinction through brand or signature. The individualization of clothing through name is important when the diffusion of style(s) becomes broader, and there are economic gains in view. In Iran, fashion practices and market logic, along with the slowly introduced legislation geared towards the copyright and patents, lead to the ideas of signature and copyright among the designers

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of Tehran (parts of the myth of authorship). Although most of the designers do not know or follow the legal procedures for registering their brands, they put names on their creation, and construct prestige and status attached to their name. Nevertheless, in the absence of a law for design or model protection, this advantage cannot necessarily be exploited through licensing.

Authors, Power, Territory Based on Taussig’s concept of mimesis, Rosemary Coombe (1996) discusses the trademark as a mode of legal spatial appropriation that effaces the original referent (oftentimes an/other who does not benefit from the economic gains brought by the trademark, in her case Native Americans). The (figurative) trademark is the expression of the mimetic capacity that influences the original. Thus, Native Americans and indigenous people have to claim intellectual property of trademark images that are imitations (and oftentimes mockeries) of themselves. The question of the extension of copyrights to culture as a product of collective human actions preoccupies anthropological inquiries in the legal systems. Strathern (1996) observes the cognitive difficulty of presenting cultures as discrete bodies that may acquire intellectual property rights. See also Michael Brown (1998). In Iran, the process of introduction of a law regarding copyrights is paralleled by practices in the fashion industry that point to defining the individual as author. The idea of author already exists, of course, but the economic construction and the establishment of an intellectual territory to be exploited is in some ways a new one. In France, in the case of licensing, the fact that the designer acquired a new social status, and that prestige became attached to his/ her name, created the economic opportunity of using one’s name

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or signature for economic gain. The license protection law came after this practice was in place. The economic law of authorship induces new conceptions of the individual and new approaches to art. The unity of art as conceived in French law does not make sense among Tehran designers. The designers from Tehran and their clients discursively separate an artist from a business person. In the opinion of my Tehranian interviewees, an artist does not look for the economic gain, since her work is defined by the timeless creation rather than by temporal economic laws. That is, in many cases, even if a creation belongs to a person, the sources of this creation are diffused in an a-temporal tradition. As Azadeh told me repeatedly, she finds inspiration in old architecture, in villages, or in the clothes of the kashkay (nomad tribe of Iran). Azadeh does not sign her clothing, nor does Parissa. They are the two designers most inspired by traditional clothing and the furthest from the market logic. While timeless, the inspiration is very well delimited territorially in the designers’ views. It is either Iranian or Western. It is interesting to relate traditional clothes to national territory and to the idea of the territoriality of the copyright. Many designers in Tehran talk about the ease with which Western designers integrate Iranian style or patterns in their models, signing them afterwards and gaining intellectual (territorial) primacy over them. “Ethnic”, “oriental”, or “bohemian” are as many styles that designate in Paris or elsewhere the procedure of author-izing unsigned models. Extended, one may talk about a territorial possession through signature. Tehran designers complain about the fact that they have to copy western styles that seem a-territorial (because of the universalist value attached), whereas fashion designers in Paris do not hesitate to employ “traditional” or “exotic” styles, which seem timeless and thus non-authored. In both cases there is a power relation. The Western fashion centers dominate, based on ascendancy, territorial and signature primacy.

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Practices of copyright entitle those who apply them to conquer new spaces, new territories. The universal characteristic of Western fashion and the engagement with modern forms through desire make many Tehranian designers create in a Western spirit that may be permanently identified as copying. That is because, in contrast to non-western clothing, Western clothing comes always already signed, integrated into a system of copyrighted territoriality. Among the Tehranian designers, Western clothes are equivalent to haute couture, gaining thus a universal dimension similar to modernity. But, as in the Eurocentric discourses of modernity in which non-western locations are always mimetic of modernity, fashion designers in Tehran are always already “copies”. The ethnological approach I presented here argues that this is clearly not the case, and that it is the organization of copyrights and authorship into a legal structure, among other elements, that confers to western designs power and ascendancy. Time and space, profit through exploitation and territory are brought together in copyright laws. In Tehran, practices of commerce and industry (and anticipated profits) introduce the needs for law, and the application of law creates ideas of authorship. The French Embassy puts at the public’s disposition a list of local lawyers specialized in copyright legal matters. Even though most of the designers I talked with do not know how these laws would apply to their products, they are signing their products, thus making possible an eventual recognition of the author. But “author” does not necessarily have the same meaning in Tehran as in Paris, at least not yet. Significant differences remain such as the separation between art, and art applied to industry (in Tehran but not in Paris) and the absence of a legal provision space that makes “author” a profitable category. A wealth of literature deals with the consequences of generalizing property and reducing the space of common ownership. For a review of this literature see Keith Aoki (no date). Biopiracy

