Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians ... · Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 58, No. 3, Architectural ... from Gottfried Semper's

Fashion and Fabrication in Modern ArchitectureAuthor(s): Leila W. KinneySource: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 58, No. 3, ArchitecturalHistory 1999/2000 (Sep., 1999), pp. 472-481Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/991541 .

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Fashion and Fabrication

in Modem Architecture

LEILA W. KINNEY Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Many modern architects (Henry Van de Velde, Josef Hoffmann, Lilly Reich, Frank Lloyd Wright) or their wives (Anna Muthesius, Lilli

Behrens) designed clothes. Others, notably Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, and Hermann Muthesius, wrote about fashion. FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste), a contemporary design office based in London, programmatically flaunts the con- nection. Yet the recent discovery of a "logic of clothes" in modern architecture and a corresponding abhorrence of fashion among its theorists and advocates has caught the field somewhat by surprise, it seems. Or maybe not. Is the claim that fashion has functioned as a silent partner of avant-

garde innovation in architecture something more substantial than the latest indictment of the Modern Movement's

utopian aesthetics and ambitious social engineering? Recent interest in the subject registers something different, I think, from architecture's variation on the "task of mourning" found in one influential strain of art criticism. In his own "farewell to an idea"-an avant-garde art founded upon critical resistance-Benjamin Buchloh, writing in 1997, denounced its "successful merger" with the culture indus-

try: "One force that fused them is fashion."' Yet the Frank- furt School assumptions about mass culture that are Buchloh's benchmark and the framework for much art- historical debate about fashion (albeit through the atypical writings of Walter Benjamin) have for the most part been left aside in architectural investigations. And most writers on architecture and fashion have viewed objections to the

"fashionable" in modem architectural discourse skeptically, observing that they often serve as a byway for the promo- tion of masculinist ideals.

Indeed, the "fashion phobia" of a key group of modern architects and theorists has become an incentive for research in itself, generating a number of studies that address the Jetztzeit of Modernism, the fluctuating status of decoration, ornament, surface, and color in architectural

design, and the role of everyday life and its accoutrements in the project of building at large. An unexpected itinerary through the last half of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth emerges from these writings, which can be located by familiar chronological events, from the

Crystal Palace exhibition (1851) to the Exposition des arts decoratifs (1925), and by well-known texts, from Gottfried

Semper's book Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kiinsten, oder praktische Aesthetik (Style in the technical and tectonic arts, or practical aesthetics [1860-1863]) to Adolf Loos's 1908 essay "Ornament und Verbrechen" (Ornament and crime) and Le Corbusier's book L'Art dicoratifd'aujourd'hui (The decorative art of today [1925]), but which otherwise produces an unusual distribution of topics and

participants. Why has the subject of fashion appeared in architec-

tural discourse at this fin-de-siecle moment? A generic understanding of postmodernism (as opposed to the specific, architectural use of the term) would suggest that cur- rent interest in fashion and cognate subjects is both



predictable and symptomatic: it has arisen along with the abandonment of absolute dichotomies such as appearance and reality in poststructuralist cultural critique, and it coin- cides with an advanced stage of late capitalism. The fashion industry, that is, has so permeated social life that it has

recently been called this century's "most evident and wide-

spread popular aesthetic form; one can argue about the

quality of fashion, but not about its pervasiveness."2 Unavoidable, too, are the questions about fashion raised over the last twenty-five years by feminist historical inquiry, questions that are too compelling to be ignored, even if not all respondents embrace its agenda. Recognizing fashion as a fundamental component of cultural expression, moreover, builds both time and unpredictability into historical expla- nation in ways that other developmental theories do not. At the same time, it allows the bizarre and the irrational to dis- turb the predominant technorational explanations of

modernity; it is for this reason that Benjamin claimed that fashion continually "prepared the ground" for Surrealism.3

A cluster of writings on architecture and fashion in the 1990s follows by about a decade a surge of scholarly interest in other disciplines, which itself was prompted by a number of methodological shifts. For most of this century, anthropology, sociology, and costume institutes have

emphasized comparative and developmental taxonomies of dress, or the social dramaturgy of nonverbal communication through clothes. Ethnographic and semiological assess- ments of urban rituals, post-Marxist attention to

consumption rather than production, feminist iconoclasm toward prescribed images of femininity, and performative theories of identity derived from Hegelian philosophy and

Lacanian psychoanalysis all renewed an interest in fashion, which was analytically distinguished from description of the artifacts that the term encompassed.

