Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body [1 ed.] 1527585824, 9781527585829

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Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body

Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body Edited by

Žarko Paić

Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body Edited by Žarko Paić This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by Žarko Paić and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-8582-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8582-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. vii Introduction ............................................................................................. viii äDUNR3DLü &KDSWHU2QH ................................................................................................ 1 )DVKLRQ7KHRU\2ULHQWDWLRQV'LUHFWLRQV'LVFLSOLQHV äDUNR3DLü &KDSWHU7ZR ............................................................................................. 33 &RQWHPSRUDU\6RFLRORJ\RI)DVKLRQ 7RQþL9DOHQWLü &KDSWHU7KUHH ........................................................................................... 52 %RG\,FRQRJUDPV7KH(QGRIWKH 6\PEROLF &RQVWUXFWLRQRI)DVKLRQ äDUNR3DLü &KDSWHU)RXU ............................................................................................. 99 %RG\DQG/DQJXDJH8WRSLDQ9LVLRQVRI)DVKLRQLQ&URDWLD6LQFH the 1960s .DWDULQD1LQD6LPRQþLþ &KDSWHU)LYH ........................................................................................... 124 ,FRQLF%RGLHV6HPLRWLFVRI0DVFXOLQLW\LQ)DVKLRQ3KRWRJUDSK\ DQG$UW+LVWRU\ .UHãLPLU3XUJDU &KDSWHU6L[ ............................................................................................. 155 %RG\,PDJHDQG$HVWKHWLFVRI(YHU\GD\/LIHLQ)DVKLRQ%ORJV $6RFLDO-6HPLRWLF3HUVSHFWLYH 0DULDQQD%RHUR

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is primarily a theoretical effort to view the phenomenon of fashion within fashion theory as establishing a new approach from visual semiotics that I have tried to elaborate on in my understanding of fashion and contemporary art. The lectures I have given since 2008 on the MA course “Theory and Culture of Fashion” at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Textile Technology have been aimed at implementing a completely different approach to fashion from the typical disciplinary rigour and habits of the academic framework of humanities. If fashion is a creative body design as I understand it within the relationship of contemporary aesthetics, the technosphere and design, then we must face the changing paradigmatic forms in which fashion appears in the 21st century after realizing that posthumanism and transhumanism are already in the works of artists like Stelarc and that fashion designers like Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan paved the way for radical body deconstruction. Fashion, therefore, emerges as a visual code of contemporary societies and cultures in the networked matrices of hyperreality and visions of that coming time that will determine the combination of cybernetics, fetishism and transgression. This book brings together the works of academicians from the University of Zagreb, the University of Teramo, and the University of Osijek, comprising art historians, fashion historians, sociologists, philosophers and theorists of visual studies. At the same time, it is a testament to the dynamic and interdisciplinary desire for openness in exploring the essentials of humanities, which necessarily require pluralism in approach, rigour in scientific elaboration, and the desire to gain insight into the creative dimension of contemporary fashion. My thanks go to my dear fellow academics who were eager to enrich this edited collection with their contributions, as well as to our students, to Anthony Wright for his proofreading, and finally to the editors of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Žarko Paiü Zagreb, March 2022

INTRODUCTION

What applies to the transformation of three forms of culture—humanistic, anthropological and semiotic—is reflected in the transformations of contemporary fashion. We can imagine a continuation of these cognitivecreative games in the coming period in which the technosphere provides opportunities for every further development of fashion as a creative body design. What remains might not be quite reducible anymore to “society” or “culture.” This was clearly the case for the most radical fashion designer Alexander McQueen when, in his last performative event called Plato’s Atlantis, he contemporaneously staged a set of digital technologies, an experiment with the transformation of the human body (“third skin”), and a new aesthetic object like women’s shoes with high heels beyond so-called everyday life. Trauma and shock beyond normally comprehended fashion as a service for beautifying reality become new signs in the creative research of contradictions in the making of lifestyles. In all the research that has been done recently, we may notice the space of experimental games directed towards the transformations of bodies in contemporary art and design, with the greatest aesthetic achievements being found in the works of fashion designers such as Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Hussein Chalayan, Martin Margiela and Jean-Paul Gaultier. So, we would like to develop an analysis of quite a different discipline named the visual semiotics of the body. If language, according to Roland Barthes’ thought, was the fundamental signifier of fashion change, which is repeated as fashion returns to its origin in the phenomenon of retro-futurism, then for contemporary fashion, the sign of the rule of new information-communication technologies and interactive media transcodes language into an image or a visual code of social forms of the spectacle. Explaining how the image now takes “the logic of language” can only be possible when we try to discuss the definition of visual semiotics. It is a post-discipline beyond the distinction between semiology and sociology. The potential of visual semiotics was only created with the introduction of visual studies and visual culture at the end of the 20th century. The sign implies the meaning of fashion as visual information. That is why the meaning of fashion thus becomes the event of interactive communication of networked bodies as aesthetic objects.

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The fundamental assumptions of the considerations that will be carried forward in this book are as follows: (1) Design today signifies the emergence of creative thinking and shaping the body in the aesthetic and biocybernetic sense of the complexity of the system. (2) Fashion has been established in the global perspective as the creative design of the body through the social, cultural and environmental worlds. Only from that viewpoint can the entire tradition of dressing and clothing enter the fashion system. This order has been stably maintained through a permanent world crisis and societal transformations. (3) Therefore, contemporary fashion is going on as a media formation of life itself through the labyrinth of “styles” and “tendencies” in the area of development of design, ranging from cultural to creative industries. All of that bestows a brand new approach to the concept of culture and the meaning of visual imagery (visual-iconic turn) that is reflected in the completely new conception of fashion. (4) Thus, fashion is no longer considered as “applied art,” just as design is no longer addicted to so-called beauty immersed in an industrial environment of modern society wherein the aesthetic object (readymade) means creation beyond the boundary lines. Instead of that, we are thrown into the development of the techno-genesis of the new worlds of creativity. The consumption of time no longer applies to passive reception but enters into the space of interactive intervention and creates some new contexts and situations in which the human body coexists with others in the global and local areas. (5) The transition from the paradigm of “industry” as a finished product to “industry” as a system of changing and emerging “smart applications” leads to the establishment of the order of the creative economy in the information society. So, the consequences of these changes are farreaching. Primarily, they are related to the education system in all spheres. Thinking that unites “inventiveness” and “creativity” has become the basis of the new cognitive or creative-emergent global world order. The technosphere should now be the main force that impacts the limits of productivity of “work” and the methods of using surplus value for capital reinvestment. (6) Fashion design as the construction of the body becomes a creative and inventive practice that has a deep impact on the aestheticization of the life-world. Therefore, its essential characteristics are derived from the very figures that embody the “creative” individuals in the information-

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cognitive world of the speed, control and transformation of (a) the synthesis of ideas, (b) hybrid styles, and (c) the implementation of eclecticism. (7) The transformation of the body—ranging from changes in gender/sexual identity and the figuration lifestyle of managers, entrepreneurs, entertainers and stars of mass culture to the post-human “creature” (robots, cyborgs, androids)—that has been introduced to fashion in the new knowledge economy. Anything can be rearranged once more; all that has been produced in the new constellations, and the whole was stirred with a completely different regime. This is reliable evidence that the meaning of fashion no longer lies in the theatre of social roles or in the media world of changing cultural identity. Quite the contrary: “society” as a techno-scientific framework and “culture” as the driving power of changing life itself are derived from the genesis of technoaesthetically produced worlds. (8) Design is no longer even a “function” or a mere “ornament” in favour of the fundamentally constructed world made by technoscience. It just belongs to the logic of contingency and emergency. Therefore, we need to decisively break all the historically obsolete binary oppositions that governed and mapped the cognitive architecture of modern sciences and arts. The era in which we operate is determined by a set of hybrid concepts and new events. Thus, the event has marked the performativity of the creative body in society, politics, the economy, and culture. *** Žarko Paiü, in his contribution dedicated to the explanation of fashion theory as an assemblage of plural orientations, directions and disciplines, claims in the opening chapter that we should be aware that the scrutiny and method in the analysis of fashion as a creative body design require crossing disciplinary boundaries, often at the cost of loss of solid orientation. Strictly speaking, regarding the question of the modern scientific methodology of fashion studies, humanities and social sciences where fashion should be included, the answer is almost unambiguous: between and on the edge of the post-disciplinary approach to the very thing of thought. Here, Paiü applies the division of fashion into analytical-structural and historicalgenealogical senses, followed by the development of scientific paradigms ranging from modern sociology and anthropology to postmodern cultural studies and, finally, contemporary visual semiotics. He assumes that three modes of the paradigm are at the same time the ways to create a theoretical approach to the topic that is historically articulated as a path towards total

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body design. These are (1) modern fashion, (2) postmodern fashion, and (3) contemporary fashion. Tonþi Valentiü next aims to provide a concise and clear critical overview of the sociological understanding of contemporary fashion phenomena, starting from the earliest analyses at the beginning of the 20th century until today, i.e. the globalized era of computer network societies as the dominant form of social organization, and to critically question whether sociology today could be a proper discipline of fashion analysis. It is apparent that fashion nowadays occupies the most important areas of aesthetic creativity. Valentiü, in his analysis, deals with the legacy of modern sociological discourse about fashion and pays particular attention to the most famous of French sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu, who approached the topic of social differences and the dynamics of separation of social formations using the example of taste criticism from the perspective of the sociology of fashion. In that sense, the emergence of new disciplines such as fashionology or the visual semiotics of fashion could be understood as both a continuation of the classic sociological approach as well as its disciplinary opposition, bearing in mind that they operate with different theoretical vocabularies. Žarko Paiü, in an extensive and provocative study dedicated to the problem of contemporary fashion starting from the visual semiotics of the body, argues in the third chapter that we are entering an age that can be explained by the assumption of the end of the symbolic construction of the body. Instead of the logic of representation of fashion in the light of modern society and postmodern culture, contemporary fashion should be regarded as a performative-conceptual turn in the very core of body iconograms. The triad of fashion in the presence of the contemporary age and its superseding has been shown through (1) syncretism, (2) hybridity, and (3) eclecticism. Paiü vividly proves how we must abandon all previous essentialist art and fashion theories and try to think about posthuman fetishism through an experimental way of deconstructing the “third skin.” Therefore, contemporary fashion, as the radical “theatre of cruelty” (Artaud) and the “eroticism of death” in its latest transgression, leads to the apocalypse of the body in the mythical act of its creation and destruction. The fetishism of contemporary art and fashion decadence are represented as interactive spectacles of narcissistic subjects/actors in the lives of iconograms beyond sanctity and sacrifice. This life is auto-poetically generated by new digital technology, and it consists of the fragmentation of identity in the networked space of the media world of art and fashion. Alexander McQueen’s show Plato’s Atlantis undoubtedly represents, Paiü claims, an attempt at a radical change in the overall view of the contemporary body as a transgression.

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Katarina Nina Simonþiþ deals in the fourth chapter with an issue dedicated to utopian visions of fashion in Croatia since the 1960s. She aims to indicate the diverse approaches of and interests in the production of Croatian artists dealing with garments as utopian visions of digital reality. Miroslav Šutej’s fashion design was highly influenced by Space Age fashion and New Tendencies, while Silvio Vujiþiü is spellbound by artificial intelligence and its potential for fashion production, which led him to create a completely new fashion language, a reflection of the digital age. In contrast, Matija ýop’s primary interest is the body, which, in the digital age, offers a plethora of possibilities for modifications and re-evaluations. The produced garment is only one means of the artistic expression of its coexistence with the body. However, both Vujiþiü’s and ýop’s productions have a strong futuristic character, much like Šutej’s sketches in the late 1960s. In addition, Simonþiþ aims to emphasise the social, political and cultural conditions in which the artists work or by which they are moved to work. Krešimir Purgar analyses the semiotics of masculinity in fashion photography and art history in the fifth chapter and argues that we need to try to see the “trivial” images of fashion advertising from a perspective that he preliminarily calls a transhistorical image system. Visual studies interpret visual codes as part of a universal system of representation, Purgar claims, as he delves most deeply into the field of pictorial hermeneutics that connects lesser-known areas between the specificity and the generality of the image. Its methodology starts from the belief that each image frames one part of reality, but it does so while not being isolated from other images, as much as their comparison may seem inappropriate and as much as the proposed semiotic leaps connect temporally, stylistically and thematically distant pictorial representations. Following Gilles Lipovetski’s thesis, Purgar concludes that the freedom to choose consumer goods based on pictorial incentives is the lowest form of democratic participation, but he also adds that the freedom to interpret these images is a much higher form of consumerist and civic consciousness. Marianna Boero aims to explore the communication trends of the language of fashion in the social universe, with particular reference to fashion blogs. With the advent of social networks, the language of fashion has undergone significant changes, which have led it to rethink and redefine some communication logics. If before fashion was a “closed universe”, reserved for a small audience, thanks to social media, it becomes a system based on the interaction between companies and their audience. An example is the possibility of attending high fashion shows through live coverage on social channels, or to participate to social communities dedicated to fashion

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events. In a context of this type, fashion experiences a process of democratization, while maintaining exclusivity, increasingly entering the daily life of the public in the social universe. Fashion blogs play a fundamental role in this sense, allowing users to identify with the proposed narratives. Precisely with the aim of investigating the way in which the language of fashion redefines its communication and symbolic methods in the social universe, this article traces the main studies conducted in the field of semiotics of fashion and then focuses on fashion blogs, highlighting the role of the body aesthetics and valorization in the overall communication. The body changes with changing fashions: both are a sign of the cultural and identity metamorphosis of society. The body of fashion is always perennially deformed, it is the mirror of social identity, the eternal return of the new. In this perspective, social semiotics can play a central role for understanding the ongoing scenario. Petra Krpan deals with fashioning the cinematic screen as body transmediality in the final chapter. She argues that fashion photography and fashion film have gone a step further in considering the relationship between fashion, the body and corporeality. The most significant changes in contemporary fashion have taken place in the context of fashion photography, fashion film and fashion performance, all under the visible influence of the media. Therefore, the notion of the media is the basis for understanding the paradigm shift that fashion experienced at the beginning of the 1990s. The most significant achievements of contemporary fashion designers such as Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Hussein Chalayan, Rick Owens and Iris van Herpen constantly remind us that the magic and power of fashion is realized in the spectacular performance of the body in the event. For fashion, in the end, remains a catalogue of fascinating images, a pure visualization of life as an aesthetic pleasure.

CHAPTER ONE FASHION THEORY: ORIENTATIONS, DIRECTIONS, DISCIPLINES ŽARKO PAIû

Introduction The fundamental notion of modern political philosophy and law since Immanuel Kant is represented by the concept of autonomy. We take this word extremely seriously because, without its meaning, we cannot understand why the desire for autonomous fields of research prevails today in the age of the interdisciplinarity of science. Fashion is like other phenomena in its constant search for its purpose and aim. Its autonomy is therefore identical to the desire for emancipation from all obstacles in the constitution of its own subject. This is nothing strange. For the phenomenon to be scientifically experienced, it might be necessary that the theory that gives it credibility reaches a high level of performativity. Autonomy, for us, should mark the freedom of disposition of our mind in modern times. But the mind is not outside the body. That body, thus, appears in the context of contemporary fashion with the reflexive power of realization of the mind and the desire for the eccentric display of the entire world of human sensitivity. This position of unfoundedness, because fashion has very lately become the subject of scientifically relevant research, reflects on the creation of a unique language and speech. The multitude of expressions for changing the style of clothing features point to the impossibility of the uniformity of fashion. Moreover, unlike other areas of the world of life such as art and architecture, the only way lacks credibility and autonomy. And without that, there is no possibility of recognition. We might be able to explain that phenomenon with the metaphor of bubble foam or of clouds moving in the sky. Both of them are perpetual and transient, almost at the border of a stable order of meaning, without their logic of action. Clothes and decorations

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belong to the body as an aesthetic object. By changing the identity of a dressed body, due to the speed of modification, it is impossible to distinguish the “style” from the “trend.” This problem becomes much more complex when fashion from visual arts and architecture takes the notions of “style” and “trend” and leads them to aesthetic-commercial visual communication in the global world of information, services and capital. Speaking of symbolic, communicative and aesthetic meanings presupposes the perceived change in what overlays the term itself as its reference framework. Is it still possible to consider fashion in the categories of linear progress and development, social dynamics, and the complexity of modernity? And, in turn, because it inevitably creates several new conceptual tools with which we will be able to reach multiple changes in fashion at the same time with uncanny speed, should we have a secure viewpoint from which we could know how society and culture in the era of the visual spectacle would transform a networked global communication? The difficulties faced by the scientific study of fashion in the 20th century stem from the area in which the term refers to two closely related meanings. They are “inclusive disjunctive.” The first one historically arose with the emergence of capitalism towards the end of the Middle Ages in the 14th century in Italy and France. Fashion shows, for example, a way of life or a high culture of perception in the mutual display of bodies within the space of aristocratic institutions of government. The word comes from the Latin modus, the meaning of which is related to habit, culture and lifestyle. In Italian and French (il modo/la mode), the expression refers to the system of rules and norms adopted. Without acquiring a symbolic meaning of differences in social status and cultural choice, fashion is therefore not just a privilege of an aristocratically shaped society. On the contrary, what also takes place is the beginning of a process of socially individuating the body. Moreover, fashion in this sense rises to the throne of social power. The aesthetic form of communication among people goes beyond political and cultural boundaries. Secondly, the meaning of fashion arose in England, the leading country of modern capitalism, under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. So, in the 16th century, that concept had its general application in commercial trade and economics confirmed. Malcolm Barnard, in his analysis, examines the crucial changes that took place at the beginning of the modern era in Europe (Barnard 2002, 114) and successfully reveals what is “new,” what has “changed,” and the reduction of fashion to the economic value of goods and the financial manner of reproduction. While the first meaning is oriented towards the norms and ideals of the aesthetic life of a modern man, the second is entirely realistic concerning the essence of capitalism as a new social order—the accumulation of capital in the form of

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the natural and cultural transformation of goods. Fashion as a culture and fashion as an economic way to gain wealth in a society based on social inequality, political liberalism and the idea of unconditional progress form the dynamic structure of Western civilization. Regarding its occurrence, its tendency is spreading throughout the whole world. In the age of globalization in the 1990s, one could truly talk about the total rule of the social form of fashion. With the old historical strength and power of capitalism, it is reflected in the desire of all to possess designed objects. The concept of fashion as a “social form” refers explicitly to the structure and matrix of the essential duplicity of its function: (a) the usable value of the goods and (b) the market value of the exchange in which the fetishism of goods has its origin. In principle, this is a revised concept from Karl Marx’s Capital. For sociological theorists of modernity, ranging from Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel to Herbert Blumer and Pierre Bourdieu, this concept is largely binding (Paiü 2007, 64–71). One cannot omit any of the other meanings of fashion. It would be a shrinking of its historically established “being.” The ambiguity of fashion, therefore, is not only evident in the fact that the Italian-French world of high fashion and style clashes with the English-American anti-fashion world and global industrial production in both its action and in the sales of clothes. What is shown in this twofoldness of the “necessity of opportunity” of fashion as a process of liberation from the laws of nature and tradition, as well as its cultural differentiation within social integration, as determined by Simmel’s famous sociological definition (Simmel 1957), might be a paradox and aporia of fashion in its relationship with modern society and culture. It cannot be determined by any means whatsoever by reaching out to the governing reference framework (capitalism-modernity-the social form of power). Why has that already been formed just like an unchangeable fateful event? The reason should be sought in the fact that a process of double emancipation took place during the 20th century: (1) the human body as an area of freedom for the creative construction of new worlds of coercion, patriarchal order, and associated dominant ideological-political systems of meaning, and (2) knowledge about the origin of new areas of research that combine the ideas of the aesthetic object (ready-mades) and lifestyles. Fashion should be regarded as a permanent change in the meaning of clothes depending on the context and the situation in which the body appears. But the change is not made for the mere “sake” of change or by anarchic spontaneity without direction. Instead, it might be necessary to introduce fashion as a creative body design into the debate. What is live, stable and steady as the flywheel to accelerate in the 21st century gives new meaning to the circular straightness in the development of something, as

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“ghosts always return” (Breward 1995, 115–118; Evans 2003, 19–28; Lehmann 2000, xx). As far as this is impossible, it is inevitable for the true beginning of a new approach to the phenomenon of fashion. That approach has opened up whole different horizons. Fashion finally gave legitimate meaning to the area of autonomous scientific discourse.1 We start from the assumption that comprehending fashion as a creative body design designates the beginning of the most significant 20th-century theoretical book that had far-reaching implications. Of course, this is the book written by the French semiologist and literary theoretician Roland Barthes titled The Fashion System (Système de la mode) from 1967. For this reason, for the first time, there is a thought that fashion is no longer inauthentic and is not merely the result of the social dynamics of modern capitalism as established in the sociological theory of modernity known as trickle-down theory. Instead of such a “traditional” approach starting from the standpoint of social class interrogative factors, a hierarchically ordered society, like a pyramid, encounters an inversion of “being” fashion. Well, it must now be understood as an advanced sign system (signifier-sign-signified). This could be a change in fashion styles and trends from a stable language system and its syntax, semantics, and grammar. All this represents a testimony of the crucial role of the concept of culture in understanding fashion. Culture, which now has the decisive meaning of the new reference framework, must 1

The concept of discourse is taken from the early philosophical work of Michel Foucault (1994). Its meaning is multiple. Discourse (Fr. discourse – language, hearing, communication mode within a given society and culture) always refers to language and power as a general framework for legalization in the historical work of man. Hence, “scientific discourse” differs not only from ordinary language in everyday use, but also from other ways of speech and written communication. Just as Roland Barthes distinguishes language (langue) from speech (parole) in his semiotics, and so fashion can encompass the difference in what characterizes the possibility of speaking (the body) as such in the human world, so Foucault also articulated that language is always directed to power structures in a particular historical context. But discourse cannot be nothing “natural” and “invariable,” but rather a historically formed relationship between language and speech in the context of socially and culturally coded power. The “scientific discourse” is always a connection between the language of the fashion and the power of social-cultural legalization under which communication processes take place. Discourse thus opens as a field of the constant change of language and speech in institutions and the world of life. When a historically determined “social form of fashion” disappears, as occurred with modern fashion (from the 1800s to the 1960s), then the discourse that gave it its gild and shine also disappears. But that does not mean that terms and language of the past do not remain. They are still present in fashion as historical epochs, but they do not have the power of enactment (such as, for example, language and speech in Renaissance or Baroque fashion).

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be confirmed as the mass culture of the consumer society and its fundamental concept of communication. Perhaps we should listen to Barthes himself when he introduces fashion into the discourse of post-structuralism as the leading theoretical direction in humanities and social sciences in the 1960s and 1980s. It could be said that this was the way of thinking for the emergence of all the fundamental ideas within philosophy, sociology, and anthropology with the concepts that have linked nature and society, man and God, and history and events in the world. In the place of persistence, there are changes, and in the place of tradition and continuity come postmodernity, discontinuity, and a whole set of concepts taken from cybernetics, informatics, and structural linguistics. In the Fashion system, the sign, on the contrary, is (relatively) arbitrary: it is elaborated each year, not by the mass of its users (which would be the equivalent of the “speaking mass” which produces language), but by an exclusive authority, i.e., the fashion-group, or perhaps, in the case of written Fashion, even the editors of the magazine; of course, the Fashion sign, like all signs produced within what is called mass culture, is situated, one might say, at the point where a singular (or oligarchical) conception and a collective image meet, it is simultaneously imposed and demanded. But, structurally, the Fashion sign is no less arbitrary; it is the result of neither a gradual evolution (for which no “generation” would in itself be responsible) not a collective consensus; it is born suddenly and in its entirety, every year, by decree (This year, prints are winning at the races); what points up the arbitrariness of the Fashion sign is precisely the fact that it is exempt from time: Fashion does not evolve, it changes. (Barthes 1983, 215)

Barthes’ main assumption is extremely significant for the further exposure of all theoretical efforts regarding fashion and, at the same time, for bringing it into the “open system” (language-sign-communication), but we must not fall into the temptation to argue that dressing and fashion are just two different forms of (or the same human tendency for) decoration in all historical periods. Absolutely not! Dressing is a mark of tradition and persistence without change. Quite the opposite, fashion is characterized by a radical cut with the past. In that sense, in a lecture at the Collège de France on “modernity” in which he mentioned Nietzsche and his analysis, Barthes used the term for the modern woman in Paris at the end of the 19th century and appropriated it to the concept of the world: “Elle est contemporaine de tout le monde” (Agamben 2009, 30–31). The problem with the theoretical “founding” of fashion as a creative body design might be that fashion cannot be reduced to the social dynamics of power, nor even to cultural differentiation in lifestyles. Why? The reason is that its uniqueness and singularity might be determined as an experiment of the existence of an

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individual, rather than as a mere dress of a social group, of the objectified phantom body that Sigmund Freud calls the super-ego area of impacts to all kinds of things. Although sociology is a positive social science that was the first to take fashion into serious consideration, the following should be emphasized. The paradox arises from that matter whereby the sociological concept of fashion can never be sufficiently deeply rooted in the underlying problem that lies on the surface of things. And that is the question of the identity of an individual subject and its autonomous body. In other words, the social analysis of fashion, as long as it is highly valued because it gives us an objective view of the state of things, is scheduled in its own way of saying. Fashion might only be a conditional social phenomenon. It is always distinctive concerning the common tendencies of a society that prescribes the norms and rules of clothing for the individual. Nevertheless, contemporary fashion at the beginning of the 21st century represents a radical emancipation from this way of understanding the body and wants the body to place itself at the centre of the question of selfhood as identity. We can find the real residence of fashion in the space of the bodily construction of identity beyond “nature” and “culture.” Our research concerning this space of experimental games with the transformations of bodies in contemporary art and design—the greatest aesthetic achievements of which are in the works of fashion designers such as Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Hussein Chalayan, Martin Margiela, and Jean-Paul Gaultier—should call this matter visual semiotics of the body. If language, for Barthes, was the fundamental signifier of fashion change, which is repeated as fashion returns to its origin in the phenomenon of retro-futurism, then for contemporary fashion, the sign of the rule of new informationcommunication technologies and interactive media transcodes language into an image or a visual code of social forms of spectacle (Paiü 2007, 217– 262; Paiü 2011, 367–427). To explain how far the image takes on “the logic of language” is only possible if we introduce a determination of visual semiotics into the debate. It should be noted that this is a post-discipline beyond the distinction between semiology and sociology. Language was suspended and neutralized with the introduction of visual studies and visual culture at the end of the 20th century. However, the sign is shown as fashion information on clothing related to new fashion trends. We can argue that the meaning of fashion, thus, becomes an event for the interactive communication-networked body as an aesthetic object. Just as art, after the movement of the historical avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century, caused beauty to vanish and “sucked” in being like in Marcel Duchamp’s famous “Bottle Dryer,” so fashion no longer finds the archipelago of beauty as the ultimate consolation of a

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classic aesthetic. Instead, we are dealing with processes of aestheticizing the world of life.2 That is how fashion “enrols” into the lifestyle of an individual as his changing identity. Nothing is persistent and perpetual. Everything is transformed into a multitude of forms. In this consideration of fashion theory concerning the multitude of orientations, directions and disciplines that deal with such a fluid phenomenon scientifically, it is necessary to find a logic of how it could be possible to understand why fashion was so late in establishing the area of overlapping tendencies in retrieving a complex lifespan and why it is not self-evident today that its autonomy, in conjunction with science, art and technology, has become a question of the design as the construction of new worlds, not just a decoration of the existing or longobsolete understanding of “applied art.” The logic of the turn begins, therefore, with Barthes’ semiotic approach to fashion as a sign of cultural change. Undoubtedly, we are aware that the very notion of culture is represented by a set of concepts just like media, communication, and the spectacle. Unlike the modern notion of culture, we should be immersed in a quite strange context when many interconnected things become a new assemblage that can be determined by cultural (in)determination. Among them, fashion stands in the midst of the “language games.” However, since the question of the unsparingness of fashion disappeared from the horizons of traditional scientific approaches, as we have seen, might also be a kind of “lack” that differentiates fashion from all other areas of human creativity, then it seems reasonable to start no longer from the simple question of what fashion is but rather from how it is produced/created as an aesthetic object, practically as a field of performance in fashion design, and ultimately as a symbolic-communication event of interaction between the participants of the process of creating a “new” beyond the traditionally understood society, culture and body. It should immediately be added that what Barthes’ semiotic approach opened for the 2

“Today, we are living amidst an aestheticization of the real world formerly unheard of. Embellishment and styling are to be found everywhere. They extend from individuals’ appearance to the urban and public spheres, and from economy through to ecology. […] Individuals are engaging themselves in a comprehensive styling of body, soul and behavior. Homo aestheticus has become the new role-model. In urban areas just about everything has been subjected to a face-lift in recent years – at least in the rich western countries. The economy too profits largely from the consumers’ tendency not actually to acquire an article, but rather to buy themselves, by its means, into the aesthetic lifestyle with which advertising strategies have linked the article. Even ecology is on the way to being an embellishment sector favoring a styling of the environment in the spirit of aesthetic ideals like complexity or natural beauty. Genetic engineering finally is a kind of genetic cosmetic surgery” (Welsch 1997, 18–37).

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understanding of fashion seems to have an identical value to the theory of media and communications of the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan in his main work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which highlights that the medium is the message (McLuhan 1994). Both are introduced into a completely different view of the world, starting from the idea of a construct of reality, but they are not based on a so-called objective existence independent of human consciousness and action. Fashion represents, thus, a media in the embodied structure of life. In all its transformations, it appears as the subject of its performance in the mirror of the public. Therefore, it has to be considered in the same way as other creative imagination products. If the novelty of a new fashion is different from clothing and custom in everyday life, then the concept of the sign is the source of all further attempts to dress and decorate the body from the structure of human communication. None of this, however, is yet sufficient to inspect the complexity of the theoretical discourse of fashion. It systematically evolves on the traces of the traditional disciplines of social sciences, such as sociology in Thorstein Veblen’s and Georges Simmel’s works and semiology or semiotics in the works of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco (Barthes 1983; Eco 1976). Contributions to the study of fashion in the 20th century were mostly directed towards the social and cultural function of clothing. It is not surprising that the concept of functionalism led to the sociological theory of Talcott Parsons, but also in the theory of architecture and design to the formation of the linguistic turn. In any case, this is self-explanatory given that the leading direction of architecture and design in modernity was influenced by Le Corbusier and Bauhaus with the idea that the form follows function, so much so that the emergence of scientific contributions to fashion within social and cultural anthropology, psychology and psychoanalysis practically focused on how and by which methods the human body in society and culture is aesthetically shaped to preserve its primary collective identity. Clothes are necessarily reduced to carriers of meaning in the binary logic of the modern world with the separation of work and leisure, town and village, gender/sex differences, generational divisions, and factors of social integration. Of course, it could not be ignored that within the psychoanalytic critique of the repression of society over the desires of an individual, the eroticism and sexuality of the female body is a condition of the possibility of creating extravagant fashion clothes. With the emergence of cultural industries and the spectacle—a film by staging the event—new limits emerge in the relationship between strict prohibitions and the conquest of free space. It should be recalled that film and television productions in Europe and America from 1920–1930 created several

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fashion styles like neo-historicism, decadent glamour and avant-garde with icons like the femme fatale of The Blue Angel Marlene Dietrich and the great seducer Rudolph Valentino in the silent film era. Jacques Lacan’s basic psychoanalysis, which he unconsciously structures as a language in the theories of the second half of the 20th century, belongs to the continuation of Barthes’ semiotics by other means. But speaking of a psychoanalytical theory of fashion as an established scientific discipline would indeed be wrong. It is better to say that there are traces of attempts to synchronously— combining new orientations in philosophy and theories of culture—find a way that approaches fashion in its indeterminacy. In that sense, Lacan’s psychoanalysis is one of the assumptions that an individual subject is a meeting of imaginary-symbolic-real traumas in the construction of a new identity, then the object’s fetishism is inevitably attributed to fashion clothing that shocks, provocatively and experimentally surpassing the moral boundaries of the conservative society (Fernbach 2002; Wilson 1985, 91– 116). The next consideration will offer reasons why the science dealing with fashion essentially must perform interdisciplinarily and why it cannot exist without a necessarily open space for the emergence of an autonomous profession of fashion studies. We should be aware that the scrutiny and the way in the analysis of fashion as a creative body design require crossing disciplinary boundaries, often at the cost of the loss of a solid orientation. Strictly speaking, regarding the question of the modern scientific methodology of fashion studies, humanities and social sciences where the fashion should be included, the answer is almost unambiguous: between and on the edge of the post-disciplinary approach to the very thing of thought. Here, we would apply a division of fashion into analytical-structural and historicalgenealogical senses, followed by the development of scientific paradigms ranging from modern sociology and anthropology to postmodern cultural studies and, finally, contemporary visual semiotics.3 I assume that three 3

We comprehend the term paradigm (Gr. ʌĮȡȐįİȚȖȝĮ, example, pattern, matrix), as a particular circuit in which assumptions and rules appear to be necessary for a meaningful notion of reality. This term was developed in the theory of science by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962), and it became generally applicable thereafter. As it relates to the models and frameworks in which the scientific way of thinking builds up its explanations of the world, it is obvious that with each change of paradigm, the perception of the world is rapidly changed. In the case of fashion, what has been paradigmatically determined in the course of the historical process since its creation in the late 14th century to the present day is that there exists a mutual relationship of permeation and mutual action

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modes of the paradigm are at the same time the ways to create a theoretical approach to the topic that is historically articulated as a path towards the total body design.4 These are (1) modern fashion, (2) postmodern fashion, and (3) contemporary fashion (Paiü 2007, 20–36). All theories of fashion within the first paradigm, except for Simmel and the conditional limit of validity of his ideas, are related to the social class hierarchy (trickle-down theory). According to that insight, fashion indicates the function of the social stability of the capitalist order. Within the framework of the second paradigm, the realm of the concept of anti-fashion and of all that is what the most significant postmodern theoretician of fashion, Gilles Lipovetsky, called the “marginal differentiation” process in his book The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (L’Empire de l’éphémère: La mode et son destin dans les sociétés modernes) (Lipovetsky 2002, 131). Finally, the third paradigm form is based on the image shift (iconic turn). Now its fashionable facility and the network of its meanings can decode an act of interpretation forms and the methods of construction of the object itself. The concepts should be applied in visual semiotics, visual anthropology, image science (Bildwissenschaft) and post-phenomenology. Three levels of this discussion will prove that fashion theory includes everything that belongs to the openness of the perspective and facility with which the image might between the reality and the thinking of the mode. No new fashion paradigms are created without influencing thoughtful changes in the understanding of the world, as is the case in art. The framework for the functioning of concepts and the categorical apparatus belonging to a certain paradigm is not closed to some impenetrable forms but is about transitions and changes of varying intensity. 4 This term implies something extremely ambivalent and at the same time contingent. As is well known, the concept of total (totality) belongs to the inheritance of classical metaphysics and rises to the notion of the entity that controls its parts in Hegel’s philosophy of the absolute spirit. The historical avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century, in its demands for changing the status and sense of art, already sought to bring disunity into the concept of totality. With the emergence of modern design, architecture and fashion, it moved in the direction of the limited autonomy of its own action. Why? Precisely because it wanted to serve the external purpose of its autonomy by taking the concept of function to explain the cause of movement in the circle of the all-round aesthetics of everyday life. Let us remember that the struggle between minimalism and the luxurious surrealistic tendency to blend metamorphic forms of radical art with a consumerist lifestyle, as seen in the case of the differences between the designs of Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, was at the same time a struggle between the two faces of the same coin: avant-garde Jesuit purity and surrealist fantasy about bizarre and extravagant fantasy worlds. The total body design therefore means the utopia/dystopia of the life itself that aspires to become an artistic event in which fashion takes the role of the creative design (Paiü 2011).

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be understood as a presentation (mimesis) and representation (repraesentatio) of some already existing reality as its description. Fashion within visual semiotics shows the sign of the new identity of the liberated body without any reference to society and culture. How must this be understood? Visuality is not just a feature of the media-constructed reality. The whole set of cultures that we call visual culture today is based on the conceptual turn from language and text to image. But the image here might be derived from the technological way of processing information. The visual culture of modern fashion determines the social status of the subject and the object of fashion change. The body image, thus, defines the manner of its meaningtyping field. It is endless as it is the world that fashion creates as a result of the absolute freedom of the construction/deconstruction of life. All this has been witnessed in the fascinating and extravagant works of contemporary fashion designers.

1. Modern society or the function of fashion: sociology, psychology and anthropology What encompasses that assemblage that we call a modern fashion? The answer seems as unambiguous as the definition of the notion of modernity. It is a way of life in an industrial society where the body serves as a means of presenting the power of capitalism and its social hierarchy. Fashion denotes a part of the modernity of the theatre of social roles precisely because it is not explicitly centred on the problem of the construction of individual identity as a subject of lifestyle. After all, fashion has only begun to spread in all directions since the emergence of a massive mode of commodity production that encompasses the entire social space of control over human behaviour. It was therefore not unusual for the first scientific study of “modern fashion” to simultaneously be a criticism of capitalist modernization to restrain the excessive and resourceful consumption of the high class. The sociology of fashion at this juncture determined the fundamental settings of the American anthropologist, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. We will emphasize some significant remarks here from his The Theory of the Leisure Class, which was first published in 1899 (Veblen 1961). For Veblen, fashion represents a result of (1) conspicuous leisure, (2) conspicuous consumption, and (3) conspicuous waste. It should be particularly interesting that fashion is defined by the anthropological need of man for the admiration of the symbolic moneypower system in the conditions of the competitive nature of capitalism. At the centre of Veblen’s criticism is the aristocratic way of life of the ruling

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elite or bourgeois class and consumption above the morally permitted measure of wealth (Davis 1992, 110–115). We must not deny that his analyses of early consumer capitalism were abundantly served by Lipovetsky in his book. In this way, they show the kinship and the differences between the two paradigms of fashion and their theoretical explanations. In the first case, it is obvious that consumption can only have the exclusive character of the ruling high-class style. But when the 1960s triumph of consumer culture emerged, and when postmodern culture was elevated to the cult of spectacle and the passage of fashion, it became clear how the subject/actor of late capitalism changed radically with the rule of media and communication. Consumption was then democratized. In the place of the decadent style of life, there was the elite fashion turn. Now, the logic of spending in signs of frivolity and the ultimate luxury of the new aristocracy is no longer important, but there is the possibility that fashion appears in the availability of the very act of a different cultural differentiation. Everything that Lipovetsky in his analysis of postmodernism in the culture of late capitalism that leads to transparency by introducing categories and concepts of fluid character is revealed in the sociologicalanthropological works of Veblen and Simmel. It should be emphasized, in particular, that Simmel’s theory of the individualizing lifestyle in the context of the creation of the landscape of mass culture breaks the boundary of the so-called trickle-down theory. Simmel was the first theoretician of fashion who, within the paradigm of modernity as a closed matrix of stability and change, noticed that the idea of fashion as a social form transformed itself. Along with Walter Benjamin, a philosopher and theorist of culture who is extremely important for understanding the new spirit of capitalism built in the eclectic mix of “arcades” and “boutiques,” the aura of high art and grand tastes prone to photography and film as new media (Benjamin 1969), Simmel precisely shows the internal tendencies of the development of fashion in the core of the construction of a new man as refined and a subject devoted to the decoration and the aesthetic design of one’s own life. Perhaps there is not such a sophisticated tendency to balance the modern man in choosing his cultural preferences, as Simmel represented in his thinking about the role and being of fashion: Perhaps Goethe, in his later period, is the most eloquent example of a wholly great life, for by means of his adaptability in all externals, his strict regard for form, his willing obedience to the conventions of society, the attained a maximum of inner freedom, a complete saving of the centres of life from the touch of the unavoidable quantity of dependence. In this respect, fashion is also a social form of marvelous expediency, because, like the law, it affects only the externals of life, only those sides of life which are turned to society.

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It provides us with a formula by means of which we can unequivocally attest our dependence upon what is generally adopted, our obedience to the standards established by our time, our class, and our narrower circle, and enables us to withdraw the freedom given us in life from externals and concentrate it more and more in our innermost natures. (Simmel 1957, 554)

The emergence of modern fashion from the spirit of the function corresponds to the emergence of fashion design as a vocational-disciplinary approach to the creation of clothing. Of course, this was happening at the same time as the historical movements of the avant-garde, particularly constructivism, surrealism and the first school of modern design of Bauhaus, in the 1920s, when design became a new feature of aestheticizing life in industrial capitalism in clothing and the practical performance of fashion. Coco Chanel and her “little black dress” innovation perfectly match the idea of pure form as a function. This was happening in the context of the emancipation of a woman’s body from Victorian torture in the name of “morality” and “virginity.” Fashion cannot be exempted from the “spirit of the times” of the 1920s–1930s, and it is associated with the logic of culturally determined progress and the development of the social form of capitalism in which there are mutually exclusive tendencies. It seems to be the “destiny” of a fashion as a contingent event. After all, nothing in history occurs according to the cruel law of linear development. We have seen Roland Barthes precisely split fashion trends from technological advancement. Fashion is changing and not developing. It is, therefore, its “logic” to include a mass reproduction of the new industry in its codes, as well as the uniqueness and unparalleled news of a uniquely created aesthetic object tailor-made for a personalized customer’s clothing. However, what the sociology of modernity with anthropology has undoubtedly opened up as a problem points to the impossibility of creating fashion by the autonomous and independent subject of the modern paradigm of science with its conceptual apparatus of “dynamics” and “movement,” the social class verticals and the functional order of a society with a series value. The problem, then, was with the cognition or theoretical rank of the first order. It had the same trouble as the design theorists had with less difficulty in the 20th century. How can one possibly talk about fashion and design if their features are passivity and mere phenomena, pure objects, and the aesthetic form of the world? Sociologically speaking, it must be recognized that, in this respect, we still do not know which deviations measure how fashion always appears to mean something else, serving another purpose, and whereby fashion, as Simmel would say, becomes a “social form” and not an autonomous field of insurmountable meanings. In other words, fashion in the classical

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discourse of modern sociology, anthropology and psychology cannot go beyond the threshold of entry into the empire of autonomy of its field. This is attested in an encyclopedic article of 1931 by the American sociologist and anthropologist Edward Sapir. According to Sapir, a fashion tries to “expand” into cultural areas as a dynamic category of social development, and its effects on society appear as well as many other similar social strengths. Sapir mentioned three such effects: (a) sexual symbolism, (b) social interaction, and (c) the cultural code of distinction according to sociosocial and gender-sex criteria and the aesthetic principle (Sapir 1931, 141 in Paiü 2007, 42). However, all that is mentioned does not emerge from the paradigm of functionalism. The reason lies in the fact that fashion is understood from the reference framework of “modern society.” This means that it comes from the idea that there are necessary distinctions between “being” and “appearance” and between “symptoms” and “phenomena” (the latter being characterized by psychoanalysis), and that something else determines the status and function of the fashion beyond the autonomous form of the fashion as such. And if “purposefulness is worthy of admiration,” as Simmel says beautifully, what if this is something intrinsic and insensitive to the metaphysical stories of the interior reception in front of the outside, the depths in front of the surface? Does this not undermine the entire building of modern science that finds its cause in causative determinism, that is, in the idea that everything has its cause and purpose and that anything beyond that does not happen in reality? All of the established disciplines in the scientific institutes of universities and research institutes until the 1960s were based on that assumption. The phenomena remain phenomena, part of the logic of scientific research. But since some thinkers such as Benjamin have considered it with extreme seriousness, giving it the hidden place of the phenomenon of the cultural constellation, that is, the montage and allegories of modern capitalism with its movement towards the conquest of an individual’s desire, it has meant that a new way of thinking has been revealed within the discourse of sociology, anthropology and psychology. When Benjamin saw contingency and not necessarily a quiver of development in his “dialectical images” and the idea of “the tiger’s leap” in returning to the end of the late 19th century would be demonstrated by suggesting a different approach and ways of thinking. From that perspective, the design was no longer merely decoration, ornamentation and “applied art” (Lehmann 2000, 203–206). It should not be at all surprising that a special place of interpretation is paid to the contributions of Benjamin in many readers and textbooks concerning fashion today, although it is quite clear that his style of writing and thought tendencies do not strictly belong to

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philosophy, sociology, anthropology, or psychology. Writing about ways presupposes a shift away from the “spirit” of objectivity and the “demon” of the quantitative methods of the fictional reality description. Modern fashion, therefore, is framed as an image of a society that in principle is still closed, despite its aspirations to reach a new space of freedom. If such fashion is always determined by a strict set of rules and norms, and if its “social form” matrix moves to different parts of the world without major difficulties, as shown by the history of global capitalism in the 20th century (Japan and China), it can be concluded that its purpose and aim is to create something derived from the logic of goods fetishism, as Marx did in his critique of the political economy, which is itself the subtitle of his Capital. The fetishism of goods and aesthetic objects might be a hidden secret of modern capitalism. Why? Simply because there is the possibility of an ideology that uses the metaphor of the advertising image for its symbolic power of rulership over people. Nothing is left beyond this. Just as in the show by the contemporary fashion designer Martin Margiela from 2014 (Artisanal collection of autumn-winter garments), in which the models’ faces and heads were covered with masks and glamorously designed covers because the true identity of the human lies in the impossibility of identity, so the end of modern fashion denotes the announcement of the period in which sexuality, social interaction and gender-sex discrimination criteria will be summarized as a common denominator in the identity of a singular individual. This question can no longer answer the paradigm of modern science with its great narratives of “objectivity,” “function,” and “social form.” What remains is part of the fragment and openness of the project, which in the 1960s would have led to the starting point and the logic of the fashion. The “social form” of fashion as a trademark of modernity has broken into debris. What is left behind? There is nothing else to do with the subjects/actors of the fashion, like the dreaded wild grove of Orpheus, for otherwise the outline has its own identity.

2. Postmodern culture or the purpose of fashion: Cultural studies, theoretical psychoanalysis and feminism What is the difference between fashion’s orientation, direction, and the scientific disciplines that deal with it? We have seen how the paradigm of modern fashion scientifically belongs to the centre of the set term of society as a frame of reference without which it is not possible to understand why the social class stratification becomes a condition of the possibility of the occurrence of a fashion as a high fashion (haute couture) and the phenomenon of imitating the lifestyle of the aristocratic elite at lower levels of “social

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taste.” Let us recall that the artistic view of what is said in Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of Leisure Class is brilliantly derived in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The screening of this epic depiction of the “American Dream” as a film was equally as successful as the acting of Robert Redford, who played the title role in the 1974 movie. Without its luxurious costumes, which is to say the fashionable clothes of the 1920s, it is impossible to spot the traumas and dreams of the aesthetic shaping of the “new dandy” in the context of capitalism with the art-deco style and the beginnings of the ingenious consumption of a “parasitic” class. However, society in the era of modernity cannot “prosper” and “evolve” if, metaphorically speaking, the watches of economics, politics and culture are not subtly set and designed. After World War II, and especially in the 1960s, the big narratives of modernity and fashion as a theatre of social roles were faced with the question of the end of ideology and the end of history. All this happened when American and European consumer capitalism faced the challenge of colonial wars (the Americans in Vietnam and the French in the Algerian War) and student “revolutions” in the streets of Paris in 1968. The context of the disintegration of the “social forms of fashion” and the emergence of the “society of the spectacle,” as highlighted by the neoMarxist theoretician and neo-avant-garde artist Guy Debord in his 1967 work La société du spectacle, opened the fundamental question of the reintegration of society with the concept of multiplicity, creating new possibilities in the interpretation of a complex reality (Paiü 2007, 243–248). We cannot particularly highlight that culture as a spectacle and culture as a struggle for “its” identity (Kulturkampf) proves that the concept of ideology has to be revisited. But this can no longer be done without influencing the media image of the world in which fashion has the almost decisive role of enchanting and fascinating the observer with what is no longer hidden behind the surface. Everything is so transparent and so visually impressive that there is no reason to argue for theories that assume that hiding behind a media event is a somewhat foreign and deep “essence” whose symbolic meaning needs to be read in the critique of the world of fashion, media and communication. Nothing is ever behind the scene. Everything might be immersed in hyperreality without depth and surface too. Fashion in the abyss of rebellion, counter-cultural movements, antiaesthetics, and the search for new meanings designates just anti-fashion clothing that crushes canons of beauty and tastes imposed by its power in the construction of human identity with the underlying categories of contemporary art—shock, provocation and experiment. Instead of the “little black dress” designed by Coco Chanel in the centre comes a cultural rebellion, located between anarchy and social protest, which was the main

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feature of the punk-style designer Vivienne Westwood. A British flag on the buttocks of a pair of jeans and a printed image-text of a vulgar profanity on a t-shirt represent the same thing that distinguished the subversive theatre of the neo-avant-garde or the poetics of pop art known as a ready-made. The destruction of the canon style of high culture and high fashion (haute couture) in democratizing culture represents a new way of disseminating fashion. Jean Baudrillard—one of the most significant postmodernist theoreticians of society and culture, and the creator of the concepts of simulation and simulacra—wrote the programmatic text for the new theory of fashion from the horizon of its “end” in the journal Communication in 1968. It is important to point this out simply because Baudrillard, along with Lipovetsky, is a thinker who would have a crucial impact on the whole paradigm of fashion from the 1960s to the 1980s. Its determinants are as follows: (1) the prevalence of new information and communication technologies; (2) the end of ideas about general and unique history and the establishment of plural forms of the world of life; (3) consumerism and the spectacle of the media construction of reality; and (4) the transformation of the world into a system of objects whose meaning becomes culturally determined by context and situation (fluidity, change, transience). In his text entitled “Fashion, or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code,” Baudrillard indicates the arrival of a “new” phenomenon that we are still theoretically discussing in different ways. Today, every principle of identity is affected by fashion, precisely because of its potential to revert all forms to non-origin and recurrence. Fashion is always rétro, but always on the basis of the abolition of the passé (the past): the spectral death and resurrection of forms. Its proper actuality (its ‘up-todateness’, its ‘relevance’) is not a reference to the present, but an immediate and total recycling. Paradoxically, fashion is the inactual (the ‘out-of-date’, the ‘irrelevant’). It always presupposes a dead time of forms, a kind of abstraction whereby they become, as if safe from time, effective signs which, as if by a twist of time, will return to haunt the present of their inactuality with all the charm of ‘returning’ as opposed to ‘becoming’ structures. The aesthetic of renewal: fashion draws triviality from the death and modernity of the déjà vu. This is the despair that nothing lasts, and the complementary enjoyment of knowing that, beyond this death, every form has always the chance of a second existence, which is never innocent since fashion consumes the world and the real in advance: it is the weight of all

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Chapter One the dead labour of signs bearing on living signification – within a magnificent forgetting, a fantastic ignorance [méconnaissance]. (Baudrillard 2009, 109).

