I discovered I was pregnant in March last year. There were a lot of things I expected now that I was expecting: a baby shower, a plastic pile of baby toys, friends and family lining up to touch my stomach. I expected the loss of free time, the end of the years in which I could just pack a weekend bag and leave. I expected motherhood. I expected the most profound experience of my life.

I tried to fashion the idea of a mother in my mind. Do prospective mothers look like oversized Cecilie Bahnsen dresses, their gauze caressing taut stomachs? Do they look like swollen but manicured feet bursting out of Birkenstocks? And what was the chance that I would look like the pregnant supermodels I looked up on Google?

They certainly don’t look like the tight-waisted PVC-dress I wore to an art opening soon after I discovered the news. I was convinced that it was my last chance to dress in such juvenile attire, corseted but carefree, not having to worry about how its fabric would feel to anyone but myself. At home, I swept my fingers along the garments in my overfilled closets, playing out the same thought experiment with every piece I touched: Is this what a mother looks like?

I did not yet have many close friends who had had children, so I built an image of motherhood through a series of purchases. I shopped for organic prenatal vitamins, baby books, and sensible undergarments. After that, I’d start browsing maternity wear, cribs, strollers. Despite the fact that my stomach was still flat — or perhaps because of it — I used material to paint a vision of motherhood.

That image truly crystallised with my first ultrasound. On the screen, I watched a white blot float around space. I squeezed my eyes to see whether I could discern a face, one that resembled the Black-Asian babies whose photos I had studied. What did people do before this, I wondered. Just wait nine months to find out whether they were pregnant or bloated? I wanted to frame the picture the doctor gave me to remember a milestone not of the fetus but of my own: it was the first time I heard a second heartbeat emerge from my own body, the first time I saw what my future would hold. Within a span of minutes, I became a mother.

But at the next ultrasound, the doctor fell silent as she kept the wand in my vagina, twisting the buttons on the machine as if she was trying to focus a blurry lens. After a while, she told me she could no longer detect a heartbeat and recommended a dilation and curettage (D&C), a procedure that would scrape my uterus clean so that no ‘products’ would cling on and stay behind. Why wouldn’t I want it to cling on? I wanted to ask. But time folded into itself, and before I knew it, I woke up in a clinic with a two-star Yelp-rating, wailing in my hospital gown. Just like that, I was no longer a mother.

As my mind stumbled out of general anesthesia, it was still filled with images of doula-influencers and a pregnant Doutzen Kroes. Despite all my research, the possibility of miscarriage had never entered my imagination. I couldn’t conceive of the fact that a baby could be lost, that the trail to motherhood, with each of its stages marked with rituals and gifts, could suddenly hit a dead end. I knew what a mother looked like by then, but what about one who has just lost a baby? Laying in bed after the operation, my underwear lined with the thickest pads my partner could find at the pharmacy, I browsed pages and pages of summer sales. Does she look like the figure-hugging dress of blood-red lace I had added to my cart? Or the stretchy skirt that could help me imagine needing room to grow, once again? Does a woman who has lost a baby still go out, does she still need cocktail dresses?          

In the weeks after, I tried to explain my grief to friends and acquaintances. I told them that I missed the baby, that I replayed every minute of my pregnancy to understand whether there was something I could’ve done to prevent its loss, that my body felt too weak to withstand the weight of death. In turn, they told me that miscarriage is common, that I’d ‘move on’ and try again. I told a friend I felt like a wailing mother elephant who has just found the lifeless body of her baby, its tusks stripped by poachers. She responded by saying that at least I have a partner who wanted kids.

All the while, friends got pregnant, friends organised baby showers, friends exchanged hospital gossip with other pregnant friends, while me and my scraped-out uterus sat on the side. When a stranger bumped into me on the subway, I pictured how they would’ve given me their seat had I been visibly pregnant. I pictured pulling my pants down and showing him the blood and mucus dripping through my bruised cervix. And then I pictured my baby, its remains chucked, after the operation, into a biohazard bin.

Back home, I rushed to the computer to search for ‘miscarriage items,’ as if there were objects I could buy to fill the void left in my body. There were memorial bracelets on Etsy, there were pregnancy loss awareness pins, there were cards that aid, ‘There is no good card for this.’ I looked for books, movies, anything that made it clear that someone believed pregnancy loss was worth making art about. But there was surprisingly little I could find, and there was certainly nothing that would suit my purpose, which was to communicate to the world that I had once been a mother, and perhaps still am. I had long relied on consumerism for answers and comfort, but it seemed that even in a society in which every niche has been commercialised, miscarriage carries little capital.

A pregnancy protrudes. It heightens and widens and deepens to take up space. Miscarriage empties. The fetus leaves the body, the hormones flush out, whatever visions for an expanded family suddenly seem no longer perceptible. I wondered whether the problem of miscarriage was a lack of imagination. It couldn’t be dressed up, packaged, and sold. It couldn’t be glamorised with a nude Annie Leibovitz photo shoot in Vanity Fair. Whatever damage had been done occurs under the skin, out of sight. There was no scar that would make it clear how much I’d been hurt, no item I could wear to communicate that I was a person in grief. Even the English language does not provide a space for my experience: the word miscarriage suggests a wrong turn, a missed exit. I wasn’t even far enough in my pregnancy for my loss to be categorised as a stillbirth, a word that at least suggests that a life had been created.

After a while, I returned to the doctor for a follow up. She inspected the ultrasound, and let out a satisfactory yelp announcing that nothing was left behind. I kept staring at the screen of the machine, which now displayed only emptiness, a black hole.

After my miscarriage, expectation turned into hope, its less arrogant cousin. Each month, I counted off the days until ovulation. Each month, I thought about which sexual acts were useful and which just frivolous. Each month, I dissected the grainy signals of my own body. Was I cold, or was I pregnant? Was I constipated, or was I pregnant? Was I losing my mind, or was I pregnant? I bought tight clothes, convinced I would have a long time to wear them still, and then I bought loose ones again, once my optimism returned. I counted off the days until my period with a jittery dread, waiting for the first possible time to do a pregnancy test. And when the test was negative, I would do another one and then another, convinced that at some point, the single stripe would, like cell-division, split into two.

By December, I was pregnant again. I felt good, I felt bad. I was mostly incredulous that my body, after having survived months without rest, nurture, and serotonin, could still grow something. I rushed to the doctor to confirm the news since I had habituated my mind to no longer trust at-home pregnancy tests. And yes, I was expecting, again. I tried to keep a lid on my hope, resisting the urge to consult my pregnancy manuals. Yet I found myself stretching my clothes again every time I got dressed, just to visualise how many more months I would be able to fit in them. My conclusion was that I owned more stretchy clothes than I expected.

Two weeks later, blood splashed into my underwear. Another ultrasound, this time showing an ectopic pregnancy. The embryo had implanted itself in my right Fallopian tube. It wasn’t willing to empty, to let go of the flesh it had buried into. The doctor gave me a dose of methotrexate, a chemotherapy agent she said would target ‘rapidly dividing cells.’ It was injected into my ass cheek as if I was nothing more than a big baby myself, and when the needle hit my skin, I cried like one too. I didn’t understand why a difference of a few centimeters distinguished a baby from cancer, love from harm.

I’ve tried to undo my expectations. I know now that pregnancy is not just a healthy and joyous experience. I know now that pregnancy can lead to death instead of life. I know now that I can be devastated enough to punch a guy on the street for harassing me in front of my obstetrician’s office, as I shouted: ‘I’m having a miscarriage!’ And every time I passed that corner again, he’d come after me and yell across the whole block he wished I’d have another one. It’s only now that I realise that the incident manifested the nightmare version of what I wanted: for everyone around me to hear about the losses I had endured. Now that the pandemic has kept both of us off the streets, I tell that story to people as a joke-filled anecdote. It elicits their laughter rather than their bewilderment, camouflaging how my sadness literally spilled out of my body’s bounds.

Where did my initial, naive expectations come from anyway? Was it from the ads of glowing women in maternity wear that kept popping up in my browser, even by the time I had entered more searches for ‘miscarriage’ than ‘pregnancy’? Was it from the books that portrayed gestation as an advent-calendar, with each chapter revealing the next stage of fetal development along various fruit-sizes? Or was it from the doctor, who, after the heartbeat was first detected, told me to start thinking of baby names?

Perhaps it was to be expected that my expectations would be such. I was born in China during the one-child-policy. Having children was not a matter of personal choice, as the country conducted mass campaigns of forced sterilisation and abortion to enforce a low birth-rate (which continue for the Uighur population today). If miscarriage did have the opportunity to occur, it might have just hastened a fate that the government would have coerced anyway. My mother had had two abortions, one before my arrival and one after. She pictured she’d be able to have more children after we left China for the Netherlands, though when we eventually did, she and my father separated. Miscarriage was never mentioned as a possibility when I was growing up. Pregnancy loss wasn’t caused by individual conditions but societal ones, the obstacle between my mother and more children situated outside of her body.

I now live in the United States, a country that has one of the most advanced medical industries but also one of the highest infant mortality rates among wealthy industrialised nations.¹ It’s a country where a child can only be brought into being through a series of consumerist choices, where ‘having’ a baby depends on the health insurance one is able to afford and the amount of reproductive technologies one has access to. And even in states where women have ‘ownership’ over their bodies to a certain extent — through access to abortion and birth control — it’s clear that not every body possesses the same value. Black newborns die at twice as high a rate than their white counterparts², while black women die at three to five times the rate of white women from pregnancy-related causes³ In the country I now live in, having a child is a privilege, even though it shouldn’t be.

In the years since I left China, my own privilege has grown. I now visit clinics where white doctors talk to me about my ‘pregnancy preparedness’ and my ‘fertility journey,’ hiding the possibility of death under their glistening surfaces and sanitised language. I’m part of a pregnancy loss support group with middle-class white women. I feel at home among the one ectopic pregnancy, two stillbirths, and five miscarriages we share among us. But as we discuss IVF-cycles, ovulation monitoring, and the best fertility doctors, even amidst a pandemic and a social uprising against racial violence, I wondered what expectations — of care, of access, of support — we still hold onto, despite all the traumas we’ve experienced.

It’s been a year since my first miscarriage, and the summer sales have returned. I buy a loose kaftan, I buy a pin-tucked denim dress, I buy cotton shorts with an elastic waistband, I buy skin-tight hotpants. There’s no coherence in the silhouette or materiality of this selection of garments, no vision of what I want to be. The pandemic rages on, and in the convergence of societal crises it has caused, I find myself escaping into consumerism again, despite the ways it has failed me. My vision of how my life will unfold is no longer progressive or linear, I don’t assume it will just heighten and widen and deepen.

I think about how the condition of the world now reflects the inner turmoil I’ve experienced in recent times. Almost everyone around me lives in uncertainty and waiting, not knowing whether their bodies will be able to withstand the traumas lurking around the corner. But I also think about my mother again. When my parents and I moved from the North of China to the wealthy South in the early 1990s, our sort was seen as uncivilised, speaking with clipped tongues and smelling of garlic. My mother and I would stroll through the first shopping malls that had been erected in the city of Guangzhou, handing over cash for whatever the salesperson said was French. We fashioned our new identities in the mass-market stores we were slowly getting to know, and did the same when we moved to the Netherlands. We believed we could force the arrival of our Dutch identities by dressing like the strange foreigners we were suddenly surrounded by. Perhaps my habit of using material to fashion a new future started long before motherhood entered my mind. And perhaps it’s something that has helped me survive previous upheavals, too.

As I’m writing, I keep going back and forth between my text editor and the browser windows of summer sales I have opened. I scroll through rows and rows of garments, hopeful that one of them will evoke a better future. I am not pregnant, but inside me, the image of motherhood I’ve conceived continues to grow.

Mary Wang is a Chinese-Dutch writer, now living in New York. She is a senior editor at Guernica.

This article was originally published in Vestoj ‘On Doubt,’ available for purchase here.

1. https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2018-annual-report/findings-international-comparison. ↩

2. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db316.html. ↩

3. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2019/p0905-racial-ethnic-disparities-pregnancy-deaths.html. ↩

What you’re about to read is a compendium of prose poems and short stories in the costume of dictionary entries, that employs fashion as device and motif. These particular excerpts centre around the figure of the designer and/or the artist, and the cult status that surrounds them.

Button: Originally merely decorative, buttons have, over time, become functional, mere means of opening and closing garments, akin to zips and other fasteners. As a result of which, buttons function like the edges of the body – the lips, the enclosure of the teeth, the rim of the anus, an opening, a mouth. The decline of the button as a sign of high ornament has made these sartorial trinkets appear from afar, as moth-eaten or charred holes. The surrealist fashion designer, Elsa Schiaparelli, however, often made her buttons out of peanuts, padlocks, and typewriter keys. Her black hat in the form of an inverted high-heeled shoe worn with a cocktail suit with pocket edges appliquéd in the shape of lips, along with her buttons, which in her own words were ‘anything but buttons’ brought to the surface of the fabric a hidden carnival humour and as a result, often repressed the body and brought clothing to the fore as a kind of symbolic language. Seen from a psychoanalytic perspective, perhaps Schiaparelli saw the body as the ‘unconscious’ of clothing.

Cuffs and Collars: A fold or band serving as a trimming or finish for the bottom of a sleeve. Initially, like the collars of a shirt – ornamental collars in the mediaeval period in Europe were worn as a form of jewellery and prior to that in the 12th century served as neck-protecting armour – cuffs were detachable. Now, attached, they appear – much like collars – as beautiful remains. There is something beautifully masculine about large collars and cuffs. Egon Schiele used to vigorously wash his collars and cuffs every evening, and, when there was not enough water, used to make his cuffs and collars, himself, out of chart paper.

Emphasis: Christian Dior, in his Little Dictionary of Fashion maintains that ‘if you have a particularly outstanding feature it is always a good thing to emphasise it. In fact the whole of fashion rests largely on emphasis.’ Perhaps the whole purpose of fashion is to emphasise the body. The purpose of collars, Dior contends, is to provide a frame(work) for the face, and if you have beautiful hands – as I do – the cuffs of my sleeves often emphasise my hands, provided they are of the right length. Necklaces emphasise necks that are already beautiful and anklets give emphasis to beautiful feet. The slightly roundish spectacles I wear emphasise my aquiline face. This took me years to understand, for all the shops selling eyewear in the city I live in sold primarily rectangular-shaped glasses that naturally hid my face, or rather made my face appear too angular and hard, nearing a cubist painting.

Frock: Originally, a frock was a loose, long garment with wide, full sleeves. It often had a belt and was worn primarily by monks and priests. Hence, the origin of the term defrock or unfrock, meaning ‘to eject from the priesthood.’ Today, a frock may designate a woman’s or girl’s, or child’s dress or light overdress. In her diary, in the spring of 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote ‘people have any number of states of consciousness and I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness’, which functions somewhat like an open secret and refers to those dresses (frocks) one wears to conceal and reveal oneself simultaneously at parties, parties one often visits begrudgingly.

Jama: During the Mogul reign in India, the coat or Jama most in vogue was a long tunic with an overlapping collar fastened by means of a binding on both sides, and gathered at the waist by a cloth belt or sash tied artistically into a knot, conferring to the garment the appearance of a full skirt with heavy falling lines. The Urdu poet, Mir Taqi Mir, was exceedingly fond of wearing pointed shoes and coats whose circumference measured fifty full yards, but with the decline of the Mogul empire, this sartorial extravagance began to be perceived as burlesque. In 1780, when Mir, forced by circumstances to leave Delhi, arrived in Lucknow in the already outmoded attire as described above, he made himself the laughingstock of the town. Fashion had moved towards the general trend of shortening dresses, signs of a declining empire.

