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Fashion and Evocation: Trace, Gesture, Object and Memory
Postgraduate seminars, autumn/winter semester 2016-‐17
Photograph by William Klein, New York Socialite at Waldorf Ball, 1954-‐55.
Venezia, Magazzino 6, aula 0.5-‐0.7
17 October 2016 > 14.00-‐16.00
18 October 2016 > 14.00-‐16.00
7 November 2016 > 14.00-‐16.00
8 November 2016 > 14.00-‐16.00
21 November 2016 > 14.00-‐16.00
22 November 2016> 14.00-‐16.00
docente Caroline Evans University of the Arts London – Central Saint Martins responsabile Alessandra Vaccari Dipartimento di Culture del Progetto Corso di laurea magistrale in arti e moda / curriculum moda Scuola di Dottorato Curriculum in Scienze del Design
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This series of six seminars identifies two apparently contradictory characteristics of fashion: materiality and immateriality. In the opening two seminars, we will look at fashion firstly as a material artefact worn on the body, and secondly as a kind of pose, or performance, consisting of immaterial gestures and attitudes. In the third and fourth seminars, we will ask whether these categories are really antithetical or whether, as seems more likely, they are profoundly inter-‐dependant. Throughout, we will discuss their links to memory, time, the body and narrative. For the final two seminars, you are asked to bring an image or object of your own choice and to discuss it in the light of the themes that have arisen so far.
Reading
You are asked to read two texts prior to each seminar. The first is a catalogue essay for a fashion exhibition, written by me, and usually short and non-‐academic. The second is a theoretical or historical text, with no apparent relation to fashion, but containing ideas that are latent in the first text. Can you see any connection? How could the theoretical ideas have been made more explicit in in the catalogue essay? And how might you be able to develop such theoretical thinking in your own academic writing about fashion in the future?
Seminars information
The seminars will be held in English Admission free Registration required ([email protected])
Programme
17 October / Seminar 1
Index and Trace: Materiality In this seminar we investigate the concepts of ‘index’ and ‘trace’ identified by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in the 19th century and then adapted in the 20th by art historians to analyse new media in art, especially photography. Surprisingly, fashion scholars have not taken up these ideas, despite their obvious relevance to the material history of fashion. The stitching on an 18th century jacket or the handwriting in a 19th century couture label are examples of the index: traces of former lives and activities. In today’s seminar, we focus on the ‘trace’ as a sub-‐category of the ‘index’, because it is rooted in the material object. The trace is a kind of palimpsest, evidenced in the dress of the past that survives today in museum archives. We begin with the wardrobe of Denise Poiret, the wife of the French couturier Paul Poiret from 1905-‐1928, and the subject of this seminar’s fashion text. Before the seminar, please give some thought as to whether the ideas in the theoretical text are implicit or latent in the fashion text. If so, how could we bring them out more explicitly? And/or, how can we use them in the seminar?
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Fashion text
Caroline Evans, ‘Denise Poiret: muse or mannequin?’, from Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton (eds) Poiret (New York, New Haven and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2007), 27.
Theory text
Selected texts from Sontag, Krauss, Doane, Iversen, Derrida, Benjamin, and Buck-‐Morss. These are collated in a single PDF for you to read.
Further Reading
Burman, Barbara, and Carole Turbin (eds) Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
Bruno, Giuliana, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Differences, special issue on the index edited by Mary Ann Doane (vol.18, no.1, 2007).
Krauss, Rosalind E, ‘Notes on the Index: Parts 1 and 2’, 1977, in: The Originality of the Avant-‐Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1986), 196-‐219.
Peirce, Charles Sanders, ‘The Icon, Index and Symbol’, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol.2, Elements of Logic, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1932), 156-‐173.
Peirce, Charles Sanders, [from] On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation, reprinted in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol.1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Klosel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1992), 225-‐228.
Riello, Giorgio, ‘The object of fashion: methodological approaches to the history of fashion’ (Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 3, 2011 DOI: 10.3402/jac.v3i0.8865). Open access at http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/view/8865/12789.
Woodward, S and Fisher, T. ‘Fashioning through materials: material culture, materiality and processes of materialization’, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty (2014). 3-‐22, download at http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/22480/1/218210_218210.pdf.
18 October / Seminar 2
Gesture and Pose: the Immaterial Seminar 1 focused on Peirce’s first definition of the index as a trace of a physical object. Seminar 2 looks more closely at his second definition of the index as ‘deixis’, quintessentially identified in the word ‘this’ and the gesture of the pointing finger. Unlike the index as trace, which is marked by the past, the deixic index exists only in the moment. Doane writes that it ‘exhausts itself in the moment’ and ‘is ineluctably linked to presence’. In the seminar, we will use this idea to think about the immaterial and performative aspects of fashion characterised by the pose and the gesture. We look at the idea of ‘modern gesture’ which, since at least the 18th century, has been a way for individuals
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to express the idea of modernity: a sense of being ‘in the moment’ which is sometimes today identified as ‘nowness’. Here ideas of time and consciousness come into play. And we consider in particular how to access historical gestures of the past which have no material trace in the present. But we also look at another kind of modern ‘immateriality’, that of the often invisible workers who produce the garments we wear. How might we see the garment as an index of human labour, a thing in which the otherwise invisible gesture of the disenfranchised maker is materialised as a trace?
