Staging Fashion: The Fashion Show and Its Spaces 9781350101838, 9781350101821, 9781350101869, 9781350101845

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STAGING FASHION

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Tiziana Ferrero-Regis and Marissa Lindquist, 2021 Tiziana Ferrero-Regis and Marissa Lindquist have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte James Cover image: Models display creations as part of Prada Spring–Summer 2013 Menswear collection on June 24, 2012 during the Men’s fashion week in Milan. © TIZIANA FABI/AFP/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ferrero Regis, Tiziana, editor. | Lindquist, Marissa, editor. Title: Staging fashion: the fashion show and its spaces / edited by Tiziana Ferrero-Regis and Marissa Lindquist. Description: London, UK; New York, NY, USA: Bloomsbury Visual Arts/Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020013054 (print) | LCCN 2020013055 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350101821 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350101838 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350101852 (epub) | ISBN 9781350101845 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Fashion shows–History. | Fashion writing. Classification: LCC GT511 .S73 2021 (print) | LCC GT511 (ebook) | DDC 391.009–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013054 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013055 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0183-8 PB: 978-1-3501-0182-1 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0184-5 eBook: 978-1-3501-0185-2 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

STAGING FASHION The Fashion Show and Its Spaces

EDITED BY TIZIANA FERRERO-REGIS AND MARISSA LINDQUIST

CONTENTS

List of figures  vi List of abbreviations  ix List of contributors  x Preface  xv Acknowledgements  xvi

Staging the fashion show and its spaces  1 Tiziana Ferrero-Regis and Marissa Lindquist

PART ONE  BODY AND SPACE  14   1 The discursive space of the fashion show  15 Tiziana Ferrero-Regis and Marissa Lindquist

  2 ‘Through the looking glass’: Thom Browne and the tailoring of a queer design  30 John Potvin

  3 In his own words: Chalayan speaks  44 Bradley Quinn

  4 The fashion chamber and the posthuman dissolution of gender  58 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

  5 ‘Savage Beauties’: Alexander McQueen’s performance of posthuman bodies  71 Justyna Stępień

  6 Under the skin: Designing immersive experiences in fashion display  83 Sarah Winter, Madeline Taylor, Kiara Bulley, Anna Hickey and Bianca Bulley

CONTENTS

PART TWO  ARCHITECTURE AND CITY  98   7 ‘It’s a sensation’: Space and affect within the fashion show  99 Marissa Lindquist

  8 Industrial chic: Fashion shows in ready-made spaces  115 Per Strömberg

  9 Staging fashion in Hong Kong’s alternative neighbourhood places and spaces  130 Anne Peirson-Smith and Jennifer Craik

10 ‘Too difficult’: Koolhaas, OMA and Prada at the boundary of fashion  146 Grant Klarich Johnson

11 Creativity, corporeality and collaboration: Staging fashion with Giorgio Armani and Robert Wilson  162 Dirk Gindt and John Potvin

PART THREE  SPECTACLE, MEDIA AND SPACE  176 12 The construction of social relations in Chanel’s spectacular shows  177 Tiziana Ferrero-Regis

13 New York Fashion Week as mediatized environment  192 Rebecca Halliday

14 Specularization of fashion: Desperate Housewives and the fashion show runway  205 Mark Taylor and Juliette Peers

15 Fashion on parade: Designing glamour and ordinariness at the British beauty contest  220 Alice Beard

Index  235

v

FIGURES

2.1

Thom Browne: Men’s Fall 2016 Runway – Paris Menswear Fashion Week, Paris, France, 2016. Photo by Antonio de Moraes Barros Filho/WireImage. Courtesy of Getty Images 36 2.2 Thom Browne: Men’s Spring 2018 Runway – Paris Menswear Fashion Week, Paris, France, 2017. Photo by Francois Guillot /AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 38 2.3 Thom Browne: Runway – Paris Fashion Week – Menswear spring/summer 2019. Photo by Peter White/Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 40 3.1 A model presents a creation by designer Hussein Chalayan during London Fashion Week, London, United Kingdom, 2000. Photo by Sinead Lynch/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 49 3.2 ‘My Remote Control Dress’ by Hussein Chalayan during the ‘Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology’ – Metropolitan Museum, New York City, USA, 2016. Photo by Randy Brooke/Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 50 3.3 A model wears a creation from designer Hussein Chalayan’s Spring/Summer 2007 ready-to-wear collection, Paris, France, 2006. Photo by Pierre Verdy/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 54 4.1 A model walks the runway at the Gucci Show during Milan Fashion Week fall/winter 2018/19, Milan, Italy, 2018. Photo by Estrop/Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 62 4.2 Models walk the runway at the Gucci Show during Milan Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2018/19, Milan, Italy, 2018. Photo by Pietro D’aprano/Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 64 4.3 A model walks the runway at the Gucci Show during Milan Fashion Week fall/winter 2018/19, Milan, Italy, 2018. Photo by Estrop/Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 65 6.1 The Collective Collection garments strung through a bathroom in Franklin Villa, 2014. Photo by Kate O’Sullivan 87 6.2 From Home, With Love participants engage with soldiers’ jacket, nurses’ apron and the homestead at the State Library of Queensland 2015. Photo by Kate O’Sullivan 89 7.1 A model walks the runway at the Prada spring/summer 2015 fashion show during Milan Fashion Week, Milan, Italy, 2014. Photo by Antonio de Moraes Barros Filho/ WireImage. Courtesy of Getty Images 107 7.2 Models wear designs by Marc Jacobs during the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Fall 2013 collections on 14 February 2013, New York City, United States. Photo by Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 109

FIGURES

8.1

8.2

8.3

9.1 9.2

9.3 10.1

10.2

10.3

11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1

12.2 12.3

13.1 13.2

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Models present creations by Dutch designer Olcay Gulsen during the SuperTrash show at the Amsterdam Fashion Week in Halfweg near Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2014. Photo by Robin van Lonkhuijsen/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 116 Adaptive reuse. Prada Foundation’s new exhibition hall, designed by Rem Koolhaas, is a former distillery turned into an art gallery. It does not hold fashion shows like PF’s earlier location at the old warehouse at via Fogazzaro 36, but it is a good example of post-industrial reuse related to the fashion industry. Photograph: Per Strömberg, 2015 120 In 2001, one of H&M’s first mega-shows in a row took place in the old limestone quarry of Dalhalla. Around 500 international journalists were invited to this promotional press show presented by iconic models such as Grace Jones, Helena Christensen and Eva Herzigova. The catwalk was located on pontoons in the lake next to the large stage at the bottom of the quarry. Here, some construction works in the quarry lake before the show at Dalhalla. Photo: Peter Roberts, 2001 122 Ground floor interior view of heritage building PMQ. Photograph by Anne Peirson-Smith 131 Retail display space in heritage building PMQ, Hong Kong, showcasing garments and accessories on sale by fashion design label Loom Loop. Photograph by Anne Peirson-Smith 137 Fashion boutique in PMQ, Hong Kong. Photograph by Anne Peirson-Smith 139 A general view of the atmosphere of the runway at the Prada show during Milan Men’s Fashion Week spring/summer 2018, Milan, Italy, 2017. Photo by Venturelli/ WireImage. Courtesy of Getty Images 152 A model displays a creation by Prada as part of the 2008 spring/summer men’s collection during Milan’s Fashion Week, Milan, Italy, 2007. Photo Giuseppe Cacace/ AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 153 A model displays a creation as part of Prada Spring–Summer 2012 Menswear collection during the Men’s Fashion Week in Milan, Italy, 2011. Photo Olivier Morin/ AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 157 Giorgio Armani exhibition at Guggenheim museum in New York, USA, 2000. Photo by David Lefranc/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 169 Giorgio Armani exhibition at Guggenheim museum in New York, USA, 2000. Photo by David Lefranc/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 170 Giorgio Armani exhibition at Guggenheim museum in New York, USA, 2000. Photo by David Lefranc/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 170 A model walks the runway during the Chanel Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2016–17 show as part of Paris Fashion Week, Paris, France, 2016. Photo by Victor Virgile/ Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 179 Cuba, Chanel. Performance of Chanel at the Paseo del Prado promenade in Havana, 2016. Photo by Adalberto Roque/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 181 From their houses (in the background) Cubans watch the Chanel performance at the Prado promenade, Havana, Cuba, 2016. Photo by Adalberto Roque/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 182 Nonie, fall/winter 2019. Courtesy Rebecca Halliday 198 Event personnel prior to Sally Lapointe, Fall/Winter 2019. Courtesy Rebecca Halliday 199

viiiFIGURES

13.3 14.1

14.2

15.1 15.2 15.3

Sally Lapointe, Fall/Winter 2019. Courtesy Rebecca Halliday 200 British actor Sacha Baron Cohen (L) gets on the catwalk as an official (R) tries to stop him during the fashion show of Spanish fashion designer Agatha Ruiz De La Prada as part of the women’s spring/summer 2009 ready-to-wear collections of the fashion week in Milan on 26 September 2008. Photo by Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 212 In a scene from The Carol Burnett Show, American comedienne and actress Carol Burnett descends a staircase wearing a dress made from a window curtain (complete with the curtain rod) during a parody of Gone with the Wind, 20 August 1976. Photo by CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images 213 Galen Ford at the Miss Great Britain competition in 1969, Morecambe, Lancashire. Private Collection. Courtesy of Galen Ford 223 Eileen Hyde (left) at the Butlin’s Miss She competition in 1970, Skegness, Lincolnshire. Courtesy of East Cleveland Image Archive, www​.image​-archive​.org​.uk 226 ‘No! Miss World! No!’ Feminist protestors invade the Miss World competition at the Royal Albert Hall in London, 1970. Photo by Leonard Burt/Central Press/Getty Images, from the Hulton Archive. Courtesy of Getty Images 231

ABBREVIATIONS

AFW

Amsterdam Fashion Week

AMO

Architecture Media Organization

CMT

Cut Make Trim

HKTDC

Hong Kong Trade Development Council

IMG

International Management Group

NYFW

New York Fashion Week

OMA

Office for Metropolitan Architecture

TDC

Trade Development Council

WME

William Morris Endeavour

CONTRIBUTORS

Dr Alice Beard is a visiting researcher at the Academy of Visual Arts, HKBU, Hong Kong. She has held positions at Kingston University, the Royal College of Art and the University of the Arts. Her teaching and research are focused on fashion media and the intersections between design, text and photography, and she uses oral history and object analysis to reconstruct production and consumption histories. Beard has curated exhibitions on Beauty Queens (2004) and Nova magazine (2006) for the Women’s Library. Her publications include articles on fashion photography and curation for Fashion Theory journal, and book chapters on fashion editing, styling and hair cultures for Bloomsbury. She was awarded a PhD for her history of Nova magazine from Goldsmiths in 2014. Bianca Bulley is a costume maker, designer and cutter for live performance and movies. She is currently the assistant head of Wardrobe at Opera Queensland and has also worked for other major performance companies such as Queensland Theatre, Queensland Ballet and Warner Brothers Studios. She has been a core member of the Stitchery Collective since 2012, and a creative partner in the label Bulley Bulley since 2018. Kiara Bulley is a fashion and costume practitioner, who has developed collaborative creative work through the Stitchery Collective since 2010 and her creative partnership in the label Bulley Bulley since 2018. Jennifer Craik is an adjunct professor of fashion at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Her research interests include interdisciplinary approaches to the study of fashion and dress. She has also researched aspects of cultural studies, cultural policy and arts funding. Her publications include The Face of Fashion (1993), Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression (2005) and Fashion: The Key Concepts (2009). Dr Tiziana Ferrero-Regis is a senior lecturer and study area coordinator (Fashion) in the School of Design at the Queensland University of Technology. Tiziana combines a professional background in the fashion industry with a scholarly background in fashion and cultural studies, and film and fashion. Between 1977 and 1991, she worked in Milan across many fields of the creative industries, from advertising to production manager at Vogue Italia and as a freelance writer. She has published widely in several journals on fashion, history and culture. Among her publications are ‘Independent fashion designers in the elusive fashion city’ (2020), ‘From Sheep to chic: Reframing the Australian wool story’ (2020), ‘Dolce and Gabbana: Sicily, tailoring, and heritage on show’ (2019). Tiziana was the recipient of the Women in Research Scholarship at QUT for a project on wool and sustainability.

CONTRIBUTORS

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Dr Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at Sydney College of the Arts of the University of Sydney. With twenty-five years of artistic practice, his video installations and performance-based works have been exhibited throughout Australasia, Asia and Europe to considerable critical acclaim. His Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions (2008) won the Choice Award for best academic title in art in 2009. With Vicki Karaminas he has co-edited Fashion and Art (2012), and co-written Queer Style (2013). His Fashion and Orientalism was also released in 2013 leading to the lead essay for the China Through the Looking Glass exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2015. Recent titles include Fashion’s Double: Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film (with Vicki Karaminas, 2015), Artificial Bodies in Fashion and Art (2016) and Critical Fashion Practice: From Westwood to van Beirendonck (with Vicki Karaminas, 2017), Transorientalism in Art, Fashion and Film: Inventions of Identity (2019), The End of Fashion (co-edited with Vicki Karaminas, 2018) and Fashion Installation: Body, Space and Performance (with Vicki Karaminas, 2019). He is also the editor of the Journal of AsiaPacific Pop Culture and ab-Original (both Penn State University Press). Dr Dirk Gindt holds a PhD in Theatre Studies and is an associate professor at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University. He is the author of Tennessee Williams in Sweden and France, 1945-1965: Cultural Translations, Sexual Anxieties and Racial Fantasies (2019) and the co-editor of Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century (2018). Rebecca Halliday, PhD, is a contract instructor in the School of Fashion and the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Her research explores the transformative impact of digital and social media on fashion and consumer culture, and how mediatized practices articulate social and branded affiliations, ideals and identities under late capitalism. Her work appears in the journals Comunicazioni Sociali, Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies and Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies as well as recent and forthcoming edited collections. Dr Anna Hickey is a lecturer in fashion marketing at the Australian College of the Arts (CollArts) in Melbourne, Australia. She is also the public programmes coordinator and founding member of The Stitchery Collective, a Brisbane-based design collective established in 2010. Anna’s research and public engagement work explores the political agendas in action across the diverse practices we call ‘contemporary fashion’. Specifically, her academic research explores how contemporary fashion phenomena can be vehicles for social progression in areas such as gender diversity, and her public engagement work attempts to explore the social aspects of fashion which facilitate connection, community and social action. Grant Klarich Johnson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California, where his research focuses on contemporary art, fashion and performance. His dissertation Sheila Hicks: Weaving to the World presents the first critical history of the prolific weaver and pioneer of global contemporary art. Based in New York, he is a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019–20. His writing appears in Artforum, Garage, The Brooklyn Rail, The Journal of Modern Craft, and Fashion Theory, among others. A graduate of Kenyon College, he is a former associate of The Kenyon Review.

xiiCONTRIBUTORS

Vicki Karaminas is a professor of fashion and director of Doctoral Studies for the School of Design at the College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand. With Adam Geczy she has co-edited Fashion and Art (2012) and The End of Fashion: Clothing and Dress in the Age of Globalization (2018) and co-authored with Adam Geczy the following books: Queer Style (2013), Fashion’s Double: Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film (2015), Critical Fashion Practice from Westwood to Van Beirendonck (2017), Fashion and Masculinities in Popular Culture (2017), Fashion Installation: Body, Space and Performance (2019) and Libertine Fashion: Sexual Rebellion, Freedom and Style (forthcoming). Other book projects include Shanghai Street Style (2013), Sydney Street Style (2014), Fashion in Popular Culture (2010), The Men’s Fashion Reader (2009) and Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television (2009). She is founding editor of The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture and the founding editor of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture. Marissa Lindquist is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Architects and currently holds a lecturing position at the School of Design, Queensland University of Technology. In 2008, she was awarded the National Dulux Study Tour for emerging architects in Australia. She formed part of the editorial team for the international IDEA Symposium 2010 Interior Spaces in Other Places Brisbane, Australia, and is recognized for her creative practice through publication within the 2012 Venice Biennale Australian Pavilion. Marissa is chief investigator for a National Medical Health and Research Grant (Australia 2019) and a recipient of the Women in Research Scholarship QUT, investigating affect and spatial perception. Her teaching practice and writing dwell on the margins of interiority, fashion and experimental making. She engages with industry through various jury panels and is a contributor for Bloomsbury Fashion Video Archives. Dr Juliette Peers is widely published as an art/design/cultural historian and curator. For twenty-five years she worked at RMIT University (Australia) as a senior lecturer in the textile/fashion/architecture/design disciplines and is currently working with the Sheila Foundation for Women’s Art and The Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptures as a historian and researcher. Women’s art and design, nineteenth-century sculpture, fashion, dolls and women’s historic material culture are particular areas of interest. Among her publications are The Fashion Doll from Bébé Jumeau to Barbie (2004) and chapters in the Berg Encyclopaedia of World Dress and Fashion (2010), Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things (2014), and Dolls Studies (2015). Anne Peirson-Smith, PhD, is an assistant professor, City University of Hong Kong, with a creative industries background. She teaches and researches fashion studies, fashion communication, popular culture and the creative industries. She is the co-author of Public Relations in Asia Pacific: Communicating Effectively Across Cultures (2010) and Planet Cosplay: Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom (2019). She is an associate editor of the Journal of Fashion, Style and Popular Culture and The Journal of Global Fashion Marketing and is co-editor of Global Fashion Brands: Style, Luxury & History (2014), Transglobal Fashion Narratives: Clothing Communication, Style Statements and Brand Storytelling (2018), The Fashion Business Reader (2019), and Creative Industries in Flux in Hong Kong: A Critical Investigation into the Challenges, Agency and Potential of Cultural and Creative Workers (Forthcoming, 2020). John Potvin is a professor of art history at Concordia University, Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal, where he teaches on the intersections of art, design and fashion. The author of over forty essays, his work has been

CONTRIBUTORS

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published in such leading journals as The Journal of Design History, Journal of Interior Design and Fashion Theory. He is the author of Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding (2008), Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (2013) and Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (2014), and the winner of the Historians of British Art Book Prize. In addition to being editor of The Places and Spaces of Fashion (2009) and Oriental Interiors: Design, Identity, Space (2015) he is also co-editor of both Material Cultures, 1740-1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting (2009) and Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity (2010). He serves as an associate editor of Journal of Design History. His current book project, Deco Dandy: Designing Masculinity in 1920s Paris, is forthcoming. Bradley Quinn Author, academic and fashion industry strategist, Bradley Quinn is an expert on wearable technology and emerging trends. His work introduces denim and sportswear brands to advanced materials, new product types and long-ranging trend concepts. Bradley lives in Paris where he directs his own consultancy and carries out research projects with laboratories and specialist institutions. He has written fifteen books, including Techno Fashion, The Fashion of Architecture, UltraMaterials, Textile Futures, Design Futures, Fashion Futures and Textile Visionaries, each presenting inspiring visions of fashion’s emerging future. Justyna Stępień is an assistant professor in Literary and Cultural Studies in the English Department of Szczecin University, Poland. She is the editor of Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture (2014) and the author of British Pop Art and Postmodernism (2015). Her research interests encompass the trans-mediatization of cultural productions, posthuman subjectivity analysed from a transdisciplinary perspective and new materialism. She has published essays on popular culture, postmodern literature, film and the visual arts, combining her interests in philosophy and critical theory. Per Strömberg is an architecture historian from Uppsala University, Sweden. Since 2012, he holds a position as Associate Professor in tourism studies at the University of South-Eastern Norway. In 2016, he finished his postdoctoral project at Uppsala University in which he explores adaptive reuse of buildings as an innovation strategy in tourism, event and retailing. One example is ‘Funky Bunkers. The Post-Military Landscape as a Readymade Space and a Cultural Playground’ (2013) in which he uses art theory in order to understand the complexity of the cultural economy of reuse. Madeline Taylor is a creator, researcher and teacher in the creative arts. A lecturer in Fashion at Queensland University of Technology and a PhD candidate at University of Melbourne, her research focuses on contemporary costume practice, technical theatre’s interpersonal dynamics and fashion performance. During her fifteen years’ experience as a practitioner, she has worked on over eighty-five productions in theatre, dance, opera, circus, contemporary performance and film around Australia and the UK. Research career highlights include an internship at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. She is a co-director of the Stitchery Collective, a Brisbane-based ARI, and was Australian editor for the World Scenography Project Vol II – 1990–2005. Mark Taylor is professor of architecture and chair, Department of Architectural and Industrial Design at Swinburne University (Australia). His primary research focus is the history and theory of the modern architectural interior with an emphasis on cultural and social issues. Mark has authored and edited

xivCONTRIBUTORS

several books including Interior Design and Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources (2013), co-edited Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (2015) and more recently Flow: Interior, Landscape and Architecture in the Era of Liquid Modernity (2018). He is currently working on Domesticity Under Siege: When Home isn’t Safe with Georgina Downey and Terry Meade. Dr Sarah Winter is a lecturer in the Queensland University of Technology’s Creative Industries faculty in which she teaches both theory and practice to interdisciplinary students. Her research focuses on immersive performance installations, and the role of memory in creating participatory experiences. During her fourteen years as a designer and performance maker she has designed for national and international audiences, with her work being shown around Australian theatres and festivals, as well as internationally in Korea and Iceland. Sarah has been a core member of the Stitchery Collective since 2014.

PREFACE

This edited volume developed from conversations around fashion, media and interior design practice made possible through the cross-disciplinary environment at the School of Design, in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology. Tiziana brought her insight as former editorial coordinator for the Italian edition of Vogue and her purview of fashion history, theory and film and costume design history. Marissa contributed with her architectural practice, fashion collaborations and pursuit for the otherness of interiority; the material and immaterial, the intimate and the sublime. Aware of the exemplary focused studies undertaken by Caroline Evans, John Potvin, Bradley Quinn, Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, and Louise Crewe, there was an evident need to survey the staging of the fashion show in its various iterations and alterities conditioned by spatial contexts and a cross-disciplinary lens. From its construction internally, adaptive to aesthetic and performative permutations, to its transgressions spatially, mobilized by interior tectonics or urban extremes, and to its dissemination and dissection through media and filmic approaches, the fashion show is at once a site for testing, critiquing, reflecting, intensifying and connecting our material and immaterial cultures.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people contributed to the completion of this book. We would like to thank the anonymous readers of our project for their insightful feedback, the staff at Bloomsbury for their extraordinary support all along this project: Georgia Kennedy and Yvonne Thouroude, and the wonderful production team at Bloomsbury responsible for the publication’s cover, layout design and copy. We are very grateful and indebted to colleagues who have supported us by dedicating their time reviewing chapters: Laini Burton, Müge Fialho Leandro Alves Teixeira, Kath Horton, Tim Lindgren, Rachel Matthews, Andrew McNamara, Paul Sanders, Glenda Strong and Dirk Yates. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the Creative Industries Faculty and the School of Design, Queensland University of Technology, for supporting the final stages of this project via their Professional Development Leave programme, which allowed us to take some time off our usual teaching duties. Finally, we would like to thank our families for their ongoing encouragement and support. The publishers would like to thank the following for the permission to reprint material: Dirk Gindt and John Potvin (2013), “Creativity, Corporeality and Collaboration: Staging Fashion with Giorgio Armani and Robert Wilson”, Studies in Theatre & Performance, Volume 33 Number 1, © 2013 Intellect Ltd. DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2017.1386503 Justyna Stępień (2017), “‘Savage Beauties’. Alexander McQueen’s performance of posthuman bodies”, Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 13:2, 170–82. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. DOI: 10.1080/14794713.2017.1345584 Per Strömberg (2017), “Industrial Chic: Fashion Shows in Readymade Spaces”, Fashion Theory, 23:1, 25–56, © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor and Francis Group. DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2017.1386503

STAGING THE FASHION SHOW AND ITS SPACES Tiziana Ferrero-Regis and Marissa Lindquist

The fashion show has a long and rich history, which has been amplified by the invention of the moving image, the spread of magazines, pop and club culture, the corporatization of fashion, fast fashion and, lately, live-streaming on the internet. Its current configuration – through the organizing principles of seasons, places and spaces – is inseparable from the modern fashion system as fathered by Charles Frederik Worth in the 1860s. Charles Worth has been identified as the creator of haute couture, which came to define the ‘sublime, heroic moment’ (Lipovetsky 1994: 55) of fashion. His introduction of two seasonal collections a year created a rhythm for fashion change and of fashion time. In the first decade of the 1900s, these seasonal presentations, at fixed dates and times in the couture salon (Lipovetsky 1994), transformed into fashion events that through their repetition generated expectations and aspirations for a rapidly growing number of bourgeois female clients. Within this systematic presentation of fashion, space became instrumental to the creation of the modern fashion moment, the perception and pleasure of being in the act of discovering newness. The site of this discovery shapes up our response to the presentation of new fashion. Notwithstanding the affective force of the fashion show, its primary purpose is to sell merchandise and promote the fashion industry, becoming increasingly attuned with the spectacle, the acceleration of fashion, the expansion of digital media and the creation of extraordinary settings. The fashion show is a moving spectacle that must constantly find new and alluring ways to present fashion, in alternative spaces, outdoors, readymade spaces, as Strömberg calls them in this volume, or in completely artificial spaces. Sometimes these spaces are not always successful, as Suzi Menkes commented on Instagram on the occasion of Givenchy spring/summer 2020 menswear collection shown at Villa Palmieri in Florence at dawn: ‘Oh no! What a let down! The Givenchy Florentine show is in the fading half light. What were they thinking . . . “poetic” maybe?’ (Menkes 2019). While the collection is visible on the show’s live-streaming and video, not all audience members seated in the garden could see the models strutting along the garden’s paths. The use of space and its effects failed to address multiple interests and viewers – it catered for the internet audience, yet disappointed spectators on location. The fashion show is widely diverse and cannot be contained within a genre or set of practices, despite attempts to categorize it as art (Skov et al. 2009) or performance (Duggan 2001), whose conventions are

2Staging Fashion

defined by the designer’s own approach to fashion. The common element in all fashion shows is that they employ skilled workers from fashion designers, models and technical crew to production designers and more recently architects. This aspect offers a rare opportunity to investigate the multilayered complexity of the encounter between space, fashion and the body. While scholarship of the fashion show is abundant, it is scattered in many journals and is concerned mainly with discussions about the fashion show from within fashion studies. Little attention has been paid to how fashion and the space of its presentation have interacted with each other, how they have transformed the fashion industry and, in turn, how they have been transformed by fashion approaches, performance, the spatial arts and spatial design, film and digital media. We recognize that in the past the spectacle of fashion, bodies and clothes obscured the stage, thus the aim of this book is to engage with the complexities of the fashion show through the reciprocal influences between the fashion show and its spaces, revealing how looking towards this interaction contributes to an augmented experience of fashion and provides a representation of our societal milieu. Motivated by the many explorations of the fashion show and its spaces of the last sixty years, this book positions the fashion show and its space at the centre of investigation, fleshing out the study of the show from multiple perspectives. Fashion inhabits many spaces and places; the retail environment is, for example, a space that emphasizes the consumer experience of fashion. However, retail is placed at the end of the supply chain; its function is to create emotional experiences in consumers and to communicate predominantly the brand’s position in the marketplace. Naturally, the architectural space is paramount to this end, and the many flagship stores of luxury brands around the globe well illustrate this point. However, Staging Fashion concentrates on the presentation of fashion in its aural moment, at the point in which newness is revealed to the world. The exploration of fashion and architecture in a retail environment would warrant a further systematic exploration. John Potvin’s edited collection The Places and Spaces of Fashion (2009) precedes the intentions of this book in that it offers an analysis of performance and fashion’s display in various sites with essays that span from modernity to the contemporary period; its essays pay attention to the fluidity between architecture, interiors and the body. Myzelev and Potvin (2010) have placed more emphasis on this perspective affirming the strong role that both fashion and interiors have had in the formation of modern identity. Thus Staging Fashion opens up to the reciprocal influences and the instrumental relationships between urbanism, architecture, the performative and plastic arts and film and digital media that have significant bearing on the presentation of the fashion moment, on the one hand, and the validation that such events in turn highlight and contribute to the renewal of historical or disused sites, and act as an agent for cultural tourism, placemaking and urban creative clusters, on the other. We acknowledge that positions held between fashion and architecture are often fraught or conflicting; therefore Staging Fashion provides examples of approaches, techniques and theories underpinning the spatial and creative disciplines transferable to the fashion show context. To understand these momentous shifts in the development of the contemporary fashion show, in Chapter 1 we offer an overview of fashion presentations and how they have established their own discursive and cultural space. At the time of writing, climate emergency protests have put the finger on fashion’s polluting and unethical practices. In July 2019, the Swedish Fashion Council cancelled its fashion week, amid global climate concerns. Extinction Rebellion activists mounted protests during London 2019 Fashion Week. Fashion weeks, the rhythmic succession of fashion’s newness, occur now in around 100 locations in the world. They are regarded as a marketing device not only for local fashion but also as a promotional tool for tourism. It is fair to speculate that in the near future, local fashion weeks will become increasingly

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important to an industry that must reinvent itself as a localized and sustainable industry. However, it is not possible to speculate on the disappearance of fashion weeks in the four fashion capitals of Paris, London, New York and Milan. On the contrary, 2019 New York Fashion Week (NYFW), taking advantage of the negative political climate of Brexit, was a triumph. In line with the historical competition between Paris and New York, NYFW maintained a media attention high through a tight and shorter schedule of shows. Tom Ford, newly appointed chairman of the Council for Fashion Designers of America, expressed his plan to make NYFW a global event, and American fashion international. Notwithstanding the conduct of business as usual in New York, London, Paris and Milan, in November 2019, Prada was the first luxury brand to sign a financial loan connected to sustainability plans (Barr 2019). The brand had already been collecting and storing all architectural materials used in Prada’s fashion shows designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). These complex catwalk constructions now have been recast in an exhibition by Rotor (Celant 2011), a collective specialized in deconstruction and reuse of building materials. Likewise, the materials of one of Chanel’s most opulent and grandiose shows – the 2018 Cruise collection – which featured a 148-metre replica ship built within the Nave of the Grand Palais was deconstructed, and its materials upcycled or recycled. Creative reuse of catwalk materials may be part of a progressive industrial reconversion of fashion, but it is difficult to speculate on the demise of fashion shows as they are the aesthetic montage of fashion’s aura, whether they are artistic, minimalist or excessively baroque.

Structure of the Book This book is divided into three parts. The chapters explore the themes presented here through manifold readings of the fashion show and its space, whether it be through studies of individual or collaborative practice, discussions of alternate sites for the display, or in the progressive transformations of the fashion show and its derivatives enabled through media. There is considerable overlap of themes and theories through the chapters, as fashion and spatial theory share many authors who have engaged with both fields. Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Elizabeth Wilson recur across the chapters, articulating key themes that have to do with fashion, the urban zeitgeist, social production, bodily transfiguration, indeterminant space, temporary and heterotopic sites, and the glaze of the digital simulacra. These themes offer a fertile ground for the exploration of complex visual, philosophical, creative and spatial dimensions of the fashion show and its spaces.

Part one: Body and space Until very recently, when in February 2018 Dolce & Gabbana sent drones with handbags down the runway in Milan, and a fashion show in Saudi Arabia in June 2018 used drones instead of models, producing a ghost-like effect of clothes floating in the air, the model’s body has been essential to the fashion show as much as its space. One of the central tenets of fashion theory is that without a body, fashion does not exist. Joanne Entwistle’s key text The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Social Theory (2015) highlights that all cultures dress and adorn the body in some ways, situating the dressed body at the centre of all social relations. More importantly, bodies show clothes in movement, a fundamental aspect

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of the fashion show. Walk, movement, pose, smile and attitude are elements that Evans (2013) isolates as constitutive of the fashion model, especially conceptualized within the frame of the cinematic fashion show as the representation and creation of the ‘modernist body’ (Evans 2013: 250). This body continued to represent the feminine ideal of perfection and symmetry while being fundamental to the seductive presentation of fashion. In 1998, Paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins opened Alexander McQueen spring/summer 1999 show No.13. Since then, catwalk and fashion shows have become sites that test difference, from the grotesque, the non-normative gender to the cyborg, exposing the less-than-perfect body. Also, queering the body through performance, semi-permanent or permanent modifications has become an increasingly visible practice that tests a myriad of conditions such as intimacy, meaning, sensibility, presence, gesture, politics and social relations, which are played out in spaces of privacy and in public realms such as the stage set or in urban life. Heidegger rethought the relationship between space and body not as one in which bodies inhabit empty spaces, but as a participatory one where both commingle and communicate (Mitchell 2016). The body is not isolated and independent from its surroundings but is co-present with the space that it inhabits. These reflections emerge in the first part of this book, which addresses the many ways in which bodies converge with the staging of the fashion show. A historical overview of fashion shows, informal and formal, and their encounter with urban spaces and unusual sites opens Part One. In ‘The discursive space of the fashion show’, Ferrero-Regis and Lindquist explore the trajectory of fashion shows and how social and cultural upheavals have accompanied the rhythm of fashion change from modernity to present day. Their chapter explores uncommon spaces that were already used for fashion shows, such as the deck of the Cunard Cruise Liner during the 1925 Liverpool Civic Week. Other key moments that changed the fashion show in the second part of the twentieth century occurred with Halston’s first collection held within his salon at the Bergdorf Goodman, although American department stores had already played a fundamental role in launching Poiret’s fashion in 1914. Synergies are uncovered between modernist architects Le Corbusier’s and Adolf Loos’s construction of space programmed for movement and spatial experience, and the choreography of the fashion show. These and other histories and narratives constitute a body of knowledge that can be called the discursive space of fashion. Potvin’s ‘Through the looking glass: Thom Browne and the tailoring of a queer design’ leads with an examination of Tom Browne’s queer strategy to design that encompasses also the spatial presentation of his collection, proposing that in the crowded landscape of many seasonal releases, designers need to maintain a coherent vision not just with space but through the way in which bodies perform within this space. Through the analysis of three of Thom Browne’s shows – fall 2016, spring 2018 and spring 2019 – and specifically focusing on interior design, Potvin contends that the unconventional and atmospheric presentations imposed themselves on the clothes, determining the way in which the clothes were read. Browne’s use of two aesthetics, austerity and camp (Potvin 2020: 31), that define the designer’s vision, together are viewed by Potvin as undermining the conformity of menswear tailoring and the catwalk. Similar to Potvin’s appraisal of the commingling between fashion and space, Quinn highlights Chalayan’s sense of the visual through architectural systems and theories of the body in ‘In his own words: Chalayan speaks’. In homage to Chalayan’s twenty-five-year anniversary of his career, Bradley Quinn dedicates a survey, a retrospective so to speak, to Chalayan’s approach to fashion, design, architectural tectonics and space. Just as the futurists thought about speed and extraordinary possibilities for clothes in the 1910s, Chalayan explores aerodynamics, technology and architecture as they interact with the body. Quinn emphasizes how clothes belong to a modular system in which they are part of the intimacy of

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interiors, which are part of architecture, and in turn is part of an urban system. This layered architectural construction of clothes defines the intimate area of the body, which becomes self-contained and functional. In the particularly poignant show After Words (autumn/winter 2000), the models walk in a bare, white chamber where minimalist furniture create an interior space. The end of the show points to clothes as a ‘means to carry away possessions’ (Quinn 2020: 48), like when one has to evacuate or escape. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas’s chapter ‘The fashion chamber and the posthuman dissolution of gender’ looks at the fashion show as a form of installation and performance in which fashion and art converge. Geczy and Karaminas articulate installation within the context of fashion display, as an approach to testing ‘material and immaterial approaches’ spatially, and the dynamic role the body and bodies have in viewing, and as components of, the overall work (Geczy and Karaminas 2019: 7). The authors look at the fashion space through a taxonomy that includes sealed, open and still spaces to analyse Gucci’s Cyborg autumn/winter 2018/2019 show. Geczy and Karaminas interpret the catwalk as a sealed space – the fashion chamber – where the audience is transported to another world, which, in the case of Gucci’s show, is one of horror. Here, indefinite bodies are imaginary others that re-orient gender and identity away from their discursive constructions, allowing new possibilities through discontinuities in a space that is cut from the world. In ‘“Savage beauties”: Alexander McQueen’s performance of posthuman bodies’ Justyna Stępień, like Geczy and Karaminas, highlights that posthuman fashion can reconfigure and alter boundaries between body and matter. Both chapters celebrate the non-perfect and the ugly, opening up possibilities for body extensions and considering difference as a posthuman progress. For the author, like in a cabinet of curiosities, the catwalk becomes the exhibition of manipulations between human bodies and different species. In Stępień’s discussion of McQueen’s Voss the human crosses with birds, while in Geczy and Karaminas’s discussion of Gucci’s Cyborg, posthumanity consists of the intimacy between dragons and humans. It is important to reflect on the similarities of the two shows that have to do with posthuman disruption, because they elicit a similar critique of twentieth-first-century fashion shows. The three authors refer to Braidotti’s (2013) systems of signification that have imposed boundaries to the human body. Stępień looks at the design work of McQueen, the way in which the designer treated, manipulated, cut, moulded the body, for example, in Plato’s Atlantis, whereas Gucci’s Michele expresses his posthumanism through the artistic direction and styling of the show. In their fashion shows, McQueen’s Voss and Plato’s Atlantis and Alessandro Michele’s Cyborg attempt to liberate the model’s body from canonical and disciplined beauty, one opting for human–animal interaction, the other for horror. Finally, in ‘Under the skin: Designing immersive experiences in fashion display’, the Stitchery Collective, represented by Sarah Winter, Madeline Taylor, Kiara Bulley, Anna Hickey and Bianca Bulley, review their immersive projects: Collective Collection (2014), a site-specific work held in an historic Queenslander-style building Franklin Villa, and From Home, With Love (2015), an installation exploring Australian relations during the First World War at the State Library of Queensland. The authors discuss the intentional framing of the work as a form of inclusive participatory design and an exploration of Ingrid Loschek’s (2009) theory of skins, reclaiming the space between memory, emotion, clothing, place and the body. They do this through a re-interpretation and deployment of the fashion show in other sites and other contexts. The Stitchery Collective focuses upon the engagement of the viewer experiencing the event by drawing upon intimate lived experience and spatial and multi-sensory approaches stimulating an embodied relation between emotion and clothing. Through this method, the authors seek to remedy the distancing from ‘the lived experience’ of bodily engagement or dressing, evident in the fashion industry and fashion experiences.

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Critical to these displays and to this intimacy is the contextual richness of domestic sites and domestic scenes. Rather than the multipurpose uniformity of typical fashion show spaces, where any spectacle (including models) is controlled and distanced from the viewer, the Stitchery turn to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space ([1958] 1994) and the richness which is evoked between the interior and memory. As such they infer an alternative runway circuit, with participants moving through one domestic interior to another, or construct domestic tableaux where they together become agents for the intimate engagement of these bygone areas.

Part two: Architecture and city Fashion and architecture have enjoyed the intersecting roles as transient urban spectacles, most cogently in the formation of modernity through the world exposition of the nineteenth century. Walter Benjamin described these sites as ‘places of pilgrimage’, ‘universe[s] of commodities’ and a ‘phantasmagoria into which people entered in order to be distracted’ (Benjamin 1969: 167–8). As repositories of cultural production and innovative displays from around the world (Breward et al. 2004), these temporary engineered marvels offered further delights to entertain the masses via musical and theatrical performances, early fashion shows (British Pathé 1931), motorcycle chariot races and even fireworks extravaganzas. These spaces of display informed new forms of urban consumption and societal engagement. Their glazed exteriors afforded the necessary innovations in transparency so fundamental to the contemporary city. Likewise, architecture and the urban domain reach beyond commodity and exchange, forming an essential socio-aesthetic fabric recording our past, informing the present and projecting emerging possibilities. Caroline Evan notes ‘fashion’s compulsive drive to alteration makes it an emblem of modernity’ (Evans 2011: 139) at a larger scale, so too does architecture and the city through its constant redevelopment, reprogramming and reactivation. From a fashion perspective the urban realm’s material, social and political dimensions provide stimulus for designers and their creative force. The cultural and aesthetic values of cities are constantly appropriated for temporary fashion performance and display, whether loaded by nostalgic historicism, austere reductivism, glistening hyper-modernity, heterotopic otherness or indeed in their rich interhybridity. Investigation of these possibilities forms the common ground within the second part of this book. Here, fashion shows are viewed as urban agents capable of activating disused sites or ‘non places’ for new creative clustering, urban placemaking and championing sociopolitical ideals. In their most current formations, they employ the digital and the real to coalesce time, space and event, joining the local here with the global there, warping spatial cohesion. Spatially, fashion shows reach back to other eras to exploit the phenomenal dimension of art installations and modern or brutalist spaces. Programmatically they are able to trans-morph other urban productions, such as stage performance or museum display, to shift the way that the viewer and the view are engaged and are staged within interior environments. The fashion show is thus perceived as a migratory, translatable and appropriating practice, possible of enlivening the city and its architectural spaces for aesthetic, social and economic gain. Marissa Lindquist’s ‘“It’s a sensation”: Space and affect within the fashion show’ opens Part Two with a review of key fashion designers and the experimental encounters between architecture and art in the 1960s and 1970s to argue that these encounters have informed recent shows by Prada, Yohji Yamamoto and Marc Jacobs. For Lindquist, the question at the core of recent fashion shows is based on

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exploration of the phenomenal characteristics of productive atmospheres. The author looks to seminal theories about the sublime (Edmund Burke) and atmosphere (Gernot Böhme) and brings forward the ‘affective turn’ to argue that with the co-presence and interaction of materials, objects and subjects it is possible to mobilize new levels of engagement between bodies and space. These experimental ideas emerging from the 1960s and 1970s contexts are entertained in recent collaborations between fashion designers and artists or architects. Deconstruction, minimalism, affect, mood, light and brute surfaces have all been a common denominator in Yamamoto, Prada and Marc Jacobs’s shows of the last few years. In these shows, atmosphere has been active in shaping the context of the fashion show where the audience is enmeshed bringing their own moods and sensations. Per Strömberg’s ‘Industrial chic: Fashion shows in ready-made spaces’ explores how the cultural values of readymade spaces or sites for reuse are appropriated, negotiated, reproduced or commodified for the fashion show. Through this cultural appropriation, Strömberg underlines the aura produced through fashion and the fashion show, and the reciprocal relationships between fashion and these sites. On the one hand, fashion is observed as appropriating the aesthetic value of adaptive-reuse buildings and spaces, and on the other, urban developers are viewed as appropriating the fashion event as an aesthetic value to define place. Strömberg looks towards Entwistle’s aesthetic market (2009) where aesthetic values are ultimately commodified and thus fashion, the site of the fashion show and indeed the locales they are situated in are all viewed as fundamental contributors to this market. He unpacks the ways in which readymade sites are employed for the fashion show, whether pragmatically and temporally, for spatial and economic realities; for the uncanny or sublime inherent within deserted spaces (such as quarries); or within already converted spaces such as art galleries in meat packing factories. Here the focus lies in what Strömberg terms ‘the user-patina’ of industrial buildings, as an evocation of experiential authenticity which employs materiality and history as a drawcard, and uses these qualities as a sign for creativity and possibility. While Strömberg highlights key designers who employ these sites from an ideological mindset, the position is that these culturally esteemed aspirations are more the exception, and that more broadly the take-up of these readymades is another ‘aesthetic tactic’ in the ‘aestheticisation of society’ for economic gain. Although Strömberg’s chapter focuses upon the aestheticization of readymade spaces, he also draws attention, as do Anne Peirson-Smith and Jennifer Craik, to post-industrial spaces as important resources for event making to renew urban areas as sites for creative development. In ‘Staging fashion in Hong Kong’s alternative neighbourhood places and spaces’, Peirson-Smith and Craik trace the transition of Hong Kong from a city of fashion production to fashion consumption, establishing emerging markets of bespoke fashion experiences capable of competing on the world stage. While the early establishment of Hong Kong Fashion Week is perceived as Western-centric, more recent profiling and investment in local incubators within revitalized warehouse spaces, heritage sites, fabric districts and areas such as the Police Married Quarters (PMQ) have established localized ‘bohemian’ urban pockets. The authors provide a case study of PMQ through onsite interviews with local inhabitants, designers and adjunct retailers who form these creative clusters. They do this through a discussion of Marc Augé’s Non-Places (1995), and argue that the transitional spaces of blended post-industrial urban quarters are enlivened by events such as fashion shows, markets, exhibitions and pop-up happenings which work to disrupt the hegemony of high street retail, and in turn support belonging and placemaking of emerging urban creatives. Events such as fashion shows at PMQ are viewed as providing ranging benefits for the area such as forming an identity for

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the quarter, activating the site and its collective urban memory and for its aesthetic agency. Though not always fully successful, staging of these spaces enhances the pull for local tenants, fashion consumers and urban tourists seeking fashionable experiences and unique moments within the city’s urban fabric. Radical boundaries, virtual spaces and transmedial surfaces are themes which Grant Klarich Johnson employs in his chapter ‘“Too difficult”: Koolhaas, OMA and Prada at the boundary of fashion’ to describe the impact architect Rem Koolhaas orchestrates in Prada’s shows and retail spaces. Johnson positions Koolhaas as a conceptual artist approaching the fashion show as an art form, where the intersections of architecture, art and fashion are exploited to provoke new modes of display and new levels of engagement between viewing subject and object. Johnson traces the beginnings of Prada and Koolhaas’s collaboration through architectural projects such as Prada’s epicenters, Prada’s fashion shows and the development of Fondazione Prada. Here the discussion loops around the material brute force of the Fondazione’s interior and the constancy of Prada’s fashion oeuvre, charged by the transient digital, frequently deployed live through Prada’s shows and retail environments to challenge viewer experience – producing, as Johnson puts it, ‘a sublime matrix more ephemeral and liquid than static architecture’ (Johnson 2020: 156). Significant to this study is the role the postindustrial site plays in the reception of art; the distillery of Fondazione Prada, Dia:Beacon and the Tate Modern are given as examples, and similarly in the staging of Prada fashion shows. Koolhaas and Prada are positioned in dialogue with ‘historical precedents’ of critical art and architectural practice, notably minimalist aesthetics of the early 1960s, which redefined relations between object, viewer and space. With this in mind, shifts in runway format and sequencing suggest a collapse of runway and viewing space, arraying activity across the space and rendering subjects as active agents within the fashion show experience. In similar vein to Grant Klarich Johnson, Dirk Gindt and John Potvin draw attention to the relationship between theatre, performance and the fashion show, through a review of Giorgio Armani and theatre director Robert Wilson’s collaborative projects in their chapter ‘Creativity, corporeality and collaboration: Staging fashion with Giorgio Armani and Robert Wilson’. This review is framed by themes of authorship, economic opportunity and indeed mutual considerations of performance enacted across three typologies of space – train station, theatre and art museum. The events programmed in these spaces present a transfer or cross-pollination of practice as a means to counter artificial boundaries between the two fields. The authors first discuss G.A. story (1996), a fashion performance retrospective directed by Wilson for Giorgio Armani. Staged within Florence’s Stazione Leopolde, spectators journeyed different sections of the station to immerse within a mise en scène of ‘Armani’s world’, a large-scale conflation of performance art, video installation and tableaux vivants. The second event, Donna del mare (1998), describes a production within the traditional theatre space where the lead authorship is reversed. The production design is viewed as sartorially enriched by Armani’s costume aesthetics and the choreography transposes fashion show styled tableaux to inform an other-worldly experience. Finally, the authors discuss Giorgio Armani’s Retrospective (2000) exhibited at the Guggenheim (New York). Here space, fashion and viewer are choreographed in totality by Wilson. While spatially the projects exemplify a shift from former derelict spaces (the train station) to esteemed museum space, the key value is the rupture of the fashion show, from, as Gindt and Potvin put it, ‘the morgue the runway inevitably constructs’ (Gindt and Potvin 2020: 173) to other more accessible and creative manifestations.

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Part three: Spectacle, media and space The relationship between the moving image and the presentation of fashion can be credited for shaping the way in which the fashion show is traditionally staged. The model’s peculiar walk, the set, lighting, décor, surfaces, music are all staple elements that have come to define the fashion show as seen typically in the woman’s film genre. Whether the plot was centred around a fashion narrative, or interiors were used as backdrops for the performance of fashion to female audiences, actresses parading the latest trends foregrounded a spectacle within the spectacle of the film, providing an experience similar to that of the real catwalk show. Digital media have increased this exposure, experience and dissemination of fashion exponentially in a process that Rocamora calls the ‘mediatization of fashion’ (2016), which shapes the way in which fashion is experienced. Media have become intrinsic to and informative of all human experiences and communication to the point that society cannot be brought outside of it. For Rocamora (2016), media, and in particular digital media, are so pervasive and intrinsic to the presentation of fashion that collections are designed with the photogenic image of the model walking on the runway as seen on a digital screen in mind. The event of the fashion spectacle is thus brought into the homes and everyday life through small screens. The chapters in Part Three look at the many ways in which fashion, through body, space and media, is transformed into spectacle. Chanel is one of the hallmarks of haute couture fashion, its lineage and influences being critical to the history of fashion and the fashion show. As Tiziana Ferrero-Regis suggests in ‘The construction of social relations in Chanel’s spectacular shows’, Chanel’s shows are lauded as some of the most spectacular productions within Paris’ fashion week calendar. Aside from commentary on world events, global innovations and even future catastrophes, Karl Lagerfeld continued to highlight and enculturate the value for creative production within the fashion industry. Lagerfeld’s nostalgia for Chanel’s historical impact through sartorial innovations, societal trends and social progress, was persistently contextualized through the lens of French nationalistic pride. Ferrero-Regis reviews two shows, the Cruise collection 2016/17 that took place in Cuba, and the Couture autumn/winter 2016/17 show at the Grand Palais. The chapter offers an analysis of this context through a discussion of the spectacle and commodity, employing Debord’s society of spectacle ([1967] 2012), and Baudrillard’s simulacra and his systematic analysis of objects and commodity ([1968] 1996). Ferrero-Regis does this to unpack the layers of Chanel’s two fashion shows where the deployment of extras becomes critical to the spectacle. Key to the analysis is the displacement of these extras from their natural sites of production and societal engagement into the constructed world of the fashion show. This displacement forms a simulacra and shifts the agency of authenticity, particularly so from a historical context, to a severed representation. Rebecca Halliday in ‘New York Fashion Week as mediatized environment’ contextualizes the fashion show as a ‘locus of communication between producers and consumers’ (Halliday 2020: 192), approaching her discussion through a framework of mediatization underpinned by social theory and mediation processes. While Mark Taylor and Juliette Peers’s and Alice Beard’s chapters address the conflation of media such as film, advertising, television spectacles (melodramas and beauty pageants) and fashion, as means to co-opt their respective value for the consuming class, Halliday situates the fashion show as media in and of itself and thus augmentable by shifts in the demands of live-streaming and online viewing culture. Halliday’s field research, limited to the more accessible ready-to-wear shows of New York Fashion Week, reveals temporal and aesthetic shifts away from the more spectacular and opulent productions of high fashion. These material sites, which traditionally have informed material culture, have

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been impacted by the immaterial of digital mediation and media practices across the fashion industry. As Halliday points out, the new modes of dissemination have enabled broader interaction extending the ‘spatial and temporal parameters’ (Halliday 2020: 194) of the fashion show, to accessible instant consumption and social mediatization. Key shows analysed in Halliday’s chapter highlight divergent conditions, from employment of the city skyline as spectacular backdrop, to rapidly emerging studio spaces readymade for media production beyond the fashion show proffering streamlined, minimalist set-ups with little correlation with the collections displayed. Halliday also draws attention to the use of tableaux display-style fashion shows where models stand dormant and with greater proximity to spectators, a form of transgression of the runway, yet also as an additional means for spectators to capture and disperse content. Halliday suggests that these tactics are woven into new social practices to facilitate ‘tacit collaboration with attendees’ (Halliday 2020: 202) while at the same time conditioning the site of the fashion show for transmission in virtual environments. Mark Taylor and Juliette Peers discuss the television series Desperate Housewives in ‘Specularization of fashion: Desperate Housewives and the fashion show runway’, framed by theories of the simulacra, spectacle and representations of reality in a post-capitalist context. They examine the series through the lens of the fashion show, first at a broader scale as a stylized total production, and more acutely, through an analysis of the episode ‘Suspicious Minds’, where the fashion show is employed as plot device. Taylor and Peers remind us of the fact that since the invention of cinema, the moving picture was a fashion show. They reveal how film and the fashion show developed coterminously and interdependently, interweaving vaudeville, theatre and stylistic production throughout history, while also exploiting their reciprocal roles in selling idealized fantasies of glamour and wealth to a consuming society. The authors navigate the paucity of fashion scholarship within popular film, which in their estimate provides multiple layers of theorizing the fashion show. Historically, fashion and film were used to promote each other, and they offer today an understanding of the retreat from authenticity enabled through film and television and their subsequent influence upon post-capitalist society, the post-feminist woman and their spaces. By providing historical examples of filmed fashion shows, both fictional and documentary, they point to a number of revelatory positions. First, the adoption of the fashion show within film and advertising to spectacularize and rarefy other objects of consumption. Second, the aggrandizement of their popularity through film and television induced a shift to other interiors, such as halls and theatres, to accommodate growing consumer audiences. Finally, and most importantly, the ‘melding of representation and actual fashion shows’ (Taylor and Peers 2020: 206), like that of Desperate Housewives, underlines Baudrillard’s simulacra, which collapses the real within representational space, where ‘the constructed’ reimagines or replays itself within a closed loop, subsequently promoting these simulated bodies, lives and environments through television and film to inform contemporary life. Alice Beard’s chapter ‘Fashion on parade: Designing glamour and ordinariness at the British beauty contest’ focuses on the emergence of the British beauty pageant and Miss World competitions throughout the 1950s to the 1970s to underscore the transformation of femininity and the female body through the staging of glamour. The interplay between television, the space in which the shows were held, the spectators and the professional opportunities afforded to these young women provide a complex reading of glamour on the catwalk. Beard reviews three key British beauty pageants: Miss Great Britain, set within the clean white lines of the modernist Super Swimming Lido at the seaside town of Morecambe; Miss She, a self-styled day-wear contest at Butlin’s beachside holiday camps; and the internationally renowned Miss World pageant staged at the Royal Albert, London. While Miss Great Britain and Miss She intrinsically mark a reciprocal association between health, beauty and ideal bodies

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set within the external natural world, the opulent interiors of the Royal Albert, in contrast, exemplified a remote world of artifice and excess for the televised Miss World competition. For Miss Great Britain, the architectural purity and newness of Morecambe’s expansive lido provide as much instruction as did the competition’s guidelines. Modernism’s dictum of purity, functionalism and hygiene reflects the idealized, disciplined and surveyed femininity promoted by the pageant, and dutifully performed by contestants, a process which Beard connects to Elizabeth Wissenger’s notion of glamour labour (2015). Butlin’s Miss She contest, though grounded in the healthy-body doctrine, is presented by Beard as framing a more ordinary construction of glamour, reinforced by DIY ingenuity and experimentation. Here the pageant runway, ostensibly formed from linings of the domestic interior, parallels the custom-made daywear fashions of contestants, albeit aspiring to the image of filmic beauty and high fashion modelling. While the relationship of femininity within these examples arguably enhances the inherent character of the contestants within context, Beard highlights the Miss World contest as a highly commodified, decontextualized event, maintaining a glamourized spectacle of femininity in the state of excess and undress, which was later to become a site for guerrilla subversion and counter-spectacle for feminists in 1970.

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References Augé, M. (1995), Non-places, London: Verso. Bachelard, G. ([1958] 1994), Poetics of Space, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Barr, S. (2019), ‘Prada Becomes First Brand to Sign Sustainability Deal’, The Independent, November 6. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.ind​​epend​​ent​.c​​o​.uk/​​life-​​style​​/fash​​ion​/p​​rada-​​susta​​inabi​​lity-​​eco​-f​​riend​​ly​-de​​al​-fa​​shion​​-luxu​​ry​-ag​​ r​icol​​e​-gro​​up​-a9​​18722​​6​.htm​l (accessed December 16, 2019). Baudrillard, J. ([1968] 1996), The System of Objects, London: Verso. Benjamin, W. (1969), ‘Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, Perspecta, 12: 163–72, MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta. Available online: https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/1566965 (accessed October 7, 2019). Braidotti, R. (2013), ‘Posthuman Humanities’, European Educational Research Journal, 12 (1): 1–19. Breward, C., C. Evans and E. Ehrman (2004), The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk, New Haven: Yale University Press. British Pathé (1931), ‘England. Fashion: Mannequin Fashion Show at London’s Crystal Palace’. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.bri​​tishp​​athe.​​com​/v​​ideo/​​VLVA8​​EYHY9​​PWW7H​​307YA​​WALW0​​7MPQ-​​NEWS/​​query​​/Fash​​ion​+S​​​how​ +C​​rysta​​l​+pal​​ace (accessed August 2, 2019). Celant, G. (2011), Rotor. Ex Limbo, Preface by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, interview by Germano Celant with Rotor, biographical and bibliographical notes by Rotor, graphic design by Rotor with Michela Bellomo. Progetto Arte Prada, Milan. Debord, G. ([1967] 2012), Society of the Spectacle. Introduction by Tom Vague, Preface by Sam Cooper. Translation: Black & Red, 1977. [S.I.]: Bread and Circuses Publishing. Duggan, G. D. (2001), ‘The Greatest Show on Earth: A Look at Contemporary Fashion Shows and Their Relationship to Performance Art’, Fashion Theory, 3: 243–70. Entwistle, J. (2009), The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion: Markets and Value in Clothing and Modelling, Oxford: Berg. Entwistle, J. (2015), The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Evans, C. (2011), ‘No Man’s Land’, in L. Weinthal (ed.), Toward a New Interior: An Anthology of Interior Design Theory, 127–144, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Evans, C. (2013), The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America 1900– 1929, New Haven: Yale University Press. Geczy, A. and V. Karaminas (2019), Fashion Installation: Body, Space, and Performance, London, UK: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Gindt, D. and J. Potvin (2020), ‘Creativity, Corporeality and Collaboration: Staging Fashion with Giorgio Armani and Robert Wilson’, in T. Ferrero-Regis and M. Lindquist (eds), Staging Fashion: The Fashion Show and Its Spaces, 162–176, London, UK: Bloomsbury. Halliday, R. (2020), ‘New York Fashion Week as Mediatized Environment’, in T. Ferrero-Regis and M. Lindquist (eds), Staging Fashion: The Fashion Show and Its Spaces, 192–204, London, UK: Bloomsbury. Johnson, G. (2020), ‘“Too Difficult”: Koolhaas, OMA and Prada at the Boundary of Fashion’, in T. Ferrero-Regis and M. Lindquist (eds), Staging Fashion: The Fashion Show and Its Spaces, 146–161, London, UK: Bloomsbury. Lipovetsky, G. (1994), The Empire of Fashion, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Loschek, I. (2009), ‘Clothes as Form’, in When Clothes Become Fashion: Design and Innovation Systems, 17–20, Oxford & New York: Berg. Menkes, S. (2019), ‘SuzyMenkesVogue’, The Givenchy Spring/Summer Show 2020, June 13, 2019. [Instagram tag] Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.ins​​tagra​​m​.com​​/suzy​​menke​​s​vogu​​e/. Mitchell, A. J. (2016), Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Myzelev, A. and J. Potvin (2010), Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity, Surrey, UK: Ashgate. Potvin, J. (2009), The Spaces and Places of Fashion: 1800:2007, London, New York: Routledge. Quinn, B. (2020), ‘In His Own Words: Chalayan Speaks’, in T. Ferrero-Regis and M. Lindquist (eds), Staging Fashion: The Fashion Show and Its Spaces, 44–57, London: Bloomsbury.

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Rocamora, A. (2016), ‘Mediatization and Digital Media in the Field of Fashion’, Fashion Theory, 21 (5): 505–22, DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2016.1173349 Skov, L.., B. Skjold, B. Morean, F. Larsen and F. F. Csaba (2009), ‘The Fashion Show as an Art Form’, Creative Encounters Working Papers #32, Copenhagen Business School: Copenhagen. Taylor, M. and J. Peers (2020), ‘Specularization of Fashion: Desperate Housewives and the Fashion Show Runway’, in T. Ferrero-Regis and M. Lindquist (eds), Staging Fashion: The Fashion Show and Its Spaces, 205–219, London: Bloomsbury. Wissinger, E. (2015), This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media and the Making of Glamour, New York: New York University Press.

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PART ONE

BODY AND SPACE Bodies are sites for testing a myriad of qualities such as intimacy, sensibility, gestural expression, gender, emergence, alterity, politics and social relations, which are played out in spaces of privacy and public realms such as the interior stage set or in urban life. Historically, design has shared fundamental roots with the arts and humanities field. The designed artefact thus demands more attention than as merely an entity for consumption, insisting greater reflection upon perceptual, emotional or bodily conditions as is the case with art. They imbue material, and immaterial conditions and inform experiences encountered between. Part One of the book ventures across the interrelations between body, design and space critical to formations of the fashion show. Ferrero-Regis and Lindquist’s chapter frames all of these elements through a brief history of the fashion show through the lens of its spaces. They employ Foucault’s discourse theory to define this interrelation as the discursive space of the fashion show, proposing that practices, narratives, appraisals, critiques, institutions, rules and disruptions of the fashion show have historically constructed the spatial context of the fashion show. John Potvin looks at Thom Browne as he extends his sartorial and queer agenda across the fashion show interior, appropriating, performing and transforming space and time to dramatize austerity and camp in men’s fashion. Bradley Quinn suggests an integration of technology or performance with fashion, through a survey of Chalayan’s shows. Conceptually driven, Chalayan’s shows exploit a range of bodily states, from sensually revealing and concealing the body to possibilities of techno body hybridizations. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas shift their gaze from the open to the sealed fashion show, where imaginary and constructed realms provide an alternative show experience invoking a posthuman alterity. Justyna Stępień reviews the work of Alexander McQueen, his strange and beautiful garments and shows, reconceptualizing the fashion moment as a site of becoming, engaging in bodily and non-bodily affective transformations. Finally, the Stitchery Collective, Sarah Winter, Madeline Taylor, Kiara Bulley, Anna Hickey and Bianca Bulley, propose a different role of the fashion show as a platform of cultural dialogue, where set design, domesticity, adornment, movement and intimacy are collectively used to share historical stories of domestic and social meaning.

1 THE DISCURSIVE SPACE OF THE FASHION SHOW Tiziana Ferrero-Regis and Marissa Lindquist

The intersection between dress, body and space produces meanings that can be traced prior to the early Renaissance and have been rewritten since, according to different cultural, social, economic and design contexts. The fashion show has commanded different staging practices in different spaces, represented through diverse media across five hundred years of fashion history. Reading the construction of the fashion show and the meanings that it has generated requires an exploration of the way in which its many manifestations have represented commercial, cultural and social tensions in history. This cumulative reading provides a framework in which the fashion show can be seen as a discursive space which reframes it as a bundle of knowledge that is not homogenous but is made up by intersections, departures and discontinuities within the knowledge itself. Thus, a discourse is also a site for power struggle. The fashion show is a microcosm where rules, and their disruptions, bodies, constructed forms, objects, clothing, practices, time and space come together to create a narrative. The accumulation of these narratives across history, including their appraisal, critiques, imagery and documentation, also correlates with many other disciplines, those of scenography, production design, architecture, interior architecture, the diverse arts, film and cinema, and more expansively urbanism and landscape architecture. As Geczy and Karaminas write (2019: 7), the fashion object is communicated ‘across a network of representations and narrative connotations’, and not in isolation. Fashion presentations can be organized in a linear way (a central walkway or catwalk with an audience at each side), in a non-linear way, such as shows at the Prada Foundation, or in seemingly indeterminate ways as choregraphed in Yohji Yamamoto’s and Moncler Gamme Rouge’s productions. Shows predominantly occur in controlled environments; there is the catwalk or show space, whether raised or direct to floor, while the more elaborate mise en scène shows are programmed by production or spatial designers in collaboration with the creative director and technical crew. Then there are the event

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participants, constituted by the backstage creative team, models, the audience (including buyers) and the media who disseminate images from the show. There are those like Martin Margiela who disturbs this approach, orchestrating shows in urban spaces and in outer Parisian suburbs, to comment on the fashion system and equally its controlled spaces. This chapter offers a brief historical survey of fashion shows and their varied spaces, along with a critical contextualization of the fashion show within social, cultural and spatial contexts. The survey provides examples of how the fashion show has exploded into new platforms and engaged with different sites, from early modern displays in urban and city spaces as precursors of the shift from the couturier’s salon, to alternative spaces in the 1960s and onwards. It underscores the sociocultural, political and technological innovations which repositioned the performance of the fashion show from the Maison to spectacular events for broader consumption, highlighting the rise of the model, media, the mobilization of celebrity, artistic and architectural collaboration, and the use of urban counter-sites to disturb societal and aesthetic conventions. The space of the fashion show reflects the changing space of cities, media and global tastes, and is a rich yet largely untapped field that deserves greater study in both spatial and fashion fields.

Modern spaces Informal fashion presentations date back to European Renaissance courts, but especially to Marie Antoinette’s appearances in the gardens and corridors of the Palais de Versailles. The aura and expectation of new fashion started to be established especially when Marie Antoinette travelled to Paris and strolled in open markets, Les Champs Élysées, or the opera, where she was admired by adoring crowds (Weber 2007). New fashion and styles were communicated informally in theatres, at social gatherings and through fashion plates. However, the fashion show in its more formal expression is inseparable from the birth of modernity. Indeed, fashion captured the process of modernization, whose chief characteristic was that of mass consumption and bourgeois aspirations of an expansive middle class. From style spotting within the anonymity of the modern city in the 1800s (Wilson 2003), by the first decade of the 1900s, fashion presentation or the ‘mannequin parade’ (Evans 2005: 125) staged on a constructed platform, sometimes elevated, or accompanied by music and lighting effects, had already been enacted beyond the Maison or salon in alternative and unconventional sites. The use of department stores, the races at Longchamp or Armenonville (McManus [1911] 2002), les midinettes at les Jardin Tuileries (McManus [1911] 2002), the beach pavilions at Chiswick (British Pathé 1927), and even on board of the Cunard Cruise ship during Liverpool Civic week in 1925 (British Pathé 1925) provided settings for fashion and solidified its presence in other spaces. At the same time, the revolution of photography, film, architecture and interior design indelibly enabled a synergy between space, staging and fashion to enrich the fashion show’s spectacle and provide greater exposure to the consuming class. To this effect, the most revolutionary space for fashion presentation was that of the moving image and the screen. On this matter, Caroline Evans’s (2003) pivotal work has provided multiple and complex readings of the fashion show with its association with modernity and spectacle (2001, 2003, 2008, 2013a, b) suggesting that fashion is the visual expression of capitalism. Evan’s work strides across theories of fashion and modernity that explain contemporary designers’ approach to the fashion show (2003), while also paying attention to the role of the model and of the live show as an essential desire to see the clothes in motion (2005, 2008). The birth of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century recorded

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body and time, and the capacity of seeing things and people repeatedly, in an instant and in motion, providing an explicit way to see fashion. Finamore (2013) describes it as ‘displacement of reality onto a screen (that) shares a similar impulse to that of fashion’ (2013: 74). A close synergy developed between fashion and the film industry, with couturiers designing for film, notably, Lady Duff Gordon, or Lucile, Poiret and later Chanel, and stars wearing famous designers’ clothes. Incidentally, the typical walk of the fashion model, with her pelvis slightly tilted forward, pivoting movement and a slightly ‘sedate’ look (Evans 2005: 126) has been based on the walk of actresses-models in fashion films. In the 1930s, the formal fashion show inserted in the film narrative created the fashion film, a discrete genre whose function was to sell an aesthetic that was then followed up through the designing and manufacturing of similar styles as seen on actresses in films. In 1910, The Moving Picture World wrote, We have pointed out over and over again in these pages that a very large part of the constituency of the moving picture theater are women and children – especially women – and that anything which tends to please and interest the faire [sic] half of humanity will retain their patronage. (in M. Tolini Finamore 2013: 108) During the Hollywood Studio period, the space of the catwalk in film was that of the couturier’s salon, made grandiose through a set design that recalled that of nineteenth-century grand palaces. In Fashions of 1934 (Dieterle 1934), one of the fashion shows occurs in Paris, in a fictional couturier salon. In The Women (Cukor 1939), the salon is in Manhattan, in a large salon decorated with art deco props, and is attended by high-class women. The set-up is similar to a theatre, with the audience sitting on chairs in loose rows looking at the stage, and a live orchestra is positioned beside the audience. On the stage, each style is presented with a rotating backdrop that reproduces the context for wearing the style: tennis wear with a tennis court, beachwear with a painted sea scene, daywear in a zoo, leisurewear in the countryside and so on. The display references a cross between the tableaux vivants and installations of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Fashion films continued after the Second World War, notably with Funny Face (1957) and continued well into the new millennium. There were those films too that parodied the fashion show for directors’ own positional and comedic ends, for example, Fellini’s iconic film Roma (1972). The film presents a ‘clerical fashion show’, where the Pontiff in appropriate regalia enters the main reception room of the papal palace, replete with raised catwalk bounding the perimeter of the room (draped in liturgical red) and overlooked by clergy spectators. As the Pontiff is seated on cascading baroque-styled chairs provided for his eminent guests, a pair of nuns performs staccato music for the show on an organ positioned central to the room and catwalk. The fashion show proceeds in a comical farce, models include nuns bounding along the catwalk with their white veils virtually taking flight, reminiscent of Sally Field’s character in The Flying Nun (1965). Two clerics enter in red silk tunics hands joined and skating along to the accompanying melody, followed by two priests on 1950s-styled biciclette, their tunics custom-designed at the rear for the functioning wheels. A procession of overly elaborate experimental light-emitting costumery for the Pontiff appears, motioned by mechanized mannequins assumedly to avoid soiling by the unsanctified. The finale presents (as with many contemporary fashion shows) a spectacular surreal concoction of atmospherics and a heavenly stage float emanating ecclesiastic light, overcoming the main audience, transfixed in holy ecstasy. Today, the fashion film has become a ubiquitous form of fashion communication. Uhlirova (2013) assigns a fundamental semiotic presence to what she calls the ‘moving image clothing’ (2013: 118),

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querying if Roland Barthes were to write The fashion system today, would he assign this signifying structure to fashion within the moving image? Barthes ([1967] 1990) astutely pointed out that clothes belong to three connected realms: clothes as material objects, clothes as written description and the constructed images of the clothes, to which we must add also the space of the clothes, starting from the body (clothes as an embodied practice) and the space of their presentation (the catwalk in first instance, as the space of the presentation of the new). Georg Simmel, author of The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), associated the connection between dramatic urban upheaval and the anxiety of the modern age beholden by speed and movement, with the rapidity of change in fashion, and as a sign for differentiation (Simmel [1904] 1957: 543). As society developed driven by these forces of differentiation and mutability, as a search for the ‘new’, so too did the spaces and places of fashion and its display. Christopher Breward (2003) suggests that in the early twentieth century designer Paul Poiret engineered ‘the spectacular, thematic party or event as a backdrop for the promotion of seasonal collections’ (Breward 2003: 105). Fashion displays such as The Thousand and Second Night created a ‘dramatic culture to inform the later development of the fashion runway show’ (2003: 106). As an adjunct to the 1925 International Exposition of Les Art Decoratifs, Poiret presented Amours, Delices et Orgues, three barges on the edge of the Seine designed to present Poiret’s creations (Diktats 2019). The barges relocated the site of fashion exposition to the urban domain and engaged a feast of sensory delights (smell, taste and sound) staged within floating interiors. Amours, Delices, Orgues incorporated intimate quarters, a working restaurant with dining spaces, and orchestral event space designed in the modern art deco style. The final barge Orgues incorporated an external timber platform which stepped progressively from roof down to the deck (Diktats 2019). The roof platform functioned like a runway, an opportunity to reformulate the fashion display to the exterior, no doubt capturing the attention of Parisian’s strolling along the Seine. These scenes were graphically captured by Andre-Edouard Marty for the artistic fashion magazine Gazette du Bon Ton (1924–25), which promoted artistic depictions of the independent modern woman through its review of leading fashion designers including Poiret, Lanvin and Vionnet (Calahan and Zachary 2015). Poiret’s penchant for Orientalism, and influence by eastern dress, highlights the West’s engagement with and translation of cultural production from other lands, exemplifying the emergence of the modern world, and unequivocally tying the development of fashion with the new interiors and graphical art production of Les Arts Decoratifs. Indeed, Art Nouveau fashion or dress was perceived with similar status as the other decorative arts (Wilson 2015: 251; Rose 2014). Costume historians Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton note that: Looking to both antique and regional dress types, most notably to the Greek chiton, the Japanese kimono, and the North African and Middle Eastern caftan, Poiret advocated fashions cut along straight lines and constructed of rectangles . . . It was a strategy that dethroned the primacy and destabilized the paradigm of Western fashion. . . . although Poiret’s Orientalism was at odds with modernism, both ideologically and aesthetically, it served as the principal expression of his modernity, enabling him to radically transform the couture traditions of the Belle Époque. (Koda and Bolton 2008) Debora Silverman’s Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siecle France: Politics, Psychology and Style (1989) acutely surveys the emergence of the modern woman alongside Art Nouveau, specifically the role of the French state and their promotion of Japanese applied arts (1989: 172), and of Siegfried Bing and Gustave

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Larroumet in the advancement of the ‘art of women’ which included dress, art, craft, interiors, furniture and objects of the interior. Through the Great Expositions and Bing’s travel to Japan as both collector and adviser to the French state, ukiyo-e wood block prints and the draped kimono had a defining effect on French architecture and fashion, contributing to the style moderne. Bing’s gallery Maison de L’Art Nouveau (1895) developed these aesthetics in collaboration with architect Henri van de Velde to create an interior ‘complete’, or a ‘total work of art’, from interior linings, furniture, domestic objects and by extension new fashions. Art Nouveau reflected in some ways Simmel’s later preoccupations with the metropolis and mental life, seen as a redirection of modernity to the arena of the interior between 1889 and 1900: psychology. A particular kind of psychology, specific to France in the decade of the 1890’s, invested the enterprise of interior decoration with new meanings, and transposed the 18th century associations between modernity, intimacy, and interiority into the new key of late 19th century spatial self-fashioning and self-projection. (Silverman 1983: 149) The inculturation and modernization of fashion, space and media through Japonisme in the West were equally observable in reverse, where Meiji laws required Japanese nobility to wear Western clothing. The translation of Western modern suits and fashion attire had great influence in modernizing Japan. Penelope Francks (2009) has charted the conspicuous consumption of the Japanese during and following the Meiji period, revealing how consumption of Western-style material and inexpensive gadgets and household goods were seen as critical symbols of ‘civilisation and enlightenment’ (Francks 2009: 151). Western-style dress fashion plates were common, and as the twentieth century progressed so did a preoccupation with cosmopolitan life, such as eating in Western-style restaurants and obtaining the Western look through visits to hairdressers and later fashion shows in Tokyo (British Pathé 1954). This brief charting of early twentieth-century fashion shows reveals that the presentation of new fashion in diverse spatial environments had already become a widespread cultural and commercial phenomenon, linking to the expansion of mass markets and the growth of capitalism and of a bourgeois class. The articulation and curation of movement observed in early fashion displays had also been foundational to architecture and cityscapes, particularly during the modern period when external forces such as transportation, film and the avant-garde arts enabled new reflections upon the experience of space. Le Corbusier’s architectural promenade represented a spatial or pictorial device centred around movement and experience (Birksted 2006). The deployment of the architectural promenade in projects such as Villa Savoye (1929) emulated the new experiences afforded by car travel by joining levels and spaces horizontally and vertically through ramps. The promenade was a mode of spatial sequencing designed not only for circulation, and the experience of successive spaces, but also acted sculpturally ‘as a device for viewing and being viewed’ (Samuel 2007: 162). Spatial sequencing, visual display and visual control were also evident in the projects of modernist architect Adolf Loos. Beatriz Colomina (1990) has noted that Loos’s renowned raumplan evident in the ‘Moller House’ was a sequencing of space based on the feminine theatre box, where the ultimate interior space, and final point of the sequence was a form of spectacle to frame the view and the viewer: ‘the voyeur (. . .) is caught in the act of seeing, entrapped in the very moment of control’ (Colomina 1990: 8). Viewing and being viewed are exchanges that occur also in a fashion show. This activity is framed within the space of the stage, where many performances occur at the same time, that of the models, and that of the spectators and photographers.

