Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015

Patricia Holland’s essay ‘When a woman reads the news’ first appeared in 1987. In this text, Holland extended feminist visual culture theory into the discussion of women in television and highlighted how female newsreaders were subject to scrutiny as to their appearance. The purpose of this article to revisit the subject in a contemporary context in order to examine why this emphasis on physical appearance, and especially attire, still exists some three decades later.

In order to discuss the sartorial dilemmas that women in news media face, in particular in the digital era when praise or censure can be immediately communicated, the article uses semiotic deconstructions of three specific broadcasts, BBC Breakfast and The Six O’Clock News and Channel 4 News, to consider how dress operates as part of a discourse of power and gender reinforcement. The article also offers three strategies, which women newsreaders appear to adopt in their attire in order to deal with the perceived issue of femininity and its appropriateness in the context of the newsroom. The larger implications of the article are that feminist efforts towards less focus on women’s appearance and attire could be seen to have had little effect, however, Judith Butler’s post-feminist writings offer an alternative perspective whereby femininity is reconfigured as a positive rather than a negative attribute.

This article examines how students at an urban high school in Aotearoa New Zealand navigate the relationship between beauty ideals and authenticity. The students privilege ‘personality’ over appearance, positioning appearance as detracting from personality. They conceive many appearance ideals to be ‘fake’, and believe that to present the self in line with these ideals is to present an inauthentic self. The students frame themselves as media literate, producing ‘sad’ Others who cannot ‘see through’ the mediated construction of beauty ideals. In addition to distancing themselves from these Others, the students use the tropes of fun and selfgrowth to frame their emulation of (and/or desire to emulate) appearance ideals as authentic expressions of their selves, rather than the desire to be seen as attractive. Most effectively, in line with the increasing amalgamation of beauty into health discourses, the students reposition appearance ideals as ‘health’ ideals, thus 28 incorporating appearance ideals into the sphere of the authentic. In doing so, the students distance themselves from the ‘sad’ feminized Other that is consumed with her looks, which allows them to position themselves as empowered rational subjects who adhere to beauty ideals ‘for themselves’ rather than for others.

The pejorative term ‘hipster’ has been prominent in popular culture since the early 2000s, typically used in reference to connoisseurs, elites, poseurs, or anyone who is unaware of their own pretentiousness. As cultural stereotypes, hipsters have been allied with a striking diversity of aesthetic forms over the last twenty years, so much so that the trope has less to do with a specific aesthetic style and more to do with the attempt to foster a counter-mainstream sensibility. In this article, I provide an historical backdrop to the rise of the postpostmodern hipster, locating its emergence in the global spread of culture in the 1990s. I argue that the current pervasiveness of so-called ‘hipster hate’ – visible on the Internet and on social media platforms such as Twitter – is exemplary of a post-critical perspective, where the hipster stereotype serves as a point of distinction that reinforces the ideologies of cultural pluralism.

Dominant western masculinity has been theorized as disembodied, in contrast to sensual, emotional and bodily-determined femininity. If this is the case, the US presidents should epitomize disembodied power. Yet presidents and presidential candidates routinely use their bodies to demonstrate their fit with positions of power. They pitch balls at the beginning of baseball season. Since the mid-1960s, one of the first public appearances of a newly elected president is his dance with the first lady at the inaugural ball. This article calls attention to the moving bodies of US presidents to see what they reveal about the relationship between physical movement and the appearance of power. It argues that presidents do political work through physical movement, including when they dance. As they dance alongside non-US visitors, or dance at inaugural balls, in televised appearances and White House social events, presidents position themselves in relation to constructions of racialized masculinity.

This article examines the materiality of fashion and the role it plays in the continuous making of personal and social subjectivities, through the author’s own experience of making seamless woven garments. Psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s influential notion of ‘the Skin Ego’ theorizes the initial formation of human subjectivity based on the tactile interaction between the mothering environment and the baby. As a garment maker, the author analyses the woven surface or garment as the extension of the Skin Ego, and inquires into the ways that the ‘separation’ from the earliest relationship and the unending attempt to repair this ‘cut’, might become figured in the ambiguity that is found in the seams and edges of garments. Integrating references from the fields of psychoanalysis, anthropology and cultural studies, this article suggests that the process of making and using garments – regarded as the interaction between human and material, as well as interpersonal, interaction – successfully reveals the ambiguities inherent in modern subjectivity.

This article focuses on the merging of technology, media art and fashion design in a specific project, Immediate Invisible (2013). Immediate Invisible was a collaborative fashion-collection project. The result consists of six modular outfits with built-in electronics for displaying physiological responses as audio output. The idea plays with a recurring theme in fashion: revealing and concealing, which is also linked with the increasing use of sensors in contemporary everyday life.

The process of making Immediate Invisible is described from the point of view of the artist and expert’scollaboration, by presenting e.g. selected materials, technology and sound, and how they affected one anotherwhen merged to create the outcome: ‘a hearing device for the body’. Exquisite Corpse by Friswell (2010), isused as a metaphor for the collaborative design method, where all disciplines had equal value in creating themodular and functional outcome. An examination of the tangible outcome is presented as the findings. Theneeds of different disciplines affected each other both as limitations and as artistic input. The project differsfrom other similar wearable projects with its modularity, and from conventional fashion due to the use ofresponsive sound as an inherent part of its aesthetics.

Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice, Marie Riegels Melchior and Birgitta Svensson (eds) (2014) London: Bloomsbury Academic, 210 pp. ISBN: 9781472525246, Hardback £58.50 [Contributions by Harold Koda & Jessica Glasscock, Jose Teunissen, Marco Pecorari, Anna Dahlgren, Julia Petrov, Marianne Larsson, Anne-Sophie Hjemdahl, Rosemary Harden, Kirsten Toftegaard, Ingeborg Philipsen, Tone Rasch & Ingebjørg Eidhammer and Jeffrey Horsley.]

‘Strikking’/‘Knitting History’: Permanent exhibition, Norsk Folkemuseum/folk museum, Oslo, Norway