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is given special attention for two reasons: first, the ethical and ontological questions it gives rise to (e.g. property over life, legally solved in some spaces through the separation between forms and vehicles of life). However, this separation is constantly contested and rearranged in practices dealing with biological matter(s); see also Paul Rabinow (1999). Second, the impact that the patents of forms of life have on peasant populations (and on global food supplies) who are obliged to buy from multinational corporations the patented technique that they previously used and was part of common knowledge. (See Vandana Shiva, 1999)

Chapter 

Pictured Bodies: Photographing for Fashion in Tehran Driving or walking through Tehran, one cannot but notice the advertisements of “e-cut”. “E-cut”, a ready-to-wear fashion brand for men, uses “stars” to advertise their products. Mohammad Reza Golzar, the lead singer in the Aryan band, appears on the banners in two different poses: at the seashore, barefoot, dressed in an e-cut three- piece suit, and petting a horse (only the head of the horse is visible, and Mr. Golzar from the chest up). At the moment, “e-cut” is the only brand that uses advertising on public billboards for fashion products. As a consequence of the interdiction of showing the forms of the women’s bodies in public, women’s dress advertising through billboards is almost entirely absent. Since body visibility is a delicate issue and spatial segregation of the sexes is an important moral concern in Muslim contexts, prac-

Figure 8.1. Advertising for E-cut brand in Tehran, 2003.

Figure 8.2. Photos of two fashion boutique-windows in Tehran. Note the difference between female (above) and male (below) mannequins.

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tices surrounding representations of bodies are predictably sensitive to these contexts. Photography is a matter of concern in any public space, be it Muslim or not. Representing an object (body) through photography means not only invoking the specter of that object but also recreating its material presence, albeit a two-dimensional one. In the streets of Tehran, representations of women’s bodies are subjected to the same requirement of modesty, or hidjab. This refers not only to photographs for billboards, but also to window shop mannequins that lack the upper half of their heads and facial features (as opposed to male or child mannequins, realistic in their representation). As opposed to women’s bodies in movement, mannequins and photographs are fixed, identifiable, and thus more easily subjected to the dominant discourse. Photography practices in Tehran’s fashion world reveal a certain mode of imagining and representing (women’s) bodies in relation to modern repertoires (like fashion), in the spatial regime of ideal public and private separation along the lines of gender. As argued in Chapter 4 and chapter 5, in Iran gender segregation and its spatial inscription are part of a historical process. However, this segregation does not follow a rigid framework along the lines of Muslim/secular, non-modern/ modern. In her account of the modernization of women in early twentieth century Iran, Najmabadi (1993) shows how women were trained to “veil” their language and their body language in the absence of the veil. Modernization meant the exit of (some) Iranian women from the homosocial space of domesticity into the the public (masculine) space. The early twentieth century modern Iranian woman was ideally portraited as an un-gendered person, chaste, and restrained in her bodily motions and expressions. Therefore, woman’s appropriation of a modern Iranian public space was accompanied by the creation of a new type of woman subjectivity, through new

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subjectivation processes that emphasized immobility and restrain. The following pages show how this early twentieth century modern asexual woman’s body is now thought of as non-modern. This is the very body that the Islamic regime idealizes in its representations and that women call into question and re-work in daily fashion practices.

The Ideal Body of “Modern” Photography Many of the designers in Tehran have their creations worn by models (always amateurs, mainly friends, or the designers themselves) and photographed. They arrange the pictures in catalogues or portfolios to be presented to their clients. I had the occasion to see a number of portfolios, the most impressive one being Parissa’s. She had collected the photos of her creations since she began designing, twenty years ago. Although the photos were not neatly arranged, I was able to see the transformation in the style of her design. The photographer was a friend of hers, and the models were also friends. The pictures were taken in her own house or in her garden. One of the most interesting settings was an empty swimming pool, in the Fall, with autumn leaves spread all over the blue background (in fact the Fall collection is Parissa’s favorite, precisely because of the colors). Although I met three photographers who worked with fashion designers in Tehran, I would hesitate to speak of an established field of fashion photography in Iran. A young designer, Mehran, first took me to the workshop of the photographer he works with. Situated downtown, not far from Baharestan, the studio was on the fourth floor of a building, in a modified apartment. I was invited to have a tea by the photographer (a young woman, very dynamic, wearing glasses, well coiffed, Laya), along with her other guests, three young women in their twenties. I later found out that one of