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Shifting the fashion show Through the 1950s, European staging of newness occurred in the Maison. At this point, fashion reformed domesticity with the sartorial and cultural promotion of the feminine ideal of wasp waists and billowing skirts. Dior’s use of the Maison’s interiors for his fashion shows projected women back to a Victorian illusion of high society, which was already seen in photography with Cecil Beaton’s famous photo shoot of Charles James’s ballgowns for Harper’s Bazaar in 1948. Conversely, the 1960s witnessed dramatic societal change, leading up to the postmodern turn of the mid-1970s. Rebellion, political and social activism, and excess in production and consumption profoundly changed the fashion system and its modes of display. The 1960s new-found freedoms in artistic expression, music and heightened urban living pronounced a shift in the presentation of fashion away from salon or Maison interiors. In a political climate of youth rebellion led from London and New York, high fashion was no longer deemed relevant and was brought down to street culture. With the emergence of street style, the function of the catwalk show expanded from being a rarefied event for the presentation of new collections to more rudimentary displays for quick dissemination to feed the ever-growing presence of media and buyers. Courrèges 1964 spring collection presenting space-age fashion radically shifted the aesthetics of the fashion show. His collection was introduced ‘in a stark modern room with white vinyl walls and white boxes to sit on. Loud beat music was playing and when the show started, giant girls with close cropped hair, freckles, suntans . . . came pounding’ (Keenan in Evans 2001: 297). At the same time, fashion designers were reshaping the look of the runway, with Mary Quant’s introduction of free form movement and jazz in her minimalist boutique Bazaar, and Kenzo Takada’s enlargement and formation of the runway space to accommodate the exuberance of the ‘Cover Girls’ shows (Evans 2001). The design and performance of shows seemed apt to accommodate the new minimalist, linear and youthful fashion of the 1960s that was to be found in the new independent boutiques of the swinging London such as Bazaar, Biba, vintage store Granny Takes a Trip and the orientalist store I Was Lord Kitchner’s Valet. In 1966, American designer Roy Halston staged his first runway show at the Bergdorf Goodman. Halston’s models revolutionized the way in which his collection was presented on the catwalk. Instead of stiff models carrying numbered placards for each style, they were ‘encouraged to do their own thing and project their own personalities’ (Frowick in Moore and Von Furstenberg 2018: 44) helping to ‘glamorise the industry for the outside world’ (2018: 51). Moore and Von Furstenberg point out that Halston employed CBS TV (1967) to document fashion shows; this move promoted the new mode of viewing fashion shows to a wider audience, and initiated the birth of fashion videography. Halston and fellow designer Stephen Burrows veered away from the standard fashion show environment by disrupting everyday space such as Burrow’s shows in lobby spaces or pedestrian footpaths to create a street-side spectacle (2018: 51). Their approach was to relax the style of fashion, making it comfortable, sensual and suitable for the youthful American women. In the ‘Battle of Versailles’ (1973) Halston and Burrows were selected among a group of five American fashion designers (Bill Blass, Oscar de La Renta, Anne Klein) to show alongside five French designers (Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro, Givency and Dior) as a means to raise funds for the restoration of Versailles. The event became legendary, catapulting America into the fashion world, and establishing New York as a fashion capital. Parisian haute couture was contrasted by sporty American ready-to-wear, yet it was the staging of the American show which also created a sensation. With minimal stage setting or props, the fashion display relied on dynamic coloured light projection matching the

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youthful and vibrantly coloured American garments, while models swayed and animated to energetic contemporary music (Made 2 Measure 2016). The event reframed the fashion show which became an entertaining event, similar to parties and happenings that were attended by celebrities. Inspiration for 1970s fashion shows came from youth, music, the plastic arts, festivals and later, psychedelic drug experiences that influenced fashion photography. Across the globe fashion shifted gear, typical of this period was the relationship between Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren with their shop SEX in the mid-1970s, ostensibly launching the punk culture in London. The twenty years between 1980 and 2000 marked a multifaced and profound change in the fashion industry. This change reverberated through all facets of fashion, including the fashion show, which became a stage for politics, as avant-garde designers used it to stage sociopolitical commentary. The runway became a space for political protest thanks to slogan T-shirts by Katharine Hamnett, Vivienne Westwood and Franco Moschino. The catwalk demonstrated its potential in capturing protests from emerging subcultures, and to their commodification, turning them quickly within the mass marketing realm. Punk’s ‘working classness’ (Hebdige 1979: 63), harsh style featuring chains and studs, grew from a youth that was dissatisfied with British hegemonic culture. Despite the commercialization of punk’s symbols, its political mandate, values and purpose continue to inspire young generations in their empowerment and engagement with political issues. The 1980s also witnessed different approaches to the body and its movement within the fashion show. The 1960s deconstruction of the fashion system resonated in the 1980s emergence of the Japanese avant-garde designers Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo with their aesthetics of poverty (Koda in English 2013: 126) and ‘deconstructed’ ready-to-wear garments and shows. Deconstructivism was not just implicated in the garments’ design (Gill 1998; Mendes and de la Haye 1999; English 2013), which disrupted previous fashion values, but also evident in the shift of context and spatial programme for the fashion show. The use of brute space and open floor plan provided opportunities to expel the linear catwalk and allow for indeterminate movement, challenging the normalized consumption of fashion display. This approach has also been coupled with spaces evoking Foucault’s Heterotopia’s, to locate fashion display at the margins or the ‘other spaces’ of urban life. In a parallel manner, philosopher Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivist theories were taken up by architectural theorists such as Bernard Tschumi, to respond to the rapidly shifting urban context, ‘promoting new modes of interaction and human relationships’ (Martin 1990: 23). Bernard Tschumi’s Architecture and Disjunction (1994) elaborated upon the agency of interstitial space, fracturing what had come before and proposing instead an indeterminate architectural programme (inclusive of urban planning) to enable events, actions and movement for the benefit of unscripted experience, and further influenced other deconstructivist architects. Tschumi’s theory of space, movement and event proposed a number of concepts such as defamiliarization, metropolitan shock, superimposition (from other disciplinary fields) and crossprogramming as spatial approaches through which society could fuse with the transitional identity of urban realms (Tschumi 1994: 227–55). Opposite to this critical disassembling of the semantics of fashion design and fashion presentations, the catwalk was also reconceptualized as a media event, notably characterized by the appearance of the supermodel as she performed on a bare catwalk, her toned body providing the fashion spectacle (Ferrero-Regis 2019).  Like the global explosion of aggressive consumption and financial speculation, the supermodel expressed female strength, corporatization and fitness, reflecting at times the new urban postmodern. The model’s performance was fundamental to the seductive presentation of fashion, her antics on and off the stage making her increasingly visible as a celebrity on her own terms.  Fashion was

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strengthened further through pop culture and the celebrity musicians, with high-profile guests such as Madonna, Prince and wild nights maintained by studio 54 since the mid-1970s.  The 1980s corporatization of the fashion industry (Stark 2018) is perhaps the most long-lasting change, when corporation umbrellas such as Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey (LVMH) and Kering (formerly Pinault-Printemps-Redoute) progressively absorbed many of the luxury independent brands and designers. With the concentration of ownership, the fashion show became the public representation of the brand and designer’s values, where aesthetics, spectacle, press coverage, sensationalism and the creation of cool events increased brand equity. In their quest to attract the attention of buyers and consumers, fashion shows increasingly occupied unorthodox spaces, from warehouses, to churches, to museums, and suburban streets. Specific designers’ shows, such as Chanel, have become the pinnacle of spectacle and opulence. Others claim a status of artistic performance or avant-garde and conceptual design. The inherent mechanism of fashion’s perpetual reinvention continues, and highlights the disparity between those brands and designers that can afford such locations and those that cannot. While in the 1990s, the majority of fashion shows were held in generic tents or utilitarian trade show complexes, such as the Fiera in Milan or the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris (Browne 2016), designers like Hussein Chalayan wanted to transform the fashion show into a ‘cultural experience’ (in Browne 2016: 6), in an attempt to steer fashion away from its hyper-commercialization as dictated by the new fashion conglomerates LVMH and Kering. Chalayan’s Afterwords show (2000) presented ‘furniture clothes’ staged within a theatre scene of domesticity to evoke the homeland, suggesting an ‘urban nomadism’ (Evans 2011: 136), and the possibility of carrying memory-laden objects across geographical borders. For key designers like Martin Margiela, social and political issues defined the formation of his fashion shows, often utilizing the rawness of peripheral urban streets or abandoned locales. The confronting production of McQueen’s graduation show Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims (1992), held at Central St Martin College, prefigured his lavish raw shows of the late 1990s and 2000s, ushering in a new look and theatricality to the show ostensibly drawn from gothic fantasy and other places. Meanwhile, the global spatial division of labour meant the relocation of manufacturing industries from the West to countries that could offer labour at cheaper prices. China emerged as the world’s largest clothing manufacturing country, which inhibited the growth of a local design tradition until well into the 2000s, when government intervention and policies started to promote and grow domestic talent (Ferrero-Regis and Lindgren 2012). Guo Pei’s rise to fame exemplifies this transition from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’ by becoming the first contemporary Chinese couturier. A little known documentary, Mao’s new suit (1997), produced and directed by Sally Ingleton with the support of the Australian Film Finance, shows Guo Pei’s beginning of her journey when she was the chief designer in a large garment company that sold to the mass market. Today, Guo Pei dresses celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Rhianna, and has become an invited member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris. The documentary’s second half is dedicated to the designer’s and her partner Cao Bao Jie’s preparation for their first fashion show in Shanghai, a self-funded and aspirational undertaking. In Shanghai, the fashion show is marred by problems. The venue is at a state-funded suburban campus, in a large functional room set up as a theatre, with many rows of chairs looking at the stage. The catwalk stage is timber, with a small protruding central podium, too short for the models to be really seen by the audience, and a distraction from the fashion to be displayed. The two designers modify the appearance of the catwalk to resemble a professional, traditional runway. Eventually, the fashion show is a success, although Pei and Jie are in a class of their own with respect to the other designers. Pei’s first fashion show is a metaphor for the rise of a contemporary creative China that, according to Ling and Segre

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Reinach (2018), is not in direct opposition to manufacturing China, but is part and parcel of multiple Chinas. The transfer of design know-how, the diaspora of Chinese designers in America, its powerful textile manufacture, internal middle-class fashion consumption, national and international retail of both luxury and fast fashion brands offer multiple and complex perspectives on the rise of Chinese fashion. Guo Pei’s first fashion show in a drab university room well represents the Chinese apparatchik and the pressure on young Chinese designers to rise on the international stage. After the economic recession of the 1990s, and the rise of China’s textile and clothing manufacturing industries, in the new millennium, the Western fashion industry re-established the authority of luxury brands through the employment of young and powerful designers as creative directors of famous brand names such as Dior (John Galliano), Gucci (Tom Ford), Burberry (Christopher Bailey) and Louis Vuitton (Marc Jacobs). The dominant visual imagery of this decade is influenced by sexualization of the body thanks to Tom Ford’s appropriation of explicit film conventions defined as porn chic (Lalanne 2019), particularly noted in his advertising campaigns. The explosion of the internet triggered a progressive spectacularization of the fashion show, delivering visually heightened and sensorial experiences, echoing the excessive music productions of the 1980s, such as Michael Jackson or Madonna’s world tours.  Between the 2000s and 2010s, the fashion show opened up further to the arts through a mutual exchange between architecture, art, film, the digital world and fashion. Prada initiated an ongoing collaboration with OMA and AMO, headed by architect Rem Koolhaas for a series of fashion shows from 2004, later expanding to the creation of the Prada Transformer Pavilion (OMA 2009) – a mobile pavilion for events and shows for Fondazione Prada. Fashioned like garments, the Prada Transformer Pavilion was composed of simple geometries wrapped together with a translucent membrane, transportable to different sites across the globe. The exhibition and publication of Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture (Hodge et al. 2006) clarified this cross-over and anticipated further opportunities of cross-collaboration and experimentation. Zaha Hadid’s Mobile Contemporary Art Container (2008), designed for Chanel, marked her own expansion into fashion and shoe design. These collaborations, together with greater exchange between filmic and aesthetic arts, moved the space of the runway into sublime dimensions, engaging with atmospherics like those of Stefan Beckman for Marc Jacobs (Beckman 2013) to provide a ‘filmic vastness’ (Johnson 2015: 316).  Today temporary architecture pavilions and architectural environments are fully established in festivals throughout the world including World Expos, and stand-alone studies such as the Serpentine Pavilion (Royal Park, Kensington Gardens), MOMA PS1 Pavilion (Queens) and M Pavilion (Melbourne). Pavilions present material and spatial experiments often utilizing theoretical and material discourse to articulate a position. Critic and architect Leon van Schaik has noted that temporary structures like pavilions are ‘uniquely suited to realizing and distilling speculations on new architectures’ (van Schaik 2016: 40). Recently they have emerged as temporary sites for the display of fashion, exploiting the convergence of the ‘speculative environment’ and sartorial ingenuity. In 2018, for example, the Serpentine Pavilion designed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo used everyday roof cement tiles stacked to form a celosia (permeable walls), emphasizing a material pragmatism inflected by changing light and shadow qualities of natural lighting (Serpentine Galleries 2018). The pavilion became the setting for Roksanda’s Spring 2019 show (The Independent 2018) for London’s Fashion Week, paralleling the designer’s architectural and applied arts background. Jennifer Craik (2009) highlights shared themes between architecture and fashion, and points to Bradley Quinn as ‘one of the few who have attempted to investigate seriously the relationship between

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fashion and non-art aesthetics’ (2009: 174). Quinn has contributed extensively to the study of shared themes, stylistic languages, techniques and processes between architectural space and fashion, and the cultural, political and social climate influencing fashion up to the present. This, Craik suggests (2009), brings the ‘spatiality’ of clothing and fashion to the fore, and calls us to explore the interrelationship between clothing and architectural space. As Craik points out, ‘Fashion draws on adjacent aesthetic realms such as art and architecture in order to push the boundaries and exaggerate the aesthetic conventions encoded in other artistic forms’ (Craik 2009: 175). Hussein Chalayan is a case in point. Both Craik (2009) and Quinn (2002a, 2002b, 2003, 2013) focus upon a deeper desire to engage with techniques and principles, to provide opportunities for innovation in fabrication, and in turn generate new forms and technologies of private and public space (both in clothing and architecture). The space of the fashion show thus becomes a site of testing these interrelationships of structure, space or dwelling, whether through subliminal interventions such as Yohji Yamamoto’s shows (Lindquist 2019) or purposebuilt arenas like Prada’s Transformer Pavilion (OMA 2009). At an urban level, human geographer Louise Crewe argues that both fashion and architecture ‘are centrally engaged in the creation of urban environments that question our notions of time, space, form, fit, interactivity, and mobility’ (Crewe 2017: 13). Crewe notes that fashion spaces offer a multitude of ways through which modes of inhabitation can be redefined and inform the built environment. By ‘exploring the mutual provocations and entanglements between contemporary architecture and fashion’, Crewe suggests, ‘offers important insights into the relational geographies of the contemporary city’ (2017: 15) and indeed deeper understandings of emotion, experience and bodily consciousness at a human level. It is helpful then to look towards the fashion show through themes shared by fashion, architecture and the urban realm to trace the societal and affective dimensions of our material and immaterial world. A final remark must be made about digital media and the increasing presence of fashion shows, often streamlined live. Rocamora (2012, 2013) has provided a considerable body of work about fashion and the blogosphere, offering a compelling argument that digital media reproduces and strengthens existing discourses and visions of fashion. On the other hand, Pedroni (2015) sees fashion blogging as a new marketing frontier that opens up a more democratic approach to fashion communication. Likewise, fashion shows streamlined on the internet represent a never-seen-before level of engagement between actors and networks, for example, photographers, models, designers, garments/collections and viewers. The open stage digital media afford to fashion has contributed to the dissemination of countless local designers, fashion weeks and fashion shows. One recent phenomenon is the appearance around the world of traditional and indigenous peoples’ fashion and fashion shows. Australian indigenous cultural production, as an example, has followed a trajectory that has seen the rise of desert painting, which led to the involvement of indigenous artists into textile prints, independent film and television production, and, finally, fashion design and fashion shows. Both fashion design and the fashion show remain connected to art production, with a limited commercial production of fashion. This must not be confused with the production of ties, scarves, sarongs, and printed T-shirts, which is subsumed in a larger business of art and craft commodities – bush tucker, art prints, artefacts, gifts – that supply a tourist market. Contemporary Australian indigenous fashion is the result of a cross-cultural dialogue between traditional communities and practices and contemporary cultural contexts. Artist Grace Lillian Lee has curated many of the fashion performances at the annual Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CAIAF). As Craik and Horton describe (2019), Lee’s work is ‘a far cry from traditional market-driven fashion shows, the visual and emotional impact of these performances resonates with local communities and arts audiences alike’ (Craik and Horton 2019: 193). These shows include hybrid forms of contemporary

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and traditional movements, such as dance, with a classic catwalk presentation and indigenous people wearing traditional costumes along with indigenous contemporary fashion, as in Jana Jaral (2016). Space is culturally relevant to indigenous peoples because of its affiliative spiritual dimension; therefore Lee’s work transcends that of the commercial space. Her show performances are sites for communities, and social and historical contexts which come together through set design, performance and fashion.

Conclusion Fashion shows and their spaces generate a multitude of practices that have to do with the performance of the models’ and audiences’ bodies in space, choreography, production design and architecture, as an ongoing spectacle of the urban fabric and extension of cultural practice. The narratives that they create through their appraisal in commercial press, scholarly literature, the business they command and their fundamental function for the presentation of fashion’s newness generate what we call the discursive space of the fashion show. Each new collection set within each orchestrated space represents a preoccupation or experimentation with new ideas, which advances material culture, societal themes and bodily or perceptual considerations. The availability of fashion shows on YouTube increases the multiplication of fashion images in the digital space, creating a world – a combination of Debord’s spectacle and Lacan’s phantasmatic imaginary – where we feel part of a democratizing process. However, the reality suggests that luxury brands’ fashion shows are redefined by the staging of exclusive events in locations that are increasingly exotic. Fully conscious of the importance of the mediatic occasion, especially in relation to Cruise collections, brands open up the event to a global audience via the digital imagery of models and collections, not always capturing the spatial, relational or affective dimension of the show.

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FEATURED SHOWS British Pathé (1925), Liverpool Civic Week: Official opening by Lord Mayor (video available via YouTube)

British Pathé (1927), Our Bathing Belles – A Chiswick Study (video available via British Pathé)

British Pathé (1954), Tokyo – East Dresses Western Style (video available via British Pathé)

Battle At Versailles (2016), Battle at Versailles: The competition that shook the fashion industry (video available via YouTube)

Jana Jaral (2016), Fashion Performance CAIAF (video available via YouTube)

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The Women (1939), The women’s fashion show scene (video available via YouTube)

Roma (1972) Sfilata di moda del clero / Clerical Fashion Show (video available via YouTube)

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2 ‘THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS’ THOM BROWNE AND THE TAILORING OF A QUEER DESIGN John Potvin

Introduction Thus far in the twenty-first century fashion designers have collaborated with star architects to create travel-worthy retail destinations (Prada; Comme des Garçons; Chanel), taken on the role of interior designer-architect to fashion entire architectural and design projects (Giorgio Armani; Versace; Missoni; Bulgari) or have instituted elaborate and complete homeware collections that serve to extend their lifestyle and brand reach (Ralph Lauren; Hermès; Giorgio Armani; Versace; Calvin Klein). While the relationships between fashion and interior design more specifically (Berry 2018; Collins and Griffin 2007; Fisher et al. 2011; Potvin and Myzelev 2010; Sparke 2008), fashion and architecture (Fausch 1996; Hanische 2006; Quinn 2003; Rendell 2000) and fashion and space (Potvin 2009) have enjoyed more recent scholarly attention, collectively they remain ripe with potential for critical analysis. However, the importance placed on and the awareness of the power of interior design for fashion can be traced back to at least as early as the first decades of the twentieth century when influential French designer Paul Poiret (1879–1944) not only established an interior design and education studio with his Atelier Martine but also transformed the grounds of his Parisian estate into a seraglio for the performance of modern fashion and alternative identities on the occasion of his Mille et deux nuits (Thousand and two nights) festivities in 1911. At this much-vaunted event, any divisions or rules marking out interior/exterior, East/West, performance/ representation and interior design/fashion blurred and what emerged was a novel way of doing fashion. In countless ways, Poiret’s design strategies remain a salient and exemplary blueprint. For its part, this chapter turns its gaze to a more recent, unique commingling of interior design and fashion. It will focus on Thom Browne’s spaces for his seasonal presentations of his menswear collections. It does so to reinforce the notion that within the twentieth-first century all aspects of a fashion house must cohere and collude to enforce a singular visual and material message, particularly within a highly

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dense retail landscape and runway schedule. Specifically, it examines what I identify as the American designer’s queer approach to tailoring and design, both as a sartorial and spatial strategy, through the exploration of specific and representative runway presentations. Austerity and camp are rarely, if ever, associated with each other or brought into close proximity to one another especially within the fickle, ephemeral and elusive realm of high fashion. Browne’s queer sense of austerity is at once unique and yet sits neatly within a broader economic landscape of fiscal restraint and hyper-masculine traditionalism. Instructive here, as a result, even if in a rather obvious way, is the use of ‘tailor’ as verb, that is, ‘[t]o design or alter (something) to suit specific needs’ (OED). Browne, as tailor and in his capacity to transform men’s fashion in such a way as to literally and metaphorically ‘suit’ specifically queer ‘needs’, goes against and yet reaffirms traditional menswear tailoring. In other words, Browne deploys the sartorial idioms of conservative, traditional masculine tailoring towards decidedly queer ends. His choices for repurposing pre-existing interiors extend this sartorial ethos, by slightly or completely adulterating the spatial environment towards his homosocial and queer agenda, as this chapter will outline. Queers in fashion are all too often taken for granted, and yet queer theory and queer identities are very rarely examined in a genuinely critical fashion for their agentic potentialities. My ambition, therefore, is to queer the fashions of display and presentation, in terms of the space and performances of the runway by exploring how austerity, when coupled with a particularized sense of camp, might prove to be a more novel, or in the very least genuinely unusual, terrain for a queer agency through appropriation, transformation and the repeated rituals of identity performance. This deployment must also be seen within the context of twenty-first-century identity politics and fashion developments, which currently privilege gender fluidity and non-binary identities. Yet, despite this current climate, inexplicably fashion studies as a scholarly discipline has been rather slow to investigate queer theory and identities and their impact within and on fashion – despite the widespread stereotype associated with the industry (See Geczy and Karaminas 2013; Cole 2000; Steele 2013). We often think of queer as exclusively against the grain, deploying a unique, inwardlooking and self-referential language to speak to a community disenfranchised within a dominant culture. Despite the adoption of queer into the mainstream, at its heart, queer remains an expression, form and act of resistance, a struggle at odds with dominant culture all the while establishing and providing a culture for a community in the ‘know’. This remains the agency of camp. With this in mind, I ask: What to make of those who establish a queer semiotics or visual language that appropriates and utilizes traditional registers of masculinity, tailoring and space towards queer ends? Here, then, queer is understood as ‘those gestures or analytical models which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire’ (Jagose 1997: 3) while also referring to ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’ (Sedgwick 1993: 8). The dominant design registers Browne utilizes as formative in his unique brand strategy is a return to the severe tailored look of the 1950s Cold War era that dominated the McCarthyist American metropolis. As a result of Browne’s seemingly odd choice, according to David Colman of the New York Times, he ‘has been out of step with the real world focusing on a fastidiously tight and buttoned-up look when most designers aim to accommodate a dress-down workplace. He has been out of step with fashion, working in fusty, old-man fabrics like grey flannel, while others are dressing men in denim, velvet and nylon’ (Colman 2006: G1). Grey, tailored, minimal and quirky were the pillars on which Browne built his American house. Not unlike most of the so-called super-brands as Harrods has come to refer to them, Browne’s boutiques and in-shop shops share in common a clear motif. They are meant to appear, not as retail environments from the twenty-first century per se, but rather

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share more in common with American corporate offices or banks from the 1950s, a period heightened by a clear gender divide and discrete gender roles. Yet, his reference to a period that is characterized by a return to conservative ideals serves as the baseline for the numerous tensions and contradictions which permeate his collections and their seasonal presentations. At the same time, Browne deploys and yet simultaneously subverts this conservative blueprint. For as fashion critic Tim Blanks noted early on in the designer’s career, there has always been ‘something intangibly perverse in the way he stages his shows’ (Blanks 2008: n.p.), marking a critical chiasma embedded in his overall design aesthetic, whether it be the clothes themselves or the manner in which he stages his runway displays. In fact, I propose that his tailoring and design strategies unwittingly affirm what can be best summarized as a renewal of the iconic phrase, ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’, famously coined and elaborated by the first modern art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68). In his ground-breaking Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755) Winckelmann paid particular attention to the sculptural unit of Laocoön and His Sons (c. 200 BCE) which he saw as beautifully embodying this seemingly contradictory ideal of ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’. Although his focus was on the Greek male nude, which he believed uniquely represented ‘the ideal of subjective and political freedom’ (Potts 1994: 4), in Browne’s work as tailor-designer the well-toned sporting yet clothed male body through its armour of uniformity and modernity is not vastly different from Winckelmann’s aesthetic ideal. For Winckelmann, what was ultimately embedded in his notion was a tension, among other layers, between sexual freedom and controlled austerity (Potvin 2014: 150). In a similar fashion, I argue there exists a parallel tension within Browne’s design strategies, that is, between austerity/camp and individuality/uniformity. With Winckelmann’s notion transformed as a conceptual backdrop, this chapter then explores the tensions inherent in what I contend to be the designer’s more successful and richer collection presentations for menswear.1 In the interest of space and time, I limit the focus to only three of the designer’s more recent collection presentations as snapshot case studies which highlight a larger queer strategy I identify in Browne’s design praxis: fall 2016; spring 2018; and spring 2019. I posit that the past five or so years, in particular, might be characterized as a period of increased camp sensibility and an unabashed elaboration of a queer design message within the designer’s oeuvre. Through this purposeful and thoughtful limitation of the material under review, I am not suggesting the issues, themes and elements I parse out here are not present prior to the period under question or in his women’s collections. Rather, my ambition and rationale are marked by a recognition of his emphasis on men’s tailoring and a conscious effort on my part to further expand the current disciplinary limitations of fashion studies which continues to rely heavily (and at times exclusively) on women’s fashion as evidence of larger currents, motifs, themes, theories and strategies.

Tailoring the rituals of fashion’s homosocial performance Browne has created his own, highly distinct uniform through the exploitation, adulteration and (even) queering of the traditional businessman’s and banker’s uniform and yet at the same time he continues to reify the quintessential men’s uniform, the classic (circa 1950s) men’s form-fitting, sober grey flannel three-piece suit. As part of his own uniform is a trouser that is either cut well above the ankles (revealing a part of the man’s body not usual for suiting) or is finished off with a pair of shorts exposing his well defined, muscular calves, the result of a daily running regime. The pairing up of traditional tailored suits

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and shorts is undoubtedly an odd if not nonsensical combination. However, this forms the basis for the uniform for Browne’s distinct nostalgia-infused world. Whether conscious of it or not, Browne begins with the premise and deploys fashion in a way that foregrounds gender as a series of repetitive and subversive performative acts, underscoring the idea that gender is not something we inherently are, but something we do. By deploying variations of the understated, sober (grey) suit as his basis, each staging of his collections refers to a performance that is at once similar, but always slightly different enough. This in turn serves to heighten the (subversive) performativity of gender implicated in his design and tailoring practice and underscores how fashion is a vital aspect to the doing of gender. Browne offers a particular expression of gender performativity through his designs and runway staging through a camp transformation of traditional male sartorial codes that function as subversive acts, a gender drag. As feminist performance scholar Elin Diamond contends, ‘When performativity materializes as performance in that risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing (a reiteration of norms) and a thing done (discursive conventions that frame our interpretations), between someone’s body and the conventions of embodiment, we have access to cultural meanings and critique’ (1996: 5). Austerity, referring to its second primary definition (OED), self-denial, moral strictness and asceticism, ostensibly contradicts the relentless drive for the novel endemic to the modern fashion system. Browne’s Hamish-like austerity coupled with the repetitive nature of his designs set in contrast to the whimsical, playful and off-kilter pastiche elements often embroidered on their garments signal a counterintuitive design ethos on all levels. This chapter hopes to make a case for the sartorial flourish of the austerity coupling with camp as a potential avenue through which a distinctly queer performance is made manifest, one that enforces a severe and (queer) modernist ideal of space, design and body politics. As I have argued elsewhere, the body and its interaction with space and place are inseparable from a discussion of fashion (2009). As a result, in Browne’s runway presentations are often seen a unique and thoughtful transformation of the special places he has rented for the cause of presenting his collection. The tension between his staging and the so-called original environment, as well as between austerity and grandeur (or camp), marks a critical chiasma at the heart of his queer tailoring and use of space. Terms such as ‘performative’, ‘conceptual’ and ‘niche’ are often used to describe Browne’s designs. Whether accurate or not, these terms nevertheless betray a certain type of vision for fashion and its stage management. Fashion runway presentations bring art, design, commerce, desire, pleasure and space together to construct and conjure a unique, special and often spectacular experience of the mundane (the quotidian act of simply wearing clothing). American critic Johnny Davis has lamented, however, that Thom Browne is a chump. He makes clothes that no normal man could wear and charges prices normal man can afford. [. . .] His penchant for fusty fabrics and a buttoned-up, two-sizes-too-small fit recalls Norman Wisdom, Pee-Wee Herman or an IBM employee from the 1950s. After he unveiled his 2007 autumn/winter collection in New York last month, the fashion blogs ran red: ‘What’s this? The homoerotic AC/DC look?’; ‘Some weird fever dream where Grey Gardens and Zoolander had a terrible car crash’; ‘Is Thom Browne’s collection meant to be a joke?’ (Davis 2007: 1) While these headlines and Davis’s comments manifest a vividly clear understanding of masculinity, the uneasiness exhibited by many critics belie the way in which gender norms are embedded even within the supposedly avant-garde, queer-friendly realm of high fashion. However, it is this adulteration of gendered

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sartorial norms that makes Browne compelling as a designer. As Blanks has underscored how his shows have ‘exploded the masculine certitudes of patrician Americana’, a fine way of explaining the likes of a jacket with a tail like the train on a gown worn over shorts, both trimmed in flowers made out of red, white and blue corduroy. With his radical fooling around with the conventions of masculine and feminine, Browne is not only providing entertainment; he’s also pointing out that that’s what a lot of fashion is, convention. (in Livingstone 2007: L2) However, as Browne makes clear, ‘I don’t think every guy is going to run out and buy a long skirt. The point is to make [men] think in a different way: I guess I could try something different. I don’t have to buy what everyone else is buying’ (in Davis 2007: 1). It is precisely these tensions, contradictions, ideals and uneasiness that expose gender to trouble. For as queer-feminist theorist Judith Butler famously argued: Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. [. . .] In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. (1990: 186) Browne’s collections share in common key features and design motifs: the runway shows display a ritualistic homosociality through which body, design and space cohere symbiotically. Each runway presentation upholds a clearly discernible central theme, whether a cabaret-inspired three-ring circus (Fall 2008), geisha-run tea house (Spring 2016), toy solider military parade (Spring 2014), macabre funerary procession (Fall 2015), swim meet competition (Spring 2008) or an all-boys’ school wintery wonderland (Fall 2018). These performative and therefore transformative atmospheric and thematically grounded environments perceptively impose themselves on and determine how the clothes are read, regardless of the clothes themselves; thus, helping to establish and reinforce the tensions inherent in Browne’s design praxis. Often, an initial, opening sequence of what can best be described as a ritualized preparation of the space is crucial as these sequences, or performances, are vital; for, it is precisely in this space and time that interior design, performance of identity and fashion come together to construct a cohesive message. In these instances of disruption from the usual experience of a runway show, the shows either begin with a series of uniformly clad models ‘setting the stage’ for the performance or the models repeat a sequence of ritualized acts that help close the show. Take as an example Browne’s fall 2018 show in which he recreated a woodland winter fairyland where two models moved around the space in specially designed white outfits which included hoody, a cardigan trimmed with red, white and blue, and skirt and trouser combination. Their seemingly useless presence lent a critical performative function, helping to transform the space of the glass-covered inner courtyard of the Palais of the École des Beaux Arts in Paris into a winter wonderland fantasy replete with birch trees and fake snow. At the end of each exit, models would return uniformly clad in grey onesie-pyjamas and proceeded to unfold and use the sleeping bags on the cots that awaited each of them. These bracketing sequences which often include a group of men, clad in specially designed sporting or corporate uniforms, hint to some extent to the

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autobiographical and highlight Browne’s well-documented love of sports and his fascination with midcentury aesthetics. It might be worth underscoring how both sports and modern tailoring have become clear staples of modern masculinity. In this way, Browne alters the purpose of the spaces he rents for his shows, transforming their storied history into a space in which homosociality coverts capitalism. In the recent era of gender blending and gender fluidity on the runway, when a number of designers showcase their men’s and women’s collections together, seemingly transgressing the gender divide, Browne orchestrates his own gender variance while maintaining and adhering to a clear and ritualized experience and expression of homosociality. While numerous designers still continue to present their men’s and women’s collections separately, as does Browne, the bookended rituals as well as the repetitiveness and uniformity of exits reinforce the homosociality of the staging. Likewise, this performance of homosocial space serves to reinforce Browne’s core brand motif, the individual acts of conformity of uniformity. A final critical aspect of Browne’s rituals of space at first glance appears as if to honour the male bonds implicated in homosociality, bonds more often than not performed in spaces dedicated to or inspired by sports. As queer-feminist scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues, a continuum exists between the homosocial and homosexual. This uneasy relationship all too often manifests itself in homophobia, male anxiety and shaming. Vital to Sedgwick’s theory is how ‘in erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: that the bonds of “rivalry” and “love”, differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent’ (Sedgwick 1985: 21). However, missing in the spaces and performances of Browne’s runway is a rivalry or contest for the affections of a putative female figure. Rather, Browne subversively takes this idea of space and bonding in another direction by literally taking the stuffing2 out of it.

Fall 2016: When Dorian Gray met Adolf Loos Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. Oscar Wilde in ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891) Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Oscar Wilde in the Preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) For his fall 2016 show, Browne conjured a rather darkened space, in which a centrally located opulent chandelier and numerous large-scale picture frames are initially hidden from view by way of draped white sheets, as if protecting them from dust while their owner was away. The initial, customary ritual saw two models together removing these protective sheets and concluded their labour by resting on two men’s club chairs where they resided for the remainder of the show. For a collection that celebrated the anonymity of grey, Browne emphasized a unique sense of anonymity by placing bowler hats not on the models’ heads but rather directly overtop their faces, obscuring any semblance of difference or individuality (Figure 2.1). Here these hats are reminiscent of René Magritte’s (1898–1967) countless surreal and perverse pictures of men in bowler hats whose identities and faces were obscured. The anonymity of Magritte’s army of bowler-hatted men is further underscored by their unremarkable black two-piece tailored suits. Browne’s reference is no mere citation of historic artistic precedent. Rather, it was more profound and

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Figure 2.1  Thom Browne: Men’s Fall 2016 Runway – Paris Menswear Fashion Week, Paris, France, 2016. Photo by Antonio de Moraes Barros Filho/WireImage. Courtesy of Getty Images.

was akin to what Oscar Wilde had witnessed and commented on in his essay ‘The Decay of Lying’, the aesthetic movement, of which he was the lead progenitor, had witnessed a move in which life imitated art: ‘And it has always been so. A great artist invents a type and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form’ ([1891] 1919: 30–1). The absent image (whether as portrait or reflection) within the frames that dominated the runway had come to life, embodied in the figures of the unidentifiable models; perhaps transformed into spectres of those who once occupied a life within the spaces of the frames? The absence of a mirrored surface or a specific portrait within the frames also emphasized the playful performance of identity that Browne and fashion in general allow for. As is often the case with a Browne runway show, models moved through the space with slow, precise processional-like movement, adding a degree of the funerary, a nod to the notion of the passing of time. The collection consisted of thirteen garments, each reworked in three different variations, rendered as either tattered or perfectly pristine versions. Between the varied states of frayed decay coupled with the Victorian sense of the macabre that pervaded the space, the presentation provided an eloquent investigation of modern masculinity through the guise of the anonymity of modern men’s suiting. Browne’s presentation recalled the work of two highly, though decidedly divergent, historical figures: architect and designer Adolf Loos (1870–1933) and poet and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). This notion of suits as anonymous armour for the modern world conjures the influential treatises of Vienna-based Adolf Loos and recalls his infamous treatise of 1908, ‘Crime and Ornament’, in which he

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claimed that a man who lets way to his inner urges in the decoration of body and home is either a ‘criminal’ or a ‘degenerate’. Although Browne has chosen Paris as his site to stage his sense of the modern, for Loos, London, largely because of the success and influence of Savile Row, stood as the epicentre of modernity precisely because it had harnessed the twinned influences of capitalism and democracy in the form of the sober, unadorned, restrained and uniform well-tailored English suit. The English suit was a perfected material manifestation of decorous masculinity precisely because it represented the pillars of respectability, sobriety and stability, the rationalist idioms that good tailoring portended. ‘In Loos’s writings, men’s fashion signifies a tension between the permanent and the fleeting, between disguise and display’ (Stewart 2000: 130). Moreover, for the design theorist, constant and rapid fluctuations in fashion, as evidenced in women’s styles, denoted the ‘fluctuations of a deviant sexuality’ (Gronberg 1998: 31). Indebted to Loos’s design theories and polemical essays, Paris-based, Swiss-born modernist architect Le Corbusier took up the cause of the designer’s notional well-suited man as the signifier not only of modernity but also modernism itself, suggesting and symbolically noting how the ‘bowler hat appeared on the horizon’ (Le Corbusier 1925: 54),3 symbolical of an industrial masculinity. Cities like Vienna, which for Loos had lost its way because of its degenerate aristocrats and dandies, and Paris, the capital of women’s haute couture and primary capital of fashion, stood as metropolises of this degenerate sexuality. Fashion capitals have long-held specific identities and culturally burdened associations, and so Browne’s choice to move his runway presentations away from the capitalist centre (and fashion capital) of New York to Paris suggests a type of degeneracy that Loos lamented a century earlier. This coupled with the manner in which he transforms the decorous uniform of masculinity, by exaggerating its proportions and silhouettes or embroidering whimsical motifs overtop, sets into sharp contrast the whimsical, campy and outlandish aspect of the quirks, the veering into fantasy and the queer hinted at in his mid-century inspired designs. These contradistinctions set into relief the constant tensions of contemporary masculinity. A second influence clearly legible in the presentation of this collection is taken from the 1890 novel by Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which stands in sharp contrast to the theories by Loos briefly outlined earlier. The three principal characters – Dorian Gray (the attractive, narcissist who descends rapidly into a world of self-indulgence and sensual pleasures), Basil Hallward (a moral-bound artist who is commissioned to paint the portrait of Gray and who succumbs to an infatuation of his subject) and Lord Henry Wotton (an aristocrat and decadent dandy who serves as Gray’s mentor and impresario to the world of beauty, hedonism and decadence) – collectively propel the clear homoerotic subplot of the novel. Overcome by sensual pleasure and hedonistic abandon and an incessant pursuit of youthfulness inspired by Lord Wotton, Gray wishes that his portrait within the frame would age, rather than his corporeal self. Over time Gray elects to lock up the portrait, pursuing a life of decadence for a period of eighteen years. After some time, the portrait’s artist checks in on his old friend and requests to see the portrait now so transformed its own creator can only rely on his signature as a means to identifying it. Hallward becomes deeply distrustful and Gray in turn murders him, blaming him for his fate. Progressively, the portrait transforms the representation of Gray into something more ugly and loathsome. Overcome by his life and what the portrait fundamentally reveals about himself, he decides to stab the picture, but what in fact he stabs is himself while the portrait is restored to its original state of pure beauty. Of the many motifs and themes that permeate Wilde’s most notorious, scandalous and yet celebrated novel, duplicity stands out as most significant: a duplicitous character who is at once an aesthete and a criminal. On this thematic level, together Wilde, Loos and Browne share in common the way in which they expose the duplicity (that is occupying two conditions simultaneously) and tensions inherent in the construction of masculinity, the limits of its manifestation and the virtues by which the idealized image within and beyond the frame is built.

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Spring 2018: Secular reliquary of gender With its plaster casts of Roman statues as background visual cues, Browne opted to use the glass courtyard of the Palais des Études of the École des Beaux Arts to showcase his spring 2018 collection. Composed by David Motion, ‘The Maze’ proved a highly appropriate soundtrack for a collection which featured perhaps Browne’s most gender-fluid collection to date. Motion’s music was originally used in Sally Porter’s 1992 film adaptation of Orlando (a novel originally penned by Virginia Woolf), which featured a gender-shifting time-travelling lead character played by the oft-androgynous Tilda Swinton. Unlike with his use of the venue for his next men’s collection for Fall, Browne chose not to redesign the space (as he often does). Rather, he elected to showcase a small series of gold-plated shoes enclosed in Plexiglas cases overtop large marble display stands. As the show began, four models stood guard over these precious fashion objects turned objet d’arts wearing quintessential Browne form-fitting uniforms of white shirt, narrow tie and grey flannel suit with trousers exchanged in favour of shorts. The model-guards seem to conjure a twisted version of an FBI agent safeguarding the secular relics not only of the fashion industry but also of gender identity itself. Shoes, and handbags in particular, are not the usual purview of the tailor’s shop. Rather, these mainstay accessories – so often associated with women – over the past several decades have become, along with perfume and cosmetics, the economic power engines of most fashion houses. This is especially true of those houses owned and operated by large luxury conglomerates. More importantly, through a cultural association and the fashion industry’s gendered association with such objects, they also stand as those objects which do not cross over well into the two primary gender segments of retail and consumption. For the collection Browne dressed his male models in skirts, dresses and Richelieu heels or Brogues with 12-inch heels (Figure 2.2) – the now twisted accessories of a new sort of contemporary femininity and dissident gender. ‘It all started with these’, referring to the goldplated shoes on display. Browne’s family established a tradition in which each first pair of shoes were dipped in gold and set on display. ‘I was thinking about how we all start off the same – wearing almost the same clothes [. . .] And then it changes’ (Browne in Fury 2017: n.p.). As Butler reminds us, ‘The notion of gender parody defended here does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original . . . [G]ender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin’ Figure 2.2  Thom Browne: Men’s Spring 2018 (1990: 188). For his part, critic Luke Leitch described Runway – Paris Menswear Fashion Week, Paris, the presentation as ‘a powerfully transgressive show’ France, 2017. Photo by Francois Guillot /AFP via (2018a: n.p.). Yet, according to Browne, ‘I don’t really Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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politicize my collections but really it’s about people being open-minded [. . .] It’s amazing how it’s so simple and people are so closed-minded. “Oh no, I’ll never wear this”. What is the big deal?’ (Browne in Fury 2017: n.p.). These clothes are, however, as critic Alexander Fury noted, complicated in that they were not simply women’s clothing placed on a male body, but every nip and tuck were administered and specially tailored to accommodate a distinctly male body, whether it be narrower hips or a wider waist (2017: n.p.). This distinction is an important one. This is simply not a case of a man wearing women’s clothing. Rather, Browne is deploying traditionally feminine garments and tailoring them anew to reform men’s sartorial contours. Moreover, with these displayed iconic gold-plated shoes a religious metaphor of sacred relic commingles with the trophies prized within competitive sports. For these objects also possess an added surplus of meaning associated with the designer’s continued interest and emphasis on sportswear and physical sports. These appear as if golden trophies, emblems of accomplishment and success as much as, as previously stated, sartorial emblems of gender. By only including these encased shoes as his act of interior design, the space of the Beaux Arts seemingly lacks transformation. However, Browne deploys the bastion of Western academic art which has long maintained gender and sexual difference through the codes of representations – of which fashion also partakes – to reinforce his queer programme of subversion. After all, as Butler questions, ‘Is “the body” or “the sexed body” the firm foundation on which gender and systems of compulsory sexuality operate? Or is “the body” itself shaped by political forces with strategic interests in keeping that body bounded and constituted by the markers of sex?’ (1990: 175). The body is itself always in representation and does not exist as some prior original. Shoes are those markers of sartorial, bodily accessories which help to clearly denote our gendered identities as early as those first baby shoes. Browne himself made clear his intentions for the use of these shoes in the space recalling: I wanted them to look at the baby shoes, reminiscing back to the day it all started. When they could choose whichever path they wanted [. . .] I like the idea that when you are a baby you wear pretty much the same clothing as your brothers and sisters. And I think that culture dictates which way and what kind of clothing you wear – but it is nice that you can pretty much do whatever you want. (Browne in Leitch 2018a: n.p.)

Spring 2019: Camp and the garden of silly delights In his show notes for spring 2019, Browne asked his audience to ‘[p]lease see the world through my eyes . . . please’ (in Leitch 2018b: n.p.). Indeed, what the designer was asking was to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole with him and enter a tailor-made surreal, artificially turfed landscape populated by campy garden gnomes. Traditional suits for this season were festooned with embroidered colourful whales, toy sailboats and lobsters, common motifs in his menswear collections. Here, everything appears ill-tailored, with nothing fitting quite as it should, a world of proportions reminiscent of Alice in her decidedly warped Wonderland. To help see this already brightly coloured landscape, Browne also handed out yellow-tinted glasses to witness a show whose soundtrack was David Bowie’s 1970s hit ‘Free to be You and Me’, ‘driving home’, noted Leitch, ‘the big theme of diversity and tolerance’ (Leitch 2018b), a theme that has dominated countless catwalks in recent years. In her celebrated essay ‘Notes on Camp’ Susan Sontag4 asserted that ‘[c]amp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization’ (Sontag 2001: 276). Sontag further

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Figure 2.3  Thom Browne: Runway – Paris Fashion Week – Menswear spring/summer 2019. Photo by Peter White/Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

asserts that ‘many of the objects prized by camp are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It’s not the love of the old as such. It’s simply that the process of aging and deterioration provides the necessary detachment or arouses a necessary sympathy’ (Sontag 2001: 285). Here garden gnomes coupled with ‘fusty fabrics’, as Davis once described them, are combined to represent a sort of passé, middle-class suburban inadvertent expression of kitsch, here appropriated and seen through the yellow-tinted looking glasses of Thom Browne. With the audience fenced off by way of white picket fence, once again the École des Beaux Arts in Paris was transformed into landscape in which garden gnomes began the show by mowing lawns in uniform grey, sober, yet playful, short suits, while models displayed colourful, whimsical tailored outfits seemingly more suitable to children, garden parties and Alice’s Wonderland companions (Figure 2.3). As with the clothing itself, proportion, scale and the normative colour palette of the landscape of the ‘runway’ are thrown out altogether. At the end of the show, similarly attired men walk hand in hand together, while one of the garden gnomes waves to the crowd and retreats to his various ill-proportioned wooden home which itself defied the laws of tasteful interior design. While not unusual, this garden of campy delights provides the space for the American designer’s constant interplay and tension between paired down, grey, minimalist tailoring and an overproportioned, exaggerated and colourful artifice and exuberant stylization.

Conclusion Designers skilfully deploy both fashion and interior design through a singular vision to the point they become inextricably linked. Like many designers who show their collections in Paris – and

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in contradistinction to many Milanese-based designers – Browne often changes his venue for each collection to lend a different and unique vision to the presentation. Runway presentations bring together art, design, fashion, commerce and space together to construct and conjure a unique, special and often spectacular experience of the mundane (the quotidian act of simply wearing clothing). The point of my investigation was not simply to interrogate specific collections of fashion, but rather to witness how key collections are transformed by purposeful practices of interior design and spatial dynamics. As a result, I conclude this chapter by way of a brief description of a recent two-store, 15,000 square foot boutique opening in Miami’s Design District in 2018. In partnership with Flavio Albanese of the Milan-based ASA Studio Albanese, Browne’s store features an assortment of polished, slick marbles, including (white) Calacatta and an abundance of (grey) Bardiglio marble. Here, within this minimalist swimming pool meets bank space, the boundaries marking out walls from ceiling to flooring are dissolved by using identical marble tiles. Within this high gloss interior, Browne’s collections are set into relief, a striking juxtaposition between whimsy and colourful fantasy on the one hand and controlled grey-toned conservative restraint on the other. In addition to the clothes and the uniformly clad sales staff, the store is also populated by exceptional French and American modernist furniture by designers like Jacques Adnet, Pierre Jeanneret, Edward Wormley and Paul McCobb, among others. Slick, impersonal and repetitive, Browne’s boutiques, whether in Miami, Tokyo or New York, celebrate mid-century American modernism, and yet the designer deploys spaces of the usual, the familiar, the typical, the traditional and transforms them by adulterating their original raison d’être. Fashion shows, which are constructed around fashion weeks, form part of a ritualized sense of time, spring/summer and fall/winter, and are part of a normalized seasonal calendar. Yet, spatially, fashion shows exist outside of normative time; they display clothing for a period of time that has yet to take place, in a singular location meant to signify a global experience with the clothes produced in a different location than that of the presentation and shipped to myriad places and spaces around the world. Although Michel Foucault highlighted a number of differing and yet intersecting types of heterotopic spaces, most relevant for our purposes here is how a heterotopia marks out a space of difference, and through the rituals associated with that space occupies a position ‘outside of all [other ordinary] places’ (1998: 24). The spaces of boutiques (see 2009) and runway presentations are certainly ‘mythic and real, imbued with elements of fictional space and material space. [. . .] Heterotopias do not exist in isolation, but become visible through their differences with other sites as they upset spatial relations or provide alternative representations of them’ (Quinn 2003: 28). The ritual preparation or repetitive-styled finale of Browne’s shows suggest a slowing down of time, one which marks the space as heterotopic and different not simply from the world which surrounds it, but also distinct from the fashion system itself which progressively favours shorter and shorter presentations. Browne constructs spaces and utilizes environments for his runway shows that seemingly stand the test of time, to exist outside the vagaries of fashion’s rapacious temporal flux. Browne’s minimal bank-like spaces that he collaboratively constructs for his boutiques coupled with his appropriation of venerable spaces like the Palais of the École des Beaux Arts are juxtaposed with fleeting collections that can be described as progressively more fantastical, campy and queer which contradict the spaces of their display. Browne’s design ethos is progressively split in its personality, a seemingly wide-ranging marketing strategy that might appeal at once to both the conservative traditionalist and the whimsical so-called arty-type. In short, through a twenty-first-century idealization of mid-century modernism and traditional tailoring ideals, Browne’s queer spatial designs and appropriations provide ‘gestures or analytical models which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between’ (Jagose 1997: 3) bodies, gender, space and fashion while also providing his audiences with ‘the open mesh of possibilities [. . .] and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify

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monolithically’ (Sedgwick 1993: 8). In short, they provide an updated expression of the tensions famously expressed by Winckelmann and outlined at the outset of this chapter to one of austere camp and camp austerity, a chiasmic tension that resides at the heart of Browne’s queer aesthetics.

FEATURED SHOWS Thom Browne: Men’s Fall/Winter 2016/17 (video available via YouTube: FF Channel)

Thom Browne: Men’s Spring/Summer 2018 (video available via YouTube: FF Channel)

Thom Browne: Men’s Spring/Summer 2019 (video available via YouTube: FF Channel)

Notes 1 Browne has been nominated for eight (and has won three) Menswear Designer of the Year awards by the Council of Fashion Designers of America; approximately 70 per cent of his business remains menswear. 2 The use of ‘stuffing’ is purposeful here as a mainstay of Browne’s design aesthetic is a padded and stuffed silhouette; these puffed-up, bulky additions appear as if padding is seemingly suitable for contact sports. 3 By the early twentieth century, the bowler hat had shed its nineteenth-century working-class affiliation and was now being worn by businessmen working in financial districts in the West. 4 Sontag’s essay ‘Notes on Camp’ formed the theoretical and conceptual framework for the 2019 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute’s 2019 annual fashion exhibition, titled ‘Camp: Notes on Fashion’. I would contend, however, that the exhibition threatens to provide the final proverbial nail in the coffin of queer representation and visibility, co-opted by mainstream institutions and media.

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References Berry, J. (2018), House of Fashion: Haute Couture and the Modern Interior, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Blanks, T. (2008), ‘Review of Thom Browne Fall 2008 Menswear Show’, Vogue. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.vog​​ ue​.co​​m​/fas​​hion-​​shows​​/fall​​-2008​​-mens​​wear/​​​thom-​​brown​e (accessed December 12, 2018). Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Cole, S. (2000), ‘Don We Now Our Gay Apparel’: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century, London and New York: Berg. Collins, P. and J. Griffin (2007), Wear Your Chair: When Fashion Meets Interior Design, New York: Fairchild Publications, Inc. Colman, D. (2006), ‘A Man in Short’, New York Times, October 19: G.1. Davis, J. (2007), ‘The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit; To the Uninitiated, He Is a Designer Who Makes (and wears) Comically Ill-Fitting Suits. To His Devoted Fans, He Is Nothing Less than the Saviour of Menswear. But How Does Thom Browne See Himself?’ The Independent on Sunday, March 4: 1. Diamond, E. ed. (1996), Performance and Cultural Politics, New York and London: Routledge. Fausch, D. (1996), Architecture: In Fashion, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Fisher, F. et al. eds (2011), Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today, Oxford and New York: Berg. Foucault, M. (1998), ‘Of Other Places’, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), Visual Culture Reader, 238–44, London and New York: Routledge. Fury, A. (2017), ‘48 Hours in Paris with Thom Brown’, The New York Times Style Magazine June 27: n.p. Geczy, A. and V. Karaminas (2013), Queer Style, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Gronberg, T. (1998), Designs on Modernity: Exhibiting the City in 1920s Paris, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Hanische, R. (2006), Absolutely Fabulous: Architecture and Fashion, London: Prestel. Jagose, A9. (1997), Queer Theory: An Introduction, New York: New York University Press. Le Corbusier. ([1925] 1987), The Decorative Art of Today, Cambridge: MIT Press. Leitch, L. (2018a), ‘Review of Thom Browne Spring 2018 Menswear Show’, Vogue. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​ .vog​​ue​.co​​m​/fas​​hion-​​shows​​/spri​​ng​-20​​18​-me​​nswea​​​r​/tho​​m​-bro​​wne (accessed December 12, 2018). Leitch, L. (2018b), ‘Review of Thom Browne Spring 2019 Menswear Show’, Vogue. https​:/​/ww​​w​.vog​​ue​.co​​m​/fas​​ hion-​​shows​​/spri​​ng​-20​​19​-me​​nswea​​​r​/tho​​m​-bro​​wne (accessed December 12, 2018). Livingstone, D. (2007), ‘Thom Browne Pulls Off Triple Play’, Toronto Star, December 28: L2. Loos, A. ([1908] 2002), ‘Crime and Ornament’, in Melony Ward and Bernie Miller (eds), Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos, Toronto: YYZ Books. Potts, A. (1994), Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Potvin, J. ed. (2009), The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007, New York and London: Routledge. Potvin, J. (2014), Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain, Studies in Design series, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Potvin, J. and A. Myzelev, eds (2010), Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity, Farnham, UK and Burlington, USA: Ashgate. Quinn, B. (2003), The Fashion of Architecture, Oxford: Berg. Rendell, J. (2000), ‘Between Architecture, Architecture and Identity’, Architectural Design, 70 (6) (December): 8–19. Sedgwick, E. K. (1985), Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1993), Tendencies, Durham: Duke University Press. Sontag, S. (2001), ‘Notes on Camp’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Picard. Sparke, P. (2008), ‘Interior Decoration and Haute Couture: Links between the Developments of the Two Professions in France and the USA in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries – A Historiographical Analysis’, Journal of Design History, 21 (1): 101–7. Steele, V. (2013), A Queer History of Fashion: From Closet to Catwalk, New Haven: Yale University Press. Stewart, J. (2000), Fashioning Vienna, Adolf Loos’ Cultural Criticism, London: Routledge. Wilde, O. ([1891] 1991), ‘The Decay of Lying’, in Intentions, London: Methuen.

3 IN HIS OWN WORDS CHALAYAN SPEAKS Bradley Quinn

Introduction Hussein Chalayan has strong views about fashion, just as he has strong feelings about architecture, technology, the body and design in general. A self-styled ‘ideas person’ who forges unexpected alliances between clothing, machinery, built structures and technology, Chalayan is a thinker who refutes the premise that fashion and material intelligence should be separate entities. In fact, much of his output during the previous two decades has brokered significant connections between them. As Chalayan builds bridges between the visual, the ideological and the tangible, his designs operate like a scalpel that slices open the surface of the fashioned body, peeling back the skin of superficiality to reveal the complex messages that clothing can convey. Conceptual designers rarely get their moment in the fashion limelight. The industry is characterized by style over content and image over substance, and the vast stranglehold of contemporary fashion caters to mainstream trends and image-making ideals. Chalayan’s forward-thinking approach is seldom about the shock of the new, and his vision leads him to explore concepts that most conventional designers would deem to be incompatible with fashion design. Chalayan is one of the few fashion practitioners who can be recognized as a ‘designer’ rather than a ‘stylist’. Many of the creatives working in the fashion industry merely resurrect older modes of dress or reinvent the basic garments found within the traditional fashion canon. Chalayan moves forward with completely new forms, shapes and materials conceived to define space, reflecting the construction principles and notions of contemporary architecture more than conventional fashion. Those who understand Chalayan’s approach recognize that his clothing designs are minimal in look but maximal in thought. His fascination with architecture, spatial dynamics, urban identity and aerodynamics is expressed in garments based on concepts, architectural systems and theories of the body. Chalayan’s sense of the visual is ultimately true to his grasp of the practical and cultural needs resolved by clothing, and his private resolve to push the boundaries of fashion as far forward as he can.

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This chapter was written exclusively for Staging Fashion as Chalayan approaches the twenty-fifth anniversary of his illustrious career and represents a view from inside the industry. Over the years, Chalayan has agreed to allow me to interview him twelve times, resulting in articles for magazines and newspapers, chapters in books and essays in exhibition catalogues published by museums presenting the designer’s work. In the sections that follow, I survey the designer’s contributions to fashion and his remarkable vision for the future of the discipline, punctuated with quotes extracted from my own interviews with Chalayan. The sections address Chalayan’s use of the fashion show to exploit architectural tectonics, spatial dynamics and new materials in relation to the space of the body. These inform a new axis between fashion, architecture, technological innovation and the broader urban environment. As this text generates a broader understanding of the designer’s work, Chalayan’s own words provide unique insights into his inimitable approach.

Rise to fame Chalayan’s work was spotted by fashion journalists in the UK soon after he received his BA degree from Central Saint Martin’s School of Art in London in 1993. His final year collection The Tangent Flows is the now-infamous series of buried garments that had been exhumed just before the show and presented with an illustrated text that explained the process. The ritual of burial and resurrection gave the garments a dimension that referenced life, death and urban decay, in a process that transported the garments from the world of fashion to the bounty of nature. The work attracted the attention of the London boutique Brown’s, which featured the collection in its window display. Since then, Chalayan has collaborated with architects, artists, textile engineers and set designers; won awards; and produced collections for other established fashion labels. Despite his British education and long-term residency in London, Chalayan is true to his Turkish Cypriot origins, only recently coming to terms with being labelled as a ‘British designer’. ‘I’m grateful that I have a bi-cultural background’, he said. ‘I was exposed to more things. You have more to respond to and you question things more’ (Chalayan 1999, interviewed by author). The idea of ‘national’ style is problematic for the fashion world, where designers of diverse nationalities show in the fashion capitals. While his conceptual approach brought him into the same arenas as Martin Margiela, John Galliano and Kosuke Tsumura, Chalayan seems to have more in common with Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo, who show in Paris, than with any British designer showing in London. Fellow Turks Rifat Ozbek and Nicole Farhi are also acclaimed for their collections, but bear no similarity to Chalayan’s work at all. Despite becoming an overnight success in the fashion world and receiving worldwide recognition for his ground-breaking designs, the first decade of Chalayan’s career was haunted by financial turmoil. Chalayan elected to voluntarily liquidate his business in 2001 and began looking for new assets in order to continue. His label was restored by a licensing deal with the Italian manufacturing company Gibo, which manufactures clothing for many leading designers. Chalayan’s arrangement with Gibo had resolved a long-standing saga of production problems – with Gibo came an assurance that each collection would be delivered on time. With Gibo’s backing in place, Chalayan later struck a deal with the British luxury retailer Asprey, which appointed Chalayan creative director of fashion for their clothes and accessories line in 2001. Chalayan’s new role at Asprey came with the challenge of transforming his fascination with architecture, aerodynamics and geospatial politics into a collection he described as ‘lighter, more classical’ than his own label. However ‘light’ the collections may have appeared, the garments required

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an audience with the confidence to carry off clothing still heavy with the thought process that created them. Commercial success resulted from sound business backing that supported the launch of diffusion lines in 2002 and 2004, with Chalayan eventually selling the rights to his menswear line to internet retailer Yoox in 2007. A collaboration with Swarovski resulted in the series of laser LED dresses launched in early 2008, but none proved to be commercially viable. Later that year, Chalayan was appointed creative director for sportswear brand Puma, while also collaborating with German hosiery label Falke to produce footwear pieces for his autumn/winter 2008 collection showcased in Paris. The year 2015 proved to be one of Chalayan’s best years to date, ushering in new alliances with brands and institutions. After Chalayan was engaged by Vionnet to design the brand’s demi-couture collection in 2014, he joined the creative team for Vionnet’s prêt-à-porter line in 2015. The same year, Chalayan was appointed head of fashion at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The genius of Chalayan’s work lies in his ability to explore principles that are visual and intellectual, charting the spectral orientations of urban societies through tangibles like clothing, buildings, aeroplanes and furniture; and through abstractions such as beauty, philosophy and feeling. While Chalayan accepts the practical reasons for clothing, he does not regard them as the starting point in the design process. ‘My work is about ideas, really. My starting-point isn’t always the woman. It’s the idea’, Chalayan said, regarding fashion as a vehicle for the concepts he explores and the structures he envisages (Irvine 2001). Chalayan does not relate his works to the canon of iconic fashion or the notion of design classicism, nor does he view them as expressions of the time we live in. ‘They are more about timeless objects’, he explains, refusing to limit them to fashion-oriented interpretations or assign them to a specific era (Chalayan 1999, interviewed by author). Chalayan takes clothing far beyond the modernist fashions of the early twentieth century that echoed the architectural lines of buildings in the cut of dress.

An architect of ideas While outwardly Chalayan interprets clothing as individual structures, he is mentally withdrawn into a quest to discern their meaning within the collective structures of society and material culture. Chalayan’s vision is to fully integrate clothing with their surroundings, rendering a comprehensive understanding of different environments and the diverse factors that create them. Chalayan has identified the potential that garments have to function as components of a modular environmental system, in which they conform to the architectural principles of shelter, protection and social structuring, yet maintain the mobility, flexibility and individuality that architecture lacks. As Chalayan charges process with the same equity he invests in form, he blurs the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the intangible, creating an intellectual forum as fluid as the concepts it represents. Chalayan briefly considered becoming an architect before deciding to study fashion, and his affinity with the built environment continues. ‘I work in a cross-disciplinary way with people in other fields who contribute to what I am doing. I am interested in forms generally, not just in clothing but in other things too’, he said (Quinn 2003). Chalayan has collaborated with architects on a number of collections, and even lectured to the architecture and interior design students at the Royal College of Art in London. ‘One thing to keep in mind’, Chalayan said, ‘is that when fashion looks modular and structured, people automatically call it architectural when it isn’t. It takes a lot of structuring to make a dress truly architectural. Architecture can be designed in a fluid and unstructured way that doesn’t look architectural, but it

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is still architecture’ (Chalayan 2000, interviewed by author). As Chalayan’s adherence to architectural principles becomes more pronounced, his work represents a congruity of ideas that indicates fashion and architecture are coming closer together than ever before. Chalayan’s long-standing fascination with aerodynamics manifested in his collections in autumn 1995, when he designed a series of flight-path prints. His Aeroplane dresses and Kite dresses were created through the use of architectural proportions to direct the spatial relationship between the fabric and the body, while Chalayan reflected on the relative meanings of speed, flight and the gravity of the body. The dynamics of the Kite Dress amplified its interplay with its surroundings by encoding ‘messages’ from the body, the built environment and the spatial zone above it as it flew, returned to earth and rejoined the physicality of its wearer. ‘Everything around us either relates to the body or to the environment’, Chalayan explained. ‘I think of modular systems where clothes are like small parts of an interior, the interiors are part of architecture, which is then a part of an urban environment. I think of fluid space where they are all a part of each other, just in different scales and proportions’ (Interview 2009). For his before minus now collection (spring/summer 2000) Chalayan returned to his architectural theme, designing a series of dresses in collaboration with b consultants, a firm of architects with offices in London at the time. The dresses featured wire frame architectural prints against static white backgrounds, generated by a computer programme designed to facilitate drawing a range of threedimensional perspectives inside an architectural landscape. The renderings’ geometric dimensions suppress the depiction of real space and create a reality independent of the shapes and textures found in the organic world. Such absolute symmetry and concise angles create the illusion of a realm that has been carefully ordered and controlled; yet the architectonic expressions correspond to physical registrations of surfaces, smart systems and programmatic mappings. Juxtaposed against the organic curves of the body, these representations of inhabitable spaces reinforce the truism that the body inhabits its clothes. As abstractions, the images can simulate either dystopia or utopia, providing a representation of a refuge or a token of resistance. Each garment was designed to present a challenge to conventional fashion thinking. Chalayan was not tyrannized by conventional cutting and simplified lines, but applies mathematical principles to the garments themselves, balancing their construction against the geometry of the body. In Chalayan’s hands, all garments and built structures manifest as externalizations of the body, shaped and proportioned to contain an individual or designated to house groups of people. In the Echoform collection (autumn/winter 1999) Chalayan created thought-provoking designs like leather dresses inspired by car interiors to represent ‘externalising speed and putting it back on the body’, and mimicked aeroplane interiors by attaching padded headrests to dresses to evoke thoughts on speed, spatiality and well-being. ‘We subconsciously amplify the structure of our bodies when we build something – a building or a machine’, Chalayan explained. ‘If you look at car interiors, they are like a negative of the [reclining] body. I wanted to re-project that projection back on to the body and see what I came up with’ (Irvine 2001). Chalayan’s examination of speed connects his work to a range of discourses that compare the body to machine parts and technological innovation. He imbues the dresses with technologies that represent the interactivity, productivity and uniformity akin to the machine-like principles of control and efficiency. References to these hi-tech systems in fashion fuse its body-conscious ideals with a belief in automation, speed and accuracy as the means of achieving it. The Geotrophics collection (spring/summer 1999) adapted chairs to be wearable extensions of the human form. Chalayan’s Chair Dresses represented the idea of a nomadic existence, which, like the vision of Archigram, would be facilitated by living within completely transportable environments. With a

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determination to express ‘how the meaning of a nation evolves through conflict or natural boundaries’, Chalayan explored the meaning of geographical places and politicized spaces that cannot easily be defined architecturally (Irvine 2001). Acknowledging the body’s role as a locus for the construction of identity, he highlighted how its appropriation by national regimes would orient and indoctrinate it according to the space it ‘belongs’ to. In his symbolic effort to equip the wearer with a portable homeland, Chalayan reinstates a sense of individual identity in defiance of the myth that a homeland is designated by geographical borders alone. The relationship between space and identity was later expanded in the ground-breaking After Words collection (autumn/winter 2000) (Figure 3.1) and demonstrated for the audience of the fashion show. Chalayan chose to stage the fashion show at Sadler’s Wells theatre in London, relying upon the architectonics of the theatre and the stark design of the set to boost the collection’s message. Chalayan designed a bare, white backdrop flanked by asymmetrical planes on three sides, featuring 1950s-style furniture that the models transformed into clothing in the show’s finale, either by wearing it or by carrying it off the stage. Some of the garments in the collection were equipped with pockets and compartments that would hold essential belongings, or fuse with other items of clothing so that they could be put on more quickly. ‘A part of the idea was camouflage, so that things could be left in an obvious place and still be there when people came home again. That was part of the concept behind the dresses, that they were something valuable disguised as chair covers that no one would take’, Chalayan explained (Interview 2009). The space occupied by clothing is central to Chalayan’s vision: clothing defines the intimate zone around the body, architecture a much larger one. In After Words, Chalayan expressed how either could become a danger zone and a refuge, a means of transportation for what could be carried and a camouflage for things left behind. Symbolically, the models were able to transport items from a ‘threatening’ environment to a safe place, re-establishing the safety and familiarity associated with them in different surroundings. It is significant that they transported the garments by bringing them into contact with the body, rescuing them as one would carry a child to safety. The show was based on the idea of having to evacuate home during the time of war, hiding possessions when a raid was impending, and using the agency of clothing as the means to carry away possessions. The show’s finale recalled the 1974 Turkish military intervention that displaced both Turkish and Greek Cypriots from their homes. ‘You hear these stories of how people would sneak back home when they weren’t supposed to and take away what belonged to them. In some respects, that’s what was recreated on the stage, more poetically’, he said (Interview 1999, interviewed by author). The collection was intended to express displacement and expatriation, but the objects made for the collection were also recognized for their design genius. Each piece of furniture featured on stage belonged to the collection; they had been systematically designed to transform into dresses and skirts, complete with pieces of luggage to pack away the clothes taken off. The collection’s congruency with architecture became even more apparent as rumours spread that Chalayan was launching a furniture and home accessories line. While Chalayan has no immediate plans to do so, many fashion designers routinely produce ranges of soft furnishing, tableware and decorative objects. Architects also design lines of furniture or even lighting for the environments they design. Their presence in living spaces establishes a point of congruency where the two disciplines meet on equal ground; while interior design is neither architecture nor fashion, both disciplines employ it as a means of subdividing and conquering space just as Chalayan did. Dressing the body and dressing the interior are part of the same process, ornamenting and understanding proportions, matching textiles and colours. Architecture, fashion and interior design exist symbiotically in the same system – none would be possible without the other.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Figure 3.1  A model presents a creation by designer Hussein Chalayan during London Fashion Week, London, United Kingdom, 2000. Photo by Sinead Lynch/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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Chalayan’s furniture was deployed as extensions of the theme he was representing through the fashion. For architects who produce furniture, the designs are generally intended to complement their own architectural projects, unifying the aesthetics of the building and the functional objects within it in a single, harmonious whole. Although home and work environments are typically separate spaces, they are also integrated aspects of the built environment. For fashion designers, an interior accessories range is a lifestyle statement that amplifies the message behind the label. They ‘fashion’ the interior in an expression of personal style that can be worn off the body, yet frame the body stylistically within its milieu. The inhabitants explore and define their identities through the interior as they interpret their meanings for themselves, creating images that speak both to the individual who has created it and to the world at large.

Remote control couture The ground-breaking garment that came to be known as the Remote Control Dress (spring/summer 2000) (Figure 3.2) is a seminal work, and generally regarded to be a hi-tech triumph that married fashion to technology. ‘The dress expressed the body’s relationship to a lot of invisible and intangible things – gravity, weather, flight, radio waves, speed, etc’, Chalayan said (Quinn 2002). ‘Part of it is to make the invisible tangible, showing that the invisible can transform something and say something about the relationship of the object – the dress in this case – between the person wearing it and the environment around it.’ Chalayan established a new affinity between the human body and its surroundings, mediated by clothing designed to transmit information between the wearer and the built environment around them. The Remote Control Dress was designed by means of the composite technology used by aircraft engineers, mirroring the systems that enable remote control aeroplanes to fly. Crafted from a combination of glass fibre and resin, the dress was moulded into two smooth, glossy, pink-coloured front and back panels that fasten together with metal clips. Each panel is encased within grooves of 2 millimetres in width that run throughout the length of the dress. These seams create the only textural differences in the dress, Figure 3.2  ‘My Remote Control Dress’ by Hussein Chalayan revealing interior panels made in translucent during the ‘Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology’ plastic, accentuated by lighting concealed – Metropolitan Museum, New York City, USA, 2016. Photo by within the solar plexus panel and the left side Randy Brooke/Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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elevating panel. The cast plastic surface of the panels resembles contemporary armour; the fine details of its lines and poetic gestures of its pale pink contours illustrate Chalayan’s maxim that clothes are a second skin – albeit one that echoes the attributes of the fashioned body more than the organic body. The plastic shell used in the dress’ construction is created via a range of new hi-tech fabrics and new technologized processes that make it possible to adapt industrial materials for use as garments. Lightweight metals, reinforced plastics, glass fibres and industrial mesh are now crafted into shapes more characteristic of architecture than clothing – in fact, the dress’ moulded shape, resilient materials and waterproofing all mirror the built environment more than conventional fashion. In recent years, Chalayan has focused more and more on the use of new materials while continuing to use traditional fabrics. As the façade-like structure of the dress forms an exoskeleton around the body, it imbues it with elements of body consciousness. The dress’ contours mimic the curves of the fashioned female body, arcing dramatically inward at the waist and outward in the hip region, echoing the silhouette of the corset and the crinoline. This gives the dress a defined hourglass shape that incorporates principles of corsetry in its design, emphasizing a conventionally feminine shape, while creating a solid structure that simultaneously masks undesirable body proportions. In aesthetic terms, the Remote Control Dress has been variously described as ‘arrestingly modern’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘breath-taking in its simplicity’. The dress possesses a subtle sensuality that is remarkably futuristic in its clean, simple lines, shining surface and lustrous colour. It would be hard to overlook the transcendental properties of the structure itself, negotiating a fine line between machine-like homogeneity and ultra-modern style. Wireless systems of this type were first appropriated from architectural blueprints and adapted for garments by the now-defunct research organization Starlab. Based in Brussels, Starlab pioneered early prototypes of wearable technology introducing layers of conductive fabrics that combined to create specific functions, such as communication and data storage. In researching their i-Wear prototypes, Starlab developed clothes that could be programmed to anticipate and respond to the wearer’s needs by communicating wirelessly with remote systems. Although their prototypes featured state of the art technology that provided the wearer with a broad range of functions, they never progressed to a finished model before the projects were terminated in 2001. Chalayan’s Remote Control Dress, though less technologically sophisticated, was the first wireless device to be presented as a fully functioning fashion garment, with the capacity to interact with sensors embedded in the architectural structures surrounding it (Quinn 2002). Recognizing that the built environment is no longer inert, Chalayan began to explore the technological and material innovations that give architecture an intelligence of its own. Buildings are learning to respond and adapt to their environments through ‘smart’ systems that detect and adapt to changing weather conditions or security alerts. Buildings are becoming living organisms, probing their surroundings to collect information for the structures and systems they house. The Remote Control Dress is a ground-breaking achievement on many levels, not least because it reveals the role that technology plays in the congruency between fashion and architecture. Rather than isolating the wearer from tactile experience, the dress employs technology to enhance the individual’s relationship to the material world. While this initial prototype makes only basic responses to the activities around them, it holds the potential to become increasingly sophisticated over time. The dress was conceived as an interactive machine that roams the city and engages with buildings as well as with the public; by doing so it stimulates a relationship with public space by injecting personal experience into

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what can be a harsh, anonymous environment. Subsequent models of the Remote Control Dress will be improved and adapted as the garment is slowly transformed by the experiences of its wearers. The Remote Control Dress was not designed specifically to explore the relationship between technology and the body, but examine how the form of the garment could evolve around the body in a spatial relationship to its environment. ‘If you alter the way the body comes across in the space around it, then the body alters everything in the space that affects it’, Chalayan explained. ‘The dress can also be transformed invisibly by the environment. The idea was a technological force between the environment and the person’ (Chalayan 1999, interviewed by author). Extending the function of dress beyond clothing is a recurrent theme in Chalayan’s work, and the Remote Control Dress demonstrates that a garment itself can be constructed to interact with other humans as well as with computerized systems distant in time and space. The interoperation and integration of clothing into ‘intelligent environments’ is a major forum for both architecture and science, since pioneering wireless technology is the key to expanding existing networks and paving the way for a range of new systems. The relay systems imbedded in intelligent buildings include speech-recognition technologies, advanced sensors, infrared data transmission and new types of interfaces. Such electronic systems can be embedded invisibly almost everywhere, so that sensors can exchange information about the stimuli they are programmed to detect. These systems could even connect the wearer to larger bodies of people, businesses and governments through the agency of wireless communication technologies. In a more visionary context, the Remote Control Dress also heralds a new axis of fashion and architecture, one that signals the integration of the constructor and the constructed as they coalesce in a mutual system. The dress confronts one of the most profound issues raised by new technologies: that human identities could potentially take on the characteristics of machines or architecture. Though the wearer can access external symptoms via the remote control mechanism, inherent in the dress is a sinister reversal – the potential for those systems to control the wear, or maintain constant surveillance over the wearer’s activities. The interface of flesh and technology is both thrilling and terrifying, if technology holds the potential to override the body’s commands and take control of it before the wearer is able to escape. Confining the body this way is tantamount to caging it behind panoptical walls. With architectural systems now lining the surface of the body itself, their presence in built environments could become redundant. As the dress moves through the urban landscape in this new, technologized guise, the wearer assembles and organizes information according to its engagement with remote sensors. The wearer, encased within the dress’ shell, also exploits opportunities to distance themselves from the observer, effectively constructing a barricade between self and voyeur. In the thinking of Walter Benjamin, this heightened sense of observation and remote interaction would signify the return of the flâneur, resurrected from nineteenth-century Paris and reoriented within an ever-changing matrix of urban consumption (Lauster 2007). The system that the dress belongs to expands capitalist relations of production into areas beyond production: the restructuring of urban life by invisible modes rather than spectacle. The dress’ engagement with surveillance places emphasis on visibility; a concept essential to the consumption of fashion but often underestimated in interpretations of it. Clothes, being the form in which the fashioned body is made visible, give the wearer a public identity while fostering the construction of the self. The gaze of visual technologies makes the experience more intimate and more exotic, amplifying

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the function of clothing as both boundary and margin in the ever-widening gap between public and private personae. As an architectural structure, the dress is loaded with symbolic value: it is a hallmark of scientific progress, a tool of communication, a shelter for the human form and metaphor of the body. For fashion, it achieves innovations never thought possible, and amplifies the potential fashion has to interact and communicate with other systems. As the dress interacts with its immediate environment, or performs manoeuvres originating from a command centre, it enables the body to extend its range of movements and control beyond arm’s reach. The dress makes it clear that the fashioned mechanization of the body and the integration of clothing into a larger technological system produce a whole new range of practices, possibilities and aesthetics that eliminate many of the boundaries separating the fashioned body from the architecture surrounding it.

Material maestro and technological innovation ‘My approach to materials is probably different to many designers’, Chalayan explained. ‘They generally serve one of two purposes. They either mirror the shape of the body and amplify its movements, or have the capacity to create an alternative meaning for the body. Materials can imbue fashion with whole new functions, basically creating a character or telling a story’ (Dent and Beylerian 2007). Chalayan famously coated a cotton dress with iron filings and buried it in the ground. He later exhumed the dress to see what kind of pattern the process would create, and how the process of burial, exhumation and resurrection could be reflected in the garment. ‘All materials have their own persona. I use them as mediums of communication’, Chalayan explained. ‘In many cases, timehonoured materials speak of luxury and comfort, which is something I may decide to challenge or refute altogether’ (Interview 2006, interviewed by author). In the hands of a conventional designer, ‘time-honoured materials’ may refer to silk, duchesse satin, linen or wool, but to Chalayan, the term also applies to wood, metal hardware, plastic substrates and inflatable fabrics. Chalayan has cast hard resins to create moulded dresses, carved wood into corseted silhouettes, crafted accordion-like skirts in wood and used plastic-based fabrics to support technologically advanced machine-powered dresses. ‘The messages that new technology and futuristic materials transmit are different to conventional ones’, Chalayan said. ‘Those that are inorganic and chemically inert have properties that are the direct opposite of the body, so I think it’s fascinating to combine an inert material with living, breathing flesh’ (Chalayan 2006, interviewed by author). Although much of Chalayan’s work connects to a technofashion aesthetic, many of his ideas are executed in tradition fabrics. ‘I don’t always feel it’s necessary to process and manipulate materials or try new ones’, Chalayan explained. ‘I generally remain true to wearable materials. Luxurious fabrics that feel good and perform well can be just as interesting as new materials if you use them in an innovative way’ (Chalayan 2006, interviewed by author). Chalayan’s drive to innovate has enabled him to find inspiration in a range of unexpected forms and technologies. His fascination with aerodynamic surfaces, for example, inspired his synthetic resin Dwell Neck and Aeroplane dresses, which introduced a range of streamlined forms and hard materials that were atypical of fashion. The moulded seams of the Dwell Neck dress were fastened with hardware clasps, and the Aeroplane dress featured sliding panels that operated electronically. ‘I realised that the hard shell of the Dwell Neck dress and metal fastenings were new to fashion, but introducing those

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materials to fashion was not my intention. Because it wasn’t possible to achieve that aerodynamic shape in conventional fabric, I was forced to look around and find other materials to work with’ (Chalayan 2006, interviewed by author). Chalayan cited the Dwell Neck dress as being a typical example of how he encounters new materials in his work. ‘The idea usually comes first and then I start looking around for materials’, he said. The search for materials doesn’t always result in being able to use something that would be right for the project. Often the most visionary materials out there aren’t ready to be sold commercially or available in a form that can be handled easily, which means you have to look for something more conventional to use. So even if I knew that there were materials out there that could execute an idea perfectly, it was sometimes a case of finding out they weren’t ready for use. (Interview 2006, interviewed by author) Some of Chalayan’s most ground-breaking uses of technology and materials were presented in his spring/summer 2007 collection, titled One Hundred and Eleven (Figure 3.3); Chalayan designed dresses powered by machine-driven levers that opened and closed to reconfigure the shape and silhouette of the garment. Hemlines rose autonomously, a bustier opened of its own accord and a jacket unfastened itself and pulled away from the model’s torso. These designs were made possible through collaboration with the team behind the special effects for the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) film, who

Figure 3.3  A model wears a creation from designer Hussein Chalayan’s Spring/Summer 2007 ready-to-wear collection, Paris, France, 2006. Photo by Pierre Verdy/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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microchipped fabric panels so that they would move according to the sequences Chalayan programmed them to. The mechanical dresses were made by hand and carefully fitted with electronic machinery. The garment’s surfaces were painstakingly embroidered with thousands of Swarovski crystals, giving them the dual appeal of opulent elegance and hi-tech savviness. Although the garments were powered by batteries, research into the capacity crystals have for harnessing solar power indicates that they may one day provide a viable power source for techno fashions. Chalayan’s use of shape-shifting fabrics enabled his garments to morph into entirely new designs, and his hats were able to radically change shape. Shape-memory fabrics, such as those woven from fibres of the shape-memory alloy Nitinol and interspersed with nylon, make these innovations possible. Nitinol is highly elastic and is capable of changing shape when temperatures rise and fall, returning to its original shape when temperatures stabilize. It is this shape-memory property that enables the fabric to shorten and lengthen, which is how the dress will perform when temperatures fluctuate. Nitinol, an acronym for Nickel Titanium Naval Ordinance Laboratory, is a family of intermetallic materials that contain a mixture of nickel and titanium. Other materials can be added to enhance or adjust the material’s properties. Because the fabric’s weave has five nylon fibres to every Nitinol fibre, the clothing made from it will be high performance, washable and comfortable. Chalayan was one of the first big-name designers to inject this kind of technology into fashion, and his success seems to anticipate a day when the integration of technology and garment design will be seamless and efficient. This moment marked a radical departure from a world where distinctions between body and technology, body and dress, natural and artificial, once seemed clear. This illustrates how, as Michel Foucault described, social and cultural discourses construct our bodies in a way that makes us as analogous to a machine as possible (Rainbow 1984). The design of the dress is imbued with technologies that make interaction efficient, productive and empowered, akin to the machine-like principles of controlled automation. The presence of hi-tech systems in fashion fuses its body-conscious ideals with a belief in automation, speed and accuracy as the means to achieve it. As Chalayan continues to pioneer hybrid forms, his work builds bridges between seemingly incompatible materials. ‘Duality has always been a part of my work’, said Chalayan. ‘I present my sculptures in the same fashion collections as wearable clothes, and I combine scientific ideas with the animal nature of the human body. I think that my choice of materials will always be another manifestation of dual ideas, because I plan to continue combining high-tech materials with handcrafted ones’ (Dent and Beylerian 2007: 135). In September 2015, Chalayan opened his first flagship store in London, marking a career milestone for the designer and his followers. The store gave the Chalayan brand a distinctive global signature that resonates with consumers around the world, creating a forum where the British public can gain direct access to his vision for space, product design and garments. In his own-brand space, Chalayan makes his long-held vision of fashion’s past, present and future explicit. As Chalayan continues to forge new dynamics between fashion, design, art and architecture, the synergy between them may radically redraw the boundaries of the fashion world.

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FEATURED SHOWS Hussein Chalayan: Spring/Summer 1999 (video available via YouTube: Chalayan)

Hussein Chalayan: Autumn/Winter 1999 (video available via YouTube: Chalayan)

Hussein Chalayan: Spring/Summer 2000 (video available via YouTube: Chalayan)

Hussein Chalayan: Autumn/Winter 2000 (video available via YouTube: Chalayan)

Hussein Chalayan: Spring/Summer 2007 (video available via YouTube: Chalayan)

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References Chalayan, H. (1999), Interview with the author, London. Chalayan, H. (2000), Interview with the author, London. Chalayan, H. (2006), Interview with the author, London. Chalayan, H. (2019), Chalayan [Website] www​.chalayan​.com Dent, A. and G. Beylerian (2007), Ultra Materials, London: Thames & Hudson. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), [Film] Dir. Alfonzo Cuarón, USA: Warner Bros. Irvine, S. (2001), ‘Deconstructing Hussein’, The Telegraph, December 5. Lauster, M. (2007), Walter Benjamin’s Myth of the Flâneur, Modern Humanities Research Association, Cambridge: MHRA Publishers, 102: 1. Quinn, B. (2002), Techno Fashion, Oxford: Berg. Quinn, B. (2003), The Fashion of Architecture, Oxford: Berg. Rainbow, P. (1984), The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books.

