OF ALL FORMS OF design, fashion is the most tactile. We wear it next to our skin. This makes digital representation a paradox. The pixels which model a garment online are not just distortions, as would be the case for most visual culture. They efface what makes clothing clothing: exchanging sweat for warmth, experience for stains, blisters for coolness.

They also grant new qualities. Jpg files can be cut up and restitched without sewing machines. Videos travel more quickly than container ships. It’s an opportunity and challenge for any emerging label, but particularly for those in China, where seventy-two percent of shoppers prefer to purchase clothes online, more than in any other country.¹ The country’s platforms for commerce and self-branding are, moreover, distinct and self-contained, even as global fashion grows increasingly borderless.

This September, Labelhood, the Shanghai-based design incubator, teamed up with Vestoj to host a roundtable on digital authenticity with three emerging labels, each of which carves a different niche within the Chinese fashion landscape. The below is an edited transcript of the discussion. We are publishing it in conjunction with our latest print issue, On Authenticity, out December 20.

With:

Yirantian Guo, designer of womenswear label Yirantian
Alve Lagercrantz, co-designer of womenswear label Sirloin
Yushan Li, co-designer at menswear label Pronounce
Mao Usami, co-designer of womenswear label Sirloin
Jun Zhou, co-designer at menswear label Pronounce

***

Alice Hines: I want to ask a very open-ended question. Do you think authenticity is a relevant concept for designers today? Is it something your labels are working towards? 

Mao Usami: I think [authenticity] is fading, or merging, or collapsing. Because high-street brands started to get the capacity to copy instantly what’s happening at Paris Fashion Week, while high-end brands still take three months for production. And now Gucci and Vetements are starting to borrow from high-street fashions. It’s a never-ending game, like cats chasing each other. For an emerging label, it makes it difficult to define your brand: is it high end, low end, mainstream, subculture? Everything is merged.

Yushan Li: Our brand Pronounce is based on rock wear. We reuse a lot of classic elements, borrowing from historical visuals. So it’s a similar discussion. If we take this element and incorporate it in our new collection, how do we make it authentic? There is a really blurry line between referencing classics and copying. Vetements, for instance, sometimes does one hundred percent the same as vintage, and sells it ten times more expensive. I don’t think that’s a good way. There are other smart ways, or humorous ways, to reference things but still be authentic.

Yirantian Guo: I think a lot about how there isn’t original clothing. A turtleneck already exists. So what a designer does is represent it using original details, or a seasonal concept, adapting the element to make it her own. That’s the originality. For example, you use buttons and colours and fabrics which fit your brand, and make the item suitable for your target group.

Alve Lagercrantz: I think [the Chinese e-commerce platform] Taobao has a lot to say about the future of authenticity. If you search ‘Armani jacket,’ you get one million versions of the same thing, with slight adjustments: golden buttons or silver buttons, big sleeves or short sleeves – all these modifications. And there’s a little bit of creativity put into every version of it. There is something strangely appealing about it.

Alice: The funny thing about that example is that there is an original, authentic Armani jacket.

Alve: Sure, but you don’t know which version is best. It’s maybe not the original. And that original Armani jacket, that also came from something, you know? I think about our place as designers within an ocean of images and garments, a kind of melting pot. Originality is about figuring out how to use those components and play with them.

Yushan: We personally don’t find any difficulties. Our building has a modem which allows us to access foreign websites, which we feel is essential, so we don’t feel the wall. It costs about 500 RMB per year. The only difficulty is the speed of the internet. So we have Instagram, and a website, of course; a WeChat official account; and we have Weibo, the Chinese Twitter. We don’t have Facebook. Our main goal is the Chinese market, but we travel everywhere to get inspirations.

Mao: I’m from Japan and Alve is from Sweden, and we are beginners on the Chinese market, so we don’t really know how to navigate these platforms yet. We met in London and came here to start our label, Sirloin. We have Instagram accounts, Facebook accounts, which we connect to with a VPN. And a website. We don’t have WeChat yet, or a platform for selling online.

Jun Zhou: In China, online stores are easier with KOL, who are key opinion leaders, basically famous people who help sell things. If you open your own account without one of them, it’s very difficult to promote it.

Alice: I read an interesting statistic about Internet celebrities in China, which is that they created an economy worth 58 billion RMB in 2016, more than the country’s cinema box office. That’s a huge amount. Is that something emerging labels like yours can — or want to — get a piece of?

Yirantian: I think in China it’s really complex. There are many different kinds of KOL. We sometimes call them superstars, or there’s also a word called ‘Wang Hong.’ Some have really good taste, others are really rich, and some are Wannabes, just pretending they are KOL.

What happened to my brand Yirantian was that a lot of Wang Hong started wearing our jewellery, all of the sudden. We don’t know why it started, and it wasn’t clothes, just jewellery. At the beginning, I didn’t even know they were Wang Hong. My friends would tell me, ‘Do you know they are really famous on Weibo?’ And they’re telling their followers how to do styling and makeup and all that.

A challenge on Taobao is that some things are real, some things are fake. For our online platform, we only sell jewellery and T-shirts. And at the boutiques we collaborate with, they will sell some of our garments but not depth. So with the Wang Hong, it increased our sales and brand awareness, but at the same time, it also created a problem with fakes. Because if one Wang Hong buys your product, the followers will copy her. Like on Taobao, they would write ‘Korean designer brand,’ and we’d see our images, but it’s not our product. And the price is much lower, and it sells a lot.

In the beginning, I was really sad. Maybe I’m fragile. These things aren’t good quality and they impact how people see our brand. You don’t have a channel to protect your own things. But I can also take it as an accomplishment, that the product I make is very suitable to the market.

Alice: What do the rest of you think about this phenomenon?

Yushan: I think it’s Chinese following American culture. Also, one interesting thing I just thought of is that, in earlier times, people were probably still copying in this way. They’d take your products but you’d never hear about it. Now that we’re in an age of full sharing and very fast communication, people send you a screenshot or tag you. So you see the copies, and you think that it’s happening more, but actually probably it happened before. It’s just the rate of communication which changed.

We’ve also found people using our photography. Not in the sense of copying our designs, but using our image as their profile picture, for instance, maybe without credit. We take it as an honour. We’re happy to see that, although we would prefer to be credited. I think that’s the character of sharing and community, in our social media generation.

Alice: I have a quote that I thought would be interesting to get your opinions on, by the French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard. He wrote, ‘We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.’ This was in 1981, before digital media. Do you find it harder to create something meaningful, in a world where everyone is constantly being exposed to so many different images?

Yushan: I think everything has its meaning. Meaning has different layers and levels. It might be good, bad, influential, pointless, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have meaning.

Alve: When Alber Elbaz quit [Lanvin], he said something about, ‘When I started my job I was a couturier. Then I became creative director. And now we’re image-makers.’ We showed our first collection season last season, and soon realised we are pretty old school. If we were more clever, we might have put more of our budget on images. It’s definitely true that classical designing is becoming less important, and new brands focus on creating images. At the same time, especially for young brands, only doing clever marketing strategy is not really enough. Because to be visible in this ocean of images, you also need to be really personal.

Jun: In my opinion, I think images, the story, is more important than the product today. Everyone can design a good product, but not a good image. If the brand has a good image, if its meaning travels, that’s why I want to buy the products. It’s what distinguishes it. Louis Vuitton has a good shirt. Dolce & Gabbana does too. So why do you buy one and not the other?

Yirantian: I think more people have the ability to make good designs today – I mean designs that look good on the surface. But maybe they are copies. If you want to do a really good, unique brand, not that many people have the ability.

Alice: Is image-making a euphemism for marketing here?

Yushan: No, because it can be about self-expression too. For example, on our social media, we post random things, for atmosphere. Fashion can sometimes be too purpose-driven, especially in China, and we are kind of against that. I think it’s typical of Chinese people’s business minds, to make things always about goals and outcomes. Sometimes we really hate that, because it can kill the creativity or possibilities of inspiring stuff.

Alice: Is one necessarily better than the other, though? I often see ads for fashion brands in European fashion magazines that try to look like fine art or photography, but they always manage to sneak the bag in, hiding in the corner. It’s almost like they’re ashamed. Isn’t it better to be straightforward?

Alve: We’re doing a project now on ‘Tuhao,’ which is sort of like Chinese Nouveau Riche. It’s a culture of using objects as symbols, of showing off with products. I agree that in Europe, it’s a little bit ugly to put a bag front and centre on Instagram. Labels try to hide it a bit. While in China, you can just get to it. You don’t necessarily need a story – it’s a nice logo, a nice shape.

