Fashion & Power – Vestoj

Losing Control

Dr Sean Trainor — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 10:06:53 +0000

MODERN AMERICAN MASCULINITY IS about mastery and control: control over one’s destiny and that of ‘lesser’ men and women. The late Notorious B.I.G. summarised this vision of manhood succinctly when he rapped ‘never lose, never choose to,’ but the same sentiment is manifest in a variety of pop cultural forms. Never mind that the imperative for mastery seems to emerge from outside of masculine men and women – that pop culture protagonists are impelled by a force that they themselves do not control. Unencumbered by this contradiction, John McClane and his kindred spirits seize control of Nakatomi Plazas all across the pages, screens, and stages of American cultural life.

This obsession with masculine control is nothing new. When thirteen of Britain’s North American colonies waged war against the British monarchy, General George Washington based his claim to authority in part on his self-mastery. Seemingly unflappable, and blessed with an unfailingly rigid mouth (a trait he carefully cultivated), Washington was believed to possess the discretion necessary to command men’s fates in war. After American independence, men like U.S. Senator Henry Clay (who coined the phrase ‘self-made man’) and U.S. president Abraham Lincoln were celebrated for willing their way to wealth and power, despite lowly origins. And, from slaveholding aristocrats to humble dirt farmers, early American men measured their manhood according to mastery. To be a fully-fledged adult white man in this age was to control ‘dependents:’ to own the resources that women, non-whites, and children needed to survive.¹

Masculine mastery and control were, at some level, patent fictions. Slaveholders would have gone bankrupt and poorer men starved without the labour of enslaved people, free women, and countless other ‘dependents.’ But, as is often the case, various forms of physical, legal and economic violence allowed men to avoid this basic reality – or, perhaps more accurately, to create the reality they desired. The lash, the law and the promise of inherited lands thus made real a degree of control that was otherwise perilously tenuous.

All this, by contrast, is why the nineteenth-century history of American and European men’s grooming is so interesting: because, in this realm, the reality of interdependence between men and their ‘dependents’ was so poorly disguised. Here, European and American men glimpsed the fateful possibility that they might not be in control of their bodies; that they might, in fact, owe more to the men who shaved their stubborn whiskers than those men owed to them. In response, they inaugurated a dramatic half-century of beard wearing – and endowed their newly-grown beards with the symbolic trappings of mastery. But try as its proponents might to disguise the beard’s origins, the style remained a child of fear: an implicit recognition of the very interdependence that masculinity seeks to deny.

Viewed from a distance of more than a century, the nineteenth-century beard fashion looks like a basic historical fact. For many observers, the succession of bearded and otherwise unremarkable U.S. presidents during the decades preceding 1900 is no more surprising than the fact that there are mountains in Switzerland. And yet the arrival of this fashion came as a great shock for those who lived through it. Sweeping much of Europe, North America, and Latin America after roughly two centuries of clean-shavenness, the beard movement was almost certainly the most dramatic development in nineteenth-century men’s fashion – every bit as shocking as if knee breeches and ruffled shirts were to once more become the dominant mode of men’s dress throughout the so-called ‘Western’ world.

The apogee of this trend, according to one scholar, arrived between 1870 and 1900. After carefully analysing more than a century’s worth of men’s images from the Illustrated London News, sociologist Dwight E. Robinson, writing in 1976, placed the twin peaks of the beard fashion – with roughly forty-five percent of all men’s images featuring a full beard – at roughly 1875 and 1895. Facial hair more generally, Robinson added, peaked around 1890, with approximately ninety percent of all men depicted in the News wearing a beard, moustache, or sideburns.²

While Robinson’s analysis remains the most exhaustive quantitative study of the nineteenth-century facial hair fashion, there is reason to doubt its accuracy. This is especially true for areas outside of Britain, which arrived at the facial fashion at different times and for different reasons. My own research, for instance, indicates that as early as 1865, roughly half of all general officers serving in the American Civil War sported a beard of some description, while only ten percent were clean-shaved.³

The precise trajectory of this trend, however, need not detain us here. Instead, what should concern us are the reasons for the beard’s popularity. These reasons, as is typical for nearly any fashion, are both varied and mysterious. To date, scholars of the nineteenth-century beard movement – including Christopher Oldstone-Moore, whose 2015 Of Beards and Men is the first rigorously-researched, book-length analysis of grooming trends from antiquity to present – have emphasised the way in which facial hair embodied and reflected larger ideals of the age.

