When Karl Lagerfeld passed away, the fashion press celebrated his ‘controversial genius’¹ with a plethora of articles which listed his most contentious designs and statements. In considering examples of his most innovative work—think the sportswear and hip-hop-inspired maximalism of Chanel’s 1991 Autumn/Winter collection, which masterfully subverted the founder’s sartorial vocabulary whilst simultaneously paying homage to it—alongside eyebrow-raising instances of cultural appropriation like the dresses from Chanel’s Spring/Summer 1994 with printed quotes from the Koran, these articles made a tacit statement: that these examples should be considered as equally creative and even, perhaps, as the two sides of the same coin. In doing so, the fashion press was amplifying Lagerfeld’s own thoughts on the matter, which were summed up in 2010 by one of his famous aphorisms: ‘Be politically correct, but please don’t bother other people with conversation about being politically correct, because that’s the end of everything. You want to create boredom? Be politically correct in your conversation.’²

Despite this statement, the designer has usually apologised to those who felt disrespected by his work. This is not by any means an isolated case; from Yves Saint Laurent to Rei Kawakubo and Marc Jacobs, examples of cultural unawareness are historically accompanied by reluctant apologies. These apologies often sound like crocodile tears, in part because they tend to employ PR speak, in part because culprits like Lagerfeld often quickly move on just to stumble upon another cycle of controversy-apology a couple of years later. This overall feeling is amplified by the pervasive omertà of the fashion media at large which, as some commentators have noticed, are happy to publish these stories for clicks yet keep tacitly condoning this kind of behaviour by invoking creative genius or eccentricity to shift focus from the structural issues of the system.³

Sometimes, however, journalists set their usual professional caution aside. In the March issue of Vogue Italia, writer Angelo Flaccavento penned a self-professed ‘rant’ against political correctness in fashion, which he sees as ‘a conformist trap, set in the name of a false respect that is perhaps even more divisive and discriminatory.’⁴ ‘Awareness,’ he continues, ‘cannot be cultivated by force’ because the creative act is by definition ‘anarchic, boundless, bulimic and incorrect’⁵ and should therefore elicit outrage. The article was written as a reaction against what Flaccavento sees as the ‘intransigent moralists who raise their shields at the slightest hint of appropriation, whether real or presumed’ and the ‘guard dogs who, in the name of a foolish notion of inclusiveness, impose ridiculous parameters that are merely exercises in censorship.’⁶

But if fashion designers can and should shock and provoke, isn’t the social media outrage not only to be expected, but also an intrinsic part of increasingly performative fashion conversations as well? And why would fashion designers specifically enjoy unlimited freedom of expression? Who would claim this right next? Artists? TV presenters? Politicians? Do fashion designers really want to be the creative equivalent of Piers Morgan?

More to the point, any claims to censorship in this case sound preposterous given the meaning of the term and its relation to power. The word censorship describes ‘the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good’⁷ and is usually applied by governments or by those in power positions through laws and regulations. So how can someone who is given a voice in the pages of the most powerful fashion magazine in the world claim that fashion is being censored? And can social media backlash against creative directors at the helm of powerful global brands like Lagerfeld or, more recently, Miuccia Prada and Alessandro Michele, ever be considered an example of censorship?

While creative freedom is essential, fashion critic Vanessa Friedman notes that some social media outrage is equally ‘legitimate’ and that one needs not ‘climb on a politically correct high horse’⁸ in order to question a designer’s output. Scholar Mathilda Tham once argued in Vestoj that both risk and shame should have a place in fashion and calls for a ‘collective vision … for defining what types of risk sincerely have a place in fashion and which have not.’⁹

Building on this, I propose that we frame the question not in absolute terms — as in, should fashion be politically correct or politically incorrect? — but rather in terms of risk. We could ask instead: what role can political correctness play in fashion? In doing so, political correctness can help us frame a collective vision and discourse which establish what risks are worth taking to maintain fashion’s provocative, playful, innovative and subversive enfant terrible attitude and what risks are to be considered fashion faux pas — and I am not referring to sporting white after Labour Day.

In my experience of teaching historical and critical studies to fashion students, I have seen first-hand how political correctness can work as a tool for unpicking the system in productive ways. Discussing controversies in the history of post-war fashion for instance — from Dior’s New Look and YSL’s wartime-inspired Libération collection to the poorly-timed 1995 Comme des Garçons show for which Rei Kawakubo was accused of appropriating the concentration camp aesthetic — can become a way for students to think collectively through concepts like creativity, power, representation, and socio-cultural context. The first two examples in particular show students that the term political correctness itself is relatively recent and that, at a time when it did not even exist, designers nonetheless received plenty of criticism, only it was not as immediate and wide-reaching as it is in the age of social media.

In other words, political correctness should be divested of the connotations which politically conservative political discourses have assigned to it in the past couple of decades — let us remember that this is the rhetoric used by those who mock people who fight for the collective good by calling them ‘snowflakes’ and ‘Social Justice Warriors’— and reclaimed instead as a productive tool to discuss the underpinnings of the industry in innovative and forward-thinking ways. After all, I would suggest that when we talk about political correctness in fashion, we are actually having a conversation about the creative constraints and challenges within which fashion operates. Political correctness challenges designers to walk away from the easy temptation of cultural appropriation, to leave their ivory towers and to think outside of the box. As a conceptual tool it forces us to realise that true creativity in fashion flourishes within and because of real-life constraints and that it is these constraints that make us appreciate the magic of fashion even more. Political correctness functions as the moral barometer which helps us distinguish between true creativity and laziness, between innovation and cultural stagnation, between ‘Yas qween!’ and ‘thank u, next.’

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

1. ‘The controversial genius of Karl Lagerfeld,’ BBC News, 20 February 2019.  ↩

2. ‘Karl Lagerfeld Quotes,’ Vogue, 19 February 2019. https://www.vogue.co.uk/gallery/karl-lagerfeld-famous-quotes.  ↩

3. See for instance Lara Witt, ‘Stop mourning oppressors: anti-condolences for Karl Lagerfeld,’ Wear Your Voice Magazine, 19 February 2019. https://wearyourvoicemag.com/culture/anti-condolences-karl-lagerfeld?fbclid=IwAR1D7QGNs1kLbHt2u_nYAL5wIgO0T5UGEq3K2fq4kGy49CnqC4kuPN3zfuM ↩

4. Angelo Flaccavento, ‘On creative freedom and political correctness,’ Vogue Italia, 13 March 2019. https://www.vogue.it/moda/article/di-liberta-creativa-e-politically-correct ↩

5. Ibid ↩

6. Ibid ↩

7. George Anastapio, ‘Censorship,’ Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/censorship#ref58991.  ↩

8. Vanessa Friedman, ‘Should fashion be politically correct?’ The New York Times, 15 October 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/fashion/should-fashion-be-politically-correct.html. ↩

9. Mathilda Tham, “The green shades of shame,” Vestoj. http://vestoj.com/the-green-shades-of-shame/.  ↩

A PR chaos quickly ensued. On Twitter, regular users and ‘sneakerheads’ alike shared photos and videos as they burned or tossed in the bin their pair of New Balance.⁶ Meanwhile, rival brand Reebok cynically seized the opportunity and offered to send replacement shoes to many outraged customers.⁷ Shortly thereafter, New Balance disassociated itself from far-right ideology with a statement that divorced its concern for local manufacturing from white supremacist agendas. Unfazed, Anglin followed up on his first post by saying that whether or not the company identified as Republican is irrelevant and suggesting that the brand make him an official spokesperson:

If I were in the marketing department of New Balance, I would take it a step further and offer me, Andrew Anglin, publisher of the America’s most-trusted Republican news outlet, a product endorsement deal. I’m in great shape, have ripped abs and would look fantastic on a billboard that reads ‘Official shoes of the Republican Party: New Balance stands with the White race.’⁸ 

The social media outrage caused by Anglin’s endorsement of New Balance, on the other hand, was an inadequate response inasmuch as it was mostly directed at the company rather than at Anglin and the political views he represents. Boycott may be appropriate in the case of companies who do business with certain political figures, as in the case of the Grab Your Wallet campaign,⁹ but it is misguided in the case of brand appropriation, which does not require direct affiliation on the part of the brand. Furthermore, by focusing on the PR scandal not only did most mainstream media outlets give free PR to Anglin and his site – neo-Nazi groups and public figures regularly use grandiose statements, racist hashtags and ‘trolling tactics’ to build their ‘brand’¹⁰ – but they also failed to address the dynamics of neo-Nazi’s appropriation of a mainstream footwear brand with a global distribution.