4 THE FASHION CHAMBER AND THE POSTHUMAN DISSOLUTION OF GENDER Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

Introduction About one minute into the launch of Alessandro Michele’s Gucci autumn/winter 2018/19 collection at Milan Fashion Week, two models, a man and a woman, emerge holding replicas of their own heads. Subsequently held props of a baby dragon and a snake maintained the appeal to the grotesque, but were innocuous in comparison. By all accounts, the severed heads completed the conceptual intent already pregnant within the finely tuned setting of the catwalk performance itself. Clinical and spare, there was not much room for everyday insinuations of beauty or pleasure. The Gucci Hub in Milan was transformed into an operating theatre complete with emergency exits. The walls were in block panels of pale mid-tone green, the colour of surgical smocks. There were two parallel bays of raised operating beds, draped in the same green, set on a red linoleum square. The rest of the floor was a spotless, unbroken pale blue, replicated by the ceiling except for channels of white LED light and high-intensity examination lamps which were suspended over the beds. The non-ambient light, together with the clean, industrial surfaces, conspired to create an unforgiving and expectant atmosphere, the equivalent of the apprehension leading up to an operation. The theatre was surrounded by plastic chairs, the kind that we see in waiting rooms at medical facilities, except they were not intended for patients, but for the audience. The medical spell of the installation drained any ambiguity as to how the audience may interpret the collection title, ‘Cyborg’, namely that the designer’s ‘creations’ – to invoke the preferred word of Charles Frederick Worth – were coterminous with the models, who were themselves ‘creations’ – to invoke Mary Shelley’s monster Frankenstein. The concept of the installation, as Calvin Chong observes, ‘reflects the work of a designer, the act of cutting, splicing and reconstructing materials and fabrics to create a new personality and identity with them’(Chong 2018). Humans through the audience were invited to reflect that what they were being presented with was a mediated, retooled and possibly superior order of

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existence. This was not just fashion as a commercial-creative spectacle; it presented fashion as a vehicle, a catalyst and consummator, of a new order of being. There was no ambiguity about this, everywhere were countless signs of the ambiguities of gender, and more universally, strategies that threaten to shatter humanist ontology itself. Against an atmosphere of the scientific and the specific, the clothes were dizzyingly eclectic and the delineation between genders, tantalizingly unclear. None of the models wore make-up that reflected gender norms, while even fewer of them were in any way conforming to heteronormative codes of beauty. Aside from the enigmatic semiotic layers of the catwalk show itself, there was a minimal sense of conventional seduction. Instead, the unease caused by the grotesque was the order of the day. The collection is characterized by overdress on multiple registers, for an aggregate of content-saturation and aesthetic dissonance. It is also hard to think of very many collections in which the historical, ethnic and other references were so profusely concatenated. With all this difference afoot, the collection also begged the question as to alternative modes of judgement and evaluation. There are two arguments that we advance in this chapter, and which are implicit in the title. This collection was exhibited much in the manner of an artistic performance-installation, and in a closed environment that reads much like a film set. The audience entered into such highly deliberated and worked spaces to find themselves as if transported to another world. While fashion has always been about gesturing to an unattainable (or perhaps attainable) elsewhere, these spaces engender a strong, compelling sense of a constructed artificial environment. The second, and connected, argument is that these constructed spaces allow for alternative gender constructions to break free while making the very constructedness of gender more transparent. For the altered space elicits altered states, expressly free from habitual social dynamics. Contemporary fashion’s fantasy spaces make way for fantasy bodies that are less or even unrestricted by laws of nature, revealing the extent to which these laws are subject to their own arbitrariness and power play. Hence, in certain fashion shows, it is in the partial suspension of the putative laws of nature that subtler, less restricted forms of human identity can be played out. The notion of the ‘fashion chamber’, then, is one that can encompass a theme park, a chamber of horrors, a boudoir, a stage set or all of these. While the fashion chamber has its roots in the dioramas and thematic displays of the Great Exhibitions of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, they must more correctly be seen as arising together with the phenomenon of virtual reality and with the ubiquity of the moving image in mediating everyday lives. For within the virtual domains, individuals exist as multiple, as aliases and fashioned alter egos, and are responsive to the point of expectation of the aestheticized dreamworlds. Taking the Gucci Fall/ Winter 2018 collection aptly titled ‘Cyborg’, this chapter looks at the fashion chamber as a site of fashion display and will suggest new ways of thinking about fashion that moves away from the materiality of the garment to its simultaneous situatedness in imaginary and constructed realms.

Fashion installation: Open and closed Increasingly in the last twenty years the fashion industry has harnessed artistic practices to their own ends, whose profitability is not necessarily only monetary, but critical. This can be said of the term ‘installation’ which refers to a form that uses or occupies a space. The space can be the architectural space of the gallery or museum, or the architectonic siting can be more imaginary and transient, such as when a creative work occupies areas outside of conventional exhibition spaces. As we have argued in Fashion Installation (2019), this definition is aptly suited to the ways in which fashion is presented

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and displayed, where designers have availed themselves of increasingly more sophisticated systems by which to convey the fashion object, which exists not in isolation, but across a network of representations and narrative connotations (Geczy and Karaminas 2019). One way they have done this is to rethink traditional modes of displaying and presenting fashion, from eliminating the body to subsuming the garment under the extravagant pageantry of the event, as open, sealed or still installation such as a retail space, a museum, a gallery or a catwalk. Building on this taxonomy, the fashion chamber is a rethinking of the sealed or closed installation of the fashion show. Unlike the open installation where the audience is almost part of the catwalk, making the boundaries porous, the sealed catwalk is similar to that of a film set where the audience are made to partake in a different world, an altered reality. They are transported from the habituated world that makes sense and which is supposedly verifiable to places that are hypothetical, imaginary or unfeasible. This presents a number of quite compelling problems when faced with fashion as opposed to art. For the other-worldly has always been the province of art’s content, meaning and motivations, whether that be in pre-modernism and the representation of the religious and holy, to modernism to a utopian world and a higher consciousness. Art embodies what Ernst Bloch in his massive opus called Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1954–59), that is, a portal to a better state of being. His contemporary Theodor Adorno maintained a similar principle but in its present state, but emphasized that under current circumstances, this improvement was an as yet unfulfillable promise. In any case, art in its manifestation as material and representation is irreducible to that material, since its virtue lies in its outward gesture, to a promise if something better or a condemnation of the facts and realities of the present. What then, if fashion plays with the same principle? This is certainly the notion built into the fabric of this collection. While traditionally the alienation between the everyday person and model is aspirational, here it is through the strange and the baffling, or to borrow from Mark Fisher, weird and eerie (Fisher 2017). The models, the clothing and the setting, are purposely stripped of the references that bring them back to the safe and familiar space of the lived world. Instead, the aesthetic appears to be in abeyance, to float in an elsewhere, which makes the experience of this installation so unnerving, for the language of fashion is that it be inserted into the lived world and into human experience. Instead, human experience and conventional living are subordinated, disavowed. Such aesthetic rearrangements are made all the more possible in fashion through a mode of presentation in which the constituents appear to exist within their own independent sematic capsule. It is an extreme example of the effects to be obtained from a ‘sealed’ catwalk, as we call it (Geczy and Karaminas 2019). Crucially, the sealed catwalk show is not solely about the display of garments, but the concept is more complex and central to the collection. What distinguishes them from the theatricalizations and tableaux of earlier fashion (and cultural) displays since the mid-nineteenth century is that the fashion chamber exists as a sophisticated and anticipatory form of marketing. As an artificial enclosure, it seeks to encapsulate what it suggests is a homogeneous, hermetically sealed sensibility – enshrined in the intersection between aesthetic and narrative – crystalized with the foreknowledge that it will be profusely recorded, reformatted, circulated, shared. An analogy with postmodern painting is instructive at this point. Of the abstract painting by Gerhard Richter, for example, it has often been remarked that they were not a departure or violation of his figurative work based on archival and personal photography, but rather a completion of a project. For unlike the non-objective paintings, say, of abstract expressionism, whose language and mythology are such that they need to be seen objectively ‘in the flesh’ and are a shadow of themselves in reproduction, Richter’s abstract paintings are comprehensible in reproduction. Their sympathy to being photographed makes the compelling case that they indeed are made to be

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photographed, that it is not in their physical state that they are best seen, but rather as a reproduction, an image on a piece of paper or projected onto a screen. Similarly, the fashion chamber supplies a context that runs in tandem and possibly at cross-purposes to the materiality of the garment. The consumption of the collection is not only through experiencing it in its catwalk launch then in wearing one or a number of items, as is traditionally the case but also far more across media and through the transaction of snaps, icons and bites among interested parties, one-on-one or through social media. Such may also be the case for open catwalks, but their openness tends to emphasize the performative immediacy of the occasion, much as watching a recording of a play elicits suspicion or disappointment because the live component is essential to the meaning or intent of the work. By contrast, to witness a closed catwalk live, as a fashion chamber, is more analogous to being present during the filming of a television series or a film, where it is customary to cross between seeing the action with one’s own eyes, and looking at how the action is enframed by the camera. The live action exists for the sake of being recorded, and the experience in its recorded state is far different from it live. In a similar vein, the fashion chamber is a fashion experience in which the multiple ways of viewing events are encoded into its form and content.

The fashion chamber of horrors When extrapolated beyond its most literal sense of being simply a room, the idea of the chamber is freighted with connotations of pleasure and death. When death, think of the forbidden chamber in folktales, such as the one in Bluebeard’s castle where he keeps his murdered wives, or the chambers of torture in the writings of the Marquis de Sade. When pleasure, the chamber is the space of the boudoir, where illicit and forbidden desires can be made a reality. Where they conjoin, and what is key to our argument, is that they are sites where forbidden desires can be carried out. They are where there is the promise of realized fantasies, and therefore belonging to activities that are not held to account according to normative social behaviour. The chamber is unrestricted by the inhibitions that come from being observed and judged. This means that the spectators of the fashion chamber all enjoy the pleasure of suspecting they are voyeurs. They are presented with something that has been hidden, even forbidden. The spectacle of the fashion chamber turns this relationship into something of a double helix, wherein of course the event is designed and staged to be seen, yet the audience are made to feel that they have stumbled on something completely foreign, unfamiliar and unhomely – uncanny (unheimlich). In Gucci’s ‘Cyborg’ collection we are presented with a fashion chamber that acts as a suite of operating theatres where a procession of trans-human models parades past surgical lights and tables. A model wears a Victorian black velour dress with ruffled collar and cuffs, teamed with punk sneakers with flashing lights. Her cobalt blue turban is finished with a descending neck scarf. Meanwhile another model holds a replica of his head, which is decidedly androgynous with long fine peroxide hair and chiselled features. He is followed by his morbid female twin (Figure 4.1). Duplicates and doubles of each other. Their scowling faces are decidedly adolescent and something of a coda to the jarring medley of styles in the collection. Cultural motifs clash with commodified brands; Hollywood’s Paramount Films finds its place on jumper with a Chinese neck line and the release poster of 1965 American exploitation film Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill, Kill (Russ Meyer, dir.) is printed on a jumper worn by a model wearing a face mask in the style of a Moslem niqab. The logo of New York baseball team, Yankees is embroidered on garments from hound tooth coats to woollen beanies. A boyish African American model’s ‘NY’ cap was offset with a hand bag. As the catwalk unfolded the gender slippages became more plentiful and diverse.

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Figure 4.1  A model walks the runway at the Gucci Show during Milan Fashion Week fall/winter 2018/19, Milan, Italy, 2018. Photo by Estrop/Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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Michele’s garments are constructed from assemblages of Other cultures borrowed, appropriated and placed into a different context: the burka, Chinese pagoda hats, Japanese kabuki knitwear, Russian babushka dolls and Romanian gypsy turbans. Signs and symbols belonging elsewhere, borrowed and acculturated into a different order of things, a taxonomy worthy of Borges Encyclopedia: (1) masks (2) scarves (3) aprons (4) heads (5) small creatures (6) reptiles (7) hats. The ‘gathering’ and re-allotment of signs and symbols, and the assemblage of other worlds reflect wider cultural rules, mainly of gender, aesthetics and power. To collect is transformed into the desire to possess, to select, order and classify into hierarchies of ‘collections’ where culture and customs are saved out of time. The ‘Cyborg’ collection is a form of ethnography where motifs and accessories are selected and detached from their original temporal settings and given value in a new arrangement in a catwalk collection. As Eric David writes, ‘“Cyborg” is a sensational parable of hybrid designs, cross-cultural references, clashing aesthetics and brazen symbols that speaks of the possibility of being liberated from the confines of the natural condition we are born into’ (David 2018). In the same vein, Rosi Braidotti argues that the salient trait of the global economy in contemporary capitalism is its techno-scientific structure, what she calls the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science’ (Braidotti 2013: 6). The biogenetic structure of capitalism is even more prominent to any discussion of the posthuman because it involves the human genome project, stem cell research and the biotechnological intervention upon animals, plants and cells (2013: 6). Braidotti writes that capitalism is a spinning machine that actively seeks and produces differences for the sake of commodification. These deterritorialized differences, notes Braidotti, are ‘packaged and marketed under the labels of “new, dynamic and negotiable identities” [which produce] an endless choice of consumer goods that triggers a proliferation [of products] and a vampiric consumption of quantitative options’ (2013). Many of these consumables have to do with hijacking aspects of Other cultures and repackaging them in a hybrid arrangement such as fusion cooking, world music or, in this instance, fashion. Although written in a different context, but of relevance, Sneja Gunew pursues a similar line in her critique of multiculturalism policy and the ways in which it manages diversity. ‘Aspects of cultures that are considered desirable’, what she calls the three c’s of multiculturalism – custom, cooking and costume – are celebrated by the dominant culture and other aspects that are deemed undesirable are discarded (Gunew 2003). Like fusion cooking that combines elements from different culinary traditions, or world music which mixes different styles of music with more than one cultural tradition. Fashion plunges from the spoils of cultures, pillaging styles, taking signs and borrowing histories in its will-to-produce, or reproduce the ‘new’, the next best thing, the something different. The spacious and arbitrary changes within fashion are there for the sake of the market impulse. We might even go as so far as to insist that the fashion system from its very beginning in the nineteenth century survives off copies, replications and citations in its quest for regeneration and survival. Returning to the Gucci installation, the space of the operating theatre acts as a site where technological apparatus or machines manage the transformations between human and other species (Figure 4.2). In this way, the theatre was intended as a metaphor for the posthuman condition, where people construct their identities and undergo regeneration through technology. Much like the Greek god Prometheus who stole fire from the gods to give to the people to better their lives (he was later punished by the gods) or Dr Victor Frankenstein who harnessed electricity (the latest technology at the time) to create an improved and ideal ‘man’. ‘We are the Dr Frankenstein of our lives’, said designer Alessandro Michele. ‘There’s a clinical clarity about what I am doing. I was thinking of a space that represents the creative act. I wanted to represent the lab I have in my head. It’s physical work, like a surgeon’s’ (Michele in Mower

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2018). For Michele, the designer is a surgeon, ‘a Dr Frankenstein figure come to life- stitching together fabrics and materials in order to forge new sartorial personalities and identities’ (Gordon 2018). Victor Frankenstein is a scientist with overweening ambitions, self-destructive hubris, who loses touch with reality in his quest to produce a human being, a rational knowing subject that is capable of emotions and language. Much like Mary Shelley’s sapient creature Frankenstein (or the Modern Prometheus, 1818) who was sutured Figure 4.2  Models walk the runway at the Gucci Show during Milan together from body parts stolen from Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2018/19, Milan, Italy, 2018. Photo by Pietro the slaughterhouse and the local D’aprano/Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images. cemetery then activated in ‘new’ life through surges of electricity harnessed from the lightning bolts. This classical ideal of ‘Man’ was formulated by Protagoras as ‘the measure of all things’ and represented by Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man was the image of bodily, mental and spiritual perfection. Frankenstein is an emblem of humanism that saw the moral, biological and discursive expansion of human capabilities into an idea of teleologically ordained, rational progress. Humanism historically developed into a hegemonic cultural model which shaped a certain idea of Europe not only as a location but also as a site of critical and self-reflective reason that coincided with a rational consciousness that was masculine and white. In the process of creating his ‘ideal man’, Victor produces a hybrid monster whose bodily proportions are too large and his complexion so pale and translucent that muscles and skin vessels are visible. Much like Michele’s models who seem out of place and completely alien to the human world of natural law and moral codes, they carry their severed heads in their arms, give birth to dragons (Figure 4.3) and chameleon lizards and some, not all, possess extra eyeballs. If the models can be dismissed as anomalies, aberrations of nature produced as part of a designer’s creative expression, then the natural order would remain intact, undisturbed. But they cannot be easily dismissed, they are here to undermine the existing order. If they are here, then they exist and that the categories that we have used to make sense of the world are no longer valid. In the nature’s order of things, people do not keep dragons or chameleon lizards as pets, nor do they carry their twin severed heads in their arms like accessories or handbags. The catwalk is a manifestation of what Mark Fischer calls the ‘weird and the eerie’ when the human condition is so grotesque that the animal does not fit in, but instead is a freak of nature ‘who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining natures products into hideous new forms’ (Fischer in Thacker 2017). The concept of the eerie is bound up with subjectivity and the relationship between self and world. The weird and eerie pop up in those moments when things are not as they should be, or what we expect or accustomed them to be and when we suspect we are not who we think we are. For Fisher the weird is constituted by a presence, a niggling feeling, or a gut sense that something is not quite right, exorbitant or out of place. Eugene Thacker describes it as

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Figure 4.3  A model walks the runway at the Gucci Show during Milan Fashion Week fall/winter 2018/19, Milan, Italy, 2018. Photo by Estrop/Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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‘the part that does not fit into the whole, or the part that disturbs the whole – threshold worlds populated by portals, gateways, time loops, and simulacra. [When] fundamental presumptions about self, other, knowledge, and reality have to be rethought’ (Thacker 2017). In contract to the weird, the eerie is constituted by a ‘failure of presence or a failure of absence’, where there is nothing where there should be something, or vice versa. It is in this space of the eerie where we encounter ‘disembodied voices, lapses in memory, selves that are others, revelations of the alien within, and nefarious motives buried in the unconscious, inorganic world in which we are embedded.’ (2017). ‘The weird thing is not wrong’, says Fisher, ‘after all, it is our conceptions that must be inadequate’ (Fisher in Thacker 2017). This dilemma is what the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov called ‘the fantastic’, the hesitation experienced by readers, in this case the audience, when presented with ambiguities concerning reality and when unnatural phenomenon turns out to have a rational explanation (Todorov 1975). Frankenstein’s main themes are well known: the tragic creature, the hubris of the scientist (the embodiment of reason), the quest for knowledge and the harnessing of technology. Whether fatalistic or optimistic, the novel (and Michele’s collection) asks a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? As Frankenstein asks:

And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, . . . I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man . . . .When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned? (Wollstonecraft Shelley 2007) It cannot be forgotten that there is more than one tragic layer to Shelley’s story. It is the tragedy of Dr Frankenstein himself, his overweening ambition and the consequences of this. But at the same time, we cannot feel too much superiority over him, as he is a symbol of humanity itself, told in the myth of Prometheus who must suffer for defying the gods. Ironically enough, Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation was published at almost exactly the same time (1818/9) as Shelley’s novel (it was subsequently revised twice), which famously contends that humanity is condemned by a will that always seeks to overstep the bounds of the possible and the plausible, leading as inexorably unfulfilled and unhappy. If Frankenstein is successfully restored to life, it is a flawed life, which therefore presses home that nature is not superable: he is a poor copy of a human, and a terrible one. He is the embodied

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message that efforts to overcome nature inevitably end in terror. And so, the other tragedy is in the monster itself, not asking to be born (as for all of us), and doomed in the misery of a life without love or intimacy, a pariah from birth because of the very unnaturalness of that birth. The triumphs of human creation are always haunted by the possibility of so many unforeseen consequences. If the story of Frankenstein is the quest for humanism gone horrible wrong and that ‘Man’ was indeed dead as Foucault proclaimed in The Order of Things (1970), then Michele’s collection is a radical rethinking of the human and asks the question: What, if anything, is the idea of the human? ‘Gucci Cyborg is post-human’, reads the show notes, ‘it’s a biologically indefinite and culturally aware creature. The last and extreme sign of a mongrel identity under constant transformation. The symbol of an emancipatory possibility through which we can decide to become what we are’ (Gordon 2018). The refrain, ‘to become what we are’ is essential to the notion of posthumanism, which joins the ranks of innumerable other ‘posts’ since postmodernism, is a deceptive and something of a misleading term, as is the ‘end of man’ that Foucault articulates after Nietzsche. The posthuman embodies something of Nietzsche’s ‘transvaluation of values’ inasmuch as the original ideals of humanism as inherited from Socrates and Plato are reoriented. Crucially for our topic here it is the orientation to gender and the body. For whereas humanism exhorts the individual to be true to his or her (usually his) inner self, posthumanism exhorts the subject (who may no longer extol his/her individuality except for banal genetic, biological uniqueness) to become again (with undertones of Nietzschean becoming). That is, the human body and subjectivity are not receptacles of quality to be realized and fulfilled; rather, they are agents as raw material to be moulded, shaped and reshaped as foreign agents. As Geczy observes in the opening to his book on artificial bodies, ‘Put simply, in the humanist age Pinocchio wanted to become a human; in the so-called post-humanist age, humans aspire to become Pinocchio’ (Geczy 2017). The posthuman condition is a profound alteration of humanism since at least the time of the ancients in that it considers and treats the body no longer as something to be fulfilled, to bring out the best potential of traits bestowed by biology and nurture. Rather biology is no longer just increate, it is also intervention and invention. Hence with posthumanism nature and nurture become conjoined: the body has become raw material for manipulation. The former question of ‘Who am I?’ has now radically mutated to ‘What can I be?’ and with the possibility of asking that question again and again. An individual’s ‘inner nature’ has become folded with technology that tends to abjure the tragedy pregnant in the condition of Frankenstein in the name of fantasy.

The dissolution of gender, posthumanism and the end of ‘Man’ The Gucci ‘Cyborg’ installation offers us an alternative vision of new formations of subjectivities that are not regulated to discursive formations of gender, race or sexuality, but challenge the very idea of what constitutes the human. Here gender and species are scrambled together to produce new forms of life that are open-ended, rather than human centred. In the process of becoming, the lines of demarcation between male and female, white and black, organism and machine, human and animal cease and are recast into new modes of being to be purchased and consumed. As Donna Haraway comments, ‘This is Man the taxonomic type become Man the brand’ (Haraway 1997: 74). Like Haraway who imagined a world without gender, without genesis and without an end, Michele imagines a time, this Time, where

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identities are neither mutable nor fixed but can be adjusted, redefined and even imagined in a Gucci pluriverse. ‘Gucci Cyborg is post-human’, states Michele, ‘it has eyes on its heads, faun horns, dragon puppies and double heads. It’s a biologically indefinite and culturally aware creature’ (Michele in David 2018). Atypical, flawed and anomalous. Michele envisions the Gucci cyborg as an icon of technology, born in an operating theatre and free from the confines of culture (and language) that orders and constructs identity. ‘I’m happy I was born as a hybrid. The surgical set represented the way we change ourselves, our physicality and the idea of possibility. Clothes just help us become who we want to be’ (Michele in Bocadolobo 2018). One that breaches and rejects the boundaries between human, animal and machine. In Haraway’s words, ‘cyborg’s signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange’ (Haraway 2017: 11). Haraway associated the cyborg with domination, the military and high technology, ‘the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism’ (2017: 8). She saw the cyborg as a figure to provoke (socialist) feminist women into resistance and action and move beyond the limitations of gender and identity politics. Haraway continues: ‘the cyborg is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities, which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work’ (2017). While on the one hand a cyborg world is about an apocalyptic war that appropriates women’s bodies waged in the name of defence, argues Haraway, on the other hand, the cyborg offers unimaginable possibilities where people can realize the potency of partial identities and contradictory standpoints. ‘Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate’, Haraway argues, ‘in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling’ (2017: 15). In an interview published in Theory, Culture and Society, Haraway said that her ‘feminist friends and others in 1980 thought the cyborg was all bad’ (Gane and Haraway 2006: 136). When Haraway wrote The Cyborg Manifesto, it was 1985 when the throes of the Cold War were in their final years. American military projects were involved in global surveillance control, cybernetics and artificial intelligence as information machines. Cinema was populated with evil scientists and ambiguous replicants who spun out of human control. Following along the lines of Shelley’s Frankenstein, Peter Manoogian’s science fiction action film The Eliminators (1986) casts Roy Dotrice as Albert Reeves, an evil scientist who creates a ‘mandroid’ from the body of a drowned pilot in a top-secret military facility. Ridley Scott’s neo-noir Blade Runner (1982) starring Harrison Ford is set in a dystopian future in Los Angeles where the powerful Tyrell Corporation has engineered synthetic humans known as replicants to work on space colonies. Similarly, themes of capitalism, privatization, corruption and authoritarianism can be found in RoboCop (1987), the cyber-punk action film directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Alex Murphy as the police officer-turnedcyborg. Set in a crime-ridden Detroit sometime in the future, Murphy is murdered by a gang of criminals and turned into a superhuman cyborg enforcer by Omni Consumer Products, a megacorporation which controls the city. And then there was The Terminator (1984) directed by James Cameron and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator. Schwarzenegger is a cyborg assassin sent to earth to kill Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton) before she gives birth to her future son, who will save the earth against the machines in a post-apocalyptic future. The cinematic vision of the world in the 1980s reflected the fears of the populace and represented the natural world as arid, wasted and destroyed. ‘Writers enthusiastically depicted the earth’s environmental and social systems as in meltdown and disarray – as, in effect, in apocalypse; they then transformed this apocalypse from the end of humanity to the positive and liberating beginning of what they called posthumanity’ (Buell 2004: 236).

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In the years since, new technologies have evolved from the same forces that developed the cyborg: the internet and the World Wide Web (www). The internet has also provided a host of products that have aided in the distribution of fashion as well as enhanced its social aspects: fashion films, fashion blogs, Pinterest, Instagram, online retail and the online streaming of fashion shows. The cyborg and drone have also appeared a number of times on the catwalk installations. For his spring/summer 1999 collection for Givenchy, Alexander McQueen imagined women as robots down a mirrored runway. Embellishments took the form of circuit boards and models wore clear plastic body casts that were battery powered and flashed LED lights. The theme of robotics was also prevalent in McQueen’s Fall/Winter collection the same year, with model Shalom Harlow emerging on a wooden platform wearing a white tulle underlay. As she slowly twirled two robots – industrial automobile spray painters – sprayed her with paint. Fashion historian Valerie Steele who was present at the installation said that ‘it was so terrifying because of the idea of the robotic figures that seemed to be menacing her’ (Bateman 2016). Frederic Jameson wrote that postmodernism and its aesthetics are marked by ‘an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that’(Jameson 2001: 1). While Haraway’s manifesto was a reaction to informatics of domination, cyborg politics and the importance of information technology, Michele’s cyborg collection is a response to the modification of the human species through genetic engineering, digital technology and bioengineering. The collections’ thrift shop aesthetic of mismatched fabrics and styles is aligned to the millennium’s sustainability movement which offers a solution to global warming and its resultant environmental disasters from climate change. Simply put, we are spiralling towards a dismal future on an uninhabitable earth. If we are to return to the concept of the spinning wheel of capitalism, turning so fast that market forces co-opt everything in its path, then the Gucci ‘Cyborg’ collection is the commodification of difference, packaged under the banner of a sustainable posthuman world. Just as Gucci Cyborg was being installed at Milan Fashion Week, Dolce and Gabbana referenced cyborgs and future dystopias for their Fall/Winter 2018 collection sending drones instead of models down the catwalk carrying their latest handbag collection. Meanwhile, Prada recruited Instagram artificial intelligence (AI) virtual influencer ‘it girl’ Lil Miquela to post a series of 3D-generated gifs of herself wearing the current spring/summer 2018 collection. She was seen posting hashtags of posters from the collection on her Instagram, and on Prada’s account she gave followers a mini tour of the Rem Koolhaas–designed installation using a drone that she controlled with her iPhone. ‘It wasn’t my first fashion show but it was my first show in Milan’ (Allwood 2018), said Lil Miquela, a simulated and computer-generated avatar, in an interview with Dazed magazine which was conducted via email: ‘I’m such a huge fan of Mrs Prada and the brand . . . .Prada and I have a lot of the same passions and objectives’ (Allwood 2018).

Conclusion The fashion chamber is a site that allows for any possibility. It is cut from the world and thus from all of its continuities, concerns and conventions. Since fashion is always about alteration and becoming, it allows the dynamic to reach unforeseen extremes. Gucci’s ‘Cyborg’ collection is arguably an extreme in fashion design, display and performance that scratches the limits of the horrifying and the absurd. Many may not relate to the clothes or the people wearing them, which is because they relate to something beyond us. If we don’t desire them, that may be because they portend to a new level, or kind of desiring, that is based on sites and mechanisms of continuous subversion, where the single individual has subdivided

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into the multiple, where the state of being has stretched to states of continual re-realization, where horror is matched with the power of possibility. But what may be most compelling about this collection is that it does not avoid the tragedy that lies in wait in our hubris to overstep our human mark. Where two hundred years ago the warning was decisive, we are as alarmed as much as titillated by the prospect that what had been a warning now only exists as a ‘perhaps’, suggesting that new horizons of gender, subjectivity, sociability and bodily awareness are a closer horizon that we might first have believed.

FEATURED SHOWS Gucci: Autumn/Winter 2018/19 (video available via YouTube: FF Channel)

References Allwood, E. (2018), ‘An AI Insta It-Girl Was at the Prada Show-but WTF Does that Mean?’, Dazed. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.daz​​eddig​​ital.​​com​/f​​ashio​​n​/art​​icle/​​39171​​/1​/ai​​-inst​​a​-it-​​girl-​​lil​-m​​iquel​​a​-was​​-prad​​a​-aw1​​8​-sho​​w​​-but​​-wtf-​​ does-​​that-​​mean. Bateman, K. (2016), ‘Show to Know: When Alexander McQueen’s Robots Spray Painted Shalom Harlow’, Allure. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.all​​ure​.c​​om​/st​​ory​/a​​lexan​​der​-m​​cquee​​n​-sha​​lom​-h​​a​rlow​​-runw​​ay​-sh​​ow (accessed March 2019). Blade Runner (1982), [Film] Dir. Ridley Scott, USA: Warner Brothers. Bocadolobo (2018), ‘Gucci Vs Cyborg – Gucci’s Post-human Fall Winter 18 Collection’, Bocadolobo. Available online: https​:/​/bo​​cadol​​obo​.c​​om​/bl​​og​/fa​​shion​​/gucc​​i​-cyb​​org​-g​​uccis​​-post​​-huma​​n​-fal​​​l18​-c​​ollec​​tion/​. Braidotti, R. (2013), ‘Posthuman Humanities’, European Educational Research Journal, 12 (1): 1–19. Buell, F. (2004), From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century, London and New York: Routledge. Chong, C. (2018), ‘Gucci Fall 2018 Features Disembodied Heads, Baby Dragons, and More’, L’Officiel. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.lof​​ficie​​lmala​​ysia.​​com​/f​​ashio​​n​-wee​​k​/guc​​ci​-fa​​ll​-20​​18​-sh​​o​w​-no​​tes​-d​​ragon​​s. David, E. (2018), ‘Gucci Cyborg: A Chimeric World of Fluid Identities and Trend-Defying Fashion’, Yatzer. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.yat​​zer​.c​​om​/gu​​cci​-c​​yborg​​​-fw​-1​​8​-19 (accessed February 2019). Fisher, M. (2017), The Weird and the Eerie, London: Repeater. Gane, N. and D. Haraway (2006), ‘When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done? Interview with Donna Haraway’, Theory, Culture and Society, 23 (7–8): 135–58. Geczy, A. (2016), Artificial Bodies in Fashion and Art: Marionettes, Models and Mannequins, London: Bloomsbury. Geczy, A. and V. Karaminas (2017), Critical Fashion Practice from Westwood to Van Beirendonck, London: Bloomsbury. Geczy, A. and V. Karaminas (2019), Fashion Installation: Body, Space and Performance, London and New York: Bloomsbury.

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Gordon, G. (2018), ‘What All Those Severed Heads and Dragons at Gucci Were All About’, Saviour Flair. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.sav​​oirfl​​air​.c​​om​/fa​​shion​​/3685​​43​/gu​​cci​-f​​all​-​w​​inter​​-2018​. Gunew, S. (2003), Hunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalism, London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (1997), Modest_Whiteness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan_Meets_Oncomouse: Feminism and Technoscience, London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2017), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press. Jameson, F. (2001), Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press. Mower, S. (2018), ‘Gucci, Fall 2018 Ready-to-Wear’, Vogue Runway. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.vog​​ue​.co​​m​/fas​​ hion-​​shows​​/fall​​-2018​​-read​​y​-​to-​​wear/​​gucci​ (accessed February 2019). RoboCop (1987), [Film] Dir. Paul Verhoeven, USA: Orion Pictures. Terminator (1984), [Film] Dir. James Cameron, USA: Orion Pictures. Thacker, E. (2017), ‘Weird, Eerie and Monstrous: A Review of the Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fischer’, Boundary 2. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.boun​​dary2​​.org/​​2017/​​06​/eu​​gene-​​thack​​er​-we​​ird​-e​​erie-​​and​-m​​onstr​​ous​-a​​-revi​​ew​-of​​ -the-​​weird​​-and-​​th​e​-e​​erie-​​by​-ma​​rk​-fi​​sher/​ (accessed February 2019). The Eliminators (1986), [Film] Dir. Peter Manoogian, USA: Empire Pictures. Todorov, T. (1975), The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Wollstonecraft Shelley, M. (2007), Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.gute​​nberg​​ .org/​​files​​/84​/8​​4​-h​/8​​4​-h​​.h​​tm​#ch​​ap13 (accessed February 2007).

5 ‘SAVAGE BEAUTIES’ ALEXANDER MCQUEEN’S PERFORMANCE OF POSTHUMAN BODIES* Justyna Stępień

Introduction This paper explores reconfigurations of the body to argue that posthuman fashion designs can alter the boundaries between matter and its ideation. To illustrate these processes, the paper examines Alexander McQueen’s projects displayed during his retrospective London exhibition Savage Beauty, which was originally staged at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2012. What differentiates McQueen from mainstream fashion designers is his departure from the confinements of fashion industry norms, which enable him to explore zones of interactivity between human and nonhuman forms and at the same time to redefine the essentialist position of a body. Adopting a Deleuzio–Guattarian theoretical framework and in line with its new materialist re-workings by Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti, the article reveals how McQueen’s projects – which, in the idiom of Gilles Deleuze, are moments of ‘becoming’, understood here as process ontology, which denies essentialist being and indicates that world is always moving (Braidotti 2002: 43) – test the body’s potential and transgress limitations imposed by established systems of signification. As ‘becoming’ is the production of differences and movement evident in changes between particular events, it can be anticipated that bodies are thus never completely made, remaining always in the making (Parr 2011: 26). They extend while encountering the shared materiality of the world’s processes, often contributing to bodily transformations. To strengthen this effect, the designer

*This chapter has been previously published in full in the Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 13:2, 170–182. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. DOI: 10.1080/14794713.2017.134558

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engaged audiences in sensational performances of ‘more-than human, more-than-textual, multi-sensual worlds’ (Vannini 2015: 3) on the stage, indicating that there is therefore a need to make a shift in the conceptualization of a body from frameworks of representation to a new materialist ontology of affect, sensation and material transformation. From this perspective, the paper holds that McQueen’s works open up bodies to the unknown, creating an assemblage of human and nonhuman affects, understood here as ‘passages of intensity’ of experience, a passage from one state to another (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164).

Alexander McQueen’s posthuman bodies In comparison to the mainstream fashion industry, Alexander McQueen’s works reconfigure the model’s body, creating a site for the transgression of hegemonic forms and allowing the wearer to constantly open up to the world of differences. In fact, his unwearable works defy the conventions of functionality of clothes, becoming rather artistic installations than ordinary garments, designed primarily for catwalk shows or displays in galleries. Avant-garde in their tone, the projects experiment with a variety of forms and materials, exploring the limits of what a body can do when it is outside the consumerist world of fashion. Having abandoned consumers’ tastes, his works reflect and inflect people’s way of thinking about the limits of fashion, subverting the body’s dependence on sociocultural conventions. Although some of his projects were subsequently translated into more wearable items sold in the designer’s boutiques, the items from his collections reconceptualize the frameworks of the production and proliferation of exceedingly similar types of femininity and masculinity imposed by the fashion industry, opening the body to constant becoming, to the unknown and liminal. His designs set the body in motion, liberating it from the dominant modes of identity construction that impose the ideal of beauty on consumers to uphold sociocultural roles and tastes to discipline the body. Thus, the model’s figure when wearing McQueen’s clothes looks distorted, often genderless, so that his projects would thereby seem to be questioning symmetry and proportions as necessary ingredients of the ideal of beauty (Svendsen 2006: 89). In opposition to the contemporary standards of beauty, the designer’s works become an attempt to escape from Harold Koda’s assertion that ‘fashion is the evidence of the human impulse to bring the body closer to an elusive transient ideal’ (82). In doing so, McQueen’s projects encompass what is different, peripheral and alien, appealing to sensuality as an emergence of meaning, confronting a beholder with something other, yet present, and apparently even more ‘real’ and tangible than normative projects promoted by the major fashion houses all around the world. Thus McQueen’s fashion elicits reactions that are often destabilizing and stem directly, as in the case of performance art, from the audience’s emotional engagement that exceeds rational comprehension (Bolton 2015: 17). Whether it was one of his most autobiographical collections The Widows of Culloden (autumn/winter 2006) or his last one Plato’s Atlantis (spring/summer 2010), the shows provoke his audience to react emotionally to the accumulation of ambivalent forms and structures in his compositions, subsequently making them rethink the status of the human body and its relationality with the world’s complexities. As the designer emphasized in an interview, ‘it is always about pushing to the extreme, the human body, human nature. As a designer you’re always working with cutting up the body to different proportions, different shapes. This is what a designer’s job is, to transcend what fashion is and what it could be’ (Wilcox 2015: 33). His projects alter the body, offering an entirely new language of fashion that could embrace the dynamic

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relations of the worlds’ polarities to form an assemblage where the division into beauty/ugliness, human/ nonhuman is abolished. Although McQueen has been often criticized for misogyny towards models due to his demanding methods of work, pushing his models to act in extreme conditions on the stage and wearing heavy layers of clothing tailored in unnatural shapes, his aim – which he repeatedly stressed during numerous interviews conducted with him – was to reflect the prejudices and limitations of the audiences’ aesthetic judgements rather than caging women in unnatural conditions (Wilcox 2015: 33). Despite the censure, the catwalks revealed his artistic craftsmanship and organization of bodily movements, accentuating also ‘the dialogue and the embodied knowledge of both the maker and the performer’ (Evans 2015: 189). His shows posed a question about how the agency of both garments and accessories affects the models’ bodies and how the body reshapes elements of the designer’s projects. It appears with McQueen that the relationality of all the elements can unfold alien areas of the body, repudiating standardized concepts that people often ascribe to their own bodies. Erin O’Connor, one of his leading co-workers, recalls her own experience of modelling for McQueen: ‘[H]e deconstructed the idea of what a woman should look like, what a woman should possess, and for the roles that I played–whether they were dark, or mysterious, or triumphant – they were always empowered and they knew exactly who they were, and he was the enabler. I think he had a real love of women in that sense’ (Evans 2015: 199). One thing is certain, from the very beginning of his career, as emphasized by his models, McQueen left room for freedom of expression, saying ‘go out there and do your thing’ (2015: 199). Hence, his shows were invariably imbued with a sense of potency and unbridled imagination, which led to a destabilization of bodies on the catwalk. Immersed in a network of nonhuman relations, McQueen’s projects – which consist of organic and nonliving forms – imply that the human body is decentred by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic and economic networks. In other words, in the face of total control by technologies, unified subjectivity has undergone a profound transformation, becoming co-dependent on scientific, medical and ethico-political factors that all construct complex entities. Thus, to counter normative conventions of beauty, to open the possibilities of body extension given by the technological advancement, McQueen – as a 1998 guest editor of the magazine Dazed and Confused – decided to place double amputee and Paralympic champion Aimee Mullins on its cover. Half naked, her prosthetic legs on show, and under the headline ‘Fashion-able?’, this issue destabilized the concept of a human’s corporeality, emphasizing the role of fashion and technology as transformational media in acting against sociocultural standards. More importantly, the images of Mullins, which exposed both human and nonhuman parts, rebelled against dominant representations of the disabled, which would in some ways actually deny her disability (Smith 2006: 55). McQueen’s presentation emphasized the powerful role of technological transformations of disability. And as Marquard Smith points out, thanks to the photo session prepared by McQueen and Nick Knight, Mullins’s ‘disability was simply seen as another perfect example of posthuman progress, a simple celebration of the human spirit’s victory over adversity’ (2006: 55). McQueen’s fascination with the athlete endured, and he continued to engage her in his shows, side by side with his other models. Mullins subsequently became a recognized icon; what was particularly appreciated by the designer was her bodily difference and her creative possibility, which completed his vision of interaction of different matters that form the world’s assemblages. In this manner, Mullins’s posthuman body helped McQueen to unfold and deploy multiple patterns of a subject’s ‘becoming’ and its interconnections, showing that the body cannot be analysed as a passive living material but should be seen as a ‘techno-organic interface, a techno-living system segmented and territorialised by different political models (textual, computerized,

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biochemical)’ (Preciado 2008: 108). Hence, the posthuman body in McQueen’s works has become symbiotically related with, and consequently must be analysed within, an infinite number of nonhuman modes and relations. In other words, his artistic practice accelerated our realization of the need to go beyond the human sphere and interrogate the limits of what human corporeality is.

Matter, the body and fashion At this point, to understand McQueen’s renegotiation of body processes, it is crucial to delimit a new materialist acknowledgement of matter. This will allow me to show how his fashion challenges the conventional treatment of materiality of the body as passive entity in humanist (dualist) discourse. As his projects embark on the modifications of the body emphasizing that it is an event of human and nonhuman affects, this conceptual framing will enable me to embrace the scope of the extension of posthuman bodies and their relationality with the environment, technology and other species. Through a nondualist intellectual orientation, we understand how both modernist and postmodernist cultural theories have failed to understand matter as a co-creator and generator of constantly changing meaning. This is a direct effect of the fact, as Karen Barad notices, that ‘the linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately everything – even materiality – is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation’ (2003: 801). And even though postmodernity is associated directly with the return to ‘the other’, the marginalized, these ‘differences’ – as Rosi Braidotti notices – ‘have been turned into and constructed as marketable, consumable and tradable “others”’ (2002: 175). In effect, this structuralization and neutralization of the ‘other’ contributed to the reproduction of the same dualism (bodily and non-bodily; nature and culture; organic and non-organic) to sustain anti-essentialist formulae. To oppose this line of reasoning, the new materialist theoretical framework engages itself in the study of ‘metamorphosis’ (Braidotti 2002), or in the idiom of Manuel DeLanda, ‘morphogenesis’ (1996) of intensive material processes and the actual forms they can produce (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 107). In this light, this entanglement of materiality and meaning proves that the formation is not solid and stable but can exist within the realm of both discursive and non-discursive processes, beyond the representational processes that indicate ‘the power of the precognitive approaches’, ‘corporeal rituals and entanglements embedded in embodied action rather than talk’ (Vannini 2015: 4). And thus, beyond the modernist’s one True representation of matter and the postmodernist’s plethora of equally valid representations, as indicated by van der Tuin and Dolpijn in their seminal work New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies – a collection of essays and interviews conducted with the most prominent new materialist scholars – matter in new materialism is a ‘transformative force in itself, which in its ongoing change, will not allow any representation to take root’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 107). Accordingly, while matter can connect, disconnect and co-produce meaning, it is never autonomous. This is particularly evident in McQueen’s fashion projects, which produce this dynamism of multi-layered matters, blurring the boundaries between body and garment. Clothes, accessories and various forms of body decorations are not only material objects with unique cuts and tailoring, enriching the models’ corpuses, but objects and bodies also develop a new set of relations while interacting with one another. This results directly from the fact that, as Karen Barad asserts, every matter is ‘an active participant in the world’s becoming, in its ongoing intra-activity’ (2003: 803), which can be understood as an inexhaustible dynamism of interactions of different matters that form a new relationality. In effect, the intervention of

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different matters triggers constant metamorphosis of the world’s processes. These are, in other words, intra-actions, which are dynamic, reconfiguring homogeneous boundaries to enable phenomena to come to matter and be part of the world in its ‘becoming’. Hence, it can be anticipated that clothes and body gain equal agency in the formation of life processes. The whole body emerges as teeming with different layers of fabrics and forms that fold in and out of the body at the same time. And while affecting one another, the body modifies its bodily capacities, forming, what Deleuze and Guattari (2005) consider as numerous assemblages through which it extends and interconnects in myriad ways. As the position of the body is reconfigured, it is determined by what affects it and by how it is affected. To borrow from Spinoza, ‘human body is affected in very many ways by external bodies’ (2000: 130). In this respect, when the body, as an interconnecting entity, is not passively receptive but constituently activated by shared affectivity of different matters, it undergoes limitless modifications – or as noticed by Rosi Braidotti – metamorphoses. Alexander McQueen’s works capture these processes.

McQueen’s posthuman fashion and metamorphosis in Voss This brings us to the stage where we need to outline the nature of McQueen’s posthuman fashion and its material becoming on the catwalk. While watching his shows, one has the impression of stepping over a threshold leading to the spheres formerly beyond the canon of beauty and normalcy. McQueen’s spring/ summer 2001 collection Voss, with projects that are not merely objects but experiments in assimilation and transformation of the human and natural world, accentuated the processes of metamorphosis of matter, opening the unknown spheres to fashion spectators. Interestingly, the title referred directly to the name of a Norwegian town renowned as a wildlife habitat, from the very start of the show, the collection elicited a strong audience reaction (Bethune 2015: 312). Clearly, the show had nothing to do with some putative Scandinavian serenity. As Kate Bethune recalls in her review, ‘an enormous clinical glass box formed the centerpiece, constructed to resemble a padded cell in a psychiatric hospital with white tiled floors and walls formed from surveillance mirrors. The light levels in the glass box rose to reveal models trapped in the cube, who were unable to see the audience’ (2015: 312). This tactic of direct separation of the models – wearing hospital headbands – from the audience required observation from an untypical perspective, as it resembled a Victorian exhibition of live human curiosities. To evoke the indefinability of the place and materials, the designer incorporated multiple and disparate themes at the same time, constructing an assemblage of different intensities of patterns, fabrics, natural elements and objects with cultural and historical references. The major focus of this collection, however, was on the richness of the natural world and its intraactivity with corporeality. While disclosing the world’s biodiversity, McQueen did not imitate nature per se; he prepared his collection in a way that is in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that ‘becoming is never imitating’ (Seely 2012: 255), as it goes beyond the representational level. In this respect, the richness of his material composition and the unusual format of the show thus enabled the designer to capture the morphogenesis of the body in a diversified natural habitat, demonstrating that ‘materials are no mere props for performance but parts and parcel of hybrid assemblages endowed with diffused personhood and relational agency’ (Vannini 2015: 5). Hence, fur, feathers, leather and other natural elements emphasize that they are all: ‘a part of a larger process, as possessing a liminality that speaks of further evolutions, more complex hybridity of restlessness and potential. As Deleuze and Guattari

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suggest, all that counts are the borderline – the anomalous’ (Faiers 2015: 127). The body extends itself, while being at the threshold of the unknown, interacting with otherness to produce new ways of embodiment. The process of becoming is activated and thus a reconfiguration of the pre-established possibilities of what a body is and can do is triggered. To illustrate this process of production of new subjectivities in Voss, McQueen gave a deep insight into the lives of birds, underlining substantial differences between them and marvelling at their continuous variations and metamorphoses. The assemblage of human and bird elements helped him to mark the Deleuzio–Guattarian threshold of becoming, at which corporeal processes can move across species. One dress is made of green ostrich feathers and painted muslin supported by a crinoline resembling rather a camouflaged furry caterpillar than a bird. The garment is covered by a woven silk coat, which looks like a cocoon trimmed at the neck, and cuffs with feathers to strengthen the effect of transfiguration of the creature, accelerated by the variety of materials that constitute the project. McQueen enriched the coat, which is in the shape of the wings of a butterfly, with a print that contains the eyes of the designer to further deterritorialize – understood here following Deleuze and Guattari as a movement that produces physical, mental and spiritual change – the model’s corpus. The designer’s eyes replace the organs of the caterpillar and thus viewers can see that the designer marks his presence, as if the artist were actively participating in this ongoing metamorphosis of a new-born organism. In this respect, the mutation of different elements can be seen as the designer’s attempt to understand this process of birds’ variation, their constant becoming and the capacities of matter for self-organization. The dress is not just a piece of clothing here but a process that transforms both the model and the materials of which it is made. The project allows the subject – the model – to go beyond the privileged position of the human, formerly perceived as the only carrier of an agency, to indicate that major cultural productions have been driven by an anthropocentric violence towards the inhuman. The designer’s sharp-edged tailoring, embellished with unearthly ornamentation, alien forms and floating fabrics, mark in this collection moments of transition, discomfort and transformation, during which the audience could encounter a posthuman ‘self’. This state reflects directly, as Deleuze and Guattari noted in A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia: the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline functioning as Anomalous, but there is a string of borderlines, a continuous line of borderlined (fiber) following which the multiplicity changes. And at each threshold or door, a new pact? A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible. (2005: 249) While encountering a variety of human and nonhuman elements in each project of the designer’s collection, models undergo a transformation, becoming the other/the marginalized, the animal/the nonhuman to erase the boundaries between self and other. Despite its apparent heaviness, this hybrid dress – which consists of several layers – sets the body in motion, rendering the process of transition from a woman, bird, butterfly to a kind of moth. This metamorphosis occurs through fine cutting and tailoring that merge with the digital print to produce the flow and rhythm of the matter, opening up the possibilities of further ‘becoming’. When wearing these clothes, the human figure looks distorted yet beautiful, and with its detailed green plumage, the dress exhibits McQueen’s artistic finery and fascination with decoration and adornment. Most importantly, the fabric and the feathers in this project circulate the model’s body, interactively participating in the ongoing morphogenesis of all the materials, questioning symmetry as a necessary ingredient of the ideal of beauty. On the catwalk, all the components of the dress

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are able to generate an energy that opens up new channels of sociocultural interaction. This is a posthuman body which reflects new ways of embodiment and subjectivity; all the elements of the garments, which are set in motion, distort and re-contour the body’s shape to open up the realm of ‘becoming’, where sensations and affect act directly upon the viewer. Referring here to Karen Barad’s definition of intra-activity, we may notice that the model and the clothes, while intra-acting with one another undergo metamorphosis. As Barad asserts, ‘it is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful’ (2003: 815). The transformation of the model’s body, which eventually breaks down borders between diverse agencies and entities, deterritorializes – transforms – the corpus from dominant modes of stratification. The motion and intra-activity between various matters in the project are McQueen’s attempt to elevate the body’s affects and intensity. This induced affective nature exceeds materiality and commodification, both of the clothes and the corpus of the model, transgressing sociocultural expectations and subsequently achieving pure molecularity, destabilizing perception as a whole. The designer’s works appear to be a process of moving across species, and that ‘becoming’ is, as Deleuze and Guattari emphasized in What is Philosophy? ‘neither an imitation nor an experienced sympathy, nor even an imaginary identification . . . .It is a zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility, as if things, beasts, and persons . . . endlessly reach that point that immediately precedes their natural differentiation’ (1994: 173). McQueen’s garment provokes becoming-animal not because the model looks or acts like an animal, but because part of her body has become indiscernible from that of an animal. This a direct effect of the fact that the intra-activity forms a new assemblage of human and nonhuman affects through which the model’s body can extend and interconnect. His hybrid project, which embraces animal features and floral elements, trigger – following here Deleuze and Guattari – moments of becoming-animal ‘alluding to the nonhuman forces inherent in sexuality, its affective dimensions that are also found in encounters with animals’ (Seely 2012: 253). However, the process of becoming-animal enables the designer primarily to redefine the model of Western conceptualization and create ways of understanding the interconnections that govern the world, rather than to come back to a state of pure animality of the human. The ostrich garment drifts away from the dualist praxis, indicating that the process of becoming means no hierarchy at all. Whether the designer drew his inspiration from biology or geology in his projects, the complexity of nature provided endless stimulation for his creative works; they were attempts to capture unknown, often marginalized, forces and energies and to dispose of the distinction between subject and object. At this point, it is crucial to highlight that these projects with natural adornments are not intended to make the garment more sophisticated and thereby demonstrate our superiority over other organisms, but instead to put all those elements in proximity with one another, irrespective of their roots and traits. Thus his works integrate ‘shells, feathers, antlers, animal skins and even taxidermied animals to bring the wearer into a molecular proximity’ with the elements constituting the garment (Seely 2012: 253). From this perspective, molecularity is seen here as a creative act and event, where there are always entities that are related to duration, not to separate matters. His hybrid projects, consisting of animal, human or vegetal entities, imply that body is an assemblage, ‘a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures’ (DeLanda 2016: 1).

(Un)folding posthuman bodies in Voss In his book The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze explores the richness of Baroque forms, giving insight, among other things, into the structural complexities of its fashion. For this philosopher, the

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époque, in architecture, sculpture, painting and fashion, is ‘defined by the fold that goes out to infinity’ (1993: 121). In other words, its highly eclectic and complex forms that ‘fold, unfold and refold’ (Conley 2005: 170), eclectically embracing and revealing the structures in the majority of projects. And likewise the new materialist approach towards the capacities of matter, inspired to a large extent by Deleuze’s writings, Deleuze asserts: ‘the folds of clothing acquire an autonomy and a fullness that are not simply decorative effects. They convey the intensity of a spiritual force exerted on the body, either to turn it upside down or to stand or raise it up over and again, but in every event to turn it inside out and to mould its inner surfaces’ (1993: 122). Interestingly, the process of (un)folding different matter processes and surfaces is particularly accentuated in the other projects from the same collection, Voss. For instance, a garment with richly embroidered Japanese silk with floral patterns as an overdress, polished oyster shells as an underdress and a neckpiece of silver and Tahiti pearls reshapes the contours of the body, folding and unfolding the different layers. The composition of different materials, once set in motion on the catwalk, transfigures the model’s body, immersed in the mixtures of folding structures. The body of the model is constantly relating to the other elements of the work, becoming what is inside and outside of the garment at the same time. Here in this project, the body becomes a potential site, unmodified and modified, on which the designer experiments with alien forms, with the textural and sculptural possibilities of fabrics and objects. Fine craftsmanship and precision working with a plethora of different materials enabled McQueen to construct a hybrid garment with a fully transformative effect, allowing the body the continuous possibilities of changes and extensions. Focused on playfulness with innovative materials and complex pattern-cutting of highly synthetic and natural fabrics, the project unfolded the agency of the matter he worked with. This effect derives from the fact that McQueen managed to achieve a fluidity of forms and enhance a sort of movement, leaving the impression that his clothes constantly fold, unfold and refold. The variety of loosely hanging folds produced by asymmetric, laced, multi-layered textiles, and the reimagined proportions of the garments overflowing the whole model, conceal and reveal the body in motion. In this respect, McQueen’s garment melts with the body, providing the body with unnatural curves, reshaping it in numerous ways to give new lives. Once set in motion, heavy, thick, enveloping fabrics became dynamic and vibrating forms that unlocked formerly unseen lines, gaps and fissures in each and every garment. The flexibility of the atypical materials used in the garment, redefining the relationship between fabric and flesh, open up the body to the unknown, to the nature of sea creatures and plants, which we might express differently by saying that ‘this is not a static relationality but a doing – the enactment of boundaries’ (Barad 2003: 803). This process demonstrates, in Karen Barad’s terms, that all bodies, not merely ‘human’ bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity – its performativity. This is true not only of the surface or contours of the body but also of the body in the fullness of its physicality, including the very ‘atoms’ of its being. Bodies are not objects with inherent boundaries and properties; they are material-discursive phenomena. (2003: 823) Inevitably, McQueen’s projects take on new life when put on models’ bodies; they become all-embracing garments that can create seamless constructs, where body and clothing become an open-ended entity, for the body for him is always in a process and recreating itself ad infinitum. In effect, this confrontation of the agency of the object with the agency of the model is, in the idiom of Karan Barad, ‘not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world’ (2003: 818). In this respect, the matter of the body, as a dynamic and fluid creation, always adapts to the conditions of a given moment, cooperating with multilayered garments, accelerating the processes of mutual transformation.

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Becoming an underwater assemblage McQueen’s last fully realized collection, Plato’s Atlantis, inspired by the story of the lost city of Atlantis (Wilcox 2015: 83) and Plato’s theory about its submergence – that it was the result of a volcanic eruption – offers an other-worldly narrative about the human’s transformation into an aquatic species. The 2009 collection opened with a mesmerizing and discomfiting film, directed by McQueen with Nick Knight and Ruth Hogben, which depicted a woman mutating into an aquatic creature (86). The film features the Brazilian model Raquel Zimmermann, lying on sand, naked, with snakes writhing across her body. She is then immersed in a water tank filled with black eels, reinforcing the impression of being on the verge of the world of air and water. Claire Wilcox neatly summarizes the grand opening of the show and the position of the model in this video: throughout, digital prints from the collection were projected onto her body, transforming her into a semi-reptilian being, and culminated in the digital multiplication of first, the snakes, and then her body, in a series of fractals. The effect was that of an exquisite kaleidoscopic image, even Mandala-like, that suggested both the mechanised cogs of a machine and the birth of a hybrid species. (2015: 86) The project, which presented an apocalyptic vision of the ecological meltdown of the world, mixed aquatic and terrestrial animals, aliens, cyborgs and mythical elements, all made from innovatively combined high-tech, superlight, water-resistant, synthetic fabrics. And as Stephen Seely noted, thanks to this experimental fusion of materials, the fashion designer produced ‘a series of garments that effectively created a new species beyond the human. As neither fully animal nor human, alien nor mechanical, future nor past, the nonhumans in this show are beautiful reverberations of a people to come, or a people long gone’ (2012: 15). In contrast to the previous collection, these works are preoccupied with the motif of survival in the face of rising sea-levels, during which humans are forced somehow to revert to an amphibian state; as if this is the only solution for humankind on the brink of a catastrophe. In this respect, the project suggests that the process of becoming nonhuman appears to be very natural to us. Once in danger, our instincts can dispose of sociocultural constraints and embrace the outer to finally become nonhuman. The garments enable the model to open up to intensities from the external world and thus the modification of an individual can be initiated. Similarly to Voss, McQueen’s digitally printed and engineered designs with corroded metallic embroidery reflect the process of morphogenesis of the body of the model. Folded and draped around the body, these patterns of ‘becoming’, these constant recreations, are particularly accentuated in the project ‘Neptune’s Daughter’. The garment consists of a dress, leggings and Armadillo boots – which appeared also in Lady Gaga’s single Bad Romance and accompanied the finale of Plato’s Atlantis – covered entirely with large opalescent sequins (Wilcox 2015: 91) glistening and resembling the structure of a snake or amphibian-like skin. Indeed, the model is no longer clearly a human in this project, wearing an amphibian mermaid-like outfit. The body and garment become one, creating a bioluminescent seahuman – a creature that is able now to free itself from the fixed forms of mainstream stratification of the body and adopt to the changing conditions of the environment. This garment aptly illustrates, as Kate Bethune emphasizes, that ‘McQueen developed a host of new shapes, tailored to mimic marine features: pronounced hips and shoulders gave way to amorphous forms; a fluted miniskirt resembled the folds of a jellyfish; puffed sleeves were folded and pleated to connote gills’ (2015: 321). In this respect, the work shows that clothes are not added to a body that pre-exists; rather, the materials and forces that

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produce the body (flesh, skin, limbs, movements, speeds, flows) and the garment (fabrics, movements) are connected to produce an entirely new assemblage that consists of its own new arrangements (Seely 2012: 258). In his notes accompanying the show, McQueen emphasized that the aim of the collection was to create a hybrid creature that would survive without the use of man-made breathing apparatus (Wilcox 2015: 91). The designer questioned the traditional category of the human and nonhuman, using the category of posthumanism to reconfigure notions of human normativity. This affective reinvention of the ‘self’, which demands the active involvement of the body in new ways, enables the wearer to be in the creative process of ‘becoming’, subsequently indicating the formation of a posthuman assemblage. Accordingly, the reshaping and co-shaping of the body stems from the confrontation of mutually affecting matters; and this is particularly amplified while watching the model walking down the catwalk. Some of the spectators may realize that, thanks to the movement and the unity of the body and the garment, the body is somehow liberated, as the perfectly tailored clothes trigger nonhuman affects and intensities that are subsequently inserted into this world. Even though McQueen’s collection thus – to some extent – commodifies the female body as it is a part of the fashion industry, the project indicates that corporeality is something more than a biological or organic whole, more than a self-sufficient system. It is always a cultural product, or as Elizabeth Grosz puts it, ‘a site of social, political, cultural and geographical inscriptions, production and constitution not in the opposition to each other but as necessarily interactive’ (1994: 23). The body is traversed by various levels that link the most different bodies, particles and forces, consequently integrating into the world’s structures. The numerous metamorphoses of the human contribute to the moment of intensity on the catwalk that becomes an event, or rather a form of performance, during which one can encounter a bloc of sensations, ‘that is to say, a compound of precepts and affects’, waiting to be constantly reactivated by a spectator or an actor (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 64). The qualities of McQueen’s fashion operate in the field of affect rather than knowledge.

Conclusion The discussed works reveal how McQueen’s fashion, through its various mutations and experimentations, operates within the shared materiality of world processes to develop autonomous modes of bodily production out of the regimes of cultural representations. McQueen’s unwearable works offer new forms of conceptualizations of the posthuman body in a technologically advanced world – visible particularly via the scientific advances such as prosthetics, genetics, neurobiology and robotics – that work through capture and use of regimes of the nonhuman. The body in his works, in contrast to dominant trends set by the fashion industry, undergoes transformation in tandem with the reformulation of the material processes. His posthuman bodies are the extensions of bodily possibilities, assemblages whose function or potential or ‘meaning’ becomes entirely dependent on which other bodies or machines it forms an assemblage with (Malins 2004: 85). While overcoming limiting and essentializing bodily categories, it is apparent that McQueen’s fashion intensifies the process of ‘becoming’, showing that ‘there is no the body; there is a continuous bodying’ (Massumi 2015: 103). By examining different projects, it is evident that the designer creates different intraactivities between bodies and garments that unfold themselves to non-homogenous, non-singular spaces and matters, revealing and concealing their inner structures. In this sense, through affects and encounters with other bodies and entities, the body undergoes constant transformations, generating an infinite number of possibilities of interaction of matters. McQueen’s projects became posthuman embodiments without fixed properties, unfolding themselves to new forms of subjectivity. Exposed to the process of constant ‘becoming’,

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the body in his collections transgresses its dominant position (a masculine, white, heterosexual praxis) melding with the minoritarian, the rejected/the abject, to activate the open-ended process of de-personalization (Braidotti 2011: 118). In effect, the posthuman body is a matter of intensities and affects generated through interactions with nonhuman forms. Performative practices become thus a threshold to all the upcoming bodily extensions in the designer’s shows, allowing their constant ‘becomings’. Free from fixed codes and open to new states and capacities, the body thus can act and be acted upon, extending its capabilities. As a postscript, I will refer once again to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who emphasized that subjects must become minoritarian to flee from a dominant sociocultural stratification (2005). Against the logic of representation inherited from the Platonic and Cartesian privileging of the mind, and by extension of the eye, McQueen’s posthuman fashion aims at finding more dynamic ways of accounting for bodies, movements and events. His projects, which are beyond representational processes, do not validate identities and institutions but instead enable new forms of action and bodily transformations. In this respect, the clothes make a shift in the conceptualization of the body from epistemological frameworks of signification and representation to an ontological framework of affect, sensation, and material transformation. Almost in a ritualistic manner, McQueen’s works reconnect his clothes with the outer world, forming, referring back to Karen Barad, numerous intra-activities, relations that enable to deterritorialize fixed structures. From this perspective, the reasoning about what fashion is and what it might mean becomes dependent on practices that unlock new human and nonhuman potentialities and affects.

FEATURED SHOWS Alexander McQueen: Spring/Summer 2001 (video available via YouTube: Alexander McQueen)

Alexander McQueen: Autumn/Winter 2006 (video available via YouTube: Alexander McQueen)

Alexander McQueen: Spring/Summer 2010 (video available via YouTube: Alexander McQueen)

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References Barad, K. (2003), ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (3): 801–31. Bethune, K. (2015), ‘Encyclopaedia of Collections’, in C. Wilcox (ed.), Alexander McQueen, 303–27, London: V&A. Bolton, A. (2015), ‘In Search of the Sublime’, in C. Wilcox (ed.), Alexander McQueen, 15–25, London: V&A. Braidotti, R. (2002), Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2011), Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti, New York: Columbia University Press. Conley, T. (2005), ‘Folds and Folding’, in C. Stivale (ed.), Gilles Deleuze Key Concepts, 170–82, London: Acumen. DeLanda, M. (1996), ‘The Geology of Morals: A Neo-Materialist Interpretation’. Available online: http://www​.t0​.or​.at​/ delanda​/geology​.htm (accessed June 12, 2009). DeLanda, M. (2016), Assemblage Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1993), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, London: The Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2005), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dolphijn, R. and I. van der Tuin (2012), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Open Humanities Press, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. Evans, C. (2015), ‘Modelling McQueen’, in C. Wilcox (ed.), Alexander McQueen, 189–203, London: V&A. Faiers, J. (2015), ‘Nature Boy’, in C. Wilcox (ed.), Alexander McQueen, 123–41, London: V&A. Grosz, E. (1994), Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Malins, P. (2004), ‘Machinic Assemblages: Deleuze, Guattari and Ethico Aesthetics of Drug Use’, Janus Head, 7 (1). Available online: http://www​.janushead​.org​/7​-1​/malins​.pdf (accessed May 10, 2017). Massumi, B. (2015), The Power at the End of Economy, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Parr, A. (2011), The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised edn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Preciado, B. (2008), Testo Junkie: Sexe, Drogue et Biopolitique, Paris: Grasset. Seely, S. D. (2012), ‘How Do You Dress a Body Without Organs? Affective Fashion and Nonhuman Becoming’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 41 (1/2): 247–65. Smith, M. (2006), ‘The Vulnerable Articulate: James Gillingham, Aimee Mullins and Matthew Barney’, in M. Smith and J. Morra (eds), The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, 43–72, London: MIT Press. Spinoza, B. (2000), Ethics, ed. and trans. G. H. R. Parkinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Svendsen, L. (2006), Fashion: A Philosophy, London: Reaktion Books. Vannini, P. (2015), Non-representational Methodologies: Re-envisioning Research, New York: Routledge. Wilcox, C. (2015), Alexander McQueen, London: V&A.

6 UNDER THE SKIN DESIGNING IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES IN FASHION DISPLAY Sarah Winter, Madeline Taylor, Kiara Bulley, Anna Hickey and Bianca Bulley

Introduction Australian design group the Stitchery Collective uses clothing and carefully designed and curated space as transportive tools within their immersive installation works. The Stitchery Collective draws upon multiple design perspectives through their diverse collection of skill sets. Individual members work across fashion, theatre production and performance design and all bring their unique approach to designing and curating space, clothing and immersive environments. This chapter explores two audio-based immersive installations by the Stitchery Collective, Collective Collection (2014), a site-specific work held in an historic Queenslander-style building in Brisbane, and From Home, With Love (2015), a site-generic work purpose-built for a commission in a gallery setting for an exhibition celebrating the centenary of the First World War. These two installations will be discussed through the theoretical lens of Ingrid Loschek’s ‘skins’ (the body as first skin, clothing as second and architecture as third) (2009), which directly informed the creation of the two works that focused on the use of clothing and space as tools to immerse audiences. In addition, the chapter will briefly discuss the importance of participatory design and how this is translated into fashion, particularly outlining the importance of the ‘participant’ role through Vinken’s theory of ‘PostFashion’ (2005). This increased interest in the participatory experience in fashion display is also part of a larger movement in installation and event design where scenographic practices have expanded to focus on design as a participatory ‘mode of encounter and exchange founded on spatial and material relations between bodies, objects and environments’ (McKinney and Palmer 2017: 1). The Stitchery Collective’s installation works are primarily centred around the experience of a single participant, and

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while the works function respectively within both a fashion context and a museum context, they do not follow the contemporary mode of display in these areas. The chapter identifies contemporary fashion spaces, such as the shopping mall, catwalks and costume museums, as disengaged from the ‘lived’ experience of clothes. The Stitchery Collective utilizes the lived experience through both sensory and oratory means, inviting participants to engage, interpret and collaborate through their experience of the installation works. This chapter will unpack the conceptual underpinnings of Collective Collection (2014) and From Home, With Love (2015) through a combination of fashion, expanded scenographic and architectural concepts, highlighting how they can be productively employed in the creation of fashion spaces and display modes.

The Stitchery Collective’s creative practice The Stitchery Collective regularly works within the context of the art gallery or museum, creating interactive installations, facilitating fashion and craft-focused public programming, as well as hosting community engagement events. The commission of fashion-based public engagement programmes such as these highlights an increasing interest in fashion within the gallery and museum context as a mode of drawing in and engaging broader audiences (Navarro 2014: 446). Fashion is easily accessible to a diverse public audience, as it is something that every individual engages with daily, through the media, as a consumer practice and through their relationship with their own wardrobe and body. This accessibility is fostered in the public’s lived experience of clothing. Contrary to this, the highly commercial fashion industry is fundamentally hierarchical and exclusive, heavily segregated from the personal experience of dressing and being dressed. These two different experiences of fashion are both separate and enmeshed together and often hard to typify through terminology such as ‘fashion’ and ‘clothing’. These terms are frequently used interchangeably across both popular and academic dialogues, as well as in the preceding outlined set of experiences. Within this chapter we will use the term ‘fashion’ to designate aspects of or the totality of the fashion system, while the word ‘clothing’ will refer to the material garments that are worn, forgotten, remembered and included in the installations under discussion. The Stitchery Collective’s practice, while situated in the field of fashion, functions outside the traditional modes of fashion design, production and display, arguing for inclusivity and accessibility, with a participatory focus. Over our history the Stitchery Collective’s practice has expanded from community-based engagement and programming to staging large installations and participatory events that demand audience engagement. In all of these large-scale works the characteristics of expanded scenography play a significant role and have consequently become a distinctive element of the Stitchery Collective’s creative works.

Fashion spaces When considering fashion spaces and displays, three elements must be expressly considered – bodies, clothing and space. These elements are present in all places of fashion display, though the corporeal body is often replaced by the plastic shell of a mannequin. Fashion theorist Ingrid Loschek (2009) aptly contextualizes these elements as modicums of human experience and presence. Loschek (2009: 17)

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discusses clothing and architecture as extensions and containers of the corporeal body’s spatial form, interfaces between the body and the exterior environment. Loschek utilizes the metaphor of ‘skin’, the flesh as the first skin, clothing as the second and architecture as the third. This metaphoric extension of the flesh can help unpick how human presence manifests within clothing and architecture, particularly within domestic spaces like those used within the Stitchery Collective installations. In this chapter Loschek’s theory is used as a lens to examine how clothing and space are employed within these installations. Contemporary spaces of fashion display, such as the shopping mall, catwalk and fashion museum are largely homogenized, functional and ordinarily disengaged from a personal or intimate experience. Current consumer-centric fashion spaces emphasize consistency across the multiple spaces a brand might occupy around the world. Large monopolies of retail space developers, such as Westfield and CFX, further this uniformity of experience. For the consumer, this translates into a space that is generally clinically clean, brightly lit, blandly decorated and busy with other people and competing visuals from a variety of merchandisers. The emphasis of these spaces is solidly focused on consumption and purchase. This visual language is generally replicated within the fashion show or runway. Fashion parades, for instance, are commonly orchestrated so that they are distanced from the viewer, a spectacle watched in a controlled space. The fashion show is voyeuristic in nature – similar to a traditional theatre show with a clear demarcation between audience and performer. It positions all audience members as external observers, rather than reflecting the personal or intimate. Skov et al. suggest that the aesthetic conventions of the runway serve to emphasize and reproduce fashion’s established boundaries and hierarchies (2009: 23). While luxury brands can, and do, create spectacular environments to show their clothes, the majority of fashion runway events must support multiple designers and brands and are thus limited to a ‘neutral and anonymous’ space design (Skov et al. 2009: 7). This bland uniformity is usually repeated in the bodies and expressions of the models who display the clothes, with consistency of size, shape and colouring key consideration in their casting (Entwistle and Wissinger 2006: 779). The whole experience is orchestrated by the designer or producer, and the speed at which the clothes flit past makes it difficult to form a connection with individual items. The fashion museum space replicates many of the display methods of fashion retail spaces, including reliance on mannequins to stand in for moving human bodies and an emphasis on neutral modernity within display spaces. Similar to that of the fashion parade there is a distinct line between viewer and object. Wilson comments that ‘a dusty silence holds still the old gowns in glass cabinets’ (1987: 1). The museum context emphasizes the distance between the viewer and these fetishized objects, fixed rigidly in position and separated by glass or boundaries defined by pedestals, railings and the invigilators. While the reasoning behind this distance is to preserve the clothing as artefacts, the result to the observer is a sense of alienation and fetishization (Entwistle 2015). These modes of contemporary fashion display are distinctly different to people’s embodied and corporeal understanding of clothing, and do not acknowledge the memories and stories that are often associated with particular pieces of clothing and garments. The Stitchery Collective’s practice instead focuses on the memory attached to clothing as a mode of engagement for audiences. Through focusing specifically on alternative display methods that bring audiences closer to clothing, the Stitchery Collective have developed an innovative practice that is immersive in form, and utilizes space, clothing, audio and hallmarks of expanded scenography to create participatory experiences that explore ideas of clothing, memory and the domestic space.

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The Collective Collection Can you hear me? Good. I want to show you something special. It won’t take long, but you have to trust me. Don’t worry about looking silly or doing anything wrong. Let the party carry on around you. Just listen to my voice and let me lead you. See that glass door in front of you? Walk up and look inside. That woman is my great aunt. This was her house. That is her, in her twenties, as she would have looked in this house. Throwing parties just like this one. She was always wearing something she had created, hand sewn, not always with great skill, but with pride. Hear that music behind you? Head towards that sound, up the stairs. I want to show you something, it won’t take too long. This big old house leaks stories. (Audio excerpt from Collective Collection, The Stitchery Collective, 2014)

Through the use of storytelling, the opening lines of the audio accompaniment to Collective Collection (2014) initiate an engagement with both the installation space and the material objects within the space. The installation was an immersive experience created in a heritage Queenslander (an architectural home that is specific to the Australian state) in Highgate Hill, Brisbane. The overarching aim was to establish an encompassing environment that was wholly immersive for the participant. The installation was deliberately designed to display a collection of garments designed and made by the Stitchery Collective of the same name as the installation work, purchasable as patterns for people to make versions of the garments at home. In this sense, the installation was positioned within a fashion context, where a purchasable product was being showcased. However, the installation was in direct opposition to typical forms of contemporary fashion shows. Rather than creating a spectacle of the garments, the intention was to make them feel known, to have a sense of story, place and identity – like loved clothing in a familiar wardrobe. For the Stitchery Collective, the comfort and intimacy of the domestic environment were integral to developing the engagement between the audience, clothing and space. For that reason the chosen space for the exhibition was a very familiar space for the predominantly Queensland audience. Franklin Villa, a heritage listed in Queenslander, was built in 1892 and has the hallmarks of domestic space that are very familiar to Queensland audiences; in addition, the house also operates as a bed and breakfast, which gave the Stitchery Collective access to key domestic spaces such as a kitchen, a living room, verandahs, hallways, bathrooms and bedrooms in which to display the garments. Each bedroom in Franklin Villa is individually decorated, which enabled different clothing to be curated to different rooms through the extension of the ‘character’ of each room. This approach of responding to the physical architecture of the site as a key aspect of the work is a common feature of site-specific works (McKinney and Palmer 2017: 5). The space itself structured the content and format of the work which in turn deeply informed the audience experience. As a bed and breakfast, the differing styles of the various bedrooms prompted the creation of distinct ‘characters’ that inhabited them, which were introduced through the audio. These differences were accentuated via the incorporation of additional props and room styling, and the careful selection and display of appropriate Collective Collection garments. In this way the idea of the architecture being an extension, or third skin, of these imagined human presences is emphasized. In turn, the Stitchery Collective intended that people would have a personal connection with the stories told of each garment and follow this to reconnect with the art of making garments from patterns themselves. Contemporary theatre and performance theorist Jen Harvie writes that site-specific work can be especially powerful as a vehicle for remembering (2005: 42). The familial and everyday nature of the domestic space further creates an environment which allows the participant to tap into their personal

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memories of home and enables a deeper immersion within the experience. This notion resonates with the writings of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his seminal text The Poetics of Space. In this text he discusses connections between memory and architecture, establishing the notion that the first house each person inhabits is imprinted on their psyche as a child and, subsequently, any room entered is interpreted in relation to that first world they knew, ‘for our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word’ (Bachelard 1994: 4). Bachelard’s (1994) emphasis on childhood experience as a lens of interpretation and understanding is vital to an understanding of this installation work. Much of the audio in this installation consisted of real, personal and nostalgic memories of childhood events tied to physical locations. For example, in the bathroom (Figure 6.1) the audio talked of doing washing as summer storms rolled in, feeling the humidity build during the day, and handwashing inside while the rain fell in the afternoon. This is a very familiar scene to Australian audiences who have lived in the subtropics. To support this narrative, the scenographic element of scent, or aromaturgy, was utilized. In the room, the smell of soap flakes filled the air, further immersing the participant in the world of the garments, sparking memories of washing their own garments and the care practices that surround them. While the details may be blurred by time, the sensory – the strongly remembered sounds and smells from past years – are clear. It is this idea of recreating and interpreting clothing through the lens of memory that encourages intimate connections, be that of a remembered domestic space or recollected stories of clothing.

Figure 6.1  The Collective Collection garments strung through a bathroom in Franklin Villa, 2014. Photo by Kate O’Sullivan.

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Loschek defines architecture as the ‘encasing of “air-space” in which people spend time, move around and store things’ (2009: 17), and in this sense the third skin is not limited to walls and objects but includes all that is encased within the ‘air-space’, including smell, sound and light. This definition correlates with the intersubjective relational approach of extended scenography, which posits architecture as an ‘active spatial event’ (McKinney and Palmer 2017: 10). Anthropologist Peter Pels has suggested that our interaction with objects is best experienced through the use of the senses (1998: 100), a point expanded on by Sarah Winter who explains, ‘tactile and sensory-based environments allow the participant to engage in lived and sensory modes, which provide a richer and deeper connection with the space’ (2014: 84). Within Collective Collection (2014), the audio guided the audience through the spaces, inviting them to touch the object, feel the fabric of their clothes and share stories. In addition to providing atmospheric sound and guided instructions, the audio also directed the participant to consider other sensory experiences available to them in the space. This included commentary such as ‘I came in here because I loved the smell. The heat of the day, the wet air, the clean linen, the dry cotton’, or ‘One time I spilt half her perfume, the room still smells of it. Lily of the valley’. Other instances were suggestions for gestures to support intimacy and mindfulness such as ‘Touch the glass, is it cool?’ or ‘Take a moment to feel the weight of your clothes. Do they move when you walk? Do your shoes pinch? Did you choose your favourite thing to wear tonight?’ The reflections engaged by this last prompt further draws out connections between the second skins of the attendees, their own clothes and the third skin of the installation they are immersed in. While the use of an unconventional, albeit domestic, space addresses the Stitchery Collective’s intention of immersive engagement, it also presented some dilemmas; by displacing the traditional practices of the fashion exhibition or fashion show, it also displaced the traditional display of fashion, that is, clothes shown on bodies. The conventional modes of display – be they on models or mannequins – would have disrupted the space. Models would have diminished the intimacy of experiencing the space, instead creating a different, tension-filled intimacy between the performer who is being watched and the participant who is watching. Furthermore, the static presence of a mannequin in the rooms of the house would have created a sense of falseness or artifice within the naturalistic setting of the domestic environment. Instead, the clothing within the work was consciously displayed in a way that would look natural in a ‘home’ (discarded on the floor, carefully draped over the back of a chair, hung in a closet, pegged to dry as laundry) giving it a sense of being worn or lived in. This display method had the impact of making the participants feel like the person, or character, in the room had just stepped out for a moment, and they were seeing these clothes in their usual environment. This display choice alluded to the lived experience of the space and objects, and the corporeal presence of bodies, even in their absence. In Collective Collection the architecture of the heritage Queenslander was a key element in the creation of an immersive fashion experience, drawing heavily on Loschek’s notion of architecture as third skin. In a later work From Home, With Love, which existed in a gallery context, the use of clothing as second skin was crucial for creating an immersive experience of clothing.

From Home, With Love This. This is my jacket. My uniform. My stamp that I am an Australian amidst a sea of strangers. It identifies me, and hides me. I remember when it was brand new, crisp, starched. My mate Ted was keen to join. So there I was. People had looked admiringly at me as I walked home in my uniform,

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rifle slung over my shoulder. The bus driver wished me luck and refused to take my money. The boots squeezed, they were a little tight, but the fella had assured me they would relax with time. That patch there on the right, the blue and black one? That tells people I’m in the 25th. The jacket is important in the trenches at night. It’s comforting. Reminds me why I’m here. Sometimes I think if it wasn’t for the uniform tying us together, reminding us that we are fighting for each other . . . Well, you’d just go a little mad. (Audio excerpt from From Home, With Love, The Stitchery Collective, 2015)

From Home, With Love (2015) was a site-generic, interactive installation, based within the State Library of Queensland Gallery, which invited the audience to engage with the intimate experiences of Australians on the frontline and at home during the First World War. The work was specifically designed to be interactive and was part of a larger exhibition which included artefacts, video and audio recordings (Figure 6.2). The installation was separated into three tableaux that replicated the objects and spaces of a soldier, a nurse and a domestic family at home during the war. The first area featured a heavy military jacket in front of a section of trench wall, the second a nurse’s apron in a partition of a medical tent and the final comprised a hallway table in an Australian homestead set with a number of small pieces including a collection of knitted socks, parcels to be sent away and decorative war memorabilia. Like that of the Collective Collection (2014) installation, audio was used to direct and engage the audience. The stories used within the exhibition were fictional, based heavily on research on the real experiences and correspondence of Australian soldiers, nurses and families. The installation was designed to be both interactive and tactile with the participants encouraged to pick up and put on items of clothing that retained small indications of their fictional past: a pretty rock picked up by a soldier and hidden in a pocket, stains on a nurse’s apron, an army sock with the embroidered initials of a loved one off at war. From Home, With Love was a commissioned work, intended to engage audiences with the somewhat overwhelming topic of the First World War. The Stitchery Collective’s approach is supported by Clark and De La Haye, who state, ‘Since the late twentieth century there has been a growing interest in the importance of multi-sensorial experiences – as opposed to the more traditional acknowledgement of sight and touch – in shaping people’s experiences of objects in everyday life as well as historical and contemporary artifacts exhibited within museum contexts’ (2014: 4), and McKinney and Palmer who suggest that scenography generates ‘understanding that is founded in sensual, emotional and aesthetic responses’ (2017: 11). The original concept behind this work was to emphasize the small humanities

Figure 6.2  From Home, With Love participants engage with soldiers’ jacket, nurses’ apron and the homestead at the State Library of Queensland 2015. Photo by Kate O’Sullivan.

