TWELVE O’CLOCK. DÉJUNER chez Jeanne Veron, Place Vendôme.

Anna, dressed in the black cotton, chemise-like garment of the mannequin off duty was trying to find her way along dark passages and down complicated flights of stairs to the underground from where lunch was served.

She was shivering, for she had forgotten her coat, and the garment that she wore was very short, sleeveless, displaying her rose-coloured stockings to the knee. Her hair was flamingly and honestly red; her eyes, which were very gentle in expression, brown and heavily shadowed with kohl, her face small and pale under its professional rouge. She was fragile, like a delicate child, her arms pathetically thin. It was to her legs that she owed this dazzling, this incredible opportunity.

Madame Veron, white-haired with black eyes, incredibly distinguished, who had given them one sweeping glance, the glance of the connoisseur, smiled imperiously and engaged her at an exceedingly small salary. As a beginner, Madame explained, Anna could not expect more. She was to wear the jeune fille dresses. Another smile, another sharp glance.

Anna was conducted from the Presence by an underling who helped her to take off the frock she had worn temporarily for the interview. Aspirants for an engagement are always dressed in a model of the house.

She had spent yesterday afternoon in a delirium tempered by a feeling of exaggerated reality, and in buying the necessary make-up. It had been such a forlorn hope, answering the advertisement.

The morning had been dreamlike. At the back of the wonderful decorated salons she had found an unexpected sombreness; the place, empty, would have been dingy and melancholy, countless puzzling corridors and staircases, a rabbit warren and a labyrinth. She despaired of ever finding her way.

In the mannequins’ dressing-room she spent a shy hour making up her face – in an extraordinary and distinctive atmosphere of slimness and beauty; white arms and faces vivid with rouge; raucous voices and the smell of cosmetics; silken lingerie. Coldly critical glances were bestowed upon Anna’s reflection in the glass. None of them looked at her directly… A depressing room, taken by itself, bare and cold, a very inadequate conservatory for these human flowers. Saleswomen in black rushed in and out, talking in sharp voices; a very old woman hovered, helpful and shapeless, showing Anna where to hang her clothes, presenting to her the black garment that Anna was wearing, going to lunch. She smiled with professional motherliness, her little, sharp, black eyes travelling rapidly from la nouvelle’s hair to her ankles and back again.

She was Madame Pecard, the dresser.

Before Anna had spoken a word she was called away by a small boy in buttons to her destination in one of the salons: there, under the eye of a vendeuse, she had to learn the way to wear the innocent and springlike air and garb of the jeune fille. Behind a yellow, silken screen she was hustled into a leather coat and paraded under the cold eyes of an American buyer. This was the week when the spring models are shown to important people from big shops all over Europe and America: the most critical week of the season… The American buyer said that he would have that, but with an inch on to the collar and larger cuffs. In vain the saleswoman, in her best English with its odd Chicago accent, protested that that would completely ruin the chic of the model. The American buyer knew what he wanted and saw that he got it.

The vendeuse sighed, but there was a note of admiration in her voice. She respected Americans: they were not like the English, who, under a surface of annoying moroseness of manner, were notoriously timid and easy to turn round your finger.

‘Was that all right?’ Behind the screen one of the saleswomen smiled encouragingly and nodded. The other shrugged her shoulders. She had small, close-set eyes, a long thin nose and tight lips of the regulation puce colour. Behind her silken screen Anna sat on a high white stool. She felt that she appeared charming and troubled. The white and gold of the salon suited her red hair.

A short morning. For the mannequin’s day begins at ten and the process of making up lasts an hour. The friendly saleswoman volunteered the information that her name was Jeannine, that she was in the lingerie, that she considered Anna rudement jolie, that noon was Anna’s lunch hour. She must go down the corridor and up those stairs, through the big salon then… Anyone would tell her. But Anna, lost in the labyrinth, was too shy to ask her way. Besides, she was not sorry to have time to brace herself for the ordeal. She had reached the regions of utility and oilcloth: the decorative salons were far overhead. Then the smell of food – almost visible, it was so cloud-like and heavy – came to her nostrils, and high-noted, and sibilant, a buzz of conversation made her draw a deep breath. She pushed a door open.

She was in a big, very low-ceilinged room, all the floor space occupied by long wooden tables with no cloths… She was sitting at the mannequins’ table, gazing at a thick and hideous white china plate, a twisted tin fork, a wooden-handled stained knife, a tumbler so thick it seemed unbreakable.

There were twelve mannequins at Jeanne Veron’s: six of them were lunching, the others still paraded, goddess-like, till their turn came for rest and refreshment. Each of the twelve was a distinct and separate type: each of the twelve knew her type and kept to it, practising rigidly in clothing, manner, voice and conversation.

