4	Magic Fashion1

The finding of an object serves exactly the same purpose as the dream, in the sense that it frees the individual.

ANDRÉ BRETON

There is more to fashion than meets the eye. The Surrealists understood its uncanniness and in Fashion and Surrealism, the late Richard Martin explored their ability to penetrate beneath its surface. His starting point was Lautréamont’s famous definition of beauty as ‘the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table’, illustrated by Martin with two Surrealist images of a woman being actually sewn, actually created by a sewing machine. These are disturbing images that seem to endorse common objections to fashion: that it distorts and actually physically harms women, for example. But Martin’s comment is subtler. A garment, a dress for example, he suggests, is not the woman who inhabits it, yet references her, and is a memory of her body.²

Each of the female bodies in the images, a painting by Oscar Dominguez and a collage by Joseph Cornell, appear passive and unmoved as she is fashioned by the machine. Such eerie detachment is a facet of that uncanny quality that, says Hal Foster, ‘is central to Surrealism’. The Surrealist Uncanny consists in part of a ‘confusion between the animate and the inanimate’.³ This is central to the relationship between garment and wearer. Normally, in our interactions with others, we see not bodies but clothing; clothing stands in for the body. It is, as Martin suggests, an intimate and even mysterious relationship. In the works by Dominguez and Cornell, the female figures are both living and inanimate, in suspended animation at least. They purvey serenity rather than a sense of constriction. Yet they also recall Simone de Beauvoir’s denunciation of fashion and beauty culture as the reduction of the living woman to a thing:

Routine makes a drudgery of beauty care and the upkeep of the wardrobe. Horror at the depreciation that all living growth entails will arouse in certain frigid or frustrated women a horror of life itself; they endeavour to preserve themselves as others preserve furniture or canned food. This negative obstinacy makes them enemies of their own existence … good meals spoil the figure, wine injures the complexion, too much smiling brings wrinkles, the sun damages the skin, sleep makes one dull, work wears one out, love puts rings under the eyes, kisses redden the cheeks, caresses deform the breasts, embraces wither the flesh, maternity disfigures face and body … spots, tears, botched dressmaking, bad hair-dos are catastrophes still more serious than a burnt roast or a broken vase, for not only does the woman of fashion project herself into things, she has chosen to make herself a thing.⁴

Walter Benjamin echoed this thought in his ambiguous notes on fashion in The Arcades Project, perceiving a sinister side to fashion: ‘Every fashion stands in opposition to the organic. Every fashion couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, fashion defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve.’⁵

To the confusion between the animate and the inanimate, the Surrealists added the confusion between the natural and the artificial. Fashion lives this out, for garment and body are inseparable, neither complete without the other. The naked body may be biologically complete in itself, but is not socially and culturally complete without adornment. And certainly the garment is a mere shadow of itself until it is inhabited. Théophile Gautier observed:

In the modern age clothing has become man’s second skin, from which he will under no pretext separate himself and which belongs to him like an animal’s coat, so that nowadays the real form of the body has been quite forgotten.⁶

This may be less true today than it was in 1860, but it is still clothes that make the body culturally visible and, conversely, the clothes themselves are only complete when animated by a body. As the Surrealist-influenced designer Elsa Schiaparelli put it: ‘A dress cannot just hang like a painting on the wall or like a book remain intact and live a long and sheltered life. A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn.’

We initially tend to assume that fashion is intended to improve our appearance and make us look more beautiful, but Richard Martin underlines the ambivalence of this close relationship between fashion and body, something well understood also by the Surrealists. For them, he argues, fashion offered a ‘compelling friction between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between disfigurement and embellishment, body and concept, artifice and the real’.⁷

By aligning fashion with art, Richard Martin asserts fashion’s cultural importance. If fashion is a form of art then it becomes more than a soothing consumer product aimed at making life more pleasant. Art offers an ‘insurrection to daily life’. Art is subversive, challenging our assumptions.

On the other hand, Surrealist artists, such as Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau and Cecil Beaton, forged in the 1930s a close relationship between fashion, popular media and commerce. Surrealism provided a fertile source of inspiration for fashion magazines, advertisements and window displays as much as film and photography, which were transformed by the movement. Many in the art world argued that in engaging with fashion and advertising, Surrealism was cheapened; that Surrealism proved amenable to the purposes of consumption, proved its superficiality and lack of integrity and disbarred it from being considered as art. (Psychoanalysis, of course, was similarly used in PR and marketing, yet has escaped criticism on that account.) It was also in its use of psychoanalytic ideas that Surrealism, as used, say in advertising, linked consumer objects with the unconscious desires of the public.