Architectural history, it turns out, was ideally situated to deal with the double connotation of fashion as the history of clothing styles and the more specific use of fashion to des-

ignate the process of change peculiar to capitalism. Because architects active around the turn of the last century were concerned directly with dress--either as an effort to reform modern appearance or as part of the scenography of interiors-and because they were deeply engaged with the tem- poral problematic of creating a modern style, their debates betray an interesting conflation of clothing as artifact and fashion as process, which in other fields has created ambiguity. To this they brought a theoretical heritage concerned with the origins or primordial basis of architecture as a fabrication of enclosure, shelter, or dwelling; analogies to covering the body were standard, and textiles were postulated to have played a crucial role. Dress design has been an aspect

of the reevaluation of modem domestic architecture, decoration, and interiority that began in the late 1970s, in which architects associated with Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, and the Viennese Secession figured. Research into the history of arcades, department stores, international exhibitions, museums, and the connections among them revealed the institutional and typological parameters of nine-

teenth-century commodity culture.4 And books such as Eliz- abeth Wilson's Adorned in Dreams (1985) accentuated issues that made fashion relevant for architectural historians-its links to mass communication, industrial design, and urban

spectacle. But not until the publication of Architecture: In Fashion (edited by Deborah Fausch et al., 1994), which derived from a lecture series organized by students in the Princeton University School of Architecture, was the con-

cept of fashion granted an explanatory role in relation to modern architecture.5

The sense of discovery that this topic produces comes from identifying the issues that arise from architecture's

specific engagement with fashion rather than concerns

generic to fashion. Three major preoccupations stand out: the notion of Bekleidung as a first principle of architectural

design ("dressing" in Harry Mallgrave's translation of Sem-

per's term);6 the search for universal forms that could revo- lutionize appearance in contemporary life across a range of material and architectural production, whether through the

agency of style, the aesthetic aims of Gesamtkunstwerk, or the purportedly objective selection of standardized types; and the effort to control the dynamic of change under industrial capitalism. For the sake of brevity, one can think of these three interlocking components of the architectural discourse on fashion under the rubrics of fabrication, dress reform, and antifashion.

The scope of the problem is presented in the wide-

ranging essays by Mary McLeod and Mark Wigley in Archi- tecture: In Fashion; Wigley's White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995) considerably expands the topic. In McLeod's essay, fashion and moder-

nity are triangulated with gender, as is the issue of figuration in architecture, which McLeod casts in terms of a choice between clothing a building and stripping it bare; the con- tested element is of course decoration. She describes how the association of the classical orders with clothed or naked human figures was transformed, first through Semper's theories about the relationship between hanging textiles and the origins of architecture (what he called "the Principle of Dressing"), and then through modern clothes themselves, which serve as an index, sometimes avowed and sometimes not, of attitudes toward modern architecture (Figure 1). As McLeod argues, nudity in architecture, or architecture

FASHION AND FABRICATION IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE 473



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Figure 1 Goffried Semper, Der Stil in den

technischen und tektonischen KOnsten, oder

praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch fur Tech-

niker, KOnstler und Kunstfreunde, (Frankfurt

am Main, 1860-1863), vol. 1, plate. VI. Sem-

per's study discussed the origins of architec-

ture in the textile arts, a fundamental point in

recent writings about architecture and fashion.

relieved of superfluous ornament, was equated with the functional male suit, especially during the years 1890 to

1925; Le Corbusier, for instance, made this point by con-

trasting images of Lenin and Louis XIV in L'Art dicoratif d'aujourd'hui.