Round the austere table were now seated Babette, the gamine, the traditional blonde enfant; Mona, tall and darkly beautiful, the femme fatale, the wearer of sumptuous evening gowns. Georgette was the garçonne; Simone with green eyes Anna knew instantly for a cat whom men would and did adore, a sleek, white, purring, long-lashed creature… Eliane was the star of the collection.

Eliane was frankly ugly and it did not matter: no doubt Lilith, from whom she was obviously descended, had been ugly too. Her hair was henna-tinted, her eyes small and black, her complexion bad under her thick make-up. Her hips were extraordinarily slim, her hands and feet exquisite, every movement she made was as graceful as a flower’s in the wind. Her walk… But it was her walk which made her the star there and earned her a salary quite fabulous for Madame Veron’s, where large salaries were not the rule… Her walk and her ‘chic of the devil’ which lit an expression of admiration in even the cold eyes of American buyers.

Eliane was a quiet girl, pleasant-mannered. She wore a ring with a beautiful emerald on one long, slim finger, and in her small eyes were both intelligence and mystery.

Madame Pecard, the dresser, was seated at the head of the mannequins’ table, talking loudly, unlistened to, and gazing benevolently at her flock.

At other tables sat the sewing girls, pale-faced, black-frocked – the workers heroically gay, but with the stamp of labour on them: and the saleswomen. The mannequins, with their sensual, blatant charms and their painted faces were watched covertly, envied and apart.

Babette the blond enfant was next to Anna, and having started the conversation with a few good, round oaths at the quality of the sardines, announced proudly that she could speak English and knew London very well. She began to tell Anna the history of her adventures in the city of coldness, dark and fogs… She had gone to a job as a mannequin in Bond Street and the villainous proprietor of the shop having tried to make love to her and she being rigidly virtuous, she had left. And another job, Anna must figure to herself, had been impossible to get, for she, Babette, was too small and slim for the Anglo-Saxon idea of a mannequin.

She stopped to shout in a loud voice to the woman who was serving: ‘Hé, my old one, don’t forget your little Babette…’

Opposite, Simone the cat and the sportive Georgette were having a low-voiced conversation about the tristeness of a monsieur of their acquaintance. ‘I said to him,’ Georgette finished decisively, ‘Nothing to be done, my rabbit. You have not looked at me well, little one. In my place would you not have done the same?’

She broke off when she realized that the others were listening, and smiled in a friendly way at Anna.

She too, it appeared, had ambitions to go to London because the salaries were so much better there. Was it difficult? Did they really like French girls? Parisiennes?

The conversation became general.

‘The English boys are nice,’ said Babette, winking one divinely candid eye. ‘I had a chic type who used to take me to dinner at the Empire Palace. Oh, a pretty boy . . .’

‘It is the most chic restaurant in London,’ she added importantly.

The meal reached the stage of dessert. The other tables were gradually emptying; the mannequins all ordered very strong coffee, several liqueur. Only Mona and Eliane remained silent; Eliane, because she was thinking of something else; Mona, because it was her type, her genre to be haughty.

Her hair swept away from her white, narrow forehead and her small ears: her long earrings nearly touching her shoulders, she sipped her coffee with a disdainful air. Only once, when the blonde enfant, having engaged in a passage of arms with the waitress and got the worst of it, was momentarily discomfited and silent, Mona narrowed her eyes and smiled an astonishingly cruel smile.

As soon as her coffee was drunk she got up and went out.

Anna produced a cigarette, and Georgette, perceiving instantly that here was the sportive touch, her genre, asked for one and lit it with a devil-may-care air. Anna eagerly passed her cigarettes round, but the Mère Pecard interfered weightily. It was against the rules of the house for the mannequins to smoke, she wheezed. The girls all lit their cigarettes and smoked. The Mère Pecard rumbled on: ‘A caprice, my children. All the world knows that mannequins are capricious. Is it not so?’ She appealed to the rest of the room.

As they went out Babette put her arm round Anna’s waist and whispered: ‘Don’t answer Madame Pecard. We don’t like her. We never talk to her. She spies on us. She is a camel.’

That afternoon Anna stood for an hour to have a dress draped on her. She showed this dress to a stout Dutch lady buying for the Hague, to a beautiful South American with pearls, to a silver-haired American gentleman who wanted an evening cape for his daughter of seventeen, and to a hook-nosed, odd English lady of title who had a loud voice and dressed, under her furs, in a grey jersey and stout boots.

