Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists

by Agnès Rocamora (Editor), Anneke Smelik (Editor)

Learning how to think through fashion is both exciting and challenging, being dependent on one s ability to critically engage with an array of theories and concepts. This is the first book designed to accompany readers through the process of thinking through fashion. It aims to help them grasp both the relevance of social and cultural theory to fashion, dress, and material culture and, conversely, the relevance of those fields to social and cultural theory. It does so by offering a guide through the work of selected major thinkers, introducing their concepts and ideas. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and is devoted to a key thinker, capturing the significance of their thought to the understanding of the field of fashion, while also assessing the importance of this field for a critical engagement with these thinkers ideas. This is a guide and reference for students and scholars in the fields of fashion, dress and material culture, the creative industries, sociology, cultural history, design and cultural studies."

Genres: Fashion, Nonfiction, Art, Theory, Sociology, Anthologies

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2015

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a few days on holiday from work, I felt like reading some theory. Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists consists of seventeen short chapters, each summarising the contribution of a specific theorist to the study of fashion. Some (Marx, Freud) were very familiar, while three were new to me (Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, & Nicklas Luhmann). Despite being written in academic style, I found all the chapters pleasantly clear and readable as this is intended as an introductory text for students. It probably also helped that in most cases the theories were being applied to an area of study that the original theorist hardly commented on, if at all. The first thing I should mention is that the book does not use a consistent definition of fashion to distinguish it from wearing clothes. Some chapters consider fashion to have begun with mass production of clothes in the nineteenth century, while others refer to it in the Renaissance, etc. This isn't really a problem, although it creates occasional confusion.

While I found all the chapters interesting, my two favourites focused on Walter Benjamin and Pierre Bourdieu. The former reignited my desire to read The Arcades Project by discussing Benjamin's commentary on, 'the way in which fashion invests in historical references while simultaneously undermining them'. The Bourdieu chapter is fun as it applies his field theory to fashion blogging. (Note that this book was published in 2015; I miss fashion bloggers.) The Barthes chapter is useful for summarising elements of his book The Fashion System, while also containing the highest density of jargon, e.g. 'Taking up this hermeneutic challenge, we can see how the painting invites a series of polysemous responses or interpretations concerning its subject matter and style of representation and how these subtend the form and content of the YSL ad as well.'

I enjoyed being introduced to new theorists of relevance to fashion and finding familiar theories applied in new ways. There's a nice little critique of Baudrillard in chapter 13:

From a theoretical viewpoint, looser signifier-signified relationships may simply mean a fragmentation of society into smaller units of relevant frames of reference, with less rigid boundaries, rules, and membership requirements. It may also imply shorter and faster cycles of change of what a relevant reference group regards as the appropriate code, but does not necessarily indicate the abolition of a code. From an empirical viewpoint there is ample evidence, experimental and anecdotal, to suggest that signification in fashion is far more resilient than some post-modern thinkers would have us believe.

My experience of the chapter on Bruno Latour was coloured by a savage and utterly convincing critique of his actor-network theory in relation to the environment, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World by Andreas Malm. This theory is applied a bit more cautiously in the realm of fashion, rather than to justify absurdities about coal being an 'actant' (active participant) in climate change. Nonetheless, theorists should be wary of claiming that nature and culture are the same in this post-modern age. Doing so obscures understanding.

The chapters on Deleuze and Derrida were informative, while putting me off reading the theorists' own works. Judith Butler's chapter was good, but barely scratched the surface of gender and fashion. It's also notable that all sixteen other chapters covered male theorists and barely mentioned gender at all, despite its obvious importance to fashion. I suppose most of the big-name theorists of the 19th and 29th centuries were European white guys and this is an introduction to them specifically. Anyhow, I enjoyed Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists and it whetted my appetite for more fashion theorising.

[Majken Emilie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very good, very helpful book!

This book is an overview of the key theorists whos work relates to fashion.