Analyzing many of the same sources used by McLeod,

Wigley develops these points further. The precise means by which he argues that Semper's ideas were transposed to the twentieth century are intriguing and no doubt debatable. For example, Le Corbusier's "Law of Ripolin" (1925) referred to Loos's "Law of Dressing" (1898), which in turn was obviously indebted to Semper. In the end, Wigley redi- rects Semper's arguments about polychromy and the function of fabrics as a mask for the material function of wall toward whitewash and erasure. Surface and skin, not structure or space, are the basis of modern design, no matter what its apologists said; following Semper, Wigley treats

space as clothing. He traces a second displacement of Sem-

per's thinking by following the impact of Riegl's modifica- tion of it (a complicated subject in itself) on architects associated with the various institutions out of which the modern emerged, specifically the Viennese Secession, the German Werkbund, and the Bauhaus, and then reconnects to Semper via the German and Austrian absorption of Eng- lish Arts and Crafts, which had a decisive impact on Sem-

per's articulation of the "Principle of Dressing" in the first

place. A third version of Semper resonates in Chicago, through the contacts and mutual sympathies between Loos and Louis Sullivan. A fourth is to be found in Le Corbusier's

unpublished 1931 manuscript on polychrome architecture. A fifth is transmitted through De Stijl. The survival of the

bond between clothing and architecture is crucial to

Wigley's argument, but not always for the reasons one

might suspect. Contrary to the typical condemnation of the ornamental excesses of Secessionist architecture, for exam-

ple, Wigley states: "Indeed, they see their commitment to dress design as being responsible for their principle of construction rather than a means to disregard it."' He elabo- rates this proposition across a large swath of modern architecture, where he persistently takes up Le Corbusier's

challenge to "think against a background of white."'

However, it is the black frock coat called by Baudelaire in 1845 "the outer skin of the modern hero" that takes on a

surprisingly literal role in the primary sources that are ana-

lyzed in these studies, as the cut of a man's suit is seen to be the paradigmatic model for the construction of modern

housing in particular.9 The Anglophiles Loos and Muthe- sius were influential in mobilizing English tailoring as a model for architecture, arguing that the gentleman's suit achieved a stability of appearance in the face of the fickle

femininity of fashion (Figure 2). The dramatic sexual

dimorphism of clothing that characterized the nineteenth

century until its disruption in the 1920s by the new look in women's wear structures McLeod's account and provides a

fascinating filter through which to examine the architectural production of the first half of the twentieth century. By the late 1920s, after women's clothing had dramatically changed, architects including Bruno Taut and Le Corbusier

experienced a significant level of anxiety about the laggard styles of men's clothing and, correspondingly, their lack of fit with domestic architecture (Figure 3). Tracking the

appearance and disappearance of male, female, and androg-

474 JSAH / 58:3, SEPTEMBER, 1999



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Figure 2 Cover of Das Andere, no. 2 (15 October 1903). Loos's mag- azine contained ads for Goldman and Salatsch men's clothing store, which he designed in 1898. Mary McLeod discusses Adolf Loos's embrace of English tailoring as a model for modern architecture.

ynous clothing in architectural design and discourse also

starkly reveals the extent to which gender became a primary way of signifying power struggles, even when sexuality itself was not necessarily at stake.'0 An extreme (or should we say "hysterical"?) example is Loos's gender-baiting attack on the "feministic eclectic rubbish arts" of the Wiener Werk- stditte in 1927, a charge to which Hoffmann responded with a libel suit."1

The degree to which architects and writers on fashion

participated in the dress-reform movement, while previ- ously known from specialized literature on fashion or spe-

cific architects and movements, is made abundantly clear by the assemblage of evidence. The point is not that dress reform is something that architects happened also to under- take; rather, reform clothing was on the frontier of arguments for the modern, making it possible to see form as it might eventually be articulated in architecture. This claim that dress reform was avant-garde has traditionally been made using the example of the Russian Constructivists such as Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, who had, Osip Brik announced in 1924, "already set out on the road from

picture to calico-print."'12 In contrast, architects working in

developed consumer societies found that fashion threatened or compromised their goals; the ambivalence of the

Bauhaus, which eliminated clothing design from the school and restricted women to the textile workshops, is a reveal-

ing case. Even artists most closely identified with clothing

design, including Van de Velde and Hoffmann, one learns, undertook dress reform in the name of opposition to fashion. One of the predictable ambiguities in writing about architecture and fashion, an ambiguity that generates a good deal of confusion in whatever context it is encountered, is whether fashion is vilified because of its association with the feminine, or whether it is accused of being feminine by its

opponents as part of a rhetorical strategy of condemnation. The leader of this effort, in Wigley's estimation, was

Sigfried Giedion, whom he characterizes as the chief information officer of the "fashion police" and whose writings, especially Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth ofa New Tradition (1941), disciplined troops of young architects for several generations thereafter.