This instance of appropriation is not an isolated case. In a recently defunct blog, an American neo-Nazi sympathiser proposed that far-right groups appropriate Adidas with the aim of turning ‘something that the everyday person wears’ into ‘a symbol of our movement.’¹¹ And it is not just footwear brands that are being appropriated. Cartoonist Matt Furie’s character Pepe the Frog went from ‘inoffensive Internet meme’ to being ‘hijacked by hatemongers’ from the so-called alt-right.¹² Food is not safe either: fast food chain Wendy’s was celebrated on The Daily Stormer after Pepe the Frog accidentally made an appearance on the company’s social media account¹³ and even milk has been appropriated as a symbol of racial superiority.¹⁴ These instances show that white supremacists seek recognition by associating themselves with mainstream symbols and material goods. They seek visibility by appearing ordinary and, thus, paradoxically invisible.

As the case of New Balance shows, this desire to hack the mainstream manifests itself in sartorial terms too. If traditionally skinheads donned a specific subcultural uniform consisting of ‘tight trousers, T-shirt imprinted with neo-Nazi slogans and massive Doc Martens boots laced to the knees,’¹⁵ Anglin’s posts made it clear that this is no longer the case. While this may be a new phenomenon in the U.S. it is not the case in Europe. As early as 1993 it was observed that ‘German neo-Nazi skinheads are changing their style. They are growing their hair and increasingly swapping jackboots and bomber jackets for “normal clothes,” such as ‘jeans, running shoes and parkas.’¹⁶ A 2014 article in Rolling Stone even documented the rise of Nazi hipsters or ‘nipsters,’ who sport tote bags, Converse shoes, skinny jeans and beards, appropriate reggae and dance the Harlem Shake.¹⁷

In this sense, the appropriation of New Balance certainly overlaps with attempts by the far-right to look less threatening and appear more palatable to broader audiences, as the case of alt-right demagogue Richard Spencer’s suit-and-tie image attests.¹⁸ Like a suit, a uniform of jeans, T-shirt, New Balance trainers and sporty jacket relies on invisibility. The person (usually a white man) who wears it is virtually indistinguishable from a non-far-right guy in a casual everyday garb, just like a nipster may be impossible to distinguish from a regular hipster. Invisibility as a strategy also overlaps with three elements that have been to an extent addressed by the media but not necessarily linked with neo-Nazi ‘style’: whiteness, the discourse around technology and masculinity.

In his famous 1997 study of whiteness in Western cultures Richard Dyer argues that white people have historically represented themselves as ‘the norm.’ In doing so, whiteness and normativity become synonyms. This equation renders whiteness invisible, which means that all the variations of non-whiteness are constructed as visible others.¹⁹ The appropriation of mainstream brands, in this sense, uses sartorial invisibility – the fact that white supremacists could visually ‘pass’ as moderates or liberals – to paradoxically build what Spencer calls ‘white identity politics.’²⁰ To this end German Nazi-hipster Patrick Schroeder ‘conducts seminars showing neo-Nazis how they can dress less threateningly and argues that anybody from hip-hop fans to hipsters in skinny jeans should be able to join the scene without changing the way they look.’²¹ Style is then either thought of exclusively as a tool to assimilate or paradoxically discounted altogether as irrelevant to one’s political beliefs. For white supremacists ditching the skinhead image means leaving behind their status as subculture, which defines itself in opposition to the mainstream, to reaffirm whiteness as the mainstream. In the process whiteness would be rendered invisible and its dominance reiterated because in Western cultures invisibility, as Dyer points out, is indeed the privilege accorded only to those in power.

Invisibility as a mode of operating under the radar and not ‘outing’ oneself also resonates with the so-called Alt-Right’s fixation with technological discourses and imagery. That white supremacists are social media-savvy trolling experts who operate online to expand and reinforce their network is well-documented.²² But technology is also celebrated in Alt-Right aesthetics for its potential ‘to conquer and to reaffirm inegalitarianism,’²³ which goes hand in hand with the reaffirmation of white dominance. As merchandise from The Daily Stormer attests, neo-Nazi aesthetic taste includes eighties comics and sci-fi content [which] offer normative gender roles, hyper-masculine futurist heroes, hypersexualised women and a variety of visions of humans transcending their bodily limits via technological innovation.’²⁴ The transhumanism represented in popular films such as Blade Runner and The Matrix is also celebrated.²⁵ That the latter was directed by two transwomen is strategically ignored, but its hacking ethos finds an expression in practises such as ‘Operation Google,’ which is used to bypass the algorithms set up by search engines to identify and block content that is deemed discriminatory. This strategy entails replacing racist epithets with the names of the very same companies that implement anti-discriminatory policies – Google, Skype, Yahoo and Bing are some examples – on forums like 4chan and /pol/ so as to avoid flagging and deletion.²⁶ Operation Google thus hacks the very system it aims to bypass. It renders racism, homophobia, transphobia and white supremacism undetectable, that is invisible to algorithms, on the most used search engines in the world. In this sense, one could see the appropriation of New Balance trainers and the company logo as its sartorial equivalent: Operation New Balance is a way to hack the wardrobes of as many consumers as possible.

Last but not least, the popularity of eighties comics and sci-fi imagery in Alt-Right aesthetics and the choice of appropriating a brand of trainers have one more thing in common: both unabashedly celebrate masculinity. This is not to say that sneaker culture is inherently misogynist, but rather that it offers men the possibility to reclaim adornment and fashionability while retaining associations with a traditionally male-dominated cultural realm like sport.²⁷ In virtue of that sneaker culture becomes a preferential site for the projection of the idea of a dominant, physically strong and ready-for-action masculinity that perfectly embodies the fascist belief in ‘permanent warfare’ as well as its obsession with ‘sexual politics’ and gender symbolism.²⁸ But whereas ‘sneakerheads’ are likely to make bold statements with vibrant or limited edition trainers, sobriety is key to uphold standards of neo-Nazi masculinity. As one of the commenters on Anglin’s post writes, New Balance ‘are gorgeous, nothing extremely colourful and gay as hell, just plain grey.’²⁹ Once again, value is placed on avoiding visibility and distinction.

Invisibility as strategy thus brings together many of the key elements of neo-Nazi ideology and aesthetics. Social media outrage in the guise of brand boycotts and shoe burning will not prevent further attempts from the far-right to hack, infiltrate and colonise our political imaginary as well as our wardrobes. Rather, what we need to make visible and to examine are the invisible processes by which we can potentially become victims, allies and vehicles of such unacceptable ideologies.

