Fashion and Cultural Studies 9781350104679, 9781350104686, 9781350104716, 9781350104709

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Copyright
Title
Contents
Plates
Figures
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Fashion Studies and Cultural Studies
Chapter 2 Intersectional, Transnational Fashion Subjects
Chapter 3 Fashioning the National Subject
Chapter 4 Racial Rearticulations and Ethnicities
Chapter 5 Religion, Fashion, and Spirituality
Chapter 6 Class Matters, Fashion Matters
Chapter 7 Gendering Fashion, Fashioning Gender: Beyond Binaries
Chapter 8 Sexual Subjectivities and Style-Fashion-Dress
Chapter 9 Dressed Embodiment
Chapter 10 Bodies in Motion through Time and Space
References
Index
Plate 1
Plate 2

Citation preview

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FASHION AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Dr. Susan B. Kaiser is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Davis, in the Departments of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and of Design. Her research centers on the interplay between intersectional, feminist cultural studies, and fashion studies, with a current interest in theorizing time through fashion. She is the author of The Social Psychology of Clothing: Symbolic Appearances in Context (1997) and Fashion and Cultural Studies (2012, 2021) and more than one hundred journal articles and book chapters in the fields of textiles, clothing, and fashion studies; cultural studies; consumer cultures; sociology; and related fields. She is editor of the journal Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, published by Intellect, and a fellow and past president of the International Textile and Apparel Association. Dr. Denise Nicole Green is Associate Professor at Cornell University, where she also directs the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection. She teaches fashion in the College of Human Ecology and is an affiliated faculty member in the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, Cornell Institute for Archaeology and Material Studies, American Studies Program, and the Department of Anthropology. As a fashion anthropologist, she uses ethnography, film production, historical methods, creative design, and curatorial practice to explore the intersections of design, culture, identities, and dressed embodiment. She is on the editorial boards of the Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, Fashion Studies, and Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty. She was vice president of publications for the Costume Society of America, 2017–21.

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First edition published in 2012 by Berg, reprinted in 2019 by Bloomsbury Visual Arts This edition published in 2021 Copyright © Susan B. Kaiser and Denise Nicole Green, 2021 Susan B. Kaiser and Denise Nicole Green have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Simone Eloisa White All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0467-9 PB: 978-1-3501-0468-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0470-9 eBook: 978-1-3501-0469-3 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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FASHION AND CULTURAL STUDIES SECOND EDITION Susan B. Kaiser and Denise Nicole Green

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CONTENTS

List of Plates ix List of Figures xi Acknowledgments xiii 1

Fashion Studies and Cultural Studies 1 Articulation 6 Style-Fashion-Dress 8 The Fields of Fashion Studies and Cultural Studies 9 Fashion Studies 10 Cultural Studies 14 Conceptualizing Culture and Fashion 16 Circuit of Style-Fashion-Dress Model 17 Production 19 Consumption 22 Distribution 24 Subject Formation 26 Regulation 29

2 Intersectional, Transnational Fashion Subjects 31 Assumption 1: Structure–Agency Dynamics Include Processes of Persuasion, Consent, and Resistance 33 Assumption 2: Subject Formation through Style-Fashion-Dress Is a Process of Navigating Intersectionalities 34 Assumption 3: Structures of Feeling—Expressed through Subject Formation and the Fashion Process Alike—Articulate Between Everyday Life and Culture through the Circuit of Style-Fashion-Dress 38 Ambiguity 39 Cultural Ambivalence 40 Cultural Anxiety 41 Assumption 4: The Field of Critical Fashion Studies Needs to Move from Identity Nots to Identity (K)nots 42 Assumption 5: Fashion Is Transnational—Not Merely Western or “Euromodern” 43

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Assumption 6: The Process of Negotiating Ambiguity Is Not a Level Playing Field, and It Is a Material Process—Especially in a Transnational Context

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3 Fashioning the National Subject 51 Nation ≠ Essence 51 Nation as Different Than: Representing the Other 53 Folk Costume, National Dress, and Fashion 54 Working the Hyphen: Nation-State and Style-Fashion-Dress 56 French Revolution 56 Chinese Cultural Revolution (and Beyond) 59 From European Expansion to Globalization 61 Decolonizing Fashion: Beyond the Metaphor 63 Globalization 66 Intersectionalities and Entanglements 69 4 Racial Rearticulations and Ethnicities 73 Race and Ethnicity: Sliding Signifiers 74 Racial and Ethnic Rearticulations 77 Color 79 Hair 82 Ethnic Rearticulations: Belongings-in-Difference 86 Sliding into Appropriation, Sliding into Religion 90 5 Religion, Fashion, and Spirituality 95 Subject Formation 99 Spirituality, Subjectivity, and Materiality 101 Modesty 103 Piety, Orthodoxy, Religiosity 106 Regulation 107 State Alignment with Religion 108 Freedom from Religion 108 Freedom of Religion (Religious Freedom) 110 Production, Distribution, and Consumption 110 The Jewish Diaspora and the Textile, Clothing, and Retail Industries 111 The Globalization of Muslim Fashion 113 6 Class Matters, Fashion Matters Conceptualizing Class Caste Systems Sumptuary Laws, Materials, and the “Natural” Order Class, Intersectionalities, and Industrial Capitalism From Textile to Apparel Production: At Home, in the Factory, and in Protest Class and Fast Fashion vi

117 119 121 122 124 128 133

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Contents

Metaphors of Class Structure and Change: The Flows of Fashion Status Claims and Status Demurrals

133 138

7 Gendering Fashion, Fashioning Gender: Beyond Binaries Soft Assemblages Marking, Unmarking, and Remarking Gender Sex, Gender, and Style-Fashion-Dress: Feminist Deconstructions Theorizing the Body and Style-Fashion-Dress Transgender Studies through Bodies and Style-Fashion-Dress Menswear Out of the Academic Closet Multiple Masculinities Zoot Suit La SAPE in Congo US National Survey of Male Intersectionalities

141 145 145 147 149 151 155 156 157 159 160

8 Sexual Subjectivities and Style-Fashion-Dress Sexual Subjectivities Binary “Beginnings” and Reversals Homophobic Discourses On the Protracted Coming Out of Heterosexuality 1960s and 1970s: Social Movements and Sexual Fashions 1980s and Beyond: Queering Fashion Gazing Subjects and Positionalities Sexuality through Intersectionalities

165 167 169 170 176 176 180 184 186

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Dressed Embodiment 189 From Phenomenology to Dressed Embodiment 190 Abstracting the Body and Representing Embodiment 192 Anthropometrics and Sizing 193 Stigmatizing and Celebrating Fat Bodies 194 Sizeism and the Fashion Industry 196 Flaunting Fat 198 Dis/abled Bodies 200 Athletics and Bodily Exceptionalism 200 Addressing Ableism 202 Disabling Environments and Style-Fashion-Dress 203 Fashioning Disability 204 Concealment 205 Diversion and Reframing 205 Modifying and Making 206 Compensation 206

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Social Inclusion Social Uniqueness Embodied Subjectivities

206 207 209

10 Bodies in Motion through Time and Space 211 Time and Space (and Place) 211 Age/Generation and Place 213 Fashion’s Way with Time in Space: Spatiotemporalities 218 Industrial Time 218 Anti-/Nonlinear Time and Space 221 Nostalgia 221 Time–Space Compression and “Speed-Space” 222 Uchronic Temporality and Utopian Spaces 226 Closing/Opening Thoughts 228 References 231 Index 255

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PLATES

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Juliana (8) and Sienna (almost 11) in Half Moon Bay, California, during the Covid-19 pandemic in January 2021 2 Lil Nas X performs on-stage wearing a holographic fringed cowboy-style getup by Danish brand Krone during Internet Live by BuzzFeed at Webster Hall on July 25, 2019 in New York City 3 A protester wearing a BLM facemask during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan, on June 14, 2020 4 Fiber to fabric to garment production in southern India, 2016–20 5 On June 20, 2020, people gathered for an antiracism protest in Hyde Park, London 6 Designer Patrick Kelly wears his signature look—overalls and a snapbrimmed baseball cap—at a fashion designers’ party against AIDS in Paris, France on October 26, 1988 7 Three examples of Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations’ shawls, circa 1882 8 Sans-culottes with spear and sword in Paris, France during the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century 9 Indigo-dyed shirt with the French word Non (no) rendered in repeat using a wax-resist surface design technique 10 Ahmed Sékou Touré (1922–84), first president of the Republic of Guinea, spears the serpent that is colonialism in this commemorative cloth from the late 1950s 11 Haa’yuups stands alongside his family’s ceremonial screen in the storage area of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, June 2010 12 A model walks the runway at the Viktor & Rolf Spring/Summer 2015 fashion show, “Van Gogh Girls,” during Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week on January 28, 2015, in Paris, France 13 Wearing kente cloth, Democratic lawmakers kneel on June 8, 2020, to observe a moment of silence on Capitol Hill for George Floyd and other victims of police brutality 14 A model walks the runway during Sister The 3rd Collection by Pyer Moss as part of New York Fashion Week at Kings Theatre on September 8, 2019, in Brooklyn, NY 15 Many multicolored kipas/yarmulkes for sale at a market in Jerusalem 16 A group of young, stylish Muslim women in London 17 Britain’s Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, leave from the West Door of St George’s Chapel on their wedding day, May 19, 2018, in Windsor, England

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18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

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Character Goh Peik Lin, played by Nora Lum (a.k.a. Awkwafina), in Crazy Rich Asians (2018), directed by Jon M. Chu Caricature of Beau Brummel in watercolor by Richard Dighton, 1805 US Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter, Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens, Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Stephen G. Breyer pose for the first picture with Roberts in his position in the Chief Justice Conference Room, Monday, October 3, 2005, at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC Henrik (almost 7) and Hope (almost 4) during the COVID-19 pandemic, April 2020 Denise shortly after her birth on April 15, 1985, in Upstate Community Hospital, Syracuse, NY A Sapeur group poses for pictures at a family house on February 12, 2017, in Kinshasa, DRC Trucker hat and camouflage tank top from the 2005–6 “Do Ask, Do Tell” collection by the clothing brand DITC (Dykes in the City) Lindy West in her wedding dress, 2015 Lizzo in a Moschino gown designed by Jeremy Scott and worn for The BRIT Awards at The O2 Arena on February 18, 2020 in London In March 2000, Australian Susie O’Neill, Olympic and World record holder, wears a controversial new suit called Fastskin, modelled on shark skin and improving swim times as much as three percent A corset designed by French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier and inspired by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo Keisha Greaves and her mother, Patricia Bryan, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 22, 2019. Greaves created the “Girls Chronically Rock” branded T-shirt line after being diagnosed with muscular dystrophy in her mid-20s. While living with a chronic disability, she has turned her love of and expertise in fashion into a successful career. Denise at 4 years of age in upstate New York, 1989 At center, a sweater designed and made by a knitter from the Cowichan First Nation. At left and right are knock-off designs by Ralph Lauren, which the brand called “Cowichan Sweaters” until bad publicity prompted a renaming of the sweaters to “Cowichan-inspired” Brianna Noble, equestrian businesswoman and community activist, prepares for an Afrofuturist tribute to the film Black Panther on 30 October 2020

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FIGURES

1.1 Möbius strip illustrating convergence of time and space through the fashioned body 4 1.2 Women in bathing suits march down an aisle at a union convention in support of the strike against manufacturer Gantner and Mattern 7 1.3 Circuit of style-fashion-dress 18 2.1 Intersectionalities among subject positions 36 2.2 Structures of feeling in the circuit of style-fashion-dress 39 3.1 Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) wears a dhoti and small cap of khadi cloth while sitting at a charka (spinning wheel), circa 1925 64 3.2 Contestants wear hybrid cheongsam dresses at a beauty contest held at a hotel in Singapore, circa 1955 68 4.1 Angela Davis wears an Afro hairstyle in May 1975 84 4.2 Artist Frida Kahlo (1907–54) wearing a huipil (blouse) and jewelry associated with her ethnic Mexican identity, circa 1945 89 4.3 Michael Fokine and Vera Fokina as the Golden Slave and Zobeïde in the 1910 Ballets Russes production Scheherazade 93 4.4 Turbans self-fashioned from scarves and worn by white-appearing women in France in 1944 93 5.1 John Calvin (1509–64) 97 6.1 Karl Marx in his frock coat, circa 1860 126 6.2 A group of women, many wearing shirtwaists, raise their hands to volunteer for picket duty during the New York Shirtwaist Strike of 1909, which was also known as the Uprising of 20,000 132 7.1 Jerome Mendelson models a Zoot suit in a clothing store in 1942 158 7.2 From left to right, Jamaican immigrants John Hazel (a 21-year-old boxer), Harold Wilmot (32), and John Richards (a 22-year old carpenter) arrive at Tilbury onboard the ex-troopship Empire Windrush 160 8.1 Writer Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), standing at right, was a prizewinning writer whose novel The Well of Loneliness was originally banned in Britain for its sympathetic approach to female homosexuality 173 8.2 American gay liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson (1945–92, wearing headband) and an unidentified person in facepaint, on 7th Avenue South, between Grove and Christopher Streets, at the second annual Stonewall anniversary march (Gay Liberation Day), later known as Gay Pride, New York, June 27, 1971 178 10.1 Susan at 4 years of age in Orléans, France, circa 1957 214

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was written by two white female professors at land-grant universities in the United States. The land-grant system dates to 1862, a time when Native Americans were further dispossessed of their territories through the Morrill Act (Lee and Ahtone 2020). Archaeological anthropologist Kurt Jordan (2020) explains, The federal government acquired Morrill Act lands through treaties (some ratified, but others unratified by the United States Senate), executive orders, and in some cases without any sort of treaty or agreement whatsoever. In all instances, negotiations were backed by the force of the US military and Indigenous Nations often had little or no bargaining power. Frequently violence, much of it genocidal in intent and impact, had taken place to expel Indigenous peoples shortly before US universities obtained the land.1 Writing this book has been a privilege, one enabled by asymmetrical power relations, colonial institutions, and dispossession, among other tragedies and inequalities. It is also a platform where we hope to address injustices by thinking critically about fashion and drawing upon diverse historical and contemporary examples. Fashion, style, and dressed embodiment are powerful forces that come to be through systems of production, consumption, distribution, and regulation that entangle in complex ways with subject formation—that is, who we are being and becoming every day through dress and in place. We begin our acknowledgments with the places—at once physical, economic, and institutional—from which we write. Susan teaches at the University of California, Davis, and lives near the university, which is located in Patwin tribal territories. For thousands of years, the land on which the main campus sits has been the home of Patwin people. Today, there are three federally recognized Patwin tribes: Cachil DeHe Band of Wintun Indians of the Colusa Indian Community, Kletsel Dehe Wintun Nation, and Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation. The Patwin people have remained committed to the stewardship of this land over many centuries. It has been cherished and protected, as elders have instructed the young through generations (https://diversity.ucdavis.edu/land-acknowledgement-statement). Denise is on the faculty at Cornell University and lives and works in the homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ (Cayuga Nation). The Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations that precede the establishment of Cornell University, the state of New York, and the United States of America. Cornell