Karl Lagerfeld: A Prussian fox who left the city situated at the banks of the Elbe for Paris, and became immediately a star. Although he loved modern art, he did not hang paintings on the wall; instead he surrounded himself with books and paper. Karl loved paper and reading was his truest joy. His protestant work ethic helped him shine in the fashion industry. He was known to have said that he is a fashion nymphomaniac who never gets an orgasm. In some ways, a futurist, he criticised his friend, colleague and rival, Yves St. Laurent for being so attached to the past and the use of memory in his collections – Yves St. Laurent was obsessed with Proust. Very few people remember what Lagerfeld looked like as a young man; it is as if he arrived in his prime in old age with his snow-white ponytail, and dark glasses that hid his sympathetic eyes. A teetotaller himself, he did, however, prefer the company of people who liked to get high and slowly destroy themselves. During his later years, he stuck to a strict diet and exercise regimen – drinking diet coke from morning to night, he only drank drinks that were served cold – allowing him to remain as light as a feather, much like the models he dressed-up – he often referred to himself as a coat-hanger. Although many a fancy-clad population surfaced for his funeral, Lagerfeld was known on many occasions to say that when it is done, it’s done, all over. This Prussian fox would have preferred the death of a wild animal, left to die in the heart of a forest.

Mannequin:  Contrary to what is understood under this term, a mannequin is not a mere (wooden) doll upon which garments are hung, as if on a hanger. Mannequins are those bodies that by virtue of their splendour and animation breathe life into cloth. It was Charles Frederick Worth, the grand couturier, who replaced the wooden doll with a human model. Often, however, these human models conduct themselves as if they were mere wooden or plastic dolls, without life or intelligence.

Metamorphosis: Fashion’s seduction must rely on its powers to immediately transform, something we are already familiar with as children. The wolf – who is in fact a paedophile – disguises himself as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother by virtue of his dress, and the story of Cinderella does not merely express the dreamscape of the persecuted. The fairy, by a mere stroke of a magic wand, changes Cinderella’s clothes immediately; what society considered to be a pestilence, a servant girl lying in the ashes is now all of a sudden by virtue of a flux in attire, adored. There is nothing as transformative as putting on, or for that matter removing, clothes. Elsa Schiaparelli knew she was unconventionally attractive and always felt the transformative magic of a dress, a dress that could change her from ugly duckling to swan. ‘Nobody knew how I would appear. Sometimes I lead fashion. At other times, wearing my ordinary clothes, I appeared like my own ugly sister.’

Scarf: A piece of fabric worn around the neck or head for warmth, sun protection, cleanliness, fashion, or religious reasons or used to show the support for a sports club or team. A scarf can be made in a variety of different materials such as wool, linen, silk, or cotton. On September 14, 1927, the dancer Isadora Duncan chokes to death in Nice, France, when the enormous silk scarf she is wearing gets tangled in the rear hubcaps of her open car. To this, adds the writer Gertrude Stein, ‘Affectations can be dangerous.’

Skirt: A piece of clothing that is largely worn by women and girls and that hangs down from the waist. Often its perimeter is so large that it results in rendering a clear demarcation between the person wearing the skirt and the world around her. In France, after the demise of Louis XIV, women began to ‘loosen’ up by wearing clothes with flowing lines. One such curious feature of that era was the return of hoops. Instead of putting emphasis on height, they had their skirts distended sideways, sometimes so much as fifteen feet, making it difficult for two women to enter a doorway side by side or share a seat on the same couch. The width of this skirt affected even architecture, such as the curved balusters of 18th century staircases in France. Although I have never worn anything that resembles a skirt, I have spent much of my life skirting around opportune moments, promises of happiness, and the perimeters of what lies at the heart of life.

Uniform: Distinctive clothing worn by members of the same organisation or body or by children attending certain schools. In Robert Walser’s novel about a mysterious boarding school, Jakob von Gunten, Jakob likes to wear uniforms because even though they make the students look alike and essentially bound, unfree, the uniforms themselves are beautiful and Jakob likes to slip inside them. At any rate, Jakob contends, it is far better than having no uniform and being compelled to wear shabby, torn clothes; Jakob also never really knows what to wear and wearing a uniform frees him of that burden. Hermann Broch, in his Die Schlafwandler contended that ‘A uniform provides its wearer with a definitive line of demarcation between his person and the world. Closed up in his hard casing, braced in with straps and belts, he begins to forget his own undergarments and the uncertainty of life.’

Vair: Fur, typically bluish-gray, obtained from a variety of squirrels, used in the 13th and 14th centuries as a trimming or lining for garments, but more importantly the material used to make the inner sole of Cinderella’s lost shoe, for were it really made of glass, her soft feet would have never been able to remember whether the shoe truly belonged to her.

Veil: When she was low and felt that the world was being inordinately unkind to her, she would look around for the emergence of new, fresh retail: shopping malls, minor arcana. Her husband, the late navab, had left her with as much money as few friends. Cloistered and sheltered in an ancestral home ridden with portraits of her ancestors, her friends would always try to guess what kind of family resemblances there may be. The old begum sahiba, who grew up in the palace walls of a crumbling empire, was now safely settled in a luxurious but nonetheless civilian home in a posh part of town. For months, she had been listening to rumours of the construction of a new mall, one that was not only intended to be large but also well designed – suitable for young children in order to play – the latter of which the begum did not care about. Being childless, she filled and measured her life in shopping bags, whenever she felt lonely and sad, buying clothes ranging from Zara to Alaïa. Even though she was not particularly fond of sweets, she bought baklava, kaju katli, pain au chocolat for her neighbours, friends who never knew how to return these kindnesses. The Begum Sahiba indulged their appetites. She made it a point to invite to her house – something which developed in some respect to a kind of obsession – obese and by and large unhealthy people; she insisted to present them with lavish meals, as a sort of tease. The Begum Sahiba was not particularly attractive but she never failed to understand the transformative power of a dress, and had lately even indulged in plastic surgery: She enlarged her lips, lifted her cheekbones and got a successful nose job – what more could a mere face handle? She, however, was content with her small breasts and rear, both of which were always anyway covered by an abhaya. With the help of just the right eyeliner, lipstick and rouge, the perfect veil, she would stroll the avenues of the newly built mall barely recognised.

Zipper: A fastener that initially was camouflaged in clothing until Elsa Schiaparelli incorporated them on sportswear in 1930, and introduced exceedingly large ornate zippers into her collection of evening dresses in 1935. Although Schiaparelli could alter visual phenomena with much ease and grace – she believed in magic – and render radical transformations that nevertheless expressed themselves subtly – who else could have made a shoe sit on a head as comfortably and naturally as a hat – she still worked within a human frame(work), unlike many designers today. By introducing the conspicuous zipper, she understood that hidden things can, in fact, be removed from their hiding places, like a wound that has been stitched-up by a zipper, a mechanical scar that by virtue of a kind of surgery closes what was once open.

Gaurav Monga is a writer and teacher from New Delhi. His most recent book, Raju & Kishore, was published by Raphus Press in 2022. He is currently teaching a course called Fashion in Fiction at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Gandhinagar.

Genuine excitement. Apprehensive self-consciousness. Venues so big you feel small. People lining up who won’t get in but stay there anyway. A bustle at the entrance. Overhearing: ‘But I’m on the list!’ Saying: ‘But I’m on the list!’ Exchanging smiles with a security guard who tells you Ah il fait bien d’avoir un petit chaleur humaine. A woman wearing a dunce’s cap on the second row, blocking the view for those on the third. That woman from the TV in mirrored aviators and turquoise hair. Once more a plethora of Asian faces in the audience, despite a shortage on the catwalk. Spotting, in the audience at Undercover, a man in a jacket that spells out ‘Fighting for Freedom’ on the back in the Latin alphabet, and also in Cyrillic: which side is he referring to – you want to ask but never do. Avoiding eye contact with those you’ve already greeted and have nothing left to say to. A complete inconsistency in terms of how people dress: some as if it is a regular day at the tax office, others as if it’s the grandest costume ball of the year; some as if it’s the height of summer, others as if it’s still winter (which it is). More applause than usual. Less applause than usual. Exactly the average amount of applause. A curious mix of expressions on people’s faces: ‘This is my umpteenth show and I just want to go home’ versus ‘Oh my gosh pinch me I can’t believe I’m finally here!’ As soon as the last clap dies down, a throng at the door: hurry hurry hurry or else you’ll miss the next show! People typing furiously on their phones. VIPs and VICs lining up to get backstage: there’s champagne to be drunk, and cheeks to be kissed. Men in make-up. Men in skirts. Men in sequins. Acting cooler than you feel. Sunglasses everywhere, though there’s no sun in sight. Sunglasses indoors, infallibly. Beautiful people, on the catwalk and off. Good bone structure. Good skin. Good hair. Purple hair, green hair, blue hair, pink hair. Influencers and first-timers lingering around after the show taking selfies. The familiar faces. Everybody looking at each other while pretending not to. Bra top and suit jacket combos. A man in a white dress shirt and nothing on his bottom half, except a prosthetic vulva: who is he? A generic-looking old white man with a Germanic accent regaling the crowd with stories about his multiple homes and pools: later you find out it’s the painter Anselm Kiefer. Michèle Lamy conducting herself like Madame de Pompadour, surrounded by adoring acolytes. A throbbing base that makes your heart quiver. Models in perspex heels so high it’s a miracle no one trips and falls. Blacked-out pupils and long trains on skirts and coats on the Rick Owens catwalk. Towering head-dresses at Comme des Garçons. Nicolas Ghesquière showing long knitted scarves at Louis Vuitton, a crowd-pleaser. Peacocking: ridiculous, beautiful, moving. No coats, even in sub zero temperatures. A lot of belly buttons on display. Crowds moving in unison, phones held aloft to catch a glimpse of a celebrity you’ve never heard of. Stern-looking men in dark suits surrounding beautiful young women with perfectly applied make-up and professional hair. Bumping into people you never see, except at fashion shows. Waving to friends across the catwalk, then losing them in the crowd. A swarm of shiny black cars with tinted windows blocking the street. Bored-looking drivers lining the sidewalk while smoking and drinking coffee from paper cups. Monogrammed handbags. Logos, though not as many as last season. Someone who looks like Madonna, but isn’t. Off-duty model style, flawless. Making as if you don’t notice the street style photographers, even when they’re right in your face. Arriving too late after having stressed like crazy, and missing the show. Arriving too early and having to wait outside in the rain without an umbrella. Not getting the ticket you really really wanted. Mind boggling sets intended to awe you into submission, which works, almost. Watching a street style photographer trying to capture an influencer crossing the street as if no one is watching. That same influencer crossing the street multiple times, back and forth back and forth, so everyone gets their shot. Avoiding becoming the figure cropped out behind said street style star. The PRs looking anxious behind clipboards and iPads. The most important members of the audience always arriving last. No visibly handicapped people, ever. A congregation of photographers at the end of the catwalk competing to take the exact same photograph. Always at least one orange knitted hat worn by a man in the audience. Tim Blanks on every front row. Bare breasts on the catwalk for no good reason. Relief that the PR clocked you meaning you’ll get a ticket to next season’s show too (hopefully). Wishing the week was over. Wishing the week would never end. Loving it hating it but loving it more.

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

In the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic the world of luxury fashion intensified its doubt about one of the governing rules of the fashion system: the premise of acceleration. In previous decades it was often young or rather avant-gardist designers who challenged the workings of the fashion system as they operated within the wider process of the intellectualisation of luxury fashion.¹  The fast pace of fashion production and consumption and the harm such rhythm causes to clothing makers, clothing wearers and the planet they inhabit featured prominently in the critiques of such vanguard designers who, like Walter Van Beirendonck, question ‘the Kleenex mentality’ in fashion where ‘[s]omething is used for one or two seasons and then thrown away.’² Yet it seemed that only in 2020, prompted by the worldwide Covid-19 crisis, the world of high-fashion set on fire the idea that fashion equals acceleration.

Now more established fashion houses, such as Armani and Gucci, jumped on the bandwagon, and for the first time an industry-wide mobilisation around the urge to slow down took shape. The platform #rewiringfashion, founded by ‘a growing group of independent designers, CEOs and retail executives from around the world who have come together in this challenging time to rethink how the fashion industry could — and should — work’ proposed the deceleration of the fashion calendar to maximum two collections a year, because the current fashion system ‘ultimately serves the interests of nobody: not designers, not retailers, not customers — and not even our planet.’³

The internal gaze of the fashion system thus focalised on the suffocating speed of the fashion carrousel. Several lifestyle and fashion media featured prominent high-fashion players who called for a shift from race to leisurely stroll in the tempo of fashion production and consumption, initiated by the ‘quarantine of our consumption’ from which trend watcher Li Edelkoort believed would follow ‘a blank page for a new beginning.’⁴

Other industry professionals expanded on this desire for a fresh start. In Women’s Wear Daily, Giorgio Armani published an open letter condemning the ways in which luxury fashion mimics the production rate of fast fashion retailers. ‘Luxury cannot and must not be fast,’ which will ‘ultimately bring the customers to the understanding of the value of fashion and its collections.’⁵ Alessandro Michele, creative director of Gucci, likewise announced on Instagram that he will ‘abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows to regain a new cadence.’⁶ This model of seasonless collections, ironically still shown twice a year, constitutes ‘a radical new fashion model’ according to British Vogue.⁷ ‘Welcome to the start of the brave new fashion world,’ tweeted fashion journalist Vanessa Friedman of the New York Times, after Michele published his statement. As a result of the doubt circulating in luxury fashion, the system would hit the brakes. Moreover, this deceleration was presented as a clear break, a rupture with the temporal build-up of the fashion system.

In this essay we explore the type of doubt that currently circulates most in the high-fashion industry, and term it ‘little doubts.’ We consider the fashion system’s investment in ‘little doubts’ in relation to the more game-changing variant of ‘radical doubt’ through the lens of the philosophy and history of science, while also drawing on insights from system’s theory, as formulated by environmental scientist Donella H. Meadows in Thinking in Systems.⁸

The notion of ‘paradigm,’⁹ or ‘[t]he shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions, [that] constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works,’¹⁰ runs through these conceptualisations as a common thread. The ‘paradigm’ concept enables us to develop how merely correcting the existing system, or engaging in ‘little doubts,’ will not open up a system’s horizon to newness, in the way philosopher Walter Benjamin understood the new, i.e. as an interruption of continuity and not just as ‘novelty – the interruption that figures within continuity and thus does not figure as an interruption as such.’¹¹

By asking the question what or who is being served by the little doubts now oozing through the cracks of the luxury fashion system, we explore the ways in which the current concerns about the temporalisation of high-fashion do not offer the game-changing narrative they claim to do. From the comparison between the field of fashion and science production offered in this essay, we expect to find such ‘interruption of continuity’ to be initiated at the periphery of the fashion system.

The Shame, the Shame

All high-fashion pleas for the deceleration of the temporality of fashion ask for a return to twice-yearly fashion change based on the natural seasons (spring and autumn). This rhythm might seem unseen before given that the interval between collections has seriously decreased over the past decades. Yet gradually and successfully built throughout the 18th and 19th century, the natural season model constitutes the foundation of the temporal architecture of fashion on which the system developed into a commercial powerhouse.

This architecture came about through a rationalisation of beforehand fickle and unpredictable fashion trends by techniques that orchestrate the temporal experience of fashion.¹² At the court of Louis XIV a ‘natural’ autumn/winter and spring/summer fashion season was first introduced. Before, one could not predict the trends that would follow, making it difficult for clothing makers to anticipate the wearers’ demand. Moreover, it was often the wearers who influenced which styles or ornaments were in fashion, not the industry. Louis XIV’s Minister of Finance decided that the press was a convenient instrument for this process of rationalisation. The court journal Le Mercure Galant began to announce in the early spring and autumn what people were expected to wear at court. By timing the reports following the model of twice yearly fashion change the press evoked negative emotions about current outfits and prompted courtiers to invest in new attire. Of course, older sources also mention the shame surrounding clothes that are deemed old-fashioned by others, who hereby demonstrate their fashionability. This occurs for instance in the 13th century novel Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, where a group of fashionably dressed ladies and knights meet a group of hunters in ugly coats ‘which were not new this year.’¹³ Yet the later 17th century first witnessed a systemic integration of the fashion concept’s temporal dismissive logic of advancedness and backwardness which tends to shame individuals and groups who ‘lag behind’ to convince them to keep up with the times by buying into the aesthetics and lifestyles of the advanced.