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

1. http://www.dailystormer.com/your-uniform-new-balance-just-became-the-shoes-of-white-people/ ↩

2. https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-balance-faces-social-media-backlash-after-welcoming-trump-1478823102 ↩

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/business/statement-on-trump-puts-new-balance-shoe-company-in-cross-hairs.html ↩

4. http://www.dailystormer.com/your-uniform-new-balance-just-became-the-shoes-of-white-people/ ↩

5. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-gibson1aug01-transripit-story.html ↩

6. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/business/statement-on-trump-puts-new-balance-shoe-company-in-cross-hairs.html ↩

7. http://www.esquire.com/style/news/a50877/reebok-replace-new-balance-trump-comments/ ↩

8. http://www.dailystormer.com/the-daily-stormer-fully-endorses-new-balance-whether-it-is-a-republican-company-or-not/ ↩

9. https://grabyourwallet.org/ ↩

10. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/trolls-for-trump ↩

11. https://jobewatson14.wordpress.com/2016/10/01/altright-brand-appropriation/ ↩

12. https://newrepublic.com/article/137545/perversion-pepe-frog ↩

13. http://forward.com/news/359129/did-wendys-become-the-accidental-neo-nazi-happy-meal/ ↩

14. http://www.avclub.com/article/milk-chugging-alt-right-trolls-shut-down-shia-labe-250242 ↩

15. S John, ‘Carnaby Street: A mixture of trendy shops and neo-nazis,’ Toronto Star, Aug 5, 1989. ↩

16. A Tomforde, ‘Neo-Nazis in Germany ditch ‘skinhead and boots’ image,’ The Guardian, Nov 18, 1993. ↩

17. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/heil-hipster-the-young-neo-nazis-trying-to-put-a-stylish-face-on-hate-20140623 ↩

18. See for instance http://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/the_hatemonger_next_door/ and http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/11/how-the-alt-right-uses-style-as-a-propaganda-tool.html ↩

19. Richard, Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture, New York and London: Routledge, 1997. ↩

20. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/richard-spencer-trump-alt-right-white-nationalist ↩

21. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/heil-hipster-the-young-neo-nazis-trying-to-put-a-stylish-face-on-hate-20140623 ↩

22. See for instance http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/trolls-for-trump ↩

23. http://baltimore-art.com/2017/02/11/the-aesthetics-of-the-alt-right/ ↩

24. Ibid. ↩

25. Ibid. ↩

26. https://ageofshitlords.com/4chan-pol-launching-operation-google/ ↩

27. Y Kawamura, Sneakers: Fashion, Gender, and Subculture, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. ↩

28. http://baltimore-art.com/2017/02/11/the-aesthetics-of-the-alt-right/ ↩

29. http://www.dailystormer.com/your-uniform-new-balance-just-became-the-shoes-of-white-people/ ↩

THESE ARE INSTAGRAM COMMENTS below black and white images of workers being ‘real men’ – building, plastering, carrying heavy weights, fixing things or more generally just getting their hands dirty. Some of them in tight T-shirts, some of them shirtless. One of them looks directly at the camera, aware that he is being looked at. The caption says ‘thanks you for the hard work,’ followed by a hashtag, #realpeople. Things get even more real – pun intended – as each worker has been dutifully branded: #DGPlasterer, #DGElectrician, #DGPlumber and so on. This is a Dolce & Gabbana social media campaign, designed to promote the opening of the brand’s new flagship store in Milan’s über-fashionable Via Montenapoleone – an area where such ‘real’ people are arguably hard to come by. An Instagram user seems rather perplexed: ‘Lol they call him “real people” what do “un-real people” look like or behave like?’

Do not fear; Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce are not quitting fashion for documentary photography. They have just taken one further step in the inclusion of ‘real’ people – non-models – in their advertising campaigns. Only this time it is not cute Sicilian grandmothers or an exotic bullfighter, but rather working-class men and used as props in the never-ending quest to sell more handbags, perfumes and shoes.

The photographs seem to celebrate the human component behind the perhaps less-than-real architecture of capitalistic desire, but may in fact elicit the opposite response. The reality of the workers is literally filtered – most likely through Instagram’s Inkwell – and turned into a black and white fantasy reminiscent of Herb Ritts’ male portraits. Dolce & Gabbana is famous for this visual approach, as its underwear campaigns and the D&G coffee table book Uomini (‘Men’) show. Behind these images of ‘real’ people is a not-so-subtle invitation to eroticise the workers, their bodies, their performance of ‘real’ masculinity. It unintentionally brings to mind Elizabeth Hurley’s classist use of the term ‘civilians’ for non-celebrities on Larry King Live in 2000.¹ The hashtag #realpeople implies a distance, both erotic and social: they are ‘real’ people, we are not; this is ‘real’ work, ours is not.

Another step towards the marketing of the ‘real’ is the brand’s autumn/winter 2016-17 advertising campaign, which portrays models catapulted in the streets of Naples, where they wander around the city and interact with locals. The ‘real’ people pictured in D&G’s autumn/winter 2016-17 campaign are locals and passersby that happened to be on location on the day of the shoot. The campaign was ‘meant to bring fashion to the people’ and depict ‘real life,’ according to the designers.² The idea of spontaneity also dictated the choice of working with Franco Pagetti, a war photographer, who was convinced to shoot the campaign after the designers reassured him with the words: ‘We don’t give a damn about fashion. Who cares about clothes and glossy images. We want photos that are real, emotional, authentic.’³ And who better to capture reality than a war photographer? Indeed, some reality managed to sneak into the images. Bags from rival brands like Armani and Givenchy show in the images, for instance – as an effort to preserve the spontaneity of Pagetti’s approach, according to Gabbana. But as observed by a fashion commentator, ‘next to the rich, highly adorned D&G looks … everything else looks pretty blah.’⁴ This means not only that the D&G products look desirable in comparison to those by other brands, but also that the clothes worn by the ‘real’ people in the campaign, and therefore by extension their bodies and their visual presence, look ‘pretty blah’ too. The consumers are invited to look at drab ‘real’ people next to fashionable, desirable Dolce & Gabbana products – so much for not giving a damn about fashion.

The dynamic between the models and the passers-by suggests the temporary meeting of two worlds apart, in which the gaze once again plays a key role. On the one hand, the foreign, rather awkward look of the designers and the richly adorned models – emblems of global modernity – onto the locals; on the other, the look of the locals onto the alien creatures who suddenly appeared in their familiar landscape. In both cases, a traditional heteronormative gaze. Male models are shown as dominant; they actively interact with the locals, bond with other men and flirt with older women. Female models, on the other hand, appear to be rather overwhelmed by the interactions. One of the images shows the only black model in the campaign walking down the street, seemingly embarrassed as men look at her and one even claps behind her. Is this supposed to be what ‘real’ men do? Perhaps yes, according to the designers. ‘Boys will be boys!’ seems like an accurate description of the brand’s historical reliance on tropes of hyper-masculinity like ‘the Latin lover.’ ‘Real’ people and ‘real’ men, then, come from the post-war Italy of La Dolce Vita. ‘It is still like the 1950s here, in a way,’ stated the designers on Facebook referring to Naples.⁵ The reality they present is orchestrated through the choice of location and further mediated by a nostalgic gaze. This time, the feeling is of a social and temporal distance.

Ultimately, the emphasis on the ‘real’ in Dolce & Gabbana’s advertisements and social media campaigns originates in a preoccupation with authenticity, which for them is to be found in specific places and people: workers, Napolitans, Sicily, the monolithic Italian family. They all become marketable symbols of craftsmanship and tradition that the D&G brand story relies on. The authenticity is, however, heavily curated – it feels more like an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians than a photograph by Nan Goldin. ‘Dolce & Gabbana is the banner label of reality TV. Bling, brevity, bra straps, Beckhams,’ observed a fashion journalist in 2005.⁶ The brand has been attempting to rewrite its story, from reality TV bling to romanticised fantasy of ‘Italianness,’ arguably to facilitate its transition from ‘legitimacy’ to ‘heritage.’⁷ The pressure is arguably even stronger in countries with a strong cultural identity like Italy, where brands like Gucci, Ferragamo, Armani and Prada have respectively taken steps to ensure their status as heritage brands through archives, museums, foundations and publications. Dolce & Gabbana, perhaps realising its slight delay in the race for heritage status, seems to have strengthened its marketing strategy by resorting to the banner of the ‘real’ as a way to create a direct, emotional connection with the people who supposedly inspire the designers. Ultimately, however, the attempt to integrate ‘real people’ in its promotional campaign echoes other questionable attempts to pay homage to those with lower or non-existent social status, much like John Galliano’s controversial homeless-inspired collection for Dior in 2000. These campaigns fall into a trap that fashion is already way too familiar with: an effort to separate itself from the ‘real’ through a sellable fantasy, which in turn relies on the commodification of the real itself. None of these ‘real people’ could actively partake in, and much less buy into, Dolce & Gabbana’s ‘real’ world. So while the brand’s marketing strategy aims to be a fresh take on heritage branding, it has ironically succeeded in communicating the outdated policy that high fashion and ‘stuffy’ museology share: ‘you can look but you can’t touch.’