There is 17 theorists and each chapter is about 20 pages long. The chapters are short and concise, and because of that perfect for anyone who wants to read more fashion theory but doesn't know where to start. This is perfect if you study fashion and are writing/going to write an essay or dissertation and you're not sure where to start. This is obviously a guide to the different theorists and not texts by the actual theorist themselves. Each chapter is written by different people who I assume are specialized in the subject/theorist

The theorists included are:
- Karl Marx - Fashion and Capitalism
- Signmund Freud - More then a Fetish: Fahion and Psychoanalysis
- Georg Simmel - The "Philosophical Monet"
- Walter Benjamin - Fashion, Modernity and the City Street
- Mikhail Bakhtin - Fashioning the Grotesque Body
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty - The Corporeal Experience of Fashion
- Roland Barthes - Semiology and the Rhetorical Codes of Fashion
- Erving Goffman - Social Science as Art of Cultural Observation
- Gilles Deleuze - Bodies-Without-Organs in the folds of fashion
- Michel Foucault - Fashioning the Body Politic
- Niklas Luhmann - Fashion between the Fashionable and Old-fashioned
- Jean Baudrillard - Post-modern Fashion and the End of Meaning
- Pierre Boudrieu - The Field of Fashion
- Jacques Derrida - Fashion under Erasure
- Bruno Latour - Actor-Network-Theory and Fashion
- Judith Butler - Fashion and Performativity

[Paul Ataua · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Thinking Through Fashion’ sets itself up as an introduction to the key theorists in Fashion, and it is really just that. Each part introduces some sociologist or philosopher and gives a fairly shallow sketch of what they have to say and how that relates to fashion. Given that the book covers 17 theorists in just over 300 pages, it means that, unless a brief glimpse is all you are looking for, you only get a simple and not very satisfying introduction . On the positive side, however, there is enough in each chapter to let you know whether you want to pursue a more in-depth study of that theorist, and in that lies the reason for the four stars.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"As fashion spreads, it gradually goes to its doom. [...] Fashion always occupies the dividing-line between the past and the future, and consequently conveys a stronger feeling of the present, at least while it is at its height, than most other phenomena." ~ George Simmel

[Katrina Sark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anthony Sullivan, “Karl Marx – Fashion and Capitalism,” pp.28-45

p.30 – In Hegel’s work Marx found the seeds of his own theory of history: “historical materialism.” Hegel had argued that the development of society and the ideas that shaped it, went through distinct stages. Any change from one type of society to another did not come about gradually, but through ruptures and antagonisms rooted in conflicting ideas about how people understood the world. Thus, for Hegel, progress could only come about if this contradiction in ideas was resolved by a move to a new revolutionary way of thinking, a synthesis which provided a more complete and higher level of understanding of the world.
However, Marx’s “historical materialism” saw social change as arising not from contradictions in the ideas in society, but in its material conditions of life and the way in which labour was organised. Marx argued that the conflict over ownership, control of production and it product was the central contradiction in capitalist society. It created distinct groups or, in his terms, classes, and resulted in a struggle between them for control of labour power.
For Marx, labour changes human nature itself because our active interaction with the material world through labour reshapes our consciousness.

p.34 – There was then a contradiction between the emergence and spread of a culture of fashion in the early capitalist period, and the exclusion of the majority of the working class from fashionable ready to wear until the second half of the twentieth century, when fashion genuinely became “fashion for all.” This was fundamentally an issue of the cost of new readymade garments. A typist who earned “about 66 pounds per annum in 1910” and had a budget for clothing of about “5 pounds per annum” could not afford to be fashionably dressed, only “respectably” so. Marx and Engels argue in The Manifesto that the potential productivity of the “forces of production” was limited or “fettered” by the class based social relations of capitalism, which created conditions of scarcity in what should have been an era of plenty.
Until the rise of trade unions at the end of the nineteenth century forced increases in pay in the developed countries, fashion was simply beyond most working-class people’s pockets. Fashion is here understood in Barthes’ sense of a rapid cycle of stylistic obsolescence where the rate of “replacement exceeds dilapidation” (Barthes 1998: 297-98).

p.35 – Marx argued that capitalism was a system based on the exploitation of workers by capitalists. Understanding how this exploitation works to extract what he called “surplus value” can help us to comprehend the contradictions between fashion production and consumption. More specifically, it can explain why fashion in the twenty-first century continues to heavily exploit the labour of the garment workers who produce the clothes most of us wear today. Such toil, little different to the horrific sweated conditions endured by garment workers in Marx’s day, persist because if fashion is to continue as a mass consumer phenomenon it must be made and sold cheaply.

p.36 – The question of why the production of fashion took such a cruel, inhuman form. In Capital, Volume One, Marx examines the textile industry, tailoring and other forms of garment manufacture, to bring home the realities of the exploitation of labour needed to produce fashion’s finery. Here, as elsewhere, he argued, that “alienation” meant labour produced what he called “marvels and beauty beyond necessity,” but always at the price of “deformity” and suffering for the worker.