Since its budding days, the fashion press has played an important role in the system’s rule of shaming people about their ‘old’ clothes (and other lifestyle choices). One of the authors experienced the effect of this controlling strategy when, after ticking most boxes in an ‘interior bingo’ editorial in the weekly magazine of a Belgian high-quality newspaper,¹⁴ she looked at her home through the eyes of others. Seeing the many plants, the white walls, the grey sofa and the white Danish kitchen with black countertops, made her feel out of place. She viewed her home as a lifestyle choice, felt out of joint with the times, and began to contemplate if she should buy a can of dusty pink paint for the white-coloured ceilings (one of the more up-to-date changes to be made according to the interior bingo). All definitions of shame agree on the principle described above; because the ashamed individual is afraid not to belong, he accepts the lead of the ones who set him aside,¹⁵ or at least he contemplates accepting the lead.

High and Slow, Fast and Low

The doubt that has been swelling in the field of luxury fashion wants the interval between en vogue and passé to increase, calling for a return to the foundational state of the system’s temporality. Drawing on system’s theory, we expect that such interventions will not lead to massive changes to the set-up of the fashion system.
Donella Meadows compares the basic arrangement of a system to a bath tub filling up by a flow of water that can be controlled by a faucet. She argues that changes to ‘the size of the flow are dead last on my list of powerful interventions’¹⁶ in a system. After all, whether several collections or merely two fill up fashion’s tub, ‘if they’re the same old faucets, plumbed into the same old system, turned according to the same old information and goals and rules, the system behaviour isn’t going to change much.’¹⁷ In light of our exploration where to look for game changers, it is interesting that interventions on the size of the flow in systems are particularly appealing to ‘the individual who’s standing directly in the flow.’¹⁸ He or she has difficulty to look beyond this parameter to the rules or even to the paradigm of the system. Too much of an insider perspective might blind people to the larger leverage points for system change.

Meadows concludes that ‘if the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick-start it.’¹⁹ The discourse of the high-fashion stances against the fast pace of current fashion testifies to this status quo. The various proposals do not challenge the governing temporal dynamic of fashion. The shaming and its logic of advancedness and backwardness is not addressed. Rather this logic is employed to create or reinforce the social boundaries of luxury fashion, and to delineate who belongs and who does not.

For instance, Armani pits his view on the ‘timeless elegance’ of high-fashion, ‘which is not only a precise aesthetic code, but also an approach to the design and making of garments that suggests a way of buying them: to make them last,’²⁰ against fast fashion. The designer finds that the wearers of a trend-driven, fast-paced consumption pattern, who often stem from lower socioeconomic background and lack the taste for timeless clothing and buying ‘quality over quantity’ in which upper and upper-middle class women are socialised, operate in immoral ways.²¹ This turns the groups who have been found already to experience more negative emotions around dressing fashionably into lesser human beings, in a moral, aesthetic and temporal way.²² ‘[M]odern man considers his clothing as the expression of personal identity.’ Therefore, “[i]f slow becomes the new fashionable thing and you can only afford fast fashion, not only is your outfit out of joint, but it feels like you as a human being belong to the past.’²³ Armani sustained the primate of advancedness and backwardness with a language of fast and slow that seeks to re-install the heavily blurred boundary between low-end and high-end in the current fashion landscape. In the end, by making clear that fashion is as much an aesthetic economy as a moral one, Armani hopes to witness a future fashion landscape where only those may participate who possess the refined taste to appreciate timelessness.

The way in which Armani and other high-fashion professionals question the speed of the fashion cycle does not lead to disruptive newness, but to a proposition for a novelty way to continue the power of the ones who took up these positions in the first place. From the heart of the fashion system now come ‘little doubts,’ which carry a sense of threat to an important pillar of the fashion system, i.e. acceleration. However, these little doubts have been quickly recuperated by the ruling logic of fashion: casting slowness in a language of fashionability. Ultimately, it renders these doubts harmless as they now serve the commercial and moral project of luxury fashion. The paradigm of fashion was never challenged. But where might we expect to find such radical doubt? Comparing the fashion world to the field of science production, its history and philosophical ramifications, assists in an exploration of this question.

Benchmarks and Outsiders

Doubt serves a useful purpose: it allows us to question the world around us, forcing us to find patterns in chaos which might lead to new inventions. At first sight scientists look like a professional group who particularly value doubt. Yet given the prominence of ‘advanced insights’ in the development of scientific thought, suggesting the prevalence of novelty in continuity over disruptive newness, we wonder if and to what extent scientists are open to new information as it comes along?²⁴

A scientist needs to achieve credibility for his or her discoveries to stand. In science, just as in fashion, social status matters. Scientists communicate their findings to peers through diverse channels. During this contact a community develops something of a benchmark for what a reasonable scientist should doubt and criticise. If adopted by enough scientists, the benchmark becomes the measure of both the scientific community in general and of the status and belonging of the individuals who maneuver the field.

Self‐affirming reasoning then lurks around the corner and may well be woven into the field’s standard practice.²⁵ Warnings of possible errors are typically not taken seriously by peer-scientists, do not result in peer-reviewed publications and do not help to shape the benchmark. This is how alternative models and even long‐standing objections can get suppressed from a discipline’s collective toolkit and memory. Moreover, expert over‐confidence or the tendency for experts to treat their own model as necessary is a well‐established empirical fact. For instance, in mainstream economics it became difficult to discern credit bubbles, because the efficient market hypothesis (understood in terms of random walks and arbitrage‐free environments)²⁶ makes no conceptual space for it. Eugene Fama, the economist who actively promoted efficient market-theory, replied to The New Yorker in 2010 when asked if ‘the inefficiency was primarily in the credit markets, not the stock market — that there was a credit bubble that inflated and ultimately burst’: ‘I don’t even know what that means. People who get credit have to get it from somewhere. Does a credit bubble mean that people save too much during that period? I don’t know what a credit bubble means. I don’t even know what a bubble means.’²⁷ Of course we all know what it meant as we were confronted with the real life consequences of ‘the credit bubble,’ but Fama’s paradigm did not allow him to see.

What happens to the rare scientists who ask questions that challenge the reasonable benchmarks? They are set aside, their careers often stopped in their tracks. Gregor Mendel’s work on genetic inheritance was ignored during his life, despite the numerous attempts he made to contact to renowned scientists in his time. Ignaz Semmelweis noticed a correlation between hygiene and death rates in hospitals. Yet when sharing these thoughts with his fellows, he was disregarded and scolded. Two decades later, Semmelweis was proven right by Louis Pasteur. Alfred Wegener proposed that continents moved over time and used to form one primal continent. His theory was rejected during his lifetime but is now part of mainstream science. Finally, the theory of Joseph Lister, who argued that pus was a sign of infection, was rejected by the majority of the surgeons in the 19th century, who took Lister for a whipster and in no position to defy the medical establishment. Radical doubt or paradigm-challenging doubt is more often than not pushed outside the field of science production. Such doubt is allocated to the sphere of the irrational, as it does not pay tribute to the current reasonable benchmarks.

This is not to say, however, that the system of science production does not allow doubt, because it does. But much like the fashion world, the science system tolerates only little doubts to circulate because it can translate those doubts back into its governing structures. Philosopher Herbert Marcuse termed such process ‘repressive tolerance’ or the ways in which the dominant system (of fashion and science) permits a sense of deviancy as long as the constitutive norms are not challenged to the extent that the system cannot bring the deviancy to resonate with its own premises.²⁸ Interestingly, today a discussion of speed also takes centre stage in the little doubts going round in the scientific field. The previous decades’ academia developed a ‘publish or perish’ mentality. This pressure to publish led to an irrational overproduction and decreased the quality of peer review. Moreover, because the scientific field was taken over by a financial logic, intellectual gatekeepers were enabled to sustain dominant paradigms. An increasing number of researchers, grouped in the slow science movement, doubt this culture of acceleration, though of course they too need to abide by the suffocating publishing logic in order to be heard and not manoeuvred outside the field.

Looking at the history of science, we cannot deny that paradigms change and are still changing. Who then takes on and succeeds in such a task and from what position are the individuals operating who set in motion such disruption? A brief historical case-study illustrates that often outsiders are able to debunk paradigms.

Already in early modern Europe a close connection between social status and epistemological credibility was in place.²⁹ In the 16th century strict boundaries between the different disciplines persisted.³⁰ Natural philosophers and theologians had obtained the scientific right to make claims about reality, mathematicians and astronomers had not. This is why when astronomer and mathematician Copernicus presented ‘De revolutionibus orbium coelestium’ in which he explains the heliocentric hypothesis only mild controversy followed. After all, an astronomer cannot give a true account of the workings of the heavens.

Also Galileo Galilei was lacking the necessary social status as a mathematician to legitimate his findings which were based on Copernicus’ heliocentrism. But by refashioning himself into a new type of philosopher at the Court of the Medici, Galileo found a way out. Because philosophers perceived Galileo’s claims as an invasion into their own domain, they employed the tactic of delegitimisation and presented Galileo’s hypothesis as coming from a lower discipline. Yet because this hierarchy of the disciplines was embedded in the universities and not at court, Galileo’s move to the court life permitted him to be more than a university mathematician. He became a court philosopher, using his outsider position to claim the right to challenge the dominant geocentric paradigm. As a court philosopher he published several works in which physical theories are based on heliocentrism as a reality, not as a mathematical instrument.³¹ ‘The great book of nature,’ Galileo noted in his 1623 essay ‘The Assayer,’ ‘is written in mathematical language.’ Yet the Catholic Church tried to put the genie back in the bottle: Galileo was forbidden to teach, publish or defend heliocentrism in 1616, leading up to house arrest in 1633, because in fact Galileo did not stop publishing and discussing his ideas. One of the greatest scientists of all times thus started out as an outsider with little social credibility to make claims about reality. Yet by creating a new identity as a court philosopher, he shook the tree of geocentrism and could pave the way for Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

Traps and Opportunities

This much is clear: in both the fields of science and fashion a bias against the disruptive newness stemming from radical doubt is flourishing, which is why game-changing insights often take so long to enter or even do not make it into the annals of scientific or fashion history. The hierarchical organisation of both fields plays an important role in this dynamic. Recent studies have shown that such hierarchical structure discourages new people from joining and presenting possible unconventional ideas.³² Much is lost because of it. Refusing to set things on fire does not generate a richer soil – it merely allows to grow plants from the same family. So what can be done? Below we propose an explorative and humble way forward.³³

Meadows discusses several traps in a system that might turn into opportunities for system change when addressed appropriately. In general we believe that the fashion system has a bad reputation when it comes to moral standards. This might lead to the trap of ‘drift to low performance.’³⁴ Moral standards are performative in the sense that low standards become the benchmark for future choices. Deviations from the lower standard are then considered smaller trespasses than if this behaviour were measured against higher moral standards. Clearly the performativity is rooted in the expectations people have of the system’s behaviour, which immediately opens up an escape route.

Much like the way in which the robust finding of the ‘Pygmalion effect’ in educational science demonstrates how teachers’ positive expectations of the performance of a student impacts the learning process (because of an upwards cycle in which the student senses the expected high standards, in turn encouraging self-esteem and confidence which leads to more time and energy invested in school),³⁵ we should ‘[k]eep performance standards absolute. Even better, let standards be enhanced by the best actual performances instead of being discouraged by the worst.’³⁶ In diverse segments of the fashion industry, we may find examples of fashion professionals and organisations that set the bar high. We need to teach those examples to future generations of fashion professionals. Likewise we need to ask ourselves if the higher moral standard that proposals such as #rewiringfashion undoubtedly aim for, reaches high enough when the good of designers, retailers, costumers and the planet are kept in mind, but not the good of the people who make much of the clothes circulating in the fashion system (#rewiringfashion fails to mention them). Turning this system trap into an opportunity requires much attention to the system’s goals. These goals erode easily when all people are presented with to form their expectations on are alienating experiences of fashion that lead one to paint ceilings pink, to head out to buy yet another new dress out of fear that others might notice that you have worn the ones hanging in your wardrobe several times, or to scapegoat groups who cannot afford luxury fashion.

Thinking through the goals and performance standards of the fashion system, begs the question for what kind of doubt we are educating the next generation of fashion professionals: little doubts or radical doubt? Do we want them to be aware of the current paradigm they are expected to work within or not? Do we also seek to offer them tools for cultivating paradigms that we have not been able to articulate so far, to envision and to shape? We agree with critical fashion practitioner Femke de Vries that we ‘have to make sure that fashion isn’t educated through the industry and its media outlets.’³⁷ Triggering an imagination of the type that Flemish philosopher Kris Pint calls ‘resistance of imagination’ (‘verbeeldingsverzet’ in Dutch) and that dares to resist the status quo rather than tinkering at the margins is key. Pint describes how this type of imagination begins with the sensation ‘I do not feel at home here,’ which ‘opens the empty space in the self where suddenly one can experiment with hitherto unthinkable practices and ideas.’³⁸

One way in which fashion education – and all types of education – can tend to this resistance of imagination is paying close attention to and debating with students the words, language and discourse of fashion as a cultural phenomenon and industry. Meadows describes how interventions in the language used in systems offer a strong leverage point for system change, if the language ‘is as concrete, meaningful and truthful as possible’ and if one can ‘enlarge language to make it consistent with our enlarged understandings of systems.’³⁹ Speaking from classroom experience and not from empirically gathered data, we noticed that an increasing number of fashion students finds it hard to present themselves with the f-word, rather seeking shelter in expressions such as ‘I make clothes.’ In addition, some fashion professionals working in the periphery of the fashion system, like Dutch designers Elisa van Joolen and Anouk Beckers and the fashion collective Painted Series, refer to the people they design for not as ‘consumers’ but as ‘clothing wearers’ or ‘wearers.’

Both the current proposals for slowing down fashion change stemming from the heart of the fashion industry, which we believe originate from the intention of setting higher moral standards (but not high enough), and these language experiments of people who are still in-training or deliberately placing themselves outside or at the margins of the system illustrate the increasing pressure on the current paradigm of fashion. It signals that a growing number of people who somehow align themselves with the creation of fashion seek to carve out for themselves a space to feel at home in the designs they create and the clothes they wear.

Yet we concur with Meadows that in the long run the alternative fashion worlds imagined by interventions on the discourses of fashion might spark bigger changes in the system because of the well-established performativity of language. ‘Words are not innocent. They sway from deeds to imagination,’ noted novelist Stefan Hertmans.⁴⁰ When taking into account that with repeated phrases like ‘the more stitches, the less riches’ characters in the novel Brave New World are taught to consume, and that in psychological experiments ‘the subtle use of the world ‘consumer’ seems to suffice to stir up mistrust and to let people pass on responsibility,’⁴¹ looking at the flip side of the coin reveals an opening to a genuine new fashion world where the use of a more concrete language – we are all clothing wearers – stirs us away from triggering the rugged side of human nature, and towards a new paradigm.

Blind Spots

At best education presents a necessary platform to cultivate an openness to be aware of and to be able to question a system’s paradigm. Yet the question what such openness towards paradigm change offers both fashion and science remains unanswered.

Paradigmatic awareness leads to identifying biases in scientific thinking patterns. Standpoint theories illustrate how one should not trust blindly the rational capacities of science. For instance, research in DNA-based medicine still views people of European ancestry as the dominant standard for all of humanity. Human diversity is disregarded, which is why a lot of individuals (everyone who is not white and not male) could be left behind in this new branch of medicine. Also, people of Latin-American background do not react as well to the common anti-asthmatic inhalers as white individuals, and people of Asian descent have a higher chance of severe or even fatal side effects when taking certain anti-seizure drugs than white individuals. Women as a group need to accept higher risk of depression, blood clots, and cervical cancer, when taking hormonal contraception. Wider society would never accept these risk rates in White males. Hence, we know far less about the ways in which our paradigms disfigure reality than we believe we do. Blind spots are everywhere.

Therefore we need citizens who are aware of the paradigms that govern the systems in which they operate and who are handed the tools to be critical enough to detect the flaws circulating within a system. We need individuals, groups, organisations and institutions who in the process of uncovering a system’s blind spots dare to resist the current paradigm by imagining alternative mirror images to identify with. For the fashion system this entails that the imagination deemed crucial to the system’s operations (the proposal #rewiringfashion for instance dreams of ‘the beauty, imagination and craft that remain at the core of this business’ to return)⁴² does not serve the goal of eroding the system to an industry capitalising on alienation. And we need citizens who constantly perform a risk analysis of their own basic assumptions about (social) reality so that they understand ‘at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realisation as devastatingly funny.’⁴³

Nobel Prize winner Max Planck summarised the changing of paradigms as follows: ‘[a] new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’⁴⁴ Bringing up this citation in a fashion theory class we built on the research for this essay, one of the students confronted us with a blind spot of our own: we do not have the time to wait for opponents to die and a new generation to take over.