THE IDEAL BODY OF “MODERN” PHOTOGRAPHY 263 them acted as a model for Mehran’s creations. None of the women wore headscarves or manto inside the studio. They were sitting on a low bed in the middle room of the apartment, now converted into the office of the studio. On the desk there was a telephone, a set of photography journals (Aks, the local photography publication), a calendar, and fiscal receipts, along with other office supplies. The room to the left of the entrance was the laboratory to which I did not have access. I was invited into the studio, the room at the right of the entrance. The space only contained a metal-shelf against the right hand wall, and a chair in the far-left hand corner. In the same corner hung big drapes in three colors (blue, red, and yellow, the main colors of the spectrum). They were used for backgrounds in taking pictures. The studio was equipped with two projectors, some tripods, and an electric heater, which the host turned on. During our talk, we mainly discussed the photography as profession in Tehran. The lack of an appropriate space for a studio is what bothered her the most. Nevertheless, she showed me some of her works, most of wich were protraits; her passion was doing portraits, especially women’s portraits. Laya confessed that due to the specificity of the public spaces in Tehran, not all of her work may be exposed. Her collaboration with Mehran limited to the collection he did as a student for his BA degree. That collection was later sent in Finland for the international exhibit in fashion 2002. At first glance, her photographs disturbed me, but I was not exactly sure why. Only later, while witnessing at a photographic session (which I will describe in detail shortly), did I realized that what seemed odd to me was the static position of the fashion models in the pictures. The bodies in the photographs suggested immobility in their poses, even the photographs of fashion creations had a quality reminescent of old-fashioned wedding pictures. The bodies suggest a static, albeit elegant, pose. In contrast, the fashion photographs in

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Europe are characterized by a certain mobility of the body, achieved through different techniques, from rapid shooting to images collage. This is rarely seen in Tehran fashion-photography. In Tehran, the body, and the female body in particular, is represented in an immobile position. In public spaces one can easily observe the immobility of women, their restraint in movements and gestures. This was a characteristic that seemed strange to my eyes since the beginning of my first sojourn in this city. Women on the street are generally very conscious of their body position, almost always looking straight ahead, eye-contact is generally avoided. Hands are kept near the body, when they are not hidden by the chador. In her analysis of body movements in Tehran, Shahshahani (in press) explains how public/private spaces are differently marked through body postures and gestures. She argues that while men’s bodies, which are allowed a great liberty of movement, dominate the public, the private gives women more mobility. Dance movement is the final expression of this domestic mobility, to which men are merely spectators. I found the same tendency in fashion photographs for Lotous magazine. Destined for public use, these photographs show models taking up static poses, standing and, more rarely, sitting. There is one notable exception to this rule: a moving woman’s body is acceptable only when associated with home appliances. The picture below advertises for the vacuum cleaner LG, and it can be understood in the movement schema discussed above. Although a public representation, this photograph is of a domestic woman’s body, admist the home chores. In the configuration of patriarchal, religious, and state power at play in public, this is another instance of unproblematic-motioned woman’s body, besides dance. The only fashion photographs I have seen with models giving the impression of movement were in private portfolios. However,

THE IDEAL BODY OF “MODERN” PHOTOGRAPHY 265 as Nasser, a photographer told me later on, posing in motion is frequent for private designers. To designate difference in types of fashion photographs, Nasser used a term that immediately interested me: [...] And I can take many kind of poses for girls, but it is forbidden to take modern pictures. Just you have to show the quality and the dresses. (my italics)

This formulation suggests that “the quality of dresses” is insufficient to ensure the modernity of a picture. In Nasser’s opinion there is something that is missing in a non-modern picture, a constitutive part that adds to the form, colors, cut of the dress, in order to give it the modern quality. I, of course, immediately inquired about his

Figure 8.3 Advertising for vacuum cleaner on a bus in Northern Tehran (Tajrish square).

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meaning of “modern pictures”, and was surprised (and delighted) to find strong references to the theoretical framework I have constructed. As expected, his response raised several key themes: Of course you have seen the Elle magazine, or Vogue, but we cannot do this here. When you see Elle or Vogue, or other fashion magazines, you see the model maybe moving, maybe in a special pose, lying or something like that. But here, no, we cannot do this. Just straight looking and it has to be simple.

Thus, modern is equated with bodies in movement, leaving tradition to the realm of the immobile, static, and unfashionable. The modern woman’s body is a dynamic one, having inscribed upon it the deeper characteristics of modernity: acceleration of time, social flexibility, and mobility, all expressed in fashion’s rhythm and its capacity of transforming the body’s expression, or the body itself. In Tehran, restrictions regarding the pose of the body, coupled with the equation ‘fashion equals modernity’, led the photographers I interviewed to conclude that fashion is non-existent in Tehran. However, many stylists involved in fashion production have a different opinion. Fashion is constituted as a contested domain because of its immediate reference to modernity. For Nasser a modern body is simultaneous visible and mobile, following Western ideal-types. For the stylists creating in the context of Tehran fashion production, the Western ideal type, while present, is only one reference among others that contribute to the creation of a variety of aesthetic styles. In spring 2003 I visited Nasser’s studio, a three store building in red brick, not far from Hafte-tir Square. I have arrived there invited by Mahla, in order to witness the photographic session for the second issue of her fashion magazine. The studio had the offices in each of the stores, leaving for the photographic room a very tall ceiling, with a metallic bridge at the height of about nine-ten

Figure 8.4 Picture for a private portfolio (reproduced with permission)

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meters. The architectural plans were brought through a friend of the photographer from Germany. Due to the various uses of the studio, Nasser explained to me that they needed a high ceiling: One of my friends in Germany took the plan, and I built it here. I needed a tall ceiling to take pictures from above. We take pictures of many Persian carpets. You have to be above of the carpet, in its exact center. That is why I needed a nine meters height.