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of the war, in particular, objects of material comfort. Research into the home front and the effort to knit socks for soldiers was central to the development of the work. Simple objects, such as the sock, took on deep significance during this time, both for citizens on the home front – as a small act of assisting and protecting their loved ones overseas and at war – and for the soldiers – who treasured the comforts of a dry pair of socks amid the discomforts and horrors of combat. Correspondence between those away and those at home was also highly important. In each of the three spaces built – that of soldier, nurse and homefront – both objects of material comfort and correspondence were foregrounded. The soldier’s jacket housed a precious letter. The nurse’s space included a small cupboard containing postcards. The homefront’s half-knitted socks lay in front of a dresser drawer full of letters. Like Collective Collection (2014), the spaces of From Home, With Love (2015) alluded to lived interiors. While the rich domestic interiors of Franklin Villa allowed Collective Collection (2014) to tap into the sensory (particularly the olfactory) to heighten this experience, the environmental restrictions of a gallery meant that this was not a possibility in From Home, With Love (2015). In the museum context the participant was not fully immersed in the architecture, and could see the artifice of the built set – which existed as 2 metre square vignettes of the different environments – war trench, field hospital and a Queenslander homestead. In the absence of a fully constructed architectural environment, the lived experience was emphasized through personal and intimate objects such as domestic items, letters, washing and shaving equipment. The installation was designed to take participants on a journey through different warfront contexts, and on to the final set replicating features of the iconic and highly localized Queenslander-style house. This encouraged the engagement of the participant’s own experiences via a familiar domestic space, and brought the audience home metaphorically at the end of their journey. This sense of personal journey was encouraged by inviting participants to wear the displayed clothing as they experienced From Home, With Love (2015). Due to the generic architecture of the gallery, this installation required the clothing to act as a conduit for the immersive experience. Applying Loschek’s metaphor of the three skins (2009: 17), in this work the participants stepped into another’s skin (the second skin of clothing), through touching and stepping into other people’s (or character’s) clothing, which in turn created a strong tactile and embodied connection between the participant and the experience.

Experiencing bodiless clothes Fashion studies has directed significant attention to the connection between clothing and social identity (Entwistle 2015; Bell 1978; Simmel 1957; Barnard 1996), with clothing acting as a mutable system of signs that is readable and read by society. However, as Entwistle points out, many of these studies tend to ‘neglect the body and the meaning the body brings to dress’ (2015: 33). Loschek’s second skin is an apt term to apply to clothing, as it is carried on the body, is designed to move with and mould to the body, and when the body is absent, it retains the shape of the body’s limbs and proportions. Entwistle attests, ‘dress in everyday life cannot be separated from the living, breathing, moving body it adorns’ and that ‘dress, the body and the self – are not perceived separately but simultaneously, as a totality’ (2015: 33–4). This totality means that when clothes are separated from the body and self – especially worn clothing that has an established physical connection to the body and self – it will retain something

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of the body and self even in separation. Within the Stitchery Collective installations, the absence of bodies as they manifest within clothing and space is highly significant to the design of participant experience. In particular, the works aim to connect the participants to a lived, sensory experience of clothes and spaces. Indeed, the sensorial elements of bodiless clothing are prominent within the creative development of both projects. Early in the design and development of each installation, the Stitchery Collective held discussions regarding the intimacy of experiencing clothing, both in wearing and viewing. Of particular concern was how clothing is perceived when a body is absent, and how to negotiate this in the installations. Reflecting on our own experiences and the documented experiences of various scholars (Entwistle 2015; Wilson 1987: 1; Ash 1999: 139; Stallybrass 2012; Bell 1978; de Perthuis 2016), the encounter of clothing without a body was considered significant, divided into either ‘dead’ (described as haunted, eerie, alien) or ‘lived’ (characteristically inhabited, imbued with lived memory, intimate, subjective). As such, a short look at the two different experiences of bodiless clothes, as dead and lived, is needed. In her seminal text Adorned in Dreams, Elizabeth Wilson describes the eerie, haunted experience of the fashion museum, suggesting ‘the living observer moves, with a sense of mounting panic, through a world of the dead’ (1987: 1). While this is perhaps a poetic exaggeration of what an individual feels in the presence of bodiless clothes, it acts to highlight the connection of dress to the corporal, and in extension, death. For Wilson these clothes are ghosts, ‘only half understood, sinister, threatening; the atrophy of the body, and the evanescence of life’ (1987: 1), unsettling in their continued existence past the death of the body, self and time they were once connected to. On the other hand, Joanne Entwistle points to the context of the museum display as the point of alienation (2015: 42). Documented and displayed in a museological setting, the garment is cut off from the familiar experience of clothes, as they are worn, felt, smelt and arranged in everyday life. Experiences of ‘lived’ clothes seem to be strongly contextualized by sensory connections, which tap into the individual’s own lived experience and memories. Clothing can be universally comprehended, as all people, regardless of race, gender, age or class, dress the body (Entwistle 2015; Ash 1999: 131). Thus, arguably, while cultural and social practices of dress can differ, the material and sensorial experiences of clothing can be considered as a common and uniting experience. Juliet Ash (1999: 128) explains how in connection to this commonality in material and sensorial experiences, part of the individual’s comprehension of bodiless garments is through a projection of their own experiences onto the garments. In the absence of bodies, clothing hold ‘several memories of clothes: as they have previously been represented [cultural, social, historical]; as they appear to us in our lives [personal, subjective]; and as imbued with memories themselves [material, sensorial]’ (Ash 1999: 128). The following reflection by Peter Stallybrass (2012) on a deceased friend’s jacket illustrates this sense of projected experience as he considers the material, sensorial and personal meaning imbued within worn clothing: I was inhabited by his presence, taken over. If I wore the jacket, Allon wore me. He was there in the wrinkles of the elbows, wrinkles that in the technical jargon of sewing are called ‘memory’; he was there in the stains at the very bottom of the jacket; he was there in the smell of the armpits. Above all he was there in the smell. (Stallybrass 2012: 186) Here Stallybrass suggests that the second skin, the clothing, acts as a sensory vessel for evoking memory and creating a personal engagement with the object.

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The use of the sensorial, within the installation design of Collective Collection and From Home, With Love, aims to connect the participant to an intrinsically personal experience of clothing. Thus, while it is, on the one hand, a predefined, narrative-driven experience that is delivered by the same means to multiple participants, there is also an expectation that each participant would experience the installation subjectively, within the privacy of the audio headphones. Ultimately, it is the participant who directs the work through their personal lens of experiences. The participant, as Ash (1999) suggests, projects their own contextual meaning and experience into the installation. This expectation is supported by Maaike Bleeker, who suggests that a ‘seer’ combines what they think they see with subjective experience to augment and extend the scenography (2008: 18). For example, in From Home, With Love, the objects and clothing in the installation represented the distant past. Conventionally, the garments in the display would be considered the ghosts, as discussed by Wilson (1987: 1). However, in the context of From Home, With Love, the participants wear and inhabit the garments while being told an evocative and personal history of the clothing itself. Through this inversion of dominant fashion and clothing display models, in which the audience steps into another skin – of architecture and clothing – and thus inhabits the story and memory of the garment, the idea of the garments as ghosts is inverted. This is captured by a participant reflecting on their experience in Collective Collection: Garments were quite literally strewn about the house and an audio delivered through headsets immersed guests in an experience blending snippet of people’s past with the rooms within Franklin Villa. It was quite surreal watching people wearing headsets, gliding silently from one room to the next, crossing paths with others without acknowledgement for fear of missing part of the experience being relayed through the headset. (Participant feedback, Collective Collection)

As this excerpt suggests, in this work the participants themselves potentially become the ‘gliding’ ghosts of the house, while the created characters and the clothing become the ‘real’ inhabitants of Franklin Villa. This subjectivity was played with throughout the audio guidance, which culminated in the attic of the four-story house with the instruction to remove the headset and listen to the laughter, music and conversation of the launch party occurring on a below balcony that occupied participants as they awaited their turn as if it was an extension of the soundtrack. In this manner, a combination of subjective interpretation and physical presence, the participant becomes a collaborator in the installation. In From Home, With Love the audio draws the wearers’ attention to the material qualities of the garment while they wear this second skin, such as the heavy weight of the army jacket on the participant’s shoulders and the importance of this for warmth during cold nights in the trenches. In these instances, the personal, the sensorial and the collective historical memory of the First World War are woven together, bringing the garment to life. McKinney and Palmer argue that awareness of the agentic capacity of materials is a defining concept of extended scenography (2017: 8) and this attention to material details was replicated in the other two tableaux, bringing the participants’ attention to the wear and tear on the apron, or the time consuming tight knitting of the handmade socks. In this way, the sensory elements of physical interactions with these objects and clothing can bring the relevance of the past into the experience of the present, and create an immersive experience for the participant in the installation.

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Participation in design and fashion British installation designer Onkar Kular applies the term ‘speculative design’ to his interactive works, which employ specific triggers to stimulate participant’s engagement through speculation, reflection and debate. Employing a participatory design model, he posits that ‘key to speculative design is that it is open ended; where the final result is not fully anticipated by the designer, but seen as the response given by the user or audience’ (Kular in Russell 2016: 110–11). In the Stitchery Collective’s work, the speculative triggers are delivered through the audio narrative and are intended to engage with the participant’s introspective experience of clothing, through prompting reflection and nostalgia. Through the device of storytelling and more direct trigger questions, participants are invited to interpret and hence, as Kular suggests, become a collaborator in the experience (in Russell 2016: 110–11). Furthermore, Kular implies that ‘the museum and gallery working in this context [of Speculative Design] may no longer function simply to display artifacts and objects, but become active agents’ (Kular in Russell 2016: 110–11) in what Gillian Russell calls embodied criticality, ‘A living-out situation, where meaning is not a predetermined element of a work but instead generated through a performative function that takes in the present’ (Russell 2016: 107). Like that of Kular, the Stitchery Collective’s work is emblematic of a change in approach within the gallery and museum. While not conceived through a model of participatory design, the Stitchery Collective’s work does focus on the participant’s individual experience and story, and this participant-centric approach within the installations are consistent with much of the ideology that underpins participatory design, including speculative design. According to design theory, participatory design requires the direct involvement of ‘people in the co-design of the artefacts, processes and environments that shape their lives’ (Robertson and Simonsen 2012: 2). Emerging from information technology design, early participatory design set a precedent for the active inclusion of end-users in the design process, enabling users both democratically and educationally. This inclusion has since become widespread in many different areas of design (Iversen et al. 2012; Robertson and Simonsen 2012). Robertson and Simonsen (2012: 2) define participants as typically undertaking ‘the two principal roles of users and designers where the designers strive to learn the realities of the users’ situation while the users strive to articulate their desired aims and learn appropriate technological means to obtain them’. Using these terms of designer and user in a very general sense, they acknowledge the contestable nature of this division, as during the design process these roles can be frequently blurred. An interesting correlation between these ideas and that of the Stitchery Collective’s installations can be seen when contextualized within the history of fashion’s participatory models. These include the various overlaps and divisions of the designer and user, or consumer roles. Indeed, when related to contemporary fashion history, this increased blurring of roles has been present since the midtwentieth century. This is particularly evident in the development of subcultural style groups since the 1960s (Hebdige 1979). Fashion scholar Barbara Vinken refers to this contemporary period as postfashion, and argues that one of the signifiers of the postfashion era is the ‘co-production between the créateur and those who wear the clothes’ (2005: 35). For Vinken, the individual creatively acts through their clothing choices, commonly a ‘carnivalistic’ mash-up of designer, mass-produced and thrifted items (2005: 64), as well as their styling and altering of garments. Of particular interest is an individual’s ability to act creatively and independently, both inside and outside of the homogenized choices offered in the fashion mass market. While the designer is still present, fashionable clothing is developed on a much more individual and participatory level.

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The egalitarian postfashion model correlates neatly with the Stitchery Collective’s history of practice, which values individual style and connections with clothing. The traversing of the user/maker roles has been a standard component of many of the public engagement projects undertaken by the Stitchery Collective. In the installation works, this user-centric model of postfashion manifests in a heightened valuing of the everyday lived experience of clothing as well as the participant’s role as a collaborator in the work, rather than focusing on the Stitchery Collective as a designer in the installation or pattern range. Sustainability scholar Kate Fletcher argues that ‘while the goal of participatory design is to devolve the role of the creator and promote action and participation in users’ (2012: 194), a by-product of participatory design is the enriched object value. The Collective Collection as a range of purchasable patterns encouraged a clear participatory approach between the Stitchery Collective as créateur and those who will make and wear the clothes. Dressmaking, as a craft, allows the individual wearer to have creative direction and expression through the selection of fabric, colour, fit and trim. This required the wearer to have adequate knowledge of (and competency in) fashion, style and some of the technicalities of dressmaking. To support this, the pattern range was designed to include more and less technically complex sewing projects. Fletcher points to the user’s tactile experience of an object as a key to increasing the understanding, valuing and meaning of an object (2012: 194). While many contemporary individuals are not as technically savvy in the manufacture of clothing as in previous generations, the encouragement to make their version of the garments displayed in the installation allows them to display their own aesthetic and cultural understanding in their choices. This all compounds to devolve the role of the designer, placing emphasis once again on the individual wearer/user. Parallel to Viniken’s discussions of postfashion, a similar de-hierachialization was occurring in the field of scenography where the shift to the post-dramatic de-hierarchized practice was allowing, or even requiring, participants to take an active part, and often had a focus on reimagining existing social structures (McKinney and Palmer 2017: 5–8). Following this, the interpretive role of the participant is accentuated. For the works under discussion, the installation’s layering of sensory elements, storytelling, the domestic realm and speculative audio triggers expand the participant experience and meaningmaking the work undertakes.

Conclusion The Stitchery Collective’s installation works Collective Collection (2014) and From Home, With Love (2015) are immersive, focusing on a solo participant experience that evokes memory recall and subsequent emotional engagement. Although similar in form, there are distinct differences between the two works. The Collective Collection (2014) was an audio-based, immersive, site-specific work held in a historic four-storey Queenslander in the iconic Brisbane suburb of Highgate Hill. Collective Collection emerged primarily as an organic creative process exploring fashion display design and engagement, with the site informing many of the creative, and staging, decisions. Reflecting on Loschek’s notion of clothing and architecture as a second and third skin (2009: 17), the site was of pivotal importance in creating immersion and emotional engagement for the participant. From Home, With Love (2015) was also an immersive audio work; however, it was site generic in form – commissioned for an exhibition celebrating the centenary of the First World War and the stories of

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Queenslanders. This installation was more designed and manufactured in form than Collective Collection; however, it drew directly from the form and purpose of Collective Collection, inviting participants to engage and interpret through their experience of the clothing and space. In this work key signifiers of comfort and domesticity were an integral part of the purpose-built design, bringing the homely to the institutional gallery space. In the absence of a rich architectural third skin, Loschek’s notion of clothing as a second skin (2009: 17) was the key to immersion in From Home, With Love (2015) as we asked participants to literally step into another’s clothing (a soldier’s jacket, a nurse’s apron, a hand-knitted sock), thereby creating a vessel for remembering. Within these installations, the design of space and presentation acted as contextualizing factors to how clothes were experienced. By identifying two forms of audience experience, clothing as dead and clothing as lived, this chapter proposes that space and presentation can be specifically designed to generate an intimate engagement between audiences and bodiless clothes. Through the use of immersive, sensory and interactive modes of experiencing fashion and clothing, Collective Collection (2014) and From Home, With Love (2015) attempted to connect participants to a lived, sensory experience of clothes and spaces. In doing so, the installations pushed a deeper engagement between the participant, the clothing and the space, instilling the material objects with more meaning than a traditional fashion parade, or fashion museum context. By considering these installations through the lens of Loschek’s ‘skin’ theory (2009: 17), it can be suggested that clothing and the domestic environment are, through extension, part of the totality of the body and self, and hence innately manifest ideas of human memory and presence.

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References Ash, J. (1999), ‘The Aesthetics of Absence: Clothes without People in Paintings’, in A. De La Haye and E. Wilson (eds), Defining Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning and Identity, 128–42, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bachelard, G. (1994), Poetics of Space, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Barnard, M. (1996), Fashion as Communication, London & New York, NY: Routledge. Bell, Q. (1978), On Human Finery, 2nd edn, New York, NY: Schocken. Bleeker, M. (2008), Visuality in the Theatre, London: Routledge. Clark, J. and A. De La Haye, with J. Horsley (2014), Exhibiting Fashion: Before and after 1971, New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press. de Perthuis, K. (2016), ‘Darning Mark’s Jumper; Wearing Love and Sorrow’, Cultural Studies Review, 22 (1): 59–77. Entwistle, J. (2015), The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, 2nd edn, Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Entwistle, J. and E. Wissinger (2006), ‘Keeping Up Appearances: Aesthetic Labour in the Fashion Modelling Industries of London and New York’, Sociological Review, 54 (4): 774–94. Fletcher, K. (2012), Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys, London: Earthscan. Harvie, J. (2005), Staging the UK, Manchester: Manchester United Press. Hebdige, D. (1979), Subculture: The Meaning of Style, New York, NY, London, UK: Routledge. Iversen, O. S., K. Halskov and T. W. Leong (2012), ‘Values-led Participatory Design’, Co-Design Journal, 8 (2–3): 87–103. Loschek, I. (2009), When Clothes Become Fashion: Design and Innovation Systems, Oxford and New York: Berg. McKinney, J. and S. Palmer (2017), Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design, London: Bloomsbury. Navarro, H. (2014), ‘Fashion as Public Art: Strengthening Communities through Site-Specific Fashion Collections’, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, 1 (3): 445–57. Pels, P. (1998), ‘The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy’, in P. Spyer (ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, 91–120, New York, NY: Routledge. Robertson, T and J. Simonsen (2012), Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design, London: Taylor and Francis. Russell, G. (2016), ‘Curating Critical Design: An Embodied Criticality’, in L. Farrelly and J. Weddell (eds), Design Objects and the Museum, 107–11, New York, NY and London: Bloomsbury. Simmel, G. (1957), ‘Fashion’, The American Journal of Sociology, 62 (6): 541–58. Skov, L., E. Skjold, B. Moeran, F. Larsen and F. F. Csaba (2009), ‘The Fashion Show as an Art Form’, in Creativity at Work, Creative Encounters Working Papers Series, 38. Copenhagen: Creative Encounters. http://www​.cbs​ .dk​/creativeencounters. Stallybrass, P. (2012), ‘Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things’, in J. Hemmings (ed.), The Textile Reader, 68–77, London and New York: Berg. The Stitchery Collective. 2014, December 10. Collective Collection [installation]. Franklin Villa, Brisbane. The Stitchery Collective. 2015, June 6 - July 26. From Home, With Love [installation] as part of the Distant Lines Exhibition. SLQ Gallery, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane. Vinken, B. (2005), Fashion Zeitgeist, Oxford: Berg. Wilson, E. (1987), Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: Virago Press. Winter, S. (2014), ‘The Monadic Environment: Evoking Emotion and Memory in Participatory Performance’, PhD diss., Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. Available online: http:​/​/epr​​ints.​​qut​.e​​du​.au​​/7868​​4​/2​/ S​​arah%​​20Win​​ter​%2​​​0Exeg​​esis.​​pdf (accessed August 20, 2019).

PART TWO

ARCHITECTURE AND CITY This part of the book approaches the physical aspect of the fashion show and its space, as it is played out in architecture and the city. The city, its architecture and spaces act as a backdrop for fashion. Not only does the city provide a stage for everyday fashion transactions, but it is also a central aspect of the consolidation of certain labels whose brand story is connected to particular cities that are part of the global chain of fashion. Buildings and city spaces are more than mere inspiration for designers or potential sites for avant-garde performance. Built heritage, dismissed warehouses and brute modern space embed tangible and intangible values that intersect with the history of locales and their cultural and aesthetic condition. Marissa Lindquist looks at the interplay of architectural space, the material and immaterial viewed through the lens of 1960s minimalist art and its contemporary reflection within the fashion show, bringing the condition of spectator and models to the fore. Per Strömberg looks at the value of warehouses, derelict factories and abandoned subway stations as spaces that while adhering to modernist avantgarde ideas of the readymade, also participate in the commercialization of fashion through a circular economy of reuse. Anne Peirson-Smith and Jennifer Craik’s discussion of Hong Kong deals with the rising success of Hong Kong as a global fashion capital. The authors look at the way in which lately Hong Kong has focused on localized design and business within historic locales, by supporting spaces for emerging designers and pop-up shops. Grant Klarich Johnson focuses on the work of Koolhaas/OMA and their collaboration with Prada. Here the constancy of material space (brute concrete) for Prada’s shows provides opportunities to blend material and performative boundaries and provides a complex and diffused viewing experience. Finally, Dirk Gindt and John Potvin provide a review of the fashion/ performance collaborations between Giorgio Armani and Robert Wilson. Their analysis of Armani and Wilson’s collaborations stretches across three sites, where among other tactics, tableaux vivants and the inverted ‘catwalk’ provide new experiences for the viewing public.

7 ‘IT’S A SENSATION’ SPACE AND AFFECT WITHIN THE FASHION SHOW Marissa Lindquist

Introduction In 2011, Christian Borch hosted a conversation with Gernot Böhme, Olafur Eliasson and Juhani Pallasmaa to unpack key thoughts on atmosphere, art and architecture (Borch et al., 2014). The meeting was a collection of creative minds known for their theories and practices which hinge on sensation and space. The discussion focused upon conditions of affect, temporality and the capacity of materials to dilate spatial atmospheres or mobilize new levels of engagement within space. Interest in these material and immaterial transactions appears to have been taken up recently in haute couture shows which explore the collaborative potential of spatial artists and designers. Frequently, these shows are described as sublime, conveying the ineffable affective dimension experienced not just in the sartorial ingenuity on display, but also through the show’s total mise en scène. Contemporary artists operating in this milieu undoubtedly take their lead from the work of artists such as Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, James Turrell and experimental film directors operating within the 1960s and 1970s. These early experimental works sought to challenge the notion of art, and shift the way artforms were encountered and perceived. While generally reductive, anti-emotive and disparate in position, many of the works ranging from three-dimensional architectonic objects to assemblages in fluorescent light, imbued material or immaterial conditions towards the viewer, their bodies and, indeed, the broader exhibition space. The generative field of these installations undoubtedly affected a deeper perceptual awareness and physical consciousness of art and its space. This chapter looks back upon key fashion designers of the 1960s onwards, and how they engaged in similar experimental approaches (light, form and body) within their shows, reflecting the new material and societal shifts significant to the era. This analysis will form a background from which to review recent shows by Yohji Yamamoto, Prada and Marc Jacobs, and how they employ aesthetic staging to similar

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effect, calling to mind the contemporary work of Dan Flavin, Michael Heizer and Olafur Eliasson. The aim of the chapter is to draw attention to these approaches which seek to engage the viewer, their bodies and space in different ways as a means to meditate upon the creative production of haute couture away from the conspicuous consumption of hyper-mediatized fashion and its display. The paper uses Gernot Böhme’s exploration into the production of atmospheres (1993, 2017) to lead into the paper, whereby staging of receptive materials, sound, light and the perceiving body become critical agents within the production and experience of the show.

Atmosphere Atmosphere has preoccupied Gernot Böhme since his early focus in aesthetics. Atmosphere, in its various guises and iterations, has been a central theme for aesthetics, phenomenology and theorists of material phenomena, from Edmund Burke’s sublime (1757) to Martin Heidegger’s stimmung or mood ([1927] 1996). One of Böhme’s first reflections on atmosphere, as a new theory of aesthetics, was concerned with the ‘relation between environmental qualities and human states’ (Böhme 1993: 114). Here, he focused on atmosphere’s indeterminacy, noting that one has the ‘impression that “atmosphere” is meant to indicate something, difficult to express . . . something beyond rational explanation’ (1993: 113). Böhme’s observation ostensibly attunes to Edmund Burke’s position on the sublime, formulated over two hundred years earlier in the mid-eighteenth century (Burke and Boulton [1757] 2008). The sublime is worthy of exploration here given its repeated use to underscore the production notes of contemporary fashion shows. While Böhme’s concept motions towards something difficult to describe, Burke’s sublime evoked an irresistible force blocking reason, and knowable only in physiological terms as stages of encounter and states of intensities (such as magnificence, terror and wonder) (Burke and Boulton [1757] 2008). Böhme theorizes atmosphere more generally and accessibly within the context of the everyday, designating affective distinctions in relation to how objects, environments and subjects are perceived and received. More recently, his theory has shifted with greater focus towards spatiality and the constructed arts finding rapport with architectural practitioners and their theories: Juhani Pallasmaa’s Encounters (Pallasmaa and MacKeith 2005, 2012) and Peter Zumthor’s Atmospheres (Zumthor 2006) who champion the affective possibilities of architectural experience. Böhme believes that atmospheres are not just received or perceived by us but also produced (Borch et al. 2014: 91) and so pose questions that spatial designers should undoubtedly concern themselves with: How do you make atmosphere? This is something difficult to achieve given that in his mind atmosphere ‘is not a thing, rather a floating in-between’ (Böhme 2013: 3). It is within the field of fashion and the staging of the fashion show that Böhme’s question has considerable relevance. In putting forth this position, which considers both the production and reception of atmosphere, he points to the generative capacity of designed space and the materials within them to effect atmosphere, from interiors, to architectural and urban space, but more specifically the affective dimensions made possible by scenography, or the ‘stage set’ (Böhme and Engels-Schwarzpaul 2017: 158). The productive aspect of staging renders atmosphere quasi-objective and intersubjective (Böhme 2013: 3), in that it is generated in objective material terms, but also conceivable as a shared experience. The general act of staging in theatre production or large-scale events is seen as an opportunity to engage in the productive force of ‘atmosphere’, whereby the audience is tuned in as it were through

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form, space, light and sound. Atmosphere is thus seen not as a mode of shaping objects, but through which to create openings where phenomena can emerge, rendering a sense of ‘felt presence’ within space (Böhme and Engels-Schwarzpaul 2017: 70). In this chapter, therefore, I look more closely at the staging of the fashion show and the construction of atmosphere. This enquiry considers the impact that technology and the arts of the 1960s and 1970s (Meyer 2001; Dimant and Costa 2010) had upon fashion when, as Caroline Evans suggests, the fashion show shifted to resemble the shows we know today (Evans 2001: 295). The exploration of key minimal artists and their conceptual focus upon materiality, form, perception and bodily acts provides opportunities to investigate the staging of productive atmospheres (Olafur Eliasson in Borsch et al. 2014: 93) within the space of the fashion show. Through understanding minimalism, fashion and modernity’s interrelationship, we can begin to understand the resurgence of these aesthetic tendencies within the contemporary fashion show, and how it, together with the cooperation of the fashion garments and the audience, helps to engender new bodily and spatial experiences. Significant studies into fashion, such as those by Christopher Breward (1995, 2003), Valerie Steele (1997), Pamela Church-Gibson and Stella Bruzzi (2013), and Caroline Evans (2001, 2003), have focused upon the relationships between modern life and the fashion world. In Swinging Sixties: Fashion in London and Beyond 1955-1970 (Breward, Gilbert and Lister 2006), ChurchGibson (Church-Gibson 2006) and others discuss the sweeping influence new media brought to the production and display of fashion. They list the impact of cinema, new architecture, contemporary arts and performance, as opening up modes of consumption, taste and an aesthetic shift in fashion. The space of the city is portrayed as the brave new world which co-depicts fashion and the new urban landscape as generators for new modes of living. The fresh lines of the modern and brute city are showcased extensively through burgeoning new media (television, film and print) and employed as a live backdrop and quasi-runway in many arts/fashion features of the era. For example, art critic Elyssa Dimant (Dimant and Costa 2010) describes the use of the high-rise Pan Am building, which exemplified architect Walter Gropius’s modernist theories, as backdrop to Guy Bourdin’s model shoot for French Vogue in 1966 (Dimant and Costa 2010: 22). The impact of the new world, performance, movement and architecture was a central influence to avant-garde couturiers of the time, most evidently in the designs of Yves Saint Laurent and the futuristic ready-to-wear fashion of André Courrèges, who noted that: Now a-days you walk more slowly, you run a lot more, you get out of cars, and dances in modern life have changed a great deal too . . . and I thought that would add something, to add something more lively than clothes that were static, but to show them with the exaggerated movement of the dance. . . . Always relationships between forms, colours and volumes . . . . Every time I find myself in front of works by Corbusier or Kandinsky, or an airport by Saarinen, in front of modern furniture, and it moves me. (BBC 2016 [Transcription]) Though the dramatic changes in the production of art throughout this era are referenced by couturiers and designers as generators of new fashion (such as the earlier developments of constructivism, de Stijl, futurism and pop art), minimalism’s aesthetic had a profound reach beyond just reductionist form. It democratized and streamlined fashion, interiors, product and furniture design, indelibly influencing the conceptualization, construction and performance of the fashion show itself.

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Primary Structures Emerging from post-war tradition and conformity, the rise of the ‘Mods’ in the late 1950s was transformative for European and American culture throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In London, the Tate and Whitechapel Galleries brought to the UK new experimental themes entertained by America’s and Britain’s growing appetite for popular culture. Whitechapel Gallery’s This Is Tomorrow exhibition held in 1956 merged architectural and artistic aesthetics derived from influences of constructivism, found art and symbols of popular culture. Cheryl Buckley (2007) has noted that it was the birthplace of pop and ‘a celebration of American mass culture and a technological future . . . occupying a seminal position in British art – [it] also played a pivotal role in helping to reorient design in the late 1950s and ‘60s’ (Buckley 2007: 147). The exhibition included works by the Independent Group and Team 10 architects Alison and Peter Smithson. The Smithsons challenged notions of conventional artistic values by promoting ‘bizarre or anti-aesthetic images . . . that flouted humanistic conventions of beauty’ (Banham 1966: 61). Their House of the Future proposed a new model for living, displaying technologically defined continuous interiors fabricated with mass producible preformed plastic linings, which was to have an incremental impact within the new consumer society and modern home life. In 1966, a group of young American and British artists came together to produce an unprecedented exhibition of art works which exemplified a shift in the focus of art. Primary Structures: Younger American and British Artists (1966), presented within New York’s Jewish Museum, was a collective essay of new materiality which denounced the existing canons associated with art. The work focused upon the properties of materials and immaterial matter in and of themselves, composed of simple geometric architectonic forms of new materials such as plastic, aluminium, fibreglass and steel, brightly coloured or revealing material truths. The immaterial included investigations of the luminance produced by monotone colour and tubular light, made possible by the innovations in fluorescent tubing and lighting the decade before. The exhibition included the works of Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin among others, and became a showcase for the new minimalist aesthetic in the world. Art historian James Meyer in Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001) notes that Primary Structures was a survey of recent work, and the sixties art looked different. Compared to the relational and quasifigurative sculptures of the fifties . . . .The Primary Structure had smooth, shiny surfaces of fibreglass and sheet metal, simplified geometries and bright colour. Sized to the viewers’ body and the gallery space, it promoted a different sense of scale . . . the new sculpture explored typically architectural concerns. (Meyer 2001: 24) Meyer (2001) and Dimant (Dimant and Costa 2010) note that Donald Judd’s minimalist manifesto ‘Specific Objects’ (1965) created a public discourse for the minimalist tenet. Dimant observes that ‘Judd’s minimalist structures, grounded by pre-existent tectonic formations, echoed the larger visual tendency of the 1960s to reduce’ (Dimant and Costa 2010: 32). The minimal works expelled the typical sculptural pedestal and rendered pictorialism irrelevant by engaging directly with the space of the gallery, emphasizing the works scale, autonomy and physical spatial presence as works within and of themselves. As Meyer points out throughout Minimalism, not all artists of Primary Structures concurred with this pure reductive approach (Meyer 2001). Dan Flavin engaged with the physical presence and

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phenomenal limitlessness of lamp light (Meyer 2001: 105), Robert Morris engaged with psychological or gestalt dimensions (Meyer 2001: 158) and Carl Andre explored serial installation, drawing focus towards the horizontal field of the floor ‘as a formal organisation’ (Meyer 2001: 194). Within Primary Structures, Dan Flavin’s work corner monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (for *P.K. who reminded me about death), created earlier in 1964, employed four florescent tubes arrayed at eye level fixed to the corner of the Gallery 1. The installation emanated an expansive red glow which immersed both viewer and space, reasserting the relationship between space, installation and the viewing body. This work preceded later sensory experimentation with fluorescent luminance which would consume Flavin over the proceeding decades. Robert Morris’s ‘L-beams’ (66–67) in Gallery 5, presented two 8-foot fibreglass L beams in disarray as a means to call focus on the reductive art process and new scales and materials which could affect bodily perception. Meyer views this minimalist outlook as emerging conterminously in the design and visual arts as ‘the minimal look’ (2001: 24). He refers to the take-up of minimalism in Harper’s Bazaar following Primary Structures’ closing show, under titles such as ‘The New Dazzling Directness’ or ‘The X Factor in Art’, and was ‘viewed as a “culture sell”, whereby a product’s image could be upgraded by associating it with the most advanced culture . . . projects by these artists gave the magazine a sexy edge and avant-garde appeal’ (Meyer 2001: 29). Robert Morris continued to engage with body, movement and perception with the later Tate Exhibition Robert Morris (1971), where the Turbine Hall was transformed into a contemplative arena (Compton [1971] in Floe 2014) for museum goers to explore material forms, inclined platforms and spheres at varying scales. It was a means of making people ‘physically aware’ by engaging participants through bodily interaction, creating a sensation and uncanny atmosphere within the space of the museum. These works focused on displaced forms brought together through materiality of the everyday. The Robert Morris exhibition was largely built upon the new minimalist ideals, and Morris’s earlier engagement with choreograph at the Judson Dance theatre, New York. In an interview for the Tate (Grant 2008), Morris also referenced the influence of his dancer wife Simone Forti, in that ‘her strategic structural investigations involving the use of one set of things to generate results entirely different from the first set of intentions’ affected his work with objects and spaces (Grant 2008). The exhibition opened up opportunities to move and engage in unprecedented ways in keeping with the new ways of living and behaving possible in the 1960s and 1970s.

Fashion, performance, luminance The impact of the late 1950s fashion on contemporary life through designers such as Mary Quant and André Courrèges is well documented. Their engagement with modern themes of form, performance and space raised by contemporary artists and the performative and spatial manner with which the designers staged their fashion shows demand further study. Research on Mary Quant’s revolutionary and, indeed, democratic influence upon fashion mode and fashion retail (her Bazaar Salon, for example) is exhaustive if not by Mary Quant’s own biographical work Quant by Quant (1966) and Mary Quant My Autobiography (2012). Quant was a product of an artistic world – a graduate of Goldsmiths in the late 1950s – and the scene of contemporary arts practice in Britain, including artists such as Bridget Riley, John Cale and later Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. With husband Alexander Plunket Green, she was viewed as

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the undisputed Queen of the Chelsea set (Melly 2005), a mod collective made up of socialites, actors, film directors, musicians and contemporary artists. By the mid-1960s Quant was synonymous with Swinging London, part of an expanding arts scene which included the likes of David Hockney, Peter Blake and contemporary sculpture artists who exhibited in White Chapel and the Tate (Melia 1995). Immersion within this artistic melange and engagement of new materials and new behaviours underpinned Quant’s designs for garments. Her designs which ‘suited the actions of normal life’ have been credited by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, as one of the first to use PVC in fashion (V&A 2016). This engagement and experimentation with form and scale extended to the settings of her fashion shows and exposés. In her 1967 fashion exposé she shows a suite of models in minis and PVC boots atop a matching plastic bleacher stage set (British Pathé 2011). The models engage their bodies in unusual ways, legs splayed in many directions. One model is lying on her back immersed in the staging itself with only legs revealed. Another model with watering can acts to water the legs as if to bring something new to life. In the same year, another fashion shoot involves models in mini dresses and opaque tights bouncing onto the catwalk with a number of stylized thick white plastic rings. The models play a game of rolling the rings back and forth to one another, followed by other models unzipping and zipping mini dresses (ITN 1967). These acts exemplified a differing relation between materials and bodies within the fashion show and the new zeitgeist of freedom pervading society. At the same time André Courrèges was also changing the way in which haute couture garments were worn and presented, attracting the eye of Roland Barthes. Emerging from the salon of Balenciaga in the late 1950s, Courrèges’s take of new minimalism and futuristic visions inspired by space was represented not just in the materials used in his collections, such as those launched for his Couture Future in 1967, but also in the design of his White Salon and studio, where his collections were first displayed (Evans 2001: 297). Originally a student of engineering and fan of modernist architecture, his own studio functioned like an open plan command centre – with cylindrical copper kitchen forming the central pivot. Archival video footage and images (Paris Match Archive 1969) of Courrèges’s late 1960s fashion shows reveal a co-partnering of fashion and salon interior, played out in a minimalist composition incorporating both curved and rectilinear white walls as stage set, and audience areas fitted with white soft vinyl plinths with full mirrored background. Similar to Quant, the staging of the designer’s fashion show and photo shoots included models jumping akimbo within the all-white interior, futuristic props such as space cars, or white fringe style curtains enabling the model’s body to appear and disappear with unusual effect. Courrèges played off the volume and space of architecture within his couture designs, seeking ‘the perfect balance between volumes and movement’ (Courrèges 2018). Courrèges’s trademark white garments were frequently accented by vivid colours and silvers conveying the vibrancy of contemporary life and optimism for the future. At the time Barthes referred to the couturiers’ models as ‘fresh, full of colour or coloured, dominated by white through the new’ (Barthes 1967), an unusual phrase, as if affecting a new luminance. Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani noted that Courrèges reinvented women and ‘projected her into space age’ with ‘organic volumes designed with ruler and compasses, geometric cuts in white or silver, neon flashes by Dan Flavin’ (Sozzani 2012). Courrèges metallic ‘space age’ fashion presented new receptive materials, reflecting innovations in lighting analogous with Dan Flavin’s radiant experimental light fields. Dimant (Dimant and Costa 2010) suggests that although the proto-futurist offshoot of minimalism was outmoded by the end of the 1960s, the synthesized vocabulary of ‘geometric composition, disciplined reductivity, monochromism and pedestrian accessibility of the style would endure as mainstays of a minimalist undercurrent in sculpture, architecture, decorative arts and, of course fashion’ (2010: 40).

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The contemporary fashion show In the past twenty years there has been an upsurge of fashion couturiers and designers collaborating with renowned artists, from print and colour design, fashion accessories and fashion media, to much more fundamental collaborations in fashion as surveyed in Fashion and Art (Geczy and Karaminas 2012) and Art: Fashion in the 21st Century (Oakley Smith et al. 2013). Leading museums and art galleries convene almost yearly exhibitions of haute couture designers and their various artistic collaborations and experimental intentions. Partnerships between the arts and fashion is not new, Mondrian for Yves Saint Laurent (1965), Dali for Schiaparelli (1969) and more recently Damien Hirst for McQueen (2013) are well known. However, the scope has broadened to spatial contexts of fashion retail environments, fashion exhibitions and the fashion show (both real and the virtual), bridging inter-relational possibilities for fashion, art and architectural space once more. While in the late 1970s to early 2000s, the fashion world witnessed a theatricality and spectacle of the fashion show which drew from cinematic and performative themes, a turn in more recent years to affect and materiality staged within brute space has become more pronounced. This shift underlines a new criticality within fashion to align with notions of authenticity while at the same time reflects a greater interest concerning fashion and its relation to the human condition. Arguably, it is an attempt to push fashion away from the reproducible to the more critical level of the arts, as Grant Johnson notes: Installation art has been critically recognized as a form apparently more resistant to Benjaminian issues of reproduction, and thus, apparently also resistant to commoditisation. Often engaging sound and other senses beyond sight, firsthand experience of an installation ostensibly resists reproduction as an image or textual account. Like the fashion show, it seems to structurally insist (more than painting or sculpture) on the presence of the viewer at its original presentation. . . . It is ‘site-specific’, bound to a certain place at a certain time and thus to a fixed audience of viewers. (Johnson 2015: 325) The significance of installation within fashion has been the focus of an in-depth study by Adam Geczy and Vicky Karaminas (2019) where they draw attention to the body, space and performance of fashion displays and shows. Oakley Smith et al. (2013) highlight the work of fashion designers Hussein Chalayan, Viktor and Rolf, and Henrik Vibskov who collapse fashion and the fashion show into art. These designers use the catwalk, as they put it, to ‘convey deeper messages about transmutation . . . to fully integrate the body into the artwork that is the garment . . . raising the question of whether the act of simply wearing fashion is itself a form of art’ (Oakley Smith et al. 2013: 17). The fashion show in this instance remains critical as an experiential site where a haptic staging of garments, bodies and effects generates productive atmospheres. In the following section, I focus briefly upon three fashion houses and their shows, Yohji Yamamoto, Prada and Marc Jacobs, whose respective creative collaborations have been instrumental in transitioning the experience of the fashion show to draw upon the bodily and the affective to transcend a more intimate, considered state between audience, space and fashion.

Movement, sand, light Yohji Yamamoto’s entry onto the world fashion scene in the early 1980s has been revered as a complete disruption of European haute couture. Together with Rei Kawakubo, they induced a new wave of fashion

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which placed greater emphasis upon materiality and construction, and towards the interactive space between body and cloth in ways that had not been seen before. Yamamoto’s approach has been recognized extensively as deconstructionist (Gill 1998, English 2013a; 2013b), reflective of the dominant thinking emerging from the 1970s across the globe, particularly so in the field of architecture and art. Deconstructivism relied on the breaking down of elements and engagement with indeterminancy often through the manipulation of space, open programming and superimposition. Central to Yamamoto’s oeuvre has been an intense admiration for essence of materials, as observed by Wim Wenders in the documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothes (Yamamoto and Felsberg 2003). He revels in their inherent ‘feel’, and the ‘ability to dwell deeply upon the complexities of the world and the human condition which manifest in his garments and the performance of his shows’ (Lindquist 2019). The production design of his shows is minimal and austere, designed within spaces such as Centre Pompidou, Theatre National de Chaillot, Trocadero and more frequently brute industrial spaces such as La Halle Pajo. Through his long-term collaboration with scenographer and lighting designer, Masao Nihei, Yohji Yamamoto has been able to transform the display of his garments performatively, capturing moments of light, darkness, material and mood. Yohji Yamamoto’s 1996 autumn/winter show in New York dramatically shifted his runway approach, opting for a square stage without catwalk, programmed directly on the bare floor. Models ventured onto the stage indeterminately in an asymmetric movement somewhat replaying the sartorial asymmetry revealed throughout the collection. This engagement with movement allowed the body to be viewed at many angles, with Yohji’s constructed spatial garments and their sculptural openings concealing and revealing the line of the body as they passed speechless onlookers. The New York show was a sensation, presenting couture as a ‘theatre in the round’ approach, exploiting and performing minimalist space to focus spectators’ gaze upon garment, form, body, poise and movement. Like the synthesized structures and found objects of Primary Structures, scaffolding and light appear to have become a signature backdrop for Yohji Yamamoto’s collection displays. Scaffolding has been used in his shows since the late 1980s, pairing frequently with severe yet sombre qualities of empty brute space that he selects to display his collections. Many of his shows at the turn of the millennium used fields of illuminated scaffolding installed within the show’s space to create a phenomenal dimension to the collection. In a manner similar to that of Dan Flavin, these light installations permeated a spatial reverence while drawing focus upon the texture and tailoring of what could be described as Yamamoto’s experimental noir garments. Light and scaffold installations have also informed the setting for his exhibitions such as the 2011 V&A Exhibition Yohji Yamamoto (V&A 2011), and have re-emerged in more recent shows such as Paris 2012 autumn/winter, where scaffolding is arrayed asymmetrically within the runway space and painted red suggesting an emerging thresholding, mystery and intimacy (Lindquist 2019). Yamamoto’s use of brute space and minimalist intervention appears to have set a trend for shows engaging with a pared-down yet productive atmosphere, exploiting the force of light, installation, material and movement, which have also informed the shows of Prada and Marc Jacobs. Prada has long been a contributor and patron of the arts. Fondazione Prada was established in 1993, with a mission to provide a territory for ‘free thinking’ through research and exhibitions of established and emerging artists (Fondazione Prada 2015). Its collections include contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Michael Heizer and many of the artists involved in the original Primary Structures exhibition such as Walter de Maria, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. Much of the exhibited work is site specific, and follows diverse genres of art including installation, the immaterial arts (sound, light, atmosphere), cinema, experimental film and architecture. More recently the foundation has worked with renowned architect

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Rem Koolhaas and his firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) for the development of their new premises in an existing distillery in the south of Milan (Fondazione Prada 2015). In conceiving the project, Koolhaas noted that the design of the Fondazione enabled permanent interaction, where ‘the complexity of the architecture will promote an unstable, open programming, where art and architecture will benefit from each other’s challenges’ (Fondazione Prada 2015). The design for Fondazione Prada, developed from a long-term relationship between Rem Koolhaas OMA/AMO and Prada through the design of their retail boutiques. OMA established AMO at the turn of the millennium, as an additional production arm to expand architectural work into the realm of media, fashion, communication and information, and has been the creative force behind many of Prada’s recent shows. Two of these shows, Prada Men’s and Women’s 2015 spring/summer and Prada Men’s and Women’s 2016 spring/summer fashion collections, exemplify Koolhaas’s ‘unstable’ open programming. Reductivist and devoid of referential art, the shows somehow exude Fondazione Prada’s quintessential taste for material, form and affect carried through much of their contemporary art collections. Prada’s Men’s and Women’s 2015 spring/summer show Outdoor/Indoor/Outdoor has been described by AMO as ‘investigating natural elements and their relationship to indoors’ to ‘explore new forms of experience of the space and of the show by the audience’ (OMA, 2014). The men’s show engaged with the pure geometry of a central pool divided by a simple ‘walkway’ which models circulated and traversed randomly, while the women’s show presented a compositional landscape of purple sand dunes, and determined a scattering of movement around its perimeter (Figure 7.1). In both shows, the

Figure 7.1  A model walks the runway at the Prada spring/summer 2015 fashion show during Milan Fashion Week, Milan, Italy, 2014. Photo by Antonio de Moraes Barros Filho/WireImage. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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models navigated these ‘outside landscapes’ producing a varied catwalk format, while the unusual juxtaposition and evident tension set between the installations and passing models created a different viewing experience for the audience. The ‘dune’ landscape of the women’s show in many ways conveyed a similar sensation to that of Carl Andre’s brick installation floor work of the early 1960s and 1970s. Correspondingly, the central pool in the men’s show recalled the power of works such as Michael Heizer’s North East South West (1967/2002). These installation works use familiar exterior materials displaced to the interior, and so brings a disturbance of expectation for the spectator – both at the time of first experiencing the scene when entering the brute space and as the models perform the catwalk. As OMA notes, ‘blue water and purple coloured sand invade the space, redefining the existing architecture elements, modifying proportions, turning the show into unexpected landscapes . . . the combination between the irregular sand volumes and the geometry of the tribunes modifies constantly the relationship between the spectators and the fashion’ (OMA 2014). Prada’s Men’s and Women’s spring/summer 2016 show Indefinite maintained this approach through the use of a static translucent ‘veil’ floating above the audience. It recalls the ephemeral, motion-based installation work of Rem Koolhaas’s long-time collaborator, Petra Blaisse. Petra Blaisse’s interest in the inside and outside, and their transactional affects to generate new experiences, was the key driver behind her work Re-set (2012) which was installed within the Dutch Pavilion of the 2012 Venice Biennale. Re-set (2012) revealed how the experience of space could be changed and charged by simple interventions, in this case a curtain flowing continuously throughout the interior, reconfiguring and reorganizing empty space into mutable spaces manipulated by ‘light, sound and space’ (Blaisse 2012). The 2016 Prada show evoked this transitional horizon, by exploiting the in-between, and the material difference of fixed polycarbonate illuminated and suspended above the existing brute space where audience, models and catwalk comingled. Like Re-set, the installation shifted the fashion show experience to one provoking a spatial and material awareness, and an attempt, as OMA notes, ‘to play with perceptions of continuous space’ (OMA 2015). The phenomenal conditions informed by key minimalist installations of the Primary Structures exhibition and consideration of the relationship between the work, the gallery space and indeed the viewing public present opportunities within Prada’s contemporary fashion shows to draw greater awareness to the spatial, material and immaterial dimensions of fashion and the temporal nature between the viewer/ spectator, the staged environment and the garments on display. It reflects Prada’s and undoubtedly Rem Koolhaas’s esteem for Fondazione artists such as those from Primary Structures, Michael Heizer and others, and their engagement with material and spatial affects. The staging of unexpected materials, external elements which collide with internal conditions and the phenomenal interplay of lightness and density set forth qualities which Böhme might define as ‘difficult to express’ but which is contingent upon the productive dialectic of the material and ephemeral, and the interrelationship between viewing and presenting bodies. These are qualities which can also be found in many of Marc Jacobs shows as he attempts to create a greater connection between viewers and his collections. Marc Jacobs is said to be a master of suggestion and mood, and has collaborated with artists of film, photography and print since 1990s, including Juergen Teller, Richard Prince, Stephen Sprouse and Takashi Murakami while the creative director at Louis Vuitton. In 2005, Louis Vuitton collaborated with Olafur Eliasson in the opening of their flagship store on the Champs Elysées – Gallerie Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton. Eliasson’s Your Loss of Senses (2005), a black box devoid of light, sound and movement which viewers could experience, has been described as a ‘space of invisibility and inner reflection in a building that is otherwise dedicated to showing off and conspicuously consuming luxury goods’ (Vanska

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and Clark 2017: 200). The work prefaced a trajectory away from overt consumption, bringing consumers back to modes of intense presence and reflection. Eliasson’s mastery of affect appears to be transformative for Jacobs. Discussing the set design of Marc Jacobs autumn/winter 2013 show, designed by Stefan Beckman, Jacobs pointed to the mood and devastation generated by Hurricane Sandy, and the desire to not produce a show ‘so graphic or so up’ (Jacobs 2013). Backstage he recalled with inspiration the effect of Eliasson’s Weather Project (2003) exhibited a decade earlier at the Tate Modern. Olafur created this yellow orb which emits this very low frequency light and takes the colour out of everything except yellow . . . and it was so serene and peaceful . . . and also so dramatic to see the world without colour. With all the acts of weather (from Hurricane Sandy) . . . we just thought that the Weather Project was a perfect inspiration for the set. We wanted to keep it simple, very strong and very glamorous. (Jacobs 2013 [Transcription]) The 2013 autumn/winter show for New York Fashion Week presented models with a demure look and evoking a bygone era, walking in the round at the New York Armory. The spatial largesse of the armoury and its brute surfaces afforded an ideal environment to receive the intense ‘yellow orb’ lighting which rendered the space heavy and brooding. Reflective fibres in the garments acted as receptive materials,

Figure 7.2  Models wear designs by Marc Jacobs during the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Fall 2013 collections on 14 February 2013, New York City, United States. Photo by Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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which actively reflected a luminous then obscured mood as the lighting sequence changed throughout the show. The slow circuitous route of the models, the light, the garments and their reflectivity worked in unison to produce a deeper level of material and spatial experience for the viewing spectators. Each component became productive agents, pulling the staging to a palpable almost transcendental level. Grant Johnson has noted that Jacob’s incorporation of ‘a sign of contemporary art . . . distinguishes him as more than a fashion designer’, it ‘brands his work as beyond the realm of fashion, characterizing him as more than a producer of a certain kind of object . . . he is an author of perception itself’ (Johnson 2015: 321).

Conclusion Eliasson’s Weather Project (2003) persists as an essay of the phenomenological given by lighting and its atmospheric conditions to affect new levels of embodied awareness and intense individual and communal experience. Eliasson notes that by looking back at work like the Weather Project, we are able to reflect upon new possibilities and engage in a more profound understanding of how we perceive and are affected by the world around us. He refers to the collective and intersubjective experience engendered by the Weather Project (2003) as a co-production between sensing bodies, affective light and the environments within which they are set (Eliasson 2015). As with key minimalist art from the 1960s and 1970s, works of art within this genre generate another level of bodily engagement, which acts to open up our perceptual awareness and deepen our production within the world. Gernot Böhme calls us to look towards the stage set as a means of testing more focused ways of engaging in time, space and the human condition. These conditions, whether they engage the body in uncanny ways or with the phenomenal materiality inspired by minimalism, are deployed now more strongly with a new culture of sensibility surrounding fashion and the arts. The fashion show presents opportunities to permeate garments, bodies and the self, through the charged interplay of materials, whether they be garment, installation, structure, space or the immaterial of light. These productive atmospheres do not rest purely upon shaping objects or formulating static environments, but are activated through material and spatial interactions creating opportunities where phenomena are extended or emerge, rendering a ‘felt presence’ which Böhme alludes to. In returning to the conversation highlighted earlier, Olafur Eliasson astutely articulated that architectural detail and artistic intervention can make people more aware of an already existing atmosphere. That is, materiality can actually make atmospheres explicit – it can draw your attention and amplify your sensitivity to a particular atmosphere. All materials have psychosocial content, and the right material can make the atmosphere apparent by giving it a trajectory, by making it almost tangible. Yet it could also go another way: the materiality of something has the capacity to work in a non-normative or liberating manner, opening up new ways of engaging with the atmosphere. (Borch et al. 2014: 95) Fashion shows like those mentioned for Yohji Yamamoto, Prada and Marc Jacobs make space for the ineffable through productive atmospheres. They dilate time and space, extending moments where affective relations between phenomena, the viewer and the viewed emerge providing deeper access to sartorial authenticity, mastery and material themes.

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FEATURED SHOWS Yohji Yamamoto: Women’s Autumn/Winter 2012/13 (video available via YouTube: Trendstop)

Prada: Men’s and Women’s Spring/Summer 2015 (video available via YouTube: Prada)

Prada: Women’s Spring/Summer 2016 (video available via YouTube: Prada)

Marc Jacobs: Women’s Autumn/Winter 2013 (video available via YouTube: Vogue)

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Weather Project (2003), [Installation], Olafur Eliasson, Installation in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. Available online: https​:/​/ol​​afure​​liass​​on​.ne​​t​/arc​​hive/​​artwo​​rk​/WE​​K1010​​03​/th​​e​-w​ea​​ther-​​proje​​ct Yamamoto, Y. and U. Felsberg (2003), Notebook on Cities and Clothes, Widescreen edn., Troy, MI: Anchor Bay Entertainment. Your Loss of Senses (2005), [Installation], Olafur Eliasson, Louis Vuitton Store, Champs-Élysées, Paris. Zumthor, P. (2006), Atmospheres: Architectural Environments; Surrounding Objects, Basel: Boston.

8 INDUSTRIAL CHIC FASHION SHOWS IN READY-MADE SPACES* Per Strömberg

Introduction In autumn 2014, the Swedish sportswear company Björn Borg launched their spring/summer 2016 collection at an obsolete subterranean command bunker from the Cold War during Stockholm Fashion Week (SFW). The bunker was used as an associative backdrop for the runway show. The project manager of the Björn Borg show explained the choice stating that ‘the location was unique, mystical and exciting. It fitted well with our theme’ (Lindberg Nyvang, personal communication, 02-03-2015). The show perhaps represents a new spatial twist at SFW, but not in an international context. At present, we can see this staging concept of adaptive reuse being repeated at fashion weeks all over a ‘polycentric fashion world’ (Skov 2011), creating a subgenre of unusual runway locations at warehouses, derelict factories and bunkers. The ‘adapted reuse’ – that is, reusing an old site or building for a purpose other than which it was built or designed for – of post-industrial environments is the ultimate focus within this study. Why does the fashion industry locate its runway shows in obsolete factories, derelict subway stations, worn-out warehouses, gigantic gasholders and subterranean bunkers? In this chapter, the runway shows in these specific settings are treated as a vehicle to make a broader sketch of the fashion industry and of urban ‘fashion-branding’ (Rocamora 2009) over the past thirty years. This type of spectacle has much to say about the relationship between consumerism, art and urbanism. For example, as cultural appropriation has become ever more important as an artistic expression and as an innovation This chapter has been previously published in full in the journal Fashion Theory, 23:1, 25-56, 2017. Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor and Francis Group. DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2017.1386503 *

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strategy in the popular culture of late capitalism, it is worth analysing its role in different settings. What role does adaptive reuse play within the fashion industry in the intersection between fashion, art and marketing? In this intersection of the fashion industry, the main form of capital traded is cultural. In my view, adaptive reuse of post-industrial space is a way of employing ‘reuse value’. Primarily, there is a pragmatic aspect of ‘reuse value’ (similar to Marx’s notion of ‘use value’), that is to meet certain needs by the means of reuse. In addition, this reuse value also includes sociocultural aspects, Figure 8.1  Models present creations by Dutch designer Olcay Gulsen that is, in the form of symbolic capital during the SuperTrash show at the Amsterdam Fashion Week in Halfweg near Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2014. Photo by Robin (the commodity as a sign), which van Lonkhuijsen/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images. finally can be converted into profit (exchange value). What is of special interest for this chapter is the convertibility of cultural values from symbolic to economic capital, and vice versa, within an overall cultural economy (Du Gay and Pryke 2002). There has always been a complex connection between culture and economy, which is possibly more intense today due to the nature of competition and to contemporary marketing aesthetics. This connection continuously needs to be investigated, here, regarding ‘spaces of consumption’ (Gottdiener 1998) within the fashion industry: how are cultural reuse values being negotiated, reproduced and commodified in these (social) spaces?

Studying the runway show as a cultural-economic, media-related and socio-spatial phenomenon During the last twenty years, scholars from various disciplines have addressed the phenomenon of fashion shows extensively, from the point of view of design history (i.e. Duggan 2001; Evans 2001; Khan 2000) to ethnography (Entwistle and Rocamora 2006) within the broader field of culture studies. Many of these scholars acknowledge that fashion shows and their locations have gradually become more important to fashion designers and their brands. Nevertheless, few studies focus on the spatial aspects of the event. Bradley Quinn’s work The Fashion of Architecture (2003) is an exception in which the author highlights fashion in relation to architecture. In this chapter, I pursue a cultural analysis in order to reach an understanding of, and to interpret, cultural representations and practices of runway shows. For this matter, I turn to the cultural intermediators such as Dan Arne, the creative director of the H&M show at Dalhalla in 2001, for an in-depth interview. This

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fashion show is the primary case for this study, having an instrumental function. Sweden is an upcoming fashion nation on the ready-to-wear market due to brands such as H&M, Acne and J. Lindeberg. As Swedish fashion brands and SFW try to make a name for themselves in a polycentric fashion world, the marketing strategies mentioned in the essay are just reflecting what other fashion weeks and brands try to achieve. The Swedish context is just another example which illustrates general features of the fashion show that also appear elsewhere. The aim of this study is to contribute to the academic discourse on the runway show by theoretically treating it as a cultural phenomenon in relation to what Joanne Entwistle defines as a ‘market of aesthetics’. An aesthetic market is one in which an ‘aesthetic quality’ is commodified, that is, a look or style is ‘defined and calculated within a market and sold for profit’ (Entwistle 2009: 10). While Entwistle mainly examines the market of fashion modelling where the aesthetic quality is the core commodity, I study the locations in which these different qualities are staged, accentuated and interchanged. It is a marketplace where different markets come together. The fashion clothing industry is supported by a range of mediating professions such as fashion modelling, advertising and scenography. These act as ‘cultural intermediaries’ (Bourdieu 1984) of taste and style, moving between the realms of production and consumption. Today, appropriation is a well-established art practice of borrowing or stealing, making new uses for and changing the meaning of the objects, images and artefacts of a culture. It is central to artists’ critique of the contemporary world and their visions for alternative futures (Sturken and Cartwright 2001; Schneider 2006). The manner in which buildings and spaces are repurposed, reused and remodelled today is analogous to the art practice of the ‘readymade’ or ‘found objects’ of the modernist avantgarde. Readymades are ordinary manufactured objects with non-art functions that the artist selects and modifies. As exemplified by the first exhibited readymade – Marcel Duchamp’s urinal – by simply choosing the object and repositioning or joining, tilting and signing it, the object becomes art (Evans 2009). Analogously, I use the neologism of ‘readymade space’, alternatively ‘found space’, as a theoretical metaphor in order to describe and analyse practices of adaptive reuse. As Walter Benjamin (2008 [1935]) states, mechanical reproduction has changed the way we consider art. Consequently, the changing notion of art has also had an impact on how we consider manufactured and mass-produced everyday objects or pieces of trash in aesthetic terms. Like the readymade object, ‘readymade spaces’ are borne from mass-production and share attributes of seriality, prefabrication and standardization: they are spaces of mass-production and mass-produced spaces.

The changing concept of runway shows Runway or fashion shows are defined as marketing events for fashionable clothing (both in regard to stylistic innovation and production), often related to fashion weeks held biannually. The typology of fashion shows stretch from promotional press shows to other categories such as showroom shows for selected groups of buyers, or celebrity shows directed at the end client. Caroline Evans (2001) has depicted the historical development of the runway show from the first theatrical and themed parades and plays to the strict scheme at the couturier’s salon or at luxurious hotels in the 1950-60s, which set the standard. The elaborate and spectacular fashion shows of today originate from the 1960s and the rise of ready-to-wear, men’s wear and fashion magazines, which totally changed the prerequisites of fashion

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shows. Designers such as Jean-Paul Gautier and Vivienne Westwood early on turned their attention to the catwalk itself. Shows were taken out of traditional arenas, and then attention turned to the design of the shows themselves (Kahn 2000). The contemporary fashion industry is image-driven, conceptual and highly involved in branding strategies. Consequently, this has reinforced the importance of spectacular shows. Visibility is crucial, because the runway show is also a vehicle for the haute couturiers to sell perfumes, sunglasses and bags that are more accessible for the public as a whole, and by that, sharing a part of the designers’ brand equity and its aesthetic values. Runway shows have a primary commercial goal, that is, to present new collections (or the concept for ready-to-wear collections) for fashion buyers and to attract media attention. Designers work with conceptualized collections (Evans 2003; Kahn 2000) which are closely associated with marketing strategies. Thus, the show has become a vital part of the orchestration of the garments as a cultural statement. The location and the setting of the show becomes part of the extended, conceptual product (Frey 1998). As a result, the designers’ tool box of impression making has expanded considerably during the last decades. This expansion can be observed in terms of the format (such as size and placement of the audience), high tech and web-based solutions, live music, celebrities in attendance, advanced lighting, art performances, puppet shows, holograms etc., and finally, the holding of shows in unusual locations.

The invention of unusual show locations in a contemporary setting In a contemporary marketing setting, the literature of fashion history (e.g. Duggan 2001; Evans 2001) sometimes refers to Issey Miyake and Martin Margiela as pioneers of leaving the traditional arenas (e.g. theatres, mansions, couturier’s salons, luxurious hotels). In 1988, Miyake pioneered the use of unusual show spaces by using a swimming pool in New York. One year later, he placed his show in a disused subway station in Paris (Evans 2001). However, it is worth noting that in fashion capitals such as New York, there had been an extensive practice of locating runway shows all over the city – in lofts and studios, in clubs and restaurants, from the 1970s up until New York Fashion Week (NYFW) began being held at Bryant Park in 1993 (Fortini 2006). The main strategy for newcomers and promising designers has been and still is to present their collections ‘off-schedule’ and ‘off-location’, separated from the official runway tents or grand exhibition halls, which have been the standard for the last decades. Under these conditions, it is obviously more difficult to attract the attention of the media and buyers. Until the 1980s, fashion shows in London had been held all over the city in whatever place demanded the lowest rental fee, thus using the rentgap for survival which is still a common practice. When London Fashion Week (LFW) was launched in 1984, the newly established British Fashion Council located its first venues in a tent in front of the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington (O’Byrne 2009). This underground and somehow underdog approach continued when London later became a breeding ground for spectacular fashion shows performed by young British fashion designers, notably Alexander McQueen, who staged his Nihilism spring/summer collection in the Bluebird Garage in Chelsea in 1994, and the Dante autumn/winter show at Christ Church in Spitalfields in 1996. Their spectacular approach was later adopted by the big fashion houses in Paris. However, the commercial reality behind these spectacles was mostly pragmatic:

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because of the deficient infrastructure of the British fashion industry, the designers had few options and nothing to lose (Evans 2003). Thus, the pragmatism of choosing unusual locations such as lofts, factories and warehouses cannot be underestimated. Availability, lighting, low rents, vast spaces, logistics, adjacent distance to the fashion fairs, etc. all play an important part in the selection of an optimal location. That being said, I would like to elaborate upon the issue of adaptive reuse in relation to runway shows. I generally distinguish between three main perspectives of adaptive reuse: First, the pragmatic reuse value, that is, to meet the most practical needs mentioned earlier. Second, the aesthetic reuse value, which emphasizes the look, style or atmosphere of the environment as a means of reaching a goal (e.g. for profit). Finally, the ideological reuse value, where adaptive reuse as a strategy is a part of an ideological standpoint or even a political statement which may have artistic as well as commercial goals. In the following sections, I will focus on the latter two domains of this theoretical division and present a typology of fashion shows at unusual show locations.

A typology of unusual show locations based on adaptive reuse I distinguish three types of adaptive reuse for runway shows for which urban or post-industrial spaces play an essential role. First, there are urban spaces that are still-in-use but temporarily hosting runway shows. For example, in 2015, the British Fashion Council moved their official home from Somerset house to Brewer Street NCP Car Park in order to get closer to the vibrant area next to Brewer Street. Car parks seem to have a special attraction. For instance, the Victoria Squares underground car park was used for the same purpose during Belfast Fashion Week in 2010. Margiela is known for his unusual show locations. One show was held at a Salvation Army depot in the outskirts of Paris in 1992. Miyake’s show mentioned earlier, took place in a metro station at Porte des Lilas in 1989. The subway or railway station concept has been repeated in more flamboyant ways during fashion weeks in New York (Chanel 2006), Milan (Gucci 2016), Dunedin (diverse, 2011) and Paris, notably John Galliano’s Diorient Express-show for Dior at Gare d’Austerlitz in 1998 where the models departed in an old train after the spectacle. These spaces of everyday life are mostly used as a poetic backdrop for these shows, but sometimes they are extensively elaborated to the point that the realism disappears. Margiela intentionally searches for realism in order to accentuate his counter-cultural message by putting fashion in dialogue with everyday spaces more spontaneously. Second, there are shows that take place at deserted locations and wastelands within the urban fabric. Here, Margiela is a precursor. One of his more famous shows took place in an abandoned lot in a poor immigrant neighbourhood in the 20th arrondissement outside Paris (1989) where the locals were highly involved. The show has been considered to be ‘game-changing’, giving inspiration to younger designers such as Raf Simons (O’Mahony 2016). Another case is the 1992 spring/summer show in the derelict Parisian metro station of Saint Martin, which had been out of use since 1939 (Evans 2003). According to Quinn (2003), there is a parallel between Margiela’s second-hand clothing and derelict urban areas, defined as ‘war zones’ or ‘wastelands’. His appropriation of abandoned spaces for the purpose of runway shows is directly related to his counter-cultural approach to the fashion industry. Therefore, this genre could be labelled ‘squatting’ or as ‘guerrilla-fashion shows’.

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Third, a large number of shows are performed at post-industrial spaces such as factories, lofts and warehouses, which are converted to spaces for art exhibitions or cultural events with the ability to host fashion shows. During the last decades, many cities have created an infrastructure for cultural activities following a post-industrial grammar of urban development. Fashion weeks around the world have not been late to employ these spaces for their events. In London, there is a range of post-industrial runway sites which accentuates the traditional underground attitude of British designers as a complement to the official fashion tents, such as the Truman Brewery (e.g. House of Holland 2007), the Albert Embankment Warehouse (e.g. Alexander McQueen 2015) and the old granary of Central Saint Martin (Paul Smith 2013). In Paris, a new set of runway spaces has been employed since the first elaborated subway shows of Miyake and Margiela. For example, Raf Simons’s spectacular show in 2013 for Dior at a former air dock, previously converted into an art gallery, at Larry Gagosian’s Le Bourget. In 2010, L’Institut Français de la Mode moved to the old docks along the Seine next to Gare d’Austerlitz. These docks, as well as the train docks of Halle Freyssinet located nearby, have been an important runway infrastructure for Paris Fashion Week during the last decade. Other European fashion weeks have created similar infrastructure, Amsterdam for example. In 2013, runway shows were performed at Transformatorhuis, a former transformer plant, and in a gigantic gas works, Gashouder, in the Westergasfabriek area. Further from the city centre, the real estate company Cobraspen has developed SugarCity, an old sugar factory, into a diverse event space, in which SuperTrash staged their collection during AFW 2013 (Figure 8.1). New York has a long tradition of loft showing (to allude to Sharon Zukin’s book Loft Living) since the 1970s in view of the city’s many conversions of former factories and warehouses to apartments, studios and restaurants. After years of being centralized to white tents at Bryant Park, NYFW returned to various warehouses around the city in 2016, including for example Skylight Modern, Skylight Clarkson and The Duggal Greenhouse, a former navy yard. Thus, the post-industrial event space is still relevant to NYFW. Smaller fashion weeks, such as Melbourne, Copenhagen and Warsaw, as well as independent shows, have also explored the post-industrial concept, e.g. the Paprocki and Brzozowski show during Warsaw Fashion Week in 2015 in an old manufactory of telephones, telegraphs and motorcycles called Warsaw Soho Factory. The redevelopment of industrial areas as well as place-making for cultural events are very significant to urban politics and the goal of developing vibrant ‘creative cities’ (Smith and Warfield 2008). The new location of Prada Foundation in Figure 8.2  Adaptive reuse. Prada Foundation’s new exhibition Milan is a very good example of this. The hall, designed by Rem Koolhaas, is a former distillery turned into new building complex was originally an an art gallery. It does not hold fashion shows like PF’s earlier old distillery which has been converted location at the old warehouse at via Fogazzaro 36, but it is a good into an art gallery (Figure 8.2). It is located example of post-industrial reuse related to the fashion industry. next to the Largo Isarco, an area that is Photograph: Per Strömberg, 2015.

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gradually being redeveloped. The main purpose of Prada Foundation is to hold art exhibitions and cultural events, but the post-industrial gallery is also used as a runway space. These kinds of multi-functional spaces for art and cultural activities, including runway shows, constitute a subgenre of the third category, that is, when the show space is put in direct dialogue with arts through a branding process. This is important for the fashion brands in order to attach the value and significance of art to their products and reinforce an image of being producers of art and culture themselves, not only producers of garments to wear (Taylor 2005). To recapitulate in relation to the last category, I choose to use the word ‘readymade space’ or ‘found space’ metaphorically in order to underscore the fact that the industrial heritage constitutes a considerable part of these runway spaces. They are waste spaces that are now being ‘found’, re-appropriated, and commodified in various ways as expressive passe-partouts for the event.

Aesthetic reuse value and the cultural alchemy of appropriation While pragmatic, aesthetic and ideological reuse values may be put to work simultaneously through adaptive reuse, I argue that the aesthetic aspect is highly emphasized today. The point of departure of appropriation as artistic practice is the intertextual, contradictory and somehow, promiscuous, playing with connotations and experiences of derelict spatiality and materiality. One can metaphorically express these attempts of turning industrial waste spaces into attractive event settings in terms of a ‘cultural alchemy’ in which the former buildings are aesthetically processed. By this metaphor, the ethnographers Löfgren and Willim (2005) would like to stress some of the features of the ‘New Economy’, a label ascribed to the extended and somewhat overheated transition between the manufacturing-based to a service-based economy in the 1990s: the elements of surprising combinations and crossovers, the fetishization of the irrational and mystical and the drive to make gold out of dust through the power of imagination and economic speculation. In modern economic alchemy, ‘re-’ processes such as re-cycling, re-imagining or re-inventing often have a prominent position (2005). In brief, as Nikos Papastergiadis (2006) remarks, the dustbins of history have become the key sites for innovation and cultural renewal. Redundant industrial buildings have become available in two senses. First, because the spaces are available to be re-appropriated by new business ventures and events since the former activities have ceased due to structural changes in society. The reuse of buildings is a symptom of ‘creative destruction’ in Schumpeter’s (2010) sense, meaning that new industries flourish on the basis of the old. Second, these spaces are also culturally appropriated. Re-contextualized buildings and spaces are able to communicate fresh meanings. Readymade spaces such as Halles Freyssinet or Cité de la Mode et du Design in Paris become tools with the purpose of communicating values of innovation, creativity and novelty which are important features of the fashion industry. In 2001, one of the most spectacular shows of H&M took place in the old limestone quarry of Dalhalla, Sweden, the bottom of which had earlier been converted into an opera stage (Figure 8.3). From the top of the quarry, a road leads down to the bottom along the steep limestone walls, whose rugged surface bears witness to the power of man’s work. The vastness of the space and the ruggedness of the walls evoke feelings of the sublime, but it also creates an ideal acoustic setting

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Figure 8.3  In 2001, one of H&M’s first mega-shows in a row took place in the old limestone quarry of Dalhalla. Around 500 international journalists were invited to this promotional press show presented by iconic models such as Grace Jones, Helena Christensen and Eva Herzigova. The catwalk was located on pontoons in the lake next to the large stage at the bottom of the quarry. Here, some construction works in the quarry lake before the show at Dalhalla. Photo: Peter Roberts, 2001.

for cultural activities. According to Anna Sandberg, account manager for H&M, the ready-to-wear company wanted to make ‘the ultimate fashion show, something really special’ (Arne 2001) at Dalhalla, that is, something attention-grabbing that would attract media coverage. After the transformation of the quarry into an opera stage, Dalhalla became a national showcase for the Swedish creative industries. The catwalk was located on pontoons in the lake next to the large stage at the bottom of the quarry. To locate the event at this spectacular site fit well with the aims and vision of H&M and the show’s creative director, Dan Arne. The goal was to evoke a sense of exoticism, Swedish-ness, contrast and creativity: ‘I felt, how exotic it could be to experience such an urban runway show in such a weird landscape, which both the limestone quarry and the region of Dalarna were a part of. This contrast was so physically present and very sensuous. [. . .] The show became a surrealistic happening’ (Arne, personal communication, October 17, 2011). This kind of play of juxtapositions of the rough edged ‘hardware’ (the quarry and the natural environment) and fashionable ‘software’ (the runway show and its fashion collection) is an important feature for these event spaces. It creates a contrast which is able to be expressed as both creativity (potentials of innovation) and spectacularity (potentials of being attention grabbing). The point of

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departure for the whole Dalhalla-venture was an aesthetically grounded postmodern ruin-romanticism which turns rust and limestone dust into appealing gestures of victory over the site’s past life. Since Duchamp once challenged the art institutions by signing and exhibiting a urinal – a manufactured everyday object – the taste for machine aesthetics and industrial spaces has grown. As Willim (2008) argues, the manufacturing infrastructure in the West has been redefined as a cultural heritage while its attributes have been revaluated in aesthetical terms, both regarding appreciation for machineaesthetics on the one hand, and the poetics of industrial or urban decay on the other, for which patina is an important feature. Willim refers to this tendency in terms of ‘industrial cool’, that is, a somewhat distant and aesthetic approach to post-industrial factories which is exactly what appropriation practices of adaptive reuse are all about. By recapturing my spatial metaphor in reference to the readymade, there is also a sense of surrealism in the way runway shows take place in post-industrial spaces. The contrast-making of adaptive reuse is very much based on the same ‘explosive junction’ that Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists once sought. The proper aesthetic reuse value of post-industrial environments as runway spaces is the potential of making a statement through contrast.

Ideological reuse values: Brand-squatting and guerrilla fashion shows As the third dimension of adaptive reuse, reuse values may also be engaged for ideological purposes. According to Duggan (2001), there is a tradition of staging fashion shows loaded with social commentary that goes back to the happenings and performance art of the 1970s. Margiela’s earlier works are significant though unique examples of employing reuse value from an ideological point of view. By staging his shows in abandoned places and everyday spaces such as a Salvation Army depot in the 1990s, he highlighted the conceptual relationship between these readymade spaces and his collections of recycled fabrics and second-hand clothes. As a newcomer, he also used ‘antiaesthetics’ as a strategy to culturally gain a position on the field of haute couture. In the same way Duchamp once challenged the notion of art and its institutions by exhibiting everyday objects as art, Margiela challenges the structures of the fashion industry by employing ‘readymade spaces’ and hence imposes himself as an artist with a political message. Margiela pursues a kind of ‘brandsquatting’, or, to borrow the melodramatic words of Umberto Eco (cited in Hebdige 1979), a ‘semiotic guerrilla warfare’ in which he promotes himself as a designer of his own brand while opposing the throwaway-spirit of consumer society. To break conventions by using provocative imagery is a fundamental mechanism of modern fashion design: for suppliers and the cultural intermediaries as well as for the users. Some designers choose to convey their message through the clothing, while others rely on the performance. It is not far-fetched to allocate this radical attitude to the catwalk given the fact that the runway show itself has become an integrated part of conceptual fashion design and an indispensable means of getting media coverage. This is what Kahn (2000) refers to as ‘catwalk politics’, that is, when the runway show is used as a political platform for the designers’ statements which in themselves are rhetorical devices for selfreflection, stylism and activism.

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As Quinn (2003) and Evans (2003) also have noted, Margiela employs the same artistic tactics as the Situationist movement of the 1960s. Similar to the avant-garde strategy of the readymade, dérive encourages an ‘oppositional reading’ of the cultural texts, in this case, the runway show. Such practice is similar but not identical to what Lefebvre (1991) describes as ‘spatial appropriation’, that is, to inhabit and even take over spaces by rejecting their planned functionality. For Lefebvre, spatial appropriation is ultimately about power-relations, culturally and spatially, which Margiela tries to highlight by exploring and employing spaces that are ‘found’. Margiela wishes to bring his fashion away from the established runway salons, to impose a political message and to make a name for himself at the same time. One could argue that his subversive runway shows are mere radical marketing ploys that mask the commercial reality. In order to avoid such accusations, Margiela involved the local community in different ways for his show in the Parisian suburb in 1989 (O’Mahony 2016), and he donated the entire collection to the Salvation Army depot in which he held the show in 1992 (Kahn 2000).

A marketplace of impression-making Adaptive reuse may indirectly transmute industrial concrete walls into new economic values in many senses, but what kind of values are we talking about and how are they realized by means of marketing aesthetics? Runway shows in readymade spaces involve several markets that relate to the fashion industry. These markets, all of which are involved to some degree with the idea of aesthetic quality, include event management, fashion modelling, real estate, etc. In Entwistle’s (2009) study of the market of fashion modelling, she defines the ‘aesthetic market’ as a place in which ‘aesthetic quality’ is stylistically refined as a commodity, defined, evaluated, calculated and sold for profit by a range of cultural intermediaries. In relation to aesthetic markets, Entwistle (2009: 28) argues, ‘aesthetic value is the value generated around the commodity and the business selling it’. The success of a business is dependent on ‘non-economic’ concerns such as emotions, looks, expressions and praise generated by what Entwistle calls ‘aesthetic knowledge. The creative director of the H&M show at Dalhalla is a good example of such a cultural intermediator who employs such aesthetic knowledge with the aim to create brand equity. After years of cooperation, H&M gave Dan Arne a considerably free role to interpret the aesthetic value of the collection and the brand itself. He highlights the importance of the limestone quarry with its sixty metres of vertical surrounding stonewalls as a backdrop for the event. The sensuous marketing potential of this former industrial site was a key feature for choosing Dalhalla: ‘This was a statement, showing H&M at high international level, [. . .] to put it [the collection] in relation to contemporary ways of expressions, how to visualize and concretize fashion today, for example, with the use of art’ (D. Arne, personal communication, 17-10-2011). Here, the creative director is rhetorically relating to the world of art in a way that makes him appear as an artist. This is not surprising in view of Melissa Taylor’s (2005) paper on fashion’s cultural dialogue between commerce and art, which has a long tradition of cultural exchange. Fashion brands and their creative workers constantly aspire to become a part of high-culture by attaching to fashion the value and significance of art. However, Taylor (2005) notes that while the fashion industry tries to boost its relation to art, the art world seeks to defuse its commercial opposite. The marketing aesthetics of the fashion industry are very much conceptualized and multi-medial but primarily it is about ‘auraproduction’ related to branding processes, with reference to Walter Benjamin’s (2008) notion of aura.

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It is not only a search to find the right choreography and scenography for impression making (Löfgren 2005), but an evocation of experiential authenticity. This is exactly what site-specific, aesthetic reuse values are expected to offer: suggestive spatiality and rough-edged materiality with patina, animated by the historical context. This tendency can be understood in light of a capitalist dilemma that Gottdiener (1998) refers to as the ‘realization problem’. Explicitly stated – unless goods can be sold, no profit will be realized. The abundance of producer’s goods and services whose use values are equal and whose appearances are similar, forces suppliers to articulate the symbolic aspect of goods and services as well as the spaces in which consumption and marketing take place. Hence, the symbolic values of goods and services are not only of importance when purchasing the product; the spatial context in which the purchase is made (or marketed) is of utmost importance as well (Gottdiener 1998). If the marketing or the purchase of goods and services fits well within the setting, the consumer event becomes even more apt. Here, authenticity, high art, attitude and street credibility, materialized through the use of space, become cultural capital in the ‘aesthetic marketplace’. The aesthetic marketplace is not just a metaphor; it is a physical place in which the cultural intermediators meet to evaluate and bargain. At readymade spaces used for runway shows, aesthetic reuse value is a part of the whole orchestration of the brand and its collection.