Modern architects' search for a principle-function, standardization, type, a machine aesthetic-that would save them simultaneously from feminization and the fatal obso- lescence of becoming yesterday's fashions suffuses this mid-

century literature. Even the infamous arguments between Muthesius and Van de Velde about individualized versus standardized production can best be grasped through the

Abb. 28 rFianenkleidUing rvonI alten, Agypten bil helite.

Nach dem Hausfrauenkalender der Franckhschen Verlagshandl ung, Stuttgart.

Figure 3 Bruno Taut, Bauen: Der

neue Wohnbau (Leipzig, 1927). The evolution of women's clothing returns in the 1920s to the simplic-

ity of the Egyptians and Greeks.




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Figure 4 Advertisement for Mer-

cedes-Benz model 8/38. In the back-

ground is the house by Le Corbusier

and Pierre Jeanneret, Weissenhof-

siedlung, Stuttgart, 1927. Mark

Wigley notes that Le Corbusier

makes women's dress a model for

modern architecture when describing the interiors of the Weissenhof

houses in the Werkbund's housing exhibition. Photograph courtesy

DaimlerChrysler Classic Archives,

Stuttgart

subtext about clothes in their writings; amplifying them is a

parallel discourse about the relative virtues of art-dress or

uniformity in clothing, or, one might more profitably argue, the difference between couture and ready-to-wear. Although Wigley devotes considerable attention to the 1927 Weissen-

hofsiedlung organized by the Deutsche Werkbund, whose

reception in subsequent literature, he argues, is symptomatic of the blinding effects of the mythology of the white wall in modern architectural criticism, the debates surrounding the formation of the Werkbund from two decades earlier are in fact as crucial to understanding the connections between fashion and architecture and, indeed, the entire subject of mass culture in early Modernism (Figure 4).

Recent studies of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century German architectural theory have revealed how

closely intertwined are the terms fashion and style; the latter has long been recognized as a "keyword" in the Kultur versus Zivilisation discourse, and the former is explored in Frederic J. Schwartz's 1996 study of the aesthetic, socio-

logical, and economic writings associated with the Werk-

bund, from its formation in 1907 through its 1914 exhibition in Cologne.13 The publications of McLeod, Wigley, and Schwartz are indispensable supplements and correctives to one another.14 Although they analyze many of the same architectural sources, Schwartz incorporates the

writings of economists and sociologists whose work was




crucial for Werkbund discourse, including Werner Sombart and Georg Simmel; yet in spite of all his discussion of fashion, he makes no mention of the dress designs of major Werkbund architects or the obvious point that in many of these texts, women's clothes stand for fashion and men's for standardization. His exemplary reconstruction of the intense and occasionally ponderous German literature on

fashion, however, allows one to develop an ear for the unstated assumptions that inform the slogans and pro- nouncements about fashion in the literature of modern architecture. Fashion, Schwartz argues, must be seen in relation to style-or rather, as its antithesis. Never as neu- tral as the concept of space, which also emerged in late-

nineteenth-century German discourse and has received more attention, fashion was the organizing principle for a discussion of what kind of cultural production could coex- ist with or even survive mass production. The Werkbund writers were fixated upon fashion's threat to style, because its exaggerated subjectivity destroyed society's capacity to create connectedness. For them, fashion both exploited and caused fragmentation in modem life; style's challenge was to become the unified formal expression of an epoch. This

therapeutic notion of style is quite distant from the classi-

fying systems derived from the natural sciences and

Enlightenment philosophy; ultimately, however, it was a

theory of cohesiveness projected upon the past. According to Schwartz, "If style was a figure of longing, it was also a

theory of form under precapitalist conditions of culture." The workings of fashion, by contrast, contained "a nascent, if crude theory of mass culture." 15 From the dystopia of fashion would emerge the utopia of style.