Online shops are much more product driven than [physical] shops, in my opinion. I think there are a lot of brands that can survive with just good, interesting, great products, completely without branding. Because when you shop on an online shop, you have millions of products and you pick the one that is the nicest. You don’t care about image. You just buy it, a nice T-shirt.

Yushan: On the other hand, there are also digital tricks. You can present two T-shirts, one is really good, one is really bad, but perhaps they look the same online. You don’t feel it, you don’t touch it, you don’t wear it, so you don’t know. It’s kind of a… digital black hole.

Alice: Can we talk about cultural appropriation? I think this is very much connected to digital media and meme culture, and in America, people are now hyper-aware of this phenomenon. How does that conversation play out in China?

Yushan: One example is that hip-hop became really popular this summer in China. I think it’s because there’s a gap, a lag, since the internet platforms here are different, between what’s going on inside China and the outside world. So lots of designers begin doing hip-hop, but they don’t always compliment it. They’re just using it, in a really bad, old, boring way. It’s a fake hip-hop style. It’s meme culture, but a rubbish way of doing it. In general though, I think there shouldn’t be a limitation on using other cultures. All cultures are shared. But it depends on the sensitivity of the designer, to do it in a good or bad way.

Mao: Whether something is perceived as appropriation or not is really context based. I recently read two articles, for instance, about the appropriation of Japanese culture in America. One was written by a Western writer, and they were focusing on a shoot American Vogue did in Tokyo, where the magazine cast a white model to wear a kimono. There was a big argument happening in America among the whites, but in Japanese news, everyone was saying, ‘Why not?’ These are beautiful pictures, it’s not disturbing anything about Japanese culture.

The second article was heavily discussed in Japan but not not America. The Washington Post posted an article about cherry blossom season in New York, and there was a picture of an Asian woman wearing a traditional costume under a tree, and article explains it’s a Japanese lady in America, who is wearing a kimono and enjoying her culture in a far-away place. But for Japanese eyes, she was obviously Korean, and wearing a Korean uniform, not a Japanese one. It was a huge argument in Japan, that never crossed over to America at all. That was quite funny for me.

Alice: So those conversations totally missed each other, even though the subject is cultural exchange. I’m curious on a related note if you all feel pressure to represent your own culture, or nation, through your designs?

Yirantian: I think for me, it’s not important. Many Chinese designers today have studied abroad and know a lot about Western culture. It’s becoming less important where you are born and where you are from. Instead it’s about what you do and what you present. 

Yushan: I kind of hate the concept of representing your country, actually. The reason we picked our name, ‘Pronounce,’ is because you don’t know where it’s from, or what it represents. You don’t know what we’re about until you see our clothes.

Alve: We are in a funny position with this topic. Neither of us are from China, but for Sirloin’s first collection, we were inspired by elements of Chinese life that we’ve seen around us since we moved. And quite a lot of people picked up on it, and we’ve become sort of strange ambassadors for China, and Chinese culture, although it was not really a conscious decision by us. We are, in a way, tourists.

Alice: It’s interesting to me that none of you fully embrace the idea of representing Chinese design, although Labelhood is an incubator for Chinese designers, and in that way, even this roundtable is a bit of a nationalistic project. Do you see the irony here?

Yushan: I think eventually you end up representing your country whether you like it or not. The more successful you get, the less you are able to avoid it.

Alice Hines is Vestoj’s online editor and a writer in New York.

Sarah Meyohas is a French-American artist. The images are taken from her film Cloud of Petals, documenting a performance in which 10,000 roses were hand-plucked and digitized in the atrium of Bell Labs, the New Jersey corporate site where digital information networks were invented.

Thanks to Tasha Liu and Labelhood for facilitating this event.

Buy Vestoj: On Authenticity here.

1. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/retail-consumer/total-retail/total-retail-categories.html ↩

Vestoj and Style Zeitgeist have teamed up in a dialogue and series of critiques of recent events in fashion media to raise more wide-reaching questions about the state of contemporary fashion media – and what that says about our industry at large. In the third instalment, we examine the notion of transparency, and how four different publishing platforms are dealing with the issue in relation to their respective funding models.

LOUIS VUITTON’S RECENT 2017 resort collection was presented last month at the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Niterói Contemporary Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The modernist building’s curvaceous ramp, set against a spectacular mountainous bay, was an ambitious venue that made for a photogenic catwalk locale, though its opulence, for some, jarred with the country’s current political and economic uncertainty.

Coverage delivered in the form of reviews and photo-ops ensured that the cost of its staging – from the elaborate set, to the flying in of overseas press, buyers and celebrities – was money well spent. This came via the typical set of high traffic fashion platforms like Vogue.com, T Magazine, High Snobiety and WWD, ensuring the event was thoroughly and successfully documented.

Within this slew of articles, The Business of Fashion weighed in with a piece that recorded the event by mostly addressing its economic and political significance. Against a backdrop of the otherwise mostly frivolous coverage, BoF attempted a more analytical, and much welcome, perspective of the event. However, more thought provoking was a short statement at the end of the article stating LVMH’s investment in the platform. It read:

‘Disclosure: LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton, is part of a group of investors who, together, hold a minority interest in The Business of Fashion. All investors have signed shareholder’s documentation guaranteeing BoF’s complete editorial independence. Lauren Sherman travelled to Rio de Janeiro as a guest of Louis Vuitton.’

The statement appears to be an attempt to reassure readers of the publisher’s candour, and their dedication to deliver unbiased and reliable coverage of the event despite the apparent relationship between host and guest. The gesture reflected a transparency rarely seen in the murky realm of fashion publishing.

Other publications have not gone so far as this. The fashion and lifestyle platform Nowness,¹ that has Dazed & Confused’s Jefferson Hack as creative director, is also funded by LVMH. Though editorially very different to The Business of Fashion, there is no mention of the funding from the luxury group anywhere on the site. Instead, this information is found only through a general internet search, or on the LVMH website.²

‘Nowness has built the influence and authority to genuinely curate and shape the future of cultural conversations, and goes beyond just delivering experiences. We provide solutions to the industry by creating bespoke content for premium brands looking to reach our premium audience. Nowness is truly an innovator.’

– Jefferson Hack, creative director at Nowness, as featured on lvmh.com 

When Nowness was launched in 2010, an article by The Guardian responded with a brief, but apt blog post shortly after, highlighting the project as one that, ‘promises to blur the lines between editorial and promotional content in a “beautiful” way.’³ Back then Nowness was one of the first of its kind in the digital realm, but the site has since become emblematic in the landscape of fashion publishing where sponsorships are often shadowy terrain, particularly concerning the agenda an investor might have. Though the funding model adopted by Nowness allows the platform to remain advertising-free, issues arise around selectivity and what is chosen to be featured as published content. For example, Nowness often releases exclusive features, such as collection videos, made by Louis Vuitton and other brands within the LVMH group.

The Talks,⁴ an online interview platform created and funded by Rolex, reflects another editorial venture for a luxury company. The website aspires to cultural capital with editorial featuring interviews with high profile figures from art, film and fashion – similar to earlier incarnations like United Colors of Benetton’s Colors or Acne’s Acne Paper. Unlike Nowness, The Talks’ website reveals its economic framework immediately and explicitly with the Rolex logo on the right-hand of the website’s banner, relying on this separation with the editorial as a brand-building exercise for Rolex. Within the industry, marketers and press teams place significant emphasis on ‘content,’ a buzzword that is seen to be a critical mode of generating cultural capital, and thus sales, for a brand.

A similar and recent example of brand-generated editorial is the print publication Porter, the in-house fashion magazine launched by Net-a-Porter in 2015. Porter models itself off the tradition of the seasonal high fashion magazine, and, though it is obviously affiliated with the Net-a-Porter group, still targets the same audience as its competitors, and is thus challenged by notions of transparency in terms of the brands they choose to feature – or not feature – in their fashion stories.

The relationship between advertising (brand) and editorial (publication) in fashion has never been straightforward, as scholar Lynda Dyson contends, ‘Editorial is […] perhaps, the most valuable form of media content because it is perceived to be unbiased and believable. Its ‘‘purity’’ (precisely because it is not advertising) derives from its aura of authority and neutrality.’⁵ But this merging of brand and publication has profound implications. The reality facing these relationships as they explore the paradigm of editorial-as-brand extension, beyond the era of print sales, is the compromise on editorial selection process. Even in posting a disclaimer at the end of their review of the Vuitton show, one could argue that BoF still faces the same issue of what is not said in the article. Thus the challenge facing fashion journalism lies in what an editor, stylist or writer chooses to feature.