I came to the studio at around 3 pm, after I helped loading the dresses for the photographic session in Mahla’s car (a Mini Morris, old model). Three young women in their early twenties arrived, models, and, as a first gesture, they take off their veils and comb their hair. I was offered potato chips, very popular among young people in Tehran. The first session was for school uniforms. Presenting children’s fashion and school uniforms was a new idea for Mahla. The first issue of her journal did not have such presentation. The three models she used for the children photographic session were between six and nine years old, and their mothers accompanied them. At the ground level there was the hall for taking pictures, in the underground there is another big hall, used by the young women to prepare themselves for the session – there are no real cabins, just a big hall, with a small table, chairs and a telephone in one corner, and a big tap on one of the walls. I later found out that this room is also used as a studio. I make light conversation with the models, one of them knows Spanish, another German. We are at the ground floor. Three men prepare the studio. A frame of polyester is set up to protect the photographer from the light of the projectors. There are three umbrella projectors, and two big canon-like ones. During the photographic session I had the occasion to talk with the photographer, the models, and with Mahla. The models were all University students, and Mahla personally recruited them. She

THE IDEAL BODY OF “MODERN” PHOTOGRAPHY 269 told me the story of one particular young woman that she has seen while driving her car. Mahla made a U turn and followed the young woman’s car until it stopped. Mahla proposed the job directly to the young woman who now came to the Lotus office (at the time of my visit) accompanied by her mother. Over tea, Mahla explained the kind of work she does, showed them the dress she is currently producing, and the Lotus magazine (then at its first issue). The models I talked to told me that there is no material gain in this work, but they do it as a hobby. One man is running from projector to projector modifying the light’s intensity. The other two are talking about the photographic materials. The school-girls enter the studio, accompanied by their mothers, and Mahla very carefully ties their shoes, talking gently with them. In the conversations I had, fashion, dress codes, and modernity intertwined, bringing the contested social meanings of these terms to the surface. The photographer (Farshid) complains about having to do fashion photography, as he is a specialist in still photography. “Fashion photography is new here. I do not like to do it.” Mahla is prompt to answer: “He doesn’t like it, because he doesn’t like the headscarf ”. The photographer replies: “I don’t like it but I have to do it. Each country has a tradition. Here we have to deal with this tradition.” Farshid perceives “tradition” as an impediment in the development of fashion, as something that directly opposes it, and opposes Mahla’s efforts to create a fashion magazine. His experience abroad, in Switzerland, where he spends most of his summer, contrasts with his manner of working in Tehran: You are looking at fashion in Tehran?! This is my question to you: (amply gesturing towards the little girls wearing blue headscarves). If you think this is fashion, I will say it is fashion! And these are the children of fashion.

Leaving aside his ironic and caustic tone, Farshid’s affirmation distills the meaning he attaches to the term fashion. For him (as for

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many others I interviewed) fashion is everything but the work he is engaged in at the moment of our meeting (always fashion related), even though he is photographing for a fashion magazine. His affirmation became even more interesting when he discusses the issue of body posture, and pose: Fashion (in Switzerland) is different, he continues. You can do everything you want ! Here you cannot ! I see women as men, no difference. So it should be no difference here, too.

The difference is both gendered and geographically marked. In Farshid’s words, there is a “here” where gender organizes fashion photography, and a “there” where gender is erased. “There” is modern (and fashion exists) while “here” is not. This difference is deeply reflected in Tehran fashion practices, but also the dynamic of these practices may reflect shifts in the meaning of this difference. The restraint in women’s bodies movements and postures, the limited tolerance in most public places towards experimental clothing, are indicators of the difference between men and women in Tehran. Thus, while talking about fashion, Nasser was telling me: Young people like to be fashionable. You can see it everywhere, and there is no problem for the guys. But for women... In the houses yes, in the parties, yes.