Dr. Aurélie Van de Peer is a fashion scholar, writer and lecturer, affiliated with Ghent University and the Master Fashion Strategy program of ArtEZ University of the Arts.

Dr. Merel Lefevere is a philosopher of science who specialises in theories of unification and feminist social epistemology at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University.

1. The process of the intellectualisation of high-fashion was initiated in the late 1980s and 1990s by more avant-gardist Japanese, Belgian and British designers who showed their collections in Paris and London. Their design practice was characterised by both external reflections (i.e. on wider societal developments) and internal reflections (i.e. on the fashion system). In the review practice of the connoisseur fashion press the view on the nature of luxury fashion as an intellectual endeavour was sustained to the extent that by the turn of the 21st century all designers, also more commercially-oriented fashion houses, were expected to operate within this intellectual frame of reference. See also: A Van de Peer, Re-artification in a World of De-artification: Materiality and Intellectualization in Fashion Media Discourse (1949–2010). Cultural Sociology 8(4): 443-461, 2014.  ↩

2. W Van Beirendonck, Walter Wordwide News – ‘Fashion is Dead!’. First published in 1990, consulted at http://ensembles.org/items/walter-van-beirendonck-fashion-is-dead-summer-1990?locale=en, [accessed October 7 2020].  ↩

3. No author, #rewiringfashion, consulted at https://www.rewiringfashion.org/ [accessed August 29 2020].  ↩

4. M Fairs, Coronavirus offers “a blank page for a new beginning” says Li Edelkoort. Dezeen, March 9 2020, consulted at https://www.dezeen.com/2020/03/09/li-edelkoort-coronavirus-reset/, [accessed August 24 2020] ↩

5. F Romano Riggio, Armani’s open letter to fashion. Man in Town, April 9 2020, consulted at https://manintown.com/giorgio-armanis-open-letter-to-fashion/2020/04/09/?lang=en, [accessed August 25 2020]. ↩

6. No author, Gucci Will Go ‘Season-less,’ According to Creative Director Alessandro Michele. The Fashion Law, May 24 2020, consulted at https://www.thefashionlaw.com/gucci-will-go-season-less-according-to-creative-director-alessandro-michele/, [accessed August 24 2020]. ↩

7. A C Madsen, ‘A More Inventive Product’: Alessandro Michele Outlines Gucci’s Radical New Fashion Model. Vogue UK, May 25 2020, consulted at https://www.vogue.co.uk/news/article/gucci-alessandro-michele-seasonless-show-model, [accessed August 25 2020].  ↩

8. D H Meadows, Thinking in Systems. London: Earthscan Publishing for a sustainable future, 2008. ↩

9. Philosopher Thomas Kuhn describes a paradigm as ‘some accepted examples of actual scientific practice – examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together – provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research.’ T Kuhn, Structures of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 10, 1960. ↩

10. Meadows, Thinking in Systems, p. 163.  ↩

11. A Benjamin, Style and Time. Essays on the Politics of Appearance. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, p. xvi, 2006.  ↩

12. For further development of this temporal architecture of the fashion system, see for instance: A Van de Peer, The Temporal Architecture of Fashion. Its seasons and weeks. In: C Evans and A Vaccari, Time in Fashion. Industrial, Antilinear and Uchronic Temporalities. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.  ↩

13. The original text reads ‘qui ne furent noeves oan.’ In this forest scene in Le Roman de la Rose (1210-1212 or 1127-1228) the narrator uses positive adjectives for the fashionably dressed characters and contrasts those qualities with the old-fashioned attire of the hunters, hereby illustrating the use of the temporal dismissive logic of the fashion concept. S G Heller, Fashion in Medieval France. Oxford: D.S. Brewer, 2007, p. 69, authors’ emphasis. ↩

14. A Bogaerts, (Ge)Woonbingo. De Standaard Magazine, January 12 2019.  ↩

15. H Terwijn, Een emotietheoretische benadering van schaamte. PhD Thesis, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, 1993. ↩

16. Meadows, 2008, p. 148.  ↩

17. Ibid, p. 148.  ↩

18. Ibid, p. 148.  ↩

19. Ibid, p. 148.  ↩

20. Romano Riggio, Man in Town, April 9 2020.  ↩

21. K Rafferty, Class-based emotions and the allure of fashion consumption. Journal of Consumption Culture, 11(2), pp. 239-260, 2011.  ↩

22. Ibid, 2011. In Rafferty’s research women from lower socio-economic backgrounds describe more often than upper-middle class women the fear of not being dressed fashionably, concerns about being viewed in public wearing the same dress, and shame when feeling like they are dressed in old-fashioned styles. More than women socialised in higher socioeconomic milieus, they tend to experience fashion as a way to concur a position in a competitive social world, which results from a lack of class-based self-confidence rooted in the belief that one’s aesthetic and cultural choices shape the benchmark for others.  ↩

23. A Van de Peer, That Future Boom Boom Boom: Circulariteit in de mode. Metropolis M, August/September, MODE/S, pp. 68-70, 2020.  ↩

24. This section is partly inspired by M Lefevere and E Schliesser, Private epistemic virtue, public vices: moral responsibility in the policy sciences. In C. Martini & M. Boumans (Eds.), Experts and consensus in social science, 50, pp. 275–296, Springer, 2014. ↩

25. Meadows (2008, p. 155) considers the occurrence of self-affirming reasoning as a trap of the system, as it forms a ‘reinforcing feedback loop’ that rewards the winner of a competition (the scientist whose work appears in a peer-reviewed publication) with the means (social status within the scientific community) to win further competitions. This results in fewer and fewer competitors entering or staying in the game who might challenge the assumptions that underlie the published findings. A system made up of reinforcing feedback loops thus makes it harder to maintain the openness that allows questions about the system’s own governing rules and underlying paradigm.  ↩

26. The efficient market hypothesis claims that markets are very efficient in representing all the available public and private information in individual stock prices and in the stock market as a whole. Therefore stock are always traded at their fair value. An efficient market cannot be beaten by analysis to predict future prices. Since investors act instantaneously on unpredictable and random information, stock prices also change unpredictably. Price charts seem to follow ‘a random walk.’  ↩

27. J Cassidy, Interview with Eugene Fama. The New Yorker, January 13, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/interview-with-eugene-fama , [accessed September 2nd 2020].  ↩

28. H Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Beacon Press, 1964.  ↩

29. M Biagioli, Galileo Courtier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ↩

30. R Westman, The Astronomer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Study. History of Science, 18: 105, 1980.  ↩

31. He published works such as ‘Sidereus Nuncius’ (1610), ‘Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems’ (1616), ‘Discourse on the Tides’ (1632). ↩

32. See for instance: J Wang, R Veugelers and P Stephan, ‘Bias against novelty in science: A cautionary tale for users of bibliometric indicators,’ Research Policy, 46(8), pp. 1416-1436, 2017; P Azoulay, C Fons-Rosen and JS Graff Zivin, ‘Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?,’ American Economic Review, 109(8), pp. 2889-2920, 2019. ↩

33. We offer our views on the leverage points for system change as a first exploration of this process and hope to join forces with other scholars and practitioners to proceed in studying what the next phases of this process of paradigm change might look like and might lead to. ↩

34. Meadows, 2008, p. 191.  ↩

35. R Rosenthal and L Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom. The Urban Review, 3, pp. 16-20, 1968.  ↩

36. Meadows, 2008, p. 192.  ↩

37. F de Vries, fashion in times of the Coronacrisis, and post-crisis, June 14, 2020, https://fashionprofessorship.artez.nl/activity/fashion-in-times-of-the-coronacrisis-and-post-crisis-a-letter-by-femke/, [accessed September 5 2020].  ↩

38. K Pint, De wilde tuin van de verbeelding, Amsterdam: Boom, 2017, p. 72, translation by the authors.  ↩

39. Meadows, 2008, p. 175. ↩

40. P Verbeken, In de woorden van extreemrechts hoor je de rancune van de grootvaders. De Standaard der Letteren, Saturday September 26, pp. 4-7 (p. 6), translation by the authors.  ↩

41. M Vansteenkiste and B Soenens. Vitamines voor Groei. Ontwikkeling voeden vanuit de Zelf-Determinatie Theorie. Gent: Acco, p. 402, translation by the authors. For this argument Vansteenkiste and Soenens refer to the study of M A Bauer et al. Cuing consumerism: Situational materialism undermines personal and social well-being. Psychological Science, 23, pp. 517-523, 2012.  ↩

42. Romano Riggio, Man in Town, 2020, authors’ emphasis.  ↩

43. Meadows, 2008, p. 164.  ↩

44. M K Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers. New York: Philosophical Library, 1950.  ↩

Leather in all its variations becomes the smell of my father’s presence. A worn pouch in which sweet pipe tobacco was stored, the generations-old razor strop that hung in the bathroom. Shoes polished every week with a rag swirled in a gelatinous block of mink oil, a brown leather bomber jacket from the late 50s, its heavy folds frozen in place with muscle memory. And myriad colognes, the last ritual of grooming. According to society, scent should have been introduced through my mother and her perfumes, one of the first lessons of the Western feminine path of desire and its becoming. But as Wayne Koestenbaum writes, ‘as if we could neatly divide male and female dreaming!’¹

A lipstick, an eyelash curler, a fine-brushed liquid eyeliner. My mother’s minimal process, the application of each as careful and studied as the stroke of her calligraphy brushes. The abbreviated beauty of motion echoing the gendered learnings of a specific culture. There was an absence of scent which I craved, associating it with a wild luxuriance I knew from playing in a rampant garden and images of classic movies, where every woman had a cache overflowing with perfume. The great black and gold stoppered boules of Lanvin—Arpège or My Sin on Bette Davis’s vanity in All About Eve, the towering factice of Robert Piguet Bandit in the Paris bathroom from which Ann-Margret applies in delight in Made in Paris spoke to some secret world. Perfumes became the ultimate luxury in my eyes, and the ultimate femininity. My assumption was that this near-mystical sillage, like the distraction of a magician’s smoke, would transport me to womanhood. But I learned a scented path is as complex in its revealings of desire and development as any perfume’s structure.

In place of a vanity, a cupboard, unassuming with white wooden shelves. In it, masculine became feminine, then neither and both. Unspoken permission, joyful olfactory explorations where everything became possible. So much of perfumery is olfactory sleight of hand, and a leather scent is never simply leather, but contains anything from birch tar or galbanum or violets, fruit to opoponax. The liquid within almost any perfume bottle is a chameleon, altering with the different skins it encounters, an ongoing Ovidian transformation from antiquity to the present. Perfume means ‘through smoke,’ and we emerge from bottles changed. I cannot remember the first commercial scent of my father’s that I surreptitiously tried—for he also made his own simple colognes—Puig Quorum, Lagerfeld Classic, Knize Ten, or Pierre Cardin, but what I immediately knew without a more articulate means of expression was our skins reflected both shared and different facets. These could not be dismissed as merely masculine or feminine, which turned my thus-far understanding of perfumes and relation to them upside-down. Writing about the artist Sherrie Levine, Donald Barthelme notes, ‘A picture on top of a picture. What happens in the space between the two.’² Somewhere between masculine and feminine lies the understanding of all desire.

In the early 80s, femininity was big and colourful. The women of the magazines I adored wore clouds of Bellville Sassoon and the electric colours of Yves Saint Laurent; too much was never enough. Perfumes reflected these. The ‘big’ 80s scent is now a cliché, due in part to releases as Giorgio Beverly Hills, Dior Poison, and Calvin Klein Obsession, extending to teenage scents such as Coty Exclamation. Though men’s scents had their own notoriety—Guy Laroche Drakkar Noir and Yves Saint Laurent Kouros being permanent ghosts of high school hallways well into the 90s and beyond—I found the bottles which lined my father’s shelves subdued in comparison. Without the technical vocabulary of perfume, I knew them as what I already knew of the world: the scents of walking outdoors and gardens, antique shops, closets, and the small collection of objects my parents had acquired together. Despite the abundance of bottles which did not speak to wealth but the necessity of frugality which determined our lives, my father would scour outlet stores for discounted bargains, and there was an unconscious curation in his small collection which reflected his quiet nature. To wear or be worn is a choice, and in scent I discovered sillage as an extension of myself.

Calvin Klein’s CK One was yet to be imagined, and Yves Saint Laurent’s 70s utopian dream of a shared perfume, Eau Libre, had failed. Perfume was firmly entrenched in gender, each side striving to be the ultimate embodiment of femininity or masculinity. Yet for some reason a lot of what my father wore—fougeres (herbal-greens) and aromatic ambers or woods—was disconnected from their advertising imagery (a 1984 Quorum ad shows a man in a suit lying on his side, his shadow that of a devil. The caption: ‘a cologne for the other man lurking inside you’). On my skin Quorum was the smell of forest walks, tobacco, and leather. If it reminded me of walks with my father, his pipes, razor strops and leather polish, it also became mine, something I can now only describe as the smell of thinking, as I would walk to school sniffing my wrist and considering what it was I wore. I knew full well that he knew I wore them and perhaps he never said anything because he wanted me to feel I had the right to take his scents and make them my own; an act of necessary theft rather than a gift which risked the burden of present lesson or future expectations.

So the idea of gender as a necessity of perfume fell away, just as it was beginning to in clothing—borrowing from both my mother’s store of kimonos and accoutrements as well as my father’s oversized sweaters and tweed blazers—and how I had long felt about my sexuality. The olfactory revelations of those morning walks and the realisation that my parents had unknowingly gender-swapped the stereotypes of minimal and more elaborate beauty rituals began to answer the questions and feelings I had long had as to why I ‘must’ be a certain type of person; both in dress and desire in the eyes of others. In an essay about the clothing designer Eileen Fisher, Janet Malcolm writes about some samples ‘the image … wafted out of them like an old expensive scent.’, as well as noting something of importance she reads in a Fisher brochure titled ‘Simply—To Be Ourselves’: ‘the underlying philosophy of our design—no constraints, freedom of expression.’³ That Fisher was influenced by the kimono in her simple designs reminded me that in design, perfume, and desire, there are simply elements: one takes those and becomes the person they wish to be in the world. To (re)create, manipulate, and distract from the norm; the magician’s smoke and sleight of hand.

As I learned more about the technical aspects and narratives of scent, gender, leather and smoke began to blur. According to Robert Piguet Parfums, Bandit was ‘based on a “Bad Boy” concept … Piguet shows featured models sporting villain masks and brandishing toy revolvers and swords.’⁴ Chanel’s Cuir de Russie scent was inspired by Coco’s lover the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich.⁵ In 2000, Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle released Le Parfum de Therese, an until-then private fruity-leather 50s creation by the perfumer Edmond Roudnitska for his wife.⁶ Malle’s entire line is marketed as gender-free, but it is especially endearing that Therese is now for all. My father once expressed that he liked Guerlain Shalimar, but my mother would not wear it—a revelation of two parts: first, she had no desire to conform to someone else’s, especially as a young Japanese wife, and second, that Shalimar is a leather ‘oriental’ (rich in amber and/or other resins; here, opoponax and incense). Years into adulthood, I look at my ever-evolving collection and see that it still echoes my father’s cabinet: the smoky vetiver of Chanel Sycomore, powdery leather of Celine Reptile, the sweet tobacco of Boucheron Ambre d’Alexandrie. I prefer feminine scents with a touch of austerity, like the sombre mossy rose of Dior Gris Dior, or full-blown carnality, in the sunny fleshiness of Divine L’etre Aime Femme.

