FASHION E-Book

Anouchka Grose

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'Spirited, serious, and funny all at once.' Clare Farrell 'Fashion, in the old sense, has become desperately uncool. But into this new space we're seeing a flood of upcycling, the use of reclaimed deadstock and an army of widely divergent bodies and faces. Is that enough to save fashion from the obsolescence it probably deserves?' From the court of Louis XIV to TikTok's Avant Apocalypse, psychoanalyst and clothes lover Anouchka Grose takes an unexpected look at fashion to unpick the hold it has on so many of us. But rather than insisting we give up on the thrills that fashion has to offer, Grose outlines a radically new approach to the way we represent ourselves and looks forward to a future where our clothes treat us – not to mention the planet – more kindly.

Leseprobe

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Notting Hill Editions is an independent British publisher. The company was founded by Tom Kremer (1930–2017), champion of innovation and the man responsible for popularising the Rubik’s Cube.

After a successful business career in toy invention Tom decided, at the age of eighty, to fulfil his passion for literature. In a fast-moving digital world Tom’s aim was to revive the art of the essay, and to create exceptionally beautiful books that would be lingered over and cherished.

Hailed as ‘the shape of things to come’, the family-run press brings to print the most surprising thinkers of past and present. In an era of information-overload, these collectible pocket-size books distil ideas that linger in the mind.

nottinghilleditions.com

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FASHION

A Manifesto–

Anouchka Grose

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For Ali Rowe, who fights so hard to make a better world

Contents

– Title Page –– Dedication –– Introduction –– What is Fashion? –– Status: How Clothes Position Us Socially –– Fashion as Art –– Horror: The Body in Fashion –– Harm: How Our Clothes Can Hurt Us –– Beauty and Ugliness: Fashion as Unlikely Redeemer –– Time: Why We Like to Wear the Same Stuff at the Same Time –– Technology: Are Digital Garments the Answer? –– Lucky Punk –– Fashion’s Alternative Future –– Acknowledgements –– About the Author –– Copyright –

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– Introduction –

It feels a little anachronistic to be writing about fashion right now. We’re still relatively fresh from pyjama-wearing lockdowns, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that we’ve already passed a number of environmental tipping points that pretty much guarantee we’re on course to disaster. The idea that we should go out and buy clothes we don’t need, to impress people who probably don’t care, makes little sense. The clothing industry accounts for 10 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, while flying contributes a mere 2.4 per cent. Clothing production is also responsible for 20 per cent of the world’s wastewater, not to mention widespread labour rights abuses, plus its part in industrial farming for the production of wool and leather. As people often like to point out these days, a T-shirt that costs £3.00 comes with untold costs for the planet. So by far the most sensible thing to say about fashion is simply: ‘stop!’

Still, many of us remember the days when the seasonal influx of new shapes, colours and textures into the luminous paradises of H&M, Topshop and Miss Selfridge seemed a cause for celebration and joy. Like 2children who grew up eating chops only to discover that their favourite supper was hacked from the corpse of a fluffy lamb, we have somehow to metabolise the cognitive dissonance produced by the realisation that, all along, we’ve been funding a toxic regime. We understood that fashion was a bit scoundrelly from the way it knew how to prey on our insecurities in order to make us part with our cash. We were aware of the part it played in the proliferation of eating disorders. We’d clocked that reading Vogue often made us temporarily depressed. We’d seen Zoolander and The Devil Wears Prada and basically agreed that fashiony people can be idiots. But perhaps we didn’t realise how enthusiastically it was ushering us headlong towards the apocalypse.

One small sign of hope is that the fashion industry itself now knows that we know that things can’t go on this way. Heightened awareness of the severity of the climate crisis, plus the body positivity movement, plus an insistence on diversity that goes beyond tokenism all mean you can’t keep pumping out images of skinny, white women in all-new swag and expect people to like you. Fashion, in the old sense, has become desperately uncool. Into this new space we’re seeing a flood of upcycling, the use of reclaimed deadstock and an army of widely divergent bodies and faces. But is that enough to save fashion from the obsolescence it probably deserves?