So, Baudrillard has raised the question of the meaning of the fashion trinity, which inevitably breaks in every “new” theory of fashion with the new conceptual apparatus. This trinity is orientation, direction and discipline. By orientation, we mean the cognitive-theoretical framework that always comes from philosophy and its conceptual games and is accepted and applied in the discourse of social sciences and humanities. In the case of a paradigm of postmodernism, there is no doubt that conceptual games are those that characterize philosophy as the notion of deconstruction in Jacques Derrida, the notion of difference and repetition in Gilles Deleuze, and the terms signifier-signified in the semiotics of Roland Barthes. At the same time, this orientation represents a criticism of the modern paradigm of knowledge and the establishment of new thought systems that are collectively referred to as poststructuralism. It would be impossible to approach postmodernism from the 1960s to the 1980s if we did not theoretically take this turn from the rule of modern society to culture as a spectacle, consumerism and communication networks of interaction between the mass audience or users. It is sufficient to analyze the postmodern theory of fashion just like how the anti-fashion punk style builds up a new identity of bodily inscription to see how the concepts of poststructuralism correspond to something that Baudrillard specifically emphasizes in his text—the disintegration of tradition and the overlap of “neo” and “retro” tendencies in fashion discourse at all levels. When it comes to orientation, it might not be by chance that one of the most significant fashion styles at the end of the 20th century took on the very complex position of the philosophical search for difference and otherness performed by Derrida. This was, of course, the style of deconstruction in fashion. In the 1980s, it was connected with the Japanese designers Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo and Issey Miyake, as well as the Belgian designer Martin Margiela (Loscialpo 2009, 25–27). Finally, the transgression and acceptance of a new way of thinking in a scientific discipline that already exists, such as sociology or the anthropology or psychology of fashion, signified a complete break with the previous set of conceptual disciplines and its meaningful overturning into new forms of scientific discourse. In Vertigo in Fashion: Towards a Visual Semiotics of the Body (Paiü 2007), it was clearly stated that fashion has to start thinking only from its autonomy. The paradox is that fashion studies could only arise when fashion was transformed into an extravagant body. All disciplinary boundaries once acted “too narrowly.” Perhaps they were even somewhat dogmatic. And it could be appropriate to develop a

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conceptual and analytical move to a state that does not require a paradigm of cultural events with which life becomes stylized, and the subjects/participants of “open or consummate fashion,” as Lipovetsky called it (1994, 131–133), become the autonomous producers and consumers of its amazing objects (clothing, footwear, jewellery, fashion accessories, perfumes). Transgression must be established as a fundamental principle of thinking and living in times of complexity and contradiction.5 If the transition from one paradigm of fashion to another occurs within the relationship of tradition and modernity, which means that it pre-existed in a different form or is its radical transformation in the manner of conceptual architecture, then the term “society” is replaced by “culture” in a cognitive-analytical and methodological sense. This means that culture is no longer called the area of high humanistic values and the field of the anthropological lifestyle of a nation, social group and collective identity. Culture is precisely what semiotics as a “science” or “discipline” of humanism has identified as a special set of meanings. In other words, culture is no longer understood by the means or function of social integration. The autonomy of culture signifies its purposefulness, becoming a factor of the very “development” of society that we can now call “cultural development.” Many spheres of life take on the pompous cultural features of the concept of capital to the industry as shaping awareness with new media. From the 1960s to the 1980s, when theoretical approaches to fashion were increasingly associated with the rise of cultural studies as well as the compound of cultural and sociological studies with theoretical psychoanalysis (Marx and Freud, Gramsci and Lacan), it was not unexpected that this new criticism of their subject would take the very spread of culture as a new ideology. The most important books from fashion theory from this postmodern perspective, in which we are faced with many disciplines and

5

The concept of transgression (Lat. transgressio, transition over, exceeding the limit) was developed by the French poststructuralist thinker Georges Bataille in his writings on eroticism, death, the sacred and the obscene. Contemporary fashion shows it in the fetishistic feature of an aesthetic object, which overwhelms the works of the designers Jean-Paul Gaultier and Alexander McQueen. In Bataille’s theory, transgression is not performed as the overturning of an absolute ban such as incest taboos, but rather the ban is framed in sacrificing the body by knowingly taking over the risk of overcoming all existing moral-political and socio-cultural boundaries (Paiü 2011, 391–411 and 429–471). When it comes to fashion, transgression points to the relationship between the body and the aesthetic object. Fetishism is a mode that appears as a picture of the world that is no longer oriented towards the other side and the inside. Instead, it is a crossing of the boundaries between art and fashion in the idea of a pure object.

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approaches, are the already mentioned study of the French sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky and those of the British feminist theorist Elizabeth Wilson. How could fashion be contemplated within a theory that is not entirely coherent but which, inevitably, has to take on underlying concepts and create the new as a synchronic union of a multitude of different circuits? In the case of Lipovetsky, we can find a criticism of a modern paradigm with sociology as the main scientific discipline. But to make the paradox larger, the subject of his criticism regarding the notion of fashion is neither Veblen nor Simmel, but his contemporary Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most significant sociologists of culture in the second half of the 20th century and the author of the cult book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (La distinction: Critique sociale de jugement) from 1979 (Bourdieu 1986). As is well known, Bourdieu was the creator of a whole range of concepts that are useful for the postmodern paradigm of culture and fashion, such as “symbolic and cultural capital,” “habitus,” and “distinction.” But his starting point was, in theory, a neo-Marxist approach, according to which culture always appears as an ideology that resists the interests of capital. In the case of fashion, it is quite clear that Lipovetsky holds Bourdieu to be the most important sociologist to analyze the fashion complex as such through the concepts of cultural and symbolic capital, which is also the field of human desires and its world of pleasure and creativity, above the logic of the ideological mask of so-called real life. Lipovetsky, therefore, in his analysis, cannot accept any renewal or replenishment of the social class theory, nor the theory of Bourdieu. Instead, his main assumption is extremely sharp. Where does fashion begin and where does it end, in the era of exploding needs and proliferating media, mass advertising and mass leisure, stars and “hits”? What is left that fashion does not rule, at least in part, when the ephemeral governs the world of objects, cultures, and meaningful discourse, and when the principle of seduction has profoundly reorganized the everyday environment, news and information, and the political scene? The fashion explosion no longer has an epicentre; it has ceased to be the privilege of a social elite. All classes are caught up in the intoxication of change and fads; the infrastructure and the superstructure alike are subject, although to different degrees, to fashion’s rule. We have reached the era of consummate fashion, the extension of the fashion process to broader and broader spheres of collective life. (…) Everyone is more or less immersed in fashion. More or less everywhere, and a triple operation that specifically defines fashion is increasingly implemented: the operation of ephemerality, seduction, and marginal differentiation. Fashion has to be delocalized. It can no longer be identified with the luxury of appearances and superfluity; it has to be

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identified with the trivalent process that is thoroughly overhauling the profile of our societies. (Lipovetsky 2002, 131)

New cognitive-theoretical and methodological bases should be applied to this notion of fashion. The criticism of “dialectical methods” introduces at the same time the game of a variety of disciplines with which to reach the puzzle of fashion in a new post-industrial society. Lipovetsky, on the other hand, continues within his sociological discourse with the analysis of postmodern fashion, but his sources are quite different. These are primarily Barthes’ semiotics of fashion and the otherwise profiled idea of mass culture in its closeness to and differences from British cultural studies, an extremely important paradigm for the notion of scientific progress in the study of marginal groups and their lifestyles. Lipovetsky’s study is considered one of the most important books for the postmodern paradigm. Its influence is still apparent in the fact that newer theories of fashion cannot evolve its hypotheses without elaborating on the terms “completed fashion” and “form-fashion” if they want to cross to the other coast and leave behind the legacy of discourse served by the sociology of fashion as a fundamental discipline, understood as fashion from Barthes’ semiotics, without questioning their assumptions. Moreover, instead of the singular theory, there are fundamentals for accepting the plural theory. This does not mean that it is an issue of the adoption of “his” theory as the choice of a fashion brand in the “supermarket of lifestyles” as it is in his concept-metaphor for postmodern fashion, as was explicitly said by the anthropologist Ted Polhemus, the main theorist of anti-fashion (Polhemus 2006). To the question of why the plural theory, not just the singular theory, should be accepted, the answer might be simple—because fashion in its openness and autonomy is radically transformed into form and content, appearance and appearance. Fashion theory assumes its multiplication. But it can not go to infinity. There is always a limit, even though it is extremely fluid. The boundary stems from the autonomous area of each discipline that overlaps with the rest so that their order seems like a spiral coil. In contrast to this attempt, Wilson approaches fashion in her study by adopting a critical attitude of feminism and theoretical psychoanalysis, although it does not reach the level of Lacan as an unquestioning authority for the critique of ideology in the era of visual culture. What Wilson exemplifies in her analysis is an attempt to critique fashion from the complexity of its immanent practices, such as, among other things, the creation of a new (female) identity by critically deconstructing a whole series of patriarchal-symbolic practices embodied in the way that fashion enters life in Western societies. Her criticism of Baudrillard, in turn, means a departure from the cold indifference of postmodern theory to women’s

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exploitation in the system of neoliberal capitalism (from the woman as a fashion to the advertising function of a female body). In this way, the theory moves from “new positivism” and approaches the critical theories of postmodern culture, for which fashion is a representative example of aesthetic appeal and an ideologically transformed matrix of female body conquest. No doubt, with her preferences, feminist theories of fashion gained the “spread of the struggle” to approach the most important problem of the postmodern paradigm as such. And that is how a new identity is created and why it is fashion since the decoration and aesthetics of the existing world became the social and cultural constructions of life itself (Negrin 2008, 33–52; Wilson 1985, 117–133). Just a few more remarks on the notion of postmodern identity in fashion are in order. As is well known, identity is created like a construction. It should already be assumed that the fashion idea in the period of deconstruction and postmodernism will go hand in hand with the tendencies of exposing the ambivalent structure of society and culture. Carnevalization and gender/sex transgression are merely indications that fashion does not attract bodies in motion, but rather that its meaning lies in creating a new world as an aesthetic horizon. At the time of total identity fluidity, it becomes apparent that style cannot be reduced to street revolt, just to antifashion extravagance. To take postmodern fashion as a reason for its survival, it might be necessary to get a fusion of high fashion and antifashion, even if this seems to be a seemingly impossible project. But let us remember that Vivienne Westwood’s career should be an indicator of this aesthetic trend in which paradoxes and aporias rule, not linearity. Identity, therefore, does not inherit but creates itself by running a lifestyle. Although it is undeniable that fashion from 1960 to 1980 was a “masquerade” and “carnival” that went beyond the culturally coded network of metamorphic bodies, as best seen in the transformations of pop star and multimedia artist David Bowie, there is still something “persistent” in this amazing game that transforms all identity signs (gender/sex, race/class, male/female, travesty/transgression). Lacan, in his analysis, considers the picture from the horizon of psychoanalysis and comes to the conclusion that it is a screen and the surface of what has the feature of the spectacle. It is a phenomenon of sight or observation. And it is no longer in the sense of a passive looking-to-world but in the sense of an active participant of an event that changes our understanding of fashion and the human body. The view always applies to a change in the subject matter. Why, in contemporary fashion, might it be significant to perform the realization of a phenomenological epoché or purification of the area that now requires its own and total purity? We have seen that the issues of visibility and look,

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narcissism, and fluid identity design are crucial to any further analysis. If, therefore, identity is something that has to arise and does not fixedly exist, then fashion apparel is no longer understood as presentation and representation (mimesis and repraesentatio) but as a performance of identity in the process of the transformation of society and culture. Existential phenomenology, as early as the work of Maurice MerleauPonty, began with the criticism of the subject as the bearer of the persistence and immutability of consciousness. Opening the question about the body was decisive for all further theories of the eccentricity of the subject from the position of his radicality of similarity and difference. How does the theory of fashion respond to these new challenges that set it to move events from the area of pure reflection to visualization, from the area of text to image, from the field of aesthetics to works in the aesthetics of events? Just as is shown in the performative handbook or fashion show that Alexander McQueen very mysteriously called Voss in 2001. The spectators and public actors look marvellously at the models on the track behind the mirror where they see their reflection. With the rise of narcissistic culture, it seems to us to weirdly urinate into a picture without a world, into scenes of amazement and an anxious sense of absolute solitude and gaps. Moreover, it could be shown that between the perversion of the concealed secret of the Other and the desire to expose one’s own body in the public space, there is a mutually incentivizing relationship. No one is innocent anymore. Being in the space of contemporary fashion means being exposed to the view of the Other and enjoying this act of visual interaction of the naked/dressed body. The naked body does not mean, however, being naked in the public space but reducing the body to an object in the aesthetic field of signification that is already determined by its meaning outside fashion and its circumstances. Speaking in the true spirit of Barthes’ semiotics, a contemporary fashion becomes a meta-language of events with which the possibility of opening of meaning arises or disappears. Why? Simply because the event can be all-and-nothing, even the political violence of a dictatorship and the final countdown of the values of civilization.

3. The contemporary body or fashion as an image: Towards a visual semiotics If fashion is a creative body design, then the theory of the reference framework of modern society and postmodern culture has to be abandoned as a determining factor for any further attempt at an interpretation of fashion in a timely manner. First of all, this is the age that began symbolically in 1989 with the demolition of the Berlin Wall that separated the Western

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societies of neoliberal capitalism from the totalitarian order of real socialism in the world. What might be called globalization in economics, politics, and culture has its consequences on fashion design and fashion. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the homogeneity of global fashion should begin to emerge as there are boundaries in the presentation of seductive and attractive clothing where fashion has so far not been found due to a patriarchal culture, religious fundamentalism, or societies and states with traditional values such as are found in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia (from Qatar and Indonesia to Nigeria and China). As demonstrated by the most significant theoretical studies on globalization in the field of sociohumanities at the beginning of the 21st century, the global capital relocation processes open up the possibility of redefining the development potential of small regions and nation-states in the European economic and cultural space. This also presupposes a radical change in the way that social identity is presented. The contemporary fashion design approach, therefore, incorporates into its scientific, artistic, and technological domain and theory the global identity of a global consumer with specific cultural habits and different collective lifestyle patterns. Fashion design is nowadays the structure of (1) cultural capital in the flexible development strategies and global challenges of an adaptable and innovative economy of supply, (2) a creative industry based on the interaction of science, art, and new technologies, and (3) an interdisciplinary area of the permeation of society, culture, and nature in ecologically sustainable development. The paradigm of theoretical approaches to contemporary fashion, therefore, can no longer be the domain solely of sociology, anthropology, and psychology but also of cultural studies, theoretical psychoanalysis, and feminism, if you want to include everything that fashion has become in its radical iconic turn. Current theories of science do not obey the reality of the existing conceptual system but transform science itself into technological processes of “new nature.” In that sense, it becomes obvious that fashion can no longer be excluded from technology in general, aesthetics, and the design of life. A series of new cognition-theoretical paradigms that contributed in the late 20th century to a different understanding of the world through changing its essential manifestations (complexity-emergence-chaos) cannot be overcome by the influence of cybernetics and visual semiotics on the development of new anthropology. Moreover, poststructuralism developed a new set of terms with Barthes, Derrida, and Deleuze that derived from the flourishing of new information and communication technologies and aesthetics focused on the question of “virtual reality.” The fashion of Barthes through Baudrillard and Lipovetsky was defined as a “cultural code,” the “visual order of meaning,” and “image as information.” In the

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1990s, everything accelerated when the digital age of the global cybernetic way of life arose, and when there is no gap between the virtual and the real, there is no gap between the worlds. The paradigm of contemporary fashion presupposes the abandonment of “society” and “culture” and the transition to a state of pure corporeality as a spectacle of images in the form of the media structure of reality. In a new form, fashion is transformed into (a) a performative-conceptual event; (b) the design of life itself, for which basic categories like syncretism, hybridity, and eclecticism are decisive; and (c) an open event of bodily transgression (fetishism, eroticism, and death) in the public space of the staging (Paiü 2011, 367–390). Instead of “the form of a fashion,” the form of a spectacle becomes effective. And it only accelerates everything visible in the postmodern capitalism of aesthetic spending. Now, fashions for the contemporary assemblage of cultural tendencies are becoming pure “aesthetic capitalism,” and that is shown beyond all existing borders of art and science, technology, and the body. It seems that the most impressive analyses were performed by the British fashion theoretician Caroline Evans in her 2003 book Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness, in which she says: The challenge of this book has been to find a way to talk about contemporary and near-contemporary fashion. The existing frameworks did not make it easy. I wanted to find a way to discuss 1990s and turn-of-the-century fashion that offered more than the traditional focus of art and design history of the past so that I could also accommodate the present meanings and future possibilities of fashion. (…) I turned not so much to psychoanalytic or poststructuralist accounts as to historians and writers such as Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx. But I read Marx, in particular, against the grain, as gothic fiction rather than political economy. (…) From ‘heroin shock’ to Alexander McQueen, the distressed body of much 1990s fashion exhibited the symptoms of trauma, the fashion show mutated into a performance and a new kind of conceptual fashion designer evolved. These are just three examples of fashion ‘at the edge,’ fashion which exists at its own margins. While becoming more vivid in its presentation, many of its themes became correspondingly darker in the 1990s. Often permeated by death, disease and dereliction, its imagery articulated the anxieties as well as the pleasures of identity, alienation and loss against the unstable backdrop of rapid social, economic and technological change at the end of the twentieth century. (Evans 2003, 3–4)

Yes, fashion in the paradigm of contemporaneity cannot be simply a compilation and computation in the accelerated history of social progress and cultural development of the West and the surrounding worlds. On the one hand, the theoretical “big narrative” of the body shows that the only

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meaningful player in the fragmentation of the body is the process of the emergence of otherness and difference. All this is possible only when there is no longer a consideration of how fashion protects us from the anxiety of wandering in the labyrinth of signs. Unlike Evans’ objectives, our research has the main intention to investigate the figure in the era of the technosphere with its mimetical and representational framework, and thus, by analogy with the discipline of art history and its recent upgrades, what Paul Virilio calls “the aesthetics of disappearance” (Virilio 1991) cannot be fully comprehended. Indeed, what in this contemporary way gives the unseen and inexplicable amazement of an interactive observer in the event of the absolute visibility of the object is no longer its attraction, ephemerality, and marginality, as Lipovetsky found. Contemporary fashion is a creative design of life that breaks down into fragments and leads to the existence of an apocalyptic risk and salvation, end-of-fashion awareness, and at the same time the attempt to find a new alternative, even at the cost of inevitable failure. Is that not, after all, a symbolic event of pure aesthetic pleasure and indifference resulting in image performance as Alexander McQueen created in 2009 in Plato’s Atlantis, his last fashion show? The problem with contemporary fashion and its theoretical performance is simply that it enters the sphere of the inhumane. This concept was already performed in close connection with posthumanism/transhumanism. It should be known that postmodern theorists of body transgressions very often used the phrase about the end of humanity as a “grand narrative,” as Lyotard did. The inhumane dressing does not seem to be perceived as something extremely bizarre and extravagant in the sense of extreme alienation. After all, inhumanity refers to the exploration of the empire of aesthetic objects without which no contemporary fashion should be possible along the way. Objects, the inhumane, and mirrors embellish this uncanny power of the imagination. On the other hand, apart from the torture and hysteria that is fashioned above other creative practices as the only extravagances of transience, mortality, and oblivion, there is an exciting adventure of new theoretical conceptualization. If we keep this in mind, then we should be able to search the paths that could lead us to the very core of our investigations. If those matters are exactly as they have just been described above, then fashion at the time of the technosphere can only be understood from the post-disciplines that all came into being in the 1990s from the paradigm of visual studies, visual culture, and image science (Bildwissenschaft). When the image determines the body’s manner of action in the world, then we can talk about the image representation of fashion. Everything is subordinated to it: from fashion photography to the spectacle of a fashion exhibition as a

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show. But the most significant consequence of this is that the body becomes the first and last instance that decides on the identity of the contemporary man in the world of difference and otherness. Just as fashion now reflects and expresses something existing in a society like mirroring-picture, but whose meaning is always expressed in events to create a new context, which means that the final fashion becomes the creative process of shaping the body in its unassailability and freedom, so the post-disciplines are in an uneasy situation in which they constantly have to change their origins and re-create their conceptual circuits for what is happening here and now. The reason lies in it the fact that all becomes a system of objects and more autonomous, such as appliances operated by “artificial intelligence” (AI). The path to contemporary fashion is also visual semiotics as the postdisciplinary orientation that the body understands as the images of movement and time, like the philosophy of the event and cinema of Gilles Deleuze (1986). Fashion as art and architecture disappears into the logic of the technosphere. Thus, its key categories become computation, planning, and construction (Paiü 2016, 121–143). What, therefore, signifies visual semiotics? First of all, it is not just the transition to Barthes’ semiotics of fashion with its basic terms of sign-signifier-signified in another context in which the image has become more important than language. That would be naive and banal. Instead, the visual-semiotical twist of contemporary fashion means that fashion and contemporary art have become “selfsufficient.” This self-perceived selfhood may be a symptom of far-reaching consequences. The Italian semiotician Ugo Volli has argued that fashion can no longer be explained by illustrating the dynamics of social and cultural changes. Instead of that, we must reconsider the conceptual order of things and terms and be aware that a fashion needs some kind of inventive approach because the tiny line between clothing and fashion should be abandoned when clothing becomes a new fashion style and trend in a contemporary global context (Volli 1990). In any case, searching for a royal path to comprehending a fashion outside a mainstream approach would be hard conceptualizing work, in many respects even precarious and with no guarantee of success in advance. Moreover, its interpretation is not sufficient to know about its styles and trends. A much more cognitive effort is needed. Like contemporary art, fashion requires theoretical research too. It does not relate to any supreme signifier that gives it the right to life. Instead, signs are now emerging as visualized concepts. These are the icons with which the body determines its “real” identity. The freedom of the body in a performative event denotes the moment when the image precedes language so that the fashion is at all possible as a “form of life.” But that does not mean that fashion appears

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only in the material structure of the existence of global capitalism, as a mere cultural contribution to economic value? Fashion, of course, represents a true “essence” of what many contemporary theorists of culture seek to find in 21st-century capitalism when they call it “information,” “cognitive,” and “aesthetic.” It is about the territory and archipelago of the desire for sociocultural recognition and the consumption of aesthetically shaped objects. The quest for a new human identity corresponds to the unconscious desire to win in a culture that has lost ground in nature and is thus thrilled to permanently innovate. The body of contemporary fashion has just been constructed for the creative emergence of a new one in the constant transformation of forms and shapes. Contemporary fashion cannot, thus, be regarded as the possibility of a planetary “expansion” of the commodity form, but rather as a complete “implosion of information.” When that happens, we are faced with what Baudrillard calls the “ecstasy of communication.” Indeed, fashion is at the end of its historical-epochal walk to the freedom of the body that only occurs in that ecstatic circle of the renewal and retro-futurism of communication in all its transformations. In the song “Fashion” from the 1980 album Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), David Bowie’s visual event is all too clear and unambiguous with all its androgynous, transsexual, and transgender spectacle of desire to be someone else on the stage of narcissistic culture gaps. That is one way how the durable and widely accepted concept of fixed identity crashed like towers of dust. All the searches of contemporary cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnologists for a new notion of identity cannot overlook the factual situation of things. This is the disappearance of “rigid” signifiers and their replacement by “current” metamorphosis without any model in the historical world of tradition, whether real or imaginative. However, in light of the body’s exposure to changes that today are studied within the scientific paradigm of posthumanism/transhumanism, which means analyzing what is inhuman in the synthetic nature of “artificial life” (AL), we can see that fashion is no longer just about “clothing” and body dressing. The space of its action might be established as designing the system and environment of aesthetic objects, one of which is the human body. This is the obvious paradox that modern fashion, in its release from the torture and repression of “society” and “culture,” is once again traumatically inserted into a whole range of victim sacrifice practices with the ultimate goal of radical eccentricity and extravagance. In terms of “normal life” in the modern society of everyday fashion, its needs have become “queer.” Its fate in free bondage reaches out to the uncanny desiring machine of contemporary man. They show the performative event of visual culture with which the image of the body

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becomes more than the symbol of this luminous and dark reality in such a plastic way that we are exposed to the grace and inefficiency of its disappearance.

Conclusion Interdisciplinary cultural studies, and within that, fashion studies, created for the last decade of the 20th century as a productive link between modern humanities and social science, techno-science, digital technology, and contemporary art, is signified by these determinants: (1) the social process, with its production, distribution, and consumption cycles; (2) the social and cultural phenomenon that is, admittedly, irreducible to other phenomena of everyday life, but at the same time cannot be interpreted without a connection to the social definition of the concepts of taste, lifestyle, arts, and leisure; (3) the area of the cultural integration and differentiation of individuals and groups in identity creation; (4) the mechanism of social competition and the process of choice between rational and irrational life alternatives for gaining prestige and social status; (5) the field of the social struggle for domination through the accumulation of symbolic and cultural capital in social communication; and (6) the cultural capital of an individual, nation-state, or transnational society of knowledge articulated in the information economy of culture or creative industries. Contributions to the interdisciplinary interpretation of fashion and fashion design by the end of the 20th century show the historical changes in social structures, ideological powers in the world, and the way of articulating the relationship between fashion and the social environment. If fashion at the beginning of the emergence of modern culture was differentiated by social class at the time of the postmodern cultural shift with the means/purpose of identity, then what is happening with modern fashion in the era of the media spectacle with the primacy of information, communication, and interactive participation of the digital public is coming out of all social and cultural suits. This act means moving to the living of fashion itself. So, in its final stage, it becomes a transformation of the digital body without organs. When a contemporary visual artist and fashion designer like Hussein Chalayan is arguing today that there is no difference between architecture and fashion, it seems that the time has come for a new approach to fashion and fashion design as such. Of course, fashion cannot be architecture, as it might not be an art in the traditional way of thinking. Its history has been achieved through many jumps and leaps, and since the 1960s, we can say that it has been through a period of astonishing acceleration. Contemporary fashion, thus, belongs to design as a synthesis

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of science, technology, and art. And so, it is necessary to create conceptual circuits that will explain these subtle connections between truly different discourses of knowledge, skills, and imagination. The designer’s statement is by no means a provocative media outline following the core rules of the media world: to shock, to attract attention to extremist attitudes, to create excrements. On the contrary, the testimony only confirms the scale of what is already called a fashionable turn. More than anything, it is not self-evident that fashion reflects or expresses social change. Likewise, it is not just a sign of changing cultural paradigms of human activity. Fashion has transformed into something completely “uncanny.” Of course, so has the entirety of art and architecture. It has become a lifelong manifestation of the aesthetics of the world. The social changes and cultural strategies of the globalized world are oriented towards this process. The aesthetics of society correspond to the same process of the aestheticization of the world in contemporary art. Fashion has already become the design of a metamorphic body. It only needs to condition social relations and cultural communication with others. The speed of fashion change goes beyond the changes of modern societies and the whole area of cultural communication. Therefore, the development of theories of fashion from the modern and postmodern to the contemporary paradigm (societyculture-body) shows us how fashion approaches are happening at the same time as signs of the pictorial and visual age. Instead of language, commonly applied with its “solid” markers in all cultures, the emphasis is shifted to “light” and fuzzy features of the body as an image whose identity is no longer a matter of dressing through habit and custom, but a constant desire for the fascination with the Other. In this enchanting circle of innovation and renewal, fashion is “today” becoming a creative body design.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. Nacktheiten. Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer. Barnard, Malcolm. 2002. Fashion as Communication. London-New York: Routledge. Barthes, Roland. 1983. The Fashion System. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 2009. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London-New Delhi: SAGE. Benjamin. Walter. 1969. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217–252. New York: Schocken Books.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London-New York. Routledge. Breward, Christopher. 1995. The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress. Manchester-New York: Manchester University Press. Davis, Fred. 1992. Fashion, Culture, and Identity. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. MinneapolisLondon: University of Minnesota Press. Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Evans, Caroline. 2003. Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, Deathliness. New Haven, CT-London: Yale University Press. Fernbach, Amanda. 2002. Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Post-Human. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. Lehmann, Ulrich. 2000. Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lipovetsky, Gilles. 2002. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Loscialpo, Flavia. 2011. “Fashion and Philosophical Deconstruction: A Fashion in-Deconstruction.” In Fashion Forward, edited by Alissa de Witt-Paul and Mira Crouch, 13–29. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA-London: MIT Press. Negrin, Llewellyn. 2008. Appearance and Identity: Fashioning the Body in Postmodernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Paiü, Žarko. 2007. Vertigo in Fashion: Towards Visual Semiotics of the Body. Zagreb: Altagama . Zagreb: Altagama. —. 2011. Posthuman Condition: The End of Human and the Odds of Other History. Zagreb: Litteris. —. 2016. “Technosphere – A New Digital Aesthetics? The Body as Event, Interactivity, and Visualization of Ideas.” In Theorizing Images, edited by Žarko Paiü and Krešimir Purgar, 121–143. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. —. 2021. Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art: Pictures Without a World. Cham: Springer. Polhemus, Ted. 2006. Hot Bodies – Cool Styles: New Techniques in SelfAdornment. London: Thames & Hudson.

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Simmel, Georg. 1957. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (May): 541–558 Veblen, Thorstein. 1961. The Theory of Leisure Class. New York: Random House. Virilio, Paul. 1991. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. New York: Semiotext(e). Volli, Ugo. 1990. Contro la Moda. Milano: Feltrinelli. Welsch, Wolfgang. 1997. “Aesthetics beyond Aesthetics.” In Proceedings of the XIIIth International Congress of Aesthetics, Lahti 1995, vol. III: Practical Aesthetics in Practice and Theory, edited by Martti Honkanen, 18–37. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1985. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: Virago Press.

CHAPTER TWO CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY OF FASHION TONýI VALENTIû

Fashion can be briefly defined as a change in the clothing styles and looks adopted by certain groups of people, and from a sociological perspective, it is shown as a system of signs, a social pattern of values, and a way of acquiring collective and individual identity. Since fashion has been one of the most influential phenomena in Western civilization from the Renaissance to the present day and given its position, which can be understood in various economic, ideological, cultural and artistic formations, it is clear that fashion has become a subject of sociological studies relatively quickly. The main idea of this essay is to provide a concise and clear critical overview of the sociological understanding of contemporary fashion phenomena, starting from the earliest analyses from the beginning of the 20th century until today, i.e. the globalized era of computer network societies as the dominant form of social organization, and to critically question whether modern sociology could be a proper discipline of fashion analysis. It is apparent that fashion nowadays occupies the most important areas of aesthetic creativity. From this perspective, it is understandable that the emphasis will be on social parameters that define fashion equally as a social production and as an art form, as both play a complex role within the ideological construction of the fashion phenomenon. This means that fashion will be viewed not only as a means of identification and socialization but also as a symbolic communication with the assumption that fashion was and remains one of the key ways of affirming social power and creating cultural and symbolic capital. Of course, in modern society, the boundaries of classes are softening, leading to the democratization of fashion, and the broad masses of consumers are beginning to dictate fashion styles. With the development of the industry, i.e. the consumer society, fashion is constantly accelerating the rhythm of fashion changes. This has led to the fact that there is no longer one fashion but a plurality of fashion expressions. Nevertheless, fashion still has “stratification” features; that is,

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according to many authors, it maintains and legitimizes the power of the ruling classes and is one of the key parameters for reproducing ideological mechanisms of differentiation in social taste. Therefore, one part of this essay will be devoted to the analysis by which one of the most famous French sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu, approached the topic of social differences and the dynamics of the separation of social formations using the example of taste criticism from the perspective of the sociology of fashion. In that sense, the emergence of new disciplines such as fashionology or the visual semiotics of fashion could be understood as both a continuation of the classical sociological approach as well as its disciplinary opposition, bearing in mind that they operate within different theoretical vocabularies. It must be taken into consideration that the sociology of fashion as a specific area of the social study of fashion phenomena developed as a scientific discipline a hundred years ago and that traditional interpretive patterns are not always applicable to modern times. Various authors and theories have pointed out the differences between classical and modern interpretations of fashion. This primarily refers to the fact that today, unlike at the beginnings of this discipline (for example, in the works of Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen or Immanuel Kant), in the interpretations of contemporary authors such as Gilles Lipovetsky, Gillo Dorfles or Ted Polhemus, the emphasis is on a paradigm shift in the age of late capitalism. Namely, as Žarko Paiü (2011) observes, today we can talk about fashion only within an interdisciplinary context, where social-humanistic sciences, techno-sciences, digital technologies, and contemporary art understand fashion in many ways: 1) as a social process with its production, distribution and consumption cycles; 2) as a social and cultural phenomenon which, admittedly, is irreducible to other phenomena of everyday life, but at the same time cannot be interpreted without a connection with the social definition of the concepts of taste, lifestyle, art and leisure; 3) as the area of the cultural integration and differentiation of individuals and groups in the formation of their identity; 4) as the mechanism of social competition and the process of choosing between rational and irrational life alternatives for gaining reputation, prestige and social status; 5) as the field of social struggle for domination through the accumulation of symbolic and cultural capital in social communication; and 6) as the cultural capital of an individual, a nation-state or a transnational knowledge society that is articulated in the information economy of cultural or creative industries (Paiü 2011, 3–4). In this context, all six of these determinants are common to both traditional and contemporary sociological analyses but are distinguished by a different way of articulating the relationship between fashion and the social environment.

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More precisely, if fashion as a mass phenomenon in sociology originally occurred within the sociology of culture, and if the sociology of fashion is the study of forms of fashion, the relationship of social groups and masses with fashion, and the special laws that determine the development and evolution of fashion, then today, “what happens to modern fashion in the media spectacle with the primacy of information, communication and the interactive participation of the digital public influences all social and cultural outfits” (Paiü 2011, 4). Since fashion is understood here primarily as a social phenomenon, it is subject to various economic (production, distribution and consumption), cultural (differentiation of individuals and groups in identity formation), social stratification (mechanism of social competition) and artistic (creative industries) parameters and interpretations. As Lipovetsky (2002) succinctly observed, form as fashion is manifested in its radicalism in the accelerated rhythm of product change and the instability of industrial products. Economic logic has simply thrown out every ideal of permanence, and production and consumption are governed by the rule of transience. Precisely from the perspective of criticism of the late-capitalist clothing system and efforts to demystify the fashion industry and its ideology, many engaging anti-capitalist studies have emerged in recent years, pointing to the drastic consequences of profit-making and the consequent exploitation of oppressed workers in Third World countries (e.g. Hoskins 2014). The discrepancy between the use and the symbolic value of clothing in such cycles of production, distribution and consumption is greater now than ever before in history.

1. Classical sociological theories of fashion Although fashion as a social and historical phenomenon has played and still plays a very important role in the social definitions of taste, lifestyle, art and leisure and has been a sign of the differentiation of individuals and groups in the formation of their identity for centuries, philosophers have hardly dealt with fashion, considering it as something too trivial, as the realm of the transient and the insignificant. There are exceptions, for example, in the reflections of Adam Smith or Immanuel Kant, primarily in the field of aesthetics, i.e. the issues of taste, beauty and the new as its essential feature (Svendsen 2006, 23–29). Georg W. F. Hegel, Theodor Adorno and especially Walter Benjamin intermittently gave it some attention, the latter laconically establishing that fashion is the “eternal return of the new,” and thus Benjamin was the first philosopher to connect fashion with the period of modernity, i.e. to determine its typical feature of breaking with tradition and its constant desire for something new. The importance of fashion may

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have been first understood by Kant, who said: “It is better to be an idiot of fashion than just an idiot.” Unlike philosophy, sociology began to take an interest in fashion early on, starting from the simple assumption that it was a social and cultural phenomenon that is impossible to ignore in the analysis of modern societies. The most important sociologists of fashion in that early period were undoubtedly Simmel and Veblen. In his text “Philosophy of Fashion,” published in 1905, Simmel distinguished between fashion and clothing, viewing fashion as a broad social phenomenon that stands out in all fields of social life, believing that language use and manners are also subject to fashion. To that extent, it can be said that, in his analysis, Simmel is in a way a predecessor of Lipovetsky because both authors perceive fashion as a form of social change independent of a particular object and as a social mechanism characterized by its short duration. In addition, Simmel was the first to see the connection between fashion and identity: clothing is a decisive part of the construction of the self (Svendsen 2006, 137–155), which means that identity is no longer given by tradition but chosen by individuals within “lifestyles.” Classical sociological theories, as expected, focused on fashion as a sign of class distinction (which marked not only Veblen’s analyses but also Bourdieu’s reflections on fashion and taste as a social critique of judgement). It was customary to place the emergence of fashion at the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, or mercantile capitalism, which does not mean that there was no fashion in antiquity, but rather there was style: although there were variations in clothing concerning materials and details, the shape of the clothing remained essentially unchanged, and there was no aesthetic autonomy in the choice of clothing either. Here, due to the frequent identification of concepts, it is necessary to emphasize the difference between fashion and style: although they have some related elements, authentic style shows peculiarities in structure and taste and acts as an inseparable whole, different from those that preceded it. Fashion often keeps pace with styles, but they are often in disagreement. Sometimes the fashion of a certain style becomes established only when that style has been abandoned and replaced by a new style, or also, for example, when some outdated style goes back into fashion. In general, the notion of style is primarily associated with art history, while the notion of fashion is important today in the context of lifestyle, a term that arose with the emergence of industrial society, and in the analysis of social phenomena, among others. According to the aforementioned Simmel, fashion is an imitation of a predetermined pattern; it satisfies the need for social support while also satisfying the need for differentiation or change, i.e. social

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separation. Thus understood, fashion is nothing but a special form of creativity in which the tendency towards social egalitarianism merges in a single action with the tendency towards individual diversity and change. In that regard, the fundamental premise of Simmel’s theory of fashion is still sociologically relevant, because the individualization of lifestyles today becomes the sale of the “image” in the world as a lifestyle supermarket. However, it should be borne in mind that before the process of individualization, fashion was a product of class division: it meant connecting with people of the same socio-economic status and thus simultaneously isolating that group from lower social groups, whose characterization was that of not belonging to that group. This was extensively analyzed by Bourdieu. Thus, connecting and differentiating are the two basic functions of fashion. For Simmel, fashion belongs to the higher strata; as soon as a particular mode is accepted by the lower layers, the higher layers reject it and replace it with a new one because it becomes so profane that it no longer has the function of differentiation. Simmel finds it quite natural that the lower strata tend to rise and fashion is the most accessible path for external imitation. The essence of fashion, according to him, is that fashion is practised by only a part of the group: as soon as what some people initially wore is taken over by everyone without exception, as is the case with some elements of clothing and behaviour, it is no longer called fashion. Although he lived and wrote his books in the early 20th century, Simmel lucidly sensed the essence of the modern age and anticipated some of its movements. Likewise, he notes that fashion cannot be called anything new if it spreads rapidly in society but is only a phenomenon that is believed to disappear as quickly as it appears (Svendsen 2006, 36–63). Veblen’s concept of fashion is similar to Simmel’s in some segments and contrasts with it in others. The basic thesis he presents in his classic study The Theory of the Leisure Class (1994) is that people value wealth and money, so the more expensive an object is, the more beautiful and desirable it is considered. The upper class, by their nature, tend to show their power and opulence because the need for wealth is based on the creation of stratification by reputation. Of course, for a person’s wealth and power to be assessed, they must be socially visible, and this is not possible without the public sphere as a space to show off wealth. According to Veblen, a visible indicator of wealth is, for example, how free time or leisure time (expressed by the ancient Greek scholé) is spent. At that time, people were engaged in activities that had nothing to do with mere subsistence: art, sport, or engaging in desirable social behaviour. To acquire certain skills or appropriate behaviour requires free time, which is an indicator of wealth, a

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reflection of the fact that these people do not have to spend their lives struggling for their existence but can afford to engage in other things. However, according to Veblen, in modern society, the function of expressing wealth is taken over by conspicuous consumption, buying and accumulating goods that arise as a product of monetary competition, and in this sphere, fashion is a typical form of extravagance, especially in clothing and other areas. Here, too, we come across a similar formulation as in Simmel and later in Bourdieu: the lower classes try to imitate and adopt the manners and the taste of the higher layers, that is, the members of each layer accept the mode of the next highest layer, the group immediately above theirs. In other words, two principles are operational: differentiation within one’s own class and imitation of a higher class. Fashion is about the interaction of these two different principles of beauty – if fashion only followed the principles of monetary beauty, objects would become more expensive and grotesque. On the other hand, if fashion only followed the principles of aesthetic beauty, people would already find perfection. Fashion combines these two principles, which means that the natural sense of taste corrects the fashion exaggerations of what is ultimately called kitsch. It can be said that although Bourdieu tried to distance himself from Veblen’s theories, he largely followed the same principle and model: the driving force in symbolic consumption is not primarily the fact that the lower strata mimic more strategies of the higher strata (Bourdieu 1996). Consequently, for Bourdieu, taste is, in a way, a “negative” category, a “social sense of orientation” that a priori gives us a certain place in that social space. It is precisely here that Bourdieu is on the same line of argumentation with Simmel and Veblen: fashion is an invention of the upper class that aims to make a difference between itself and the lower classes. But there is one important and significant difference: it favours symbolic and cultural rather than economic capital (Bourdieu 1996, 11–18, 260–283, 466).

2. Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: Establishing a new field of research Bourdieu’s major sociological work is considered to be Distinction, originally published in French in 1979, and it has since become an unavoidable reference point not only for sociologists but also for many other scholars and experts dealing with culture in the broadest sense of the word. According to some of them, there are at least two important reasons: first, no one like Bourdieu has treated culture as thoroughly as a social phenomenon. The work includes an analysis of cultural taste, both of

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popular and cultural experts such as art critics, the lifestyles of old and new ruling social classes, the proverbial bearers of culture in terms of high culture, the social space in which the results of struggles over cultural values take place and are structured, as well as their definitions, all the way to cultural politics as an expression of the merging of class habitus and political ideology. Another reason for the great importance of this book lies precisely in the ‘contagious’ concept of distinction. It is so used by many other authors that it can sometimes be considered synonymous with Bourdieu’s sociological interpretation of culture. Thus, the strength and provocativeness of Bourdieu’s main argument, as noted in the previous section in the comparative review alongside Veblen and Simmel, consists in the fact that the refined taste and other characteristics of members of high culture represent almost nothing more than their means of separation from the lower social classes. In other words, our tastes are ultimately determined by our social background, and differences in this regard can hardly be reduced or reversed through (re)socialization, education, and similar forms of compensation provided by modern democratic societies. The question Bourdieu addresses in his book is not a question of status dilemmas (although distinction, according to the author, also represents symbolic capital) but of the nature, production, basis and dynamics of social differences. It is important to emphasize here that it is not society that produces differences but vice versa: social differences produce society, which is very similar to a famous Marxist argumentation (“the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”), which means that Bourdieu does not run off this analysis, although it is not explicitly identified with it. In the eighth chapter of In Other Words, entitled “Essays on Reflexive Sociology” (Bourdieu 1990, 123–140), he sets up social taste as a system of classification models and uses the term “constructivist structuralism” (or “structuralist constructivism”), seeking to develop a different notion of structure from Claude Lévi-Strauss, which means that in society (not only in mere symbolic systems of language, myth, etc.), objective structures appear that are independent of consciousness, such that subjectivism reduces structures to interactions and objectivism deduces actions and reactions from structures, which is a kind of form of “social phenomenology” (Bourdieu 1990). In this sense, as Paiü (2011, 6–7) precisely states, “the articulation of the process of power struggle in the social field of action of postmodern subjects/actors of fashion proves to be an extremely important topic.” It is the subject of a sociological interpretation of new notions of cultural struggle, habitus, lifestyle, and symbolic and cultural capital. For Bourdieu, fashion can be understood primarily as a code for social differentiation in taste, social identity and cultural capital. Thus, the notions of taste, social

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identity and cultural capital in Bourdieu’s sociology of the practice of the subject’s action (which within the field of historical forces seeks to change social relations and prevailing norms of behaviour) are extremely important for a different understanding of fashion. Bourdieu finds fashion to be a universal social form in conditions of constant changes in contemporary lifestyles. What does this mean in concrete examples from the field of the sociology of fashion? Fashion as a formal structure of the individualization of lifestyles here has a completely different function and role than in the classical sociological interpretations of Veblen and Simmel – it is a specific cultural production and, as such, participates in the general cultural production of modern society. How does Bourdieu define distinction? Primarily through cultural and artistic production and the attitude towards them, and this reveals not only taste but also economic and social conditions, thus legitimizing social differences. Since the introduction in Distinction is recognized as an effort to construct a “naturally” given taste, Bourdieu sees its foundation as an ideology that deals not only with the situation of the subject but also with subjectification, for which social, cultural, political and theoretical relations must be established. The analysis of distinction structurally includes three main parts (social critique of the court of taste, economics of practice, and class tastes and lifestyles). Bourdieu, legitimizing himself primarily as a sociologist, critically accepts and reinterprets the rich heritage not only of sociology but also of other social sciences and humanities. Another of Bourdieu’s merits is that it was he who introduced the concept of cultural capital into contemporary sociology, trying to explain how social relations are mediated by economic, political and cultural practice. In short, cultural capital is any form of knowledge, moral value, and/or artistic preference of individuals and groups from the local to the national and global levels. It conditions social differentiation as a new kind of social stratification (see Paiü 2007, 2011). All actors in the fashion process behave in a way that respects and accepts the three basic determinants of fashion: novelty, change and obsolescence. The game in the struggle for the dominance of differences within a given environment, for example, high fashion, is guided using symbolic power that legitimizes norms of behaviour. A novelty in historical distinction is shown in the expanded notion of fashion as a lifestyle, which arises in the process of individualization. The lifestyle of the new cultural elite is not, therefore, a separate case of the elite attitude towards fashion and its contents, but a universal model of creating a lifestyle of hedonism, consumption and narcissistic pleasure in fulfilling the liberated body’s own needs.

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There are two other “actors” in Bourdieu’s analysis that must be pointed out: the notions of class and habitus. He uses class in at least two predominant contexts: in the Marxist sense of social formation and as a sociological construct of a group with recognizable characteristics. The sociological analysis thus reveals social divisions grounded in the ideology of “natural divisions” as ideological complements of status and class distinction (“class and class division”). Through class as a key form of social battle, Bourdieu builds a social fabric in which distinction has the main word, and class is determined primarily relationally and by the amount of social determination by origin and inevitable legitimacy. However, given that the social fabric he builds in his analysis mostly revolves around the strategy of reproduction of dominant classes, i.e. dominant “fields of production” and capital (symbolic, economic and cultural), a critical question arises as to what extent his theory is deterministic-Marxist in the sense of what we might call the “principle of determinism of social battles.” Bourdieu’s aesthetic critique can therefore be objected to for placing too much emphasis on competing for power and the relationship of domination and subordination. On the other hand, when the distinction between elite and mass in modern society has been abolished, social class stratification is no longer decisive for the production of culture and thus of fashion. “Lifestyle and the field of struggle in Bourdieu’s sociology of culture indicate a new area of cultural research. In the case of the neo-Marxist social critique of fashion, as undertaken by Bourdieu, these are concepts that are nothing more than an extension of his key theory in general – the theory of habitus” (Paiü 2011, 9). There are different definitions of habitus: one of them is that habitus is a system of embodied schemes that are created during collective history, acquired during individual history that operates in a practical form and for a practical purpose. In short, habitus mediates between the social field and the human body, with each habitus being socially conditioned. However, the second definition of habitus as a “system of permanent dispositions, i.e. individual characteristics and preferences through which we perceive, judge and act in the social space” (Maštruko 2017, 274) is more theoretically effective here. Fashion, accordingly, emerges as a habitually determined stability complex of ideas of change in the context of the social reproduction of life. Being a subject/actor of fashion is not just a lifestyle choice but the result of the previous historical and social determinants of an individual’s habitus. However, the problem with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus is not only that culture is placed at the centre instead of society. Social differences are also replaced by differences in the power of culture. This determines the conditions of reproduction in the era of the rule of global capitalism

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(postindustrial society and postmodern culture). The main limitation of such an approach to fashion is not, furthermore, in the fact that it reduces fashion as a universal social form to a special cultural production of the field in which the new rules of the game take place. The power of difference stems from the fundamental power of social development as a scientific and technological project of transforming the body into an image produced from artificially constructed reality. Ultimately, fashion no longer represents social relations but aesthetic-media relations. It is a mirror of social change and a sign of the construction of new cultural identities. But fashion can be understood neither as a social phenomenon nor as a cultural one. This leads to the fact that, with the development and global expansion of the creative industries, fashion design takes a key place in the new development paradigm of society.

3. The relevance of classical sociological theories of fashion today Almost four decades have passed since the publication of Bourdieu’s Distinction in French, so it is reasonable to consider the extent to which this major work – which marked an entire era of the sociological analysis of taste, the economics of cultural goods, and fashion – is relevant today, in the third decade of the 21st century, when the processes of the relocation of global capital in the modern world have opened up opportunities for radical changes in the method(s) of the social representation of identity. Sociology, like any other science, is developing rapidly and must always adapt its categorical apparatus to the time, society and processes with which it deals. As has already been pointed out, understanding social differences and the dynamics of separation of social formations (more precisely, classes) is a feature of the constructed and targeted strategy of social development and the foundation of its entire battle based on distinction. Therefore, the basis of the analysis became a distinction – a difference that can be recognized. Science, like sociology, Bourdieu argues (1996, 1–11, 503–519), should therefore construct and interpret the foundation of social differentiation and the ideology that produces, perpetuates and uses it. Thus, a distinction is a very powerful fuel of social dynamics, and its research requires a great effort to identify the points of transition of social trajectories and the efforts to maintain class position in the structure of social dynamics. The author methodologically explained this procedure in a kind of “postscript” to the book (Bourdieu 1996, 503–546). Since this text deals with sociological analyses of fashion, it is reasonable to ask what the contemporary correlation is between the nature, foundations and production of the dynamics of social

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differences on the one hand and the new role and function of fashion design and contemporary fashion in the age of globalization on the other. If the contemporary approach to fashion design includes specific cultural habits and different collective lifestyles in its scientific, artistic and technological field and theories of the social identity of the globalized consumer (Paiü 2011), then Bourdieu’s theory can be applied today in three structurally significant fields – the social critique of taste, the economics of practice, and class tastes and lifestyles – in the context of the emergence of the social court of taste in the changed circumstances of the development of creative industries based on the interaction of science, art and new technologies. As much as Distinction is a capital work that, over time, has become an unavoidable reference work not only for sociologists but also for many other cultural scientists and experts, many studies have recently been published that critically review some of his theses, finding them difficult to apply in the already mentioned changed circumstances in the ways of the social representation of identity, i.e. in the modern era, which is a combination of information and communication technologies, information processing, and symbolic communication with the processes of globalization, digitalization and networking. Proponents of Bourdieu will rightly point out that his fundamental value is that, to this day, no one else like him has so thoroughly treated culture as a social phenomenon, analyzed cultural taste and the lifestyles of old and new ruling social classes, and, through the highly operable notion of “distinction,” showed how our tastes are ultimately always determined by our social background.1 On the other hand, other authors2 have focused more on the sociology of cultural production and consumption in the context of fashion, trying to critically rethink Bourdieu’s extensive and empirically extremely detailed and vividly substantiated analyses that can be applied to contemporary fashion and which today deeply permeate all social and cultural systems and domains of life. There is no doubt that Bourdieu’s sociology of culture was central to consumption studies. For example, however, Rocamora (2002) believes that Bourdieu does not pay enough attention to the “materiality” of material culture, the meaning of which is analyzed only in the symbolic code. He also does not think about the meaning (and significance) of mass fashion (be it symbolic or body-sensual) and the impact it had on the field of haute couture fashion, therefore ignoring the theoretical implications of such influence. One of the 1

Detailed analyses can be found in works such as Earle 175–192; Margolis 64–84; or Shusterman 1999, 214–220. 2 For example, Davis 1994, Kawamura 2018, Rocamora 2002, and Svendsen 2006. We will omit Lipovetsky’s (2002) interdisciplinary analyses as well as Barthes’ (1990) inspirational semiotic interpretations here.

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most important objections Rocamora makes is that Bourdieu, in his work, reduced the discrepancy between empirical reality and its conceptual framework to a minimum. Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of fashion, as well as his sociological theory in general, relies on invaluable conceptual tools such as struggle and social position/status. However, this is sometimes only a partial analysis that excludes various situations in which contradictions and complexities arise that call into question its analytical framework, drawing attention to its conceptual rigidity and a certain determinism (conditioned by the unorthodox Marxist approach). For Bourdieu, consumption patterns are precisely articulated along class lines, and the relationship between the production and consumption of fashion is relatively unambiguously and easily resolved through the idea of homology. Transitions, irregularities and dissonances are minimized or simply left unexplored. Fashion has become a global postFordist industry, making transitions and dissonances even more pronounced. Players in the social field are more numerous, the market is more fragmented, products are offered and disappear faster than the fashion industry can keep up, and there is not enough time or space to express clear strategies of class differentiation. New patterns of the consumption and production of fashion have emerged that do not necessarily fit Bourdieu’s model, including those influenced by mass fashion in contemporary society. Since the 1970s, the conflict between haute couture and mass fashion has prevailed, and it has now become dominant. This is a crucial and important division, not only in the field of fashion but in the field of culture as a whole, and it is a change that Bourdieu did not seem to have in mind, i.e. the impact of such changes was not sufficiently reflected in his model of cultural distinction. Thus, some aspects of Bourdieu’s aesthetic sociology have lost their relevance due to the thorough transformation of social patterns, “especially in terms of cultural and artistic production and rigid class divisions” (Maštruko 2017). “The transformation of social conditions of cultural production, consumption and construction of taste, as well as the general logic of social dynamics, leads to the need for a theory that leaves more room for subjective agency, i.e. the individual or collective ability to act, construct and resist social determinants” (Maštruko 2017). It is crucial for Bourdieu’s analysis that there are objective social relations, that is, social relations that are real even if the actors in the field of action do not acknowledge their existence. When Bourdieu speaks of habitus (see the abovementioned definitions of the term), it is in a way a matter of believing that we have chosen what is imposed on us. This may seem like a free choice, but in reality, it is a direct reflection of objective class affiliation.

