Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Volume 3, Issue 1-2, 2012

In the chaotic urban scenario of late nineteenth-century New York, fancy dresses became expressive sartorial embodiments of the tensions unfolding in the city. This article explores the fancy dresses worn by New York’s high society during the Gilded Age, through the analysis of Jose Maria Mora’s photographic collection of the guests who attended the Vanderbilts’ Costume Ball and Bradley-Martin Ball.This research addresses these fancy dress balls beyond their common description as conspicuous social events of New York’s upper-class society. It also interprets the chosen fancy costumes and their personifications as expressions of the elite’s relation to political, cultural and social phenomena of the period. As dress historians have commonly disregarded late nineteenth-century fancy costumes, this article illustrates their relevance in the study of social and cultural identities.

In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), Pierre Bourdieu argues that the individual who employs fashionable attire to create an impression of being higher in society than he or she is ‘constantly overshoots the mark for fear of falling short, betraying his uncertainty and anxiety about belonging in his anxiety to show or give the impression that he belongs’. An opposite reading is presented in Footnotes on Shoes (Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferris, 2001) and in Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Nan Enstad, 1999). Both provide examples and analyses of women who consciously overshoot the mark ‘because it feels good’ and because it functions as a means of controlling one’s own image. This tension is at the heart of critical explorations into the practice of ‘class-passing’, a form of masquerade achieved through the visual technologies of beauty and fashion. Embedded within this practice is the question: Who manages the impression being created and for what purpose? This article looks closely at two examples of literary class-passing in American literature of the inter-war years, 1919–1939. Both novels feature a female protagonist who attempts to transform her class position by donning garments ‘above’ her class station. Both novels were written by popular women writers, Imitation of Life (1933) by Fannie Hurst and Stella Dallas (1923) by Olive Higgins Prouty, whose status as popular writers barred them from the restricted definition of serious, modernist literature that guided writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The plots these and other women writers of the time created presented a lower-class protagonist who successfully class-passed through her assumption of high-brow fashions, in effect, fashioning herself into a different social position. For women writers of the time, this ability to break seemingly unbreakable class barriers held special resonance; as popular, female writers, they held a similarly lower-class position within the literary canon, and the barriers against their critical acclaim were as seemingly unbreakable as the barriers against their class mobility. By authoring texts of fashioned class-passing, these women writers acted out what they hoped to achieve in their own lives: an equally successful attempt at canonical passing.

In H. G. Wells’ ([1909] 2005) novel Ann Veronica, Ann Veronica’s father and another man reminisce that while the burgeoning Suffragette used to be ‘all hair and legs’, it seems that ‘Now she’s all hat and ideas’. The men’s inability to distinguish between Ann Veronica’s hats and her ideas directly equates with England’s larger concerns over how a woman’s fashion, an outward marker, offers personal insight into her otherwise hidden political and national affiliations. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) encouraged its Suffragettes to dress fashionably, respectably and well so that their political beliefs and violent techniques never called into question their inherent and true Englishness. The WSPU used women’s fashionable dress to offer an overtly political argument: women could be both fashionable Englishwomen and militant Suffragettes. Further, the WSPU urged working-class Suffragettes to protest in their regional dress – Scottish kilts, Welsh hats, or Lancashire shawls and clogs, for example – to present a visual connection between Women’s Suffrage and British nationalism. When Suffragettes paid particular attention to the outward markers of self and femininity, they did so to claim participation in nation and to maintain association with traditional femininity in order to legitimize their efforts to an audience potentially hostile to their cause. This article argues that Victorian and Edwardian women championing for the Vote chose fashions that adhered to traditional gender and national roles in order to prove that national allegiance and social transgression were synonymous, that the role of Suffragette was not marginal but rather central to the consensus, and that fictional and nonfictional Suffragettes could be both politically and fashionably capable.

Based on narratives obtained during long-term fieldwork (2008, 2010–2011) among elite Indian women in South Delhi, this article examines their post-marital relationships through the lens of fashion. These narratives strikingly relate fashion to identity, desire and sexuality, as much as to their repression. Throughout these narratives a dynamic between the cultural concepts of pativrata (devoted wife) and vamp (sexually desirable female character in Indian cinema) emerges as a desire of these women to be sexually attractive to their husbands. This leads to attempts at masquerading as vamps, as much as to outright transformations, in which the wearer becomes one with her mask. These processes turn out to be significantly influenced by the repertoires of Hindi cinema, and manifest in post-marital masquerading thus unsettling the imagined clear-cut dichotomies of surface and substance, mask and essential identity. The transgressive acts of these women, enacted through fashion, also challenge the Indian patriarchy, and may serve as an entry point to a critique of the Indian social system at large that is built around the suppression and control of female sexuality.

The example of the nineteenth-century literary dandy offers a strategy for transcending social, class and gender barriers through fashion. In this article, I demonstrate that writers, from Eugène Sue to Charles Baudelaire and Rachilde, used representations of the dandy’s androgyny and luxury as a means of overcoming the subordination of the literary domain to capitalist practices. The dandy’s inevitable narrative punishment through death and disgrace also provides release from the tension stemming from the ideological shift in men’s sartorial practices from ostentatious garb to sober and more ‘democratic’ clothing at the end of the eighteenth century. I argue that the dandy’s anti-normative behaviour is a heroic act, perceived and represented by his literary ‘parents’, when both capitalist and political discourses propagate a spurious equality and impose a misleading uniformity in dress on post-Revolution French society. The dandy’s excesses allow modern readers to decipher the writers’ attempt to bridge the gap between social appearances and political reality. For early nineteenth-century writers, the dandy could only be a social climber and a criminal. However, as the century closes, writers begin to appreciate his counter-discursive impact.