1https://archaeology.cornell.edu/cornell-university-and-indigenous-dispossession-project

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has been called a “land grab” university (Lee and Ahtone 2020) because its land base and endowment were built through expropriation and theft of Indigenous lands across the United States (in addition to the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’). Through the Morrill Land Grant Act, Cornell ultimately dispossessed Indigenous peoples of 987,000 acres of land and mineral rights to 420,000 additional acres—all of which would become a foundation of the university’s endowment (read more: https://blogs.cornell.edu/cornelluniversityindig enousdispossession/). In addition to its connection with place, fashion is deeply entangled with time, and the second edition of this text was written during a particular moment in history— one in which the United States became violently and vividly reminded of its historical and ongoing structural racism and police brutality. In addition, a global pandemic, unchecked capitalism, and climate change shaped our perspectives as we wrote the revision. Amidst these challenges, we (Susan and Denise) carved out a collaborative process in the fullest sense. Susan was delighted when Denise agreed to be a co-author, and at every stage of the co-writing and decision making, Susan has been extremely grateful for Denise’s intellect, proactive passion, sense of social justice, creativity, and perseverance. Denise was honored to be asked to contribute to the revision, and enjoyed rethinking, reframing, and reimagining possibilities with Susan, who has been such an incredible mentor over the years and an innovative thinker in the field of fashion studies. We are collaborators with shared subjectivities and divergent ones. In authoring any text, it is important to acknowledge intersectional subjectivities amidst the places and times from which we write. We will discuss this further in Chapter 10, but it is also an entry point to this text. As white, middle-class, US Americans, we have benefited from white supremacy, class privilege, and access to education. As we emphasize throughout the book, we are always in a process of being and becoming through our appearances. In other words, who we are and how we look are entangled, produced, and reproduced through discourses, materials, and bodies. While we are both white, middle class, cisgender women with US citizenship, we differ with regard to age, sexual orientation, spiritual beliefs, dis/abilities, and, of course, dressed embodiment and preferences for style-fashion-dress. The revision of this text has been unsettling and has challenged us to reflect upon our assumptions, biases, and privileges. Dismantling systems of white supremacy and racism, as well as ableism, sizeism, ageism, xenophobia, transphobia, and other forms of inequality and discrimination means that we must continually and critically self-reflect, both as individuals and as part of academic communities, and make change through our scholarship (and the foci of our scholarship). We have endeavored to follow the erudite lead of Kimberly Jenkins, founder of the Fashion and Race database, in her effort to “expand the narrative of fashion history and challenge mis-representation within the fashion system.” Our revisions seek to redress absences and to rethink, deconstruct, and update examples and language that was found in the first edition while expanding upon new and more inclusive, nuanced discussions. We welcome critiques of this text and opportunities to further root out discriminatory thinking—so often latent and hegemonically “invisible”—in the field of fashion studies and beyond. xiv

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Together, we made extensive revisions throughout this edition. We especially want to thank our Bloomsbury editor, Georgia Kennedy, for expertly shepherding this process with professional competence, grace, patience, understanding, and encouragement from the beginning to the final submission. She garnered very helpful and thought-provoking assessments from several anonymous reviewers, whose generous suggestions we took to heart and hope we have addressed. Among those suggestions was the request for two additional chapters: one on religion and faith, and one on the body (including issues of size and dis/ability). Susan took the lead on the former, and Denise on the latter. We appreciate Georgia’s assistance in obtaining peer critiques of these two new chapters, and are very grateful to Heather Akou and Carmen Keist for their insightful suggestions and constructive comments. We owe a great intellectual debt to Carol Tulloch. Her conceptualization of stylefashion-dress continues to be transformative, productive, and full of possibility for critical fashion studies. Throughout this book, we use her terminology with gratitude to capture the complex interplay among style, fashion, and dress. Recognizing the interconnectedness of these three concepts and their part–whole relationships, Tulloch has opened up possibilities for a more inclusive approach to analysis, moving beyond binary oppositions that have plagued fashion, including fashion versus style, fashion versus dress, fashion versus traditional costume. Further, Tulloch’s (2010, 2016, 2020) critical race theoretical perspective has pushed the field forward in ways that thoughtfully and critically consider African diasporic experiences in relation to style-fashion-dress, expanding understandings of “aesthetics of presence,” decolonization, and joy, as well as enslavement, colonization, persecution, and discrimination. We have so many other additional fashion studies scholars we would like to acknowledge and thank for their inspiration and provocation: Susan Ashdown, Susan T. Avila, Jen Ayres, Ben Barry, Fatma Baytar, Gozde Goncu-Berk, Annette Becker, Sara T. Bernstein, Linda Arthur Bradley, Chris Breward, Judith Byfield, Patrizia Calefato, Elise Chatelain, Nina Cole, Shaun Cole, Maxine Craig, Jennifer Craik, Mary Lynn Damhorst, Alison Matthews David, Lucy Dunne, Joanne Eicher, Tameka Ellington, Caroline Evans, Joseph Hancock II, Jana Hawley, Janet Hethorn, John Jacob, Kimberly Jenkins, Heike Jenss, Yoo Jin Kwon, Minjung Lee, Reina Lewis, Tasha Lewis, Michael Mamp, Sara Marcketti, Joseph Medaglia, Christina Moon, Kristen Morris, Jo Paoletti, Huiju Park, Jean Parsons, Kimberly Phoenix, Eric Darnell Pritchard, Kelly Reddy-Best, Andy Reilly, Agnès Rocamora, Noliwe Rooks, Jooyoung Shin, Patrizia Sione, Anneke Smelik, Efrat Tseëlon, Connie Ulasewicz, Sue Watkins, Elizabeth Wilson, and our colleagues who are no longer with us—the late Fred Davis, Dana Goodin, and Charlotte Jirousek. We have had the privilege of working with amazing students while revising this book. In various ways, they have contributed to the rethinking of this text, for which we are truly grateful. Thank you to Grace Anderson, Sian Brown, Livia Caligor, Amanda Denham, Rachel Hope Doran, Kelsie Doty, Jenny Leigh Du Puis, Jessica Guadalupe Estrada, Rachel Getman, Mireya Gonzalez, Kate Greder, Georgia Hausmann, Chris Hesselbein, Joshua Johnson, Jane Leyva, Mona Maher, Dyese Matthews, Kaylani McCard, Christine McDonald, Victoria Moore, Caitlyn Park, Sarah Portway, Juliana daRoza, Kat Roberts, xv

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Vanessa Sanchez, Emily Satinsky, Leah Shenandoah, Lila Shermeta, Samantha Stern, Fin Sterner, Aureolus Stetzel, Quinessa Stibbins, Kyra Streck, Kelly Sullivan, Sophie Wang, Simone White, and Lynda Xepoleas. We are especially grateful to Lynda Xepoleas for her assistance with our bibliography and incredible attention to detail. Simone Eloisa White photographed the cover image for the book when she was a student in Denise’s class, which included a field trip to apparel manufacturing facilities north of Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, in January 2020. White’s photo shows garment workers manufacturing for the US export “tween” market at a factory known as Master Rao’s Temple for Hope, Opportunity, and Happiness, located in Doddaballapura, Karnataka, India. The photo reveals many layers, intersections, and entanglements of style-fashion-dress. The women sewing on the production line wear brightly colored, distinctive saris, hairstyles with fresh fragrant flowers, and earrings, all forms of selffashioning amidst the required personal protective equipment like masks and hairnets. The garment workers both make and wear fashion, and navigate the regulations of the factory floor as they sew clothing that will soon be sold to young women halfway across the world. This image challenges the false dichotomy between “producers” and “consumers” of fashion, a theme we revisit throughout this book. Susan would like to thank her colleagues and friends, who have provided inspiration and moral support in a wide variety of ways, especially those in the following departments and programs at UC Davis: Cultural Studies; Design; Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies; and Textiles and Clothing. So many diverse, critical, and creative insights have emerged from the students in these programs, as well! Many thanks to Anna Kuhn for ongoing encouragement and perspective. And I cannot thank Denise enough for collaborating with me; as with earlier projects we have worked on together, I have learned so much from you and have enjoyed every minute of our interactions. You give me so much hope for the future with your intellect, passion, and sense of purpose; I cannot thank you enough for the ways in which you inspire and push me to pursue new directions for critical fashion studies. Finally, I want to express gratitude to my sisters, Jeanette, Linda, and Pam, and my late parents, Clyde and Carolyn Benke, for fostering an ethos of lifelong learning, tolerance, and respect for others. To my grown children and families (Nathan, Christina, and grandchildren Sienna and Juliana; Carolyn, P. K., and grandchildren Henrik and Hope): thank you for helping me try to be current and for your support, love, and all of the joy! And to Mark, my special Covid companion in the last year and husband for 48 years, I cannot adequately express how grateful I am for your encouragement to complete this project, your gourmet meals, and everything else you do every day to bring happiness and meaning to life. Denise began sewing at a young age, thanks to her skilled mother, and this material practice began to prompt questions about the meaning(s) of clothes. I was (and still am) intrigued by the way people used fashion in disparate ways to convey themselves and began studying fashion as an undergrad at Cornell University. One afternoon while browsing the stacks of Mann Library, I found a copy of Susan’s 1997 book The Social Psychology of Clothing: Symbolic Meanings in Context. I could hardly contain my excitement—this was

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a topic I was endlessly curious about, and the book was extensive. I am so grateful for this moment in the library, finding a book that transformed my life. It brought me into contact with Susan, and eventually to my graduate work at UC Davis, and now this book project. Thank you Susan for believing in me and for always demonstrating kindness and generosity in teaching, mentorship, and collaboration. I am also grateful to my other graduate and undergraduate mentors, Gastón Gordillo, Charles Menzies, and Charlotte Townsend-Gault, at the University of British Columbia; Julie Wyman and Joan Chandler (in addition to Susan) at UC Davis; and Van Dyk Lewis, Anita Racine, Margaret Frey, and the late Charlotte Jirousek at Cornell University. I would like to thank my colleagues, students, and fellow alumni from Cornell University for their ongoing inspiration and insight, and especially in the College of Human Ecology, Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design, the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, the Human Sexuality Collection, and the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection (thanks, Helen!). I am grateful to the quuʔas from Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations who have welcomed me into their lives and trusted me to conduct research in their communities (thanks especially to my frequent collaborator and co-director Haa’yuups). My parents, Jean and Robert Green, have made so much possible for me and my brother, Casey, and I feel incredibly fortunate for their ceaseless love and support. Thank you to my dear friends, family near and far, my cats, yoga community, and especially to my love, Joan Lubin.

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CHAPTER 1 FASHION STUDIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Fashion is not a thing or an essence. Rather, it is a social and embodied process of negotiation and navigation through the murky and yet-hopeful waters of what is to come. Fashion involves becoming collectively with others. When and where does this happen, and who gets to decide what constitutes fashion? It turns out that this is neither a smooth nor a seamless process: multiple perspectives compete and contribute based upon diverse cultural histories, vested interests, and hopes and dreams. The process of fashion is inevitably linked to making and sustaining, as well as resisting and dismantling, power. Fashion materializes as various bodies move through time and space. Time and space are both abstract concepts and contexts: the process of deciphering and expressing a sense of who we are (becoming) happens in tandem with deciphering and expressing when and where we are. This is not as simple as it may sound; the process of expressing this “who, when, and where” is an ongoing challenge of traversing multiple ambiguities and contradictions associated with the following: ●

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being an individual fashion subject in the context of a global economy, in which fashion flows through complex, transnational dynamics that are at once visual and material, virtual and tangible, local and global; simultaneously referencing elements and issues of the past with those of the present and emerging future; concurrently and intersectionally embodying and fashioning gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, class, nation, age/generation, body size, dis/ability, and other “subject positions” that are themselves shifting through complex power relations; desiring at once to fit in with one’s social world and to express some degree of uniqueness within that world; and an ever-changing interplay between freedoms and constraints, which refers to the ongoing structure–agency debate in the social sciences and humanities.

Fashion is never finished, and it crosses all kinds of boundaries. It is ongoing and changes with each person’s visual and material interpretations of who they are becoming and how this becoming connects with others’ experiences within time and place. Fashion is also about producing clothes and appearances, working through ideas, negotiating subject positions (e.g., gender, ethnicity, class), and navigating power relations. It involves mixing, borrowing, belonging, and changing. But it is also about matching, creating, differentiating, and continuing. It is a complex process that entangles multiple perspectives and approaches. The study of fashion, as well, requires

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integrative and imaginative ways of knowing. Throughout this book, we draw on fashion studies and feminist cultural studies concepts, metaphors, and models that challenge simple oppositional (either/or), linear (straight), and essentialist (predetermined, fixed, bounded) ways of thinking about and with fashion. Oppositional thinking produces false dichotomies by oversimplifying differences and limiting options for the analysis of connections and entanglements. Framing fashion in either/or terms also prevents understandings of what the feminist geographer Doreen Massey called “power geometries”: for example, the complex interplay between time and space (Massey 1993). In other words, power is multidimensional, not just oppositional. Fashion helps us to contemplate power in ways that multiply, complicate, and intersect beyond (and in the space in-between) oppositional thinking. Studying fashion is a both/and, rather than an either/or, activity. Fashion thrives upon contradictions (conflicting truth claims) and ambivalences (conflicting emotions); hence, it requires both/and ways of knowing and feeling. Combining fashion and feminist cultural studies perspectives encourages thinking that disrupts, blurs, and transcends binary (either/or) oppositions. One of the fundamental binary oppositions feminist theorists have critiqued is masculinity versus femininity, because this either/or way of thinking has historically limited options for considering gender in a more expansive and inclusive sense, perpetuated power-related hierarchies, and prioritized white masculinity as the dominant way of being in the world. In the realm of modern, white, Western fashion, as we will see, this has meant that there has been a dominant myth that men are not supposed to care too much about how they look. Their power comes from being “unmarked” (Phelan 1993) as contrasted with women, who assume the “masque” of femininity (Tseëlon 1995) and hence become more “marked” as the “other,” according to the mythical binary opposition. This myth, which becomes normalized through media representations and social interactions, reinforces the idea that dominant masculinity is about gazing at women, while dominant femininity is about being gazed at (Berger 1972). Disrupting this binary, essentialist way of thinking about gender alone, Black feminist theorists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), bell hooks (2000a), and Patricia Hill Collins (2019) have emphasized the ways in which the intersectionalities between gender and race have historically disadvantaged African American women, who at once find themselves in multiple and intersecting systems of oppression. Gender (considered in more depth in Chapter 7) is not the only problematic binary opposition or dualism that has limited thinking about fashion, however. Indeed, until recent decades, the study of fashion has been stifled by the either/or thinking associated with modern Western thought: ● ● ● ● ● ●

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changing fashion versus “fixed” dress modern fashion versus traditional costume Western dress versus “the rest” the future versus the past time versus space structure versus agency

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masculinity versus femininity white versus Black straight versus gay cisgender versus transgender unmarked versus marked dressing to belong versus dressing to differentiate mainstream consumer fashion versus alternative street style consumption versus production, and so on.