The aesthetic market and the real estate market While I have been addressing aesthetic reuse value in relation to the aesthetic markets of the fashion industry, I will now put it in relation to the real estate market and urban politics. The practices of adaptive reuse tend to originate in subcultures outside the business sphere of the cultural economy. Often, for example, artists and activist cultures play a critical role in the re-evaluation of potential areas for gentrification. In a European context, new social movements have paved the way towards the creative reuse of factories for post-industrial purposes in cities like Hamburg (Franzén 2005) and Copenhagen. In New York, Andy Warhol’s visionary studio, the Factory, was an announcement for the ongoing gentrification process of Manhattan. Zukin (1982) describes this restructuring of downtown Manhattan during the 1960-70s, when former industrial buildings started to be reused and exploited by processes of gentrification: initially, by ‘first gentrifiers’ such as the artists and activists, then by gallerists and real estate developers, and finally by institutions such as art museums and offices. Now, these urban environments are employed by high-end stores to market their brands as well as for their events. For example, several of the main show spaces of NYFW mentioned earlier are currently located in former warehouses in Manhattan, managed by the Skylight Group. In fact, there is a growing market for events associated with fashion weeks and runway shows around the globe. First, there are real estate companies, which are suppliers of event spaces. Then, there are event companies that manage such events. Sometimes, the event businesses are an integrated part of the real estate company. In Amsterdam, for example, real estate companies like the Westergasfabriek BV and Cobraspen at SugarCity, develop and rent out post-industrial spaces for creative and cultural events including Amsterdam Fashion Week, while their associated event businesses manage these events, for example, SugarCity Event. Another type is publicly/semi-publicly owned event spaces provided by the city municipality itself. In Copenhagen for example, fashion events have taken place at the former

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warehouses of the Carlsberg brewery and at the Meatpacking District, both of them being publicly owned. In both cases, these post-industrial locations have become important resources for urban redevelopment, creative clustering, event-making, and finally city branding, which at the same time provides new perspectives on the employment of aesthetic reuse value. Many scholars (e.g. Evans 2009; Hutton 2004; Zukin 2010) have observed the increasing demand for place-bound identities in relation to industrial heritage, all of which are valued for their symbolic, economic and recreational potential. The ‘user-patina’ of industrial buildings is a fundamental feature of aesthetic reuse value. It is the core benefit of any adaptive reuse for urban redevelopment, and the core of creative destruction: Capital tends to abandon places only to return later when they are fully degraded so that the marginal benefit of investment is greater than returns from elsewhere. Therefore, adaptive reuse as a strategy is not only a way of creating unique settings for runway shows; it is a part of a larger cultural economy applied to the real estate market in which high-profiled events like runway shows are important tools with the aim being to raise the prices of land. The potential of making a profit on the real estate market is not the only driver for urban redevelopment. For many cities, supporting and fostering various initiatives within the creative industries has become important in order to cope with structural changes: to stimulate innovation and creativity and to replace and convert former production industries with ‘creative melting pots’. To ‘find new use for old buildings and derelict sites’ is very much related to what Mommaas (2004) terms ‘creative clustering’. Some of the places that have been used for runway shows are converted industrial buildings which now work as permanent incubators for artistic education and creative businesses, for example, Cité de la Mode (Paris), Soho Factory (Warsaw), and the Meatpacking District (Copenhagen). Not surprisingly, the Parisian Halles Freyssinet, where many runway shows have taken place, has been redeveloped into an incubator for creative industries called Station F. Other drivers for creative clustering are branding and place-positioning strategies, which are designed to strengthen the identity, attraction power and market position of places (Mommaas 2004). Fashion events are a part of this picture and are not only limited to the four big fashion capitals. Many cities have recognized the ‘place-making ability of fashion design’, that is, the ability to ‘fill a cosmopolitan form with local content through displays and events associated with a heightened sense of here-and-now’ (Skov 2011: 138). Therefore, cities are trying to copy the concept of fashion weeks and create creative clusters in a polycentric fashion world. Rocamora’s (2009) labelling of this process is to the point. She argues that marketing the city by means of developing and encouraging fashion and fashion-related activities is a process of ‘fashion-branding’ the city, to which fashion journalism and social media contribute. To conclude, fashion events are used as geopolitical ammunition in competition with other cities whilst the redeveloped industrial areas function as the infrastructure. They play a representative role in order to accentuate the imaginary of the ‘creative city’ through the use of aesthetic reuse values.

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Conclusion The creators of fashion shows in readymade spaces try to make their shows unique by bringing out values of authenticity (patina), spectacularity (attention-grabbing) and creativity (innovation) that are inherent to the site’s past usage. In reference to all the aforementioned cases, is it really an innovative way of staging fashion? Desire for the new lies at the very core of fashion consumerism. There is a striking paradox in the way the repetition of similar spatial concepts risks cancelling out the very uniqueness each venture is aiming for. Although almost every branding theory claims that companies as well as cities should promote their own distinctive character, many fashion weeks stick to the same post-industrial formula of ‘loft showing’. Or, instead of seeing it as a failure, should we rather understand the memeticmimetic ‘copy-and-paste-strategy’ as a consequence of a competitive polycentric fashion world, and – like Simmel and Bourdieu – consider it as an intrinsic cyclic logic of fashion that inspires newcomers to ultimately create something new? Another conclusion is that the aesthetic value of adaptive reuse has become even more important as a part of the image at the expense of pragmatic reasons for choosing such spaces, even though they coincide in many cases. Leaving the unique case of Margiela aside, most runway shows that take place in a readymade space are done without any consideration to, or intention of, being socially or politically subversive. Mostly, attitude is the message, not the call for change. Therefore, I argue that adaptive reuse for runway shows is a sort of re-appropriation of the subversive tactics of the artistic avant-garde, of new social movements and of alternative urban lifestyles such as squatting. Their subversive expression is commodified and spatially converted into a stylistic contrast or a lifestyle statement, which can then be converted into economic capital. Hence, this is just another face of the process of aestheticization in society, that uses spatial appropriation, not as a subversive act, but as an aesthetic tactic in the pursuit of profit. Furthermore, at readymade spaces used for runways shows several markets merge and interact. All of them relate to aesthetic quality in one way or another and their cultural intermediators employ aesthetic knowledge in order to stage the fashion collection as a holistically branded Gesamtkunstwerk (ger. ‘total work of art’), of which H&M’s Dalhalla event is an illustrative example. Production of newness demands fresh ways of choreographing innovations and harnessing the potential energy of being ahead. Reuse, recycling and upcycling, and the values associated with these strategies currently constitute a cultural economy of their own – from second hand clothing and fashionable ‘hacktivism’ (Busch 2009) to post-industrial eventscapes and urban politics – which needs further research. As aesthetics has become a new cultural matrix as well as an economic strategy in society, it is relevant to continue to theoretically scrutinize these processes of ‘aestheticization’ (Welsch 1996). This ongoing discussion helps us to understand the role and conditions of reuse in today’s consumer society, and provides us with new knowledge about the nature of aestheticization processes in the fashion industry and in the overall cultural economy.

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FEATURED SHOWS Super Trash: Fall/Winter 2015 (video available via YouTube: Super Trash)

Bjorn Borg: Spring/Summer 2015 (video available via YouTube: Dutch Brand Management)

H&M: Dalhalla 2001 (video available via YouTube: Svenskt Mode 2000-2015)

Comme des Garçons: Spring/Summer 2011 (video available via YouTube: Christian Poulot)

References Arne, D. (2001), H&M Dalhalla 2001. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v=​_W8​​​zpchT​​51M (accessed May 14, 2014). Benjamin, W. ([1935] 2008), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, London: Penguin. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge. Busch, O. von (2009), Becoming Fashion-able: Hacktivism and Engaged Fashion Design, Gothenburg: Camino. Du Gay, P. and M. Pryke (2002), Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life, London: SAGE. Duggan, G. G. (2001), ‘The Greatest Show on Earth: A Look at Contemporary Fashion Shows and Their Relationship to Performance Art’, Fashion Theory, 5 (3): 243–70.

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Entwistle, J. (2009), The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion: Markets and Value in Clothing and Modelling, Oxford: Berg. Entwistle, J. and A. Rocamora (2006), ‘The Field of Fashion Materialized: A Study of London Fashion Week’, Sociology 40 (4): 735–51. Evans, C. (2001), ‘The Enchanted Spectacle’, Fashion Theory, 5 (3): 271–310. Evans, C. (2003), Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Evans, D. (2009), Appropriation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fortini, A. (2006, 8 February), ‘How the Runway Took Off: A Brief History of the Fashion Show’, Slate. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.slat​​e​.com​​/arti​​cles/​​arts/​​fashi​​on​/20​​06​/02​​/how​:the​_runw​ay​_took​_off​.html (accessed December 1, 2015). Franzén, M. (2005), ‘New Social Movements and Gentrification in Hamburg and Stockholm: A Comparative Study’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 20: 51–77. Frey, N. (1998), ‘Mass Media and the Runway Presentation’, in G. Malossi (ed.), The Style Engine, 30–9, New York: Monacelli Press. Gottdiener, M. (1998), ‘Consumption of Space and Spaces of Consumption’, Architectural Design, 68 (1/2): 12–15. Hebdige, D. (1979), Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Methuen. Hutton, T. (2004), ‘The New Economy of the Inner City’, Cities, 21 (2): 89–108. Khan, N. (2000), ‘Catwalk Politics’, in S. Bruzzi and P. Church Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, 114–28, London and New York: Routledge. Lefebvre, H. ([1974] 1991), The Production of Space, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Löfgren, O. (2005), ‘Catwalking and Coolhunting: The Production of Newness’, in O. Löfgren and R. Willim (eds), Magic, Culture and the New Economy, 57–72, New York, NY: Berg. Löfgren, O. and R. Willim (2005), ‘Introduction: The Mandrake Mood’, in O. Löfgren and R. Willim (eds), Magic, Culture and the New Economy, 1–18, R. Oxford, New York: Berg. Mommaas, H. (2004), ‘Cultural Clusters and the Post-industrial City: Towards the Remapping of Urban Cultural Policy’, Urban Studies, 41 (3): 507–32. O’Byrne, R. (2009), Style City: How London Became a Fashion Capital, London: Frances Lincoln. O’Mahony, R. (2016), ‘Remembered: The Game-Changing Martin Margiela Show of 1989’, The Business of Fashion. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.bus​​iness​​offas​​hion.​​com​/a​​rticl​​es​/bo​​f​-exc​​lusiv​​e​/rem​​ember​​ed​-th​​e​-gam​​e​ -cha​​nging​​-mart​​i​n​-ma​​rgiel​​a​-sho​​w​-of-​​1989 (accessed June 7, 2017). Papastergiadis, N. (2006), ‘Modernism and Contemporary Art’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23 (2–3): 466–9. Quinn, B. (2003), The Fashion of Architecture, New York: Berg. Rocamora, A. (2009), Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media, London: I.B. Tauris. Schneider, A. (2006), Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schumpeter, J. A. ([1908] 2010), The Nature and Essence of Economic Theory, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Skov, L. (2011), ‘Dreams of Small Nations in a Polycentric Fashion World’, Fashion Theory, 15 (2): 137–56. Smith, R. and K. Warfield (2008), ‘The Creative City: A Matter of Values’, in P. Cooke and L. Lazzaretti (eds), Creative Cities, Cultural Clusters and Local Economic Development, 287–312, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Sturken, M. and L. Cartwright (2001), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, M. (2005), ‘Culture Transition: Fashion’s Cultural Dialogue between Commerce and Art’, Fashion Theory, 9 (4): 445–60. Welsch, W. (1996), ‘Aestheticization Processes: Phenomena, Distinctions and Prospects’, Theory Culture Society, 13 (1): 1–24. Willim, R. (2008), Industrial Cool: Om postindustriella fabriker, Lund: Humanistiska fakulteten, Lunds universitet. Zukin, S. ([1982] 1989), Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Zukin, S. (2010), Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

9 STAGING FASHION IN HONG KONG’S ALTERNATIVE NEIGHBOURHOOD PLACES AND SPACES Anne Peirson-Smith and Jennifer Craik

Introduction The fashion show in modern urban settings has continued to reinvent itself and redefine the boundaries between art and commerce in its spectacular, staged performative displays. The staging of fashion shows serves to highlight fashion’s dominant commercial and symbolic aspects given that it represents a tradable commodity, while signifying social and cultural status and identity. Hence, at catwalk events fashion brands are visibly promoted for sale and differentiated from competitors by crafting multi-sensory, spectacular displays. This chapter will trace the evolution of this fashion ritual through the changing face and form of staged fashion events in Hong Kong as a window on the history of the fashion and garment industry, and as a way of mapping the evolution of collective taste in fashion over fifty years. The analysis will be directed by Henri Lefebvre’s notion (1991) of the social production, direction and use of urban space. This will be supplemented with Marc Auge’s concept of non-spaces (1995) and Howard Becker’s (1984) claim that artworlds, such as fashion, are directed by specific cultural and aesthetic rules. It will also address the complex relationship between fashion and performance art in forming a ‘cultural buzz’ as a way of promoting fashion designers and fashion brands, and in validating Hong Kong’s role as a creative Asian fashion hub. It will further argue that Hong Kong has more recently accommodated alternative creative approaches to fashion development, retail and promotion based on a form of territorial stage-setting enabling the fashion micro-entrepreneur to occupy viable outlets in unique locations within non-traditional spaces (McColl et al. 2013) such as heritage sites (Figure 9.1). This trend includes mini-fashion shows, designer presentations and maker workshops – either temporary or permanent – within strategically placed neighbourhoods likely to attract and orient relevant, like-minded

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producers and consumers. The chapter will examine fashion shows exhibiting local fashion designers’ work in urban zones. Residual areas are used to stage events fostering the fashion experience as an interruption (Ferreri 2015), or a festival, given the surprise effect created and the related media buzz generated in the fashion show as pseudo-event (Boorstin 2012). The location of fashion in ‘non spaces’ as transitional social areas in urban commoditized zones (Auge 1995: 107) highlights a physical engagement with materiality and the social significance of fashion beyond the garment itself. It also challenges the seeming hegemony Figure 9.1  Ground floor interior view of heritage building PMQ. Photograph by Anne Peirson-Smith. of digital retail fashion futures, albeit that online promotion via bloggers is deemed essential to maintaining brand visibility. This analysis will also exemplify how the fashion show, as a promotional tool for creatives and their country of origin, is part of the fashion placemaking trend. In doing so, it will illustrate how the fashioning of Hong Kong’s urban spaces, in both actual and constructed ways, is based on an innate relationship between physical fashion objects and their intangible significance.

The fashioned urban space: Fashion and/in the city The dynamic synergy underpinning the connection between fashion and the urban sphere is based on contrasts and juxtapositions demarcating the replacement of the old with the new, given that endless change and renewal is part of fashion’s DNA, and plays out in aspirational social practices such as the fashion show staged in urban settings. The significance and management of urban space and the presence of the fashion system and the fashioned and fashionable body is a ubiquitous aspect of modern city life. In urban spaces, ideas of identity, citizenship, difference and belonging are continually staged and played out. These relationships are driven by economic and social needs and the actions of people living collectively in built environments, resulting in the physical appropriation and re-appropriation of territory formed into dwellings and activity zones. Urban human existence is overlaid with abstract justifications of ownership and agency, reflected, for example, in the promotional narratives revealing the power relations of staged fashion displays. Urban space in its varied material, perceptual and symbolic manifestations essentially provides the ‘stage’ on which city life is continually performed by many players on a daily basis. The conceptual triad representing the existence and use of space in everyday life proposed by Lefebvre is useful to typify the power relations engendered among urban dwellers. Here, urban space is socially produced, constructed and directed by knowledge and skills in spatial practices in the way that cities are planned, constructed and managed. This is manifested in representations of space appropriated to reflect local cultures,

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ways of living and associated value systems, and lastly, in representational spaces ‘embodying complex symbolisms’ (Lefebvre 1991: 33). In this way, symbolic and material endeavours of the modern city and its fashioned and fashionable inhabitants establish and enact a sense of place through occurrences such as the fashion show infused with commodification and consumption practices, memory and history, construction and reconstruction. In the urban context, the fashion show event creates a bounded space within the larger envelope of the city, and even if performed and located in the street, the catwalk event represents a framed spectacle, in contrast to routine urban existence. The outward physical setting of the fashion show, in its locational places such as trade and exhibition centres, is permanent, founded on functional urban planning strategies. Equally, the fashion show ritual has an enduring urban presence given its commercial and promotional functions. Yet, the rhetorical use and symbolic interpretation of this space are based on ephemeral, experiential and relational aspects of human engagement and social interplay. The transitory, largely anonymous, occupants of fashion shows temporarily inhabit these ‘non spaces’ ‘in which only the moment of the fleeting images enables the observer to hypothesise the existence of the past and glimpse the possibility of the future’ (Auge 1995: 87) in the super-modern illusion of being part of a global fashion system and world city. Hence, human activity and social meaning are place-specific and both oriented to place and contained within it, thereby imparting a sense of place appropriateness as in the city-specific naming of fashion weeks. However, the (re)making, (re) presentation and re(use) of place as heritage space covers both physical manifestations and how it is imagined and perceived, often beset with contradictions where the visitor’s relation with the space and the situated event assumes more importance than relational factors with others. Material and imagined urban constructions promise ‘authentic’ experiences for the visitor, while ignoring the destruction of the location’s traditional fabric or the displacement of inhabitants who fail to fit into this schemata on account of the lack of resources or misaligned values, resulting in exclusion, marginalization or disappearance, individual isolation, rootlessness and spatial anxiety (Auge 1995). The promotional narratives involved in constructing place as a form of innovative urbanism through urban renewal and heritage projects attempt to highlight the value of one promised location above another to justify the narrative of an essential ‘must visit and see’ experience. The content of such narratives in modern global cities often tap into notions of exoticism, orientalism and imagined geographies (Nava 1996) of fashioned place located in the binary between the centralized modernist West versus the marginalized, traditionalist East. Contextually, Hong Kong is positioned as residing between two Oriental and Occidental poles, notably when debating its contested role as a fashion city and the supposed privileges or inequities of its colonial heritage (Abbas 1997). In reality, this has resulted in a displaced identity crisis for its home-grown fashion designers tending to measure success by being educated and finding success in global fashion cities such as New York, London and Paris as a form of cultural superiority (Skov 2011). Nevertheless, Hong Kong’s claim to be a fashion city (Gilbert 2006) has historical validity and highlights the dynamic transglobal flows of people, trade and trends, while reflecting the constantly changing site of engagement for fashion retail and display. Originally a centre for textile production in the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps it is now more accurately experienced as a retail fashion city or a stylized shopping destination. Nevertheless, Hong Kong’s deep-rooted aspiration to be a creative fashion centre is a story of the often unrequited quest played out in communities of practice such as fashion design, and lived through its staged promotional and staged events such as fashion shows within the managed urban landscape.

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Fashion show origins The history of contemporary fashion weeks can be rooted in the evolution of global trade fairs (Allix 1922), from the creation of long-distance export markets in the form of medieval fairs featuring the wares of travelling caravans to showcasing the regional production of goods at world expos across time. Trading fairs are barometers of internationalization, locating the need to project local markets beyond their locus to current trends for consolidating national or regional economic networks like fashion weeks and composite fashion shows in facilitating a range of commercial, knowledge, social and cultural exchange. Commercial fashion displays from the peripatetic exhibiting of static bodies as dolls dressed in the latest Paris fashion collections or Theatre de la Mode in 1945 were premised on the commercial intent of selling a designer’s or fashion house’s collection (Kawamura 2004). The contemporary fashion show has its origins in invitation-only events held in the salons of couturiers intended to sell haute couture garments to social elites at the turn of the twentieth century. Essentially, these formal, controlled, rarefied happenings were hosted for wealthy private clients or fashion system insiders in ateliers, theatres or upscale department stores in major cities such as London or New York with the intention of generating orders and dictating style trends for the forthcoming dual season. The form and location of the fashion show continued to evolve across the twentieth century crystallizing its role as a marketing tool, alongside the increasing presence of merchandisers and journalists when ready-to-wear fashion started to dominate the post-war market. It can be argued that the fashion show from its outset has always been a spectacular display of varying scale with garments paraded on modelled, mobile bodies for visual consumption. The inclusion of the public in fashion shows held in pop concerts, playgrounds, fairgrounds or railway stations broadened their mass entertainment function (Tolini Finamore 2010: 308). Equally, in the twenty-first century access to fashion show viewing has been broadened beyond physical and virtual boundaries. The digital domain now affords the unlimited viewing of fashion shows, with livestreamed ‘view and order’ fashion shows at major catwalk events, for example, from Burberry to H&M. The current chapter draws a wider temporal frame around the fashion show in Hong Kong, given that it is often held outside of the set fashion calendar and allocated fashion weeks, occurring multi-modally at any time of year, in multiple formats and in varied geographies.

The social milieu of fashion weeks and fashion shows The social environment is the site of myriad events of cultural production that occur in the process of interaction between individuals, groups and institutions (Becker 1984). The fashion show and related events occur within the social milieu, playing a significant role in determining how and why fashion as a cultural industry is created, understood, distributed and endorsed in society. Fashion, as with other cultural industries, is a taste-directed phenomenon guided by the conventions of the zeitgeist and reinforcing the ramifications of class systems. It is also socially consumed, premised on and fuelled by moments of cultural ‘buzz’ created by the event attended by interconnected industry players which in turn stimulate consumption and valorize cultural and aesthetic values via media coverage, word of mouth and ‘word of mouse’. The fashion show event requires an agglomeration of effort, knowledge and talent in one place, in real time and in situ. It involves a range of cultural intermediaries located in the embodied

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field of fashion interacting at spatially and temporally bounded events (Entwistle and Rocamora 2006: 716). The temporal and geographic occurrence of such cultural events is temporary and dynamic – not static or fixed. It also traverses physical, geographic and cultural boundaries and puts smaller fashion cities on the map whereby ideas are ‘circulated and connections are forged’ (Rantisi 2011: 263). The dual function and purpose of the fashion week and the shows that it espouses operating in ‘second-tier’ fashion cities such as Hong Kong operating outside of the Paris, London, New York vortex are founded on a renewed economic approach using aesthetic creativity and symbolic meanings to differentiate fashion outputs and their place of origin in transglobal contexts. Proximity is important in making the fashion enterprise operational with regard to the spatial geography of players involved in the design process, given that in Hong Kong fashion designers are situated next to the relatively low-cost centres of production in China. The proximity of creative communities in terms of their shared social and cultural affinities and values engenders mutual understanding, trust and implicit knowledge (Maskell and Malmberg 1999). While fashion shows can operate to establish momentary links among and between creative producers and their consumers, are they capable of contributing to either placemaking or place marketing and if so, how? Should the momentum for the development of an indigenous fashion industry come from a top-down government source, or be galvanized by the grassroots in the shape of the producers themselves, or as a hybrid private-public sector–based model of the two? Both models have been used in Hong Kong as a way of developing the fashion sector ranging from government support and control in the form of education, seed funding and trade fairs, to more recent backing from private sector initiatives, including hybrid variants in recognizing the fashion industry’s importance for Hong Kong’s regional and global status as a creative hub.

Fashioning urban Hong Kong Hong Kong has long tried to associate itself with fashion and style (Karacs 2016). It is an iconic example of a designated urban space that has been the site of modern fashion production and consumption from factory floor to high street department store. Since the 1800s, Hong Kong as an entrepôt settlement servicing China, Britain and India developed as a hub for production, distribution and consumption with the textile, apparel and fashion industry becoming the visible face and symbolic go-between as the first Asian world city that Westerners could comfortably accommodate (Tam 2014). Since the Second World War, Hong Kong has been synonymous with the fashion industry, initially as a site of mass manufacturing based on the cut-make-and-trim of basics and mid-market apparel. By the 1960s it was attracting international buyers for large ready-to-wear orders (Au et al. 2004; Zhou 2015). The industry was bolstered by the establishment in 1966 of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), which aimed at stimulating economic growth especially the apparel sector. The slogan ‘Made by Hong Kong’ was coined to emphasize Hong Kong as a cultural and commercial centre for fashion production. It invoked agency, and at the same time, a sense of ‘Hong Kong and the world’ (Skov 2004: 191). This branding has characterized and shaped Hong Kong’s self-promotion and its status as a fashion capital. In recent decades, as China has developed a market economy and mass-production capacity (Segre Reinach 2015), Hong Kong has also shifted from making to branding to creating and designing, largely when exporting the Chinese and Hong Kong–produced fashion brands overseas in the commercial arena of fashion trade fairs and in reportage on fashion media events (Tse 2014).

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Through this transnational trading activity cultural producers and political intermediaries are continuing an ongoing tradition of East–West mercantilism in the entrepôt trade between China and the world. It also represents part of a continuing tradition of seeking and assuring export markets for creative products and knowledge capital. Both China and Hong Kong in the past thirty years have desired to be recognized as espousing an innovative, creative fashion design industry capable of competing on the world stage. Their governments and individual designers strongly desire to activate the change from workshop of the world to cradle of creative innovation (Wu 2009). The former British territory’s development as a fashion and design centre from the 1960s onwards reflects the evolution of the textile and garment industry from manufacturing-based production centre to a service-oriented economy through the invention and implementation of design technology and the promotion of home-grown Hong Kong fashion brands by the government and trade department. This also spawned the launch of Hong Kong Fashion Week in the mid-1960s and later the setting up of fashion programmes at the tertiary education level from the 1980s onwards. The Trade Development Council (TDC) and the Federation of Industries established Hong Kong Fashion Week in 1968. Its development reflects the evolution of the textile and garment industry in Hong Kong from production to service orientation. This annual event historically at its outset operated as an export fair at the base of the value chain, as a low-end supplier of garments offering manufacturing capabilities to overseas visiting buyers. Gradually, over the past two decades it has re positioned itself on the international fashion fair circuit, in line with the diminishing manufacturing role of Hong Kong, by showcasing couture offerings to international buyers for global boutiques and department stores. Increasingly, this evolution of Hong Kong Fashion Week has impacted the social ordering of space and place in the globalized fashion landscape from export-oriented trade fair representing regionally located industries to ‘intermediary fair designed to reinforce Hong Kong’s position as a sourcing hub and a regional fashion leader’ (Skov 2006: 772) Here, the emphasis is placed on the visible fashion image, as opposed to the commercial deal, with a variety of cultural intermediaries contributing to this promotional moment, both real and aspirational. While some commentators argue that the international promotion and pitching of Hong Kong fashion has long overlooked the strategic nurturing of local fashion designers, Tsui (2009) argued that in fact there have been three generations of fashion designers over that period: the 1980s pioneers such as Walter Ma, the 1990s practitioners such as Lulu Cheung and Barney Cheng, the 2000s prospects such as Dorian Ho, to which can be added the relatively prosperous 2010s as the visibility and distinctiveness of Hong Kong fashion design attempted to garner global attention with international road shows for its young designers (Zhang 2017a, 2017b; Tudor 2017; HKTDC 2017). The inaugural 1968 Ready-to-Wear Festival was the start of Hong Kong’s investment in profiling the fashion industry internationally by showcasing selected local designers and manufacturing following a time-honoured Western model of fashion promotion based on elite fashion shows driven by sartorial spectacle (Duggan 2001; Evans 2001; 2011) and invitation-only fashion events (Clark 2001). This combination of design and production has marked the distinctiveness of Hong Kong fashion ever since, along with its geographic proximity to major fashion capitals. Hong Kong has also been agile in moving up the value chain by focusing on high-end and later luxury fashion and apparel to become a dominant apparel exporter of the mid-1980s (Wilson Trower 2013), as well as establishing a more local fashion culture involving fashion magazines, fashion TV, fashion retail destinations, aggressive fashion promotion and fashion design education.

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Hong Kong fashion designers, such as Vivienne Tam and David Tang (formerly of Shanghai Tang) or LuLu Cheung, with prominent retail outlets located in large shopping malls and major shopping centre sites, became household names that secured the reputation of Hong Kong as a vibrant fashion city from the 1990s. Although located in Asia, Hong Kong has been imbued with a Western zeitgeist as part of its heritage and identity (Ling 2010). As a consequence, and given its robust economy and active consumer spending power across thirty or more years, Hong Kong became synonymous with the luxury fashion market (Doyle 2017) fanned by the proliferation of fashion catwalks, sourcing and trade shows, and fashion exhibitions, performances and myriad events, in addition to operating as attractive tax-free fashion retail tourist sites for mainland Chinese consumers. Yet, mainland luxury fashion consumers are increasingly shopping in home-grown cities or online (Bloomberg 2015) in view of convenience or the threat of social protest. Nevertheless, the TDC conscientiously organizes many fashion-related events, including the biannual Hong Kong Fashion Week, which since 2017 has included Centrestage (HKTDC 2018), featuring emerging designers, with labels such as Juun.J, FFIXXEDSTUDIOS, Loom Loop, Jourden, Doriskath, IDSM, Ms Min, and Tak Lee and Jourden (Hodson 2016; Zhang 2016; Gao 2017; Caterinella 2019). This latest phase in Hong Kong’s life as a fashion centre reflects a shift in the monopolistic HKTDC strategy to enhance the international showcasing of Asian fashion identity, both within the region and internationally (Speer 2013; HKTDC 2017). Yet, Centrestage has been criticized as being safe, staid and static in comparison to more happening fashion weeks in China such as Shanghai’s Intersect that involve influencers and global celebrities such as A$SAP Rocky as a reverse flow of influence. To answer the criticism that young Hong Kong designers have technical ability but fall short on business knowledge, industry experience or marketing savvy, the government allocated over HK$500 million in budgets from 2016 to 2018 to nurture and promote young talent in the fashion sector earmarked for overseas scholarships and promotional shows. Some regard this cash injection as being a little too late (Zhang 2015) and forecast that tier-one Chinese cities will soon take the lead in fashion. Others consider that the Hong Kong government is fixated on copying old creative industry models looking westwards to London and Paris as model fashion capitals and fashion weeks (Peirson-Smith 2013) instead of focusing on Asian markets and developing a stronger regional fashion node as with Seoul or Tokyo. More recently, alternative locally based private sector–funded design spaces, incubators and fashion events have been hosted to showcase emerging talent such as the Fashion Farm Foundation (FFF) founded by the Laws textile company, which provides design and exhibition space in its Lai Chi Kok converted warehouse. In addition to funding the FFF, the foundation hosts an annual Fashion Guerrilla fashion road show where ten upcoming Hong Kong fashion designers are taken to premier fashion shows. In a parallel development, the Hong Kong textile company, the Nam Fung Group, has transformed its former textile mill, the mills, into a design incubator and heritage centre. Under this scheme, old warehouses have been turned into more affordable design spaces and mentoring evenings are a regular fixture for young designers to pitch their work in return for business advice and knowledge capital. In a parallel venture, major retail house the Joyce Group and Lane Crawford have established a fashion incubator for emerging fashion designers, including hosting local fashion shows at the redeveloped former Hong Kong Police Married Quarters (PMQ) (Figure 9.2), for example, to highlight emerging talent with industry potential (Harilela 2016). This offers an alternative mentoring and support system to supplement the ‘cherry-picking’ selective support provided by the TDC for ‘star’ designers. It also highlights the value of having both public and private sector involvement in the fashion design education and early career mentoring process. Most recently, the government in partnership with Hong Kong Design Institute (HKDI)

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Figure 9.2  Retail display space in heritage building PMQ, Hong Kong, showcasing garments and accessories on sale by fashion design label Loom Loop. Photograph by Anne Peirson-Smith.

has earmarked a five-storey site in the midst of the original garment and fabric wholesale district, Sham Shui Po as a creative hub consisting of showrooms, exhibition space, studios and incubators for a wide range of stakeholders from students to retailers and tourist. These collaborative creative cluster initiatives highlight the importance of creating alternative local spaces for fashion relevant to the community and as a site of place tourism with a defining narrative (Craik 2014; Jansson and Power 2010; Leslie et al. 2015). As part of this trend, in the past decade, the fashion scene in Hong Kong has started to adopt a more localized direction based on an understanding that fashion talent needs to be nurtured and accommodated at the local level. This has manifested a move away from complete reliance on the international showcasing of selected Hong Kong fashion talent in the traditional TDC fashion week road show, or being showcased in major stores and malls alongside international brands, to the use of small scale and pop-up retail spaces located in alternative bohemian neighbourhoods where clusters of local designer boutiques offer more unique, curated fashion experiences based on alternative narratives about space and place (Leslie et al. 2015) and more disruptive retail opportunities (Zhou 2015). By adopting this new strategy, Hong Kong has accommodated alternative creative approaches to fashion development based on a form of territorial stage-setting enabling the fashion micro-entrepreneur to find an affordable, viable outlet – either temporary or permanent – within a strategically placed community. These sites are found in particular neighbourhoods such as Star Street in Wan Chai or Tai Kwun on Hollywood Road, FFF in Lai Chi Kok and the Fashion Walk shopping zone in Causeway Bay, which attract relevant, like-minded consumers – local, regional and international. At the same

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time, in these localized neighbourhoods an innovative staging of fashion and lifestyle is taking place, where the fashion and lifestyle consumer is offered a more immersive engagement with creators and designers through more strategically executed fashion experiences based on atmosphere and unique locations (McColl et al. 2013), in addition to mini-fashion shows, designer presentations and experiential workshops. The residual retail zones or heritage buildings with a previous life and usage can be used to stage events, as non-traditional fashion spaces. This fosters the fashion consumption experience as an interruption (Ferreri 2015) or a festival, given the surprise effect that it creates and the media buzz that it generates. The need to locate fashion in a built environment in these supposed, mythic ‘non-spaces’, as transitional social areas in the urban commoditized zone (Auge 1995: 107), also highlights the need to physically engage with its materiality and its social significance beyond the physical garment or style offering itself. This trend also potentially challenges the seeming hegemony of digital retail fashion futures, albeit given that online promotion via bloggers or vloggers, for example, is essential to maintaining brand visibility. Although this is not the last word on fashion promotion given the importance of a bricks-and-mortar presence in urban spaces such as Hong Kong where in a compact city of easily accessed networked retail zones, the fashion shopper wants to view and feel garments pre-purchase.

PMQ site of the fashion show: A case study The next section is a case study of refashioned cultural hub PMQ, supplemented with views of fashion designer informants working there. The analysis is structured according to a populist and functional assessment of artforms in society based on an understanding that popular arts in the process of creating objects such as fashion, decoration and photography are natural heirs of folk art and perform critical social functions, in contrast to the more elevated mores of fine art or high art. This encompasses the idea that the fashion spectacle or show represents a blended rationale of aesthetics, production and commerce. Artforms, such as fashion outputs, have aesthetic, cultural and social roles and their extrinsic meanings need to be analysed according to the cultural, social and spatial contexts in which they occur (Gowans 1971). Hence, at an operational level fashion shows define a sense of place in public spaces for urban inhabitants via a functional process of identification, persuasion, orientation and regulation. Fashion shows enhance the visibility and importance of a built landscape and place, they attempt to impact the cognitive, affective and behavioural states of spectators and viewers, they validate the location of a place and define and regulate activity in public spaces, while also being regulated by it. Symbolically, they operate as a form of substitute imagery by materially and physically representing or performing concepts, narratives and themes, which is also extended to the digital domain. Rhetorically, fashion events and the fashion show convey ideas associated with the designer, the collection and garment, persuading the viewer to pay attention and support the message within the content of the display, and aesthetically by presenting a show to please the eye and mind. The hosting of the fashion show and related fashion-themed events and exhibitions at the heritage site PMQ, above the central business district in Hollywood Road, on Hong Kong Island, illustrates the multiple roles and functions of the urban-located fashion show. PMQ is a revitalization project opened in 2009 by the Hong Kong SAR government, formerly the site of the historic

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Central School, founded in 1862 by the colonial government as the first school to provide Western education in the former British colony. After destruction by a fire after the Second World War, the site became the PMQ in 1951 for rank and file officers until falling into disrepair in 2000. As part of the government’s ‘Conserving Central’ initiative the project was awarded to the Musketeers Education and Culture Charitable Foundation Limited and supported by Hong Kong Design Centre, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the HKDI of the Vocational Training Council. According to PMQ’s website, the building was earmarked after public consultation as a dedicated space for the development of a local creative industries hub, through the provision of open public space and tangible heritage conservation (PMQ 2019). Income is generated from over seventy fixed-term leased units and twenty short-term leased units by small businesses at subsidized rates, with Vivenne Tam, Kapok and local lifestyle brand G.O.D. occupying larger retail units on the ground floor. This accommodation of established fashion brands is viewed as being at odds with PMQ’s mission to support emerging designers. Yet others see the involvement of mature brands as necessary support and endorsement to anchor the rental income for the overall project. The hybrid funding model is based on government-financed foundational structural and building phases for the renovation costing HK$420 million with capital costs and internal décor being covered by the operator who donated a start-up seed money sum of HK$110 million, in addition to the site’s operation, management and maintenance. This not-for-profit approach intends to plough any net operating surplus profits back into the revitalization project to sustain and support its future.

Identification and orientation function Heritage spaces such as PMQ for staging fashion events, fashion shows and fashion retail units and workshops provide a useful space for new designers to house and showcase their work (Figure 9.3). Typically, the ground floor courtyard area is used to hold fashion show events, in addition to The Qube, a 600 square metre structure on the second floor. Initially, PMQ used fashion shows and fashion events to signal its intention to function as a creative base. As the cultural space has become recognized as a cultural landmark, mentioned regularly by the Hong Kong tourist board literature, featuring in lifestyle magazines and bloggers, its fashion shows and events have also benefitted by positive association. The coverage received during the launch of PMQ certainly validated this borrowed interest and strengthened its brand identity as a creative hub, making the heritage site attractive for hosting creative Figure 9.3  Fashion boutique in PMQ, Hong Kong. Photograph industries related events (Kammerer by Anne Peirson-Smith. 2014). PMQ’s vision as a creative hub

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was also challenged by some residents as lacking direction in representing a mishmash of commercial versus non-commercial intentions for fashion, lifestyle, art, creativity, craft, DIY workshops or food and beverage served up across the various formats of workshops, studios, galleries, retail stores, popups and catering units resulting in minimal traffic and poor business returns (Chow 2015). Other retail occupants also noted the disjuncture between the high-end fashion events and shows and the larger society client in attendance and their lack of interest in visiting and patronizing the situated retail units. The more popular night markets and fashion displays in the open atrium were inappropriate for their stock as one local fashion designer observed: ‘This place is good for hosting high society events – but this does not bring in the custom as it’s the wrong segment. Likewise, the weekend fashion and craft markets organised by management are too low end for us and I would not put any of my silk collection outside of a controlled air-conditioned environment in an open-air stall!’ (Dina, PMQ fashion boutique owner, March 2019). In terms of orientation, the visitor number and sales have been patchy since inception resulting in a high turnover after the two-year lease period, with some emerging local fashion brands such as local design brand Chocolate Rain vacating due to high rental and management costs and a low return. Given its evolving nature and as it represents a unique initiative giving impetus to other schemes, PMQ is a pathfinder whose successes will be copied and mistakes avoided in future by similar heritage enterprises given over to creativity design and lifestyle experiences, such as the mills. It would also appear that fashion has been a consistent thread throughout the events and exhibitions held in the heritage space which some residents have regarded as beneficial to their efforts, given that they are among like-minded start-ups. As one accessories designer observed: PMQ is a good thing for me as both a creative and retail concept – can they really be separated? I can also use this valuable and rare space for Hong Kong as a workshop and experiment with my work and test out directly on both my neighbours in other stores and my customers who visit me – which is a very efficient way of doing some market testing for my designs. (Kent, designer, PMQ boutique manager, February 2019)

Persuasive function The rhetorical function of fashion shows operates in a symbiotic way as the venue benefits from its associated usage as a viable venue for high-profile events. In this context, the situated hosting of fashion shows at PMQ reinforces the need, not just to preserve the collective memory of a territory in physical form, but also to bring it to life through active reuse ‘giving it another life, giving a new positive angle on post-colonialism’ as a resident fashion designer noted. This is all the more pertinent as Hong Kong has only relatively recently in the past twenty years started to selectively preserve historic buildings as opposed to redeveloping them into high-rise offices or residential units, typical of many Asian cities, as modernized redevelopment historically took precedence over heritage conservation. The content and type of fashion shows and exhibitions held at PMQ also tap into current trends and issues facing the fashion industry such as sustainable fashion consumption habits (Zhao 2018). In this sense, the educative potential of these events is often realized alongside commercial objectives to sell fashion and attract people to visit the retail site. Hence, NGO fashion sustainability champion Redress (Peirson-Smith 2019) regularly holds events showcasing its annual Eco Chic Design

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award winners. PMQ also organizes regular ‘Smart Runway’ events intended to involve and showcase the work of local designers reflecting new trends and innovation as with the ‘Canvas of the Night Sky’ fashion show in September 2018 featuring a collaboration between ten selected and matched fashion and technical designers tasked with creating a ‘complex visual experience on stage’ (PMQ 2019).

Aesthetic function While fashion shows have multiple purposes, the aesthetic display has been an enduring feature, allied to the commercial intent to stimulate sales and provide support by showcasing a designer’s work. The juxtaposition of legacy settings like PMQ to highlight a new collection appears to be an attractive proposition enhancing the aesthetic impact of garment display. In the Instagram age, this setting also enhances the all-rounded experience of the show in framing highly sharable images as an extended promotional arm. The aesthetic display extends beyond the catwalk notably at the VIP opening nights and parties that are a hallmark of Hong Kong fashion events. It was notable that at the January 2018 travelling Chanel exhibition, ‘Mademoiselle Privé’, many of the high society attendees wore both vintage and contemporary Chanel suits and dresses. In this way, the performative aspect of fashion shows extends beyond the modelled outfits to the strategically dressed attendees, typical of most Hong Kong fashion show events.

Regulatory function Generically, the fashion show is a highly staged and managed affair driven by professional knowledge and skills of a cast of cultural intermediaries involved in the backstage work. While PMQ is a public space dedicated to providing open access for viewing, shopping and dining, resident fashion events comply with the elitist ‘invitation only’ opening night for selected VIPs, often followed by an after-party on the same site. Fashion events at PMQ, such as the Chanel retrospective, are carefully policed and impervious to the non-invitee. While this legitimizes the cachet of PMQ as a desirable venue and the show as trending event, accorded status by the presence of the rich and famous, it reinforces the hierarchical status and the social boundaries of the fashion system and the power relations at play in Hong Kong society equating fashion with privilege. Equally, some small designer brands housed in PMQ can feel marginalized by such privileged management and control given that they are not included in the show or invited to the party as one designer explained: ‘I understand that the management are raising the profile of PMQ by actively hosting these events, but the resident designers are often not included or involved in any way. The fashion designers that are involved are often hand-picked maybe so that they will be future residents here. But what about the rest of us?’ (Jen, PMQ fashion boutique owner, February 2019). Combining resources and sharing intent, in May 2015, FFF launched a ‘Friday: Dress Hong Kong’ initiative at PMQ with a cocktail party, fashion exhibition and catwalk for invited guests including local business leaders, government officials and fashionistas before opening the display to the public. The event aimed at encouraging Hong Kong people to wear and support local fashion every Friday and share images of their outfits on social media. While it highlighted the work of young local designers

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such as mountainyam, Modement, The World is Your Oyster, Erbert Chog and Kris Jane, whether it was successful in its core intention is questionable. Equally, the PMQ management and collaborators are experimenting with the democratization of fashion displays and deregulating the boundaries as with the ‘Fashion 4 Everyone’ and ‘Fashion@Everywhere’ initiative in as part of multi-evented ‘Fashion Month PMQ’ in September 2016 which engineered a threeday tour of local fashion designers’ work into the community and beyond PMQ on a fashion truck, FashMobile, in the urban districts of Central, Tsim Sha Tsui, Causeway Bay and Mong Kok.

Conclusion The proliferation of contemporary fashion shows in Hong Kong, outside of the government organized biannual shows of local designers at Hong Kong Fashion Week, represents an artworld straddling commercial, aesthetic, social and cultural traditions mediated through collaborative professional practices as universal features. While the fashion show retains an elitist gloss, it functions to orient, identify, aesthetically elevate, enchant and persuade the onlooker. In the past, fashion shows were considered to be central to understanding how the fashion industry worked by choreographing mobile newness in the ‘catwalk economy’ of expectations (Löfgren 2005: 64). The transient ubiquity of fashion shows and fashion weeks around the globe highlights their importance as promotional fashion devices, while at the same time indicating that they may be reaching saturation point, as some suggest that purpose and presence need redefining with the advent of live-streamed fashion brand events at all levels of the market. This begs the question as to whether fashion shows and the spatial or geographic locations in which such displays are staged are central to an understanding of how fashion works. In the specific location of Hong Kong, the relocation of fashion shows to historic sites cum designated creative clusters suggests a more disruptive departure from managed clothes parades of the past. While some of the functions driving these new developments replicate the original purpose of the fashion show and mirror the elitist practices of the West, which Hong Kong’s fashion scene has perpetuated across time in an attempt to overcompensate for its garment manufacturing heritage, it has also found a way of signalling a unique contribution to the world fashion system. Hong Kong culture represents a complex, postcultural blended form of Eastern tradition and Western modernity overlaid with Eastern modernity and Western traditional influences. The same can be said for its urban development as reflected in the city landscape with its ancient and modern dualities, which are also reworked as a regular source of inspiration for local fashion designers. The contemporary staged fashion show in Hong Kong appears to have found a home in the nonspaces of urban heritage settings that offer to elevate the identity and aesthetic appeal of the staged fashion event experience and its spectacularly showcased content where old becomes new. In this sense, the allocation of urban-located creative design hubs such as PMQ may constitute an alternative ‘topographical imaginary’ as a counterweight or interruption to contested or imposed issues of identity, sovereignty and ownership by embracing ‘Hong Kong’s urban geography as a source of meaning identity and significance’ (Toland 2017: 100). Instead, fashionable identities are located within and against the backdrop of a built city environment, and not solely on the backs of its inhabitants. However, the question remains as to whether the future of Hong Kong fashion will be as present and adaptive as the heritage sites housing its creative outputs, or whether it will be as fleeting an encounter as the promotional hype and buzz of the evanescent fashion show.

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Kammerer, P. (2014), ‘Finally, a Heritage Project to Be Proud of in PMQ’, SCMP, 21 July. Available online: https​:/​/ ww​​w​.scm​​p​.com​​/comm​​ent​/a​​rticl​​e​/155​​6960/​​final​​ly​-he​​ritag​​e​-pro​​jec​t-​​be​-pr​​oud​-p​​mq. Karacs, S. (2016), Fashion Faux Pas: Why Hong Kong Designers Struggle to Make a Global Impact, SCMP. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.scm​​p​.com​​/news​​/hong​​-kong​​/econ​​omy​/a​​rticl​​e​/198​​6777/​​fashi​​on​-fa​​ux​-pa​​s​-why​​ -hong​​-kong​​-desi​​gners​​​-stru​​ggle-​​make-​​globa​​l. Kawamura, Y. (2004), The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, Oxford: Berg. Lefebvre, H. (1991), The Production of Space, trans.  D. Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Leslie, D., T. Brydges and S. Brail (2015), ‘Qualifying Aesthetic Values in the Experience Economy: The Role of Independent Fashion Boutiques in Curating Slow Fashion’, in A. Lorentzen, K. Topso Larsen and I. Schroder (eds), Spatial Dynamics In the Experience Economy, 88–102, New York: Routledge. Ling, W. (2010), ‘From “Made in Hong Kong” to “Dressed in Hong Kong”: Searching for an Identity in Fashion’, Visual Anthropology, 24 (1–2): 106–23. Löfgren, O. (2005), ‘Catwalking and Coolhunting’, in Magic, Culture and the New Economy, Oxford: Berg. Maskell, P. and A. Malmberg (1999), ‘Localised Learning and Industrial Competitiveness’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 23 (2): 167–85. McColl, J., C. Canning, L. McBride, C. Nobbs and L. Shearer (2013), ‘“It’s Vintage Darling”: An Exploration of Vintage Fashion Retailing’, Journal of the Textile Institute, 104 (2): 140–50. Nava, M. (1996), ‘Modernity’s Disavowal: Women the City and the Department Store’, Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of Modernity, 38–76, London: Routledge. Peirson-Smith, A. (2013), ‘Wishing on a Star: Promoting and Personifying Designer Collections and Fashion Brands’, Fashion Practice: The Journal of Design, Creative Process & the Fashion Industry, 5 (2): 171–202. Peirson-Smith, A. (2019), ‘A Spotlight on Redress: A Case Study of Sustainable Fashion Initiatives Influencing Consumption Practices in Hong Kong and China’, in A. Gwilt, A. Payne and E. A. Ruthschilling (eds), Global Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion, 174–8, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. PMQ. (2019), PMQ: Heritage. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.pmq.​​org​.h​​k​/her​​itage​​/hist​​ory​​-o​​f​-pmq​/ Rantisi, N. M. (2011), ‘The Prospects and Perils of Creating a Viable Fashion Identity’, Fashion Theory, 15 (2): 259–66. Segre Reinach, S. (2015), ‘Chinese Fashion in the Making: Essays, Books and Films’, International Journal of Fashion Studies, 2 (2): 307–19. Skov, L. (2004), ‘“Seeing is Believing”: World Fashion and Hong Kong Young Designers’ Contest’, Fashion Theory, 8 (2): 165–93. Skov, L. (2006), ‘The Role of Trade Fairs in the Global Fashion Business’, Current Sociology, 54 (5): 764–83. Skov, L. (2011), ‘Dreams of Small Nations in a Polycentric Fashion World’, Fashion Theory, 15 (2): 137–56. Speer, J. (2013), ‘Seeking New Markets at Hong Kong Fashion Week’, Apparel, 54 (12): 37. Tam, A. (2014), ‘A History of Hong Kong Fashion: A Look Back at 60 Years of Hong Kong’s Fashion Evolution’, Time Out, September 10. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.tim​​eout.​​com​/h​​ong​-k​​ong​/s​​hoppi​​ng​/hi​​story​​-of​-h​​ong​-k​​ ong​-f​​as​hio​​n​#tab​​_pane​​l​_5. Toland, A. (2017), ‘Hong Kong’s Artificial Anti-Archipelago and the Unnaturing of the Natural’, in A. Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds), Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism, 87–107, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Tolini Finamore, M. (2010), ‘Fashion Shows’, in V. Steele (ed.), The Berg Companion to Fashion, 306–9, Oxford: Berg. Tse, H. L. T. (2014), ‘Fashion Media Communication in Hong Kong’, International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education, 7 (2): 66–74. Tsui, C. (2009), China Fashion: Conversations with Designers, Oxford: Berg. Tudor, E. (2017), ‘Emerging Hong Kong Brands Catch the Eye of Paris Fashion Week’, Fashion Farm Foundation, March 2. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.scm​​p​.com​​/life​​style​​/fash​​ion​-l​​uxury​​/arti​​cle​/2​​07545​​3​/eme​​rging​​-hong​​-kong​​ -bran​​ds​-ca​​tch​-e​​y​e​-pa​​ris​-f​​ashio​​n​-wee​​k. Wilson Trower, V. (2013), ‘Pre-Transnationalism in Dress, A Methodology: The Unique Example of Hong Kong’s Expatriate Women, 1960–1997’, Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 4 (1): 7–23. Wu, J. (2009). Chinese Fashion from Mao to Now, Oxford: Berg Publishers.

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10 ‘TOO DIFFICULT’ KOOLHAAS, OMA AND PRADA AT THE BOUNDARY OF FASHION Grant Klarich Johnson

Introduction This chapter surveys the interior design of Prada’s fashion shows, specifically those created from 2006 to the present by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the design firm headed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. For more than fifteen years, the brand has collaborated with OMA on a diversity of projects, from advertising, publications and exhibitions to monumental permanent structures. Landmark projects include designs for Prada’s retail spaces (referred to as ‘Epicenters’) in New York and Los Angeles (2000–2001 and 2002–2004, respectively), and more recently the Fondazione Prada, an expansive art exhibition campus in Milan (2015). Emerging in the late 1980s with her breakthrough must-have-it bag, a black nylon backpack christened with Prada’s iconic triangular label, Miuccia Prada stewarded her inheritance, a luggage company founded by her grandfather, into an immensely profitable global brand, expanding from accessories into clothing for both men and women, fragrances, as well as an additional spin-off brand, Miu-Miu, and major brand acquisitions including Jil Sander and Helmut Lang. As a brand, Prada’s tidy accessories accorded with an overall trend in the 1990s towards more minimalist and restrained fashion, and yet both then and now Prada demonstrated an affection for kitsch and whimsical touches, emulating a style that is ‘classic but also eccentric, frumpy; yet undeniably hip’. Prada’s designs are understood as paragons of cool and chic, partially because they offer clothes that look ‘normal, but not quite normal’, with ‘little twists’ and touches of ‘bad taste’(Steele 2003: 107). On the occasion of an exhibition of Prada’s designs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, critic Judith Thurman deemed Miuccia Prada, ‘the world’s most influential designer’, an evangelist for ‘ugly cool’ (Thurman 2012: 24–6). Rem Koolhaas founded OMA in 1975, and has since demonstrated a progressive and influential approach to architecture and design, not only in the realization of actual buildings (quixotic landmarks

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including the headquarters for China Central Television, Beijing, 2012, and the Seattle Central Library, 2004) but also via his prolific output as a writer and theorist in books like Delirious New York (1978), and S, M, L, XL (1995). Described as ‘a first rate provocateur’ with a ‘habit of shaking up established conventions’, Koolhaas is understood as much as a ‘conceptual artist’, as a more singularly minded architect focused on refining any one particular style (Ouroussoff 2012). Prada’s affiliation with Koolhaas informs both popular and scholarly discussions of Miuccia Prada and her work (Specter 2004; O’Hagan 2013), and OMA’s work for Prada represents one of its best-known and longest-standing relationships, making the synthetic analysis of this tenure that this chapter offers relevant both for those interested in contemporary architecture and design and fashion. All of Prada’s men’s and women’s wear shows designed by OMA have occurred in the same space, one part of a former distillery facility in Milan. Since 2015, the same site has also become home to the Fondazione Prada, a contemporary art foundation and exhibition venue supported by Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli. This shared site, I argue, suggests that OMA and Prada have long inhabited and styled the site as an arena for aesthetic experience, cultivating a space for the provocative intersection of viewing subject and object, both fashion and, later, art. Inspired by this, I mobilize Koolhaas’s more permanent architectural work for Prada as a conceptual lens for OMA’s designs for the fashion shows. In light of the site-specific continuity between the shows and the Fondazione, the aforementioned appraisal of Koolhaas as a kind of conceptual artist and Miuccia Prada’s own often concept-driven collections, this chapter analyses OMA’s designs for those shows via methods developed for contemporary art and via art and architectural criticism (all of which echo the wake of minimalist and conceptual art’s tradition). Informed by readings of architecture as it intersects with art (particularly the work of Giuliana Bruno and Hal Foster), this chapter theorizes OMA’s designs for Prada’s shows as logically connected to its more permanent architectural spaces, both the Fondazione as a consecrated art space and Prada’s Epicenter retail spaces, which together embody ‘shopping’ as a universal mode that informs our experience of both art and fashion (Bruno 2014, 2007; Foster 2013). Through this synthesis, I argue that OMA’s designs propose new visual discourses and modes of display through which to enliven and understand Prada’s objects. Informed by the methodology of art and architectural criticism, instead of parsing OMA’s designs for Prada’s shows season by season, this chapter offers a formal analysis of them that surveys and synthesizes, conceptualizing them as a sustained inquiry at the boundary between consuming subject and commodity object.

The art of Prada Nicky Ryan’s ‘Prada and the Art of Patronage’ has argued that Prada’s affiliation with Koolhaas and OMA, along with Prada’s investment in contemporary art more broadly, solidifies the brand’s elite, luxury status by aligning it with the architect’s own avant-garde status (Ryan 2007). Ryan’s article works to counter the distinction Miuccia Prada has often reiterated, distinguishing her fashion business from her art collecting and claiming that her exuberant patronage be understood as a personal enthusiasm and not a calculated act of branding. To analyse Prada’s positioning, Ryan employs several theories developed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, particularly his writing on social distinction (Bourdieu 1984) and definition of the field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1993). Demonstrating Bourdieu’s claim that ‘taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’, Ryan argues that Prada’s aesthetic affiliations are deployed ‘to legitimate social difference and to mark and maintain brand distinction’ (Ryan 2007: 21).

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Demonstrating Ryan’s argument, mainstream press and fashion media have often taken note of Prada’s aesthetic investments, especially when they shore up an eccentric image of Miuccia Prada. For example, multiple profiles of Miuccia Prada note the installation of a Carsten Holler at the company’s corporate headquarters, a one-way conduit between her personal office and an exterior courtyard several stories below (Specter 2004; Sooke 2009), repeatedly positioning it to stand as a figurative detail, an apt introduction to Prada’s characteristic quirks. Holler’s slide, a flagship work of 1990s relational aesthetics, becomes a versatile metaphor for Prada’s own contradictions. The slide is both a playful, everyday object recognizable to toddlers and, especially when it becomes labelled as art and installed in an office building, an obscurity and occasion for estrangement, excluding and confusing viewers unschooled in or sceptical of its significance as conceptual art. This binary potential echoes a way of thinking about Prada’s fashion, functional as clothing on the one hand, and also legible as art for those in the know. An argument similar to Ryan’s, that aligning fashion with art elevates the status of the former to accord with the latter, could be applied to a variety of proliferating practices at the intersection of fashion and art (as exemplified by the case of Prada and Koolhaas, this includes any aesthetic activity classically positioned as higher than fashion, including architecture) from Jeff Koons’s purses for Louis Vuitton (2017) to Rodarte’s collections staged in various art galleries and museums (including at Gagosian, New York, from 2009 to 2013; the Dia Arts Center in 2017; and the Huntington Library in 2019). As such, instances of cultural intersection between name brand creators in various fields must be analysed not only for their sociological significance (in the vein of Bourdieu’s aforementioned studies of taste and distinction) as acts of class or market positioning but also for their particular symbolic significance as idiosyncratic cultural acts (Bourdieu 1984, 1993), for example, as I have just demonstrated in my reading of the metaphoric potential of the Holler slide. Interrogating the discourse offered by those credited as their makers, Rem Koolhaas and Miuccia Prada, I regard OMA’s design for Prada methodologically as art, utilizing the techniques of formal analysis, art and architectural criticism, and the theoretical frameworks of art history and visual studies. Informed by Miuccia Prada’s and Rem Koolhaas’s own aesthetic development in the wake of minimalist art (and later, minimalist fashion), I theorize OMA’s work for Prada in dialogue with relevant art historical precedents and as such as akin to acts of conceptual art at the intersection of fashion and architecture, both very much formulated in the wake of minimalist art’s reconfiguration of space, object and subject. As such, I follow the model of literary and art criticism, a method more prepared to analyse such collaborations in their particularity, as symbolic acts where form, style and symbolic content intertwine. In fact, this approach realizes the argument foregrounded by recent scholarship (again informed by sociologists like Bourdieu (1993), Goffman (1986) and Becker (1982)) which has argued that we regard ‘the fashion show as an art form’ in its own right, just as we would autonomous works of art like Holler’s slide, Koons’s sculptures or Koolhaas’s buildings (Skov et al. 2009).

Constancy and change As a central figure of the Italian contribution to fashion’s fall and spring show seasons, Prada has returned for many years to the same vast concrete interior for its Milan presentation, a distillery first built in the 1910s, and much more recently adapted, in 2015, by Rem Koolhaas into the Fondazione Prada. This repurposing of post-industrial site as a venue for aesthetic presentations follows the general trend towards converted rather than purpose-built museums and art exhibition spaces around the turn of

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the millennium. Fashion, especially for those creators like Prada who follow the contemporary art world closely, here follows the similar juxtaposition to be found at museums like Dia:Beacon in upstate New York which converted a Nabisco factory for the exhibition of largely minimalist art, the Tate Modern in a former London power station, or a spate of commercial galleries renting space in former warehouses with concrete floors, exposed I-beam ceilings and A-frame vaulted skylights in neighbourhoods like Manhattan’s Chelsea. In all these instances, like Prada’s shows staged by OMA, contemporary art came to occupy the vacant spaces left behind by now-absent manufacturing and heavy industry. Space formerly occupied in order to realize more banal, everyday commodities have been repurposed, almost consecrated, to reify luxury objects. Advancing this cycle of ‘creative reuse’ one degree further, the Belgian design and architecture collective Rotor creatively surveyed OMA’s show designs in 2011 by filling the same space within which Prada’s fashion shows usually occur with stacks of the dismantled set pieces of previous shows, saved by Prada since 1993. Interested in how buildings and architectural spaces are variably used, wasted and reused, Rotor invoked the question of sustainability, and the fashion show’s potentially irresponsible relationship to its imperatives. Filled with vast stacks, Rotor’s installation made the monumental quantity of materials required to sustain the biannual cycle of fashion shows physically daunting and literally palpable to visitors. As described by The New York Times, ‘these pieces, all of which show signs of previous use, have a ghostly presence, telling tales the viewer can’t quite grasp and turning the enormous space into a kind of conceptual version of a big-box home improvement store’ (Viladas 2011). Dramatizing the space’s history as a palimpsest of architectural schemes, futuristic foam blocks in white, pink and turquoise are amassed beside complicated carpentry and parquet. They summarized how OMA’s elaborate and yet intrinsically temporary interiors for Prada have employed a vast lexicon of materials, some more ecologically friendly than others, to conjure a wide spectrum of moods and settings. Notably, the exhibition evidenced the fact that Prada had not wasted but (possibly surprisingly) instead had saved its sets, anticipating the architectural concept and eventual cache of ‘creative reuse’ – without necessarily identifying a second life for these relics beyond Rotor’s intervention. Neither completely disposed of nor recycled, the ‘ghostly’ installation was haunted by the still ambivalent relationship between fashion and sustainability. As Rotor’s installation evidenced, over the course of more than a decade Koolhaas’s team has dressed the distillery space in ways that demonstrate both consistency and flexibility, a strong metaphoric interplay for a heritage brand such as Prada (founded in 1913, and reconceived by Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli into its contemporary configuration beginning in the late 1970s) to thematically conjure for itself as time passes and markets shift. By repeatedly adapting the same brutal, concrete space for the shows, Koolhaas’s interiors firstly lend Prada an obdurate constancy, arguing for it as a stalwart of old-world Italian craftsmanship which uniquely combines both heritage and modernity. While the site is repeated, it is dressed to create a variety of distinct settings. Prada’s dependable return to the venue, season after season, echoes the durable concrete character of the monumental space. Evocative of an industrial or even fascist Italy, the space looks like a harsh relic of a drab, austere past markedly distinct from Prada’s often conceptually rich, indulgently citational, or decadently urbane design palette. Vast, like a drill hall or a space for manufacturing, as a blank canvas the space suggests a brutalist monumentality, resoundingly empty. The immensely tall space is punctuated by relatively simple, square concrete pillars which vault into a ceiling of lightly gridded recessions. The hall has the harsh efficiency of a warehouse and anticipates the brutalism of post-war architecture by Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer. The squarely colonnaded interior recalls a distinctly Italian vision of the twentieth century, one that is modern, ancient, unforgiving and mysterious, as in the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio Di Chirico. This

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repeated site, a bulwark of concrete that looks prepared to withstand a nuclear holocaust projects a sense of sturdy constancy for Prada as a brand, its identity materialized as an obdurate fixture of Italian luxury, heritage craftsmanship and productive manufacturing resolutely assured. Season by season, this site is dressed to shift its appearance and heighten the thrall and overall excitement of independent collections, several of which would be otherwise rather soft-spoken affairs if left to rest solely on the clothing’s impact. Some presentations (such as that used for both Men’s and Women’s Spring 2009) leave much of the site visible, its basic architecture palpable to the viewer and a significant contributing factor in the overall mise en scène, while others almost completely obscure or distract from it with elaborate false walls, wallpapers, floor coverings, risers, seating or other significant architectural build-outs (including those excavated by Rotor) that create a theatrical façade or arena, architecture within architecture. Void of windows or skylights, the hall shuts off the outside world, allowing OMA’s theatres to encourage the viewer to forget the world they have just left entirely, replaced at least for the show’s duration by the visual logic and order of the space at hand. For example, paired with the clothing of Men’s Spring 2009, the cast concrete pillars patinated by time and use reinforced the uncomplicated mood of the collection, filled with classic staples (polos, oxford shirts, belted overcoats) offered in a familiar menswear palette of olive, brown and navy. When this collection departed into quixotic garments – latex yellow jackets, a mossy neck-strap bolero and various monochrome, beige, layered linen ensembles – the drill hall or manufacturing overtones of the space grounded them as allusions either to the materials of military and industry or to the rustic costume of old-world craftsmen like aproned woodworkers or bakers. The sense of contemporary menswear fantasizing about a past or imaginary life as a tradesman, fisherman, soldier or sailor echoed the set’s tiered, curvilinear wooden risers, evocative of handcraft’s wooden benches, or sand dunes, beaches and Mediterranean islands populated by humble labourers. Making use of the same set, this same season’s womenswear was similarly casual, often explicitly rumpled and wrinkled. Garments carried patterns of fish and mermaids again in a neutral palette between black, beige, brown and an acidic yellow-green that all together also played between military and beachy allusions, with surface textures evocative of shells, crumpled paper or tents and parachutes. This embrace of a unique found site (as opposed to a venue purpose-built from scratch or one shared with other brands) as part of the backdrop of the contemporary fashion show can be found in much of the presentations of recent fashion (Strömberg 2017). As such, Prada and OMA may present a case study symptomatic of a more general trend. Like Prada, but in an American context, Marc Jacobs repeatedly utilized the equally vast armouries and drill halls of Manhattan for his presentations (Johnson 2015). They evoke much the same feeling, a monumental but also brooding, looming space, allowing for the juxtaposition of a found past with a fashioned present. Because these spaces are not generally dressed to completely obscure their basic qualities, viewers retain a sense of the particular materiality and historic specificity of them, the visceral language of the aging building as a kind of modern ruin. They are not theatrical blank slates or nondescript white tents. Such combinations create a charged temporality, charged with an antiquated or threatening past contrasted by the shock of fashion’s promise of the new.

A radical space: From Epicenter to fashion show OMA began designing Prada’s fashion shows comprehensively in 2006, a logical evolution of the collaboration between the two luxury brands which had begun at the turn of the century with the debut

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of Prada’s Epicenter, a New York retail flagship in Manhattan’s SoHo neighbourhood, another space, like the Fondazione, charged in turn to lend significance to fashion and art. The metal fencing cages and gymnasium-esque wooden panelled interior of the space, a totalizing conversion and reconceptualization of the building’s existing nineteenth-century New York skeleton, advertised an urbane approach to technology, materials and form, pragmatically and soberly futuristic. The arrival of Prada’s quixotically decadent remodel at ground level mirrored the physical and spiritual conversion throughout the neighbourhood, as gritty lofts abandoned by pre-war manufacturing were converted into glamorously sparse and spacious apartments or similarly chic offices. Notably, Prada’s store would occupy the same space previously programmed as the Guggenheim museum’s downtown branch before it too abandoned SoHo. The arrival of Prada clearly marked the end of SoHo’s previous life as a low- or no-rent haven for experimental artists (and later, their gallerists) squatting and reimagining an abandoned New York. Prada’s arrival demonstrated how completely this creative mythology had been swallowed up and priced out by the blasé normalization of yuppies, a Gen X re-embracing and reimagining how to display the exuberant wealth of the millennium pivot. Prada became some part of their answer. Descriptions of the flagship building, a metaphor for a new ideology espoused by both OMA and Prada, fetishized the ‘smart’ and cool tech Koolhaas incorporated, underscoring (in a classically modernist way) how supposedly ‘functional’ flourishes effectively serve more as affectively significant additions, contributing to an overall mood of machine-assisted prowess and luxury. Dressing room doors became opaque with the touch of a finger, screens throughout the space allowed visitors to order garments and browse styles while radio antennae tracked pieces in and out of dressing rooms (Specter 2004). In a zone called the ‘aura’, screens known as the ‘ubiquitous display’ show loops of video, such as footage from a mall in China. Both technically sophisticated and simple display screens and surfaces for video and still imagery allow for a shifting display of graphics based on each season’s overall aesthetic. Later, when OMA began to design Prada’s fashion shows, these displays would allow for the mise en scène of collection presentations to cross-pollinate into the scenography of Prada’s retail spaces, to inflect the new collection’s arrival in stores with iconography beyond the garments themselves. For example, the pie charts, graphs and lists that backdropped both the Men’s and Women’s Fall 2010 collections reappeared as printed wallpaper for the retail spaces. Ditto the retro collages of fall 2017 and the comic book friezes of spring 2018 (OMA) (Figure 10.1). For both of these latter shows, OMA’s backdrops became transmedial surfaces, allowing prints and patterns already animating the surfaces of the clothes, from the pulp fiction femme fatales of Robert McGinnis to the dynamic cartoons that decorated both gendered collections, to continue as if seamlessly from the surfaces of the clothing to the surfaces of the space around them. Conceptually, such continuity encourages a sense of these respective surfaces, although carried by supports as distinct as human bodies and walls, as democratically connected and contiguous, permeable one into another and somehow synthetically one. Recorded video of fashion shows (or something like the aforementioned mall footage deployed by OMA/Prada), projected or displayed on small to very large screens or surfaces, became an increasingly ubiquitous inclusion in luxury fashion retail design in the second decade of this century for many brands. Influenced by Koolhaas’s multimedia enthusiasm, the virtual synthesis of the recorded performance of the fashion show into the real space of retail animated the otherwise still garments on display. It encouraged a blur between then and now, here and there, a retrospective, ideal past incorporated into the real here and now. It also suggested an appropriate embodiment of garments and accessories to potential consumers, themselves an animating force in the otherwise static holding tank of retail.

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Figure 10.1  A general view of the atmosphere of the runway at the Prada show during Milan Men’s Fashion Week spring/summer 2018, Milan, Italy, 2017. Photo by Venturelli/WireImage. Courtesy of Getty Images.

It allowed two ‘live’ moments to coalesce. As such, animated displays of recorded footage not only extend the ‘life’ and event of the fashion show beyond its first occurrence, they also complement and question the ontology of the traditional display mannequin, one of fashion’s familiar found objects and other conventional display conceits. Anticipating this conceptual disruption Prada has often multiplied its mannequins into an ‘army’ of false bodies (as seen following the store’s opening in 2002–2003, and as recently as 2018 on the central stairwell) stacked too close to approach or circle individual mannequins, or otherwise identified ways to make them partly ridiculous or potentially superfluous in the rhetoric of its visual merchandising (Moss 2018). Like the various Epicenters also of their design, OMA’s fashion show designs would similarly dramatize technically sophisticated interfaces and motifs, utilizing digital projections and video to both heighten and confuse perception of the recurring show space. For 2008 Men’s Spring collection, viewers and models were surrounded by aerial views of a complicated hedge maze, creating a claustrophobic feeling or encouraging the sense of confusion and panic possible in such complicated gardens (Figure 10.2). This animation was heightened by graphic arrows printed on the floor as the clothes themselves ultimately built up to reveal vibrant jewel-toned prints (some in bloom) emerging from an initially sober, unremarkable collection of practical, black ensembles at the start. For 2010 Women’s Spring show, a large wall running down the centre of the catwalk (with black and white diner tiling on either side that matched the collection’s overall palette) allowed for a monumental projection that at times suggested a false recession into a virtual architectural space, vast and elongated arcades with

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columns rushing into linear perspective that at times matched several garments with printed imagery of beaches and other landscape vistas. This façade was perforated at regular intervals with monumental rectangular doorways, allowing seated viewers on either side of the wall not only to see the circling models briefly for a second time, on their return trip, but also to look upon their vaguely doubled image, other real spectators lined up and facing them through the doorways. More projections would continue to open Figure 10.2  A model displays a creation by Prada as part of the 2008 windows onto fictive spaces as time passed, like the airy urban vistas of spring/summer men’s collection during Milan’s Fashion Week, Milan, rooftops and sparse mid-century Italy, 2007. Photo Giuseppe Cacace/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy interiors of mod living rooms and of Getty Images. corporate work spaces for the Men’s 2013 Fall show that harmonized with the jewel-toned colour blocking of the collection and real furniture designed by OMA for Knoll International. For the Women’s 2013 Fall presentation, surrealist photogram-esque collages of grill, grate and fence patterns intermingled with spooky noir silhouettes of cats, branches, anonymous women and window blinds set at an angle, underscoring the distressed styling of the models, hair slicked so as to look drowned, and necklines pulled off the shoulder or otherwise askew. These images were cropped and framed by a colonnade pattern that matched the real columns of the space exactly, drawing the viewer completely into a trompe l’oeil effect, and confusing the division between real and virtual space. Like designs for theatre, the increasingly detailed sets heighten a sense of narrative and context for respective collections. Such continuities between OMA’s retail spaces for Prada and its temporary designs for its shows demonstrate an understanding of retail space too as a staged, theatrical and adaptable space. Shifting according to the design of the fashion show and its associated collections, retail spaces mimic the mood and iconography of the fashion show to welcome consumers otherwise absent from the exclusive space of the show into its seductive aura. This comprehensive perceptual play may reflect a continuation of what Koolhaas intended to introduce in designing the Epicenters. ‘I tried to inject instability to make a radical space’, he told reporters upon the debut of the New York store. ‘You never know what you are going to get here’ (Hales 2001). That said, it may be more precise to state that OMA locates not so much a radical space as a radical boundary between distinct spaces and times. Just as the Prada Epicenter mixes a real time with a recorded or recalled past or elsewhere, OMA’s show designs overall expand the real space of the show across a boundary (often represented literally by various surfaces for projections or other evocative planes of imagery, such as the vast 20 × 35 metre carpet with a Navajo pattern for Fall 2012 that suggested one continuous and thus gigantic rug) into fictive virtual spaces. Giuliana Bruno has scrutinized what she calls the ‘surface tension’ of such interfaces, from digital projections to elaborately folded textiles, and theorizes that surface is

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‘configured as an architecture’ (Bruno 2014). Judged by their work for Prada, it is clear that surfaces, in their diversity and intersection, from textiles to projections, similarly inform OMA’s approach to architecture. As such, OMA’s designs locate Prada not so much in a fixed architectural space as in one notable for its permeable and mobile boundaries that not only allow but also encourage several realms to kiss. Patterns and themes, both the material and the conceptual, move between and across both clothing and space as part of a cohesive theatre.

Too difficult In describing why she sought Koolhaas as a collaborative partner, Miuccia Prada repeatedly asserted her attraction to the architect’s reputation as uniquely difficult or complicated: We laid out all the books that we had on contemporary architecture on the floor. I looked at the work of Rem Koolhaas. I didn’t know anything about him, yet for me he was the only one. I am very proud of that. I saw something that was different in his work. It was more than architecture. I saw something more complicated. Some of the people around us said that he is too difficult, that he is impossible, that he is too conceptual, a cult architect. We said, ‘Probably he is the right one!’ (in Sischy 2002) Describing the same origin story elsewhere, Prada described the same moment, when her husband suggested: ‘Let’s take out the books, and perhaps we will see something that looks exciting.’ I picked out the work of Koolhaas. I didn’t know him. Or his work. Everyone was suggesting somebody, and nobody suggested him. They said, ‘Ah, no, forget it, he is too difficult.’ But immediately when somebody is difficult for us it’s exciting. (in Specter 2004) Elsewhere she has stated, ‘We checked out a lot of architects. I really appreciated what Koolhaas does, because he is interested in so much more than architecture. Everybody we talked to about him said, “He’s too difficult.” That made us really sure he was right for us’ (Sudjic 2004). In every instance without fail, Prada rehearsed the phrase ‘too difficult’, casting Koolhaas as a challenge, both for her as a collaborator and, assumedly, for any user of his work. As such, Koolhaas, and Prada by extension, are branded as user ‘unfriendly’, radically against the grain of conventional capitalist wisdom. Reflecting how much Prada would prefer to be understood as more than fashion (approaching the conceptual complexity of art), she casts Koolhaas as ‘more than architecture’ (Sischy 2002). It is Koolhaas’s supposed difficulty, his intellectual complexity and wide-ranging interests that make him appropriate for Prada, suggesting these are qualities at the core of the brand’s own mission, key to Miuccia’s practice and sensibility as a creative director and designer in her own right. ‘What I really like about them is that they have an incredible, instinctual kind of visceral and material intelligence, and it is combined with a real intellectualism. Of course, we are very critical, and some people would find it scary. But I think they find it exciting’, remarked Koolhaas, burnishing the reputation of Prada’s leaders, Miuccia and her husband Patrizio Bertelli (Sischy 2002). The trio unites according to an ethos of criticality, fierce, ‘real’ intellectualism that is not only about the mind but also about the visceral matter of materials,

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a logical investment for a designer of garments as well as an applied architect, grounded in more than paper models and academic theories. Reflecting this origin story’s suggestion of a kind of blind date or pairing arising from some kind of chance procedure, a significant partnership that arises without knowing ‘anything about him’ or by simply pulling a book off the shelf like a card from a deck, Miuccia Prada has continued to describe their relationship as one that preserves an element of relative creative autonomy. ‘When we chose to work with Rem Koolhaas, we knew that we weren’t going to be making many suggestions to him about how it should be’, she has said (Sudjic 2004). In theory, this model of collaboration harkens back to the supposed chance encounters between distinct media occasioned by post-war avant-garde performers like Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, who would supposedly arrive to rehearsals and even performances without coordinating the distinct content of choreography, music and costume/set designs (respectively) as a cohesive aesthetic beforehand. As such, jarring combinations were frequent but also encouraged by the process. That said, palpably haphazard combinations are less pronounced in Prada and OMA’s collaborations than those of potential Dada-inspired precedents. Although they are at times stylistically disjunctive, they are usually still characterized by juxtapositions that complement rather than impede or startle. This difference in part reflects the longer developmental process typical of architecture, less likely to take on an improvisational rapport, but also the fact that Prada ultimately retains directorial control. In 2016, OMA partner Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli used the word ‘osmotic’ to describe the partnership, stating that ‘Miuccia is involved in every creative discussion from the very first steps to the very last ones. Our collaboration is based on a constant dialogue and exchange of ideas. The process is theatrical in a sense: The set echoes the collection and vice versa and they are both outcomes of the same cultural imagery’ (Moss 2016). In a slideshow made to accompany this interview, one sees that this shared ‘cultural imagery’ takes the form of shared mood boards, collaged surfaces that combine images from art, historical, architectural and even simply purely material sources (Moss 2016). Upon the debut of her LA store Observer, critic Deya Sudjic claimed: ‘There is a view that Koolhaas is a kind of Svengali who holds Miuccia Prada in thrall, pushing her into pouring untold millions into a series of shops that are as expensive as they are perverse’, although he ultimately resolved, ‘It’s not a view held by anybody who has actually met her’ (Sudjic 2004). The generally cohesive aesthetic continuity between Prada’s clothes and OMA’s designs demonstrates that their autonomy finds a way to create a reinforcing rather than clashing combination in most instances, even if one or the other doesn’t make many explicit suggestions, ‘about how it should be’. Reflecting on his work with Prada, and his exploration of shopping as a teacher, Koolhaas has stated, ‘I am interested in fashion as perhaps one of the most pure forms of recreation. It’s about a maintenance that doesn’t require any explanation or argument and that can be completely shameless – and I think it is easier to reach the sublime in fashion than in any other way’ (Sischy 2002). Elsewhere, he articulated how, Shopping used to be an autonomous entity with its own metabolism . . . but over the past twenty years it has infiltrated almost every other activity known to man. Airports, churches, universities – it has become impossible to disentangle and separate the fate of these entities from shopping. They support each other, and you don’t know where one ends and the other begins. (Specter 2004) Here, Koolhaas returns us to the question of the boundary between realms, casting ‘shopping’ – and fashion as its urform or ultimate incarnation – as the driving phenomenon confusing otherwise distinct

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cultural zones. Not only capable of the sublime, but also infiltrating every aspect of life as never before, Koolhaas casts ‘shopping’ as an intellectually stimulating frontier, a membrane to contemplate but also experience first-hand, observing as a spectator but also activating as a consuming performer. Invoking the notion of the sublime in regards to fashion, Koolhaas (as well as his colleagues, elsewhere) positions it to inherit the tradition of Kantian aesthetics and European Romanticism (Sischy 2002; Moss 2016). As embodied by their shows, this permeability is a compelling way to understand both OMA and Prada’s definition of fashion and ‘shopping’ as a phenomenon not grounded solely in discrete commodities but in their intersection with human subjects in diverse, heterogeneous spaces charged not only by literal things, garments or accessories but also by the presentation and perception of them, a sublime matrix more ephemeral and liquid than static architecture. As such, ‘shopping’ encompasses the charged intersection between commodity objects and consuming subjects. Shopping is the transitive membrane that connects but also blurs them into a continuity of experience and sensibility. We might imagine OMA’s designs for Prada as constructing and imagining this charged space, this permeable membrane, so much so that it is palpable and exciting. As the first public viewing of new commodities ‘shopping’ arguably begins at the fashion show, so that it precedes the Epicenter in initiating the disease or disaster of consumer desire. As I will discuss here, in OMA’s approach, viewers of the fashion show become part and parcel of the show itself, confusing the boundary between production and consumer.

Where one ends and the other begins Back at the New York Epicenter, a dramatic central staircase descending from the ground floor encourages shoppers to descend into an indulgent void. One Virgil for this journey was Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, who spirited boyfriend Jack Berger (and viewers) into Prada’s subterranean dressing rooms in an episode from the show’s sixth season (Sex and the City 2003). Regarding purses and garments displayed like sculptures along the way, the monumental and surreal staircase, running alongside a monumental concourse of polished wood referred to by Koolhaas as ‘the wave’, encourages a sense of spiritual journey, wonder, gravity and conceptual complexity for the shopping experience. Similar stairwells demarcate the significant experience anticipated (as well as the abandonment of the quotidian street left behind) at ancient temples, classical revival American courts and state houses, as well as Beaux Arts and other older art museums, like at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the interior stairwells of the Louvre. Although unlike these spaces, Koolhaas moves viewers down rather than up from street level, fetishizing descent rather than ascent. This spatial metaphor recalls descents into a spiritual and earthen underworld, such as that of Dante’s Inferno or of Persephone into Hades’s land of the dead. Less morbidly, maybe it captures the descent into a space of buried treasure and reward. While other epicenters such as OMA’s design for Los Angeles introduced other similarly iconic grand staircases, OMA’s fashion show designs echoed the oddity and play of the epicenter’s staircase by reimagining the catwalk, the usual pathway of the fashion show beginning with their debut in 2006. Even more so than the elaborate mise en scènes, whether projected tableaux or real temporary constructions, these convolutions of the itinerary, the classical ritual of the fashion show may be OMA’s most radical and important intervention and contribution to the recent historical development of fashion. In one season, pre/post-OMA, Prada went from presenting its collection in the usual straight procession and recession, extremely familiar, to OMA’s first non-linear conceit. Reviewing documentation of Prada’s shows before and immediately after, one witnesses a stark, almost shocking shift. Rising

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to the occasion of the clothing at its centre, the show’s setting abandoned uniformity in favour of theatrically announced individuality. For OMA’s first design, the linear catwalk ballooned outward into an oblong oval constructed by bright red rectangular blocks. Employed as benches, they positioned spectators not only at the runway’s edges but also at the heart of the resulting racetrack void, arguably the show’s corporeal core. Meanwhile, the runway surface itself was a shiny slick black reminiscent of latex or an oil slick. For the next shows, OMA doubled down, producing two dramatically elevated ramps for both the men’s and women’s shows, sending models into the crowd of the audience first down a steep drop and then into a hairpin turn, like Hotwheels cars. While the men’s ramp gradually introduced stairs, the women’s was flat. One wonders which presented the more hazardous course. Possibly betraying an answer, the women’s ramp (unlike the Men’s) came with a single banister alongside its initial descent. From here, OMA would experiment with increasingly complex catwalks and courses, including a maze of right-angle pivots demarcated by black arrows on the runway floor that echoed the projected images of a hedge maze in Men’s Spring 2008; the sharply intersecting vectors of Fall 2010’s data-scape (used for both Women’s and Men’s); the amorphous beige field of negative space between the rounded cornered islands, Mayan pyramid-esque wooden risers introduced in Spring 2009 (again, used for both); or the lattice grid of AstroTurf for Men’s Spring 2012 punctuated by hundreds of blue foam cubes, used as seats for solitary spectators arrayed tidily across the grassy field (Figure 10.3).