In this context one can grasp the sense in which architects felt themselves to be Davids to fashion's Goliath; the crusaders for Modernism were in competition over the definition of the "new" with an inescapable and powerful adversary; the very words modern, moderne, and moderniti contain the evil root mode that needed to be expurgated. And Otto Wagner obliged, by changing his title Moderne Architektur (1896) to Die Baukunst unserer Zeit in its last edi-

tion (1914).16 The "dilemma of fashion" turns out to be as fundamental a discussion for the history of art and architecture at the turn of the last century as the historicists' "dilemma of style" had been a century earlier, for fashion had radically altered the tempo of change by continuously plundering historical styles and presenting them, with small variations, in order to stimulate artificially demand for the up-to-date. Vieux-neufis the French term for an historical pastiche, and, by extension, it can be applied to the distinc- tive rhythm of change and production of novelty that early- twentieth-century commentators saw deployed in the

anonymous and insidious but near-magical realm of fashion. It was no longer, "In what style shall we build?" but, "Style or fashion, that is the question"; not a battle of styles but a battlefor style.17

All these recent writings are part of a growing recog- nition that a heroic version of Modernism that demonized

nineteenth-century antiquarianism was in fact indebted to the period's debates about decoration, ornament, polychromy, and historicism, and not only for a set of theoretical principles to reject. Schwartz's book, furthermore, provides an important historical and intellectual context for Walter Benjamin's writings, particularly his notes for what he called the Arcades project, an unfinished book in which fashion was a major topic. Benjamin's ideas were among the first to be brought to bear on architecture and fashion, notably in Beatriz Colomina's discussions of Loos. The result is to situate Benjamin's views on fashion within those of the German thinkers to whom he was indebted, rather than exclusively within the orbit of his well-known dis-

agreements with Theodor Adorno about mass culture.

Although Schwartz cautions against assuming that the dis- courses of fashion, style, and the commodity remain the same throughout the Werkbund's duration, he nevertheless reads Adorno's "culture industry" thesis and Benjamin's Arcades project as ironic final chapters in the Kulturkritik debates.

If Loos is the link between Semper and Le Corbusier, then Corbu (or Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, in his earlier incarnation) is the link between the ideas of the Werkbund and the decorative-arts movement in France, as Nancy Troy and others have shown (Figure 5). Loos's essay "Ornament and Crime," published in French in 1913, has long set the

agenda for historians of the decorative arts, who have

sought to understand the dramatic reversal of fortune in the status of the decoration that took place in the years between 1890 and 1914. They wanted to know not only why ornament was "criminalized" but when it was feminized, and which came first. That domesticity was another site of anx-

iety and disavowal in Modernism is the thesis of the recent collection of essays edited by Christopher Reed entitled Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (1996). Loos, Le Corbusier, and Benjamin figure prominently, but little of the other Semperian, dress- reform, or antifashion rhetoric appears. Because discussions of fashion and architecture so frequently crop up in the vicinity of discussions of domestic architecture, even if the latter are not always presented as such, it becomes apparent that "a successful merger" of the topics of decoration, domesticity, and fashion in modern art and architecture would be welcome. Debora Silverman's book on Art Nou-




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Le Corbusier chose the illustrations and

wrote the copy for the American maker of

portable armoires, Innovation. They illus-

trate, according to Nancy Troy, his ideas

about the mechanical selection of types.

veau in France, its revival of the rococo style moderne, and the feminization of the luxury-crafts tradition provides an

important part of the picture. Nancy Troy's ongoing work on the couturier Paul Poiret, who joined interior to dress

design in a mutually reinforcing enterprise, will no doubt offer another.

The organization of the fashion industry into couture, ready-to-wear, and interior sectors needs to be more care-

fully correlated with developments in architecture, an analysis Val Warke has undertaken from a contemporary perspective, where the parallels seem obvious.'8 The process by which modern architects embraced, more or less des-

perately, standardization as the solution to the twin prob- lems of style and the chaotic change that afflicted commodities is a large topic. Schwartz has made an important contribution, with an analysis of Behrens's development of a trademark and brand name for AEG that grasps not

only the substitution of trademark for ornamentation in the turbine factory building, but also the creation of a signature style for the commodity. At the same time, the early-twentieth-century architectural debate about standardization and the identification of ideal types (so striking a departure from the typological function that physiognomy and clothing had served in previous centuries) can be more precisely understood by considering the history of the fashion industry.

