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Extravagances: Habits of Being 4
This final volume in the four-volume series Habits of Being shows how the dialectic between everyday appearance and outrageous acts is mediated through clothing and accessories. It considers how clothing and accessories can move quickly from the ordinary to the extravagant. Employing many different approaches, these essays explore how wearing an object—a crown, a flower, an earring, a corsage, a veil, even a length of material—can stray beyond the bounds of the body on which it is placed into the discrepant territory of flagrantly excessive public signs of love, status, honor, prestige, power, desire, and display. The varied contributions of scholars (historians, ethnographers, literary and film critics) and artists (photographers, sculptors, writers, weavers, and embroiderers) take up the threads of these forays into history, psyche, and aesthetics in surprising and useful ways. With examples from around the world, contributors address how the simple action of ornamenting the body, even with something as common as a button, are open to elaborate interpretations—which themselves offer new understandings of human behavior and artistic endeavor. When our “habits of being” receive close scrutiny, they seem anything but habitual. Mariapia Bobbiobi; Camilla Cattarulla, U of Rome Three; Paola Colaiacomo, Sapienza, U of Rome; Maria Damon, Pratt Institute of Art; Joanne B. Eicher, U of Minnesota; Maria Giulia Fabi, U of Ferrara; Margherita di Fazio; Adeena Karasick, Fordham U; Tarrah Krajnak, Pitzer College; Charlotte Nekola, William Paterson U; Victoria R. Pass, Maryland Institute College of Art; Amanda Salvioni, U of Macerata; Maria Anita Stefanelli, U of Rome Three.
328 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 2015
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January 6, 2021
Clothing as a semiotic system. This is the purpose of the four volumes under consideration, with far more material than I will be able to touch on in these brief reviews. I will however point the way into this vast landscape of signifiers. Clothing as a semiotic system; clothes as language. In other words, the clothes say more than the mouth. How a person dresses tells us more about that person than the words or gestures which they might perform for our benefit.
We can begin with some remarks from Mariapia Bobbioni, an Italian psychoanalyst who practices in Milan.
Psychoanalysis gives great weight to the "inevitability of death." I don't think you need any special understanding of psychology to understand why this is important, though it often remains hidden under secular and sacred disguises. Clothing is another way in which we cover our fear or uncertainty about death. Wrapping everything up is a common human desire because we are incomplete beings, however you wish to cut it. Bobbioni is out of the box with the female body, something which has held my attention, more or less, for forty some odd years. Women are not accessible to others unless we first traverse the landscape of their clothing. The female body controls the desires of young males in a hyper media environment. It also controls women who do not have to guess about how they appear in public.
Displays of the female form are everywhere, in glossy magazines, on social media, and in shop windows. The tension between the 'ordinary woman' and the 'high end model' must be unbearable for some. The male gaze helps to define all this and keeps the wheels of desire and consumption turning.
Perhaps for those coming to discussions of fashion for the first time it may be appropriate to appropriate the terms of Saussure: langue and parole. The system of fashion is the system of a language. Each garment has a role to play in the entire system. When a woman or man dons an article of clothing, parole is announced. Some element of the total system has been selected. It is that element which captures our attention and controls our destiny for just one day.
We can begin with some remarks from Mariapia Bobbioni, an Italian psychoanalyst who practices in Milan.
Psychoanalysis gives great weight to the "inevitability of death." I don't think you need any special understanding of psychology to understand why this is important, though it often remains hidden under secular and sacred disguises. Clothing is another way in which we cover our fear or uncertainty about death. Wrapping everything up is a common human desire because we are incomplete beings, however you wish to cut it. Bobbioni is out of the box with the female body, something which has held my attention, more or less, for forty some odd years. Women are not accessible to others unless we first traverse the landscape of their clothing. The female body controls the desires of young males in a hyper media environment. It also controls women who do not have to guess about how they appear in public.
Displays of the female form are everywhere, in glossy magazines, on social media, and in shop windows. The tension between the 'ordinary woman' and the 'high end model' must be unbearable for some. The male gaze helps to define all this and keeps the wheels of desire and consumption turning.
Perhaps for those coming to discussions of fashion for the first time it may be appropriate to appropriate the terms of Saussure: langue and parole. The system of fashion is the system of a language. Each garment has a role to play in the entire system. When a woman or man dons an article of clothing, parole is announced. Some element of the total system has been selected. It is that element which captures our attention and controls our destiny for just one day.
Displaying 1 of 1 review