The American gentleman approved of Anna, and said so, and Anna gave him a passionately grateful glance. For, if the vendeuse Jeannine had been uniformly kind and encouraging, the other, Madame Tienne, had been as uniformly disapproving and had once even pinched her arm hard.

About five o’clock Anna became exhausted. The four white and gold walls seemed to close in on her. She sat on her high white stool staring at a marvellous nightgown and fighting an intense desire to rush away. Anywhere! Just to dress and rush away anywhere, from the raking eyes of the customers and the pinching fingers of Irene.

‘I will one day. I can’t stick it,’ she said to herself. ‘I won’t be able to stick it.’ She had an absurd wish to gasp for air.

Jeannine came and found her like that.

‘It is hard at first, hein?… One asks oneself: Why? For what good? It is all idiot. We are all so. But we go on. Do not worry about Irene.’ She whispered: ‘Madame Vernon likes you very much. I heard her say so.’

At six o’clock Anna was out in the rue de la Paix; her fatigue forgotten, the feeling that now she really belonged to the great, maddening city possessed her and she was happy in her beautifully cut tailor-made and beret.

Georgette passed her and smiled; Babette was in a fur coat.

All up the street the mannequins were coming out of the shops, pausing on the pavements a moment, making them as gay and as beautiful as beds of flowers before they walked swiftly away and the Paris night swallowed them up.

Jean Rhys was a Caribbean-born British novelist and short-story writer. Before writing The Left Bank, her 1927 debut story collection in which “Mannequin” originally appeared, Rhys worked as a model, canteen worker and chorus girl, experiences which shaped her often-autobiographical fiction. 

ACCORDING TO THE PHILOSOPHERS Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in art as in philosophy authors create conceptual personae as productive tools to express ideas and suggest new modes of thought.¹ Friedrich Nietzsche signed himself ‘the Antichrist’ or ‘Dionysus crucified’ while Joseph Beuys crafted his ‘shaman’ persona for his Actions from the 1960’s forward to combine his spiritual inclinations with unorthodox materials and a ritualistic brand of performance art. The same is true for artistic collectives such as Invisible Committee and Bernadette Corporation, which can be seen as examples of ‘collective conceptual persona[e]’ in that they are groups who perform a fictive person by ‘opting for opacity.’² In fashion, both designers and brands can become ‘social and/or artistic masks.’³ Designers or brands often employ a conceptual persona as productive tool to describe their creative approach or express their philosophy. The recently renamed Maison Margiela has successfully chosen anonymity as core value and PR strategy since its establishment, often using the mask both literally and metaphorically.

Yohji Yamamoto’s autobiography, My Dear Bomb (2010), similarly creates a complex conceptual persona of a designer, that of the ‘insider/outsider.’ A composite autobiography; the text of My Dear Bomb is a collection of multiple voices, writing styles and visuals. The designer’s own poetic writing dominates the text of the book, but is punctuated with other ephemera: recorded conversations with writer Ai Matsuda, lyrics to songs by Yamamoto, as well as short contributions and letters from friends and critics. Visuals such as photographs and sketches confer to the autobiography elements typical of journals and sketchbooks. Throughout the book, and in the obscurity of its non-linear narrative, Yamamoto positions himself as an outsider despite the fact that he is celebrated as a ‘designer’s designer’⁴ by the fashion industry at large. The book is an extension of Yamamoto’s practice but ultimately reinforces the core values and aesthetic of the Yamamoto brand in the creation of this paradoxical persona.

Throughout My Dear Bomb, Yamamoto maintains a resistance to the fashion industry. Reflecting on his 1981 debut in Paris, which received criticism from mainstream press and established his cult-like following, in the book the designer explains this ambivalent position with a metaphor: ‘I was turning my back to stick out my tongue at the world, so when they praised me for it, I immediately felt uneasy.’ This oppositional stance to the industry, and accepted notions of fashion, is reiterated with the use of militaristic terms. His relationship to fashion is a ‘fight,’ a ‘struggle,’ a ‘battle’ motivated by ‘anger’ and ‘rage’ – a careful selection of words that underlines Yamamoto’s awareness in crafting his persona and philosophy. Fashion itself becomes a war-like endeavour: ‘Simply put, the work of a fashion designer is a battle with tailoring.’ These principles can be seen in Yamamoto’s women’s and menswear, which regularly seek to challenge the association between Western femininity, display and sexuality and traditional notions of masculinity and power. This outsider stance, further developed in My Dear Bomb, extends beyond fashion and embraces broader socio-cultural systems of control, including bourgeois values and gender roles, an ingredient essential to the Yamamoto brand.

