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Fashion
and Modernism 1.2
There was a bit of confusion regarding my last post about Bourdieu and artistic appreciation. Bourdieu often gets the best of me. Let me take this opportunity to clarify.
For those of you who missed the last post, I was trying to map Bourdieu's description of aesthetic judgement on to fashion design. Maybe this is just mental masturbation, but JF & SON is not just about fashion, it's also about masturbation.
For those of us unfamiliar with Bourdieu, he is neither a structuralist nor a subjectivist. In fact, Bourdieu made his name by rejecting these two dueling epistemes. I made the mistake in the last post of making Bourdieu sound like a die-hard marxist. Here's my chance to redeme myself.
In "Distinction," Pierre Bourdieu describes the process of encoding
and decoding that takes place in the appreciation of an art object.
For Bourdieu, aesthetics is a strategy, a cultural practice, that links objective social constraints with individual subjective experience. Aesthetic appreciation involves a complex
series of readings that draw from the spectator’s knowledge
of art and his/her ability to contextualize the art object in past
and present works. This experience is partly a consequence of class (Bourdieu links education to wealth) and partly a result of the engagement between the artist and the spectator:
The pure intention of the artist is that of a producer who aims
to be autonomous, that is, entirely the master of his product, who
tends to reject not only the ‘programmes’ imposed a
priori by scholars and scribes, but also— following the old
hierarchy of doing and saying—the interpretations superimposed
a posteriori on his work. The production of an ‘open work’,
intrinsically and deliberately polysemic, can thus be understood
as the final stage in the conquest of artistic autonomy by poets
and, following in their footsteps, by painters, who had long been
reliant on writers and their work of ‘showing’ and ‘illustrating’.
To assert the autonomy of production is to give primacy to that
of which the artist is master, i.e., form, manner, style, rather
than the ‘subject’, the external referent, which involves
subordination to functions even if only the most elementary one,
that of representing, signifying, saying something.
Bourdieu describes artistic intention, a subjective matter, as a condition of structuralist, or, in-terms of art, modernist goals. The artist's objective is to free his/her work
from interpretation, and in that process he/she creates an art that
is “open”—that asserts the autonomy of form and
material from subject or reference. Aesthetic appreciation is limited by the spectator's ability to contextualize this art "which ever increasingly contains reference to its own history [and] demands to be perceived historically; it asks to be referred not to an external referent, the represented or designated ‘reality’, but to the universe of past and present works of art." For Bourdieu, modernism is both the end-game of artistic intention, and a strategy taken upon by artists and spectators, which establishes a common measure of understanding. Modernism as a strategy, introduces the role of wealth, as wealth dictates a person's capacity to understand this art.
In
no other field are class differences in taste more exigent than
in the consumption of clothing. While money may determine the quality
and type of fashion a person can consume, ultimately the stores
that service working class customers and the stores that service upper class
shoppers offer very different aesthetic choices. And, I would argue,
that Bourdieu provides us with a clear understanding why.
The popularity of celebrity personalities like Gwen Stefani, Jennifer
Lopez, the Olsen twins, etc. amongst mass retailers like Macy’s,
K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Target, etc., reinforces Bourdieu’s position. The
popularity of these brands has little to do with the quality, material,
and construction of the garments; rather it is the subject—the
celebrity—that generates the appeal. Moreover, the designers
of these brands do not intend to distance the work from its author
or eliminate a priori assumption about the work. In fact, a priori
assumption is the necessary appeal behind the designs. A person
needs to appreciate the Jennifer Lopez identity and want to emulate
her before he/she can purchase J. Lo's design.
Amongst the designer brands, the case is different. Here construction
and materiality take precedence over external referent. Prada, Raf
Simons, Rick Owens, Anne Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela, Alber
Elbaz, Nicholas Ghesquire—these are all designers for whom
identity and subject take a back seat to form, manner, and style.
That is not to say that these designers never employ an external
referent, but that these designers
are known more for a silhouette, a material, a form, a style, than
an imitation of an individual or identity.
But things get tricky with this argument. It just so happens that
the majority of these “modernist” designers happen to
abide in Europe, where as the more non-modernist, or representational
designers (of high-end clothing) reside in the US. Take Marc Jacobs,
for example, who happens to be one of the most popular American
designers of the last 10 years. There is no Marc silhouette or material; instead,
he creates collections based around a pastiche of themes:
Belgian-deconstructionist vs. 70s disco glam vs. 90s sportswear,
etc. for his spring ’07 collection. Or take that other most-American designer, Ralph Lauren. No one has done a better job at defining a clear subject and identity for which customers may associate than Ralph. How do we explain this divide between American and European tastes. Obviously wealth does not dictate the divide.
-JCF, 25/12/07
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FASHION AND WARFARE 1.1
"War is the father of all and king of all." --Heraclitus,
Fifth century B.C.
There has always been a complicit, if not obvious, relationship
between warfare and design. Almost every design discipline originated
on the battlefield: before he was the "father of architecture,"
Vitrivius was a military engineer, and devoted two of his ten books
on architecture to military matters; the 16th century study of signs,
semiotics, which precipitated graphic design, referred to new methods
of military maneuver based on visual signaling.
Fashion design happens to be the one exception to this rule. No
doubt army's have always required the assistance of fashion designers
to design uniforms and armor, but fashion as an actual design discipline
emerged independently of the military complex. That fashion design
has existed on the margins of academia for so many years can partly
be explained by this fact. In the United States, the defense industry
is the largest financial contributor to the university school system.
In this way, the war machine not only produces but also legitimates
disciplines.
That being said, there is a major sea-change taking place in the
military, and fashion design is set to play a pivotal role. In the
past ten years, the US military has adopted a new theoretical and
practical approach to defense, named the Revolution in Military
Affairs (RMA). RMA posits that the large, cumbersome infantry system
of battle is obsolete, and that small, networked, and technologically
sophisticated military units are more affective at defending the
country against equally decentralized threats, like terrorists.
RMA's emphasis on lightness and speed means that the ideal soldier
must be an entirely self-sufficient unit that can operate autonomously
and without covering, while maintaining complete synchronicity with
his/her command base.
Apparel design has come to play a formative role in the creation
of this elite soldier, or what the military has named the "Future
Force Warrior." As one engineer at the army's textile development
center, NATICK, told me: "apparel design has become the new
architecture." The war machine's new found interest in fashion
has enormous consequences, not only for fashion design, but also
for the apparel industry: after the Bush administration increased
defense spending in 2004, the apparel industry had its first net
job gain since 1990.
What may historical precedents tell us about a future in which fashion design and warfare become conjoined? This relationship also raises important biopolitical questions as the military's interest in design moves closer to the dynamics and territory of the human body...
-JCF, 1/12/2007