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More precisely, Bourdieu believes that autonomous aesthetic taste is not autonomous at all, being close to the modern neoliberal dogma of globalizing capitalism that imposes the “tyranny of choice” under the cunning assumption: “you have the freedom to choose whatever you want, but only if it is what we have already given you in advance.” In Distinction, Bourdieu clearly emphasizes that any socially recognized hierarchy of artistic types corresponds to a social hierarchy of consumers, so the sociological notion of taste autonomy is fundamentally illusory – taste is simply an expression of class affiliation or aspiration. In this sense, the sociologist Bourdieu opposes the philosopher Kant – for the latter, only free or autonomous taste is important and worth considering, and for the former, it does not exist because it is not a matter of free choice. Of course, there are aesthetic choices, but for Bourdieu, they are, as we have just indicated, imposed. Taste is not “inborn” but cultivated by social discipline. Another term that has often been used in this essay – the term “class” – proves problematic in several respects. Bourdieu operates in many aspects from a perspective in which taste must be explained starting from a classdifferentiating principle (Svendsen 2006, 111), and it is precisely this differentiation that drives the whole process. However, all these analyses are strongly based on the notion of a class that is no longer operative (or at least is less usable today than forty years ago, not to mention in the 19th century when it played a very strong role in Marx’s analysis). Moreover, Bourdieu presupposes a kind of unique, objective space of differentiation in which cultural capital functions as a means of exchange, questioning whether there can be an objective principle of organization that can explain differences in the social field. To be precise, if culture is no longer understood only as a humanistic horizon of values reduced to high art but as a way of life and human identity in all its complex social relations, then identity as an institutional order of traditional and modern values cannot be attached to the notion of class. The rise of modern individualism in which taste is increasingly an individual thing and fashion in the age of postmodern cultural reversal becoming both a means and a purpose of identity do not fit into Bourdieu’s classical categories, which are dominated by a hierarchy of tastes written and analyzed in a specific cultural-historical context in the mid-1970s. The result of all that has been mentioned above is the creation of a social space in which differences are set, and although they can provide social and cultural capital, they cannot be included in an objective (i.e. social) hierarchy. It is not just that social class no longer has the same meaning today as it once did or that class consciousness is in considerable decline, but that cultural division is based on lifestyles that are now becoming indicators of status, and this is no longer a strictly vertical division

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but also a horizontal fragmentation of a social group that was once considered homogeneous. Moreover, due to a kind of democratization of access to cultural objects characteristic of modern times, objects of consumption lose the power of attaining status. Understandably, the growing socioeconomic quality of life and professional mobility in Western European societies has resulted in the heterogenization of cultural practices and preferences, and media globalization has made elite and popular aesthetics (and thus fashion) more accessible to wider segments of the population. In addition, production is focused on meeting the demands of the middle class and the broad consumer masses, rather than on the needs of the upper classes. The members of the new petty bourgeoisie are the perfect consumers that economic theory has always dreamed of, and so it is no wonder that Bourdieu sees the new middle class as representative of almost everything modern in modern society. In erasing cultural boundaries among social groups, confidence in the power of the social conditioning of fashion as an original modern social phenomenon is increasingly losing its justification, and the metamorphoses of body design coincide with the fundamental determinants of globalization. Because of the deep connection between symbolic consumption and identity construction, class affiliation (an argumentative underpinning that is invariable in Simmel’s, Veblen’s and Bourdieu’s work) becomes less important, because today’s fashion consumption is not so much directed towards class as towards personal identity. As we have seen previously in the analysis of classical sociological theories of fashion, for Veblen, the showing of class affiliation is almost exclusively a matter of consumption. In contrast, the postmodern consumer cannot build his identity on this alone because he will undermine identity formation – ultimately, the symbolic value of things becomes superficial and changeable like a fluid postmodern identity. Goods can become a sign only because they are emptied of their immanent value. The ability to present depends on the inner absence of meaning. This is not only a reflection of Roland Barthes’s (1990) analysis of the sign system of fashion, but here we can also recognize the legacy of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who clearly emphasized in their Dialectic of Enlightenment that consumers cannot classify anything. Here we are returning to the above postulate of modern capitalism that choice is completely free, but on the condition that we choose what someone has already chosen for us in advance. This is where the vicious circle emerges: the faster fashion changes, the cheaper things become; thus, faster fashion changes encourage consumers and force producers to accelerate the rapidity of the economy and industry. However, in reality, an imposition from above will continue to prevail, as

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the production of goods and their distribution will remain in the hands of industrialists and traders, not in the hands of numerous consumers. The transition of fashion canons from the ruling classes to the poor is not so much a reflection of the democratization of fashion as of the stylistic alignment of the society in which we live. Hence the notion of ostentatious consumption was especially emphasized by the sociologist and media theorist Dick Hebdige. On the other hand, there is Bourdieu’s line of argument that stems from his definition and understanding of habitus, which is still an operable term in sociology. Claims about the “reflexive self” as a result of creating lifestyles contradict Bourdieu’s theory of action, which emphasizes through habitus that identity can be shaped far less by reflexive intervention than many modern sociologists would like to show. One’s habitus is shaped by social structures, and it causes actions that in turn reproduce social structures. Bourdieu emphasizes this precisely by saying that habitus schemes are original forms of classification that operate below the threshold of consciousness and language and are therefore beyond what can be controlled by the will, so it cannot be changed by a conscious act of the will. Although this sounds like further proof of the strong social determinism of Bourdieu’s theory, i.e. socio-material limitations, it should be pointed out that they are very present in lifestyle choices, choices that become imposed, with aesthetic choice becoming the centre of identity formation. And as Bourdieu has meticulously shown in thousands of examples from French life in the 1970s, the aestheticization of life for economic reasons is not equally accessible to everyone, so identity does not become constructed by a self-sufficient (autarkic) self but is always created based on social relations. In this respect, Bourdieu was right in anticipating the later thesis that consumer patterns are conformist rather than creative and dynamic, and Lipovetsky’s thesis that the whole world of objects and discourse begins to be ruled by the logic of transience.

Conclusion In the previous passages, I tried to outline the basic tenets of the sociology of fashion, focusing on a brief overview of some important theories and basic creeds of the discipline, especially on Bourdieu’s analysis in this field as a kind of case study, showing the connection between theoretical study and fashion practice. In a sense, this essay is a succinct (and therefore necessarily reduced) analysis, not an exhaustive problem interpretation: it is a “foreword” to this scientific field both from the perspective of fashion studies in a narrower sense and within a broader humanistic disciplinary framework. How should the possibilities, achievements and limitations of

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the sociology of fashion and the impact of fashion design on the specific problem setting that was discussed here be assessed? At the very beginning, I emphasized that fashion, from a sociological perspective, is understood as a system of signs, a social pattern of values, and a way of acquiring collective and individual identity. In this sense, the sociology of fashion necessarily overlaps with other disciplines in interpretation and accordingly includes various semiotic, philosophical, anthropological and cultural aspects. The example of Distinction clearly shows the extent to which lifestyle and the field of struggle in Bourdieu’s sociology indicated a new area of cultural research. But it should be borne in mind that at the time of the emergence of the theory of distinction some forty years ago, one could still speak of the difference between mass-produced and luxury products: standardized products regularly had a technological and stylistic deficit in comparison to luxury products. In the period of mass culture, and thus the period of mass and cheap reproduction, more attention is paid to the democratic aspect of fashion and its independence from the class hierarchy, as stated by the American sociologist Herbert Blumer, who, unlike Bourdieu, did not emphasize fashion as a mechanism of differentiation. In mass fashion, products are intended for mass consumption, and it expresses the need for conformism more than the need for the manifestation of stratification. However, as Paiü accurately observes, it is a great merit of Bourdieu that he presented the basic models of the changed social behaviour of new classes and strata in modern society. By introducing explicitly new notions of lifestyle, habitus, symbolic and cultural capital into sociology, he contributed to the study of culture in the works of recent advocates of cultural studies, feminist social critique (gender studies) and literary theories of modernism, paying more attention to another dimension of individualization and societies in terms of their social stratification in the conditions of consumer capitalism, which puts culture at the centre of its mechanism of reproduction (Paiü 2011, 10). Thus, the social class dimension has not disappeared but has been differentiated: social differences have been replaced by differences in power culture because, in the era of the rule of global capitalism (postindustrial society and postmodern culture), fashion determines the conditions of reproduction. In addition, the opposite process occurs from that described in detail by Simmel and Veblen: today, the ruling classes must also consider the clothing of the broad masses. There are professional designers working in the mass fashion industry who take their ideas and models directly from the street, which, in a kind of ironic way, is a reversal for the upper classes to copy the fashion of the lower social strata. This transformation, often described by fashion process theorists, does not make the role of designers

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obsolete – quite the opposite: to meet the mass demand for ever-new products, their creations still have to be styled and offered to customers at an accelerated pace. Accordingly, an industrial society transformed into a postindustrial or mass consumption society has led to a hastened rate of economic production, which means that haute couture no longer has to be as expensive as before. However, it has also led to a massive expansion of sweatshops, which has shifted industrial production to Third World countries, creating a huge imbalance between the production and selling prices of products, and at the same time producing a new class of extremely poor and disenfranchised workers (Hoskins 2014). In this sense, class differentiation has shifted from the consumer to the production segment: in developed countries, quality clothing is available to most people, but a new textile proletariat has been created, hidden away from the eyes of Westerners. Given that modern society is constantly encouraging people to consume, and they exceed their needs to do so, an artificial need or a demand for unnecessary luxury is created: people are persuaded to spend more than they need. The ideal and extreme example of extravagance is fashion, and as such, it promotes sales and speeds up capital turnover. Moreover, all modern industries tend to imitate the method of fashion designers and fashion trends, and since it is a self-dynamic social process because fashion does not seem to follow objective criteria and reasons, reducing the realm of contingency, the result is a complex system on the edge of deterministic chaos. But in this chaos in the foreground is the desire of the individual for social differentiation and identification, and these are the characteristics that have been a constant of sociological discourse from Simmel and Bourdieu to the present day. Lipovetsky summed it up suggestively, saying that fashion is a “vector of narcissistic individualization,” that is, the first essential mechanism for the constant social production of personality, thus aestheticizing and individualizing human vanity. He calls it the “empire of the ephemeral” in which everyone can participate and create their lifestyle and personality, and this is in stark contrast to Veblen’s privileged class. The sociology of fashion has a significant place in the comprehensive understanding of the phenomena of taste, aesthetics and culture, and it is quite certain that it will have to develop more and more as an interdisciplinary field. At the same time, fashion will play an increasing role as a creative industry and less as a means of class differentiation. Namely, fashion no longer represents social relations but aesthetic-media relations with oneself. Fashion takes place in a society without a hard line of demarcation of classes and strata. It is a mirror of social change and a sign of the construction/deconstruction of new cultural identities. But fashion

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can be understood neither as a social nor as a cultural phenomenon, although its form of action is the social and aesthetic code of modernity. Beyond its marking of the ‘spirit of the time’ of modernity and its continuation in the postmodern world that loses the boundaries of distinguishing between elite and mass culture, high and mass fashion, there is an open area of fashion that metamorphoses into the very life of the designed body. “What remains in modern fashion in the context of globalization is primarily a symbolic and real struggle for the authenticity of one’s own cultural identity” (Paiü 2011, 11). Given that the development and global expansion of the creative industries of fashion design are becoming a key place in society’s new development paradigm, that there is a simultaneous and interactive permeation of body design with new technology and lifestyles, and that fashion design can no longer be considered a mere decoration of the human body and a superficial aestheticization of the society of the spectacle, a different understanding of fashion beyond strictly defined sociological frameworks is needed to analyze the emergence of a symbolic and real struggle for the authenticity of one’s own cultural identity. It is no longer a social class-structured struggle but the birth of a new form of cultural capital as a new kind of social stratification. One of the main tasks of the 21st century’s sociology of fashion is to detect and accurately analyze the various transformations of fashion design and view contemporary fashion in the age of information and communication technologies within the scope of new theoretical vocabulary.

References Barthes, Roland. 1990. The Fashion System. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —. 1996. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davis, Fred. 1994. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoskins, Tansy E. 2014. Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. London: Pluto Press. Kawamura, Yuniya. 2018. Fashionology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies. London: Bloomsbury. Lipovetsky, Gilles. 2002. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Maštruko, Nina. 2017. Distinctive Taste in the Field of Fashion. Zagreb: Tvrÿa. Paiü, Žarko. 2007. Vertigo in Fashion: Towards Visual Semiotics of the Body. Zagreb: Altagama —. 2011. Fashion Design in the Age of Globalization. Zagreb: TTF. Rocamora, Agnes. 2002. “Fields of Fashion.” Journal of Consumer Culture 2, no. 3: 341–362. Shusterman, Richard. ed. 1999. Bourdieu: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Simmel, Georg. 1905. Philosophie der Mode. Berlin: Pan-Verlag. Svendsen, Lars H. 2006. Fashion: A Philosophy. London: Reaktion Books. Veblen, Thorstein. 1994. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Dover Publications.

CHAPTER THREE BODY ICONOGRAMS: THE END OF THE SYMBOLIC CONSTRUCTION OF FASHION ŽARKO PAIû

Long live the new flesh! David Cronenberg, Videodrome

1. Beyond a fashion? “Elle est contemporaine de tout le monde” In a world without the metaphysical foundation of beauty and reign of the sublime, the categories of contingency and chaos have long since lost the meaning of modern aesthetic values. Instead, technically-scientifically shaped forms of life take on the task of decorating the surrounding world. The process of aestheticization covers all areas of life. However, in that gap between the worlds—one that strives to preserve by collecting objects and traces of the past and another of integral reality that, like a soap bubble, bursts in the air—there is going to be something disturbing and, at first glance, uncannily spirited. This event signified the experience of German literary romanticism and psychoanalytic-philosophical insights from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger. We should here call to mind the uncanny experience of the world (Unheimlichkeit). The fantasy of an unusual object of the universe, which is at the same time close and strange like a puppet or a cyborg in a virtual space, as assumed in the movie The Matrix, belongs to one of the iconographic foundations of fetishism in modern culture. To even think of the loss of beauty and the transition to the world of decoration as a world of fashion, it might be necessary to find out what is going on in the world and in time that is disturbing and uncanny as conditions of the possibility of the reign of the fetishism of objects. Is it a unique and universal world and a unique and universal time?

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The answer to this question seems to be an insight into the disputes between the postmodern deconstruction of truth and the new cognitive realism. It seems just like a dispute between those who deny the universal truth of reality and its existence outside of the context and situation and those who depart from the idea of transcending the long conditionality of our knowledge of the world. If it is about a unique world of things, what can the identity of contemporary art and fashion be? If, however, a multitude of worlds and different perceptions and experiences of time proves the primacy of that “ontology of things,” then the question of the essence of contemporary art and fashion and the question about the status of the contemporary metamorphosed body as a visual matrix of the machine and the cyborg has to be found in the new concept of life. What if it is about the other world and the disappearance of time? If, therefore, a homogeneous area and heterogeneous bodies lie in it, and its deployment of immigrationemigration constitutes an entirely new situation at the end of history, how is it possible to access that hiatus, namely, one in multiplicity? This could be the exact situation of all things, just as nomadism, loss of homeland and transgression have been successfully represented in the installations and critical reflections concerning fashion of the designer Hussein Chalayan (Evans 2005, 8–15; Quinn 2005, 46–51; Steele 2001). In his aesthetics, Immanuel Kant assumed that ideas of beauty as disinterested spectators belong to the field of court taste. Such a judgement cannot be objectively legalized. The reason is that it should be not a category of mind, irrespective of whether they are antinomically defined, such as, for example, the case of the idea of God. However, the idea of beauty may have a general scope that should take the place of aesthetic judgement. So, it is always culturally determined or customarily arbitrary. This assumption has undergone a new interpretation in semiology or semiotics of Saussure and Barthes. For them, the signifier is a cultural order, not the natural condition of communication. Is not that something that we can add to contemporary fashion? It cannot be otherwise thought of as an essential cultural and decentralized order of meaning—as an apparatus and whether it is an enabler1—at the time of the transition of social relations to the network of visual communications. If there exists a universal language of fashion (la langue), then the multitude of speeches of fashion (la parole) might be equivalent to a multitude of cultural orders. We should note, in advance, 1

The concept of the apparatus or the device of power is taken from the late ideas of Michel Foucault. It is a term that replaces discourse and marks a set of rules, codes, language norms, socially structured structures, scientific and religious discussions, economic contracts, and collections of straight rules in structuring the power of life by itself (Agamben 2009b).

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that the ideal speech situation in the postmodern context encompasses the assemblage of ready-mades and designed fashion objects. The multitude is reflected in one. Instead of the autonomy of the discourse of fashion, the apparatus of fashion still has to be in the operation of the heteronomy of fashion. This could be the attitude of Gilles Lipovetsky in his famous book The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. The concept of open fashion determines our fluid and very complex age. Fashionable clothing is less and less a means for social distancing, more and more an instrument for individual and aesthetic distinction, an instrument of seduction, youthfulness, and emblematic modernity. Ever since it began, fashion has blended conformity with individualism. For all its openness, contemporary fashion still has not escaped that basic structure. But there is a difference: individualism has become by and large less competitive, less concerned with what others think, less exhibitionist. (Lipovetsky 2002, 127)

Contemporary fashion, thus, stems from an uncanny blurry aesthetic and a transgressive encounter. In all manner of manifestations of transgression, the transition to the norms limits the fields of autonomy. The peak of transgression is represented by the taboo of eroticism. Although the notion of transgression was developed by Michel Foucault in his analysis of the will, knowledge and biopolitics of the modern age (Foucault 1977, 29–52), it was undoubtedly Georges Bataille who gave this concept the power of reflection for the upcoming era. Transgression is, namely, directed towards eroticism, exile, taboo, sacrifice, violence, divine, sacred, ritual, craving, and exclusion. While Foucault describes transgression as a boundless boundary and the emptiness of excess after the death of God and the establishment of new frontiers towards infinity, Bataille, in the victim’s economy determined by crossing the limits of the allowable excess, searches for quite different features of the same order of things (Bataille 1985). In his analysis of the differences between Foucault’s and Bataille’s concepts of transgression, Chris Jenks shows that the term may refer to: (1) the negative (2) the scandalous (3) the subversive In order to understand transgression, it is necessary to break the idea of a cause, to establish what is decentralized from the covenant that announces the end of the idea of man, and, last but most significantly, the end of the idea of representation (Jenks 2003, 91). Life becomes a torture of self-

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affirmation in the cruelty of life’s power. Within this, sexual urge forms the structure of all social structures of kinship. Of course, the boundary between all possible beauty and the deadly zone of decadent fetishism arises and leads to the uncanny nature of eroticism (Fernbach 2002). Whereas Baudrillard would view fetishism in terms of the desire to inhabit self-contained formal codes that overcome all internal ambiguity and external materiality, Derridian post-Marxists would locate the fetish in semantic indeterminacy and the ambivalent oscillation (hence dialectical resolution) between contrary determinations, a “space” where codes and their logic break down in a materiality that is conceived in terms of pure difference, contingency, and chance. (Apter and Pietz 1993, 125)

The scandal of the body in fashion suggests that unspeakable situation. It is the only way to stop the communication between body-like objects. The body can appear as a subject of desire only by transforming itself into a thing. This thing is exchanged for the whole thing in a real and symbolic market. However, all this is happening beyond the instrumental function of the language. Starting from the fetishism that objectified desire in the language of the appropriation of changes observed by the object, we might be aware that this has directly impacted the notion of contemporary fashion. Thus, language assumes mastery over things that matter due to strengthening the thing itself. The power of that order represents the symbolic condition of the actual subjugation of the desires of the Other (Lacan 1996). But without oral experiment in the world of the touching object of worship, there is no kind of fetishism regarding the desiring object. Surely, things are revived only due to the magical power of language. They are appropriated by oral communication. That is why the taboo of cannibalism denotes a realsymbolic order of the law, which is the act of the cruelty of nature punished by the ban on swallowing, chewing, and eating the Other in the form of the human body. It is a paradox of Christianity that it is in the Eucharistic act of the mystical bonds between Jesus Christ and the community of believers where the ban is experienced together with the desire for them to generalize another symbolic act of swallowing the Other. Without this, it is not possible to understand the thought of transgression as contingent on the connection between the body and the soul in the encounter with death. It becomes a strange fact that this experience is at the same time the meaning of philosophy from Plato to Arthur Schopenhauer (thanatón méleté) and the taboo of eroticism as a cosmic-anthropological sacrifice from the Marquis de Sade to Georges Bataille. Transgression might be defined as the inner logic of the aesthetic overcoming of body boundaries in contemporary art and fashion. It is nothing external to the time of fashion but rather to its

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“essence.” That is a reason why we cannot designate fetishism as a scandal. Quite the contrary, it could be necessary for the excessive creative freedom of the body in the event of its universal symbolic and actual sacrifice. As Amanda Fernbach argues, fetishism changed the very heart of contemporary fashion during the 1990s due to the transformation of bodies from the representation of subculture styles to the personalized identity of the media-constructed reality. But what should be noted when we speak about such a thing as fetishism? No doubt that subcultures try to perceive fetishism as a celebration of difference. So, all that set of beliefs about gender, sexuality and the body might be transgressed in the theatre of contemporary spectacle, where we can find these features articulated in film but also in feminist and postcolonial criticism. For many theorists, fetishism has a very complex meaning due much to Freud’s interpretation. As we know, for him, the fetish could be interpreted as a supplement for the mother’s missing phallus and a disavowal of her sexual difference. But, with a little help from current critical theory, fetishism might be regarded as being almost the same as the production of posthuman “Otherness.” Fernbach, thus, claims that the mainstream interpretation of old fetishism is not and never has been acceptable for analyzing the phenomenon of cultural fetishism. We can see that all the different forms of fetishism—decadent fetishism, magical fetishism, matrix fetishism and immortality fetishism— have strong impacts on realizing a strange and uncanny potential for contemporary fashion regarding the mixture of styles and tendencies. In any case, Fernbach argues that fetishism—which we should describe as making a difference, unlike the old concept familiar to modern fashion and art— cannot have the function of representing the subculture, but rather the new fetishism emerging from “inside” wants to determine a fetishism as a bodily-designed adventure without any kind of previous limits and borderlines (Fernbach 2000; Fernbach 2002) The freedom without body transgression denotes an illusionary activity of the mere decoration of the world. In doing so, it always comes to fight against the subjecting freedom of body institutions of social control. The freedom of the body designates a pretence of the law to the event of its sacrifice. However, the sacrifice always takes place in the name of the metaphysical reduction of the body in its holiness of freedom. Being free means having and holding on to its “own” body. It is projecting-protecting the existence in all kinds of events and situations. This is called the existence of the body. Having a body and being a body are not quite different things, although it does seem so at first glance. The existential experience of freedom means truly having the ability to dispose of your body without compromise. But the notion of possession is always determined by the will

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of the Other, and this forms the structure of the capitalist economy of the exchange of objects on the market. In the case of fetishism concerning contemporary fashion, the existential experience of freedom becomes a search for a different form of identity and the construction of a lifestyle. It goes so far that the question of the life and death of a man is a question of the physical existence of his freedom to lead his life decisively, even to make sacrifices in the context of social deviations. Fashion today has more kinship with the ethical-political turn of aesthetics than ever before. It is sufficient to take the example of what Karl Lagerfeld did when designing a dress for his muse and mannequin Claudia Schiffer by incorporating text from the Quran into a lascivious design and thus provoking that part of the world where fashion is still considered as a decadent Western eccentricity and the sign of total power as such. Death and suicide give the body what is unkempt, scandalous and subversive. In the first case, it is the ultimate limit of finiteness to infinity, and second, the negative freedom of sacrifice in the name of something “higher” or a nameless name of nullity. Socrates’ death seems to be the most tragic case in the history of Western metaphysics. The victim is unreasonable, and the punishment, of course, seems quite unforgivable. Finally, the congregation of death by suicide represents the last act of encounter with that overcoming in the universe—the soul in immortality as an illusion and as the truth of human existence. Both the illusion and the truth make that encounter tragic. The illusion of truth shows the truth of illusion in the absence of the metaphysical justification of life, more than anything other than the unavoidable power of the life of the body itself. The performed actions of contemporary artists with the intervention and participation of their bodies in a pre-ideological-political and culturally predetermined social history—such as the works of Marina Abramoviü and Tomislav Gotovac—overlap the issue of the status of artistic work at the time of the new media as well as the issue of the singularity of the body in the live event without representativity (Fischer-Lichte 2004). Art cannot be a mere imitation of life. It is always reproductive in creating life in an artistic work as an event. The documentation of contemporary art and fashion is, therefore, a question of the limitations of the endless repeatability of the event in the virtual space and the actual time of the actuality of the digital image. What is truly the uncannily indefensible and inexpensive in modern art and fashion? Fernando Pessoa, in his unique The Book of Disquietude, written under his alternate writing name of Bernardo Soares, synthesized the modern world in his reflexive mythopoetical experience into three essential characters of the foregoing of the coming time:

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(1) the fantasy of the immortality of the body-soul in the labyrinth of interwoven texts of tradition and contemporaneity; (2) a vision of the multiplicity of being as the metamorphic identity of a man whose dreams live in the dreams of the cruelty of passing reality; and (3) the paradoxical logic of the coexistence of the avant-garde and decadence with the idea of fetish facility beyond the apparatus of desire as a transgression of love and death into the pure complicity of death (eros and psyché). What is the point of The Book of Disquietude? Undoubtedly, the most memorable statement that should be noted is that we are faced with the psycho-drama (writing the soul in the text) of the modern age. Psychodrama is concurrent, thus, with the confession of a modern subject about the history of one’s own world experience as a language. Who speaks profoundly inside The Book of Disquietude? No one else but the subjective language of modern man’s experience. But what does the language of The Book of Disquietude say about the world and human existence? Precisely that the language reveals the inner history of the modern human psyché. Pessoa’s idea of the book signified the world as a concept and performance from the experience of the language itself as a concept and a performance. It is already apparent that contemporary art might be understood by way of being in the process of play. We can assume that the open work is always a conceptual-performing act in the process of the event. So, in it, the relationship between the author and the public audience acts as an interactive meeting of the subject/actor and the object of the same performance. Unlike the avant-garde scope of the destruction of language in futurism and dadaism, Pessoa attempted to make public the nonideological idea of the purity and perfection of the language beyond the present of Being and beings. It is the crystallized saying and the fantastic interpretation of the world, not the sign or the symbol of something sublime and unreachable. This language is addressed to anyone and everyone. In addition, the identity of a modern man might be identical to the multiplication of beings. Pessoa himself was the best example of the metamorphic identity of the Other in himself. The beginning of endless identity bias as bodysuits of the Other begins with the endless process of marking the bits as the eccentric and de-centred network of meanings. What is valid for the “writing scene” of Pessoa is valid for the entire manner of postmodern identity from the body as a language. In this case, language here appears to be identical to the soul (psyché). Language has a soul. It shows the meaning of the world in creative chaos and construction. Every word is

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spoken and written (grammé) on the surface of the earth like a trail. The Book of Disquietude shows Lisbon and its objects through dreamlike landscapes of language reflection. Mirrors and shadows, twilight and sunrise, the infinite escapes of the soul, and the perception of the subjectness of a modern man require another life outside of the current fury. Language, therefore, does not strike at the phenomenon of the world but rather the world of repeatability and traces of speech. All of that can be said in the traces of the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida (1967). Without language, the soul cannot travel through the labyrinths of fantasy, water, and the compressed networks of everything that is. Strangely, it seems that this corresponds to the media concept of the implosion of the meanings of the message. Bernardo Soares represents the true, fictitious, and imaginary state of the soul in the transformations of the subject/author. It is a constant state of flux figures and masks in a chaotic order of changing their essence on epochal occasions. It considers the late Heidegger, and his postulate “stability in change” describes the way of fighting the scientifictechnical system to boost the consumption of objects (Heidegger 2005). All three features of the coming era are already like new symptoms in this “time.” In the language of psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, the symptom repressed the hermeneutic notion of a sign and the process of identifying and revealing something that is concealed in signs and symbols. This suppression, however, is the result of the temporary state of the triumph of the logic of the scientific spirit of psychoanalysis over the archaeological combination of original thinking. Like any suppression, like that of Freud himself, one can contribute to the traumatic conflict of the subject with one’s own identity. Symptoms are not stacked and secret signs. Here we are faced with the question of the process of marking a subject as a traumatic field of the psyché in the modern age. The difference between symptoms and the marked difference is a difference between the text of psychoanalysis as the world and the hermeneutics of the world as text. Indeed, it should only be the sign of modern times that satisfies the definition of the modern assemblage of stability in constant change. Actuality, hence, corresponds to the “true” ecstasy of modernity.2 Without immodesty in the present, there 2 Agamben’s contemplation of the relationship between “modernity” and “contemporaneity” on the traces of Nietzsche and Barthes shows that the true contemporariness of our age is nothing but the “non-modern,” that is, the spirit of our time is at the same time radically beyond the actuality and is paradoxically within itself. Agamben, in his analysis of the “spirit of the time” of contemporaneity, places the concept of fashion at the centre. Contemporaneity denotes paradoxically

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is no rootedness in the stable soil. In immense fashion, there are astonishingly dizzy styles. Everything works perfectly in the circle of its profane features. But we could not find its oppositions in a scale dress of some imaginary tradition without the entirety of history. Of course, it seems to be naive today if we seek to interpret the study of the anthropology of culture concerning the question of the idea of nature and culture in the unWestern history of the world. We could only speak about transgression within the modern world as a progression of the stable system of things. Just from the idea of a straight line, the development of societies in history may have binary oppositions of fashion as progress/development and dress as a bounty on the continuity of tradition (Lévy-Strauss 2001; Loschek 1991). The puzzle of the emergence of fashion derives from the emergence of a social form of capitalism. Therefore, the very idea of the new is realized when this becomes a pure form of the scientific-technical production of things and objects in the form of the social organization of life. This form also belongs to the structural matrix of contemporary capitalism. As Ezra Pound once said—Make it new!—nothing can be left untouched by this marvellous desire for change, nothing at all. We should not forget that fashion and capitalism arose at the end of the Middle Ages. From that point of view, fashion historians have argued that this happened in Italy at the end of the 14th century. The emergence of fashion, thus, corresponds to the origin of the symbolic value of abstracted work as the condition of possibilities in this world (Blau 1999). Without the abstractions of all social relationships in the form of goods fetishism, as Karl Marx determined the essence of the ideological-political system of liberal capitalism to be, the idea of newness cannot arise without the slightest transformation of man into the market. The end of the new might be cracking in the very mode of presenting a fetishism of commodities when fashion as goods goes beyond the use of ready-to-wear and exchange values (the symbolic function of fetishism). What about confirming this upcoming time beyond the paradoxical act of visuality regarding the three forms of presence in a contemporary era and all its effects? Among them, fashion has become the the presence/absence of anachronism and modernity because actuality means to be “à la mode” by being out of fashion. So, the fashion is synonymous with “now,” the moment, and the style of timelessness. In order for fashion to establish its power as a system, although Agamben does not use this key Barthesian notion of the semiotics of fashion in his analyses, it could be necessary to establish a transition between “still” and “no more.” That is a reason why the testimony in Paris of a modern woman at the end of the 19th century decisively emphasized her figure for the modern situation of fashion or the contemporary world as such, based on the logic of self-production and newness as the inner driver of global capitalism: “Elle est contemporaine de tout le monde” (Agamben 2009b, 30–31).

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emergence of all phenomena. But in contemporary fashion, it is not only its sultry form from the modern industrial society to liberal globalization and capitalism but rather its simpler form that determines that every fashion object itself possesses the fetishistic character of the commodity as a prey of the desire. If, at the end of society, no form of fashion disappears, the sort of mode of presentation in the sense of the role of the social theatre and the cultural stage of the struggle for the creation of a new identity, then it might be the right time to approach the attempt to deconstruct fashion as the fetish body of the posthuman “nature.” The entire set of metaphysical symbols has disappeared from it. Fashion has, thus, been moved to the media world of communication. In any case, we should note that the linguistic messages lost their meaning and received a multitude of new significations (Baudrillard 1998). The assumption for this radical deconstruction of the deconstruction of fashion itself is to move from one side to all theories of symbols and signs, all theories of the representation of fashion, and all the theories that define fashion as this or that phenomenon (social or cultural, ideological or otherwise). But what if contemporary fashion does not appear anymore? If, then, the fashion that determines the techno-scientific image of the world and the visual creation of identity takes over all of the decomposed forms of art and all that stumbles upon them, and by re-joining their “genetic code” is revived in the project of creative body design, can we still hold the eye to its fundamental initiator, which is at the same time the fundamental driver of the contemporary age (society, culture, history)— the very idea of the new? This question in modern times could be a quest for autopoietic strategies producing the life of the spirit and might be determined by current information-communication technologies. In the meantime, the only remaining field of action for fashion reflected as the total design of the world in the spatial implosion of information and the time of the ecstasy of communication might be the total aesthetics of the world and its transformation into the fetish archipelago of things. The only thing it has left now is to be a “symptom” of the disappearance of what has so far been considered a phenomenon. How can we understand and interpret it? In any case, it will not be strange if we assert that this has already happened in the thinking of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard. A turn from consciousness to language or from the spirit to the body occurred throughout the 20th century in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, the philosophy of language of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the criticism of Western metaphysics as the destruction of traditional ontology performed by Martin Heidegger. The appearance is never present in its purity. The use of a sign as a substitute for or addition to the original phenomenon of consciousness determines the possibilities and limits of

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semiology and semiotics. In short, the path to the very occurrence assumes a critique of the path of each phenomenology, which is based on the separation of the system world and the world of life. This thought of late Husserl was and remains active in the theories of postmodernity by JeanFrançois Lyotard and the theory of communicative action by Jürgen Habermas (Paiü 2008). The question of how to rid the world of the irreducible life of subjugation is certainly a formed instrumental activity, and the order of the mind and discursive rationality still remains a challenge for understanding the theory of contemporary fashion (Evans 2003; Sawchuck 1987). If we were to go only to items of Derrida’s deconstruction, or even Deleuze’s philosophy of the immanence of the body without organs, we would see some extremely “scandalous” things: namely, the body can no longer be determined by any other stuff outside the body itself. This media project in the context of the current situation and its conceptual performativity remains the only real territory of contemporary arts and fashion as such. In the second turn, thus, the only remaining territory of contemporary art and fashion has been deterritorialized. It could be everywhere and nowhere. So, deterritorialization denotes the process of deploying art and fashion from previous aesthetics to the aesthetics of the occult transgression of the body. The act of deployment itself also carries the possibility of a new placement. It seems very interesting to note that contemporary art in its spatializing space is derived from being merely the setting of a subject as a thing/object in space. The installation of the object in space supports the work and the event of just placing the space on the side of the subject and the object. But space opens a way to modern times before the work of deterritorialization liquidates the same direction. Undoubtedly, the only remaining territory might be the interactive communication of the body as moving towards that spectacle in the body’s iconograms. How should this assemblage be understood? First of all, the body is no longer perceived as a place of decoration and a space for entering features from the social theatre of different roles as it was in the era of modernity. Instead, we are witnessing a cultural modification aimed at strengthening the position of the body beyond gender/sex differences. Consequently, we find ourselves in an occasion of constant transformation of identity, as was evident in David Bowie’s fashion travesty. Almost all theories of contemporary fashion still speak of it as a phenomenon that refers to the rule of something else. So, fashion has always been frivolous and superficial. It was understood only as a function of social adaptability to order or, in turn, the liberated identity of a person, constituted by the movement of creating an autonomous lifestyle (Polhemus 1996; Polhemus 2006). The phenomenology of the world is always a sign or

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symbol of something else. The problem is understanding fashion as a phenomenon that the object/thing over nothing means nothing represents. That is why contemporary fashion can be perceived as a rebellion against what has remained of the appearance of its long-standing rulers. But that was possible only when the body as a creative design of life had to be taught by the current language of such a rebellion against the system of fashion. The ideological rule of fashion, however, is today established by a visual code of surveillance (Emberley 1987). Thus, the order is established by the media formation of reality as: (a) the image of fashion, (b) the language of fashion, and (c) the world of fashion. In this three-form pattern, Barthes’ structure is represented as a rational theory of text and fashion. But the emphasis is not only on the text but also on the pictorial language of the object (Barnard 2001; Paiü 2007). In the semiotic theory of fashion performed by thinkers from Barthes and Eco up to contemporary theorists such as Volli, Calefatto, Barnard, Davis, Evans, Steele, and Wilson who apply interdisciplinary methods of visual studies, it should be common to talk about image aspects of fashion that have primacy over language (Barthes 1964, 32–51; Barthes 1983). We cannot forget that the metaphor of the image (of fashion) includes the third symbolic element of excess meaning that forms the meaning of the image in the process of transforming the entire assemblage. The relationship between language and image is often sought to be clarified through the traditional logic of science based on the concept of cause and effect. However, we cannot understand how the visual language of fashion at the same time assumes the reign of the sign and the signification process with which the subject becomes a complex system of references. The fashion object, though not as it works in the assemblage of traditional dressing customs (Indian sarees, for example), has taken on the very changeable nature of the image. Put in other words, in the context of contemporary fashion, it might be anything under the condition that fluid cultural values determine the body as a master-signifier of the spectacle as such. The triad of fashion in the presence of the contemporary age and its superseding has been shown through: (1) syncretism, (2) hybridity, and (3) eclecticism.

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All that is happening is in the spectacle in the integral reality of syncretism (ideas), hybridity (identity) and eclecticism (performance). The radical concept of ideas, identity, and performance point to the fundamental determinants of the Hellenistic period in the history of art after the classical period of Greece. Symbolic historical decadence marked the cosmopolitan city of the encounter of different religions, spiritual worldviews, artistic styles, and cultural orders of meanings—Alexandria. Modern decadence, however, primarily has its direction in the ambivalence of the term. And this is in the very notion of the relationship between modernity and tradition. It may be paradoxical that decadence no longer marks the awareness of the crisis and the rift of classic ideals. The concept of decadence now points to the symptoms of the alienation of the post-historical world. It is a modern appearance resulting from the autopoietic apparatus of the capitalist power structure. The fetishism of goods and artefacts, as a rule, and symbolic power facilities represent a new form of modern decadence. In the 501st fragment of The Book of Disquietude, Pessoa writes: Modern things include: (1) The evolution of mirrors; (2) Wardrobes. We advanced to being clothed creatures possessing body and soul. And since the soul always conforms to the body, it developed an intangible suit. We advanced to having largely clothed souls. In the same way that we advanced – as humans, as bodies – to the category of clothed animals. It’s not just the fact of our suit becoming a part of us; There’s also the complexity of this suit and its curious quality of having virtually no relations to the elements of natural elegance found in the body and its movements. Where I asked to characterize my soul’s condition, explaining it with the senses, I would speechlessly point to a mirror, to a hanger and to a fountain pen. (Pessoa 1991, 294)

Pessoa’s turn towards the living body of objects (of fashion) conceals in itself a response to the overall effort of the fall of the avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century to overcome the split between spirit/soul and body in the image and the language of “primitive and archaeological modernism” (Agamben 2009a, 29–30). The disembodiment of language by Russian futurist poets, dadaists who turn language to the performativity of the body to the public area, expressionists’ nature of the world as a scream and experience of trauma, the surreal dismemberment of the body in the assemblage, procedures of the radical deconstruction of the body as an object of aesthetics of perceptual shock as a condition of the possibility of all forms of shock and provocation (e.g., Antonin Artaud’s film The Seashell and the Clergyman and Salvator Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s An

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Andalusian Dog), and, finally, the division of the artwork into the event of an interactive spectacle are the gifts of the subject/actor of artistic practice to open the media art of today as a matrix of complex methods of objectifying the body as a language and an image (Mersch 2002; Paiü 2021). A quite common interpretation assumes that even insightful theorists should articulate how fashion was creative in designing the body’s appearance still only assimilates the tendencies and styles in visual arts that spearheaded the 20th century but is not the right companion with its discursive games, science, art and design (Evans 1999, 3–32). Such a position might be present even in the theoretical introduction to the multidisciplinary field of fashion studies. Thus, it is not uncommon that the relationship between art and fashion in modern times is considered further in the same tone as pure “illustrations” and “determination” in fashion (Barnard 2007). Another form of the same old story shows that fashion has always represented only the occurrence of a super-determination of the structure of social or cultural order with ideological-political significance. Never considered autonomously, as a rule, there should never be a consideration of the sovereignty of its unobtrusive appearance. Hence, the exceptions form the semiotics of fashion in the works of Barthes, Eco, Lipovetsky, and contemporary approaches from visual semiotics to the deconstruction of language and images. But turning around the body in modern art and fashion, of course, has quite another face. If one person confirms this idea of the “empty transcendence” of language in modern literature, especially in the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, then the other person should note that something that occurs as a flaw in the very concept of modernity, in general, conceals the entire assemblage of consequences. That face denotes a metamorphic face under the mask. The first novel in the history of Western culture, Petronius’ Satyricon, in which the writer reveals the dark glory of the decadence and transgressions of the Roman Empire under Nero and consists of a series of fragments and can thus be regarded as a far-reaching historical predecessor of postmodern literature, was the inspiration for Federico Fellini’s film Satyricon, which deals with the impossibility of identity outside the fragmentation of the multitude of faces. Fellini, thus, interprets Petronius starting from the labyrinth of images as an allegory for the contemporary decadence of Western culture. We know very well that this carnivalesque has a deep impact on our postmodern crash of values and styles. But this decadence is not only the utmost aesthetic pleasure, it is also possible. Life beyond the pleasures of aesthetic appearance would be deserted and empty. Therefore, the allegory in the era of image culture instead of text culture—as the paradigm shift of culture in the contemporary era was determined by

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Foucault—shows how artists might be able to think reflexively in the images. Their images are conceptual views and presentations of the disturbing reality. In any case, the theatricalization of life corresponds to the theatricalization of death in the endless series of masks. The original Roman or Latin expression for the mask is persona. Hiding behind the masks is not the real face. Indeed, the new weight below that is not in niches other than what Pessoa prophetically signified as forthcoming in the 399th fragment of The Book of Disquietude: My destiny is decadence. (Pessoa 1991, 230)

Breaks within the basic line of modernity introduce the experience of contemporaneity that encompasses the entire set of discursive practices and exercises. Therefore, the reflective thinking of eccentric and de-centred subjects can no longer be measured in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan’s main thesis is that the unconscious is structured like a language. Put differently, it applies to all other structuralist and poststructuralist interpretations of the world in the game of the signifier, the signified, and the sign from Barthes to Derrida. In contrast, it has openness in the immanent structure of the events of the body itself as a language and a picture that interprets the world in general. The body prevails in the world as technology precedes fashion. The point is that the body is now visible in its pure immanence and the depths of the fetish object visualized before any possible interpretation. The figure of the body as an event in motion precedes the general language of the body’s interpretation. The visual semiotics of the body no longer uses any of the traditional semiotic meanings such as the sign, the signifier and the labelled. On the traces of Eco’s concept of iconograms from his semiotic interpretation of the open work, we shall try to prove the setting for image dividing language as a distance communication instrument. Instead of the semiotic concepts of language experience, it should be noted that we are now faced with a corporeal complexity that is otherwise structured. Contemporary fashion as a total creative lifestyle design takes over the language of the deconstruction of the body and the image of life. What is it? Total creativity? Since the beginning of the historical avant-garde, it has been self-explanatory: the idea of functional design by Bauhaus corresponds to the idea of the modern world as the formation of the aesthetic object. The prohibition of beauty, decoration and narratives is related to the historical canon of beauty in decorative and ornamental decadent art of the late 19th century. If we keep that in mind, we have chosen the path of interpretation in close connection with some strange and uncanny event. What is at the core of that matter?

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The avant-garde fashion in the works and concepts of futurism in Italy in the 1920s and the suprematistic ideas of Kazimir Malevich’s radical unpredictability of the world were established in the concept of the total design of life as a social and aesthetic transgression of the figurative art of decadence. Like Adolf Loos’s notion of “an ornament as a crime,” Malevich’s total design was primarily directed at the radical aesthetics of a new socialist society. Since the very beginning, fashion has been the avantgarde deconstruction of the surrounding world and the entire world of life. This is indirectly witnessed by the fact that fashion design, with the appearance of Coco Chanel, was at the same time a child of the avant-garde because, in the 1920s, clothes began to be released from the beauty and exaltation of the previous Victorian era. Fashion became, according to the ideas of functionality and minimalism, a new style of body styling that almost resembled the architecture and design of Bauhaus. Finally, that is a reason why Walter Benjamin’s allegorical image of Paul Klee entitled Angelus Novus has been interpreted from the apocalyptic perspective as a catastrophe of the coming future. Guy Debord, on the contrary, in The Society of the Spectacle, termed this strategy détournament (Jappe 1999). Therefore, decadence cannot be perceived without a more radical contrast with the concept of the historical avant-garde and its destructive logic and the destruction of the entire ancient world. Avantgarde and decadence are not hostile binary oppositions. This was due to the ideological-political establishment of the historical avant-garde as the aesthetic-political (totalitarian) order of the world from 1917 to 1989 (Groys 2008). Since it is only the body seam between the strength of radical modernity and the ecstasy of radical decadence, it might be clear that the whole order of contemporary fashion, which occurs after the end of the aestheticpolitical (totalitarian) system, can be considered as a facility in the posthuman condition. That matter denotes a state of a new mythical consciousness and retro-futuristic vision of the upcoming era as the end of humans and the world. At the same time, this leads to a change in the point of view of the notion of the body and hence of fashion as a total body design in the context of contemporary art. That would develop the setting of the end of the symbolic formation of fashion and the disappearance of fashion as a phenomenon in the contemporary era of a radical form of the world as techno-scientific environmental logic of new media. The next consideration will try to determine the concept of the open event of a transgression of the body in analogy with Eco’s concept of open work. What is the body as an open transgression event? Can any kind of body in its posthuman (in)completeness, which today is genuinely determined by biomedical

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interventions and cosmetic surgery, be understood outside the horizons of historical metaphysics? In all its variants, the metaphysical conception implies that the body of a human is understood dualistically: (1) as a body or apparatus of a body in the mechanical paradigm of life, and (2) as a spiritual machine or unity of life with the definition of a human as an animal rationale. In both cases, we must keep in mind the essentialist concept of the body, either as a matter or as a spiritual substance. Only in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Lacan’s psychoanalysis, Derrida’s deconstruction, and Deleuze’s nomadology did the body become an immanent event of life itself as a synthetic unity of spirit and matter. The turn to the body of fashion is primarily seen in the openness of the events of the bodily inscription of identity (Grosz 1994). In any case, with a new notion of identity concerning the globalized tendencies in art and fashion, we have to emphasize the overlapping relationships between nature and culture, dressing and fashion, and the adorned and the designed body without any reference to previous metaphysical signifiers. The beginning of postmodern fashion denotes, thus, the deconstruction of the body’s surface and screen. It looks like an open-hearted skin on the drama of the idiot. It is about the political-cultural strategy of forming the Other as queer identity. Vivienne Westwood and her anti-fashion subversion politics of high order lead into the world of the metamorphic identity of the Other. Street fashion at the same time destroys the decadent fetishism of high society, taking on its figures of eroticism and death in the new mantle of anarchic techno-freak fetishism (Fernbach 2002, 135–181). Only with the turn of ecstatic bodiliness does true dignity return to the metaphysical understanding of being human. If one thinks that the body indeed begins to exist only within the contemporary age of digital production of fashion, then that statement is about the possibilities of the body in the posthuman condition or about the possibilities of living based only on realized odds of non-living in the cybernetical order of network and rhizomes. Technology now precedes the life of fashion, not vice versa. The appearance and body posture of the fashioned fictional feature of contemporary fashion cannot exist. So, the fundamental assumption of new media is that, unlike the old media, they operate synthetically. It means that the existence of the past is technically and technologically allowed in the form of the virtual presence of the body. The synthetic “nature” of new media allows the body in the posthuman state to orient itself towards the past. Due to the digital picture

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body in its immersion, what “real” object has been determined no longer applies. Namely, the digital image does not appear and does not have a place in any external or internal objects. Starting from that perspective, it generates and synthesizes reality as a reference system, referring to other media. In this way, within the meanings of fashion, it has the features of the transmedial Matrix. Its reference system derives from the media’s creation of the body. The existence of the body in the assemblage of the posthuman condition as a robot-android-cyborg condition now proves that real odds of the existence of the living body are realized in contemporary fashion and its associated world of globally networked identities. That is a reason why the problem of contemporary fashion is lacking in the symbolic code of fetishism. When we are faced with that matter whereby it is completely penetrated with fantasies about the fetishism of objects, then something “scandalous” exists in that synthetic fetish. This is Baudrillard’s answer to the question about the end of the representation and coming to the integral reality of hyperreality. Namely, the sign does not represent the subject because the subject is a sign itself. In the vicious cycle of the disappearance of the signification reference, the idea of the sign of the signifier disappears altogether. Fetishism, thus, refers to the opacity of objects without the desire for the subversion of obscurity. The coldness of the techno-futuristic object of transgression in the state of the “perverse” cyborg can no longer preserve the essence of fetishism at all. If there are no taboos or scandals in the very nature of that which is elevated as inexpressible and inexhaustible, then in the convention remains only a new interpretation of the past like the upcoming delays of another, more uncanny “nature” than a so-called “natural nature.” That is a reason why contemporary fashion in the age of the world as image-fetishism tends to be the scandal. If it reflects Baudrillard in his analysis of another version of “joyful nihilism,” then it is not about travelling through time in the past. On the contrary, the past is staged in a virtual presence in the form of neo-style, and its assemblage designates a combination of past and future. Retro-futurist fashion, hence, could be somewhat uncannily stable in its term. We can say that it should be called a myth in the more distant sense, as for dystopian movies like A Clockwork Orange directed by Stanley Kubrick and Alexander McQueen’s fashion show Plato’s Atlantis. However, the return of myth to contemporary fashion occurs in a double operation: (a) the gender/sexual equilibrium of desire for a fetish object, and (b) the technological-scientific creation of the decadent fetishism of the object as a synthetic material (“third skin”) and as a synthetic form of posthuman beings dressing in the “costume” of current fashion.

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In contemporary art performances, Stelarc goes far away from the issues of the posthuman body. Orlan is also famous due to her experiments with the transplantation of skin, and fashion performances like McQueen’s indicate the disappearance of the biological body in a techno-cybernetically structured laboratory (Fortunati, Katz and Riccini 2003). Although we still distinguish between art and fashion in the contemporary era of the rule of the technosphere, it is obvious that this distinction is beyond any action of metaphysical rank and assemblage of being. Art and fashion belong to the sphere of the posthuman body in the event of a total design of life. Fundamental concepts that link the synthetic unity of the network and rhizomes in the open process of constructing art and fashion are: (1) the fetishism of objects, (2) the transgression of the body, and (3) the conceptual-performative design of a body as an object in a virtual space and real-time. The end of the symbolic representation of fashion, therefore, is nothing more than the beginning of the body’s staging as an open event of the visual script of fashion in its presence in the distance. Everywhere and nowhere, fashion is taking place in the media environment of dialogue and discourse about its assemblage. What does that mean? Namely, fashion becomes a complex relationship system that can only be decoded if we know how its bio-cybernetic code works. We do not need to go far. We could just look at the design of a posthuman body that has been found in TV series like Star Trek since the end of the 1980s. Contemporary fashion, hence, is not a fashion that refers to something as fixed as society, culture, ideology, or politics. Its reality encompasses the media event of dialogue and discourse about fashion. This is only the case in the constant staging of scandals and the subversion of the body in transgression, and the dialogue and discourse about the mode of action present a blend of banality and gnostic extraction, as well as “specialist” hermetic knowledge about the things and its blow-up along the way. How this could happen and with what terms and modes of the subject’s performance will be the topic of our next considerations.

