Fashion and Memory |
Clothes wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Fashion and photography have much in common. Each claims the status of art, yet remains at its margins. Photography was born as an industrial process, which produces the image en masse. Fashionable dress was originally artisanal, but it too has been wholly incorporated into and transformed by mass production. Both fashion and photography claim the status of art. Photography’s claim to aesthetic status has achieved some recognition, yet photography-as-art constitutes only a small part of all photography.
Fashion’s claim to artistic status remains contentious. Many writers interested themselves in fashion over the course of the twentieth century, but for most that interest was sociological, psychological or economic. In 1985, George B. Sproles, a behavioural scientist, pointed out that ‘fashions are aesthetic products and any theory of fashion will necessarily include aesthetic components’.1 This followed the 1983 Yves St Laurent retrospective at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a groundbreaking departure for an art museum to hold an exhibition of fashions, but since that time there have been many and one could argue that this proves fashion’s artistic status.
However, in an exploration of the question, Sung Bok Kim cites a number of writers, including the late Diana Vreeland, who had been the doyenne of fashion in the 1950s and 1960s, editor of American Vogue and of Harpers Bazaar, who continued to insist that fashion and art were distinct and separate. For one art critic, Michael Boodro, cited by Sung Bok Kim, this was due to the commercial basis of fashion. The intervention of an industrial, mechanical process negated the possibility that an aesthetic product could be ‘Art’. ‘Art is eternal, while fashion designs are ephemeral’, claimed Boodro.2
Art was long held sacred. It transcended commerce. It was difficult to align photography to this notion of the special status of art. The relationship of fashion to the body and its association with novelty and change, at a time when art was held to express the eternal, disqualified it. Vreeland believed that art was ‘spiritual’ in a way that fashion could never be.
The late Richard Martin disagreed. Art, he argued, has become a commodity as much as fashion, although there is a lot of denial in the art world about this. On the other hand, fashion is potentially every bit as expressive as other art forms. And even Boodro acknowledged that there were strong links, even a convergence between the two. After all, from time to time, artists such as Gustav Klimt had designed clothing, and couturiers such as Yves St Laurent, with his 1965 Mondrian dress, drew on art for inspiration. Nonetheless, Boodro still distinguished between art, ‘typically private, the creation of an individual’, and fashion, a public ‘collaboration between designer, manufacturer and wearer and then between wearer and viewer’. But such a definition would also apply to film, which is considered a form of art. Indeed, the majority of art forms involve collaboration. The orchestra, the classical artist’s studio and the theatre would be unable to produce art without it. Even the writer must work with editors and publishers if her work is to see the light of day.
Alison Gill interrogated the artistic status of dress in relation to the ‘deconstruction’ or ‘mode destroy’ fashions of the 1990s: the work of Martin Margiela, Comme des Garçons, Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten. These could be interpreted as anti-fashion, a kind of dismantling or analysis of fashion or a form of avant-garde fashion.3 These were as original and challenging as any artwork.
A decade later the idea of fashion as rebellion – anti-fashion – has less traction. The classical avant-garde shared the assumption of the dominant society against which it rebelled: that the culture moves continually forward in a series of moves and counter moves, with the future forever overcoming the past. Today this driving forward, whether evolutionary or revolutionary, has been thrown into doubt and the idea of the avant-garde has lost its potency.
At the present time, fashion styles are disseminated globally by means of the reproducible image, so that quite aside from the characteristics they share, fashion and photography are economically entwined. This economic symbiosis has a further dimension in that both mass fashion and the mass image have aestheticised the globe, massively contributing to the visual culture in which we now live.
Fashion and photography are also alike in that in contemporary society both function as potent visual representations of history; of the past. This does not just mean in terms of images in the press and other mass media; the rise of mass photography has meant that amateur photography – the snapshot – has become a major bearer of personal memories, just as images in the mass media become the archives of public memory.
One long-standing difference between photography and fashion has nevertheless persisted. Many still hold to the idea that fashion could never express any kind of truth about the world. It could never illuminate anything, but was destined always to be a sort of meretricious gloss on modern life and for moralists a kind of lie: concealing, from a left-wing perspective, the underlying ugliness of consumer capitalism; for the right, the sinfulness of the human body and inferiority of womanhood.
By contrast, photography was the bearer of truth. The camera could not lie. In fact, even before the advent of digital photography and the computer, which bring endless possibilities of altering the raw image, it had been realised that no photograph is neutral, but that the photographer always constructs the image. Nevertheless, photography continues to benefit from the idea that it bears witness, that it is objective. At the same time this supposed documentary objectivity distinguishes it from art. It is visual journalism rather than visual literature.
Alternatively, photography could claim artistic status by trying to be more like art, but Walter Benjamin disliked this kind of arty photography. He wrote:
The more far-reaching the crisis of the present social order … the more has the creative – in its deepest essence a sport, by contradiction out of imitation – become a fetish, whose lineaments live only in the fitful illumination of changing fashion. The creative in photography is its capitulation to fashion. The world is beautiful – that is its watchword. Therein is unmasked the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connexions in which it exists.4
Benjamin rejected the ideology of Art for Art’s Sake (as would any good Marxist of his time) and realised that the kind of photography that is closest to painting renounces some of the distinctiveness and disavows some of the other possibilities of photography. To think of photographs in some abstract sense as art also tends to distance both from the realm of the everyday; when it is as reminders and memorials of the everyday that the hold of photographs is so potent. A meaningful photograph would be more like a found object than an oil painting.