Yet it is possible to overemphasise the showmanship and playfulness of artists such as Dali at the expense of a different, literary tradition in Surrealism, dominated by André Breton, the difficult patriarch of the movement. Breton disliked Dali, whom he nicknamed Avida Dollars, alluding to Dali’s thirst for fame and celebrity; whereas he himself was rigorously intellectual and his work in many ways courted obscurity.

Both were nevertheless intensely preoccupied with the nature of the unconscious: but where – as so many argued, even at the time – Dali’s efforts to introduce psychoanalytic symbolism and concepts into his art resulted in an all too conscious and knowing intellectual vulgarity, Breton pursued his sense of the Marvellous by journeying into ‘an uncharted conceptual terrain’, using the ‘disorientating signposts’ of somnambulism, hypnotism and the occult ‘on a “voyage to the end of the Unknown to find the new!” ’⁸ In Breton’s world, objects acquire an obscure and often disturbing significance, very different from the consciously witty and subversive garments of, for example, Schiaparelli.

Breton was a resolutely avant-garde and intellectual writer. At the same time his interest in fortune-telling, clairvoyance, hypnotism and the tarot connected him to a mass popular audience. Breton, unlike many intellectuals, did not approach such beliefs with a sense of irony. Otherwise rational individuals read horoscopes, perhaps even consult astrologers, refer to their own personal characteristics in astrological terms (‘I’m a typical Leo’) and enjoy tarot readings. But there is more often than not an element of disavowal in this, an ironical self, distancing from anything resembling total, unquestioning belief. In approaching ‘superstitions’ naively, as it were, Breton both acknowledged the role of ‘fate’ in human life, which is the extent to which we do not control our own destinies, and equally the persistence of human efforts to reach beyond the surface of life to find underlying meaning.

Garments play a significant role in the shadowy realms of superstition, fate and the occult. Sportspersons and actors seem particularly prone to superstition, no doubt because of the emotional and physical risks any performer takes in testing their skill in front of an audience. Billie Jean King, for example, a multiple Wimbledon champion in the 1960s, had a favourite dress she had to wear for every match, Bjorn Borg did not allow himself to shave for the duration of a tournament and Goran Ivanisevic, unlikely winner of Wimbledon in 2001, celebrated each successive unexpected match victory by stripping off his shirt and tossing it into the crowd, as a mascot or fetish for the lucky spectator who caught it.⁹

It is not surprising that dress should be involved in personal superstition, nor are such superstitions confined to performers. Certainly for many individuals, articles of clothing not only affect mood and self-perception, but also acquire quasi-magical properties and meanings.

The British psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, noted how many small children have a special object, often a blanket or shawl, or sometimes a scarf or even part of the mother’s dress, which they have to have with them at all times. Winnicott’s name for this ‘security blanket’ was the ‘transitional object’. He believed it symbolised the mother and the mother’s body. The infant clings to this symbol or metaphor of the mother as it gradually separates physically and emotionally from this first symbiotic relationship, which begins for many as a kind of merging. The piece of material or garment stands in for the mother during the transition from complete dependence to relative autonomy.

Walter Benjamin implied a similar association between clothing and the mother/child relationship when he wrote of ‘what the child … discovers in the pleats of the old material to which it clings while trailing at its mother’s skirts’. Garments, once they have been worn, come to have a residue. They take on qualities of the wearer and of the occasions on which they were worn. Their feel and smell come to represent memories, conscious and unconscious. They are far from being simply functional adjuncts to the body, or even a language of communication, but take on symbolic meanings of which we are not always aware.

In their superstitious behaviour, tennis players exposed a central feature of magical beliefs when focused on an object. The idea of ‘luck’ is intimately related to the idea of ‘chance’. A ‘lucky’ outcome imbues the object that is believed to have contributed to it with an element of fate, converting chance into its opposite. On the first occasion a garment worn for a match that was won had been chosen by chance, but retrospectively is imbued with the fortunate outcome so that now the choice of that garment rather than any other seems to show the ‘hand of God’. In this way a chance object becomes a fetish object and therefore highly magical.

