the neophile

“Fashion not only confirms and economically functionalizes the division of gender and class; it constructs and subverts them by stripping them bare – if this clothing metaphor is allowed here – and reveals them as an effect of construction.” Barbara Vinken in Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System, trans. M. Hewson (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 4.

For further reading, please also check Joanne Entwistle’s The fashioned body : fashion, dress and modern social theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). Please see below for a short clip that was broadcasted on German television in Die Sendung mit der Maus (English: The Program with the Mouse).

“Nobody really knows anymore, especially in the U.S., what couture is. […] They’ll say, ‘This couture dress by Ralph Lauren,’ and I’m like, ‘No. NO.’” Valerie Steele, fashion historian and curator, in:

Binkley, Christina. “Fashion Journal: So What Does ‘Couture’ Mean, Anyway?“, Wall Street Journal. April 26, 2007.

For a proper definition of ‘haute couture’, read this chapter.

“Hedberg nennt die Stockholmer eine Verbraucherelite, beschreibt sie als relativ junge Gruppe, etwa 25 bis 40 Jahre alt, aufgeschlossen, etwas blasiert. Die Schweden haben eine Vorliebe für das Uniforme. Böse Zungen behaupten, daß immer nur eine Meinung oder Mode den Ton angibt. Mit Todesverachtung und ohne Schwimmweste stürzen sie sich in die Trend Wellen, die rasch aufeinander folgen. Heute Indianer, morgen Cowboy aber nie beides zugleich.”

Lisbeth Borger-Bendegard und Alphons Schauseil, ”Kopfüber in jede Trend-Welle“, DIE ZEIT,  22.06.1984.

Referring to Prada’s menswear show F/W 2012 and to the appearance of Willem Defoe, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as models, Eric Wilson asks: “Could real actors do better than professional models?”. Scholar Bärbel Sill argues that ”…stars personalize the clothes they are wearing in transferring elements of their star image to the clothes. Thus they have a capacity advertising the clothes which models on their own may not. Acting is fundamentally different to modelling, in that the model is unable to give the clothes they are wearing the same ‘character’ as a star does.”

For further reading: Sill, Bärbel. “Stardom and Fashion: on the Representation of Female Movie Stars and Their Fashion(able) Image in Magazines and Advertising Campaigns.” In Fashion as photograph: viewing and reviewing images of fashion, edited by Eugénie Shinkle, 127-140. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008.

“Sicher: wenn die Bilder nur ins Museum kommen, dann sind sie nicht gut genug. Bilder, die niemand braucht kommen ins Museum – nein, eigentlich in Kunstgalerien. Aber das sind keine Kunstgaleriefotos. Klar, sie werden veröffentlicht, in Zeitschriften. Überall dort, wo man über diese Art von Problemen nachdenkt. Und die Probleme sollen dann diskutiert werden, auf Grundlage dieser Fotos.”

Oliviero Toscani in Peter Scharfs Dokumentarfilm Schockbilder – Der Mann, der mit Werbung Politik macht (2010). Vorgestern sorgte Toscani wieder für Schlagzeilen. Eine Auswahl seiner Fotografien hat die SZ hier.

‎”When Candy Spelling, wife of Dynasty producer Aaron Spelling, made her one protracted visit to the couture shows it was worth forty-two first-time customers to the House of Chanel. […]

Because she won’t fly, she took a private Pullmann across the Rockies from Los Angeles to Grand Central Station, then the QEII to Cherbourg, thence to the Rue Cambon by a fleet of Rolls-Royces. She bought lustily.”

Nicholas Coleridge, The fashion conspiracy: a remarkable journey through the empires of fashion (London: Heinemann, 1988), 170.

“To play the game, one has to believe in the ideology of creation and, if you’re a fashion journalist, it is not advisable to have a sociological view of the world.”

Pierre Bourdieu, trans., Sociology in question (London: Sage, 1993), 138.