p.37 – Similarly, Engels, whose father owned a textile mill in Manchester, had already documented the poverty and misery that arose from the production of all kinds of commodities in England’s industrial cities in the 1840s. Pointing to the “15,000 mostly young, women seamstresses” who worked, slept and ate in their workshop premises, labouring for 15 to 18 hour days, he wrote, “it is a curious fact that the production of precisely those articles which serve the personal adornment of the ladies of the bourgeoisie involves the saddest consequences for the health of the workers.”
Understandably, given these circumstances, Marx hoped that the invention of the “decisively revolutionary” sewing machine would transform the production of garments through the use of modern industrial methods. But Marx’s hopes were not fulfilled and the sewing machine intensified the exploitative pressure on garment workers rather than alleviating it. Understanding why this was so, and why no other major advances have been made in the technology used to make clothes in the CMT process, is the key to understanding fashion’s contradictory or ambivalent status.

p.41 – Commodity fetishism – In Capital, Volume One, Marx writes that “the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities.”
This argument – the core of Marx’s theory of “commodity fetishism” – captures the gap between fashion’s appearance as a visual feast, from catwalk to high street, and its essence or origins in, and continued existence through, productive labour. This separation of production, created capitalism. Capitalism is then a system based on producing commodities for sale at a profit on the market, exchanging “labour power” for cash wages, and that money in turn for commodities. It thus subsumes the social labour that goes into making fashion, while hiding its wider social and ecological costs to both people and planet. Moreover, for Marx, who above all argued that our creative “species being” meant we could change ourselves by changing the world, “commodity fetishism” threatens our sense of our wider power to make and remake history.
When the Italian political economist Galiani argued that “value is a relation between persons”, Marx added that it is “a relation concealed beneath a material shell.” Though mostly hidden from us by the fetishistic effects of branding, markets, distance and routine, occasionally the shell of the fashion commodity cracks.
Fundamentally, then, it is the combination of class exploitation and inter-firm competition within capitalism that accounts for the persistence of sweated labour in fashion manufacture, in both Marx’s day and our own.

Janice Miller, “Sigmund Freud – More Than a Fetish: Fashion ad Psychoanalysis” pp.46-62

p.54 – It was Laura Mulvey, who in 1975 used the Lacanian concept of the gaze to argue that looking possesses two functions in relation to cinema. First, it produces the pleasure when the individual on screen acts as an object of desire – is objectified – functioning as an image which invites us to immerse ourselves in the delights of looking. Second, it plays a fundamental role in identification and this the formation of identity, echoing the Lacanian mirror stage.
As early as 1972, John Berger was making connections between images and the position of women in wider culture and in doing so united the psychoanalytic concept of the gaze with the analysis of gender identities in culture. Berger recognized that across historical European paintings and into the contemporary advertising image of the time he was writing, there existed conventions of representation that objectified women by making them passive objects to be looked at. In such images, women are not shown to be living, breathing or thinking individuals. Nor are they shown to be a complex and diverse group. Instead, they are stereotyped. As we have already seen, the gaze has been argued to be a means of constituting identity and for Berger the core concern is that in terms of these representations and stereotypes women have historically wielded little of the representative power. Thus, how women are shown has been largely out of their hands and has come also to be how they are valued and how they understand their own value.

p.55 – Concepts of the gaze have been applied to fashion to critique the ways in which it represents the body in imagery and media of all kinds. Leslie Rabine charges fashion images with circulating limited and oppressive images of women, arguing that: “Associated with the eye of the camera in the domain of film, the gaze functions in the domain of fashion as s framing device of the photograph that invests it with desire and provides the erotic charge in which the image is bathed for the female spectator. Whatever the gender of the gaze in feminist photography or film, in the photography of the Anglo-American fashion magazine it is, with extraordinary exceptions, emphatically male and constitutes its object as heterosexual female. Outside that look, the woman of fashion would not exist” (1994:65).
Anneke Smelik (2009) is interested in how bodies on screen reflect and inform the fashionable and often difficult to attain idealized bodies against which the audience measures their own. Her work reminds us of the important point that the body itself is as subject to fashionable change as the clothing that covers it. For Smelik the contemporary gaze is more neutrally distributed across both genders but it is no less pervasive. As she argues, “the voyeuristic gaze has been internalized in impossible norms for a thin and yet strong and well-formed body” (2009: 183).