Figure 10.3  A model displays a creation as part of Prada Spring–Summer 2012 Menswear collection during the Men’s Fashion Week in Milan, Italy, 2011. Photo Olivier Morin/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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In several instances, the model’s itineraries were not indicated by the static architectural elements in place before the show began, but rather were revealed by either decisively illuminated pathways (as in Men’s Spring 2013) or simply the choreographed thrust of the models themselves (as for the Men’s Fall 2012 showing). Taken as a whole, Koolhaas’s designs reject the rote linearity of a straight catwalk, conceiving of a variety of programmes for models to parade down increasingly convoluted paths. Since, this device has become commonplace, again, for brands well beyond Prada’s experimentalism. This narrative of increasing complexity is fitting for Prada’s brand identity, often understood to be conceptually dense, and at times more complicated with inspirations than most can decode (Vogelson 2018). Just as the models, no matter the convulsions of the course, depart and arrive from the same simple backstage, Prada’s design process still must find its way from its multitude of references and at times seemingly eccentric pursuits to a functional, commercial collection that will succeed in stores. In these rearrangements, attention is diffused throughout the space, dispersed widely rather than to one particular point. As such, the show becomes less like a carefully focalized theatrical event and more like the playing field of a sport like soccer or basketball. Activity is arrayed across the space, and the spectator is more completely revealed and incorporated into the visible field rather than differentiated into a darkened abyss. In a recent appraisal of Merce Cunningham’s Events performances, the art historian Claire Bishop has underscored Cunningham’s interest in how television inaugurated (in the choreographer’s mind) an increased ability within viewers to apprehend a performance from more than one angle rather than the single angle of a traditional proscenium stage (Bishop 2019). Informed by this belief, Cunningham sought to emulate the normal dynamics of people moving on a sidewalk or street, as well as the unpredictable and dispersed activity of a sports field as we direct our attention towards, or rather across, it (Bishop 2019). All of these perceptual analogies hold too for Prada and OMA’s sets for its shows, where spectators are arranged to witness the show from innumerable angles, and models move with an increased unpredictability, breaking with the usual rote linearity of the catwalk. By scattering models across complicated fields rather than linear catwalks, OMA’s sets for Prada encourage the fashion show to approach the quality of Cunningham’s dispersed choreographies by not only blending spectators into the field of fashion’s event, the fashion show, but also begin to approach the quality of everyday people arrayed within and moving through the real settings it virtually depicts: office buildings, beaches, sidewalks, roads, homes, tiled arcades, hedge mazes, golf courses and on and on. Beyond this, the design often implicates or incorporates the audience itself into the middle of the runway’s dynamic course, thus making them part of the performance of the fashion show. As described by OMA partner Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, this is very much intentional, stating, ‘in terms of spatial qualities, we try to constantly redefine the relationship between the audience and the fashion, reinventing the typical mechanics of a fashion show’ (Moss 2016). To return to the sociological theorizations of the fashion show with which this chapter began, such redefinition confuses the demarcation these studies have worked to diagram, the line between the more everyday sectors set aside for audience or backstage preparation and the charged ritual space of the fashion show, an ‘on stage’ area where performance shifts clothes into fashion (Skov et al. 2009). Summarizing the revised relationship between art and spectator configured by neo-avant-garde art after 1960, critic and art historian Hal Foster describes the viewer as ‘prompted to explore the perceptual consequences of a particular intervention in a given site’ (Foster 1993). In their handling of the fashion show, I see Prada and Koolhaas as theorizing the discrete garment, fashion’s supposed

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object much in the way established by minimalist sculpture and the visual and spatial practices inaugurated in its wake. In the words of artist and influential writer Robert Morris writing in the 1960s, ‘the object is but one of the terms in the newer esthetic . . . .One is more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from the various positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context’ (Morris 1993). With such minimalist theories in mind, I argue that Koolhaas and Prada present their work as similarly instigating, minimalist conceptually if not stylistically. Their designs bring attention not only to the garment but also to the total mise en scène, the theatre that imbues it with meaning or produces a particular experience including the critics, buyers and celebrities incorporated as activated and increasingly visible spectators. As Foster recalls, minimalism and the art that followed in its wake were subject to a critique that it proposed ‘an attempt to displace late-modernist art by means of a literal reading that confuses the transcendental “present-ness” of art with the mundane “presence” of things’ (Foster 1993). Here we return to the question of liveliness and co-mingling (both temporalities introduced earlier in my discussion of the representation of the show in the space of retail). This confusion is key to Prada’s project, creating garments, accessories, ‘things’ that not only confuse our sense of what separates an object from a subject, but also what boundary distinguishes commodity ‘things’ like fashion from supposedly autonomous or transcendent categories like art.

Conclusion As I have argued, in the space of the fashion show Prada and OMA propose a situation where categories and perceptions mingle compellingly. It is a realm of self-conscious perceptions and permeable membranes between cultural categories, a boon to Miuccia Prada’s investment in the aesthetic and conceptually compelling over commercial pandering. I have employed OMA’s more permanent architectural projects for Prada as a conceptual lens through which to understand its designs for Prada’s fashion shows, arguing that they are connected experientially as well as theoretically. I have examined Koolhaas’s definition of shopping and fashion as radical modes through which contemporary culture continues to locate and construct a Romantic sublime. My argument has drawn upon theories of art and architecture to ground OMA’s designs for Prada as aesthetic texts legible within these frameworks as well as in legitimate dialogue with various art and cultural precedents. I have underscored important developments and experiments, such as the abandonment of the linear catwalk, that have situated Prada and OMA as pioneers in new approaches to the fashion show and how we understand our perception of it. Ultimately, I have positioned Prada and OMA’s collaboration as an heir to minimalist and conceptual art, aesthetic interventions that organize our attention not only towards discrete objects (like garments) but also to the dialogue between site, architectural frame and observing subject that lend them their ultimate significance.

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FEATURED SHOWS Prada: Men’s Spring/Summer 2018 (video available via YouTube: Prada)

Prada: Men’s Spring/Summer 2008 (video available via YouTube: Fashion Central)

Prada: Women’s Spring/Summer 2010 (video available via YouTube: FF Channel)

Prada: Men’s Spring/Summer 2012 (video available via YouTube: Prada)

References Becker, H. S. (1982), Art Worlds, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bishop, C. (2019), ‘Cunningham and Television in the Sixties’, New York Public Library, January 18, 2019. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyp​​l​.org​​/blog​​/2019​​/01​/1​​8​/mer​​ce​-cu​​nning​​ham​-t​​elevi​​sion-​​sixti​​​es​-cl​​aire-​​bisho​p (accessed July 31, 2019). Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993), The Field of Cultural Production Essays on Art and Literature, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Bruno, G. (2007), Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bruno, G. (2014), Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foster, H. (1993), ‘The Crux of Minimalism’, The Return of the Real, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foster, H. (2013), The Art-Architecture Complex, New York, NY: Verso. Goffman, E. (1986), Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston, MA: North Eastern University Press. Hales, L. (2001), ‘Surprises in Store’, The Washington Post, December 29, 2001. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​ .was​​hingt​​onpos​​t​.com​​/arch​​ive​/l​​ifest​​yle​/2​​001​/1​​2​/29/​​surpr​​ises-​​in​-st​​ore​/7​​47b0a​​2f​-b9​​28​-44​​3c​-a1​​93​-11​​6491d​​ 90749​/​?nor​​ed​ire​​ct​=on​​&utm_​​term=​​.ca7e​​10f8b​​df2 (accessed July 31, 2019). Johnson, G. (2015), ‘Citing the Sun: Marc Jacobs, Olafur Eliasson, and the Fashion Show’, Fashion Theory, 19 (3): 315–30. Morris, R. (1993), ‘Notes on Sculpture, Parts 1 & 2’, in Hal Foster, Return of the Real, 50, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moss, H. (2016), ‘The Making of Prada’s Understated Architectural Set’, The New York Times Style Magazine, February 25, 2016. Moss, J. (2018), ‘Inside the Store that Changed the Way We Consume Fashion’, AnOther, May 3, 2018. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.ano​​therm​​ag​.co​​m​/fas​​hion-​​beaut​​y​/108​​15​/in​​side-​​the​-s​​tore-​​that-​​chang​​ed​-th​​e​-w​ay​​-we​-c​​ onsum​​e​-fas​​hion (accessed July 31, 2019). O’Hagan, A. (2013), 'Power of One: Miuccia Prada’s Circle of Influence’, The New York Times, May 27, 2013. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​013​/0​​5​/27/​​t​-mag​​azine​​/powe​​r​-of-​​one​-m​​iucci​​a​-pra​​das​-c​​ir​cle​​-of​-i​​ nflue​​nce​.h​​tml (accessed July 31, 2019). Ouroussoff, N. (2012), ‘Why Is Rem Koolhaas the World’s Most Controversial Architect?’ Smithsonian, September 2012. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.smi​​thson​​ianma​​g​.com​​/arts​​-cult​​ure​/w​​hy​-is​​-rem-​​koolh​​aas​-t​​he​-wo​​rlds-​​most-​​ contr​​overs​​ia​l​-a​​rchit​​ect​-1​​82549​​21/ (accessed July 31, 2019). Ryan, N. (2007), ‘Prada and the Art of Patronage’, Fashion Theory, 11 (1): 7–24. Sex and the City (2003), [TV programme] HBO, July 20, 2003. Sischy, I. (2002), ‘The Rebel in Prada’, Vanity Fair, January 2002. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.van​​ityfa​​ir​.co​​m​/new​​s​ /200​​2​/02/​​prada​​​-stor​​e​-200​​202 (accessed July 31, 2019). Skov, L., E. Skjold, B. Moeran, F. Larsen and F. F. Csaba (2009), The Fashion Show as Art Form, ©reative Encounters Working Paper, Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School. Sooke, A. (2009), ‘Miuccia Prada interview: Fondazione Prada, Milan’, The Telegraph, May 5, 2009. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.tel​​egrap​​h​.co.​​uk​/cu​​lture​​/art/​​52775​​07​/Mi​​uccia​​-Prad​​a​-int​​ervie​​w​-Fon​​dazio​​​ne​-Pr​​ada​-M​​ilan.​​html (accessed July 31, 2019). Specter, M. (2004), 'The Designer', The New Yorker, March 8, 2004. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.new​​yorke​​r​.com​​/ maga​​zine/​​2004/​​03​/15​​/t​he-​​desig​​ner (accessed July 31, 2019). Steele, V. (2003), Fashion, Italian Style, New Haven: Yale University Press. Strömberg, P. (2017). ‘Industrial Chic: Fashion Shows in Readymade Spaces’, Fashion Theory 23 (1): 25–56. Sudjic, D. ‘On the Contrary, Koolhaas’, The Observer, July 17, 2004. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​ om​/ar​​tandd​​esign​​/2004​​/​jul/​​18​/ar​​t1 (accessed July 31, 2019). Thurman, J. (2012), ‘Twin Peaks’, in Schiaparelli & Prada: Impossible Conversations, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Viladas, P. (2011), ‘Milan Report: Rotor at the Prada Foundation’, T Magazine, April 14. Available online: https​:/​/tm​​ agazi​​ne​.bl​​ogs​.n​​ytime​​s​.com​​/2011​​/04​/1​​4​/mil​​an​-re​​port-​​rotor​​-at​-t​​h​e​-pr​​ada​-f​​ounda​​tion/​ (accessed December 6, 2019). Vogelson, N. (2018), ‘In a System that Demands Simplicity, Miuccia Prada Offers Complexity without Apology’, Document, October 29. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.doc​​ument​​journ​​al​.co​​m​/201​​8​/10/​​in​-a-​​syste​​m​-tha​​t​-dem​​ ands-​​simpl​​icity​​-miuc​​cia​-p​​rada-​​offer​​s​-com​​​plexi​​ty​-wi​​thout​​-apol​​ogy/ (accessed July 31, 2019).

11 CREATIVITY, CORPOREALITY AND COLLABORATION STAGING FASHION WITH GIORGIO ARMANI AND ROBERT WILSON* Dirk Gindt and John Potvin

Introduction As a social space, the theatre, both the stage and the auditorium, has long worked as a locus for the diffusion of the latest fashion. Today’s runway presentations with live models presenting a designer’s collection in front of a select audience emerged in the late nineteenth century. While living fashion models were initially used as lifeless mannequins to display clothes to prospective buyers, pioneering couturières and couturiers like Lady Duff Gordon (aka Lucile 1863–1935) and Paul Poiret (1879–1944) introduced the fashion show as a theatrical event that took place in a stage-like setting (Kaplan and Stowell 1994; Troy 2001; Evans 2001; Schweitzer 2008). Today, the creative and aesthetic boundaries between fashion, theatre and performance have become increasingly blurred, leading Ginger Gregg Duggan to exclaim that ‘fashion is the performance art of the 1990s’ (2001: 244) in a special issue of Fashion Theory devoted to the intersections of performance and fashion. Indeed, the elaborated runway shows of avant-garde designers such as John Galliano and the late Alexander McQueen as well as Martin Margiela and Viktor & Rolf are often notable for their degree of spectacle and showmanship (Evans 2003). Moreover, performance artists have allied themselves with the world of fashion to explore new ways of creative expression. Combining performance art and photography, Cindy Sherman uses dress and masquerade to problematize the representation and performativity of gender (Loreck 2002).

This chapter has been previously published in full in the journal Studies in Theatre & Performance, Volume 33 Number 1, © 2013 Intellect Ltd doi: 10.1386/stap.33.1.3_1 *

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She has also collaborated with Comme des Garçons in 1994 on the house’s advertising campaign; she has since published a book with designer Marc Jacobs and fashion photographer Juergen Teller in 2006, modelled for Balenciaga in 2007 and appeared on the cover of L’Uomo Vogue in 2009. Finally, Marina Abramovic has worked with Givenchy and makes regular appearances in both ‘edgy’ and mainstream fashion magazines such as Another Magazine in 2010, i-D in 2011 and Elle Serbia in 2011. This article, itself a collaboration between scholars from two different aesthetic disciplines, attempts to offer a critical take on the creative and economic relationship between theatre, performance and fashion by exploring the notions of collaboration and authorship through the work of two individual artists: Italian designer Giorgio Armani and American theatre director Robert Wilson. We wish to signal that we are not arguing that collaboration is unique to these two artists, nor are they the first to work cooperatively. Armani has a long and documented influence on artistic genres such as film, pop music, opera, dance and theatre. While he is mostly known for having designed Richard Gere’s iconic wardrobe in American Gigolo (dir. Paul Schrader 1980) along with countless Hollywood movies, he has also created costumes for numerous stage productions, among them Cosi Fan Tutte at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (dir. Jonathan Miller 2004), Bernstein Dances at the Hamburg Ballet (chor. John Neumeier 1998), Richard II at the Old Vic (dir. Trevor Nunn 2005) and Chicago on Broadway, as well as a number of dance performances by Joaquín Cortes and contemporary pop singers’ world tours. Among the designer’s cultural philanthropic involvements, we find a patronage of Wilson’s Watermill Foundation. Wilson is no stranger to collaboration either and has worked with his adopted son Raymond Andrews (Deafman Glance 1971) as well as poet Christopher Knowles and composer Philip Glass (Einstein on the Beach 1976). In addition, he directed a critically praised revival of the postmodern playwright Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine in 1986, the same year that he staged Euripides’ Alcestis, to which performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson contributed the musical score. In 1990, he created the successful musical The Black Rider with William S. Burroughs and Tom Waits, and in recent years he has collaborated with the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, who set music to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2009), and Marina Abramovic on her performance The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic (2011). However, here we address three unique and rich instances of collaboration, epic in scale, from three different spaces, which all possess a subtle desire to extend the lifespan and relevance of the fashion object: a performance art installation in a once derelict, purposefully redesigned train station; a play staged in a traditional proscenium arched theatre; and a retrospective exhibition held in a fine art museum that invited the visitors to walk the catwalk. Given our interests in the creative meetings between theatre and fashion, we focus on the concrete results of the collaboration, that is, the actual events, the mutual artistic and economic benefits for both parties as well as the critical reception and discourse surrounding them. In a detailed analysis of the case studies, we devote particular attention to how Armani and Wilson work with space, embodiment, corporeality and the relationship between performer and spectator. Together, the three examples lead us to explore what collaboration might suggest or point to in terms of the body’s sensory experiences within a broader cultural landscape. They also demonstrate how critics, and to a certain extent, scholars, surveyed, scrutinized and reinforced the boundaries of one discipline to ensure the other did not pollute it, thereby reinforcing the artificial separation of the limits and boundaries of creative and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

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G.A. Story: Creativity and commerce Armani first became aware of the Texan director’s work when he attended a performance of Orlando in 1993, and in 1996 approached Wilson to produce G.A. Story, a hybrid fashion show/retrospective, to be held in Florence’s nineteenth-century Stazione Leopolda. The then derelict train station was renovated and redesigned as a 4,500 square metre exhibition space under the direction of architect Gae Aulenti, an undertaking heavily subsidized by the Italian government.1 Under the auspices of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Pitti Immagine Uomo, a twice-yearly menswear tradeshow held in Florence, G.A. Story was to honour the history of the Italian designer as well as unveil his latest spring/summer 1997 menswear collection. To ensure the fullest possible impact for the event, which had the potential to influence more than the fashion system, Armani asked Wilson to take charge, stating: ‘It’s a risk, I realize, and I’m not calm. [. . .] In the beginning I was afraid. The idea of not being able to use my stuff, my lights, my catwalk, my colours to propose my clothes in my atmosphere terrified me’ (quoted in Pollo 1996: 17). Maintaining control and refusing to delegate power have become notoriously associated with ‘King Giorgio’, as the fashion press has baptized him. The designer nevertheless welcomed this challenge and the possibilities it offered to display both previous and current collections, claiming: ‘I am very happy to be changing my means of presenting the collections. I have left Bob a lot of room to work, and I think my clothes will speak for themselves’ (quoted in Anon. 1996b).2 The designer’s desire for the ‘clothes to speak for themselves’ underscores his need to control the interpretative potential of his creative output as well as the belief that the clothes should stand on their own and transcend both time and space. It also importantly means that he regards his clothes and designs as such a powerful statement in themselves that his creative identity never risks being overshadowed or compromised by the collaboration with Wilson. This ideologically driven decontextualization also underlies a common practice among influential designers such as Armani to position their clothes as emblematic of a transhistorical ‘style’ transcendent of the mere ephemerality of fashion. In this way, then, style is understood as standing the test of time, beyond the vagaries and whims of the fast-paced fashion system. Indeed, in the context of G.A. Story, garments from the 1970s were placed side by side with garments from the 1990s with the explicit goal of transcendence. For the event, Wilson planned a large-scale experience replete with three stages and eleven offstage spaces to accommodate eighty performers (fifty of whom were models while the other thirty were dancers) as well as an army working behind the scene coiffing and dressing the models. ‘This is just what we have in opera’, Wilson commented on the scale of the show and the sheer number of people involved (quoted in Anon. 1996b). Described by the Daily News Record as a ‘gargantuan performance art piece cum fashion show’ (Anon. 1996a), G.A. Story in actuality was much closer to a medieval spectacle, where the audience would walk around the market square to witness different scenes from the story of creation, performed simultaneously and ordered spatially from heaven to hell. Similarly, the specially invited audience at Stazione Leopolda was led through different sections of the former train station to witness different segments of the large-scale cultural performance: performance art, video installations and tableaux vivants. Armani’s latest collection was interspersed with garments from the designer’s archive in order to mirror his history and reinforce the continuity on which he has built his fortune and reputation. Video screens projected photographs from previous advertising campaigns as well as pictures of the designer with celebrity friends like Gere, Claudia Cardinale and Isabella Rossellini. For Armani, the

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event offered an opportunity to control his own historiography, while at the same time proving his artistic aspirations by aligning himself with one of the most celebrated theatre directors, both of which only served to reify his significance to the Made in Italy label, a fact that lay at the heart of the organization’s invitation. Armani’s desire to decontextualize his work as part of the Pitti’s twenty-fifth anniversary exhibition, which asserted and celebrated the importance of the Made in Italy label, served to reinforce his centrality within the evolution of the Italian fashion and textile industries on a global scale while simultaneously forestalling any real critical engagement with the material itself. In the end, the effect of the presentation was not unlike the twice-annual runway shows the designer hosts in Milan, devoid of any historical contextualization of his position within, and contribution to, the globalization of Made in Italy. In his conceptualization of G.A. Story, Wilson devoted particular attention to the space and took full advantage of the possibilities that the Stazione Leopolda offered. For 90 minutes the audience moved through different sections of the station and could indulge in the world of Armani through Wilson’s eyes. The different stations of the event took the viewer-participant first through the four seasons as a way to present collections from different times of the year. The spring section, for instance, took place in a mythical garden with trees, green grass and light rain. From there a dreamy beach scene opened up to models displaying part of the spring/summer 1997 collection moving in slow motion, almost as if in trance, a choreographic idiom endemic to Wilson’s oeuvres. The scene was complete with a female model sitting motionless in a beach chair while a man jogged casually in the background and a young boy languidly played in the sand. Wittily described by La Repubblica as ‘Armani on the beach’ (Quadri 1996: 46), a pun on Wilson’s 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, the scene unabashedly borrowed from Wilson’s 1971 production of Deafman Glance, in which the physical motifs were identical: a man running slowly in the background, a woman sitting in an identically styled chair, motionless, almost lifeless, while a child played by himself in the sand. The blue background – Wilson’s signature colour – gave the scene a dreamlike atmosphere while also alluding to the sea. Another section represented a fairy-tale garden with tall bushes, where models stood still, like wax dolls, and displayed formal tailored clothing. At the centre was a sleeping beauty dressed in a long diamond-encrusted sheath, lying in a wooden alcove bathed in golden light. Casual daywear was displayed in an office context with models sitting around a red, rectangular table performing daily tasks in slow motion. The models imitated working-place rituals by taking notes, which they then crumpled up and threw away over their shoulder. Evening wear was exhibited in an elegant, minimalist setting with two levels connected by a white staircase. The models occupied these different levels and spaces and presented the creations against a screen lit, once again, in light blue. Finally, one part of the station-cum-exhibition-space consisted of a long gallery where male models, clad in nothing but underwear and swimwear, stood motionless on display blocks in classical poses that were more reminiscent of antique statues than fashion mannequins, an effect enhanced by the white paste combed through their hair. Le Monde drew attention to this unabashed celebration of the beauty of the young male body and also noted the homoeroticism implicit in the performance: ‘They unveil, in favour of a summer collection for ’97 cut very close to the body, the whole panorama of homosexual mythologies, from Renaissance statues to Bruce Weber’s photographs, passing through to the erotic drawings of Jean Cocteau’ (quoted in Benaim 1996). The cultural performance at Stazione Leopolda was a curious combination of high art, theatre, fashion, politics and economics. Although other, lesser known men’s wear designers and manufacturers exhibited on the same occasion, press reports understandably focused attention on Armani and his importance for the Italian fashion system and, as an extension, the country’s economy. Managing

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director of Pitti Immagine, Raffaello Napoleone, expressed it best when he stated that ‘[e]veryone will benefit from [Armani’s] presence here because he represents Italian creativity and has the support of the fabric and manufacturing industry behind him’ (quoted in Anon. 1996b). While the Italian fashion industry focused its spotlight on Armani’s contribution to Pitti Uomo and the benefits for the city of Florence, the concrete advantages of the event for Wilson should not be underestimated. On the occasion of the trade show, the Tuscan city was also hosting a European Union summit. The summit’s 300 participants were invited to an exclusive showing of G.A. Story on 21 June, while the fashion industry had to wait until 3 July. Armani and Wilson were consciously targeting an audience that would not usually attend or show any direct interest in a fashion exhibition. Moreover, the event was heavily reported throughout the media, guaranteeing further exposure for its two creators. While the Italian media focused on Armani’s contribution to the national economy, for Wilson G.A. Story was a clever way to prominently display his name and work to politicians from fifteen European countries. This particular collaboration with Armani and the fashion world only further ensured and enhanced necessary exposure and the promise of future funding. Wilson’s large-scale productions are dependent on extensive sponsorship; his success is due largely to the funding European theatres and governments have provided to stage his various projects (see Arens 1991). During the three days of rehearsals for G.A. Story, Wilson worked with the models just as he would with stage actors, focusing on movement above all else. Given that there was neither a dramatic text to be staged or interpreted nor any attention paid to narrative, he had the privilege of concentrating exclusively on choreography and visual imagery. The striking results were several tableaux vivants, with the models moving in a specific Wilson manner, characterized by a considerable slowing down of the usual, often exhaustive pace of a runway show. The director explained: The universe of the runway is a priori completely different from that of theatre, because it all goes so fast. [. . .] This marks the first time that I have worked with models. Rather than walk as they are used to, I asked them to listen to the movement inside themselves, to find the line. Above all one must not think about it. The gesture follows. (quoted in Benaim 1996) One is tempted to wonder whether it was easier for Wilson to work with professional fashion models who are used to expressing themselves through movement, gestures and choreography rather than with words. Given their training, seasoned models are more often in control of their physical expressions, sometimes even better than many stage actors. Critical reaction to G.A. Story was mixed. Le Monde lamented the slow tempo of the alternative fashion show and the lack of ‘dramatic tension’, except for the office scene which mirrored the conditions of modern times ‘with an assembly of directors transformed into a seminary of apostles’ (Benaim 1996). A similar complaint was raised by DNR, whose critic claimed that while the slow movements and gestures were well suited to the opening swimwear collection set on a beach, ‘Wilson’s staging worked less well with an eveningwear grouping that was more funeral (replete with widow) than festive’ (Anon. 1996a). In the service of both the garments and choreography, and in keeping with Armani’s own use of controlled light in both his runway theatre and boutiques that highlight each garment to best effect (Potvin 2009), Wilson worked meticulously with the staging of light. Not going unnoticed, Le Monde, for example, praised his successful way of ‘grazing, with his paint- brush of light, the silhouettes of Giorgio Armani, to emphasize their fineness’ (Benaim 1996). Impressed by the show, Corriere della Sera submitted: ‘One

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has never seen a theatrical performance at the service of fashion with similar potential interpretations, so grand and intimate at the same time, dreamlike and even exciting’ (Dubini 1996: 15). Both the designer and the director were satisfied with the outcome of G.A Story and decided to continue their collaboration and take it to the next level. While Armani had invited Wilson to stage the cultural performance at Stazione Leopolda, two years later Wilson commissioned Armani to design the costumes for one of his own theatrical productions.

The lady from the sea: Independent femininity Donna del mare was Wilson’s second production of a play by Henrik Ibsen and his first attempt at directing in Italian. He had previously staged When We Dead Awaken at the American Repertory Theatre (1991) and went on to direct a highly anticipated but critically rejected version of Peer Gynt in Oslo for the centennial of the playwright’s death. Donna del mare premiered at the bicentennial of the Teatro Comunale di Ferrara on 5 May 1998 and took part in the International Theatre Festival in Istanbul at the end of the same month. Wilson directed and outlined the concept of lighting and scenography, Michael Galasso was in charge of composing the music and Armani designed the costumes. After an Italian tour in 1999, the production was revived and remounted with a new cast at international theatre festivals in Maubeuge, Créteil, Seoul, Warsaw, Malaga, Oslo, Sevilla and Madrid. Rather than staging Ibsen’s original text or having a dramaturge adapt the play (which is Wilson’s usual procedure when working on a canonical play), Wilson commissioned American author and cultural critic Susan Sontag to produce her own, highly idiosyncratic take on the protagonist Ellida Wangel, who is torn between her husband and a mysterious seaman to whom she was engaged ten years earlier and who now has returned to renew their relationship and take her back to the sea with him. Apart from turning the five-act play into seventeen short scenes and cutting several characters in the process, Sontag’s version distinguishes itself by a stronger emphasis on the play’s mystic elements and a decidedly more pessimistic, not to say cynical, ending. The script succeeds in ‘Wilsonizing’ Ibsen by shortening the dialogues and giving them a highly stylized touch, well suited to the director’s approach to a modern classic. The characters’ dialogue is often reduced to only one line or even at times simply one word. More often than not, these are delivered as monologues, since the characters barely address one another. The most rhythmic vocal element is introduced in the minimalist conversations between the daughters Bolette and Hilde who repeat almost all of their lines (Scene V) or the key words (Scene XI). These scenes add a musical and, because of their monotony, hypnotic touch. Similarly, Ellida’s monologue in Scene VI consists of nonsensical sounds and grammatically incorrect fragments. Further enhancing the rhythm and musicality, a ballad inspired by Norwegian folklore interrupts the action halfway through the plot and recounts the story of a woman who followed her forbidden love onto a boat only to see her man reveal himself as the devil and take her to hell (Sontag 1999a). In her analysis of the production, Maria Shevtsova points out that ‘Wilson treats Sontag’s scenes as tableaux, and lights them predominantly in broad swathes of blue, like colour on a canvas, suggesting the sea, the sky, the horizon, evening and night’ (2007: 91); comments which could also perfectly describe G.A. Story. Dominique Sanda, who played Ellida, admitted her fascination with the play: ‘Right away I felt a crazy attraction to this play where the heroine, Ellida, is femininity itself. I have always wanted to be directed by Robert Wilson’ (quoted in Thebaud 1999). Armani’s costume for Ellida, limited to a regulation Armani midnight blue pullover and bright blue long column skirt (reminiscent of Wilson’s own use of the colour), was in keeping with the designer’s rigorous minimalism that characterized his work in the 1990s. Through

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the simplicity of the garments, which allowed for full motion of movement, Ellida’s ‘true femininity’ was not elided but placed in the forefront. Even the rigour by which his models are made to walk down the runway reinforces Armani’s vision of gender and femininity more specifically, as more recently commented on by Robin Givhan of the Washington Post: Their walk is choreographed, but isn’t demanding. Armani always gives his models their dignity. They are young women doing a job of showing off clothes. They are not sashaying along like seaports. They aren’t somnambulating with a glass-eyed stare. Their eyes don’t look dead. As one watches them move along, you think, yes, there are synapses firing in that pretty little head. . . . For Armani, the woman is inextricable from the clothes. (2009) Illustrating the performative power of clothes, Armani’s designs for Sanda enhanced Ellida’s determined and proud femininity, and the dark blue colours gave her a dignified posture in line with the character’s melancholia and her struggle for independence. The choice of Armani as costume designer for this particular play is significant, given that he based his career in women’s wear on strong, masculine-inspired and powerful clothing for independent, successful working women. Moreover, the dark shades of blue enhanced the gloomy atmosphere of the story. While the costumes made a significant contribution to the overall production, Armani’s involvement was reduced to a mere footnote in the Italian press whose reactions to Wilson were divided. Corriere della Sera appreciated Wilson’s directorial approach and the symbolism of Sontag’s text, where all the characters seemed to be strangers who have their origins in the sea, and noted that ‘[w]e are all foreigners, all repositories of a dual nature, all men and fish, all sirens, or mermaids’ (Cordelli 1998: 35). La Repubblica was far from impressed by the production, not to say bored: ‘But this physicality is combined with the text in a monotone collage instead of bringing it to life, in a frozen and immobile composition that inexorably repeats the same images without evolving’ (Quadri 1998: 42). The paper ended its review by claiming that the reason the audience applauded at the end was merely because of the famous names involved in the production. In the first case study, Wilson’s set and directorial approach provided Armani with a means to realize his ambition to preserve his cultural patrimony and legacy, while the Texan director was given the opportunity to promote his own name to potential financers. In the second example, Armani’s costumes contributed to the general atmosphere of the play and, more specifically, to Wilson’s and especially Sontag’s ideological statement of a woman’s struggle for independence. Creating the costumes for the theatre offers a designer an alternative avenue for creative expression as much as a way to further expose his or her name and brand to differing audiences, not least when the production goes on tour as was the case with Donna del mare. Deploying the proscenium theatre (the most traditional locus for the presentation of the most revered performance genre, i.e. spoken drama) as an alternative fashion runway is not without its risks, as demonstrated by a 1929 production at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, where the female costumes for a large-scale wedding scene were sponsored by the department store Nordiska Kompaniet. The elegant designs with tasteful colours provoked mixed reactions in the press, ranging from praise to the concern that the fashion display risked distracting from the play (Bergman and Harning 2008: 58). For both G.A. Story and The Lady from the Sea, critical reaction was mixed, but importantly no reviewer questioned the comingling of theatre and fashion. For both events, the boundaries between the two disciplines and industries appeared (at least on the surface) to be maintained. The cultural performance at Stazione Leopolda was understood as a fashion trade show with economic interests for the Italian fashion industry,

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while the Ibsen/Sontag play was approached as high-brow art, as an avant-garde take on a canonical play presented at highly respected theatre festivals. Armani’s designs were so well suited for and integrated into the production that neither critics nor audiences felt threatened or perceived the stage as being invaded by high fashion. Rather, it was the third collaboration between Armani and Wilson that proved to be the most provocative and raised critical concern about the still maintained dichotomy between popular fashion and high art, when the two artists invaded the space of the art museum.

The Guggenheim exhibition: Reinventing the white cube Given his extensive collaboration and patronage of various artistic forms, the next logical step for Armani, it would seem, was to collaborate directly with the sphere of the modern art museum, par excellence the temple of worship for high art. Crafty and shrewd as always, and never one to miss an opportunity for self-promotion, he sidestepped the fashion system altogether at a time when he was garnering less praise and editorial space from the industry press and took his aesthetic message to the people with the international exhibition ‘Giorgio Armani: A Retrospective’ that began in 2000 in New York at the famed Guggenheim Museum, celebrated as much for its iconic interior architecture as for its important collection of modern art. Despite heavy criticism, this strategy proved to be highly successful for both the designer and the gallery, with record attendance of 29,000 people per week, 5,000 more bodies than at the ‘Art of the Motorcycle’ exhibition hosted in 1998. The massive and grand exhibition showcased over 400 garments spanning three decades, along with sketches, projected advertisements and numerous musical scores composed expressly for the event, conjuring once again a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk. Wilson’s major contribution to this third collaboration was his design of the spatial installation of the exhibition in New York and the subsequent six other international venues which housed it (Berlin, Bilbao, London, Tokyo, Shanghai and finally the designer’s home town of Milan). He utilized the Guggenheim’s spectacular central spiralling ascending pathway to best effect as a means of controlling both the space and the audience by wrapping the outer perimeter with a taut scrim, actively disabling the visitors from looking down into the gallery’s foyer (Figure 11.1). Wilson directed the flow and visual experience of the audience (not unlike the preformulated path the spectators in the Stazione Leopolda had to take), obliging them to continue along the path and focusing their attention solely on the displayed clothing. Here, within the space of the famed museum, Figure 11.1  Giorgio Armani exhibition at Guggenheim museum in Wilson played with the notional New York, USA, 2000. Photo by David Lefranc/Gamma-Rapho via white cube of the modern art gallery Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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Figure 11.2  Giorgio Armani exhibition at Guggenheim museum in New York, USA, 2000. Photo by David Lefranc/ Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

and wrapped, that is, clothed it with the softness of fabric, thereby establishing a correlation between architectural space, human choreography and the exhibited garments. Co-curated by Harold Koda and Germano Celant, the retrospective was divided into eight core sections in which Armani and Wilson staged the mannequins ‘in a series of landscapes’ (Wilson 2007: 19). Each thematic landscape featured its own backdrop design as well as its own soundtrack, composed, once again, by Galasso, who had previously collaborated with Wilson and Armani on Donna del mare. The first section, located in the High Gallery and aptly and simply entitled ‘Black and White’, iterated Wilson’s continued interest in altering the perspectival dynamic between space, object (here, clothes and mannequins) and audience (Figure 11.2). Here subjectivity and spatial identification were toyed with, purposefully inverted. Compelled into this blackpainted room, the viewer became the central actor and walked along a makeshift runway identical to that located in Armani’s Milan bunker-like basement theatre in Via Borgonuovo, where he stages his fashion shows for the press and buyers At the end of the makeshift runway, set within a recessed niche and flanked on either side by various mannequins featuring black and white sartorial confections, the visitor-viewer was invited to contemplate one lone garment, its auratic presence enhanced by way of clever illumination (Figure 11.3). The visitor was then made to walk back on the Figure 11.3  Giorgio Armani exhibition at runway, once again ‘performing’ for the silent crowd Guggenheim museum in New York, USA, 2000. of fully dressed yet headless mannequins, to leave Photo by David Lefranc/Gamma-Rapho via Getty the space of the High Gallery and continue his or Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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her way along the spiralling pathway. While this white garment was no more special than any others in the room, it did elicit a unique choreography for it allowed the visitor to ‘walk the runway’ while lifeless mannequins were watching. Wilson’s prescribed path controlled the space of the museum and the visitors’ movements, yet ironically he also offered his audience a unique phenomenological and corporeal experience by allowing them to playfully walk the catwalk. Elizabeth Wilson notes the difference between clothes interacting with living bodies and clothes displayed in a museum: ‘There is something eerie about a museum of costume. A dusty silence holds the old gowns in glass cabinets. In the aquatic light (to preserve the fragile stuffs) the deserted gallery seems haunted. The living observer moves, with a sense of mounting panic, through a world of the dead’ (2003: 1). At the Guggenheim, however, the director and the designer reversed this traditional physical, conceptual and spatial relationship the gallery visitor has with historical costumes, by casting the spectator as a performer within the landscape of the museum. Here the haunting yet elegant spectres of fashion’s past spatially redefined fashion’s performativity; here audience members became performers, while the once performed garments on immobile mannequins reverted to passive onlookers, evoking fashion’s unique and often complicated relationship to embodiment. These passive (historical) actors were transformed into onlookers of/in the present, relevant anew. The director stated that ‘[t]he spectator in a sense is like a performer, as the choreography and movements vary according to the design and shaping of the room’ (Wilson 2007: 18). Meaning in this exhibition, much to the horror of textile curators, was also achieved by the countless visitors who kept grabbing the garments, thereby further emphasizing the importance of touch and embodiment. Encouraged by Wilson’s planning of the space, Armani’s fashion was not only experienced as visual and performative, but also as a haptic pleasure by the visitors who on more than one occasion were compelled to take an active role in the exhibition display by touching and grabbing the garments. The exhibition asked the visitor to think about desire, pleasure, agency and the self through the spatial choreography engendered by Wilson. Space is a living organism, and not simply conjured through, or for the service of, sight alone. Spaces wherein meaning is apprehended through the senses, that is, ‘[p]henomenological space[s]’, are not simply dependent on sight alone, but run the full gamut of ‘other sensations and relations of bodies and objects in a lived world’ (Pollock 1988: 65). Sight, smell, sound and touch become necessary sensory conduits these artists stimulate as a way to conjure a more complete aesthetic world. It is a world so complete and refined that sensory stimulation on the part of the participant is the very act that constitutes cultural patronage itself and subsequently engenders the economic exchange that so dominates critics’ and scholars’ ideas about fashion and theatre. Neither Wilson nor Armani are strangers to collaboration, but in this particular instance their collaboration provoked a whirlwind of criticism at whose centre the tensions between theatre/art and fashion/commerce were brought to the foreground. Cultural critics were intolerant of fashion’s incursions into the purported stable realm of high art museum as much as they were unprepared for Wilson’s choreography which allowed an unprecedented intimacy between visitor and object. Wilson himself commented on the criticism: Many people were very angry with me for doing the Armani show; they thought fashion should not be in a museum of, quote, fine art. But I don’t see so much difference between Matisse drawing a line or Armani trying to draw a line with fabric: you’re drawing a line. I never understand how one can just

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be a director, because being a director you have to know something about lights, about dress, about make-up, you have to know something about a chair, about architecture, about music, literature and history, so that one thing leads to another. It’s all part of one concern. (quoted in Costa 2003) While critics and scholars seem to fear that art institutions are becoming victims of the ‘artistic aspirations’ of the fashion world, curator Koda has been quick to dismiss claims that the world of fashion is the only one driven by money, glamour and politics by retorting: ‘What, as opposed to the art world?’ (quoted in Lee 2000).

The art of collaboration The declaration of the death of the author and the attempts to reformulate the author function since the late 1960s (see Barthes 1977 [1968] and Foucault 1984 [1969]) did not envision the magnitude and reach of a globalized economy and the impact of neo-liberalism on the arts. The growing influence of fashion within every domain of our lives (including interior space, cultural representation and consumption) has meant that authorship has come to signify lifestyles, ways of living one’s life entirely through the aesthetic, that is to say a Gesamtkunstwerk (see Potvin 2010). As part of this growing and expanding sphere, fashion houses have come to recognize the importance of collaboration, turning to key figures in other aesthetic and cultural industries, including theatre and performance, to forge larger creative and financial networks of influence – without sacrificing their respective position. In our case, the continuing ideological, economic and cultural investment into the status of the auteur led to some interesting contradictions, which were most palpable in the media discourse, that is, both the presentation and the critical reception of the three into theatre and fashion events. The critical reception of the collaborative meetings importantly betrayed a certain amount of social limitation, cynicism and cultural unease. So long as the immediate economic gain was the prime motivation and outcome (as it was in Florence at the Pitti Uomo) or the presence of fashion was discreet and reduced to a mere foot- note (as was the case with Armani’s contribution to The Lady from the Sea), the collaboration was left untarnished and non-threatening to the critical establishment. For the journalists reviewing G.A. Story, the main interest lay in Armani’s economic contribution to the Italian economy and fashion and textile industries; Wilson’s conceptualizations of space and presentation were an interesting, yet clearly subordinated aspect for the media. The opposite was true for the Ibsen production, where Wilson’s directorial approach was of interest for the media, whereas little attention was paid to Armani’s designs and their importance in the representation of the lead character’s femininity. Put otherwise, the art/ commerce dichotomy remained unchallenged in both cases, if in different ways. The rupture, however, occurred in the event of the Guggenheim exhibition, when the hierarchical status of theatre and art was threatened by the commercial interests and vagaries of fashion. Collectively, the criticisms simply reified a notional schism between art and commerce by romanticizing the (hallowed spaces for the) performing and visual arts, free from any apparent commercial interests. Cynicism clouded the reviewers’ perception of the show; unable to move beyond Armani’s substantial donation to the museum, they failed to explore the ways the exhibition adulterated the binary marking a museum installation as static and a theatrical performance as dynamic. Wilson gave the artistic twist to the exhibition by controlling both the

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architecture itself (by way of the white scrim) and manipulating the choreography of space and the path of engagement. Fashion and art critics and scholars were – and still are – not prepared to accept the reversal of traditional spectator-performer relationships that characterize both theatre and fashion. Critics of the Guggenheim show, most explicitly, missed the point that they were the ones onstage, meant to perform amid the supposed lifeless macabre spectres of fashions past. It would seem that professionals from outside fashion are well equipped – through distance – to animate the ever-expanding landscape of fashion as a creative industry. In fact, in all three instances, Wilson demonstrated how someone from outside the fashion system can revive the clothes, whisking them away (even if only temporarily) from the morgue the runway inevitably constructs for its inhabitants. Fashion benefits from being ripped from its safety nets and resuscitated by way of external forces, and for this reason the collaborations outlined here resurrect it, extending its life, lending it a transcendence known and coveted in the industry as ‘style’, helping its designer to overcome the temporal patina that the debris of fashion inflicts on its progeny. These long-term collaborations must also be seen in light of a desire to diversify cultural currency and cachet beyond one aesthetic practice and affect the way people engage with cultural products. The three cases propose a reversal of the disciplinary and cultural order whose outcome, we suggest, shifts our contemporary experiences of the body beyond the restrictive confines of the ocularcentric that so dominates the West into a larger mode and arena that begins to enliven more of the senses, in particular performative and haptic pleasures. By blending different artistic genres and industries, and by exploring different locations in a playful way, the fashioned spaces and the performed objects Wilson and Armani have created and exposed the decline and fall of the simplified dichotomy that separates theatre from commerce, fashion from art and high art from popular culture. In this meeting the two artists have provided each other with possibilities and explorations, and in so doing have allowed for theatre’s and fashion’s multiple personalities to come through.

Notes 1 The choice of architect is significant here and marks another layer to Armani’s desire for continuity in his collaborations. In 1992, Aulenti, a good friend of the designer, curated an installation of 100 pieces of Armani designs as part of the 40th anniversary exhibition of the Sala Bianca in Florence. The venue and timing, not unlike the 1996 G.A. Story, marked the anniversary of the Made in Italy label, which made its debut in the immediate post-war period. Significantly, in that same year Armani received the prestigious Fiorino D’Oro award to honour the designer’s contribution to promoting and expanding the Made in Italy image around the world. 2 Armani experimented with alternative means of staging a fashion show as early as 1983, when he presented his fall collection, not in a traditional live setting on the catwalk, but using video projections and mannequins to display the clothes. This choice took the fashion world by surprise and reactions ranged from confusion to negativity (see Cocks 1983).

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References Anon. (1996a), ‘Armani’s Grand Performance’, Daily News Record, 8 July, n.p. Anon. (1996b), ‘Pitti’s Armani Retrospective to Have Operatic Proportions’, Daily News Record, 9 May, n.p. Arens, K. (1991), ‘Robert Wilson: Is Postmodern Performance Possible?’, Theatre Journal, 43 (1): 14–40. Aspesi, N. (1996), ‘Bob Wilson: io e Armani artisti in cerca di purezza’, La Repubblica, June 21: 35. Barthes, R. ([1968] 1977), ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, 142–8, New York: Hill and Wang. Benaim, L. (1996), ‘Culture – Bob Wilson Met en scène le défilé de Giorgio Armani’, Le Monde, July 6, n.p. Bergman, A. and N. Harning (2008), Teaternskläder: 100 år av dräkter på Dramaten, Malmö: Arena. Cocks, J. (1983), ‘The Theater of Fashion’, Time, May 9: n.p. Cordelli, F. (1998), ‘Piu’ che uomini, sirenetti’, Corriere della Sera, May 13: 35. Costa, M. (2003), ‘Action man’, The Guardian, September 11: n.p. Dubini, L. (1996), ‘Armani trasforma la moda in teatro’, Corriere della Sera, July 14: 15. Duggan, G. G. (2001), ‘The Greatest Show on Earth: A Look at Contemporary Fashion Shows and Their Relationship to Performance Art’, Fashion Theory, 5 (3): 243–70. Evans, C. (2001), ‘The Enchanted Spectacle’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 5 (3): 271–310. Evans, C. (2003), Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Foucault, Michel ([1969] 1984), ‘What Is an author?’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, trans. Josué V. Harari, 101–20, New York: Pantheon. Givhan, R. (2009), ‘Two Paths Diverge in Italy; Armani Keeps to Sidewalks; Prada Prances in the Streets’, Washington Post, September 25: n.p. Kaplan, J. H. and S. Stowell (1994), Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lecca, D. (1996), ‘The Last Designer’, The New York Magazine, September 16. Lee, A. (2000), ‘Art for Armani’s Sake’, Salon, October 18, http:​/​/www​​.salo​​n​.com​​/busi​​ness/​​featu​​re​/20​​00​/10​​/18​/a​​ rman​i​​/inde​​x​.htm​l (accessed May 14, 2010). Loreck, H. (2002), ‘De/constructing Fashion/fashions of Deconstruction: Cindy Sherman’s Fashion Photographs’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 6 (3): 255–76. Pollo, P. (1996), ‘Armani: sfilate al tramonto’, Corriere della Sera, May 9: 17. Pollock, G. (1988), Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London and New York: Routledge. Potvin, J. (2009), ‘Armani/architecture: Giorgio Armani and the Textures of Space’, in John Potvin (ed.), The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007, 247–63, New York and London: Routledge. Potvin, J. (2010), ‘The Velvet Masquerade: Fashion, Interior Design and the Furnished Body’, in John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (eds), Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity, 1–17, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Quadri, F. (1996), ‘Wilson: Armani on the Beach’, La Repubblica, July 5: 46. Quadri, F. (1998), ‘Com’ è noiosa la sirena femminista’, La Repubblica, May 7: 42. Schweitzer, M. (2008), ‘Patriotic Acts of Consumption: Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon) and the Vaudeville Fashion Show Craze’, Theatre Journal, 60 (4): 585–608. Shevtsova, M. (2007), ‘Robert Wilson Directs When We Dead Awaken, The Lady from the Sea and Peer Gynt’, Ibsen Studies, 7 (1): 84–104. Sontag, S. (1999a), ‘Lady from the Sea: Based on the play by Henrik Ibsen’, Theater, 29 (1): 92–112. Teller, J., C. Sherman and M. Jacobs (2006), Juergen Teller, Cindy Sherman, Marc Jacobs, New York and Milan: Rizzoli.

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Thebaud, M. (1999), ‘Dominique Sanda, l’ondine de Bob Wilson’, Le Figaro, March 15: n.p. Troy, N. J. (2001), ‘The Theatre of Fashion: Staging Haute Couture in early 20th Century France’, Theatre Journal, 53 (1): 1–32. Wilson, E. (2003), Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, rev and updated edn, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wilson, R. (2007), ‘La Triennale di Milano: Giorgio Armani’, in Giorgio Armani: A Retrospective, 18–19, New York: Guggenheim Museum.

PART THREE

SPECTACLE, MEDIA AND SPACE Digital media have increased the exposure, experience and representation of fashion exponentially. However, the relationship between the moving image and the presentation of fashion is hardly new. Since the 1930s, the fashion film has been a staple in the woman’s film genre, where storylines are centred around a fashion narrative, and interiors are used as backdrops for the performance of fashion to female audiences, with actresses and models parading the latest trends. These films foregrounded a spectacle within the film’s own spectacle, providing an experience similar to that of the real catwalk show. The close synergies between the film and fashion industries created the first possibility for moving fashion shows available to mass audiences. Newsreels contributed to popularize fashion presentations that in the 1950s were held in upmarket hotel foyers. Digital technologies have facilitated the hyper-spectacle of the real fashion show, in that now every luxury brand is part of technological shift of the spectacular and commercial nature of the fashion show, enhancing its visibility. This final part of the book thus explores the fashion show bound up in spectacle, media and space spanning the contemporary to the historical. In Tiziana Ferrero-Regis’ chapter, spectacle has moved into a representation of imaginary and real worlds where spectators, models, Chanel’s own workers or passers-by are unwittingly severed from their authentic life-worlds. Rebecca Halliday’s chapter reads the city through a discussion of the fashion event, arguing that New York Fashion Week opts for a more mediatized approach to the catwalk where spectators are offered a range of opportunities to capture the event to share digitally. Mark Taylor and Juliette Peer’s discussion of Desperate Housewives in their chapter contextualize the fashion show within a broader historical review of fashion film, including television series, offering multiple modes for theorizing the fashion show. They underline Baudrillard’s simulacra which collapses the real within representational space, where ‘the constructed’ re-imagines or replays itself through television and film,  in turn influencing consumer tastes.  Finally, Alice Beard investigates spectacle and glamour through the runway design of beauty pageant shows from the 1950s to 1970s in Britain, revealing how the models’ own bodies and attitudes were influenced by the staging of the runway. The interplay between the space in which the shows were held, magazines and global televised productions provides a complex reading of glamour on the catwalk.

12 THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL RELATIONS IN CHANEL’S SPECTACULAR SHOWS Tiziana Ferrero-Regis

Introduction From 2005, Chanel’s shows at the Grand Palais have become key moments in Paris’ collection presentations. These shows are resource-heavy physical representations of microcosms; they are based on sensorial experiences and have been defined by the press as ‘outwardly’, ‘extravaganzas’, ‘outlandish’, ‘over-the-top’ and ‘immersive’. Behind these theatrical masterpieces there was the work of Karl Lagerfeld1 and teams of set designers who transform Chanel’s insignia into cultural, historical or political events through the use of thematic objects and props. One example is Chanel’s grandiose autumn/winter 2008/09 show at the height of the global financial crisis, when Lagerfeld proposed a giant merry-go-round with oversized bags, pendants, pearl bracelets and logos. Other shows include the recreation of an airline desk, a supermarket, a theatre in ruins, a polar environment which incorporated a real iceberg transported from Scandinavia and a fake feminist protest in a reconstructed boulevard in the Grand Palais. What follows is a discussion of two of Chanel’s shows, the Cruise collection 2016/17 that took place externally in a pedestrian boulevard in Cuba and the Couture autumn/winter 2016/17 show at the Grand Palais which featured 120 of Chanel’s petites mains (first hands) and seamstresses working in a space that recreated the ateliers of Rue Cambon. Both shows introduced a different aspect to the show through the presence of outsiders that functioned as extras. In Cuba, local residents, who were excluded from the show, but looking at the show from their windows, balconies, rooftops and the street, represented a new political and economic opening to the West by the Cuban government. At the Grand Palais, les petites mains were drawn from the atelier to the staging of the show to elevate artisanal production. In this chapter, a close reading of Guy Debord’s critique of the society of the spectacle (2012: 32) is applied to both shows to argue that the spectacle produced in Cuba presided over the formation of desire and aspirations as proposed by first world economies, while the spectacularized labour of seamstresses

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mediated luxury fashion production to the audience, viewers and consumers. These two shows have been chosen as emblematic of many others featuring the presence of people outside of the regular fashion entourage of models, photographers and media. The chapter examines first the context of the two shows, and then offers an analysis of this context through a discussion of the spectacle and the commodity. To analyse these multi-layered aspects of fashion and fashion shows, in addition to Guy Debord (2012) I draw on Baudrillard’s (1996) systematic analysis of objects and their commodification, to argue that Chanel’s petites mains and Cuban residents were transformed into commodities, thereby mediating culture, history and politics through their onstage presence. As Debord writes, ‘the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images’ (2012 [1967]: 24). Likewise, in The System of Objects Baudrillard argues that objects’ status as a system of meanings implies their ‘transformation of the human relationship into a relationship of consumption’ (2012: 200). Through a content analysis of the shows’ videos, the chapter offers a theoretical analysis and an empirical demonstration of how the context, content and the form of specific cultural objects and symbols are intertwined in the show’s performance. Thus, while it is possible to argue that models, clothing, journalists, buyers and objects are all part of the theatricality of the show, this chapter proposes that the inclusion of fashion workers and the participation of Cuban onlookers to the spectacle have created a turn in the aestheticization of the fashion space and its human capital. By occupying the space of the fashion spectacle, people’s relations have become representations of the real, just as celebrities are ‘the spectacular representation of a living human being . . . by embodying the image of a possible role’ (Debord 2012: 33).

The shows Chanel started to stage its shows at the Grand Palais in 2005. Lagerfeld’s choice of the Grand Palais was motivated by Coco Chanel’s own patronage of the glass-domed space. The site’s own grandiosity, boasting the biggest nave of Europe, and emblematic of early twentieth-century architecture, has provided much of Chanel fashion shows’ attraction. Lagerfeld reimagined the site in many ways, from the recreation of a Greek amphitheatre to the launch pad of a rocket ship, to a supermarket, an airline desk, a beach, a theatre in ruins and more. Stark (2018) confirms that fashion shows’ promotional power has been amplified by their theatrical staging through art-directed spectacles that are expected to communicate strong messages about a brand. Chanel’s shows respond to this mandate while also normalizing contemporary social and cultural issues, for example, through the iceberg show and the feminist demonstration in a fake Parisian boulevard reconstructed at the Grand Palais. The first of such shows was held in 2002 in Paris. Its success prompted Karl Lagerfeld to stage biannual shows of ready-to-wear or couture collections. Chanel has also held shows in other locations in places of cultural significance,2 but the shows that are held at the Grand Palais are based on extremely elaborate sets, whose artifice is revealed by the open set that shows the nave’s modernist ceiling; they are the highlight of Paris Fashion Week, and often double up in different locations around the world (Colapinto 2007). Following Duggan’s five categories of fashion shows (2015), Chanel’s shows must be classified as spectacle, owing to their close connection to performance. Duggan maintains that in these types of catwalk shows, plots are weak, but their themes are easily recognizable through related music, lighting, props, realistic and grand scale sets, hence they are referred to as ‘theater without a plot’

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(2015: 246). The atmosphere thus created becomes immersive in that spectators – media, buyers and celebrities – are integrated within the restricted environment recreated on stage. Chanel’s Haute Couture autumn/winter 2016/17 was dedicated to the Métiers d’Art, the ateliers that contribute to the making of bespoke haute couture where seamstresses and petites mains stitch by hand all the ornaments, tulles, embroideries, feathers and lace on Chanel’s clothing. Objects and tools of their labour such as fabrics, sewing machines, mirrors, cutting tables, mannequins, toiles and pins were transported to the Grand Palais, where an enclosed circular space was created within the grand arcades of the glass dome. This staging recreated the environment of Rue Cambon, Chanel’s atelier and headquarters, and the various ateliers where the garments are made. The stage featured a series of connected rooms opening on a corridor which functioned as the runway. Models entered the catwalk from the middle of the atelier, walked around the stage returning to the backstage through the same door; photographers were crammed right in front of the entrance doubling up as exit (Figure 12.1). The audience sat in the centre of a circular platform, their gaze directed to the models. This layered arrangement allowed seamstresses and craftspeople to be seen, albeit at the periphery of the circular platform – thus as a backdrop – as they went about their work on the collection on show. Journalists and celebrities were also allowed to mingle with the petites mains before the show, observing their work closely.

Figure 12.1  A model walks the runway during the Chanel Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2016–17 show as part of Paris Fashion Week, Paris, France, 2016. Photo by Victor Virgile/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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Coco Chanel’s traditional colours of black, white and pink complemented autumnal hues, while the garments featured angular and sleek shapes with traditional tweed and trademark jackets. The collection paid homage to 1920s modernism and fin-de-siècle artistic dress. Accordingly, the stage featured classic 1920s French windows and doors; walls were painted in a subtle and neutral creamy hue. The enclosed space of the set created an intimate and collected environment, despite the grandiose open space of the nave above the stage. In an interview, Razane Jammal, Lebanese actress and Chanel ambassador, declared, ‘The setting is very intimate and it is nice to see Karl celebrating the seamstresses. It shows you that Chanel is about teamwork, not just one person. Karl might be the designer, but the execution is just as important’ (in Denman 2016). This point is reinforced by the many short videos released by the brand in previous years as it embarked in a promotional campaign in support of artisans, craftspeople and ateliers which are involved in the making of Chanel collections. These promotional videos show extreme close-ups of hands, diamonds and tools, from the drawing of the intricate ornaments on a necklace, to the hands of the chiseller and the silversmith (Creation of Chanel Joaillerie 2010). A short video features the making of the collection’s ornaments by Fiona Douchez, the head of one of the two flou (soft and flowing) ateliers (World Fashion Channel 2017). The images of Fiona Douchez and other petite mains are spliced with images of Lagerfeld’s drawings, showing Lagerfeld’s artistic expression as it is transferred to the hands of the artisan (Le savoir faire 2016). This editing proposes the direct correlation between the designer’s initial concept, the making – Douchez and the artisans – and the catwalk – the models – ultimately connecting design, production and consumption. The 2016/17 Métiers d’Art couture show elevated the artisan, pulling craftspeople from invisibility and making transparent not only the artisans behind haute couture but also the secrets that surround it. The show also made a point about craft value, the disappearing artistry of craftspeople and the appreciation of haute couture. While all the press praised Lagerfeld for this show, the media chastised the 2016 Cruise show in Cuba for its insensitivity to people who had been living with food rationing as a result of the United States’s economic embargo of fifty-five years (Armstrong 2016). The show occurred postembargo, as the sanctions were lifted by President Obama early in 2016. It caused concern when it was discovered that Cuban designers had been banned from the show, and a group of Cuban architects presented a complaint against Chanel taking over the Paseo del Prado. Bruno Pavlosky, president of fashion at Chanel, confirmed that the show was planned in open air and in a public space so that many people could see it (Armstrong 2016). This apparent democratic approach to Paseo del Prado fits within Chanel’s continuous reference to Coco Chanel’s legacy and 1920s modernism. The famous tree-lined promenade was re-landscaped by a French landscape architect, Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, in 1925 (Figure 12.2). According to Lejeune (1996), the 1920s redesign of Cuba’s public spaces was part of a programme targeted to the transformation of Cuban architecture from a colonial vision to that of a modern metropolis that fitted with the establishment of the republic. The redesign aimed at fusing nature with city and architecture creating the ‘salon’ of the twentieth-century city (Lejeune 1996). The correlation of the Paseo del Prado with Forestier is significant in this analysis as Forestier was associated with other architects to fund the Société Française des urbanistes, which aimed to create a civic art that would reform cities by designing democratic open spaces available to all citizens. Forestier’s democratic project was aligned with modernity and issues to do with urban expansion and densification, hygiene, open spaces and democratic reorganization of city life (Lejeune 1996). With its modernist geometrical pavement, the Paseo del Prado was the perfect backdrop for Chanel to create media attention without the need to create one of its multi-million dollars sets. The tree-lined boulevard and the buildings that

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Figure 12.2  Cuba, Chanel. Performance of Chanel at the Paseo del Prado promenade in Havana, 2016. Photo by Adalberto Roque/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

face the Paseo del Prado constituted the perfect recall of a Paris of Haussmann memory, but imbued with Caribbean flavour provided by the decay of old colonialist architecture, palm trees and 1950s almendrones in bright colours, which transported guests from their hotels to the Paseo. Photographic images and footage that circulated after the show reveal Cuban people looking at the Paseo from balconies of the surviving palaces of late nineteenth-century Cuban business class. The cheers of passers-by and onlookers added to the spectacle offered by celebrities, models and fashion journalists attending the show (Figure 12.3). Chanel’s Cruise collection was heavily inspired by French-Cuban culture and history. Billowing skirts in off-white tulle, short black spencers, black and white brogues, military green jackets and berets, puffy sleeves made with frayed strips of fabric that recall Latino ruffles, T-shirts with the slogan ‘Viva Coco libre’, and male models who walked with Cuban cigars and Panama hats culminated in a carnivalesque procession of Cuban musicians followed by cheery models acting casual. The icons that Lagerfeld referenced and appropriated conflated to produce an iconoclastic unmaking and remaking of Chanel’s insignia within a political and social setting. The military green, the French beret reimagined by Che Guevara, in turn reimagined by Lagerfeld (and Maria Grazia Chiuri in her 2017 winter/fall Dior collection), models of colour with Afro hair, Panama hats, cigars, black and white brogues, ruffled sleeves, the Paseo del Prado itself and Cuban onlookers belong to a mix of Latino-American symbols that are activated both in the collection and within the show; they signify an imaginary ‘other’ world whose geographical place is somewhere between the Caribbean and South America. During Chanel’s show, the Kardashians also arrived with their filming crew to film an episode of their reality television show. Both Chanel and the Kardashians were preceded by Rihanna who went to Havana in October 2016 to shoot a cover story for Vanity Fair. Likewise, the Rolling Stones filmed a concert in Cuba in March 2015. Pavlosky said that staging the show in Cuba, ‘It’s really not about a financial transaction for us. We’re not going to be selling here for a very long time to come, if ever. It’s a question of

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Figure 12.3  From their houses (in the background) Cubans watch the Chanel performance at the Prado promenade, Havana, Cuba, 2016. Photo by Adalberto Roque/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

Chanel being culturally engaged with the world. We’ve had Chanel in Seoul, Chanel in Salzburg, Chanel in Dallas’ (in Armstrong 2016). By Pavlosky’s own admission, the show was not about sales to Cubans, but rather about branding Chanel’s involvement with a country whose culture is emerging to the world. The arrival of North American stars and Chanel in Cuba made visible the country to the rest of the world, while appropriating their culture. This visibility was mediated through spectacle and showbiz with the place’s past and cultural symbols, which were captured in images subsequently disseminated through internet. The complaint presented by Cuban architects referred to the appropriation of the Paseo as a cultural signifier of democratic modernity, hinting at a non-democratic exclusion of Havana’s inhabitants. In the two examples discussed, ordinary people appear as performers of their social condition, therefore they become their own representation within the spectacle of fashion. In the case of the seamstresses, Chanel has drawn spectators inside the world of the haute couture, albeit commodifying the workers. In the case of the show in Cuba, Chanel has drawn away attention from the substance and materiality of things and their cultural provenance, inviting spectators to absorb the totality of the spectacle which supported social relations among the people involved in the show.

Spectacle Chanel’s spectacular shows have consistently recreated environments and narratives that commented on politics, the environment, domesticity and the future while constructing fictional universes with opulent

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interior design and objects. Many fashion designers have invested their shows with greater meanings that either explore social issues – Alexander McQueen’s reconfiguration of the body (Stępień 2017 and 2020: 71) – or become spaces where the design process, history and memory are the focus of the show – for example in conceptual or avant-garde designers such as Hussein Chalayan. For Duggan (2015), McQueen was a spectacle designer, while Chalayan is a representative of ‘substance’ designers (Duggan 2015: 250). According to this classification, experimentation can be seen as representing the intellectualization of fashion, offering an alternative to the spectacularization of fashion, which is instead synonymous with commerce. This reading stems from the binary and unresolved construction of fashion sitting ambiguously between art and commerce that materializes in the continuous reinvention of fashion shows in the attempt to either highlight this construction or flee from it. McQueen challenged the boundaries between spectacle and performance by infusing his shows with sociopolitical commentary, such as his Highland Rape show in 1995, and the catwalk performance of Aimee Mullins, a famous Paralympic athlete fitted by McQueen with prosthetic legs. John Galliano’s Fall/Winter 1998 Diorient Express is positioned somehow ambiguously within the category of spectacle designers (Duggan 2015). The show was staged in the Austerlitz train station and consisted in a dreamlike sequence of clothes and models, who were either parading the clothes or standing still like extras in a silent film. The clothes bordered on costume, blurring the lines between theatre and film and fashion. Suzy Menkes defined it as a ‘delirious mixes of place and time that make his shows into magnificent but essentially ridiculous time-travel costume parties’ (Menkes 1998). The setting and the use of extras seem to indicate that Galliano wanted to flee from a conventional catwalk, and desired instead a performative staging of his designs. Galliano also experimented with unconventional fashion shows, for example, with outsiders participating in the show finale. In his 1997 spring/summer collection, on a circus-like stage designed by Michael Howells, which complemented Galliano’s mix of Asian, Indian and African influences in his garments, a group of gipsy musicians entered the stage, mingling with the models in the final procession. Chanel’s introduction of people other than models is not a novelty, and thus this investigation provides a framework for the analysis of other shows where the human presence is functional to a spectacle-discourse. While grunge, hip-hop and minimalism characterized the 1990s, Galliano’s and McQueen’s sumptuous shows opened up a new association between fashion and the show business which required designers to assume a new role as the creative director of catwalk presentations (Stark 2018). In fact, the staging of expensive and spectacular shows coincided with the corporatization of fashion through the acquisition of brands and labels by global conglomerates Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey, Pinault S.A. (Kering from 2013, through various naming iterations), venture capitalists, corporate acquisitions and business investors. Long-established fashion houses such as Givenchy and Dior were able to stage grandiose shows to generate media attention and hype. Fashion’s new financial paradigm called for what Lögfren termed ‘constant micro-dramas of movement’ (2005: 63), which aptly catered for fashion’s constant search for novelty, and well defined the turn to sumptuous spectacles of luxury fashion. The extravagant fashion show created the ‘catwalk economy’ (Lögfren 2005), seasonal expectations of originality by staging, performing and choreographing the new. In the new economy of the 1990s, fashion shows were required to be energetic, hot and innovative. The supermodels’ hot athletic bodies provided the energy and novelty required. Also, the staging of multi-million dollars shows occurred simultaneously to the acceleration of fashion time caused by fast fashion which has forced haute couture and high design to intensify collections and styles presentations. This was the second major paradigmatic change in the industry in the second half of the twentieth century since the disruption caused by street styles in the 1960s.

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Powerful marketing, newness, self-referentiality and manipulation of symbols are mechanisms internal to the fashion system. The new fashion system based on corporate ownership, management and acquisitions retains all these elements, if not accentuated. Given its commercial mandate, can fashion shows be instances of social and political commentary? Fashion is pervasive, ubiquitous, the embodiment of identity and about class and economic status; it articulates culture as it is deeply embedded within the practices of production and use in everyday life to the point of becoming ‘naturalized’ (Segre Reinach 2011: 28). The catwalk represents a break in the everyday life-ness of fashion, as it is governed by specific rules of presentation that are highly ritualized and have to do with staging, music, casting, body performance. It is the perfect setting for attracting attention of media and buyers, and thus it is the catalyst of dominant culture and views on feminine aesthetics. However, the catwalk also becomes the site where conceptual and activist designers can present their alternative views about fashion and its connection with capitalism and consumption by breaking the rules of fashion and the catwalk itself. Duggan (2015) likens the fashion shows of Hussein Chalayan, Martin Margiela and Viktor and Rolf, with their emphasis on conceptual design, to theatrical performances that question fashion’s symbiotic relationship with capitalism and hence commodified spectacle. For Hoffman (2009), Hussein Chalayan’s 2000 show After Words is spectacle dressed up in ideas that bring to the fore ruptures and disjunctures within the fashion system. Evans (2003) pointedly comments on conceptual designers’ manipulation of signs to create disjunctures while being part of the very industry they attempt to critique. Since mid1850s, multiple artistic discourses have provided elevated validation for the work of anti-establishment designers, and thus are well documented in fashion studies (Wilcox 2001; Quinn 2002; Evans 2003; Duggan 2015). There seems to emerge a distinction between conceptual and avant-garde designer’s self-validation through the staging of highbrow shows, on the one hand, and the commercial, luxury brands and their multi-million dollars shows, on the other. However, internal critiques to the fashion system can be recuperated and branded as another spectacle because fashion, with its pervasive omnipresence, can be transformed in mere representation within the totalizing essence of capitalism. As Swyngedouw argues, ‘even opposition to commodity-culture and capitalism takes spectacular forms’ (2002: 159). A fashion show is not only an opportunity to present and sell fashion’s newness but also an imagemaker once it becomes disseminated in media. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord, Evans (2013) proposes that at the end of the twentieth century the fetishization of the commodity has shifted to its representation. However, she points out that despite its mutation into a fetishized image, the fashion object has not completely disappeared and remains real in the form of what she calls ‘the repressed’ (2013: 94), or the return of the hysterical symptom of modernity (Evans 2003: 79). That fashion sits ambiguously between its status as image and as a real object is not a late twentieth-century characterization. This duplicity between materiality and image had already emerged with the shift to a ‘mass culture of viewing’ with the invention of photography and cinema. For the Boston physician, poet and humorist Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing in The Atlantic in 1859, photography was already a process where the form of objects was separated from the physical objects themselves. Holmes maintained that matter as a visible object was no longer useful, ‘Form is henceforth divorced from matter’ (in Trachtenberg 1980: 80). Holmes went so far as to hint at the loss of value of the original object once its form could be extricated and disseminated in an infinite number of images. The divorce between the object and its representation marked the shift to a culture of viewing, which is now only amplified by the technology of digital media. He anticipated what Benjamin questioned in 1935 in relation to the mechanical reproduction of the work of art and the loss of its aura and affective status.

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Holmes’s early observation of the disconnection between form and representation brings the discussion to the heart of Debord’s (2012) society of spectacle where he argues that not only objects but also social relations have been replaced by their representation, a point that is pertinent to this discussion of commodification and fetishization of people. Guy Debord and the Situationists have regained a relative rediscovery and respectability in the last twenty years (Swyngedouw 2002). In fashion studies, Evans (2001, 2003, 2013) has applied Debord to contemporary fashion to provide an analysis of what she proposes as a very different economic system from that of nineteenth century or the 1960s, when Debord published his anti-establishment critique of capitalism. Evans (2003, 2013) recognizes Debord’s contribution to intellectual debates about the transformation of the commodity form into sign, and our consumption and experience of the sign in lieu of the object. However, she also disputes Debord’s description of the society of the spectacle because his analysis is today redundant in view of the radical transformations brought about by digital information (2003: 2013). On the contrary, Debord’s brilliance consisted in illustrating so early in its post-industrial manifestation the totalizing capacity of late capitalism to mould and adapt constantly. To illustrate this point, any revolutionary artistic, urban and architectural movements and practices of the 1960s and 1970s have been appropriated, aestheticized and depoliticized, academically and commercially, by the very logic of capitalism, which turns everything into commodities. For Debord, one fundamental shift of late capitalism is that through increased specialization of labour and fragmentation, identity is no longer formed at the point of production but at the point of consumption, a point that fundamentally turned Marxist critique of labour relations on its head. As Debord put it (2012: 27), contemporary capitalist society rests on the contemplation of objects and their seductive image. This discussion brings us to the core of this chapter: How can human beings be commodified? To suggest that Chanel workers or Cuban onlookers were objects is clearly not only flawed but also inarguable. However, in Chanel’s shows there is a theme of ambivalence that appears to, on the one hand, be empowering and giving visibility to people and cultures and, on the other, enforce a subtle process that transforms people and their bodies into commodities. The principle of commodity fetishism is ‘the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things” (. . .) where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it’ (Debord 2012: 29). The commodity is dominant through its form of representation as image; thus, spectacle and commodity are inextricably linked. The understanding of this process of transformation through commodification requires a cross-examination of the political economy of labour and use-value.

Commodity Fashion is a system of mediation between the individual and society, culture, material and immaterial values, production and consumption. The fashion system is in continuous transformation to ensure never-ending novelty and innovation, whereas capitalism’s goal is to increase economic growth. They have common historical roots, as the rise of capitalism in Paris, with its complex web of manufacture, marketing and consumption of luxury goods, was crucial to the birth of a modern fashion system (Sewell 2010). Thus, fashion and capitalism are bound in their quest to accumulate images, products, wealth, meanings. The catwalk economy, with its mix of theatrical performance and fashion, offers a spectacle that serves the commercialization of fashion, and people and objects are part of the spectacle as extras, models,

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public or props. The fashion shows reviewed here could be understood as an esteem for the artisanal and engagement with other cultural worlds. Lagerfeld had an ongoing agenda around the promotion of haute couture and the Métiers d’Art, thus he actively sought to give voice to the hidden labourers of haute couture. I propose that when workers are extracted, distanced or displaced from their workplace into the artificial space of the spectacle, and inhabitants are limited in their habituated environments, they cannot exist in their real dimension, they cannot help but enact and perform, and therefore social relations are transformed into a simulation of the real. Thus, Chanel contributed to transform labour into an exchangeable commodity that, in turn, created value for brand Chanel. Baudrillard well sums up how interior design – the runway interior design in this case – is an organized system that requires not only the technical aspect of design but also the cultural need for atmosphere. Stages work like interiors in which people are placed by ‘man [sic] the interior designer’ who is the ‘active engineer of atmosphere’ (Baudrillard 1996: 26). where he controls the space and the actions within the space. Lagerfeld’s organization of the system-runway is to place props, people and models in a controlled environment, where viewers are also placed so that their look is intentionally directed. Through an objectivizing approach, Lagerfeld, like ‘man [sic] the interior designer’ (Baudrillard 1996: 26), placed his subjects on the stage as actors and extras; he created space, no longer an interior décor. This is to say that in the functional arrangement of space and staged interior, in the 2016/17 autumn/winter haute couture collection, the petites mains became commodities through their aestheticization. Debord mentions the celebrity as ‘the spectacular representation of a living human being’ (1996: 33, para 60) who personifies the image of a possible role. In the case of the show, the petites mains became the representation of themselves, and thus simulacra. Lagerfeld’s sixteen shows to date dedicated to the Métiers d’Art have received media appraisal for their exposure of the hidden handwork that transforms a garment into haute couture. In regard to the 2016/17 autumn/winter show, Lagerfeld said, ‘I thought that was a modern idea, to make them participate’, ‘They should be shown, too’ (in Safe 2017). Tanguy de Belair, the chief operating officer of Michel, a millinery, said, ‘Chanel bought us to preserve the knowledge and standard of what we do’ (in Haytjan 2006). The discourse that Chanel and Lagerfeld have created around the preservation of craftmanship and skills that are disappearing is intrinsic to Chanel’s design philosophy, the tradition of haute couture, and, in Barbara Vinken’s words (2005), to the griffe. Haute couture is not only a material practice, or one of fashion’s mode of production, but also a cultural tradition and patrimony that goes back to Charles Worth, the founder of the modern fashion system. At the core of haute couture there is the creation of garments through a painstaking and elaborate process of hand sewing. The making of a simple haute couture dress requires between 70 and 90 hours of work (Shaeffer 2001: 7); the cost of such a garment can be equal to a luxury car or a small house, and only a select group of women can afford it (Shaeffer 2001: 7). However, the influence of couture design continues to reverberate in the women’s global fashion industry, continuing its fundamental function within the fashion system. In the French language, haute couture workers, seamstresses, beaders and needleworkers have been referred to as petites mains, small hands. By referring to these people’s labour and expertise fetishizing a body part, a connection is made between their social worth and their economic worth as specialized labourers. Marx’ formulation of the theory of commodity identifies exchange value and use-value as two fundamental qualities of the product of labour. Likewise, the description of commodity usually takes two aspects, the representational and the material. The labour of the petites mains is both material and representational, with the latter referring to the way in which couture is perceived and imagined in the fashion system, by clients, media and in the form of image.

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Thus, human labour required for the production of haute couture becomes exchange value. This is not to say that the petit mains’ labour is completely dominated by Chanel and Lagerfeld. The artisans of the Métiers d’Art have autonomy in that they can choose to work also for other designers or luxury brands. However, ateliers that were once fully independent are now collected according to their specialization under the Chanel logo and ownership: the shoemakers, the pleaters, the milliners and hatmakers, the goldsmiths, the costume jewellers and so on. Thus, the workers’ existence is defined by what they produce in a specialized way, which in turn has acquired a symbolic cachet through the history and practice of couture. The display of the petites mains in a spectacularized space presents an opportunity for rendering visible labour that has remained shrouded in the mystery and secrecy of haute couture, but it also highlights the alienation of the workers, whose relationships, as described by Debord, are defined through consumption, with no access to the product of their own labour. In the Cuban show, residents not invited to the show stood on balconies of dilapidated colonial buildings. Cubans contemplated the commodity representing the economic and cultural power of the developed world, and that, according to Pavlosky, will never be sold in Cuba. Idania del Rio, a Cuban fashion designer, said, ‘I want to see what $40,000 clothing looks like’, adding also, ‘It was very interesting and maybe too nostalgic. A lot of Cuban cigars, colours and hats from another era. It represented a Cuba that doesn’t interest me right now, because today’s Cuba is another, more contemporary Cuba’ (Agence France Presse 2016). Idania del Rio refers to the pastiche that emerges in the collection, an interpretation of Cuba’s history and iconography by the Western world. This selection of iconic garments and symbols are transformed again into representation once they move onto the stage of the performance-show, after manipulation of their original meaning. The presence of photographers, audience and models contribute to this transformation. As Skov et al. (2009) pointedly note, a second move consists in the consumption of the collection, and this is achieved through the dissemination of images and videos of the show, which shifts once more the economic purpose of the presentation to an aestheticized experience. Cuban onlookers, excluded from the show, were at any one-time viewers and the viewed, becoming part of the representation and aestheticization of the show, in turn commodities within the frame of the show and of the image.

Conclusion The spatial setting is functional to the establishment of spectacular shows. Outdoor settings and obscure venues are a characteristic of the late twentieth-century show, but they had already been established as conventions since late nineteenth century with everyday display of fashion in the city, notably Parisian arcades, cafes and theatres (Wilson 2003). The fashion show as a totality mediates between design, production and consumption, while also framing and aestheticizing cultural, political and social issues in an environment that is set apart from daily routines of getting dressed. Models, audiences, photographers and props are all part of this ephemeral setting. Chanel is known for the staging of spectacular and theatrical shows to promote the brand. Behind these multi-million dollars theatrical shows there was the work of Karl Lagerfeld and teams of set designers, who recreate many different environments and venues, and transform Chanel’s insignia into cultural, historical or political props through the use of objects and people beyond professional models. Chanel’s shows juxtapose spectacle with commodity, and with a social or political comment on contemporary issues.

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Two shows in particular, the Cruise collection 2016/17 that took place in Cuba and the Couture autumn/winter 2016/17 show at the Grand Palais, which featured 120 of Chanel’s petites mains and seamstresses working in a space that recreated the ateliers of Rue Cambon, have made visible culture, society and politics. In Cuba, in a concentric, enclosed and layered display of space, which isolated it from the city, local residents, formally excluded from the show, viewed the show from their balconies and the street. Their presence is captured in images, aestheticized and recast to mediate the relationship between a new political and economic opening to the West by the Cuban government. In the case of the Chanel seamstresses, the petites mains were extracted from their workplace and used as props around the catwalk space, without being given the possibility of telling their stories. This was a total transformation of the fashion show, because the petites mains’ work is steeped in the fashion industry; therefore, they anchored and communicated not only haute couture but also the idea of fashion itself. The chapter has presented a theoretical analysis and an empirical demonstration of how the context, content and the form of specific cultural objects and symbols are intertwined in the show’s performance. The chapter proposes that the presence of outsiders on the catwalk is the result of the transformation of the human relationship into a relationship of consumption (Baudrillard 1996; Debord 2012). While it is possible to argue that models, clothing, spectators and objects are all part of the theatricality of the show and its objectification, it can be said that the inclusion of workers or the participation of Cuban onlookers to the spectacle has created a new turn in the aestheticization of human capital.

FEATURED SHOWS Chanel: Fall 2008/9 (video available via Vogue Runway)

Chanel: Cruise 2016/17 (video available via YouTube)

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Chanel: Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2016/17 (video available via YouTube)

Dior: Fall/Winter 1998 Diorient Express (video available via YouTube)

Hussein Chalayan: Autumn/Winter 2000 After Words (video available via YouTube)

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Notes 1 Karl Lagerfeld passed away at the same time in which this chapter was finished. Undoubtedly, Chanel’s big performance shows owe to the artistic and entrepreneurial flair of Karl Lagerfeld. However, this chapter’s goal is not to focus on Karl Lagerfeld as an artist or as an author. The chapter has remained untouched, except for changes in verb tense. 2 For example at the Grand Central Station in New York in 2006, in California in 2007, in Venice in 2009, in SaintTropez in 2010, in Cape d’Antibes in 2011, at the Palais of Versailles in 2012, in Singapore and Dallas in 2013, in Dubai in 2014, in Rome’s Cinecittà studios in 2015, in Havana in 2016, at the Paris Hotel Ritz in 2016, in Hamburg and Bangkok in 2018, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019. These shows showcased different collections, either the Metiers d’Art collections, or ready-to-wear or cruise collection.

