4
“. . . IMAGES WITHOUT BOTTOM . . .” (1988)
Stuart Ewen
Style, bard to define . . . but easy to recognize.
—MAGAZINE ADVERTISEMENT FOR HATHAWAY BLOUSE
Each week on television, a taut-faced woman named Elsa Klensch hosts a program titled “Style.” The prime focus of the show revolves around the new designer collections, transporting us to major fashion shows around the world, but there is more.
Some features center on the homes of the people in the world of fashion design: castles in the countryside near Rome; converted farm houses in rural Connecticut; fabulous playpens overlooking Paris. Still other items deal with the daily lives of people employed in the “world” (one dare not call it industry!) of fashion. We follow a tawny Milanese mannequin through her regular two-hour body and facial treatment at Sergio Valente. We observe a busy New York model, rollerskating and taking tap-dance lessons; intimately sharing her longing to “make it” in the musical theater. We glide through the byways of Tokyo with Toko, a slender fashion model with “the most famous Japanese face in the world.” Her spare time, we learn, is divided between shopping for her new apartment and practicing traditional Japanese Buddhism. Materialism and its spiritual rejection coexist without conflict.
Accompanying commercials blend right in, telling us of the slimming value of Tab cola, or of the way that Henry Grethel clothing will lead us into accidental and anonymous romantic encounters with beautiful women—or men—in elegant hotel rooms.
We see that style is about beautiful mouth-watering surfaces, but we see more. Beyond displaying surfaces, the uninterrupted message of the television program is that style makes up a way of life, a utopian way of life marked by boundless wealth. The people we view apparently inhabit a universe of bounty. They wear dresses costing thousands. They live in castles. Their encounters with interior designers lead to unrestrained flights of fancy. Their desires, their fantasies, their whims are painlessly translated into objective forms. There are no conflicts. In the name of “good taste,” there is no mention of cost. There is no anxiety about affordability.
This way of life is marked by an endless succession of material objects, yet it is a life that curiously seems to float beyond the terms of the real world. This is essential to the magic of style, its fascination and enchantment. Part of the promise of style is that it will lift us out of the dreariness of necessity.
At the other end of the tunnel of television, however, sits the viewer: cheaper clothes; no castles; bills piling up; no stranger to the anxieties of desire placed within the constraints of possibility. The viewer sits, watches, embedded in the finite terms of daily life. From this vantage point, the viewer is engaged in a relationship with style. It is a relationship that offers a pledge, a pledge repeated across the panorama of American consumer culture again and again, day in and day out. Everyday life in its details (clothing, house, routine objects, and activities) can, through the sorcery of style, be transformed. Without ever saying so explicitly, the media of style offer to lift the viewer out of his or her life and place him or her in a utopian netherworld where there are no conflicts, no needs unmet; where the ordinary is—by its very nature—extraordinary.
Style today is an incongruous cacophony of images, strewn across the social landscape. Style may be borrowed from any source and turn up in a place where it is least expected. The stylish person may look like a duchess one week, a murder victim the next. Style can hijack the visual idiom of astronauts, or poach from the ancient pageantry of Guatemalan peasant costumes.
An advertisement for Neiman-Marcus (1984), one of the most fashionable department stores in the United States, reveals style’s ability to constitute what Herbert Marcuse once described as a “unity of opposites.” In an ad for women’s clothing, the newspaper display offers readers a choice between two stylistic polarities.
One possible direction is “Attitude,” a cool and self-confident expression of aristocratic taste. The typeface here is elegant and conservative. Above is a photograph of a woman, a poised Parisian, perhaps, wearing a broad-brimmed
chapeau and
haute couture coat. Her delicate hand caresses the brim of her hat; her skin is milky white; her eyes are passive, and vacant. Below her, the words:
ATTITUDE IS disposition with regard to people or things.
ATTITUDE IS wearing the correct thing at the correct hour.
ATTITUDE IS a seam.
ATTITUDE IS exactly sized. (“I wear a size 6”)
ATTITUDE IS a mode.
ATTITUDE IS dressing to please someone else.
ATTITUDE IS an evaluation.
ATTITUDE IS strolling the avenue.
ATTITUDE is Neiman-Marcus.