For European Romantics and their American counterparts, according to Oldstone-Moore and others, facial hair reflected a larger fascination with both medieval aesthetics and the concept of nature. (Beards, notably, were a central feature of men’s grooming in the Middle Ages, and the bushy beard was presumed to be more ‘natural’ than the shaved face.) European and American imperialists, meanwhile, cherished the beard as emblematic of their own ostensible superiority to those with a limited capacity – real or imagined – for facial hair growth (usually Asians, Africans, and indigenous Americans). And radicals of various stripes – including socialists, nationalists, abolitionists, religious extremists, and health reformers – adopted the beard to symbolise their rejection of the status quo. Health reformers, in particular, proved influential in this realm – arguing convincingly, though inaccurately, that the beard protected its wearers against tuberculosis and prevented men from inhaling particulate matter (no small thing for those living in the period’s coal-red cities or working in its dark satanic mills).⁴ All of these assessments of the beard fashion’s origins and meaning have much to recommend them. When nineteenth-century men, in both Europe and America, articulated why they chose to adopt the beard, they did so in precisely these terms – generating hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pro-beard polemics repeating the foregoing claims. But these assessments of the facial hair fashion’s origins also ignore what may be its most interesting feature: the fact that, in important and fundamental ways, men throughout the Atlantic basin did not choose to adopt the beard. It was not, in other words, a style over which they exercised that quintessential masculine virtue: control.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the relationship between barber and patron throughout much of Europe and North America was not fundamentally different from many other service relationships. Patrons sought out barbers for a good shave – a task many men found too difficult or too unpleasant to perform for themselves in the era of the straight razor. Barbers sought out customers for their incomes. And, by a variety of means, customers pretended that they controlled the relationship from beginning to end. They were the ones who sought the barber’s patronage, after all. And, in any event, most barbers were low-status figures – poor whites in Europe, men of colour in America – over whom patrons exercised control outside the shop as well as in it.

Beginning in the 1840s and 1850s, however, the relationship between barbers and patrons took a deleterious turn. Barbers, once seen at worst as mischievous schemers (like Beaumarchais’ Figaro) and more frequently as harmless, vapid chatterers, assumed a menacing cast. Indeed, during these years, patrons awakened en masse to the fact that barbers held deadly blades to their throats, and almost immediately began fantasising about the murderous possibilities of the barber shop. In the process, they grappled with the very real possibility that it was barbers, and not themselves, who controlled the act of grooming.

The most obvious example of these murderous fantasies was the story of Sweeney Todd. First told in the novel The String of Pearls, published serially between 1846 and 1847, the story of Sweeney Todd centers on a London barber who slashes unlucky customers’ throats, dispatches their bodies to a dungeon-like basement by means of a trap-door barber chair, and, with the help his co-conspirator Mrs. Lovett, transforms their lifeless corpses into delicious meat pies.⁵

Despite its patent ridiculousness, The String of Pearls proved immensely popular, inspiring a blockbuster theatrical adaptation and a raft of literary imitations. In the U.S., these imitations ranged from pulp drivel like ‘A Narrow Escape,’ a widely circulated tale in which an alcoholic enslaved barber murders a customer, to Herman Melville’s masterful ‘Benito Cereno,’ in which an enslaved mutineer named Babo quietly menaces his captor using a straight razor.⁶

Robert L. Mack, the leading scholar of Sweeney Todd, compellingly argues that these tales proved popular in the 1840s and 1850s because they spoke to larger fears about urban anonymity. In this light, The String of Pearls and its imitators are best understood, not as stories about a murderous barber, but as tales of a murderous stranger who claims the lives of unattached urban dwellers.⁷

Undoubtedly, there is much to recommend a broadly social interpretation of Sweeney Todd’s popularity and that of its imitators. Fears of urban anonymity were rampant throughout Europe and North America during this period, as individuals grappled with the rapid growth of vast, impersonal cities. In the U.S., meanwhile, where the Sweeney Todd character was, as suggested above, frequently replaced by a barber of colour, the story spoke to widespread white fears of black violence and dissimulation.

And yet Mack’s interpretation fails to take seriously the setting of these stories. While tales of tonsorial violence were important vehicles for exploring larger social anxieties, they were also, plainly and specifically, about the latent menace of the barbershop. How else can we explain the fact that, in the many tales inspired by Sweeney Todd, the murderous barber is rarely, if ever, replaced by another kind of blade-wielding tradesperson: a rampaging butcher, for instance, or an unhinged fish-monger?

Whether fears of gullet aggression inspired the story of Sweeney Todd or vice versa remains unclear. Most likely, the two were intimately intertwined. What is clear, however, is that Sweeney Todd, and the fears it embodied or inspired, had a dramatic effect on the history of men’s grooming. Across Europe and North America, a growing number of men abandoned the barbershop and took up shaving themselves. This was reflected, not just in the demographics of several major American cities, where the number of barbers shrank relative to the populations they served – a figure that indicated decreased demand for barbers’ services. It was also apparent in the comments of numerous commentators.⁸

In an 1860 article for the British publication The Albion, for instance, an anonymous writer reflects not only on the disappearance of barbers – their red and white poles ‘as scarce as good Madiera’ – but also on the menace of the shop. ‘I don’t mind … admitting honestly,’ the writer notes, ‘that I’m afraid of the barber … It is the hints, and inuendos [sic], and covert violence to which you are subjected that set my nerves in a utter. I wouldn’t mind if they’d assault you unmistakably and openly; you’d know what course to pursue under those circumstances.’ Instead, the barber, ‘by a gentle pressure of the thumb, forces your head into the most eligible position for being guillotined’ and ‘[beats you] with a couple of hard brushes about the head, ears, nose, and eyes till your head burns, your ears redden, your eyes smart, and your nose very nearly bleeds.’⁹