The implications of commercial ties needs to go beyond a statement tacked on at the end of an article since it will inevitably permeate the editorial decision-making of what is published and written. For example, BoF’s Vuitton show review featured extensive quotes from an interview with LVMH’s chief executive, Michael Burke, who justified the show as an economic strategy for the luxury conglomerate despite the controversial locale, allegedly motivated by ‘generat[ing] dedicated global media coverage and activate regional markets.’⁶ The article appeared to defend the cultural implications of the event by choosing to feature a largely one-sided argument with a representative from LVMH, and so was not able to generate debate on the topic. In this case, as with others, the potential for self-censorship on what is written, so as not to compromise their source of funding (LVMH), is, arguably, as powerful as the choice of garments featured on the pages of Porter. Since, in the case of BoF, ‘investors have signed shareholder’s documentation guaranteeing BoF’s complete editorial independence,’ a risk might be that this apparent transparency allows the publishers to ‘get away’ with more.

The editorial content housed by these publications becomes a point of contention in negotiating reliable and balanced coverage. Though BoF, The Talks and Porter (among other similar brand-affiliated editorial ventures) function differently in terms of publications and have different investment models, they embrace new modes of funding that tread thorny terrain in maintaining a clear boundary between advertising and unbiased journalism. The final disclaimer at the end of the BoF article presents a move in a new direction in terms of editorial transparency, however it raises deeper questions about selectivity within editorial content.

Laura Gardner is Vestoj’s former Online Editor and a writer in Melbourne.

1. https://www.nowness.com/ ↩

2. https://www.lvmh.com/houses/other-activities/nowness/ ↩

3. ‘LVMH launches luxury online magazine Nowness,’ The Guardian blog, 27 February 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/media/pda/2010/feb/26/lvmh-luxury-online-magazine-nowness ↩

4. http://the-talks.com/ ↩

5. Dyson, L 2008, ‘Customer magazines: The rise of the “glossies” as brand extensions’, in T Holmes (ed), Mapping the magazine: Comparative studies in magazine journalism, Routledge, London. ↩

6. ‘Vuitton Investing, Not Surfing, in Brazil’ by Imran Amed and Lauren Sherman for The Business of Fashion, May 29, 2016 ↩

The press release for Jefferson Hack’s new book We Can’t Do This Alone: Jefferson Hack The System permeated fashion and design media these last few weeks. The monograph, released mid-May and published by Rizzoli, is a hardback, visually led selection of the editor and publisher’s work on Dazed & Confused magazine over the years.

As the author, Hack is presented as a fashion provocateur, moving easily across cultural categories. Concurrent with the book’s launch, Hack collaborated with French designers Each x Other creating T-shirts (stocked in Paris boutique Colette and priced €155 to €255) for their spring/summer 2016 collection. The T-shirts endorsed the book by referencing its title along with statements like: ‘The best way to make money is not to make any.’

The book’s contents select from Dazed & Confused magazine’s prolific body of work over its twenty-five year existence, adding to this, it features contributions from the high profile figures, like co-founder and photographer Rankin, musician Björk, actress Gwyneth Paltrow to artist Ai Wei Wei and novelist Douglas Coupland.

Since it was founded in 1992, Dazed & Confused has persisted through commercial and economic shifts in the fashion industry. It was initially conceived as a zine when eighteen-year-old printing student Hack approached photography student Rankin to create a publication to represent London’s art colleges as a collective. The project began in a black and white poster format, and its pages reflected the counter-cultural, DIY spirit of an era where cultural disciplines were beginning to break down and speak to each other more dynamically.

These early issues were highly influential in merging genres from fashion, music and art graphically on the page. Hack and Rankin, two bold students frustrated with the state of media in the creative arts, appealed to a young, culturally savvy, style conscious reader in reaction to mainstream glossies. The first issue reflected this spirit with its opening manifesto reading:

‘This is not a magazine. This is not a conspiracy to force opinion into the subconscious of stylish young people. A synthetic leisure culture is developing – plastic people forced fed on canned entertainment and designer food. Are you ready to be Dazed & Confused?’

– Dazed & Confused, issue 1 1991.

These counter cultural beginnings are essential to the branding of the global media company Dazed now operates as, and We Can’t Do This Alone attempts to project this energy. An opening essay by Hack reads as a call to action. He writes: ‘We are all media. We can rewrite the rules together. We have the power to construct our own language and distribute our own images.’ The tone is similar to Dazed & Confused’s initial issue, but the economic context in which it is written is vastly and fundamentally different.

The graphic approach to layout also echoes this paradox. Collated and designed by New York-based art director Ferdinando Verderi, the publishers worked with Kodak to produce a unique cover for each of the 5000 copies in the print run. No stranger to corporate collaboration, Verderi is a founding member and creative director of the ad agency Johannes Leonardo, whose clients include Coca Cola, Adidas and Trip Advisor.

Corporate dealings are home territory to Hack. As publisher and director of Dazed Digital, Hack oversees an editorial and media empire that now incorporates AnOther Magazine, Dazed Digital, AnOther Man, NOWNESS (funded by luxury conglomerate LVMH) as well as Dazed & Confused. On their website, Dazed Digital boasts global brands like Armani, Chanel, Nike, Swarovski and Dunhill as key clients. Given this, Dazed Digital is unequivocally embedded in the mainstream fashion system, making the political-sounding rhetoric and graphics of We Can’t Do This Alone seem empty to say the least.

In effect, the book is a corporate project dressed up in DIY aesthetics. Dispersed through its pages are hyperbolic, political-sounding phrases presented in graphic arrangements. One spread features the text, ‘A conspiracy of ideas’ in an artwork of haphazardly cut and stapled paper. The message is direct but fundamentally ambiguous: who the conspirator is, and how we, as readers, are supposed to deal with this ‘conspiracy’ remains unarticulated.

Hack’s claim as an independent publisher is equivalently hollow, prompting criticism from journalists on the commercial activity of the Dazed Group. Features on Hack in The Guardian and the Financial Times have addressed this.¹. In a particular ‘Lunch with the FT’ feature for the Financial Times, John Sunyer mentions to Hack his ‘surprise at the amount of “content sponsored by brands” in his magazines, much of it passed off as regular journalism. Take, for example, the October 2013 issue, in which six pages are given over to Hack’s collaboration with Tod’s, the luxury Italian shoemaker.’²

When offered the opportunity to respond to these criticisms, Hack still doesn’t seem to be able to articulate a key distinction between independent publishing and corporate activity. In an interview with Lou Stoppard for SHOWstudio in 2014, she questions him on the commercial motivations of Dazed & Confused:

“When you started Dazed you talked about it being an independent magazine, […] but you yourself, and Dazed Group, doesn’t operate in an independent way, you’re very closely tied to advertising.”

“Independent doesn’t mean anarchist. Independent for me means we choose what we do, and nobody tells us what to do.”

“So your stylists don’t shoot full looks for advertisers then?”

“Of course they do. But I still decide what happens. What goes in and what doesn’t. We make all the decisions. And that’s independence.”

[…]

“Independence from what?”

“Independence from anybody telling us what to do. We do what the fuck we want to do. That’s independence. It’s that simple.”

– Interview with Jefferson Hack by Lou Stoppard for SHOWstudio in March 2014, https://vimeo.com/91950177

In her research on ‘niche fashion magazines’ fashion scholar Ane Lynge-Jorlén cites Dazed & Confused, among others as part of a genre of magazines that although aesthetically is ‘positioned outside the mainstream, their financial underpinning is advertising revenue, and they are thus, not outside commercial interests.’³ Dazed & Confused’s implicit relationship with big corporations, despite claiming an independent status, functions as a brand extension for the luxury fashion companies it features in ‘full looks’ on its pages; a relationship that symbolically and economically reinforces the brand value of both parties in the contemporary market.

Under the umbrella of Dazed Digital, a content and media producer for corporate brands, Hack capitalises on the cultural clout generated from Dazed & Confused’s heritage as a counter culture publication. Yet, fundamental changes in the way this publication operates in the commercial market indicate the magazine’s shift from being an independent publisher to a media agency, making press release statements like ‘If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything,’ dangerously hollow. Stoppard querying Hack about ‘Independence from what?’ is a critical question in defining a position in relation to the commercial high fashion system, and Hack’s oblique answer points to the difficulty of appearing ‘authentic’ while simultaneously being transparent with your commercial motives.