2. Fashion as an open transgression event: Corpus hermeticum, eroticism and death If any of the famous 20th-century writers belonged to the lineage of Jorge Luis Borges as an emblematic figure of new mannerism and postmodernism at the end of the modern era, then it was surely Umberto Eco in all his

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fictitious and also theoretical works. His books dates back from the idea of beauty in Thomas Aquinas and medieval life and through the aesthetics of the open work with the experimental works of Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage up to semiotic theory, which seeks to establish a conceptual framework in the “search for the perfect language.” And it is not by chance that Eco turned their ideas into text and interpreted the text. So, entering into the post-historic times of the realm of networks and rhizomes, the global world of information-communication, new media and transgressive identities correspond to the concept of contemporary fashion (Evans 2003). But what kind of relationship might there be in his sophisticated notion of the world as a text with the ambivalences and paradoxes of contemporary fashion? For Eco, the primacy of the interpretation of the text derives from Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic set of unlimited processes that are being labelled in modern times. It is determined by a multitude of different interpretations of the same text in its multiplication. This does not mean that unlimited semiosis can conclude that the interpretation does not have criteria. Paradoxically fresh and powerful, Eco’s semiotic interpretation of the text and Bataille’s economy victims in the eroticism of death are seen in something that at the same time entirely belongs to the aesthetics of the open event of transgression and what goes beyond the starting of a symbolic end of fashion. This was the case with the last event of an interactive show by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen before his suicide—Plato’s Atlantis—in the spring of 2010. The iconogrammatic structure of interpreting the body as an open-ended event of transcendence goes beyond the very concept of transgression and its allegorical figures, which appear as the key literary figures of the interpretation of the text. Eco’s semiotics is directed at advancing the concept of interpretation. This is true for all three phases of its development: from the early concept of aesthetics of the 1960s (open-concept work), general semiotics with its emphasis on the concept of a reader in the process of signifying the text of the 1970s, up to the age of the text in the interpretation of works from the 1990s (Eco 1976; Eco 1989: Eco 1990). If we apply it in fashion as a cultural communication system and as a text of interpretation in an author-user-work triad, we encounter the language of contemporary fashion in all its ways. Visual semiotics can be understood as a complex theory of communication or as a theory of culture. It consists of the language-speaking competencies of subjects/actors of discourse and dialogue in networked texts. Semiotics designates the theory of interpretation, which does not pose the question of what the sign signifies to some object of consideration. On the contrary, it is fundamental to understand the signs in art, literature, medicine, design,

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and ultimacy in general linguistics. Every single communication should be comprehended as a matter of interpretation. In another, pragmaticinterpretative spirit, Eco’s theory encompasses a critique and extension of the concept of Derrida’s deconstruction in the following aspects. If Derrida argues that it is all just a matter of deconstructing the text in its difference (différance) in the production and reproduction of texts’ differences, then Eco’s attempt is all just a question of interpretation of the text. In both cases, there are different approaches and different insights into the features of text as such. While for Derrida, in the traces of de Saussure, Barthes and Lacan, the signifier determined the process of signifying in the text, Eco’s assumption is included in the semiotics of culture as communicating the aesthetics of reception, namely in a pragmatic horizon of the exploration of the other feature of the sign. Each sign is read by the symbolic code of interpretation of culture. It has its place (space) and the power of the signifier (time). The word is always made utilizing the interpretation of codifying communication. That is a reason why the concept of open work can be understood from the horizons of subjects/actors of interpretation. What should be noted about Eco’s determination of artwork? The semiotic definition is that it is a work that is understood by a plurality of messages, and it consists of many signifiers contained in one single meaning bearer. The open work, therefore, inevitably reveals itself in multiplicity. It is well known that the concept of polytheism in Barthes and Derrida is key to the interpretation of the text. But in Eco, the theory of interpretation recognizes two degrees of openness: (1) limited openness to which the observer or user (viewer, listener, reader) gives meaning, and (2) a free space of interpretation, which is limited only by the structure of the work itself in the movement of its form and the indefinite sense of final meaning. Thus, Eco’s concept of open work can be linked to an open body as the horizon of writing without a transcendental signifier. This body is open to all possible interpretations of its inscription. If they come from the interactivity of author and audience as subjects/actors of the communication of work that is completed only by its interpretation, then the fate of contemporary art and fashion is an incomplete event of interpretation of the event itself, which leaves a trace of actual controversy in the picture as a visual facility. Due to the interactive nature of new media, contemporary fashion determines the body’s iconograms, not a linguistic coding text (Eco 1976). The theory of interpreting works from the immanent structure of the

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work itself is, first of all, challenging for understanding contemporary art and fashion. The point is that the concept of the openness of the work now shows the openness of body events in transgression. The interactivity of a performance event, whether it is a conceptual career in a new media or a physical act of provocation of a beast in the public space in real-time (Marina Abramoviü versus Plato’s Atlantis), at the same time leads to the mingling of art and life and their new frontier. All that should be significant here is achieved in the lust for corporeal self-presence and the presence of distance as a transgression of the event itself. Since human language is multifaceted, loaded with culturally coded symbols and metaphors, it is obvious that the universality of truth cannot be attained, but it is always the work of infinite interpretations of the same in differences. Each object has its secret, and each secret is revealed by hiding another secret. The idea that each medium is related to the other medium, which is at the centre of Marshall McLuhan’s theory of media from Vilém Flusser to Jean Baudrillard, results in the corpus hermeticum developing in the dream and the visions of the coming as opaque and inadmissible. The Hermetic doctrine must take place within the world as a stage. The world should be regarded as a linguistic phenomenon in theatres without speech because communication is possible only beyond language. This is, however, the essence of Barthes’ semiology and his theory of fashion. The meaning of what is shown through a linguistic, iconic, and symbolic message lies beyond that of language. That is a reason why Eco rightly says that Hermeticism in the heart of the decadence of the West at the same time makes it impossible to dream of mingling the same things of art and life through (1) mysticism and alchemy, and (2) poetry and philosophy. Impossibility cannot be understood as the inability to realize the concept. Quite the contrary. Impossibility can only be understood virtually as an opportunity to imagine something different from reality and what precedes it. So, the open transgression of the body in contemporary fashion is necessarily a virtual impossibility of the only actual reality. Put in other words, if it is the essence of contemporary fashion in its visual creation and if the body iconogram is already a predefined image mode as a condition of real fashion in the image of the object in the real world, then the dream visionary project of modernizing contemporary fashion in the metamorphic body is without any other attributes than the infinite right of the subject to “have” and to “carry” his body as an experience of absolute freedom.

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Mysticism and alchemy point to the gnostic secret of creation. In Hermeticism, this corresponds to the idea of an ur-matter known as nigredo. It is about darkness before distinguishing between light and darkness. In contemporary visual arts, however, a series of paintings by Anselm Kiefer entitled Nigredo, part of the Saturn and Melancholy cycle of the 1990s, is directly related to the ambivalent order of the avant-garde and decadence, Gnosticism, matter, and Hermeticism in modern re-interpretation experiences of the human body. What is transgressive here is nothing more than the experience of overcoming and the difference between the historically devoted body experience of corpus mysticum and corpus hermeticum. Nowhere is all that has been mentioned so transparent, shocking, provocative, radically transgressive or so intense in its paradoxical reaction to the experience of open art/fashion as the event than the conceptual embodiments of McQueen in his fashion shows, from Highland Rape (1993) and Dante (1996) to Plato’s Atlantis (2010). Contemporary fashion is a creative body design. It rests on freedom and contingency. Freedom has no other “purpose” except in the metaphysical justification of the sanctity of life in the gloomy body. Its fate might be placed in the transgression of everything that has been established as a natural order, but also the transgression of everything that has been established as a standardized cultural order of power control over the body. The ambivalence of contemporary fashion combines two things: the aesthetical nature and the naturalization of culture as taboos and scandals. Claude Lévy-Strauss called it the universality of incest as the order of the primitive figure of kinship and the particularity of culture as a universal ban. Without the transgression of incest taboos in contemporary fashion, it cannot be a scandalous-subversive theatre. Therefore, contemporary fashion as the radical “theatre of cruelty” (Artaud) and the radical “eroticism of death” in the latest transgression leads to the apocalypse of the body in the mythical act of the creation and destruction of the body. We have seen that Eco, in his semiotics of a text’s interpretation, opened up the issue of the visual art of modern art and fashion as an act/event. In it, the author-workaudience communicate with each other due to the experience of the preontological notion of the body as the openness of the world at large. But despite the semiotic or, indeed, the Gnostic reading of the text and the interpretation of the body’s history as a corpus (mysticism and hermeticism), in its labyrinth, like Borges in the world of text, it remained too pure, with almost virginal innocence, and that means that the imaginary is unfinished in his historical drama of embodiment. The naked body in contemporary art and fashion is by no means Eco’s or Borges’ body of mysticism and alchemy, poetry and philosophy. On the contrary, it could be a radically

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transgressive body of the eroticism of death, as in Bataille’s thoughtful attempt to sacrifice and sanctify the thought beyond the historically established discourse of polytheistic and monotheistic religions. In contemporary art and fashion, there is no transgression without scandal and subversion. And what could be still more scandalous and subversive nowadays in the uncanny vehemence of holding a candle to the objects of the mythical apocalypse of the body and the decadent fetishism of objects of perversion as an apparatus of fashion at its ultimate stage of transformation from an inanimate object into posthuman technology—from puppet to cyborg (Paiü 2011)? What is the meaning of the transgression of the body as an event in the eroticism of death? It is not necessary to point out the evidence that the actions, performances, and conceptions of contemporary art and fashion in their most radical and, at the same time, most aesthetic and transgressive events are directed at the first and last mystery of the mythical and historical destiny of man in the face of his existence. The body points to the end of the being in time. Eroticism is obviously not just a life-giving confirmation of the power of the body in its primordial instinct of existence. It is far more than the impetus for death. The eroticism of the pre-Socratic metaphysics to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis might be at the centre of considerations of governing oneself and others. The question of the power of mastery over the self and others is nothing but the question of the new definition of a subject in his bodily extravagance at the edge of life and death. Foucault’s and Bataille’s notions of transgression are not just an alternative order of the life-power of nature, which in parallel also exists as a kind of “cannibalism” at the heart of the dominant discourse of the suppressive impulse and its repressive sublimation in the setting of Western culture from the early Middle Ages to the late modern era. Similarly, neither transgression is identical to violence or the ritual sexual perversions of psychopathological forms. Limits are necessary to exceed, scandalize and subvert the body in contemporary art and fashion to have the possibility of marking a radical eccentricity. Without the ban, there are no metaphors or scandals of the allegorical designation of excessive events in the world of art and fashion. There is no doubt that the whole of the 20th century has determined a sign of a radical critique of this mode of suppression of the devastating nature. The body, therefore, might appear under the signs of surveillance and control. This is carried out in the various institutional forms of torture and self-punishment of the second phase of its negative narcissistic liberation in Western culture (Pitts 2003). The self-victimized body might not just be the way to the masochistic body but also to the discovery of the subject of the body’s freedom. It passes

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down the path of self-identification through the pain and suffering of its decentralization. That should be a reason why contemporary fashion, in its decadent scenes of the transgression of the body, no longer deals with the naked body as a function of releasing the drives and dignity of persons. It is obsessively preoccupied with inter-medial inscriptions of pain, suffering, torture, and self-torture; the whole imagery of abjection and monstrosity represents that the sublime in the act of perversion is already right there (Steele 1985). Like a dark shadow, the history of the body in the West is determined by the position of its ambivalence. What does this mean? It is at the same time a sign of emancipation in the sense of rationalism and a trace of self-sacrifice as an internal duty and command that comes from the referential framework of the patriarchal society. All that Foucault analyzed as the history of knowledge/power over the body is also related to the practice of typing traces of submission and emancipation. Hence, fetishism has to be reinterpreted, beginning with its subversive side, destroying the order of the power/knowledge of the body, which, as Baruch Spinoza said, we still do not know about either. That is an additional reason why the fetish object of a decadent and avant-garde modern fashion is an abject or ultimate point of the perceived negative sublimation. Liquids and metamorphic bodies, blood and sperm, dread and monstrosity are no longer figures of the negative aesthetics of ugliness. Eroticism transcends the instinctive structure of sexuality and life’s excesses beyond the distinction between “nature” (incestuous and cruel) and “normal” (culture’s sublimation in the techniques of disciplining and controlling the body). In his writings, especially in Eroticism and Theory of Religion, Bataille established a new profane discourse of holiness (Bataille 1957; Bataille 1989). The body appears to him in the total openness of death as the “inner experience” of the world. With that, we should go beyond any definition of discipline, society, control, morality, and aesthetics. It should not be so surprising, therefore, that his thinking is drawn to the ideas of contemporary art and fashion as the most important areas of the overlapping discourse of post-metaphysical philosophy and literature. As Derrida’s way of thinking and writing seems quite synonymous with the practice of the deconstruction of texts, writing on the edges, palimpsests, marks and dissemination, so Bataille’s thinking and writing might just be good practice for transgression in the text itself. In other words, eroticism is not just a taboo in Western culture. Through eroticism, the scandal is a scandal and subversive to the negativity of the text itself as an experience of overcoming the metaphysics of the body. The writing method simultaneously shows the epistemology of reading the text as a transgression of the “sense” of what is historicallymetaphysically determined by the sacrifice of the body and the sacredness

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of the soul. For resignation on contemporary art and fashion as the radical transgression of the body in the fetishistic facility of post-human beings, which transcends the binary oppositions of inanimate-live, it is sufficient here to point out the following ideas of Bataille on eroticism, death, transgression, taboo, and violence. First of all, his general economy of expenditure indicates criticism of the rationality of capitalist production and spending on objects as matter. The exchange between bodies and objects is the exchange of life and death in the form of an unconditional life gift. Sexuality in the form of desire has the form of the appropriation of the Other. But this is at the same time the desire to acknowledge the subject in the very self. The sexual act in itself has the power of life and death, and the body is ecstatic, completed in orgasmic death, which, like the apocalypse, in itself affects repeatability. Bataille says the following about that paradox and the aporia of economy and sacrifice: …the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles—the overturning of the ethics that grounds them. Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking—and of ethics. If a part of wealth (subject to a rough estimate) is doomed to destruction or at least to unproductive use without any possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return. Henceforth, leaving aside pure and simple dissipation, analogous to the construction of the Pyramids, the possibility of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving: The industrial development of the entire world demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations. An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire… It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences. (Bataille 1991, 25–26)

The fundamentals of Bataille’s writings, the continuation of Nietzsche’s thinking of life as being in the eternal return of equal, is nothing but the experience of the border. Being and nothing cannot be understood dialectically. Anyway, we can argue that these are the same thing. Transgression, thus, represents the point of difference between the two in the process of affirming their differences. But without the knowledge of the first and last border, there is no possibility of experiencing the temporality of the body. The sacrifice of the body and holiness in contemporary art and fashion is necessarily articulated in rituals of violent and excessive approaches to the body. Eroticism cannot have its subversive power of transgression if a set of prohibitions founded by religions does not legally

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exist. In this case, the difference between polytheistic and monotheistic religions is a question of distinguishing between traditional and modern societies. The secular holiness of the body does not exclude the archaeological power of sacrifice by other means in modern times. The question of tragic victims in contemporary art and fashion sets starts from the distinction between myth and the science of the body. Transgressive situations such as conflicts between cultures and different conflicts around identity in the globalized world of today mean that sacrificing the body becomes inevitable. Bataille says that the first metaphor of faith belongs to the knowledge of death. The next assumption seems decisive. It makes the credo of any further consideration of the idea of the transgression of the body open to the event of contemporary art and fashion. This is Bataille’s claim that transgression does not signify the extinction of incest or the taboo of all civilizations from “exiled” to “contemporary.” On the contrary, transgression designates the overcoming of the taboo and its completion in the conscious sacrifice of the body. Since sexuality and eroticism form principles that break up order based on the rational exchange of objects/things on the symbolic and the real market in human societies, the inevitable consequence of a transgression in the self-affirmation of life forces eroticism as such. This is the same as how it creates the world altogether and destroys it. The ambivalence of contemporary art and fashion represents just that, and it should be defined as a transgression of lively corporeal exchange facilities with something from the other side of living. What is beyond the very heart of the art goes beyond contemporary art to go away. In this way, a total design of the body transforms it into a decadent fetishism abject without an object. Eroticism now crosses its boundaries. It thus becomes the perversion of the object itself as an abyss, as is evident in the cultural fetishisms and techno-fetishisms of contemporary art and fashion, as was excellently described by Fernbach (2002, 182–226). What can we conclude concerning that matter? Abject without a facility means that eroticism goes beyond the limits of the sacred in the negative sublimation of the body. The most radical act of cosmic-anthropological transgression might be a kind of opposite to the resumption of the logic of symbolic and real exchange facilities on the market within capitalist-organized social production. Instead of Marx’s critique of the political economy, which puts forward the idea of a liberal idea of the freedom of the individual as a private owner of his workforce, Bataille talks about the victim’s economy. In that context, it should be noted that the body is in its unconditional facticity and always realizes the only facility of the thing as such. The sacrifice of the body goes beyond any utilitarian logic of the subject. In any case, the body has no use or sacrifice.

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It is always just that the means are dedicated to the purpose. In this way, the “naturalness” of the capitalist economy functions in the way in which fashion determines the occurrence of value. However, Bataille’s “solar economy” has a metaphysical aura and goes beyond the idea of using or utilizing the value of objects/objects. This means that fashion in modern times can no longer be understood by the symbolic act of presenting something beyond its uselessness and total controversy. Once the usable value of the fashion as the object/thing serves, at the same time, as a metaphysical or symbolic representation of the fashion (sign-signifiersignified), it is lost. The body is the absolute sacred sacrifice in the name of the unconditional “solar economy.” Therefore, the last truth of eroticism derives from extinguishing the usefulness and working of the body as an object/thing. When it no longer exists, it is the most sacred of all holiness— the sacrifice of the body as the “solar body,” an astral-stellar gift returning to its origin. An apparent feature of this is the eroticism of death for us in spending the object as an object. Hence, the apocalypse of the body itself, which happens in the contemporary era of visual communication in the information society. The fetishism of contemporary art and fashion decadence is represented as an interactive spectacle of narcissistic subject/actors in the life of iconograms beyond sanctity and sacrifice. This life is auto-poetically generated by new digital technology, and it consists of the fragmentation of identity in the networked space of the media world of art and fashion. The victim, of course, was a narcissist banalized as a victim of the subject in the cruelty of the world of culture and fashion. The reality show remains the only space of this banal-sublime neutralization of fashion, which ironically perceives its senselessness in stylizing the anonymous factory of “glorious empty gags.” The abject becomes an object of monstrousness in the form of stickiness and disgust. Everything that belonged to the imaginary aesthetics of ugliness now appears unhuman initially for fetishized features of the body itself in a posthuman condition. The difference between the main feature of literary decadence, as found in Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo, and the main prototype of the monstrous corpse of posthumanism, as seen in Alien, is that Quasimodo belongs to the other side of the humanistic idea of beauty and sublime, while the alien as “holy monster” is beyond good and evil, a pure posthuman machine living-life of the contemporary age. Winning the abject over the object of the fine arts finally appears to be a true transgression in general—in the pure negative jouissance of the body in its physiological-aesthetic modes of being-to-death. Eroticism represents a transgression of death itself, which needs a form of the body for its sacrifice,

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reaching the state of pure mimesis—an imitation of the spiritual sacrifice of the body by repeating the ritual sacrifice to infinity (Nancy 1991, 20–38). This is based on the contemporary economy of fashion as a spectacular event of body transgression. Nancy, in his interpretation of Bataille’s problem of metaphysical victimization and erotism, indicates that the victim’s body is always a mimetic act of repetition of what is naturally “predestined.” Thus fashion, in its representational-communication function of body transgression events, returns to its starting point with that virginal “natural” has a mythical structure of violence against nature as such. There is no significant difference between films such as Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring or James Cameron’s Avatar and Alexander McQueen’s Highland Rape fashion show. Nature can exist in the form of a virgin or primordial body in rape or violence against it. The paradox is, therefore, scandalous: without violence or rape, nature does not exist per se. We have seen that Lacan’s primacy of the symbolic order or culture serves as a taboo that reigns over nature. But McQueen’s Highland Rape should be noted simply as a paradigmatic event of a monstrous surge because it speaks directly of blood and sperm as the violence of the institutional patriarchal order against the Other—a woman as a mythically exalted virgin (Evans 2004). If the victim is “an institution of the absolute economy of absolute subjectivity,” as Nancy argues in his interpretation of Bataille, then the endless repetition of the sacrificial rites in contemporary art and fashion events of the transgression of the body as abject go on further without its symbolic object of desire. Fetishism inevitably becomes a consequence of the order of cultural decadence in the synthetic, hybrid and eclectic form of the new identity of the body. It is not, therefore, the fetish and the character of contemporary art and fashion that “objects perceive me” in observation right now, as Paul Klee wrote in his diaries. The rebellion of objects belongs to the fictional character of the worldliness of the contemporary world. There goes everything that is ready-made or body-to-wear (ready for use or carrying). They do not notice objects; instead, the entire world of objects is transformed into an abstraction of art as an addendum or a substitute for the primary path of body sacrifice. What is happening in contemporary art and fashion might be the choice between simulacra and the nothingness of objects in the form of visual communication, the iconograms of the very body of life. No one can foresee the final boundary of this deadly sacrificial body dance in virtual and actual life. But what is in the process of transforming the body identically into differences in the true transgression of body events in the space of life and death? The self-destruction of the body as an object/thing takes on the ancient ritual techniques of crucifixion,

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stretching, tattooing and engraving of signs on the body, dissolving its “black holes” and opening wounds to the limits of pain and suffering. In this unhappy sacrifice of the body, contemporary art and fashion transcend the boundaries of art and life by paradoxically setting a new frontier. That new frontier between art and life becomes the technosphere itself. A technically engineered body changes the biological nature of the living body of plants, animals and humans. This represents the disappearance of nature in the immortality of the posthuman body. The absolute subjectivity of this body at the same time designates its deepest perversion and opacity. That body, ultimately, cannot be naked. Furthermore, there is nothing in the universe that is anything but human-all-to-human. Stelarc’s performances, Orlan’s experiments with transplanting the skin, and McQueen’s theatricalization of cruelty in the transgression of gender/sex fashion labels point to the same common denominator—extreme horror as the ultimate truth of eroticism and death. We should note that our daily experiences in designing the surrounding world in globally networked societies confirm this extreme and exaggerated condition. Whatever the sovereignty, it represents the mode of the transgression of the body beyond a fashion—the death of the fashion and its unique symbolic form.3 We have to know in advance how this happens and what really stands behind it if any kind of matter should still be a supplement for the lost innocence of the world.

3. Mythical regression of the future: Allegory without text Let us go back to another explanation of fetishism. The differentiation of so-called classical fetishism and all its postmodern forms can be summarized by distinguishing imaginary fantasies about prosthetic bodies of women as castrating man in Freud’s key psychoanalytic interpretation of the perversion of facilities and generalized fantasies on the entire world of 3

“It is in this tradition, of spectacle, excess and showmanship, that one can locate the London shows of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen in the 1990s, and their respective shows in Paris for Dior and Givenchy. McQueen’s models walked on water (apparently), and were drenched by ‘golden showers’ or smeared in blood and dirt. Galliano’s narratives were loosely based on a series of spectacular women from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. For each show he created a fictional character around whom the narrative edifice was built. Each model in any one show had only one outfit—there were no quick changes here—and was encouraged really to play the part. These shows moved into the realm of pure entertainment. Generally the collection had been sold beforehand, and the show thus became a kind of showcase of the designer’s mind. The ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin ascribed to the artwork had become detached from the goods and associated with the designer’s ‘vision’” (Evans 2001, 301–303).

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objects as perverse facilities’ desire to possess the sublime structure of objects/things. In classical cases, fetishism is the worship of pseudodominant objects (dominatrix-type women as cruel rulers in skin, latex and gum). It is a symbolic replacement for the cruelty of the natural power of the patriarchal order. In the second case, the above-mentioned rule applies techno-morbid abstractions without objects. The more man is not in the function of the reflexive self-object of the masochistic desire for the vengeance of the Big Other, the less men and women are lying in the posthuman body of the uncanny perversion of objects/things themselves. This is a distinction of the “ontological” as such. This can be set as the typological distinction between “politically conservative” fetishism, which serves as a mere theatricalization of the current order of cultural power in which the perverse worship of women’s shoes, leather goods and various forms of bondage only establishes the order of the normalization of violence in a liberal, permissive society, and the radical fetishism of the world of global corporate capitalism. Classic fetishism produces the icon of perverse women’s beauty. She is uncanny and monstrous. After all, it must cut up the “normal” assemblage of body and culture like a Medusa’s head. Postmodern fetishism is, therefore, basically transgressive, and it is structurally based on the decadent separation of the binary oppositions of male-female and nature-culture from the established order of worshipping clean and indifferent abjection facilities (Fernbach 2002, 72). Put in other words, the criticism of nature as a meta-language of ideology makes postmodern fetishism active in the path of negative freedom. This assumption shows that contemporary visual culture and its related art and fashion are self-reflective narcissism: “We know that faith in nature is a lie and that’s why we believe in its radical opposition—the fictional objects of culture as a lie of lies.” The body that appears as abject/object cravings in a posthuman machine or body without organs is seductive. It depicts objects as objects/things of deep trauma and jouissance experiences. Now pleasure appears as a visual fascination of objects. And they are in the interactive network of the relationship of the perversion of life itself. The fetish of the subject, therefore, appears in the classical model as a function of normalizing the original perversion of heterosexual relationships in civil society. Freud’s psychoanalytic criticism of the history of Western civilization is almost identical to the sociological analysis of Norbert Elias. The sociologist of the civilization process speaks of the power to rationalize social institutions and the traumatic suppression of physicality in the public domain, which raises all forms of violence of the patriarchal order in the private and intimate space of the development of civil marriage (Elias 1989). This ambivalent process of public virtues and private sins establishes

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a model of fetish fantasy. We can see here the dominant form of “blowing out” or catharsis, but not a radical transgression, as the obsession with fetal objects is kept within a strictly public-private divide in civil society. All of this can be perfectly seen in the conceptual-performative actions of Alexander McQueen. The reason is that contemporary fashion as a radical open event of the body itself on the stage of the “society of the spectacle” embodies the experience of radical fetishism as an experience of the transgression concerning the eroticism of death. We can use the term embodiment for the act of forming the lofty-human body as androgencyborg-angel from the incarnation of the abjection of all the innate insurgents of the traumatic existence of humans (women and men) in a globally networked society. We may say here that dispelling the speech about the symbolic creation of the identity of the contemporary body in fashion derives from the inner need for confirmation and confession of the facts of emotional determination in permissive culture. Instead of any symbolic representation of identity, it should be the return of allegories in the pure mythical-visual form of the image beyond the text. This is a reason why all conceptual-performative project designs might be an interactive spectacle of body iconograms.. For contemporary fashion to exist, it might be necessary to finally “bring forth” the body that, in its absolute freedom, lives by “carrying” life as the work and the event of a radical artistic project of transgression. In Plato’s Atlantis in the spring of 2010, McQueen not only reached “the greatest depth of impersonality,” as James Joyce wrote in 1905 from Pula to his brother in Dublin, but also touched the deadly area between art as life and fashion as a show or illusion of the same life. Conceptually speaking, he completed his artistic work. Is not it strange that this is precisely what is more about the contemporary era of media production and the absolute staging of the “experience society” than the entire industry of contemporary minds in its boring reinterpretations that were already seen in the avantgarde and the early 20th century? Is it even possible that a fashion show in its visual event, the iconograms of the body, speaks more of dogmatic contemporary art as a reflexive subversion of the world itself, which has been signified as global, post-historic, digital, information-communicative, post-ideological, heterotopic, and the dystopia of the deep notion of time? The answer is confirmed in advance. Moreover, not only is it possible, but it might also be necessary and inevitable that the allegorical event of the body as a mythical feast of contemporaneity is represented as a radically reversed metaphysical feature of contemporary art. So, this just means that fashion can no longer pass by the appearance and banality of life. From the rhizomatic structures of the world’s worldliness which is beyond

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spirituality, and is therefore symbolic, nothing in the air, that is to say, in the future, lies in the imagination of the experiment of the world as the total design of the posthuman body and its life. In any case, fashion and art meet the experience of the body design in artificial life (AL). Authenticity bestows the resurrection of neo-Platonistic or Hellenistic concepts— syncretism, hybridity and eclecticism. The blending of differences in one— creating a new one from a plurality of different compounds and relating to reality as a relationship to the system reference based on understanding the world of fashion as an interpretation—might be the structural unity of this triad in the concept and practice of the contemporary body (art-fashion). The design has its origins in the aesthetics of the surrounding and inner world, and fashion as a total body design no longer adorns the clothing of a stable body, but the metamorphic body constructs identities with its inscriptions, such as the absolute whiteness of Mallarmé’s The Book or the absolute sound of Stockhausen’s and Cage’s musical compositions—the absolute point of the condensation and compression of the body itself, the thought acoustics in anything that exists in space and time. McQueen has an exceptional place in the theory of contemporary fashion. A New York Times journalist wrote that his fashion show is not just a vision of tomorrow’s future, but a vision of the future as a future at least 30 years in advance. The future of fashion in contemporary fashion is no longer considered from the point of view of the utopian imagination of some “naive” anti-fashion Barbarella or Solaris in the starry space of the night. Rather than the SF-speculation of fashion, in the contemporary era of the reign of new media and digital images, it acts as a virtual transgression of reality. The term “iconograms” started to introduce considerations that would show how euphoria no longer has the essence of contemporary fashion. We cannot confirm the continuity of styles or the removal of provocation and shock in the discontinuity of history. The overwhelming tendencies of neo-historicism, neo-avantgardism, and inadequate decadence with the tendencies of futuristic vision and dreams lead to the fact that contemporary fashion can only be understood from the perspective of the body as an image-creation or, following the contemporary concept of reality, the pictorial trace of the event of the interactive spectacle. All boundaries are accepted and destroyed. And the question of the identity of the body in the age of transgression in contemporary fashion is precisely a question of the limits of the living body. In the metamorphic process of emergence, the posthuman body of the androids and cyborgs of the boundaries of the living and inactive become fictitious. Jean-Paul Gaultier, in his vision of the upcoming fashion of the techno-futuristic environment

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of digital architecture and networks of the world ahead of him, dreamed of creating a collection of clothing at the end of all imaginative collections. In that dream, which resembled a faint body apocalypse and a mysterious state of instability of fashion, his fashion always indicated its signs of crossing gender/sex boundaries, religious bans, racial differentiation, and everything else that history has labelled with the lines of the symbolic rule of fixed differences and more homogenous identities (Evans 2003). Cultural history is the history of clothing in the sense of developing cultural hegemony. Gaultier’s visions coincide partly with McQueen’s radical triad. But the difference exists in the fact that McQueen starts from the assumption that the social form of fashion has broken up. The fragments belong to the visual representation of the spectacle of the body itself. This is a reason why fashion trends are faced with the spectacle of a performance event. Behind that, there is nothing more. Furthermore, there is no secret of the symbolic stone or the sublime object of desire. The abject without an object represents the centre of the “big narrative” (the show). Without it, fashion no longer has its visual signifier. When nothing is left behind, then fashion becomes the design of the body in a techno-futuristic disguise of fetishism. In other words, the lifestyle of transgression becomes a new body of the fatal deconstruction of fashion. McQueen’s “fashion,” in addition, represents the allegory of the future as the upcoming mythical apocalypse of the body. In it, sacrifice, eroticism, nihilism, death, and transgression are the fundamental figures of the reflexive interpretation of the end of a symbolic form of creation. Fashion is dead—long live the new body! We cannot forget the fact that Walter Benjamin used the concept of allegory in the meaning of the substitute sign. In it, the image structure of the message assumes the task of interpreting the narrative structure of the event. Benjamin alleges that “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (Benjamin 2009, 78). The allegory is not merely a substitute mother of cultures towards metaphors and symbols as the “biological” father of marking things. The figure of allegories always appears as what goes beyond the marking process. It is a true iconic turn in contemporary culture that visual identity codes precede every possible reality of the object as a body. And although one of the founders of the “pictorial turn,” Gottfried Boehm, rightly refers to the function of the metaphor as a concept and figure of thought beyond the representation of “things,” pointing to the traces of the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the philosophical fundamentals of Wittgenstein and Austin, and the deconstruction of Derrida, it is undeniable that the allegory of postmodern criticism of the representation of the referent of reality is decisive in the figure of the artistic subversion of the very unity of life and

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art (Boehm 2007, 34–53; Jameson 2009). We should remember how, in postmodern architecture, ornament overcame its position as a “crime,” as Adolf Loos condemned every form of decoration in modern architecture and art, and became the second nature of the narrative structure of the new image—so much so that we became modern in architecture with the code of the digital age of new media, based on the logic of transcoding the message, rising above the devastating ideological and aesthetic advance of the avant-garde and decadence in the 20th century on the obsolescence of ornaments and the progress of function, that is, the relation between the narrative and the event in conceptual-performing art. This connection should be transgressive. It goes beyond binary oppositions like nice-ugly, good-evil, male-female, or nature-culture. So, the allegory of contemporary fashion as a transgression of the body in the event of the eroticism of death could be precisely the transgression of “meaningful” visuality in general. Now, we shall see that visual media are not at all an inherent feature of the digital age. After all, this has been stated in self-criticisms of visual studies and the pictorial turn, as the founder of this theoretical paradigm, W.J.T. Mitchell, already did in his late works (Mitchell 2005, 257–266). If the media of our digital age are not visual, then what does the word mean? Do we have to talk only about turning back to the deconstruction of Derrida with the premise that everything should be just a text? The problem of triggering a symbolic form of creation cannot be defined just as the problem of a new and contemporary interpretation. This would be the most important issue of the contemporary body as a condition for the possibility of being a subject and object of contemporary art and fashion. For this condition of opportunity to be fulfilled, it must hit the third end of the idea of man. It is no longer the end of the metaphysical idea of a man (Heidegger) or the post-metaphysical deconstruction of the essence of the human (Derrida), but the idea of the human as the bodily-synthetic unity of nature and culture in the form of a posthuman machine (androids, cyborgs, monstrous objects of abject). This event also denotes the beginning of true fashion experimentation with what precedes it as well as the idea of civilization as such. The foregoing can be nothing but a myth of bliss and the virgin source of civilization before civilization, the astral-starry body before the corpus mysticum-hermeticum and before modern embodiment and embodiment in a mechanically organized body. Before making the final stroke of the idea of fashion as a spectacular banality and frivolity of decadent Western civilization, McQueen came out of the body’s perception as a concept for use and consumption, which is evident in his Plato’s Atlantis show. In the 1990s, two aesthetic and cultural-political shows concealed the idea of nature and beauty through the systematic action of the

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“natural” and “cultural” logic of the late (the fetishist) sublime object of global capitalism. The first show was named Highland Rape (1993) and the second Dante (1996). The first allusively represented the aggression of men and the rape of women. These are the emerging aspects of cruelty and the feminine culture of the adoration of virginity and motherhood. Although the politico-cultural allegory of the show, according to McQueen, is that, historically, England “raped” Scotland with hegemonic rule and the war between England and Scotland was a genocide of the Scottish people, the problem of interpretation cannot be simply reduced to the historical and political aspect of the allegory. McQueen reveals that, with the contemporary fashion within the conceptual-performative turn, the show is referring to the horror and the uncanny thing in the world. The uncanny and the sublime determine the spectacle of extreme frivolity whereby genocide and ethnic cleansing in the global age are understood in the media representation of social reality. The form of presentation has become like a postmodern soap opera. Laughter and the banality of life are becoming the media environment for the tragic experience of the present, which has deep roots in the past. The best example of this aesthetic of a soap opera in the odour of a political issue is represented by Roberto Benigni’s film about the Holocaust titled Life is Beautiful (Žižek 2000). And there is no doubt that the problem that McQueen put on the scene was greater than it was visually witnessed by the cruelty of the scenes of raped girls in torn clothes, brutally beaten with broken limbs. Rape in the permissive culture of the narcissistic West, paradoxically, attempts to be justified by the uncanny beauty and guilt of the object/thing of man’s desire. In addition, the sublime backdrop of this aggressive crime against nature appears in the idea of the subject of redemption—the Mother as a holy virgin and a donor of life. So, Lacan’s two deaths, real and symbolic, can be applied here by alleging that the allegorical death of a sign in the narrative of the relationship between England and Scotland goes beyond the symbolic death of culture and the real death of nature in the birth of the posthuman body. This body, of course, is still gender/sexually distinct and is characterized by a figure of a doll that, as in Artaud’s surrealist dramas of the 1920s, appears with the scattered body of the object itself. The feminine body in contemporary art and fashion is necessarily something superficial, perfectly aestheticized, sculpturally determined by a seduction function and an aesthetic object as a fantasy of a fictional character. In this double figure of the beauty of a woman’s fashionable body as a colonized space, the corporate economy of fashion is written as a global sign of the structural perversion of the meaning of primordial nature and decadent culture. Fashion and postmodern advertising strategies have a visual function of the

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ideological-political signifier and are marked when it comes to the colonization of the cultural means of the postcolonial subject as Other (e.g. Christian Dior’s concept of “Les Coloniales” in the 1980s). The body of women in the posthuman body of androids and cyborgs remains the body of an endless field of skin instinct, facial interventions, cosmetic surgery, and transgressive S/M aesthetics. McQueen does not model a new “look” for a new woman in contemporary fashion but radically deconstructs the idea of female beauty as a natural and cultural fact in the world of consumer signage. We might comprehend cruelty as the basic notion of these neoavant-garde and decadent aesthetics beyond that of beauty (Evans 2003, 141–161). It looks like McQueen was no longer dealing with the beauty of an idealized female body but with the transgression of the idea of divinity as a display of inadvertence in the monstrously cruel thing that belongs to the outer and inner worlds of the global media age of narcissism, apathy and dystopia. It is rare that we have such a case that goes beyond the boundaries of so-called frivolity and triviality in a fashion design. Moving across the borderlines and leaving a sign of authenticity belongs to transgression in the very concept of freedom. The body is a medium of freedom, and McQueen knows perfectly well what the point of it is. In the Dante show in 1996, we are faced with experiencing the decadent beauty of a woman as a femme fatale. The figure is appropriated from finde-siècle literature and painting. Let us make a few more clarifications here. When we introduce the figure of a femme fatale to this discursive game, we do not think only of the problem of female emancipation and the deafening beauty that radiates and brings discomfort into the existing order. On the contrary, with this figure, we want to emphasize the supremacy and bodily contingency in the understanding of contemporary fashion. Like contemporary art, fashion at the end of history is determined by its sovereignty to no longer takes account of anything other than itself. In this way, decadent beauty lies in the position of transgression in all directions. The paradox is that the concept of beauty from modern aesthetics under the auspices of the aestheticization of the world of life takes on the task of emancipating the subject, starting from the inscription of pure physicality as a provocation of the social tastes of modernity. The body, therefore, becomes subject to a double emancipation, both from the rule of the male principle of permissibility and from the dominant performances of the female body as something predetermined by the affective and sensual features of “nature.” This completes the history of the body as submissive and subjected. The freedom of the human body starts in the decadent beauty that is the direction of death, which marks the moment of the emergence of contemporary fashion. Therefore, fetishism has liberated apostasy nowadays, no matter

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how we should interpret this kind of cultural turn. Still, we could note that there is not something undeniable here. Namely, fetishism is denoted as expanding in all areas of design in contemporary fashion simply because the body is a territory of the “libidinal economy,” which also denotes the space of realizing everything that a great spectacle has to give to its enchanting participants in its appeal to aesthetic objects (goods in the form of excess desire). We are talking about fetishism that no longer has any external or internal resistance to the ideas of society, culture, or politics. This fetishism lies in itself as a spectacle of the narcissistic adventure of a subject who strives to become what he adores and works on his discipline of obedience to the object’s self. To determine the difference between the fashion object and the performance of a body that does not wear clothes as a burden of historical elegance but as a lifestyle chosen from the multitude of opportunities of today’s consumer society, one needs to perceive what we call a semiotic difference.4 And it is a sign of the symbolization of a body 4

The term semiotic difference assumes what is derived from Barthes’ notion of meta-language. As is well-known from his study entitled “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Barthes introduces this term that is extremely important for understanding the relationship between society, politics, ideology, and culture in shaping messages in the advertising image of a consumer lifestyle. The object becomes the bearer of meaning, and this also means the place of mediation between the structures of social production of myths that now no longer have a narrative perception of the world but are primarily determined visually as a coded message. The ideology of a fashion object works directly in the transparency of the sign, the signifier, and the signified. So, the semiotic difference might be regarded as the key feature in the mediaconstructed assemblage of photographic and filmic reproduction in contemporary fashion. Barthes says: “We will only study the advertising image. Why? Because in advertising the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentional; the signifieds of the advertising message are formed a priori by certain attributes of the product and these signifieds have to be transmitted as clearly as possible. If the image contains signs, we can be sure that in advertising these signs are full, formed with a view to the optimum reading: the advertising image is frank, or at least emphatic. (…) It can thus be seen that in the total system of the image the structural functions are polarized: on the one hand there is a sort of paradigmatic condensation at the level of the connotators (that is, broadly speaking, of the symbols), which are strong signs, scattered, ‘reified’; on the other a syntagmatic ‘flow’ at the level of the denotation – it will not be forgotten that the syntagm is always very close to speech, and it is indeed the iconic ‘discourse’ which naturalizes its symbols. Without wishing to infer too quickly from the image to semiology in general, one can nevertheless venture that the world of total meaning is torn internally (structurally) between the system as culture and the syntagm as nature: the works of mass

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that is no longer a result of society and culture. Instead, the fashion object and body as an event create new social relationships and cultural orders of meaning. The sexual impulsivity of the woman gains new symbolic meanings, such as aggressive and dangerous beauty, cruelty, and the eroticism of death. But what is new is that McQueen introduces the elements of lesbian decadence, so it breaks the classic model of beauty and the elevation of the fetish object of desire. But what is most interesting in this performance event is the radical deconstruction of the historical-symbolic concept of decadence. Instead of the deadly beauty remaining in the romantic vision of inexperience in the unrestrained encounter with the object of the sublime, now cracks enter the idea of decadent beauty. It is an intervention in itself at the centre of the object-oriented transformation of women’s fashion from the period before the aristocratic order of haute couture and the French Revolution. McQueen deconstructs a woman’s body with inscriptions of sexuality and eroticism as perversion and cruelty, fetishism, and death: a plastic skeleton in a corset in photographic footage of a woman’s body reverses a self-taught order. Fashion is a form of the socio-cultural perversion or fetishism of goods in the spectacular visual order of signs. When the form of decomposition works in the logic of an image without a sign, as shown by Baudrillard, instead of the visual semiotics of fashion, it is the transgression of the body itself as an image. The only thing left in contemporary fashion, and this is shown in Dante, is a shocking and provocative performance on the scene of the body as a subject and fashion as an object of shyness and the sublime. At the turn of the 20th century, the idea of deadly feminine beauty deconstructed the very idea of fashion as a natural bond of the dress with the transformations of the idea of beauty. But that is the real problem. Fear of illness that appears with the paranoid fear of the contemporary age is at the same time a real sign of the decadence of the global age. In the 1990s, disease-to-death took the form of a planetary disease such as AIDS, and in the social meaning of this disease is first a disease characterized by decadence because minority groups of sexually different and racially oppressed in the Third World were vulnerable to it (gay populations and African peoples). Second, in this way, it is not just the other side of Western Eurocentrism but the eccentric and hybrid identity of the Other as an unreal threat to the stable order of modern body politics in the fashion apparatus or communications all combine, through diverse and diversely successful dialectics, the fascination of a nature, that of story, diegesis, syntagm, and the intelligibility of a culture, withdrawn into a few discontinuous symbols which men ‘decline’ in the shelter of their living speech” (Barthes 1980, 270, 283).

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dispositif. McQueen’s politics of transgression entered into a discussion of the character of the ambivalence of the inadequate style of the late 20th century in fashion. It is simultaneously a craving for perfect beauty and an act of the destruction of beauty, a fascination with the object of beauty as a sublime and strange reaction to the unfinished event of the meeting—the terrorist act of breaking organs in the public space. What remains is the ultimate stage of social apathy and sexual liberalism, as in Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Elementary Particles—loneliness and autism, apathy and narcissism in search of the lost idea of love. It is only apparent by allegory that the fashion spectacle of the transgression of the body is placed at the centre of the decomposed social system of the body (as fashion). Symbols are no longer “symbols” because they lack a metaphysical reference of reality, whether it is an aristocratic order of high taste, which persists in the performances of John Galliano, or of the libertine civic society in which the body functions in the context of the total openness of so-called marginal or aesthetic differentiation, which is a keyword of the theoretical attempt of Lipovetsky. Simply stated, this means that lifestyle allows an individual to be the subject of his/her own body and when he/she stands on the edge of social survival. Anti-fashion clothing allows, thus, the kingdom of the illusion of a narcissistic postmodern subject. Its body is represented as a tabula rasa on which signs of affiliation are entered. In addition, its body signifies a totem without taboos and taboos without a totem, the perfect emptiness of all the definitions, punctum and surface, screen and stage. Finally, we are talking about a body with the same assemblage as a template for the architecture of deconstruction of the modern body as a fixed and stable identity. Architecture and fashion, thus, are the only areas of entry into the body of the metamorphic obsession and the sublime of the contemporary age. Both are happening in the digital scape of the object as the process of objectifying the body in the world as a readymade of post-industrial civilization. Chalayan’s metamorphic architecture corresponds to the nomadic destiny of man in temporary cities and networked societies of virtual schizophrenia of identity. On this, Caroline Evans says that: Chalayan’s design motifs of technological progress were shadowed by the darker motifs of displacement, exile and uprootedness. This shadow generated a bleak beauty that haunted the modernist purity of his installation-like shows. (Evans 2003, 288–289)

But the body has not come out of being-to-death ever since. It did not come out of a genetic brand without a name and did not deny the subjection of the

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digital social control machine in the global age. In contemporary fashion, everything is bizarre and extravagant: from the structure’s fetishism to the transparency of the body as a desiring machine. So, what seems most significant comes from the technosphere as the way the body works in the situation and in the context of its obsolescence. The eternal youth of fashion stands in opposition to the traumatic destiny of ageing and the amnesia of the living body. It might therefore all be so artificial and so replaceable as implants and appliances in the flesh that we are faced with an experience that reminds us of the liquidity and fluidity of cultural strings. The last show of Plato’s Atlantis (2009) brought McQueen to the pinnacle of his notion of body history as the history of sacrifice and the transgression of nature and culture. Sacrifice should be understood symbolically and ontologically. If fashion is due to the discovery of the unconscious and desire (Freud’s psychoanalysis) and the steps in the transgression of all social and cultural boundaries (Bataille’s theory of religion) relative to the body as to its incarnation into the world of events, then its destiny might be on the verge of avant-garde and decadence. In other words, fashion denotes transgression in the very language as an unconscious production of desire. Many theorists of design and fashion explain the concept of the history of the body by the absence of any reference to pastoralism and the divine innocence of nature in the age of romanticism, although it should be apparent that the idea of transgression is the uncanniness of nature and the sublime drifts directly into romanticism. In addition, we have a lot of proof that the concept, just like Unheimlichkeit, was born in the very heart of that revival of ancient history as a myth. Of course, it is a distinctive feature of the German programme of a rebirth of the Greek paradigm in art and philosophy in the 1800s. But, unlike the reversion of Galliano’s neo-historical interpretation of history as a bricolage of styles and criticism of the historical exclusion of Other—racially diverse, gender/sexually eccentric, extravagant bodies of European decadence— McQueen perceives history as a traumatic experience of the pain and suffering of the body. Let us remember that this is very similar to how we comprehend the birth of the subject in Lacan’s psychoanalysis. The trauma precedes consciousness just as freedom in its contingency precedes the modern notion of existence. In Plato’s Atlantis, the body was exposed in contemporary fashion as a concept of liberty in opposition to the tyranny of society, politics, and ideology. The alliance with Sade’s criticism of civil society as a rationalist theatre of cruelty and perversion in the “heart of darkness” is evident in all the allusive procedures of the great presentation of the traumatic body of a contemporary subject. As for Lacan, he says he is no longer a master in his home. What does McQueen point to in this

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ambiguity of history as traumatic allegories from Highland Rape to Plato’s Atlantis? Nothing but the paradoxical self-referral of eroticism and terror, horror and beauty. In the 1990s, this was underlined by the increased morbidity and aestheticization of the narcissistic society of the spectacle. Debord himself spoke of three stages of the spectacle: (1) concentrated, (2) diffused, and (3) integrated (Debord 1994). The last stage represents the realization of the universal perversion of the world as the fetishism of goods/objects in the form of a digital image. The decadence of the contemporary era is that the whole of the enlightening social life became aesthetic in all aspects of that concept. A man emerges, thus, as an illusory entity in the figuration of a lifestyle, not as an authentic individual in all kinds of skills and attributes. This manner of perverted identity transformation, in which fashion becomes an open event of an interactive spectacle of body transgression, occurs in the likeness of a global reality show. This is not just a shocking exaggeration in the media world. Plato’s Atlantis undoubtedly represents an attempt at a radical change in the overall view of the contemporary body as a transgression. Sometimes it seems to us that this uncanny thing—contemporary fashion—has come to the final border of the impossible and that there is no longer anywhere further to go. Everything has already been seen in neo-avant-garde art as shock and provocation strategies, and supposedly this would have to end with the repetition of events that was a core of the aesthetics of Romanticism when it propagated the idea of the ugly as a counterweight to the beautiful. But we should not detect a problem in causing monstrous feelings and experiences of negative catharsis. Instead, one needs to see why there is a permanent need for the fascination with the sublime object of desire to come to the fullness of cruelty and abjectness. Let us see how that matter evolves. The show begins with the mythical scenes of the blue of the water, the sky, and the archaeological power of being born out of the darkness. The snakes and the human body in the torment of birth put the body in an event of mystery to the sound of new age music. But the event should be perceived as allegory, and the performance has a feature of the unrepresentable/sublime. McQueen uses the neo-avant-garde poetry of writing the body as a picture in the interplay of interacting bodies in the play itself. Cinematic references to this fashion show are obvious in SF films such as Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989), and John McTiernan’s Predator (1987). McQueen’s main intention was to reveal some inner links with Charles

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Darwin’s theory of biological evolution and posthumanism/transhumanism, where we can find the set of ideas that try to operate in our assemblage of visions through the mediation of biological and technological features concerning human advancement. The first cause and final purpose of evolution might be realized in fashion as our dreams and hyper-reality. No matter how deep it goes under the first, second, and third “human skin,” these fascinating image-effects produce strange and uncanny effects in the spectator’s attention long after he/she has watched that spectacular inscenation of bizarre and extravagant images. Plato’s Atlantis is perfect proof that the “iconic turn” encompasses bodies, brains, eyes, and emotions in the synaesthetic adventure of contemporary fashion. We cannot deny that, in this case, different strategies fascinate spectators with the aestheticization of life, starting with the creation of the body as experimentation. In this respect, it should be an attempt to think of the beginning and end of the body concerning the indivisible world of objects that surpass us. The visual achievements of contemporary technology are mobile cameras, which, on both sides of the stage as monstrously elevated Aliens, have no limit in every moment of life in the show on two moving platforms that screen what is going on. What transparency and what a sublime experience of the mixture created by the technosphere! The choice of the title of the show undoubtedly signifies the provocation of the theory and the overall postmodern interpretation of the world as a text. Not coincidentally, it is the allusion to a myth that incorporates ideas of the collapse of civilization (decadence) after its golden age and the idea of the restoration of civilization on just another element. Water has the esoteric meaning of ancient elements and new features of the world and humans as a whole. Atlantis is mentioned by Plato in dark mythical designation in two of his dialogues—Timaeus and Critias. But McQueen does not use postmodern irony, bricolage, pastiche and carnival figures to point out the dimensions of the inexpressible. When models come out onto the scene, everything is established as a mythical regression of history. The future as an upcoming time of uncertainty and unexpectedness is no longer traumatic and full of anxiety. It is a self-sacrificing body in a retro-futuristic display of inadmissibility. Women’s bodies glide on the runway like the hybrid posthuman bodies on the set of the TV show Star Trek. So, what remains of all that is mythically constructed for the body is not clothing for cyborgs and androids but the extravagance, like so many bodies, of the snake shoe design, which figure the female body up to the living/dead new-age fetishism. We can say that the body is no longer a body. It is (not) the birthplace of the posthuman era of myth regression, which is nowhere

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beyond this civilization, nowhere beyond this world, beyond Baudelaire’s empty transcendence from Paris Spleen—anywhere out of the world. The iconograms of contemporary fashion are “here” and nowhere else. They are in the virtual things of the apocalypse and the sacrifice of the world as a mythical Atlantis, which is always born again in the moment of the radical nihilism of forever secluded history. McQueen came to the threshold of the impossible body project—the death of fashion in the decadent vision of the mythical regression of history. There is nothing left behind the body. The event has already happened when fashion has become the body design of life itself. The threat of fashion does not come from the techno-fetishism of objects that become more and more clumsy forms of cold indifference. On the contrary, the danger is that there is no longer a free body with its own autonomy that is searching for its right to enjoyment and liberation from all the repressive actions of society, politics, and ideology in the global order of capitalism. Instead, we encounter a vacant space spotted by new alienation. Now it is feared that inside is pure anxiety and nothingness. Looking at it from another perspective, the body’s transgression has its profound meaning only when we are faced with uncanny circumstances in our comprehension of the culture in which we might be witnesses and guardians of collective memories. And fashion as a creative body design holds that issue in all aspects of life, from youth to old age. The paradoxical conjunction of avant-garde and decadence begins and ends with the mythic regression of history. Fashion has been avant-garde since its inception because it is the most visible phenomenon and symbol of modernity. In its final stage of integral fetishism, the body became an image without a world, an abject without objects, a mirror and a wardrobe of the modern age, to rule things as objects and things as things. In the process of purifying fashion from all external references, we witness the emergence of a total fashion that is now not only exempt from the tyranny of society and politics-ideology but has also become the liberating power of writing differences into the body of one’s disobedience. Fashion has become a creative design and visualization of life as such. But when design escapes the aesthetic life and bestows it with its metamorphic appearance in an endless series of lifestyles, then all that remains exists in a different and radical way in this world outside the ecstasy of communication and the tyranny of the new. Returning to the mythical in the allegory of contemporary fashion is the only way the body exacerbates its nullness of disease-to-death until its last breath. However, does the body in all its metamorphic conditions not become obsolete? Without the idea of the new Atlantis and the unborn world of “things,” it could necessarily all be becoming just a new body celebration

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as the object of the enjoyment of energy. Creatures, animals, humans, machines—everything just disappears into the endless archipelago of dreams and nightmares. The disappearance of fashion designates the beginning of a new body history. But what if the event of this new history is just a glimpse at the upcoming darkness of the world in visions and images of dreams? And there is nothing more than this endless space of the uncanny and fascinating—a deep blue.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2009a. Nacktheiten. Frankfurt/M: S. Fischer. —. 2009b. What Is An Apparatus? And Other Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Apter, Emily and William Pietz, eds. 1993. Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca, NY-London: Cornell University Press. Barnard, Malcolm. 2001. Fashion as Communication. London: Routledge. —. 2007. Fashion Theory: A Reader. London-New York: Routledge. Barthes, Roland. 1964/1980. Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books. —. 1983. The Fashion System. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bataille, Georges. 1957. L’érotisme. Paris: Minuit. —. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1989. Theory of Religion. New York: Zone Books. —. 1991. The Accursed Share, vol 1: Consumption. New York: Zone Books. Baudrillard, Jean. 1998. Selected Writings. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2009. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. LondonNew York: Verso. Blau, Herbert. 1999. Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Boehm, Gottfried. 2007. Wie Bilder Sinn Erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeigens. Berlin: Berlin University Press. Debord, Guy. 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Derrida, Jacques. 1967. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit. Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. —. 1989. The Open Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1990. Interpretation and Overinterpretation: World, History, Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Elias, Norbert. 1989. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, vols. I-II. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Emberley, Julia. 1987. “The Fashion Apparatus and the Deconstruction of Postmodern Subjectivity.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 11, no. 1–2: 39–89. Evans, Caroline. 1999. “Masks, Mirrors, and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and Decentralized Subject.” Fashion Theory 3, no. 1: 3–32. —. 2001. “The Enchanted Spectacle.” Fashion Theory 5, no. 3: 271–310. —. 2003. Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, Deathliness. New Haven, CT-London: Yale University Press. —. 2004. “Fashion: Alexander McQueen.” 032c.com, no. 7 (Summer). http://032c.com/2004/fashion-alexander-mcqueen/ —. 2005. “No Man’s Land.” In Hussein Chalayan, edited by Caroline Evans, Suzie Menkes, Ted Polhemus, and Bradley Quinn, 8–15. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers/Groninger Museum. Fernbach, Amanda. 2000. “The Fetishization of Masculinity in Science Fiction: The Cyborg and the Console Cowboy.” Science Fiction Studies 27, no. 2. https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/81/fernbach81art.htm. —. 2002. Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Post-Human. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2004. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Fortunati, Leopoldina, James E. Katz, and Raimonda Riccini, eds. 2003. Mediating the Human Body: Technology, Communication and Fashion. Mahwah, NJ-London: LEA Publishers. Foucault, Michel. 1977. “A Preface to Transgression.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, 29–52. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Grosz, Elisabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Groys, Boris. 2008. Art Power. Cambridge, MA-London: MIT Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2005. Vier Seminare. Frankfurt/M: V. Klostermann. Jameson, Fredric. 2009. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998. London-New York: Verso. Jappe, Anselm. 1999. Guy Debord. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press. Jenks, Chris. 2003. Transgression. London-New York: Routledge. Lacan, Jacques. 1996. Écrits. London-New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lévy-Strauss, Claude. 2001. Myth and Meaning. London-New York: Routledge.