On the same page, on the other side of a sharp, jagged line, lies another vision of style: “Latitude.” Far from the “cultured” refinement of the aristocrat, this is about breaking the rules, violating taboos. The typeface here is scrawled, in bold graffiti strokes. Above is a picture of another woman, a languid and brooding Semitic type, wearing the head scarf of a Palestinian and a loose-fitting desert caftan. She reclines; her arms fall back above her head. Her skin is olive, glistening with moisture, and her dark eyes look off to the side, gazing in the direction of forbidden desires. Below her, the words:
LATITUDE IS freedom from narrow restrictions permitting freedom of action.
LATITUDE IS changing the structure of a garment, however, whenever, the mood hits.
LATITUDE IS a slash.
LATITUDE IS whatever feels comfortable.
LATITUDE IS a mood.
LATITUDE IS dressing to please yourself.
LATITUDE IS an evolution.
LATITUDE IS loving the street life.
and, once more,
LATITUDE IS Neiman-Marcus.
Colliding world views are translated into style, images to be purchased. As disembodied images, they can be easily reconciled, both available from the same source. As the ad concludes, we are instructed that style may fall on “the left or right” of a “strongly defined line,” yet depending on the “moment or imagination,” either may be appropriate. Style makes statements, yet has no convictions. “Our stocks,” the advertisement concludes, “are full of both looks. Ask any N-M salesperson for a little direction—or just say the word. Attitude. Or Latitude.” Obedience or self-determination, conservative or radical, Brahmin or Untouchable, Superego or Id; any of these dualities may be purchased, simultaneously, in the world of style.
If the style market constitutes a presentation of a way of life, it is a way of life that is unattainable for most, nearly all, people. Yet this doesn’t mean that style isn’t relevant to most people. It is very relevant. It is the most common realm of our society in which the need for a better, or different way of life is acknowledged, and expressed on a material level, if not met. It constitutes a politics of change, albeit a “change” that resides wholly on the surface of things. The surfaces, themselves, are lifted from an infinite number of sources.
The imagery of elite culture is an ongoing aspect of style. A magazine advertisement for Benson & Hedges “Deluxe Ultra Lights” places two large, gold-edged packages of cigarettes in front of a sweeping spiral staircase, draped in muted tones of ivory and pink. Halfway up the stairs a woman in a beaded evening gown, dragging a white mink stole up thickly carpeted stairs, has her cigarette lit by an elegant gent in a black tuxedo. Meanwhile, in another ad in the same magazine, an unseen hand pours Chivas Regal scotch into a sparkling crystal slipper. Each image reeks of money, offering the consumer a democratic promise of limitless possibility while, at the same time, projecting the sheltered prerogatives of an elite few. Assuming the iconography or “attitude” of elites may, for some, represent a change for the better, an elevation of status. More and more, however, style offers other visions of change, drawn from an endless repository of images.
ELLE magazine presents a photo-feature entitled “Paramilitary Mode.” Sultry, daring members of a “pricey platoon” display the potential allure of military gear. “Wake up to the fun of fatigues,” challenges the text, as an enticing woman, preparing for “combat,” removes her button-fly pants, revealing camouflage panties upon her forward-thrust hip.
TAXI, a slick magazine on “fashion, trends and leisure living,” presents a profile of Ennio Capasa, a “rising star” among fashion designers. His “Japanese-influenced collection,” comments the magazine (quoting the New York Times), “looks like what one imagines a rebel against totalitarianism would do to make drab clothes individual and the stultifying sexy.” Political transformation and liberation come through “with energy and force,” part of a bold, sensual new look.
An advertisement for Esprit jeans argues that “denim and jeans-wear” are “social equalizers.” Warring on the elitist tyranny of “silks and satin,” the ad continues, Esprit jeans offer an “Elegance” that is “anti-fashion and anti-luxury.” To underscore the political egalitarianism of the product, the jeans are modeled by two “real” young women—not professional models—whose credentials are listed to create an atmosphere of intelligence, physical and spiritual health, and firm social commitments. Both blond and blue-eyed—conforming to the Aryan, photogenic ideals of the fashion trade—these two really care. Cara Schanche of Berkeley, California (another symbol of youthful idealism), is an “English Literature Student, Part-time Waitress, Anti-Racism Activist, Beginning Windsurfer, Friend of the Dalai Lama.” Her soulmate in style, Ariel O’Donnell of San Francisco, is a “Waitress/Bartender, Non-professional AIDS Educator, Cyclist, Art Restoration Student, Anglophile, Neo-Feminist.” In the world of style, ideas, activities, and commitments become ornaments, adding connotation and value to the garment while they are, simultaneously, eviscerated of meaning.