Departing from the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s reading, this study attempts to demonstrate that the male dandy, who attached great importance to his public image, turning his body into a work of art in the way he posed, dressed and behaved, was exploited in various forms, by various groups of women between the 1840s and 1920s. While investigating the characteristics of dandyism and its manifestations in women who worked in the fields of literature, visual and performing arts, and lived in the context of the early feminist movement in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Paris and London, this article focuses primarily on the courtesans of the Second Empire, the male impersonators of the late Victorian theatre and the wealthy Anglo-American lesbian collective of the 1920s. As a part of the modern urban life and a marker of the instability and mobility of modern gender identity, women found new ways to communicate, both sartorially and professionally, in a setting where men’s clothes, accessories, habits and lifestyles offered women independence. While locating female masculinities in the discourse of masculinity with its own history, characteristics and representations in this ongoing process shaped by culture and choice, this approach endeavours to reveal female dandyism as a curious yet alluring way of relating to oneself in spite of the patriarchal culture.

Fashion reality programming is traditionally panned by critics as shallow, rooted in what seems like liberating postfeminist power consumption and in rigid gender, racial and class divisions. Relying on what Angela McRobbie has called the postfeminist masquerade, the experts featured in these shows use the logics of postfeminism and consumer capitalism to construct the ideal female subject. In each programme, the programme host is the fashion expert and the contestant is the grateful pupil, receiving a lesson on the tenets of a culturally constructed and idealized postfeminist femininity. Contestants learn how to stitch together and perform the desired feminine subject by adhering to the cultural codes outlined in the postfeminist masquerade. In embracing the postfeminist masquerade, however, experts are also teaching contestants how to engage in a strategic performance of gender, making each programme’s lesson segment an unstable space that exposes the seams of femininity. The lessons on feminine masquerade are intended as tutorials on consumerism. Nevertheless, these lessons acknowledge the labour of femininity and demonstrate the artifice of gender production. Parsing the postfeminist ethos that permeates fashion-themed reality programming, I discuss whether the lesson of masquerade productively undermines the myth of natural, gendered beauty, possibly prying open spaces for political contestation and enabling the contestant to pursue what can be understood as a ‘becoming’. While a postfeminist, consumerist femininity is always positioned as the desired result of each lesson, I propose that the tactics of masquerade that structure each lesson segment acquire political implications as they approximate the theatrical spectacles that Bertolt Brecht has called ‘epic theatre’.

Hair is modified, dressed or fashioned to convey a multitude of meanings and, as such, can be considered a form of masking. Interrogating the phenomenon of the ‘blonde myth’, this article examines the meaning of blondeness through the performances of popular culture icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Madonna and Lady Gaga. An exposition of the history of the contradictory stereotypes that are contained within the construction of the blonde as sexual and stupid, leads to the question: Why would a woman choose to become blonde if to do so risks negative stereotyping? I contend that women knowingly enact ‘blondeness’ to exploit its construction as a feminine ideal. They believe that contemporary appropriations of the blonde do not occupy the space of an exploited feminine victim. Instead, appropriating the blonde constitutes a deliberate move to occupy a powerful visible space. Finally, I argue that they achieve this position by employing strategies of the carnivalesque: humour, parody and irony which cast a reflexive light on the constructed nature of the stereotype, while at the same time reinforcing it.

The critically acclaimed television series Sex and the City aired for six seasons between 1998 and 2004. The programme, however, has been criticized for its promotion of heteronormativity and lack of racial diversity, a criticism that was maintained for the sequel to the first film, Sex and the City 2, in which the four main characters take a trip to the United Arab Emirates, was panned by critics for its Orientalism. In a scene towards the end of the film, the Muslim women save the American women from religious Muslim men in the marketplace. In this sequence, the Muslim women bring the American women into a room where they unveil themselves to reveal Louis Vuitton designer clothing under their abayas. Following this scene, the American characters wear abayas in order to escape. This scene corresponds to Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘carnivalesque’, in which traditional conventions are reversed and the characters behave outside their normative framework. However, I argue that in this context, such a masquerade fails to accomplish a reversal because of the underlying dominant colonialist power structures.

The Color Revolution, Regina Lee Blaszczyk (2012) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, (368pp.) 9780262017770, HB, $34.95Nordic Fashion Studies, Peter McNeil and Louise Wallenberg (eds) (2012) Stockholm: Axl Books, (368 pp.), 9789197859899, HB $35.

19th Century Shapes: Reminiscence & Reinvention – ‘Cristobal Balenciaga: Collectionneur de modes’ and Comme des Garçons: ‘White Drama’ Familiar silhouettes, conducive to imitation and simulation, emerge in exhibitions of Balenciaga and Comme des Garçons in ParisThe Elements Words are Made of, Zameret Compound, Tel Aviv, 1–23 March 2012Ad-Dress: Thoughts on Garments, the Jerusalem Artists’ House, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 21 May 2011–20 August 2011Insalaam, Inshalom, Beit Hair Center for Urban Culture, Tel Aviv,27 November 2011–3 October 2012

Avec Armes et Bagages: Dans un Mouchoir de Poche, Musée de l’Armée, 26 October 2012   – 13 January 2013

Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints, (2003), Sharif Waked, Video DVD, 7 minutes.