In his failure to answer his critics, Hack, not surprisingly, appears unable to demonstrate what exactly needs to be ‘hacked’ in the fashion system. Apart from a light-hearted pun in its title, how to meaningfully subvert the system that he has become a leading tastemaker of, is a question his book raises but fails to answer. Instead, it falls amongst the many voices that harp on about the sorry state of the contemporary fashion industry, without wanting to acknowledge the role they play in constructing and upholding it. The end result is just more white noise.

Laura Gardner is Vestoj’s former Online Editor and a writer in Melbourne.

1. see Eva Wiseman (2011), ‘Still Dazed at 20: the gang who changed pop culture’, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/nov/05/dazed-confused-gang-still-cool, 6 November, 2011 ↩

2. ‘Lunch with the FT: Jefferson Hack’ by John Sunyer for the Financial Times, 8 August 2014. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fc444a8a-1cab-11e4-88c3-00144feabdc0.html ↩

3. Ane Lynge-Jorlén 2012, ‘Between frivolity and art: Contemporary niche fashion magazines,’ Fashion Theory, vol. 16, issue 1, pp. 7-28, Berg, Oxford. ↩

Vestoj and Style Zeitgeist are teaming up for the coming weeks in an ongoing conversation and exchange of ideas. This dialogue will take the form of a series of critiques of recent articles in the fashion press with the aim of delving deeper into the state of contemporary fashion media – and what that says about our industry at large. In our first conversation we look closer at a text by Alexander Fury on Alessandro Michele of Gucci and Demna Gvasalia of Vetements and Balenciaga, recently published in New York Times’ T Magazine’s ‘The Age of Influence’ issue, in order to ask more wide-reaching questions about the role and significance of fashion writing today.

MANY ARE THOSE WHO today speak of the necessity of a ‘fashion revolution.’ Certainly there are some fundamental issues in the way fashion currently functions; the pressure on brands (high and low) to distribute garment collections at a faster pace, the question mark over the role of fashion weeks in the current climate (and the fashion show as the optimal model for displaying clothes), and the flux that the role of the ‘creative director’ of high fashion brands is currently undergoing – not to mention the ethical concerns that have dogged the industry for decades. In T Magazine’s ‘These Two Guys Are Changing How We Think About Fashion,’ Alexander Fury talks obliquely about rules that need to be broken, and implicates ‘the editors, the designers, the corporations’ as the manufacturers of these rules. But if the fashion system at large is at fault, what role does Fury and T Magazine (the editors) alongside Michele and Gvasalia (the designers) of Gucci and Balenciaga (the corporations) play?

There are countless flaws in Alexander Fury’s article, (many of which are pointed out in Eugene Rabkin’s recent opinion piece on StyleZeitgeist¹) but perhaps the most significant (and common) one is that the writer neglects to see the role he himself plays, alongside his client and subject, in the mainstream fashion system. With this in mind, it’s worth broadening the spectrum to ask wider questions, not just about lazy journalism but rather about what we can expect from the fashion press today, and what role each of us have in upholding the ‘status quo’ that Fury refers to in his article, and that so often gets blamed for the ills of our industry.

There is a vicious cycle between mainstream fashion media platforms and the industry at large, with the tendency of fashion press to generate hyperbolic statements that feedback false narratives into fashion’s economic framework, as well as to its consumers. Fury’s truism that, ‘rules in fashion are made by the industry: the editors, the designers, the corporations who fund the whole thing’ is a sentence that seems to gesture vaguely at the industry paradigm, but this simply reflects a ‘Buzz Rickson effect.’² A similar dynamic occurs between fashion media platforms – both their editors and writers – and the fashion industry at large. In this case, however, the textual storytelling around the so-called ‘broken system,’ Gvasalia, Michele and so forth, builds on the cultural capital of these conglomerates. As a result, companies, like LVMH and Kering, acquire a perceived status as ‘avant-garde’ or ‘rule-breaking’ to their brand.

Fashion writing has a tradition of being flaky, commercially-motivated and solipsistic, and what is often lacking in mainstream fashion reporting – Fury’s article being a good case in point – is actual argument offering a balanced point of view and consideration of both sides to an argument. Fury, as so many other fashion critics, not only fails to provide the debate with any analysis, but also fails to identify the real issue – the lack of self-awareness that so often leads to unwitting self-censorship and any critique that does more than just gesture vaguely at the industry at large.

Nearly two decades ago, Anne Hollander attempted to explain ‘why there is no good fashion writing’³ in a piece for Slate Magazine, and her observations about verbal hype, (Fury, for example, calls the reactions to Gvasalia’s first Balenciaga collection ‘ecstatic’) the relationship between advertisers and publishers (Kering, who owns both Gucci and Balenciaga, is a major advertiser in T Magazine) and the far-remove of most catwalk garments from the reality of the majority of women’s everyday lives, (Fury extols the virtues of both Michele and Gvasalia who ‘talk frequently, incessantly about clothes, rather than fashion’ but fails to mention the exclusivity inherent in said clothes due to their price tags) still hold true today. The type of obliviousness displayed here by Fury, and elsewhere by so many other fashion writers, raises the question of what is really going on in the triangle between publishing platform, writer and brand. As a rule writers and editors would never openly acknowledge the influence that corporations have on editorial content, and to avoid cognitive dissonance, most find ways of obfuscating this fact from themselves as well. The tacit agreement that ‘you don’t bite the hand that feeds you,’ thus mostly comes across in the attitude that fashion journalism should be about ‘seduction’ (as Vogue’s Hamish Bowles acquiesces in Vestoj ‘On Power’) or the rationalisation that posits that a magazine should only feature what its editors like. The psychological defence mechanism that gives rise to criticism by omission is but one of the many ways that the fashion press avoid the discomfort that would arise from any overt censorship, be it from your publisher or a press executive at any given fashion house.

Literary scholar Siobhan Brownlie describes self-censorship as occurring ‘prior to publication when the cultural agent censors his or her work voluntarily, in order to avoid public censorship, and/or in order to achieve approval from the dominating sector in society. Self-censorship may be conscious or unconscious (in which case social norms have been internalised).’⁴ Understanding how self-censorship affects fashion writing is crucial for any discerning consumer with an interest in reading between the lines: it is the compromise we make in order to marry our desire for expression with the (perceived) necessity of paying heed to the dominating forces in the industry. Noam Chomsky has famously written about the manufacturing of consent, and the filters that he identifies with regards to the elite domination of mass-media news reporting are as relevant when it comes to analysing the microcosm of fashion press: ownership and profit-orientation of the media, advertising as primary income source, the reliance of information provided by agents of power and the regular disciplining of errant media.⁵ The interests and choices of the fashion press can be understood better when we as consumers keep in mind that very little gets printed that hasn’t first gone through these filters.

The filters that affect what gets printed today are often so insidious and fundamental that it is fully possible for a well-meaning reporter to convince him or herself that s/he is working with full creative freedom. With this in mind, perhaps the most relevant question to ask when reading fashion reporting is what kind of critique we can expect from any publication, whether owned by a news conglomerate or an independent publishing house, while it is funded by advertising and keen to keep its position in the pecking order? It may be cloaked in ‘avant-garde’ and photographed by Juergen Teller, but all too often fashion writing is nothing short of propaganda.

As T Magazine broadcasts on its most recent cover – this is the age of influence.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s Editor-in-Chief and Founder.

Laura Gardner is Vestoj’s former Online Editor and a writer in Melbourne.

1. http://www.sz-mag.com/news/2016/04/vestoj-x-sz-what-revolution-t-magazine-gucci-and-vetements/ ↩

2. The ‘Buzz Rickson’ was a jacket, in the style of an MA-1, that writer William Gibson fictionalised in the 2003 book Pattern Recognition, as a result and due to popular demand by fans of the book, the company created a jacket as it was described in the book. http://gizmodo.com/jackets-dreamed-up-by-william-gibson-are-gaining-a-foll-1463266282)”>http://gizmodo.com/jackets-dreamed-up-by-william-gibson-are-gaining-a-foll-1463266282 ↩

3. ‘A Loss for Words: Why there’s no good writing about fashion’ by Anne Hollander for Slate Magazine, 1997. http://www.slate.com/articles/business_and_tech/clothes_sense/1997/02/a_loss_for_words.html ↩

4. S. Brownlie, ‘Examining Self-Censorship: Zola’s Nana in English Translation’ in Ed. F. Billiani, In Modes of Censorship in Translation: National Contexts and Diverse Media, Manchester, St Jerome Publishing, 2007 ↩

5. N. Chomsky & E. S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent, London, Vintage, 1994 ↩

These structural forms; internal belts, gathers, labels and immaculate stitching, are captured as abstract forms in Adam’s photographs, reminding us that a garment is a multi-faceted object that can be examined both in intimate detail, and as a stylised object or image in a gallery space. Looking at new ways of engaging with garments in an institutional archive, the series reveals and explores what is inevitably hidden from view in exhibiting and storing fashion objects. On closer inspection, these structural details force us to view garments as individual objects or artefacts, in absence of the body.