In each of these cases, the first term gets prioritized over the second and often becomes normalized, and herein lies the problem: power becomes constructed in simplistic and uncritical terms. Obscured by these constructions are the overlapping realities, the contradictions, the third terms (e.g., bisexuality, genderfluidity) or other multiple possibilities that are in-between or outside of these binaries, and the subtle, subversive ways in which power operates in everyday life. We always need to be on the lookout for additional terms, beyond two, and to foster a better understanding of the space in-between and around the two. As we will see throughout this book, the pairs of terms above would benefit from further terms or a rethinking of their relationality as both/and (or ideally, when possible, both/and/and [von Busch 2020]) rather than either/or. Some of the terms used above, such as fixed and the rest, should probably be dispensed with altogether. However, sometimes there are two terms that need to be looked at together in order to get a sense of a both/and whole. Among the binary oppositional terms listed above, four stand out in this way: time and space (considered in Chapter 10); and unmarked and marked or, better, processes of unmarking and marking; structure and agency; and dressing to belong and dressing to differentiate. There are some terms that cannot be easily disentangled as a pair because we experience them simultaneously (in both/and ways) through everyday embodied experience. How can we visualize “twos” as interdependent or convergent, rather than oppositional? The cultural theorist Noam Chomsky (1986) talks about convergence as a kind of mathematical mystery, using the metaphor of the Möbius strip (see Figure 1.1). In the nineteenth century, the German mathematician Augustus Möbius found that a strip or ribbon that is two-sided can be experienced as one continuous surface. There is a kind of convergence that results when there is no inside, no outside, no beginning, and no end. When the ends of a strip of fabric or ribbon are attached and the resulting loop is slightly twisted, it becomes possible to move along a path without leaving a side or crossing an edge. Normally, fashion is all about crossings, intersections, and entanglements, but as the Möbius strip reminds us metaphorically, it is also about convergence and connection. As individuals fashion their bodies (see Entwistle 2000), for example, they experience this process as a convergence of time and space. We cannot separate when we are from where we are in the course of everyday experience. The field of fashion studies requires multiple metaphors and models to think with at once; part of the task of fashion studies is to mix metaphors in ways that enable critical

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Figure 1.1  Möbius strip illustrating convergence of time and space through the fashioned body. Designed and constructed by Aureolus Stetzel.

and creative understandings of the pleasures and power relations associated with how we dress or style our appearances in everyday life. We need multiple metaphors or models (Kaiser 2008) to think about the complex “hows” and “whys” of body fashionings. Textiles are both material and symbolic; hence, they hold a lot of potential for understanding both physical and sociocultural qualities. Given the flexible, malleable nature of two-dimensional fabrics and their complex production, textile metaphors abound. One of these involves fabric’s ability to fold: to bend, to wrinkle, to twist, to drape. Cultural theorists such as Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) found “the fold” to be a productive metaphor for issues of time, space, and subjectivity (being and becoming). For example, Benjamin observed that the fold represents the ways in which fashion “contains the ghost of the past in the present via the recycling of past styles”; it fosters memories such as those of a child holding onto the folds of their mother’s skirt (Benjamin in Geczy and Karaminas 2016: 88–9). Benjamin saw the fold as a model that challenges any modern idea of linearity in fashion history. Fashion, that is, has a nonlinear or even antilinear (Evans and Vaccari 2020: 21) way with time: it simultaneously evokes memories of the “past present,” on the one hand, and an “anticipated future,” on the other (Geczy and Karaminas 2016: 88). Gilles Deleuze used the metaphor of the fold in a slightly different way, but one that also highlights both/and ways of knowing, rather than thinking in terms of either/or 4

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oppositions. Folding and unfolding, in Deleuze’s view, are not opposite essences but rather part of ongoing processes of infinite possibility or becoming (Deleuze and Strauss 1991: 227, 243). These ongoing processes represent the agency of action, as “philosophy finds in the fold the expression of a continuous and vital force of being and becoming” (Conley 2005: 180). As fashion theorist Anneke Smelik (2014) puts it: There is thus always an exteriority on the outside, and an interiority on the inside, which can swap places in the folds of fashion. It is this eternal process of moving in-between inside and outside that the fold expresses its unlimited freedom. The fold is a way of thinking space and time as the same thing, or rather as a relation folded upon one another. (47, emphasis added) Smelik (2014) goes on to say that the concept of the fold “demolishes binary oppositions” (38); this is a key idea in feminist philosophical thought (beginning with the binary opposition between masculinity and femininity), in addition to Deleuze’s formulation. And it applies in folds to fashion studies. Materially, the fold can take on a variety of forms in fashion, including pleats, ruffles, bows, subtle twists, knots, and so on. Throughout this book, a variety of metaphors are used alongside the textile metaphors and the Möbius strip (and its convergence of two concepts) in order to capture the complexity of flows, intersections, and entanglements among multiple concepts (e.g., identities, materials, and practices). In Chapter 10, we come back to the theme of time and space—taken together and intimately connected. For now, it is helpful to reflect on the ways in which, when worn on moving bodies, “folds of fashion” seem to take on a material life of their own. Deleuze originally focused on the embellishments associated with the European Baroque aesthetic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with cut and sewn parts of garments that continue to present themselves on fashion runways, as well as on bodies in everyday life. However, the concept of the fold also applies extremely well in cultural contexts that involve folding, wrapping, and draping textiles on the body on a daily basis: Indian saris, Sikh turbans, Muslim hijab, and so on. Each time the textiles are manipulated, wrapped, or “folded” in one form or another, they become at least a little different: a process of becoming. We need multiple metaphors or models, in part, to achieve a goal of inclusivity in fashion studies. Indeed, fashion highlights the multiple intersections and entanglements among gender, race, ethnicity, national identity, religion, social class, sexuality, body size, dis/ability, and other facets of our identities. Even more forcefully, it plays an active role in producing intersectionalities and entanglements: visibly, materially, conceptually. The field of fashion studies brings these intersections and entanglements to light and helps us interpret flows and convergences along the way and, accordingly, has much to contribute to the field of cultural studies. At the same time, the field of cultural studies has much to offer to the field of fashion studies. Both fashion studies and cultural studies remind us that we have to move beyond either/or binary oppositions in order to make sense of everyday life. Why and how? 5

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Articulation Let’s pursue an example of moving beyond either/or, binary oppositions by using a key idea in cultural studies: articulation. The influential cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall developed this concept, pointing out that the word “articulate” has at least two meanings: (1) to connect or to join, and (2) to express. In cultural studies terms, it involves bringing together phenomena that “do not necessarily hang together” to forge new linkages and make new statements (2017: 241). So at its inception, articulation requires both/and thinking. The linkages and statements created are historically specific; they provide a sense of closure that may foster productive change incrementally, but that closure is likely to be temporary—in and of the moment (and space). To be sure, articulation is a truly embodied concept. Think about all of the parts of the body that have to work together to allow articulation through speech: the tongue, lips, jaw, vocal cords and other speech-related organs, bones, and muscles. It is only through their everyday articulations that we are able to speak—as just one form of connection and expression—through a complex blending of physiological and symbolic processes. In many ways, this kind of spoken articulation becomes a metaphor for having a voice or a sense of agency through everyday looks or fashionings of the body. Individuals mix and match different elements to formulate temporary expressions about who they are or, more accurately, are becoming. In a demonstration of both/and articulation, Stuart Hall used jazz as an example of the articulation of structure and freedom. A jazz player himself, he said that he loved the tension associated with being “set free to be creative because you knew there was always an underlying structure” (Hall 2017: 129). In many ways, fashion, too, offers a combination of structure and freedom (which can loosely be equated with agency: an exercise of “voice”). Figure 1.2 depicts a more fashion-related example of exercising voice: garment workers protesting amidst a labor dispute, wearing the swimwear that they and other garment workers made in the factories. With both their actions and their embodiment of the suits of their labor, they ironically straddle issues of structure and agency—that is, “voice” within the context of the structures of their employment and their gender. In cultural studies, articulation is also a method that can be used to analyze culture (Slack 1996). It is a method based on the recognition that people articulate— combining this and that to make all kinds of visual statements and to display agency through style and other everyday practices. Analytically, the method of articulation involves breaking down wholes that appear “natural” or harmonious and identifying differences, contradictions, or fractures in the whole. The method of articulation is not just a process of negative critique. It goes further by rearticulating into other wholes, by considering new possibilities and formations, according to cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg (2010: 22), or by envisioning and building up new frameworks for interpretation. Grossberg (2010) describes how as a method one might visualize articulation as LEGO building blocks to demonstrate the breakdown of wholes that appear “natural” or harmonious by identifying differences, contradictions, or fractures in the whole. But key to articulation is not only the deconstruction of the whole but 6

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Figure 1.2  Women in bathing suits march down an aisle at a union convention in support of the strike against manufacturer Gantner and Mattern. Photo courtesy of the Kheel Center for Labor Management and Documentation Archives, Cornell University. Collection #5780, Archives of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, photo ID 5780PB33F7F.

also the construction of a new formation (joining disparate elements) that creates novel frameworks and has cultural and political resonance (Grossberg 2010: 22). LEGOs and jazz offer vivid metaphors for thinking about what articulation does to join structure and freedom, as well as about deconstruction and reconstruction. Even more vivid and compelling for fashion studies, however, is the metaphor of the body being continually fashioned and refashioned—through articulations and rearticulations as individuals combine this and that to make all kinds of visual statements through style as a quotidian practice. Plate 1 depicts Susan’s granddaughters Juliana (8) and Sienna (almost 11); their styles articulate through this-and-that coordination in everyday life: in this case, for a trip to a beach in northern California. On an unusually warm day in the winter of 2021, it was hard to know exactly what to wear to a usually chilly place. Juliana (left) is wearing a bathing suit under her dress (a hand-me-down from one of Sienna’s friends). She pairs the dress with camouflage leggings and mismatched socks (one of her signature stylings). Her facemask has pandas on it along with hints of pink that match one of her socks and the strap of her backpack. Her Fitbit watch is an apparel technology that tracks time as well as her bodily movements, but it also has aesthetic features and matches the stripe in her other sock. Sienna, too, has tiny pink accents in her style: her Fitbit watch, part of 7

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her backpack, and the tab on the zipper of her jacket. Overall, however, she favors blue, which is the dominant color of the separates in her wardrobe. Juliana and Sienna say some of the choices were deliberate and some were rather random (e.g., what was handy and clean); regardless, the process of putting looks together constitutes a process of articulation in everyday life—in ways that the apparel industry can never fully anticipate.

Style-Fashion-Dress Fashion theorist Carol Tulloch (2010) articulates style-fashion-dress as a system of concepts; she uses the hyphens between each term to propose whole-and-part relationships. She also uses each term on its own: “As long as the precision of their meanings are clear, they are always connected as part of the overall purpose of a subject of study” (Tulloch 2010: 274). She uses style as “agency—in the construction of self through the assemblage of garments, accessories, and beauty regimes that may, or may not, be ‘in fashion’ at the time of use” (Tulloch 2016: 4). Tulloch further describes style as “part of the process of self-telling, that is, to expound an aspect of autobiography of oneself through the clothing choices an individual makes”—what she has come to call style narratives (Tulloch 2010: 276, 2016: 5). In The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora, Tulloch (2016) elaborates on the importance of style narratives as an “aesthetic of presence, a technique of being to counter the aesthetics of invisibility that people of the African diaspora have had to overcome since slavery” (3, original emphasis). The larger articulation of style-fashion-dress locates style in the context of fashion: a social process in which style narratives are collectively “in flux with time” (Riello and McNeil 2010: 1). Fashion as a social process encompasses more than clothing style. Its reach also spans food and furniture preferences, popular culture, language, technology, science, and many other dimensions of culture and everyday worlds. However, there is something that is especially compelling about fashion in the context of the body’s appearance because it is so “up-close” and personal in everyday experience and perception. Fashion matters in everyday life and is produced and performed through bodies. Dress, like style and in conjunction with fashion, begins with the body. Fashion sociologist Joanne Entwistle (2001) has observed that “dress cannot be understood without reference to the body … and the body has always and everywhere” been dressed. As we will discuss further in Chapter 9, she developed the concept of “situated bodily practice” to highlight the embodied nature of dressing (34). Part of this situated, embodied practice involves the ways in which people modify and/or dress their bodies, as dress scholars Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne Eicher (1992) have conceptualized. They have defined dress as “an assemblage of modifications of the body and/or supplements to the body” (1). In recent years, the concept of “assemblage” has assumed added significance in feminist and queer studies. The body itself is an assemblage of sorts—combining biological, social, and cultural dimensions of self-understanding and public presentation—as Ann Fausto-Sterling (2003: 128) notes in her description of

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gender as a “soft assemblage” (discussed further in Chapter 7). The feminist and queer studies scholar Jasbir Puar (2017) has used the concept of assemblage to characterize the complex array of objects and affects (feelings) that become embodied in relation to the interplay among visually perceivable aspects of the body (e.g., skin color) and dress (e.g., a Sikh turban), as well as the emotions associated with gender, sexuality, race, religion, and nation since 9/11. Notably, all three of these terms—style, fashion, and dress—can be used as verbs as well as nouns; they refer to processes and concepts, so there is a family resemblance among them (Barnard 2002). Together with the use of articulation as a method in cultural studies, we can recognize the parts (the individual terms) and wholes (the system that connects them). Clearly, the terms overlap, but each sheds some light on a different practice or process. It becomes possible to break down the system while recognizing that new articulations will occur. For example, in Plate 2, musical performer Montero Lamar Hill, known professionally as Lil Nas X, articulates between two different musical genres through his style-fashion-dress. He combines rap and country and the aesthetics that correspond with each. He earned the moniker “Father of Fringe” for wearing traditional cowboy-style jackets, but made of nontraditional colors and materials, like the holographic vinyl seen in Plate 2. His look is both cowboy and rapper, traditional and contemporary. He also uses style-fashion-dress to articulate between multiple intersecting and overlapping identities: born outside of Atlanta, Georgia, in 1999, he is part of Generation Z, also known as “Zoomers,” and negotiates his generational and regional identities in conversation with class, time, Blackness, camp aesthetics (discussed further in Chapter 8), and queerness through the dynamic of style-fashion-dress. In his hit song “Old Town Road,” the lyrics “Cowboy hat from Gucci / Wrangler on my booty” bring together luxury fashion (e.g., Gucci) and workwear (e.g., Wrangler) through Lil Nas X’s embodiment (e.g., “my booty”). Style-fashion-dress (a fashion studies concept) and articulation (a cultural studies concept and method) work well together; they cut both ways to enable understandings of context.