For men like the anonymous Albion author, the appropriate response to the terrors of the barber shop was clear: ‘I shave myself,’ the writer proclaimed. And so too, for the first time, did countless other men throughout Europe and North America during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Soon they discovered, however, that shaving was no simple task – that, despite unkindly estimates of barbers’ intelligence, the operation of shaving was, in fact, a difficult one. As a result of these first-time shavers’ incompetence, the act of shaving became a source of torment. Over the course of the early nineteenth century, in fact, complaints of pain became a constant refrain in articles on shaving – with roughly half of all American articles on the subject referencing pain or discomfort by 1850.¹⁰ These complaints, moreover, were exacerbated, not only by the primitive conditions in which many men shaved – without access, for instance, to warm water, decent shaving soap, large mirrors, or light – but also by the indifferent quality of the tools at their disposal. Thanks to a high American tariff, passed by a nationalistic U.S. Congress in 1842, top-notch continental razors suddenly jumped in price for American consumers. British and continental consumers, meanwhile, had to contend with lower-quality blades, as European manufactures compromised on quality to keep their wares competitive in U.S. markets.¹¹

The result of all this was that, by the late 1840s, a growing number of men were giving up on shaving altogether and letting their beards grow freely. As early as 1853, roughly one-in-eight New Yorkers, according to an informal survey by Scientific American, had adopted the style. And by the mid-1860s, as suggested previously, nearly half of European and American men had followed suit.¹²

During these years, and in the decades to follow, many men did their best to make the beard, and facial hair more broadly, symbols of masculine virtues. And, in many respects, they succeeded. Following a lengthy public relations campaign waged in newspapers, magazines and books, European and American proponents of the beard seemed to convince significant portions of their respective societies that the beard symbolised everything from patriarchal firmness and racial mastery to healthfulness and beauty. In the eyes of the public, then, facial hair appeared to be a style that men had freely chosen, and that reflected mastery and control: both of themselves and their bodies, and of the ‘lesser’ men and women whom they were charged with governing.

In point of fact, however, the beard was anything but. Instead, its deep history speaks to a fundamental loss of control: a fearful recognition of dependence on the part of European and American men; and a grim realisation that the body is, ever and always, the work of many hands.

Sean Trainor is a historian specialised in men’s fashion and grooming in nineteenth-century America. His book, Groomed for Power, is about the antebellum American beard movement.

This article was originally published in Vestoj ‘On Masculinities.’

See, for ex. S McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. ↩
D E Robinson, “Fashions in Shaving and Trimming of the Beard: The Men of the Illustrated London News, 1842-1872,’ The American Journal of Sociology 81 (Mar., 1975), pp.1,133-1,141. ↩
See S Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power: A Cultural Economy of the Male Body in Nineteenth-Century America’ (Ph.D. diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 2015), p.2. ↩
C Oldstone-Moore, Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2015; C. R. Oldstone-Moore, ‘The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain,’ Victorian Studies 48 (Fall 2005), pp.7-34; Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power,’ esp. Ch. 4. ↩
The String of Pearls has been republished as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Ed. R L Mack, New York, Oxford University Press, 2007. ↩
For one of several versions of this tale, see ‘A Narrow Escape,’ Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), May 15, 1847; see also H Melville, ‘Benito Cereno,’ The Piazza Tales, New York, Dix & Edwards, 1856. ↩
R L Mack, The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend, London, Continuum, 2007. ↩
S Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power,’ p.69. ↩
‘Barbers,’ The Albion 38 (Jun. 30, 1860), p.303. ↩
S Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power,’ esp. Ch. 1. ↩
Ibid., esp. Ch. 2. ↩
‘Bearded Civilizaton,’ Scientific American III (Jul. 9, 1853), p.342. ↩

The Antihero’s New Clothes

Alex Esculapio — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 11:47:54 +0000

Nessa on stage in her Roland Mouret dress.

IN 1996 PERFORMANCE ARTIST Marina Abramović created The Onion, a video installation in which she eats an onion while her own voice-over repeats, among other things, ‘I want to understand and see clearly what is behind all of us.’ As she bites into the onion she smears her lipstick, a symbolic coming undone of her identity. The devouring of the onion goes hand in hand with the urge to destroy the many layers of cultural and social identity she is made of. Similarly, the voice-over for the opening monologue of The Honourable Woman, the 2014 BBC miniseries starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, recites:

Who do you trust? How do you know? By how they appear or what they say? What they do? How? We all have secrets. We all tell lies, just to keep them from each other and from ourselves. But sometimes, rarely, something can happen that leaves you no choice but to reveal it. To let the world see who you really are. A secret self. But mostly we tell lies, we hide our secrets from each other, from ourselves. So when you think about it like that, it’s a wonder that we trust anyone at all.

The voice belongs to the protagonist of the series, Vanessa (Nessa) Stein, an Anglo-Israeli businesswoman who, together with her brother Ephra, has inherited her father’s company. In order to make up for their father’s Zionist beliefs and arms dealing, which led to his murder in the presence of young Nessa and Ephra, both have engaged in extensive philanthropic work to facilitate the reconciliation process between Israel and Palestine. As the public face of the Stein Group and a politically outspoken entrepreneur, Nessa carefully crafts her appearance. Costume designer Edward K. Gibbon spoke of Nessa’s clothes are ‘a protection layer.’¹ Like the opening monologue suggests, there is more that lies behind her sophisticated armour; in fact, Nessa Stein is ‘not quite the woman she appears to be’ as Hugh Hayden-Hoyle, the head of MI6’s Middle East desk, observes in episode six. During the unravelling of the main plot of The Honourable Woman, which centres around the Stein Group’s attempt to build optical fibre cables in the West Bank, viewers also witness the peeling off of Nessa’s layers of identity.