The unusual exhibition organized by Bernard Rudof-

sky in 1944 for the Museum of Modern Art, Are Clothes Modern? brings this embrace of standardization and unifor-

mity to a surprising conclusion (Figure 6). Using an

approach to the history of clothing suggestive of both Sur- realist exhibition tactics and ofJ. C. Flugel's The Psychology of Clothes (1930), the exhibition revealed dress to be a bizarre architectonic reshaping of the human body. However, lest one be misled, an introductory text panel proclaimed: "Warning! This is NOT a fashion or dress-reform show."19 Felicity Scott has described the unusual genesis and unex-

pected presentation of this show at MoMA (the only one in the museum's history devoted to clothing), which, she

argues, deployed costume as a critique of modern architec-

ture, specifically of the excessive rationalization and disre-

gard for domestic habits typical of the International Style. As an architecture-reform show, it began with a critical

investigation of modern domestic habits. Because Rudof-

sky viewed architecture itself as a formalization of habita- tion and routine behavior, changing clothing's relationship to the body would entail a change in the spaces that people inhabit: "A change in dress from irrational to rational will

bring about a parallel change in our surroundings and will

permit better ways of living."20 Aesthetic reformulation, in other words, would move bottom-up rather than top-down, a reversal of the typical hierarchy of the material arts. In a

display window installed a month after the show's opening, Saks Fifth Avenue took up the narrow question, "Are clothes modern?" but, according to Scott, the architectural

journals did not engage Rudofsky's proposed "readjust- ment" of International Style architecture to accommodate




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X's ........... ................ . ......... . ........ .. . . ....... ... .... .. -.::Y.:.:: . ............ ..... . ....... . ....... ... . .. ... ... .......... ........ . ...... ... . ........ N o ........... VS. . ....................... ...... . ... . ......... .... ... . ........ ... .... .. ... .... .. ...... .... .. .. ........ M a ST M, M., NO iROW -.K? . ........ ............. ................... .. ........ . .. ....... .. ...... .. . . . so. ....... ..... .............. .. ...... . ............. .. . . . ..... .. ..... ....... ......... .. . . ... .. ... .. . ..........................

Figure 6 Installation view of Are

Clothes Modern? exhibition at the

Museum of Modern Art organized by Bernard Rudofsky, 28 November 1944

to 4 March 1945. Analytical diagram of

the modern business ensemble, with

twenty-four pockets and seventy buttons. Demonstrating the decorative

aspects of modern clothing, Rudofsky's label states: "What glass beads are to

the savage, buttons and pockets are to

the civilized." Photograph courtesy The

Museum of Modern Art, New York

domestic habits.21 Here again is a plea for an architecture of everyday life, which, more than anything else, seems to characterize both the threat and the promise of architecture's engagement with clothing.

Relatively little writing on fashion has originated from within the domain of architecture, whereas the related literature in economics, history, sociology, anthropology, costume history, decorative arts, and women's studies is extensive. Aside from the major scholarly effort under way to write an adequate history of consumer societies, the most

compelling writing on fashion in the last thirty years has

emphasized unpredictable and resistant uses of commodi-

ties, particularly the mobilization of style in the definition of subcultures.22 The personal transformation through

adornment that Baudelaire first identified in his 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life" became by the turn of the

century the basis of social theories of imitation and emula- tion in writings on fashion by Georg Simmel in his essay "Die Mode" and by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).23 Today it dominates understandings of fashion, which is construed both as an arena for the construction of identity and as a conceptual metaphor that

explains the incompleteness and contingency of that effort.

Sorting through these issues and their relevance for architectural history is a complicated task and one still under way. But thanks to these initial analyses, the sheer quantity of references to clothing and fashion in architectural discourse can no longer be ignored.




Notes 1. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Critical reflections," Artforum 35 (January 1997): 69. The full text reads: "Predicted with gloom in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment, cited since then almost ritualistically by artists, critics, and theoreticians as though the invo- cation could perhaps still ward off the inevitable, it has become indisputable that the sphere of social production traditionally called 'avant-garde art' and the one called, since 1947, the 'culture industry' have performed a successful merger. One force that fused them is fashion." 2. Giannino Malossi, "The Industry of Fashion," Rassegna 73 (1998): 53.