I recall a moment as barely a young adult, being asked with surprise by a female work colleague if I was wearing a men’s cologne. This was the (mostly) minimalist 90s, with Bvlgari Eau Parfumée Au Thé Vert, Issey Miyake L’eau d’Issey, and of course, CK One. I wore Halston Catalyst for Men, a rich herbal-leather warm with bay, nutmeg, and woods. I replied yes, to which she said with a laugh, ‘you would wear something like that!’, a compliment, but telling in that she adhered to a divide she would never cross or erase. Some time ago, I was sent a beautiful booklet by the perfume house Le Galion with descriptions of all their scents as well as vintage images. I smiled at the advertisement shown for Sortilège, a 1936 powdery aldehydic floral: featuring a beautiful Newton-esque model in a plunging black and white gown, chic black headwrap, diamonds and rubies, and glamorous makeup, the caption read: ‘Cette année, les femmes ressemblent à des femmes. C’est Sortilège leur parfum’ (roughly: ‘This year, women look like women. It’s their perfume Sortilège’). Perfume remains a state of skin and smoke, the division and blur where gender and ritual can play.

Tomoe Hill is not a writer, but in her words rather ‘someone who writes.’ She once studied philosophy at King’s College, London and is now at work on a book, tentatively called Songs for Olympia.

1. W Koestenbaum, My 1980s & Other Essays, FSG Originals, 2013. ↩

2. D Barthelme, Not-Knowing, Counterpoint, 1997. ↩

3. J. Malcolm, Nobody’s Looking at You, Text Publishing, 2019. ↩

4. ttps://robertpiguetparfums.co.uk/collections/classic-collection/products/bandit-eau-de-parfum ↩

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuir_de_Russie ↩

6. https://www.fredericmalle.co.uk/product/19566/50136/perfume/le-parfum-de-therese/by-edmond-roudnitska ↩

1. See, for ex. S McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. ↩

2. D E Robinson, “Fashions in Shaving and Trimming of the Beard: The Men of the Illustrated London News, 1842-1872,’ The American Journal of Sociology 81 (Mar., 1975), pp.1,133-1,141. ↩

3. See S Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power: A Cultural Economy of the Male Body in Nineteenth-Century America’ (Ph.D. diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 2015), p.2. ↩

4. C Oldstone-Moore, Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2015; C. R. Oldstone-Moore, ‘The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain,’ Victorian Studies 48 (Fall 2005), pp.7-34; Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power,’ esp. Ch. 4. ↩

5. The String of Pearls has been republished as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Ed. R L Mack, New York, Oxford University Press, 2007. ↩

6. For one of several versions of this tale, see ‘A Narrow Escape,’ Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), May 15, 1847; see also H Melville, ‘Benito Cereno,’ The Piazza Tales, New York, Dix & Edwards, 1856. ↩

7. R L Mack, The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend, London, Continuum, 2007. ↩

8. S Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power,’ p.69. ↩

9. ‘Barbers,’ The Albion 38 (Jun. 30, 1860), p.303. ↩

10. S Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power,’ esp. Ch. 1. ↩

11. Ibid., esp. Ch. 2. ↩

12. ‘Bearded Civilizaton,’ Scientific American III (Jul. 9, 1853), p.342. ↩

Fashion is not a product.

Fashion is not a mirror of society.

Fashion is not the favourite child of capitalism.

Wearing fashion and thinking through fashion¹ are two practices I love – for their creativity, complexity and their potential. So much so I made them my profession. Of course, both have their frustrating, even despairing moments: the limits of fashion, physically and aesthetically, but more so its destructive impact. Yet, they both hold a universal creative potential. What fashion can do!

The act of dressing oneself, the touch of cloth, the stroke of air in the space between body and fabric, textiles and constructions to soften or strengthen one’s frame – fashion rests at the heart of each. Most importantly, fashion is a uniquely universal connective tissue. Everyone has fashion. Not in that we are all encouraged to be consumers of fashion, but in the sense that we all fashion ourselves. There are no un-decorated people in the world. Yes, what fashion can do!

This article then is about the complexity of fashion. It is about the ways fashion has come to be seen in relation to and because of capital. Fashion, or rather, the current fashion system favours financial and socio-cultural capital over human and natural capital. It privileges symbolic capital, the non-tangible. As such, fashion is mediated in reductive and glamourised ways: a ‘bright cellophane wrapper.’² In 1938 fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes, in Fashion is Spinach, predicted that women, more precisely the American woman, would eventually look inside ‘the wrapper,’ question its contents and reject most of it. Today, on average, U.S-Americans purchase one item of clothing every week.³ However, while recent decades have seen a hundred-fold increase in fashion consumption rather than its informed rejection, they have also seen a significant rise in coverage, discussion and the study of fashion – of ‘looking inside the wrapper.’ Since the 1990s there has been a discursive explosion around the subject of fashion in different media and within both the popular and academic spheres. This rich landscape of commentary is a reaction to the explosion of fashion itself. Beginning in the 1960s and particularly since the 1980s fashion has surged in horizontal and vertical scope. It has exploded as a global industry and socio-cultural phenomenon. The principle of fashion, of permanent and accelerating change, governs much of contemporary global life and culture.

The proliferation of fashion has entailed a diversification of meaning – and its loss to some degree. Fashion, nowadays, not only refers to the principle of change, mostly of changing styles, but also to an industry, to a system and to objects, ideas and images. Yet, the way it is mediated stands in contrast to the richness of fashion, to its diverse impacts, its complexity and ambiguity.

I would argue that we have a disordered perception of fashion. This article, then, takes three pervasive claims often made in relation to fashion – both within popular and academic literature – and aims to counter them or, rather, complicate them. I thus seek a fuller understanding of fashion in relation to different forms of capital and aim for an ambiguity in the perception of fashion. The ability to love and hate fashion, to fault and praise it, to see its destructive and creative potential – all at once.

*

Fashion is not a product.

‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire–like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’⁴

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1887

Why are the seams and labels of our garments placed on the inside? Why do we wear these traces of construction on our skin? Why do our clothes tend to be softer on the outside?⁵

Because fashion in our acutely visual and vision-centred culture emphasises the visual garment: what clothes look like rather than how they feel. And because fashion is not a product but a commodity, an abstraction that entices us to forget about the processes and people involved in its production.

‘Fashion prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish demands to be worshipped,’⁶ wrote the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in 1935 with reference to Karl Marx. The notion of commodity fetishism is central to Marx’s analysis of capitalist ‘modes of production’ in Capital published in 1848. It essentially refers to the objectification of human relationships.

Capitalism, according to Marx, is based on commodities: ‘The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities.”’⁷ He refers to a commodity as ‘a mysterious thing’ and details: ‘simply because in it the social character of the men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. […] There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.’⁸

The objectification of our relationships with one another and with nature under capitalism forms the basis of an abstraction of creative labour into ‘dead labour,’ of creative products into commodities. In relation to fashion, the notion of commodity fetishism ‘captures the gap between fashion’s appearance as a visual feast, from catwalk to high street, and its origins in, and continued existence through, socially productive labour.’⁹

Thus, fashion is discursively constructed as a constantly shifting series of style-building products. Fashion is constructed as ‘new’ through what is said and what is done¹⁰ – through words, images, how it is staged in shows and shops, the visual and verbal narratives. As such it epitomises post-truth. Fashion is fake news. Bright, cellophane wrappers. Everchanging, perfect and auratic products on display in shops, represented in magazines and increasingly on screens obscure their origins, ingredients and makers, their supply chain and impact – emphasising instead their sign value. Human capital and natural capital, the skills of most of its makers, their contributions and the world’s stock of natural assets are largely written out of the story fashion tells. This privileging of economic capital is emblematic of capitalism. The fact that we think of people and our planet in terms of capital, in terms of worth is inherent in our political and economic system.

The French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu highlighted the importance of different forms of capital in his Distinction in 1979 and later explained the impact of the dominance of the economic paradigm. He argued that it was ‘impossible to account for the structure and functioning of the social world unless one reintroduces capital in all its forms and not solely in the one form recognised by economic theory.’¹¹ Bourdieu criticises the reductive use of the notion of ‘capital’ which defines our age: ‘Economic theory has allowed to be foisted upon it a definition of the economy of practices which is the historical invention of capitalism; and by reducing the universe of exchanges to mercantile exchange, which is objectively and subjectively oriented toward the maximisation of profit, i.e. (economically) self-interestedly, it has implicitly defined the other forms of exchange as noneconomic, and therefore disinterested.’¹² It is thus that fashion in its current system can get away with favouring economic capital over human and natural capital.

Bourdieu distinguishes between three fundamental forms of capital: economic, cultural and social,¹³ all of which are essential for fashion, which, is, however predominantly reduced to its economic dimension. As a result, the process of fashion is sidelined. Yet, when we buy a garment, we pay hundreds of people involved in global production processes. While the final retail price and its current shares devalue both, creative labour and the cost of nature, we still support and invest in existing and future supply chains. I would argue that fashion is one of the most unsustainable industries because of our disordered perception of fashion as product, because of the way it is discursively constructed as a commodity and how that affects our relationship with our garments. However, we can, as human geographer Louise Crewe suggests: ‘use our economic and cultural capital to resist the worst excesses of the free market.’¹⁴ What does that mean? And is it more easily written than lived? Yes and no. We can ask questions about the products we buy and all their forms of capital. We can educate ourselves about the processes and people involved and resist fashion being reduced to a product, a fetishised commodity. We can call into question the oxymoronic nature of sustainable fashion, call into question the promise that we can buy our way out of a crisis that has largely been created by buying stuff, by global mass consumerism, as Greta Thunberg is currently reminding us.¹⁵ Finally, we can question the premise of the current fashion system, which largely relegates us to the role of passive consumers rather than active makers¹⁶ and acknowledge fashion as process and creative human labour. It is us who fashion ourselves – not fashion.

*

Fashion is not a mirror of society

‘Fashion reveals itself as the most reliable cultural mirror we own.’¹⁷

Norbert Stern, Mode und Kultur, 1914

‘I think fashion is a fantastic subject as it’s the most immediate, acute, and precise reflection of society.’¹⁸

Angelo Flaccavento, The Sartorialist, 2012

The reflective and anticipatory powers of clothing and fashion have been noted by numerous writers from Shakespeare and Honoré de Balzac to Oscar Wilde. Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle remarked in 1833 that, ‘The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes […] – till they become transparent.’¹⁹ One hundred years later Walter Benjamin referred to fashion as a ‘measure of time.’²⁰ The ‘most reliable mirror’ according to dress historian Norbert Stern.

The common understanding of the mirror perceives it as a neutral reflective surface of ‘bare facts.’ Fashion as a representation of society, its ‘most precise reflection,’ as the fashion reporter Angelo Flaccavento put it when interviewed by the style blog The Sartorialist. Yet, specular reflections are optical illusions based on light and its energy. Standing in front of a mirror, we see not only a virtual image, but also a fundamentally distorted one. The mirror has a flattening affect, transforming us from three-dimensional physical beings into two-dimensional virtual and visual ones. It does not reverse us. Thus, caught between magical and objective knowledge a mirror is much more subjective and altering, much more of a virtual social presence – particularly in the act of getting dressed, which mostly takes place in front of it and essentially impoverishes our experience of dress.²¹

Seeing how mirrors work, this metaphor needs to be reconsidered. Fashion, a highly distorted reflection of society. Take a copy of UK Vogue in 1967, or the garments from that year preserved in a museum’s dress collection. What kind of a society would you glean from this (subjective) selection? A young, white, slim, middle-class one. Fashion, a reductive and misleading mirror.

Moreover, underlying this metaphor seem to be two further prevalent perceptions of fashion: that fashion communicates accurately and that what we wear is indicative of who we are. This reading of fashion implies that if fashion were a mirror of society and its members, the mirror can be read. These two ideas are inherently connected and have been naturalised so thoroughly that their arbitrary nature, their constructedness appears remote.

To comment that fashion is a precise reflection of society implies that the commentator can read that reflection, which in turn, points towards a certain cultural capital on the part of the critic. How fashion communicates and how accurately it does so, has been the subject of much debate however. Rather than a ‘silent visual language,’²² the communicative properties of dress might be most usefully conceptualised as a ‘clothing code’²³ because dress cannot produce permanent symbolic solutions. Its symbols are too ephemeral, its ambivalence too deeply rooted. An excess meaning always escapes. Although the relationship between language and fashion is at best metaphoric and misleadingly metaphoric at that, the idea that fashion can be straightforwardly read stubbornly persists.

The second idea, that the self is immanent in appearance seems equally naturalised. In 1528 the Italian courtier Baldassare Castiglione wrote of the correlation between outward appearance and inner being.²⁴ He was writing at a moment when merchant capitalism was on the rise in Italy and against the backdrop of a burgeoning meritocratic society that placed greater emphasis on fashionable dress as a form of self-expression.²⁵ Since the nineteenth century industrial capitalism and secularisation have given further rise to the notion of personality and the belief that appearance is indicative of it. The developing dichotomy between the public and private realms in modernity is analysed by sociologist Richard Sennett in his seminal The Fall of Public Man. He addresses the modern belief that clothes communicate an ‘authentic’ self: ‘One is what one appears; therefore, people with different appearances are different persons. When one’s own appearances change, there is a change in the self.’²⁶ His account is based on a number of literary sources including Carlyle and Balzac, for whom ‘clothes are a favourite subject [as they] reveal the character of those they drape.’²⁷

Within contemporary consumer society fashion is said to be a central marker of identity²⁸ and the most important form of non-verbal communication.²⁹ Fashion is discursively constructed as a mirror that can be read, notwithstanding its deeply distortive qualities and the historical arbitrariness of the metaphor itself. This construction is also indicative of a naturalised correlation between fashion and capitalism.

*

Fashion is not the favourite child of capitalism

‘One need not fear being accused of exaggeration in asserting: Fashion is the favourite child of capitalism: fashion arose from its inner essence and expresses its character as do few other phenomena of our contemporary social life.’³⁰

Werner Sombart, ‘Economy and Fashion: A Theoretical Contribution on the Formation of Modern Consumer Demand,’ 1902

Werner Sombart’s predicament of fashion as ‘the favourite child of capitalism’ has taken on a life of its own. It has often been reiterated in popular and academic writings, yet, mostly without reference to its original source.³¹ Both Louise Crewe in The Geographies of Fashion and Tansy Hoskins in Stitched-Up include the metaphor as central arguments in their recent analyses of the fashion system.³² This conclusion to the early analysis of consumer demand in fashion by the German economist and sociologist has most prominently been restated by Elizabeth Wilson in her seminal Adorned in Dreams, one of the founding texts of contemporary fashion theory. She connects the origins of fashion to ‘the early capitalist city’³³ and its rise to ‘the development of mercantile capitalism.’³⁴ ‘Like any other aesthetic enterprise fashion may then be understood as ideological, its function to resolve formally, at the imaginary level, social contradictions that cannot be resolved. It has in fact been one site for the playing out of a contradiction between the secularity of capitalism and the asceticism of Judaeo-Christian culture […].’³⁵ Fashion, ‘the child of capitalism,’³⁶ as she terms it somewhat more neutrally, ‘speaks capitalism.’37

Wilson’s discussion, in turn, has repeatedly been taken up by fashion theorist Anthony Sullivan. In his different writings on Marx and fashion, he reiterates this metaphor and concluded in a recent article thus entitled that ‘[f]ashion remains, as the historian Elizabeth Wilson once put it, very much the child of capitalism.’38

More than a century after Sombart made the predicament, does it still hold? Capitalism remains fundamentally concerned with the maximisation of economic and financial capital. It thus thrives on newness, speed and consumption – the same principles that define fashion and its current system. Hyper fast fashion as the favourite child of deregulated global turbo capitalism?

The metaphor is alluring. It captures the inextricable and interdependent relationship between fashion and capitalism. Yet, it also suggests fashion to be infantile, innocent and Western. And fashion clearly is neither. A gendered reading of the metaphor might infer capitalism as the father of fashion, his favourite daughter – very much in the tradition of ‘men act and women appear.’³⁹ Infantilising fashion negates its impact, both positive and negative. It negates its simultaneously creative and destructive powers.

While Wilson terms fashion the child of capitalism, she is also critical of its ambiguity and effect which she likens to that of capitalism:

Fashion speaks capitalism. Capitalism maims, kills, appropriates, lays waste. It also creates wealth and beauty, together with a yearning for lives and opportunities that remain just beyond our reach. It manufactures dreams and images as well as things, and fashion is as much a part of the dream world of capitalism as of its economy.40

The infantilisation of fashion means that it does not have to assume responsibility for its impact. It permits fashion to disassociate itself from its supply chain and the social and environmental impact of its production, for example. More generally, it permits fashion to disassociate itself from human and natural capital.