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Lipovetsky, Gilles. 2002. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Loschek, Ingrid. 1991. Mode – Verführung und Notwendigkeit. Munich: Bruckmann. Mersch, Dieter. 2002. Ereignis und Aura: Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. “There Are No Visual Media.” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2: 257–266. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. “The Unsacrifieable.” Yale French Studies 79: 20– 38. Paiü, Žarko. 200. Vertigo in Fashion: Towards Visual Semiotics of the Body. Zagreb: Altagama —. 2008. Visual Communication: An Introduction. Zagreb: Center for Visual Studies. —. 2011. Posthuman Condition: The End of Human and the Odds of Other History. Zagreb: Litteris. —. 2021. Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art: Pictures Without a World. Cham: Springer. Pessoa, Fernando. 1991. The Book of Disquietude. Manchester: Carcanet. Pitts, Victoria. 2003. In The Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Polhemus, Ted. 1996. Style Surfing. London: Thames & Hudson. —. 2006. Hot Bodies – Cool Styles: New Techniques in Self-Adornment. London: Thames & Hudson. Quinn, Bradley. 2005. “An Architect of Ideas.” In Hussein Chalayan, edited by Caroline Evans, Suzie Menkes, Ted Polhemus, and Bradley Quinn, 46–51. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers/Groninger Museum. Sawchuck, Kim. 1987. “A Tale of Inscription/Fashion Statements.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/Revue Canadienne de théorie Political and Social 11, no. 1–2: 51–67. Steele, Valerie. 1985. Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 2001. “‘Style in Revolt’: Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen & Vivienne Westwood.” In Radical Fashion, edited by Claire Wilcox, 46– 53. London: V & A Publications. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion. London-New York: Verso.

CHAPTER FOUR BODY AND LANGUAGE: UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FASHION IN CROATIA SINCE THE 1960S KATARINA NINA SIMONýIý TRANSLATED BY IVANA LUKICA

Full creative freedom present in the process of clothing design since the 1960s has influenced the intensive theoretical questioning of the relationship between fashion and art, their synergy, sameness and opposition, prevalent during the 1990s (Kim 1998; Martin 1999; Miller 2007). Garment forms and surface manipulation techniques were observed as expressions of artistic production indivisible from the body as the medium. The emphasis on the body in this action of fashion and art is responsible for establishing new paradigms, especially that of deepening knowledge of the performative character of fashion. However, Ingrid Loschek concludes that theoretical orientations toward the connections between art and fashion are the fruits of new class identities formed by political, intellectual, and cultural interventions resulting in art expanding into fashion (Loschek 2009, 167). Their fusion especially intensified with the development of computer technologies and science. In a contemporary society of digital culture based on the legacy of late twentieth-century transhumanism, new technologies penetrate art at the expense of traditional, conventional and conservative production techniques, especially in fashion design. In such a way, the garment takes on the character of utopian visions in the real and virtual worlds while the body is subject to imaginative manipulation thanks to digital progress. It is a substantial step back from a century of playing the game of body affirmation or negation by means of a garment. The contemporary age abandoned this established pattern; clothing no longer has such an important role in achieving the ideal body, and interventions now occur on the body itself. We live in the era of body culture. As a result, the observation of the body

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as an iconic allegory of the spirit of the time is not surprising. The key role the body plays in the formation of society’s taste was emphasized by Bourdieu’s term habitus in 1984. On the other hand, Entwistle states the crucial role time and space play in our relationships with our own body and those of others (Entwistle 2015). Loschek, too, emphasizes the body as a crucial element of fashion expression that can don objects or surfaces, not just clothes. It is these terms that follow Jennifer Craik’s anthropological line of thinking (Craik 1993). She analyzes the phenomenon of fashion as a general expression of acculturation, and the body as an essential part of cultural re-examination makes its presence in twentieth-century conceptual art unsurprising. If we look briefly at the key moments of art and fashion permeation during the twentieth century in order to better understand the climate in which Miroslav Šutej’s utopian research of clothing and body synergy took place in 1960s Croatia, it is necessary to emphasize the contribution of the great clothing reformer Sonia Delaunay. Avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century laid the foundation for the inclusion of clothing items into new expressions of art concepts. Delaunay’s anti-fashion dress was called the robe simultanée (1913) and was a reflection of Orphistic principles based on simultaneous contrast. Delaunay used them to achieve a stronger synthesis of body and clothes.1 At the same time, Italian futurists considered fashion evil (Stern 2004, 29). Their ambition regarding totality could not ignore clothing that naturally belonged to the realm of art. However, their interest in clothing was not primarily motivated by the desire to promote minor art but to expand art into every aspect of human life. Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) de-structured clothing by visually destroying the wearer’s anatomy. The goal of systematically using asymmetric cuts and permeating colours was to achieve a general, dynamic effect similar to his paintings. By trying to avoid a depressive approach to clothing, Balla wanted to completely eliminate the traditional shape of clothing and the process of sewing. He included the wearer as an active participant (modifier) by allowing them to change their form depending on their current mood.2 This meant that the wearer was no longer subject to clothing, that dressing oneself no longer depended on fashion, and that fashion had lost its purpose. 1 According to her own words, Delaunay was not interested in contemporary fashion.

She did not attempt to innovate the cut but to revive the art of clothing by using new fabrics in a wide variety of colours (Stern 2004, 64–65). 2 Alternative materials and innovative shapes were advised for construction: aluminium, wooden or metal ties, asymmetric shoes, trapeze handbags, hats with built-in details, shiny materials, body painting, etc. However, traditional decorations such as geometric and floral embroidered motifs were advised as well (Buxbaum 2005).

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The user was given control over changes in dressing and had to enter the aesthetic sphere and co-operate with the designer. Within these limitations (in contact with the designer), the clothing user was able to express their own creativity, and the clothing became an open work of art presented on their body. Conceptualism and Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades (1916) changed art’s attitude towards wearable clothing products. Artists such as Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Méret Oppenheim were focused on the symbolic character of clothing. The body was left out of the presentation of clothing, but the dematerialized presence of a human being was still physically and spiritually imprinted onto the garment (Loschek 2009, 167). The 1960s were revolutionary in the social, technological, geopolitical, and scientific sense as well as in providing a wide spectrum of artistic forms of expression. Consumer habits diversified. The younger hippie generation opposed social norms, especially the political ideology that justified war as the protection of the oppressed. They supported the universal idea of freedom, which was reflected in their attitudes towards body autonomy, rejected the stereotype of typically male or female clothing items, and promoted unisex clothing. Moreover, young musicians defied gender identity through clothes. For example, David Bowie wore a Michael Fish dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World (1970/1971). His androgynous body and specific taste in clothing and performance enabled fashion and the media to toy with gender identity. In the twenty-first century, Lady Gaga generated enormous media interest by flirting with gender identity when introducing herself to the world dressed as a man on the cover of Vogue Hommes Japan (2010). In addition, the 1960s were revolutionary in conquering space that influenced new ideas of bodies’ and clothes’ abilities by declaring a new language of fashion. New synthetic fabrics in intense colours were presented that affirmed and exposed the body like a second skin. This was especially visible in American sportswear and space-age fashion. The American company DuPont (1802) and the British company Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) (1926) manufactured polyamide-, polyester-, and polyurethane-based fibres as well as polyvinyl derivatives. Synthetic fabrics made of such fibres offered a new perspective on the possibilities of garments and contributed to the undoing of the traditional distinction between daywear and eveningwear. The elastic garment offered freedom of movement and a new understanding of comfort. In addition to these textile innovations, futuristic or space-age fashion was influenced by the Space

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Race between the Soviet Union3 and the United States of America, which was closely followed in Croatia as well. Through their themes and costumes, television shows such as Star Trek (1966) or films such as Barbarella (1968) contributed to the spectacle of uncertain expectations and media coverage of conquering new space frontiers and promoting human presence in new worlds. The Parisian designer Paco Rabanne, the costume designer on Barbarella, was the main representative of futuristic fashion alongside Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges. Their body of work and the artistic atmosphere in Paris were paramount for the turn towards the fashion of the Croatian artist Miroslav Šutej, one of the representatives of the New Tendencies movement, which foreshadowed the beginning of the digital era in Yugoslavia (Bousfield 2021).

1. The new wave in 1960s Croatia After World War II, Croatia became a part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–1992), colloquially called Tito’s Yugoslavia. The new government did not swear an oath to the king and nation as the governments of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had but only to the nation. In his 1946 Iron Curtain speech delivered in the United States, Winston Churchill warned of the Soviet influence on Europe and colourfully described the division of the world into two blocs: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent” (Turner Vuþetiü 2008). The new social and political system in Croatia, one of the republics in Yugoslavia, strongly influenced all spheres of culture. Women were encouraged to be equal to men in the building of a socialist society and dress in simple, comfortable, practical, and functional clothing. Individualism in fashion and emphasizing the body were not widely accepted. Moreover, the time and money spent on superficial matters that did not contribute to socialist progress and the wider good, such as excessive body care or fashion, were not considered beneficial to society (Simonþiþ 2019). However, the unwritten social rules in fashion and dressing were not imposed on art. Quite the opposite. The development of visual arts, architecture, and technology was strongly encouraged. The modernism in the design of real and imaginary objects stood out, especially that of the Experimental Atelier (abbreviated to Exat 51), which was established in

3

The race began with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 into space in 1957, continued with Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space in 1961, and ended with Neil Armstrong’s landing on the Moon in 1969.

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1951 in Zagreb and remained active until 1956.4 The split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union as well as Tito’s rejection of the Informbiro resolution certainly benefited the group. This act contributed to the atmosphere of artistic freedom that was until then dominated by socialist realism. The Exat 51 group produced sophisticated modernist art, tried to revive the spirit and principles of the avant-garde with their manifesto, and supported abstract art, contemporary visual communication, and the desire to join together all the disciplines of fine arts. Their efforts laid strong foundations for modern art to flourish in socialist Yugoslavia, as was made evident in the Cold War Modern: Design 1945–70 exhibition held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2008 (Turner Vuþetiü 2008). Croatia was in a specific situation during the period of Exat 51’s activity: it was a socialist republic under a strong influence of western consumerist habits (Duda 2005, 6). During the 1960s, several factors influenced the public’s fashion taste: for example, fairs, fashion shows, and television broadcasts of music festivals such as Sanremo. The primary influence, however, was the fashion magazine Svijet (from 1953) and fashion segments in daily newspapers such as Globus, Slobodna Dalmacija, Plavi vjesnik, Veþernji list, and others. Yugoslavia, situated between the two blocs, increasingly turned its gaze towards the west, which was especially visible in the productions of Exat 51 as well as the constructivist ideas of the international art movement New Tendencies in the 1960s. Alongside a somewhat older generation of Croatian artists,5 one of its members was Miroslav Šutej (1936–2005), whose op-art was freed of any type of narration (Denegri 2003; Denegri 2007; Makoviü 1975). The work of New Tendencies, characterized by new technologies in communication with the audience and which leaned towards op-art and introduced video art, bio-art and robotics, was presented in international exhibitions from 1961 until 1973. The social role of artists as promotors of the idea of collective work as opposed to that of the lonely genius was especially important to them. Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, was the unofficial cultural capital of Yugoslavia, whose political and economic power was concentrated in Belgrade. All the important festivals such as the Music Biennale Zagreb, the Genre Experimental Film Festival (GEFF), and the animated film festival Animafest Zagreb, founded in 1961, 1963, and 1972 respectively, were held in Zagreb (Fritz n.d.). The Tendencies 4 4

Its members included the painters Ivan Picelj, Vlado Kristl, and Aleksandar Srnec and the architects Bernardo Bernardi, Zdravko Bregovac, Zvonimir Radiü, Božidar Rašica, Vjenceslav Richter, and Vladimir Zarahoviü. 5 Vjenceslav Richter, Julije Knifer, Vladimir Bonaþiü, Ivan Picelj, and Aleksandar Srnec.

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exhibition held in Zagreb in 1968 focused the audience’s attention on computer art. It was symbolic of a society on the verge of great change and a world ready to enter a new future in which scientists would take primacy over traditional artists, collective production would supersede individual production, and reason would have a privileged position over intuition in art.

2. Miroslav Šutej and the utopian vision of surface Miroslav Šutej’s 1963 drawing Bombardiranje oþnog živca (Bombardment of the Optic Nerve) was presented with the works of other New Tendencies members at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1965 op-art exhibition The Responsive Eye. Šutej’s work at the time included research into optical, dynamic structures and abstract surfaces on which certain forms want to conquer the space of new media by forming image-object and sculpture-object.6 These objects were exhibited in the Yugoslav pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1968 (Makoviü 1996). However, Šutej’s name is recognizable not only for his op-art work but also for his interest in fashion and clothing objects, which was influenced by New Tendencies’ constructivism. Artists of Russian constructivism were expected to contribute to the destruction of the old world by creating objects in line with revolutionary values. Among the many everyday objects, clothing was especially important because it reflected class distinctions more than any other. As classes no longer existed in the new revolutionary world, they had to be eliminated by new forms of clothing as well. The focus was on a new type of clothing as a symbolic reflection of social cohesion and the communist system. Vladimir Tatlin’s constructivist clothing is an example of an anti-fashion idea in which the author regards clothing as a machine (Buxbaum 2005; Stern 2004, 48). The anti-fashion principle guided the artist Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958) as well. Her clothing (1917) was constructed out of basic geometrical shapes: squares, circles, and triangles (Buxbaum 2005). When presenting clothing, the focus lay on form and colour, while the body as the medium of the presentation was of secondary importance. In the totalitarian Soviet Union, the crucial element of the design was not its aesthetics but its social impact, which was particularly visible in the glorification of sports and stadiums, where the uniform and the body in service of the country were celebrated. Šutej designed the Croatian football team jerseys with their iconic red and white squares in the 6

Šutej’s work, outside of op-art, consists of creating the Croatian coat of arms and flag, political posters, and the opening credits of the prime-time news show Dnevnik in the 1990s (Kiš 2013).

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1990s when Croatia became an independent country. In his own words taken from the daily newspaper at the time, “If we think of football matches as a great spectacle, not only of sport, which they actually are, then I see a lot of opportunities for imaginative creators” (Kiš 2013). The constructivist principle of clothing that nullifies class distinction can be found in Šutej’s fashion sketches. However, Šutej’s interest in clothing surfaces in the 1960s was especially close to the ideas of the suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), who promoted the introduction of clothing products into the world of art as opposed to the constructivists, who transposed them from art into industrial production (Stern 2004, 60). Malevich’s 1923 watercolour of suprematist clothes of the future points to a strong interest in the functionality of clothing and the need for the synergy of white, black, red, and gold geometric shapes and the surface, i.e., the garment. He developed his sketches until the 1930s, but the garments were never realized. The sketches show the body in a subordinate position to the clothing or as an extension of the clothing’s surface (Sportsmen, 1931). The 1930s sketches of clothing compositions (Suprematist Figure, 1931–1932) in which the author plays with and manipulates the body are particularly interesting. For instance, certain figures are missing arms or are physically separated from the ground while their heads are projected onto the infinite sky. Šutej’s anti-fashion sketches from the late 1960s were similar to the utopian character of Malevich’s never-realized sketches of clothing of the future. Šutej’s sketches are the result of his stay in Paris and his contact with trends inspired by futuristic space-age fashion as well as by the dominance of New Tendencies. After receiving a French government scholarship in 1964, Šutej left for Paris, where he came into contact with a very versatile Parisian art scene that included kinetic art, geometric abstraction, art informel, art brut, and new realism, as well as American pop art. However, he also contemplated fashion and clothing, which is not surprising as this interest went back to his school days and university studies (Pintariü 2013, 22). Parisian fashion at the time was imbued with futuristic trends, visible in the work of Paco Rabanne, Pierre Cardin, and André Courrèges. In 1964, Courrèges presented a new look, the so-called Moon Girl look, inspired by the omnipresent mania for the conquest and exploration of space. He based the collection on synthetic materials, silver miniskirts with geometric patterns, headdresses shaped like space helmets, glasses with eye slits, and high, white PVC boots with low stacked heels, the so-called Courrèges boot. The material of the future was plastic in intense colours. Courrèges built his collections, much like the avant-garde artists Stepanova and Malevich before him, on

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geometric shapes: squares, trapezoids, circles, and triangles. Šutej followed Courrèges’ body of work, as evidenced by his 1964 collage that included a photograph of Courrèges’ model obtained from a Parisian fashion magazine (Pintariü 2013, 22). However, unlike Stepanova and Malevich, Courrèges, Rabanne, and Cardin were focused on new materials and technologies in textile production and created their collections in collaboration with the textile industries. Innovative construction and unconventional materials as well as a sense of experimentation became features of the avant-garde fashion of the decade (Kamitsis 1999). Cardin presented his signature look consisting of geometric shapes and motifs as early as 1954 by negating the female silhouette with his bubble dresses. Four years later, he presented a unisex collection and laid the historic foundation for questioning gender identity in a fashion that would peak at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 1968, Cardin presented his new, ultralight, waterproof, three-dimensional material called Cardine (dynel), which was crease-, fire-, and acid-resistant. Rabanne shaped mini dresses out of metal discs. He presented Twelve Experimental Dresses in 1964 and Twelve Unwearable Dresses in 1966. The dresses were highly sculptural, constructed of plastic squares and triangles connected with metal rings. In this Parisian, futuristic fashion atmosphere, Šutej started a series of fashion sketches in intense colours that evoked the appearance of new synthetic materials as well as alternative plastic or metal accessories in various geometric shapes. The sketches were presented in 1971 in a graphics portfolio symbolically entitled Antifashion.7 However, the first sketches were made in 1965, and he continued creating them until 1974. In the preface of Antifashion (Horvat Pintariü 1971), Croatian art historian Vera Horvat Pintariü points out Rabanne’s attitude towards women’s clothing that goes through a phase of destruction as the key to understanding Šutej’s sketches. She defines destruction as a process of ending all established traditional methods of clothes production. Clothing created by new production techniques required new terminology, which Horvat Pintariü took from Rabanne and called anti-clothing. Clothing became a critical instrument and a tool of a specific social group. Women no longer dress but disguise themselves, Rabanne said. His insight into the historical role of clothing and its relationship with the body was especially important to Horvat Pintariü. The vehement repression of the body that was entirely accepted by civilization is based on forced Church authority and the sinful body present in western culture since the Middle Ages. On the other 7

The album contained five original serigraphs by Šutej and was published in sixty copies, signed and enumerated by the author himself.

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hand, the nude look and body affirmation through fashion that Horvat Pintariü recognized in the hippie generation marked the end of conservative civic absolutism. The new generation, whose visual appearance has been inspired by different cultures, build garments by freely choosing old and new materials. This created ready-made pieces that define a new concept of the clothing object. In order to describe the new principle of dressing which was also present in Šutej’s sketches, Horvat Pintariü used terminology borrowed from the fine arts. She treated the design of a clothing composition as conceptual work and called the product an object rather than clothes. She continued by saying that Courrèges’ geometry and Rabanne’s metal mobiles were disintegrated by the new “wild” culture she called anti-fashion. It created a different iconosphere and a new psychosociology, annulled the difference between male and female clothing items, between useful and useless, moral and immoral, unique and serial, salon and the street, flea market and boutique, folk handicraft and the synthetics of the technological era, and the western and the distant eastern civilizations (Horvat Pintariü 1971). Therefore, it was not anti-fashion as defined by J. C. Flügel in 19318 or Ted Polhemus in 1978,9 but a completely new, wild culture reflected in clothing objects with a futuristic-utopian character in Šutej’s fashion sketches. By creating imaginary models, he treated clothes like a second skin that sometimes opens in forbidden places or intertwines and stretches around the body like a gossamer membrane. The membrane plays a game of spatial covering and uncovering. Šutej’s vision of clothing was not merely that of thermal protection but an extension of functions possible for the human body. Namely, it was a machine that enables taking off and landing, a lattice-structured signalling device with flexible antennae, a protective armour with magnetic plates and electrodes, or simply a pressure suit for outer-space excursions. This clothing fiction was never realized and consequently never used. This, however, is insignificant if we think of the role of utopian projects in the history of human creation, change, and discovery. The graphics of the clothing from the future utilized intense colours and curved shapes similar to mobiles and suggested the use of 8

In The Psychology of Clothes (1931), Flügel differentiates between the fixed costume and modish costume. These two types have opposite attitudes towards space and time. The first type changes slowly, takes up less space, and is different for each social entity. It matches traditional clothing. The second type changes rapidly but is quite similar in all areas of the world that share a culture and communicate in appropriate forms. 9 In 1978, Polhemus called the fixed costume anti-fashion, and the modish costume fashion. His aim was to point out the form of expression that connected fashion and anti-fashion as a reflection of social and political circumstances, the ways they adapted to each other, and the places of their presentation (Polhemus 1978).

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industrial materials. The two-dimensional shape formed by a structural black line had a pronounced gender identity with the representation of female breasts. The fascination with emphasizing gender identity by its discovery through garments was especially present in the series of black and white sketches. The figures are static, arms and legs spread, and the body is reduced to being a carrier of clothing objects. Nonetheless, even though the body was not of primary interest, the clothing objects cannot exist without it. With his monumental garments, Šutej hid the bodies’ characteristics from the observers, thus encouraging them to create their own interpretations. However, clothing objects similar to mobiles contributed to the creation of new silhouettes with added physical value (three heads, four arms). It was a vision or a premonition of a digital age in which humankind is a reflection of a hybrid being woven from human characteristics and new shapes and materials. Artistic visions encouraged questions about the function of clothing in the future, its influence on forming collective and personal identities, and particularly the role of the body trapped in the clothing object of the future. The focus on science and new technologies as the starting point of artistic reflections present in Šutej’s sketches was characteristic of the New Tendencies movement. However, the idea that intuitive artistic production would be replaced by science, technology, and industrial production, in other words, the rational approach, never came to be. This was already evident in the Tendencies 5 exhibition showcasing Victor Vasarely that took place in Zagreb in 1973. It was replaced by new types of art and production that again stemmed from the performance of one artist and their intuitive questioning instead of the collective, rational, and scientific approach. Body art, performance art, land art, and conceptual art became dominant forms. Nonetheless, Šutej continued to share his ideas and experiences of clothes and fashion with the students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he taught from 1978 until he died in 2005.

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Figure 1. Two graphic sheets from Miroslav Šutej’s Antifashion, 1971. Held in the National and University Library in Zagreb. Print collection. Reference number: GZGM 111 šut 3.

3. Miroslav Šutej’s anti-fashion influence on students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb In the 1990s, Miroslav Šutej nurtured a sensibility towards op-art in students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb as well as conducting research into fashion and clothing. A group of female artists called Daklelososi,10 several being Šutej’s students at the Academy, tested the garments’ performative character and the role of the body in their work. According to Anÿelkoviü Džambiü and Bitanga (2021), the group was part of an alternative culture that formed in the post-war years of the 1990s that were marked by uncertainty, trauma, and the imposition of new ideologies. The name Daklelososi was created by the well-tried Dada method of random choice and the merging of that which cannot be merged: choosing words by closing 10 These were Ivana Franke, Gordana Košþec, Jasminka Konþiü, Ana Kadoiü, Ida Mati, Ksenija Domanþiü, Ljubinka Grujin, Danijela Stankoviü, Mia Krkaþ, and IvaMatija Bitanga. Koraljka Kovaþ joined the group later on. The group was further expanded with associate members.

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the eyes and pointing a finger at a randomly chosen page of a book that happened to be on the table (a monograph of the painter and Academy professor Nives Kavuriü Kurtoviü). The two words chosen by the index finger were dakle (Eng. therefore) and lososi (Eng. salmon, plural). They held their first anti-fashion performance as students in 1996 at Gjuro II, a nightclub in Zagreb. The fashion collections were extremely anti-fashion in character. The clothing objects were made of paper, batting, cellophane, wood, wire, canvas, nylon, carpeting, cardboard, and textiles, and the presentation was highly performative. Anti-models whose bodies were not in line with the runway beauty standards of the time were hired (Anÿelkoviü Džambiü and Bitanga 2021). The group introduced humour and intense colours into fashion but did not have a manifesto of social activism or criticism like the Dada performances at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a group of young women who, at a time of transition and an oppressive political atmosphere, entertained themselves and the audience with humour and silliness, exploring the artistic elements of clothing surfaces and the role of the body. Unlike Šutej’s utopian visions of fashion that were never realized and did not focus on the body, Daklelososi’s starting point was always the dialectical role of the body concerning the costume, the audience, the artist, and the wearer. What came out as the result of this goofy stage play was the liberation of the body as well as the liberation from the socially imposed behavioural boundaries embedded in the individual. Liberation encompassed the collective and the personal artistic spirit. In this process, the presented clothes made of alternative materials primarily served as costumes and the reason for the public display of the body that would become liberated through this ritual. Daklelososi’s primary goal was a performance as an artistic act and not the development of clothes as a vision of future fashion, which was true of Šutej. Another of Šutej’s students who was especially engaged in fashion, fabrics, garments, and the body followed in his footsteps in the medium of graphic art. His name is Silvio Vujiþiü (born in 1978).

4. Silvio Vujiþiü: The new language of fashion New Tendencies’ influence on art and even fashion is present to this day. Enthusiasm for the group has continued since the 1980s due to new technologies and computer art. An increasing number of media artists and fashion designers revitalize the principles of New Tendencies and discuss the relationship between art, technology, and social change. Silvio Vujiþiü has emphasized the importance Šutej and his attitudes to fashion have had on his own work in fashion and art. In doing so, he

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describes Šutej as an admirer of the American photographer Richard Avedon and fashion as a phenomenon of innovative artistic expression. He states that Šutej was interested in inventive processes in fashion such as exploring screen printing on textiles, applying printing on hair, or making tattoos based on his own unique drawings as fashion accessories. Vujiþiü adds that Šutej primarily wanted to be a fashion innovator, a pioneer of new ideas, views, and approaches. His interest was not focused on the realization of garments but utopian ideas recorded exclusively in art templates of clothing silhouettes. Šutej’s artistic fashion ideas, especially during mentorship, served as road signs for Vujiþiü’s creative development during his studies. In addition, Vujiþiü was very much influenced by deconstructivism, archiving clothing items or clothing-based forensics, concepts noticeable in the work of Martin Margiela and Hussein Chalayan. He continuously analyzed the language of fashion, questioning the meaning of terms and exploring the boundaries of and the interplay between art and fashion. Combining graphic art with textile and clothing production research, he dealt with the topics of current political and social events in addition to transience, death, and transformation. He is the author of several fashion brands: the E.A. 1/1 S.V.11 ready-to-wear collection for men and women, Label 1/1, which consists of pop-up projects and streetwear, and E.A. 1/1 S.V. UNIQUE PIECE, which offers made-to-measure fashion and is characterized by an experimental approach to fashion, materials, printing, and production processes. His 2006 Exposed to Virus and Fashion collection has been singled out from his rich body of work as the first example of the synergy of new technologies, programming, and the role of the body in fashion (Golub and Mrduljaš 2013). It is important to notice that Vujiþiü devises and single-handedly carries out all the phases of production, from fabric to garment. In the aforementioned collection, he used digital technology in fabric production by first creating an algorithm for weaving that the computer later used to produce the fabric. However, he added an HIV-like virus to the algorithm, which changed the final appearance of the fabric by deforming parts of the motifs. Namely, pixels were replaced by squares in different tones of grey. Each tone was recognized as a new type of weave not compatible with the next weave at all points of connection, which led to the dissolution of the surface and yarn breakage. The result was a mistake in weaving that would be interpreted as waste material in 11 E.A. stands for Épreuves d’Artiste (Eng. artist’s proof): an impression of a print taken during the printmaking process in order to see the state of a plate (or stone, or woodblock). A proof may show an incomplete image, a trial impression, that in modern practice describes an impression of the finished work identical to the numbered copies.

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production. Nevertheless, considering that Vujiþiü’s concept was directed at pointing out the devastating consequences HIV had had since the 1980s, a fabric with a flaw was the expected result. He presented the collection made of wearable virus-infected fabric in 2006 on the premises of the textiles factory Tkz in Zagreb, hiring Berlin porn stars, whose profession is at most risk from HIV, as models. As the pinnacle of the utopian vision of the digital and information age and the synergy of human art and science, the focus is directed on his recent work Soll, a programme made in cooperation with the architect Miro Roman in 2020. Soll is a fashion designer, artificial intelligence, search engine, and an image cloud, and it develops to become something more. He lives on the internet but manifests physically in his fashion brand E.A. 1/1 A.I. His intelligence stems from various places – his database contains the entire E.A. 1/1 S.V. visual body of work spanning 20 years, his textual brain originates from written archives of Vujiþiü’s work, and his inspiration comes from theoretical texts and films. Soll uses a generative adversarial network (GAN) to articulate new concepts of clothes and the faces of the wearers. In order to self-organize images (such can be found on www.ea11sv.com), he uses self-organizing maps (SOMs), i.e., an artificial neuron network (Joka 2021).

Figure 2. Soll fashion design: Look 1_Soll SS21 and Look 2_Soll SS21. © Silvio Vujiþiü. Retrieved from https://ea11sv.com/product-category/ea11ai/.

When Vujiþiü and Roman conceptualized the designer, they wanted to give him a mythological background. According to Soll’s made up genealogy, his biological mother is the personalized search engine Alice_ch3n81 (https://ask.alice-ch3n81.net/), which was devised and created by Roman,

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and his three biological fathers are the Greek gods Chronos and Apollo and the human Silvio Vujiþiü. His name was created by combining individual letters from the names Chronos, Apollo, and Silvio (E.A. 1/1 S.V n.d.b). Soll is artificial intelligence. He acts independently. His work can be reinterpreted, i.e., it can be influenced in the sense of production. He is an instrument of sorts that can be used to communicate by text and images, and anyone who accesses the ThinkSoll search engine on the new website can experience such communication. Soll designs atmospheres, concepts, clothing silhouettes, and clothing/textile textures, as well as anticipates new faces of models. He mirrors images, folds them, identifies objects in them, and anticipates new designs, which he generates by producing visual material. He does not create cuts for garments; they are made by programmes that download them from 3D models. Soll designed a collection that is sold on the website in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and is traded with cryptocurrencies. In the visual presentation of new garments based on Vujiþiü’s photo archive of models and garments in his collections (E.A. 1/1 S.V n.d.a), new constructions of clothing and body are designed. The borders between human tissue and garment do not exist in image formations that merge the body and the clothing object. Hybrid shapes are created, visions of fashion trends and bodies of the near future. Presented in partially blurred outlines, they contribute to the effect of synergy between two entities (human and material) that become one in the performative sense. Their descriptive ambiguity opens a lot of space for the creation of new paradigms concerning their reciprocity, functionality, production, and final appearance. In addition to the collection of fashion images, Soll started producing physical garments, the first of which was presented at the Device_art 7.021 festival of art, robotics, and new technologies at the Museum of Contemporary Art-Zagreb on December 3, 2021. Soll exhibited a coded jacket entitled Your image is my weave and all I want is a racing coat. It is a garment materialized by combining machine intelligence, data from the digital archive of images, and a repertoire of cuts and colours from the biker culture. The jacket was exhibited with the documents detailing its creation. Soll started the design process by collecting images from the Device_art 7.021 catalogue, which is considered theft. By appropriating all accessible data, Soll manipulated the exhibition to highlight the racing coat. In his design process, he sorted and classified objects, colours, concepts, and people in all the images of artistic work. By playing with machine intelligence, the recognition of objects, artworks, and their energies, Soll synthesized his newest fetish – a rare, luxurious garment woven from artists’ works. He did not design the jacket in the usual way: he wrote it. Soll coded

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ten songs into his fantasy of 168 jacquard weaving patterns. After he wrote the jacket, he translated its visual code into twelve colours characteristic of modern biker equipment that were included in his library of fetish. Woven in new colours and indexed by the means with which Device_art speaks of the world, the racing coat became a uniquely coded garment of the moment without the possibility of reproduction (Vizkultura 2021). Soll does not design garments for specific bodies. The identity, appearance, and abilities of the body are of secondary importance to him. He focuses his interest on the clothing object, which he tries to enrich with the ease, fastness and freshness of the race, the softness, the instability and abstract nature of data, and the ingenuity and technical virtuosity of the artist. Added functions of the body by means of a garment—which were areas of interest for different designers and artists such as the members of the Dada movement and futurism, space age designers, Hussein Chalayan, Kosuke Tsumura, Alexander McQueen, or Iris von Herpen—are abandoned by Soll in favour of the new computer language (script) of fashion production. A new script, a new fashion language, and a new form of clothing and textile production are at the centre of his interest, and they bring us back to the 1960s principles of New Tendencies in which art and computer science intertwine. In order to better explain Soll’s affiliation with the new, fashion-artistic expression characterized by new technologies and the importance of the execution technique in the understanding of the artistic process, Roman wove the Greek word techne (IJȑȤȞȘ, tékhnƝ, ‘craft, art’; ancient Greek: [ték‫ހ‬n‫)]ޝܭ‬ (Online Etymology Dictionary n.d.), which he linked to a philosophical term relating to fabrication which comes from the Proto-Indo-European root teks- meaning to weave and to fabricate. If the Old Greek root of the word art contains a synonym for production and weaving, it is quite logical to deepen contemporary production with new technologies in fashion and textile production. The new fashion language of production requires the studying of new reading and writing skills in order to better understand Soll’s fashion-artistic objects. It is as if we are at the turning point of a new age, much like the man at the end of the fifteenth century who was caught off guard by the discovery of a printing machine. Readily available written words and books demanded a new literacy, unlike the reading of frescoes and paintings of the early Middle Ages. In order to understand Soll, we find ourselves at the beginning of a new age in which technologically advanced production created a new fashion vocabulary. The need to study the digital language enables the understanding, monitoring, and guiding of artificial intelligence, and Soll intends to keep the human presence in his production process. In contrast, a garment from the sixteenth century once more

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becomes a priceless status symbol whose worth is hard to determine given its demanding production process.

Figure 3. Soll: Your image is my weave and all I want is a racing coat and Soll coat elements. Device_art 7.021. Photo: Damir Žižiü © Silvio Vujiþiü.

Figure 4. Soll coat patterns. © Silvio Vujiþiü, 2021.

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5. Matija ýop: The new body in art and fashion While the prophetic vision of Silvio Vujiþiü’s contemporary fashion is directed towards a hybrid production of man and artificial intelligence, it is important to note the work of Matija ýop as well. Coming from Croatia, ýop understands the artistic heritage of New Tendencies and the representatives of performance art. He is educated in humanities, technical sciences, and art.12 In addition, he developed his creativity and research interests extensively during his studies at the Royal College of Art in London. He identifies as an artist, although his work includes fashion design as well as costume design. He has stated in conversation13 that he is somewhere in between two fields that are very close to him: art and fashion. He believes that a brand-new field is being formed in contemporary creative expression (a synergy of art and fashion, especially its performative nature) in which he acts as only one of the triertempters (a translation of the invented Croatian word pokušaþ, meaning someone who tries the public, tries their hand at forming and defining a new field, and attempts to create the foundations of a new field14). Fashion is becoming a form of artistic expression regarded as equally valuable as traditional art, which is evident in the inclusion of garments in the permanent exhibition of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. This holds France’s national collection of modern and contemporary art, mostly world masterpieces, and has just recently started to view fashion as part of contemporary art practices. ýop’s clothing products were chosen as the first exhibits in the medium of fashion design in 2021.15 ýop returns to the principles of New Tendencies in his work and involves various associates from the fields of science and art in the idea of collective production. The majority of his work was created in cooperation with architects, computer scientists, and scientists in other natural and technical fields. As part of his education in London, he devoted himself to studying digital language, which led to his employment at the fashion houses of Vivienne Westwood (2019) and Alexander McQueen (2020). His exploration of digital language deepened in different mediums while always 12

He studied Croatian language and literature at the Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek and graduated at the Faculty of Textile Technology in Zagreb. 13 Stated during his guest lecture at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, University of Ljubljana, on December 2, 2021. 14 ýop used this term on the Izvan formata TV show on December 2, 2021. 15 Two clothing products, Type 1 and Type 2, belong to the Object 12-1 series and were designed in 2012. The collection won the Grand Prix Habitus Baltija in Riga in 2013. The third dress, Recollection, Type M1 negative, is part of the Recollection collection created in 2017. According to ýop, all three dresses are the result of specific pursuits of the modular system of building in the medium of fashion.

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focusing on the body, which he abstracts or gives additional value. He is particularly engaged in the exploration of the female body. By investigating the body’s performative character, clothing becomes just one of the segments of the design process. He is more inclined to the concept of an exhibition than that of a fashion show or a fashion performance. The recent exhibition entitled Proces (2021), curated by Tamara Christo at the Croatian Designers Association, was focused on the phases of the exploration of the role of clothing’s surface and its relationship with the body in various mediums. The author does not linger on the garment; it is merely a means of pointing out all the body’s possibilities, which he explores in the digital medium as well. Much like Vujiþiü, he uses a new fashion metalanguage in his research process, a laser cutter in the manufacturing of clothing objects, 3D printing, and hand assembling similar to the puzzle technique. With these procedures, he replaces the traditional cutting and sewing techniques of using scissors, needles, and thread, as space age fashion designers did in the 1960s. However, his work particularly focuses on the body. If one thinks about the term deconstruction in the 1980s and the 1990s, which primarily meant deconstructing the garment and the surface as well as the body, one thinks of the reconsideration of the clothing silhouette in Rei Kawakubo’s Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body collection (1997, widely remembered as the Lumps and Bumps show) or the works of the French artist Orlan and her modifications of the body. ýop thinks of the modification of the body and the body itself as a composition formed by the montage of text, image, sound, and movement. The integral reality of the body is the result of its digitalization and the loss of its foothold in the new media environment. Such a body no longer represents anything, mimics anything, nor presents anything. Converting the body through different mediums negates the very matter of the body. The author’s act is an experimental game with the body’s shape stripped of all meaning. (Christo 2020)

In his digital presentation, the body floats, separated from its natural habitat, evoking its esoteric, transcendental character. It is reminiscent of Šutej’s anti-fashion utopian forms drawn separated from the ground or of McQueen’s 2006 hologram of Kate Moss. ýop’s affinity for the body’s fluidity is evident in the series of photographs gradually stripping the model and leaving her in her natural garment. In addition, ýop examines the procedure of the extraction and destruction of the common fashion language in the form of a book by referring to Plato’s texts. He writes it artistically: by graphically remodelling the words, reminiscent

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of the Dada process, he creates a new imaginary language entitled Plato out of Context. Matija’s Plato out of Context follows in the footsteps of the avant-garde reimagining of language by the methods of Dadaist typopoetry, i.e., a new graphic organization of the text in which avant-garde artists reinterpreted poetic texts as visual sheet music. Matija’s process of deconstructing the language of fashion is precisely that – a revival of the avant-garde destruction of language on the body in the environments of new media. (Christo 2020)

Figure 5. Matija ýop: Digital Body, Type 3 and Morana Type A. Photography: Matija ýop. Performer: Morana Radoþaj. © Matija ýop, 2017.

Figure 6. Matija ýop: Laser cut scan Mask 1 © Matija ýop, 2017.

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Figure 7. Slika. Matija ýop: Recollection, Type M2, 20-1 and Type M2, 20-2. Photography: Vanja Šolin. Performer: Morana Radoþaj © Matija ýop, 2020.

Conclusion This chapter aimed to indicate the diverse approaches and interests in the productions of Croatian artists dealing with garments as utopian visions of digital reality. Šutej’s fashion design was highly influenced by space age fashion and the New Tendencies movement, while Vujiþiü is spellbound by artificial intelligence and its potential for fashion production, which led him to create a completely new fashion language, a reflection of the digital age. In contrast, ýop’s primary interest is the body which, in the digital age, offers a plethora of possibilities for modifications and re-evaluations. The

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produced garment is only one means of the artistic expression of its coexistence with the body. However, in both Vujiþiü and ýop, the production has a strong futuristic character, much like Šutej’s sketches in the late 1960s. In addition, the chapter aimed to emphasize the social, political, and cultural conditions in which the artists worked or were moved to work. Found on the borderline between fashion and artistic exploration, Vujiþiü’s and ýop’s interests focus on the body, the role of clothing, and new technologies as means of realizing clothing products or presenting one’s own concepts. Their primary interest is not the body as a carrier of cultural identities but how the body can be manipulated through different mediums and creative stimuli. As a result, this chapter has presented fashion as a synergy of the artistic and scientific fields, the ideas of which have been present since as far back as the avant-garde artists of the first half of the twentieth century. Musing about fashion as art and the clothing object as an artistic form of expression offered the acquisition of new terminology originating from the field of art. However, since the 1960s, and especially since the appearance of unisex fashion, interest in the role of the garment has moved towards the role of the body as a reflection or construction of identity. In addition, anti-fashion is the topic of writings emphasizing traditional clothing and garments not conditioned by fashion phenomena. This precise term experienced a revolution in the new millennium in the form of Lidewij Edelkoort’s Anti_Fashion, A Manifesto for the Next Decade (2015), who uses the term anti-fashion as a synonym for a new fashion movement that rejects the common patterns of behaviour and production within the wellknown fashion system. The Croatian art historian Vera Horvat Pintariü was of a similar opinion in the 1970s. She used the term anti-fashion to define something completely new in fashion (a new wild culture) that severs the ties with the known concept of fashion. The works of Vujiþiü and ýop were analyzed as visionary ideas of performative clothing concepts of the digital age, similar to the aforementioned meaning of anti-fashion. Vujiþiü’s artificial intelligence, as a hybrid body of a man and a machine, designs, manufactures and presents fashion collections and clothing objects. ýop’s digital reflections focus on the possibilities and new values of the body presented as a frail metaphysical structure in clothing similar to a materialized fragile border. As observers and participants of the digital age, we are faced with the need to learn about the new body and a new fashion language.

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References Anÿelkoviü Džambiü, Ljubica, and Iva-Matija Bitanga. 2021. “Nježna kontrakultura 1990–ih.” Kulturpunkt.hr. https://www.kulturpunkt.hr/content/njezna-kontrakultura-1990–ih. Accessed December 14, 2021. Bousfield, Jonathan. 2021. “Behind the Yugoslav art movement that predicted the of digital art.” The Calvert Journal, October 27, 2021. https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/13223/behind-theyugoslav-art-movement-that-predicted-the-birth-of-digital-art. Buxbaum, Gerda, ed. 2005. Icons of Fashion: The 20th Century. New York: Prestel. Christo, Tamara. 2020. “MATIJA ýOP: PROCES (9. – 20.10.2020.).” HDD, October 6, 2020. http://dizajn.hr/blog/matija-cop-proces/. Craik, Jennifer. 1993. The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion. London: Routledge. Denegri, Ješa. 2003. Prilozi za drugu liniju: kronika jednog kritiþarskog zalaganja. Zagreb: Hortezky. —. 2007. Exat 51 i Nove tendencije: umjetnost konstruktivnog pristupa. Zagreb: Izdanja Antibarbaus. Duda, Igor. 2005. U potrazi za blagostanjem. O povijesti dokolice i potrošaþkog društva u Hrvatskoj 1950–ih i 1960–ih. Zagreb: Srednja Europa. E.A. 1/1 S.V. n.d.a. E.A. 1/1 S.V. https://ea11sv.com/. Accessed December 11, 2021. —. n.d.b. “Soll.” ea11sv.com. https://ea11sv.com/soll/. Accessed December 11, 2021. Entwistle, Joanne. 2015. The Fashioned body: Fashion, Dress & Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Evans, Caroline. 2005. Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, Deathliness. New Haven, CT-London: Yale University Press. Flügel, John Carl. 1931. The Psychology of Clothes. London: Institute of Psycho-Analysis and Hogarth Press. Fritz, Darko. n.d. “Digitalna umjetnosti u hrvatskoj 1968–1984” [Digital Art in Croatia 1968–1984]. Tehniþki muzej Nikola Tesla. http://digitalna-umjetnost-u-hrvatskoj.eu. Accessed November 10, 2021. Gnamuš, Nadja. 2021. “Iconoclasm and Creation of the Avant-Garde.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, edited by Krešimir Purgar, 167–186. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Golub, Marko and Maroje Mrduljaš. 2013. “Silvio Vujiþiü: Sva umjetnost je živa stvar | All Art is a Living Thing.” Oris 81: 196–213. http://www.oris.hr/files/pdf/zastita/29/Oris.81_S.Vujicic_Interview.pdf Horvat Pintariü, Vera. 1971. Antimoda. Zagreb: Atelier Brane Horvat. Ince, Kate. 1998. “Operations of Redress: Orlan, the Body and Its Limits.” Fashion Theory 2, no. 2: 111–128. Joka, Saša. 2021. “Modni alkemiþar Silvio Vujiþiü o revolucionarnom dizajnu i umjetnoj inteligenciji.” Elle, November 8, 2021. https://elle.hr/Moda/Dizajneri/a31183/Modni-alkemicar-SilvioVujicic-o-revolucionarnom-dizajnu-i-umjetnoj-inteligenciji.html. Kamitsis, Lydia. 1999. Paco Rabanne. London: Thames & Hudson. Kim, Sung Bok. 1998. “Is Fashion Art?” Fashion Theory 2, no. 1: 51–72. Kiš, Patricia. 2013. “Retrospektiva M. Šuteja: Nakon pola stoljeüa ‘Bombardiranje oþnog živca’ stiže iz MoMA-e.” Jutarnji list, June 26, 2013. https://www.jutarnji.hr/kultura/art/nakon-pola-stoljeca-%E2%80 %98bombardiranje-ocnog-zivca%E2%80%99–stize-iz-moma-e1156256. Loschek, Ingrid. 2009. When Clothes Become Fashion. New York: Bloomsbury. Makoviü, Zvonko. 1975. “Miroslav Šutej.” Život umjetnosti 22–23: 92–105. —. 1996. Miroslav Šutej: retrospektiva grafike. Zagreb: Kabinet grafike HAZU. https://www.ipu.hr/content/zivot-umjetnosti/ZU_22–23–1975_ 092–105_Makovic.pdf. Martin, Richard. 1999. “A Note: Art and Fashion, Viktor & Rolf.” Fashion Theory 3, no. 1: 109–120. Miller, Sanda. 2007. “Fashion as Art: is Fashion Art?” Fashion Theory 11, no. 1: 25–40. Online Etymology Dictionary. n.d. “Teks-.” Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/*teks-. Accessed December 12, 2021. Pintariü, Snježana. 2013. Šutej: retrospektiva: Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, 29.6.-3.11.2013. Zagreb: Muzej suvremene umjetnosti. Polhemus, Ted. 1978. Fashion & Anti-Fashion: Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment. London: Thames & Hudson. Simonþiþ, Katarina Nina. 2019. “Modni dizajn i kriza.” In Dizajn i Kriza [Design and Crisis], edited by Irfan Hošiü, 202–229. Sarajevo: Buybook. Stern, Radu. 2004. Against Fashion Clothing as Art, 1850–1930. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Turner Vuþetiü, Flora. 2008. “Vruüe teme hladnog rata.” Vijenac 382, October 23, 2008. https://www.matica.hr/vijenac/382/vruce-teme-hlad nog-rata-4131/.