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

1. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0010/20/lkl.00.html ↩

2. M Romani, ‘D&G: umanità e bellezza, chi se ne frega della moda,’ la Repubblica, 19 June 2016, http://www.repubblica.it/venerdi/articoli/2016/06/09/news/umanita_e_bellezza_chissenefrega_della_moda-141658616/ ↩

3. Ibid. (my translation)  ↩

4. A Vingan Klein, ‘Dolce & Gabbana Features the People of Naples (and Other Brands) in Fall 2016 Campaign,’ Fashionista.com, 14 June 2016, http://fashionista.com/2016/06/dolce-and-gabbana-fall-2016-campaign ↩

5. Ibid. ↩

6. L Armstrong, ‘The guys who got the girls to get their bras out,’ The Times, 20 May 2005 ↩

7. E Corbellini & S Saviolo, Managing Fashion and Luxury Companies, Rizzoli ETAS, 2012 ↩

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 

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 

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 

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.

1. http://fashionista.com/2014/12/the-honourable-woman-costumes ↩

2. Ibid ↩

3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/11046592/Why-The-Honourable-Woman-has-captured-our-hearts.html ↩

4. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0e520adc-2210-11e4-9d4a-00144feabdc0.html ↩

5. Ibid. ↩

6. https://www.nowness.com/series/fashion-disciples/fashion-disciples-philophiles ↩

7. http://fashionista.com/2014/12/the-honourable-woman-costumes ↩

8. Ibid. ↩

9. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/jul/29/fashion-tv-shows-reinventing-style-working-women-honourable-woman ↩

As evident in the poster of the series (above), each character dons a specific style. High heels, designer suits and feminine blouses are Karen’s staples; Will’s pared-down, sophisticated style conveys the seriousness of his profession but also of his paternal role in this queer family; Grace’s wardrobe is professional but with a twist, as a designer she experiments more with clothes; last but not least, Jack’s suburban dad look is a counterpoint to his over-the-top, diva personality and a strategic choice to make him more palatable to ‘average Joes.’¹ Each of the characters transgresses their fairly stable sartorial identity at a certain point in the show. Such transgressions are usually identified as fashion faux pas by the proverbial caustic joke. A classic way in which Karen, the self-proclaimed fashion expert in the group, calls out Grace for going over-the-top is ‘Honey, what’s this? What’s going on? What’s happening?’ These comments are usually accompanied by a condescending smile. Many of the show’s jokes also include references to gay culture, marking the characters as queer while also drawing in a straight audience. It is in this spirit that Jack calls out Grace for looking like ‘sporty Spice’ in the pilot and Karen tells Jack he is as gay ‘as a clutch purse on Tony night’ on episode twenty, season four.

In the same spirit, Will, who usually acts like the responsible father and breadwinner, is called out when he does not live up to masculine ideals. ‘The Third Wheel Gets The Grace,’ the first episode of season four, begins with Will showing Jack, Grace, and her boyfriend Nathan a pair of jeans that he bought in France:

Will: Well, what do you think?

Jack: Nice. Do they sell men’s clothes where you got those?

Grace: I love those jeans.

Will: Thank you.

Grace: I wore them to my bat-mitzvah after party.

Will: These are men’s jeans.

Nathan: Willard, relax. It’s a very smart-looking pant. It’ll save you having to tell people you’re gay.

Will is mocked for not looking masculine enough and Nathan, despite being straight and stereotypically masculine, is in on the joke and thus temporarily ‘in’ with the queer family. A mainstay of the humour of Will & Grace, this type of joke relates to the practice of ‘reading’ in New York’s 1990s vogueing subcultures. This is captured in the documentary Paris Is Burning by performer Venus Extravaganza: ‘Reading is the real artform of insult. You get in a smart crack, and everyone laughs and ki-kis because you found a flaw and exaggerated it.’ So while ‘reading’ entails bringing someone down for a flaw or fashion faux pas, it also brings everyone who is present together when the joke lands. Furthermore, everyone is in turn subjected to ‘being read,’ which makes this sense of humour completely democratic within the elective family.

The same sense of humour and fashion-savviness simultaneously demarcates those who belong to the circle and those who do not. An example of the latter is an episode when Karen finds herself at a support group where gays and lesbians are ‘converted,’ she observes: ‘Good lord, look at these people. Just because they stopped being gay doesn’t mean they have to stop having taste.’ Later in that episode, ‘The Third Wheel Gets The Grace,’ all the characters go to the annual Barneys sale in New York, a ritual that Will and Grace have observed since they were teenagers, and from which Nathan feels excluded. Threatened by their clique-like dynamic, he decides to join them. Despite his good intentions he finds himself cracking under the pressure when it comes to decoding clothes:

Grace: Okay, is this a powerful madam executive having cocktails at the Mercer Hotel or is it a PTA mom trying to cover up an affair with a superintendent?

Nathan: Erm… the other one?

Grace: What other one?

Nathan: You know, the whore at the hotel.

Grace: What?

Nathan: I don’t… I don’t…

Grace: Okay okay. How about this one?

Nathan: Oh, that’s the nice PTA one.

Grace: No! If anything this is the whore at the hotel! I mean, I’ve actually seen whores in hotels wearing this! And if that’s the case, why do I want this? Why do I want this?!

The scene ends with both of them in tears and Nathan saying ‘I miss Will!’ and adding ‘There’s no way we’re gonna have sex together after I helped you pick dresses for five hours! Find your friend, finish each other’s sentences. I love you Gracie, but I gotta go find a sports bar.’ Indeed, as the scene unfolds Will spots Grace crying and comes to save the day. When asked what he thinks of the outfit she has just shown to Nathan, he confidently offers: ‘It’s fine, Mrs. Fleischman, if you’re gonna continue that affair with the superintendent at the school district.’ Harmony in the queer family is quickly restored through the joke. Nathan’s distance from the circle is further reiterated by Will, who observes: ‘Poor guy. Making him choose designer clothing when the only labels he owns say “Nathan” in red marker.’

In the same episode Jack is working on his relationships with Elliott, his biological son, and Karen re-negotiates her relationship with Rosario, her maid. The characters do so through clothes, which reveal their mediating power in the show. Jack accompanies Elliott to Barneys to look for back-to-school clothes as a father/son bonding activity. Jack is naturally confident in his taste and chooses tight leather trousers and a floral shirt for Elliott, who tries them on hesitantly:

Jack: What’s the matter, don’t you like it?

Elliott: It makes me look like Ricky Martin.

Jack: So you do like it! … Oh, that’s a bad thing.

Elliott: I’m sorry.

Jack: That’s okay, if you don’t like it we can get something else. Go change.

Elliott: I just think wearing leather pants for PE would be a mistake.

Jack: Then why did you say you liked it when I picked it out for you?

Elliott: Well, you seemed so excited about them and…

Jack: What?

Elliott: I just wanted you to like me.

Jack: Well you don’t need to get these clothes for me to like you, Elliott. I do like you. We’re good.

Elliott: You do?