The Honourable Woman opens with Nessa’s ceremony of ennoblement in the House of Lords, where she is given the title of Baroness due to her commitment for the Middle East peace process. At the party that follows the ceremony, she wears a Roland Mouret leopard print dress while giving a speech on a podium, her body language confident and relaxed, slightly provoking. The scene provides the blueprint for Nessa’s confident public persona and wardrobe. Whereas most political female figures seem to embrace Margaret Thatcher’s sartorial mantra ‘never flashy, just appropriate,’ Nessa’s outfit of choice for her public appearances is always a designer dress. According to Gibbon, ‘the untraditional dress choice was … a way to turn the idea of power dressing on its head.’² Nessa’s fashionability sets her apart from the traditional establishment she is now a part of and, rather than being perceived as inappropriate or garish, lends her confidence and an enviable presence. Her style consciously bends the codes of power dressing and, in doing so, lets the audience know that she is perfectly aware of, and ready to challenge, the rules of power play. As journalist Sarah Chalmers observed, ‘everything about Nessa Stein’s demeanour screamed player, before she had even uttered a word.’³

Nessa Stein at the press conference in Gaza.

While it is hardly a surprise that designer dresses clothing matter in an upper-class London setting, Nessa’s armour follows her on her official trips to the Middle East. In episode four, a flashback shows Nessa give a speech at the Stein Foundation’s university in the West Bank, her first time in Gaza as official representative of her company. For the occasion she wears a long, black dress with lace details, a sombre, safe choice which reveals that her fashionable armour has not yet been perfected. The flashback also discloses a crucial secret in Nessa’s life: her kidnapping during her first visit to Gaza. This tragic event radically affects her personal and professional life. It also hints at Nessa’s conscious use of clothing as shield and profound impact on her choice of self presentation. This radical change is marked, for instance, by her forgoing of jewellery post-kidnapping, a detail that suggests her conscious attempt to project a more controlled image.

Flash forward to present-day in episode seven and Nessa, back in Gaza for a press conference on her plan for the expansion of fibre cables into the West Bank, once again commands an audience in a draped, solid peach silk dress. The soft material and warm colour seem to suggest a more vulnerable side to Nessa’s personality. In the same episode, she is later forced to renounce her dress armour altogether and opt for a more practical trouser suit, as she prepares to make an appearance for the public groundbreaking that will symbolically inaugurate the Stein Group’s project in the West Bank. The conversation with Frances, her assistant and advisor, shows Nessa’s attachment to her public uniform:

Frances: I’m so sorry, I should have thought of this.
Nessa: What?
Frances: You can’t wear a dress.
Nessa: Why?
Frances: Think about it. You can’t go climbing up a ladder, into a cabin, in a dress.
Nessa: Really?
Frances: Really. You’re gonna have to wear trousers.

In fact, trouser suits are Nessa’s go-to garb for everyday life, when she does not have to appear in public, and are often worn with replicas of 1970s Yves Saint Laurent silk blouses.⁴ The suits are a second layer of Nessa’s personality, one that is only revealed to her family, colleagues and to the viewer. Her pared-down yet sophisticated style is shared by other contemporary female characters on TV, from Scandal’s Olivia Pope to The Fall’s Stella Gibson, who have all contributed to the redefinition of power dressing. Jo Ellison, fashion editor for The Financial Times, has observed how the wardrobe of professional women on TV has gone through a ‘Célinification,’ a progressive shift towards ‘sumptuously luxuriously spare tailoring, svelte silhouettes and form-skimming power skirts’ led by Céline under creative director Phoebe Philo.⁵ The ‘Philophile’ has thus emerged as a contemporary fashion archetype on the small screen and, as fashion historian Valerie Steele noted, Philo’s effortless, androgynous take on power dressing has ‘made a lot of other things look fussy and old-fashioned in comparison.’⁶

Nessa’s immaculate white trouser suit for the groundbreaking.

Yet it is in the moments when Nessa is completely alone, usually before she goes to bed, that her well-hidden self is revealed. Her nightgowns and pyjama sets by Belgian designer Carine Gilson help create a sense of casual intimacy between Nessa and the viewer. The luxurious tactility and visual appeal of silk also provide a striking contrast with the panic room Nessa sleeps in every night, possibly in response to the trauma of being kidnapped and held hostage. It is in this room that Nessa’s layers of identity are removed to reveal her fears and secrets. The all-white, clinical room evokes science-fiction atmospheres rather than those of a political thriller, and indeed the costume designer had initially intended for Nessa to sleep in ‘a Sigourney Weaver in Alien-esque tank and boy shorts set’ which, however, later seemed out of character.⁷ In the words of Gibbon, the scenes where Nessa is in the panic room show her ‘being covered, but uncovered.’⁸

Nessa in her panic room.