Special issue on "Coating." 3. "Die Mode is die Vorgaingerin, nein, die ewige Platzhalterin des Surre- alismus" (Fashion is the forerunner, no, the eternal placeholder for Surre-

alism). Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, vol. V:1 of Gesammelte

Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), 113. On the role of fashion in Benjamin's work, see also Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., and Lon-

don, 1989). 4. There is a large literature on these topics by now, but several early books

inspired by Walter Benjamin's research agenda were decisive in shaping this

topic. See Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the

Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton, N.J., 1981); Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berke- ley, 1982); Johann Friedrich Geist, Arcades: The History of a Building Type (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1983). For the convergence of the tactics of exhibition, publicity, and display at Bloomingdale's and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1980s, see Debora Silverman, Selling Culture: Bloom-

ingdale's, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan's America

(New York, 1986). 5. The editors of this volume identify the events and sources leading to their

publication as follows: a seminar on fashion given in 1987 by Val Warke at Cornell University; Beatriz Colomina's 1990 lecture "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," later published in Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (New York, 1992), 73-128; the workshop "Gender, Fashion, Style: The Construction of Modernity," which I cochaired with Mary McLeod at the

Barnard Feminist Art History Conference in 1990, and a subsequent lecture

by McLeod at Princeton in the fall of 1990; and Mark Wigley's theorization of structure and ornament in graduate seminars at Princeton. 6. See Harry Francis Mallgrave, "Introduction," in Gottfried Semper: The Four Elements ofArchitecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mall-

grave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge and New York, 1989), 24 and 293 n. 84. Mallgrave rejects the customary translation of Bekleidung: "I believe the narrower rendering of this term as 'cladding' (with all its

unhappy associations in English of an inexpensive covering) fundamentally distorts this crucial concept of his theory and estranges the notion of 'dress-

ing' from its related concept of 'masking.' " It would be interesting to know whether "cladding" became the common term in part because of the Mod- ern Movement's emphasis upon structure rather than surface or ornament. 7. Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1995), 88. 8. "There may be people who think against a background of black. But the tasks of our age-so strenuous, so full of danger, so violent, so victorious- seem to demand of us that we think against a background of white." Le Corbusier, "A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin," in The Decorative Art of Today (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1987), 192. 9. Charles Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1845," in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Cambridge and New York, 1972), 105.

10. A classic statement of this fundamental tenet is Joan Scott, "Gender: A

Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (December 1986): 1053-1075, reprinted in Joan Wallace Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 28-50. 11. Wigley (76-77) discusses the incident, which is known primarily from

newspaper accounts. His sources are Werner J. Schweiger, Wiener Werk- stdtte: Design in Vienna, 1903-1932 (New York, 1984), and Eduard Sekler, Josef Hoffmann: The Architectural Work (Princeton, N.J., 1985). 12. Osip Brik, "From Picture to Calico-Print [1924]," excerpt in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory: 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 327-328. Originally published in LEF (Moscow), no. 6 (1924): 30-31, 34. Translation by R. Sherwood, Form (Brighton) no. 10 (October 1969). Christina Kaier deliv- ered a paper entitled "Agit-Fashion" on Popova's and Stepanova's textile and clothing designs in the session "Fashion, Culture, and Identity" that

Nancy Troy and I cochaired at the College Art Association annual conference in 1999. The fledgling attempt to create a socialist consumer society in the 1920s will be discussed further in Kaier's forthcoming book on Rus- sian Constructivism. 13. Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture

Before the First World War (New Haven and London, 1996). See also Francesco Dal Co, Figures ofArchitecture and Thought: German Architecture

Culture, 1880-1920, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New York, 1990), which noted the importance of discussions of fashion. 14. In an endnote addendum to his book, Schwartz stresses that "the dis- cursive function of the concept of fashion that McLeod and Wigley focus on can only be understood through an exploration of the material economy implied by the term." See p. 227 n. 67. 15. Ibid., 27. 16. McLeod, 40, and Wigley, 167, both refer to Harry Francis Mallgrave, Introduction to Otto Wagner, Modern Architecture (Santa Monica, Calif., 1988), 45. 17. Fritz Schumacher, "Stil und Mode," in Im Kampfe um die Kunst: Beitriige zu architektonischen Zeitfragen (Strasbourg, 1899), 24-25, cited in Schwartz, 28. See Wolfgang Herrmann, ed., "In What Style Should We Build?": The German Debate on Architectural Style (Santa Monica, Calif., and Chicago, 1992). The title is from Heinrich Hiibsch, In welchem Style sollen wir bauen?