***

To create these images, the garments hung in the National Gallery of Victoria’s photographic studio like specimens. Draped from equipment and stands, prodded and propped with tripods, the objects were circled and inspected in detail, held in place with artificial arms wearing white gloves and tissue paper. The clock was ticking; six hours to photograph nine garments when about half-way through, the signature hand-stitched chain at the base of the Chanel jacket refused to cooperate, hanging dogmatically for much longer than the others, reigning over us with arrogant authority, like the grand Dame herself.

This was the setting that accompanied the project ‘Inside Out’, devised by Vestoj’s Laura Gardner following a visit to the NGV fashion and textiles store. Hung on individual coat hangers or flat in boxes, archival garments are disassociated from the body, affording them different views. As objects they can be turned, opened and uncovered, and their individual architectures discovered. These acts were mimicked in the photographic studio, as photographer Adam Custins peaked up through and into the interiors of garments, recording their structural forms on Polaroid film.

The project was inspired by a hat by the London-based milliner Stephen Jones, ‘Mr Whippy’, 1995 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) where white soft pleated fabric is piled lusciously on the brimmed form to create the impression of a soft-serve cone, complete with a glossy red cherry on top. Inside the crown, a neat ring gathers the silk lining to its centre. This single elegant detail sparked the concept for ‘Inside Out’: to reveal the hidden construction details of works in the NGV’s Fashion and Textiles collection and the internal scaffolding upon which a garment sits. Through collaboration, these undersides of a garment’s exterior are revealed with a photographer and a writer, reinterpreting the gallery archive.

In gallery display, the construction details of a garment are typically hidden from view. Insides are often filled with a mannequin, the outside view of the garment prioritised to replicate how the garment would be worn. Yet with or without mannequins, it can be difficult to provide two views simultaneously, to show the outside and the underside of the same form. To view the outside one looks at, to view the inside one looks in, as such, these two realms remain separate. ‘Inside Out’ aims to address this, positioning the viewer inside the garments, at times looking in, and at other times looking up. For Christian Dior, dresses were constructed like buildings,¹ and, like buildings, garments can be traversed, to afford both an inside and outside view. This project aimed to traverse the garment interiors through the eye of the photographer, and inject the camera through the hollow garment to reveal and explore its scaffolding, hidden from view from the exterior.

Nine works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries featuring critical and unexpected details of construction were selected from the NGV collection. Some construction details were predictable, such as the whalebone stays within a nineteenth century bodice. Other details were less predictable, such as the fine, contrasting, fan-like stitches at the top of these stays, or the hatched padding inside the chest of a man’s tail-coat from the 1930s – applied to enhance the pectorals and to improve the wearer’s form.

The project offered alternate views of the garment; the photographer’s lens, cropped, framed and lit to abstract and mystify the technical attributes. The forms were re-interpreted by Custins, revealing their unexpected beauty and inner secrets. Working with the confines of the limited stock of the Polaroid film format, each work was photographed merely once, twice at most, rare in the digital age. Added to that was the unpredictability of the film itself. As the last of its kind, it was aged and temperamental in the process of development, adding a capriciousness to each of the images as they were forced to surrender to the medium of the Polaroid, which brought with it elegance, charm and risk.

The outcome is an image series created by Custins that interprets the construction details of the garments into abstracted terrains, painterly textures and abstracted symmetrical marks. They provide an intimate view that allows viewers to traverse the internal spaces of garments, and seek the marks made for, and by, the absent body.

***

1. E. TERRY & SON, Southseaactive England 1900sDress c.1908viscose, rayon, cotton, glass(a) 49.0 cm (centre back) 53.0 cm (sleeve length) (bodice)(b) 121.0 cm (centre back) 34.8 cm (waist, flat) (skirt)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneGift of Miss P. Acklon, 1979 2. CHRISTIAN DIOR, Paris (couture house)French est. 1946Christian DIOR (designer)French 1905–1957Zelie, cocktail dress 1954 autumn-wintersilk122.0 cm (centre back) 32.0 cm (waist, flat)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbournePurchased NGV Foundation, 2006 3. CHANEL, Paris (couture house)French 1914–1939, 1954-Gabrielle ‘Coco’ CHANEL (designer)French 1883–1971Suit 1970 spring-summersilk, wool, brass, metal(a) 64.0 cm (centre back) 58.2 cm (sleeve length) (jacket)(b) 64.0 cm (centre back) 38.5 cm (waist, flat) (skirt)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneGift of Mavis Powell, 1986 4. ENGLANDDolman 1880silk, metal, elastic53.0 cm (centre back) 55.2 cm (sleeve length)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbournePresented by Mrs Gordon Landy, 1983 5. MDME BRONTE, London (dressmaker)English active 1890sEmma Jane EXLEY (designer)active 1890sAfternoon dress c.1895silk, ballen, metal hooks141.5 cm (centre back) 30.0 cm (waist, flat)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneThe Schofield Collection. Purchased with the assistance of a special grant from the Government of Victoria, 1974 6. STEPHEN JONES, London (milliner)English est. 1980Stephen JONES (designer)born England 1957‘Mr Whippy’, hat 1995 spring-summer, Legasty collectionpolyester, silk, synthetic sparterie, metal, paint150.0 cm (outer circumference) 28.0 cm (height) 49.4 cm (width)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbournePurchased, 1996 7. TAGNEY & RANDELL, London(tailor)English 1845–1948Tail coat c.1935wool, silk, linen113.5 cm (centre back) 64.0 cm (sleeve length)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneGift of Mr J. McG. Edwards, 1979 8. ENGLANDPelisse and dress c.1818cotton, silk metal (buttons and hook and eye)(a) 141.0 cm (centre back) 66.0 cm (sleeve length) (pelisse)(b) 4.8 cm x 4.8 cm (ribbon) (c) 136.0 cm (centre back) 35.0 cm (waist, flat) (dress)National Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneThe Schofield Collection. Purchased with the assistance of a special grant from the Government of Victoria, 1974 9. ENGLANDWedding gown c.1885silk, cotton, balleenNational Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneGift of Mrs Sister Winifred Hurley, 1962

1. Christian Dior, ‘Dior by Dior’, 1958, p.21-22 ↩

***

How to Escape the Present

This is the curious thing with garments from the very distant past: the more we speculate – bring them forwards with our clumsy words, tie together loose stitches and reverse the processes of time – the more they erase themselves, in silent defiance. We lose them in our own imperfect memories, whispers misheard, glimpses misread, illusions mistaken for the real. We scrape, unfurl, peel back, and then we forget what we were looking for in the first place. But if we leave them be, they will give us a new image every time we look. They are palimpsests; faint histories partially revealed, transforming at each reading.

***

***

Now, hanging off the surgical rail, is a diminutive English tail-coat. It is a symmetrical wonder of collars, sleeves, buttons (three on each side of the bodice), and of course a precise pair of tails, its most prominent asset, draped over what seems like a surgeon’s tripod arm. This is a black bird in mourning barathea weave, its chest now deflated, hesitantly caught in mid-rescue.

Second only to the tails are the lapels – silky, slyly smiling, hiding something – coaxing us towards some hidden, internal pleasure. The surgeon peels back the large lapels with his gloved tripod arm extension and we peer in, fetishised and feverish, and discover, a matrix of repetitive stitch lines extending from around each armhole; black on black, criss-crossing to form geometric grids, or else marching mechanically side-by-side forming concentric patterns. This might possibly be an incognito bird, hiding in the coded micro-landscape of grids, lines, squares, bubbles, tiny ripples of secrecies.

***

They tell us that this black bodice is part of a majestic mourning gown that would have been worn around the year 1908, perhaps only once. Its sleeves are politely tucked behind its back, elbows bent in symmetry. Our attention is drawn to its raised textured surface, slithering with black cords and flat braids, their fern-like fronds creeping in darkness across the black surface. The woman who wore this had wanted woven hair instead of these cords and braids. She would have been comforted by her body crawling with the hair of the deceased – but she was not granted this solace.