This paradox is perhaps best embodied by silk, the material that ideally connects Nessa’s wardrobe, from her dresses and blouses to her night slips. The ambiguity of the material, which conceals the body while also following its contours, conveys the character’s desire to protect herself through layers of clothes and to still look attractive. But it also stands for the pleasure she takes in clothes, in wearing them and touching them, in the feeling of the fabric on her skin. The materiality of clothing is a powerful reminder that, in The Honourable Woman, fashion is not meant to be aspirational; or as Gibbon put it, for Nessa ‘fashion isn’t there to be pretty – it’s a layer between her and the world.’⁹

Alex Esculapio is a writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton, UK.

http://fashionista.com/2014/12/the-honourable-woman-costumes ↩
Ibid ↩
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/11046592/Why-The-Honourable-Woman-has-captured-our-hearts.html ↩
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0e520adc-2210-11e4-9d4a-00144feabdc0.html ↩
Ibid. ↩
https://www.nowness.com/series/fashion-disciples/fashion-disciples-philophiles ↩
http://fashionista.com/2014/12/the-honourable-woman-costumes ↩
Ibid. ↩
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/jul/29/fashion-tv-shows-reinventing-style-working-women-honourable-woman ↩

Walking Taller

Laura Gardner — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 19:49:47 +0000

A HANDFUL OF CENTIMETRES can have a lot of power in the business of shoes. Recognising a market for well-designed, well-made men’s ‘heels’, Jennen Ngiau-Keng’s began his company Taller Shoes in 2007 and now offers a range of over one hundred elevated men’s shoes. The names of each of the shoes – Mr Debussy, or Mr Mozart – are a nod to Jennen’s career as a professional violinist: he’s played for the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra among others. The company stocks a range, from black formalwear shoes to boating loafers, each of which add between five and thirteen centimetres to the wearer’s height with a reinforced insole.

Not only do the shoes appeal to height-challenged customers (including celebrities), but also attract men working in security and law enforcement, highlighting a link not only between height and confidence, but also with power. Even so, the website still has to reassure their customer with ‘discreet packaging’, orders arrive anonymous and free from Taller branding. Body enhancement products, though readily accepted by parallel female markets, are reluctant to take off for men. Jennen hopes elevated shoes will simply become the new normal, a boost of confidence without the social stigma. Speaking with Vestoj, the designer and entrepreneur explains how the shoes work, what made him start his own company and what it takes to feel comfortable within your own centimetres.

Yakunins (Japanese officials) in Nagasaki, Japan in 1868. Collection of the National Museum of Denmark.

***

I remember looking up celebrity heights online and there was an American advertisement that kept coming up claiming that Tom Cruise or Mark Wahlberg wore elevated shoes, so I decided to buy a pair from the States to try. I’m five foot seven inches and my partner at the time was taller than me when wearing heels, particularly when we used to perform on stage together. I realised that a lot of men faced the same issue with partners in heels and I saw a market to bring them to Australia, but to incorporate better quality and design.

When I began Taller Shoes I designed eight styles and began with an order of six hundred pairs. The shoes themselves are an adaptation of a normal shoe – a sneaker, for example, which fits a thin insole. Taller Shoes have a much thicker, elevated insole that goes into the shoe in the same way, but if you were to put a thick insole into a normal shoe you can’t fit your foot inside and it slips out. So our shoes are designed to be higher at the heel of the shoe creating space to accommodate the raised insole. In designing the shoes we look at what’s on trend but we’re also mindful of what styles suit the structure of the elevated insole. There are a lot of styles that wouldn’t work: for example, more streamlined, narrow shapes don’t work. The shoes are made in our factory in China: for each shoe there are about twelve different people involved the making process. Then we try them on and see how they look, there’s a lot of back and forth with the factory in tweaking the samples.

A man in a ceremonial dress, Nagasaki, Japan 1868. Collection of the National Museum of Denmark.

We’ve built on the original styles seasonally but also through feedback from customers – hearing what they like has been hugely important to the growth of Taller. In order to keep the business sustainable we have to cater to a wide audience, so we have a broad range of designs. I’m quite out there with my taste in fashion – I like to look a bit different – but I find I have to be more restrained when I design for Taller to cater to a more conservative man. I have a few more adventurous styles but they are slower moving in the range; the majority of customers are more subdued in their taste.

In the beginning you learn about the business and what’s important to your customers. I had a few people email me complaining that they had the shoes delivered to their work, because they didn’t want people to know they were wearing these types of shoes. It can be difficult to market ourselves when our customers want their purchase to be discreet, but I guess men just don’t want others to know they’re wearing elevated shoes. We have a lot of shy customers that prefer to buy online rather than come into our stores, but we send all our packages discreetly to satisfy this.

Japanese pilgrim on a trip, Japan. Collection of the National Museum of Denmark.

A lot of the customers are women who come in with their male partners, particularly for special occasions like weddings, and our best sellers are black formal shoes. Word of mouth is also very important for our business, especially where men don’t openly want to talk about wearing the product. Before we were doing a lot of advertising in Men’s magazines like GQ, Men’s Health and fitness periodicals, but in fact we did much better when we advertised in women’s magazines.

I also realised there was a big market in the security industry, for police officers and bouncers for example. Customers that might already be tall, but want that extra height to give them a sense of power, and as a result we’ve increased our sizes to go up to size twelve. The reason for buying our shoes might be the height of your partner, or your job, but what’s most important is that we give our customers a sense of confidence. It’s amazing, I’ve had smaller guys come in and you see the change in them; they leave and they’re happy and smiling. I think a powerful person is someone who has a strong presence. In the end this is all in the mind and how you feel about yourself carries through to how you present yourself. To me, a powerful person is someone with a lot of self-confidence, someone who is self assured and without hang-ups. This is an alpha person: confident in the way they walk and move. Ultimately, it doesn’t depend on how tall you are at all. The extra few centimetres is more about a psychological difference. I used to be more self-conscious and thought I needed to be taller, but as I’ve become more confident in myself, height doesn’t make a difference anymore, and that’s a nice realisation.