One could make a similar argument for fashion: that it has become over-identified with celebrity glamour, when its real interest and meaning lies in the opposite: that it is quintessentially about the everyday; everyday life. Clothes are what we put on every day; even those who most strenuously insist that what they wear has nothing to do with fashion, and that they are not interested in fashion, are nevertheless wearing clothes as directed by fashion in one way or another. No one wore jeans to the office or to a party 50 years ago; men (let alone women) did not wear shorts in town. Men did not wear vests (i.e. a T-shirt) as an outer garment either. Women did not go about in what would once have been considered underwear, for example, a camisole in summer. The casualisation of dress, which has made it possible for many individuals to feel that they have opted out of fashion, is in fact a fashion in itself, even were it not that the jeans we wear today are subtly different from those of ten or 20 or 50 years ago. (To say this is not to deny that there continues to be sartorial rules in many situations.)
Photographs preserve the past and therefore have nostalgia potential. This might seem to separate photography radically from fashion. We choose the clothes we wear every day in order to look right now – today. In that sense fashion is very much about the present. It is about fitting in, while, perhaps, remaining distinctive. It is to create an impression and to persuade others that this is who we are; this is what we are like. In that sense the everyday practice of fashion has nothing to do with the past or with memory. In fact, the wish is to efface the past, to erase any memory of our having been other than what we are or how we wish to appear today.
Fashion photography, which brings the two together, is effectively a specialised domain, which de-historicises fashion and, as Susan Sontag points out, idealises it. It aims to create a mood rather than to inform. Photographers such as Corinne Day and Juergen Teller aimed to extend their art beyond the narrow perimeters of the garment itself to address social concerns. Theirs is thus a creative and engaged form.
But although a strong case can be made for the importance of this kind of fashion photography, fashion photography offers something very different and much more self-conscious than the presentation of clothes in all those photographs that are not fashion photographs. For one thing, fashion photography creates an enclosed, self-sufficient world. Inevitably – proposing as it does the right way to look now – it effaces the past, or at least creates a strange disjuncture from it. Even when it references the past it creates a stylistic pastiche of pastness that bears little relation to any actual past. This is consistent, of course, with the present dayness of our fashion practice. On the other hand, photographers such as Teller and Corinne Day share the concerns of non-fashion photographers such as Nan Goldin – and thus with other art forms – in proposing what was once the new aesthetic of the dark, the deviant, the disturbing, a reaction against the formalist notion of timeless beauty; but unlike Nan Goldin they do not capture and memorialise an actual subculture, they simply recreate it as pastiche.
This means that fashion photography could be less interesting than, say, amateur snapshots, photographic images of fashion in everyday life that memorialise the ephemeral. A fleeting moment is captured on a piece of paper or celluloid, or, today, on a chip. Snapshots, photo-journalism and news pictures capture people wearing clothes in the situations in which they actually wear them, in the street, at home, at parties, in demonstrations or in crowds at sports events – clothes in use, rather than the presentation of an ideal of fashionable dress which is what fashion photography is. Even the contrast between the fashion pages and the gossip spreads at the back of Vogue or similar magazines – and the celebrities on these pages are normally expensively dressed with an eye to being photographed – presents a telling difference between the ideal and the actual. It does not necessarily follow that snapshots are more authentic than art or fashion photography, but certainly their relationship to both past and present is different and distinct. The former, as Benjamin suggests, captures the moment in a unique way. ‘The most precise technology’, he writes,
can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us. No matter how artful the photographer … the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has, so to speak, seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.5
Roland Barthes dwelled, like Susan Sontag, on the melancholy estrangement of the photograph in his Camera Lucida, a meditation on photographs of his recently dead mother. Along with Benjamin, he insisted on the magical quality of photographs. Photographs differ from paintings in that what they show us really was. These persons actually lived; these streets did exist. But they are stuck in the past and we cannot reach them. The photograph can never become Alice’s looking glass, which dissolved so that she could move into the alternative world within or behind the glass. As we stare at a photograph we remain locked out of its reality. For Sontag, a photograph is a message from the past, with all the pathos that that entails. The persons caught on camera are ghosts from the past, testifying to the relentless passage of time. The clothes they wear as they stare out at us form an integral part of the image and of their ghostliness and these comical démodé outfits, of which they as often as not seem so proud, contribute to the pathos of these figures. In this way fashion and photography are central to a presentation of the past and of transience. It is essentially their fashionable dress, or dress of its time, that now underlines the transience of these lives.
Yet we are as likely to mock these images of the past as to find them poignant. How could they, our forebears, have put up with these fashions! How ridiculous they are. How could we ourselves have worn those dreadful clothes! This is a form of protective disavowal that seals off the sadness we might otherwise experience at seeing our much younger self with long hair and silly sideburns or with enormous 1980s’ shoulder pads.
This suggests that there may possibly be a protective aspect to the fashion cycle. It could perhaps be that the changes that take place in fashion, with its continual and recurring incitement to find beauty in the new, represent a beneficial impulse. Far from signifying a trivial and superficial attitude to life and to the world, perhaps fashion’s cycle testifies to resilience and optimism, to overcoming, as Freud suggested, the mourning and pain occasioned by our recognition of transience. One could argue that many, indeed most, societies did not have a fashion cycle at all in the sense in which we understand it. But clothing rituals have existed in all societies, and perhaps one should see modernity’s fashion cycle as the ritual of a dynamic and hectically innovative society in adjusting to the force and pace of change and helping us to live with it.