The surgeon had separated the bodice from its skirt and in his unbridled enthusiasm had prematurely opened up the hooks and eyes all along its front, exposing for our pleasure the magnificence of the internal handwork. All around the bodice are stiff stays of varying lengths, arrayed with calculated distance apart from the one another.  They had the monumental job of keeping the woman in mourning upright in her moments of despair, whether real or feigned. They stay hidden between the lining and outer fabric, their existence referred to only by the securing stitches. The person who had put them there had a wicked sense of humour; each stay was fussily secured with five contrast stitches in dull gold thread, in a half starburst pattern – a skeletal hand bidding a perversely cheerful ‘hello’. On her centre back, on the tape that runs along her waist, there is a stitching of a big ‘X’ – black on black: she had taken a vow of secrecy, on a promise made between her and the black bird.

***

Next the surgeon wheels in a structured dolman in silk faille. The little grey lilac creature is a work of stiff symmetry, with calculated ruffles around its neckline, hem, cuffs and down its centre front. It extends longer at the front – a pair of dangling tongues – wanting, longing, feeding. With his white gloved-hand on a tripod arm, the surgeon pushes back the shoulder. And then, poking into the dolman’s low armholes, we see the woman – elbows bent – revealing part of her arms, with her hands permanently and symmetrically poised to receive, to greet another. We gaze straight into the mouth of each sleeve, then into the dolman’s underside – into her interior. The mouth is a cavernous expression, rudely golden in the light, awkwardly open just so: a gaping, a gasp, aghast – a silent scream fixed in place. Lined in contrasting cream silk, the fleshy innards are dressed with quilting lines carving the front and back bodies like surgical markings, a matrix of symmetrically paired vertical and horizontal lines that kiss at the centre back, down the centre front and side seams.

And as we look on, we discover the secret of the dolman: a pair of elastic ties at the centre back waist, designed to secure it in place by wrapping around the woman’s waist. They are a pair of lovers stretched out on a quilted bedspread, arms touching, fingers curling towards one another. Had the woman thought about them in this way? She had been gone for a long time. Right now the pair hangs in silent partnership – one slightly longer than the other – waiting, the full length of their sides touching. Around the year 1880 someone had stitched them in place, had meant for them to be together for a long time.

***

Next: a cream boucle wool jacket, with gold buttons and a chain circling the hem. To get the full effect of its circular motion, it is raised high so one peers upward into its internal void. From below, the chain floats weightlessly; a quiet miracle where gravity is mere perspective. This will never be worn again, harbouring a weighty history that has stubbornly ceased to continue. The chain must link and unlink. Over the course of time, after repeated attempts at remembering and amending, and after all these attempts at reversing the processes of time, we realise that all stories must fall apart, must be wholly re-imagined.

***

And then, nervous punctuation mid-sentence – an exclamation mark mid-story: a curious hat makes its way onto the surgical table. It is a mass of fine accordion pleats draped around a broad brim. The pleated cream satin dances in careless, improvised whirls, folding around itself in a circular motion and forming soft peaks and melting folds. It is a mysterious formation – a swift, spontaneous dance of soft, vanilla cream – oozing and drooping. The surgeon, in one clinical move, flips the hat around to reveal the mechanics of its conceit. The pleated satin is draped and secured around a small circular form at the base of the hat – a cyclonic device which holds the swirls together, tentatively, by its sheer internal force and tension of the dance. But I say, let us not forget, that on the other side of the eye of the cyclone, lays a bright little red cherry: the heart that makes it dance.

***

We are nearing the end, and, hanging, in heavy folds of cream brocade and silk, is a full-length English dress from 1895. It has a high neckline, and drapes heavily on the front and back. The two leg-o’-mutton sleeves, with full-fat-fecund potential, hold more than one pair of arms. The milky fabric smells like dairy-fresh flesh, the skin held together by the lovers’ seal locked within the weave. A long time ago, for a brief period in their lives, they had been brought together and then held apart before they destroyed each other. The dress sighs in folds and tucks, the gap between each breath a falling apart of a seam, and the weave loosens and the skin wastes away, so that with each breath taken, a tiny part of the lovers’ seal is unlocked.

This is a dress of seams that breathe; they inhale to hide and exhale for escape. It is a dress for two lovers, who, for a long time now, have been held at arms’ length from each other, and when the dress finally falls apart they will meet again, for a brief while.

***

Waiting at the back of the row is the bride, dressed for the sole purpose of greeting her husband for the first time. But this is what we have imagined – perhaps she had loathed that day in 1885. Her dress, assumed to be originally covered in lace, but all that is left are traces of surface stitching where the lace might have been placed, and later removed. Her cream satin skirt now hangs lifeless, and makes no protest when it is pried open at the centre back, revealing the whalebone crinoline floating around her hips. Two circular scaffoldings orbit an imaginary centre, creating a void. As she walked down the aisle, her hips swaying side to side, the crinoline might have trembled.

***

Lastly, floating on the photographic stand, is a woman-child in the shape of a delicate, white cotton dress. Before she was a bride she had dared to dream of other loves, other lives. Now, strung up by her shoulders, she is merely swaying in this clinical place. Her gentle, puffed sleeves are crinkled from a late morning rise. The white flowers, seeds and leaves embroidered on her hems would have once liked to sing and dance on the lawn. But for now, she is mute. Her back is turned towards us. She is slit open, down the full length of her back, from the neck past her waistline, to reveal her interior. The void in her being is temporarily padded out with tissue paper, her paper-thin skin peeled back. The surgeon has to work quickly. The lights, cameras and sharp instruments are all pointing at her. In the light, she is so translucent that she is almost not there – only an impression and a faint outline are left of her. For a while I thought she might have just escaped. At the base of her neck is a little ribbon; someone close would have tied that for her, before fastening her with hook and eyes down her back. On the inside of centre back seam, is an inscription of her name. Each time she was tied in, someone would have seen and whispered it to themselves.

Then the camera takes its shot, catches her just before she flees – or does it? And then we wait for her to re-emerge from 1818 – a magical conjuring, a chemical-synthetic, spiritual-ectoplasmic divination. And as the image begins to float to the surface of the photograph, she herself plates up the pièce de résistance: the dress without the body, the ghost without the form, the name without the person: ‘Caroline Foster’.

***

All photographs taken on the day of shooting at the National Gallery of Victoria.

‘I’m not interested in rules, or whether they are there or not. I do not consciously set out to break rules. I only make clothes that I myself feel are beautiful or good-looking. People maybe say that this way of feeling is against the rules.’

Rei Kawakubo

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH DRESS and fashion – as individuals and as a cultural collective – is guided by the necessary rules and edicts that reinforce what we should, or more importantly, should not, wear. These form like the repeated lines of opposing graphics in a print or pattern that carefully divide one visual element from another, separating positive and negative values in space. In this instalment to our collaborative series with Missla Libsekal of Another Africa, we look at the way graphics are visually arranged, divided and drawn over the body, balancing these tensions of form and colour to impose a two-dimensional pattern on the body.

Aesthetic codes of dress are omnipresent throughout fashion media and communication. From the point of sale, to the images and text of magazines and press, we are rigorously and consistently told ‘what to wear’ and ‘what not to wear’ with a decisiveness that filters into every aspect of clothing. Particular modes of dress are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ binary opposites that form repeated patterns of behaviour in a network of rules weighted with consequence. Print and pattern in dress is itself an aesthetic dictated by such rules: how one should wear printed fabric, supposedly to avoid ‘clashing’ or ‘gaudiness’, is a familiar seasonal dialogue.

Rei Kawakubo’s statement that in designing she is ‘not interested in rules, or whether they are there or not’ is somewhat significant in this respect, but perhaps idealistic when looking at the output of Comme des Garçons. More often than not, the designer’s work is inextricably linked with the cultural and societal dictums of style that it is exposed to. In other words engaging with sartorial norms is unavoidable. Even so, it seems the further a designer places their work away from such codes, the more they are subject to comparison with them. The infamous, and affectionately titled ‘Lumps and Bumps’ collection did just this in its outlandish rejection of the ‘ideal’ figure. These notions weave through every aspect of the Comme des Garçons’ sensibility and we see a similar rejection of what is aesthetically pleasing in the graphics of the Comme des Garçons Shirt advertisement artwork by Tauba Auerbach, something that is frustrating to observe in its optical dynamic. Likewise, the accessories designer, Michelle Elie embodies these apparent tensions in her highly graphic ensemble at Paris Fashion Week, rejecting style commandments of balance and restraint. The Comme des Garçons outfit that she wears is layered to a clashing and noisy effect, going against how print is generally expected to be worn; that is, with balance and subtlety.