Another ad, for Bloomingdale’s “Fall ’87 Collection,” draws its idiom from an indiscriminate clatter of social, political, and artistic references. “Courage comrades,” begins the ad. “Back-to-School’s anything but a bore for young Post-constructivists. We condone conspicuous clothes with working-class conviction. . . . And a fundamentalist belief in French Connection, The Fall ’87 Collection. . . . Juniors moves into a new age at Bloomingdale’s. From counter culture to sophisticated, sexy, fast forward fashion for progressive thinkers.” Ideas and concepts—socialism, fundamentalism, conspicuous consumption, new age—meld into an effervescent swirl of inchoate activity, a fashion statement, implying everything, signifying nothing. Here, amid the polymorphous collage, we are tantalized by empty promises of transgression.
If the “life-style” of style is not realizable in life, it is nevertheless the most constantly available lexicon from which many of us draw the visual grammar of our lives. It is a behavioral model that is closely interwoven with modern patterns of survival and desire. It is a “hard to define . . . but easy to recognize” element in our current history.
Often silently, at times unacknowledged, style works on the ways that people understand and relate to the world around them. Its influence can be seen within the insecure, but nonetheless formative, boundaries of adolescence, when the search for
identity accelerates. Anita A——, now a twenty-four-year-old college student, confides,
When I was in high school I cut out an advertisement from a magazine and hung it on my wall. The ad read “Create An Image” in big bold white letters. . . . I don’t remember what the ad was for, and I never really cared. . . . I simply wanted to remind myself to work on my style. . . . I used to be really taken by someone who could cause that intense silence just by entering a room. I was often captured by their style.
1Lisa E——, twenty, feels that style “is closely related to advertising.” “My elements of style,” she readily admits, “are what’s spread across the pages of
Vogue, Elle and
Glamour magazines.” She explains,
Right now I’m in the middle of a style change. I’m making myself miserable as I wait for my hair to grow out from an extremely short, close shaven cut. That haircut was my favorite. It was easy to care for. It looked great on me. I was always complimented . . . so why change it? The androgenous, short-haired look of Annie Lennox has been replaced by the more feminine locks of Paulina Porizkova. Her image is everywhere nowadays. It’s her image that is making me desire longer hair. So I will add that to me.
2For others, style is seen as a powerful mode of self-expression, a way in which people establish themselves in relation to others. Michael H——, who grew up in the South Bronx, spent much of his childhood and adolescence playing basketball. For him, style was an essential part of the game, part of winning:
I played the game from sun-up till sundown. It’s never enough to just score the ball in the basket, or to simply block someone’s shot. There’s got to be style added to it . . . finesse, control, aggression. When a basketball is dunked in the basket, especially while an opponent is present, it says a statement and a sense of style. “Get off of me, and take this!” is the clear message. To block an opponent’s shot and send the ball into another area of the park or gym is very threatening and shows style.
Michael’s sense of “style” has been shaped by the choreography and competition of basketball, but it has also been mediated by items from the marketplace. Michael discusses the use of commodities in the process of establishing and expressing cultural meanings:
When I grew up I wore basketball sneakers and Lee jeans. I wore my hair sometimes in braids or in waves, and I walked with a bop. It’s a cultural statement that my friends and I identified with while growing up. . . . It’s the “thing” to wear basketball sneakers in the ghetto.
3For a newcomer to the United States, the preponderance of market-place style can initiate a moment of personal crisis. For Linda M——, a young woman who grew up in Peru, in a culture that she describes as “traditional,” her encounter with “style” in metropolitan New York accentuated a fissure of meaning. In Peru, she explains, style was understood as “the way in which the inner being of someone is expressed.” Here, in the United States, style has a “very different meaning . . . which comes from the external world rather than from the inner one”:
Not only tastes are being shaped, . . . but also perceptions of one’s own self. . . . The interaction of people and environment is being turned inside out.