Fashion text
Caroline Evans, ‘The Evolution of Pose’ in: Judith Clark, Handbags: the Making of a Museum (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 231-‐33.
Theory text
Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity & Blackwell, 2000). Chapter 1, ‘Addressing the Body’, 6-‐39.
You are not required to read the entire chapter (though of course you may choose to). Please focus on the following passages which we will discuss in the seminar:
pp.10-‐12, passage on p.10 starting ‘A sociological perspective …’ and ending on p.12 ‘… post-‐structuralism and phenomenology.’
p.14 single paragraph on Mauss, starting ‘For the anthropologist Marcel Mauss …’ and ending’ ‘… by the majority of men’.
pp. 36-‐39, read from the section titled ‘Dress, Embodiment and Habitus’ to the end, including the final two paragraphs which conclude the entire chapter.
Further reading on gesture and time, also relevant to week 3
Agamben, Giorgio, ‘Notes on Gesture’ in: Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 133-‐140.
Agamben, Giorgio, ‘What is the Contemporary?’ in: What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009),39-‐53.
Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). For bodily hexis: 93-‐4.
Bourdieu, Pierre, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). For habitus as embodied history: 5.
Brandstetter, Gabriele, Poetics of Dance: Body, Image and Space in the Historical Avant-‐gardes, trans. Elena Polzer with Mark Franco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On dance, but with strong potential for application to fashion modelling and posing.
Brandstetter, Gabriele, ‘Pose-‐Posa-‐Posing: Between Image and Movement’ in: Elke Bippus and Dorothea Mink (eds), Fashion Body Cult (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2007), 248-‐264.
Brown, Judith, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009).
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Cote, Andrea and Joelle Jensen, ‘Identifiable Gestures’, in Posing, Abrons Art Center at Henry Street Settlement, New York, 2007, 3-‐9.
Dillon, Brian, ‘Inventory/Talk to the Hand’, Cabinet, issue 26, Magic, Summer 2000. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/dillon.php
Evans, Caroline, The Mechanical Smile; the first fashion shows in France and America 1900-‐1929 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), chapters 11 and 12 on the walk and the pose.
Flusser, Vilém, Gestures, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Gardner, Laura. ‘The Bryanboy Gesture: Appropriation of the Fashion Blogger Pose, Vestoj Online (at http://vestoj.com/bryanboy-‐and-‐appropriation-‐of-‐the-‐fashion-‐blogger-‐pose/).
Hauser, Kitty, ‘The fingerprint of the Second Skin’, in: C Breward and C Evans (eds) Fashion and Modernity (London: Berg, 2005), 153-‐174.
Mauss, Marcel, ‘Techniques of the Body’ [1934] in: Jonathan Crary and Sandford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 454-‐477.
Siegfried, Susan L., ‘The Visual Culture of Fashion and the Classical Ideal in Post-‐Revolutionary France’, Art Bulletin (March 2015, vol.XCVII, no.1), 77-‐99, see especially ‘Gestus’, 82-‐84.
Voina, Ann-‐Marie, ‘Tucking in Our Ends’ SHOWstudio, June 2016. http://showstudio.com/project/hair/hair_gestures_essay
Further reading on labour
Greenhouse, Emily, ‘An S.O.S. in a Saks Bag’, New Yorker, 3 June 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/an-‐s-‐o-‐s-‐in-‐a-‐saks-‐bag
Hatcher, Jessamyn, ‘Shirtwaists and the Price of Fashion’, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/mediamosaic/thepriceoffashion/article.php?a=hatcher-‐jessamyn
Mallett, Whitney, ‘Inside the Massive Rag Yards That Wring Money Out of Your Discarded Clothes’, New Republic, 18 August, 2015, https://newrepublic.com/article/122564/inside-‐massive-‐rag-‐yards-‐wring-‐money-‐out-‐your-‐old-‐clothes
Rivoli, Pietra, The Travels of a T-‐Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power and Politics of World Trade (John Wiley and Sons, 2005, 2009).