The Fields of Fashion Studies and Cultural Studies As interdisciplinary fields, both fashion studies and cultural studies require the perspectives of multiple disciplines, theories, methods, and practices in order to analyze fashion and culture critically and thoughtfully. Both fashion studies and cultural studies began to develop as fields in the latter half of the twentieth century although, in some form or another, can be traced to earlier interest in history, culture, and dress as crosscultural phenomena. They both blend various disciplines in the humanities (e.g., art, art history, design, the dramatic arts, history, literature), the social sciences (e.g., anthropology, geography, sociology, psychology), and related interdisciplinary fields (e.g., gender studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies), as well as the sciences.

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Fashion Studies Interest in the study of dress is centuries old. According to British dress historian Lou Taylor (2004), over two hundred collections of engravings, etchings, and woodcuttings were published in Germany, Italy, France, and Holland between 1520 and 1610. Europeans had an intense interest in understanding people in the “newly discovered remote corners of the world” (Taylor 2004: 5). Yet they did so in a way that created a binary opposition between self and other. Taylor indicates that these early publications are a major source of information on the visual representations of “European notions of the barbarous and exotic Other” (5). She discusses the distinct histories between museum collections focusing on ethnographic (e.g., folk, peasant) dress versus those highlighting “fashionable Euro-American dress” (311), which has contributed to the false dichotomy between “modern fashion” and “traditional costume,” mentioned earlier. Moreover, Taylor notes how the study of dress history has moved toward more interdisciplinary, critical, and inclusive approaches in recent decades, yet there is still much to be done to recover diverse dress histories around the world. Similarly, Christopher Breward (1995) has called for, and demonstrated the benefits of, blending art history, design history, and cultural studies to foster a “new cultural history” with “a more questioning framework which allows for explanations which are multi-layered and open-ended” (3–4). Recently, fashion studies scholars and historians Kimberly Jenkins and Jonathan Square have each created digital humanities platforms that do the work of expanding and disrupting the fashion history canon.1 These platforms create possibilities for both/and thinking and challenge the white supremacy of both the fashion industry and the academic field. Fashion studies as an interdisciplinary field also emerged from late nineteenthcentury thinking about culture, social class, design, and modernity in the “Western” world—in fields as varied as anthropology, art history, history, literary studies, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. This period also saw the institutionalization of design education, a product of the Arts and Crafts movement in England that sought to elevate both the quality of design and the working conditions of the craftspeople who performed the labor. In the field of sociology, Georg Simmel (1957 [1904]) was fascinated with the interplay between social-psychological impulses of imitation (to be like others) and differentiation (to distinguish oneself from others). This interplay, he argued, propelled fashion change in modern societies. He, like the economic sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1899), attributed much of this change to social mobility in an open, “free” society. Veblen highlighted the hypocrisy associated with the “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous leisure” of the bourgeois (upper-middle) classes (to be discussed further in Chapter 6). Unlike Simmel, Veblen did not take fashion seriously as a social process and cultural phenomenon; he seemed to think that fashion made no economic sense and was the source of society’s ills. In the 1980s, the British feminist fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson (1985) critiqued Veblen by pointing out his masculine, utilitarian bias. She argued instead for a more 1https://www.fashioningtheself.com and https://fashionandrace.org

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complex approach using themes of ambivalence and contradiction. She noted that “we both love and hate fashion,” just as we both “love and hate capitalism itself ” (14). She argued further that there is a profound modern, Western (masculine-biased) sense of unease and ambiguity about the body and its relation to clothing. Somewhat similarly, the American sociologist Fred Davis (1992) attributed fashion change itself to instabilities related to “culturally-coded identities” such as gender and social class, among others. Like Wilson (1985) and Davis (1992), Kaiser, Nagasawa, and Hutton (1991, 1995) interpreted fashion through concepts of ambivalence and (its cousin) ambiguity. Drawing on symbolic interaction—a school of thought within sociology that has had strong ties with cultural studies since the 1980s—Kaiser et al. highlighted the importance of negotiation as a social process in fashion change and synthesized this theme from the works of (1) Gregory Stone (1969) in his analysis of appearance and the self in relation to others, (2) Herbert Blumer (1969) in his treatise on fashion as a process of “collective selection,” and (3) essays by Fred Davis, which were later integrated into his 1992 book. There are multiple genealogies of fashion theory. Just a few are included here by way of introduction, but the works of other contributors are included to the extent possible throughout this book. Genealogies of fashion theory are complicated and cross-cutting; interdisciplinary routes are neither separate nor linear. Another, overlapping genealogy derives from social studies of textiles and clothing developed in the United States in home economics programs in the land-grant system (historically an agricultural system) of higher public education. Initially, this system addressed issues of production and consumption in highly gendered and place-based ways: with production as a masculine process outside of the home and consumption as a feminine activity that enhanced homelife. Yet there were notable exceptions, such as at Cornell University, where Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose co-founded a program in home economics (now the College of Human Ecology) which sought to reconsider the home as a space of labor, scientific inquiry, and creative production. They also developed academic programs to offer career pathways outside of the home, including fashion and textiles. The “Costume Shop” was created in 1918 to give students experience in production, and they worked with clients to develop and create fashions that would appeal to their everyday needs and desires. At Cornell, home economics embraced “the art and science of living,” a mission that guided the college and its nascent fashion program to bridge art and science to better the lives of people. The legacy of this approach is evident at Cornell, and other universities where fashion programs descended from home economics, which consider clothing (and fashion) as a basic human need (along with food and shelter), an important form of individual and cultural expression, and an industry. Since the 1950s and 1960s, textiles and clothing scholars have studied issues of selfesteem, social meaning, and other social and psychological considerations (e.g., Damhorst 1985; Horn 1965; Kaiser 1985, 1997; Miller-Spellman, Damhorst, and Michelman 2005; Rosencranz 1950, 1962, 1965; Ryan 1966); ethnographic and cross-cultural research (e.g., Eicher, Evenson, and Lutz 2008; Roach and Eicher 1965, 1973); historical studies 11

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(e.g., Farrell-Beck and Gau 2002; Paoletti 1985, 1987); and economic analyses of clothing consumption (Winakor 1969). Textile science faculty conducted research on, and taught students about, material properties such as durability and colorfastness. By the early 2000s, fashion design and fashion merchandising could be found in many universities throughout the United States, with the other areas (e.g., social psychology, cultural and historical studies, textile science) still playing important supporting roles. Similar programs rooted in the history of home economics exist in South Korea, Japan, China, India, Canada, and other countries. In Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites and Practices, fashion studies scholar Heike Jenss (2016) describes how the interdisciplinary field of fashion studies was influenced by an increased “blurring of genres” and disciplines in the humanities and social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s, along with a “paradigm shift toward … contextuality and constructionism.” By the 1990s, fashion studies had begun to “crystallize” as a truly interdisciplinary field (7). Interdisciplinary, transnational, and critical studies of style-fashion-dress have burgeoned since the 1990s. In 1997, Berg Publishers produced the “Dress, Body, Culture” book series, along with the journal Fashion Theory, which launched in 1997. These works have circulated a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship on historical and transnational cultural studies of style-fashion-dress. In the twenty-first century, the field of fashion studies has exploded with publications. In 2010, Berg introduced the journal Fashion Practice, and the publisher Intellect began to publish the journal Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty. Also in 2010, Oxford University Press published the ten-volume Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion (edited by Joanne B. Eicher), which included entries from scholars around the world. In addition to the existing interdisciplinary academic programs, new fashion studies programs emerged in Canada, France, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States (e.g., Parsons New School for Design), and elsewhere. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, more fashion-focused readers, handbooks, and journals were introduced. The Bloomsbury publication The Handbook of Fashion Studies (2013) pulled together essays related to the themes of time, space, materiality, agency and policy, science and technology, and sustainability (Black et al. 2013). The British publisher Intellect began to publish Film, Fashion & Consumption (2012); Clothing Cultures (2013); Fashion, Style, and Popular Culture (2014); Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion (2014); International Journal of Fashion Studies (2014); and Studies in Costume & Performance (2016). Ben Barry and Alison Matthews David co-founded Fashion Studies, an open-access digital journal that launched their first issue in 2018. Other digital platforms have emerged recently as well, including The Fashion and Race Database (https://fashionandrace.org), which mentioned earlier is an open-source platform for written works, exhibitions, and curricular materials that was founded in 2017 by fashion studies scholar Kimberly Jenkins. Historian Jonathan Michael Square created Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom (https://www. fashioningtheself.com), another open-access resource with a corresponding social media account and virtual community “for exploring larger questions of race, identity, and equity” (Square 2020). 12

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The need to move beyond stereotypical notions of who gets included in fashion studies has proven an important emergent theme in recent scholarship. The first edition of this book, Fashion and Cultural Studies (Kaiser 2012), sought to transcend a hegemonic perspective on fashion (i.e., one that prioritizes the perspectives of white, Western, thin, bourgeois, straight women) by fostering a more inclusive, intersectional understanding of multiple, overlapping, and fluid identities. Since the first edition, there has been increasing scholarship on all of these issues, furthering the need to reframe the paradigm of fashion studies by analyzing inclusion and exclusion, breaking down false dichotomies or binary oppositions that have elevated some voices, bodies, and appearances while marginalizing and subjugating others. Fashion scholars have increasingly asked: whose bodies have been absent from the fashion media, pedagogical materials, and scholarly productions? Scholars such as Lauren Downing Peters (2014, 2017, 2019a, 2019b), Carmen Keist (2017), Deborah Christel (2014, 2018), and Ben Barry (2014, 2019) have pointed out that exclusion of fat bodies in fashion studies, for example, contributes to sizeism and fatphobia. Christel (2018) has argued for “fattening fashion pedagogy,” while Keist and Peters have used the historical record to understand how design discourses have pathologized and marginalized fat women’s bodies through descriptive categories like “stoutwear” and “plus-sized fashion.” Fashion studies scholar Kelly Reddy-Best has worked with colleagues to examine textbooks in the field of fashion and have consistently found an absence of racial and body size diversity (Reddy-Best and Choi 2020; Reddy-Best et al. 2018a, 2018b, 2018c). Other issues that have been of increasing concern to fashion scholars since the 1990s include the ways in which the fashion system often exploits labor and the environment (discussed later in this chapter in the discussion on production), as well as cultures. At the time of this writing, The Research Collective for Decolonizing Fashion, which was founded in 2012, has advocated for “critical investigation and dialogue into that commonly denied, forgotten or otherwise hidden diversity, and explores interconnections among fashion systems outside the dominant ‘world fashion city’ network, by providing a multidisciplinary and multicultural forum where new critical paradigms can be developed from cross-cultural perspectives.”2 The expansion of social media over the past fifteen years has created a platform to call out fashion designers, brands, celebrities, and other “influencers” for cultural appropriation and other ways that their fashions perpetuate exclusionary, racist, classist, fatphobic, transphobic, xenophobic, and other discriminatory ideologies. As we move toward the third decade of the twenty-first century, fashion studies scholars and social media watchdogs alike are thinking critically about fashion systems from multiple perspectives that consider both the detrimental and exploitative aspects of fashion and the simultaneous possibilities that fashion offers as a form of expression and resistance. In 2018, fashion scholars Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun offered a helpful history of the study of style-fashion-dress, arguing convincingly that (1) fashion history had

2https://rcdfashion.wordpress.com/about/

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been Eurocentric in its focus, and (2) the paradigm around fashion scholarship had shifted from the idea that fashion “began” in “post-1350 Europe and its diaspora” to a wider understanding of fashion history as a “global phenomenon” (Welters and Lillethun 2018: 7). They picked up on fashion scholar Jennifer Craik’s (2009) concept of the “fashion impulse” to provide global historical evidence of “the desire to embellish the human body” as the primary reason for dress and the human desire for novelty or change (Welters and Lillethun 2018: 29)—across time and space (far beyond, if not before, the documentation of upper-class European fashion change). Part of the problem of the Eurocentric bias in fashion history, they argue, stems from the almost exclusive focus on changes in the ways in which garments were tailored (i.e., cut and sewn) to fit the body, excluding changes in textile design, draped garments, and the grooming and accessorizing of the body (e.g., hair, makeup, jewelry) that had occurred throughout the world. These conversations mark an important shift toward decolonizing fashion studies by critically reflecting upon how Eurocentrism has been produced and reified by our scholarship and teaching in the field. As anthropologist Angela Jansen (2015) has argued, we must begin by rejecting the notion of a singular fashion system and consider instead how multiple fashion systems articulate and develop “in conjunction, competition, collaboration and independently” (2). Multiple fashion systems is another way to think about both/and, and is one approach acknowledging and uprooting systemic racism with the field and the fashion industry. Recent open-access digital humanities projects like The Fashion and Race Database (Jenkins 2017) and Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom (Square 2019) do the work of bringing forth multiple stories, fashion histories, and perspectives in an accessible medium. In other words, they work toward dismantling systems of white supremacy that have been institutionalized in fashion pedagogy, scholarship, and the industry and make it available publicly. In 2020, the journal Fashion Theory published a special issue on decolonial fashion discourse (Jansen 2020). Transnational fashion networks and conferences (many now virtual due to the Covid-19 pandemic) have fostered a lot of ferment in the field in recent years. One notable example is Carol Tulloch’s organization of an African diaspora network and a special issue of Fashion Theory (2010) that summarizes the activities and collaborations related to this network. Increasingly in fashion studies, old assumptions about what constitutes “fashion,” for example, have been shattered and new questions have emerged in the context of critiques of globalization, garment labor, environmental harm, and Eurocentric stories of style-fashion-dress. Interactions with the field of cultural studies—directly and indirectly—have been pivotal in new articulations within fashion studies. Cultural Studies The field of cultural studies also developed in the second half of the twentieth century, at a moment “when culture becomes both visibly central and explicitly ambiguous” (Grossberg 2010: 173). Most noticeable among these was the vibrant center of theory 14