The Nigerian photographer J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere’s iconic images of the hairstyles of his native culture, show painstakingly crafted forms on the head. The graphic effect of creating positive and negative space with hair is a powerful stylistic example of the balance of print on the body. Not unlike the function of print, the surface of the skull is subject to the dividing characteristics of pattern. Similarly, the hennaed feet in the adjacent image by Malian photographer Alioune Bâ, ‘Djabi’, show a traditional and culturally symbolic technique that is used to created graphic boundaries on the body.

Throughout these images, there is a notion of balance through the use of pattern on the body: creating an equilibrium between positive and negative values. Herb Ritts’ photograph ‘El Mirage’ from 1990, captures the seductive power of this tension between spaces. Through shadow, the feminine curvature of the body is enhanced with the photographer’s signature stylistic execution. Next to this, Constance Stuart Larrabee’s black and white image of a boy under the shadows of mesh window frame, also reflects an application of print – albeit less stylistically that Ritts – to create form and balance on the natural landscape of the body.

Pattern and print could thus be a metaphor, or visual realisation of these omnipresent guidelines that reside over fashion and the way we dress from day to day. Both deal with necessary opposites in order to create balance (or lack of), trading in positive and negative values, from what we should or should not wear on our bodies, to the tensions created from opposing forms or hues on a colour wheel.

1. J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, ‘Untitled’, 2006
2. Alioune Bâ, ‘Djabi’, 1997. Courtesy of Opus Art
3. Valérie Belin, ‘Moroccan Brides (Untitled)’, 2000
4. Floor tiles at Palais Mokri, Fez, Morocco
5. Comme des Garçons Shirt artwork by Tauba Auerbach, 2008
6. Untitled (Ndebele woman), copyright Sam Haskins, from the book ‘African Image’
7. Odili Donald Odita, ‘Sister Midnight’, 2013
8. Moroccan zelig tiles, in Fez, Morocco
9. Constance Stuart Larrabee’s image of a young gold miner watching Sunday mine dance, Witwatersrand, near Johannesburg, 1948. Courtesy of the National Museum of African Art
10. Herb Ritts, ‘El Mirage’, 1990, showing the back view of a Versace dress
11. Malick Sidibé, ‘Les 2 Amies (Cousins)’, 1975
12. Michelle Elie wearing Comme des Garçons during Paris Fashion Week

Missla Libsekal is the founding editor of Another Africa.

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself aloud.

Coco Chanel

THE BODY IS A realm of political, social and cultural negotiation; and as such, dress and adornment powerfully represent characteristics within these categories. Artist Barbara Kruger summarises this function eloquently on her 1989 poster, ‘Your body is a battleground’. As the body is crucial to our whole understanding of dress and fashion, it is both vulnerable and powerful as it is symbolically manipulated with clothing. In the third instalment in the collaborative series between Vestoj and Another Africa, we explore the lengths we go to in building meaning onto the body.

When Nelson Mandela wore a bathrobe and neckpiece to represent the traditional costume of his Thembu tribe to his trial after evading authorities as the ‘Black Pimpernel’, he was communicating a distinct message with the body, one of resilience and protest in the wake of his political persecution. Similarly to Mandela the politically symbolic Miriam Makeba often wore her hair in the traditional Fulani style, a sartorial presentation that was inextricably linked to her political identity and context. Considering examples such as these, Coco Chanel’s words, ‘The most courageous act is still to think for yourself aloud’ might speak of the act of externalisation, and of the materialisation of ideas and intent on the body. The politics of the body are also at play when we look at the reappropriation of menswear for women, and notions of androgyny, from Marlene Dietrich’s seminal presentation in tuxedo trousers in the 1930 film ‘Morocco’ that influenced the iconic Helmut Newton image of Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Le Smoking’, invoking the historical narrative of women wearing pants.

Notions of gender also come into play here: a realm in which the fluidity of dress becomes particularly powerful. In one image, a Woodabe man prepares for the Gerewol festival in Tahoua, Niger with extreme care; preening, dressing and applying make-up to impress members of the opposite sex in the ceremony, an age-old tradition of the region. In more contemporary phenomena, similar lengths might be taken by followers of high fashion, or the act of dressing to transgress gender.

Dressing the body is an act of covering nakedness – the fashioned figure’s opposition. In this sense, nakedness is a blank canvas, with no signifiers of social and cultural context, and from which the process of concealing (and sometimes revealing) occurs. In the words of Yves Saint Laurent, ‘Le plus beau vêtement qui puisse habiller une femme, ce sont les bras de l’homme qu’elle aime.’ or ‘The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves.’ Suggesting that the purest expression of the body is one without fashion, and its symbolic trappings, this expression sits in contrast to Newton’s image of ‘Le Smoking’.

A decade earlier, the sexually emancipated image of Grace Jones whose presentation of power balances masculine and feminine aesthetics with commercial success, has some strong visual and symbolic parallels with YSL’s ‘Le Smoking’. To the right, Samuel Fosso’s black and white photograph ‘Angela Davis’, from the 2008 series ‘African Spirits’, is an image that is straightforwardly ambiguous. In the tradition of self-portraiture of photographers like Cindy Sherman, Fosso dressed himself as key African and Black American political figures and images for the series. The styling of the portrait of himself as the Black Panther figure, political activist, intellectual and feminist Angela Davis, engages with notions of ownership – of an image and one’s appearance, and its political and gender-based signifiers and historical narratives of resistance.

Across all of these images, each presenting varying manipulations of dress and its manifestation on the body with differing connotations; the notion of the body, the surface upon which identity is formed, still holds true. Through this process of presentation, the intent of an individual is externalised on the surface of the body; but also we are able to take ownership and claim our body through these lengths.

 

1. Woodabe man of the Fulani ethnicity preparing for the Gerewol festival, Tahoua, Niger, photograph by Jean-Christophe Huet
2. Athi-Patra Ruga, ‘UnoZuko’, 2013. Courtesy of Whatiftheworld Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
3. Miriam Makeba wearing a Fulani hairstyle c.1970s
4. ‘Rien n’est plus beau qu’un corps nu. Le plus beau vêtement qui puisse habiller une femme, ce sont les bras de l’homme qu’elle aime. Mais pour celles qui n’ont pas eu la chance de trouver ce bonheur, je suis là.’ Yves Saint Laurent, 1983, translated as ‘Nothing is more beautiful than a naked body. The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves. But for those who have not had the chance to find happiness, I am there.’
5. Fashion designer Gabrielle Coco Chanel with Duke Laurino of Rome on the beach at the Lido, 1930, photographed by Gjon Mili
6. ‘Le Smoking’ by Yves Saint Laurent, photograph by Helmut Newton for Vogue Paris in 1975.
7. ‘Rive Gauche et Libre’ editorial for Vogue Paris, September 2010 featuring Josh Parkinson, photograph by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggot, with styling by Carine Roitfeld
8. Grace Jones in her ‘One Man Show’ in 1982, photograph by Adrian Boot
9. Nelson Mandela portrait wearing traditional beads and a bed spread, in hiding from authorities as the ‘black pimpernel’, 1961. Photograph by Eli Weinberg
10. Barbara Kruger, ‘Untitled (Your body is a battleground)’, 1989
11. Samuel Fosso, ‘Angela Davis’ from the series ‘African Spirits’, 2008
12. Nástio Mosquito’s ‘Mulher Fósforo’, 2006. Courtesy of Sindika Dokolo Foundation
13. Edith Bouvier Beale in ‘Grey Gardens’, 1975

Missla Libsekal is the founding editor of Another Africa.

I first need to work on the fabric. I need to cut it, think about the shape, drape it on the bust ­– reflect on it.

Azzedine Alaïa 

IN THE SECOND INSTALMENT to our collaborative series ‘Sartorial Meditations’ with Another Africa, we look more closely at the various ways in which the continuity of fabric, and its endless potential, is cut into or interrupted by pattern and form.

From the exclusive realms of haute couture, to traditional systems of dress, there are processes that – although they sit as cultural polar opposites – share common themes. Cutting is a technique that creates form on the body; be it of the skin or fabric.

In the black and white photographic series ‘Omo’ by American photographer Drew Doggett we discover an image of a scarified bust depicting sculptural form on the body through the act of repetitive cutting as practiced by the Suri people in southern Ethiopia. The body’s surface is restructured in this process, likening it to the bottle of Jean Paul Gaultier’s ‘Classique’ perfume that sits beside it.