References Agence France Presse. (2016), ‘Chanel Glamour Comes to Now Fashionable Cuba’, The Guardian, May 4. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/fa​​shion​​/2016​​/may/​​03​/ch​​anel-​​glamo​​ur​-co​​mes​-t​​o​-now​​-fash​​ionab​​l​ e​-cu​​ba​-ka​​rl​-la​​gerfe​​ld (accessed February 17, 2019). Armstrong, L. (2016), ‘Chanel’s Most Contentious Show Yet: The Story behind Cuba’s First Fashion Show – and a Guest Appearance by the Kardashians’, The Telegraph, June 25. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.tel​​egrap​​h​.co.​​uk​/ fa​​shion​​/even​​ts​/ch​​anels​​-most​​-cont​​entio​​us​-sh​​ow​-ye​​t​-the​​-stor​​y​​-beh​​ind​-c​​ubas-​​first​​-f/ (accessed January 9, 2019). Baudrillard, J. (1996/1968), The System of Objects, London: Verso. Benjamin, W. (1969/1935), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), lluminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books. British Pathé (1925), ‘Liverpool Civic Week’. Available online https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=4Zm​​​dqetv​​Ob8 (accessed February 12, 2019). Chanel. (2010), ‘Creation of Chanel Joaillerie Jewellery’. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=HUZ​​ P​qIE8​​GP8. Colapinto, J. (2007), ‘In the Now: Where Lagerfeld Lives’, The NewYorker, March 19. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​ .new​​yorke​​r​.com​​/maga​​zine/​​2007/​​03​/19​​​/in​-t​​he​-no​w (accessed December 12, 2018). Debord, G. (2012/1967), Society of the Spectacle. Introduction by Tom Vague, Preface by Sam Cooper. Translation: Black & Red, 1977. [S.I.]: Bread and Circuses Publishing. Denman, S. (2016), ‘Ateliers Are the Stars of Chanel’s Latest Collection’, The National, July 9. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​natio​​nal​.a​​e​/art​​s​-cul​​ture/​​ateli​​ers​-a​​re​-th​​e​-sta​​rs​-of​​-chan​​el​-s-​​lates​​​t​-col​​lecti​​on​-1.​​16261​4 (accessed January 20, 2019). Duggan, G. G. (2015), ‘The Greatest Show on Earth: A Look at Contemporary Fashion Shows and Their Relationship to Performance Art’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 5 (3): 243–70. Available online: http:​/​/dx.​​doi​.o​​rg​/10​​.2752​​/1362​​70401​​​77896​​0883 (accessed May 4, 2017). Evans, C. (2001), ‘The Enchanted Spectacle’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 5 (3): 271–310. Available online: http:​/​/dx.​​doi​.o​​rg​/10​​.2752​​/1362​​70401​​​77896​​0865 (accessed January 2, 2019). Evans, C. (2003), Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Evans, C. (2013), ‘Yesterday’s Emblems and Tomorrow’s Commodities: The Return of the Repressed in Fashion Imagery Today’, in Pamela Gibson and Stella Church Bruzzi (eds), Fashion Cultures, 77–102, Oxon/New York: Taylor and Francis. Haytjan, E. (2006), ‘The Hands that Sew the Sequins’, The New York Times, January 19. Available online: https​:/​/ ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​006​/0​​1​/19/​​fashi​​on​/th​​ursda​​ystyl​​es​/th​​e​-han​​ds​-th​​at​-​se​​w​-the​​-sequ​​ins​.h​​tml (accessed January 25, 2019).

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Hoffmann, M. (2009), ‘Is a Fashion Show the Place for Social Commentary? Investigating the Spectacle Dressed Up in Ideas in Hussein Chalayan’s after Words’, Australasian Drama Studies, 54 (April): 35–49. Holmes, O. W. (1980/1859), ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays on Photography, 71–82, New Haven: Leete’s Island Books. Lejeun, J. F. (1996), ‘The City as Landscape: Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier and the Great Urban Works of Havana, 1925–1930’, The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 22: 150–85, trans. John Beusterien and Narciso G. Menocal. Available online: http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/1504152 (accessed January 9, 2019). Löfgren, O. (2005), ‘Catwalking and Coolhunting: The Production of Newness’, in O. Löfgren and R. Willim (ed.), Magic Culture and the New Economy, 57–71, Oxford-New York: Berg. Menkes, S. (1998), ‘Galliano’s Diorient Express Runs Out of Steam’, The New York Times, July 21. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/1​​998​/0​​7​/21/​​style​​/IHT-​​galli​​anos-​​diori​​ent​-e​​xpres​​s​-run​​​s​-out​​-of​-s​​team.​​html (accessed January 4, 2019). Quinn, B. (2002), Techno Fashion, Oxford: Berg. Safe, G. (2017), ‘Chanel Celebrates the Ladies behind the Seams’, Sunday Style, July 31. Available online: News​ .c​om https​:/​/ww​​w​.new​​s​.com​​.au​/l​​ifest​​yle​/s​​unday​​-styl​​e​/cha​​nel​-c​​elebr​​ates-​​the​-l​​adies​​-behi​​nd​-th​​e​-sea​​ms​/ne​​ws​-st​​ ory​/2​​adb​61​​e2d64​​4e1ad​​393b2​​4e8b6​​60727​6 (accessed January 25, 2019). Segre-Reinach, S. (2011), Un mondo di mode: Il vestire globalizzato, Rome-Bari: Laterza. Sewell, W. H. Jr. (2010), ‘The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-century France’, Past and Present, 206, The Past and Present Society, Oxford. Available online doi:10.1093/pastj/gtp044. Shaeffer, C. B. (2001), Couture Sewing Techniques, Newton: The Taunton Press. Skov, L., E. Skjold, F. Larsen and F. F. Csaba (2009), ‘Creativity at Work: The Fashion Show as an Art Form’, Creative Encounters Open Papers #32, Copenhagen Business School. Available online: https​:/​/op​​enarc​​hive.​​cbs​ .d​​k​/bit​​strea​​m​/han​​dle​/1​​0398/​​7​943/​​Creat​​ive% 20Enc​​ounte​​rs​%20​​Worki​​ng​%20​​Paper​​s​%203​​2​.pdf​​​?sequ​​ence=​1 (accessed June 2, 2018). Stark, G. (2018), The Fashion Show: History, Theory and Practice, London: Bloomsbury. Stępień, J. (2017), ‘Savage Beauties’. Alexander McQueen’s Performance of Posthuman Bodies, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 13 (2): 170–82, Available online: DOI: 10.1080/14794713.2017.1345584. Swyngedouw, E. (2002), ‘The Strange Respectability of the Situationist City in the Society of the Spectacle’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26 (1): 153–65. Vinken, B. (2005), Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System, Berg: London/New York. Available online: DOI: 10.2752/9780857854094/FASHZEIT0008. Wilcox, C. (2001), Radical Fashion, London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Wilson, E. (2003), Adorned in Dremas: Fashion and Modernity, London: I.B. Tauris. World Fashion Channel. (2017), ‘Chanel Metiers D’Art 16–17 Savoir-faire’. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​ com​/w​​atch?​​v​=gBp​​​ewTd8​​XJE (accessed January 20, 2019).

13 NEW YORK FASHION WEEK AS MEDIATIZED ENVIRONMENT Rebecca Halliday

Introduction The fashion show has its origins in the mid-1800s in the couture salon of Charles Frederick Worth, where house models displayed clothes to clients in an intimate event known then as the mannequin parade (Evans 2001). Over the next decades, the audience expanded to include international buyers and members of the press, and a seasonal presentation schedule was formalized (Evans 2001, 2013). Since its inception, the fashion show has functioned as the locus of communication between producers and consumers, while companies have experimented with varying degrees of theatricality in their presentations.1 Fashion shows are most often exclusive performances for industry personnel, celebrities and elite clientele. Historically, consumers had to wait up to six months after collections’ debut to locate items in stores or access media representations. Formats used to disseminate fashion show content have included illustrations (Evans 2013); print photographs and textual criticism; informational film reels in the first half of the twentieth century (Evans 2001; Uhlirova 2013); and broadcast fashion television programmes from the 1980s to this decade (Fulsang 2004; Warner 2014). In the late-2000s, online and digital media created a temporal and cultural shift in modes of fashion communication that assumed such forms as the integration of live-streaming into fashion shows; the posting of fashion show content on social media; and the incorporation of more ‘democratic’ pursuits such as street style photography and fashion blogging. All of these media practices have coalesced around fashion weeks and fashion shows. As material sites, these events and event series are exemplars of what Rocamora (2017: 505) terms a comprehensive ‘mediatization of fashion’. Still, the schedules and protocols of fashion weeks have tended to remain a constant factor even as the events have become more tailored for transmission to international audiences. This chapter examines the fashion show spaces of New York Fashion Week (NYFW) in terms of their capabilities for the mediatization of the event to an online spectatorship and for theatrical modes of presentation. For reasons of scope it focuses on the venues in use since 2013, when the entertainment corporation (WME-IMG) took over the event. I argue that the spatial relations, mediatized enactments and theatrical affordances of New York Fashion Week’s main venues

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do not permit the use of opulent production elements but rather facilitate a more mediatized mode of spectatorship that directs attendee and consumer focus to the collections as aesthetic and commercial wares. I describe the performance elements and physical spaces of the presentations but also consider the mediatized enactments and relations specific to these events. This chapter derives from field observation that I conducted at NYFW during the Fall/Winter 2016 and Fall/Winter 2019 seasons in addition to later observations of select video records of presentations I attended. In 2016, I attended five fashion shows, and in 2019, six. While eleven shows over two seasons offer a small sample, most of these shows were nonetheless located at venues controlled under the official NYFW calendar during those seasons. This sample number results from the difficulties of obtaining tickets to presentations when one is a researcher rather than an industry member, a hurdle that Entwistle and Rocamora (2006, 2011) also describe when undertaking their prescient observations on London Fashion Week. I obtained (often standing) tickets to shows through a combination of industry connections and direct email requests to companies whose presentations were listed on the official calendar. The shows that I attended – with a few exceptions – were those from newer or mid-level brands. I did not attend fashion shows from more high-profile companies that were, as I note here, held in non-publicized or ‘secret’ locations known only to invited, influential insiders.

The mediatized fashion show The roster of international fashion weeks consists of the traditional ready-to-wear ‘Fashion Month’ series in the ‘Big Four’ fashion capitals of New York, London, Milan and Paris but has proliferated to cities on six different continents.2 Much of the inventiveness of fashion presentation and the technical affordances of the venues depend on the decisions of planners and stakeholders, the architecture of host cities and the creative decisions and production budgets of the companies or brands.3 While NYFW offers a useful unit of analysis for the mediatization of fashion shows, it would be problematic to position the event as identical in format and concerns to other international series. Nonetheless, several of the issues that NYFW has faced – in particular the integration and effects of digital media – reflect the concerns of the international fashion industry. The observations I make of NYFW circa this decade can be used to consider both the material and social practices through which fashion weeks have become mediasaturated and fashion shows tailored for media, down to the layout of spaces and calculated set and performance elements. To account for the multifarious modes of in-person and screen-based interaction that contemporary fashion shows instantiate, I incorporate a framework of mediatization that combines conceptualizations derived from the intersections of social theory and media and performance studies. Social theories of mediatization posit it as an ‘umbrella term’ (Hepp 2013) that addresses the formative role of media and mediation processes and practices in the maintenance of social relations, communities and institutions. Definitions of mediatization resist historical periodization but rather pinpoint certain conditions or criteria: ‘qualitative shifts in social-material relations’ wherein our reliance on communication media assumes a state of ‘dependence’, in which procedures are built around and cannot function without media use (Jansson 2015: 16). Jansson (2015) uses Bourdieu’s concept of the doxa, a set of understood social standards within fields to demonstrate the integration of communication media into social, corporate and political entities at the level of individual

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action (see also Rocamora 2017: 517). He identifies three forms of media dependence: functional dependence, defined as ‘procedures [that] are altered and made dependent on mediated forms of communication’ and cannot be performed in their absence; transactional dependence, in which actors follow practices that media have instantiated; and ritual dependence, in which ‘the possession of certain media technologies’ is ‘normalized’ and actors must master their use to achieve successful outcomes (Jansson 2015: 16–17). Mediatization further refers to a transfusion of media in quotidian life; it encompasses the habituation of media use in social interactions to form what Rocamora, citing Jansson, describes as ‘routinized mundane practices’ (2017: 518). In Rocamora’s (2017: 506– 12) characterization of the ‘mediatization of fashion’, the mediatization of the fashion show – here producers’ consideration of how the event will read across different screens and platforms – is one of three arenas in which media have become arranged within fashion’s industrial and social structures.4 At the turn of this decade mediatization assumed a new conceptual scale in fashion, in terms of the ‘instant’ circulation of content, the sheer number of devices and platforms used, and the personalized and handheld nature of products and interfaces.5 Indeed, media have infiltrated fashion show spaces in manners that demonstrate all three of forms of dependence. The mediatized fashion show both offers a novel mode of user interaction and extends the reach of content outside of fashion shows’ and fashion weeks’ spatial and temporal parameters. To probe fashion shows’ modes of transmission and interaction, it is further useful to incorporate Auslander’s definition of mediatization as the encroachment of electronic media and media uses into the spatialities of live performance (2008b: 11). Auslander (2008b) traces mediatization to the advent of cinema and later to television, which honed the technical mechanisms of ‘live’ broadcast. Auslander asserts that ‘the live’ as concept or experience (as liveness) cannot be separated from the mediatized, and that the relation between these realms, often seen as dialectical, must be reconceptualized as ‘historical and contingent, rather than determined by immutable differences’ (2008b: 11), while those phenomena that are labelled ‘live’ should be read in terms of their mediatized after-effects. Auslander’s formulation can be used to describe media’s inroads into the fashion show and the transmission of its environment as a mode of virtual performance. The production of fashion shows with consideration to when and how these events will be transmitted exemplifies a condition in which, as Auslander describes, ‘the live event exists as much to serve as the basis for a mediatized representation as to be an end in itself’ (2008b: 30–1), in a manner that recalls sports competitions and Hollywood award ceremonies albeit on a lesser scale. Liveness accounts further for the embodied performer–audience relationship that underlies fashion shows. Auslander examines events based on matrices of spatial and temporal co-presence, whose combination establishes classic liveness, a ‘default’ condition that can deliver a more affective experience for persons within an enclosed environment (2008a: 108). This model helps to illustrate how the fashion show positions its insider audience in relation to the models and to each other, and attends to how the performance translates to an online spectatorship invited to interact with and disseminate the content. Mediatization does not, however, describe the mere transmission of fashion show content; rather, mediatization has also rendered audience members and their spatial relations visible in an unprecedented manner whose implications scholars continue to unpack. Entwistle and Rocamora (2006, 2011) – writing in the mid-2000s before social media became omnipresent – combine Bourdieu’s theorization of cultural fields and notion of habitus as a framework to describe the social and industrial machinations of London Fashion Week. Fashion weeks (and fashion shows) offer a literal manifestation of the field in which

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invitations are a marker of membership and attendees’ embodied positions indicate social influence. Entwistle notes that the ‘bounded nature’ of the field is analogous to high fashion since high fashion positions itself as ‘an exclusive world not everyone can participate in’ (2009: 36–7). To describe the directions of audience members’ gazes within the space, the authors reference Foucault’s illustration of the Panopticon, a prison in which a central tower oversees all inmates, who cannot see each other but maintain tacit awareness of their possible surveillance (Entwistle and Rocamora 2006: 744). In fashion show spaces, a reverse Panopticon occurs: members that possess the most capital, ‘the more powerful bodies’, are seated in the front rows and become a focal point, while members seated further back (if seated at all) possess a more total view of the audience but hold the least status (Entwistle and Rocamora 2006: 744–5). Entwistle and Rocamora define fashion capital as a form of capital ‘specific to the field of fashion’ that is, like habitus, acquired through education, embodied in sartorial choices, demeanour and attractiveness, and conveyed through familiar, performative social enactments (2006: 744–8). The authors cite the ‘air kiss’ as an example of the latter, as it is a gesture performed to communicate that one has professional or personal contacts also in the room (Entwistle and Rocamora 2006: 747). The fashion show further communicates fashion’s own cultural clout, as one’s presence at the event signifies a measure of field influence and connection both in the actual space and now within virtual spaces. Fashion personnel can be situated as cultural intermediaries, a term Bourdieu coined to describe a class of workers in the creative and media industries (1984: 325), but that now spans numerous positions that liaise between creators and consumers (Entwistle 2006; Negus 2002). Featherstone locates cultural intermediaries as those arbiters of taste who associate with ‘artists and intellectuals’ but remain beholden to a mass public: ‘sustaining the prestige and cultural capital of these [elite] enclaves, while at the same time popularizing and making them more accessible to wider audiences’ (2007: 19). Prior to the rise of online and social media, the competition for field influence in fashion was still heated but members’ enactments at fashion shows were more insular, with intermediaries ‘performing for each other’, to use an oft-cited observation from performance scholar Doreen Kondo (1997: 103; see also Entwistle and Rocamora 2006: 745). In this decade, the field of fashion’s social enactments are transmitted within and beyond venue barriers to mediatized audiences, to the extent that insiders have both adapted and adopted certain behaviours according to the presence and affordances of screen-based devices. Access to the event itself is predicated on media use that includes the issuance of email invitations and QR codes to be scanned at often multiple points of entrance and applications to track one’s show schedule. Fashion’s mediatization has also altered fashion’s industrial hierarchies to admit influencers who make content accessible to their followers via social media while positioning themselves as possessors of fashion capital due to their presence at the shows. What Entwistle and Rocamora (2006, 2011) described as the realization of habitus through performative practices has morphed into a similar but mediatized set of enactments in which it becomes harder to tell who holds particular status in a room prior to or after the shows. Attendees take selfies or photographs of their companions until personnel instruct them to take their seats and the visual hierarchies of the field of fashion are confirmed or re-established. Still, one can detect the ‘actual’ celebrities due to the circles of press photographers and camera flashes that surround them before the show. The spill of the runway lights onto their bodies keeps them further visible throughout the presentation, as well as in streamed or circulated content.6 Media therefore permeate all corners of NYFW (and others) both to broadcast the shows across multiple platforms and to facilitate insiders’ admission to the spaces and their circulation and communication of capital.

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New York Fashion Week as a live and mediatized event The earliest incarnation of NYFW as an official series of fashion presentations arose out of competition between the dominant Parisian couture sector and a nascent American fashion scene in the early twentieth century. Since the 1860s, New York had been the epicentre of apparel manufacture and retail in the United States (Rantisi 2004: 91), but as of the 1900s consumers still obtained their sartorial inspiration from illustrations of Parisian collections and the shipment of the latest fashions and their mass-produced knock-offs to US retailers. The first formal showcase of American fashions occurred in November 1914 when US Vogue produced a ‘Fashion Fête of American designs from prominent New York stores at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel’ as part of a war relief effort (Evans 2013: 90).7 In the late1930s, American journalists and manufacturers formed associations to implement resolutions to increase awareness of domestic talent (Rantisi 2004: 96–7). In the mid-1940s, the Second World War halted fashion production in Paris for a second time, and the United States stepped up its promotion initiatives, with the Garment Retailers of America financing fashion shows in New York (Milbank 1989, as cited in Rantisi 2004: 96). The first NYFW, then titled Press Week, was produced in 1943 under the direction of publicist Eleanor Lambert (Milbank 1989). New York Fashion Week continued as a series of presentations at various municipal sites until 1993, when, under the control of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and its executive director Fern Mallis, it was moved into a set of tents erected at Bryant Park to ‘centralize’ its scattered show locations (Jennings 2019). The International Management Group (IMG), overseer of numerous international fashion week series, purchased the event in 2001 and renamed it under corporate sponsors, first Olympus and later Mercedes-Benz. Bryant Park remained NYFW’s home until 2010, when the event was relocated to the Lincoln Center, in part because the latter venue had the technical infrastructure needed to live-stream the shows (Jennings 2019). The first concerted efforts to live-stream NYFW presentations were made in September 2011 following the example of London Fashion Week, which, in February 2010, had become the first of the ‘Big Four’ Fashion Weeks to undertake live-streaming of all of the shows on its calendar (Rosenbloom 2011). Since 2013, NYFW has operated under WME-IMG, a fusion of IMG with the entertainment firm William Morris Endeavour. In 2015, WME-IMG folded MADE Fashion Week, a smaller independent showcase that had run concurrent with NYFW, into its operations. WME-IMG’s mandate for NYFW – one contentious within fashion circles – has been to incorporate a more experiential element to the fashion shows not in terms of theatrical production but rather in terms of an emphasis on fashion’s commercial allure: invitations to celebrities and media influencers; tickets offered as part of expensive retail-themed consumer tours; and the production of fashion shows with the intent of media circulation (see Friedman 2015; Jennings 2019). As of 2015, the main venues were Skylight Clarkson Square, a spacious studio located in SoHo, and Skylight Moynihan Station, a converted office building at 8th Avenue and West 33rd Street, near Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. For Fall/Winter 2018, NYFW moved into two new venues. The primary venue is Spring Studios in Tribeca – a multipurpose and (as I discovered) labyrinthian site that boasts several gallery spaces of which two, the 3,400 square feet Gallery I and the 4,000 square feet Gallery II (Spring 2019b), were in use for Fall/Winter 2019. The secondary studio venue, Industria, is located further north on Washington Street. While these main venues offer a flexible infrastructure for media production, several brands have held presentations at off-site venues to capitalize on more

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ornate architecture or niche locations and/or to make their events more exclusive, as often the locations are not publicized on the main calendar, and those without invitations do not know where the shows will be held. These decisions have caused continued tension with NYFW coordinators that want to see the fashion shows and the lines themselves unified under a corporate event banner (Friedman 2015). Critics have complained that in recent seasons NYFW has become static and uneventful (see Jennings 2019; van Elven 2019). The handful of fashion shows that can be considered spectacular or extravagant productions have tended to be one-off or commemorative affairs, often involving the presence of mainstream celebrities. Notable events have included live-streamed ‘see now buy now’ presentations from fashion lines such as Tommy Hilfiger and Tom Ford; Kanye West’s off-calendar fashion shows to launch his Yeezy seasonal collections in which models undertook performances of stillness created with performance artist Vanessa Beecroft; Ralph Lauren’s black-tie fiftieth-anniversary menswear celebration at Bethesda Terrace in Central Park in 2018; and Riccardo Tisci’s elaborate outdoor Givenchy fashion show held at Pier 26 in 2015, for which he collaborated with performance artist Marina Abramovic. The latter show functioned as a dual promotional tool for the launch of Givenchy’s Madison Avenue flagship store and a celebration of Tisci’s decade as Givenchy’s creative director. As such, Tisci made the event a star-studded and more public affair, offering 1,000 tickets for sale or donation (Rocamora 2017: 510). However, these fashion shows have earned press attention because of their unusual scale in the more minimalist NYFW presentation landscape, and the one-time production of a Givenchy fashion show in New York should be considered a case of a French fashion house staking its claim in the US market through a more European mode of presentation.

The studio spaces of the fashion show The relocation of NYFW presentations into studio spaces already outfitted for media production has facilitated a more uniform and streamlined element to the overall fashion week experience, demonstrated in the clean-lined, whitewashed and minimalist set-ups of the spaces themselves. The studio space at Skylight Clarkson Square was set up with three runway sections, with attendees seated on two rows of benches: the elite attendees faced the middle section, while the rest of the attendees faced the side sections. Attendees could turn their bodies to see all of the sections, creating various modes of looking and possibilities for photo-taking. Skylight Moynihan Station utilized a more ‘traditional’ set-up with a long, U-shaped runway bifurcated by benches on which were seated the highest-profile audience members, though those seated in the upper risers on either side of the runway faced just half of the front row attendees; the smallest venue at MILK Studios, used for the MADE Fashion Week shows, had the same bifurcated set-up but at a much smaller and more intimate scale. The Spring Studios complex is operated by Spring, a creative production agency that was founded in London in the 1990s and expanded to New York in 2013 (2019a). Spring first established itself as a set of studios for ‘still and motion shoots’ but has ‘expanded’ into hosting and production, ‘building audiences within fashion, beauty and luxury and creating global prestige campaigns, engaging content, and high-end cultural events’ (2019a). As Forbes notes, the complex has also functioned as a film and visual art showcase venue and is home to both the Tribeca Film Festival and the Independent Art Fair (Montero 2018). Both Gallery I and Gallery II were long and rectangular and boasted floor-to-ceiling window facades on the far wall, which offered a west-facing panoramic view of New York that enhanced one’s sense of location in an international fashion capital (Figure 13.1). However, at a hotter-ticket show in the upstairs Gallery I, the windows were

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blacked out with thick blinds to feature a fluorescent floor installation – this lent the room a more exclusive feel despite its expansiveness. Industria, part of an operation with locations in Manhattan and Williamsburg, is also a film and photo studio and event space with a high-profile clientele: its studios ‘have been designed for commercial shoots as well as a variety of exceptional events including exhibitions, conferences, fashion presentations, trade shows and pop-ups. Clients include Nike, Google, Sony, Gucci, Estée Lauder, Adidas, Porsche among many others’ (Industria Figure 13.1  Nonie, fall/winter 2019. Courtesy Rebecca Halliday. n.d.). Both of the current principal NYFW venues therefore boast facilities already oriented not just towards fashion event production but also to the mediatization of these events via the lenses of professional photographers and videographers and attendees’ handheld devices. The front-of-house environments offer additional reminders of and calls to media use: in the hallway outside the elevators at Spring Studios, a monitor showed footage of earlier fashion shows, while the check-in area boasted two backdrops where attendees could photograph each other and a multidirectional mirror for taking outfit selfies – all this before and after one entered the studios. Live streams can be shot from multiple points but tend to consist of a handful of stock shots: an angled or aerial perspective of the studio shot from a camera mounted above the action; a frontal shot of models walking towards the media pit from a camera stationed in or above the pit; a closercropped torso-to-head shot of the same model; the traditional tracking ‘toe-to-head’ shot common to film (Herzog 1990) and to television; and, depending on the set-up, an angled shot as the model turns back towards the top of the runway. I note, however, that of the six fashion shows that I attended in Fall/ Winter 2019, only two were live-streamed for the official NYFW site suggesting that not all fashion lines were considered high profile enough to warrant a live-stream and that brands were more reliant on press photographers and social media users to share content. It is expected now that any person in a fashion show venue could hold a camera and capture either film or video content: from the accredited media – the photographers in the standard media pit and those that photograph the front row celebrities – to event interns and staff to attendees in all sections, and that the production elements should account for all possible angles, modes of content capture and transmission, and social media affordances (see also Rocamora 2017). Several attendees in the back rows where I tended to be positioned held up their smartphone cameras in video mode and recorded snippets of the presentations as this was easier and less of a distraction from the ‘live’ performance than attempting to take multiple photographs. While NYFW’s ‘versatile galleries’ provide ‘ample space for pop-ups and elaborate set designs’ (Montero 2018), I observed for Fall/Winter 2019 either sparse fashion shows with no sets – directing the audience’s focus towards the clothes – or the installation of focal or sculptural set pieces, often using saturated colours, or even short performances that provided an atmospheric element in the studio but were intended to be photographed or video-recorded for brand websites or for social media. At the

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presentation for the Chinese fashion line LANYU at Industria set elements were non-existent save for a hot pink carpet the length of the runway that complemented a more spring-focused collection in Easter yellows, pinks and mauves; the carpet then functioned as a backdrop in press photographs and in the official live-stream. At the fashion show for the Vietnamese-American designer Phuong Muy, in Gallery II at Spring Studios, the focal element at the top of the runway was a prominent but deceptively simplistic sculptural installation, produced by event company Eyesight, that consisted of a sheet of white, translucent, parachute-like material installed in the middle of a circle of six portable fans that kept it aloft and continuously fluttering.8 Two floor-level spotlights positioned further towards the upstage corners and two angled lights on a plot above shone red light at the sheet making its colour and movements appear flame-like and adding a brilliant red hue to the studio as attendees entered. This feature offered fodder for social media as well as a backdrop for press photographs of front row attendees, and a photograph of the set was later featured on the brand’s website. When the show started, the light, and thus the parachute material, turned to white as the installation provided a backdrop to the model procession that emphasized saturated red hues in several of the dresses, done in pointed shoulders and voluminous skirts with mesh and silk. The models had to walk around the installation as they entered and exited the runway; two assistants knelt in inconspicuous locations to hold the material down so that it formed an arch as it billowed, but also to contain the material in case it threatened to block a model’s path or presented a tripping or fire hazard. A more elaborate set installation could be found upstairs at the fashion show for Sally Lapointe, a New York-based ready-to-wear brand that specializes in luxurious fur, faux fur, leather and silk pieces and has become popular among New York’s upper class as evidenced from the arrival of a female clientele in their own head-to-toe furs and Chanel and Hermès handbags. This futuristic installation, from event production company Dizon Inc., consisted of a set of metal beams in a scaffold-like configuration with fluorescent strips that took on a blue or purple tint (Figure 13.2). The beams are rendered invisible in the frontal press photographs taken from the media pit and distributed on media websites and on the brand’s social media accounts, but are visible in photographs or footage shot at an angle, suggesting that the production design was intended to translate across the live stream and across social media content. The set enhanced the luxurious metallic sheen and tones of the fabrics, and the beams showed up in an even sharper contrast on the multitude of screens on devices that the audience held up to document the model procession, establishing moments in which the presence of the screens instantiated a further sense of linearity, reflection and forward movement – and even a sense of networked connectivity – within the space even before images of the event were transmitted and multiplied on social media platforms for additional Figure 13.2  Event personnel prior to Sally Lapointe, Fall/Winter user interactions (Figure 13.3). 2019. Courtesy Rebecca Halliday.

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Figure 13.3  Sally Lapointe, Fall/Winter 2019. Courtesy Rebecca Halliday.

Two shows that I attended – one in 2016 and the other in 2019 – used a static mode of presentation that emphasized the bodies of the models as a tableau intended for a mediatized mode of spectatorship. Models stood in rows and faced the attendees, who mingled throughout the space and were permitted to take photographs both of the looks and of each other to document our presence. The 2016 presentation, for the womenswear line Veronica Beard, was held at the upper-crust Hoffman Hall at the Skyline Hotel in Chelsea. The models were positioned on a set of risers, lined up ten in a row, and stood motionless with a neutral stance and their hands in their pockets. While they were permitted to return the audience’s gaze, their stillness enhanced their role as dress forms and retail mannequins and imbued them with a doll-like appearance: vessels for the clothes propped before an audience of fashion personnel and consumers. I read various levels of comfort and expressions of ease, amusement, annoyance and even defiance across the models’ faces even as their stance did not waver. Evans (2013: 164–79) articulates that since the first couture presentations, multidirectional gazes, dependent on one’s industry role, class position and gender, have operated within fashion show spaces. Audience members scrutinized the models in our various capacities as consumers (or companions), journalists, bloggers and/or influencers, photographers or (in my case) researchers. The use of cameras on the part of press photographers and attendees penetrated the invisible barrier between model and audience. While most attendees maintained a distance of a few meters, a male photographer walked up to a model and placed his camera within inches of her arms and torso, obtaining close-up shots in an invasive manner that drew murmurs from the rest of the attendees assembled, suggesting that his move constituted an aberration of proper conduct or made us uncomfortable on her behalf. The model remained immobile. In this presentation, the models served

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a dual function as both the focus of the presentation (or the wearers of the clothes) and the production themselves – as objects to be photographed for public consumption. In 2019, the ‘static’ presentation for Studio One Eighty Nine took on a much livelier format. The brand, co-founded by designer Abrima Erwiah and actress Rosario Dawson, is a fashion line and ‘social enterprise’ that operates out of New York and Ghana, West Africa, producing womenswear and menswear in cottons and knits with vibrant ‘African and African-inspired’ prints (Studio One Eighty Nine 2018). Its presentation, held in Gallery II, saw a racial- and gender-diverse cast that included some older male models, children and models with visible tattoos. The models faced the audience in both standing and seated positions as some attendees captured photographs and others walked along the row recording the entire tableau. The models were allowed to alter their poses on their own or in response to verbal requests from press photographers or audience members that wanted to photograph certain parts of their looks. Although the audience still had power over the models to instruct them on how to pose, the level of interaction between model and photographer was far higher here than at Veronica Beard, and the photo-taking process appeared less invasive to the models’ personal space. The most mediatized element however was a performance from a Ghanaian dance troupe that took place approximately thirty minutes into the presentation and in which some models participated in a seemingly unscripted manner before an audience that competed to hold up their devices to document the action and the eclectic atmosphere of the presentation space. In both of the fashion weeks that I attended there was little correlation between the location or layout of the venues themselves and the aesthetics, colours or opulence of the collections. The one exception was the Veronica Beard presentation, in which the wood-finished, antiquated Hoffman Hall reflected the brand’s monied associations. Rather, NYFW’s main studio venues offer a ‘blank’ (and indeed also whitewashed) canvas to showcase collections within an internationalized NYFW urban landscape; however, such a ‘uniform’ aesthetic belies and even emphasizes an increasingly marked cultural and ethnic diversity of the collections and the designers that have chosen to showcase their brands at the event in recent seasons. New York Fashion Week has attempted to make its spaces uniform in order to showcase the collections and facilitate their transmission, but the result is a revelation of a difference and diversity in the collections themselves and their modes of presentation that exceeds stakeholders’ attempts to streamline collections under a banner of commercial fashion.9

Conclusion At NYFW, there remains a pervasive sense that fashion shows should be mediatized – and a desire on the part of attendees to capture content of themselves and others – but also that the efficacies of transmitting fashion show content need to be re-evaluated aside from increasing the capital and profiles of brands and influencers alike. Rather, there is a sense of mediatization for its own sake or because media affordances are so available. The use of set elements and installations that are sufficiently complex to impress attendees but still recordable is consistent with critics’ lamentations that fashion shows now exist with the sole aim to feature certain elements to be shared as photographs, GIFs, videos or memes: a series of what writer Alec Leach terms ‘shareable moments’ that include collection pieces, installations and snapshots of celebrities and that tend to be oriented towards stimulating consumer purchases (2017; see also Gordon 2017). Indeed, the press has speculated that NYFW will move in future seasons into ‘The Shed’, the brand-new US$475 million multipurpose arts and cultural centre that opened on 5

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April 2019 as part of the new upscale and much-publicized Hudson Yards retail complex in Chelsea (see Lockwood 2019; Schama 2019), presenting tantalizing possibilities for the fusion of mediatized fashion presentations in proximity to a new bastion of international fashion capital and brick and mortar luxury retail. The impact of fashion weeks’ mediatization, however, of which the fashion show remains the core, resides in the accumulation and surfeit of moments rather than in individual units – or rather in a process of recording and transmission that is both individual and collective within and beyond the walls of the presentation spaces. While it remains a challenge for a researcher to trace and quantify the total number of media impressions that each fashion show generates, I have sought here to demonstrate the social practices that transmit the field of fashion into virtual environments and the infrastructure through which New York Fashion Week facilitates mediatization in a process of calculated and tacit collaboration with attendees.

FEATURED SHOWS Nonie: Fall/Winter 2019 (video available via Fashion TV)

Sally Lapointe: Fall/Winter 2019 (video available via NYFW)

Notes 1 Clark (2001) discusses this concept with particular attention to the role of the printed invitation as an initial communication tool between fashion lines and their in-person audiences. 2 The 2015 exhibition Global Fashion Capitals at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York named twenty-three additional fashion capitals – listed in order of when their fashion weeks were founded: Madrid, Tokyo, Melbourne, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Beijing, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Moscow, New Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Rome, Copenhagen, Kiev, Stockholm, Mumbai, Berlin, Barcelona, Istanbul, St. Petersburg and Lagos. The exhibition named New York as North America’s only fashion capital despite the increased and competing profile of fashion weeks in Los Angeles and Miami. 3 The late Karl Lagerfeld’s elaborate Grand Palais installations for Chanel, which have become an ephemeral ‘fixture’ of Paris Fashion Week, offer one example.

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4 In addition to the mediatization of the fashion show, Rocamora (2017) describes the mediatization of fashion retail and of the ‘(fashionable) self’ through consumers’ own screen-based performances. 5 The production of ‘see now buy now’ fashion shows and addition of pre-collections can also be considered new occurrences resulting from mediatization. 6 For reasons of scope, this chapter focuses on the interiors of fashion show environments, but street style photographers remain a reliable presence outside the venues despite practitioners’ sense that the heyday of street style photography outside fashion shows had waned in the middle part of this decade (Luvaas 2016). I observed in 2019 less competition on the part of photographers but more effort on the part of attendees to preen for photographers, often standing still in conspicuous locations outside the main entrances to earn photographers’ notice. Some attendees arrived with a personal photographer in tow to capture them walking back and forth in front of the venue or to film commentaries. These actions indicated more effort on the part of attendees to earn social capital through their mediatized presence at events. 7 The event was billed as a war relief fundraiser for France and did include some French looks but still featured ‘American sportswear’, a decision that ‘caused a fashion diplomatic incident’ in which couturiers threatened to blacklist Vogue editors until Condé Nast proposed a French-oriented Fashion Fête, held the following year (Evans 2013: 91). 8 Information on event production and set design credits was obtained through printed programmes and brand social media posts or website content. 9 It would be further useful to discuss the relations between space and collection at New York Fashion Week within the context of other international fashion week series and their venues, presenters and urban landscapes; however, a thorough comparison remains outside of the scope of this chapter.

References Auslander, P. (2008a), ‘Live and Technologically Mediated Performance’, in T. C. Davis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, 107–19, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Auslander, P. (2008b), Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd edn, London and New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clark, J. (2001), ‘A Note: Getting the Invitation’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 5 (3): 343–54. Entwistle, J. (2006), ‘The Cultural Economy of Fashion Buying’, Current Sociology, 54 (5): 704–24. Entwistle, J. (2009), The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion, Oxford: Berg Publishers. Entwistle, J. and A. Rocamora (2006), ‘The Field of Fashion Materialized: A Study of London Fashion Week’, Sociology, 40 (4): 735–51. Entwistle, J. and A. Rocamora (2011), ‘Between Art and Commerce: London Fashion Week as Trade Fair and Fashion Spectacle’, in B. Moeran and J. S. Pedersen (eds), Negotiating Values in the Creative Industries, 249–69, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Evans, C. (2001), ‘The Enchanted Spectacle’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 5 (3): 271–310. Evans, C. (2003), Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Evans, C. (2013), The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900– 1929, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Featherstone, M. (2007), Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 2nd edn, Los Angeles: SAGE. Friedman, V. (2015), ‘Fashion Week, Reinvented’, New York Times, September 9. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​ imes.​​com​/2​​015​/0​​9​/10/​​fashi​​on​/fa​​shion​​-week​​-spri​​ng​-20​​16​-re​​​inven​​ted​.h​​tml?_​​r=0 (accessed May 31, 2019).

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Fulsang, D. (2004). ‘The Fashion of Writing, 1985–2000: Fashion-Themed Television’s Impact on the Canadian Fashion Press’, in A. Palmer (ed.), Fashion: A Canadian Perspective, 315–38, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gordon, C. (2017), ‘Here’s Why Every Fashion Brand Needs an ‘It’ Statement Piece (and Memes)’, Highsnobiety, June 26. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.high​​snobi​​ety​.c​​om​/20​​17​/06​​/26​/f​​ashio​​n​-mem​​​es​-ve​​temen​​ts/ (accessed May 31, 2019). Hepp, A. (2013), Cultures of Mediatization, trans. K. Tribe, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Herzog, C. (1990), ‘“Powder Puff” Promotion: The Fashion Show-in-the-Film’, in C. Herzog and J. Gaines (eds), Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, 134–59, London: Routledge. Industria (n.d.), ‘About’, Industria. Available online: http://www​.industrianyc​.com​/about/ (accessed May 31, 2019). Jansson, A. (2015), ‘Using Bourdieu in Critical Mediatization Research’, MedieKultur, 58: 13–29. Jennings, R. (2019), ‘The Decline of Fashion Week, Explained’, Vox, February 8. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.vox​​ .com/​​the​-g​​oods/​​2019/​​2​/4​/1​​82069​​07​/ne​​w​-yor​​k​-fas​​hio​n-​​week-​​2019-​​death​ (accessed May 31, 2019). Kondo, D. K. (1997), About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater, New York: Routledge. Leach, A. (2017), ‘VLONE Proved that Fashion Shows Are Pointless (But We Still Need Them)’, Highsnobiety, July 5. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.high​​snobi​​ety​.c​​om​/20​​17​/07​​/05​/v​​lone-​​fashi​​o​n​-sh​​ow​-pa​​ris/ (accessed May 31, 2019). Lockwood, L. (2019), ‘Will New York Fashion Shows Ultimately Land at The Shed?’ WWD, January 9. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​d​.com​​/fash​​ion​-n​​ews​/f​​ashio​​n​-sco​​ops​/w​​ill​-n​​ew​-yo​​rk​-fa​​shion​​-show​​s​-ult​​imate​​ly​-la​​nd​​-at​​-the-​​ shed-​​12029​​52247​/ (accessed May 31, 2019). Luvaas, B. (2016), Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Milbank, C. R. (1989), New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style, New York: Harry N. Abrams. Montero, R. (2018), ‘New York Fashion Week Returns to Tribeca’s Spring Studios for Second Season’, Forbes, August 31. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.for​​bes​.c​​om​/si​​tes​/r​​oytel​​monte​​ro​/20​​18​/08​​/31​/n​​ew​-yo​​rk​-fa​​shion​​-week​​ -retu​​rns​-t​​o​-tri​​becas​​-spri​​ng​-st​​udios​​-fo​r-​​secon​​d​-sea​​son/#​​3ae3a​​3c944​​df (accessed May 31, 2019). Museum at FIT. (2015), Global Fashion Capitals, Available online: https​:/​/ex​​hibit​​ions.​​fitny​​c​.edu​​/glob​​al​-fa​​shion​​​-capi​​ tals/​(accessed May 31, 2019). Negus, K. (2002), ‘The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance Between Production and Consumption’, Cultural Studies, 16 (4), 501–15. Rantisi, N. M. (2004), ‘The Ascendance of New York Fashion’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28 (1): 86–106. Rocamora, A. (2017), ‘Mediatization and Digital Media in the Field of Fashion’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 21 (5): 505–22. Rosenbloom, S. (2011), ‘Way Off the Runway: Live Streaming of Fashion Week’, New York Times, September 7. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​011​/0​​9​/08/​​fashi​​on​/li​​ve​-st​​reami​​ng​-of​​-runw​​ay​-sh​​ows​-n​​ew​-​yo​​rk​-fa​​ shion​​-week​​.html​ (accessed May 31, 2019). Schama, C. (2019), ‘The Shed 101: Everything You Need to Know about New York’s Massive New Cultural Institution at Hudson Yards’, Vogue, April 5. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.vog​​ue​.co​​m​/art​​icle/​​the​-s​​hed​-h​​udson​​ -yard​​s​-​new​​-york​​-guid​e (accessed May 31, 2019). Spring. (2019a), ‘About’, Spring. Available online: https://www​.springstudios​.com​/about/ (accessed May 31, 2019). Spring. (2019b), ‘New York Studios’, Spring. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.spr​​ingst​​udios​​.com/​​event​​s​/new​​-yo​rk​​ -even​​t/ (accessed May 31, 2019). Studio One Eighty Nine. (2018), ‘About Us’, Studio One Eighty Nine. Available online: https​:/​/st​​udioo​​neeig​​htyni​​ne​ .co​​m​/pag​​es​​/ab​​out​-u​s (accessed May 31, 2019). Uhlirova, M. (2013), ‘100 Years of the Fashion Film: Frameworks and Histories’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 17 (2): 137–58. van Elven, M. (2019), ‘What to Expect from New York Fashion Week’, FashionUnited, 5 February. Available online: https​:/​/fa​​shion​​unite​​d​.uk/​​news/​​fashi​​on​/wh​​at​-to​​-expe​​ct​-fr​​om​-ne​​w​-yor​​k​-fas​​hion-​​​week/​​20190​​20541​​393 (accessed May 31, 2019). Warner, H. (2014), Fashion on Television: Identity and Celebrity Culture, London: Bloomsbury.

14 SPECULARIZATION OF FASHION DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES AND THE FASHION SHOW RUNWAY Mark Taylor and Juliette Peers

Introduction The American television series Desperate Housewives ran for eight seasons on American Broadcasting Company from October 2004 to May 2012. From the first episode, the series was an immediate hit, particularly as many themes appealed to female viewers, and to an extent, replaced the award-winning series Sex and the City which last aired in 2004. Remarkably, the series became iconic and influential virtually from the moment of its launch, and captured and captivated a vast audience from suburbia to academia. The sheer numerical size of its following makes it an important repository of early twenty-firstcentury beliefs and attitudes. In 2006, it was calculated that the series enjoyed a ‘viewership of more than 21 million’ (Merskin 2007: 133). Concepts, images and phrases from the show have become memes and fads in real life. Moreover, the term ‘desperate housewife’ entered popular culture (Desperate Housewives 2005) and turns up as an ironic catchphrase in both journalism and academic literature, without any direct association to the actual phenomenon of the Desperate Housewives ‘universe’ or its global fandom.

Pilot Popular culture, magazines, blogs and fans acclaimed the series as a rich source of commentary upon fashion, and generated much enthusiastic copy glossing and analysing clothes, accessories, interiors as well as plotlines and characters. Not surprisingly, as a phenomenon of both entertainment and social history, Desperate Housewives has attracted a considerable amount of scholarship, including standalone anthologies (Akass and McCabe 2006). However, historians and theorists of art, design and fashion appear to have paid less attention to the series than either fans or colleagues in other disciplines. Yet

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Desperate Housewives offers abundant opportunity to engage historically and empirically with both fashion and design (as a visual entity) in popular culture, especially the impact of professional modalities. This is particularly apt, since fashion is not only ubiquitous in the Desperate Housewives universe but also always styled, performed and projected, through plot devices and narrative content such that the television series can itself be considered a fashion show per se and an influential framework for ‘staging fashion’. At a more mundane and empirical level, the inclusion of a fashion show in the plotline of the ‘Suspicious Minds’ episode references a long history of creative visuality of the fashion show in film, theatre and vaudeville throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. That is, little was fabricated per se for the show (except for props like the ruined dresses seen as part of Gabi’s ultimately chaotic fashion show) and that much about the visuality of the show is in fact styled/brokered by the several relevant professionals involved from items, garments, jewellery and furniture already available at different levels of the US market. This interchange between imagined narratives of the fashion show in live and mediated entertainment and actual commercially based showings of new designer fashions can be tracked from the infancy of both the cinema and the live fashion show between 1890 and 1910. Thus, Desperate Housewives not only is a cult television series but also offers multiple modes for theorizing the fashion show. This chapter affirms the key role that ‘design’ and ‘fashion’ played in creating the distinctive and much-loved Desperate Housewives universe, and examines how, in the series, the fashion show is seen, in Baudrillard’s terms, as a simulacra (Baudrillard 1988). That is, this enormously successful television series affirms postmodern theories of representation and the disappearance, or twisting, of ‘authenticity’ in an era of late capitalist consumption. This is evidenced through the series’ ability to substitute knowing informed satire for direct mediation of ‘reality’, and that actual and imagined fashion shows are interchangeable or at least frequently overlap. That is, Desperate Housewives is, in Baudrillard’s terms, ‘a play of illusions and phantasms’ (Baudrillard 1988: 171) but what draws the audience and makes this programme successful is the wholehearted revelling in the warmth of accessorized middle-class America, from the white picket fences to the designer clothes. Through an overview of live mannequins in both couture houses and runway parades and the fashion content in film, this chapter indicates how fiction and documentary reportage often blur around the fashion show. That is, it examines how the fashion show is often a slippery and unreliable narrative, sliding into a parody of itself while yet affirming the value of clothes and fashion industry practices. This melding of representation and actual fashion shows happens to a greater degree than scholars have previously suggested. The ‘space’ and ‘place’ of the fashion show under discussion here is conceptual as much as physical, a liminal state between different modalities and content in representation and narrative, fact and fiction, homage and mockery. However, the historiography of Desperate Housewives reveals some significant lacunae because many of the publications cluster around specific disciplines and themes. Most frequently, the series is analysed from the perspectives of television studies and feminist social history. Within television studies, it is esteemed as an artefact itself and for standing at the zenith of a three-decade-long evolution of sophisticated, well regarded ‘evening soap’ (Hill 2010: 165). Another key scholarly node of interest is the series role as an intermediary between older and newer forms of television. Desperate Housewives always makes much of its supposed authenticity and veracity, despite constantly revealing itself as intensely meticulously styled visually, narratively and performativity. The plausibility, yet simultaneous artificiality, identifies it as an important intermediary step to the currently ubiquitous phenomenon of reality television that dominates contemporary television programming. However, producers found that they could replace the wealth, whiteness, evocatively styled mise en scène and gothic intrigues of the scripted and acted Desperate Housewives more cheaply with the non-professional world of the wildly

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successful global Real Housewives franchise (Beck, Hellmeuller and Aeschbacher 2012: 6, 9; Levy 2018: 370) which delivered the same high drama and high fashion. The supposedly real and ‘authentic’ was barely different to the scripted, constructed and performed, given that reality television itself is often carefully curated for maximum effect (Beck, Hellmeuller and Aeschbacher 2012: 6). Another tranche of scholarship around Desperate Housewives focuses upon generational changes in models of feminism and the social history of changing perceptions of and roles for women. A number of television programmes, particularly Ally McBeal (1997–2002), Sex and the City (1998– 2004) and Desperate Housewives (2004–2012) are credited with shaping the popular concept of the ‘post-feminist’ woman (Hill 2010: 164; Kaufer Busch 2009: 96). As these three television shows (and others) from the late 1990s, early 2000s present women who have agency, wealth, sexual confidence and (at least on paper) a degree of equality and power in relation to men, such popular shows are partly a fulfilment of second wave feminism. At the same time, the overt narrative of grooming and consumption associated with post-feminist television, such as Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, countered the democratic, military androgyny and disdain for fashion and glamour that in popular culture has been ascribed to 1970s feminism. ‘Post-feminist’ television shows deal a second blow to 1970s feminism. While the female characters of the ‘post-feminist’ TV series seemingly have achieved all that their mothers were fighting for, they remain deeply unhappy and frustrated. Such issues are characterized, for example, in the ‘Pilot’ episode of Desperate Housewives which opens with a suicide (that of Mary Alice Young), and the various characters are introduced as mourners giving their condolences. From the perspective of post-feminist television, 1970s feminism not only lacked taste but was also misguided. Within the scripts of recent television series, female characters often express their discontent with the conflicting expectations of success in work, family and love that is thrust upon them by feminism. The lack of fashion scholarship around Desperate Housewives is notable, particularly as the show is highly fashion literate. In a video interview, Catherine Adair, costume designer for Desperate Housewives, confirms the intentionality of the costume design, revealing herself as highly literate in a broad range of metanarratives that are evidenced via her choice of clothing for the characters (Adair n.d.). These metanarratives range from empirical knowledge drawn from her life as a fashion and design professional, from the workings of fabric and cut, to the reputations and oeuvre of major designers. Adair, like the whole of the franchise, is also wise in modern myths and urban legends, including currently accepted meanings of garment typologies, the symbolism of colours or gestures and self-presentation. With reference to the characters of Wisteria Lane, their clothing is seamlessly matched to the location, with beige interiors accented by a soft plum coloured jackets and lounge suites matched with skirts and tops. Through this deliberately and expertly colour coordinated world, the softness of suburbia and life in oversized houses representing family and monetary success was represented to an accessible audience. Clothing and accessories were certainly not ordinary high street, but included designer attire such as Ralph Lauren cashmere sweaters, Calvin Klein shirts, Karen Millen dresses, Diane von Furstenberg camisoles, J Crew cardigans and Stuart Weitzman thongs (Campbell-Green n.d.). Jewellery was also carefully curated and with the same detail and expertise by Karo Vartanian, who worked closely with designer Adair. His styling blended avant-garde and classic pieces, vintage finds with named designers, and considered issues such as colour and monetary value when selecting items to be worn on the show (Bernstein 2006). Dressed this way, the characters continue the Hollywood and early television tradition of perfect staged lives, and are excruciatingly perfect as any fashion magazine depiction of family life might be. However, in reality, nobody outside fashion catalogues dressed like this. Their immaculate taste and timing for wearing the right outfit

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in the right setting was about as real as their impeccable homes. Thomas Walsh, another professional on the team, also thought through these houses as designed spaces (Hendrickson n.d.). It could be, as Bruzzi and Church Gibson suggested in relation to Sex and the City, that fashion is the ‘fifth character’ in the show (Bruzzi and Church Gibson 2004 115–29). This proposition is, in some ways true, although many put the recurring femme fatale Edie Britt, including Nicollette Sheridan, the actor who plays her, into that role of the next important factor after the lead players (Keck 2005). Certainly fans used Desperate Housewives in the same manner that they used Sex and the City, as a source of advanced fashion knowledge and trend spotting, thus indicating the legitimacy of linking these early twenty-firstcentury television series to fashion marketing and communication. Bernstein notes that ‘many female viewers who used to tune into Sex and the City to see the next hot jewellery or accessory item, now tune into Desperate Housewives for the same reason’ (Bernstein 2006: 46). However, fashion is not so much a character in Desperate Housewives as a member of the production team. Within the series’ extended universe, fashion serves other functions than showcasing contemporary developments and products. In one of the few academic discussions of the ‘look’ and design of the series, Rachel Velody, when discussing the hairdressing of the main characters, suggests the series is intensely and intentionally ‘designed’ and intended to be read and decoded visually (Velody 2008). Rather than being fashion journalism we should think of Desperate Housewives as resonant with a medieval altar-piece or a large-scale Victorian era painting by W. P Frith. Fashion offers important cues about plot and situation, when the overall narrational sequence can be artificial and potentially confusing. Multiple simultaneous plots are rapidly intercut – often revealing treachery and duplicity known to the viewer and the narrator but not to the characters themselves – facilitated by the concept of the Wisteria Lane neighbourhood and linked friendships that form the basic structural rationale of the plots. The series’ overall style features fast-paced changes of location which bring multiple plot complications via scripted interchanges that frequently work up to climaxes of stylized confrontations, revelations and accusations played out between often two characters in dialogue. This structure is of course drawn from daytime television soaps, where the format is used less ironically. As much as being infotainment in its own right, fashion and styling is a driver of extended metanarrative content around Desperate Housewives and triggers multiple cultural associations. These cultural associations often play out as camp, hyperreal and parodic, ensuring that irony is a consistent presence. The irony is inflated somewhat by the unheimlich spectre of the dead narrator, Mary Alice Young. Not only has being on the other side given Mary Alice a godlike omnipresence and insights unknown to the living residents of Wisteria Lane, but she also shares her secrets of the past, present and future freely with the viewers, making them more informed than the characters themselves about their current predicaments. This shared complicity distances the viewers from the characters, and reduces direct self-identification. Conversely the heroines of Sex and the City often represent ‘authenticity’ against sham (Bruzzi and Church Gibson 2004 127). They were not so much the victims of either their own greed/ambition (and therefore classical hubris) or simply the wicked humour of the scriptwriter as so often were the characters in Desperate Housewives. Moreover, the authenticity and straightness of Sex and the City as a spokesperson for fashion are affirmed by Anna König in her analysis of the series’ presence in British fashion journalism. König argues that Sex and the City ‘is more than just a manifestation of fashion fantasies. Rather it might be regarded as the explicit televisual embodiment of an alluring lifestyle . . . the audience is tantalised by a complex way of life . . . [t]he pricey clothes should therefore be seen as part of a complete New York lifestyle, one that has an exciting and romantic international appeal’ (König 2004: 140). Viewers saw the four Sex and the City heroines directly as wish-fulfilment figures, and its popularity was partly due to the enthusiastic advocacy of fashion writers and the fashion press as much as television reviews and fan media (König 2004: 142–3).

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In identifying Sex and the City’s close match to concurrent accepted norms of fashion journalism, König overviews the nature of the discipline in the 2000s. She especially identifies the overlap of public interest in celebrity culture as simultaneously driving magazine sales and increasing the column space devoted to fashion journalism, which now centres upon celebrity wearers of clothes as much as the activities of designers. Sex and the City fits neatly into popular taste for news about celebrities, and basically uncritical discourse. She briefly references, yet dismisses, a dissonant critical view of fashion writing as discussed by Angela McRobbie who sees fashion writing as ‘effusive babble’ that ‘is never critical, only mildly ironical’ and always stays within the values and templates of its host industry and never challenges them (König 2004: 132). For König, part of the defence of the directness and noncritical voicing is that both readers and the industry prefer and endorse these norms and the shift towards popular culture links already has intellectually diversified fashion writing. Yet if it is the agreed template that writing around fashion, for both journalism and more formal narratives, is accepting, positive and uncritical, then Desperate Housewives presents an opportunity to play with and diverge from this norm. Desperate Housewives often proudly performs its artificiality and displaces ‘the real’ as insufficient. In this way the series reminds one of Baudrillard’s discussion of simulacrum. Baudrillard’s (1988) perspective on signs, meaning and in particular simulacra is therefore useful in this context. He discusses a simulacrum as an artificial or constructed reflection of a space, practice or event. In light of the complexities of our environment and modes of inhabitation, a sign that offers deliberately rich representational content might communicate multiple additional, coherent meanings. And while a simulation is not perfect and contains imperfections, it must therefore, in some way, accommodate its lack of authenticity. It could, for example, attempt to hide its flaws, potentially resulting in the production of a facile or repressed sign, or it could seek to celebrate them, a possible sign of dissidence, resistance or even revolution. Desperate Housewives veers away from the sincere positivity that captured both a general and professional audience for Sex and the City. It moves towards an entity that, while an example of popular commercial television, is not dissimilar to and resonates with Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra, even if it may be claiming too much to state that this television soap opera is solid proof of a theoretical proposition per se.

Gabrielle’s fashion show Desperate Housewives belongs to a long history of filmed fashion shows, both fictional and documentary. This history is essential both to the history of the fashion show and to popular engagement with fashion. While fashion is always eye-catching and orchestrated in Desperate Housewives, the ‘Suspicious Minds’ episode is notable for including the set-piece of a fashion show within the narrative. This fashion show not only celebrates the popular perception of the series as highly fashion literate but also links into a long history of fashion shows in narrative film and theatre, including Hollywood film and the popular North American stage. Fashion shows even turn up in superhero narratives such as the early camp television series Batman, ‘Catwoman’s Dressed to Kill’ (1967, season 3, episode 14). Many films have been set in fashion houses across nearly a century from the 1920s onwards. Frequently, the fashion show scenes in moving narratives are non-diegetic, formalized stand-alone interludes where the plot is suspended to concentrate upon the clothes. These moments reify ‘fashion’ as something greater, beyond the narrative universe of the story, that exists in its own seasons and harmonies. The clipped but highly gestural narration of Desperate Housewives already is detached and enigmatic, but the fashion show though presented in laconic tableaux, equally has an existence and a resonance beyond the frame of Wisteria Lane.

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In this episode, we learn that Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria) was a former fashion model. A series of flashbacks at the start of the episode introduce a backstory that becomes increasingly elaborated as the series develops. We learn that teenage Gabi is raped by her stepfather and runs away to New York, where she uses both her looks and her lack of illusions about men to break into the modelling industry, and then uses her status as an admired model to find a rich husband. Although later episodes undermine her achievements by revealing that she may have been losing bookings and jobs on account of industry perceptions that she was unreliable and difficult, and that, although she is now bored by suburban life, her modelling career itself had been fading. Gabi is established as simultaneously glamorous and in masquerade, hiding the sordid lower class truth of her origins. This ambiguity of origins and duplicitous presentation of identity has always been at the heart of the fashion show, per se. Even with its elaborate, and in recent years highly conceptual and immersive setting, the fashion show has never been l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake), but hiding the baseline commercial impetus as an advertisement. Likewise, the fashion show model is an actress, selling an idea of a dress. Once this was an anonymous faux aristocrat, often trained and renamed by the designer, as did British couturier Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon) with her chosen models (Schweitzer 2008: 597). In recent years, the supermodel is a celebrity with a fame independent of her ‘day job’ in showing a specific dress at a specific event. In some ways, this amplifies her status as actress/artifice in her own right. Yet the ambiguity is swept aside as the Desperate Housewives fashion show is at first played straight. While exhibiting the standard tropes of fashion parades, runway, lighting, compere, designer dresses, this event proves remarkably slick for a local hospital fundraiser. Much of what the viewer sees in this charity fashion show recalls other fictitious fashion shows in film and entertainment. While the magical transformation of the fashion parade from black and white to technicolour in The Women (dir. Cukor 1939) may be the most obvious example, the Wisteria Lane fashion parade is similarly alchemical, beyond the laws of logic and physics, or at least narrative detail. In many films, the fashion parade is an interruption to the obvious narrative flow and stands alone as a tableau to the nominal expected world of the story, as it does in this case. For example in ‘Suspicious Minds’, the housewives, without any training, have mastered all the expected choreographed gestures and conventions of modelling and perform them perfectly in an ex-diegetic manner. Racks of designer dresses and other equipment have turned up in Gabrielle’s home, along with many of her neighbours from up and down the street, to staff the parade, provide grooming, marshalling and other assistance. Finally, all is set up in an entertainment venue following a very brief establishment shot sans transport and bump-in. While neither a Paris extravaganza nor a contemporary art event of the quality and intelligence of a Viktor and Rolf conception, it is the type of fashion show that one would expect to see in a department store or at a charity lunch or fundraiser, complete with large audience, runway, chandelier, flowers, lights, audio and compere. Apart from sending out invitations, the show comes together without any organizational effort or backstory, other than Gabi’s status as a former model. Her industry knowledge gives Gabi the licence to offer fashion advice to her lesser sisters and above all piously remind the participants that the show is not about oneself and looking attractive but staged for the public good. In that disavowal of frivolous intent, we can link this episode back to the couturier Lucile’s patriotic fashion show, Fleurette’s Dream at Peronne (1917), which first played as a stand-alone theatre piece and then transferred in a truncated version to touring with the B. F. Keith vaudeville circuit in North America. Nominally drawing attention to the plight of French civilians caught up in the warzone, Fleurette hides in a cellar in Peronne, but dreams of her previous lifestyle as a couture model (Schweitzer 2008). The wartime story becomes a rather flimsy excuse for the showing of lavish fashions in tableaux of upper-class life,

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a format established in tableaux of lifelike wax figures at international exhibitions such as Paris 1900, Turin 1911 and early filmic fashion advertising documentaries. The proceeds were supposedly directed towards refugee and civilian charities in France. However, the exposure and the publicity were also useful for Lucile. Like other elite fashion houses on both sides of the Atlantic, business was slow due to families going into mourning, fewer social events, restricted travel and even governmental curbs on spending, a measure that designers and retailers fought back against, with overtly patriotic gestures such as Lucile’s event. Even at this early date, the fashion show already offered multiple messages. The capacity for the fashion show to dominate and stand beyond its narrative setting is also established at this foundational moment. Part of the moral fantasy is that the dreamed scenes in haute couture offer a succour to the wartime reality, as did the whole playlet in being nominally a charity fundraiser for refugees. Lucile’s First World War fashion extravaganza was possibly the source for the ongoing interweaving of haute couture shows and entertainment in twentieth-century American popular culture. The British House of Lucile is now believed to be the first couture house to set up a stage with appropriate décor and theatrical lighting within their showrooms to present shows. In particular, Lucile claimed that she was the first person to train young women in movement and deportment so as to be ‘the incarnation of enchanting womanhood’ and ‘do justice’ to the clothes that they modelled (Schweitzer 2008: 597). Even before Fleurette, Lucile had presented her fashions on the public stage. She had previously provided designs for the Ziegfeld Follies and loaned out her mannequins to Florenz Ziegfeld for performances (Mendez and de la Haye 2009: 193, Schweitzer 2008: 596, 598). Thus, the statuesque aristocratic hauteur of the fashion model up to the 1960s, and the equally dignified mien of the non-dancing Follies showgirl, walking at a steady pace and displaying remarkable costumes had a conjoined origin. Yet, as the ‘Suspicious Minds’ episode unfolds, the fashion parade falls into disorder. At around thirty-two minutes into the programme, Edie Brett (Nicollette Sheridan), real estate agent and resident femme fatale of Wisteria Lane, enters the runway having modified her assigned conservative dress to make it in her words ‘more audience friendly’. Edie’s alterations also signal to the audience that she is, again in her own words, ‘not wearing underwear’, placing her own body as more important than the fashion she is modelling. When the compere reading out the set script announces the next garment to be a ‘dignified classic’ suitable for family events such as christenings or mother of the bride, the tight slip dress that appears on the runway is anything but dignified. However, the altered dress is yet again magical and unreal, as the substantial alterations were not hastily contrived backstage and would have taken considerable skill to fabricate, given that in production of the episode there would have been two separate garments to effect the transformation that appears on screen. Edie’s actions have broken her responsibility to the designer and the garment, an expected transgression given her ongoing reputation. An even greater transgression occurs when Helen Rowland (Kathryn Harrold), who wrongly believes that Susan Meyer (Teri Hatcher) is having an affair with her underage son, destroys Susan’s embroidered silk evening dress in a fistfight seconds before she is due on the runway. Susan becomes a figure of fun as she stumbles ungracefully down the runway on one shoe, in a tattered dress, abjectly (if rather unnecessarily) clutching her crotch (see link to video at the end of this chapter). That self-conscious and embarrassed gesture marks her as the antithesis of the expected confident supermodel ideal that is a recognizable hallmark of the fashion show template. Moreover, the fashion show’s raison d’etre is to promote and sell the dress, not to despoil it. Following the fight in the dressing room, Susan Meyer, parading with torn dress and unkempt hair, is certainly not the ‘the incarnation of enchanting womanhood’ nor can she ‘do justice’ in the words of designer Lucile to the clothes for which she ought to be the interlocutor (Schweitzer 2008: 597).

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This mayhem is by no means alien to the history of fashion show moments in film. As a familiar trope, the filmed fashion parade has achieved the status of being worthy of parody and remains recognizable even when subverted. In Brüno (dir. Charles 2009), a famous scene has the eponymous hero launch the narrative of the film by walking onto the runway of the Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada fashion show at Milan Fashion Week (2008) wearing his innovative ‘Velcro suit’. This extremely fashion forward garment destroys a media stand, collides with racks of dresses in a chaotic frenzy and culminates in Brüno (Sacha Baron Cohen) walking many dresses and some considerable yardage of black velvet curtaining along the runway (Figure 14.1). Brüno’s mishap is much like that in Went with the Wind! (Carol Burnett Show 1976, season 10 episode 8), a parody of Gone with the Wind (dir. Fleming 1939) by American comedian Carol Burnett. In her portrayal of protagonist Scarlett O’Hara, Burnett as Miss Starlet descends the staircase in a dress made from the green curtains, but forgets to remove the curtain rod, a moment that caused more audience laughter than any other comedic occasion (Figure 14.2). Yet even Brüno can be read as a film that celebrates fashion, ‘Brüno is really a fashionista after our own hearts as he discusses which Sex and the City girl he is with a group of butch looking men and wears a D&G uniform during his time in the armed forces’ (New Fashion Film Hits Our Screens 2009). An early and major cinematic fashion narrative that equally displayed disorder also featured in Irene (dir. Alfred E Green, 1926), a film based upon a popular Broadway musical comedy from 1919 centred on the

Figure 14.1  British actor Sacha Baron Cohen (L) gets on the catwalk as an official (R) tries to stop him during the fashion show of Spanish fashion designer Agatha Ruiz De La Prada as part of the women’s spring/summer 2009 ready-to-wear collections of the fashion week in Milan on 26 September 2008. Photo by Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy of Getty Images.

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fortunes of a couture house. The story of Irene was ‘a multi-million dollar global phenomenon’ (Cantu 2015: 11) in the 1919–40 period, and went from the stage to both silent and sound filmed versions, and enjoyed popular success outside the United States. First, protagonist Irene (Colleen Moore) stands upon a motorized dais as it gently revolves, striking poses while the effeminate Madame Lucy (George K. Arthur) creates beautiful evening fashions by draping fabrics in the manner of Madeleine Vionnet. The scene descends into farce when Irene first does not conform to the static ice goddess image demanded by male designer Madame Lucy. Then the turntable goes into overdrive with Irene dazed and dizzy, standing in her underwear as the drapery falls off. In a second and later scene Irene reduces an in-house fashion parade to chaos when a mouse appears in the showroom. These scenes could be read as natural American resourcefulness and invention defeating European effeteness and class-bound society, which was a symbolic theme that threaded through Irene and other musicals, plays and films that drew on its narrative precedent (Cantu 2015: 15–16). Figure 14.2  In a scene from The Carol Burnett That is, but for the final extended fashion interlude, Show, American comedienne and actress Carol which features Irene as a star, and is played entirely Burnett descends a staircase wearing a dress made straight and conforms to images and templates from a window curtain (complete with the curtain rod) seen in contemporary French fashion documentary during a parody of Gone with the Wind, 20 August films. Rather than lampooning fashion and its rituals, 1976. Photo by CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images. the elaborate parade in Irene affirms high fashion’s Courtesy of Getty Images. entrancing and diverting role and prefigures Irene’s happy marriage into the elite. Thus Irene is linked to Desperate Housewives, either consciously or happenstantially. Desperate Housewives starts where Irene finished, with the modelling and the couture industry allowing an outsider to marry upwards. By the 2000s, the ambitious underclass girl is not Irish American but Hispanic American. As with Gabi’s fashion show, both Brüno and Irene offer simultaneously a deconstruction yet an affirmation of fashion’s rituals.

Twinned origins, film and fashion shows as popular sensations Towards the end of Irene, the formal parade sequence was filmed in an early colour process, now degraded, but the spectacular art deco design, which references Paul Poiret’s exoticism and Jeanne Lanvin’s glamorous eighteenth-century style robes de style, as well as jazzy sporty day clothes and

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expensive furs, remains visible. Less remembered by mainstream film historians, the leap to colour prefigures the fashion parade in The Women, and was repeated in the 1940 sound version of Irene (dir. Wilcox) when Irene wearing her ‘Alice blue gown’ suddenly appears in colour and manages to pass herself off as an aristocrat. In this version, the couture house and fashion modelling scenes remained in black and white, including the comic business of Irene disrupting and confounding the contrived expectations of Madame Lucy. While hardly remembered by historians of cinema and fashion, Irene is an important foundational point in establishing the fashion show as a favourite set-piece in both film and the public imaginary. The musical comedy and silent film popularized the concept of the couture house to a working and middle-class audience who themselves could not buy from such exclusive firms. When the silent film version arrived at their local Australian cinema, residents of the rural town of Gosford, New South Wales, were advised to ‘see the, wonderful fashions [sic] parade, which is done most lavishly in natural colours. Sixty beautiful girls appear as fashion mannequins in “Irene”. This big screen version of the famous musical comedy is easily the biggest triumph of Colleen Moore’s remarkable career’ (Irene 1927). Such audiences had also viewed documentaries of Parisian couture seasonal releases for nearly three decades, particularly through the Pathé newsreels, which featured Parisian parades. Film was a fashion show from the date of its origins as a medium. The two phenomena, cinema and the public display of fashion beyond the relatively private activity of presenting live models to a potential client, are mutually interdependent. Both are essentially popular art forms, which emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Film and the fashion show are also imbricated in complex and powerful commercial systems. If a film or a fashion show delights its audience, immediately the income streams of those who produce or promote the entity will benefit. They are elaborate fantasies yet also highly functional as they are channels for stimulating sales, both of the original entity and a web of associated products and experiences. Here again we may consider the role of the simulacrum in relation to promoting the interests of capitalism. However, the relationship is more direct than the identical commercial function. Colour, texture and detail of clothes, both of ethnography and of haute couture became a staple of very early cinema. Fashionable dress did not enjoy the cultural and curatorial primacy that it does today. In this early cinematic context, folk dress and ethnographic cultures were equally effective as high fashion for the early cinema, offering colour and decoration to capture entertaining visual content (Hanssen 2009: 111). Early film companies sent camera operators and film crew out across the world to find intriguing subjects, while making a claim for the political and educative importance of film (Cavendish 2018: 109). Dress was a tangible medium for communicating regional variations and cultural difference. Concurrently, many early films such as the 1896 Melbourne Cup (Sestier and Barnett 1896) with its extended sequences of the enclosure and female and male fashions, or a number of films of Paris and other cities from c. 1900, show wealthy elites. Yet it was not only the fascination of form and design that made clothes an ideal subject for the film camera but also the sight of clothes being worn in motion demonstrated a key innovative effect of film as an art form. Concurrently the capturing of movement by film opened out a new method of selling clothes. By c. 1900, these relatively random scenes of people in motion had morphed into a fictitious genre of fashion advertising films. They were short and often set in a couture house, but took the voyeuristic fascination of watching the wealthy, seen in early films, shift into an advertorial narrative. An early clip of c1900, dated by the clothes worn by the actresses, shows a designer seating a client in her studio and parading models wearing her latest productions (Women’s Fashions n.d.). Other clips show women consciously parading and posing, both inside and outside, presenting themselves as formally dressed upper-class ladies but also showing different views of the

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dress and its accessories, miming a narrative in which wealthy friends admire and examine each other’s outfits, which allowed for close focus and extended camera shots. The genre was fully codified by c. 1910, with the French production company Pathé emerging as the leading exponent and consistently coordinating their releases to the cycle of new collections (Hanssen 2009: 113). Films intended to sell couture garments, even within the first decade and a half of film technologies, are choreographed to include consciously constructed gestures designed to show off the dresses. They are depicted through women walking towards and away from the camera, women turning to show the dress from several angles, opening their coats and drawing attention to the accessories that complemented the dress. All of these actions, including the march to and from the camera (given that there is always a contingent of still and moving image camera operators at the end of the runway), are in the repertoire of a contemporary fashion show. The conventions of the fashion documentary or fashion newsreel film were established within the earliest era of cinematic production and stayed fundamentally the same until at least the 1930s (Hanssen 2009: 107). Much of this fairly static choreography and camera work persisted into the video fashion news services that were a key means of globally distributing official images of European fashion into the 1990s, until digital technologies rendered them obsolete. Film and the fashion show are so closely twinned that by the early 1900s the fashion show was more securely established in film than in real life. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, live fashion shows were occasionally viewed negatively by police and public authorities. There were fears of traffic disruptions on the streets and overcrowding within buildings, with thousands of spectators turning up for events even in relatively small towns. Therefore, police in New York sought to ban live fashion shows in department stores (Schweitzer 2008: 592). On the continent, Paris police shut down an attempt to present fashion on live women posing in shop windows in 1907; hence, mannequins could remain on duty only within the closed premises of the couture houses. The news of this police action spread as far as Perth on the west coast of Australia, a long way from Paris, figuratively and literally (Living Models 1907). Simultaneously an increasing corpus of live fashion shows were presented with official endorsement and without being interrupted by the police. One early high-profile public fashion parade was in London at the Franco-British exhibition of 1908 where ‘[t]wo hundred “charming girls” have been engaged as “mannequins”, or living dress models. All day long they will parade and show off the lovely creations of rival competing firms’ (Beauty Exhibits 1908). In 1905, the Australian Natives Association used ‘living models’ wearing Australian-made fashions as a promotion for Australian industries in Sydney (Exhibition of Manufacturers 1905). In Berlin, the Gerson department store used live models and supplied actresses with dresses in order to attract and sell to their fashionable clientele. Following the trend to display via theatrical plays, Gerson also moved into formal fashion shows for both individual female clients and selected audiences of consumers several times a week by 1910 (Ganeva 2009: 129). Between 1911 and 1913, the live fashion show became a fad in the United States. The issues of large audiences and congestion within and outside commercial premises led stores to hire halls and theatres for their events, and spurred owners of such buildings to organize their own fashion parades to cash in on the fad. Thus, fashions were routinely shown on the variety and vaudeville circuit during the First World War era (Schweitzer 2008: 591–4). Valerie Mendes and Amy de la Haye note that Lucile’s self-managed fashion shows in a theatre in New York c. 1913–14 regularly attracted 2,000–3,000 visitors several times a week (Mendez and de la Haye 2009: 193). Such numbers indicate that the fashion show was already a spectacular piece of public entertainment at this early date, prefiguring the large audiences that the performance of fashion in Desperate Housewives would attract nearly a century later.

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On the programme of the massive 1908 couture show at the Franco-British exhibition there were scenes set at court functions, the races and the hunt, replicating the fictional narratives of aristocratic life seen in the advertising films. Equally this concept of showing fashion as a fabricated representation of aristocratic life, upon which the viewer could spy, was drawn from a highly successful but static display at the couture pavilion at the Paris 1900 exhibition, and repeated on other occasions such as the Turin 1911 exhibition. The sense of observation of the reality of upper-class life was further emphasized in the 1900 exhibition as one of the tableaux represented designer Jeanne Paquin (Dymond 2011: 5, Steele 1991: 27), who was one of the chief organizers of the display itself, in her workroom, giving public access to the interior workings of a design house. In these static displays, the role of the faux aristocrat was not taken up by specially trained women but by wax figures, a reminder that the earliest French designer to label her garments, and set a consistent corporate brand in her packaging, was not Worth but the elite Parisian doll maker Calixte Adelaide Huret. She did so close to a decade before Worth introduced his name on labels within garments from his house (Peers 2015). With their elaborate wax mannequins with hair and glass eyes, these fashion displays not only were easily ported into film but also link backwards into the Wunderkammer tradition or pre-enlightenment science as documented by Barbara Stafford (1996: 47–53). These displays were both lifelike and highly orchestrated and knowing like Desperate Housewives, presenting a super-real vision of life, using the artificial, and often playfully over-elaborated to ‘sell’ or explicate complex ideas. Indeed the fashion show itself could be seen as a late capitalist revival of pre-enlightenment modes of emotionally inviting and immersive information delivery.

Conclusion This history of making the display of fashion a spectacular alluring fiction is also at times a feminist history, one that ranges from Jeanne Paquin to Lucile. Both of these women were innovators and shaped practices long before the better acclaimed Chanel. With this in mind we can therefore return back to Desperate Housewives, where designer Catherine Adair publicly stated her commitment to and pride in educating the viewers via her onscreen design choice, to select and wear clothes that enable viewers to present themselves with more complex and elegant personae in public, and, in particular, transform the negative stereotypes of older women in popular culture (Adair n.d.). The type of exaggerated prosperous and groomed suburban femininity which spoke of male fantasies and the suppression of women in The Stepford Wives (dir. Forbes 1975) now becomes a sign of female power and agency in Desperate Housewives. The groomed attire of each of the Wisteria Lane ladies is to some extent an extension of each character’s personality, and compatibly visualized with their costumes (Adair n. d.). Equally the set design of the interior of the homes of each ‘housewife’ correlates to her characterization and established backstory (Hendrickson n. d.). Fashion is brought into focus not only through the consistent parade of somewhat stereotypical representations of characters and their attire but also through the staged fashion show that in itself is a representation of an idea. The ‘Suspicious Minds’ fashion show creates a tension between the runway show and the fashionconscious narrative that threads the series. It is a tension that is not grounded in any ‘reality’ except its own. That is, it absorbs the real within itself, such that the only escape is to present the Real Housewives as if they somehow transcend the soap opera. In Baudrillard’s terms we could say that in Desperate Housewives the ‘real’ world of fashion is somehow bypassed for an ‘unreal’ avalanche of fashion images, that is hyperreal and self-referential. For many of the reasons outlined earlier, Gabi’s fashion show is a copy of the original and at the same time displaces that original, becoming real in its own right.

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We could say that if the runway is the locus of the specularization of a woman, with emphasis on the glamour of the setting, clothing and accessories, then Gabi’s hyperreal fashion show is a simulacrum that has some basis in the history of cinema, theatre and fashion houses, and the scripted parodies that reinforce artificiality. As viewers shift from the Desperate through the Real there is no longer any distinction between reality and representation; there is only the simulacrum. That is, the ‘representation precedes and determines the real’, and indicates a loss of distinction between reality and the simulacrum. If we now understand the Desperate Housewives fashion show as a simulation and not an imitation or parody, then as a simulation it replicates and produces signs of the real, which in this case includes the intention or parody of itself. Hence, the fashion show (the runway) within a fashion show (the series) and the destruction of clothing becomes the real. The simulation ‘produced’ symptoms and the ‘authentic’ – that is, since the fashion show includes the destruction of clothing, it must be ‘true’, particularly as it accords with the narrative. What we might call the authenticity of the narrative. In Baudrillard’s terms, if something (fashion show) can be simulated or ‘reduced to the signs which attest to its existence’, then as a simulation, ‘it is not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in a uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference’ (Baudrillard 1988: 170). This link to Baudrillard’s third order of simulacra through media culture is the ability of these media to interpret, promote and sell our selves through images that operate in the space outside the realities of our lives, and our lived environment.

