‘This was a store,’ offers Vogue, ‘where they literally rolled out the red carpet for celebrities who arrived ready to sort through piles of […] bedazzled T-shirts featuring their [own] faces.”¹ Theorist Jean Baudrillard, noting hyperreality’s tendency towards creating a ‘real without origins or reality,’² might as well have been speaking about this environment when he referred to our ever-increasing fascination with the obscene. For capitalism and idiot scandal, it couldn’t be bettered. Kitson was the party-girl incarnation of Nicole Ritchie, gaunt and pre-motherhood; it was Blonde Lindsay Lohan, and Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton’s Assistant, and Britney Spears with acne. Kitson was, most of all, mid-Noughties MTV, beaming out nobodies ‘getting real’ – a relic itself, of a time when TV had only just seized on the idea of faking real-life.

The New York Times, for its part, describes the closure of Kitson as breathlessly as if it were eulogising the Chelsea Hotel. ‘More than a place to pick up Juicy Couture tracksuits and Ugg boots,’ reporter Sheila Makirar explains, ‘Kitson provided a backdrop for celebrity melodrama: Ms. Spears trying on hats at 2 a.m. Ms. Hilton shopping with girlfriends, oblivious to her dog urinating on a display of studded ballet flats. Kim Kardashian, before she went West, browsing the boutique, fresh-faced in an empire-waist maxidress.’³ Once, ‘Ms. Spears’ also went shopping in Kitson with menstrual blood staining her thigh,⁴ though this passes unmentioned; perhaps because, as far as mythologies go, it’s violent rather than melodramatic. Kitson, quite often, was both: a stage-setting for weird tableaux, peopled by seemingly-unhinged celebrity socialites. Surfing its mid-Noughties girl-wave, you had to get raw or be drowned.

It’s strange now, in hindsight, to think about all the world’s girls in their Juicy­-brand tracksuits amid the Clenbuterol boom, when ideal bodies were meant to be radically, hungrily skeletal, i.e. un-juicy: wearing garments labeled with zeroes but shaped nothing like them. Ones, instead, were the bodily trend: lines of straight little ones and elevens, as narrow as Adderall rails, were mobbing Kitson in frenzies at weekends. All over L.A.’s sidewalks, there were girls pulling rank in their pastel-pink two-pieces; girls with Swarovski Razrs; girls with loose, pale hair extensions and plastic French tips. The pre-GRC economy hadn’t yet tanked and so class felt superfluous as a pretense. ‘Los Angeles’ turned into ‘elsewhere.’ Then, ‘Los Angeles’ turned into ‘everywhere’ – or, to be accurate, everywhere Westernised on earth became a Los Angeles outpost, and the dogged pursuit of fame that exists in L.A. became something not local, but global, so that all of us found ourselves stepping wide-eyed off the bus in perpetua, dressing for anonymity in expensive leisurewear even with no paparazzi to hide from.

Aspirational brands beget tribes, but Kitson’s following differed from most in the way that it prized a point lower than pinnacle, seeking instead a new power that fed on imperfect girl archetypes. Kitson women were ones who flaunted their alcoholism, their air-headedness and their sexual dysfunction. Within their aesthetic, new-money’s excess sensibility fused with the kitsch preoccupations of mallrat teenhood. T-shirt slogans like ‘I LOVE SHOES AND BAGS AND BOYS’ appeared beside ones that screamed, unselfconsciously, ‘XANAX’ or ‘VICODIN.’⁵ There were sloppy pronouncements like ‘THIS IS MY LAST CLEAN T-SHIRT.’ There were slogans about celebrities, worn by other, lower-grade celebrities, tracing out mirror-recursions of fame and non-fame and half-fame in their casual paparazzi pictures.

The popular mantra of ‘never-too-rich-or-too-thin’ still persisted, but now we agreed that a girl could be messy as long as she made enough money, or owned enough shoes. Dysfunctional socialites, unsurprisingly, proved to be dysfunctional consumers; for the first time, the people we wanted to be like were the people we were like, only richer. Bona fide ‘hot messes,’ they drank the same hyper-coloured vodka shots from their girlfriends’ navels; suffered the same anxieties, shared the same addictions and shortcomings, and called men ‘boys’ as a means of nullifying the terror of possibly dying alone. They blacked out. They crashed innumerable cars. They rarely excelled at anything, but the very fact of their aimlessness made them interesting to us because they validated our lazy ennui.

Some of them, of course, eventually grew up and streamlined their public identities so that their flaws were less prominent. As in Susan Sontag’s definition of camp, Kim Kardashian has since become ‘art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is “too much,”’⁶ and so the kittenish garment sloganeering of Kitson no longer suits her purposes, either as icon or object. Worn in public, statements defy others’ need to project their own values on popular figures, and Kardashian – ever the capitalist – knows this, though she has occasionally played the billboard for her now ex-husband, Kanye West. Britney Spears, in wearing ‘I’M A VIRGIN (BUT THIS IS AN OLD SHIRT)’ and, later, ‘I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM,’ wrote her pre-breakdown memoirs in two lines. There is a famous image of Lindsay Lohan shopping in Kitson, wearing a T-shirt that says ‘SKINNY BITCH’ in lettering made from twigs; its tone – confrontational, smugly flawed, and delivered hot on the heels of an anorexia scandal – is pure Kitsonese, regardless of whether she actually bought it there.

For Kitson’s celebrity girl-gang, the ethos of Barbara Kruger’s ‘I SHOP THEREFORE I AM’ merged with the grimiest texts by Jenny Holzer (‘DISASTER DRAWS PEOPLE LIKE FLIES,’ or ‘WHEN YOU BECOME RICH, DEATH SNIFFS THE AIR AND STARTS CIRCLING’) so that, in playing with medium-and-message, they conjured Umberto Eco: ‘where is the mass medium? Is it […] the polo shirt? And at this point who is sending the message? The manufacturer of the polo shirt? Its wearer? […] Because it’s a question of ideology.’⁷ There, on L.A.’s Robertson Boulevard, wearer and manufacturer had reached – albeit temporarily – an ideological understanding, promoting their own hypothetical slogan, I AM THE IMPERFECT IDEAL. In a Los Angeles Magazine profile of Kitson, back in 2005, the magazine made the decision to lead not with pap-shots or portraits, but with a falsified digital image; one just as redolent of the American dream as a Richard Prince Girlfriend, but even more cheap, and less deep. The picture was of Lindsay, smiling coquettishly, being arrested for crashing her car by the shop-front. ‘IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT,’ screamed the headline, ‘GET OUT OF THE KITSON.’

Philippa Snow is a Norwich-based freelance writer.

1. http://www.vogue.com/13390437/kitson-closing-paris-hilton-victoria-beckham-britney-spears/ ↩

2. J. Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation, Michigan University Press, 1981. ↩

3. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/fashion/kitson-where-kim-kardashian-and-britney-spears-shopped-sees-the-end.html?_r=0 ↩

4. http://jezebel.com/346256/doth-not-a-mentally-ill-popstar-bleed ↩

5. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/kitson-lawsuit-xanax-vicodin-adderall_n_3837291.html ↩

6. S. Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp,”’ The Paris Review, 1964. ↩

7. U. Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality, Harcourt Publishers Ltd., 1990. ↩

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.