Fetish takes its own specific form in consumer society. A different ritual holds sway and it is fashion that ‘prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish demands to be worshipped’.¹⁰ The society of the commodity demands the novelty of the continually changing. It follows that the rapidly changing fashion cycle is particularly resonant in the society of capitalist consumption, since it symbolises the way in which the fixed and stable class and social relationships of earlier epochs are dissolved. Therefore, where commodities once signalled established rank, they now increasingly operate as signifiers of identity, social place, make believe and value – and also of desire. The idea of fashion as symbolic is often taken to mean simply that designer clothes and ‘labels’ become straightforward status symbols, operating purely on a conscious level of emulation and display; but there is much more to it than that. Garments, like other objects, take on imagined and/or subjectively experienced properties that go far beyond the flaunting of wealth or refined taste. It is because we live in a society dominated by capital and consumption that we commandeer material goods for the symbolic expression of values remote from materialism. Superstition, magic and spirituality are expressed through secular fetishes – as we shall see later in relation to ‘fans’.

Magic, witchcraft, paganism and superstitious practices are the residues of older religions crushed by monotheism – although Christianity itself incorporated various features of pagan belief. But in any case, until the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century in Britain, magic and science were similar, and beliefs that today seem fanciful or magical, such as astrology, were part of the educated person’s picture of the universe and its workings.¹¹

A similar mingling and confusion between Christianity and paganism is to be found in the history of the fetish. Very briefly, the idea of the fetish arose in ‘a mercantile intercultural space created by the … trade between cultures so radically different as to be mutually incomprehensible, that is the European slave trade with West Africa’. It is a hybrid, belonging to neither culture. The term originates from the Portuguese and from the period when Portuguese traders were active along the West African coast. These Roman Catholics brought ideas of witchcraft, superstition and idolatry to the objects and practices they encountered. In the seventeenth century, Dutch protestants ousted the Portuguese, and for them the fetish and related phenomenon represented a ‘chaotic irrationalism’. This complex cultural encounter eventually led to the Enlightenment view of the fetish as an example of false values and superstitious delusions. These blocked reason and were misunderstood as miraculous events whose origins lay in the natural world.¹²

The fetish therefore arises in the same period as the commodity form. It became an important rhetorical and theoretical idea in the writings of the foremost theorist of commoditisation, Karl Marx. For him, Capital itself was a kind of fetish and political economy; an ‘a-theological religion of everyday life’ in a secular society that remains fundamentally irrational. Marx developed the concept of commodity fetishism to describe and explain the way in which, as in a religion, an inanimate human product acquires a life of its own. The difference is that whereas in anthropological fetishism the fetish bestows power (whether real or imaginary) on the owner or wearer, in Marx the fetishisation of the commodity involves the disempowerment and alienation of the human actors.

Marx wrote of the fetishism of the production process, but objects of consumption, including of course garments, are also fetishised, taking on a meaning far beyond their use – or exchange – value. They therefore become like figures of speech or metaphors. Above all, the fetish involves a form of ‘disavowal’. A fetish object takes on, for its owner, metaphorical and symbolic meanings which make disavowal possible, disavowal being the idea that ‘I know this cannot be true but yet I believe…’.

The fetishism of articles of clothing and body parts is most usually discussed in relation to sexual fetishism, and for the Surrealists the conjuncture of dress and the body could certainly become intensely erotic, as the artist Hans Bellmer indicated:

I wonder if I will wear the tight seamless trousers made of your legs … and do you think I will, without swooning prematurely, button over my chest the heavy and trembling waistcoat of your breasts? As soon as I am immobilised beneath the pleated skirt of all your fingers … you will breathe in me your perfume and your fever.¹³

Sexual fetishism is important, but the fetish, including fetish garments, may also stand in for other, more nebulous desires: for power, for social affirmation, for spiritual certainty, as well as, of course, as Marx demonstrated, representing the machinery of capitalism.

Theodor Adorno, analysing astrology and occultism, saw popular superstitious practices as alienated, yet, like neurotic symptoms, having their own rationality; they perform a function of compromise between situations in which individuals are powerless, yet desire to feel they have some control. The still pervasive, classical liberal view of the unfettered individual and his freedom is incompatible with the paranoid, bureaucratised world we live in, Adorno argues, but quasi-magical beliefs provide some kind of defence in this world. At the same time he notes the irony and disavowal characteristic of our attitude towards astrology and similar beliefs, an intellectual attitude he describes as one of ‘disoriented agnosticism’. Yet alienated forms of belief nevertheless express real and genuine yearnings, for something beyond the organised sciences which, as Adorno says, ‘do not cover the universality of existence’.¹⁴

