- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Critical Studies in Men's Fashion
- Previous Issues
- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017
Critical Studies in Men's Fashion - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017
-
-
‘Till They See a Man in Spite of His Clothes’: Twentieth-century media and Raymond Duncan
More LessAbstractRaymond Duncan (1874–1966) entered the twentieth century clothed in a Greekinspired dress influenced by the past, yet strikingly modern for his time. Duncan, a leader at his own self-sufficient art colonies in Paris and Nice, spent 62 years of his life dressed in the daily uniform of hand-woven tunics and leather sandals that he and his followers created for themselves. Duncan first adopted his social and gender-defying philhellenic costume in 1903, and coverage of Duncan and his companions’ dress in newspapers and other media outlets continued throughout his lifetime. This article explores Duncan’s defiance of social conventions via his clothing, and the evolving attitudes of the twentieth-century mindset, from scandalized shock at Duncan’s trouser-less appearance during the 1910s to bemused curiosity from the 1920s onwards. As a male artist travelling through cultural centres such as Paris, London, Berlin and New York during the twentieth century, the attention afforded by the western press to Duncan’s ‘draperies’, long hair and sandalled feet contributed to the artist’s notoriety and success, and revealed a gradually evolving social interpretation of bohemian dress, which, by the time of Duncan’s death in the late 1960s, approached understanding and acceptance.
-
-
-
Cloning fashion: Uniform gay images in male apparel
More LessAbstractFashion has often served as a signifier of masculinity, from baroque flamboyance to neoclassical simplicity. Gay men have used fashion to create a recognizable image, sometimes in imitation or exaggeration of aggressively heterosexual attire. Before Stonewall, the gay man was often identified as a ‘Pansy’. After the Second World War, the artist Tom of Finland began presenting a new image of gay men – happy, rambunctious and hypermasculine in appearance, coinciding with the development of biker culture and social groups of gay men who did not identify with the effeminate stereotype. With gay liberation came the ‘Clone’, a series of variations reflecting the concerns of gays, who co-opted apparel and grooming identified with traditionally ‘masculine’ men, including some viewed as oppressors. The 1970s Castro Clone provided a contrast to the disco look. During the 1980s, when men’s fashion took on an androgynous or self-conscious air, the ACT UP Clone originated with AIDS activists using clothes to make a socio-political statement. In the 1990s, gay men became more secure and self-expressive but, arguably, shallower. The new Chelsea Clone look focused on tight clothes on a muscular body, contrasting the weight loss associated with HIV. In the early twenty-first century, gay uniformity declined. A highly muscular physique was seen as the hallmark of the AIDS generation. Straight ‘Metrosexuals’ adopted gay style, and in reaction, gay men turned to a less-polished appearance, again emulating and at times parodying heterosexual male archetypes. As civil rights expand, the visual boundaries of clothing seem to be disappearing.
-
-
-
Identity and the imaginary: Rhetorics of menswear in literature and film
Authors: Kenneth M. Kambara and John DemingAbstractWe critically examine the use of menswear in literature and film as an expression of Weltanschauung, a view of the world by creatives in the literary and visual arts. While depictions and presentations of menswear serve as rhetorical devices in literature and film, this occurs within a sociocultural meaning system, where the creator not only captures elements of social realities but also serves to influence them. Our enquiry informs how taste is defined through the distinctions made in social processes involving cultural capital through creative production. This involves context-rich analyses of how menswear is used to craft identities and tropes embedded within a historicized imaginary that may have never even existed. Such an examination of menswear as an art form in media allows for a nuanced critical analysis of gender performativity and issues of trajectories of meanings over time. Our theoretical framework builds on the fashion system and cultural reproduction work of Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu, respectively. We use several key case studies of twentieth-century authors and film projects to develop new theory that has implications for understanding menswear as an art form with societal significance, with implications for better understanding gender, identity, culture and the everyday praxis of individuals and institutions.
-
-
-
Gender fluidity in men’s fashion: From Shakespeare’s modern English to the new millennium
By Patti JordanAbstractThis study explores how art, performance and the fluid construction of gender identities have significantly influenced men’s fashion over the trajectories of both time and place. Comparisons are made to the similarities and differences between everyday dress, and dress for performance. Studies of particular epochs indicate noteworthy changes in men’s fashion, such as sixteenth-century dress and costume in Shakespearean England, the nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement, twentiethcentury counterculture and the new millennium. Emphasis is placed on the transformative development of New English, and how this linguistic trend, as well as the increase in world travel, may have augmented changes in men’s dress. Western fascination with eastern influences and emerging concepts of exotic dress during the nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement to the present are noted. Other pivotal moments, such as the development of twentieth-century fashion subcultures, mirror specific contemporary shifts in men’s attitudes towards the construction of gender identity and fashion influence. Cross-analysis is introduced through visual and verbal linkages as well as diverse art genres so as to further examine men’s styling at decisive points in fashion history.
-
-
-
Anatomy’s a drag: Queer fashion and camp performance in Leigh Bowery’s Birth Scenes
More LessAbstractLeigh Bowery is often remembered for his outlandish fashion design, controversial performance art and alternative rock band, Minty. Bowery’s performances in his self-fashioned ‘looks’ were genre- and gender-bending. His costumes were often transformative prosthetics and imagined anatomies that acted as fantastical yet temporary body modification. While Bowery’s incessantly shifting body is addressed, this article focuses on Bowery’s notorious Birth Scenes (1992−94). Manifesting in a variety of iterations, Bowery literally wore another person, who happened to be his wife, as drag for simulated birth onstage. And importantly, the performances occurred at queer venues and events during the ongoing AIDS crisis of the early 1990s. Through visual cultural analysis, this article argues that Bowery manipulated camp tactics of artifice, incongruity, appropriation and humour, to challenge normativity and capitalism, and furthermore; to test cultural assumptions about drag performance, which was then having a distinct cultural moment in the early 1990s. This article explores Bowery’s Birth Scenes to understand how queer fashion and performance combine to explode notions of the body and embedded sociocultural norms of sexuality, gender and consumerism.
-
-
-
Reviews
Authors: Graham H. Roberts, Roberto Filippello and Megan VolpertAbstractFashion and Masculinity In Renaissance Florence, Elizabeth Currie (2016) London and New York: Bloomsbury, xvi + 202 pp., 40 b&w illustrations, ISBN: 9781474249768, h/bk, £85.00
Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear 1715–2015, Sharon Sadako Takeda, Kaye Durland Spilker, Clarissa Esguerra, Peter Mcneil and Tim Blanks (2016) Munich, London and New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Prestel Verlag, 272 pp., ISBN: 3791355201, h/bk, £22.75
Men and Style: Essays, Interviews, and Considerations, David Coggins (2016) New York: Abrams, 272 pp., ISBN: 9781419722325, h/bk, $30.00
-