Here one can find the same perceived and perpetual separation and juxtaposition men/women, public/private. “In the houses, in the parties” are private locations open to “modern bodies”, and to the display of fashionable clothing. I witness photographing for “private portfolios” in Shadi Parand’s workshop, a designer that gained momentum after she was invited to expose her work in London, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in January 2004. A night of Iranian fashion animated the Statues’ Hall of the Museum, featuring Iranian designers from

Figure 8.5 Sofra posing for Shadi’s portfolio (reproduced with permission)

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Tehran, Paris, and London. Now, after the show and after a series of articles on her creation published in Western European journals, Shadi started to build a portfolio using clients as models. The designer uses the portfolio for showing to her clients and for promoting herself in Western fashion journals. She also recruited a young woman (Safro) who finished her studies in Iranian handicrafts, and who is both assistant and model. Safro initially was Shadi’s client and became model after she showed interest in working in fashion design. Shadi herself takes the photographs of her creations, and sometimes she invites a male friend to help her. At the time of my visit, using two digital cameras, Shadi and her friend took pictures of Safro and a client wearing the clothes she ordered. While Safro displayed a relaxed bodily attitude, moving freely and posing for the cameras, the client was rigid in her posing. Shadi’s friend and my presence, both of us armed with cameras, obviously made her uncomfortable. Knowing that the photographs would be used only for private showing did not contribute to changing the client’s body attitude. In a certain manner, our presence there already constituted a public. On the contrary, Sofra was used to having a certain public for her posing. Her photographs wearing Shadi’s creations were also used in foreign journals (e.g. La Libre). As previously shown, the practice of fashion advertising in Tehran urban spaces follows the same gender separation inscribed in the spatial regime. Easier to control, visual representations generally follow the dominant discourse that allow visibility for men’s bodies, while women’s bodies are invisible or at best immobile when in public. Particularly the association of women’s mobile body with fashion products is rendered invisible in the spaces that fall under official control. Fashion boutiques for women in Tehran do not have women models images on the banners above the door, in contrast to men’s fashion stores.

Figure 8.6 Entries in fashion boutiques for women (above) and for men (below).

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But in Tehran there is one important exception to the rule of the representation of women and women’s bodies in public: film posters. The importance of the film industry on the bodily aesthetic, and the marriage of fashion and film, is not recent. In spring 2003, to celebrate the long collaboration between fashion and film, the Parisian stores Printemps and Bonne Marché both organized exhibitions presenting famous actors and their fashion choices, in film or in private life. In winter 2000, Guggenheim Museum in New York organized an Armani retrospective. One special section was dedicated to stars and their Armani dresses, as they appeared on the silver screen. And everybody knows about the lifetime “aesthetic marriage” between M. Yves Saint Laurent and Mme. Catherine Deneuve. In many cases film stars set the trend in fashion, or fall themselves into the trap of fashion victimization... Tehran is no exception to this rule. Azadeh is one of the most famous costume and set designers in Iran (nominated twice in the last year for the 6th Iranian Cinema Festival Award). At the same time, she is a keen observer of the aesthetic influences film has on the fashioning of the body in Tehran. For example, when I worked on the movie Haman, in ’68 (1990), [...] I tried to change a little the dress of women appearing on the street. I give to actresses appearing on the street to wear not only mantos, but two pieces dress or things like this.

The film is set in contemporary Tehran and tells the story of a woman who tries to divorce her husband. He opposes the divorce because he is still in love with her (and because the shari’a laws advantaging men allow him to do so). At the time, two-piece dresses were not seen on the streets of Tehran, and Azadeh used this artifice mainly in order to suggest the changing of setting from public spaces to private houses.

THE IDEAL BODY OF “MODERN” PHOTOGRAPHY 275 The film has been very popular, and it was the first movie after the revolution in which we could see women dressed differently. After this, I have seen how the designers from Tehran, in their small creation houses, started to change the clothing style: colors, cuts...

I cannot but rely on her account regarding this film as the generator of the new style, but what is interesting in this case is not the “originality” of the design, but rather the back-and-forth of aesthetic canons from the screen to everyday life. Presently, some banners for popular movies in Tehran show the actors in their entirety, dressed in street clothes, walking towards the viewer. Women occupy an important place in these posters, they often have lead roles contemporary set films1. One of the most recent examples is the movie Ghogha, which follows the story of a woman who escape prison in order to inquire her dark past, and to avenge her sister. The film touches actuality urban themes, like AIDS, class division, and prostitution. The poster shows Ghogha (the hero), dressed with blue russari, dark blue roopoosh, jean, dark glasses on, walking towards the viewer, and followed by two young men, also dressed streetwise. It is interesting to remark that on this banner (and in the movie), the woman is the leader, the center of the image, (while generally in other posters women usually follow men, e.g. “Youth Dreams”). Except film posters, no other banners at the time of my fieldwork in Tehran showed women’s bodies engaged in movement in a publicly meaningful way. These posters constitute an ad-hoc sort of advertising for women’s dress, proposing, through the actresses’ presence, different styles of body in public. While this may be not a new phenomenon, I have only remarked it during the summer of 2003. It must 1

For a detailed discussion about representation of women in Iranian contemporary film, see (Naficy 2003)

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be remembered that in all of the cases, including movie posters, the women wear the russari. While body mobility and exposure is equated with Westerntype modernity, in Tehran’s public spaces women’s bodies are ideally immobile and covered. Nonetheless, while one may find this ideal in most of the public photographic representation and in mannequins of shop windows, women’s fashion practices introduce new dimensions and meanings to the use of urban space in Tehran. Just as in the movie Ghogha, certain types of modern (mobile) women are making their place in the predominantly masculine urban public space of Tehran.