Jack: Yeah. Besides, I’m your father. I may need a kidney one day.

Through their clash in taste both realise that they are looking to get to know each other and connect at some level. Jack understands this and accepts that his fashion sense does not work for Elliott. He finally agrees to take Elliott to Target to find something that he will feel comfortable in.

Similarly, Karen agrees to accompany her long-time maid Rosario to buy shoes at Barneys in occasion of their fifteenth anniversary. The occasion itself marks a typical trait of their relationship, which mocks straight companionship with Karen playing the capricious woman while Rosario takes on a decisive, pragmatic male role. This dynamic is reinforced at the beginning of the episode by Karen, who hands her credit card over to Rosario and says ‘Here, take my charge card, go down to the men’s department and buy yourself some new shoes.’ But Rosario insists that they go together and Karen reluctantly agrees. Once at Barneys, however, Rosario is very indecisive and takes forever to pick a pair of shoes. This makes Karen suspicious and creates the set for the surreal dialogue that follows:

Rosario: What if I said I don’t want any of these things?

Karen: I’d say you’re crazy.

Rosario: What if I said I’ve just been stalling so I could spend more time with you.

Karen: I’d say you’re a lesbian.

Rosario: What if I said that’s all I wanted for our anniversary?

Karen: I’d say you’re a crazy lesbian.

Rosario: Well it’s the truth, that’s all I wanted.

Karen: …You wanted to be with me because you like me? Okay, this is getting too real. Here, buy whatever you want. I need to get out of here, I can’t breathe.

Karen then runs out of Barneys. When Jack spots her and attempts to start a conversation she simply replies ‘Can’t talk, feeling something.’ While her relationship with Rosario is left unresolved in the episode, this is the first time the viewers see them connect at a deeper level. Karen’s conviction that ‘in order for people to like you, you have to buy them things’ is also implicitly questioned by Rosario’s desire to spend quality time with her. In this sense, Karen’s surface is scratched and the ability of clothes to mediate social interactions unveiled.

‘The Third Wheel Gets The Grace’ shows how fashion operates at different social levels on Will & Grace. The appearance-centric sense of humour and the framing of clothes as social objects are two of the elements through which the characters create a special ‘queer’ family with its own rules, one that makes their respective biological families, and heteronormative society at large, seem dull in comparison. The importance of appearance and surface in the show, then, can be read as simultaneously stereotyping and subversive: it is the particular ‘queer’ sensibility of the humour in the series that allows for these two seemingly contradictory readings to fruitfully coexist.

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

1. ‘Jack is a preppy type. I’d love to put him in tighter clothes, but the studio’s scared that if he looks too gay the boys in Oklahoma won’t watch the show.’ Costume designer Lori Eskowitz-Carter quoted in Liz Hoggard, ‘Behind The Scenes – Hello campters: What really happens on the set of America’s most popular gay sitcom,’ Sunday Mirror, 05 May 2002. ↩

Transparent begins with Maura’s failed attempt to come out to her children as a transgender woman. Disguised as her old self Mort in an oversized men’s shirt and shorts, her hair gathered in a small, perfunctory bun, Maura is unable to be honest with Sarah, Ali and Josh because she’s overwhelmed by their self-centeredness and selfishness. The viewer, much like Maura’s children, is still unaware of what is really happening. It isn’t until the end of the first episode that we see Maura as herself rather than as Mort. After the unsuccessful coming-out dinner is over, Maura’s real self is revealed with her hair worn loose and a flowing, 1970s-inspired kaftan. These two elements will develop as a mainstay in her signature style throughout the series. As costume designer Marie Schley stated, kaftans convey a certain gender ambiguity and eccentricity, while also evoking broad cultural references:

‘Jeffrey [Tambor] and I discussed which women Maura would be looking to and feel a kinship to. We talked about Joni Mitchell and Mama Cass. Also, Maura’s not just a transgender person. She has many other elements to her life. She comes from a liberal, intellectual background. She’s a professor. We always thought she’d be well travelled, and she probably went on sabbatical and gathered items from around the world.’¹

In the first half of the first season, Maura’s style blossoms and becomes more elaborate as she eases into the feelings of liberation, discovery and regeneration following her coming out. For the first time in her life, as she resolves to her daughter Sarah, she is no longer ‘dressing up as a man.’ A key moment is Maura’s sartorial transition is the friendship with Davina, a trans woman who works at the LGBT Centre in L.A. Davina introduces Maura to hair extensions, gives her makeup tips and baptises her style as ‘California earth mama,’ which perfectly captures Maura’s love of kaftans and hippie culture, which she had only partially experienced as Mort before.

But Maura’s look wasn’t always inspired by the likes of Joni Mitchell. The episodes feature flashbacks to the late 1980s and early 1990s that reveal Mort’s friendship with another trans woman, Marcy, who becomes a companion along his process of experimentation and self-discovery. When Mort and Marcy bravely decide to meet in a hotel and introduce themselves as their female selves for the first time, Mort is wearing a mid-length, blond wig, a sequinned top and officially introduces herself to Marcy as ‘Daphne Sparkles.’ The name and the exaggerated femininity of the clothing are symbolic of Mort’s anticipation to wear women’s clothes, but the effect is borderline parodic: Daphne Sparkles looks more like a drag queen than a transgender woman. In fact, Marcy tells Mort that he needs a less ‘stripper-y’ name for her feminine self and baptises her as Maura. It is only in later flashbacks that we see Maura’s style evolving from sparkling, over-the-top 1980s references, towards flowing silhouettes and natural fabrics. One of the most successful looks created by Schley is the outfit worn by Maura to a Shabbat dinner, the first time we see Maura in the role of the family ‘matriarch.’ For the occasion she wears a rainbow kaftan made in Israel and a necklace of mah-jongg tiles. The clothing references Maura’s identity as a Jewish woman, while the tiles, according to the costume designer, evoke a traditional scene of old ladies playing mah-jongg together.² The entire ensemble conveys much more than just her gender identity; rather, it embraces her as a complex, multifaceted person, and her dress is an extension of this inner identity.

The flashbacks also show the stark contrast between Maura’s earthy, hippie-inflected style and that of Shelly’s, Mort’s ex-wife. The difference is rooted in their personality and ambiguous gender roles in the family. Shelly sums up her dissatisfaction with the role swap during a family emergency with the line ‘I want you to be a man. Save the goddamn day.’ Shelly’s paired-down, masculine style is symbolic of the fact that she was forced to wear the trousers in the family as Mort unconsciously took on more of a motherly role. Later on in season two, when they attend Sarah’s wedding, the contrast could not be more evident: Maura is wearing a summery, breezy dress while Shelly is in a trouser suit. As season two progresses, however, and Shelly finds a new partner, her clothing becomes more colourful, the silhouettes less angular.

While Shelly’s clothes become more relaxed as the series goes on, the style of Josh, her and Maura’s son, becomes more serious and curated. At the beginning of Transparent we meet Josh as a musical producer who is going through a mid-life crisis, however, during season two we see him try to take responsibility for his life choices. This transition is manifested through a slow move from unbuttoned shirts and a casual style to a more muted colour palette and button-ups, which don him a more corporate, controlled look.

Similarly, Josh’s sister Ali, the younger of the Pfeffermans, goes through a radical sartorial transformation during the two seasons, perhaps the most significant one after Maura’s. What the two share is a sense of discomfort with their own body as well as struggles with their gender identity. While Maura’s is mostly shown through the flashbacks, Ali’s is explored in the present. The two of them strongly resemble one another; in fact, in the pilot Maura tells Ali: ‘you know, out of all my children you’re the one. You can see me most clearly.’ Ali’s issues with her body and gender identity parallel Maura’s in the series. Since episode one she is depicted as a typical tomboy who struggles with her femininity and has body image issues. After Maura’s coming out she becomes more keen to explore gender and decides to enroll in a women’s and gender studies program. There she meets Dale, a transgender man, whom she is deeply attracted to. During their first conversation he mentions his love of hyper-feminine women, or ‘high femme’ in his words, and observes that Ali on the other hand ‘gives off a dyke vibe.’ This prompts her to attempt to achieve a femme look that matches Dale’s cowboy getup: a leather fringe jacket, a dress that would not look out of place in a saloon, heeled boots and bright, red lipstick.