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and practice at the University of Birmingham (the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies) in the 1970s. Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-born Black British scholar, played an important role in the formation of the center and its mission, drawing on the class-based studies of Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Richard Hoggart in the 1950s and 1960s. These scholars had been driven by the question of what had happened to British working-class culture after the Second World War, during a period of relative economic affluence and a “conservative hegemonic mass culture” brought about by capitalism (Hall 2016: 5–6). Hall along with his colleagues and students pursued studies of workingclass male youth subcultures, including issues of resistance to dominant culture through styles in fashion and music. Hall’s background and subjectivity—born into a “coloured middle-class family in Jamaica, still [in 1932] a British colony” and with darker skin than most of his family— led him to describe himself as “a colonized subject” whose life “can be understood as unlearning the norms” in which he “had been born and brought up” (Hall 2017: 3). He theorized his experiences through the joint, entangled lenses of race, ethnicity, and nation (Hall 2017). Meanwhile, the United States and elsewhere in the 1960s and early 1970s witnessed resistance against previous narratives of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, the body, national identity, and age/generation. In many ways, cultural studies—as a transnational, interdisciplinary field—sought to ask new questions about culture as it articulates with everyday life–power relations associated with older narratives and accepted “truths” about diverse identities and their interplay. The study of relations through social movements is key to cultural studies, which emerged in various sites around the world. The feminist movement, the civil rights movement, the gay and lesbian rights movements, and other social movements around the world (e.g., antiwar, anticolonial, environmental, disability rights) contributed to the development of cultural studies as a field interested in understanding how cultural processes, including fashion, shape everyday life. These movements began to “unframe” some of the frameworks that had previously been taken for granted as “natural,” “normal,” or “the way it should be.” These movements reacted to, or at least questioned, a number of assumptions associated with dominant (white, masculine or feminine, upper-middleclass, heterosexual) culture. The feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, often referred to as secondwave feminism, not only fought for crucial economic and reproductive rights but also raised questions about the extent to which fashion and beauty systems might entrap women in traditional feminine roles. As Evans and Thornton (1989) note, some feminists rejected exclusive symbols or practices of femininity (e.g., makeup, bras, skirts, leg shaving). Fashion itself, they argued, is a process of experimentation, and feminists have taken on different projects to fight for change (e.g., garment worker rights) as they have explored the complicated ways in which feminism is not only about gender relations but also about their interplay with other vectors of power. Feminist interventions in the center further complicated the studies by highlighting gender biases in understandings of “subcultures” (McRobbie 1989, 1991, 1994). 15

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Key to a cultural studies approach is the idea that gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, class, religion, body size, dis/ability, age, generation, regional location, and other subject positions organize identities, social relations, and the objects and images that culture produces (Newton et al. 1998). Cultural studies scholars refuse “to reduce human life or power to one dimension, one axis, one explanatory framework” (Grossberg 2010: 16). The field also works against a logic of essentialism—that is, the belief that things are the way they are because that is “just the way they are.” Essentialist thinking fosters stereotypes because it suggests that a subject position such as gender predetermines (biologically or otherwise) a set of traits that apply to “all women” (e.g., “women’s drive to shop is in their genes”) or “all men” (e.g., “men are not into fashion”). In other words, cultural studies reject the idea that “everything is sewn up in advance” or that “identities are fixed” (Grossberg 2010: 22). In cultural studies terms, articulations and rearticulations continually challenge fixed ideas that gender (or any other subject position) is an essence or a thing that should be accepted as a “natural” or a biological given (as discussed further in Chapter 7). Rather, from a feminist cultural studies perspective, gender is embedded in social interactions, cultural understandings, and webs of power, simultaneously shaping and being shaped by these forces. Gender cannot be completely separated from ethnicity, social class, national identity, dis/ability, religion, body size and appearance, and other power-laden aspects of identity that appear on and through the fashioned body.

Conceptualizing Culture and Fashion The dialogue between cultural studies and fashion studies has been highly fruitful for thinking through concepts of culture and fashion: both are good concepts “to think with.” The definitions of the two words are interrelated and remarkably similar, although they have different connotations. The Oxford English Dictionary (2010) defines culture as “the distinctive ideas, customs, social behavior, products, or way of life of a particular society, people, or period.” And fashion is defined as “a prevailing custom, a current usage; esp. one characteristic of a particular place or [we would prefer “and” here] period of time” or, more specifically, “the mode of dress, etiquette, furniture, style of speech, etc., adopted in society for the time being.” It seems that culture is a somewhat broader and more enduring concept than fashion, although both concepts include the idea of custom: “a habitual or usual practice; common way of acting; usage, fashion, habit (either of an individual or of a community).” Perhaps we can think of fashion as “custom for a time,” and culture as “custom over time.” Interestingly, the word custom is related to costume (a form of dress that often connotes an “other,” whether in time, place, or culture). Similarly, custom also closely relates to the cultural studies concept of habitus—that is, the routine cultural practices embodied in everyday life (Mauss 1973; Bourdieu 1984). Fashion, like culture, is both an embodied social process and a material practice. Both fashion and culture simultaneously undergo continual change and continuity. 16

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These simultaneous processes are complex and even contradictory. They remind us that everyday life and, indeed, global capitalism are full of contradictions. As we have seen, either/or ways of thinking (i.e., change or continuity) create false dichotomies and are therefore insufficient to understand how fashion and culture work. Instead, understanding fashion and culture requires both/and thinking (i.e., change and continuity). That being said, analyzing fashion and culture in tandem provides an opportunity to consider what these two concepts—and the fields of fashion studies and cultural studies that pursue them—have to offer each other. Given that both fashion and culture simultaneously undergo ongoing processes of change and continuity, perhaps fashion can best be understood as change within continuity, whereas culture reveals practices that emphasize continuity within change. Each concept, in its own way, offers a lens through which to make sense of simultaneity: how different ideas or process not only coexist but also interact dynamically and often dialectically. Simultaneity, however, is not simply a combination of two items. Even both/and thinking, while necessary, is not sufficient to grasp the multiple complexities and contradictions associated with fashion and culture. Similarly, no single model nor metaphor can sufficiently capture these complexities and contradictions. This book offers two models or metaphors that combine fashion studies and cultural studies as alternatives to simple oppositional (either/or), linear (straight), and essentialist (predetermined, fixed, bounded) ways of thinking about and with everyday fashion in a transnational world: (1) the circuit of style-fashion-dress (introduced in this chapter and developed further in Chapter 2) and (2) intersectionalities, introduced in Chapter 2.

Circuit of Style-Fashion-Dress Model The “circuit of style-fashion-dress” model (Figure 1.3) was adapted from the cultural studies’ “circuit of culture” model (du Gay et al. 1997: 3) to illustrate and interpret the material, social, economic, and embodied flows of style-fashion-dress. The original circuit of culture model contained the following elements: representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation. The adapted “circuit of style-fashion-dress” model makes two revisions: distribution instead of representation, and subject formation instead of identity, as explained below. Overall, however, the rationale for the model remains the same: culture flows (and so does fashion). The choice of a circuit in Figure 1.3, rather than a binary opposition (e.g., production versus consumption) or a line (e.g., a production pipeline or supply chain), in cultural studies and fashion studies, is deliberate. A circuit connotes the idea of constant movement and multiple sites, connected by routes with potential detours. The routes are not linear, and movements flow in multiple directions and are impacted by various forces (and vice versa). Circuits of culture and circuits of style-fashion-dress recognize that time and space intertwine through cultural practices that are themselves interconnected. Moreover, there are multiple circuits overlapping in complex ways through diverse cultural histories and practices. Each concept in the circuit is itself a process. 17

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Production

Distribution

Consumption

Regulation

Figure 1.3  Circuit of style-fashion-dress. Adapted from the cultural studies’ “circuit of culture” (du Gay et al. 1997: 3) with Kelly Sullivan.

To illustrate the multidirectional flows in the circuit, we introduce the facemask as a kind of case study; in 2020, this object became a transnational item of style-fashiondress due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This simple 4″ × 8″ piece of fabric became not only a protective, life-saving device but also a multilayered cultural symbol prone to fashion. For example, the photograph in Plate 3 was taken at a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in Tokyo, Japan, in mid-June 2020 and illustrates how a relatively unembellished reusable facemask was transformed through DIY (do-it-yourself) design techniques to signal solidarity. The BLM design on the mask was clearly hand-drawn, likely with a permanent marker, and is worn in combination with a beaded necklace in Rastafarian colors, dredlocks3 wrapped around her head, and a T-shirt that reads “melanin.” The T-shirt reinterprets the graphic design aesthetic of the NBC television show Friends, which had an all-white leading cast, making the T-shirt a clever kind of counter-discourse that challenges the white legacy and exclusionary nature of the popular sitcom. The mask does the protective work of covering the mouth and nose while simultaneously declaring alignment with the BLM movement (see Plate 3). In places like the United States, masks became central to a range of issues, such as gender, racial, and political identities, and debates regarding individual freedom, community welfare, and governmental regulation. A survey of emerging adults in the United States revealed that those who identified as male, white, conservative in political affiliation and who lived alone or with a romantic partner only were significantly more

3Fashion studies scholar and designer Tameka Ellington (2015) explains that “the term ‘dreadlocks’ is said to have been coined by European slave traders, who thought Africans looked dreadful when they emerged with matted formations in their hair after having been trapped in the slave ships for months. The term has since been spelled ‘dredlocks’ (removing the ‘a’) in order to remove the negative connotation.” We have chosen to spell dredlocks without the “a” for this reason.

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likely to avoid wearing a facemask (Green et al. 2021). By contrast, in Asian countries such as China, there is more of an historical and cultural acceptance of facemasks. In 2003, an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) resulted in widespread mask adoption (Kaiser and Smelik 2020: 13). Nearly a century prior in 1910–11, wearing masks in public became associated with modern science and health during the pneumonic plague epidemic in Manchuria (Lynteris 2018). Facemasks also raise key material issues that include (1) initial shortages and mixed medical advice, (2) the choice of disposable or reusable fabric, (3) whether the fabric is dyed, printed, or finished, (4) the construction of the mask (e.g., the style, the number of layers, the efficacy), and (5) environmental issues, such as waste. Our overview of the circuit of style-fashion-dress begins with production.

Production One of fashion’s “early relatives” is the Latin root word facere, which means to make or to do (Barnard 2002). The French word faire (also derived from the Latin word facere) has similar meanings. Hence, one important idea underlying the concept of fashion— in some European cultural histories, at least—is the twin processes of making and doing: engaging in a cultural practice. A garment, a look, or even social differences among groups of people are produced through these practices. The circuit of style-fashion-dress helps to materialize culture’s circuits. Fashion’s materials (e.g., fibers, fabrics, garments) flow, and they are made by and for bodies; hence, environmental and labor issues become an important part of production at every stage from fiber to fabric to fashion (see Plate 4). Fashion production continues to have a negative impact on the environment, and issues of sustainability have received heightened awareness in the field in recent decades (Hethorn and Ulasewicz 2015). These issues become important considerations at every stage of production, as well as distribution and consumption. Fibers that derive from plants (e.g., cotton, flax, trees) and animals (e.g., wool, silk) are renewable and biodegradable and hence have some environmental advantages over fibers derived from fossil fuels (e.g., polyester, nylon, polypropylene) and that generate long-term waste. Still, there are environmental tradeoffs even with natural fibers, such as the amount of water and chemicals required to produce and process them. The natural environment is also exploited in production, from the materials used in clothing and textiles (e.g., fibers, dyes, and the processing of these resources into garments), to the environmental waste produced through the disposability of “fast fashion” (Fletcher 2014; Hethorn and Ulasewicz 2015). Garments and textiles make their way into the secondhand clothing market, which may involve the redistribution of used clothing to Africa and Latin America—with detrimental economic, cultural, and environmental impacts on local textile/apparel industries. They may also end up in landfills, or in the air we breathe through incineration. Analyzing environmental issues from the standpoint of facemasks, for example, we can compare disposable and reusable facemasks. Disposable facemasks are made 19

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from petroleum-based, nonwoven materials: polypropylene fibers, a nonrenewable resource from fossil fuels. The thermoplastic fibers melt into a web through a process of ultrasound that generates heat. Once the nonwoven fabric is made, it needs to be “sewn”—often through ultrasonic “welding”—to produce disposable masks. In the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic in China, the demand for disposable masks exceeded the supply, and there was a shortage. This was one of the factors leading the World Health Organization (WHO) to initially not recommend mask-wearing among consumers at large; there was soon a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) in hospitals around the world. Later, when production had ramped up sufficiently to meet demand, the WHO recommended mask-wearing. (Another scientific factor that influenced the change was the discovery that Covid-19 can spread through asymptomatic individuals.) Meanwhile, individuals with sewing skills and a machine began to make reusable masks from woven or knitted fabrics for themselves or others (Kaiser and Smelik 2020). DIY videos and patterns emerged online, including make-do solutions such as cutting up old t-shirts, for those without extra fabric around or sewing capability. In a study of 18–24-year-olds in the United States, researchers found that nearly half of respondents (47 percent) had worn a homemade facemask during the summer of 2020 (Green et al. 2021). At least two and preferably three layers of fabric, or pockets for filters, were recommended for protection. More consumers became makers. Before long, however, apparel manufacturers were shifting production from fashionable clothing to PPE, after many retailers cancelled orders, and thousands of garment workers were laid off in countries such as Bangladesh (Paul 2020). In order for textiles to be made into masks or apparel in general, fibers need to be spun into yarn, which is then manufactured into fabric, most typically through processes of weaving or knitting (see Plate 4). There are strong etymological roots between the words “text” and “textile,” both derived from the Latin word texere, which means “to weave” (Oxford English Dictionary 2010). Indeed, long before the advent of written languages, the production of textiles became a vehicle to tell cultural stories around the world. Textiles (and other materials and media) record and represent culture. Hmong (or Miao, as known in China) textiles, traditionally made by women from Southeast Asia, offer a vivid example: reverse appliquéd—a complex technique that involves cutting and stitching through layers of fabric—and embroidered fabrics tell cultural stories that have been passed down from generation to generation. This was a way of recording history through material culture, rather than written language. With the migration since the 1970s of an estimated 180,000 Hmong people to the United States, Australia, and other nations, the traditional mode of storytelling has transformed (Wronska-Friend 2010). Fibers and their formation into material structures have long served to record histories around the world. The production of cloth became an industrialized process with the mechanization of spinning and weaving in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The invention of the sewing machine in the nineteenth century made the production of an easier and faster process (see Figure 1.4). However, clothing production is still extremely labor-intensive; garment-making (sewing) technology has not changed significantly since the invention of 20

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Figure 1.4  Garment workers in a manufacturing facility, likely New York City, around 1910.