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

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE FASHION INDUSTRY?

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 14:29:41 +0000

WHAT FOLLOWS IS THE first part of a long narrative interview conducted by Anja Aronowsky Cronberg for Vestoj ‘On Failure.’ Read the full chapter in the print edition here.

‘Indoor Sculpture’ by Erwin Wurm, 1999.

With:

Tim Blanks, editor-at-large at Business of Fashion

Thom Browne, founder & head of design at Thom Browne

Ralph Toledano, president of the Fédération Française de la Couture, du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode, president of the fashion division at Puig, CEO at Nina Ricci

Jean-Jacques Picart, fashion and luxury goods consultant

Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons International

Glenn O’Brien, editor-at-large at Maxim

Hirofumi Kurino, co-founder & senior adviser for creative direction at United Arrows

Steven Kolb, president & CEO at Council of Fashion Designers of America

Nicole Phelps, director at Vogue Runway

Nathalie Ours, partner at PR Consulting Paris

Robin Schulié, brand manager & buying director at Maria Luisa

Andy Spade, co-founder of Partners & Spade, co-founder of Kate Spade, founder of Jack Spade, founder of Sleepy Jones

Tim Walker, freelance photographer

***

Glenn O’Brien: Do you know who the ‘pharmakoi’ were? They were the scapegoats in Ancient Greece. They were sacrificed annually, driven out of Athens or thrown off a cliff, in a purification ritual. That’s what we do to people who fail today. Drug addicts, criminals, people on ’entitlements’ – we ostracise them. In America we can’t accept failure; we can’t say that we’ve failed. Instead it’s the system that’s failed, the president that’s failed, the congress that’s failed – we never fail. I’m not a failure, I’m on the chamber of commerce for god’s sake! In fashion it’s the same thing: people are in denial about failure. The game is about how to transform failure into a perceived success.

Robin Schulié: The press release that was put out after Alexander Wang was fired from Balenciaga was pure propaganda. It was your typical statement where everyone praises each other to the sky. There was no reason given for the ‘separation’. And then Alexander Wang started giving interviews about his new store opening in London and none of them mentioned what had happened at Balenciaga – it was all airbrushed out of the success story that is Alexander Wang. Hilarious!

Jean-Jacques Picart: In fashion we treat failure as if it was a disease.

Steven Kolb: There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in this industry. It’s hard to tell how well a fashion business is doing: whether people are getting paid, what a company’s cash flow is like.

Ralph Toledano: Failure in fashion is not selling.

Steven Kolb: Look at Band of Outsiders. It was a ten-year business, critically acclaimed, on the radar of major editors; they’d won prizes and had a point of view. They grew from zero to seventeen million in a decade, and they just folded. Why? They just didn’t have the resources to take their business to the next level. You know, it’s easier to take your business from zero to ten million in a relatively short time span, but once you hit ten million it becomes much harder to grow. You need an influx of capital to really start investing in expansion, in distribution and stores, in control of inventory and wholesale – all those things are expensive. Lots of fashion companies take outside investment at this point, and most of those investors aren’t fashion people. That leads to conflict because people have different expectations.

Jean-Jacques Picart: Success or failure in fashion isn’t a measure of how talented you are as a designer. You can be the most talented designer in the world and still fail. There are so many incredibly talented designers who had to close their brands because they weren’t commercially successful. That they were the darlings of the press doesn’t matter in the long run. If you don’t know how to translate your creative vision into commercially viable products, this industry will spit you out.

Steven Kolb: Often designers get stuck on whether they get a bad review or no review for a collection, on what Suzy Menkes thinks. To me, that’s not failure. Going out of business, that’s failure. Not being able to deliver what you promise, not being able to pay your employees, not being able to feed the infrastructure you’ve created – that’s failure.

Nicole Phelps: Success in fashion today is about how many $5000 handbags you sell. That’s what determines if a designer stays at the head of a brand. How many bags a brand sells matters infinitely more than what I, Vanessa Friedman or Suzy Menkes might think.

‘Indoor Sculpture’ by Erwin Wurm, 2002.

Adrian Joffe: I’d say there’s a blueprint for success today – a certain path you need to tread. And an important part of it is being charming to reporters. Do the blah blah blah. Some people who are successful today are brilliant at it. They can charm the pants off anyone.

Tim Blanks: Look at who makes it today. Look at Proenza Schouler for instance; I find them banal but they’re cute and charismatic. Then again, there are designers like Joseph Altuzarra, who’s a genius in my book, so I’m glad that he’s so telegenic and gets a leg-up because of it. On the other hand, there are designers like Anna Sui who have forged ahead for years doing absolutely amazing work. Her shows now have a much better calibre of audience than they used to, but she never quite manages to hit the big time because Anna Wintour doesn’t like her.

Nicole Phelps: If you look at someone like Frida Giannini who was fired from Gucci recently, it’s very hard to see what her next act might be. She was always a bit aloof with the press, and that didn’t make her many friends in the business. That might affect her chances to get another high profile job. Let’s just say that she doesn’t have the world’s most powerful editor in her court.