While the high femme look is short-lived, it offers Ali room to experiment with gender via clothing choices. The two extremes are reconciled in her appearance at the end of season two, where Ali seems to have come to terms with her homosexuality. Her clothes are genderless but more fitted and colourful in comparison to her earlier casual garb, her makeup becomes subtle and her hairstyle more disciplined. Her newly found confidence is thus accompanied by the creation of a stylised tomboy look. In this sense, Ali’s sartorial transition is as significant as Maura’s in terms of gender expression, in that it explores the hyper-masculine, the hyper-feminine and settles somewhere in the spectrum between the two.

By exploring a variety of ‘transitional’ wardrobes, Transparent succeeds in bringing to the fore not only a nuanced depiction of different gender identities and expressions, but also the temporary, sometimes playful experiments that remain often overlooked in our struggle to create a stable identity, to find the red thread, if you will, that brings together our fragmented selves.

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

1. http://www.mtv.com/news/1962385/tranparent-wardrobe-interview/ ↩

2. Ibid. ↩

Inspired by the experience of writer Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, who was a producer on the hit franchise The Bachelor, the first season of the series follows Rachel, an assistant producer, as she returns to the set of Everlasting after an on-camera nervous breakdown on the previous season’s finale. Under the wing of executive producer and ruthless mentor Quinn, Rachel has to prove to everyone that she is now mentally stable as well as the most talented producer on set. Rachel’s character is central to the series: fickle and manipulative, but also vulnerable and sensitive, she embodies the ethical contradictions underlying the conditions of reality TV. By extension, her wardrobe offers a way into the parallels between sartorial and moral dilemmas in UnREAL.

Indeed, the first scene in which Rachel appears sets the tone of the entire series. Rachel is in a limousine with some contestants on the way to the bachelor mansion where show is filmed. The girls are dressed in glitzy gowns and the luxurious car interior sets the stage with clichéd tropes of wealth and old-fashioned romance sold by the show. By contrast Rachel is dressed in casual, utilitarian garb: jeans, military green jacket and a grey T-shirt. Her style signals that she’s not participating in the fantasy, but rather that she works behind-the-scenes. The dissonance is amplified by the slogan on her T-shirt, which says, rather cynically: ‘This Is What A Feminist Looks Like.’ Rachel’s look clearly sends a message in stark contrast to her surroundings. In fact, the T-shirt was based off of Shapiro’s real life choice of clothing on the set of The Bachelor, where she reportedly wore ‘a “George Bush, Out of My Uterus” T-shirt, and jeans that exposed her butt crack’ to protest the fetishised beauty promoted by the program.² As Shapiro once was, Rachel seems to be stuck in a job that promotes gender ideals that she supposedly opposes in real life.

As the show progresses, however, the viewer begins to wonder about Rachel’s actual motive for returning to work. Her ‘This Is What A Feminist Looks Like’ T-shirt is ditched in favour of a plain one as she proceeds to use an alleged feminist position to gain the trust of contestants in order to manipulate them. In season one Rachel calls on set a contestant’s abusive ex-partner because a confrontation between the two, in her words, ‘is going to be crazy empowering for the millions of women out there who are letting their husbands knock them around.’ Similarly, in season two she convinces a young African-American activist to drop out of college to be cast on the show, which according to Rachel will give her a broader platform to address gender equality and race issues. Behind the veneer of female empowerment, however, lies the desire to generate good ratings. Rachel, Quinn and the other producers are willing to do almost anything to make the girls conform to the scripted identities required to gain ratings for the show, forming the girls into typecast identities like, ‘the wifey,’ ‘the villain’ and ‘the desperate MILF.’ Their manipulations often entail style tips: when girls act too demure they are told to wear more revealing clothes, but when their clothing is too revealing they are shamed into thinking that they cannot be ‘wife material.’ Some contestants are turned into veritable caricatures: in one early episode a black girl is pushed by the producers into the ‘angry black woman’ stereotype, which leads her to pick a short, tight, leopard print dress in orange to appear more aggressive. Similarly, in season two, a white, conservative girl from the South is convinced to wear a confederate flag bikini upon meeting the new suitor, an African-American football player. As the season progresses Rachel starts to show a darker side, and her talent for manipulating the contestants emerges, as such, her wardrobe begins to take on a more curated look.

If initially Rachel is told by Adam, the show’s suitor in season one, that she looks like ‘a homeless person,’ and by Quinn that she needs to take time off because she ‘looks like crap,’ she slowly appears to take more care in her appearance. By episode four she is wearing a black leather jacket and eyeliner, which causes the response from Adam: ‘Wow, what’s the occasion? You ditched the bird’s nest look.’ Indeed, Rachel’s style appears to imitate her mentor, and the show’s villain, Quinn whenever she attempts to exert more control over her life. Josh, Rachel’s ex boyfriend who also works behind-the-scenes on the set of the show, immediately picks up on the change at the beginning of season two, asking Rachel if she has raided Quinn’s wardrobe. Her monochromatic, model-off-duty power look – a white silk blouse, a fitted, black Helmut Lang blazer, skinny jeans and heeled boots – is inspired by Quinn’s body-conscious dresses, structured blazers and high heels. The style conveys the executive producer’s ruthlessness, ‘Tell them that if they don’t take my call, I’m gonna come over there and shove my Manolos up every one of their slimy asses.’

When Rachel is not able to live up to Quinn’s expectations or begins to question the moral implications of her actions on Everlasting, her wardrobe reflexively becomes more casual. Rachel’s unstable style matches with her waves of insecurity and mood swings; according to Cynthia Summers, ‘The messier her mind, the messier her look.’³ The contrast is particularly striking against Quinn’s fashionable and expensive wardrobe. Unlike Rachel, Quinn does not have any conflict or qualms about manipulating the cast of the show, her moral distance and calculating attitude is mirrored in her consistently sleek, armour-like clothes. In many ways her style is not personal at all, but rather embodies Hollywood’s sartorial ideal of female empowerment: a mix between brand obsession à la Sex and the City and the sensible, minimalist simplicity of traditional American fashion.

What Quinn’s and Rachel’s wardrobes have in common is that they both reflect the antihero qualities of the two characters. As female producers in an industry where men are constantly given more credit and paid better, their dysfunctional, sometimes competitive relationship also provides a sense of comfort. The culmination of their mutual respect is perhaps best represented by the matching ‘Money. Dick. Power.’ tattoos the two women get at the beginning of the second season, the tone of which ironically sounds less like a feminist motto and more like the macho banter of their male counter-parts. As writer and critic D.T. Max observed, ‘You can watch UnREAL for the same destructive women-on-women behaviour you see on The Bachelor or as a witty commentary on it.’⁴

At a time when terminology around feminism and female empowerment is increasingly co-opted by corporate slogans and branding strategies, UnREAL offers a nuanced, but controversial depiction of self-proclaimed feminist characters, whose often unspoken moral stance is gradually revealed to us through the language of clothes.