Photo courtesy of the Kheel Center for Labor Management and Documentation Archives, Cornell University. Collection #5780, Archives of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, photo ID 5780PB31F14C.

the sewing machine. By the early twentieth century, with the rise of readymade or readyto-wear clothing, garment workers began to organize against sweatshop conditions and formed unions, such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Tragic events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire engendered public support for unions and protections for workers. Garment workers are both producers and consumers of fashion, and their work (and refusal to work during a strike) has a dramatic impact on systems of distribution. Fashion studies scholar Sara Bernstein (2017) has written about the ways that North American garment workers used the fashions they made to “demonstrate[e]‌that they, like all working-class Americans, were both producers and consumers,” which she argues “was one way that garment workers challenged narratives about who they were and where they belonged” (para 5). Recall Figure 1.2, an image of N.Y. Knit Goods garment workers marching in swimsuits at a 1939 ILGWU convention. They showed solidarity with their striking counterparts in San Francisco, who were locked out of Gantner and Mattern during a labor dispute in 1939, and used stylefashion-dress to draw attention to egregious manufacturing practices. Those marching simultaneously conveyed their role as consumers and producers while demonstrating their collective power to stop production and distribution. Globalization and increasing offshoring of production to low-wage regions of the world, especially since the 1980s, have meant that the exploitation of garment workers continues today with relative invisibility. Supply chains are often described as opaque, rather than transparent, and subcontracting is commonplace. By the 1990s, the “race to the bottom” by manufacturers seeking the lowest labor costs in the world had fostered an increasing “disconnect” between production and consumption, and some of the exploitation of garment makers internationally came to light. By the early twenty-first 21

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century, there was a huge gap between (1) consumers wearing “fast fashion” and (2) the workers around the world who would be unlikely to afford the very garments they have made. Complex supply chains and rampant subcontracting also contributes to a lack of transparency in manufacturing, and while labeling requirements in the United States require a “country of origin,” this only reveals the site of “greatest transformation” of a garment (typically where cutting and sewing have occurred) and nothing about the labor conditions of the factory. Consumers only become aware of such conditions once major tragedies occur and are covered in the media; notably, in 2013, a multistoried factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (also known as Rana Plaza), collapsed, and over 1,110 laborers were killed and many others injured. Some clothing companies have voluntarily found ways of making their production footprints and practices accountable and transparent. Meanwhile, consumers can still buy “fast fashion” cheaply and frequently. At the time of this writing, however, there are some signs of a movement away from fast fashion due to such factors as (1) a gradually increasing consumer awareness of abuses in the production system and (2) the dramatic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, prompting reduced consumer demand for clothes and a rethinking of fashion industry ethics and practices.

Consumption Among the attempts to resist fast fashion are consumer movements to make more informed, ethical decisions as they purchase, use, and repair their clothing. The “slow fashion” movement, for example, encourages buying fewer clothes of higher quality and wearing them longer, purchasing clothes produced (or at least sold) locally, and thinking critically about the labor and environmental conditions surrounding their production and distribution. Some consumers have become more active in producing (sewing or knitting) and repairing their own clothing. The design historian Fiona Hackney refers to the “quiet activism” of everyday making. She argues for “the emergence of a new, historically conscious, socially engaged amateur practice” (Hackney 2013: 169). This practice represents a return to the intimate connection of production (making) with consumption (use, wear) before the industrialization of fibers, textiles, and apparel. Industrialization changed the production–consumption dynamic in at least two ways: Factory-made, store-bought clothes were more detached from consumer-made ones, and they also tended to be less expensive. Prior to industrialization, only wealthy people could afford a closet of many garments. Among working-class people, formal clothes were often prized possessions that were included in wills (Crane 2000). With industrial capitalism, a binary way of thinking emerged between production— conceptualized as a mechanized and orderly process of making goods for the purpose of profit—and consumption, framed as the opposite of productivity or as “using (‘up’)” goods or products (Kaiser 2015). Cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams (1980) discussed how the metaphor of the human stomach and digestive system shaped 22

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thinking about consumption as eating. In this way of thinking, applied much more broadly to consumer products beyond food, consumers became perceived as channels “along which the product flows and disappears” (43). In this framework, consumers become “the market, which the system of industrial production has organized” (Williams 1980: 43). Of course, clothes don’t “disappear” during consumption, though their material properties do change with processes of wardrobe management, care, wear, laundering, and discarding (via donation, gifting to someone else, or to the landfill). The problem with the linear model, and hence Williams’ critique of thinking about the digestive system as a metaphor, is that it isolates the individual from the environment. Even with food consumption, human waste is generated and needs to be processed and neutralized so as to minimize negative impacts on the environment and human health. In addition to fast fashion, disposable, surgical facemasks are ubiquitous—as is their light turquoise or pale blue color—in landfills, as well as in hospitals and among consumers during the global pandemic. Their low cost and protective qualities are advantageous from a health perspective, but they are environmentally problematic; they do not disappear in landfills due to their use of petroleum-based raw materials, which themselves derive from nonrenewable resources. On the other hand, the pandemic (and especially early mask production bottlenecks) inspired many people to dust off their home sewing machines and make their own facemasks.4 As early as 1969, clothing economist Geital Winakor had conceptualized consumption as three processes: purchase, wear and care, and discard (waste). These processes are not only economic but also aesthetic, cultural, functional, psychological, and social, with issues of fashion influencing decision-making and actions throughout. Even in the case of disposable facemasks, fashion has come into play as they have become available in more colors and prints to be coordinated with outfits. As functionally protective as facemasks are, they become part of a consumer’s overall style. Reusable fabric masks offer even more opportunities for self-expression. In addition to printed text on masks representing social and political views (discussed further in a later section on subject formation), brand preferences, organizational identities, and so on, dyed and printed fabrics offer multiple opportunities for mixing and matching with the rest of an outfit. Because facemasks require so little fabric, they can also be made from the same outfit as a dress, for example, in what would otherwise become fabric waste; some maker-consumers and companies have taken advantage of this coordinating concept. At the same time, opportunities for social interaction have been limited for consumers who work remotely at home, as compared to essential workers. So, clothing consumption, overall, became reduced as a result of the pandemic. Exceptions included yoga or sweat pants to be worn at home—what sociologist Erving Goffman (1963) called “back regions” or “backstage,” using the metaphor of theater to characterize their distinction from “front regions” or “front-stage” social interactions and/or essential working contexts. Everyone is a consumer of clothing, but far fewer people actually produce garments in an industrial or postindustrial context. The accumulation of clothing in late capitalism 4https://blogs.cornell.edu/cornellcostume/2020/05/06/the-resurgence-of-home-sewing/

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is complex: some pieces are almost never worn, while others are held even once beyond repair, because of their sentimentality. Williams (1980) claimed that one important reason for this is the “magical system” created by advertising and related cultural practices that turn consumption into a process of human desires for promise, pleasure, and power: You do not only buy an object; you buy social respect, discrimination, health, beauty, success, power to control your environment. The magic obscures its real sources of general satisfaction because their discovery would involve radical change in the whole common way of life. (Williams 1980: 47)

Distribution The meanings of the style-fashion-dress objects we buy are often constructed through processes of branding, advertising, and influencing, as well as consuming—all of which are enhanced by the materiality of fashion. Materials matter and move through space in the process of getting from producers to consumers. But representation matters, as well. Stuart Hall describes representation as the “processes by which meaning is produced” (1997: 1). Hall indicates that representation does not merely represent an idea or reality that already exists, but rather constitutes (composes or establishes) our understandings of the world. Through cultural media such as advertising (a form of distribution), we experience images, stories, and sound bites that frame our understandings of what is authentic or natural, what we desire, and so on. Fashion branding, for example, strives to add a kind of symbolic value to “real clothes” by fostering or fulfilling fantasies (Hancock 2010). What kinds of fantasies might be represented to sell clothes? Glamour, success, lust, joy, coolness, hope, and happiness are among the feelings and constructs elicited by the cultural imagery that turns pretty ordinary items of clothing into objects of desire. Hence, there are two interdependent forms of distribution: (1) material distribution and (2) representational distribution. Material distribution involves the movement of materials from the various sites of production to the ultimate consumer; it involves shipping, flying, trucking, warehousing, and points of sale to consumer. Representational distribution entails processes of symbolizing, meaning-making, branding, and articulations between what producers are making and what consumers are interested in buying and wearing. In theory, located strategically between production and consumption, the process of distribution can be construed as a kind of bridge in meaning-making, as well as in the physical flow of goods. In other words, distribution can be construed as a bridge or part of the solution to the “disconnect” between production and consumption. In practice, however, distribution can also be seen as a site of rupture between the two processes when image-making (e.g., advertising, branding) overrides material practice and disguises the interplay between production and consumption. Production is largely invisible to consumers, who are bombarded with images, narratives, and messages

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about products that frequently say little to nothing about how, where, or by whom they were made. Distribution is an inherently ambivalent or contradictory concept; it includes both dividing and dispersing (Oxford English Dictionary 2010). Synonyms for “distribute” include divide, dispense, dole, deal, and the like; yet “distribute” implies more strategic planning and segmentation than “dispersion” (“scattering in all directions”) or “diffusion” (“wide distribution”). In addition to physical distribution, in capitalist marketing terms, distribution involves targeting consumers. Because diffusion, in particular, is an important part of fashion as a process of social influence, and because material movement (e.g., from the factory to the local mall or your mailbox) is fundamental to fashion, the circuit of style-fashion-dress model adapts the cultural studies’ circuit of culture model by using distribution as a broader concept than representation alone. Distribution has connotations of both material and representational elements. Further, conceptualized as both a link and a rupture, distribution ties together economy and culture through a kind of (distributive) network. Points of sale to consumers include retailing, which may assume the form of a brickand-mortar store, such as the London high street (main shopping district) where fashion scholar Reina Lewis (2015) conducted her research on Muslim fashion distribution in the twenty-first century. She found that store managers could “recognize the benefits and value of having bodies on the shop floor whose self-presentation marks them as Muslim,” as the stores’ brands could be integrated with modes of dress (e.g., a head scarf) and as Muslim marketing became “a new growth area” (236). Lewis also demonstrated the importance of online shopping, combining direct distribution to consumers from various sources—including the makers themselves—with influencing commentary about how to dress modestly and fashionably. (We discuss this further in Chapter 5 on religion.) Hence, material distribution merges and overlaps with representational distribution. Material goods are mobile, but so are meaning-making processes as retailers/ distributors share their interpretations of the products involved. These processes include the marketing, the advertising, the branding, the narratives, and the personal endorsements and appearances of the retailers/distributors themselves. What remains overlooked or ignored in representational distribution are the networks that make the whole system possible. The network metaphor used by science studies scholar Bruno Latour (2005) helps to map how humans (e.g., workers, managers, consumers) and nonhumans (e.g., fabrics, sewing machines, computers) must be considered together through a “material–semiotic” network. Joanne Entwistle (2009) refers to the important role of “cultural intermediaries” (i.e., individuals in the business of distribution and representation). Cultural intermediaries such as retail buyers, photographers, social media influencers, journalists, and fashion models constitute the aesthetic markets that “operate through the careful balancing of ‘cultural’ and ‘economic’ calculations” (Entwistle 2009: 167). Part of this balancing act involves the strategic flow of materials as well as images through the spaces in-between production and consumption.

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Fashion theorist Agnès Rocamora (2013) has described the ways in which digital media have accelerated the pace of fashion change in the twenty-first century. Fashion influencers, for example, constantly update digital sites, distributing words and images in a way that mediates perceptions of newness between producers and consumers. The clothes and accessories themselves can be instantly purchased online as well, but their connotations of newness will quickly fade. As Rocamora observes, “the flow of posts replicates the flow of goods, with the posts and goods of today … to be rapidly overtaken, out-fashioned by newer arrivals that freeze time and fashion, online into a perpetual present” (2013: 72). In the early aughts, “fast fashion” became a “retail strategy of adapting merchandise assortments to current and emerging trends as quickly and effectively as possible” (Sull and Turconi 2008). Previously, the traditional model of retailing had involved a system of seasonality (i.e., fall, winter, spring, summer lines) and resort or cruise collections for wealthy travelers. In this system, clothing styles that caught on with consumers could be pretested, ordered, and reordered from manufacturers. While new seasons brought new offerings by designers, longstanding favorites could be reordered (probably the most well-known example in European fashion history is the Delphos gown, designed by Henriette Negrin and Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo in 1907 and sold until 1950). In contrast, the fast fashion system changed to one of ongoing replenishment of new merchandise, making reordering largely a thing of the past. Representation itself became a commodity in the course of fast fashion, as influencers posted images of themselves and then—if successful in securing a sufficient audience of followers—received financial support from apparel companies and their advertisers; then the consumers/followers themselves also became commodities who could be tracked and targeted online. Representation, then, is part of distribution (the space between production and consumption). But the use of distribution—the more general term—in the circuit of style-fashion-dress reminds us that materials, as well as images, flow in the spaces “in-between.” In many ways, however, representation represses the materiality of fashion production because we focus our attention on the image rather than product quality, garment labor, or environmental impacts. We begin to imagine who we can become through the goods that we buy.