While the acknowledgement of the co-dependence of fashion and capital is essential for an understanding of either, the nature of their relationships remains somewhat obscure. Moreover, the historical role of fashion in the development of capitalism is so complex that it might even turn the existing metaphor on its head. Considering the central role of dress and fashion in the Industrial Revolution, the role of textile manufacturing in particular, fashion might be assigned the parental role, or at least that of a midwife, helping to give birth to capitalism. ‘As the Industrial Revolution progressed, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether the fashion stimulated the mechanisation or the ability to produce the fashions by mechanisation created the fashion,’ writes costume historian Phyllis Tortora.⁴¹

Karl Marx was much more concerned with and critical of the connection. He took his coat and the material of linen as starting points for his explorations of the ‘Two-fold Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities.’⁴² Marx held ‘the murderous, meaningless caprices of fashion’⁴³ responsible, not just for inspiring the general principle of change behind capitalism, but also a very concrete production model. Esther Leslie, professor of political aesthetics, explains:

Not simply analogue to the rhythm of the capitalist mode of production, fashion ‘or clothing and its rapid turnover’ is, for Marx, the very generator of the industrial revolution, even prior to the emergence of the mass market for fashion. Marx begins Capital with an analysis of material, of linen, which he will analyse all through the first part of capital as a use value, an exchange value, a commodity, an abstract form and a concrete one. And from this scrap of material Marx derives the entire economic and social, and political and aesthetic system of capitalism, which surrounded him and into whose future his thoughts were directed. This system rests on material worked by humans into garments. The textile industry inaugurates the factory system of exploitation.⁴⁴

Thus, fashion, according to Marx, is far more than the child of capitalism, far more responsible, historically at least. While the principle of fashion continues to drive capitalism, so too does the principle of capitalism continue to drive fashion. Their relationship appears to approximate the chicken or egg causality dilemma. Fashion and capitalism are co-dependent, caught in an inextricable cycle, a relentless cycle, a relentlessly accelerating cycle.

*

What Fashion Is

Few concepts in our culture are as loaded, few have been so transformed both as to their meaning and materiality, their impact and interpretation, few carry such extremes of dismissal and pursuit, few concepts match the richness of ‘fashion.’

Fashion is much more and much less than it is typically made out to be. Fashion is product, process and creative labour. It is both a mirror and maker of our society, a reflection and a distortion. Fashion is child and parent of capitalism. Although said to favour economic capital, it thrives on and relies on all forms of capital. Fashion can be forcefully creative and destructive, perfect and imperfect, beautiful and ugly. Fashion is a basic human need and utterly superfluous. All at once. Whatever might approximate a truth about fashion lies in its many contradictions.

Our Western society is a society on flight from ambiguity.⁴⁵ It favours rational thinking, insists on categorisations, scientific proof and certainty. This flight from ambiguity manifests itself in binary ways of thinking: either/or. It manifests itself in binary language, such as right/wrong, left/right or woman/man – which in turn creates binary realities that are highly reductive and incredibly difficult to undo.

In relation to fashion, an enduring discourse which has currently regained momentum, divides it in good/bad. There are reports on good or bad fashions, ethical analyses of good or bad brands, or critiques of fashion that denigrate it as altogether bad. As I write these lines Extinction Rebellion (XR) are protesting at London Fashion Week. After previously calling for the event to be cancelled, very well curated and visually poignant protests in the form of ‘die-ins’ and a funeral procession are being staged outside fashion shows. They illustrate the perceived absurdity and obsolescence of this biannual construction of fashion based around a number of ten-minute spectacles, which completely obscure their substantial human, natural and economic resources – however creative the outcome may be. Some of the XR protesters are wearing T-shirts with the following words: Fashion, Beauty, Truth, Justice.

While I agree with Greta Thunberg that the climate crisis is a matter of black and white thinking,⁴⁶ that ‘there are no grey areas when it comes to survival,’⁴⁷ I don’t think fashion and truth are mutually exclusive, neither are beauty and justice. I would argue that at the core of climate action is beauty, a notion of beauty that has nothing to do with an industry, but a fundamental motivation and human need.

We live in society on flight from ambiguity that favours categorisations and rationality. Yet, fashion is hard to categorise. It can be irrational. It thus needs to be thought ambiguously. We can have ambiguous relationships to fashion. We can oscillate between love and hate, critique and praise. We can simultaneously acknowledge its creative force and destructive impact. And we can hold contradictory ideas about fashion in our minds and act on them without having to resolve them.

Dr Renate Stauss is an assistant professor at the American University in Paris and a guest lecturer the Universität der Künste Berlin where she teaches fashion theory and cultural and critical studies. Her favourite areas of research and teaching is sociology and the politics of dress.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Capital, available for purchase here.

1. Thinking Through Fashion is the title of an edited volume by Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik which introduces social and cultural theorists and their key ideas for a critical engagement with fashion. A Rocamora & A Smelik (eds.) Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists. London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016 ↩

2. E Hawes, Fashion is Spinach. New York: Random House, 1938, pp. 336. ↩

3. https://www.commonobjective.co/article/volume-and-consumption-how-much-does-the-world-buy. ↩

4. K Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887, p.163 ↩

5. In relation to the hidden structure of garments, it is interesting to note that deconstructivist fashion makes a point of exposing the construction of garment. Originating in Japan, it derived from the aesthetic and philosophical approach of wabi-sabi, which centres around the notion of the beauty of imperfection. ↩

6. W Benjamin, The Arcades Project. London: Belknap Press, p. 894 ↩

7. K Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887, p.27 ↩

8. Ibid., pp.47–8 ↩

9. A Sullivan, ‘Fashion: Capitalism’s Favourite Child’ in: Socialist Review. May, 2017. http://socialistreview.org.uk/424/fashion-capitalisms-favourite-child ↩

10. This understanding of discourse follows on from the work of French theorist Michel Foucault and his radical social deconstructivism, as outlined in: M Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. transl. Alan Sheridan, London & New York: Routledge, (1969) 2002 ↩

11. P Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’ in: Richardson, J. G. (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986, p.242 ↩

12. Ibid. ↩

13. Ibid., p.243. Here Bourdieu also reflects on his personal ‘discovery’ of the category of cultural capital: ‘The notion of cultural capital initially presented itself to me, in the course of research, as a theoretical hypothesis which made it possible to explain the unequal scholastic achievement of children originating from the different social classes by relating academic success, i.e., the specific profits which children from the different classes and class fractions can obtain in the academic market, to the distribution of cultural capital between the classes and class fractions. This starting point implies a break with the presuppositions inherent both in the commonsense view, which sees academic success or failure as an effect of natural aptitudes, and in human capital theories.’ ↩

14. L Crewe, The Geographies of Fashion: Consumption, Space, and Value. London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, p.61 ↩

15. G Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. London: Penguin Books, 2019, p.42 ↩

16. K Fletcher, ‘User Maker’ in: Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys. London: Earthscan, 2008, pp.185–200. ↩

17. Author’s translation of ‘In der Mode zeigt sich der zuverlässigste Kulturspiegel den wir besitzen’, N Stern, Mode und Kultur. Dresden: Expedition der Europäischen Modezeitung (Klemm&Weiß), 1914, p.9 ↩

18. Angelo Flaccavento’ in: anon. ‘Style Profile… Angelo Flaccavento’ in: The Sartorialist, 18 January 2012, http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/style-profile-angelo-flaccavento/ ↩

19. T Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh. New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1833-4/1999, p.52 ↩

20. Author’s translation of: ‘die Mode das Zeitmaß‘ in: Benjamin, Walter (1983) Das Passagen-Werk. Zweiter Band. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, p.997  ↩

21. L Ruggerone & R Stauss ‘Lost in Reflection: Clothes, Mirrors and the Self’, conference paper, The Annual Conference of the Association for Art History, 2019 ↩

22. A Lurie, The Language of Clothes. London: Bloomsbury, 1983 ↩

23. F Davis, Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992 ↩

24. B Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier. Venice: Aldine Press, 1528 ↩

25. E Thiel, Die Geschichte des Kostüms: Die europäische Mode von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1982, p.152 ↩

26. R Sennett, The Fall of Public Man. London: Faber and Faber, 1993 (1977), p.152 ↩

27. Ibid, p.159 ↩

28. It was heavily theorised as such, e.g. J Finkelstein, (1991) The Fashioned Self. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991; J Finkelstein, After a Fashion. Carlton South, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1996; D Simmonds, ‘What’s next? Fashion, Foodies and the Illusion of Freedom’ in A Tomlinson, Allan (ed.) Consumption, Identity & Style: Marketing, Meanings and the Packaging of Pleasure. London & New York: Routledge, 1990, pp.121–38; E Wilson, ‘Fashion and the Postmodern Body’ in J Ash, & E Wilson, (eds.) Chic Thrills. London: Pandora,1992, pp.3–16 ↩

29. e.g. G P. Stone, ‘Appearance and the Self’ in R M. Arnold (ed.) Human Behavior and Social Processes: An Interactionist Approach. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962, pp.19–39; H-J Hoffmann, Kleidersprache: Eine Psychologie der Illusion in Kleidung, Mode und Maskerade. Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein, 1985; F Davis, Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992; M Barnard, Fashion as Communication. London & New York: Routledge, 1996 ↩

30. W Sombart, ‘Economy and Fashion: A Theoretical Contribution on the Formation of Modern Consumer Demand’ (extract), 1902, transl. K Barry, in: D L. Purdy, (ed.) The Rise of Fashion: A Reader. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2004, p. 316. ↩

31. The following two texts constitute exceptions to the unreferenced reiteration: A Briggs, ‘Capitalism’s Favourite Child: The Production of Fashion’ in: Fashion Cultures Revisited: Theories, Explorations and analysis. London: Routledge, pp.186–99, 2013 & A Sullivan, ‘Why Fashion Matters’ online, 16 May, 2017 https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/culture/clothing-fashion/item/2523-why-fashion-matters ↩

32. L Crewe, The Geographies of Fashion: Consumption, Space, and Value. London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2017; T Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. London: Pluto, 2014 ↩

33. E Wilson, Adorned in Dreams. London: Virago, 1985, p.9 ↩

34. Ibid., p.203 ↩

35. Ibid., p.9 ↩

36. Ibid., p.13  ↩

37. Ibid., p.14 ↩

38. A Sullivan, ‘Fashion: Capitalism’s Favourite Child’ in: Socialist Review. May, 2017 http://socialistreview.org.uk/424/fashion-capitalisms-favourite-child ↩

39. J Berger, Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972, p.47 ↩

40. E Wilson, Adorned in Dreams. London: Virago, 1985, p.14 ↩

41. P G. Tortora, ‘The Central Role of Dress and Fashion in the Industrial Revolution (c.1800–1860)’ in: Dress, Fashion, and Technology: From Prehistory to the Present. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, p.99 ↩

42. K Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887, p.30 ↩

43. Ibid., p.315 ↩

44. E Leslie, ‘Review of Tansy Hoskin’s Stitched Up’ in: Reviews in History. July, Review No. 1788, 2015 https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1788 ↩

45. D N. Levine, The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays on Social and Cultural Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985 ↩

46. G Thunberg, ‘Almost Everything is Black and White’ in: No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. London: Penguin Books, 2019, pp.6–13 ↩

47. Ibid., p.8 ↩

When Roland Barthes described the face of Greta Garbo as an idea, he was not only referring to its masklike qualities, but to the way it gestured to the mystical: ‘at once fragile and compact… not drawn but sculpted in something smooth and fragile, that is, at once perfect and ephemeral.’¹ ‘How many actresses,’ he added, ‘have consented to let the crowd see the ominous maturing of their beauty? Not she; the essence was not to be degraded, her face was not to have any reality except that of its perfection.’ In 1957, when Mythologies, the book containing Le Visage de Garbo, was first published, Greta Garbo had been living more or less as a recluse for nine years. Increasingly, at the age of thirty-one and never having been particularly striking to begin with, it seems to me that she may have had the right idea. To age in public for a woman is, despite all woke societal efforts to the contrary, still hell; to age in public as a star is worse. We are living in an era, thank God, in which it’s acceptable to have a fifty-year-old female lead placed front-and-centre of your Netflix series, a la Renee Zellweger in What/If. We do not yet live in one in which Zellweger has not felt the need to surgically alter her face, however, so that the version of her onscreen both is and is not the Zellweger we remember. She is closer than she ought to be to youth, and further than she ought to be from actual nature.

Even younger stars, having committed the egregious sin of no longer appearing to be smooth and fragile, perfect and ephemeral, are brutalised. A roll-call of the sex symbols of my youth in the noughties – Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox, Christina Aguilera – is notable for the fact that many of them dared to suffer what the tabloids saw as lapses in their promised hotness: weight gain, insanity, shaved heads and bad haircuts, cheap fake tans, bad plastic surgery, each mark against them more or less a problem auto-generated by the fact of being female, famous, femme and fuckable during a wave of (dubious, commercial) feminism that mistook the marketing of slogan thongs for self-empowerment. Britney, who only recently appears to be in spitting-distance of relinquishing her residency in Las Vegas, and who is not currently responsible for her own finances, is thirty-seven, making her a year older than Garbo was when she retired. In her videos on Instagram, she still looks gorgeous, bronzed, taut as a statue. She is flexible, still talented at dancing despite having suffered a knee-injury in 2004, and where she lives it looks like paradise. But isn’t she exhausted after all that work? Wouldn’t she sometimes like a vacation from being hot?

I have been thinking about beauty as a currency in women recently, especially, because I have been thinking about one of the all-time gamblers and investors in that currency, Joan Crawford. In comparison to her supposed nemesis, Bette Davis, Crawford was believed to owe her career to her beauty as a movie flapper, then to her aggressive sex appeal playing the mistress-bitch in women’s pictures. She was thirty-seven, too, when Garbo gave up public life in 1941, and had been working as an actress for almost two decades. She would never have considered quitting then, allowing audiences to see her maturing ominously until the mid-seventies, and she would never, not once, be described as ‘fragile’ or ‘ephemeral.’ Closer to the essential truth is the way that Barthes describes, in Mythologies, the new Citroen DS: as ‘the supreme creation of the era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates [it] as a purely magical object.’² ‘Joan Crawford,’ the New Yorker critic David Denby wrote in 2011, ‘[was] the prototype of the modern celebrity…who places herself at the vanguard of current erotic taste and thereby becomes attractive and slightly threatening at the same time.’³ Insensitive to tenderness and hypersensitive to imperfection, it was only logical that she would focus her attentions on being the best, the baddest, and the biggest bitch, a sex symbol too frightening and too abstract in her presentation to be (hetero)sexually appealing. If you want to see the girl next door, she quipped over and over, go next door, as if the die-hard fans she had in later life were interested in seeing girls at all.

It feels almost too on-the-nose that the ‘improved’ shape of her mouth was borne directly of disease. ‘After altering the shape of her face by having her back teeth removed to give her cheekbones,’ the Crawford biographer Shaun Considine wrote about a surgery she had in the late twenties, ‘the painful procedure…infected her gums, which stretched her mouth. When the swelling subsided, it left her with a larger upper lip. Pleased with the extension, she decided to paint in her lower lip, giving the world “the Crawford mouth.”’⁴ An alleged child rape victim and a casting couch regular so prolific that Bette Davis said she slept with ‘every male star at MGM except Lassie,’ it was not unusual for Crawford to take pain and spin it into an exaggerated, eroticised source of pleasure. ‘It has been said,’ she is supposed to have claimed, ‘that on screen, I personified the American woman.’ To believe that she agreed with this interpretation of her affect is to fundamentally misunderstand her vision; the way that she meant her looks to be interpreted like semaphore, worshipped like scripture. Always, she was meant to personify something better, something larger, than the American woman, something never more obvious than in the genesis and the evolution of the Crawford mouth.