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

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/on-lifetimes-unreal-clothes-matter-even-behind-the-cameras_us_575afb70e4b0e39a28ad798d ↩

2. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/sarah-gertrude-shapiro-the-savagely-clever-feminist-behind-unreal ↩

3. http://observer.com/2016/06/unreals-costume-designer-discusses-the-beyond-bonkers-second-season/ ↩

4. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/sarah-gertrude-shapiro-the-savagely-clever-feminist-behind-unreal ↩

Heaven’s Gate was just the latest incarnation of a spiritual New Age movement created in the mid 1970s by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles, later known as Do and Ti, or Bo and Peep, respectively. The two first met at a hospital where Applewhite went to seek treatment for his sexual and psychological issues. A successful academic with a wife and two children, Applewhite was a closeted homosexual. Deeply troubled, he obtained a divorce and was fired by St. Thomas University for having an affair with a student. Thought he didn’t find the ‘cure’ he was looking for at the hospital, he instead found an inseparable companion in Nettles. They first operated a metaphysical centre in Oregon and then led a semi-nomadic life for years, gathering followers and refining their ideology by merging New Age spirituality and elements from Christian theology with a belief in intelligent extraterrestrial life rooted in Gnosticism as well as popular culture. What tied these elements together, perhaps unsurprisingly considering Applewhite’s problematic relationship with his sexuality, was a stark refusal of the body. Fleshy, terrestrial life was looked at with disdain, in contrast to the extraterrestrial ascension that awaited the group members. After Nettles died of cancer in 1985, the urgency to reunite with her spirit on the spacecraft probably strengthened Applewhite’s belief in an exclusively spiritual afterlife, cementing the idea of the human body as mere ‘container’ in the group’s theology.¹

As in most religions, detachment from the body was achieved through bodily and sartorial practices. These included identical diets, grooming – all members sported a buzz cut – and clothing, which were meant to reinforce a unified group mentality. Heaven’s Gate’s uniforms changed slightly over time, but were consistently unisex and monochromatic: early images of Applewhite and Nettles show them wearing all black, while in a 1992 promotional video series all members wore grey collarless shirts. The dress code was to ‘emphasise modesty, comfort and utilitarian value’ while also reorienting the members ‘toward the Next Level,’² the group’s term for their extraterrestrial afterlife. Heaven’s Gate’s image for the ‘Gray,’ the alien species that were supposed to grant them access to their next life, was indeed represented as a bald, gender-neutral being dressed in a skin-tight, silver uniform. But cult members did not limit themselves to the adoption of clothing that concealed gender markers. In fact, after Nettle’s death, Applewhite encouraged them to view their human bodies themselves as garments:

‘We use the reference [“of vehicle”] to this body that we’re wearing – this flesh and bones – we use the term “vehicle” because it helps us separate from the body […] This is just a suit of clothes that I’m wearing, and at times it can be an encumbrance for me. It can be something I don’t want to identify with.’³

This belief partly explains why some male adepts went so far as to undergo castration in an attempt to eliminate the urges of the flesh. It probably also made the 1997 ritual suicide, or ‘graduation’ in Heaven’s Gate’s terminology, more acceptable for the group. All members seemed indeed relieved at the idea of leaving their containers behind. However, the media coverage of the event reveals a widespread scepticism towards the group’s religious ideology and a quasi-morbid fascination with the appearance of its members, in particular with their ‘graduation’ uniforms. One article reports a neighbour saying that ‘they looked like computer nerds,’ with the journalist adding that ‘they resemble no one quite as much as the early American Puritans in their plainness.’⁴ A different reporter called them ‘cybermonks and nuns who all dressed in black and wore their hair close-cropped,’⁵ while a journalist writing for the Los Angeles edition of Daily News suggested that they embodied ‘the wealthy casualness of modern geek chic’ and mimicked a celebrity journalist by observing, ‘And those all-black uniforms? As we saw at the Academy Awards last week, same-color shirts, ties and pants are hot, hot, hot this season.’⁶

The ties of the group with popular culture were indeed strong. Many members used to be avid fans of The X-Files, Star Wars and Star Trek – Heaven’s Gate’s black shirts featured Away Team badges, a reference to captain Kirk’s exploration team. These phenomena resonated ‘with gnostic myths of ascension’ and occasionally drew from ‘prophecies of millennial doom,’ as Star Wars creator George Lucas’ keen interest in the work of Gnosticism scholar Joseph Campbell suggests.⁷ As noted by many a reporter, Heaven’s Gate members also dwelled in California’s burgeoning tech culture: the group enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle thanks to their website design firm, unironically called Higher Source Contract Enterprises. While living in almost total isolation, then, the affiliates were very much in touch with 1990s American culture. In fact, the group’s ideology was a direct product of the ongoing merging of popular culture, spirituality and consumerism in the United States at the time.

In particular, it was the Nike trainers worn for the ritual suicide in 1997 that managed to capture the collective imagination in popular culture. As a brand which enjoyed cult status – pun intended – Nike’s signature swoosh was one of the most recognised logos all over the world. A 1998 article reports that, according to a research conducted by the company, its logo was recognised by 97% of Americans and that each American spent an average of $20 a year on Nike products.⁸ However, because the brand was so easily identified, its reputation was more readily subject to bad publicity. Between 1997 and 1998 Nike shoes were spotted on the Heaven’s Gate members, and on one of the victims of a school shooting that took place in Oregon in May 1998. A Nike baseball cap was also regularly worn by felon O.J. Simpson, a brand ambassador not as desirable as Michael Jordan, who at the time had signed a multi-million dollar deal with the company.

The swoosh became so ubiquitous, and the company so profitable, that satirist Will Durst imagined a meeting at Nike headquarters in which marketing executives discussed how to capitalise on the Heaven’s Gate ritual suicide:

‘Nike is still holding damage-control meetings on focus-group surveys to figure out if that whole Heaven’s Gate thing was good publicity or bad. “Well, on the one hand, the swoosh was on the cover of everything. On the other hand, it did tend to put a reverse spin on the whole ‘Just Do It’ thing. What we need to do is find the new cults. Quietly. Emerging cults. Cutting-edge cults. Post-grunge cults … And figure out a way where they don’t die in the end.”’⁹

In a twisted turn of events, time proved Durst right. The cult of Heaven’s Gate has entered commodity culture courtesy of 1990s nostalgia. Only two years after the mass suicide, objects that belonged to the affiliates were auctioned off by county officials in San Diego, including clothing and Nike trainers. Memorabilia were bought by ex members, by the curator of the Museum of Death in Los Angeles as well as by ordinary people – some hoping to up-sell them on the internet as ‘there are some weird people out there.’¹⁰ Internet in particular has contributed to the cult’s popularity in recent years. One need not adventure in its deepest recesses to find Heaven’s Gate Away Team patches and t-shirts available for purchase, or to stumble across Creators and Destroyers, a brand created by a religious cult aficionado that offers a ‘cult starter’s pack,’ Heaven’s Gate DVDs and Applewhite posters. A user on Yahoo-owned fashion site Polyvore even made achieving the Heaven’s Gate look much easier thanks to their style board, which of course includes a Nike top with the famous ‘Just Do It’ slogan. Durst’s parodic scenario suddenly does not seem so far-fetched.

In his seminal text Modernity At Large, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai observes that nostalgia is an essential element of modern merchandising and marketing. Specifically, he discusses the notion of ‘ersatz’ or ‘armchair nostalgia’, which he defines as ‘nostalgia without lived experience or collective historical memory.’¹¹ Following this reasoning, symbols that once held powerful meanings are consumed as empty signs or simulacra; this is true for Heaven’s Gate T-shirts as much as it is for the punk or grunge elements that are seasonally regurgitated on the runways.

What is ironic in this case is how a uniform intended to favour the wearer’s detachment from the body has been recontextualised as fashionable commodity – though perhaps not particularly surprising considering the popularity of 1990s-inspired normcore on runways and streets. The Heaven’s Gate look is, after all, a cult twist on the uniform of a suburban dad. The memory of Heaven’s Gate, then, paradoxically survives through the loss of its original meaning, and its very survival reflects the broader mechanisms of contemporary, especially American, culture. The cult has acquired its own niche spot, located somewhere between an MTV special, a Spice Girls doll and the umpteenth Friends re-run.