Figure 8.7 Banner for the motion picture “Ghogha”, center Tehran.

Conclusion

Modernity in Motion This study started with a presentation of theories of fashion, focusing on the intimate link between fashion and modernity. Using Warnier’s approach on subject formation and material culture, which draws from Mauss and Foucault, it defined the role of fashion in the processes of subjectivation as the fulcrum of this book. Fashion informs modern subjectivities through actions on three levels: time, space, and the body. Fashion organizes time, in that it sets a calendar of events that in turn re-organize urban life, and operates class distinctions; it introduces seasonal aesthetic canons; and it divides long-term time into style-epochs. The interactions of various urban spaces with fashion practices reinvest both dress and architecture with meaning and affect. Geographical space is also organized through fashion styles that borrow their name from “exotic” locations. Aesthetically organized times and spaces are frameworks for the dressed body that is constituted through its movement. Clothing is central in shaping body conduits that, in turn, form the matrix of subjectivation. Fashion lends its characteristics to these three categories, and expresses the ideal of the modern order of things: time that both anticipates and conserves, spaces that are functionally organized around the ideal of visibility, and bodies that are subject to freedom of (consumer) choice. A fashioned subject is a modern subject. Nonetheless, the study of daily practices of fashion shows contextual variations of these three socially constructed categories, and it problematizes some of their assumed characteristics.

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In Paris I followed mainly the processes of fashion production, and retailing strategies for Middle Eastern clients. There the fashion calendar organizes time and sets consumption patterns. Anticipating the next aesthetic canon is the mark of distinction operating both at the designand consumption level. The distinction operates through the alternation of seasonal fashion presentations and the bi-annual period of sales. Commodities follow this circuit as they become devalued or out-dated. Among consumers, distinction is marked through access to clothing one season ahead of their use (e.g. access to summer collections in late winter). In this study the fashion system emerged as another expression of techniques of governmentality that inform a special type of subject, the consumer. In the passage from class fashion to consumer fashion (Crane 2000) the subject of fashion as we know it today, integrates, mixes and explodes the social categories of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and age in the multitude of styles laid before the self in an array of “possible choices.” Fashion and consumerism are resonant with a type of internalized form of control, pivoting around the idea of “desire.” In advertising, one may discern the contradictory messages of “acceding to desire” as well as the moral impetus of “resisting desire,” practices that concertedly inform the new subject, the branded subject. A combination of old principles of citizenship with new consumer-oriented practices characterizes this type of subjectivation. This reflects as in a kaleidoscope both the bourgeois social order and its moral precepts, and the organization of power in a system of governmentality that anticipates individual trajectories. The discussion on Middle Eastern clients of Parisian fashion houses brought to front the question of Orientalism. The practices of fashion in Paris relate in two different ways with this question. First, one encounters the perpetuation, under a different form, of

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stereotypes about an imaginary Orient. Fashion-related Orientalism operates with, and reflects the concept of branded subjectivity. The type of judgments passed on Middle Eastern clients emphasize the eccentric choice of colors, and the excess of brand-names that are supposedly transparent in the process of buying. Despite some exceptions discussed earlier, Middle Eastern clients are described through their excessive taste. The propensity for brand-names depicts a new imaginary space of “immorality,” of conspicuous consumption that facilitates the distinction between “us, the aesthetically educated and moral subjects” and “them, the immoral consumers.” The same type of distinction cuts across French, English and other Western European societies, distinguishing the mainstream bourgeois taste from new subcultures that are emphasizing brandname clothing styles, such as “the chavs.” Although important consumer populations for prestigious houses like Burberry or Chanel, “the chavs” are stigmatized by urban middle and upper classes. As the colonial Other had its mirror at home in the marginal groups of Western societies, the post-colonial subjectivity finds a corresponding other in the chavs – “the peasant bourgeoning class,” as some define them. The second observation on fashion and Orientalism has to do with the organization of space and power, and with the distinction between public and private, exterior and interior, masculine and feminine, and modern and non-modern. Patterns of consumption among Middle Eastern clients seemed to my interviewees not so different from others; at the same time, some designers in Paris observed that a “different system of dress” seemed to inform these patterns. Some of my interviewees claimed that, while in Europe, the dress style became “boring and linear,” the “Middle Eastern system of dress” allows more spaces of experimentation in private. The Orientalist view of a non-modern East is based on the idea