Subject Formation Being and becoming are ongoing processes of subject formation. In the original cultural studies’ circuit of culture model (du Gay et al. 1997), identity was the term. In the first edition of this book, subject formation replaced identity in the circuit of style-fashiondress. We have debated back and forth about which term to use in this edition. In some ways, identity is a more accessible term, which has been used in cultural studies and fashion studies alike. And yet, it has its limitations; as a commonly used term, identity (for some) has a connotation of being “who I am,” as though it is an essence. In other words, it can become locked into a single identity (e.g., race, gender, sexuality) without 26

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considering the complex intersectionalities among them (considered in Chapter 2) and possibilities for fluidity and change. Another related pitfall has been the use of “identity politics” in the twenty-first century as a disparaging term, frequently in relation to race and ethnicity. Cultural theorist Judith Halberstam (2005) has noted how and why identity politics are critical for organizing and community building around themes of sexuality, as well as gender, race, and so on. However, if identity politics become fixed or fossilized, the critical edginess and currency are undermined. If and when this occurs, identity can become a rather static term that cannot capture all that people experience as they make style and other choices in everyday life. In other words, it does not always connote the fluidity and change, as well as the continuity, across socially constructed categories of race, gender, sexuality, and other ways of being and becoming. We do not believe that identity should go away as a concept; we just think there is a need to “drill down” across processes of structure and agency. Accordingly, we use the term subject formation in the circuit model, rather than identity. The term subject—especially with formation—allows both for more precision and more of a process orientation, than does identity. Second, subject formation is a process that celebrates “becoming” in addition to “being” as a priority and thus seems especially compatible with processes of style-fashion-dress as well as other components (processes) of the circuit model. Third, the term subject is the root word of both subjection and subjectivity; it deals with part–whole relationships. Subjection (or subject position) implies being positioned in a context structured by others or by cultural histories, whereas subjectivity implies having the agency to assert or articulate one’s own ways of being and becoming—each with its own connotations (Mama 1995). That is, subjection refers to the process of power relations being imposed in some way. An individual is subjected to circumstances beyond their control. Indeed, one is born not only into their body but also into a complex network of power relations. These power relations are embedded in cultural discourses: ongoing systematic cultural “conversations” that are unequal and asymmetrical (discussed further in Chapter 2 and later chapters). Michel Foucault (1972) theorized how, historically and institutionally, cultural discourses have imposed and shaped certain understandings of subject positions (e.g., family background, gender, nation, race, ethnicity, sexuality). As individuals take up their subject positions, they become subjected to the regulatory power of cultural discourses (Barker 2002: 33). Much Western fashion imagery of women, for example, perpetuates a cultural discourse of thinness. The standardization of female fashion models’ bodies as thin, coupled with digital technologies, functions as a cultural discourse that structures thinking about ideal fashionable bodies. A single fashion ad featuring a skinny model—further airbrushed and photoshopped—is a representation that shapes understandings of beauty and fashion. Yet, this single representation is part of a larger cultural discourse on thinness that has become institutionalized historically through visual imagery, as well as other media conversations (e.g., blogs, talk shows, articles in magazines) regarding weight loss, “ethical fashion,” eating disorders, and other related issues. Most importantly, thinness cannot be separated from other subject positions such as age, ethnicity, race, dis/ability, religion, nationality, class, and sexuality. How does such a cultural discourse influence one’s subjectivity? It is likely to structure what one thinks 27

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it means to have a fashionably beautiful body, and these “beauty ideals” are shaped by discourses around gender, race, body size, age, class, and other subject positions. Subjection through cultural discourses is part of subject formation, especially in the context of fashion, because discourses themselves change. Yet subject formation is even more dynamic, because individuals generally have some degree of agency: the freedom or ability to exert one’s voice and to resist power relations in some way. As Tulloch (2010) suggests through her concept of “style narratives,” fashioning the body is one of the ways individuals can represent a momentary sense of who they are becoming. These representations through style allow individuals to combine, or move across, their subject positions with a sense of self-awareness and self-expression: processes of subjectivity— the ongoing, changing sense of exploring “who I am” and “who I am becoming.” The metaphor of a Möbius strip, introduced in Figure 1.1, helps to visualize the ways in which multiple subject positions (structure) and subjectivity (agency) become inseparable in the overall process of subject formation through style-fashion-dress. Similarly, the processes of imitating others (belonging) and differentiating from others (demarcating) become inseparable; we do both at once. Self–other relations undergird and propel fashion change. As introduced earlier in this chapter, sociologist Georg Simmel (1957 [1904]) described the dynamic interplay between identifying with and differentiating from others as the very engine of fashion: Union and segregation are the two fundamental functions which are here inseparably united … In addition to the element of imitation the element of demarcation constitutes an important factor of fashion … Two social tendencies are essential to the establishment of fashion, namely, the need of union on the one hand and the need of isolation on the other. Should one of these be absent, fashion will not be formed—its sway will abruptly end. (Simmel 1957 [1904]: 544–6) Simmel (1957 [1904]) argues that so long as imitation (the need of union or similarity) and demarcation (the need for differentiation) both occur, the game of fashion “goes merrily on.” So, subjects, like fashion, are continually in the process of formation and change in relation to other subjects. Fashion theory highlights the interplay between these processes, beginning with both/and thinking and moving further toward more complex, multidimensional models such as intersectionality, to be discussed in Chapter 2. It spotlights, in cultural studies terms, the idea of articulation, which as we have seen involves making connections between, bridging, and joining different ideas, as well as expressing new concepts in the process of doing so. In particular, consumer thinking about “who I am in my appearance style” is often more difficult to put into words than is “who I am not” or “who I don’t want to look like” (Freitas et al. 1997). Fashion, it seems, plays a role in the ongoing creation, revision, and blurring of “borderlines” between self and other. But it also challenges these borderlines. Whereas Simmel’s (1957 [1904]) analysis primarily focused on how fashion continually challenges borderlines between social classes, it also does so through other subject positions (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age). The borderlines that shape subjectivities require 28

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ongoing construction and maintenance (Freitas et al. 1997). Borderlines, it turns out, are tenuous, fragile, and elastic; they require ongoing negotiation. The work of subject formation reflects this ongoing negotiation within cultural discourses that supply limits to personal agency. In Fashion as Communication, Malcolm Barnard (2002) analyzed the roots of the word fashion and found it relates back to the Latin word factio (factionem), which means more than making and doing, as we have seen. Factio is also related to the word “faction,” which has political implications and suggests how fashion becomes a process of differentiating groups of individuals from one another, as demonstrated in the case study of facemasks. Unfortunately, in 2020, facemasks became politicized, most notably in the United States, as a sign of identity or difference, and attempts to regulate the wearing of them were met with resistance by some.

Regulation In many countries in 2020, masks became required or recommended in public (especially indoor) places. In the United States, regulations varied by state and politics; at times, city ordinances conflicted with state policies, generating not only confusion but also health risks. In Monterey County of California, a popular tourist destination, $100 fines were levied to individuals not wearing masks. This is reminiscent of the regulations associated with the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. During that pandemic, San Francisco mandated and enforced mask-wearing and faced resistance by the “Anti-Mask League,” with some arguing that mask-wearing was a threat to their constitutional rights (Canales 2020). American resistance to regulations for the common good may reflect a cultural ethos of “rugged individualism.” In contrast, Asian countries have a longer history of compliance, with better health outcomes (Kaiser and Smelik 2020). As we have seen, subject formation is not without its limits; it does not go unchecked. Subject positioning, one component of subject formation, includes historical and cultural discourses that may prescribe options for fashion subjectivity (i.e., expression through style). Yet it is often the case that social or legal processes regulate the course of subject formation as well. The regulation of subject formation may be formal (e.g., labor laws, dress codes, uniforms) or informal (e.g., social pressures, cultural discourses, selfregulating tendencies, and the integration of all of these), but in either case, they can be personally devastating, socially contested, or culturally revealing. Regulation, whether formal or informal, entails the concept of bringing the production, distribution, and consumption of clothing “under control” and reducing these processes to “adjustments” according to “some principle, standard, or norm” (Oxford English Dictionary 2010). Principles, standards, and norms are themselves embedded in cultural discourses. Regulation related to production includes protections for, and upholding the rights of, garment workers, legal agreements regarding world trade, policies that protect the environment and consumer safety, and labeling standards (e.g., fiber content, care instructions, the country of origin). Regulations in terms of consumption may involve 29

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restrictions (proscriptions: what not to wear), prescriptions (what one has to wear, such as a uniform), or ambiguous norms about what to or what not to wear. Referring back to the circuit of style-fashion-dress in Figure 1.3, we can move through the various processes in the circuit and analyze their interplay. In reality, the processes are highly interdependent and not easily separated. Regulation cannot be separated from the expressions of resistance through subjectivity. Consumer demand influences production and hence distribution. Yet there are also “disconnects” as we have seen, given the way the fashion industry is structured, so as to render production invisible to consumers. Consumers are, in fact, much more than consuming subjects and are continually engaged in subject formation. Keeping the circuit of style-fashion-dress in mind, Chapter 2 delves more deeply into the process of subject formation by pursuing the concept of intersectionality as the interplay among subject positions.

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CHAPTER 2 INTERSECTIONAL, TRANSNATIONAL FASHION SUBJECTS

Inevitably, people appear. This is not an option; it happens. The Danish philosopher Ossi Naukkarinen (1998) refers to appearance as “the aesthetics of the unavoidable.” We cannot avoid becoming part of the visual world and hence part of fashion discourse. As introduced in Chapter 1, cultural discourse entails ongoing, systematic cultural “conversations” that are not on a level playing field. Everyone participates, inevitably, in these “conversations” through style-fashion-dress. In the process, individuals explore— in an ongoing, changing way—“who I am” and “who I am becoming”; this exploration, as noted in Chapter 1, is the process of subjectivity. Because individuals do not accomplish this exploration completely by themselves—because they think about others as they get dressed, and because they rely on feedback from others—style-fashion-dress is a social process. Subjects interact with other subjects. Individual processes of subjectivity become collective processes of intersubjectivity when individuals engage, influence, and perceive one another. An important part of a critical approach to the study of fashion is an understanding of how individuals and communities navigate the inevitability of appearance and use style-fashion-dress as a means of making identities visible. This process is a fundamental part of subject formation: an ongoing sense of self and identity in a changing world. In all cultures ever studied—historically and contemporarily—people have played a hand in modifying how their bodies look. If we can say that anything is “human nature,” this tendency toward dressing, fashioning, or styling the body must surely qualify. Of course, how this occurs varies dramatically across time and space. One thing is clear: There is no single, “natural” way of appearing. Bodies, skin colors, facial features, and hair textures, for example, vary dramatically and are not easily manipulated on a daily basis. Chapter 4 addresses issues of race and appearance in greater depth, but at this point it is important to recognize the ways in which the body interacts with style-fashion-dress in time and space. Appearance is inevitable, and as the BLM movement has demonstrated in relation to racial violence and injustice, first impressions and biases based on appearance—on the part of perceivers, such as police—may have dire consequences. Further, these first impressions and biases emerge from histories of inequality, slavery, colonization, and imperialism; they are part of structural, global, and cultural discourses such as institutionalized racism. At the same time, there are some aspects of subject formation that enable a sense of agency or, as defined in Chapter 1, the freedom or ability to exert one’s “voice” and to

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resist power relations in some way. Agency is always relational (Barad 2007): within a context of intersubjectivity. The degree of agency that individuals exert depends upon the cultural (and political, religious, class) context and various social circumstances. There is an ongoing debate in the social sciences—and in cultural studies especially— about the extent to which individuals have the agency to choose their courses of action (including how they dress) versus the extent to which “social structures” limit choices and opportunities for individuals. Often, in cultural studies and fashion studies alike, it is a both/and situation, like an assemblage of structure and agency. Style-fashion-dress as a system of concepts conveys a sense that people create their own “fashion statements” but are ultimately constrained by cultural histories of prejudice, what is available and accessible in the marketplace, dress codes and social conventions, political regimes, and the like. Part of dressing or fashioning the body is a kind of ritual experience or personal conditioning that occurs in everyday life. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984) referred to this ritual/conditioning as habitus (defined in Chapter 1 as the routine cultural practices embodied in everyday life). Everyday life—a critical concept in cultural studies and fashion studies alike—can be described as “uncatalogued, habitual, and often routinized” (Grossberg 2010: 278). Examples of habitus include showering, shaving, styling one’s hair, applying makeup, donning layers of clothing and accessories, walking and moving, and so on. Habitus is a highly embodied experience that helps to explain the link between the individual and the social: how the fact that we live in our own bodies is structured in part by our social positions (e.g., social class, gender) in the world (Entwistle 2000: 36). The concept of habitus reminds us that it is not just what one wears that matters but also how one styles, fashions, or dresses the body that tells us about everyday processes of subject formation as the interplay between subjectivity and the subject positions people inhabit. As Entwistle (2000) has pointed out, habitus is one of the ways in which people navigate issues of agency and structure in everyday life, through situated bodily practices that are culturally ingrained but that also have their own personal spin. The concept of minding appearances (Kaiser 2001) brings together situated bodily practices with streams of consciousness that are themselves embodied. The mind, after all, operates through the body; so the mind and body cannot be separated, as feminist philosophy tells us. The following questions were asked: “How can I know when I am focused on how I look?” Are these processes, in fact, contradictory? No, they are not. “To what extent does my appearance style represent or create truth(s) about who I am?” We do create everyday “truths” (with a lowercase t) or meanings as we work through our ideas about who we are becoming in the moment. And, of course, the fashion industry is pleased to comply with this process of discovery—hence the need for critical, reflexive awareness of what we are doing and why. The process of minding appearance acknowledges that self-truths are contingent or provisional, as well as embodied. Minding appearances poses challenges that become especially apparent in the context of a global economy, in which the Western mind/body “disconnect” becomes situated in “a larger disconnect between the efforts of production and the pleasures of consumption” 32

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(Kaiser 2001: 80). Yet, as we shall see in the following section, the idea of a “global” (or, better, transnational) perspective is not new. The problem is actually the binary thinking (e.g., West versus “the rest,” mind versus body, production versus consumption) that has limited imaginative approaches to the possibility that fashion is transnational. Bodies, materials, discourses, and images are made and remade, produced and consumed, created and changed through time and space. Cultural discourses are historical and have preceded individual experiences; they range from the legacy of scientific discourses on race in the nineteenth century to dominant gender myths. The remainder of this chapter is organized around six assumptions pertaining to subject formation through style-fashion-dress. These six assumptions articulate between cultural studies and fashion studies, revolving around the theme of intersectionality in a transnational context, as fashioned bodies move through time and space. These fashioned bodies change, and are changed by, interactions with and influence on other fashioned bodies. Such movements and changes cannot be separated from power relations or from acts of self-expression and resistance. In the process of moving through the six assumptions, we revisit and build on the circuit of style-fashiondress model (Figure 1.3) with the use of key concepts from fashion studies and cultural studies.