Adrian Joffe: Rei has always said that she doesn’t think she has succeeded at all. She believes that if she was successful, she wouldn’t have to think about next week’s cash flow, she wouldn’t have to worry. Sometimes I ask her, ‘Can’t you just be happy? Just for one instant?’ One time she didn’t want to come to Paris at all, she wanted to cancel the whole show. She said, ‘This is no good, no one is going to like it, it’s not good enough.’ In fact, she says that every time, and every time I remind her that she’s always wrong. It’s getting worse though, the suffering and torture she puts herself through. I’m constantly reassuring her. I try to protect her and make things easier but it just gets too hard sometimes. But that’s what drives her, this dissatisfaction. For her, one instant of self-satisfaction would mean the end.

Thom Browne: Without sounding self-congratulatory, I’d define myself as someone successful.

Andy Spade: For me success means getting respect from my peers for the work I do. If Glenn O’Brien writes about what I do, if he likes it and thinks it’s brilliant, that to me is a success. Because he gets it. Success for me isn’t financial. I mean, I know how to do things that sell. That’s not a challenge. Success to me is doing something highly conceptual that sells. Then I feel like I’m fooling the public. I like the idea of pulling the wool over the consumer’s eyes.

Glenn O’Brien: A lot of times I’ve been distracted from what I should have been doing by doing stuff just to make money. I’m a family man: I have kids and I want to live well. By many people’s standards I guess I’m a brilliant failure. But navigating this corporate colossus world is hard. You exist only through benign neglect. Like, please don’t crush me, I just want to have a hot dog stand – I promise!

Adrian Joffe: The system is what it is and fashion can’t change that. Are you going to change the world with fashion? I don’t think so. Fashion is just a reflection of society at large. We live in a culture where poor people can dress up in nice things for cheap, and where rich people want to know that they’re the only ones to have what they have. That’s not new. Some people have yachts in the Caribbean; others have a shack to sleep in if they’re lucky. My point is that we need everything – ultimately it’s about balance. In fashion, we need Uniqlo, Louis Vuitton and Comme des Garçons. Nature is about balance, and culture is too. And the fact that that balance is never achieved is what keeps things moving. If we were to somehow achieve absolute balance, the world would end. And still that’s what we keep striving for. That’s the Tree of Life.

Tim Blanks: Everything moves forward according to a dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. We go through smooth and rough patches – that’s just progress. We don’t know what our world will look like in twenty years’ time. Maybe we’ll all be living in another Fascist regime. Or in Utopia. Though I doubt it – human beings are incapable of Utopia.

Thom Browne: If you want to fight the system – good luck! A lot of people complain about the fashion industry today, but the way I see it, there’s no use complaining. I prefer to live my life according to the way things are.

Andy Spade: Look, if you choose to ignore the system, if you’re just like, I want to do my own thing, fuck the world, I hate everybody – then you shouldn’t live in a capitalist society. You should leave. Where would you go? I don’t care – but get out of America! I hate it when people whine about the system. Figure it out! I didn’t have any backing when I started; no one paid for my samples. I didn’t have any patrons; I took two jobs to pay for it all. I think the system is working fine.

Glenn O’Brien: Fashion and the big time art world have been corrupted. The only space noncommercial culture has today, is a little temporary space that nobody notices. Like the space for cheap buildings in big cities, you can fill them until they get knocked down in order to put something expensive in its place. It’s nothing new; it’s been this way since Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. But today we’ve reached this whole new level of stupidity orchestrated mainly by the mass media. Everywhere you look you see Caitlyn, Kim and Kanye. If people spend all their time thinking about ’The Real Housewives’ or ’Dancing with the Stars,’ they’re not thinking about poverty, police brutality or the exploitation of workers in Abu Dhabi.

Tim Blanks: The whole process of fashion has become fascinating to ordinary people. It’s a whole fallow area of escapism that hadn’t yet been exploited. Bread and circuses. The world has gone further and further down the toilet and fashion is glorious window-dressing. Nobody buys the clothes, but they sure like looking at them or reading about the people who make them or wear them.

Glenn O’Brien: Fashion is one of the main things that distract people from thinking about what’s important today: ecology and politics. It’s a manipulation machine. The celebrity system we have now doesn’t make people think bigger or question anything. It’s the opposite actually – it makes people think more and more shallowly.

Hirofumi Kurino: Money and politics have conquered fashion. In the press for instance, nobody dares saying anything critical anymore. To me, that shows a lack of love. If you really care about fashion, you should be able to say critical things when it’s warranted. Recently I had dinner with the editor-in-chief of GQ Japan, Masafumi Suzuki. It was just after LVMH’s Berluti presentation, and afterwards all the PR people were asking him, ‘Mr Suzuki, how did you like the show?’ I’m sure they expected the usual niceties, but instead he said, ‘It was the worst show I ever saw!’ He told them they were cheating the customer and ruining the heritage of the brand by making expensive, uninteresting clothes. The PRs were shocked, but what he said came from a place of love. He cares about the brand. And because he’s important, people listen and invite him back to see the next collection.