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of the absence of women’s bodies from the public space. The difference West versus indigenous is imagined and concentrated on the woman’s body and/or its absence (covered by the veil). In this colonial and post-colonial discursive configuration, the presence of the veil is equated with the absence of women from public (political) sphere, because women’s bodies were not visible participants in the scopic regime of power. In other words, the veil meant a nonmodern social space and indicated an otherness against which the Western self is constructed. The “Middle Eastern dress system” as presented by my interviewees is reflective of a slightly different understanding. The separation of public and private marked on clothing pointed out to a different relation with the regimes of power organized on principles of visibility. The constant scrutiny, surveillance, and the pervasiveness of power in modern European states seemed to have an expression in standardized dress, and a standardized asexual subjectivity. Different modes of subject formation seemed to be present in Middle Eastern locations, reflected by a different “dress system.” The book presents an in-depth discussion of one of these “dress systems” by looking at fashion practices in Tehran. I approached the question of the intersection of dress, nation state formation, Islam, surveillance, and urban spaces from both consumers’ and designers’ points of view. This approach questions the stereotypical representation of Islamic social organization as a spatial dichotomy between public and private. In Chapter 4 I discussed the formation of a new sense of citizenship in the Islamic Republic based on the entitlement of personal surveillance of the other in public. I have shown how different “regimes of dress” characterize different urban spaces. The argument is that different combinations of power relations, personal engagements and relationships, and the structural organization

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of space and times contribute to the definitions of these “regimes of dress.” I have argued that they are all expressions of the same “repertoire of modernity,” that is the configuration of citizenship constructions, legal understandings and contestations, and specific social structuration in contemporary Iran. Consumer attitudes, and the approach toward fashion is not, as some would have it, a form of contesting a non-modern society by its somehow newlymodernized subjects. What we have is rather a specific modern regime, characterized by a constellation of power that combines the above-mentioned elements in specific matrixes of subjectivation. State reinforced patriarchy and Western style fashion are not mutually exclusive but symbiotically developed in a place like Tehran. Fashion design practices offer the same image. A combination of specific moral considerations, political concerns, and aesthetic affiliations define the attitude towards clothing creation. As in Paris, design choices inform class subjectivities, and taste divides along the class lines. Nonetheless, there are significant differences regarding the standardization in design practices between Paris and Tehran. These include design techniques and the fashion calendar (strictly enforced and highly standardized in Paris, and more flexible in Tehran). While Paris is the fashion capital of the world, in Tehran one finds a dynamic albeit small emerging industry at the fringes of public recognition. A special chapter was dedicated to copyright laws and their conceptualization in Paris and Tehran. Chapter 7 both shows how copyright laws historically emerged in order to standardize practices that existed before, and how, in Tehran, partial application of standards coexists with authorial practices that are not the subject of any Iranian law. Fashion photographic techniques in Tehran are sites of contestation for the signification of the modern women’s bodies. For many of my interviewees in Iran the ideal type of modernity is

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Western modernity, and the ideal type of body is the mobile body. Photographic representations of mobility, when dealing with women bodies, are subject to specific contextual principles (Chapter 8). While many interviewees perceived fashion photography (and fashion) as “non-modern” because “non-Western,” others urged for the understanding of its specificity. A discussion on the specific of mobility in Paris and Tehran will bring to light the grammar of assumptions and the structure of power in fashion’s motion from one city to another.

Forms of Mobility, Forms of Modernity Different regimes of dress in urban Tehran are places in which modern subjectivities are formed. In Paris, the body’s engagement with the local modern regime reveals a mode of subjectivation based on generalized surveillance, and on forms of governmentality through signs. The bourgeois morality of restraint, reflected in fashion practices and in its forms of contestation is always already part of the overarching discourse of individual liberty measured through “choice.” At the core of this discourse, mobility and body exposure are presented as forms of universal freedom, rather than being modes of individual subjectivation through techniques of governmentality. Engagements with fashion practices are forms of subjectivation that dynamically construct the individual in categories of class, age, gender, or ethnicity, all the while questioning their social significance. In Tehran, different engagements with a modern repertoire (fashion) meet the overarching patriarchy and the modern state project that legitimizes it. At this intersection one finds the matrix of subjectivation, and the various forms of engagement with it. In Tehran a new mall-like construction, on three levels, opened its gates for the public in the summer of 2003. Commercial spaces, restaurants, and various recreations are offered to the consumer