Images of traditional practices are objectified next to those of contemporary culture, dispersed in a broader context of fashion and dress. As such, it’s important to continuously re-frame the fashion image, to place one image against another playfully, and unexpectedly, to re-shuffle how we read images of fashion and the symbols of dress.

One of the failings of fashion theory and discourse is arguably that it insists on looking at the subject as a linear dialogue where one trend or cycle leads to another. Whereas, clothing could in fact be said to be a more dynamic phenomenon, constantly shifting and appropriating itself across time and place.

These images, deeply ingrained in our notion of dress, are also inextricably linked with geography in tracing a cultural narrative. For instance, when scarification and skin ornamentation, a traditional practice, is performed in a contemporary context, it has a renewed sense of spectacle and cultural connotations.

For a couturier, fabric might be viewed as an analogy of the skin, and as such, shaping and moulding material conjures up the possibilities of the body’s flexible membrane. The starkly stylised environments of Europe’s haute couture ateliers provide an extreme in this dynamic.

Azzedine Alaïa, widely known for his pattern cutting techniques and for skilfully sculpting the body through fabric, is perhaps the ultimate contemporary couturier. In contrast to many of his historical predecessors, his designs engage directly with the anatomy. What Alaïa and his contemporaries evoke is this crucial dynamic in dress – be it haute couture or ready-to-wear – as an alignment of the skin and the anatomy of the body in the act of wearing.

These notions of cutting as a sculptural art form that creates rhythm and form on the body, traverse fashion; whether it’s the tight beaded bodice of the Dinka men in South Sudan, the tattooed skin of a Japanese woman, the age-old traditions of scarification or the revered ‘cut’ of high fashion, evocative parallels abound.

To view fashion as a network of possibilities, connotations and connections that shift and percolate with different social conditions and factors, sets a precedent for this series which aligns some of the tensions within dress and its image.

Both high fashion and traditional systems share a technique and discipline that involves a rigorous process of repetition and discipline, but that ultimately celebrate the form and texture of the human body.

1. ‘Two Dinka Men with Corsets, South Sudan’, by Angela Fisher & Carol Beckwith C-print, 76 x 52cm
2. Azzedine Alaïa by Patrick Demarchelier, from Haute Couture spring/summer 2003
3. A model wears Edward Lee tattoo shirt, featuring Americana artwork printed onto flesh-coloured mesh
4. A Japanese tattoo artist works on a woman’s backside, photographer unknown
5. Scarification c.1943, photographer unknown
6. ‘Untitled 6’, from the series ‘Omo’, showing a Suri woman, by Drew Doggett
7. Tattoo print tulle dress by Jean Paul Gaultier, 2013
8. Jean Paul Gaultier poses with Madonna for French Glamour, June 1990, photograph by Herb Ritts
9. Yombe woman, Congo c.1947. Photo by H.A. Bernatzik
10. Amazigh tattoo pattern, Berber, Morocco
11. Jean Paul Gaultier’s ‘Classique’ fragrance
12. Azzedine Alaïa, ‘Powder Puff’ long sheath dress, spring/summer 1994, photograph by Paolo Roversi, 2013
13. ‘Untitled’, from the series ‘Omo’, showing a Suri warrior, by Drew Doggett

Missla Libsekal is the founding editor of Another Africa.

Take your pleasure seriously.

Charles Eames

HOW WE UNDERSTAND FASHION is a collection of infinite possibilities, projected images and representations. At once enigmatic, desirable, glamorous, festive, authoritarian; dress is a multi-dimensional concept that might be described and observed a countless number of ways, from anthropological costume to the revered fashion image. More importantly perhaps, fashion occurs in many locations, and simultaneously across the globe. In effect, it does not follow the hierarchical template it aspires to, it instead should be read as a collective, global experience. Our understanding of dress is part of a galaxy of references across time and place: in 1937 Elsa Schiapparelli releases her ‘Shoe Hat’, an exercise in sartorial surrealism, while 4,500 kilometres away, a Nigerian man is photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt walking the street with a shoe atop his head, for reasons unknown. Both images are connected by fashion and but each is inscribed with a myriad of cultural, aesthetic, social characteristics that continue our complex and rich experience of clothing.

In a collaborative series, ‘Sartorial Meditations’, Another Africa‘s Missla Libsekal shares with Vestoj some of her notes on fashion; curating the aesthetic correlations that exist in dress and the fashion image, and reflecting on fashion’s transformative power across the globe. We begin the series with some notes on form, silhouette and its potential for absurdity in this first instalment: ‘In All Seriousness’.

Take the archetypal format of the shoe, both a sartorial adornment and an independent object in space. In shifting the placement from the foot to the head, Schiapparelli’s ‘Shoe Hat’ sought to break the conventions of form and function, this piece has been celebrated as a canonical ‘moment’ in fashion discourse. With similar surreal playfulness, a pair of shoes from the Comme des Garçons autumn/winter 2009 collection, pokes fun at the act of covering the body, by illustrating the hypothetical toes within.

Fashion’s emphasis on ‘balance’ as a design directive and aesthetic value also comes into play here, for the 2013 retrospective of the shoe designer Roger Vivier at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the cover image of the balancing shoe was chosen. The graphic photograph (originally used in an advertising campaign for the brand) reminds us of the physicality of balance as a design principle within the functions of the object. After all, a good heel is an exercise in balance in itself. In keeping with this, Vivier explains his design process, ‘I’ll resketch my drawing five hundred times to check the exactness of the idea and respect the foot’s architecture.’

In contrast, the absurdity and exaggeration of the function of dress is also an aesthetic tool, perpetuating the oft-conceived notion that fashion is a frivolous exercise. A strong image of this is Naomi Campbell’s infamous tumble in walking the catwalk for the Vivienne Westwood spring/summer 1998 collection. The image has since become symbolic of hyperbolic fashion. This is a very physical notion of balance, and under similar principles, the Nigerian man rests his shoe atop his head, reminding us that fashion is, above all, a piece of clothing that can be placed around the body and throughout different contexts.

Fashion’s ability to transform itself and consistently evolve, derives from the notion of breaking codes. When looking at the changing silhouette of the fashioned body through the past, each moment of innovation is the product of defiance from convention, of pushing boundaries. Playing with these ideas forces us to reassess our collective cultural values time again. Warhol’s letter from the Museum of Modern Art in New York brings the notion of absurdity and breaking of convention sharply into focus. His proposal of a shoe as an art piece for the gallery is ridiculous and insightful, as Warhol seems to parody both the fashion and art world in his sartorial offering to the institution.

At times ridiculous, profound, dynamic, these connections and constellations that emerge in examining the form of clothing as ornament of the body, and the fashioned image, encourage a more playful and democratic interpretation of dress, echoing the simple words of Charles Eames, ‘Take your pleasure seriously’.

1. Naomi Campbell takes a tumble during the Vivienne Westwood autumn/winter 1993 catwalk presentation at Paris Fashion week
2. Cover image for the Roger Vivier retrospective exhibition, ‘Virgule, etc… Dans les pas de Roger Vivier’ at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2013
3. Armando Cabral photographed by Richard Pier Petit, with styling by Carl Barnett
4. Hair by Olivier Schawalder for Vogue Pelle
5. ‘Nigerian Man Carrying a Shoe on His Head’ by Alfred Eisenstaedt, April 1953
6. An early example of a stiletto heel, from the International Footwear Museum of Vigevano, Italy c.1952
7. Elsa Schiaparelli, shoe hat 1937/1938 collection.
8. Delman Shoes at Bergdorf Goodman advertisement, designed by Reba Sochis of Sochis Advertising & Promotion, c.1960s
9. ‘Henna vs. Bamako, Mali’ by Glenna Gordon, 2013
10. The rejection letter to Andy Warhol from MoMA in 1956 of his gifted artwork entitled ‘Shoe’, the letter reads:Dear Mr. Warhol:Last week our Committee on the Museum Collections held its first meeting of the fall season and had a chance to study your drawing entitled ‘Shoe’ which you so generously offered as a gift to the Museum.I regret that I must  report to you that the Committee decided, after careful consideration, that they ought not to accept it for our Collection.Let me explain that because of our severely limited gallery and storage space we must turn down many gifts offered, since we feel it is not fair to accept as a gift a work which may be shown only infrequently. Nevertheless, the Committee has asked me to pass on to you their thanks for your generous expression of interest in our Collection.Sincerely,Alfred H. Barr, JrDirector of the Museum Collections P.S. The drawing may be picked up from the Museum at your convenience.
11. Shoes from Comme des Garçons autumn/winter 2009 collection

Missla Libsekal is the founding editor of Another Africa.