Maybe not. But … I LOVE fashion and can’t help 3wishing that something of its ways could have a place in the future. The paradox of preserving an imaginary space in a future jeopardised by the very thing you’re trying to save is hard to justify, but perhaps that can be the improbable purpose of this book. In order to get there, we can skip through the history of fashion and see what industrial and psychological forces caused it to take its present shape. We can look at the ways in which clothes, and changes of style, can help us to inhabit our bodies; and at fashion as a very particular art form, with its wonky combination of ‘genius creators’, mass production and unpredictable crowd behaviours. We will consider beauty, harm, technology and time as factors at work in the proliferation of new sartorial ideas, and ultimately argue for the possibility of fashion as an anarchic, hyper-social force for good. Or at least to put forward a new kind of fashion logic, purged of its traditional capacity for evil.

I feel I should declare my fashion credentials up front as they far from qualify me for rewriting the entire system. I spent many evenings growing up watching my mother dressing up to go out. I never wanted her to leave and would lounge around on her bed, extracting whatever enjoyment I could from her transitory presence. She was a journalist and fierce lunchtime shopper, always coming home with freshly-purchased, spangled, printed dresses, huge geometric earrings and colourful shoes – not to mention some quite experimental haircuts. Observing her, I made 4the link between exciting clothes and an exciting life: outfits like that demanded commensurate outings. If you wore amazing clothes, your life had to match them.

At the age of fourteen I decided that my life urgently needed to become more exciting, but my pocket money didn’t go far in Chelsea Girl. I learnt to use a sewing machine, follow patterns, and scavenge for scraps of material in the laundry cupboard. My experimental wardrobe, made from dyed sheets and curtains – intercut with the odd charity shop find – meant I could become a hair model for Antenna, Boy George’s hairdresser, which in turn meant I could hang out with other weirdly dressed people and even occasionally get into nightclubs. Thanks to clothes, my life finally began.

Since then my wardrobe has always been a mixture of home-made, second-hand and whatever I could afford from the Vivienne Westwood sale. Not to mention the odd H&M splurge. After going to art school and realising that it didn’t qualify me for anything, I offered myself to the super-stylist, Katie Grand, as an intern. Amazingly, she said yes, but then another job got in the way. I’ve also visited the upper floors of Vogue House to be vetted for their subs desk. (My interviewer visibly scribbled encouraging comments on the form, then I never heard from her again.) I’ve written the occasional article for fashion magazines, done webcasts with influencers and presented papers about fashion at psychoanalytic conferences. I’ve 5always bought and sold vintage clothing, and had a stall in Portobello in the 90s. I can make a bra and pants from scratch. I’m hardly Grace Coddington, but I’ve done my time.

I became interested in fashion in a more theoretical sense at art school in the 90s, where we were encouraged to read psychoanalysis and critical theory. There were people, like turn-of-the-twentieth-century sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who treated fashion as an added extra that could be subtracted from our lives without any of us noticing that anything was missing. But then there were others, like the nineteenth-century French literary hero, Charles Baudelaire, who saw fashion as being inextricable from the rest of modern culture. I was amazed to discover that Freud and Lacan were both major fashion hags, and also that they made fascinating comments about clothing here and there in their work. Then there was Roland Barthes’s mind-bending The Fashion System (1967), a semiotic study of the verbal and visual languages of fashion. Barthes explains that fashion is a language in which each garment is a word – in that its relation to meaning is arbitrary. But above all there was J. C. Flügel’s seminal book The Psychology of Clothes (1930) which was almost impossible to borrow from the Goldsmiths’ Library because it was always on loan to the legendary make-up artist Phyllis Cohen, who was studying fine art at the time. Flügel’s book is cited in almost all subsequent books about the history, psychology 6or even sociology of fashion. It’s amazing. And also, in places, amazingly wrong. His brilliant initial thesis is that clothing is like a neurotic symptom in that it tries to satisfy our wishes both to reveal and to conceal. Clothes are ‘a blush on the face of humanity’; like a blush, they are a very visible sign of something one might wish to hide. So far so astute. However, by the end of the book, Flügel suggests that by the close of the twentieth century psychoanalysis will have had such a transformative effect on humanity that we will walk around naked, with strap-on wallets for our keys and money.