This was also Breton’s view, but he went further than Adorno, since he rejected the view that the fetish was only an aspect of false consciousness or alienation, albeit one with a defensive function. The fetish, he believed, related to the Surrealist concept of the Marvellous. The Marvellous came about as the marriage of what the Surrealists called ‘convulsive beauty’ and ‘objective chance’. Chance encounters, unexpected places and found objects all exemplified the Marvellous. Their accidental occurrence or the unexpected manner in which the Surrealist became conscious of them invested them with the same sort of magical meaning as had been attributed to the fetish. He believed in the special importance of what he called ‘found objects’; objects he chanced upon and in which there seemed to inhere some obscure but portentous meaning. Found objects were, in fact, Breton’s take on the fetish. In L’Amour Fou, Breton defined chance as ‘the form making manifest the exterior necessity which traces its path in the human unconscious’. Engaged in an attempt to formulate a ‘modern materialism’, a form of Surrealist Marxism that would dissolve the distinction between the material and the ideal, he searched for an obscure third realm underlying both. Chance encounters and found objects were, he believed, portents of or keys to this realm in which human subjectivity and external reality might be resolved and reconciled, their contradictions abolished. The found object contains repressed energies, but at the same time has the power to undo repression. As a piece of the object world it connects that world with the psychic world of the individual.

Breton looked to psychoanalysis to bring a new dimension to Marxism, since one of its strengths is its insistence on the power of the irrational. Unlike Freud he did not seek to reduce the sway of the irrational. On the contrary: ‘it is only by making evident the intimate relation linking the two terms real and imaginary that I hope to break down the distinction, which seems to me less and less well founded, between the subjective and the objective’. This, of course, was a utopian aspiration.

There was an uncanny aspect for the Surrealists to the dreams, chance encounters and psychic states they privileged, in which dream/reality and animate/inanimate were blurred or confused. The relationship of dress to body is especially appropriate as a site of this blurring.

For the Surrealists, the memories and associations stored in the folds of garments constituted something more than alienation. Dress in modernity acts as a vehicle for the enchantment that Max Weber felt had been leached out of the world by the imperatives of bureaucratic rationalism. Dress became a largely unacknowledged conduit for the communication and symbolisation of inchoate impulses and desires. Elsa Schiaparelli’s designs from the 1930s, playful enough at first glance, exploring the ambiguously blurred boundary between body and garment, hinted at something darker and more uncanny. Far from forfeiting all claim to artistic seriousness by succumbing to the seduction of consumption and becoming part of the seduction process, her Surrealist-inspired engagement with fashion rendered it more serious, rather than being frivolous.¹⁵

Jean Baudrillard, writing 50 years later, challenged the very idea that seduction was something to be rejected. In contrast to Breton, he rejected psychoanalysis as anti-magical, because it wanted to restore unconscious impulses to the realm of reason through interpretation. He argued in favour of seduction as an anti-rationalist opposition to attempts to explain and to orthodox approaches. Seduction was ‘malefice and artifice, a black magic for the deviation of all truths, a game with arbitrary rules and elusive rituals … to seduce is to die as reality and reconstitute oneself as an illusion’. This he defended as an aesthetic rather than a moral approach to life, and ‘it is what remains of a magical, fateful world’. He suggested that fashion, which is ‘a passion for the artificial’, is a ‘kind of fetish, an increasing excess of communication’.¹⁶

Similarly, for Breton the magically found object really can unleash new energy and unchain our desires. The fetish can act as a catalyst in transforming the individual’s relationship to the world. It acts to redeem the non-sentient world and re-energise our relationship to it: as Richard Martin believed fashion could do because of its power of memory and its latent subversive quality.

Any attempt to explore the magical properties of dress may seem a puny and even trivial commentary on the unnerving world of consumption, with its illusory and disorienting powers of enchantment. There is, of course, a powerful element of disavowal in the stereotypical popular dismissal of fashion as inherently trivial: disavowal because alongside the dismissal of fashion we see crowds flocking to fashion exhibitions and devouring fashion magazines and newspaper columns.

Surrealism helps us to understand something of the reasons for our fascination with fashion and our uneasiness about it. We strive to invest our lives with something of the magical, to access ‘the dream energy of society’, which Walter Benjamin felt had accumulated within fashion, while being drained from so much of the cultural fabric of his time.

It is the very irrationality of fashion – its most frequently criticised aspect – that gives it significance. It bears witness that the magical is more than just the refuse, the useless rubbish of the rational Enlightenment world. Like Surrealism, fashion affirms the autonomy and mystery of human desire, its irreducibility, at a time when not only our bodies but also our very desires are in danger of being wholly colonised by consumer lifestyle.

Fashion, the epitome of consumerism, is also its stealthiest critic, and in its obsession with what Freud referred to as ‘the refuse of the phenomenal world’, of the disregarded, the marginal and the every day – of the tiny details rather than the grand narratives of life – suggests that there are still gaps in the apparent seamlessness of consumer culture through which we can escape into enchanted worlds.