FEATURED SHOWS Desperate Housewives, ‘Suspicious Minds’ (2004, season 1, episode 9) (video available via dailymotion)

Batman, ‘Catwoman’s Dressed to Kill’ (1967, season 3, episode 14) (video available via YouTube)

Carol Burnett Show, ‘Went with the Wind’ (1976, season 10, episode 8) (video available via YouTube: Associated Press)

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References Adair, K. (n. d.), Desperate Housewives S2 Fashion and Costumes. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​ atch?​​v​=t1S​​tTQvT​​​aCs​&t​​=36s (accessed May 2019). Akass, K. and J. McCabe (eds) (2006), Reading Desperate Housewives: Beyond the Picket Fence, London: I.B. Tauris. Baudrillard, J. (1988), ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in M. Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 166–84, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ‘Beauty Exhibits’ (1908), Daily Telegraph (Sydney), February 12: 7. Beck, D., L. C. Hellmueller and N. Aeschbacher (2012), ‘Factual Entertainment and Reality TV’, Communication Research Trends, 31 (2): 4–27. Bernstein, B. (2006), ‘Desperate Housewives’, Lustre, January/February 10 (1): 46–7. Bruzzi, S. and P. Church Gibson (2004), ‘Fashion Is the Fifth Character: Fashion, Costume and Character in Sex and the City’, in K. Akass and J. McCabe (eds), Reading Sex and the City, 115–29, London: I.B. Tauris. Campbell-Green, H. (n. d.), ‘Celebrity Style Guide’. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.cele​​brity​​style​​guide​​.com/​​c​-1​/t​​v​%20 s​​how​s/​​Despe​​rate House​wives​/fash​ion-a​nd-st​yle-o​f-Des​perat​e Housewives (accessed May 2019). Cantu, M. (2015), American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from Irene to Gypsy, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cavendish, P. (2018), 'The Delhi Durbar Comes to Moscow: Charles Urban and Kinemacolour in Russia 1910– 1916', Film History: An International Journal, 30 (3): 103–45. ‘Desperate Housewives’ (2005), Ms. Magazine, Spring issue. Dymond, A. (2011), ‘Embodying the Nation: Art, Fashion, and Allegorical Women at the 1900 Exposition Universelle’, RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review, 36 (2): 1–14. ‘Exhibition of Manufacturers’ (1905), Goulburn Herald, November 10: 4. Ganeva, M. (2009), ‘Elegance and Spectacle in Berlin: The Gersen Fashion Store and the Rise of the Modern Fashion Show’, in John Potvin (ed.), The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007, 121–38, London and New York: Routledge. Hanssen, E. F. (2009), ‘Symptoms of Desire: Colour, Costume, and Commodities in Fashion Newsreels of the 1910s and 1920s’, Film History, 21: 107–21. Hendrickson, P. (n. d.), ‘Desperate Housewives Decorating’, Homefurnishings​.com​. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​ w​.hom​​efurn​​ishin​​gs​.co​​m​/cat​​egory​​/disc​​over/​​celeb​​rity-​​desig​​n​/hom​​es​/ar​​ticle​​/desp​​erate​​-h​ous​​ewive​​s​-dec​​orati​​ng (accessed May 2019). Hill, L. (2010), ‘Gender and Genre: Situating Desperate Housewives’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 38 (4): 162–9. ‘Irene’ (1927), Gosford Times and Wyong District Advocate, May 19: 11. Kaufer Busch, E. (2009), ‘Ally McBeal to Desperate Housewives: A Brief History of the Postfeminist Heroine’, Perspectives on Political Science, 38 (2): 87–98. Keck, W. (2005), ‘Housewives’ in Suspense’, USA Today, May 5. Available online: https​:/​/us​​atoda​​y30​.u​​satod​​ay​.co​​ m​/lif​​e​/tel​​evisi​​on​/ne​​ws​/20​​05​-05​​-05​-h​​ous​ew​​ives-​​cover​​_x​.ht​m (accessed July 2019). König, A. (2004), ‘Sex and the City: A Fashion Editors Dream?’ in J. McCabe and K. Akass (eds), Reading Sex and the City, 130–43, London: I.B. Tauris. Levy, Y. (2018), ‘Serial Housewives: The Feminist Resistance of the “Real Housewives” Matrixial Structure’, Continuum, Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 32 (3): 370–80. ‘Living Models, Girls in Shop Windows’ (1907), Daily News (Perth), December 7: 10. Mendes, V. and de la Haye, A. (2009), Lucile Ltd: London, Paris, New York and Chicago: 1890s–1930s, London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Merskin, D. (2007), ‘Three Faces of Eva: Perpetuation of the Hot-Latina Stereotype in Desperate Housewives’, The Howard Journal of Communications, 18 (2): 133–51. ‘New Fashion Film Hits Our Screens’ (2009), Female First, November 6. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.fem​​alefi​​rst​.c​​o​ .uk/​​lifes​​tyle-​​fashi​​on​/st​​ylene​​ws​/B​r​​uno​-8​​042​.h​​tml (accessed May 2019).

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Peers, J. (2015), ‘Adelaide Huret and the Nineteenth-Century French Fashion Doll: Constructing Dolls/Constructing the Modern’, in M. Forman-Brunell and J. Dawn Whitney (eds), Dolls Studies: The Many Meanings of Girls Toys and Play, 157–84, New York: Peter Lang. Schweitzer, M. (2008), ‘Patriotic Acts of Consumption: Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon) and the Vaudeville Fashion Show Craze’, Theatre Journal, 60 (4): 585–608. Sestier, M. and H. W. Barnett (1896), Melbourne Cup (film). Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.nfs​​a​.gov​​.au​/l​​atest​​/spot​​ted​ -1​​896​-m​​elbou​​rne​​-c​​up​-ca​​rniva​l (accessed July 2019). Stafford, B. (1996), Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Steele, V. (1991), Women of Fashion: Twentieth Century Designers, New York: Rizzoli. Velody, R. (2008), ‘Hair-“Dressing” in Desperate Housewives: Narration, Characterization and The Pleasures of Reading Hair’, in G. Biddle-Perry and S. Cheang (eds), Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion, 215–28, Oxford and New York: Berg. ‘Women’s Fashions in the 1900’s: Film 38996’ (n.d.), Huntley Film Archive, YouTube. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​ .you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=jD0​​​xDA8A​​ZXw (accessed May 2019).

15 FASHION ON PARADE DESIGNING GLAMOUR AND ORDINARINESS AT THE BRITISH BEAUTY CONTEST Alice Beard

Introduction Beauty contests in Britain can be traced from local competitions of the 1930s through to the global phenomenon of Miss World. The success of the beauty pageant was intrinsically linked to the popularity of the British seaside holiday, for example, staged at the Super Swimming Stadium in the fashionable resort of Morecambe, home of the Miss Great Britain competition. In the post-war period the format grew from strength to strength, with Butlin’s holiday camps across the country running weekly heats for all the family, and Miss World earning prime time television space. The 1960s saw growth in the popularity of the contest as Butlin’s holiday camps developed fashion show formats with promotions such as the National Magazine Company’s Miss She contest, billed as a ‘competition in day wear’ which judged the fashionability of holidaymakers, and the Glamourous Grandmother competition which provided an opportunity for older women to parade their style. The contest also grew in commercial scope with numerous fashion and brand promotions offering sponsorship and young women using the format to develop their modelling and professional careers. However, the 1970s marked a period of decline for the image of the beauty contest, suggesting that its format and content were out of step with contemporary audiences. Feminist protestors who flour-bombed the live broadcast of Miss World at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970 created a choreographed counter-spectacle which served to challenge the narrow vision of femininity on the stage. This chapter will explore the staging of glamour by analysing the beauty contest’s parade of fashion and femininity in three different formats and contexts: Miss Great Britain at the Super Swimming Stadium,

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Miss She and Glamorous Grandmother at the Butlin’s Holiday Camp, and Miss World at the Royal Albert Hall. As John Potvin argues, the location of fashion performances are ‘sites [which] can be marked out as places and spaces which define and are transformed through, by, and because of the subjects and objects of fashion’ (Potvin 2009: 9). Drawing on archive material, press and publicity and oral history interviews with contestants and protestors, this chapter will examine how transformation and spectacle are key to the success of the format of the beauty contest. Key examples will reveal the craft and work of ‘the look’, and the production of the event, from the design and ‘dressing’ of the pageant stage, to the skill and craft of the contestants who each create their ideal look though costume and make-up.

‘Beauty surrounds, health abounds’: Miss Great Britain at the Super Swimming Stadium The popularity of the beauty pageant was inherently related to the success and eventual demise of the British seaside resort. The setting for Britain’s oldest beauty pageant signalled the Miss Great Britain contest as modern and fashionable. The reputation of Morecambe as a modish holiday destination for young, sophisticated holidaymakers had been established in the interwar period through the opening of Oliver Hill’s opulently designed art deco Midland Hotel in 1933, a dazzling modernist building with sweeping curved frontage following the line of the promenade. The Architectural Review observed that ‘It rises from the sea like a great white ship, gracefully curved, like a Venus Anadyomene in white cement’ (Massey 2000: 106). The hotel’s interior was decorated with sculptures and murals by Eric Gill and Eric Ravilious, and textiles designed by Duncan Grant and Marion Dorn. Morecambe was promoted as the ‘Naples of the North’ and described in publicity material as ‘Britain’s most modern and progressive resort’ (Records of Miss Great Britain). The town’s appeal to holidaymakers was further enhanced by the construction of the Super Swimming Stadium in 1936, celebrated as the grandest and most expensive modernist lido in the country. Designed by architects Cross and Sutton to provide a counterpart to the Streamline Moderne of the Midland Hotel, the swimming pool measured 121 metres by 34 metres and was built on reclaimed land next to the harbour overlooking the sea. The design was said to be the largest outdoor pool in Europe, utilizing steel and concrete to create vast connecting indoor and outdoor spaces with room for 1,200 bathers and some 3,000 spectators in its three-deck promenade, colonnades and grandstands. In addition to the championship-length swimming course, the lido offered a water polo area, a paddling pool, fountains, diving platforms, an artificial beach for sunbathing, a sun terrace, café and changing rooms (Benson 2003). The resort provided the perfect setting for the Miss Great Britain contest, the glamour of swimsuited contestants gracing the curved white modernity of the lido, fulfilling Morecambe’s motto ‘Beauty Surrounds, Health Abounds’. The beach is a liminal space existing between nature and culture (Fiske 1989), and the design of the seaside lido, positioned at the borderline between land and sea provides an order and a structure for pleasure and leisure. Floodlit with overhead and underwater lights to illuminate the water at night, the pool itself was central to both activity and audience. The ‘Aqua Cascades’ event presented a spectacular series of water shows set against the central fountain design of the pool. Holidaymakers were entertained with diving displays and Busby Berkeley style swimming formation sequences performed by the ‘Aqua Lovelies’, pointing to the modern glamour of Hollywood’s bathing pin-up Esther Williams, star of the 1944 film Bathing Beauty, and securing Morecambe an international, cosmopolitan atmosphere. Morecambe’s own ‘Bathing Beauty Queen’ contest was first established in the summer of 1945 and staged

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at the Super Swimming Stadium. Organized by the local council and the Sunday Dispatch newspaper, the first prize was seven guineas and a fruit basket. The contest was designed as a marketing tool to advertise the resort and increase newspaper circulation; the swimsuited winners posing by the pool pictured in publicity material were used as an image to sell the promise of health, youth, beauty and modernity. By the mid-twentieth century, Morecambe was a thriving seaside resort, and the contest had evolved into Miss Great Britain with twice daily ‘Bathing Beauty Parades’ during high season and national media coverage of the event, further boosting the popularity of the resort. For competitors and female onlookers alike, the contest afforded the opportunity to appraise fashionable swimwear as well as the bodies that modelled them. As Susan Ward recognizes, ‘Clothing for swimming, bathing, and seaside wear has been an important and influential area of fashionable dress since the late nineteenth century. The evolution of swimming and bathing costumes has been closely associated with trends in mainstream fashion and advancements in textile technology, but has also reflected broader societal attitudes about personal hygiene, body exposure, and modesty’ (Ward 2010). The swimsuit was integral to the beauty contest as ‘a garment that could reveal optimal flesh and justified as essential for judges to assess that contestants measured up to the feminine ideal’ (Schmidt 2012). In this setting the swimming costume was a necessary and desirable form of dress for participating in forms of poolside leisure, and for many young women the lido provided a welcome opportunity for a public display of glamour and fashionable femininity. As the ‘site’ for a fashion performance (Potvin 2009: 9) the swimming pool provides both the context for the bathing suit and the platform for a display of the body. For young Miss Great Britain contestant Galen Ford, parading her costume around the perimeter of the Super Swimming Stadium pool felt entirely natural (Figure 15.1), as she explains: ‘You were just walking around in your swimsuit, you didn’t feel you were doing anything different from anybody else’ (Ford 2004). Indeed, a photograph of her competition entry reveals that while the contestant takes centre stage, the image also captures audience members in various states of undress, and at the poolside a number of men similarly stripped down to their swimwear; one stretched out at the water’s edge sunbathing, and another standing casually on the bridge observing the contest, as he, in turn, is appraised by the camera. The seaside is a space where normal and everyday codes of dress, appearance and behaviour are relaxed, and as Paula Black notes, beaches and pools ‘are places for looking’ (Black 2001: 110). Galen Ford had entered her first beauty competition for the promise of a fashionable new bathing costume after the owner of a local swimsuit shop encouraged her to wear one of his latest designs. Ford was awarded second place in the Miss Great Britain competition of 1969 in her white, drum majorette style bathing costume, decorated with seven rows of gold buttons inter-looped with decorative chains and matching gold braiding on the straps. The costume was made in Bri-nylon fabric and manufactured by popular British swimwear brand ‘Nelbarden’. Jennifer Craik notes that mid-century costume designs such as Galen’s majorette style design ‘emphasised tailoring and accessories, such as belt, buttons and buckles to reinforce the public respectability of swimming and remove it from the private, erotic associations of lingerie’ (Craik 1993: 146). The history of the beauty contest reveals the changing ideal shape of women’s bodies in the twentieth century, and the fashions that dressed it, as Craik suggests, ‘In aesthetic terms, modern swimsuits highlight bodily features associated with the display of fit and healthy bodies’ (Craik 1993: 138). The beauty competition enforced strict rules regulating every aspect of a contestant’s appearance. Female chaperones acted as ‘scrutineers’ who were engaged to check body measurements, ensure the appropriate choice of costume was worn and to make sure no artificial devices like corsetry were used. Up until the 1970s, most costumes worn at competitions in Britain were well structured and thickly lined to contain the natural form of the body; bra cups were lightly padded as standard to conceal the shape of the nipple. Sarah Banet-Weiser

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Figure 15.1  Galen Ford at the Miss Great Britain competition in 1969, Morecambe, Lancashire. Private Collection. Courtesy of Galen Ford.

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argues that ‘the body in the swimsuit competition must be contained and disciplined, effectively containing in turn the potential sexual transgression visible on the exposed body’ (Banet-Weiser 1999: 71). Rules and regulations stipulating the design and style of appropriate contest attire highlight ‘the way in which the bodies of contestants are restrained and standardized’ (Banet-Weiser 1999: 71). Young hopefuls understood that to be in the running, such conventions had to be observed, for example, high heeled shoes were considered necessary to visually lengthen the legs of the competitor. At the Miss Great Britain final rules and conditions of entry specified that ‘Competitors are at liberty to emphasise their personality by the use of make-up, head decorations, shoes, etc. in any way they desire but it is stipulated that one-piece bathing costumes must be worn and must not include artificial aids, padding or attachments. All costumes are subject to examination’ (‘Miss Great Britain, Information for Grand Finalists’ Brochure, 1970). Brenda Foley suggests that the appearance of natural, authentic beauty requires ‘performing normalcy’: ‘To approximate a socially regulated and recognizable embodiment of “beautiful” is to require artificial enhancement, guided and applied, ironically, with the objectiveness of “naturalness”’ (Foley 2005: 91). Beauty queen glamour was highly constructed, and for many young women the beauty contest involved dressing up and acting out a known version of ideal femininity, to be achieved through the use of artifice such as make-up, false eyelashes, hair spray, hairpieces and fake tan. In the production of their beauty queen image, contestants were active and creative practitioners. The considerable skill required for such glamorous constructions can be understood in Kathy Peiss’s terms as ‘the creative “work” of make-up’ (Peiss 1998: 185). Galen Ford describes the production of her competition look in terms of both costuming and disguise, recalling that ‘I never felt I was better looking than anybody else, just that I could do everything the other girls were doing. You’d put on the hairpiece, the false eyelashes, the fake tan – You’d got so much fake on you weren’t really you anyway! It was a bit like going in for a dressing up competition’ (Ford 2004). The beauty contest format offers the opportunity for transformation as a form of personal production. The challenge was to be the best version of yourself, through the work of self-presentation. Indeed, as Sarah Banet-Weiser observes, the encouragement for contestants to ‘be the best you can be’ directs women to ‘pick out a certain idea of a self and through hard work and effort, become that self’ (BanetWeiser 1999: 92). According to Elizabeth Wissinger, the crafting and maintenance of appearance through personal care, diet and exercise is ‘glamour labour’: ‘Its physical mode involves maintaining a fashionable hairstyle and working to achieve a body that fits the current ideal’ (Wissinger 2015: 3). Press and publicity material surrounding the contest reproduced a popular image of contestants getting ready and ‘making-up’ their appearance. Contestants were often photographed reflected in mirrors carefully applying their lipstick, or attended to by other girls, armed with sprays and brushes. These images are ‘making a spectacle’ (Peiss 1998: 186) by extending the entertainment of the contest to the pre-show backstage, and in revealing this ‘behind the scenes’ activity, the work of the contestant and the process of transformation is highlighted. Like the fashion show, the beauty contest is defined by display and spectacle, on and off the stage.

Dressing the stage: Miss She and Glamorous Grandmother at Butlin’s Holiday Camp The Holiday Pay Act of 1938 legislated for paid holidays for employees and led to the development of residential holiday camps across Great Britain. While the luxe grandeur of seaside resorts such as Morecambe was fading in a state of decline by the 1960s due to the greater affordability of international travel, cheap holiday camps targeted at ordinary working-class families such as Butlin’s and Pontin’s enjoyed increasing popularity and commercial success (Dawson 2011). The rise in the popularity of

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holiday camps encouraged greater participation in competition events, and would open up the beauty contest to a wider range of both participants and audiences. Fairground entrepreneur and showman Billy Butlin opened the first of his holiday camps in Skegness in 1936; by the 1950s there were a further eight resorts situated around the coast of Britain and Butlin’s was recognized as an integral part of the British seaside experience. Butlin’s responded to significant changes in the social life of Britain, its camps promoted the emerging culture of health and fitness, and events and competitions from ballroom dancing to amateur weightlifting emphasized physicality and the body (Dawson 2011: 103–4). Butlin’s ran beauty and talent contests for all ages ranging from the Bonniest Baby to the most Glamorous Grandmother and the search for the gentleman with the Knobbliest Knees; the camps offered a beauty competition for every member of the holiday-making family. The most coveted and lucrative title was undoubtedly Miss Holiday Princess, first launched in 1946 with prize money and ‘awards greater than ever known before’. In 1958, the first prize was £1,000, and the offer of a two-year contract as a Redcoat staff member. The success of the beauty contest format depended largely on the enthusiasm and organization of the camp’s team of Redcoats, tasked with ‘generating gaiety at all times of the day or night’ (Dawson 2011: 168) and who were responsible for enlisting entrants, compering the competitions, as well as designing and making the sets and stages. The Butlin’s beauty contest differed from the format of a traditional fashion show in that it required the onstage performance and interaction between compere and contestant. The compere’s role was critical to engaging both the audience and the competitors on stage. In his memoir, Redcoat Rocky Mason recalls learning how to ‘dress the stage’ through observation of his peers, noting how a successful compere utilized the whole space of the stage by interacting with the audience, moving from one side of the stage to the other while addressing each section of the room (Mason 2013: 76). The compere would escort contestants onto the rostrum where they were then themselves required to ‘dress the stage’ through a carefully choreographed series of movements which mirrored contemporary fashion shows; one by one they would appear from the backstage then parade onto an extended platform ‘walkout’ which would take them towards the audience and the judges. The typical stage at Butlin’s competition events was constructed with a light timber frame consisting of fabric or paper hung panels under open trellis on either side of an archway. The archway carried the title of the competition painted in Butlin’s cursive font, so that each contestant, posing as she made her entrance, was momentarily framed as Miss She, or the Holiday Princess. Stage design and set dressing for Butlin’s competitions were also undertaken by the camp’s young staff. Rocky Mason provides a detailed account of the construction of the Miss She competition at Filey, describing how he decorated his competition stage with maroon-coloured wallpaper embellished with a gold fleur-de-lis design, and affixed sections of white-painted trellis to give the backdrop depth and detail (Mason 2013: 77). These ‘do-it-yourself’ set designs, with their handmade backdrops crafted from garden trellis and leftover offcuts of patterned wallpaper lent the Butlin’s contest a domestic aesthetic by drawing elements of private interior spaces into the design of the public stage, creating a familiar and relaxed setting for holidaymakers and the amateur contestants who took to it (Figure 15.2). In the post-war period, the beauty contest format grew from strength to strength, with Butlin’s holiday camps running weekly heats across the country. The 1960s saw growth in the popularity of the beauty competition as the contest developed into fashion show formats. The Miss She contest began in 1955 to coincide with the launch of SHE, a new monthly features magazine published by the National Magazine Company. This competition appealed to women of all ages as it didn’t require the usual ‘bathing beauty’ line-up but was instead a competition which judged the fashionability and stylishness of the contestant, as the publicity made clear: ‘We’re not looking for a beauty queen . . . Miss She must have charm, personality, dress sense and faultless grooming. So, wear your prettiest dress or smartest

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suit to enter’ (Butlin’s 1965). The competition’s call for entries made a direct reference to high fashion, and to the world of modelling: ‘Have you ever watched the posed and graceful mannequins displaying the wonderful Paris and London creations and wished that you could do that just once? Well girls, at Butlin’s you get the opportunity to show just how much dress sense and deportment you have if you enter the Grand Fashion Contest to find Britain’s Miss She’ (Butlin’s 1965). Away from the bathing beauty parade of the lido, beauty competitions that did not require a swimsuit line-up such as Miss She and Glamorous Grandmother appealed to women of all ages (from sixteen to ‘never you mind’) and offered contestants the opportunity for more considered and often elaborate forms of dressing, and of dressmaking. While Miss She billed itself a ‘competition in day wear’ it was clearly not a conventional fashion show as it didn’t showcase the collection of a single designer, or even a selection of the season’s Figure 15.2  Eileen Hyde (left) at the Butlin’s Miss She newest designs, but instead presented an competition in 1970, Skegness, Lincolnshire. Courtesy of assortment of outfits deemed by its contestants East Cleveland Image Archive, www​.image​-archive​.org​.uk. to represent their own most stylish looks. The garments worn were largely modest and conservative, consisting of skirt suits and formal day dresses. Unlike the traditional fashion show there was no ‘coordination in costuming between competitors’ (Marion 2008: 60), and so a delightful array of styles, shapes, patterns and colours could be witnessed on stage. By the late 1960s the Miss She contest attracted over a hundred entries a week, with audiences keen to admire the fashionable spectacle on stage. The parade was also watched eagerly by young Redcoats, who were themselves required to wear a strict camp uniform of white flannel trousers or skirts and a bright red blazer, as one young woman recalled: ‘Some of the entrants were so serious about it, and came prepared with gorgeous outfits which we looked at in envy as we never got to wear anything much’ (Butlin’s Memories). Set in the Butlin’s holiday camp, the Miss She contest is a ‘location of fashion’. As Potvin suggests, such spaces are ‘potential sites of and for spectacle, performance, and even transformation, . . . people seek out locations of fashion either as participants, voyeurs, consumers, spectators or would-be-models’ (Potvin 2009: 9). Finalist Eileen Hyde won second place in her competition in 1970 in an outfit she had designed herself to wear to a wedding the previous year (Figure 15.2). The outfit was entirely handcrocheted in peach and white cotton; it consisted of a knee-length dress, worn under a longer-line buttoned cardigan with three-quarter sleeves and was accessorized with a matching crocheted hat. Her outfit was complemented with long white gloves, a white handbag and white peep-toe heeled sandals. Cheryl Buckley recognizes that such designs have ‘special qualities which gave “added value” for their

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wearer – they were exclusive in that the unique combination of design elements, materials and colour was distinctive to that one particular garment’ (Buckley 1998: 166). The holiday camp setting, physically removed from the constraints of home and work, provided a pleasurable experience and a relaxed space which encouraged a freedom of creative expression and experimentation in dressing up and displaying the body. As Banim et al. suggest, the holiday ‘provides the actual and psychological space for the development and performance of different and potentially better aspects of self, realized through clothing and the display of the body . . . it offers women the opportunity to try out new images . . . afforded time and offered a legitimate space to play with dressed image. Experimental, more daring performances could be undertaken’ (Banim et al. 2005: 426). The format of the Miss She and the Glamorous Grandmother competition encourages the performance and display of this idealized version, as Banim et al. argue: ‘Clothes therefore become vehicles for displaying a better self’ (Banim et al. 2005: 426). Evelyn Waters entered her first Glamorous Grandmother competition in the early 1970s wearing a dress she had handmade in ‘black silky satin, with white swansdown all around the bottom’ (Waters 2004). Evelyn took equal pleasure in both the preparation for and the performance of the contest. As well as making her own outfits, carefully choosing materials and adding trimmings, she created her own fabrics by dyeing them to suit her chosen design scheme. She went on to win her next Glamorous Grandmother competition the following year in a pretty party dress that had started life as a pair of net curtains, which she hand-dyed a pale dusty blue and then re-made into her prize-winning costume. Evelyn’s ingenious and creative use of curtain netting to construct a fashionable appearance recalls Scarlet O’Hara’s deployment of green velvet curtains to costume her masquerade in Gone with the Wind (1939), and as Potvin observes, it is ‘the unusual and circumstantial use of home furnishings to adorn the body as fashion’ that provides the opportunity for transformation (Potvin 2010: 1). In her study of home dressmaking Cheryl Buckley argues that in creating, adapting and developing fabrics and textiles, and selecting and combining specific design features such as trimmings, such outfits are ‘clearly designed as well as made’ (Buckley 1998: 161). Competitors expressed pride in their appearance, personal style and creativity, demonstrating the ‘pleasure gained by women from designing, making, and wearing good clothes’ (Buckley 1998: 164). Evelyn’s story reveals that in the beauty contest, glamour is a construct, and fashion and beauty are acquired skills: You have got to feel good yourself you know. So, you do your best to look your best. Always walk nice and straight, and just be natural really. Don’t put on too many airs and graces. The walk, dress sense, they take that all into consideration. . . . Glamour is being dressed up, and looking good. You’ve got to do a bit to yourself, pick out the best things that you’ve got. (Waters 2004) In press coverage and publicity for beauty contests the ordinariness and conventionality of contestants’ lives were emphasized; from young mothers to grandmothers and schoolgirls to office workers, winners were prized for their ‘naturalness’. Beauty queen glamour is signalled as a productive process of transformation which is performed through the competition and extends beyond and behind the stage. Elizabeth Wilson notes that ‘Glamour . . . is an appearance. The appearance of glamour resides through, or is created in combination with dress, hair, scent and even mise-en-scene’ (Wilson 2007: 105). Glamour, personified by a well-presented grandmother or showcased in a carefully accessorized dress, was the pursuit and the promise of the Butlin’s beauty competition. Wilson argues that glamour ‘is the result of work and effort – artfully concealed of course . . . Glamour depends on what is withheld,

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on secrecy, hints, and the hidden’ (Wilson 2007: 100). However, the beauty contest tempers glamour with ordinariness, by revealing the hidden work and preparation of beauty and appearance. The contest makes its appeal not to high fashion models or readymade film stars, but to ordinary women who, through the creative construction of appearance, might become beauty queens. As one regular Miss She competitor recalled, the contest promised ‘glamour, with the hope that we too could perhaps become a model and wear fantastic clothes’ (Butlin’s Memories). While winning a beauty contest wasn’t a guaranteed entry into the world of fashion modelling, ‘professional’ competitors did use the competition circuit as a means of generating income. During the 1970s, the beauty contest made vital links with commerce and industry; sponsorship and commercial tie-ins became ever more important at a time when British seaside resorts and holiday camps were in decline due to competition from cheaper package holidays abroad. Along with this commercialization came the regulation of prizes and contest rules, greater restrictions imposed upon ‘professional’ entrants, and a formalization of competition production, design and choreography. The commodification of the beauty contest reached its peak in Britain with the Miss World competition organized by the entrepreneur Eric Morey, who applied his commercial success with the ‘Come Dancing’ televised format to the beauty contest, effectively transporting the swimsuited beauty queen from the side of a swimming pool to the stage of the Royal Albert Hall.

Making a spectacle: Miss World at the Royal Albert Hall The beauty queen moved from the local to the international stage with the establishment of Miss World, televised on the BBC from 1959. Originally devised as a sensational ‘Bikini Contest’ by Morley for the Festival of Britain in 1951, the annual Miss World competition enjoyed huge success with sponsorship by multinational companies and mass media coverage. On an unprecedented scale, the 1970 Miss World competition would be broadcast on primetime national television, attracting over 22 million viewers. Compared to the seaside lido, or the community halls of the Butlin’s camps, the staging of the contest at London’s Royal Albert Hall was unrivalled in ceremony, glamour and opulence. The lavish and grand interior of the hall, with its vast curtained stage, glass and wrought iron domed ceiling, and tiered seating and balconies to seat over eight thousand spectators, transformed the contest into a spectacular format. The event required a formal dress code; the comperes and judges on stage dressed in dinner jackets and black tie, and the audience wore their best suits and evening dresses. The stage set was designed to replicate classical proportions; four wide white Doric style columns framed the backdrop, draped in shimmering pale blue satin. The ‘walk-out’ stage was constructed of large white, intersecting hexagonal platforms, iridescent with sparkling silver glitter on to which the contestants would perform a complex set of choreographed movements across and down steps as they moved forward on to the stage. A sequence of costume change segments presented by parading contestants from around the world marked out distinct stages in the format of the competition and signalled the progression of the show towards its finale. These costume displays are ‘acts’ of performance, with each contestant presenting multiple roles: as cultural ambassador, embodiment of ideal femininity and so on. From the multi-layered costuming of the national dress round to the final swimsuit parade, the performers undress for the audience. The parade of contestants in the ‘Traditional Dress’ segment presented a bright and colourful display of

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young women dressed in a mix of historical and contemporary designs, filling the stage-like extras from a film set or entrants to a fancy-dress competition. The format was open to interpretation, some contestants sporting more identifiable versions of a ‘national costume’ than others; Miss Italy was modestly covered in a full-skirted peasant dress and wrapped in a black fringed shawl; Miss Australia appeared strikingly modern in Cossack style pants tucked into knee-length white boots and worn with a long-sleeved white tunic; Miss Canada was dressed girlishly in knee-high white socks worn with a glittering mini skirt and matching fitted military-style jacket and Mountie style hat; Miss United Kingdom dressed up as Britannia in a white toga style gown, open on one side from ankle to hip and secured with braid and buttons, accessorized with a silk rope wrapped around her waist, silver arm bands and a white plumed head piece. Comparatively, the ‘Evening Wear’ segment presented a more conventional parade of floor-length, jewel-encrusted gowns, matched with demure glamour and studied poise. The swimsuit finale presented each contestant dressed in a one-piece costume and high heels with a number card affixed to her wrist and a satin sash bearing the name of her country. Her progress across the stage was slow and sometimes awkwardly executed, with her smile and eyes fixed towards the audience and a carefully remembered routine of steps precariously performed in high heels. The parades are marked by routine and rigour, and performed with studied precision. Banet-Weiser argues that ‘the swimsuit and evening gown events are clear spectacles: the display of standardised feminine bodies parading before a panel of judges is evidence not only of self-discipline, but also of the conformity that is produced by such surveillance’ (Banet-Weiser 1999: 88). While the Miss Great Britain competition contextualized contestant’s states of undress within the setting of the swimming pool, Miss World’s competitors perform a show of undressing for the audience and judges, from the layered ensembles of traditional dress to the swimsuited finale of the crowning ceremony, costume and the costumed body is decontextualized. The elaborate setting and highly staged performances of Miss World can be viewed in Barthes’s terms as a ‘spectacle of excess’ (Barthes 1972: 15). The crowning of the Miss World winner was staged as a fairy-tale fantasy, replete with a dazzling set design and surging orchestral accompaniment. The winner, Miss Grenada, was led by hand to a gold velvet throne set centre stage, and attended to by whitewigged footmen dressed in black velvet jackets and breeches, who draped her in a heavy gold brocade cloak with satin lining. In her analysis of the fashion show, Caroline Evans points out, ‘In French spectacle also means theatrical presentation and the fashion show is undoubtedly a part of Debord’s “society of spectacle” in the way that it transforms commercial enterprise into dazzling display, aestheticizing everyday life on the catwalk’ (Evans 2003: 73). Like the fashion show, the beauty contest is a dazzling display and a cultural form which advances capitalism by naturalizing dominant ideologies. As Laura Mulvey argues, ‘The Miss World competition is not an erotic exhibition; it is a public celebration of the traditional female road to success. The Royal Albert Hall on the evening of 20 November was miles away from the underground world of pornography. The atmosphere was emphatically respectable, enlivened by a contrived attempt at “glamour”’ (Mulvey 1989: 3). Miss World was popular family entertainment; the 1970 competition was the highest rated BBC programme of the year, broadcast live into 10.5 million homes (‘Television Today: Miss World in 10.5 Million Homes’ 1970). However the format was not without its critics, the visual presence of a swimsuited contestant, presented for approval on a stage set in the formal and opulent interior of the Royal Albert Hall was problematic. For feminist protestors such as Laura Mulvey, ‘the body was the site of political struggle . . . women’s struggle to gain rights over their bodies could not be divorced from questions of image and representation’ (Mulvey 1989: xii). As the symbol for sexual inequality and discrimination the beauty contest had become the focus for Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) protests in the 1960s and 1970s

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across Europe and America (Rowbotham 1990: 248). In 1970, a group of British WLM members aimed to make a very public statement of protest with an act of civil disobedience, to disrupt a televised event and stage a ‘counter-spectacle’ at the Miss World event: ‘We calculated that groups of girls emerging from the gloom of the auditorium waving football rattles, hurling “weapons”, shouting slogans and being dragged out would create enough of a counter-spectacle to disrupt the show’ (Why Miss World 1971: 17). The protestors’ aim was ‘to take violent action, interrupting a carefully ordered spectacle, drawing attention to ourselves’ (Mulvey 1989: 3). This was a form of ‘détournement’, as a ‘redirection of images or events’, a technique advocated by Guy Debord aimed to ‘deflect, divert, distort, misuse, misappropriate’ or ‘hijack any spatial relations’ (Potvin 2009: 10). Around fifty protestors bought tickets to the Royal Albert Hall, and having secured their entrance to the event, the women were aware that they would need to fit in with the audience members who were ‘disguised in a general uniform of satin dress’ in order to not attract undue attention before the planned protest began (Shrew 1970). As historian Sally Alexander, then a single mother and student, explained, ‘We wanted to fit into the audience, so we went in with our handbags, looking good. In our bags we had little objects, we put flour into little scrunchy pieces of paper to flick around . . . there were groups of women dotted all over the hall, we could see that they were demonstrators like us’ (Alexander 2014). The aim was to look and act ‘ordinary’. Protestor Jo Robinson recalled the details of her preparation: ‘I had to dress up to get in. I wore a pink velvet coat and a hat. I took a lot of things with me to throw, old lettuces and tomatoes, smoke bombs, leaflets and a water pistol filled with blue ink’ (Robinson 2004). The guest compere, the American stand-up comedian and actor Bob Hope, performed his cabaret set to an audibly nonplussed audience and incensed the protestors with his sexist and racist routine. Making reference to the placard slogans of the picket line outside he joked: ‘I’m very happy to be here at this cattle market tonight. Moooo! . . . I’ve been backstage checking calves’ (BBC 1970). The plan had been to begin the protest once all the contestants were lined up on the stage, but Hope’s routine proved so offensive that the signal came early; the sound of a football rattle from the balcony reverberated through the hall, and a woman’s cry could be heard, ‘We’re not beautiful! We’re not ugly! We’re Angry!’ (Robinson 2004). There was a distinct pause, followed by confused silence as Hope looked up across into the audience, and then flour bombs exploded onto the stage in clouds of white powder. In the dark, protestors leapt up, determined to make their mark, shouting, blowing whistles, throwing stink bombs and tomatoes, waving placards and showering the stage with leaflets (Figure 15.3). Sally Alexander made it past the barriers: ‘I was certainly determined to get onto that stage and disrupt. Bob Hope . . . ran off absolutely terrified’ (Alexander 2014). Another protestor, Margarita Jimenez, was intercepted and carried out by police: ‘As I was lifted bodily out of the hall, three Miss Worlds came running up to me, a trio of sequined, perfumes visions saying, “Are you alright?”, “Let her go”’ (Mulvey 1989: 5). Persuaded back on stage a visibly shaken Bob Hope went off script, rambling that the protestors ‘must be on some kind of dope’, the effectiveness of the disruption was evident in his analogy: ‘For a moment I thought I was back in Vaudeville. But I suppose it’s good training for my next trip to Vietnam’ (Daily Sketch 1970: 6). Robinson vividly recalled the visual impact of the event: ‘I remember frozen moments. I looked up and I saw in the floodlights all this flour, all the leaflets coming down through the lights and I was just mesmerised. The show stopped, and it was ours’ (Robinson 2004). The protest achieved its ambition; by disrupting the proceedings and redirecting attention from the organized events on stage it challenged both the nature and the subject of the spectacle. It also challenged the attitudes and actions of the WLM, as one member described, it was ‘a blow against passivity, not only the enforced passivity of the girls on stage, but the passivity that we all felt in ourselves’ (Wandor 1986: 25). In her first-hand account of the

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event, originally published anonymously in the Women’s Liberation Movement Workshop Journal, Laura Mulvey assessed, ‘The spectacle is vulnerable. However intricately planned it is, a handful of people can disrupt it and cause chaos in a seemingly impenetrable organisation. The spectacle isn’t prepared for anything other than passive spectators’ (Mulvey 1989: 5). The event was covered extensively by the national press; on its front page the Daily Mail contrasted an image of Miss Grenada in full ceremonial regalia against a photograph of one of the ‘Bovver Girls’ being restrained by a policeman and the protestors were described a ‘gangs of demonstrators’, and characterized as mad, hysterical militants (Cameron 1970: 1). A press photo, reproduced widely in Figure 15.3  ‘No! Miss World! No!’ Feminist protestors invade the papers over the following days, reveals Miss World competition at the Royal Albert Hall in London, 1970. the chaos of the counter-spectacle Photo by Leonard Burt/Central Press/Getty Images, from the (Figure 15.3). The protestors, surging Hulton Archive. Courtesy of Getty Images. forward with banners, throwing leaflets, shouting and blowing whistles are clearly identifiable, some dressed casually in miniskirts and jeans, others like Jo Robinson at the front, dressed up in a costume of respectable femininity in her hat and velvet overcoat. The accompanying picture caption describes the ‘Invasion’ of the Royal Albert Hall as a kind of choreography; ‘down shower leaflets, up goes a women’s liberation poster and forward move the militant girls during last night’s demonstration at the Miss World final’ (Daily Sketch 1970: 6). While the press sensationalized the actions of the demonstrators, and arguably trivialized their intent, newspaper coverage and photographs both evidenced and furthered the aims of the protest, as Sally Alexander explained: ‘One of the reasons we chose Miss World was we thought that filling the Albert Hall with all different kinds of women, dressed in all different clothes, throwing things around and making a spectacle out of ourselves in the audience, would in some sense challenge the rather narrow vision of femininity on the stage’ (Alexander 2004).

Conclusion The staging and context of the British beauty contest offer a changing space for the production, display and consumption of the pageant. As a site for the Miss Great Britain contest, the curved white modernity of the seaside lido provided a glamorous backdrop for the parade of bathing beauty contestants; the poolside setting contextualizes the display and appraisal of swimsuited entrants and spectators alike. The Butlin’s holiday camp, with its borrowed domestic aesthetic and amateur handcrafted stage designs created a

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relaxed and familiar setting for its competitors and audiences, encouraging a freedom of expression and experimentation in developing, designing and displaying fashionable identities. While these ‘sites’ of fashion performance (Potvin 2009: 9) arguably make sense and give value to the appearance of the un/dressed and costumed body, the staging of the Miss World at the Royal Albert Hall presents the swimsuited contestant at its most decontextualized. In their hijacking of the Royal Albert Hall feminist protestors created a counterspectacle with a disruptive choreography of actions, sounds and images, offering the audience startling and challenging alternatives to the images of femininity on the stage. From the creative work of make-up and costume making, to set designs, stage dressing and the choreography and performance of protest, we can understand the production of the beauty contest in Cheryl Buckley’s terms as a ‘marginalized creative activity’. As she suggests, ‘such accounts can provide invaluable insights into aspects of British social, cultural and creative lives, and, in particular, changing feminine identities’ (Buckley 166-167). In the production of their own images, contestants, organizers and protestors were active and creative practitioners. Interior space and staging through design has contributed to and shaped the glamour, fashion and femininity played out in the beauty contest, contextualizing and politicizing the bodies and costumes on display.

FEATURED SHOWS Miss She Great Britain, Morecombe, Lancashire (1969) (video available via British Pathé)

UK Miss World, London (1970) (video available via BBC Broadcast)

Glamorous Grandmother Contest Final (1961) (video available via British Pathé)

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to Sally Alexander, Jo Robinson, Galen Ford and Evelyn Waters for sharing their stories. Oral history interviews were conducted for the exhibition Beauty Queens: Smiles, Swimsuits and Sabotage, curated by Alice Beard and held at the Women’s Library in 2004. Recordings of these interviews (8BQU) form part of the ‘Records of Miss Great Britain, 1945–1982’ (5MGB) held by London University: London School of Economics, The Women’s Library.

References Alexander, S. (2004), Interview with Alice Beard. Alexander, S. (2014), ‘Miss World: My Protest’, Witness, BBC World Service. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.bbc​​.co​ .u​​k​/pro​​gramm​​es​/p0​​​1swtq​​z. Banet-Weiser, S. (1999), The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Banim, M., A. Guy and K. Gillen (2005), ‘“It’s Like Planet Holiday”: Women’s Dressed Self-Presentation on Holiday’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress Body and Culture, 9 (4): 425–43. Barthes, R. (1972), Mythologies, London: Jonathan Cape. ‘Battle in the Albert Hall’ (1970), Daily Sketch, November 21: 6. Benson, D. (2003), ‘Morecambe’s Super Swimming Stadium’, Picture Postcard Monthly, August: 18–20. Black, P. (2001), ‘Walking on the Beaches Looking at the . . . Bodies’, in K. Backett-Milburn and L. McKie (eds), Constructing Gendered Bodies: Explorations in Sociology, 104–19, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Buckley, C. (1998), ‘On the Margins: Theorizing the History and Significance of Making and Designing Clothes at Home’, Journal of Design History, 11 (2): 157–71. ‘Butlin’s Holiday Guide’ (1965), The Butlin’s Archive, Bognor Regis. Butlin’s Memories, ‘Miss She Competition 1955–1983’. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.but​​lins-​​memor​​ies​.c​​om​/co​​ mpeti​​tions​​/​miss​​she​.h​​tm Cameron, H. (1970), ‘The Beauty . . . and the Bovver Girl’, Daily Mail, November 21: 1. Craik, J. (1993), The Face of Fashion, London: Routledge. Dawson, S. (2011), Holiday Camps in Twentieth-Century Britain: Packaging Pleasure, Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press. Evans, C. (2003), Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Fiske, J. (1989), Reading the Popular, Boston: Unwin Hyman. Foley, B. (2005), Undressed for Success: Beauty Contests and Exotic Dancers as Merchants of Morality, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ford, G. (2004), Interview with Alice Beard. Marion, J. S. (2008), Ballroom: Culture and Costume in Competitive Dance, Oxford: Berg. Mason, R. (2013), Butlin’s in Its Prime: Those Golden Years, North Carolina: Lulu Press. Massey, A. (2000), Hollywood beyond the Screen, Oxford: Berg. ‘Miss Great Britain: Information for Grand Finalists’ (1970), Brochure, Miss Great Britain Archive, The Women’s Library, LSE. ‘Miss World’ (1970), BBC Broadcast. 20th November. Associated Press Archive. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.apar​​ chive​​.com/​​metad​​ata​/y​​outub​​e​/fe5​​dd926​​43049​​9577e​​a6c6​b​​c9792​​99ee. Mulvey, L. (1989), ‘The Spectacle Is Vulnerable: Miss World, 1970’, in Visual and Other Pleasures, 3–5, London: Macmillan. Peiss, K. (1998), Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Potvin, J. (ed.) (2009), The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007, London and New York: Routledge.

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Potvin, J. (2010), ‘The Velvet Masquerade: Fashion, Interior Design and the Furnished Body’, in Alla Myzelav and John Potvin (eds), Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity, 1–18, Surrey: Ashgate. Records of Miss Great Britain (1945–1982) (5MGB), London University: London School of Economics, The Women’s Library. Robinson, J. (2004), Interview with Alice Beard. Rowbotham, S. (1990), The Past Is before Us: Feminist Action since the 1960s, London: Harmondsworth. Schmidt, C. (2012), ‘Show and Tell: Popularizing the Swimsuit’, in  The Swimsuit: From Poolside to Catwalk, 23–37, London: Berg. Bloomsbury Fashion Central. Web. Available online: http:​/​/dx.​​doi​.o​​rg​/10​​.2752​​/9781​​ 47428​​0051/​​Sc​hmi​​dt000​4 (accessed February 12, 2019). ‘Television Today: Miss World in 10.5 Million Homes’ (1970), The Stage, 3 December, 9, London. Accessed through the British Library Newspaper Archive https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/ bl/0001180/19701203/056/0009. Wandor, M. (1986), Carry On, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics, London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ward, S. (2010), ‘Swimwear’, in Valerie Steel (ed.), The Berg Companion to Fashion, Oxford: Bloomsbury. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.blo​​omsbu​​ryfas​​hionc​​entra​​l​.com​​/prod​​ucts/​​berg-​​fashi​​on​-li​​brary​​/ency​​clope​​dia​/t​​he​-be​​rg​-co​​ mpani​​on​​-to​​-fash​​ion​/s​​wimwe​​ar. Waters, E. (2004), Interview with Alice Beard. ‘Why Miss World?’ (1971), Pamphlet, London: The Women’s Liberation Workshop. Wilson, E. (2007), ‘A Note on Glamour’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress Body and Culture, 11 (1): 95–108. Wissinger, E. (2015), This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media and the Making of Glamour, New York: New York University Press.

INDEX

Abramovic, Marina  163 abstract painting  60 Acne  117 Adair, Catherine  207, 216 adaptive reuse concept  115–17, 119–21, 123–7 Adorned in Dreams (Wilson)  91 Adorno, Theodor  60 aesthetic knowledge  124, 127 aesthetic market  7, 117, 124-6 aesthetic movement  36 aesthetics  17, 19, 20, 50, 53, 68, 100, 102, 178, 187 feminine  184 machine  123 affects  72, 74, 75, 77, 80, 81, 99, 105, 108, 109, 110 Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada Albanese, Flavio  41 Alcestis (1986)  163 Alexander, Sally  230, 231 Alexander McQueen (brand)  183 alien  64, 65, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 91, 212 Alternative Miss World American Gigolo (1980)  163 American Repertory Theatre  167 Anderson, Laurie  163 Andre, Carl  102, 103, 108 Andrews, Raymond  163 architectural promenade  19 architecture  19, 23, 102. See also fashion Architecture and Disjunction (Tschumi)  21 Architecture Media Organization (AMO)  23, 107 Armani, Giorgio  8, 98, 163–73Amours, Delices et Orgues Arne, Dan  116, 122, 124

art  14, 115 applied  18, 23 commerce and  124, 130, 172, 183 conceptual  148, 159 contemporary  107, 147, 149 forms  99, 105, 138, 214 high-brow  169, 173 installation  105 of making garments  86 minimalist  98, 110, 148, 159 modern  169 reductive  103 theatre and  172 visual  103, 172, 197 world  130, 142 Art: Fashion in the 21st Century (Oakley Smith, Kubler, Guiness)  105 Art Nouveau  18, 19 Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siecle France: Politics, Psychology and Style (Silverman)  18 ‘Art of the Motorcycle’ (exhibition, 1998)  169 ASA Studio Albanese  41 Ash, Juliet  91, 92 Asprey  45 assemblages  63, 72, 73, 75–7, 79–80, 99 Atelier Martine  30 Atlantis Atmospheres (Zumthor)  100 audience  46, 48, 58, 59, 60, 61, 75, 84, 169, 171, 192, 195, 201 engagement  72, 85, 86, 89, 90, 93–5 gaze  200 Augé, Marc  130 Aulenti, Gae  164 aura  3, 7, 16, 124, 151, 153, 184 Auslander, P.  194 austerity

236INDEX

Australian Film Finance Australian Natives Association  215 authenticity  105, 125, 208, 217 avant-garde  72, 169, 184 couturiers  101 designers  21 performance  98 Bachelard, Gaston  87 Bad Romance (Lady Gaga)  79 Balenciaga  163 Banet-Weiser, Sarah  222, 224, 229 Barad, Karen  71, 74, 77, 78, 81 Baron Cohen, Sacha  212 Barthes, Roland  18, 104, 229 ‘Bathing Beauty Queen’ contest (1945)  221–2, 224 Bathing costume / swimsuit  ‘Battle of Versailles’ (1973)  20–1 Baudrillard, Jean  176, 178, 184, 186, 206, 209, 216, 217 Bazaar  20 b consultants Beard, Alice  9, 176 Beaton, Cecil  20 beauty pageant shows  10–11, 176, 220–32 Becker, Howard  130 Beckman, Stefan  23, 109 ‘becoming’  71, 73, 75–7, 79–81 Belfast Fashion Week  119 Belle Époque  18 Benjamin, Walter  52, 117, 124, 184 Bergdorf Goodman  4, 20 Bernstein, B.  208 Bertelli, Patrizio  147, 149, 154 Bethune, Kate  75, 79 Biba  20 ‘Bikini Contest’ (1951)  228 Bing, Siegfried  18, 19 Biological Manipulation  Bishop, Claire  158 Björn Borg  115 Black, Paula  222 Black Rider, The (1990)  163 Blade Runner (1982)  67 Blaisse, Petra  108 Blanks, Tim  32, 34 Bleeker, Maaike  92

Bloch, Ernst  60 body  2, 14, 21, 25, 50, 66, 100, 110, 163, 176, 200 and fabric  47, 74, 75, 77–81, 106 (see also clothes; clothing) and identity  48 vs. machine parts  47 male  39, 165 posthuman  72–4, 77–8, 80, 81 relationship with environment and technology  50, 52, 53, 55, 74, 80, 83, 85 transformation  77, 81 women  67, 80, 229 Böhme, Gernot  99, 100, 108, 110 Bolton, Andrew  18 Borch, Christian  99 Bourdieu, Pierre  147, 193–5 Bourdin, Guy  101 Bowie, David  39 Braidotti, Rosi  63, 71, 74, 75 branding  115, 126, 134, 182 city  126 process  121, 124 strategies  118 theory  127 brands and designers  22, 85, 116, 117, 121, 124, 130, 134, 140. See also luxury brands brand-squatting  119, 123–4 Breuer, Marcel  149 Breward, Christopher  18, 101 British Fashion Council  118, 119 Browne, Thom  4, 14 boutiques and in-shop shops  31, 41 creation of uniform  32–3 fall 2016 show  35–7 fall 2018 show  34 love of sports and sportswear  34–5, 39 spring 2018 show  38–9 spring 2019 show  39–40 tailoring and design strategies  32 Brown’s  45 Bruno, Giuliana  153 Bruzzi, Stella  101, 208 Bryant Park  196 Buckley, Cheryl  102, 226–7, 232 Bulley, Bianca  14 Bulley, Kiara  14 Burberry  23

INDEX

Burke, Edmund  100 Burnett Carol Burroughs, William S.  163 Burrows, Stephen  20 Butler, Judith  34, 38, 39 Butlin, Billy  225 Butlin’s Holiday Camp  11, 220, 221, 224–8, 231 Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CAIAF)  24 Cameron, James  67 camp  14, 31–3, 39–40 Cao Bao Jie  22 capitalism  16, 19, 35, 37, 63, 67, 68, 115, 184, 185, 214 Carrousel du Louvre  22 catwalk  4, 15, 17, 39, 58, 59, 73, 80, 105, 118, 130, 132, 171, 176, 183–5, 188 linear  21, 157, 158, 159 open  61 sealed/closed  60, 61 weird and eerie  64–5 Celant, Germano  170 Centrestage  136 Chalayan, Hussein  4, 14, 22, 24, 44, 105, 183, 184 After Words collection (2000)  5, 22, 48, 184 before minus now collection  47 Chair Dresses  47 clothing as architectural structures  46–8, 50 Dwell Neck dress  53 Echoform collection  47 furniture  50 Geotrophics collection  47 material maestro and technological innovation  53–5 One Hundred and Eleven  54 Remote Control Dress  50–3 The Tangent Flows  45 Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture  22 Champs Elysées  108 Chanel  3, 9, 17, 22, 23, 30, 141, 176, 216 autumn/winter 2008/09 show  177 Couture autumn/winter 2016/17  9, 177, 179, 180, 186, 188 Cruise collection 2016/17  3, 9, 177, 180, 181, 188 labour and commodity  185–7 Métiers d’Art  179, 180, 186, 187 petites mains  177–9, 186–8

237

shows at Grand Palais  3, 9, 177–9, 188, 202 n.3 spectacular shows  182–5 Chanel, Coco  178, 180 China  22–3, 134, 135 Chocolate Rain  140 choreography  166, 171, 173, 215, 231, 232 Church-Gibson, Pamela  101, 208 cinema/television/theatre  16–17, 67, 101 Ally McBeal (tv series 1997-2002)  207 Batman (tv series)  209 Brüno (fim, 2009)  212 Come Dancing (tv show)  228 Desperate Housewives (tv series 20042010)  10, 176, 205–11, 213, 215–17 dramas  9, 207 Fleurette’s Dream at Peronne (play, 1917)  210 history  217 Irene (film,1926)  212–13 Irene (film,1940)  214 Irene (musical comedy, 1919)  210, 214 Melbourne Cup (1896)  214 Real Housewives (tv series 2010)  205, 216, 217 Sex and the City (tv series 1998-2004)  156, 205, 207–9, 212 Stepford Wives, The (1975)  214 Clark, J.  89 clothes  2, 18, 41, 171, 214 Aeroplane  47, 53 bodiless  90–2, 95 Dwell Neck  53, 54 eastern  18 furniture  22, 48 industrial materials as  51, 53–5 Kite  47 laser LED  46 leather  47 ‘lived’ experience of  84, 88, 90, 91, 94 mechanical  55 with natural elements  75–7 types  18 wireless systems for  51, 52 clothing  40, 41, 46, 48 and architectural space  24, 86 folding structures of  78 moving image  16–18 second-hand  119, 123, 127 Western  19

238INDEX

Colman, David  31 Colomina, Beatriz  19 command bunker  115 Comme des Garçons  30, 163 commodity/commodification  7, 11, 77, 80, 117, 132, 178, 185–7 composite technology  50 ‘Conserving Central’  139 Contemporary art contemporary indigenous fashion  24–5 Corriere della Sera  166, 168 Cortes, Joaquín  163 costumes  167, 168, 222, 224. See also clothes; clothing Council for Fashion Designers of America  3, 196 Courrèges, André  101 1964 spring collection  20, 103, 104 Couture Future (1967)  104 ‘Cover Girls’ shows  20 Craik, Jennifer  7, 23, 24, 98, 222 creative cities  120, 126 Crewe, Louise  24 ‘Crime and Ornament’ (Loos)  36 Cuba  177, 178, 180–2, 187, 188 culture alchemy of appropriation  121–3 economy  116, 125, 126, 127 intermediaries  117, 123, 124, 133, 135, 141, 195 Cunningham, Merce  158 cyborg  4, 67–8 Cyborg Manifesto, The (Haraway)  67 Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Bloch)  60 David, Eric  63 da Vinci, Leonardo  64 Davis, Johnny  33, 40 Dawson, Rosario  201 Dazed and Confused (magazine)  68, 73 Deafman Glance (1971)  165 de Belair, Tanguy  186 Debord, Guy  177, 178, 184–7, 229, 230 ‘The Decay of Lying’ (Wilde)  36 deconstruction/deconstructivism  3, 7, 21, 106, 213 De La Haye, A.  89 DeLanda, Manuel  74 Deleuze, Gilles  71, 75–8, 81

Delirious New York (Koolhaas)  147 del Rio, Idania  187 Derrida, Jacques  21 Dia:Beacon  8, 149 Diamond, Elin  33 digital media  1, 2, 9, 24, 176, 184, 192, 193 Dimant, Elyssa  101, 102, 104 Dior  20, 23, 119, 120 Diorient Express (1998)  119, 183 Dizon Inc.  199 Dolce and Gabbana  3, 68 Dolphijn, R.  74 domesticity  14, 20, 22, 182 Donna del mare (The Lady from the Sea, 1998)  8, 167–9 Dorn, Marion  221 Dotrice, Roy  67 Douchez, Fiona Duchamp, Marcel  117, 123 Duff Gordon, Lucile  17, 162, 210–11, 216 Duggan, G. G.  123, 162, 178, 183, 184 Eco, Umberto  123 Einstein on the Beach (1976)  165 Eliasson, Olafur  99, 100, 108–10 Eliminators, The (1986)  67 embodied knowledge  73 Encounters (Pallasmaa and MacKeith)  100 Entwistle, Joanne  3, 90, 91, 117, 124, 193–5 Erwiah, Abrima  201 Escobedo, Frida  23 Evans, Caroline  4, 16, 101, 117, 124, 184, 229 experiments/experimentation  72, 80, 99, 102–4, 142, 157, 183 Eyesight  199 the Factory  125 Falke  46 fandom and fan culture  68, 205, 208 fantasy Farhi, Nicole  45 fashion American  196 architecture and  19, 23–4, 30, 44, 46–8, 50–3, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92, 98, 101, 147, 148 and arts  60, 101, 105, 110, 130, 147, 148, 151 Australian-made  215

INDEX

blogging  24, 138, 192 capital  3, 37, 45, 98, 118, 126, 134, 135, 195, 202 n.2 Chinese  23, 199 city  98, 132, 134, 136 design  21, 123, 132 display/presentations  15–23, 31, 36, 41, 59–60, 83–6, 88, 91, 100, 106, 126, 140–2, 196, 216 education  136 films  17, 176 homosocial performance  32–5 industry  1, 21, 22, 38, 44, 59, 71, 72, 80, 84, 115, 116, 121, 123, 124, 127, 134, 188 installation  58–61, 83–7, 89–92, 94, 95, 105 and interior design  19, 30, 31, 34, 40, 48, 146, 186 at international exhibitions  137, 193 introducing materials to  53–5 Italian  165, 166, 168, 172 journalism  126, 208, 209 and literature  118 mediatization of  9, 192, 193, 201, 202, 203 n.4 modern  185, 186 neighbourhoods  7, 130, 137, 138, 149, 151 parades  85, 210, 211, 214, 215, 220 photography  21 posthuman  71–7, 81 promotion  132, 134–6, 138, 142, 178, 220 PVC in  104 queers in  31, 33 retail  85, 103, 105, 132, 136–8 spaces  30, 84–5 (see also spaces) system  20, 131–3, 186 and technology  73 television programmes  192 theatre and  163, 173 weeks  2, 133–4, 142, 192, 194, 202 Western  18, 19, 23 ‘Fashion 4 Everyone’  142 Fashion and Art (Geczy and Karaminas)  105 fashion chamber  68 of horrors  61, 63–6, 69 sealed/closed installation  59–60 ‘Fashion@Everywhere’  142 Fashion Farm Foundation (FFF)  136, 141 Fashion Guerrilla  136

239

Fashion Installation (2019)  59 ‘Fashion Month PMQ’  142 Fashion of Architecture, The (Quinn)  116 fashion shows  1, 7, 41, 116–18, 138. See also spectacle contemporary  2, 84–6, 98, 100, 101, 105, 108, 118, 133, 142, 193, 215 content on social media  192, 201 guerrilla  119, 123–4 live-streaming  1, 9, 133, 142, 192, 196–9 in live theatre  17, 48, 61, 165–9, 194, 206, 209, 215 in mediated entertainment  206–16 in narrative film  17, 209, 212–14 open  60, 61 origin  133, 192 sealed  14, 60 shifting  20–5 traditional and indigenous peoples’  24–5 in urban settings  130–2 Fashions of 1934 (1934)  17 Fashion System, The (Barthes)  18 Fashion Theory  162 FashMobile  142 Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill, Kill (1965)  61 Federation of Industries  135 Fellini, Federico  17 femininity/feminism  10, 11, 38, 72, 167–9, 172, 207, 216, 220, 222, 224, 231, 232 Ferrero-Regis, Tiziana  9, 176 Field, Sally  17 Fiera (Milano)  22 Finamore, M. Tolini  17 First World War  89, 92, 94 Fischer, Mark  60, 64, 65 Flavin, Dan  99, 100, 102–4, 106 flesh  52, 53, 78, 80, 85, 222 Fletcher, Kate  94 Flying Nun, The (1965)  17 Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, The (Deleuze)  77 Foley, Brenda  224 Fondazione Prada  8, 15, 23, 106–8, 120–1, 146–9 Ford, Galen  222, 224 Ford, Harrison  67 Ford, Tom  3, 23 Forestier, Jean-Claude Nicolas  180 Forti, Simone  103

240INDEX

Foster, Hal  158, 159 Foucault, Michel  14, 21, 41, 55, 66, 195 Francks, Penelope  19 Frankenstein (Shelley)  58, 64, 65, 67 Frankenstein, Victor  63–6 Franklin Villa  5, 86, 90, 92 ‘Free to be You and Me’ (Bowie)  39 French Vogue (magazine)  101 ‘Friday: Dress Hong Kong’  141 Funny Face (1957)  17 Fury, Alexander  39 Galasso, Michael  167, 170 Gallerie Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton  108 Galliano, John  45, 119, 162, 183 Garment Retailers of America  196 G.A. Story (1996)  8, 164–8, 172 Gautier, Jean-Paul  118 Gazette du Bon Ton (magazine)  17 Geczy, Adam  5, 14, 15, 66, 105 gender  33, 41, 168 dissolution  66–8 fluidity  31, 35, 38 norms  33–4, 59 secular reliquary  38–9 gentrification  125 Gere, Richard  163 Gerson  215 Gesamtkunstwerk  127, 169, 172 Gibo  45 Gill, Eric  221 Gindt, Dirk  98 Giorgio Armani’s Retrospective (exhibition, 2000)  8, 169–73 Givenchy  1, 68, 163, 197 Givhan, Robin  168 Glamorous Grandmother  220, 221, 224–8 glamour  20, 220, 221, 227, 228, 232 Glass, Philip  163 Global Fashion Capitals (exhibition, 2015)  202 n.2 Gone with the Wind (1939)  227 Gottdiener, M.  125 Granny Takes a Trip  20 Grant, Duncan  221 Great Exhibitions  59 Great Expositions  19 Gropius, Walter  101 Grosz, Elizabeth  80

Guattari, Félix  75–7, 81 Gucci  23 Cyborg (autumn/winter 2018/2019 show)  5, 58, 59, 61, 63, 66–8 fall/winter 2018 collection  59 Guggenheim Museum  8, 169 Gunew, Sneja  63 Guo Pei  22, 23 Hadid, Zaha  23 Halliday, Rebecca  9, 10, 176 Halston, Roy  20 Hamilton, Linda  67 Hamletmachine (1986)  163 Hamnett, Katharine  21 handmade dress  92, 225, 227 Haraway, Donna  66–8 Harlow, Shalom  68 Harper’s Bazaar (magazine)  20, 103 Harrods  31 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)  54 Harvie, Jen  86 Hatcher, Teri  211 Haye, Amy de la  215 Heidegger, Martin  100 Heizer, Michael  100, 108 Helmut Lang  146 Heterotopia  21 Hickey, Anna  14 Hill, Oliver  221 H&M  116, 121–2, 124, 127 Hoffman Hall  200, 201 Hoffmann, M.  184 Hogben, Ruth  79 Holiday Pay Act (1938)  224 Holler, Carsten  148 Hollywood Studio  17 Holmes, Oliver Wendell  184–5 Hong Kong  7, 98, 130, 132, 134–8, 140, 141, 142 Hong Kong Design Institute (HKDI)  136–7 Hong Kong Fashion Week  7, 135, 136, 142 Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC)  134, 136 Hope, Bob  230 Horton, Kath  24 House of Lucile  211

INDEX

241

House of the Future  102 Howells, Michael  183 Hudson Yards  202 human corporeality  73, 74–6, 80, 84, 85, 88, 163 humanism  64–6 Huret, Calixte Adelaide  216 hybridity/hybrid  6, 24, 55, 63, 64, 67, 75–80, 134, 139, 164 Hyde, Eileen  226

Kering  22 Knight, Nick  73, 79 Knowles, Christopher  163 Koda, Harold  18, 72, 170, 172 Kondo, Doreen  195 König, Anna  208, 209 Koolhaas, Rem  8, 23, 68, 98, 107, 108, 146–8, 151, 154–6, 158, 159 Kosuke Tsumura  45 Kular, Onkar  93

Ibsen, Henrik  167, 169, 172 immaterial condition  14, 24, 98, 99 Independent Group  102 indetermination  15, 21, 77 Industria  198, 199 Ingleton, Sally  22 Instagram  68, 141 Installation intensity  72, 75, 77–81, 100 International Exposition of Les Art Decoratifs (1925)  18 International Management Group (IMG)  196 International Theatre Festival  167 intimacy  4–6, 14, 19, 88, 89, 91, 106, 171 Issey Miyake  45, 119, 120 ‘it girl’ Lil Miquela  68 I Was Lord Kitchner’s Valet  20 i-Wear prototypes  51

Lady Gaga  79 Lagerfeld, Karl  9, 177, 178, 180, 181, 186, 187, 190 n.1 Lambert, Eleanor  196 Lane Crawford  136 Lanvin, Jeanne  18, 213 LANYU  199 Laparelli, Ippolito Pestellini  155, 158 La Repubblica  165, 168 Larroumet, Gustave  18–19 Laws textile company  136 Leach, Alec  201 Le Corbusier  4, 19, 37, 149 Lee, Grace Lillian  24–5 Lefebvre, Henri  124, 130, 131 Leitch, Luke  38, 39 Le Monde  165, 166 Les Arts Decoratifs  18 Les Champs Élysées  16 Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, The (2011)  163 liminality  72, 75, 206, 221 Lindquist, Marissa  6, 98 Ling, W.  22 L’Institut Français de la Mode  120 Liverpool Civic week (1925)  16 Löfgren, O.  121 London  20, 21, 37, 118, 120, 134 London Fashion Week (LFW)  2, 23, 118, 193, 194, 196 Longoria, Eva  210 Loos, Adolf  4, 19, 36, 37 Loschek, Ingrid  83–5, 88, 90, 94 Loss of Senses (2005) Louis Vuitton  108 Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey (LVMH)  22, 23, 183

Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims (1992)  22 Jacobs, Marc  23, 109, 163 James, Charles  20 Jameson, Frederic  68 Jammal, Razane  180 Jana Jaral (2016)  25 Jansson, A.  194 Jil Sander  146 Jimenez, Margarita  230 J. Lindeberg  117 Johnson, Grant Klarich  8, 98, 105, 110 Joyce Group  136 Judd, Donald  102 Judson Dance theatre  103 Karaminas, Vicki  5, 14, 15, 105 Keith, B. F.  210

242INDEX

luminance L’Uomo Vogue (magazine)  163 luxury brands  2, 3, 23, 25, 85, 176, 187 McKinney, J.  89, 92 McLaren, Malcolm  21 McQueen, Alexander  4, 14, 22, 162, 183 Dante (autumn/winter 1996)  118 fall/winter collection  68 matter, body and fashion  74–5 Nihilism (spring/summer collection 1994)  118 No.13 (spring/summer 1999 show)  4 Plato’s Atlantis (spring/summer 2010)  5, 72, 79–80 posthuman bodies  72–4, 77–8 posthuman fashion and metamorphosis in Voss (spring/summer 2001)  75–7 Savage Beauty (2012)  5, 71 The Widows of Culloden (autumn/winter 2006)  72 Voss McRobbie, Angela  209 MADE Fashion Week  196, 197 Made in Italy  165 ‘Mademoiselle Privé’ (exhibition, 2018)  141 Madison Avenue flagship store  197 Magritte, René  35 Maison de L’Art Nouveau  19, 20 make-up  59, 172, 221, 224, 232 Mallis, Fern  196 ‘mannequin parade’  16, 192 Manoogian, Peter  67 Mao’s new suit (1997)  22 Marc, Jacobs  6, 7, 99, 105, 106, 108, 110, 150 autumn/winter 2013 show  109 Margiela, Martin  16, 22, 45, 118–20, 123, 124, 127, 162, 184 Marie Antoinette  16 Marty, Andre-Edouard  18 Mary Quant My Autobiography (Quant)  103 Masao Nihei  106 Mason, Rocky  225 mass markets  19, 21, 22, 93 materiality  7, 71, 74, 77, 80, 101, 102, 105, 106, 110, 125, 131, 138, 150, 182, 184 ‘The Maze’ (Motion)  38 Meiji laws  19 memory  5, 6, 8, 65, 85, 87, 91, 92, 94, 95, 140, 183

men fashion  14, 31, 32, 37 suits/wear  31, 32, 36–7, 39, 46 Mendes, Valerie  215 Menkes, Suzy  1, 183 Mercedes-Benz  196 Metamorphoses  Metropolis and Mental Life, The (Simmel)  18 Metropolitan Museum of Art  71 Meyer, James  102, 103 Michele, Alessandro  58, 63, 64, 66–8 Milan Fashion Week  58, 68 MILK Studios  197 Mille et deux nuits (One thousand and two nights, 1911)  30 minimalism  101–3, 104, 110, 159, 167 Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (Meyer)  102 Miss Great Britain  10, 11, 220–2, 224, 229, 231 Miss Holiday Princess (1946)  225 Miss She  10, 11, 220, 221, 224–8 Miss World  10, 11, 220, 221, 228–32 Miu-Miu  146 Miyake, Issey  118 Mobile Contemporary Art Container (2008)  23 models  162, 200–1, 215. See also body McQueen’s misogyny  73 Michele’s  64 uniformly clad  34 modernism/modernity  16, 18, 19, 37, 41, 60, 101, 142, 149, 180, 182, 184, 231 ‘Mods’  102, 104 molecularity  77 ‘Moller House’  19 Mommaas, H.  126 Moncler Gamme Rouge  15 Moore, Colleen  20 Morecambe  10–11, 221–2, 224 Morey, Eric  228 morphogenesis Morris, Robert  99, 102, 103, 159 Moschino, Franco  21 Motion, David  38 Moving Picture World, The (magazine)  17 Müller, Heiner  163 Mullins, Aimee  4, 73, 183 multi-layered garments  78, 228

INDEX

multi-sensuality  72 Mulvey, Laura  229, 231 Murphy, Alex  67 music Musketeers Education and Culture Charitable Foundation Limited  139 Myzelev, A.  2 Nam Fung Group  136 Napoleone, Raffaello  166 National Magazine Company  220, 225 Nelbarden  222 ‘Neptune’s Daughter’  79 ‘New Economy’  121 New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (van der Tuin and Dolphijn)  74 New York  20, 37, 118–20, 125, 134 New York Fashion Week (NYFW)  3, 9, 109, 118, 120, 125, 176, 192 Fall/Winter 2016  193 Fall/Winter 2018  196 Fall/Winter 2019  193, 198 mediatized  193–7, 201, 202, 203 n.4 studio spaces  197–201 Nickel Titanium Naval Ordinance Laboratory (Nitinol)  55 nonhuman forms  73, 74, 79, 80, 81 non-spaces concept  130–2, 138, 142 Nordiska Kompaniet  168 North East South West (1967/2002)  108 Notebook on Cities and Clothes (2003)  106 ‘Notes on Camp’ (Sontag)  39 Oakley Smith, M., A.  105 Observer  155 O’Connor, Erin  73 Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)  3, 23, 98, 107, 108, 146–56 O’Hara, Scarlet  227 Olympus  196 ontology  59, 71, 72, 152 Order of Things, The (Foucault)  66 Orientalism  18 Orlando (1992)  38 Ozbek, Rifat  45 Palais des Études of the École des Beaux Arts  34, 38, 40, 41

243

Pallasmaa, Juhani  99, 100 Palmer, S.  89, 92 Papastergiadis, Nikos  121 Paprocki and Brzozowski  120 Paquin, Jeanne  216 Paramount Films  61 Paris  37, 40, 46, 119, 120, 134 Paris Fashion Week  120, 178 Paseo del Prado  180–1 Pathé  215 pavilions  16, 23, 216 Pavlosky, Bruno  180–2, 187 Pedroni, M.  24 Peers, Juliette  9, 10, 176 Peirson-Smith, Anne  7, 98 Peiss, Kathy  224 Pels, Peter  88 performance art  72, 123, 130, 162 petites mains phenomena  6, 7, 75, 77, 78, 100, 101, 103, 106, 108, 110, 194, 214 Phuong Muy  199 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde)  37 Pinault S.A.  183 Pitti Immagine Uomo  164–6 Places and Spaces of Fashion, The (Potvin)  2 Plunket Green, Alexander  103 Poetics of Space, The (Bachelard)  87 Poiret, Paul  17, 18, 30, 162, 213 Police Married Quarters (PMQ)  7, 138–42 popular culture  102, 115, 173, 205, 207, 211, 216 Porter, Sally  38 posthumanism  14, 63, 66–8, 80 post-industrial heritage  7, 98, 121, 126, 130, 132, 136, 138–40, 142 postmodernism  68, 74 Potvin, John  2, 4, 14, 98, 221, 226, 227 Prada  3, 6, 7, 23, 24, 30, 68, 98, 99, 105, 106–8, 110, 146 art of  147–8 collaboration with OMA  150–9 constancy and change  148–50 distillery into Fondazione Prada  148–9 Epicenter  147, 151, 153, 156 Indefinite (2016 spring/summer)  107, 108 Men’s and Women’s Fall 2013 show  153 Men’s and Women’s Fall 2010 collections  151, 157

244INDEX

Men’s Spring 2008 collection  151, 157 Men’s Spring 2012 collection  157 Outdoor/Indoor/Outdoor (2015 spring/ summer)  107–8 Women’s Spring 2010 show  151–2 Prada, Miuccia  146–9, 154, 155, 159 ‘Prada and the Art of Patronage’ (Ryan)  147 Prada Transformer Pavilion (2009)  23 pragmatic reuse value  119, 121 Press Week (1943)  196 Primary Structures (exhibition, 1966)  102–3, 106, 108 Primary Structures: Younger American and British Artists (1966)  102 productive atmospheres  7, 100–1, 105, 106, 110 prosthetics  73, 80, 183 protests  2, 21, 136, 177, 229–32 Puma  46 punk culture  21 Quant, Mary  20, 103–4 Quant by Quant (Quant)  103 Queenslander house 86, 88, 90, 94, 95 queer theory  31 Quinn, Bradley  4, 14, 23–4, 116, 119, 124 raumplan  19 Ravilious, Eric  221 readymades  1, 7, 10, 21, 98, 117, 121, 123–5, 127, 133, 134 Ready-to-Wear Festival (1968)  135 reality television show  181 receptive materials Rei Kawakubo  21, 45, 105 relationality  72–4, 78 Re-set (2012)  108 reuse value  116 aesthetic  119, 121–3, 125, 126 ideological  119, 121, 123–4 Richter, Gerhard  60 Robertson, T.  93 Robinson, Jo  230, 231 RoboCop (1987)  67 robotics  68 Rocamora, A.  9, 24, 126, 192, 194, 195 Roksanda Spring 2019 show  23 Roma (1972)  17

Rotor  3, 149 Royal Albert Hall  10–11, 220, 221, 228–32 Royal Dramatic Theatre  168 Rue Cambon  177, 179, 188 runway shows  18, 20, 21, 22, 31–7, 41, 85, 115–18, 123, 124, 125–7, 166, 176, 217 Russell, Gillian  93 Ryan, Nicky  147, 148 S, M, L, XL (Koolhaas)  147 Sadler’s Wells theatre  48 Saint Laurent, Yves  101 Sally Lapointe  199 Sanda, Dominique  167, 168 Sandberg, Anna  122 Savile Row  37 scaffolding  106 scenography  83–5, 87–9, 92, 94, 100, 117 Schumpeter, J. A.  121 Schwarzenegger, Arnold  67 Scott, Ridley  67 Second World War  17, 134, 139, 196 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  35 Seely, Stephen  79 Segre-Reinach, S.  22–3 sensation  20, 71, 77, 81, 99, 103, 106 sensory experiences sensuality  14, 20, 37, 51, 72 Serpentine Pavilion set design SEX  21 Sex and the City  sexuality  31, 32, 34, 37, 39, 41 Sham Shui Po  137 SHE (magazine)  225 ‘The Shed’  201 Shelley, Mary  58, 64, 65, 67 Sheridan, Nicollette  208, 211 Sherman, Cindy  162 Shevtsova, Maria  167 Silverman, Debora  18 Simmel, Georg  18, 19 Simons, Raf  119, 120 Simonsen, J.  93 simulacra  3, 9, 10, 65, 176, 206, 209, 217 Situationist movement  124

INDEX

Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture (Hodge et al)  23 Skov, L., E.  187 Skylight Clarkson Square  197 Skylight Moynihan Station  197 Smith, Marquard  73 Smithson, Alison  102 Smithson, Peter  102 Smithson, Robert  102 social media  126, 194, 195, 198, 199 Société Française des urbanistes  180 Sonnets (2009)  163 Sontag, Susan  39, 167, 168, 169 Sozzani, Franca  104 spaces  2, 59, 99, 100, 103, 163, 171, 172, 194, 195 and body  33 of city  101 and clothing  83, 86 Cuba’s public  180 design  95, 136 domestic  85–8, 90 heterotopic  41 homosocial  35 and identity  48 modern  16–19 of operating theatre  58, 61, 63, 67 other  21 post-industrial  116, 119, 120, 123, 125, 126, 148 readymade/found  117, 121, 123–5, 127 urban  16, 101, 119, 131–2, 134 spectacle  16, 177, 178, 182–5, 187, 188 Spinoza, B.  75 Spring Studios complex  197–9 Stafford, Barbara stage set design  14, 16, 17, 25, 100, 109, 110, 155, 198, 216, 225, 229, 232 Stallybrass, Peter  91 Stark, G.  178 Starlab  51 State Library of Queensland Gallery  89 Stazione Leopolda  8, 164, 165, 167, 168 Steele, Valerie  68, 101 Stępień, Justyna  14 Stitchery Collective  5, 14, 83–4 Collective Collection (2014)  83, 84, 86–8, 90, 92, 94, 95

245

creative practice  84 experiencing bodiless clothes  90–2 fashion spaces  84–5 From Home, With Love (2015)  5, 83, 84, 88–90, 94, 95 participation in design and fashion  93–4 Stockholm Fashion Week (SFW)  115, 117 street style  20, 183, 192, 203 n.6 Strömberg, Per  7, 98 Studio One Eighty Nine  201 style moderne  19 sublime  1, 7, 8, 23, 99, 100, 121, 155, 156, 159 Sudjic, Deya  155 Sunday Dispatch  222 Super Swimming Stadium  220–2, 224 Swarovski  46 Swedish Fashion Council  2 swimsuit/bathing costume  222, 224, 229 Swinging London  104 Swinging Sixties: Fashion in London and Beyond 1955-1970 (Breward, Gilbert and Lister)  101 Swinton, Tilda  38 Swyngedouw, E.  184 System of Objects, The (Baudrillard)  178 Takada, Kenzo  20 Tam, Vivienne  136 Tang, David  136 Tate Exhibition (1971)  103 Tate Gallery  102 Tate Modern  8, 109, 149 Taylor, Madeline  14 Taylor, Mark  9, 10, 176 Taylor, Melissa  124 Team 10  102 Teatro Comunale di Ferrara  167 technological innovation  47, 51, 53–5 Teller, Juergen  163 temporary space  3, 23, 134, 149, 156 Terminator, The (1984)  67 Thacker, Eugene  64 Theatre de la Mode (1945)  133 theatricality  22, 105, 178, 188, 192 Theory, Culture and Society  67 This Is Tomorrow (exhibition, 1956)  102 Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (Winckelmann)  32

246INDEX

Thousand and Second Night, The  18 Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A (Deleuze and Guattari)  76 threshold  65, 75, 76, 81, 106 Thurman, Judith  146 Tisci, Riccardo  197 Todorov, Tzvetan  65 Trade Development Council (TDC)  135–7 Transformer Pavilion (2009)  24 Truitt, Anne  102 Tschumi, Bernard  21 Tsui, C.  135 Turbine Hall  103 Turrell, James  99 Uhlirova, M.  17 United States  102, 196 University of Applied Arts  46 unusual show spaces in contemporary setting  118–19 typology  119–21 urbanism  115, 125–7 urban landscape 24,52, 101, 132, 201 van der Tuin, I.  74 van de Velde, Henri  19 van Schaik, Leon  23 Vartanian, Karo  207 Velody, Rachel  208 Verhoeven, Paul  67 Veronica Beard  200, 201 Versailles restoration  20 Vibskov, Henrik  105 Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A)  104, 106 Viktor & Rolf  105, 162, 184 Villa Savoye (1929)  19 Vinken, Barbara  83, 93, 186 Vionnet  46 Vionnet, Madeleine  18 virtual reality  59 visual studies  148 Vitruvian Man (da Vinci)  64 von Furstenberg, Diane  20

Wainwright, Rufus  163 Waits, Tom  163 Walsh, Thomas  208 Ward, Susan  222 Warhol, Andy  125 Warsaw Fashion Week  120 Warsaw Soho Factory  120 Watermill Foundation  163 Waters, Evelyn  227 Weather Project (2003)  109, 110 Wenders, Wim  106 Westwood, Vivienne  21, 118 What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari)  77 When We Dead Awaken (1991)  167 Whitechapel Gallery  102 White Salon  104 Wilcox, Claire  79 Wilde, Oscar  35–7 William Morris Endeavour  196 Willim, R.  121, 123 Wilson, Elizabeth  85, 91, 92, 171, 227 Wilson, Robert  8, 98, 163–8, 169–72, 173 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim  32, 42 Winter, Sarah  14, 88 Wissenger, Elizabeth  11, 224 WME-IMG  192, 196 Women, The (1939)  17 Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM)  229–30 World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer)  65 Worth, Charles Frederick  1, 58, 186, 192, 216 Wunderkammer tradition  216 Yankees  61 Yohji Yamamoto  6, 7, 15, 21, 24, 99, 105–6, 110 1996 autumn/winter show  106 Yohji Yamamoto (exhibition, 2011)  106 Yoox  46 Your Loss of Senses (2005)  108 Zimmermann, Raquel  79 Zumthor, Peter  100



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