In My Dear Bomb Yamamoto’s conceptual persona is reinforced in the poetic style in which the book is written. The text resembles that of poetry or music, rather than a traditional narrative of autobiography. Throughout the book the author regularly likens his work to other components of the arts: according to Yamamoto, in fashion, as in music, the hand of the designer must be practiced like a ‘finely tuned piano’ to create a garment that will have a life of its own and ‘begin to sing.’ Even functionality is bestowed a lyrical quality in Yamamoto’s descriptions, where pockets are ‘for storing treasures,’ the ‘life or death of a garment depends on finding the point of rapture’ for a button and ‘the pleasures of attaching sleeves are like those of building tunnels.’ Yamamoto indirectly becomes himself a poet, musician and architect, creating secondary conceptual personae that reinforce his status as a fashion outsider, while simultaneously projecting an artistic aura onto his designs and, by association, his brand. By proclaiming himself an outsider, then, he engages in a branding strategy that paradoxically reveals his position as an insider.

The evocative language of these moments of reflection on craftsmanship through metaphor, imagine new possibilities for fashion as discourse and practice. By enriching its vocabulary, Yamamoto indirectly offers alternative approaches of engaging with the subject of fashion based on the richness of materiality and the bodily, sensorial experience it can trigger. In particular, references to touch and hearing throughout My Dear Bomb offer a unique insight into the potential of the ‘erotics of design’⁵ to enrich everyday life and the human experience. Like Thomas Carlyle’s tailor in Sartor Resartus, though lacking the irony of the original, the designer’s words elevate fashion to the status of an autonomous artistic realm that may even offer reflections on the human condition:

‘Just as man lives and grows old, so too does fabric live and age. When fabric is left to age for a year or two, it naturally contracts, and at this point it can reveal its charm. The threads have a life of their own, they pass through the seasons and mature. It is only through this process that the true appeal of the fabric is revealed. […] The intense jealousy I occasionally feel towards used clothing comes from this fact. It was in just such a moment that I thought, “I would like to design time itself.”’

Simultaneous to his symbolic struggle with mainstream fashion, My Dear Bomb reveals a reverence to the craft of fashion that encourages us to read Yamamoto as an ‘insider’ to the fashion community. He admits a sense of companionship with the likes of couturiers Jean-Paul Gaultier and Azzedine Alaïa in their quest for the perfect construction. When discussing the issue of the neckline, for instance, he declares himself jealous of Sonia Rykiel’s perfectly calculated round neck rather than Rei Kawakubo’s neckline, a ‘hole for the neck’ that she masterfully opens with bold, punk-like attitude. Yamamoto’s views on garment construction confirm his position as colleague to these influential designers of the past three decades, and embeddedness within these ranks in the fashion industry.

The book My Dear Bomb as an object itself fulfils Yamamoto’s trademark sensibility and ability to engage successfully with branding. The design of the book, by Paul Boudens, well-known for collaborating with members of the Belgian and Japanese avant-garde, reinforces the idea that, more than an autobiography, the book is an artistic manifesto. Yamamoto’s trademark black extends across the cover and on the edges of the pages. The paper of the book, coarse and thick, has a tactile quality that further reinforces an emphasis on the format, alongside content, of the book. My Dear Bomb in this sense is a collectible and a rare commodity in itself.

Anecdotal and often obscure, Yamamoto’s My Dear Bomb is lacking as traditional autobiography. However, it can be read as a highly refined and crafted manifesto in which Yamamoto as a person, his persona and his brand are inseparable. But if, as Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘the destiny of the philosopher is to become his conceptual persona or personae,’ My Dear Bomb allows Yamamoto to become, from time to time, a rebellious outsider, a critical insider, a master tailor, a warrior, a nostalgic poet, a sensitive musician and, ultimately, a designer whose success lies in the impossibility of pinning him down.

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

1. G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, London & New York, Verso, 1994. ↩

2. S. Lütticken, “Personafication: Performing the Persona in Art and Activism”, New Left Review, 96, Nov-Dec 2015. ↩

3. Ibid. ↩

4. L. Salazar, Yohji Yamamoto, London, V&A Publishing, 2011. ↩

5. A. Aldrich, “Body and Soul: The Ethics of Designing For Embodied Perception,” in D. McDonagh (ed.), Design and Emotion, Boca Raton, FL, CRC Press, 2003. ↩