Baboon-like in its signalling of sex and frightening in its scale, to look at it makes sense of Goethe’s claim that red, in colour theory, tends to exert a ‘grave and magnificent effect.’⁵ At twenty-four, as what F. Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the best example of the flapper,’⁶ her lips were two afterthoughts around a dazzling set of teeth; just four years later, they were wider, thicker, turned by Max Factor’s aforementioned technique ‘the smear’ into something resembling the waxy, bright red candy mouths they sell in joke shops. By the time she had turned thirty, they were as iconic and as non-negotiable a part of her self-image as the sweeping, cathedral-like bones of her singular face. By the time she appeared in Johnny Guitar, at the age of fifty, they were more paint than biology, her face pre-emptively resembling that of a male Joan Crawford impersonator. ‘Never seen a woman who was more a man,’ a bartender says about her character, a tough, butch bitch who owns a tavern. ‘She thinks like one, she acts like one. It almost makes me feel I’m not.’ It’s true that like a man, Joan Crawford turned her fury and her suffering outwards as she hit impotent middle-age, projecting an eroticism that made sex seem like a war, and sexual partners like opponents. Like a man she did not not care to hear ‘no,’ did not hear it gracefully. Increasingly, her mouth was war-paint. ‘For Joan Crawford, her cosmetics were not negotiable,’ wrote Donald Spoto in Possessed, referring to her image in the fifties. ‘As in years past, she again regarded the thickly arched eyebrows and over-the-lip gloss as an infallible sign of female desirability, and no director could shake her from that imprudent conviction.’⁷

‘[In Johnny Guitar], she is beyond considerations of beauty,’ François Truffault said. ‘She has become unreal, a fantasy of herself. Whiteness has invaded her eyes, muscles have taken over her face, a will of iron behind a face of steel. She is a phenomenon. She is becoming more manly as she grows older. Her clipped, tense acting, pushed almost to paroxysm by [director Nicholas] Ray, is in itself a strange and fascinating spectacle.’⁸ The spectacle became stranger, more fascinating, with each passing year, the Crawford mouth developing into a logo as distinctive as a Pepsi Cola label. Her self-image, increasingly baroque and recursive, became more recursive still as she began to play glamazons undone by their age: a former actress in a wheelchair, a maniac with an axe. The thought of being ‘beyond beauty,’ as Truffault said, did not present itself to her as an opportunity for anonymity or for reflection; only as a kind of half-death before death. If she could no longer be the divine Joan Crawford, it was clear that she would not return to being little lipless Lucille out of San Antonio, Texas, daughter to a housewife and a laundry labourer, step-daughter to a pervert. ‘I’ve been asked if I ever go around in disguise,’ she wrote in 1971, in an advice book called – as if it were a gospel delivered from on high by The Prophet Joan – My Way of Life. ‘Never! I want to be recognised. When I hear people say “that’s Joan Crawford!,” I turn around and say “hi, how are you?”’⁹

Crawford is a case-study in beauty capital gone bad: an ingénue, and then a sex symbol, and then a calcified image of what she believed a sex symbol ought to be, both immovable and outdated. Her beauty routine became a ritual designed to keep the desperate Texan wolf, Lucille, from her filigreed mansion door, just as Monroe’s was meant to stave off Norma Jean, or Britney Spears’ was meant to keep her from returning to being Britney Jean of Kentwood. As it turned out, fearing Lucille’s ghost proved pointless – three decades of Joan had more or less succeeded in erasing her from Crawford’s mind, the outcome being that in private she had no idea how to behave, no idea of her own desires or opinions. There were no lapses, no moments of ill-advised authenticity. By the mid-fifties, she was dressing as Joan Crawford to take out the trash, announcing ‘hello, this is Joan Crawford’ when calling up the operator, opening her fan mail in gowns specially designed for answering Joan Crawford’s fan mail. In an era when to do so was not de rigeur but unthinkably gauche, she regularly called the paparazzi. ‘No one decided to make Joan Crawford a star,’ the MGM screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas once said. ‘Joan Crawford became a star because Joan Crawford decided to become a star.’ ‘In some ways,’ she admitted, ‘I’m a goddamn image, not a person.’

It takes talent, nerve, and an unfaltering sense of self for a middle-aged famous woman to grow into an authentic and imperfect late-middle-aged famous woman. When Laura Dern said to The Guardian this summer that ‘my kids know I want to move to Paris, [because] when I’ve still not done face work at seventy, there will be directors there who will hire me and we’ll get to explore while allowing me to be my age,’¹⁰ it is possible that she was thinking of Isabelle Huppert, who at sixty-six and with what can only be minor work still looks more or less like a sixty-year-old version of herself, and whose imperious, intimidating face still moves with the elastic ease it did at thirty, or at forty, or at fifty-five. ‘I don’t feel old, and asking women about ageing is very negative,’ Huppert told the same newspaper two years earlier. ‘It doesn’t concern me; it’s other people’s problem, not mine…  I am far too lazy to exercise. I hear yoga is good and I may try it one day but I prefer to sleep.’¹¹ Laura Dern, at fifty-two, is still one of the best American actresses of her generation, a performer who transmutes what should be melodrama into something realer and more tender, and who improves year by year, project by project. Like Huppert, she had always had sex appeal, a face not easily mistaken for another face. Unlike, say, Nicole Kidman, she did not have the tremendous load of being one of Hollywood’s great beauties, its elite wives and prime GQ cover models, on her shoulders; accordingly, it is only recently that Kidman, easing on her use of fillers, has begun to turn in great performances again, unfrozen as if by a benign spell.

Once the spell is undone, it may be difficult to look back on the years spent sleeping. Jane Fonda, also marred in early life by bad behaviour from a father figure, first buried her intellect in order to make films like Barbarella, and then allowed her repressed rage to explode pell-mell by turning into Hanoi Jane. It took her until she was forty-five to conquer her bulimia and anorexia, and until she was in her seventies to realise that her ideas were intriguing enough to withstand the fact that she no longer looked like Barbarella in the photographs accompanying her interviews. ‘I’m glad I look good for my age, but I’ve had plastic surgery, and I’m not going to lie about that,’ she offered in the documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts. ‘On one level, I hate the fact that I’ve had the need to alter myself physically to feel that I’m OK. I wish I wasn’t like that. I love older faces. I love lived-in faces. I loved Vanessa Redgrave’s face. I wish I was braver. But I am what I am.’ Garbo, choosing to retire at the peak of her desirability, bought low and sold high. Other stars, afraid to sell at all, gamble until the thing they’re betting loses value. The house, if we are to think of Hollywood as a casino, always wins. The stock market, if we are to think of it as a stock market, does not always pay dividends.

‘[Joan] Crawford’s whole professional life has been one of great concern with her person,’ the photographer Eve Arnold wrote, recalling a collaboration with her in the fifties. ‘It is a commodity which she sells not only to the public, but also to herself.’¹² In the last shoot she ever did, in 1976, Crawford is all eyes and mouth and eyebrows, like a version of Joan Crawford drawn from memory on a telephone pad. Still, she is iconic, more woman than woman, and more star than star. Lensed softly, she glows like a make-up mirror. What is notable in her last year of life is the relative subtlety of her lip colour, which no longer looks deep red or bloody, like a cannibal or a mean clown, but like the lipstick of grand dame: light pink, coral-ish, designed to flatter pallor. Two years earlier, at the Rainbow Room in New York, she had made her last public appearance as Joan Crawford, recovering from extensive, painful dental surgery, and looking roughly her real age. ‘If that’s the way I look,’ she reportedly said on seeing photographs of her and Rosalind Russell in the morning paper, ‘then they’ve seen the last of me.’

She meant it – three years of reclusion followed, later by far than they were for Garbo, meaning that we had already seen what Crawford had become. Whether her retirement from public appearances had been for her, or us – whether her aim was to relieve herself of the unkind attentions of her public, or to sacrifice herself in order to relieve us of the sight of her deterioration – was unclear. What was clear was that in the photographs of her taken the year before she died, the same conceptual certainty ran through each picture like a melody with a familiar tune: that of the star who orchestrated her self-image into inhuman oblivion presenting herself the way she would like us to remember her. She did not want us to forget the version of her we had dreamed into existence after seeing her onscreen, in publicity photographs, in paparazzi shots where she was doing nothing much but still dressed as if for a premiere. She wanted us to think always of Joan, and not Lucille. The mouth, less furious and less outré than before, spoke without actually speaking. It said: think of me the way I was, forever.

Philippa Snow is a writer based in Norwich, England.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Capital, available for purchase here.

1. R Barthes, Mythologies, Les Lettres Nouvelles, 1957. ↩

2. Ibid. ↩

3. D Denby, ‘Escape Artist,’ The New Yorker, January 2011. ↩

4. S Considine, Better & Joan: The Divine Feud, Graymalkin Media, 1989 ↩

5. J. W. von Goethe, Theory of Colours, John Murray, 1810. ↩

6. D Bret, Joan Crawford: Hollywood Martyr, Robson Books, 2006. ↩

7. D Spoto, Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford, William Morrow, 2010. ↩

8. D Denby, ‘Escape Artist’, The New Yorker, January 2011. ↩

9. J Crawford, My Way of Life, Simon & Schuster, 1971. ↩

10. A Hicklin, ‘Laura Dern: “I feel like I’m ready to try anything — and to dive deeper,”’ The Guardian, June 9^th 2019. ↩

11. E Cook, ‘Isabelle Huppert: “I may try yoga one day, but I prefer to sleep,”’ The Guardian, June 24^th 2017. ↩

12. E Arnold, ‘Joan Crawford: A Public Image,’ Magnum Photo, May 10^th 2017. ↩

Fashion history writes itself through a state of permanent revolution. Dominant styles are constantly shifting and changing, being usurped and deposed and renegotiated. Who we are changes, the world changes, what we wear changes. Fashion-time is not linear. Momentum carries ideas both backwards and forwards: an old fashioned garment can become modern again. The modern can become ancient just as easily. A sincere gesture, repeated enough times, becomes a platitude, hollow and hypocritical. Coolness and good taste are little more than mirages in the desert.

It is the rare exception – whether designer, photographer, model – that escapes the natural cycles of innovation and revolution and degradation that periodically sweep through fashion ecosystems. Most get carried away; they were cool and then they weren’t. It happens slowly, and imperceptibly, and then all at once. Influence wanes and then it’s gone. Things that were cool become uncool, and some eventually become cool again.

What once was revolutionary becomes pastiche through familiarity, just as, over time, through unfamiliarity, what has been relegated to the footnotes of history can be rediscovered. It’s a simple process of reaction, boredom, of changing tastes and changing lifestyles, new technologies, and the fact that everyone is wearing that now or some designer piece gets knocked off by H&M or Boohoo and then it’s cringe and it’s everywhere.

A Vetements T-shirt used to stand for a certain insideryness; it implied the wearer possessed some knowledge of fashion’s systems of irony and value: to wear a Vetements T-shirt right now would imply a lack of familiarity with them. The kids who queued outside Supreme grew up and started wearing Lemaire. The kids who listened to grime got into techno and the kids who listened to techno got into experimental, underground folk music. The kids who collected rare Raf pieces are now wearing something utilitarian from Arc’teryx. You stop skateboarding after you broke your ankle and you stop clubbing because you can’t handle the comedown anxiety anymore and the clothes that made sense for that period of your life make no sense for the you who exists now. Clothes shape us and we shape them. If you own a ballgown you had better find a ball to go to. Don’t those now-fashionable Patagonia technical trousers make you want to head into the great outdoors?

Who we are changes, the world changes, what we wear changes.

***

‘In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated…’¹ This was how The Cut introduced the idea of the Vibe Shift to us earlier this year. The phrase ‘vibe shift,’ in this context, was coined by Sean Monahan, onetime member of K-Hole, a group of trend forecasters who most famously gave us the concept of normcore (another fashion for another time).

Fashion is an intrinsically temporal art form — it is about who we are and what we desire at any given moment in time and how those desires change over time — and the pandemic had disrupted its circadian rhythms. There was no future to project that desire into. There was no world for that desire to exist in. Fashion is social and the social bonds had disappeared.

But often, in history, ruptures lead to rebirth. And so this idea of a Vibe Shift was exciting because it felt like, after two years of this pandemic enforced semi-solitude, we needed a new way of wearing clothes, going out, of being in and seeing the world, a new philosophy of fashion, music, film, art. For two years there had been no new club nights, no new scenes, no fashion revolutions, just an aspic-coated moment that seemed to go on forever.

Things change slowly, bit by bit, and then, all at once, they change very quickly. The vibes shift. I moved house and sold my old designer clothes and paid off a credit card bill. I sold my archive Raf Simons and bought Lemaire.

Our own personal vibes shift often, constantly, imperceptibly. But Sean’s Vibe Shift was a philosophy of a larger process. ‘[Sean] thinks the new vibe shift could be the return of early-aughts indie sleaze,’ The Cut suggested.² In this moment of pained, fraught and jubilant reemergence I’d been hoping, wishing, for a vibe shift that could drive us into the future. Instead, in ‘Indie Sleaze’ we were offered more of the past (all wishes are double edged).

***

Fashion’s vibes shift continually and constantly in a quixotic quest for newness. New desires and new ways of being and new communities spring up and suddenly it feels like everyone is wearing a pitch black angular Balenciaga rubber boot and you need one. Or actually it’s all your friends starting to take magic mushrooms, and getting back to nature, and their T-shirts now sprouting inspirational, crypto-Ram Dass slogans. And maybe everyone else is feeling old and feeling nostalgic for the hedonistic days of their youths and they are talking in conspiratorial tones about the return of Indie Sleaze. Where you there the first time? Do you remember it? What, actually, is it? I think in this context it is an idealistic amalgamation of the various youth cultures of a period that spans the years 2004-2014, and their associated cultural magnum opuses. Meaning roughly: American Apparel and American Apparel advertisements, CSS, New Young Pony Club, Urban Outfitters, headbands worn across forehands, leggings, Steve Aoki, Alice Glass, The Klaxons, neon, Kate Moss at Glastonbury, early Hedi Slimane, the video for Fuck Forever by Babyshambles, complaining about people wearing band shirts when they don’t listen to the band, insincerity, The Teenagers’ Homecoming, ballet pumps, Cory Kennedy, Purple Magazine, bangs, The Strokes, Agyness Deyn, heroin, ecstasy, squatting, squat parties, looking like you live in a squat, lenseless glasses, plastic shuttered sunglasses, an absence of politics, deep V-necks, nostalgia, Topman militaria, high street romanticism, recession glamour, home counties Americana. That is to say it exists as some historic fiction of the hipster, or a hagiography of the era, shorn of its problematic edges, made neater, simpler, more digestible. But this is the reality of most histories.

If the Vibe Shift is a process, Indie Sleaze is what we get at the other end of it. But the Vibe Shift doesn’t promise just Indie Sleaze, but an increased fragmentation of culture, fashion, and identity into thousands of new kinds of hyper specific subcultural identities, that bloom not in physical spaces but in the hyperspecific, fleeting, postmodern communities of Instagram and TikTok. These are subcultures without unifying centres. They don’t reach for authenticity, or depth, but rely on the virality of a name, the suggestion of newness and the powerful aesthetic magic of the well curated mood board. They offer a promise that maybe Goblin Mood or Clowncore will make sense of some feeling within ourselves, will provide a frame that can help us understand our delicate places within the strange madness of our lives. And so it’s maybe easiest to understand Indie Sleaze and these kind of subcultures as hyperreal, Baudrillardian, in the sense that it’s hard to parse whether they are real or fictions, or if the distinction between the two, between phoniness and authenticity matter in this way anymore. As if to question, too, what alchemy turns fiction into truth. If one very cool person starts describing themselves as Indie Sleaze does that make it real? Or a dozen? Or if Vogue writes breathlessly about it? How many influencers does it take to shape a moment in time?

We are who we present ourselves as online. We don’t have to own a pitch black angular Balenciaga rubber boot, we can just post an image of Ye wearing one and its values attach themselves to us. We become Indie Sleaze by posting an old photo of ourselves, from back when, when American Apparel still existed, and we had bangs and wore ballet pumps.

It is no longer possible to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s simulation because there isn’t a difference between the two.

Fashion, in general, needs a vibe shift. It needs rapture and replacement and newness. It needs new desires and new dreams. It needs new fashions to sell. There was, and still is, a physicality to all this. Once you could walk down the King’s Road or the Bowery and take the aesthetic temperature of the moment but those spaces have less hold on the imagination now. The spaces that do are digital. For all its exclusionary pretence – will you or won’t you be invited in and where will you be sat – the fashion show is primarily a broadcast medium now. You see the shows online. You buy the clothes online. You post a picture of yourself wearing the clothes online. There is negligible difference between the reality of the physical and the digital.