My personal experience has been a difficult one. There are ways in which I feel anachronic in a modern society. . . . I found a tremendous difference in my perspectives of life and that of most people in a commercialized society. . . . Only now I seem to begin to understand why life seems so meaningless to many people in a big society up to the point where they prefer to drug themselves not to bear with an empty reality which displays a glamour of images without bottom, without real meaning. . . .
If style . . . has become something people think they could buy, then what we are losing is man himself. We are betraying our own self, we are selling our own inner being and replacing it for a more suitable one for “modern society.”
4The phenomenon of style within contemporary American society is varied and complex. It registers different meanings to different people, or among different communities. Yet what Linda M——says, about “a glamour of images without bottom,” cannot help but strike a chord with anyone who has observed, or lived in, the shadow of the managed image. In so many arenas of life, style has become the legal tender.
Style, more and more, has become the official idiom of the market-place.
b In advertising, packaging, product design, and corporate
identity, the power of provocative surfaces speaks to the eye’s mind, overshadowing matters of quality or substance. Style, moreover, is an intimate component of subjectivity, intertwined with people’s aspirations and anxieties. Increasingly, style has emerged as a decisive component of politics; political issues and politicians are regularly subjected to the cosmetic sorcery of image managers, providing the public with a telegenic commodity. Democratic choice, like grocery shopping, has become a question of which product is most attractively packaged, which product is most imaginatively merchandised. How has this ubiquitous primacy of style come about?
Precisely because style deals in surface impressions, it is difficult to concretize, to discern its definitions. It forms a chimerical, yet highly visible corridor between the world of things and human consciousness. Investing profane things with sacred meanings, however, is an ancient activity, a universal preoccupation of our species. This, in and of itself, does not define style, nor does it situate style within the particular conditions and contradictions of contemporary life.
The ornamentation of life has been practiced within traditional cultures for millennia; the tendency to invest such embellishments with intricate, powerful, and often mysterious webs of interpretation has also been common. Often interwoven within mythological and magical belief systems, decorative objects asserted astonishing powers. They could explain the world as it was, ratify established patterns of kinship and power, or express visions of something beyond the conventional terms of existence: a horror or a consolation.
Yet within such traditional societies, the role of imagery and decoration differed significantly from the volatile phenomenon of style in modern life. Traditional imagery stood for an unchanging or cyclical world, frozen in time and space, hierarchical and static, where everyone knew his or her assigned place in the “great chain of being.” Modern style speaks to a world where change is the rule of the day, where one’s place in the social order is a matter of perception, the product of diligently assembled illusions. Today, style is one way by which we perceive a world in flux, moving—apparently—ever forward, whereas traditional societies’ use of imagery invoked a sense of perpetuity, which conformed to a general outlook on life.
The power of style, and its emergence as an increasingly important feature in people’s lives, cannot be separated from the evolution and sensibility of modernity. Style is a visible reference point by which we have come to understand life in progress. People’s devotion to the acceleration of varying styles allows them to be connected to the “reality” of a given moment. At the same time they understand that this given moment will give way to yet another, and another, and that as it does, styles will change, again and again. A sense of rootedness or permanency is elusive in the world of style, and it is perhaps this quality, more than any other, that locates style in the modern world. On the one hand, style speaks for the rise of a democratic society, in which who one wishes to become is often seen as more consequential than who one is. On the other hand, style speaks for a society in which coherent meaning has fled to the hills, and in which drift has provided a context of continual discontent.
But the question of style cannot be limited to the realm of subjectivity. Style is also a significant element of power. Style, today, is inextricably woven into the fabric of social, political, and economic life. It is the product of a vast and seamless network of industries. The production of sumptuous images, for the very few, was once limited to the sacred workshops of the medieval monasteries; now, the production and marketing of style is global, touching the lives and imaginations of nearly everyone. Design, of one sort or another, is affixed to almost every conceivable commodity, and style is now “ladled out” from what the art critic Herbert Read once disparagingly termed a continuous and “glorified soup kitchen.” It is to the historic development of that “soup kitchen,” and to its implications, that we now must turn.
ENDNOTES
1 Style Project, written testimony A6.
2 Ibid., written testimony A9.
3 Ibid., written testimony A10.
4 Ibid., written testimony A2.