Nicole Phelps: The corporations are getting stronger all the time in fashion. I see new brands coming up all the time; they stay underground for a season and then they too move towards the corporations. Partly it’s because it’s too expensive and too difficult to develop a fashion line without support. But it’s also because the glamour that the corporations represent is irresistible.

Robin Schulié: When Bernard Arnault bought Christian Lacroix in 1987, it marked the beginning of a new era. Arnault was interested in building a fashion house in the traditional way – starting with haute couture, moving on to ready-to-wear and then diversifying into accessories and perfume. But Lacroix was extremely reactionary in terms of design, for the time I mean. Alaïa, Mugler, Montana and Gaultier were already huge by that point. But they were all kind of scary – too advanced for most consumers. Lacroix with his charisma, and his organza and puff skirts, could appeal to grannies. Instead of growing the business organically, Arnault invested a lot of money in Lacroix. Still, it never worked. No one wanted what he was selling.

Ralph Toledano: People who look down their noses at LVMH or Kering are just jealous. They envy their power and money. Look, the CEOs of these companies might wear grey suits and white shirts, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t get it. They do. François-Henri Pinault had the guts to hire Hedi Slimane even though everybody was sceptical and look at where Saint Laurent is now, so don’t tell me he doesn’t get it. As the president of the Fédération, I know that we need people like Pinault or Arnault to achieve our goals. They have the money.

Glenn O’Brien: The people who cooperate the most are the ones who are rewarded so there are always willing participants.

Robin Schulié: Is there any other way to play the game? If you want to compete with the big guys, do you have to do it on their terms? That’s the million-dollar question. Young designers today are often competitive. They want to prove themselves and play the game. But the market today is too fragmented, and the big brands have already honed their skills for several decades. How can a young brand compete with that? And anyway, is there really just one way to be successful? Young designers need to ask themselves if they would be satisfied with another model. Why does every designer seem to follow the same blueprint for success? Why do you need to please everybody? I can understand that Dior needs to, but Christopher Kane? What will happen to his vision once he starts making long dresses for the Middle East, short cutesy ones for Asia and conservative tailoring for Middle America?

Nathalie Ours: A designer with an independent brand needs money to develop his company. The big problem for young designers is that buyers might love what they do and order it, but to produce it they have to be able to pay their manufacturer. Bear in mind that buyers pay designers six months after they have delivered the goods, so there’s a gap in the timeline. If the designer doesn’t have a good banker or partner, how do they manage that gap? That’s the big issue. Every designer I know has the same problem. Sometimes with very new designers, a buyer accepts paying, say, thirty percent in advance. But after three or four years, the buyer says, ’Okay, we’ve supported you – enough already.’ So now what do you do? Can you afford to lose this buyer? Most designers can’t. That’s one of the reasons why many young designers are so happy to have a conglomerate behind them. It’s a way to survive.

Tim Walker: As a creative you have to work out how to direct the money into projects where you can capitalise on it. You have to know how to take your vision to a level that wouldn’t have been possible without the financial support available. That’s my tuppence worth.

Ralph Toledano: Big corporate monsters need to have a creative vision and a genius designer at the top. The public wants someone they can identify by name, someone with a recognisable face. They want a hero. That’s why fashion companies stage fashion shows – the public needs to dream. But this aspect of fashion is only partially important to the success of a business today. What really matters is the rest of the machine: the marketing, the supply chain, the location of the shop, the communication campaign. That’s where you make your billions. In this sense fashion is a commodity business. As the CEO of a company you go to the show, but in the end the quality of the show is much less important than currency fluctuations or the economic situation in China.

Nicole Phelps: The fashion industry has a knack for turning designers into stars. Look at someone like Alessandro Michele at Gucci; your typical backroom guy thrust into the limelight because of his position. We editors are storytellers by necessity – we need to create stars. We have pages to fill.

Adrian Joffe: Do multinational corporations abuse power? I’m not sure they do. They just do what they do, that’s all. They have power because they’re rich and because that lets them spend a million dollars a month in advertising budget on some magazine. And if they then expect the magazine to write nicely about them because of it, is that abuse of power? I’m not sure it is. They just do what they feel they have to do.

Glenn O’Brien: We live in a time where corporations are seen as individuals. But if you work for a corporation, are you allowed to have an individual opinion? Not really. You have to follow the company voice and the company line. It’s destructive to human beings. Me, I believe in a freelance world. Working for a company only for money is what Marx called ’alienated labour.’ Today we live in a world of alienated labour where people sell out – they sell themselves, their minds, their integrity. They become liars for money.

Andy Spade: Glenn respects commercialism just like Andy Warhol did. If I just did my work in some small corner of the world, I don’t think Glenn would respect it as much. What he respects is the fact that I built a business while still being subversive, working on two levels. I’m not claiming to be a designer or an artist or anything – I just like having good ideas that sell.

Adrian Joffe: Long live the one percent; they are the ones that change things.

Tim Walker: There’s been an incredible explosion of money and power in the industry. Today there are countless forces polluting the innocence of play and experimentation, and the impact on true creativity has been damning. From my point of view that’s a failure and a betrayal of sorts.

Ralph Toledano: Life is about power. It’s always been like that – it’s nothing new.

This article was published in Vestoj On Failure.

Erwin Wurm is an Austrian artist. These images are from his ‘Indoor Sculpture’ series, 2002.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj‘s Editor-in-Chief and Publisher.