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Vizkultura. 2021. “Odjevni predmet istkan od digitalnih podataka.” Vizkultura, December 16, 2021. https://vizkultura.hr/odjevni-predmetistkan-od-digitalnih-podataka/. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1985. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: Virago.

CHAPTER FIVE ICONIC BODIES: SEMIOTICS OF MASCULINITY IN FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART HISTORY KREŠIMIR PURGAR

In The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, dedicated to the influence of the fashion system on political, economic, and social processes in modern globalized societies, Gilles Lipovetsky devotes a chapter to the postmodern phase of advertising in which its role is equated with the fashion system in general. In his view, modern advertising introduces communication processes into a radically new state marked by a break with the monocentric belief that the media meet only the frivolous needs of the people in order for those same media to serve a system of totalitarian political control. It is the fashion logic of advertising that introduces into communication processes a kind of dialectical principle according to which resistance to totalitarianism is established by enjoying superficial pleasures and fantasies, and it is the principle of personal pleasure and freedom that embodies a fundamentally new role in fashion and advertising. However, the principle of freedom is not necessarily or automatically correlated with the advanced civilizational achievements that are supposed to make freedom possible by definition. Lipovetsky says that in advertising as a paradigm of modern communication, depth has disappeared and everything takes place on the surface; mere plays on words took over the struggle for the meaning of those words. The creative intelligence of the advertising and fashion industry is looking for great ideas that do not live longer than one season: if fashion is a fairytale land of illusions, advertising is undoubtedly a fairytale land of communication (Lipovetsky 1994, 156–168). In a radically postmodernist vein, Lipovetsky acknowledges the democratic potential of fashion and advertising, as well as their impact on the freedom of individuals, but acknowledges that this freedom is limited by pre-set – albeit numerous – choices:

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the power of advertising is paradoxical: crucial for businesses but without major consequences for individuals, it acts effectively only in the sphere of the inessential and the irrelevant. Conforming to the superficiality of its own messages, advertising itself is only a surface power, a sort of zerodegree power as measured by the standard of individual existence. It undoubtedly carries some weight in individual decisions, but only in the state of relative indifference that tends to be generated by the expanding universe of industrial hyperchoice. Things have to be put back into perspective. The influence of advertising does not abolish the reign of human freedom. Rather, its action is exercised at the lowest level of that freedom , the level where a state of indifference reigns, where there is an excess of choice among scarcely differentiated options. (Lipovetsky 1994, 165)

Lipovetsky, therefore, does not consider the function of the media and their frivolous content to be totalitarian, acknowledging that the freedom of choice of irrelevant subjects is only the lowest form of consumerist democracy and demanding that we look at this problem from a different perspective. In the wake of his media dialectic is what Julia Emberley calls the “fashion apparatus” within which the freedom to create one’s own identity codes is limited by the key problem that these codes are always precreated thanks to the media and that the concept of fashion and fashion advertising is based on the insoluble internal contradiction of fashion as a system: Inscribed in the fashion ethic is the insistence that fashion does not want to restrict individual imagination or imperialize the body for its own interest. What the fashion apparatus offers, then, is not fashion per se, but the opportunity for the individual to create a fashion, to liberate oneself from the fetters of a mundane daily existence that denies pleasure, joy, a sense of self and an experience of being. And yet, in order to produce the space of desire for that “liberation” the fashion apparatus must ensure that sufficient alienation, self-loathing, boredom and sterility exist. In the necessary production of its own contradictions, the fashion apparatus holds the subject within a spectrum of choices which close at the extreme ends of total freedom, on the one hand, and absolute control, on the other. (Emberley 1987, 48)

In my opinion, the perspective that will not bring us back to the vicious circle of media and capital on the one hand and identity as a consequence of capital on the other is the one through which the concepts of fashion and advertising and their creative effects are rarely observed: it is the historicalartistic connection of the semiotics of the body; more precisely, it is the representation of masculinity through a diachronic perspective that includes

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both the artefacts of Old Masters and the “frivolous” sphere of fashion and advertising. In order to embark on this endeavour, we must agree in advance on some of the theses by which visual studies establish their theoretical and social relevance. Firstly, we must agree that canonized works of art can be used for “non-artistic” purposes, that is, to use them for this study not only as art objects but also, and above all, as a kind of forensic evidence in the process of diagnosing image phenomena. Secondly, we need to try to see the “trivial” images of fashion advertising from a perspective that I would preliminarily call a transhistorical image system. The unquestionable value and cognitive power of art objects as the dominance of selectively chosen items would thus enter into a dialogue with trivial images of “irrelevant” fashion photography and thus pave the way for a comprehensive model of reception that is more appropriate to the epoch of digital images. One of the earliest systematic scientific reflections on the semiotic aspects of advertising, after the first insights of Roland Barthes, certainly belongs to Judith Williamson and her book Decoding Advertisements (1994), originally published in 1977. Her analyses of a wide range of examples from the advertising practices of the 1970s may seem somewhat outdated today, but this is only because advertising practices have changed significantly over the last four decades, not because her examples have lost their paradigmatic validity. What remains unchanged in the universal hermeneutics of commercial images, which makes the author’s interpretation of singular advertising campaigns convincing, is the functionality and fundamental logic of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic theory based on structural linguistics, which Williamson consistently pursued. In order to explain her own method of criticizing the content of forms and the reasons for applying semiotics to advertising artefacts, she claims in the book that we can only reach a much more interesting level of meaning of advertising texts, as well as a completely new meaning, if we uncover the mechanism by which they produce meaning and if we dare analyze the very paradigm by which their inner “language of form” works. Williamson contends that what the advertisement “says” is only what it claims to say: it is part of the “deceptive mythology of advertising” close to Lipovetsky’s thesis, which, as we have seen, leads us to believe that advertising is frivolous, easy to understand, and above all a transparent means of “message” in its background. Unlike the French philosopher, who focused on the socioconsumerist aspect of advertising, the American theorist enters the issue of the relationship between text and image (visual discursiveness) in a specifically semiotic way and compares concepts such as form and content (advertising messages) with the classical terms signifier and signified, which is a method we will use systematically here as well.

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Now we have to consider what kind of images we want or can talk about, i.e. whether the image artefacts from which we commence our analysis, both art pictures and magazine ads, can remain in the same categorical status as they were as “raw” material. In other words, do they irreversibly lose their intrinsic qualities in the non-ideological method of visual studies, the qualities that led us to include them in this diachronic analysis in the first place? I think semiotics can help us here to overcome both historical and categorical differences. Charles Levin argues that people think of images primarily as memories from the domain of their own experience, as an ensuing effect of what is seen or experienced, as something that is subsequently created – as an “afterimage.” Images as a subsequent experience are a disciplinary field of semiotics, and everything we can experience as an image fact (words, dreams or pictures themselves) can be imagined to be composed of individual signifying elements – signifiers – that form systems of re-presentation (Levin 1987, 99–111). Levin argues that Jean Baudrillard’s political economy of sign, i.e. the simulacrum as its last stage, is a logical extension of Jacques Lacan’s “sociologized unconscious,” which in Baudrillard’s case turns into a subject as “the signifier of another signifier.” In this way, the whole culture is reduced to a system, that is, to a “pure unadulterated code,” and is then inevitably subjected to the action of unpredictable effects and intersemiotic leaps (Levin 1987, 101). In the structuralist and especially poststructuralist opposition between nature and culture, the latter is always perceived as a formalistic game of codes, conventions and laws. The essence of the problem of interpreting the world and culture as signs, according to Levin, is the concept and practice of deconstructing the semiotic trinity of signifiers, signified and referents, which always prevents the completion of any process of signification and creates an unbroken chain of ever new meanings – semiosis. Visual studies, then, tries to insert itself into the process of semiosis and, like magnetic resonance imaging, give a synchronic picture of the system as a current cross-section of different processes, but one we can actually and fully comprehend, not only as a value judgement or diagnosis of historical course. In this sense, visual studies appropriates both semiotic and deconstructive tactics: it does so by assuming, first, that “the signifier is the formal starting point of rationalist thought” and, second, that it is “the discrete manipulable segment which makes analysis, abstraction, and substitution possible” (Levin 1987, 103–104). However, as Levin suggests, “deconstruction merely plays with such potentialities, without really questioning the concealment of the signifier’s origin in an operational reduction” (104), and it considers that we must begin with “writing” in order to be “properly directed toward the formal and formalizable status of the

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word, and not toward the body which speaks and writes it” (Levin 1987, 103–104, emphasis added). I will try here to find a way between the semiotic unrestrainable production of meaning on the one hand and the deconstructionist questioning of the sense we make of sign production on the other.

1. The naked and the nude: overcoming the oppositions Art and fashion intersect much more often than we may notice in everyday situations. We encounter concepts such as minimalist, retro or baroque styles relatively often and connect them equally to individual artistic epochs from recent or distant history as well as to contemporary aesthetic paradigms. Of course, we do not recognize social or artistic conventions only through style, although when we talk about fashion, style is the most recognizable distinguishing category. However, if we add narrative, iconographic or symbolic aspects to style attributes and use them in a radical diachronic leap, we can come up with very interesting insights. In the photograph by Jürgen Teller made for the Marc Jacobs perfume Bang, we see an almost mythical version of a man who possesses all the characteristics of an ideal male, from regular facial features adorned with a short beard to perfectly developed musculature (Fig. 1). The only “problem” is that we do not see the ideal male in a dominant position that complements his strength but instead find him in a position, as Gianni Vattimo would say, of a “weak subject” – in fact, in this case, a sexual object. It is not so important whether we feel lust for the character portrayed as a man who offers himself to the gaze of someone of the same or opposite sex; more important is the fact that he is offered to everyone equally. His musculature here is not a symbol of power but an aesthetic element in the service of desire.

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Fig. 1. Jürgen Teller for Marc Jacobs Bang perfume, 2010

But are we sure that this is a consequence of sexual liberation, which only recently gave men the opportunity to feel, act, and perform like women without the condemnation of the dominant streams in society, or have we already seen something similar before, for instance, two thousand years ago? The ancient Roman sculpture known as the Barberini Faun dating back to 220 BC (Fig. 2) was a symbol of homoerotically expressed beauty, an ideal that, centuries later, inspired artists such as Caravaggio and Michelangelo, that is, all those who were convinced that male beauty should not be equated with strength and domination but rather should be combined with iconographic narratives of the female body that typically surrenders or is being surrendered – to gaze, desire or physical contat. The Barberini Faun, as well as Marc Jacobs’ Bang, represents the male body as a contingent site of beauty. In order to do so, both representations must first deal with deconstructing the myth of man as a source of superior power, thus releasing the male body from the obligation to symbolize a priori domination. If it wants to draw attention to his beauty, the perfect male body must take on the elements of depicting a female body that has been adapted and shaped according to the canons of beauty for millennia of art history – both iconographically and stylistically.

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Fig. 2. Barberini Faun, ca. 220 BC. Marble copy by a Hellenistic school of the Pergamene school, or a Roman sculptor of a bronze original

In her seminal book Seeing Through Clothes, Anne Hollander points us to one aspect of the erotic portrayal of the female body through art history that could give this discussion of the male body a broader perspective. Hollander notes that undressing, taking off clothes, or revealing only certain parts of the body are clear authorial tactics of sexualizing the body and adapting it to the heterosexual taste of the observer (Hollander 1993, according to Clark 1956). She builds on Kenneth Clark’s well-known theses about the difference between nakedness and nudity, where the former word “implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition” and the latter “carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed” (Clark 1956, 3). Although Hollander notes that this sharp distinction can hardly be applied to all examples of naked body representation in practice, she considers it a useful operative thesis because

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it serves very well in dealing with the relation of any unclothed image to its absent clothing. If one follows Clark’s rule, the naked figure always appears to have some connection with actual garments, usually contemporary; the nude implies drapery. The blurring of the distinction, however, can itself become a dynamic element in nude art, deliberately used to intensify the effect of the image. Artists have made capital out of the possibility of portraying neutral-looking, Classicized bodies emerging from real clothes or idealized drapery accompanying very realistic naked bodies. (Hollander 1993, 157)

In other words, it was in the interstice of the idealization and profanation of the body without clothes that the path to timeless beauty actually lay: between the nude body as an aesthetic concept of value on the one hand and the naked, sensual body of flesh and blood on the other. By approaching reality and moving away from it, artists controlled the degree of transgressiveness of their own works by programmatically guiding the erotic imagination of the observer beyond the limits of moral acceptability. In the TV commercial for Paco Rabanne’s Invictus directed by Alexandre Courtes, we see postmodernist camp-pastiche in which the visual aesthetics of the Champions League as a metaphor for the gladiatorial arena are combined with visual elements of ancient mythology (Fig. 3). In our case, the main role is played by the “supreme god Zeus,” embodied in the footballer as absolute divination, and a seemingly important role is played by female figures, friends of the gods – and also the goddesses themselves of beauty, creativity, nature and fertility – Aglaea, Euphrosyne and Thalia. Admittedly, in the less antiquating vision of this video, female characters can be interpreted simply as cheerleaders and Zeus as Gareth Bale, but this in no way diminishes the relevance of the example offered. We are interested here, first of all, in the visualization of the male body and the conditions under which it symbolizes the general and specific characteristics of masculinity. We must pay attention to Hollander’s thesis that the most creative space of artistic activity is the one between two variants of representation: a classicized body covered with real clothes and idealized drapery from under which a realistically naked body emerges. Let us first look at whether female characters fit the aforementioned dialectics: the goddess girls are covered in light white fabrics that do not seem to be specifically tailored to fit only the female body or belong to a particular fashion style era. These are simple, timeless pieces of fabric that serve the universalistic or transhistorical vision of the entire video. Female bodies, which can be described as completely in line with the classical ideal of beauty, also contribute to this. Thus, the representation of the female body here remains in the domain of the Western Christian model of beauty,

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which, in its historical and artistic development, is related to classical aesthetic ideals, and therefore, according to Hollander’s thesis, female characters should not be particularly artistically interesting for our case.

Fig. 3. Paco Rabanne Invictus (movie still), directed by Alexandre Courtes, 2013

The counterpoint to this is, of course, the male character of “Zeus” (or “Gareth Bale”), whose idealized body is consciously profaned by neoGothic tattoos and underwear like a tracksuit or other casual piece of attire. In this way, Zeus as a mythical deity or untouchable football superstar gets surprisingly close to us and de-spectacularizes the star system and media glamour. Here, we are in the field of a typical advertising strategy of getting closer to distant worlds and realizing dreams in the mass media world of illusions. But if we look back four centuries, we will see that a very similar dialectic of nudity and divination was applied by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio in his John the Baptist of 1604 (Fig. 4). Caravaggio’s handsome adolescent does not, in his bodily constitution, reveal the symbolic significance his character has in the biblical New Testament narratives; immersed in his own world, with a cross so turned that it is barely visible, devoid of any holiness or hint of the space in which he finds himself, John the Baptist would seem entirely like a “boy next door” were it not for that sumptuous crimson drapery that gives the scene a surreal theatrical impression. In the same way that the divine body of “Zeus” from Paco Rabanne approached ordinary mortals with the lower part of his tracksuit, so Caravaggio’s frail body of John the Baptist approached the divine spheres thanks to his heavy red drapery.

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Fig. 4. Caravaggio, St John the Baptist in the wilderness, 1604; oil on canvas

Mieke Bal also draws our attention to the iconic sexuality of Caravaggio’s John the Baptist, but she explains that the visual power of the represented body depends on the crucial role of the observer. The Dutch theorist first refers to the many interpretations of this painting in terms of the artist’s alleged same-sex orientation, acknowledging its homoerotic potential that stems from the figure’s characteristic spread legs, the parts of the drapery and knees as phallic symbols, or the painter’s illusionist skills; all this makes John the Baptist a real and accessible person. However, what, in her opinion, completely breaks the barrier between representation and reality in this painting is the “second-person narrative,” the impression that the painting addresses the viewer by including him in his own narrative world. Unlike most images that tell the story of something that happened to someone else – that is, they represent “in the third person” – in the case of

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the second-person narrative, John the Baptist becomes you, and the observer of the image becomes me. Bal explains it further as follows: As tyrannical as love itself, the painted surface dictates how the “second person” must confirm the first person’s subjectivity, the kind of subjectivity it wishes to be produced and hence how the viewer must be engaged: not as a bare, abstract, theoretical, disembodied retina, but as a full participant in a visual event in which the body takes effect. The second-personhood I am elaborating here, then, is qualified as erotic so as to insure this bodily participation. (Bal 1999, 189)

Although Bal adds elements of narrative theory and Lacanian theory of the gaze to the functions of the body and clothing in the Italian Baroque master, the dialectical principle that drives the processes of the cognition of masculinity has the same effect on identifying the observer with the main protagonist in both Paco Rabanne’s advert and Caravaggio; the observer imagines that the strong body of the “deity” can at least for a moment become his own, just as a weak body can become a symbol of the power of the observer’s faith.

2. Bodies without clothes: playing on toughness and vulnerability Let us now turn our attention to the painting Susanna and the Elders by Jacopo Tintoretto of 1556 (Fig. 5). The constitution of the erotic dimension of this representation takes place outside the domain of the body in the narrow sense, i.e. outside the body as an object. Although the main character is present in the full element of her own femininity, the painting achieves its erotic effect by repeatedly focusing the viewer’s gaze around the body and next to the body. Anne Hollander draws our attention to pieces of clothing, a robe, a towel and a corset, which Susanna took off herself by recklessly throwing them to the ground (Hollander 1993, 160). Although the rejection of clothing necessarily leads to the revelation of the body, what crucially contributes to the erotic effect is not the de-idealized nakedness of the female character but the intention to expose her body to a view of the other. Since this mannerist painting retains the concept of idealizing the Old Testament motif, the realism in it is achieved first by the actual clothes that Susanna took off, and then by the implied act of undressing that preceded the represented scene. In this way, Tintoretto’s painting combines the idealization of a body shaped according to the canons of late Cinquecento beauty with the de-idealized, profane effect of sexual stimulation, very close

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to the contemporary depictions of readily available perfection that Gilles Lipovetsky speaks of.

Fig. 5 Jacopo Tintoretto, Susanna and the Elders, 1556; oil on canvas

One possible example of this is a Dolce & Gabbana advertisement in which we see the male sex symbol Matthew McConaughey dressed in unbuttoned shirt, like a modern, shaved version of the ancient Roman faun sitting reclining in an armchair with soft, oversized pillows in, we can easily assume, the lobby of a five-star hotel (Fig. 6). What further eroticizes McConaughey’s idealized body in this ad is the same thing that de-idealizes and makes available Susanna’s beauty, and that is the preceding context of the body offered for visual consumption: in Tintoretto’s case, it is the striptease Susanna performed in front of lustful old men, and in McConaughey’s case, it is his implicit role as a high-class male prostitute that anyone can own for certain financial compensation. We could define the preceding context as something that we do not physically see in the picture itself, but we recognize it as a potential consequence of the events that preceded the presented motif, like the reason or motivation for which we see the characters in exactly the position in which we find them, and not in some other. The preceding context is, on the one hand, highly speculative in nature – for we can never really know what preceded the scene; the reality

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of the image encompasses only one infinitesimal moment, like two photographs that can never be completely identical. On the other hand, the represented scene can uncover a lot of details that can significantly reduce the unknowns about “what really happened.” This is especially true of historical events for which there is a well-established cause-and-effect sequence of why and how something happened (see more in Purgar 2013, 116–126). In both cases, the body is the visual focus of the image, but the beauty of the body does not derive primarily from its aesthetic appeal but the illusion of democratic enjoyment of the body of perfect beauty.

Fig. 6. Matthew McConaughey in a Jean Baptiste Mondino advertisement for The One perfume by Dolce & Gabbana, 2008

Let us stay a little longer in the interstice marked by nakedness and nudity, reality and myth, exposing our own and other people’s bodies. Hollander claims that the sexual charge of the image is much greater when the naked or nude body is present together with the clothed one, and one of the traditional places of the exposure of the male body to the eyes of clothed persons is the motif of mourning Jesus in the Pietà. The Gospel of John in the New Testament describes the moment when the soldiers took off Jesus’ clothes: When the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his clothes, dividing them into four shares, one for each of them, with the undergarment remaining. This garment was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom. “Let’s not

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tear it,” they said to one another. “Let’s decide by lot who will get it.” This happened that the scripture might be fulfilled that said, “They divided my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.” So this is what the soldiers did. (John 23–24)

According to what we have established so far, as well as according to Clark’s definition, the body of Christ is nude because it is an idealization of the body as a symbol of sacrifice, but it is also naked because it testifies to the embodiment of the divine ideal: “God became man.” In contrast to this undeniable erotic component of the nude/naked body prompted by the inevitable views of others, Hollander believes that conventions have been adopted that de-eroticize Christ’s body, such as his characteristic beard, long hair and the iconic depiction of his head. We never experience “holy nudity” as trivial nakedness. This principle becomes clear only when it is absent in a painting, for example, as in Sandro Botticelli’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (Fig. 7). “In the Botticelli, the beautiful and beardless Christ is draped nakedly and dramatically across the Virgin’s knees, and the attendant clothed company seems overcome, not by his death but by his obvious attractions—especially the women in the foreground” (Hollander 1993, 179).

Fig. 7. Sandro Botticelli, Lamentation over the dead Christ, 1490–1492; oil on panel

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The motif of the Lamentation, of course, has been portrayed in art history in its rudimentary form of pure suffering and deep grief as well. Therefore, depending on the viewer’s interest in the motif of the body, the ensuing meaning will shift from a mimetic interest in narrativizing the scene to an interest in structuring the image itself, to what Max Imdahl calls the Ikonik (Imdahl 1996). The two examples that follow, one classical Renaissance and the other contemporary, show well the iconic power of recognizable symbols or, in the semiotic terms of Barthes’ mythology, how the signified becomes the signifier of the second degree – the myth. The Pietà of Andrea Mantegna is best known for the radical perspective distortion used in it (Fig. 8). Although it does not fully correspond to the Renaissance central perspective, the prevailing impression is that in this painting, the very structuring of reality according to the fifteenth century ideal of representation has become its most important element, that which the contemporary observer, and especially the trained art historian, will first see in it. Mantegna’s “extreme perspectivism” in this painting points very well to the duality of the most famous modern theory of perspective, that of Erwin Panofsky (see more in Holly 1985; Panofsky 1996; Somaini 2005). The German art historian warns of the fundamental contradiction of the system of pictorial representation based on precise mathematical-geometric projections, calling “symbolic form” what Leon Battista Alberti, in his treatise De Pictura of 1435, believed was a “finestra aperta,” that is, more than just a trope – a window into the real world. Panofsky explains the contradiction of the central perspective by acting to be the most objective method of representing the subjective position of the artist. Namely, each point of view in paintings with a central perspective represents a unique and, for each painting, different physical (but also creative) position of the painter/observer. At the same time, uniqueness is related to the mathematical universality of the principles of representing what only the observer, from their unique position in space, can see.

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Fig. 8. Andrea Mantegna, The Lamentation, 1480; tempera on canvas

The radical perspective shortening of the figure of Christ in Mantegna possesses a mathematical error because in the existing view, the legs in the foreground would have to be significantly larger and the head in the background smaller. Mantegna, therefore, subjectively emphasized the priorities of his own “point of view” at the expense of objective presentation. Diverting attention to the way of articulating three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional picture plane can be called a kind of metapictorial strategy of the author in which the elements from which something is made (the painting, in this case) are more important than what the painting represents thematically. The dramatic and deeply emotional act of mourning the dead Jesus, as the presumed primary meaning of this image, gave way to the very act of representation as an utterly unusual and all the more specific meaning. When the specificity of the mode of representation itself is used as a theme in another picture, even many centuries later, then we can say that the authentic or primary meaning became a signifier of the second degree and took on the status of a myth. This is exactly what happened in the historical parallel between Mantegna’s Dead Christ and Benetton’s advertisement depicting a crushed family gathered by the sickbed of their dying son. Of course, the context of

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the son’s imminent death in Benetton’s ad is completely different from the Gospel motif, and it is, as we know, a 1990 photograph by Therese Frare depicting David Kirby, a terminally ill AIDS patient (Fig. 9). Although it was published in the high-circulation Life magazine and later won the highest acclaim of photographic criticism, this picture probably would never have become so famous if it had not been republished as part of Benetton’s advertising campaign, which allegedly had the noble goal of raising awareness of AIDS, but which was eventually remembered, like the photograph itself, as just another weapon in Benetton’s strategy of shock. To the theorist of visual studies, this ad is less interesting as a contribution to the discussion of the moral implications of using the diseased individual to increase the profits and social prestige of a world-renowned corporation and more as a confirmation of the transhistorical importance of the signification game of semiotics in the unbroken chain of semiosis. I would like to speculate here that Frare’s photograph would not be so significant if it had not been published in the context of Benetton’s ad, nor would Benetton’s ad be included in so many moral debates if there were no direct connection – a semiotic leap – between the iconic aspect of Mantegna’s dead Christ and the image of the dying David Kirby. This connection, however, cannot be theological either – it is a symbol of the Christian faith on the one hand and an ordinary man on the other; we cannot establish it even according to the degree of credibility of the event – on the one hand, it is an allegorical depiction of death as the atonement for the sins of all mankind, and on the other, it is an individual death as it happens every day. What connects these two depictions, however, is the visual semiotics of the sick/helpless/dead body: due to its recognizability, the dead Christ in a very shortened perspective has become a metonymic sign or epitome of the suffering of the male body, which eventually turned into another iconic body – this time in the form of the spectacular de-epitomizing of suffering in the cynical exploitation of the agony of David Kirby.

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Fig. 9. Theresa Frare for Benetton; art director: Oliviero Toscani, 1990

Benetton’s advertisement used Mantegna’s meaning of male suffering through a similar visual representation (perspective shortening, the family gathered) as a starting point in the function of advertising and its message, which is significantly different from the original religious motif; thus, the meaning of Mantegna’s dead Christ became in Benetton, in the person of David Kirby, a signifier of the second degree, something that in a completely new constellation of the late twentieth century would create entirely new meanings unique to its own time. But did we get closer to the “final” meaning of the ad with this insight, or did we just get into a problem we did not intend to get into, accepting the methodology of the signifying chains and leaving the realm of meaning empty again? In other words, the question arises as to whether we can approach Benetton’s ad as a semiotically explicable phenomenon of metapictorial commentary on Renaissance painting as the first point in the chain of semiosis or whether it is, for example, a compassionless postmodernist commentary on the society of the spectacle about which other humanistic disciplines, those more morally “sensitive” than semiotics, could have much more to say. I believe that this is a process in which ethical issues of the role of images cannot be left aside, and the role of image theory will be fulfilled only if it starts systematically uncovering the problems arising from the encounters of historical images with their contemporary “avatars.”

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3. Ambivalent bodies: Between scopophilic power and endangered masculinity In one of his articles dealing with French painting in the transition period between classicism and romanticism, Norman Bryson, one of the founders of visual studies and a representative of so-called new or critical art history, discusses Laura Mulvey’s theses from her world-famous essay “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” (Mulvey 1975) and calls into question her basic thesis set out in that text. In the context of Bryson’s polemical claims, I think two of his statements are most important to our discussion. Firstly, he says that Mulvey’s thesis that, in the scopophilic and voyeuristic urge, the male gaze is automatically and by definition directed towards the woman as a visual and consequently sexual object cannot be correct. Secondly, he believes that the identification with the characters on the canvas is not due to scopophilia and voyeurism, that is, the Freudian unconscious, but due to visual-cultural reasons, i.e. the conventions of representation (Bryson 1994, 230). Let us first deal with Mulvey’s first statement by recalling her basic theses. Due to the specifics of the cinematographic apparatus, observers experience film diegesis as an extension of reality and completely surrender to the reality of the film image. Starting from the male character as the default, the male viewer always identifies with the male character in the film, and identification with events on the film screen always takes place along these predefined parallel axes: a man with a man, a woman with a woman. Because, according to Mulvey, classic Hollywood narrative films favoured normative heterosexuality and the fundamentally subordinate role of women as objects of male scopophilic enjoyment, so well-established gender-taking processes within film reality could only produce identical normative roles in the real world. Mulvey suggests that this process is easy for the male spectator, especially in those cases where such filmic codes as the view-pointing of shot/reverse shot establish the camera as seeing from the point of view of the male character or intra-diegetic hero. But the ease with which such codes invite the male spectator into the space and landscape within the film should not, I think, be taken at face value. Rather, ease of identification here might be thought of as portraying an “enchanted” relationship between male spectator and male character […]. One might suggest here that the streamlined ease of projection that invites the male spectator to align himself with the perspective of the male hero in fact exists to simplify and to pacify the mechanism of intermale identification—which I suggest is a much thornier business than the enchanted fiction of identificatory ease proposes. (Bryson 1994, 230–231)

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The problem, then, is not in the mechanism of identification itself but in what is truly seen in an image (film, television, or painting on canvas). The problem is, first of all, in the historical dimension of the visual construction of masculinity, which brings us to Bryson’s second thesis. Namely, he believes that if men can learn anything from feminism, then it is the realization that gender is a cultural construction, both for men and women. If they accept this realization, men become much more sensitive to how they are portrayed in different contexts of commercial and artistic representations and become aware that any visual representation can testify to their hetero, homo, trans or androgynous gender role. Berkeley Kaite advocates a psychoanalytic approach to this problem, arguing, for example, that when viewing pornographic material, identification takes place through the observed body as a new form of discursiveness, not just through the body as a medium of narration (i.e. nakedness) in the narrow sense. In this process of visual imagining (because pornographic imagination creates powerful mental images), “specular identification” is key; it can no longer be explained by traditional dichotomies of watching/being watched and male/female because pornography allows for many unexpected identifications in “oscillating looks”: “The look is possessed by both the reader and the subject of the representation; thus subject positions of male/female are only as good as their discourses: i.e. when talking of the power of the gaze, designations of masculine/feminine do not represent a picture of unity but are themselves unstable” (Kaite 1987, 152). Kaite then refers to Paul Willemen, who introduces the notion of the “fourth look,” i.e. a kind of negotiation of looks and enunciations that take place in the scopic field, when shooting with film cameras, engaging views that capture certain angles, motives or scenes. Willemen writes: “When the scopic drive is brought into focus, then the viewer also runs the risk of becoming the object of look” (Kaite 1987, 152). To explain the process of identification as primarily visual and less psychologically conditioned, Bryson draws a very long transhistorical parallel: from the ancient Greek sculpture of Polycleitus’ Doryphoros to the sculpted body of Arnold Schwarzenegger as depictions of phallic symbolized power on one side, with the equestrian paintings of Théodore Géricault as a symbol of endangered masculinity on the other. In the Greek statue and Schwarzenegger’s press photographs, the American theorist notes a marked discrepancy between the representation of primary and secondary gender marks; namely, there is a striking discrepancy in the display of masculine strength, muscle, and body beauty with the way the male genitalia is represented. In Greek sculpture, it is markedly not commensurate to the proportions of the body, while in bodybuilding

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photographs it is shown as if it does not exist or as if it has no place in that photograph at all. Bryson argues that the penis is not simply banished from these depictions but that the whole body is transformed into a symbol of phallic power, from signs of bloating and the removal of body hair to the excessive visibility of veins. The imaginary image of masculinity is created by putting the genital area in the background or eliminating it and transferring its characteristics to the body as a whole through the stylistic means of expression of metonymy (Bryson 1994, 186). In other words, these two bodies ceased to be what or how we truly see them and became tropes, transmissions on the way to some other meaning or, as I mentioned earlier, new, mythical signifiers. Before we try to explain how contemporary fashion photography reflects the ambivalence of masculinity, we will take from Bryson another very instructive example from the history of painting. Géricault began making his paintings of chasseurs (horseman) near the end of the Napoleonic Wars when clear failures on the battlefield provoked a crisis of the militaristic concept, which in turn created a culture of painting to which Géricault contributed a pessimistic vision of war heroism with depictions of wounded soldiers and overall moral decadence as a consequence of war suffering (Bryson 2009, 200). However, what is most interesting for us, and Bryson begins his analysis with this part of the French painter’s work, are the paintings created at the very beginning of that period because they identify the visual elements we analyze here in a contemporary context. In the painting The Charging Chasseur of 1812, we see Napoleon’s soldier in a position that seems to radiate a superior symbiosis of man and horse, and which at first glance iconographically conveys the power of war victories (Fig. 10).

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Fig. 10. Théodore Géricault, Charging Chasseur, 1812; oil on canvas

Contrary to the original impression, the American theorist draws our attention to a whole range of iconographic details that undermine the greatness of French militarism and, more interestingly for our discussion, destabilize the visual symbolization of masculinity. First, for example, the outlines of the rider and the horse are not of the traditional pyramidal shape due to the great perspective depth of the horse’s ascent; then, a strong rotation of the horseman’s head and sabre directed backwards, instead of forwards, stop the rectilinear movement forwards; third, unlike AntoineJean Gros’s earlier painting The Battle of Abukir (1806), where a cavalryman is in the midst of military turmoil surrounded by a multitude of bodies, Géricault does not portray any context of the battle, as if the interrupted, falling energy of other horses and the entirety of the cavalry (the invisible preceding context, as explained earlier) is not enough to oppose the current enemy. Could we assume that Géricault’s chasseur was the only really visible character in the painting – remaining alone in the middle of the

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battle, without an enemy – so that, as a “weak subject,” he could retain the fantasy? First, the fantasy of his own masculinity, and second, the illusion of the masculinity of all other men who could and wanted to recognize themselves in its visual symbols (see Bryson 2009, 197)?

4. Contingent bodies: Coming to terms with the power of images We can find a similar, more recent example in a motif from the Eros advertisement by Versace. It is reminiscent of ancient depictions of gods and classical sculptures of celebrities for at least one very visible reason: the male figure is placed on a base characteristic for stone pedestals used for presenting sculptures in a public space (Fig. 11). On the pedestal, the Apollonian appearance of a dark-skinned man reveals a perfect “sculptural” skill, although it differs significantly from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s extravagant muscular hypertrophy. The display is completely idealized and minimally reduced as if deliberately placed in a time without history and distinct associations to the fashion-stylistic aspects of any historical epoch. However, the pedestal signifies duration, timelessness and everlasting value, and in the Western Christian tradition, timelessness is most easily associated with classical antiquity, this ever-coveted ideal of perfection. The television version of this advertising campaign shows this much more clearly: ancient gods carved in stone and the ruins of ancient Roman temples serve as a mise-en-scène for the god Eros in his very carnal mission of spreading love, passion and sexual lust. In the photo, Eros is not alone, however; he is accompanied on the pedestal with an oversized bottle of perfume, which thus becomes one body with a living sculpture of Eros.

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Fig. 11. Mert & Marcus for Versace Eros, 2012

The photographic representation, again, treats the genital area interestingly: it is not quite visible but is significantly emphasized by the position of the perfume, as the diagonal line of the slanted bottle almost intersects the region of the loin and continues through the torso vertically towards the head and the sharp chiaroscuro line dividing the head into two parts. Despite the instability of the slanted bottle that seems to fall to the right (it is not entirely clear whether the man is holding the bottle with his left hand or not), its diagonal seamlessly attaches the man’s body to his symbolic prosthetic extension (the bottle), thus establishing a powerful vertical axis that stabilizes the whole picture. We, therefore, experience advertising in a constant dialectic of falling and stability, weakness and strength; like Géricault’s Charging Chasseur, masculinity is precisely iconographically established – by means of a pedestal, masculine strength and superior gaze – but it is also precisely disturbed: by diagonals and the suggestion of destroying and shattering precious objects. Although the depiction of the

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man in this photograph is in the service of paradigmatic masculinity, the composition is deliberately “weakened” to establish an emotional, perhaps even feminine counterpoint to unadulterated masculinity. Although he is a mythological man, Eros can hit anyone with his arrow, and his message concerns everyone. That is why the iconography of this painting has a builtin “error,” and that is its intrinsic transhistorical significance: as with Géricault, the ambivalence that hides behind a seemingly perfectly constructed motif becomes a reason to look and reflect. Precisely because of that, it would be too easy to draw a parallel with Schwarzenegger and his smooth, well-built phallic figure, although Eros also nurtures the cult of the (depilated) body in every respect. The symbol of masculinity in this ad is not fully established, and to analyze the visual impact of the image from a specific perspective of image science, as we have seen, it does not matter whether the reason for this is an explicit current trend in fashion photography or the fact that the producers wanted to attract audiences of a different gender. What really interests us here is the way of intersecting the meaning of those two images as an artefact and representation. Let us now look at an ad for Versace’s high fashion women’s footwear brand (Fig. 12). The first thing that every observer will notice is the strong contrast between women’s shoes in the foreground and the visual environment that is not associated with high fashion, glamorous evening jetset performances or some recommended identification or use of a represented product, which should be the main function of advertising. Another striking contrast concerns the accentuated femininity of the shoes themselves and the male characters who dominate the composition, who in turn, with their smooth reddish-toned bodies, produce the effect that the brilliantly polished high-heeled shoes are actually meant for them. Basically, this is an atypical work of semiosis that is very rare in advertising and where the image is only an aid to achieve the self-referential role of the brand itself, which wants to attract attention using often unconnected series of metaphors or the circumvention of social norms to arouse shock and transgressiveness. (The aforementioned Benetton ad is part of that simplified chain of associations.) This ad, however, hides, in my opinion, another important dimension that is masked by a whole range of interesting visual and gender-performative issues mentioned earlier, which situates the basic visual narrative into a much broader structure of modern art and modern scopic regimes in general.

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Fig. 12. Gianni Versace – magazine ad for a women’s line of shoes

In Versace’s advertisement, we find what we, together with the American theorist Linda Nochlin, could call “a body in pieces” (Nochlin 1994, 23– 38). Like Norman Bryson, she views visual representations as semiotically coded, as a kind of metonymy or substitute for transferred meanings that do not arise from what the image narrates but from the way individual signifiers are structured. Nochlin argues that the new way of framing – more precisely, everything that falls within the scope of the impressionist painters, such as Èdouard Manet, Edgar Degas, or Paul Cézanne – testifies to a new understanding of pictorial representation as a convention. What we do not see, because it remains outside the frame of the picture, has the same dramatic importance as what we do see since the reality of the picture testifies to the mere selection of a vast visual field and the fact that each representation is based on choosing only one among many possibilities (note our concept of the preceding context). That realization, Nochlin argues, is at the core of the modernist scopic regime. For example, in Degas’s 1875 painting Place de la Concorde, we do not see a single character in their

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physical integrity, nor do any of the characters communicate with the observer, which can be considered a method of fragmenting the frame and rejecting psychological connections very similar to cutting male bodies and wandering gazes in the Versace advertisement mentioned above (Fig. 13).

Fig. 13. Edgar Degas, The Concorde Square, 1875; oil on canvas

Nochlin believes that a distinction should be made between the meaning of cutting or edging the image space itself on one side and the meaning of the fragmented bodies that such cutting creates. It suggests two opposing interpretations with the addition of a third possibility as the potential areas of greatest artistic freedom: (a) “Total contingency”: This is the equivalent of the meaningless course of modern reality itself, which has no definite beginning, middle or end. Contingency was most often associated with the then new medium of photography and its ability to create random fragments of the visible world as we would find it if we suddenly stopped moving (which photography, in a technical sense, does). (b) “Total determination”: This implies that the cut or the crop (a photographic frame) is a deliberate creative tactic of the painter. In this case, the limits of the frame and fragmentary visualization within it must be read as the “laying bare of the device,” which leads us to

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the self-referentiality of avant-garde and especially neo-avant-garde art. One is “forced to pay attention to the formal organization of the picture surface, which becomes the realm of the pictorial signifier, not a simulacrum of reality, however modern.” (c) “A third alternative”: This means creating works of art as experiments with reality, between contingency and determinism, and understanding art as a game, but one that has clear rules and boundaries. The game, of course, involves breaking the rules on the thin line between the old and the new, the known and the unknown, the permissible and the forbidden (Nochlin 1994, 37–38). Like Degas’s Place de la Concorde, Manet’s Masked Ball at the Opera of 1874 is a distant ancestor of Versace’s visual extravagance and its “total contingency” as it shows the birth of modern society from a new media perspective and a media-centric worldview (Fig. 14). Nochlin paraphrases Manet’s friend Stéphane Mallarmé, who remarked that Manet had discovered “a new manner of cutting down pictures” so that their frame is now “such as the view I would see if I framed my eyes with my hand at any given moment” (Nochlin 1994, 37; see also Harris 1964). Both artists show us that we will shortly observe the whole reality through the lens of a camera and that the upcoming cinematic logic of the image will consist of a series of connected pictures and standstill fragments of time, none of which will show the whole world or the whole bodies.

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Fig. 14. Édouard Manet, Masked Ball in the Opera, 1874; oil on canvas

Conclusion Visual studies interpret visual codes as part of a universal system of representation while delving most deeply into the field of pictorial hermeneutics that connects lesser-known areas between the specificity and the generality of the image. Its methodology starts from the belief that each image frames one part of reality, but it does so not by being isolated from other images, as much as their comparison may seem inappropriate and as much as the proposed semiotic leaps connect temporally, stylistically and thematically distant pictorial representations. Following Gilles Lipovetsky’s thesis, we can conclude that the freedom to choose consumer goods based on pictorial incentives is the lowest form of democratic participation, but we may also add that the freedom to interpret these images is a much higher form of consumerist and civic consciousness. As for the visual communication of fashion, we have seen that gender stereotyping can be found in many historical references that give additional justification to the transhistorical study of visual phenomena and that it is possible to penetrate a different meaning of fashion photography under the thin consumerist membrane of advertising discourses. On this track, we found that art history and contemporary fashion advertising can view the male body in its entirety –

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physical, mental or gender – only as a series of fragments constituted visually, culturally and historically, following representational traditions and transcending them in unlimited open play between contingencies and determinism. Finally, we have shown that the fragmentary nature of masculinity can be experienced in a wide range between two extremes: from the depiction of the whole body in various states of nakedness/nudity and offered to diverse gazes – by using traditional conventions of revealing the female body to deliberately giving bodies a feminine character (Dolce & Gabbana) – to the formalistic fragmentation of the image itself which offers no single male body in its complete physical integrity (Versace).

References Bal, Mieke. 1999. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bryson, Norman. 1994. “Géricault and Masculinity.” In Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, edited by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, 228–259. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Clark, Kenneth. 1956. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Emberley, Julia. 1987. “The Fashion Apparatus and the Deconstruction of Postmodern Subjectivity.” In Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America, edited by Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, 47–60. Montreal: New World Perspectives. Harris, Jean C. 1964. “A Little-Known Essay on Manet by Stéphane Mallarmé.” The Art Bulletin 46 (December): 561. Hollander, Anne. 1993. Seeing Through Clothes. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Imdahl, Max. 1996. Giotto, Arenafresken. Ikonographie – Ikonologie – Ikonik. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Kaite, Berkeley. 1987. “The Pornographic Body Double: Transgression is the Law.” In Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America, edited by Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, 150–168. Montreal: New World Perspectives. Levin, Charles. 1987. “Carnal Knowledge of Aesthetic States.” In Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America, edited by Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, 99–111. Montreal: New World Perspectives. Lipovetsky, Gilles. 1994. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Translated from French by Catherine Porter. Princeton, NJOxford: Princeton University Press.

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Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn): 6–18. Nochlin, Linda. 1994. The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity. New York: Thames & Hudson. Purgar, Krešimir. 2013. Slike u tekstu. Talijanska i ameriþka književnost u perspektivi vizualnih studija [Images in Text: Italian and American Literature in the Perspective of Visual Studies]. Zagreb: Durieux and HC AICA. Williamson, Judith. 1994. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyars Publishers.

CHAPTER SIX BODY IMAGE AND AESTHETICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN FASHION BLOGS: A SOCIAL-SEMIOTIC PERSPECTIVE MARIANNA BOERO

Introduction This article aims to explore the communication trends of the language of fashion in the social media universe, with particular reference to fashion blogs. With the advent of social networks, the language of fashion has undergone significant changes, which have led it to rethink and redefine some communication logic. If fashion was previously a “closed universe”, reserved for a small audience, thanks to social media, it has become a system based on interactions between companies and their audience. Examples include the possibility of attending high fashion shows through live coverage on social channels or participating in social communities dedicated to fashion events. In a context of this type, fashion experiences a process of democratization while maintaining exclusivity as it increasingly enters the daily life of the public in the social media universe. Fashion blogs play a fundamental role in this sense, allowing users to identify with the proposed narratives. It is precisely with the aim of investigating the way in which the language of fashion redefines its communication and symbolic methods in the social universe that this article traces the main studies conducted in the field of the semiotics of fashion and then focuses on fashion blogs, highlighting the role of body aesthetics and valorization in the overall communication. The body changes with changing fashions: both are a sign of the cultural and identity metamorphosis of society. The body of fashion is always perennially deformed. It is the mirror of social identity, the eternal return of the new. In this perspective, social semiotics can play a central role in understanding the ongoing scenario.

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1. The semiotics of fashion: A theoretical framework Semiotics began to be interested in fashion and in the language of clothing in the late sixties when Roland Barthes (1915–1980) published the book Système de la mode (1967), a fundamental text for the studies in this sector. As recalled by Massimo Baldini (2005, 17), before Barthes, there were only a few references to the subject, traceable in the works of Ferdinand de Saussure, Pëtr Bogatyrëv, and Nikolai Trubetzkoy. In particular, de Saussure (Cours de linguistique générale, 1916) stated that language is a system of signs comparable with other systems of signs, such as the alphabet of the deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, forms of courtesy, military signs, the language of clothing, etc. and that it is simply the most important of these systems. Pëtr Bogatyrëv, in his text The Functions of Folk Costume in Moravian Slovakia (1937), highlighted the possible homology between language and clothing more explicitly, stating that to understand the social function of clothes, we must learn to read these signs (clothes) just as we learn to read and understand different languages.1 The path to a more direct study of fashion from a semiological perspective, however, started with Algirdas Greimas and Roland Barthes, and it is precisely from their contributions that this essay moves, with the aim of describing and specifying the field of a semiotics interested in fashion, before then highlighting the most recent semiotic research on the topic. In the first part of this essay, we will retrace some of the stages of Greimas’s and Barthes’s studies on fashion before then focusing on some contributions from the social semiotic perspective.2 As is well known, in Greimas’s studies, fashion was an early and apparently transitory interest. He devoted his doctoral thesis, “La mode en 1830. Essai de description du vocabulaire vestimentaire d’après les journaux de l’époque”, to this topic in 1948 (see Pezzini 2018). It is a work of lexicographical reconstruction and sociolinguistics that ranges from the study of the lexicon to narrative analysis and from reflections on the forms of life to the aesthetics of everyday life. At the beginning of the path to a more directly semiological study of fashion, Greimas reconstructs the 1

Moreover, he underlined the different functions of “costume” and “fashion”: while the former tends to remain almost motionless, fashionable clothing changes rapidly, even if both are subject to mutual influences. Bogatyrëv also noted other differences: the costume is more conservative and traditional, while fashion depends on the tailor’s creativity and aims to be different from what is already in use. Beyond this useful distinction, the semiotic setting of Bogatyrëv underlines a very important aspect from a semiotic point of view: clothing, like language, has many functions and, above all, has the function of an object and a sign at the same time, and it can be worn and/or interpreted in various ways. 2 See Boero 2015, 2019, Landowski 1989, Marrone 2001, and Traini 2008.

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vocabulary of romantic fashion, starting from the abundant documentation (fashion magazines, novels, memoirs) being a testimony of the fact that fashion is clearly perceived as a very complex cultural phenomenon. In the preface of the thesis, entitled “Objects and methods”, Greimas justifies the choice of his object of study from various points of view. The vocabulary of fashion, which he considers one of the main social forms of luxury, seems to him to be of particular interest as a useful space to show both its constitution processes and its fast changes. The continuous formation of neologisms is endowed with a particular expressiveness, and it is therefore suitable to become, like other areas of luxury, a source of unprecedented correspondences and metaphorical creations. The period chosen for the study is the era of the Restoration, around 1830, which is considered important not only for the renewal of the language that more generally characterizes it, but also for the stabilization of the way of dressing. In the introduction of his thesis, “Les conception de l’élégance vestimentaire”, Greimas emphasizes the social-aesthetic dimension that concerns the performance of clothing in every society: on the collective level, people define their status level or their social ambitions through clothes, and at the same time, on the individual level, they try to express their own personality through clothes. According to Greimas, this is a seemingly contradictory search for identity, conceived both as belonging and originality. Hence, a first exploration of the 1830 vocabulary concerns the articulation of the judgment of taste in the fashion field. Being fashionable, for people or things, is a value that marks the desirability of someone or something, and it is linked to the need for novelty that distinguishes modernity. Moreover, the fashion content of something – dress, behaviour, place, etc. – depends on its adoption by those whom each era considers its own judges of elegance (“reference group”). It is interesting that the terms that appear in the fashion judgment are in turn subject to fashion, according to an articulation that always opposes the positive terms – the area of good taste – to their opposite. Therefore, a sort of isotopy of veridiction emerges, useful to unmask those who seem elegant and fashionable (but who, in fact, are not) and those who practice imitations of what is fashionable, risking appearing vulgar and ridiculous. While Greimas presents a historical-social study of French vocabulary oriented on a historicist structuralism, Barthes explores the parallelisms that can be observed between language as a whole and clothing in a more radical way (Barthes 1967; Marrone 2006; Pezzini 2017). In the book Le système de la mode (1967) and in numerous articles and essays, he agrees with de Saussure’s considerations on the possibility of using the semiological approach not only for verbal language but also for other types of language.