Wissinger, Elizabeth, ‘Modelling a Way of Life’, ephemera (7(1) 2007), 250-‐269. An article on the immaterial and affective labour of fashion modelling: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/7-‐1wissinger.pdf
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7 November / Seminar 3
Objects and Agency Moving on from the polarity set up by seminars 1 and 2, today we look at how fashion is, in fact, both material and immaterial at once, and how these qualities are co-‐dependant. To do so, we focus on the relationship between clothing and movement. From at least the 17th to the 20th centuries, fashion has decreed how people should walk, move and behave, via a range of both physical and social ‘pedagogies of the body’ as described by the French historian Georges Vigarello: these include corsetry and tight-‐lacing, gymnastics, formal dancing, and deportment manuals. Today we modify our bodies through surgery and diet, or, less permanently, by wearing high-‐heeled shoes and corsets as outerwear. Do these devices make us walk and move differently, and how much agency do we have when wearing such apparently constricting garments? We will draw on ideas about ‘objects with agency’ from Bruno Latour’s ANT (actor network theory) to discuss these questions.
Fashion text
Caroline Evans, ‘Hard Looks: Modelling McQueen’, in: Claire Wilcox (ed), Alexander McQueen (London: V&A Publications, 2015).
Theory text
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 79-‐82.
Further Reading (and refer back to week 2 also)
Candlin, Fiona, and Raiford Guins (eds), The Object Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).
Gell, Alfred, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in: Candlin and Guins, ibid, 208-‐228.
Laemmli, Whitney E., ‘A Case in Pointe: Romance and Regimentation at the New York City ballet’, Technology and Culture (vol.56, no.1, January 2015), 1-‐27.
Latour, Bruno ‘Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a few Mundane Artefacts’, in: Candlin and Guins, op cit, 229-‐254. In this essay Latour discusses how artefacts discipline the body when attributed with moral qualities.
Rocamora, Agnès, and Anneke Smelik (eds),Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), see chapters on Bruno Latour by Joanne Entwistle and on Michel Foucault by Jane Tynan.
Vigarello, Georges, Le Corps redressé: Histoire d’un pouvoir pédagogique (Paris: Jean-‐Pierre Delarge, éditions universitaires), 1978. Only available in French.
Vigarello, ‘The Upward Training of the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility’, trans. Ughetta Lubin, in Michael Feher (ed) Zone: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 2, (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1989), 149-‐99.
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8 November / Seminar 4
Memory, Time, Narrative and History Today we come full circle, and return to several ideas from seminar 1 to think about what the historians Ann Rosalind Smith and Peter Stallybrass have called the ‘material mnemonics’ of fashion. Memory can seem to be ‘captured’ in old garments or accessories so they become what the writer Sherry Turkle terms ‘evocative objects’: objects that can be especially poignant and melancholic, as this week’s set texts reveal. Such evocations, be they pleasurable or painful, inevitably conjure up the themes of time and narrative. We will discuss ideas of narrativity and story-‐telling in relation to objects, and will also look at the methods of archaeologists who use ‘artefact biographies’ or the ‘cultural biography of objects’ to make sense of the distant past when no contextual material survives. (Here the literary scholar Bill Brown’s ideas about ‘thing theory’ might also come in to play.) The seminar paves the way for your own presentations in seminars 5 and 6 when you are asked to talk about a single fashion object or gesture.
Fashion text
Caroline Evans, ‘Materiality, Memory and History: Adventures in the Archive’, in: Alistair O’Neill (ed), Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!, (London: Rizzoli, 2013), 136-‐141.
Theory text
Peter Stallybrass, ‘Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things,’ Yale Review (81, 1993), 35-‐50.
Further Reading
Kopytoff, I, 'The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process' in: Arjun Appadurai (ed) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64-‐91.
Bal, Mieke, ‘Telling Objects: a Narrative Perspective on Collection’, The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 97-‐115.
Brown, Bill (ed), Things (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See especially ‘Thing Theory’, 1-‐22. Reprinted in Candlin and Guins (eds) 2009, op.cit, 139-‐152.
Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Introduction and chapter 10.
Saillard, Olivier and Tilda Swinton, Impossible Wardrobes (New York: Rizzoli, 2015).
Schweitzer, Marlis and Joannne Zerdy, eds, Performing Objects & Theatrical Things (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), on archival study as a way of bringing the performances of the past to life through handling historical dress.
Jenss, Heike, Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), see ‘Chapter 1, Fashion and Cultural Memory’, 1-‐13, ‘Chapter 2, Vintage: Fashioning Time’, 15-‐36.
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21-‐22 November / Seminars 5 & 6
Student presentations You are asked to bring in an object of clothing or an accessory and to talk about it in relation to some of the ideas about objects discussed in the seminars. Alternatively you may choose to discuss a fashion gesture or pose but you must bring an image of it, and be prepared to discuss it as an image or representation.
Suggested further reading on the object (optional)
Sherry Turkle (ed), Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge Mass & London England: MIT Press, 2007). Your two PDFs contain the following four sections from her book:
Sherry Turkle, ‘Introduction’
Eden Medina, ‘Ballet Slippers’, 54-‐60
Olivia Dasté, ‘The Suitcase’, 246-‐249
Sherry Turkle, ‘What Makes an Object Evocative’?, 307-‐319 (on p.319, finish on the paragraph ending ‘… power to injure our hearts.’)