(1828) (Karlsruhe, 1984). 18. Val K. Warke, " 'In' Architecture: Observing the Meanings of Fashion," in Deborah Fausch et al., eds., Architecture: In Fashion, (New York, 1994), 125-147. In a fascinating paper presented at the 1991 symposium that remains unpublished, H6lkne Lipstadt used Bourdieu's analysis of trademark in couture to trace the emergence of signatures on buildings in the nineteenth century. See Pierre Bourdieu and Yvette Delsaut, "Le Couturier et sa griffe: contribution ' un theorie de la magie," Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 1 (January-February 1975): 7-36. 19. Felicity Scott, " 'Primitive Wisdom' and Modern Architecture," Jour- nal ofArchitecture 3 (Autumn 1998): 241-261, wall label quoted by Scott, 247. 20. Ibid., 248.

21. Ibid., 241. Rudofsky's exhibition was first called to my attention by Christina Caloghirou, whose master's thesis cites the Saks display. "Mar- keting the Aesthetic Encounter: The Role of Consumption in the Design of the Museum of Modern Art," master's thesis, Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, 1998. 22. For useful introductions to this burgeoning area of scholarship, see John Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York, 1993); Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds., The Consump- tion of Culture 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text (London and New York, 1995); John Brewer and Susan Stavis, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property




(London and New York, 1996); and Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996). This last volume contains a comprehen- sive bibliography on fashion and related subjects. 23. There are several versions of Simmel's essay. It first appeared as "Zur

Psychologie de Mode," Die Zeit (Vienna), 12 October 1895, and the final

version, "Die Mode," can be found in Philosophische Kultur: gesammelte Essais

(Leipzig, 1911). The version most often quoted is "Die Mode" from 1904, translated as "Fashion (1904)," in Donald Levine, ed., Georg Simmel on Indi-

viduality and Social Forms, (Chicago, 1971).

Selected Texts Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen- Werk. Volumes V: 1 and V.2 of Walter

Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982.

Colomina, Beatriz. "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism." In Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space, 73-128. Princeton Papers on Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.

. Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media. Cam-

bridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1994.

Fausch, Deborah, Paulette Singley, Rodolphe El-Khoury, and Zvi Efrat, eds. Architecture: In Fashion. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994.

Le Corbusier. The Decorative Art of Today. Translated by James I. Dunnett.

Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1987.

Loos, Adolf. Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897-1900. Translated by Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith. Cambridge, Mass., and Lon- don: MIT Press, 1982.

. "Ornament und Verbrechen" (1908). Translated as "Ornament and Crime" by Wilfred Wang in Yehuda Safran and Wilfred Wang, eds., The Architecture ofAdolfLoos, 100-103. London: Arts Council, 1985.

McLeod, Mary. "Undressing Architecture: Fashion, Gender, and Moder-

nity." In Deborah Fausch et al., eds., Architecture: In Fashion, 38-36. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994.

Reed, Christopher, ed. Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Mod-

ern Art and Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996.

Rudofsky, Bernard. Are Clothes Modern? Catalogue of the exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 1944-March 1945.

-. Are Clothes Modern? An Essay on Contemporary Apparel. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947. Revised as The Unfashionable Human Body. New York: Doubleday, 1971.

Schwartz, FredericJ. The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the

First World War New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996.

Scott, Felicity. " 'Primitive Wisdom' and Modern Architecture." Journal ofArchitecture 3 (Autumn 1998): 241-261.

Semper, Gottfried. The Four Elements ofArchitecture and Other Writings. Translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Silverman, Debora. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology and Style. Studies on the History of Society and Culture, no. 7. Berke-

ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989.

Troy, NancyJ. Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

-. "Domesticity, Decoration and Consumer Culture: Selling Art and Design in Pre-World War I France." In Christopher Reed, ed., Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architec-

ture, 113-129. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996.

Warke, Val K. " 'In' Architecture: Observing the Meanings of Fashion." In Deborah Fausch et al., eds., Architecture: In Fashion, 125-147. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994.

Wigley, Mark. "Architecture after Philosophy: Le Corbusier and the

Emperor's New Paint." Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts 2

(1990): 84-95.

-. "White Out: Fashioning the Modern (Part 2)." Assemblage 22

(December 1993): 6-49.

-. "White Out: Fashioning the Modern." In Deborah Fausch et al., eds., Architecture: In Fashion, 148-268. New York: Princeton Architec- tural Press, 1994.

- . White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning ofModern Architec- ture. Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1995.




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