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For these reasons, he started to study fashion as an autonomous system with its own internal rules, with a function similar to that of natural language. Assuming a parallel between natural language and the language of clothes, he postulated a single disciplinary perspective in the study of language and dress and applied some Saussurean linguistic categories (langue/parole, synchrony/diachrony, signifier/signified) to the study of fashion. Through the analysis of magazines, Barthes noted the central role of the captions: the dress, as a real object, is taken over by a second system, which is that of language. This narrows the universe of possible meanings, highlighting details the reader will linger over. Fashion, for Barthes, is an opportunity to show a similar system to that of language. The word language does not only indicate a verbal dimension but also involves all the sign systems through which humans model their position and their relationship with the world. Fashion falls into this definition because it has an axiological function, that is, the skill to produce social values. In his theory, there is an important analytical distinction between custom and clothing: while the first is an institutional reality, essentially social, independent from the individual, the second is an individual reality, a practice through which the individual actualizes the establishment of the general custom in his/her identity (Barthes 1998, 66–67). If the phenomenon of clothing is the subject of psychological research, the phenomenon of custom, Barthes says, is the proper object of sociological or historical research (Barthes 1998, 67). The dichotomy between tradition and clothing proposes the articulation of language in de Saussure’s langue and parole: the first, social institution; the second, individual act. Barthes puts fashion into the phenomenon of custom, though sometimes it oscillates between the dispersion of the custom in clothing and, on the other side, the enlargement of the latter in the phenomenon of custom. According to this view, Patrizia Calefato (1999, 98) reflects on the social significance of dress colours. For example, in some societies, the colour black is traditionally associated with mourning and is banned from clothing for infants, who are protected from images that are culturally characterized by negative connotations (night, death, fear). Likewise, black is not generally accepted as a suitable colour for a wedding dress. These thoughts become part of the custom of a society and appear to be morphologically stable. In fashion, however, the social significance of colours fades in a proliferation of languages that become social discourses. For example, fashion sometimes allows different colours in different contexts and discourses from those provided by tradition: think of the wedding dress, whose ritual function is subjected to fashion changes, with the abandonment of white in favour of “provocative” colours and forms (for example, the use

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of red, black, slits, necklines, very short skirts, etc.). Calefato gives the examples of “urban tribes”, such as the punk and dark tribes, of the semiotic relationships between fashion and cinema, and of “designer style” – all cases in which garments are no longer the product of collective events but signs of a style, on the one hand, and consumer goods, on the other. The communicative value of clothing and of the body that wears it is also highlighted by Lurie (1981), according to whom clothing is a language with its own grammar and vocabulary, like other languages. Dress vocabulary includes not only clothes but also accessories, hairstyle, jewellery, makeup, and body decorations: it is as wide a vocabulary as that of any other language, if not more so, since it includes every item, hairstyle, and type of body decoration that has been invented. Choosing a dress is a means of defining and describing ourselves (Lurie 1981, 8). In the language of clothing, like in speech, each person has their own reserve of “words” and adopts personal changes in tone and meaning. In practice, however, the dressing lexicon of a person may be very limited: that of a farmer, for example, may be limited to five or ten words with which he can create only a few sentences, often undecorated and only able to express mostly basic concepts; on the contrary, a fashion leader may have hundreds of thousands of words to build sentences connected to many different meanings. Lurie shows an analogy between verbal language and the language of clothes. A casual way of dressing conveys fluidity, relaxation, and vitality, as happens in natural spoken language with slang. In some cases, it is also possible to equate different articles of clothing with different parts of speech: trimmings and accessories, for example, have the same function as adjectives and adverbs, which is to enrich a dress or a phrase (Lurie 1981, 10). However, we must not forget that some ornaments and accessories of a period may be essential elements of another: fashion vocabulary often changes because fashion is fickle and is just a reflection of the flow of time. Within the limits imposed by the economy, clothes are bought, used, and discarded, just like words, because they meet our needs and express our ideas and our emotions. Any attempt by experts to save outdated words or persuade people to use new terms correctly fails. Similarly, people will choose and wear those clothes that reflect their identity or what they wish to be at a certain time. Others will be set aside, even if promoted by means of mass communication. According to Lurie, the fashion industry is no longer able either to maintain a style that men and women have chosen to leave because they are far from the emerging social context or to introduce new ones that they do not wish to adopt. Thus, consumption practices legitimize or de-legitimize fashion proposals, establishing the success and sometimes also the end of a trend.

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Other contributions came later from social semiotics, a perspective in which the phenomenon of fashion is not analyzed only through the study of the verbal language used, as Barthes did, but in relation to all the types of discourses distributed within it. In this regard, it is necessary to recall the studies of Jean-Marie Floch (1995), who, considering fashion as a discourse, analyzes the total look of Coco Chanel. This led him to distance himself from previous semiotic studies, in particular from those of Barthes and Greimas, who, believing that the meaning always passes through the linguistic naming, studied non-verbal signification systems only starting from their lexicalization. In contrast, Floch declares that he is not interested in discourses about fashion (meta-discourses like the journalistic vocabulary of fashion or the lexical system of fashion professionals) but in the analysis of fashion as a discourse. First of all, he focused on the figurative dimension of Chanel’s total look. Then, he reviewed the clothing and the accessories invented by the designer, which, in some way, constitute the identification signs of the brand: for example, the trousers, the black dress, the blazer with golden buttons, the sailor’s cap, the black-tipped shoe, and so on. Framing the appearance of these inventions historically, we can see that Chanel systematically rejected the most characteristic features of women’s fashion at the time. In fact, the designer refused everything that did not respond to a precise functionality of clothing, which must be practical and comfortable, to allow women to walk, work, and move freely (Floch 1995, 130). The first narrative content of the Chanel look, from a figurative point of view, is therefore the conquest of an individual freedom, a result of modernity.3 The second content of the Chanel look is represented by a particular vision of femininity, exalted by paradox. The silhouette is in fact built from signs belonging to universes such as men’s work (jersey, sailor, striped vest) and men’s clothing (cap, trousers, tie, short hair), different from the female fashion of the time. However, these signs act as signifiers that refer to opposite meanings, such as femininity and luxury. Thanks to this game of the inversion of signifiers and meanings, Chanel wanted to affirm an original definition of the female identity that is exclusively hers. The look of Chanel is “timeless”, and this sort of exteriority to time depends on its production methods. The Chanel look, in fact, is the result of a real bricolage, that is, a work of combining and adapting signs of different origins and eras. The exploitation and co-presence of these signs suspend the temporal difference they manifest. While fashion can “go out of fashion” 3

Barthes himself (1967, 120), analyzing the Chanel style, pointed out that it corresponds to that rather short moment of our history in which a minority of women finally had access to work and to social independence.

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because it is a question of signs, the look is timeless: it represents a sensitive and intelligible structure, elaborated at the expense of the signs, regardless of their historical characteristics and their original use. In the context of fashion social semiotics, ultimately, it is necessary to cite the studies of Landowski (1995) on the role of fashion in the processes of identity construction. In fact, fashion is a key factor in the segmentation and articulation of the social space, as it makes the differences between the environments, the classes, and the generations more evident. In this context, fashion indicates the individual adoption of exterior signs, with the help of which the identity of a certain group or environment declines figuratively (or momentarily), suggesting that it belongs to the environment in question. Fashion should therefore be conceived as an interactive process of the invention and production of identities. In this process, it implements a “game of doubled oppositions”, according to which the identity of a group is constituted and solidified not only in opposition, synchronically, to others, but also, diachronically, to itself: what is fashionable here and now is opposed both to what was fashionable here yesterday/will be fashionable here tomorrow and to what is fashionable today in other places. Within societies, fashions are not imposed unilaterally by a superior and external instance but are always constituted through negotiations, repetitions, and accumulations: they are created, in fact, from extremely complex processes of interaction and self-regulation. Thus, fashion produces identities not entirely given in advance but defined at the same pace in which each specific fashion is made. Landowski closes his reflection by highlighting two paradoxes that can be found in the changes introduced by fashion. First of all, fashion, renewing the forms of objects and codes of behaviour from time to time, causes objective changes. At the same time, however, it also causes changes in the subjects themselves, who, in following it, adopt new points of view on objects, behaviours, and, ultimately, themselves. They will thus be inclined to change their habits and their criteria of judgment, adhering to the values that, at that moment, are in vogue. A second ambivalence is related to the fact that fashion enhances the present and, at the same time, trivializes it. Constantly proposing the new and introducing “discontinuities”, fashion euphorically ascends the course of time and breaks everyday life, presenting itself as a party, freedom, openness, and promise. In parallel, however, by defining what is done, it becomes a strong referential moment and a common norm, a means of recognition and normality in relation to what appears to be confused: it becomes convention, repetition – in short, the form itself of the most stable everyday life. Those mentioned are just some of the numerous studies conducted on fashion from a semiotic point of view, but they allow us to understand how

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different the premises and the survey methods used to study the phenomenon are. If, on the one hand, it is possible to focus on the study of the vocabulary of fashion, on the other, it is possible to consider fashion as a discourse itself. On the one hand, it is possible to focus on fashion as a way of interacting with other discourses over time, while, on the other, the objective is to study fashion in relation to the concept of identity. We have selected these studies because they present problems of particular interest in relation to the short forms of web texts as objects of study. In the following section, we aim to evaluate the relevance of the cited studies with respect to the changes that the language of fashion has witnessed and is experiencing with the diffusion of new web technologies. In particular, we will consider the relevance of structural studies in the face of the new textual forms that have emerged in the Web 2.0 era. The following section deals with these issues, providing examples and possible analytical directions.

2. Aesthetics of the body and everyday life in fashion blogs The studies that we have recalled outline the field of a semiotics of fashion and clarify the specific contribution offered by semiotics compared to that of other neighbouring disciplines, such as sociology. We saw the different possible perspectives in studying fashion as a language, but what does it mean to study fashion today? Are the descriptive categories of semiotics effective in facing the ongoing changes in the language of fashion? In fact, this latter language is experiencing significant mutations, both in the new textual typologies through which it manifests itself and in the emergence of a new vocabulary that redefines the expressive dimension as well as the conceptual field related to fashion. The advent of Web 2.0 communication has led to a change in the usual communication modalities, based on the image of a passive user, exclusively receptive to media messages. With the advent of social networks, the active role of the receiver is increasingly rediscovered because they collaborate in the construction of the text, establishing a relationship with the brand’s world: in the virtual places, the users set out their reading path and chooses the pages of their interest according to completely personal parameters, often difficult for the issuer to control. For a brand that was previously “communicating to”, it now becomes necessary to learn how to “communicate with” because, in the space of the web, conversational dynamics are very different from the past. We now talk about the attention economy, defined as the careful management of user attention that is difficult to grasp and maintain. The fashion blog is one of the tools to which this type of attention needs to be directed. Fashion blogs are virtual spaces that lie outside the

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communicative territory controlled by brands where the author can openly and quickly publish news, stories, reflections, ideas, personal opinions, and information, which are then displayed in reverse chronological order. In the jargon of the Internet, a blog is defined as a diary on the net; this definition, however, does not really explain what a blog is. A blog can be a diary, a notebook, a calendar, a collection of stories, or anything else the author wants; the content can be anything, and therefore it is not its content that defines a blog. What really identifies a blog is the conversational and informal tone in which it is written, enabled by technology and spread by fashion bloggers: a diary is something personal, while a blog is born to be shared. Moreover, it is possible for any user to leave a comment on each article visible to all: in this way, a discussion among users develops around the proposed topic. In recent years, the phenomenon of blogs has become widespread. Born from the will of individual users to freely write and compare themselves with the comments of others, they have become a source of interest for brands, and now all the most active online companies have a blog with the aim of creating a more informal and direct meeting point with customers. The writing practised on blogs is a counterpoint to the institutional form created for brands’ sites or newspapers: usually, the tone of the posts is informal, and the messages are short and accompanied by the presence of sources and links for supplementary information. Compared to the other tools and services offered by the web, the blog presents some peculiar traits because, on the one hand, it amplifies one of the most traditional types of writing, that is, the personal diary, and, on the other, it transforms individualism into sharing because its contents are accessible for a potentially indeterminate audience and are exposed to debate, comments, and rewriting. In fact, the content can be modified or questioned by other users at any time in a dialogue that, despite appearing similar to spoken communication, shows all the typical features of writing. Blogs do not always belong to a specific communication genre, even if they tend to maintain a certain structural coherence over time. It is possible to identify different kinds of writing on the blog: the diary genre, the thematic genre, and the literary genre. The “blog diary” uses a very free form of writing, generally using the first person; it may present features that are very similar to speech and compensation phenomena such as pitching by imitating speech pauses (using ellipses for suspense and creative punctuation). The “thematic blog” is dedicated to a specific topic (fashion, make-up, cinema, books, politics). Very often, it presents a type of writing that can be defined as journalistic. Although there are no excessive signs of revision, it is possible to find conformity with the new standard languages

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used by newspapers. The “literary blog”, on the other hand, hosts texts with literary ambitions, such as poems, stories, or prose of various kinds. The complex textuality of the blog opens several points of debate in the semiotic field. Within the blog, stories and discussions about products, places, and services take shape according to unconventional and extremely variable narrative schemes based on the author’s descriptive intentions. In the blogs, values are narrativized, inscribed in a subjective perspective and in a human context: the truth or the verisimilitude of the stories means that the readers are personally involved in the narrated experiences. We can say, using the words of Ferraro (2015), that the aspect of interest consists in the fact that rather than reducing the narrative dimension to a literal act of storytelling – that is to say, to the explicit condition in which a narrator, qualified and recognized as such, “tells a story to conscious recipients” – a blog calls into question a larger and deeper dimension, where “the experience itself and the flow of events that surround us are subjected to a narrative configuration” (Ferraro 2015, 245; my translation). Coming more specifically to the fashion field, we can see that in fashion blogs, the subjects of storytelling (fashion bloggers) become veritable communication extensions of the brand. The strategies chosen by fashion blogs can be very different from each other. In some cases, they choose to create a warmer and more direct relationship with the public through frequent verbal-visual interpellations – such as the invitation to replicate the proposed look in a personal key – and ample space is left for comments. In others, we find the choice of a more detached and self-referential language, which recalls that of services in high fashion magazines; in these cases, generally, images prevail over verbal elements, and the involvement of the public is lower. There are, however, some recurring characteristics on which it is useful to dwell. First of all, the role of the body. At the centre of each image, there is, in fact, the body of the subject, photographed in its entirety or with a focus on certain details. The body exhibited is the protagonist of the stories: clothing items acquire meaning only in relation to the body that supports them, and each product is only one of the adjuvants that allow the realization of the overall look. The general sense, in fact, derives precisely from the intersubjective relationships that the protagonist’s body can establish with other bodies and with the clothing garments in a regime that, referring to Landowski’s theory of aesthesic contagion (2003), we can define as “intercorporeality”. The representation of the body does not follow a fixed and immutable logic but is influenced by the referral practices of the users, who contribute to the renegotiation and construction of the proposed models. In this way, if the body represents a means of promoting the individual self,

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it can also be seen as an expression of social tendencies at the same time. The choices of the bloggers, therefore, are indicative of the relationship that is established between the visual representation of the self and the set of social models in which the body is represented, accepted, or denied. Another feature common to fashion blogs is the predominance of visual aspects. Although the verbal component is always present within blog posts, images play the main communicative role, anticipating a trend that represents the basis of the most used social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram. In fact, it is visual content that collects the greatest number of hits because of its communicative immediacy, and it is precisely for this reason that the wise use of images to tell stories has become crucial for brands. The relevance of visual aspects also concerns the narration level, as at the centre of each image is a core story, that is, a main story onto which, sometimes, additional micro-stories are grafted. The effectiveness of the story comes from the combination of visual signs through which actors, spaces, and times are staged. If, in some cases, information is provided through images, in others, we find a playful use of visual narration with the aim of creating atmospheres and arousing feelings. Consequently, through the image, different types of gazes (formal and informal) are summoned, and they refer, through visual statements, to a specific reader profile. A third aspect that should be stressed in the analysis of fashion blogs concerns the anchoring to a recognizable and daily context. In the blog, the product is included in the life of the blogger, and this anchorage makes the narrated world closer to the real world of the readers. At the centre of the stories, we find a relationship between the story and actual life, between fiction and reality: the presence of credible environments and characters, of likely situations in which life scenes and replicable practices of use are told, so that the recipient can identify themselves in the proposed story. If, on the one hand, the blog text aims at telling experiences and practices of real life, on the other hand, its similar story contributes to the construction of the way in which reality is, in turn, perceived and experienced by consumers. Blogs, in other words, have the ability to speak, with a specific language, of the surrounding reality in which consumers in turn are included as subjects of experience. The verisimilitude of the settings and the stories proposed is linked, in closing, to the verisimilitude of the models of beauty conveyed by the blogs, which gradually free themselves from the dominant aesthetic canons. According to these traditional canons, there was a certain image of the body which, although it varied according to an ideal of beauty and seduction tied to a specific historical and cultural context, was nevertheless a traditionally beautiful body, exhibited without imperfections. The body could serve to underline the dress or to increase its seductiveness, but in any case, it was

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distant from the daily and real life of the public. The bodies depicted on the blogs, on the contrary, while continuing to refer to certain canons of beauty, desirability, and form, are no longer unattainable, diaphanous, and distant: they break the usual representative canons and propose a reading contract based also on playful values (Floch 1990), such as irony. The communication on blogs thus opens the way to other models of beauty that gradually acquire legitimacy, helping to define not only new canons of elegance or wearability but also different images of their recipients. From this point of view, the blog produces identities and becomes the expressive channel of the new logic of the independence of taste that is emerging.

Conclusion As we have seen, the language of fashion is experiencing a continuous redefinition due to the emergence of new forms of textuality, as well as to the new interaction practices of social users. In the previous section, we highlighted the elements that characterize fashion blogs’ communication and the aspects that distinguish them from other forms of textuality. We have seen, in particular, the centrality of visual aspects, non-verbal communication, and the body, which deserves a more in-depth study. Moreover, we have seen that blogs represent scenes of everyday life and refer to the idea of accessible fashion, aimed at reaching the user’s involvement through a more direct and informal dialogue than in the past. Currently, however, the fashion blog increasingly seems to be losing its communicative strength, giving way to a faster and more essential form of communication that is mostly entrusted to images. Indeed, in the most recent blogs, the verbal component is reduced and leaves more and more space to a narration made up of visuals and temporary stories. For this reason, Instagram is increasingly assuming a central role in fashion communication: here, the overall communication is based on stories communicated through images, and the verbal component often becomes a mere caption. Therefore, should we talk about the end of the fashion blog? We do not know what the answer to this question is, but we seem to be seeing signs of this transition in three characteristics offered by Instagram. First of all, Instagram seems to better satisfy the users’ need for the aestheticization of the self, emphasizing the aesthetic dimension of bodies and objects, photographed with filters and different photographic angles. Secondly, Instagram allows the users to share content rapidly and to express it in an essential way, with simplified language: indeed, the language on Instagram is becoming ever simpler, devoid of decorations or frills; the syntax is streamlined and aims at the emphasis of the essential concept, expressed

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through a single simple proposition. The third element is the importance given to the present offered by the communication on Instagram: indeed, the conversation is postponed to other places (posts or hashtags that are mentioned in the captions) but not to other times. This trend is made even more evident by Instagram’s introduction of Stories, the content of which is usable and visible for only 24 hours, demonstrating how it is only the present moment that matters in this type of communication. From a semiotic point of view, this article will hopefully lead to a search for tools able to analyze visual stories more specifically, redefining some elements that are necessary to decode the new communication reality. Particular attention must be paid to the semiotic analysis of the contents expressed by images, from which we can trace a line back to a certain idea of fashion. At the same time, it will be necessary for semiotics to collaborate with quantitative methods of investigation for the analysis of the huge number of comments linked to images and posts. Only through this dialogue will it be possible to manage big data and to reconstruct, through the analysis of the comments, a path that can help to interpret the continuous evolution of fashion language, which is increasingly redefining itself from below, starting from the comments and the active participation of web users.

References Baldini, Massimo, ed. 2005. Semiotica della moda. Rome: Armando. Barthes, Roland. 1957. “Histoire et sociologie du vêtement.” Les Annales 12, no. 3: 430–441. —. 1959. “Langage et vêtement.” Critique 142: 242–252. —. 1967. Système de la Mode. Paris: Editions de Seuil. Boero, Marianna. 2015. “The language of fashion in postmodern society: A social semiotic perspective.” Semiotica 2015, no. 207: 303–325. —. 2017. Linguaggi del consumo. Segni, luoghi, pratiche, identità. Rome: Aracne. —. 2019. “Semiotics of Fashion: Theories and Considerations about the (new) Objects.” In La forza della moda. Potere, rappresentazione, comunicazione, edited by Giovanna Motta, 219–235. Rome: Edizioni Nuova Cultura. Calefato, Patrizia. 1999. Moda, corpo, mito: storia, mitologia e ossessione del corpo vestito. Rome: Castelvecchi. —. 2011. La moda oltre la moda. Milan: Lupetti. Del Marco, Vincenza and Francesco Mazzucchelli, eds. 2018. Nuove pratiche digitali: La ricerca semiotica alla prova. Rivista dell’Associazione Italiana di Studi Semiotici no. 23. Palermo: E|C.

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Ferraro, Guido. 2015. Teorie della narrazione. Dai racconti tradizionali all’odierno «storytelling». Rome: Carocci. Floch, Jean-Marie. 1995. Identités visuelles. Paris: PUF. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1948. La mode en 1830. Langage et société: écrits de jeunesse. Paris: PUF. —. 1970. Du sens. Paris: Seuil. —. 1987. De l’imperfection. Paris: Fanlac. Landowski, Eric. 1989. La société réfléchie. Essais de socio-sémiotique. Paris: Seuil. Lurie, Alison. 1981. The Language of Clothes. New York: Random House. Marrone, Gianfranco. 2001. Corpi sociali. Processi comunicativi e semiotica del testo. Turin: Einaudi. —. 2016. Roland Barthes: parole chiave. Roma: Carocci. Pezzini, Isabella. 2014. Introduzione a Barthes. Bari: Laterza. —. 2018. Greimas e la semiotica della moda. Palermo: E|C. https://iris.uniroma1.it/retrieve/handle/11573/1081055/627081/Pezzini _Greimas_2018.pdf. Polidoro, Piero. 2018. “Il sito web nell’epoca della sua responsività tecnica: riflessioni sull’applicazione del concetto di testo ai siti web.” In Nuove pratiche digitali: La ricerca semiotica alla prova, edited by Vincenza Del Marco and Francesco Mazzucchelli. Rivista dell’Associazione Italiana di Studi Semiotici no. 23. Palermo: E|C. Segre Reinach, Simona. 2010. La moda. Un’introduzione. Bari: Laterza. —. 2011. Un mondo di mode. Il vestire globalizzato. Bari: Laterza. Traini, Stefano. 2008. Semiotica della comunicazione pubblicitaria. Milan: Bompiani. —. 2013 Le basi della semiotica. Milan: Bompiani. Traini, Stefano and Marianna Boero. 2013. “Le langage de la mode et la comparaison des sites web.” E|C: The Journal of the Italian Association for Semiotic Studies. —. 2014. “Esperienze sul web. Il caso dei marchi di moda.” In Corpi Mediali. Semiotica e contemporaneità, edited by Isabella Pezzini and Lucio Spaziante, 129–148. Pisa: Edizioni ETS. Volli, Ugo. 1988. Contro la moda. Milan: Feltrinelli. —. 1995. “Semiotica della moda, semiotica dell’abbigliamento?” In Moda, regole e rappresentazioni, edited by Giulia Ceriani and Roberto Grandi, 125–137. Milan: Franco Angeli. —. 1998. Una scrittura del corpo. Rome: Stampa Alternativa. Zinna, Alessandro. 2004. Le interfacce degli oggetti di scrittura. Roma: Meltemi.

CHAPTER SEVEN FASHIONING THE CINEMATIC SCREEN: BODY TRANSMEDIALITY, APPEARANCE AND THE ‘EVENT’ PETRA KRPAN

Introduction: New media and the body transformation In the age of new technologies, the question arises as to whether new media can bring something new to contemporary fashion. We take the work of the Turkish-British designer Hussein Chalayan and the Dutch designer Iris van Herpen, as fundamental representatives of the symbiosis of technology, media, fashion and art, as a paradigm when we talk about the possibilities of new media in fashion, but also vice versa: of fashion in new media. This relationship, very much present in the work of Chalayan and van Herpen, brought a departure from the classic anthropological understanding of the term media as “extensions of the human senses” (McLuhan 1964). This paper also takes into account McLuhan’s understanding of the concept of media but in the context of fashion as follows: (1) Contemporary fashion takes place as a media representation of the body in an event, (2) The body becomes a media object, and (3) The notion of the observer (audience) changes its meaning. There are many definitions of the term media, but what this paper seeks to clarify is how they are used within contemporary fashion discourse and how they have contributed to the ever-changing fashion practice. New media is used as a term in many theories and research, and thus there has been a loss of references, and it is now difficult to recognize what exactly the term media refers to. In the anthropological understanding of the media as extensions, coined by Marshall McLuhan, media are part of the technical

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environment and the human environment and act as extensions of the human body and its abilities (McLuhan 1964). Paul Virilio, a French cultural theorist, urban planner and aesthetic philosopher, on the trail of McLuhan, elaborated in detail what media studies are and how he uses the term media as a prosthesis (Virilio 1999. In contemporary fashion practice, there is an adjustment to the media, but also, conversely, the medium adapts to the form of fashion practice. Sunþana Tuksar states how media are always overlapping into various areas – film, fashion, literature, etc. – and that there is a clear transgression between these areas (Tuksar 2021). Media in the context of contemporary fashion, as this research understands it, represent a new set of cultural information that identifies the body practice. The difference lies in the media mediating the same message and thus changing the relationship between the subject (sender) and the object (recipient) of the message. Let us dwell for a moment on these authors when we talk about the media transformation of the body in fashion. McLuhan’s media theory suggests that the media always refer to other media. In that sense, McLuhan states: “The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as ‘content’” (McLuhan 2008, 22). In the same way a semiotic sign always refers to another sign, the circulation of the media no longer points to reality but is about the symbolic construction of reality. As no medium is autonomous and homogeneous (Mitchell 2005) in the digital age, media impurity occurs because everything mixes and appears in hybrid forms, and this is exactly what is characteristic of modern fashion. It is a constant metamorphosis of the same in various forms. However, we need to distinguish between media according to two criteria of their practical use according to Žarko Paiü: 1) technical and technological, and 2) socio-cultural (Paiü 2008, 92). Contemporary fashion, therefore, belongs to the socio-cultural criterion, which “refers to changing social structures and cultural orders by introducing a ‘new’ medium” (Paiü 2008, 92). Fashion therefore radically changed its structure with the introduction of new media but also experienced fundamental changes in fashion photography and fashion film, which we will talk about in the following sections. New media have complex structures, abolishing old concepts of understanding time and space and causing decentralization, or, to be precise, the loss of the centre. The instantaneity of appearance, which is expressed in fashion practice, comes from the field of media. The medium makes us immediate participants, whether we like it or not. The age of telepresence in virtual space and the loss of the space of reality related to experience and temporal distance are concepts that were introduced by the Austrian artist, curator and new media theorist Peter

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Weibel. He calls this the era of absence, a period of radical absence and telematic presence (Weibel 2005). Vilém Flusser went a step further in considering information transfer and distance communication. Essentially, the fundamental difference is that technology is not a human tool and the media are not just “extensions of man.” Media, like technology as a whole, is of an IT nature because, according to Flusser, it is a concept of technology (technical images) that generates the reality of the world. It is about the transfer of social relations between entities that creates a telematic society, one that exchanges information and communicates at a distance. Contemporary fashion finds its identity in this context because it takes place at a distance as a medialized event in the magnificent performance of the body. The identity is, as Tuksar writes, “virtual identity in the transmedial understanding,” and “where there is identity, there is culture” (Tuksar 2021, 96). The era of absence has arrived in which the body and corporeality are established differently. In this context, contemporary fashion signifies a new media platform in which we can connect time, space and the body in motion. The body in new media is at the same time absent and present. Chalayan’s work has been marked by the usage of technology in collaboration with the body. He includes technology in fashion installations and collections, while van Herpen considers technology as a fundamental starting point of contemporary fashion. In that sense, van Herpen went a step further in her research. Her understanding and experimentation with body and materials at all levels of contemporary fashion design emphasized the importance of fashion silhouette and body performance. Unlike Chalayan, van Herpen subtly uses technology in collaboration with the body, creating delicate contours and presenting soft, voluminous fashion objects. Technology is no longer an extension, it is already a matter of a complete acceptance of the physical with the technological. Van Herpen includes the fundamental elements of fire, water, earth and air in her work on the trail of Alexander McQueen. However, modern fashion, in the context of body transformation, is represented in photography and film. Therefore, in this article, preference is given to the field of photography and fashion film to show the paradigm shifts in fashion that led to the transformation of the body. Although some designers, such as Chalayan, directly involve the media as extensions, photography and film radically change the representation of fashion. Thanks to new media, fashion performances and the presentation of the collections take place, as predicted by Flusser, at a distance. Accordingly, the fashion house Maison Martin Margiela presented the couture autumn-winter collection in 2012 in which there was no audience, but there was a camera that monitored and recorded everything. Fashion photography and fashion film have gone a step further

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in considering the relationship between fashion, body and corporeality. The most significant changes in contemporary fashion have taken place in the context of fashion photography, fashion film and fashion performance, all under the visible influence of the media. Therefore, the notion of media is the basis for understanding the paradigm shift that fashion experienced at the beginning of the 1990s.

1. Fashion film: From the Golden Age of Hollywood to experimental fashion film The emergence of fashion film after the 1990s as a new possibility of body performance, as well as the emergence of the body on the screen, is an important area that combines fashion theory and media as well as the field of film and photography. Film and photography in the context of contemporary fashion represent a valuable field in which the emergence of a new cinematic body is explored. It is certain that film, and before that photography, has provided an insight into the new concept of body and reality. With the advent of photography and film, the process of mediation radically changed its course; the result is a forever changed fashioned body. The connection between fashion and film and, finally, the emergence of the term fashion film after the 1990s dates back to the period of classic films and big movie stars, so it is necessary to briefly chronologically describe how film influenced fashion and vice versa. It is important to emphasize how fashion film is not genre-specific; as stated by Croatian filmologist Nikica Giliü: “Classification is extremely important in discussing any art form” (Giliü 2007, 9). But fashion film does not belong to a film genre, and yet we call it a film. Therefore, in that sense, it belongs to a certain interspace between gender, type (film type) and genre because it uses all the above categories for its representation. Iris van Herpen uses a fashion documentary film that follows the process of her work, and Nick Knight uses experimental film and mixes different media in his work. There are many film achievements in classic film, which are highlighted in this article, that have combined the fields of film and fashion and significantly influenced fashion practice and style. Fashion film belongs to the field of documentary, feature and experimental film (basic film genres), but it should be emphasized that fashion film is still an unfounded film category. As for film genres, as Giliü classified, there are genres of feature, documentary and experimental film (Giliü 2007), but due to the great influence of film on fashion, fashion film does not belong only to one genre or style. Fashion film appears in different categories and in different genres, and it can consist of feature and documentary parts.

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Therefore, the classification in this paper is somewhat different because it is associated with film and fashion within classic Hollywood films, fashion documentaries and promotional art fashion films. It is necessary to emphasize the special connection between film and fashion because films represent a new style and new ideas for a mass audience. The film, like fashion, has changed the concept of reality in a truly radical way, as well as the idea of body and corporeality on screen. The film changed social rules with fashion, setting a new fashion for a new audience. The American actress Mae Marsh agreed in 1912 to show off her bare feet, risking scandal, in a paradigmatic cave scene in the film Man’s Genesis (dir. D. W. Griffith). As early as 1910, Hollywood began bringing in famous designers and costume designers to design film costumes. In 1911, French fashion designer Paul Poiret shot his summer collection called The Thousand and Second Night, inspired by oriental harem trousers,1 and later used it for advertising purposes. In 1920, Coco Chanel was hired to design for the American actress Gloria Swanson, but Swanson despised the dark and clean Chanel lines that were not suitable for photography and film. A new generation of designers and costume designers then emerged who understood the connection between stars, film and fashion. This group of costume designers included Edith Head, who trained as an assistant to Travis Banton, himself one of the most famous designers of the 1930s, notable for dressing German-American actress Marlene Dietrich. Head’s success was that she managed to satisfy her stars, dressing them in the thencurrent American style, taking over from French fashion, and designing wearable fashion. Its special design always reflected the spirit of the times; when Christian Dior introduced New Look in 1947 with his significantly longer skirts, Head refused to specify the length of her dresses in the films she designed for, waiting for the reactions to such a fashion change to calm down. It was not until the very late 1940s that Head began designing longer dresses. Her New Look release was in 1950 in All About Eve (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz), in which actress Bette Davis wears a richly lined, bareshouldered party cocktail dress that later became an iconic dress in the fashion context. The role of the designer and costume designer in the film had changed from the Hollywood dressing system since the 1950s, when American actress Audrey Hepburn asked Hubert de Givenchy, a Parisian 1

Poiret made significant changes in women’s clothing: he introduced trousers into haute couture, and this later became a generally accepted item of clothing for women’s sports activities and leisure. Harem pants signified a liberation from Western norms and conventions. In the context of the connection between fashion and film, Poiret made a step towards a more creative and free approach to costume, often taking on elements of the Far East.

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couture designer, to design the clothes she would wear in Sabrina (dir. Billy Wilder, 1954). It was Head who did her studio work on the costumes, but the Hepburn-Givenchy relationship created the Hepburn Look, which influenced a wider audience. Classical cinema was closely associated with the concept of haute couture in Europe, especially with French fashion designers and big stars (such as Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn and Kim Novak), and in the mid-1950s, with the rise of television, film experienced a kind of a turning point. Both films starring Audrey Hepburn, Sabrina and Funny Face (dir. Stanley Donen, 1957), became places of the transformation of this actress with a fashion costume (Bruzzi 1997, 6). Although costume designers, such as de Givenchy, continued to be significant in the world of film, the relationship between fashion and film changed radically under the influence of street fashion. However, thanks to high fashion, costume designers gained a greater degree of autonomy in film. Fashion and film in the Golden Age of Hollywood represented a significant link between dressing up on film, character visualization and consumer society. Fashion was presented in film in other ways; from the 1994 film Prêt-à-Porter by Robert Altman to the 1994 documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothes by German director Wim Wenders, there were the beginnings of Japanese deconstruction that accompanied the creative process of the work of fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. A short film by the American director Martin Scorsese, Made in Milan, made in 1990, is dedicated to the work of Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani. Films that follow the process of designer work have become the standard in recent years. Iris van Herpen has re-emphasized the process of working in contemporary fashion design, even though such short documentaries existed as far back as the early 1990s. We can say that the main reason for this return of interest in observing the working process of a fashion designer is the same as the claim of Boris Groys, a theorist of avant-garde and contemporary art. Groys noted that it is necessary to document the work of contemporary artists (conceptual, performative and installation artists), and in the process of the democratization of art at the end of the 20th century, art sought to reject any form of creative idealization – not only of art but also of the creative process (Groys 2008, 53–66). In this way, the process of documenting the event of the emergence of something new in culture is connected with what belongs to the enchantment of the mass audience with its fetishized idols. As early as the late 1960s, the Spanish fashion designer Christóbal Balenciaga argued that haute couture no longer existed (Mendes and de la Haye 1999, 24). This can be seen much earlier in the 1957 film Funny Face (dir. Stanley Donen), in which a young Audrey Hepburn appears dressed in black capri pants and a black dolcevita, which was

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unknown until then in the world of film and rich costume design. A similar example is found in Kim Novak, who was also dressed in black trousers and a dolcevita in Bell, Book and Candle (dir. Richard Quine, 1958) and looks like a member of the popular beatnik subculture.2 Many films became references to fashion change and adhered to the great power of film in shaping fashion styles. During the 1980s, film and fashion underwent a radical change. High fashion was no longer present in films, famous costume designers and designers were working less with directors, and there was no more classical film. However, Giorgio Armani designed the costumes for the film American Gigolo (dir. Paul Schrader, 1980), which features a young Richard Gere as a symbol of the affirmation of men’s fashion and freedom in experimenting with colours and fabrics in his paradigmatic scene where the protagonist dresses. This film presented the connection between fashion costumes and ready-to-wear fashion (Bruzzi 1997, 7). What has happened to fashion and film in the meantime, and why is their relationship important for research in the field of fashion theories, media, and ultimately film itself? Film and fashion have discarded some of their essential features over time. Sometimes fashion on film triggered mass trends, such as cropped Tshirts and leg warmers, which were used in the film Flashdance (dir. Adrian Lyne, 1983). Some films followed tradition and functioned like a fashion show from the beginning to the end of the film. Examples of this include Pretty Woman (dir. Garry Marshall, 1990), which features American actress Julia Roberts as a Cinderella character, but also films such as My Fair Lady, directed by George Cukor in 1964, and Grease, directed by Randal Kleiser in 1978. Of all the costumes shown in the film, the costume of the prostitute played by Julia Roberts (high and narrow boots, with a top and short miniskirt) became extremely important for the youth of the 1990s. As in the case of Sabrina, Pretty Woman constructs a similar fairy tale about a young woman who becomes different by changing her appearance, clothing, and thus her economic status (Bruzzi 1997, 15). Contemporary designers from 7th Avenue have often collaborated in designing costumes for films, however their style has never prevailed over the existing character. Costume design for American productions has been done by American designers Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren, who is best known in the sector for his work on Annie Hall (dir. Woody Allen, 1977) with American actress Diane Keaton. Keaton wore clothing items with Lauren’s signature and influenced the female audience who, years later, wore clothes in a relaxed and liberating way, like the main character 2

The beatnik style existed during the 1950s and 1960s with subcultures dressing predominantly in black, and it was recognizable by dolcevitas and French hats.

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of that film. Since the late 1960s, the female star type has been stratifying, which will be discussed in more detail in the next section. It is Keaton who retained certain characteristics of the good friend type3 so that, in the 1990s, there was an “obvious revitalization of the type (which accompanies the revitalization of romantic comedy)” (Kragiü 2005, 14). However, the connection between fashion and film cannot be seen only in this costume design context, which is, of course, an important element of the film story. What film offers in terms of fashion became visible only after the 1990s with the emergence of short artistic semi-documentary fashion films. Thanks to new technologies but also the need to move fashion from the catwalk to the cinematic screen, fashion film has gradually profiled itself as an important element in research in fashion theory. Although authors such as Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson have been researching film and fashion for more than thirty years, there are not enough other relevant researchers in this theoretical field. Therefore, this chapter intends to analyze what fashion is in film and how both concepts and areas have influenced each other, starting from the period of classic Hollywood film. Fashion films can, therefore, be divided as follows: (1) Film and fashion in a classic feature film (2) Fashion documentaries (3) Advertising art fashion films Film no longer serves as a unique experience for the viewer, and this process took place precisely under the great influence of television, VHSs and DVDs, which particularly changed the experience of the film in general. The decentralization of film, and thus the fashion that appeared in films, resulted in a new type of communication. In this context, the British fashion theorist Pamela Church Gibson speaks of “images spilling over on screens,” thus creating a new way of looking at the fashion body on-screen (Church Gibson 2011, 11). The new image of the film event now represents a body that is no longer aestheticized and stylized on screen but has been preconstructed by the media for a new kind of image of fashion film. In fashion film, the body is predetermined by its content and structure and represents an experimental and hybrid body performance. The body appears in fashion film as a process, from the emergence of the garment object on film (but no longer in the context of costume design) to the complete medialization of 3 The character type of the good friend, according to the typology of female stars by Enno Patalas, is described as “the ideal partner of a guy from the neighborhood who needs her as a friend and helper … a good friend is not the subject of a struggle of men who then primarily fight for social ideals” (Patalas 1963, 180).

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the body. The growing emergence of fashion in the context of the theory as well as the philosophy of film is an important area that connects theories of fashion, media and performance. Film and fashion have developed a strong connection, from the era of classic Hollywood to today’s art documentaries about fashion. In the next section, this article will try to present the area in which we want to indicate what kind of body appeared in film after the 1990s, what its task is in moving images in the context of fashion in the film, and what the new possibilities of body and physical performance are. The great influence of female movie stars on fashion was most pronounced in the 1930s and 1940s. Female stars became style icons for mass audiences. Hollywood Golden Age costumes emphasized the natural beauty of individual stars but later served as important references for fashion designers. Hollywood, in a fashion context, served as a machine for setting fashion norms and displaying what was currently in fashion, but it also paved the way for further consideration of the relationship between film and fashion. The classic Hollywood film was associated with the strong development of the industry and was based on Fordism, the division of labour necessary for mass production. Films of that time displayed a pragmatic spirit and a respect for patriarchal norms. The space of the scene in the classic film was constructed according to the line of action or on a line of 180 degrees, which provided a common space from frame to frame. A clear relationship between the characters was established, and thus the space was clearly defined so that the viewer always knows where the characters are placed. The mode of the film makes the technique invisible (Peterliü calls the classical style an “invisible style” because the author’s or director’s interventions are hidden, or at least are such that they do not distract attention from the main plot). The shots are arranged linearly spatially and temporally so that the actor or actress does not look directly into the camera. Interestingly, this invisibility of style is replaced by other characteristics. In classic Hollywood films, stories are organized by genre patterns that have always served the film industry for the production and marketing of films. Genres, just like film stars, have emerged as a need for product differentiation systems. Each genre has a recognizable array of common features that run through the story, visual style, characters, mise-en-scène, music, and film stars. Genres consist of specific systems (patterns) for creating certain expectations and assumptions with which viewers see and understand the film. These patterns offer a way to conclude what happens on screen: why certain actions and events take place, why characters look as they do, why they speak and behave in a certain way, and so on, and all this is of importance in the context of researching fashion and film.. Singing

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is appropriate for a musical, but not exactly for a thriller or war movie. In this sense, genre systems presuppose rules, norms and laws. Given the stardom system (a cinematic phenomenon related to the level of popularity and recognition of stars), which is based on the guarantee that as many viewers as possible will react to the appearance of an actor, the types that form the structure develops. The structure is maintained by the social and psychological interests of the audience in correlation with the industry in a certain period. Therefore, it is important to present the connection between fashion and film in the Golden Age of Hollywood. In that period, we can see the relationship between the concept of the stardom system, the film and the fashion pattern. Fashion and film influenced each other, not only in the design of costumes for the cinematic screen but also in the emergence of the notion of a fashion costume, which then completely turned into a fashion object.4 Classic Hollywood film traditionally produces heroes and heroines directed towards their goal, that is, solving problems that, nowadays, are often related to saving the world. The notion of happiness presupposes the realization of a heterosexual love affair, which is the main theme of the film. Classic Hollywood relies on a so-called classic narrative style in which the story moves toward problem-solving. The montage cuts are invisible and do not require the conscious effort of the viewer to follow the action of the film, and the viewer is encouraged to identify with the characters. The study of stars is associated with the study of genres in film. A star is a less fluid category and is associated with a particular actor or actress. The types of stars emerge as links between certain actors or actresses and the roles they play, and we have already listed some in the previous section as significant to the relationship between fashion and film. The typology of female stars in classic film is very important for fashion since these actresses represented new fashion expressions and served to popularize the then lavish fashion design. The term fashion costume is used here as a link between a costume 4

Fashion costume was a transition from the classic costume design and is located between costume design and ready-to-wear fashion. This process of change was already visible in the 1970s where there were direct links between fashion costume and, for example, street fashion. One example is Foxy Brown (dir. Jack Hill, 1974) and the aesthetics of the Black Panthers, which was then the inspiration for the British fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner for her spring/summer 2015 collection. Other examples of the transition from fashion to ready-to-wear exist in John Galliano’s collection inspired by the film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie in 1985, in which the designer dealt with the notion of an imaginary woman warrior. The boundaries between fashion costume, ready-to-wear, and later fashion object were more pronounced in fashion after the 1990s, especially in the designs of Rick Owens.

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design solution and a fashion suit. It should be said that costume design is not fashion in its entirety, but film and costume lead to specific fashion clothing elements and even styles, which are permanently written into the history and theory of fashion. Through the typology of predominantly female stars, the fashion costume was established as an important element in film, but also in fashion. Using the social typology of stars, the German film historian Enno Patalas stated that there are eight basic types of female stars (Patalas 1963), and we will try to connect film genres and fashion costumes in relation to these types. The first type in Patalas’s typology is occupied by a naive woman who very often has “long curly (light) hair, heart-shaped lips, big eyes and eyelashes” (Kragiü 2005, 3). Female characters played by actresses like Mary Pickford, Florence Lawrence and Lillian Gish have been branded as naive girls with no life experience. For example, in the period from the 1910s to the 1920s, the male star appeared as a man of action and deeds, but also as a hero of western films. In the male context of the 1920s, Latin lovers appear in the form of Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, and the character of the mundane woman announces her aspiration for liberation from traditional orders. Croatian filmologist Ante Peterliü states that the type of the Latin lover is “a person who in the first place is not ‘obliged’ to fight for justice, but to win women’s hearts, according to all the rules of romantic seduction” (Peterliü 2008, 105). Another type (Cr. mondenka), on the other hand, is one who appears after the First World War as a pursuit of women’s emancipation (Kragiü 2005, 9) and remains a long-standing type of star in film. In the mid-1930s, the neighbourhood good guy type (in a male context) and the good friend type (in a female context) appear, such as the American actress Katherine Hepburn. The good friend type can draw parallels with the virgin or naive type; she is good in her actions and not so dependent on the man. A good friend does not have such a strong personality trait in Patalas’s typology, but the type includes a large number of actresses (from Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur and Rosalind Russell to Ginger Rogers), mostly “paradigmatic for the type of screwball comedy stars of the 1930s” (Kragiü 2005, 13). This type, although not so greatly expressed in character, betrays a “youthful cheerfulness and carefreeness” (Patalas 1963, 183). In Patalas’s typology, there is also the character of the femme fatale, “a kind of negative of the virgin whose ideal it is opposed to” (Patalas 1963, 50). The femme fatale, a very common character in the fashion system, especially among the designers Thierry Mugler, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Gianni Versace, is a dark-haired beauty and seductress whose character can be both positive and negative. The main representatives of this type are Lyda Borelli and Pina Menichelli, while Ava Gardner, Rita

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Hayworth, Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall are important for fashion. The femme fatale, in the history of film and fashion, is an interesting type to explore as it continues to evolve into a vamp.5 In the earlier period, in the 1930s, the vamp type was a woman of magical magnetism who destroyed men due to fate. The man who accompanies the female vamp is often a gangster hero, a type associated with the gangster film genre and which appears in the new Hollywood. According to Kragiü, the main difference between the vamp and the femme fatale types are the following: In Patalas’ definition, the vamp is mostly associated with imaginary ambiences that emphasize the artificiality of the type, which is also a reaction to the increasingly realistic characters that appear with the arrival of sound film, and is a character diametrically opposed to men (which, by destroying a man, also destroys itself), and in an important distinction from a femme fatale, the vamp must not destroy because of evil but because of fateful circumstances. (Kragiü 2005, 7)

The film Gone With The Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), starring Vivien Leigh, greatly influenced fashion and style at the time. Costume designer Walter Plunkett designed more than forty costumes just for Leigh, the most dress changes in cinema history (Butchart 2016, 74). This film undoubtedly influenced Dior’s collections of the 1950s and his H Line from 1954 and 1955, and the paradigmatic barbecue dress6of the character of Scarlett O’Hara became an inexhaustible inspiration of the time. Not coincidentally, the femme fatale type in fashion history appears as a reference to films of the mid-1940s. Lauren Bacall embodies a slightly milder version of the femme fatale in the 1946 film The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart. Furthermore, the femme fatale type is strongly presented on screen by Rita Hayworth in Gilda (dir. Charles Vidor, 1946) and by Ava Gardner in The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946), but Bacall represented a fashion element that conquered the film world with her distinctive look and appearance (Butchart 2016, 14). Following this track, in 2010, John Galliano created a homage to film noir and Bacall, using glittery raincoats and blonde models resembling actresses of the time. A direct reference to Marnie (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1964) was made by Alexander McQueen for the autumn-winter 2005 collection. Taking the character of American actress Tippi Hedren as its inspiration, the collection 5

The vamp is a specific type in the typology of movie stars, very often superior and enchantingly beautiful, but also vague and often associated with imaginary ambiences. 6 A white-green muslin dress worn by Vivien Leigh and designed by Walter Plunkett.

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presented classic costumes on the legacy of Edith Head, who was also the film’s lead costume designer. Hitchcock’s paradigmatic blonde actresses have provided inexhaustible inspiration for fashion designers, especially McQueen and Galliano in their 2005 and 2009 collections, in which they refer to The Birds (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1963). The early 1940s were also marked by the losers type among male actors (hero-losers with Bogart) and the pin-up girl type among actresses. The pinup is a very important type, as it developed during the war and refers to American actresses of prominent beauty such as Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable. Peterliü states that pin-ups are attractive actresses who are “challenging, luxurious, lush and racially beautiful” (Peterliü 1990, 325). In fashion, the pin-up appeared as a revival of the style of the late 1940s and 1950s, as a reflection of the rebellion against conventional values. Thanks to female stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, Grace Kelly and the aforementioned Marilyn Monroe, the female audience embraced waistlength dresses and capri pants to mix a variety of clothing elements in the later 1950s and which are still in fashion today. There are also transitional types of stars, while some develop into other types, which can sometimes be unfavourable to the career of a particular actor or actress. These types correspond to the value structure of society at a given historical moment. Elizabeth Taylor is an example of various types of changes in film: “from a child actress to A Place in the Sun she is a naive type (virgin, according to Patalas), then becomes a good friend, then fashionable (emancipated woman), then a femme fatale in Cleopatra” (Peterliü 2010, 328). The 1963 film Cleopatra (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) and its eponymous main character inspired Galliano’s collection for the French fashion house Dior’s spring-summer 2004 collection, in which the designer refers to Cleopatra, Nefertiti and Tutankhamun with rich decor and gold (Butchart 2016, 85). McQueen was also interested in the character of Cleopatra in his Egyptian-inspired autumn-winter 2007 collection, in which a specific cut of clothing elements predominates. The fascination with Cleopatra spread to other fashion-related industries, and when the American photographer Richard Avedon photographed the famous model Suzy Parker for the Revlon fashion campaign, he called it simply the ‘Cleopatra look’ in 1962. Furthermore, the 1950s were marked by a ‘rebel without a cause’ type, characteristic of American actors Marlon Brando, James Dean and Paul Newman, and the emergence of the nymph type. The nymph in Patalas’s typology denotes a young, spiritually immature girl, predominantly driven by emotions. This type was mostly popularized by the French actress Brigitte Bardot (Kragiü 2005, 16). Bardot appears as a “complete embodiment

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of a nymph” who “offered herself because she liked it, which confirmed her, unlike the pin-up, as a subject” (Patalas 1963, 255). The film The Wild One (dir. László Benedek, 1953), starring Marlon Brando, influenced many young people at that time, as they started wearing leather jackets down to the waist, while in one of his previous films, A Street Car Named Desire (dir. Elia Kazan, 1951), a plain white T-shirt became a symbol of rebels (Buxbaum 2005, 77). In a fashion context, the rebel without a cause type is visible in the 1990 film Cry-Baby, directed by John Waters, starring Johnny Depp and with costume design by Van Smith. Depp’s costume is in a direct relationship with Brando, Dean and Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1957), dressed in a white T-shirt, jeans and a black leather jacket, charming but also fatal to women. Costume designer Waters took advantage of the rockabilly revival and the notion of delinquency in the film, while Italian designer Miuccia Prada presented female delinquents dressed in vests and leather jackets with scarves around their necks for her 2015 collection. The crisis of the star system appeared in the 1960s and resulted in the loss of visible characteristic types, so some actors and actresses embodied several types at once, some of which were even contradictory.According to Peterliü, characters’ characteristics are most strongly connected with genres. Furthermore, a star system was created in the new Hollywood on the example of the American actress Jodie Foster. However, there was no longer just one type of star but, in each period, several different types, some of which were more permanent (as we saw in the example of the innocent bride or man of action) and some more short-lived (like a flapper-girl). Durable types were evolving and thus gaining new characteristics. According to Peterliü, the types differ according to one’s sex, whereby one is usually dominant and the other secondary, and the one that does not predominate already exists in a certain period (Peterliü 2010, 324). Properties characteristic of a star of one sex can fluctuate, over time becoming the properties of the other sex. Difficulties are worked with, and so-called character actors, specializing in complex characters, may or may not belong to a star in the system but often have a different leading role. However, Peterliü states that specific problems are created by regenerating stars, that is to say, stars that renew themselves, incarnate different characters and change types within the system (Peterliü 2010, 324). One female star who had a rich career and often changed in her various roles was the already mentioned Elizabeth Taylor, who, in the role of Cleopatra, brought together diverse types within the star system. These dizzying changes enabled her to become, in a fashion context, one of the most significant inspirations for the orientally inspired collections of Galliano

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and McQueen, and she also proved that she was more important than the film itself. As Cleopatra, Taylor proved herself “as a character actress (and even an Oscar winner), earning the most that only Hollywood provides. In the most expensive spectacle, this beauty from the dream factory gets the role of a legendary seductress, and although the film proved to be a ‘failure,’ she was beyond that failure; she could survive a film as such, and as a power, that is hard to shake” (Peterliü 2010, 327). With her looks, fashion costume and influence on the female audience, the fashion industry changed its impulse. Namely, under the regeneration of the fashion impulse, a kind of revival of styles could be introduced, which appeared in fashion after the 1990s. Another example of a regenerating star is Jodie Foster, who had a very similar career to Taylor. Changing types within the new star system, Foster has been a “prostitute, a gangster girl, a mortal, a person who kills herself, but who can try something like that – these are roles that have largely been interpreted by so-called character actresses” (Peterliü 2010, 331). Both characters, in the fashion sense, represent the spirit of the 1970s: freedom and liberation. The characters of Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro) and Iris (Jodie Foster) in the film Taxi Driver (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1976) strongly influenced the audience at the time but also the later collections of the Italian fashion house Gucci, the French fashion house Louis Vuitton, and the American fashion house Marc Jacobs, all referring directly to this film. Today’s Hollywood, however, has created stars from other cinemas by reducing them to the level of local stars. It is also interesting to see a fusion of femme fatale, vamp and emancipated woman created in the roles of the American actresses Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Kathleen Turner and Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns (dir. Tim Burton, 1992). A direct connection between the film and the character Selina Kyle (Catwoman) is visible in the work of the recently deceased designer Thierry Mugler and his spring-summer 1997 collection and in the 2014 collection from the studio The Blonds. It is important to point out that the star is not only created by films, i.e. by roles and their interpretations, but also by the promotion and publicity of the actor and actress with the great support of the fashion system. As the typology of female stars has changed since the Golden Age of Hollywood, so has the role of predominantly female actresses in fashion. Peterliü also stated this clearly: “It is obvious that the pin-up has become a more secondary type; it has been supplanted by models, poster girls” (Peterliü 2010, 342). Therefore, models can be vamps, good friends or pinups, and the fashion system allows them to make a big impact on the audience. As the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli accurately stated, “what

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Hollywood creates today will be up to you by tomorrow” (Haggard 1990, 6).