One of the many great things about Flügel’s book is that it somehow manages to be a seminal masterpiece at the same time as being chronically misguided. In that sense it’s the perfect inspirational text for someone barely qualified to embark on a set of speculations about the future of fashion. It’s possible, as a complete outsider, to hurl out a load of ideas, have some of them heartily disproven and still not look like a complete idiot. Who knew? (Oh, did I mention, he also has a passing interest in eugenics?!)

There’s also Edmund Bergler’s awful Fashion and the Unconscious, from 1953, where he develops the idea of a ‘fantastic fashion hoax’ whereby gay male fashion designers take out their vicious unconscious impulses on women by making them wear uncomfortable and stupid-looking clothes. What’s more, Bergler claims he can cure them of being gay without curing them of 7being fashion designers. Probably the less said about that one the better, although people still sometimes dutifully quote him in texts about fashion psychology.

The question it would be helpful to answer here is this: If we finally agreed to stop generating desire for unnecessary clothing on a mass scale, what would be left of fashion? Is that all fashion is? I think not, although it’s certainly a major factor in the whole scheme. Without trying to answer the question too quickly, I can perhaps at least start by saying that I will try to stand up for fashion’s less destructive qualities. The reason I will do this is that I am an addict who has no desire to give up her addiction. While I may consciously be aware that fashion is one of the many ways in which capitalism taps into our unconscious drives and desires in order to keep us enslaved, I’m also hooked enough to find it hard to imagine a life in which the satisfactions afforded by my addiction are no longer an option. At least we can say I’m a standard representative of my culture. I basically know it’s game over, but there are some bits I’m desperate to hang onto. And didn’t Marx suggest that we would keep many of the fruits of capitalism after the revolution?

Even today I’m torn between sitting at home writing this and jumping on my bike to head over to Oxford Street to look at a dress I saw in a shop window last night. Couldn’t I just try it on? It was a knitted burgundy number with an unlikely turquoise and cream intarsia blob wafting across the midriff. It was 8kind of like the sweater dresses we wore in the 90s, but also satisfyingly futuristic. The shop was a new, terrible emporium offering fast turnover and a sickening quantity of choices, all cheaply made in super-destructive fibres and undoubtedly exploitative conditions; the kind of shop we know we mustn’t shop in. Still, the dress managed to exert the kind of fascination that made me want to forget everything I know and to rush out and buy it. Surely I was allowed just this one infringement? That’s how powerful fashion can be; it can override your moral compass – even when you’re trying to write about the morality of fashion.

The fact that these words are here at all is testament to the fact that I didn’t go to Oxford Street but instead committed to sitting down to begin to explore the problem.

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– What is Fashion? –

Fashion, we have been brought up to believe (and generations of writers in a myriad of journals have contributed to this belief) is a mysterious goddess, whose decrees it is our duty to obey rather than to understand; for indeed, it is implied, these decrees transcend all ordinary human understanding. We know not why they are made, or how long they will endure, but only that they must be followed; and that the quicker the obedience the greater is the merit.

– J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes

Definitions of fashion tend to veer from the historical to the psychological to the sanctimonious. For some, ‘fashion’ has simply existed throughout human history. From the hot, woolly skirts of the Ancient Sumerians to the 2010s ubiquitous Kardashian beige, humans appear to exhibit a tendency to dress alike. This explains, in part, why a totally ‘unfashionable’ 1970s dad (ploofy moustache, corduroy trousers, knitwear) looks completely different from a determinedly normie contemporary one (unbuttoned shirt over T-shirt, nondescript jeans, deck shoes). While both dads might claim to have no interest in fashion, they are nonetheless dressed in the garments of their era. 10