p.56 – Riviere saw femininity as a masquerade in this context, as a kind of camouflage which the woman uses to hide her masculine traits and to adhere instead to the feminine qualities that culture expects from a woman. this allows the woman to compensate or perhaps more accurately over-compensate for the fact that by adopting masculine traits she had symbolically “castrated” her male colleagues.

p.57 – The possibility that fashion might oppress women has been much debated, whether it is the concerns for physical health raised in relation to garments like the corset or others, that, as we have seen, focus instead on fashion images and use theories of the gaze to think about how such images might place limitations on the groups they also represent.

Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, “Walter Benjamin – Fashion, Modernity and the City Street” pp.81-96

p.83 – Drawing from the cup of Marxism, Benjamin is from the first deeply distrustful of fashion since it is the most persistent agent of capitalism’s “false consciousness.” The latter is the notion espoused by Marx and Engels that institutions of capitalism deceive and betray the proletariat, obfuscating means and ends with the overall effect of setting up false realities and thereby impeding the possibility of effective class struggle. Fashion is the semblance of the new, a room of mirrors in which history is played out as a specular game, for which Benjamin used the term “phantasmagoria.” With fashion, the bourgeoisie can play out its false consciousness, and seek consolation in novelty, to the exclusion of the real signs of utility, that is, the operations of truth. One could say that for Benjamin, the transformation of clothing to fashion enacts a violence on this kind of aesthetic utility since it debases beauty, attraction, allure and aura to base integers of arbitrary vanity, whose qualities are exploited since fashionable beauty must die to make way for what comes next.

p.84 – Thus fashion bears witness to the bad faith in capitalism’s claim to progress, in which advancements are only made for the sake of profit. Fashion is in collusion with capitalism in a way that art is not, because fashion and art occupy different modalities of presentation and reception. The differences are less in the objects of fashion and art, since both are aesthetic creations for which judgment is always subjective, but the places of exchange – social, economic, linguistic – that they occupy. Benjamin was able to show how fashion was one of the principal means by which modernity manifests itself, but also diagnoses its own forever changing identity, its Zeitgeist. Fashion is a crystal in which aesthetics, consumption, class, industry and personal identity all meet.

p.91 – Fashion is a composite of dead references brought to life by the commodity: “Fashion prescribed the ritual according to which the commodity fetish is worshipped,” states Benjamin (1999:8).

Llewellyn Negrin, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty – The Corporeal Experience of Fashion” pp.115-131

p.119 – One’s awareness of one’s body is not just influenced by physiological changes in the body or by physical changes in the environment in which one finds oneself but also through one’s encounters with others. The body then, in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, can be understood more properly not as an object, which stands over against the world, but as a process, which is forever in a state of becoming, continually being made and re-made. Individuals do not passively internalize cultural systems of meaning, which are imposed upon them from the outside. Rather, there is an active process of meditation between the two in which each is modified by the other. Through our corporeal schema, we engage with the social / cultural world at the same time that we are constituted by it.

p.121 – Indicative of this new materialist approach to the body, the emphasis has shifted from analysis of cultural representations of the body (i.e. the body image) to an examination of how the body is experienced in a corporeal way (i.e. the “felt” body). While in our media-saturated environment where the image reigns supreme, there has been a great emphasis on the construction of the body as visual spectacle, this does not capture the way we experience our bodies as physical beings who move in space. As Mike Featherstone argues, the concept of “body image” as a purely mental construct in terms of which we fashion ourselves in problematic insofar as it reduces the individual to a disembodied consciousness that views the body as an entity apart from the self. In doing so, it fails to do justice to the fact that we habitually experience our bodies not as objects, which we appraise in a purely cognitive way, but as fleshly entities that are inseparable from us.

Paul Jobling, “Roland Barthes – Semiology and the Rhetorical Codes of Fashion” pp.132-148

p.132 – At the heart of his inquiry, therefore, is the hypothesis that real clothing – that is, what we wear in our everyday existence – is secondary to the ways in which it can be articulated in the verbal and iconic rhetoric of fashion editorials and fashion spreads: “Without discourse there is no total Fashion, no essential Fashion” (Barthes, 1990: xi).

p.142 – “The Advertising Message,” Barthes insists, “reintroduces the dream into humanity… and thereby transforms… simple use into an experience of the mind” (Barthes 1994: 176).