2. Fashion film: Philosophy and body transformations The philosophy of film and the idea of whether film can be thought of in the context of making a short fashion film and a new body category seem to have little connection. Can we think within a film, or does the film create an opinion imposed on us by its complex mechanisms of action, or is it just an impression that the film leaves upon us? How are new bodily performance elements created in a film, what is their effect on the notion of the body, and is the notion of fashion film emerging – which signifies a new performative of the body and changes the concept of physicality on the screen? The movement that exists in moving images marks a new concept of body performance. There is already, in the concept of mere media mediation from the real body to the body on the screen, a radical change and understanding of what the body is, or what it was, in the image before the creation of the concept of the body. From Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his consideration of film to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of an organless body, the body on the screen has undergone many transformations precisely through its performance. If we adhere to the thesis that the film does not think but perceives, a question arises as to what is perceived in the film. Can we argue that cinema art is phenomenological? What unites the philosophical approaches of film and fashion film? Furthermore, if the film thinks, as the French theorist Dominique Chateau argues (2011, 129), what is the result of that thinking process? It is, of course, about the notion of the immaterial in film and movement, which always refers to some kind of change and action. It is important to emphasize that this methodology does not apply to all films because, as Deleuze clearly stated, “thought in the film belongs to good films and great authors” (Deleuze 1983, 7). But fashion films do not belong to great authors, nor do they want to; their fundamental intention is to archive the process of creating an aesthetic body in motion. As the body moves, it fills the media space and time of the film but also immerses itself in the process of constant bodily transformation. The idea of the film, which deals exclusively with the concept of the body that is aestheticized and media-constructed, is visible in fashion film. The central idea is the body, which now no longer represents a suit or a clothed body. How, then, should one approach such a complex form of film when we talk about the media construction of the body on the screen, which is fashionable and experimental? The subject appearing with the body on the screen signifies interaction with the outside world, while the body signifies

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the interspace of action. The body in film, in this case, is both a fashion and a film body. We cannot speak of the physical exclusively as a concept of the material in the film. The physical character of fashion film is also its purpose. As Merleau-Ponty argues, “observing the body in motion, one sees better how it inhabits space (and, after all, time), because movement is not satisfied with suffering space and time, it takes them actively, captures them in their original meaning” (Merleau-Ponty 1978, 116). Fashion film as a genre in the field of filmology does not exist, as we noted earlier; however, in the last ten years, a lot of scientific and research work has been devoted to the fields of fashion and media theory. Film and fashion have had an unbreakable connection throughout history because film does not exist without the influence of clothing and fashion elements. The notions of clothing in film and fashion in film should not be confused here because the difference exists primarily between fashion and clothing. Fashion is always realized in the context between culture, art and industry, while clothing is associated with a bodily process – which is not necessarily fashionable. Fashion film has profiled itself as a term in the theories of one of the leading authors in this field, Stella Bruzzi, a British-Italian theorist who published Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies: Clothes, Identities, Films in 1997 and became one of the founders of fashion film theory. Although this type of film was established later due to the predominance of the digitalization of the entire visual culture, the film is explored in the context of fashion theories in connection with the construction of identity, but also to emphasize how the fashion element participates in the construction of a film image and its body. Fashion, in this context, is not explored as a costume design element that exists in all film images; it already emphasizes how the identity of the character and his/her physicality are built. The costumes in the film represent spectacular interventions on the body (Bruzzi 1997; Gaines and Herzog 1990; Landis 2012), but this is not enough to explore clothing elements or how they correspond to and with the body (Monk 2010). Fashion film is often misinterpreted in this way as fashion in film or film costume design. It represents a new media body image, while clothing elements support the development of visuality, emphasize the spectacular nature of fashion and re-design the concepts of the body and physicality. The phenomenon of fashion film has appeared thanks to the digital image and a new type of culture, and although fashion previously existed in film as clothing and costume design, it was only with the rise of new digital technologies that the term fashion film emerged. Although the history of fashion film begins much earlier than Bruzzi’s very significant book and

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research, it has profiled itself thanks to a carefully chosen methodological framework between fashion, film (media) and performance. Intermediality7 is a key concept in understanding fashion film because it is linked to these three significant research areas. Thanks to film as a medium, fashion was allowed to present itself visually as a highly aesthetic image in motion, and the bodily modes of presentation were completely adapted to the medium of film. This type of film does not adhere to fashion photography or fashion advertising but unites the two areas and is, therefore, an important area of research in fashion theories and image theories, as well as in researching a new type of corporality. As a medium and as an art, film is at the same time material and immaterial, that is to say, it is corporeal yet also virtual – it is a material spirit (Perez 1998). The emphasis in the fashion image is always based on the depiction of the body and its possibilities, while clothing in film represents a kind of tactile transmediality.8 Fashion film, above all, has the task of redefining, redesigning and reconstructing the concept of the body on film. New performance practices in film have been visible in films since the early 1990s. For example, in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (dir. James Cameron, 1991), we see visible changes in the body of the Terminator and its ability to continually transform. This transformation, however, not only applied to the bodily changes of the Terminator T-1000 but also to voice identities (Codeluppi 2006, 119). Since the beginning of the 1990s, the film has been paying increasing attention to the possibilities of the technological transformations of the physical identity of the characters. Such a body, which has been redesigned for the image, emerges as a new possibility of bodily transformation in the film image. The body of the Terminator, of course, was preceded by the 1927 film Metropolis by Austrian director Fritz Lang with the image of Mary. However, she does not have the possibility of a complete bodily transformation or of merging into other objects. What has made fashion film extremely important in the transformation of not only the genre but also the media logic of the film are not only the new possibilities of changing the body as such, but also the ways of performing the body on the screen. Before making a fashion film, short films appear that follow the process of making a garment and the concept of performing

7

The notion of intermediality refers to the takeover of one medium and its transposition into other media. The multiplication of the media leads to a kind of media impurity where the real meaning of the media cannot be deciphered. 8 The term tactile transmediality denotes a new practice of the body in media and how it behaves on the screen.

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a fashion event.9 The constant change of the body on the screen can be clearly defined by the notion of a liquid body (Codeluppi 2006) but also that of a metastatic body (Baudrillard 1988, 47). The metastatic body can change indefinitely and is constantly in bodily transitions. This is possible in a media-constructed film image, as the body in fashion emerges as the only possibility of translating into a liquid, changeable body without a clear identity. Digital processing, in which characters can be physically changed independently of the clothing element, developed in an era of the growing influence of new technology and its influence on the construction of the character in the film. A good example of this process is Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film The Irishman, in which the faces of the main protagonists (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci) are visibly, almost unnaturally, rejuvenated by technology. How much de-ageing technology10 has helped to bring body art and its aspects closer to the real course of time and how much it represents a new area within film theory is still an under-explored area within filmology; however, technology is certainly important for the concept of body modifications on the screen. The ageing process of the body can now be accelerated or slowed down, and it marks the character of fashion film – the fusion of body and clothing elements as one of the main markers in the film image, no longer as costumes or decor, but as conditions for transforming the body and its identity. The body on film has become the interest of film practice “by increasing the visibility of the body and corporeality in postmodern theory and media practice” (Šakiü 2017, 200). Theoretical concepts of the fluid and metastatic body are now being visualized in film, and no longer just in the form of photography or advertising. Therefore, clear connections between fashion and film appear here as new possibilities for decorating the visual aspects of the characters, the transmedial tactility of the body, and the new body connected to the costume. This link is made by film and separates the body from the outside world while, paradoxically, drawing into the pro-cinematic reality.11 Such a body is seen on film, and it levitates between what exists as a body and what is filmed as a body in the film. When we talk about the body in the film and 9

A fashion event is defined as a pre-media constructed event in contemporary fashion in which the performance of the body is emphasized. The notion of an event, on the other hand, refers to the definition of Alain Badiou (Fr. événement), taken from Deleuze (Paiü 2017, 344–361). 10 De-ageing technology is used to change the appearance of the protagonist, most often for the purpose of rejuvenation, and is achieved by CGI (computer-generated imagery: a computer-generated application that designs images). 11 The notion of the pro-cinematic reality refers to the reality captured by the camera. It was developed by the French philosopher and aesthetician Étienne Souriau in 1951, who described eight fundamental levels of cinematic reality.

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the body in the film, “that film can be a thematic determinant, content, but not form” (Šakiü 2017, 200). What happens to the body is a technological transformation in which the ability to distinguish what is authentic is lost. The character of such a doubled body has the task of presenting it as a medialized aesthetic object, which is the central idea of a fashion film. In this way, as in the field of performing arts, the film fashion body experiences a conceptual reversal: from the body on film shown as part of the story to the body that is a condition for the existence of fashion film. The body is understood as the possibility of the transformation in the event into a multitude of characters as an anthropological but also a performative fact. What, then, is to be achieved with the emergence of fashion film, and is it even needed as a new film-media category? What does this type of film mean for the field of film philosophy now?12 Fashion film emphasizes that the body operates in the now artificially created space because fashion is possibly no longer only a material thing but also an immaterial virtual performance in the film. With the advent of photography and film, technology enters the process of mediation and radically changes the subject-body-image relationship. Film changes the meaning of life and shapes the body in new media, but also radically changes the concept of film language and image. The notion of body and corporeality in fashion film is characterized by bodily change as a result of various technological processes. A fundamental feature of fashion film that is made possible precisely by becoming technological is the notion of a new performance of the body, as well as the creation of a new philosophical notion of the body. The term new performance means the following: a new meaning of the body, which, by its performance, marks the body as an aesthetic and fashion object. Fashion film, if it is established as stable and autonomous, wants to represent the aestheticized body that emerges as a necessary process of a film image. It is important to emphasize that this does not apply to all genres within the field of cinema studies because otherwise we are talking about fashion that exists in every film. Equally, one cannot speak of the philosophy of film for every film, but, as 12

Film philosophy is an area that developed under the influence of Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, André Bazin, Dominique Chateau, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanley Cavell and many others, and it explores the relationship between film and philosophy and the reflective nature of film. Nancy believes that the work of Abbas Kiarostami has the dimension of cinematic metaphysics (Nancy 2011, 45). Croatian filmologist Ivana Keser, in her text “Conditions of the Physical in Film,” explores how “everyone who is close to film with a foothold in philosophy wonders whether it is possible to make a philosophical film, a film that could be considered a relatively autonomous philosophical work” (Keser 2015, 533).

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Deleuze asserts, only for good films and great authors (Deleuze 1983, 7). The film, above all, proves the disappearance of the traditional notion of painting, although this is already evident in the photographic image. There is a change in the relationship, not only of the image but also of the language itself, in which the linguistic level of the image changes its real meaning. But a question also arises as to the real meaning of this type of film. Is there still language behind such images, and, if so, can it be semiotically dissected, or is it something else entirely? The photographic image was crucial for understanding technical and later digital images, but it is primarily related to the linear nature of text because technical images13 take over functions related to linear texts. Fashion images in film want to emphasize a new kind of body representation, as well as a medium that changes the perception and points to a transformation of the body, rather than the linearity of the text behind the image. Deleuze emphasizes the film movement in particular, which always points to “change, migration, changing ages.” This is no less true of bodies: “the fall of a body presupposes another one that attracts it and expresses a change in the whole that encompasses them both” (Deleuze 2010, 16). The existence of movement in the film is crucial for the performance of a fashion film and its body. Thanks to movement, we come to the whole image because movement decides what the whole image will be like (Deleuze 2012, 20). In the context of fashion film, which is still an 13 The concept of a technical image was introduced by the Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser and denotes a new type of image that has a scientific and technical origin. According to Flusser, the world is no longer our projection, but exclusively the projection and construction of the media. What is similar now appears in the virtual world, and thus both realities show their “punctuality.” Images that call into question the very concept of the image are technical images. It is necessary to build a new bridge to the “world” with the help of technical images, and this is being built by the unity of science, art and technology. As Paiü states, “the world is therefore nothing more than a ‘codified world’ – a network of signs, symbols, images. In this manner, Flusser’s notion of the world is not phenomenological, but hermeneutical. The world is understood with the help of ‘artificial’ signs by which societies communicate with each other” (Paiü 2008, 119). The digital technical image does not reject language or text – it includes it – but its linear nature turns into a structural, cybernetic form of operation. The text is now primarily of a scientific nature, and its realization is found in technical images. Technical images are those that give meaning to the world and direct connections with the traditional, artistic, cultic and magical, and as Paiü states, “the world of a technical image is an artificial world of virtual/digital reality. Flusser drew the most radical possible conclusion from there. Everything that arises from the change of the image paradigm in the digital age must necessarily cover all areas of human activities” (Paiü 2008, 127).

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under-explored area, preference is given to the mobility of the fashion body. This type of movement is visible in the fashion art advertising films Iris van Herpen, who noticed that fashion without film can no longer represent the fashion process. The fashion process14 includes not only the creation of a garment object but also the way it is performed through the film. Short art fashion documentaries date back to Wim Wenders’s dedication to Yohji Yamamoto and Japan (although they were more fashion documentaries and less promotional art films), and van Herpen later popularized them and presented the hidden work process of a fashion designer. The difference between documentaries and short feature films is in the process of making a film. The former often follows the work of one designer, such as L’Amour Fou (dir. Pierre Thoretton, 2010) on the life and work of Yves SaintLaurent. The latter intends to advertise through the artistic process. The wave of films exploring the lives of famous designers, such as Coco Chanel and Yves Saint-Laurent, who have risen to the status of myths or icons in the promotion of culture and art, points to the importance of fashion or heritage history before the renewed critical interest in biographical film as a transnational film genre (Rees-Roberts 2018, 136). In contrast, the film Dries (dir. Reiner Holzemer, 2017) is an intimate portrait of the Belgian designer Dries Van Noten that emphasizes the design practice of this fashion designer as well as his production process and his way of stylizing his collections. The film is a combination of professional and intimate and gives an insight into both lives of Van Noten, filming him both at work and in his private life. Fashion films are viewed as an experimental marketing tool of fashion houses that use storytelling and film aesthetics to promote brands and establish close and more intimate relationships with consumers. This is evident in almost all fashion commercials of major fashion houses, such as Chanel. The emphasis in fashion films is primarily on the experimental way of advertising because, as in the case of the advertising image, it is the intention of the image, in this case, the image for consumption. But fashion film also has the task of experimenting, collaging and creating a new look at the fashion body. The transformation of the body into a fashion body takes place in a fashion film, which should seduce the viewer and draw him/her into the atmosphere of fashion. Certainly, fashion photography 14 The fashion process refers to the change of body and physicality in contemporary fashion design after the 1990s under the influence of the media (first photography and then fashion film). The fashion process is close to Iris van Herpen’s concept of process film, which marks the initial process of the creation of a fashion object to its performance. The process also signifies the constant state of change in which fashion takes place, which is then reflected on the body.

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cannot do that because it is not a moving image and there are fewer technological possibilities. Fashion art advertising film has also profiled itself as a kind of an online digital platform. As early as 2010, many fashion houses started using film as a kind of advertising and artistic platform. Since 2015, the Italian fashion house Gucci has been presenting innovative advertising fashion campaigns in the form of moving images. But fashion houses are not the only ones to have started making films for their consumers; in the 3-minute short film L’Odyssée from 2012 that director Bruno Aveillan shot for Cartier, the luxury of a Parisian jewellery manufacturer was represented. Despite the film’s short running time, Cartier tried to portray a new era through a media film spectacle, referring to the Golden Age of Hollywood. This type of fashion film was also adopted by Chanel for its fragrances Coco (1991) and Égoïste (1990). In the first, the young French actress Vanessa Paradis appears as a fragile bird trapped in a cage, while in the second, there is a direct reference to actresses like Ava Gardner or Lauren Bacall, in which the models manically shout “egoist!” in the fight for their women’s rights. In the context of fashion, Iris van Herpen is making a breakthrough in fashion film, such as with her 2018 Ludi Naturae process film, which closely follows the making of her 3D models, but now has an artistic overtone. Although it is a film that simply follows the process of making each element, van Herpen noticed the importance of such promotions of her virtuosic work. Collaborating with a variety of artists, technologists and architects, van Herpen has placed herself at the top of contemporary fashion performance practice. No matter what kind of fashion film it is, its task is very precise: to make contact with the viewer as only a film can, to seduce them with the production process, and finally to popularize the fashion product so that the viewer identifies with the characters or their feelings. After the 1990s, the relationship between fashion and film went a step further than classic costume design and fashion costume. Therefore, the question arises: does fashion film deserve its place only in theories of fashion, or does it also belong in cinema studies? Although fashion film, as we can see, has not become a genre or establish itself as a separate film within a multitude of films, it has certainly done one thing – it has changed the relationship in the fashion system itself. Photography, although an important element of contemporary fashion practice, is still being replaced by fashion film because only film can represent the fashion body in motion and in its process.

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Conclusion: Body transmediality and the ‘event’ Contemporary fashion and its hybrid, eclectic form represent a new way of understanding the body and the fashion object.15 Many studies in fashion theories have neglected the fashion process and the creation of a fashion object. The visual and tactile aspects of fashion certainly should not be neglected in this area, otherwise fashion cannot be fully decoded. Fashion is, without a doubt, associated with the body (not just as dress) and creates new categories when it comes to the notion of corporeality. It is, therefore, necessary to list the most important authors who have significantly contributed to the understanding of this concept so that we can come up with formulations of fashion as an event. As Paiü states: “Corporeality in the aesthetic sense and corporeality in the sense of the material substance of an object from the living environment (flesh) are two necessary preconditions for noticing what makes the body an essential substance – the subject of visuality in perception” (Paiü 2009, 234). The German philosopher Edmund Husserl laid the foundations of phenomenology but did not deal with the return of the body. The body is no longer a mere observer but rather a kind of intermediary through which we enter the world. But the phenomenology of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty provided a methodological framework for researching the philosophy of the body. Although MerleauPonty did not deal with fashion, his understanding of the body and the corporeal turn is very important for understanding contemporary fashion design and the creation of a fashion object. Merleau-Ponty departed from Husserl’s understanding by pointing out that “physical experience forces us to consider that there are acts of thought that are not the result of universal consciousness alone” (Ruthrof 2000, 11). The body is always set in a world woven of other subjects and objects; it changed radically in the 1990s in the context of a body with a suit, thus creating a fashion object. As Paiü states, “the body is not a mere object of perception of consciousness from the position of the transcendental self. It is in its physiological state the substance to which the gaze is directed” (Paiü 2009, 235). Jean Baudrillard understands the end of the body in the context of dismembered organs (Baudrillard 1995, 68), but Paiü adds to this by clarifying that “the body is dismembered because it is a fragmented whole” (Paiü 2009, 220). The body can no longer be understood as a function or structure of the human in a preset world but more as an autonomous event in contemporary fashion design. 15 A fashion object refers to the combination of a fashion dress and the body in a different, changed form, mostly with large dimensions and a sculptural character. It is characteristic of contemporary fashion since the 1990s and emerged as a result of the intertwining of the fields of fashion, performance, design and architecture.

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Fashion just refers to the visual construction of the body of today’s society. The body of contemporary fashion in new media is gaining new experiences and opportunities. Through this process, fashion constantly shapes its fluid identity. The impossibility of finding the identity of the body is a consequence of the simulation of the media, and fashion has been articulated as a new kind of bodily event and experience. The consequence of the interaction of the body with the medium is the body that, due to the disintegration of the whole, continues to decompose in the event of fashion. Donna Haraway introduced the concept of cyborg in the early 1980s and described it as “a creature of the post-sexual world,” while “skin is the traditional border between bodies and the border of internal and external, and that border is threatened by communications and biotechnology” (Haraway 1990, 190–233). The issue of the dematerialization and disappearance of the body is important when we talk about contemporary fashion design because we have paradigmatic examples in which the body is almost non-existent; it exists only as a reminder that the body is dressed, but the dress itself does not define the body. Judith Butler, in her book Bodies That Matter: On Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), writes about the discursive boundaries of “sex” and emphasizes the re-definition of the notion of the materiality of the body by its sex and behaviour. For Butler, sex is obtained by action. Gender is, therefore, an artificial product, and “if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity” (Butler 1990, 136). In the context of marking the boundaries between internal and external, the Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz states, however, that bodily “boundaries, edges and contours are osmotic – they have great power to include and exclude external and internal in constant exchange” (Grosz 1994, 79). For Martin Heidegger, “the body is in the view of the Being as an event structured within the existential set Dasein of our existence” (Paiü 2009, 233). It sounds almost unbelievable, but in a way, Heidegger’s work Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) contributed significantly to reflections on the body. The reason is to be seen in the fact that its place (topos) is marked by the existential structure of being in the world. The fragmentation of the whole, and thus of the body, adds value to contemporary fashion because it always exists thanks to new media. Its constant presence and the constant replacement of the new brings the body to the new media environment. Thanks to the automatization of perception and reality, according to Paul Virilio, new media now rule the human body, especially in the field of performance art (Virilio 1999, 69). As Jean-Luc Nancy states about his reflections on the body: “Bodies aren’t some kind of

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fullness or filled space (space is filled everywhere): they are open space, implying, in some sense, a space more spacious than spatial, what could also be called a place” (Nancy 2008, 17). That space in which the body realizes fashion in a fashion object becomes a meeting place of diverse physical, fashion and artistic techniques. When we say ‘body’ (body, Körper, corpus), we mean something that is framed and closed, which is also limited by its surface as an object. Each body is located in a specific space. It can even be argued that space for the body is what is an inescapable possibility for time, a reality and a necessity of existence. (Paiü 2019, 46)

Merleau-Ponty and his phenomenology enabled research into embodied experience and emphasized that the mind is located in the body and how, with the help of our body schemes, we get to know the world. As MerleauPonty states: “I consider my body, which is my point of view from the world, one of the objects of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1978, 86). The body, for Merleau-Ponty, exists concerning spatiality as an object. His phenomenology has also provided us with theoretical tools by which fashion cannot be understood as an aesthetic or symbolic form but more as an experience of the body. As Paiü states in the context of thinking about the body and the consciousness of the world: “With the help of the body, man is aware of the world. It is this realization that is the reason for human irrationality. Thus, existence becomes a condemnation to freedom and meaning” (Paiü 2019, 28). The central thought of Merleau-Ponty’s work is the awareness of the body as an active receptor of the external world and as a kind of medium within which we exist in the world. In this context, fashion is understood as a new category that takes the experience of the body as a paradigm. We operate in the world, as stated by Merleau-Ponty (1962: vii– xxi, 73–89), but not only based on the construction of the mind. In addition, contemporary fashion after the 1990s deals with the experience of the body, especially when it comes to the relationship between fashion and architecture and the concept of Refuge Wear by Studio Orta. In the work of the American fashion designer Rick Owens, there is a connection between the body and the suit as an important element of creating a fashion object that does not necessarily have a form; it can be without form, cut and silhouette (Geczy and Karaminas 2017, 123). Owens skillfully uses a minimalist approach to the suit to emphasize refined form and monochrome, so his collections are often futuristic. Following in the footsteps of Chalayan, Owens also explores corporeality, installation and architecture in contemporary fashion. In his collections, heavy materials are often used in combination with feathers, silk and cotton to depict the body as a sculpture.

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He draws inspiration for his body shaping from cubism, futurism, constructivism and suprematism. Each object exists separately in the world, playing with gender/sex categories. According to Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, “suits serve to complement the body” (2017, 137). However, in this process of replenishment, an event takes place between the body, the dress and the spatio-temporal elements of the world. No, fashion is no longer worn. It is not watched or merely represented. Its presence and eventfulness enchant us in a spectacular bodily manner. Various experimental operations of contemporary fashion are indispensable for researching a new fashion body. The body and corporeality radically change their meaning and significance within fashion theories through fashion photography and film. Therefore, this paper has aimed to open a new field of research for fashion theory, filmology and cinema studies. The impact of the film process on the fashion body is very significant for this area because it has been clearly shown how fashion film is a kind of virtual performance of the body. The process that the body experiences within that medium leaves various positive and negative consequences and modifications. It is therefore not unusual that the notions of trauma, anxiety and narcissism form a triad and will provide a new referential framework for contemporary fashion, not just as an aesthetic experience of the subject’s search for his problematic identity. Contemporary fashion marks the final synthesis of visuality and eventfulness. Everything we see happens simultaneously in virtual actualization, and it defines reality as the visual construction of fashion. Therefore, the fashion we see does not necessarily have to be the fashion we wear, but it will certainly be the fashion we passionately want to see if we are not already given to decorating our own bodies with it. The most significant achievements of contemporary fashion designers such as McQueen, Galliano, Chalayan, Owens and van Herpen constantly remind us that the magic and power of fashion is realized in the spectacular performance of the body in the event. For fashion, in the end, remains a catalogue of fascinating images, a pure visualization of life as an aesthetic pleasure.

References Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. The Ecstasy of Communication. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). —. 1995. Simulacra and Simulation – The Body In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

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Bruzzi, Stella. 1997. Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies: Clothes, Identities, Films. London: Routledge. Butchart, Amber. 2016. The Fashion of Film: Fashion Design Inspired by Cinema. London: Octopus Books. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. —. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ Hove: Psychology Press. Buxbaum, Gerda. 2005. The Icons of Fashion: The 20th Century. New York: Prestel Publishing. Chateau, Dominique. 2011. Film i filozofija. Belgrade: Clio. Church Gibson, Pamela. 2011. Fashion and Celebrity Culture. London: Berg. Codeluppi, Vanni. 2006. “Tekuüe tijelo – moda s onu stranu narcisoidnosti.” Translated from Italian by Mirna Cvitan ýerneliü. Tvrÿa 1/2: 119–122. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Cinéma 1. L’image-mouvement. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. —. 2010. Film 1: slika-pokret. Zagreb: Udruga Bijeli val. —. 2012. Film 2: slika-vrijeme, Zagreb: Udruga Bijeli val. Gaines, Jane M., and Charlotte Herzog. 1990. Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body. London: Routledge. Geczy, Adam, and Vicki Karaminas. 2016. Fashion’s Double: Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film. London-New York: Bloomsbury. —. 2017. Critical Fashion Practice: From Westwood to van Beirendonck. London: Bloomsbury. Giliü, Nikica. 2007. Filmski rodovi i vrste, Zagreb: Biblioteka Sintagma. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana. Groys, Boris. 2008. Art Power. London: MIT Press. Haggard, Claire. 1990. “Dressing up in Public.” Screen International MIFED 20. Haraway, Donna. 1990. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” In Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda Nicholson, 190–233. London: Routledge. Keser, Ivana. 2015. “Tjelesna uvjetovanost filma.” Filozofska istraživanja 139, no. 3: 533–542. Kragiü, Bruno. 2005. “Tipologija ženskih zvijezda ameriþkog filma.” Hrvatski filmski ljetopis 11: 3–21. Landis, Deborah. 2012. Hollywood Costume. London: V&A Publishing. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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—. 2008. Razumijevanje Medija. Zagreb: Golden Marketing-Tehniþka knjiga. Mendes, Valerie, and Amy de la Haye. 1999. 20th Century Fashion. London: Thames & Hudson. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. —. 1978. Fenomenologija percepcije. Sarajevo: Biblioteka Logos. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? Chicago: Chicago University Press. Monk, Claire. 2010. Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008. Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press. —. 2011. God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues. New York: Fordham University Press. Paiü, Žarko. 2008. Visual Communications: Introduction. Zagreb: CVS. —. 2009. Zaokret. Zagreb: Litteris —. 2017. Doba oligarhije: Od informacijske ekonomije do politike dogaÿaja. Zagreb: Litteris. —. 2019. Tehnosfera V: Dizajn kao mišljenje, Autonomni objekti i njihove preobrazbe. Zagreb: Sandorf and Mizantrop. Patalas, Enno. 1963. Sozialgeschichte der Stars. Hamburg: Marion von Schröeder. Perez, Gilberto. 1998. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Peterliü, Ante. 1990. “Mondenka; Naivka; Nimfeta; Pin-up; Vamp.” In Filmska enciklopedija 2, edited by Ante Peterliü. Zagreb: JLZ Miroslav Krleža. —. 2008. Povijest filma: rano i klasiþno razdoblje. Zagreb: HFS – Hrvatski filmski savez. —. 2010. Filmska þitanka: žanrovi, autori, glumci. Zagreb: HFS – Hrvatski filmski savez. Rees-Roberts, Nick. 2018. Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age. London: Bloomsbury. Ruthrof, Horst. 2000. The Body in Language. London-New York: Cassell. Šakiü, Tomislav. 2017. “Tijelo na filmu, tijelo filma: tjelesnost filma i tijelo u/na hrvatskom filmu.” In Zbornik radova 45. seminara zagrebaþke slavistiþke škole, edited by Lana Molvarec and Tatjana Piškoviü, 199– 219. Zagreb: Filozofski Fakultet Sveuþilišta u Zagrebu. Starobinski, Jean. 1989. The Living Eye. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Tuksar, Sunþana. 2021. Transgressions: Transmedia Culture and Film. Pula: University Juraj Dobrila. Virilio, Paul. 1999. The Politics of the Very Worst. New York: Semiotext(e).

CONTRIBUTORS

Marianna Boero is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Language in the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the University of Teramo, Italy, where she teaches Semiotics and the Semiotics of Advertising and Consumption. She deals mainly with the semiotics of advertising and consumption, the semiotics of culture, the semiotics of fashion, social semiotics, and communication studies, and she has published several papers and three scientific monographs on these topics. Petra Krpan works as an assistant in the Department for Fashion Design, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb. She completed her education at the Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb, obtaining a BA in Fashion Design and an MA in Fashion Theory. Her PhD thesis title was “Contemporary Fashion as an Event: The New Media and Body Transformations.” She is the co-founder of the Fashion, Costume and Visual Cultures (FCVC) Network. She recently published Contemporary Croatian Fashion Photography from the 1990s to the 2020s (Croatian Association of Applied Artists Zagreb, 2022), and she is an editorial board member of Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty. Žarko Paiü is a Professor in the Department of Fashion Design, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb, where he teaches aesthetics, semiotics and media studies. His recent publications include White Holes and the Visualization of the Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Neoliberalism, Oligarchy and Politics of the Event: At the Edge of Chaos (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art: Pictures Without a World (Springer Nature, 2021), and The Spheres of Existence: Three Studies on Kierkegaard (Toronto University and The Kierkegaard Institute in Ljubljana, 2021). Krešimir Purgar is a Professor at the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, Croatia. He is the author of Pictorial Appearing: Image Theory After Representation (2019) and Iconologia e cultura visual: W.J.T. Mitchell, storia e metodo dei visual studies (2020). He has also edited W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory: Living Pictures (2017), The Iconology of Abstraction: Non-

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figurative Images and the Modern World (2020), and The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies (2021). Katarina Nina Simonþiþ is an Associate Professor of Fashion History, Fashion Anthropology and Fashion Museology in the Department of Fashion Design, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb. Her scientific research is focused on the correlation between fashion history and the sociocultural representation of clothing in visual sources such as paintings, graphics and photography. She deals with the phenomenon of clothing artefacts as symbols of belonging and as symbols of memorial inscriptions of past times. She is the author of several publications dedicated to the research of Croatian fashion history, the relationship between fashion and tradition, and the role of fashion artefacts as historical documents. Tonþi Valentiü is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fashion Design, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb, where he teaches courses in media theory, sociology of culture, semiotics of fashion, and cultural anthropology. He obtained an MA degree in philosophy and literature from the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Zagreb, an MA degree in sociology and anthropology from CEU in Budapest, and a PhD in sociology from the University of Ljubljana. His books include Multiple Modernities (2006), Camera Absondita: Essays on Ontology of Photography (2013), Archipelago of Contemporary Philosophy (2018), and Media Construction of Balkanism (2021).

INDEX OF NAMES

Abramoviü, Marina, 57, 73 Adorno, Theodor, W., 35, 46 Agamben, Giorgio, 5, 30, 53, 59-60, 64, 96 Aglaea, 131 Alberti, Leon, Battista, 138 Allen, Woody, 175 Altman, Robert, 174 Anÿelkoviü, Ĉambiü, Ljubica, 109110, 121 Apollo, 113, 146 Apter, Emily, 55, 96 Armani, Giorgio, 174-175 Armstrong, Neil, 102 Artaud, Antonin, 64, 74, 87 Arthur, Jean, 179 Austin, John, Langshaw, 85 Avedon, Richard, 111, 181 Aveillan, Bruno, 191 Bacall, Lauren, 180, 191 Badiou, Alain, 187 Bal, Mieke, 133-134, 153 Baldini, Massimo, 156 Bale, Gareth, 131-132 Balenciaga, Christóbal, 174 Balla, Giacomo, 100 Banton, Travis, 173 Barbarella, 84, 102 Bardot, Brigitte, 182 Barnard, Malcolm, 2, 30, 63, 65, 96 Barthes, Roland, viii, 4-6, 8, 13, 18, 21, 23-24, 27, 30, 43, 46, 50, 59-60, 63, 66, 72-73, 89-90, 96, 126, 138, 156-158, 160 Bataille, Georges, 19, 54-55, 71, 7580, 92, 96 Baudelaire, Charles, 95

Baudrillard, Jean, 17-18, 21, 24, 30, 61, 69, 73, 90, 96, 127, 187, 192, 195 Bazin, André, 188 Benigni, Roberto, 87 Benedek, László, 182 Benetton, 139-141, 148 Benjamin, Walter, 12, 14, 30, 35, 67, 85, 96 Bergman, Ingmar, 80 Bernardo, Bernardi, 103 Bickle, Travis, 183 Bitanga, Iva-Matija, 109-110, 121 Blau, Herbert, 60, 96 Blumer, Herbert, 3, 48 Boehm, Gottfried, 85-86, 96 Boero, Marianna, xii, 155-156, Bogart, Humphrey, 180 Bogatyrëv, Pëtr 156 Bonaþiü, Vladimir, 103 Borelli, Lyda, 179 Borges, Jorge, Luis, 70, 74 Botticelli, Sandro, 137 Bourdieu, Pierre, xi, 3, 20, 31, 34, 36-50, 100 Bousfield, Jonathan, 102, 121 Bowie, David, 22, 28, 63, 101 Brando, Marlon, 181-182 Bregovac, Zdravko, 103 Breward, Christopher, 4, 31 Bruzzi, Stella, 174-176, 185-186, 196 Bryson, Norman, 142-144, 146, 149, 153 Buñuel, Luis, 64 Burton, Tim, 183 Butchart, Amber, 181, 196 Butler, Judith, 193, 196

202

Index of Names

Buxbaum, Gerda, 100, 104, 121, 182, 196 Cage, John, 71, 84 Calefatto, Patricia, 63, 158-159, 167 Cameron, James, 80, 93, 186 Caravaggio, 128, 132-134 Cardin, Pierre, 102, 105-106 Cartier, 191 Cavell, Stanley, 188 Cézanne, Paul, 149 Chalayan, Hussein, viii, xiii, 6, 29, 53, 91, 111, 114, 169, 171, 194195 Chanel, Coco, 10, 16, 67, 160, 173, 190-191 Chateau, Dominique, 184, 188, 196 Christ, Jesus, 55, 136, 139-141 Christo, Tamara, 117-118, 121 Church, Gibson, Pamela, 176, 196 Churchill, Winston, 102 Chronos, 113 Clark, Kenneth, 129, 130-131, 137, 153 Cleopatra, 181-183 Cocteau, Jean, 101 Codeluppi, Vanni, 186-187, 196 Colbert, Claudette, 179 Courrèges, André, 102, 105-107 Courtes, Alexandre, 131, 132 Craik, Jennifer, 100, 121 Critias, 94 Cronenberg, David, 52 Cukor, George, 175 ýop, Matija, xii, 116-120 Dalí, Salvador, 64, 101 Dante, Alighieri, 74, 87-88, 90 Darwin, Charles, 94 Davis, Bette, 173 Davis, Fred, 12, 31, 43, 50, 63 Dean, James, 181-182 Debord, Guy, 16, 67, 93, 96 Degas, Edgar, 149-151 Delaunay, Sonia, 100 Deleuze, Gilles, 18, 24, 27, 31, 63, 68, 184, 188-189, 196 Del Marco, Vincenza, 167

Denegri, Ješa, 103, 121 Depp, Johnny, 182 De Niro, Robert, 183, 187 Derrida, Jacques, 18, 24, 59, 63, 66, 68, 72, 76, 85-86, 96 Dietrich, Marlene, 9, 173 Dior, Christian, 88, 173, 181 Domanþiü, Ksenija, 109 Donen, Stanley, 174 Dorfles, Gillo, 34 Doryphoros, 143 Duchamp, Marcel, 6, 101 Duda, Igor, 103, 121 Earle, William, 43 Eco, Umberto, 8, 31, 63, 66, 67, 7074, 96 Edelkoort, Lidewij, 120 Elias, Norbert, 82, 97 Elizabeth, Queen, I, 2 Emberley, Julia, 63, 97, 125, 153 Entwistle, Joanne, 100, 121 Eros, 146, 148 Euphrosyne, 131 Evans, Caroline, 4, 25, 31, 53, 6263, 65, 71, 80-81, 85, 88, 91, 97, 121 Fellini, Federico, 65 Fernbach, Amanda, 9, 31, 55, 56, 68, 78, 82, 97 Ferraro, Guido, 164, 168 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 57, 97 Fish, Michael, 101 Fitzgerald, Scott, F., 16 Fleming, Victor, 180 Floch, Jean-Marie, 160, 166, 168 Flusser, Vilém, 73, 171, 189 Flügel, John, Carl, 107, 121 Fortunati, Leopoldina, 70, 97 Foster, Jodie, 182-183 Foucault, Michel, 4, 31, 53-54, 66, 76, 97 Franke, Ivana, 109 Frare, Theresa, 141 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 19, 52, 59, 82, 92, 142 Fritz, Darko, 103, 121

Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body Gagarin, Yuri, 102 Gaines, Jane, M., 185, 196 Galliano, John, viii, xiii, 6, 81, 9192, 178, 181, 183, 195 Gardner, Ava, 179-180, 191 Gaultier, Jean-Paul, viii, 6, 19, 8485, 179 Geczy, Adam, 194-196 Gere, Richard, 175 Géricault, Théodore, 144-145, 147 Giliü, Nikica, 172, 196 Gish. Lillian, 179 de Givenchy, Hubert, 173-174 Gnamuš, Nadja, 121 Golob, Marko, 111, 122 Gotovac, Tomislav, 59 Gramsci, Antonio, 19 Greimas, Algirdas, 156-157 Griffith, D. W., 173 Gros, Antoine-Jean, 145 Grosz, Elizabeth, 68, 97, 193, 196 Groys, Boris, 67, 97, 174, 196 Grujin, Ljubinka, 109 Gucci, 191 Habermas, Jürgen, 62 Haggard, Claire, 184, 196 Hall, Annie, 175 Haraway, Donna, 193, 196 Harris, Jean, C., 151, 153, 153 Hawks, Howard, 180 de la Haye, Amy, 197 Hayworth, Rita, 180 Hebdige, Dick, 47 Head, Edith, 173, 181 Hedren, Tippi, 181 Hegel, Georg, Wilhelm, Friedrich, 10, 35 Heidegger, Martin, 52, 59, 61, 86, 97, 193 Hepburn, Audrey, 173-174 Hepburn, Katherine, 179 Herzog, Charlotte, 185, 196 van Herpen, Iris, xiii, 114, 169, 171, 174, 190-191, 195 Hill, Jack, 178 Hitchcock, Alfred, 180-181

Hoffmann, E.T.A., 52 Hollander, Anne, 129-132, 134, 137, 153 Holly, Michael, Ann, 138 Holzemer, Reiner, 190 Horkheimer, Max, 46 Horvat, Brane, 122 Horvat, Pintariü, Vera, 105-107. 120, 122 Hoskins, Tansy, E., 35, 49-50 Houellebecq, Michel, 91 Husserl, Edmund, 61, 85, 192 Imdahl, Max, 138, 153 Ince, Kate, 122 Jacobs, Marc, 128-129, 183 Jameson, Fredric, 86, 97 Jappe, Anselm, 67, 97 Jenks, Chris, 54, 97 John, de Baptist, 133-134 Joka, Saša, 122 Joyce, James, 71, 83 Kadoiü Ana, 109 Kaite, Berkeley, 143, 153 Kamitsis, Lydia, 106, 122 Kant, Immanuel, 34-36 Karaminas, Vicki, 194-196 Karan, Donna, 175 Katz, James, E., 70 Kavuriü, Kurtoviü, Nives, 110 Kawakubo, Rei, 18, 117 Kawamura, Yuniya, 43, 50 Kazan, Elia, 182 Keaton, Diane, 175-176 Kelly, Grace, 174, 181 Keser, Ivana, 188, 196 Kiarostami, Abbas, 188 Kiefer, Anselm, 74 Kierkegaard, Søren, 61 Kim, Sung, Bok, 99, 122 Kirby, David, 140-141 Kiš, Patricia, 104-105, 122 Klee, Paul, 67, 80 Klein, Calvin, 175 Kleiser, Randal, 175 Knifer, Julije, 103 Knight, Nick, 172

203

204

Index of Names

Konþiü, Jasminka, 109 Košþec, Gordana, 109 Kovaþ, Koraljka, 109 Kragiü, Bruno, 176, 179-180, 182, 196 Kristl, Vlado, 103 Krkaþ, Mia, 109 Krpan, Petra, xiii, 169 Kubrick, Stanley, 69 Kuhn, Thomas, 9 Kyle, Selina, 183 Lacan, Jacques, 9, 19, 21-22, 55, 59, 66, 72, 80, 87, 92, 97, 134 Lagerfeld, Karl, 57 Lake, Veronica, 180 Landis, Deborah, 185, 196 Landowski, Eric, 156, 161, 164, 168 Lang, Fritz, 186 Lauren, Ralpf, 175 Lawrence, Florence, 179 Le Corbusier, 8 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 4, 14, 31 Leigh, Vivien, 180 Levin, Charles, 127, 128, 154 Lévy-Strauss, Claude, 39, 74, 97 Lipovetsky, Gilles, xii, 10, 12, 17, 19-21, 24, 26, 31, 34-35, 43, 47, 50, 54, 91, 98, 124-125, 135, 153 Loos, Adolf, 67, 86 Loschek, Ingrid, 60, 98-101, 122 Loscialpo, Flavia, 18, 31 Lukica, Ivana, 99 Lurie, Alison, 159, 168 Lyne, Adrian, 175 Lyotard, Jean-François, 26, 62 Makoviü, Zvonko, 103-104, 122 Malevich, Kazimir, 67, 105-106 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 65, 71, 84, 151 Manet, Èdouard, 149, 151 Mankiewicz, Jospeh, L., 173, 181 Mantegna, Andrea, 138-141 Margiela, Martin, viii, 6, 15, 18, 111, 171 Margolis, Joseph, 43 Marrone, Gianfranco, 156-157, 168

Marsh, Mae, 173 Marshall, Garry, 175 Martin, Richard, 99, 122 Marx, Karl, 3, 15, 19, 45, 60-61, 78 Maštruko, Nina, 41, 44, 51 Mati, Ida, 109 Mazzucchelli, Francesco, 167 McLuhan, Marshall, 8, 31, 73, 169170, 196 McConaughey, Matthew, 135, 136 McTiernan, John, 93 McQueen, Alexander, viii, xi, xiii, 6, 19, 23, 26, 69, 70-71, 74, 8081, 83, 85-88, 90-95, 114, 116117, 171, 181, 183, 195 Mendes, Valerie, 197 Menichelli, Pina, 179 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 23, 68, 85, 184-185, 188, 194, 192, 197 Mersch, Dieter, 65, 98 Michelangelo, Buonarotti, 128 Miller, George, 178 Miller, Sanda, 99, 122 Mitchell, W.J.T., 86, 98, 170, 197 Miyake, Issey, 18 Molvarec, Lana, 197 Mondino, Jean, Baptiste, 136 Monk, Claire, 185, 197 Monroe, Marilyn, 181 Moore, Demi, 183 Moss, Kate, 117 Motta, Giovanna, 167 Mrduljaš, Maroje, 111, 122 Mugler, Thierry, 179, 183 Mulvey, Laura, 142, 154 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 80, 98, 188, 193194, 197 Napoleon, Bonaparte, 144 Nefertiti, 181 Negrin, Llewellyn, 22, 31 Newman, Paul, 181 Nicholson, Linda, 196 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Wilhelm, 5, 59, 61 Nochlin, Linda, 149-151, 154 Novak, Kim, 174-175

Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body Novarro, Ramon, 179 Ogilvie, George, 178 O' Hara, Scarlett, 180 Oppenheim, Méret, 101 Orlan, 70, 81 Orpheus, 15 Owens, Rick, xiii, 178, 194-195 Pacino, Al, 187 Paiü, Žarko, x, xi, 1, 3, 6, 10, 14, 16, 18-19, 25, 27, 31, 34-35, 39, 4041, 43, 48, 51-52, 63, 65, 75, 98, 170, 187, 189, 192-194, 197 Panofsky, Erwin, 138 Paradis, Vanessa, 191 Parker, Suzy, 181 Parsons, Talcott, 8 Patalas, Enno, 176, 179, 181-182, 197 Peirce, Charles, Sanders, 71 Perez, Gilberto, 186, 197 Pescie, Joe, 187 Pessoa, Fernando, 57-58, 64, 66, 98 Peterliü, Ante, 177, 179, 181-183, 197 Petronius, 65 Pezzini, Isabella, 156-157, 168 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 183 Picelj, Ivan, 103 Pickford, Mary, 179 Pietz, William, 55 Pintariü, Snježana, 122 Piškoviü, Tatjana, 197 Pitts, Victoria, 75, 98 Plato viii, xi, 26, 55, 69, 71, 73-74, 83, 86, 92-94, 117-118 Plunkett, Walter, 180 Poiret, Paul, 173 Polhemus, Ted, 21, 31, 63, 98, 107, 122 Polidoro, Piero, 168 Polycleitus, 143 Pound, Ezra, 60 Prada, Miuccia, 182 Presley, Elvis, 182 Purgar, Krešimir, xii, 121, 124, 136, 154

205

Quasimodo, 79 Quine, Richard, 175 Quinn, Bradley, 53, 98 Rabanne, Paco, 102, 106-107, 131, 132, 134 Radiü, Zvonimir, 103 Radoþaj, Morana, 118-119 Rašica, Božidar, 103 Redford, Robert, 16 Rees-Roberts, Nick, 197, 190 Riccini, Raimonda, 70 Richter, Vjenceslav, 103 Roberts, Julia, 175 Rocamora, Agnes, 43-44, 51 Rogers, Ginger, 179 Roman, Miro, 112 Russell, Rosalind, 179 Ruthrof, Horst, 192, 197 de Sade, Marquis, 55 Saint-Laurent, Yves, 190 Sapir, Edward, 14 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 72, 126, 156-158 Sawchuck, Kim, 62, 98 Schiaparelli, Elsa, 10 Schiffer, Claudia, 57 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 55 Schrader, Paul, 175 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 143, 146 Scorsese, Martin, 174, 183, 187 Scott, Ridley, 93 Segre Reinach, Simona, 168 Shusterman, Richard, 43, 51 Simmel, Georg, 3, 8, 12-13, 20, 32, 34, 36-37, 39-40, 46, 48-49, 51 Simonþiþ, Katarina, Nina, xii, 99, 102, 122 Siodmak, Robert, 180 Smith, Adam, 35 Smith, Van, 182 Soares, Bernardo, 57 Somaini, Antonio, 138 Souriau, Étienne, 187 Spinoza, Baruch, 76 Srnec, Aleksandar, 103 Stankoviü, Danijela, 109

206 Starobinski, Jean, 197 Steele, Valerie, 53, 63, 76, 98 Stelarc, 70, 81 Stepanova, Varvara, 104 Stern, Radu, 100, 104-105, 122 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 71, 84 Stone, Sharon, 183 Strossmayer, Josip, Juraj, 116 Svendsen, Lars, 35-37, 43, 45, 51 Swanson, Gloria, 173 Šakiü, Tomislav, 187-188, 197 Šolin, Vanja, 119 Šutej, Miroslav, xii, 100, 102-105, 107-111, 117, 120, 122 Tatlin, Vladimir, 104 Taylor, Elizabeth, 181-183 Teller, Jürgen, 128, 129 Tesla, Nikola, 121 Thalia, 131 Thoretton, Pierre, 190 Thorpe, Richard, 182 Timaeus, 94 Tintoretto, Jacopo, 134, 135 Tito, Broz, Josip, 102 Toscani, Oliviero, 141 Traini, Stefano, 156, 168 Trubetzkoy, Nikolai, 156 Tsumura, Kotsuke, 114 Tuksar, Sunþana, 170-171, 198 Turner, Kathleen, 183 Turner, Vuþetiü, Flora, 102-103, 122 Tutankhamun, 181 Ugo, Victor, 79 Valentiü, Tonþi, xi, 33,

Index of Names Valentino, Rudolph, 9, 179 Van Noten, Dries, 190 Vasarely, Victor, 108 Vattimo, Gianni, 128 Veblen, Thorstein, 8, 11-12, 16, 32, 34, 36-40, 46, 48-49, 51 Versace, Gianni, 146, 148-150, 153, 179 Vidor, Charles, 180 Virilio, Paul, 26, 32, 170, 193, 198 Volli, Ugo, 27, 32, 63, 168 Vuitton, Louis, 183 Vujiþiü, Silvio, xii, 110-113, 115, 117, 119-120, 122 Wales, Bonner, Grace, 178 Waters, John, 182 Weibel, Peter, 171 Welsch, Wolfgang, 7, 32 Wenders, Wim, 174, 190 Westwood, Vivienne, 17, 22, 68, 116, 196 Wilder, Billy, 174 Willemen, Paul, 143 Williamson, Judith, 126, 154 Wilson, Elizabeth, 9, 20-22, 32-33, 123 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 61, 85 Wood, Natalie, 181 Zarahoviü, Vladimir, 103 Zeus, 131, 132 Zinna, Alessandro, 168 Žižek, Slavoj, 87, 98 Žižiü, Damir, 115 Yamamoto, Yohji, 18, 174, 190