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

1. J.R. Lewis, “Legitimating Suicide: Heaven’s Gate and New Age Ideology,” in C. Partridge (ed.) UFO Religions, Florence, GB: Routledge, 2012, pp. 103-28. ↩

2. B.E. Zeller, Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion, New York: NYU Press, 2014, p. 142. ↩

3. Excerpt from the group’s 1991-2 satellite program, quoted in B.E. Zeller, Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion, New York, NYU Press, 2014, pp.118-9. ↩

4. R. Rodriguez, “Lost In Paradise: A Journey Through Heaven’s Gate,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 11, 1997. ↩

5. J. Carlin, “Who’s Next Through Heaven’s Gate?”, The Independent, March 30, 1997. ↩

6. G. Gaslin, “Cult of Popular Culture: Heaven’s Gate Suicide Earmarked With Mixed Bag of Media Iconography,” in Daily News, Los Angeles edition, April 2, 1997. ↩

7. C. Lehmann, “The Deep Roots of Heaven’s Gate,” Harper’s Magazine, June 1997, p. 15. ↩

8. T. Egan, “Downsizing the Swoosh: Nike’s Ubiquitous Logo Is Suffering From A Serious Case of Overexposure”, The Spectator, November 21, 1998. ↩

9. W. Durst, ‘Nike Knocking On Heaven’s Door,’ The Progressive, June 1997, p.12 ↩

10. One of the bidders quoted in “Suicide Cult’s Possessions Auctioned Off”, The New York Times, November 22, 1999. ↩

11. A. Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MINN.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 78. ↩

Published in 2014, Westwood’s self-titled autobiography is, more than most other examples of designer life writing, a case of celebrity autobiography. Westwood is not only an influential designer, but also the ‘godmother’ of punk, and a Dame that embodies a certain English eccentricity we have come to know and love. Name-dropping, quotes from famous musicians and actors, as well as personal letters to the likes of Naomi Campbell, are key ingredients of the book. Vivienne Westwood is also an example of collaborative autobiography; the volume was co-written with Ian Kelly, actor and biographer of fashionable figures such as Beau Brummel and Giacomo Casanova. Their collaboration is perhaps best articulated by Westwood herself in the book: ‘Nothing in the past is entirely true. But you are only in those scenes properly when they are put together. That’s what we should do, you and I, Ian: sew together all the life scenes.’ However suggestive, the sartorial metaphor is rather ill-suited. If the authorship of a garment is always collective, despite the symbolic identity between designer, maker and brand on the label, this is not the case in autobiography, where narrator and subject are usually the same person. Whether explicit or in the form of ghostwriting, then, collaborative autobiography is always bound to raise ethical concerns about the objectivity of the narrative.

Autobiography scholar G. Thomas Couser has indeed pointed out that ‘autobiographical collaborations are rather like marriages and other domestic partnerships’ in that writer and subject ‘produce an offspring that will derive traits from each of them.’² Ian Kelly seems aware of the risks of collaborative autobiography. His attempts to distance himself from his subject and the fashion system at large are implicit in his narrative strategies. This is evident in his use of quotation marks to indicate direct speech from Westwood or members of her circle of family and friends as well as explicit clarifications. For instance, in one passage Westwood explains her love of platform shoes: ‘“[…] Women should be on pedestals. Like art. Sometimes. Or look like they have stepped out of a portrait. I wear them all the time.” (It’s true.)’ Through commentary like this, Kelly establishes himself as an external, objective narrator, trustworthy of honest, impartial portrayal of the designer. However, throughout the book, the extensive use of interviews establishes a format of oral history, text that – by definition – is subjective. Subjective anecdotes such as this are often the very stuff the mythology of fashion is made out of. A premise that makes the reader wonder what degree of truth is to be expected from an autobiography, one that has been called a ‘gossip session’ by the Press Association. Accusations of plagiarism and historical inaccuracy by Paul Gorman, author of the 2001 book The Look: Adventures In Rock and Pop Fashion, have also called into question the credibility of Kelly and Westwood’s account.³

The narrative of Westwood’s autobiography is built on her parallel engagement in fashion and activism, a dynamic she has maintained since her punk years. She and her one-time partner, Malcolm McLaren have been credited with having made fashion explicitly political through the creation of the punk uniform. According to Westwood the pair were, at the time, heavily inspired by Guy Debord’s Situationist ideas, and supposedly originally conceived their clothing as ‘agitprop.’ In London during the Thatcher years, these political messages and motivations became the selling point with the disaffected youth market, de facto turning anarcho-Situationist ideas into a powerful marketing tool. Westwood acknowledges this in the book: ‘But I concluded very early on with punk that it was an immediate marketing opportunity […] punk is to do with an aesthetic but sometimes I think the only good thing that came out of it was the “Don’t trust the government” idea and that meanwhile I do think I looked great!’ Kelly also highlights this ‘shock and sell’ technique that McLaren and Westwood successfully championed – though, despite his claims of objectivity, he fails to point out the limited reach of the scene hosted in the different reincarnations of the shop on 430 King’s Road. In fact, the vast majority of ‘punks’ couldn’t afford clothes sold at SEX or Seditionaries (McLaren and Westwood’s infamous punk boutiques), nor were they influenced by the music of the McLaren-managed Sex Pistols. More often than not, punks would independently purchase commercial or second-hand fashion and alter it through DIY and a make-do-and-mend attitude.⁴ Ben Westwood’s claim that his mother and McLaren ‘were the beginners and enders of punk and that’s all you can say about punk’ – one of the many instances of oral history in the autobiography that is left unquestioned – sounds unrealistic to say the least and fails to recognise the essential cultural context of the movement in its entirety.

Westwood’s transition from punk to environmental activism is too readily resolved by the designer: ‘what I am doing now, it still is punk – it’s still about shouting about injustice and making people think, even if it’s uncomfortable.’ Yet what is more uncomfortable is, perhaps, her limited vision on sustainability in fashion, which borders on greenwashing and relies heavily on the rhetoric of spectacle – an ironic position considering the designer’s alleged familiarity with Situationism. While her donations to charity Cool Earth, occasional use of eco-friendly materials for her brand’s diffusion lines and advocacy across multiple platforms and events are worthy of recognition, her design house is nonetheless a multi-million global brand that neither makes its socio-environmental standards public nor provides any report or tangible data on its carbon footprint.⁵ Thus the seemingly easy transition from punk to environmentalism is more problematic that she lets on to be and, ultimately, highlights the uncomfortable blurring of political engagement and branding that has characterised her idiosyncratic career. In her autobiography, these ambiguities emerge at different moments through statements such as: ‘What I’m always trying to say is: buy less, choose well, make it last; though sometimes I might as well say, ‘buy Vivienne Westwood!’ While one may agree with a broad-sweeping mantra of ‘buy less, buy better,’ if we are to enjoy the privilege of choice, Westwood’s unabashed self-promotion ultimately undermines not only the authenticity of the persona she and Kelly present in her autobiography, but also her overall credibility as an activist.

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

1. See R. Mukherjee & S. Banet-Weiser (eds.) Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance In Neoliberal Times, New York: NYU Press, 2012.  ↩

2. G. T. Couser, ‘Making, Taking and Faking Lives: The Ethics of Collaborative Life Writing,’ Style, Summer 1998, 32, 2, p. 335. ↩

3. See http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/sep/02/paul-gorman-vivienne-westwood-plagiarism-claim. ↩

4. See for instance S. Suterwalla, ‘From Punk to the Hijab: Women’s Embodied Dress As Performative Resistance, 1970s to the Present,’ in M. Partington & L. Sandino (eds.) Oral History In The Visual Arts, London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 161-169. ↩

5. See for instance http://eluxemagazine.com/magazine/vivienne-westwood-is-not-eco-friendly/. ↩

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. ↩