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public. Thousands of visitors come on a daily basis to enjoy the air-conditioned environment and the modern setting in the company of family and friends. The main attraction of this new place is the third floor, the space that lends its name to the entire facility: Wonderland. Electronic games and simulators, bumping cars, bowling, are all available for a small entrance fee. The space is crowded in the evenings, with many visitors, young and old, practicing their skills at driving high-speed cars and motorcycles, sliding on snowboards and skateboards, even handling machine guns. Men and women mingle in a relatively relaxed manner, in this public place characterized by a decreased degree of state surveillance, as described in Chapter 4. The visitors experience, first hand, body motions and conduits associated with a modern way of being: skating, snowboarding, and driving high performance cars, as well as mingling, consuming, dressing in fashionable outfits, and displaying their bodies for the view of others. As mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 4, after the Islamic Revolution a self-imposed veil was cast over the modes of analysis by which some researchers and most European or American journalists presented the Iranian social context. The emblem of the Islamic Republic was the black chador, the women’s dress that never changed; Iranian women became fashion-less, Iranian society was an exile from the historical times of ever changing modernity into a space of non-changing Islamic tradition. Since the reformist president Khatami came to power in 1997, this optic has slightly changed, and the tendency has been to present a young Iranian population with liberal western orientation “deceived” by the political performance of the president. Fashion and consumption are the arguments in this very new debate, which lead journalists and documentarians to show a young secular Iran entirely opposed to the Islamic religious regime. Here, consump-

Figure 9.1 Entry in Wonderland

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tion is equated with modernity and a freedom whose development requires a non-secular regime. A recent article in “Le Monde” (05/03/04) suggestively entitled Iran : le président Khatami annonce un processus réformiste irréversible pour la République islamique presents the publication of a book signed by Mr. Khatami. The book comes as a political testament of the president who will finish his last constitutional mandate next year. The president states that, “neither secularism, nor tyranny will ever take a foothold in Iran.” Immediately after this affirmation follows a subsection entitled “Les Attentes Déçues de la Jeunesse.” It covers important political and social matters like the existence of political prisoners, the slow pace of reforms in the judicial system, as well as the issue of the last legislative elections in which more than 3000 reformist candidates were blocked from participating in elections by the High Consulate of the Guardians of the Revolution (the highest religio-political authority in Iran). All the while this article section asserts that the increasingly young, westernized, and secular population is critical of the non-secular regime. This vision appears in a nutshell in a New York Times article1 entitled “Those Sexy Iranians” The latest fashion here in Shiraz, in central Iran, is light, tight and sensual. […] Worse, from the point of view of hard-line mullahs, young women in such clothing aren’t getting 74 lashes any more – they’re getting dates. […] I don’t think Iran’s theocracy can survive them. (Kristof 2004)

The young woman in the picture above is engaged in skating. Most probably she will never use a skateboard on the sidewalks of Tehran, but her body experiences the motion conduits of any skat1

I would like to thank Tom Boellstorff for sending me this article through email.

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er. Her outfit is attuned to Iranian fashion sensibility, and friends of both sexes most probably accompany her. I watched her performance to the end. I noticed that her veil fell off once or twice and she did not bother much about it. Unlike skaters of Europe or the United States, she does not appropriate the publicness of the streets. She does, however, appropriate an equally public place, although one that is partially protected from the state/patriarchal mode of surveillance of the open street. She subjects herself to a modern matrix of subjectivation, and she does it regardless of her religious or political convictions. Her body (herself ) is in a modern hyperspace, with all local specificity. The fact that she engages in modern patterns of consumption and modern body conduits does not necessarily turn her towards secularism, if she is religious at all.

Figure 9.2 Skateboard simulator in Wonderland, Tehran 2003

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Her religiosity would not impede her modernity. In fact, she experiences a form of hyper-modernity insofar as her body partakes of similar global changes to which the emerging fashion industry of Tehran is subjected by fashion’s political economy (see Chapter 6 and Chapter 7). In Western representations of Iran there is a strong association between modernity, secularism and youth, and this representation is mediated through observations on consumption. All the while acknowledging the discontent of a certain part of Iranian population with the regime in place, my argument is slightly different: in Iran, a modern type of political subject emerged after 24 years of Islamic Republican regime. The exponents of this type of subject are the very young men and women whom the Western press presents as opposed to the Islamic regime. My research shows that they are modern without being necessary secular. Forms of democracy and democratic re-forms are part of the Iranian political landscape and interact dynamically with Islamic rule, just as fashion or skating (or all modern motion conduits) interacts with the spatial and moral configurations in a predominantly Muslim environment. Bayart (2004) proposed a vision of globalization as mode of total political subjectivation through objects (patterns of consumption and the standardization of the use of similar objects around the world, implying the development of glocal body conduits). In the long run this mode of understanding would do away with the “rhetorics of lack” that depict the non-western world: lack of fashion, lack of democracy, lack of free market, etc. Studying social practices such as fashion as they exist, and not as “they should be,” points to specific modes of subjectivation, agency, and local types of empowerment, rather than to a vision of a world divided along the lines of “absences.”

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