In order to unravel their appearance, we must first examine the roles these figures have in mainstream fashion media. Over the last decade there has been a marked shift that has elevated fashion’s industry professionals, particularly in print, into the public eye. An increasing interest in contemporary fashion from the general public, paired with the rise in diversity of fashion media and its availability has created a more expansive landscape for brands and publications alike. Fashion runway shows, which were once a function of the industry, have become an entertainment spectacle followed widely by mass audiences on sites like Style.com. In the digital age and the so-called decline of print media, fashion publishing – both online and physical formats – continues to grow, with the additions of street-style photographers and bloggers, it has also become a popular subject for film and television. Moreover, the fashion industry, which historically has been closed-off and hidden from publicity, is now readily disseminated and critiqued by anyone and everyone. It has become a subject of fascination, with designers, stylists and editors achieving near-celebrity status as public muses. In an article for the New York Times’ T Magazine, journalist Suzy Menkes describes editor Anna Dello Russo’s presence at the shows as; ‘The crowd around her tweets madly: Who is she wearing? Has she changed her outfit since the last show? When will she wear her own H&M collection? Who gave her those mile-high shoes?!’¹ Undoubtedly these industry professionals have become subjects, and their actions, or more importantly, their dress, is point of discussion.

The role of a fashion editor has shifted, alongside the rise in fashion media, from a position that dealt exclusively with editorial content, to something more of a curator or figurehead for a publication. Success is granted to those with skills that are easily translated across platforms and business projects, thus editors tout themselves as highly-personalised brands. Their appearance is closely linked to their professional ability, and is intrinsic to how they are perceived within the industry as well as the public eye. This formula was particularly successful for Carine Roitfield who, after she was stood down from Vogue Paris, released her own periodical, eponymously titled CR Fashion Book in 2012, established on her own style persona and brand. Anna Dello Russo has followed a similar trajectory alongside her role as editor-at-large for Japanese Vogue, in projects like her collaboration with H&M on an accessories range in 2013, which drew from her signature opulent look.

Certainly dress constitutes a form of personal expression – there is the age-old mantra that fashion should not be taken seriously, however we must not overlook the economic function of dressing in this context. Anna Dello Russo’s dress, for instance, directly reflects the current seasons in an act of overt promotion. In wearing the latest designs, she reinforces herself as an up-to-date figure in fashion, which offers her a powerful status as a brand in her own right, and reinforces our perception of her as a ‘tastemaker’. This makes her a desirable space for designers and brand exposure. In their dress, these women create power for themselves in an industry that is typically fickle and uncompromising, establishing an idiosyncratic and therefore irreplaceable brand. In a promotional mini-documentary Carine Roitfield did for W Magazine called ‘The Client’,² the editor is seen signing a photograph of herself for a fan outside the shows. She asks ‘What are they going to do with those?’, to which the young fashion fan responds with a wry smile ‘I’m going to sell them on eBay’.  Roitfield replies, ‘Well we’ll see how much they go for. It’s interesting to know how much you’re worth’. For A Shaded View of Fashion’s, Diane Pernet her trademark black sunglasses and veiled-beehive is a look that perpetuates her work as a blogger and journalist and she is instantly recognisable in her theatrical attire. The similarly elaborate style of Daphne Guinness, has propelled her into the public eye and consequently created opportunities for her within the industry. Although she paradoxically describes her appearance as ‘It’s against the world. I am just going to armour myself up to the teeth until no one can get me.’,³ her look has successfully provided a platform for her business endeavours, which among others includes her clothing line, Daphne, on which she collaborated with Dover Street Market in 2007, and later producing a perfume with Comme des Garçons in 2009.

A signature look also maintains status and footing in such a changeable industry. Editor-in-chief of American Vogue and the Condé Nast conglomerate, Anna Wintour, has cultivated her signature bob throughout her rise in the American fashion industry. Consistently appearing with such a clearly defined look could arguably strengthen her position of power in an industry where appearance is a constant subject of critique; her appearance functions almost as a business suit in keeping an impenetrable persona.

Appearance seemingly is everything in fashion, offering various functions for industry professionals, particularly in the expanding landscape of fashion media. A carefully orchestrated look forms a highly personal and inimitable brand for Roitfield, Wintour and Dello Russo that holds power and business potential. As such, status in the fashion industry is intrinsically linked with one’s sense of style, revealing a landscape where business and appearance are murkily enmeshed.

Mariuska is an Italian illustrator and designer based in Berlin.

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

1. ‘The Circus of Fashion’ by Suzy Menkes for T Magazine, February 10, 2013. http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/the-circus-of-fashion/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 ↩

2. ‘The Client’ produced by W Magazine from 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZHvK7qrt-8 ↩

3. ‘Daphne Guinness’ interview by Peter Brandt II for Interview magazine, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/fashion/daphne-guinness ↩