Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2014

The subject of this article is memory, specifically, the capacity of textiles to retain and communicate memory, both privately and publicly. I argue that cloth can be regarded as a form of archival information and as a carrier of knowledge. My questions centre on the value of textiles in our lives and on the role of textiles in the process of recollection, as well as the extent to which textiles can stimulate remembering, not through the strategic mnemonics of national monuments and events, or the mnemonic device of the souvenir, but rather through unplanned encounters with textiles in their various guises and in different contexts. Each attempt at recollection may reveal historical, cultural, and personal data. The themes of ‘archiving’ memory and ‘materializing’ memory are explored through an analysis of works of artists who use textile media in their visual practice and writers who include their memories of textiles in their works. I use ‘Miniature’ and ‘Gigantic’ as a critical tool to distinguish between two areas of analysis: the private and public within an interdisciplinary approach, combining the study of memory with philosophy, literature, history, material culture and visual studies.

The 1995 Comme des Garçons fashion show, Sleep, provoked widespread controversy in media commentary at the time. The author analyses the origins and consequences of the censorship that resulted in the collection not only physically disappearing, but also in almost all of its traces having been eliminated. This study attempts to show how visual materials were reinterpreted through different media using a few photographs from the show and documentary materials from Auschwitz concentration camp. Discussing the Comme des Garçons case, the author refers to Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse to demonstrate how interpretations proliferated and changed during the period following the show. Most importantly, it shows how memory operates depending on the context: not only how images may be evoked by clothing, but also practically constructed by it. This article recalls that blue-and-white striped pyjamas are an iconic image: often used in popular culture – such as film – they became a widely recognized image of prisoners in Auschwitz concentration camp. Finally, to situate the Comme des Garçons fashion show in a broader context, the article refers to the ‘Nazi-chic’ phenomena, meaning a style referring to images of Nazi Germany.

While the Judeao-Christian tradition has tended to regard clothing as ephemeral, its role in mourning and memorialization suggests that this is not the case.  Using written accounts of bereavement, I demonstrate that clothing shapes and maintains relationships between the living and the dead, allowing mourners to process loss and translate the memory of those who have died into ancestor myths.

Since the 1980s, the figure of the ‘girl’ has become one of the most prominent subject positions offered up in British fashion magazines (Jobling 1999). This way of constructing femininity harks back to the observation made by Roland Barthes, in 1967, that the rhetoric of fashion ‘reproduces, on the level of clothing, the mythic situation of Women in Western civilization, at once sublime and childlike’ (1990: 242). This article argues that both facets – the sublime and the childlike – continue to inform constructions of femininity in contemporary fashion magazines, with the niche publication, Lula, girl of my dreams, being a particularly marked example. Methods of textual and discourse analysis are employed to make sense of written and visual excerpts, drawing from issues of Lula spanning 2006 to 2012. Discourses on Romantic childhood and discourses on ‘high’ fashion – both of which construct their objects as ‘pure’ – are shown to intersect on the pages of Lula thus producing the Lula girl as otherworldly creature, while disavowing the less palatable aspects of the fashion industry that bring her into being. Inviting nostalgic recollection of childhood, the Lula girl is shown not to recall childhood in any objective sense but rather to reconstruct childhood through the mythic tropes of Romantic innocence. The possible appeal of this vision of womanhood for both magazine producers and consumers is theorized through the concept of ‘investment’ as well as recent debates on pleasure and politics in feminist media studies. Ultimately, the Lula girl is shown to facilitate imaginary solutions for real-life frustrations by dissolving the contradictions of normative femininity as well as encompassing elements excluded from contemporary definitions of adulthood.

This article employs the theoretical framework of contemporaneity to investigate the practice of German avant-garde fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm. Political philosopher Giorgio Agamben and art historian Terry Smith’s theorizations on the contemporary are examined alongside fashion theorist Ulrich Lehmann’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s concepts of Tigersprung (a tiger’s leap) and Jetztzeit (now-time). Heterogeneity, disjunction and non-linear historical time are concepts manifested through sartorial remembrance in contemporary fashion. To illustrate these ideas, this study focuses on Willhelm’s articulation of contemporaneity through the quotation of folk dress, cross-cultural borrowing and decontextualization. In so doing, a concept of history can be derived, whereby multiple narratives exist simultaneously, merging past, present and future.

The article pursues a critical inquiry, grounded in theory and practice, into the dominant trends in current organization of fashion exhibitions in museums. It presents the case of ‘Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism’, an exhibition that I curated and designed at the Historical Museum in Oslo, and that was on display from 13 September 2013–13 September 2014. This exhibition was grounded in my ethnographic research, and conceptualized as a critique of current museum practices. The article outlines some themes of this exhibition that address uncritical approaches, which use the ‘aesthetic’ to mask hierarchies of power. These include the problems of exhibiting fashion as art, corporate and private sponsorships, fashion designers as co-curators, spectacular exhibition design (form) over content, and persistent policies of infantilization and patronage of the audiences.

Sofie Berzon MacKie, ‘The House’, 26 December 2014–17 January 2015, Be’eri Gallery, Israel

The paper features an exhibition which recreates the artist’s nostalgic portrayal of her childhood home through a series of photographic images. The artist realizes her project by focusing on impressionistic domestic interior black and white images, together with sharp coloured close-up images of specific everyday objects. The paper shows how deploying light, colour and mirrors which invoke a range of artistic styles drawn from traditions of painting and photography, combines to capture the memory of ‘home’ that the house preserves.