You wore skinny jeans for a decade and now you’ve got that loose fit. The pictures of you at the Klaxons rave stayed in a folder for years until it became OK to post them again. You’re wearing baggy jeans now but boot cut is coming back. I remember once, during Indie Sleaze the first time around, I bought a pair of very skinny bright red jeans. I thought I was a person who wore red skinny jeans. But I wore them maybe twice and realised I wasn’t. I couldn’t be.

At the heart of fashion is this failure. This jacket could change your life but it won’t. You could, by wearing a leather jacket adorned with studs and pins, transform yourself into a punk. You could go out tomorrow and buy some vintage American Apparel leggings, a headband, a Strokes T-shirt, and become Indie Sleaze. You can force your own personal vibe to shift purely through willpower. But it’s hard to maintain the illusion that you are someone you’re not, or to think that, if you maintain the illusion long enough, you can become someone else entirely.

Sean Monahan, in his theory of the vibe shift, suggested that it is a permanent process. That the vibe shift leaves some people behind. That it moves in one direction. Some get stuck in an older vision of authenticity as a new vision of authenticity takes hold. The world changes and we change. Or we don’t.

For a moment I became depressed by the idea that Indie Sleaze was returning. The vibes had shifted back to where they were when I’d begun and now I was a completely different person. Or I was depressed because I could still see, via the prism of this returning, the person I used to be. And how, with hindsight it was easy to see how, the first time around, Indie Sleaze was not particularly vital, how it lacked invention and vitality and that the only thing that made it of any interest, really, was that it was my thing to belong to. It was something I was part of.

Maybe it’s natural that in these uncertain and changing moments we desire to retreat to the familiarity of our own youths, or the youths of those just a fraction older than us, youths slightly out of reach and touched by the glamour of being just out of reach. But if you’re in your early to mid thirties (ish) in 2022 this return of Indie Sleaze is probably the first time the styles of your youth have been co-opted and revived and sanitised and repackaged. And that comes with plenty of complex emotions. You are getting older. You’re dying. You are not as cool, effortless, beautiful, as you once were.

Your past, its messiness, its mistakes, the life you once lived, is smoothed out and recontextualised and made into something else by someone who wasn’t there.

And so the vibes shift again and now Indie Sleaze is back apparently although it’s not quite clear where it’s going, revived for what, and for whom. But I’m not sure it matters because time isn’t relevant anymore because there isn’t a narrative, just an amorphous continuous vibe shift that is splintered and broken and smaller and atomised.

1. Allison P. Davis, ‘A Vibe Shift Is Coming,’ NY Magazine, Feb.16, 2022. https://www.thecut.com/2022/02/a-vibe-shift-is-coming.html ↩

2. Ibid. ↩

1. The Birds

The mother once told a story about her wedding day: after the civil ceremony, having had a drink or two but not being a drinker, she thought she was a bird. Flying down the Main Street of a strange city against the blue horizon of a lake with its fish so unlike the ones of her homeland, flapping the wide arms of her flower and crane-adorned cream silk kimono, she thought she was free. The streets and buildings of Sapporo where she came from were an intuition, a memory map whose features felt as warm and alive as the skin of those who inhabited them, a territory of birds who understand place from presence alone. Even though she now finds herself in a city chaotic with numbers, where both houses and people are numbered in multiple forms, her first knowledge is through a kind of flight and touch. Forever after, she will know these streets by the wingspan of her silk sleeves, the tapping of her lacquered zori on the even cement.

In a downtown photographer’s studio, she wears the kimono again, her black hair pulled back in a splendid bun held in place with a long ebony and coral pin. Kneeling on the floor against a pale backdrop, she places her hands on her newborn daughter, both slightly open-mouthed with captured laughter. Wrapped in a red-patterned kimono of her own, she waves her hidden arms like a fledgling nesting in thick padded cotton. Gaston Bachelard, writing about nests in The Poetics of Space says the images we attribute to love come from ‘a dream of protection’ akin to armour or shelter. ‘Dreams of a garment-house are not unfamiliar to those who indulge in the imaginary exercise of the function of inhabiting.’ It is true that as soon as she can recall memories, the daughter does not think of the photo but the event; despite only remembering things like the edges of the dark beyond the studio lights, the clean, slightly camphorous scent of the kimonos, and most of all a rustling of fabric, the solidity of material that forms a garment-nest which has been built for her. The dream of inhabiting is a reality, for it has been created to be so: by her grandmother who has made her little kimono, and her mother, who by dressing her, has placed the daughter in the space she feels safe within.

When the mother came to this country, she brought with her a tanzen, a great padded winter kimono. With its velvet collar and patchwork of fine antique silks in gold-hued olive green, navy, and burnt orange, it is never worn but lies on a bed as a thick coverlet. It is a ruin of sorts, one that straddles the worlds of specific use and disuse, for as Susan Stewart says in The Ruins Lesson, ‘… ruin refers to a fabric … that is meant to be upright but has fallen … what should be vertical and enduring has become horizontal and broken.’ Here in this Western bedroom, the tanzen is horizontal but not broken, instead adjusting its meaning to a different world, the way the mother must and the daughter will. This is another of the daughter’s earliest memories: the contrast of these ruins of paper-thin silk and dense black velvet against her baby skin, its wide weighted sleeves playfully folded over her body. Though no body ever fills it, the child regards its touch as if it were its mother, and so this mass of materials endures.

On a trip to Japan, the mother of the mother folds her new grandchild in gentle, grey kimono-clad arms on a curved bridge, showing her the koi rippling beneath. Leaning over the pond, the child wears a light blue Western dress, her baby hair the colour of the carp’s orange-red scales dulled to copper under the greenish water. The grandmother has never worn Western clothes or ever left her country, but she has understood her youngest daughter’s need to go elsewhere, welcoming the child of her marriage, a little creature regarded with curiosity. The ombré of her hair and robe is another world to the cuckoo, who regards these new people and surroundings with the understanding that they are hers regardless. She takes in this new world with solemn contentment and because of the kimonos she has known in that one and this, with no sense that this is different from the one she has flown from. She moves from houses with numbers to houses without, with their old wood and paper-framed panelled sliding doors, tatami mats, and bedding put out on the floor for the night and stored away during the day. While she does not yet have formed memories that she recognises, there is feeling: deep and wide kimono sleeves that enfold her, brush against her skin whenever she is picked up or tucked in. The daughter recalls this more than the touch of skin, the feather-light strokes of these bird-women with their cloth wings, their murmured unknown words that she translates and responds to in babbled emotions.

Jacques Derrida in On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, writes that a caress is neither demand nor possession, instead a tender gesture which only knows how to give, an ephemeral promise whose reward is to live on in the eternity of memory. In these images, to hold and touch is a gift: first as the child of a child of a child, the latter two now slowly removed by time from the state of childhood; second, as love without capital, a pure and short-lived state of freedom. For those moments of touching, both are bestowed with the absence of age and a rich and wordless communication of emotions.

2. Binding and Unravelling

In the summer backyard, the child poses by a garden chair wearing a long red cotton yukata printed with tiny white fans. The gleaming metal of her hair, now tightly plaited and coiled, is as reflective of light as her mother’s is absorbing of it. One small hand flickers out from the cool sleeve like a fin; a small fish playing in the waves of Midwestern grass, an unconscious recollection of the gilded koi that swam in the Sapporo pond. In Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson writes that, ‘our daily life is spent among objects whose very presence invites us to play a part: in this the familiarity of their aspect consists.’ The garment-objects of the child’s life mean that she plays different parts; while they are both familiar to her, the audience that views her in these roles see two parts and not one person. This separation means that she herself will come to be distanced from both roles and person. To play is a serious engagement, for the imaginary mimics the real and the real wishes for another reality.

The interplay of kimono and Western clothing is as much a combat at times. The daughter cannot recall being dressed in the former in Japan, and to wear one at ‘home’ signifies a formality with only a vague sense of identity. She likes the rough cottons and heavy silks of the robes, the mousse-like airiness of the thin silk sashes that she is bound with. Bound: not a simple wrapping and tying like shoelaces, but an elaborate winding of the long material around her still-shapeless body as she holds up her arms for eternal minutes in front of a mirror. Both she and her mother are silent, aware that this ritual is love; binding as both intimacy and creation. To wear a kimono, or even a less formal yukata, means there is time spent in and with the garment. There is a particular way to sit and a way to stand, every gesture considered but innate. No one has told her how to behave when she wears one, but her body understands. The combative feeling in her—small and angry and confused—is because she does not understand why her body understands. She knows this sense is relegated to the boundaries of the home, and that to view it outside of that space becomes not a bringing together of girl and culture, but a distancing. She does not know how to contextualise this garment with her world outside of Japan, outside of the house.

Barthes, in The Language of Fashion, says that to understand clothing requires the knowledge that it is limitless in its expressions, a ‘text without end’, and so its puzzle lies in both the drawing and deciphering of its boundaries, its seams forming another kind of map. The child only understands the limits of the garment in a vague social way, and even more vaguely grasps at the question at the edges of her growing consciousness of how she is woven into this text. One day, when she is about seven or eight, her mother comes to school dressed in a kimono. She speaks to her classmates about it, and while they are polite and attentive, the girl knows that this is another thing in the list of things that mark her as an interloper. She feels the hot creeping flush of an embarrassment that even then she is ashamed of, the discord between pride and belonging whose disaffection beats loudly in her head like a parade of taiko drummers she once saw. If she understands the limits of the garment it is because there are times she wishes to cut the threads that bind her to them.

In her teenage years, she clashes with her mother frequently about clothes. It is that strange dissatisfied time, one where to be like everyone, yet different, is paramount. This warring desire and lack of clarity of who she might be, is seen to be, wants to be, manifests in how she dresses: carelessly wrapping those old silk sashes over jeans and jumpers, wearing her father’s oversized gold and black jacquard haori or long indigo blue and white yukata over white T-shirts and leggings. She wears them open as a deliberate rebellion. Untying is unbinding, unbinding is unravelling, unravelling allows her to seek herself beyond the threads while acknowledging that she will never cut them, an uneasy reconciliation since her childhood days. The daughter wants only to find some combination which is wholly her, to herself and to the world.

On the days she wears only Western clothes, she disappears into the dull checked linoleum of the school hallways—just one of others, but also false, for she feels that whatever she wears is an attempt to be like the rest that is never quite successful. She exists in a world where one is judged on brands, the young awakening of a desire to categorise according to have and have not. The daughter belongs to the latter, and now finds that the pride which so fiercely battled with belonging in her earlier days emerges with youthful fury. She takes clothes from her mother and father and combines them with a sartorial arrogance which nonetheless masks the sting of knowing that money and its display is yet another place she cannot be. But when the rough silks and cottons graze her skin, when she looks down and sees the prints of cranes and crests and patterns dancing in an elegance beyond her or anyone else’s years, it is a protection different to the garment-nests of her childhood. For she now understands that this armour is hers to wear in her own way, and in doing so the fledgling has started to make its own way in the world. In Practicalities, Marguerite Duras writes on dressing: ‘a uniform is an attempt to reconcile form and content, to match what you think you look like with what you’d like to look like, what you think you are with what you want to suggest.’ This is the closest she has to something that remains the same; garments which shift like a chameleon, reflecting both of the cultures she moves through.

3. The Dolls

She finds an old black and white photo of her mother as a teenager standing outside of her wooden house in the Sapporo snow, wearing a white kimono scattered with flowers, tabi and zori, her chin-length hair in a slightly waved bob. What she notices most of all is her smile: it is wide and full, and with the exception of the photo of mother and infant daughter in the photographer’s studio, free of the cares which have marked the one she has always known.

The daughter on her wedding day. In front of a mirror, she wears a cream silk dress layered beneath with tulle, wondering who it is looking back at her: this is not the place or the person she wants to be. She touches the organza of her bodice and feels constricted; it is not the same as the binding of love. When young, she played with her neighbour’s dolls, their plastic limbs resistant to being dressed, and once finished lay there, waiting for their joints to be directed in unnatural movement. Discussing the poet Rilke’s essay on dolls in The Dream of the Moving Statue, Kenneth Gross notes that, ‘Rilke imagines us angry and horrified when we discover … that stupidity of dolls that lets them be just what we liked,’ their passivity and inability to interact only lost through longevity, transcending their dollness. Stiffly jointed with the fear of indecision, the daughter becomes the very doll she struggled with so long ago. Suddenly she recalls her mother’s words, swimming through the ripples of silk in her memory. Hands by her sides lift halfway and drop. I thought I was a bird.

Galen Strawson, in Things That Bother Me, writes that, ‘grief felt for the person who has died seems like a natural expression of love, a natural expression whose absence would show failure of love.’ But what of grief without the extremity of death? In her mother’s snowy smile and her own wedding day reflection, the daughter feels a profound grief. She knows the latter is a failure of love; self-love, later expanding to marriage-love. With her mother, she knows it is more of an erosion: there has been nothing but love when she has known her mother, yet since that Sapporo photo, her mother has known the disintegration of a particular innocence of love which is part of the reality of its maintenance.

With the tenderness of morbidity—unpleasant subjects such as death or illness being hand-in-hand with intimacy—she sometimes wonders about the clothing of final rest. She goes through Funeral in the card catalogue of her memory and pulls up her relatives’ unremarkable costumes. Only her father wore something of note, favourite tweeds that the family associated him with. Though her mother is still alive and with good fortune will continue to be, the daughter cannot help but mentally dress her for this moment. Again, Duras says, ‘death, the fact of death coming towards you, is also a memory. Like the present. It’s completely here, like the memory of what has already happened and the thought of what is still to come.’ This dressing of a memory which has not yet occurred feels as important as imagining a doll in frozen splendour, like the kimono-clad kokeshi that lined surfaces of the house when she was young, or hinamatsuri dolls sitting in brocaded state on their tiers; passed down, and so gaining the solemnity of years, the dolls transcend the meaning of play. It is the formality of respect and the celebratory preparation of a future remembrance, the ritual of memory. She thinks again of that cream-coloured, crane and flower-adorned kimono, folded carefully in tissue and mothballs somewhere within a satin-sheen wooden chest of drawers in her childhood home. The daughter knows her mother has had to undergo her own transformations from her childhood world to the one after her marriage. She has watched her mother shed her silken wings over time, which the child then wore and shed and then longed for again. As the years passed, she recognised the pattern of the bird-women of her life, and she now looks to her memories in the way others await the migration of the swallows.

More and more, she remembers. And when she conjures the images of wearing these garments, a strange sartorial—or perhaps it is bodily—regret appears alongside them. She reflects on a specific moment of being dressed: the feeling of the sash being bound almost across her flat child’s chest. This is most likely a remnant of the infant’s unformed, unarticulated comfort at being bound tightly and safely, a memory of the womb already starting to fall away. She thinks of the breasts which formed later on and her delight at their shape, which was also a delight at becoming a woman, and so belonging to something. As they grew larger, something her mother never had except briefly in pregnancy, she felt the distance again. The loneliness of separation from the physical attributes of an identity. She has the vagaries of an undefinable face, but her figure is Western, and she knows these curved lines would now mar the perfect geometry of what was her body in a kimono. She longs for a precise physiological equation, as if it would answer the question of herself.

She thinks again of erosion; the slow, almost unnoticeable wearing love and life can often find itself going through, a change from motion to rigidity, birds to dolls. It is not that to be the latter necessarily represents a lack of love, though it sometimes does. It is a solidity and certainty that is less evocative of nests and first flights than realising the destiny of one’s eternal permanence, the transformation back to the image and dreams of the garment-house. Silk and cotton turn to wood: the grandmother, the mother, and finally the daughter in a still, smiling row, enfolded in the pinioned wings of time. The kimonos which were filled once with flesh and laughter and wisdom are now empty, in their dreaming folds they wait for new birds.

Tomoe Hill is not a writer, but in her words rather ‘someone who writes.’ She once studied philosophy at King’s College, London and is now at work on a book, tentatively called Songs for Olympia.