Efrat Tseëlon, “Erving Goffman – Social Science as an Art of Cultural Observation” pp.149-164

p.154 – Goffman was also the first to outline the dynamics of the disciplining of the body as a façade of the self. By demonstrating the ground rules of bodily presentation required to make a claim for a certain kind of identity, Goffman put the body and appearance center stage. Frost observed that over the decades following Goffman’s pioneering work, much academic scrutiny has been devoted to appearance and image. It rendered appearance as a necessary aspect of identity, and no longer as a mere optional extra (Frost, 2005).
Identity is thus located “in the pattern of social control that is exerted in connection with the person by himself and those abound him” (Goffman 1961:168).

Aurelie Von de Peer, “Niklas Luhmann – Fashion between the Fashionable and Old-fashioned” pp.200-214

p.206 – Every system produces its own blind spot, which ultimately leads to a paradox. When we return to the principal elements of sense-making, that is, observation and distinction, we will comprehend paradox better. Recall that you decided to wear the red jeans. Now assume your friend asks you why you chose to wear the garment. You maintain you selected the trousers because “there are in fashion nowadays.” Luhmann calls such statement a first-order observation in which you claim something to be the case.

p.207 – Niklas Luhmann proposed that the recognition of paradoxes may actually reveal that which remains beyond reach: the strategies systems employ in practice to function despite paradoxes (Luhmann 1995:52).
He finds that modern society consists of a plethora of paradoxes. Fashion too, as I explain below, is predicated on myriad paradoxes (Esposito 2004, 2011). One trajectory fashion scholars can take to conceptualize further the power of fashion is to probe the paradoxes at its heart.
Recently Elena Esposito (2004, 2011) developed this line of thought further in arguing that the nature of fashion is inherently paradoxical. Such paradoxes find a clear articulation in both the temporal and social dimensions of fashion.
First, fashion developed its own operative logic from the continuity of its changeable character. In other words, fashion proffered “the stability of the transitional” (Esposito 2011:607). Where in early modernity this proposal was still met with distrust, soon it acquired a sense of factuality and, I would add, normativity, in the sense that the modern individual only finds the changeable to be likeable, approvable and to be the object of reference for all items of fashion deemed to be “good.” In fashionable dress, it seems that only a “scheduled transitoriness” grants us firm ground, to the extent that we now constantly expect things to differ from whatever dress style came before.

p.208 – Yet it is paradoxical that an individual should do what others do in order to be an individual.
The power of fashion lies exactly in its frivolous and transient character. Fashion can acquire a mask of harmless ephemerality because it knows how to neutralize its paradoxes. For instance, we constantly expect to be surprised by the newness and difference of the latest fashions. Yet this temporal expectation is paradoxical in the normality it has acquired. Through attributing these expectations of surprise to the originality of individuals, however, the social paradox compensates for the temporal one. For instance, through picturing fashion designers as creative autonomous artists or particular celebrity fashion icons as the arbiters of the new, we neutralize the temporal paradox that lays bade how fashion in its changeability is compared to the continuous.

p.209 – Udo Schwarz (1982) and Ingrid Loschek (2009:21-28) picture fashionable dress as a subsystem in which all communications ultimately revolve around the binary code of In and Out. Fashion media that structure their reports on fashion items in “In and Out” columns, for example, clearly evidence this binary code. Loschek and Schmidt differ, however, on the subject of material fashion objects. For Schmidt (2007:46) the cut, fabric, patterns and textures are the very communications of fashion. Loschek instead perceives such features as parts of the programs of the system, in which the changeable nature of fashion manifests itself most clearly. Because the binary code of In and Out implies the additional code of Fashionable and Old-fashioned, Loschek maintains that the system-specific communications of fashion are centered around social validity. She writes: “the questions of which clothing is fashion is an exclusively social, communicatively negotiated definition” (Loschek 2009:25).
E. Esposito, Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden: Paradoxien der Mode. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamps, 2004.

[Kelly Gamache · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the content but some of the essays are written in ways that are harder to read than they could be. Clarity could be improved.

[Morolake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommended for fashion academics exploring how general theory intesect with the world of dress, clothing, bodies and fashion.

Also, a bit technical read. Some of the chapters were a bit clunky and hard to digest. But overall, great!

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heterogeneous.