Fashion, Style & Popular Culture - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2013

Through five cases from high-end fashion brands, this article explores the use of models in contemporary fashion marketing. The models represent subversive beauty ideals, and the aim of the analysis is to determine whether these ‘faces’ are intended to challenge stereotypes concerning age, gender, body and sexuality or whether they are examples of marketing absorbing consumer behaviour to appeal to contemporary consumers. The research is based on fashion campaigns and runway shows in mainly luxury fashion brands in the Euro-American market in the period 2009–2012. The article concludes that while greater diversity may be a positive side effect of the use of subversive beauty ideals the stereotypes are also the prerequisite for the social strategy at play. This strategy deals with the Logic of Wrong where social distinction is created through literally doing something that is considered socially or culturally wrong.

Elsa Schiaparelli is usually remembered for her whimsical and outlandish designs, shocking pink, butterfly-shaped buttons, the high heel hat and trompe l’oeil sweaters. What is less remembered are Schiaparelli’s darker designs. In the late 1930s, on the eve of World War II, Schiaparelli’s designs took a distinct sinister turn. This article explores two designs from her 1938 Circus Collection that were collaborations with the Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí: the Tear-Illusion Dress and the Skeleton Dress. Comparison of these designs with the work of contemporary designers Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen and Olivier Theyskens shows the darker undertones of Schiaparelli’s Circus Collection and its significant impact on designers at the turn of the twenty-first century. These designs reassert the corporality and mortality of the clothed body and emphasize its vulnerability. Drawing on Caroline Evan’s readings of deathliness and trauma in postmodern fashion, I will examine these impulses in the work of Schiaparelli. This article will seek to show the dark side of Schiaparelli’s work and the ways in which she responded to the impending threat of totalitarianism in the late 1930s.

Conservative Muslim women from the Arabian Gulf region typically wear an all-covering black robe and headscarf, the abaya and shayla. These garments adhere to the Qura-’nic directive to dress modestly and to avoid attracting attention from male strangers. With the enormous profits from oil and natural gas, many Muslim women have engaged in personal expressions of wealth and status through dress for decades, wearing haute couture beneath their abayas. As the region modernizes with education and careers for women, the desire for self-expression has spread to their outer garments and these opportunities have been seized by both regional designers and international couturiers. This article discusses the rise of the branded abaya.

In the last decade, ‘makeover’ reality television has become popular. Feminist scholars in particular have focused on this genre, analysing the ways in which makeover programmes reinforce specific definitions of femininity, class, and sexuality. Academics have been especially critical of the show What Not To Wear, arguing that female guests are demoralized by hosts who prescribe a rigid set of rules for dressing. Many feminist writers perceive the subjects of each week’s episode as unwilling, insecure women who yield their individuality to the dictates of the programme’s stylists. We contend these articles ignore one of the basic tenets of feminist research: the subject must be given agency and allowed to define her experience in her own words. We argue feminists should start from the presumption that these women know how they feel and mean what they say, and even allow them to participate in exploring the meaning of the makeover. To this end, we closely examined several episodes of What Not To Wear that focus on making over highly educated women (several of whom exhibit high levels of gender consciousness) in order to explore how these women understand and interpret their experiences. Also, we interviewed an actual participant in the programme and discussed these issues with her. What results is a more nuanced analysis of what women experience when they are told ‘what not to wear’, in which the subjects smoothly integrate the aspects of the makeover that resonate positively with their sense of self, and leave the rest behind.

This article investigates the characteristics that define the suitability of certain characters in a number of film and television programmes to be consumers of Hermès prestige handbags. First, it examines the status of a Birkin or Kelly bag and how it is perceived to have transformative powers within the narrative, its impact upon its carrier’s own sense of identity and how it is read by others. Apart from signalling itself as an index of luxury, the bag may also trigger connotations of a suspicious sexual nature if carried by characters that do not have the means to purchase it, and by virtue of its inherent ability to conceal. Characters require a sophisticated knowledge and class in order to bear successfully the kind of distinction that Hermès represents. Second, it addresses the viewers of these programmes as highly informed and discerning consumers of images of Hermès bags. The ability to identify specific sizes, leathers and speculate upon the authenticity of the bag is remarkable, and can be considered as a particular kind of specialized and exclusive knowledge. These readings invite us to consider this accessory as something that exceeds its function as mere costuming or prop within the mise-en-scène, as the bag seems to have agency and at times overshadows the centrality of characters.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Colombia Broadcasting System (CBS), a major US television network, cancelled all of its popular rural programming (e.g. The Beverly Hillbillies [Paul Henning, CBS, 1962–71], Green Acres [Jay Sommers, CBS, 1965–71]). Known as the ‘rural purge’, the cancellations made way for more urbanthemed shows and strove to cater to higher ‘quality’ (presumably urban) viewers. At the same time, US Vogue Magazine featured the peasant look: a decidedly rural style, but one co-opted from ‘other’ places and times. In this article, we analyse contradictory and ambivalent representations of ‘rurality’, which we describe as the construction and appropriation of non-urban life as a kind of cultural authenticity that is alternately disparaged and celebrated. Using Fred Davis’s (1992) concept of identity ambivalences and Henri Lefebvre’s (1991 [1974]) theories on the production of space, we explore cultural discourse in the late 1960s and early 1970s to interpret the complex rural-urban dynamics in fashion and television.

Mythical Islands

Green Day’s American Idiot, Merriam Theater, Philadelphia, PA, 12 February 2013

‘Fabric of Fieldwork’, Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 13 April–23 June 2012

Shanghai Street Style, Toni Johnson-Woods and Vicki Karaminas with Photography by Fung Chan (2013) Bristol: Intellect, 168 pp., ISBN: 9781841505381, Paperback, £15.95, $25

Shanghai Street Style, Toni Johnson-Woods and Vicki Karaminas with Photography by Fung Chan (2013) Bristol: Intellect, 168 pp., ISBN: 9781841505381, Paperback, £15.95, $25

Why Would Anyone Wear That? Fascinating Fashion Facts, Celia E. Stall-Meadows with Illustrations by Leslie Stall Widener (2013) Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 83 pp., ISBN 9781841507279, Paperback, £9.95, $18, €12