Assumption 1: Structure-Agency Dynamics Include Processes of Persuasion, Consent, and Resistance Power relations structure the degree of possibilities for agency through style-fashiondress. As we saw in Chapter 1, formal or informal processes of regulation restrict dress, although there may be workarounds that allow for agency and creativity. For example, school uniforms may dictate tops and bottoms but allow some choice in shoes or hair accessories. An additional way in which power operates is through acts of persuasion, as in the case of brand advertising, dominant beauty ideals, or “dressing for success” in an organization. Processes of persuasion may be taken-for-granted as natural or normative; cultural discourses, for example, have framed Fashion (with a capital F) as a white, thin, wealthy, heterosexual, Western feminine concept; narratives and images that have circulated and recirculated have reinforced exclusionary myths. The cultural studies concept of hegemony helps to explain how and why this works. This concept seeks to understand how certain ways of knowing tends to dominate and persevere in the world or a particular culture, even when these ways are not in the best personal interests of those who seem to buy into them. Why do people, this concept demands, accept and even endorse stories or myths that do not pursue their own self-interests? How does this happen? The Italian political activist and theorist Antonio Gramsci (1971) contemplated the above questions when he was in prison in the 1930s, reflecting upon how Mussolini and the Fascist political movement had been so effective, and how his own political counterefforts had not succeeded. As a result of this self-reflection and time for contemplation, 33

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Gramsci articulated a theory of hegemony: how power works not only through guns and warfare (although these too obviously influence power relations) but also through clever arguments, compelling language, and visually embodied imagery, such as the black shirts associated with Mussolini and his followers (Falasca-Zamponi 2002). Power is complex, multilayered, and nuanced. Through processes of hegemony, people become compelled to submit or buy into ideas that may be counter to their own everyday life interests. Examples of hegemony abound in the contemporary global economy, including beauty norms that privilege thin, white, Western appearances and the dominance of the euromodern male business suit. These and other hegemonies are not distinct from one another. Rather, they are distributed across subject positions. As feminist theorists Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994) have observed, hegemonies are scattered across subject positions and inequalities. Scattered hegemonies overlap, crosscut one another, and in the process become harder to trace. For hegemony is not only about politics or social class; it also pertains to other subject positions such as gender, race, ethnicity, national identity, sexuality, and so on. Like the cultural discourses in which they are embedded, subject positions cannot be separated from one another; they intersect in complex ways and become visible through style-fashiondress, as shown in Plate 5. The image depicts two individuals at a BLM rally in London. Highlighting the intersectionalities across social movements, cultural discourses, and visual identities, the image shows how resistance to structural racism, heterosexuality, and cis-gender norms is embodied and conveyed through appearance. The individual on the right holds a sign linking antiracism to queerness and also dresses in a way that conveys this. Symbols of Black resistance to white supremacy (e.g., wearing all black, including a beret and turtleneck that reference the Black Panther party of the 1960s), nonbinary gender and sexual subjectivities (fishnet stockings, leather, and red fingernail polish), and subcultural style (e.g., the piercings, jewelry, facial tattoo, and torn stockings reminiscent of punk and DIY movements) intersect through style-fashion-dress. The person on the left is white-appearing and much more subdued in their dress, yet also wears leather (boots) and a small earring, hair cut in a high fade, and holds a similar yellow sign with black lettering that reads “Black Trans* Lives Matter.” Fashioning resistance to hegemonic power and white supremacy in this instance involves not only making clear and declarative statements (through handheld signs, which are arguably a kind of fashion accessory) but also drawing upon historical references and aesthetics that connect with other overlapping and intersecting identities.

Assumption 2: Subject Formation through Style-Fashion-Dress Is a Process of Navigating Intersectionalities Subject positions are not isolated. Instead, they are multiple, and they intersect. They defy singular, essentialist ways of being. As discussed in Chapter 1, an essentialist perspective involves focusing exclusively on one subject position at the expense of others, and often employing biological essentialism to interpret difference. Essentialism 34

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may lead to gender, race, sexuality, or other subject positions “ruling” over other ways of knowing, being, and becoming. It is as though one of these subject positions is the essence (existence) of being, and the other subject positions do not exist. And this is not the case: they coexist, overlap, and affect one another. This simultaneity of subject positions is probably nowhere more evident than through styled-fashioned-dressed bodies. The concept of intersectionality, or the idea of using an intersectional approach, derives from feminist theory and has become an important framework in feminist and gender studies. Initially, an intersectional approach to research considered race, class, and gender in recognition of the fact that these subject positions are not completely separate issues for individuals in dominant and subordinate groups alike. It spread to cultural studies and to other fields in the social sciences, humanities, and beyond. The term “intersectionality” is attributed to the law professor and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991, 2017). She developed the concept while trying to make sense of what she was experiencing as an antiracist activist in college; she found that the antiracist social movement was not sufficiently addressing gendered power relations. At the same time, she was engaged with women’s studies and feminist issues and was frustrated by a lack of attention at that time to race. As she was conducting research on domestic violence in Los Angeles, she became acutely aware of how diverse systems of oppression (i.e., race, class, and gender) overlapped and interlocked with one another (Guidroz and Berger 2009). The use of the concept has since broadened to explore how intersectional analyses apply to ethnicity, nationality, age, body size, sexuality, religion, dis/ability, and other subject positions in addition to race, class, and gender. The Venn diagram in Figure 2.1 reveals how subject positions intersect. This model provides a framework for the subject positions that organize the rest of this book: nationality (Chapter 3), race and ethnicity (Chapter 4), religion (Chapter 5), social class (Chapter 6), gender (Chapter 7), sexuality (Chapter 8), body size and dis/ability (Chapter 9), and time/age and space/place (Chapter 10). None of the subject positions in Figure 2.1 are distinct from one another; instead, they intersect with each other and, indeed, with other subject positions that cannot be covered in greater depth due to space limitations. Although each in the Venn diagram becomes the highlighted focus of discussions in the later chapters, they are always considered as inseparable from other subject positions. As you can see from the shading on the circles in Figure 2.1, they are not flat; rather, they are three-dimensional. Imagine them as transparent globes—rather like balloons, except with permeable boundaries that enable each subject position to intersect with every other subject position. Additional globes can always be added; there is no limit. If not for book page limitations, we could continue to multiply subject positions in this model: what is relevant and to whom in the process of establishing a sense of identity (who I am, who I am not, where I am going with my life, and how these processes connect with others in the world). We could continue to add globes infinitum; politics, sports, art, music, educational background, and other potential globes abound as potential additions. And inevitably, any additions pertain to style-dress-fashion. Indeed, 35

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Dis/ability

Religion

Race & ethnicity

Body size Sexuality

Age & generation

Class Nationality

Figure 2.1  Intersectionalities among subject positions. Graphic by Denise Nicole Green.

additional globes intersect in complicated and, at times, contradictory ways to the subject positions that comprise the focal points in the remaining chapters. Let’s examine the globes in Figure 2.1 a bit more closely, however. They are not static; nor are they fixed. Rather, they are in motion. They rotate but not only in one direction. Somewhat erratically and jerkily, they can move in multiple directions. At times and in certain contexts, they may spin more quickly and perhaps even light up, commanding our attention and becoming especially salient in terms of self-awareness and a sense of subjectivity. And yet even when some globes “fade” from our awareness, they are still there, intersecting. How and why might some globes be more apparent to us than others? Hegemonic discourses and issues of power and privilege come into play. Many of us take our national subject positions for granted, for example, until we travel outside our nations and/or interact with individuals from other nations. Similarly, masculinity (a gendered subject position) is most likely to become salient when one is the only male in the room. Similarly, many individuals take whiteness, thinness, or heterosexuality for granted as “assumed norms” unless or until they are challenged to consider alternative ways of experiencing everyday life. Style-fashion-dress affords opportunities to connect the dots across a variety of subject positions and, indeed, to explore ways of being and becoming as subjects in the world in ways that may be otherwise difficult to articulate (as in words). And yet, we carry on. We have to style our appearances on an everyday basis; we connect with others through processes of fashion/change, and we dress our bodies in a variety of ways as we 36

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bathe, groom, shave, apply makeup, put on clothing and various accessories, and do a final check in the mirror (or not) before facing the world “outside.” The interplay among everyday subject positions is the key idea in intersectionality as a concept. Especially compelling are the overlapping or “in-between” spaces through which fashion subjects exercise agency and articulate more than one subject position simultaneously. Navigating and negotiating these spaces is key to the articulations represented by style-fashion-dress. As referenced in assumption #1, hegemonies are scattered (Grewal and Kaplan 1994), and they intersect in unpredictable ways (as the globes variously spin, light up, or call themselves in a variety of ways into our perceptual fields) based on social and physical circumstances. The spaces in between subject positions can be conceptualized as sites of ambiguity and open-ended possibility, as well as articulation. Let’s consider Plate 6 as an example of intersectionality and the spaces in between subject positions. In this image, fashion designer Patrick Kelly (1954–1990) attends a fashion designers’ event to combat AIDS, the condition that would ultimately contribute to his untimely death just fourteen months after this photograph was taken. Kelly has been described by fashion scholars as “a postmodern creative who ignores boundaries, borders, and time” (Lewis and Fraley 2015: 341) and as a “black forebearer in fashion” who “complicates our sense of fashion through his use of black memorabilia and camp not only to create something as consumable but to comment on the black body as consumable” (Barnes 2017: 678). Kelly was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and studied African American history and art history at Jackson State University before attending Parsons, eventually leaving the United States to travel to Paris and become the first American to join the ready-to-wear Chambre Syndicale (Barnes 2017). By the mid-1980s, his star was rising in Paris, and by the end of the decade, he was known across the globe. In 1987, Warnaco entered into an investment agreement reputed to be worth five million dollars; however, when the CEO of Warnaco discovered that Kelly was HIV positive, the company rescinded their funding, and on January 1, 1900, Kelly died of AIDS-related complications (Lewis and Fraley 2015: 339). Kelly, as a transnational fashion subject, used his clothing to represent the overlapping spaces between his subject positions—as a gay man who lived and died in the height of the AIDS epidemic; as a Black man designing for predominantly white clients; and as someone from a rural part of the American South who would become a successful fashion designer living in Paris. In Plate 6, he wears denim overalls, which Barnes (2017) argues was an “homage to his alleged sharecropping ancestors” (681); however, the overalls are far from “worked in,” but instead a crisp, unfaded, and unabraded dark denim, thus marking class in ambiguous and open-ended ways. Fashion scholar Eric Darnell Pritchard (2018) argues that the overalls were a way for Kelly to connect “his work ever more overtly to the history, politics, cultural traditions, and aesthetics of the Black southern poor and working classes” (33). Furthermore, he explains that Kelly’s choice to adorn himself in overalls makes “his literal work legible and establish affiliative ties with manual labor” (36), as opposed to what one might expect the leader of a fashion house to look like. Instead, Pritchard agues, “his style of dress—as with so much of his aesthetic enterprise—challenged race and class politics that dwelled in the assumption that he was either out of place or simply a novelty” (37). 37

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Liberty, the brand of overalls that Kelly wore exclusively, also conveyed the in-betweenness of his subject positions. According to the brand’s website, Liberty was founded in 1912, a time when “most overalls were from up north, but Alabama-based Liberty began supplying tough denim overalls with an allegiance that spread across the southern swath of agricultural America.”1 Wearing the brand while simultaneously donning a cap with an upturned bill that read “PARIS” was a way of articulating multiple regional identities and both past and present simultaneously. Further, Liberty was a brand adopted by the leadership of the civil rights organization Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) during the 1963 protests and notably worn by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, the SCLC’s first president (Gunderson 2008: 9). The overalls were a symbol of sharecropping and segregation, and thus a mutable material fashion used by the SCLC as a way of representing ongoing oppression and self-determination. Coming of age as a young, Black, gay man in Vicksburg, Virginia, we might assume Kelly was keenly aware of the SCLC and their fashion choices. Martin Luther King Jr said he would wear the overalls “as long as I am in Birmingham and until we are free.” In addition to the SCLC, fashion studies scholar Tanisha Ford (2015) points out that women activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) also wore overalls in the 1960s for both functional and symbolic reasons, thus “consciously producing a politics around social class while also addressing practical concerns” (77). In addition to the hat and overalls in Plate 6, Kelly also wears a patch with his golliwog logo alongside an oversized button, both of which appeared frequently in his collections, the former being his logo and the latter being part of an aesthetic he developed from his grandmother (Barnes 2017: 686). Fashion studies scholar Sequoia Barnes has argued that Kelly used “the golliwog to create an emblematic commentary on masculinity under a dual gaze, othered as black and othered as queer” (679). Patrick Kelly’s intersectional and transnational identity as a Black, gay man from the American South who came of age during the civil rights era is navigated through the fashions he made and wore.

Assumption 3: Structures of Feeling—Expressed through Subject Formation and the Fashion Process Alike—Articulate Between Everyday Life and Culture through the Circuit of Style-Fashion-Dress As we have seen, articulations involve a complex web of power relations that regulate but generally do not completely squelch individual creativity and expression. Culture both “empowers and disempowers” in contradictory ways (Grossberg 2010: 8) through the interplay of subject positions and subjectivity. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of everyday appearances: structured but not stymied by the norms of dominant fashion; limited but also inspired in various ways by gender, race, and other subject positions; regulated but resisted, at times subtly and at other times substantially. 1 https://www.libertybibs.com/about-liberty.html

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Production

ty ty Anxie eriali t a A M gen cy Creativity Am Power e big nc uity ale v i b Am

Distribution

Consumption

Regulation

Figure 2.2  Structures of feeling in the circuit of style-fashion-dress. Developed by Susan B. Kaiser and Denise Nicole Green.

Not surprisingly, given the multiple and often contradictory power dynamics involved in style-fashion-dress, a mixture of emotions and meanings emerges through this system. The cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams (1977) used the term “structures of feeling” to capture the idea that affect (the emotional realm) connects the personal with the cultural in everyday life. By combining “structure” with “feeling,” Raymond tapped the sense that many of us experience similar emotions that are in part derived from and articulated through cultural discourses as well as social and economic circumstances and our bodies. As suggested in Figure 2.2, structures of feeling mediate the processes in the circuit of style-fashion-dress: here we include ambiguity, ambivalence, anxiety, power, materiality, creativity, and agency. While the following sections focus on ambiguity, ambivalence, and anxiety, the other four structures of feeling also influence the flows (or lack thereof) in the circuit. For example, power intervenes in processes of production, as we saw in Chapter 1 and will see in relation to subject formation throughout this book. The flows from distribution (e.g., retailing) to production are not necessarily even and especially affect garment workers in subcontracted factories overseas; power often structures the relationship—and especially so in circumstances such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Materiality involves everything from textiles and clothing in the circuit to embodied experiences of making, distributing, and wearing clothes. Creativity and agency are unevenly distributed in the circuit, but they moderate different aspects of the circuit in relation in varying degrees in our subject positions, times, and spaces; they give us hope. Ambiguity As subjects fashion their everyday looks, negotiating diverse power relations in the process, ambiguity abounds. The concept of ambiguity has multiple meanings: (1) 39

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mixed metaphors or numerous layers of messages; (2) vague or fuzzy messages, such as those that cannot be put easily into words or that constitute a novel stimulus (e.g., a new style); and (3) inconsistent or contradictory messages that are unclear because they are somewhere in-between different possibilities. The distinctions among these are themselves blurry; one kind of ambiguity can overlap with another. Ambiguity often occurs in the use of words, but the potential for ambiguity in visual communication, such as fashion, is rampant, whether it is intended by the wearer or imputed by the perceiver (or both). Ambiguity can foster a sense of ironic play and can be deeply thought-provoking as it brings contradictions to the surface; it can also create confusion. Consider again the image of Patrick Kelly in Plate 6 using ambiguity as a conceptual lens. One gets a sense of his ironic play with symbolism, for example, by combining workwear and sportswear with references to Paris. He mixes metaphors as he articulates his subjectivity: what matters to him, the hegemonic fashion industry he is challenging, and so on. Sociologist Gregory Stone (1969) argued that the richest meanings often emerge from ambiguous appearances, because such appearances require mindful interpretation on the part of perceivers. As perceivers, they weigh alternative meanings, work though the fuzziness, and navigate spaces of meaning in-between competing possibilities. Ambiguity, in other words, may foster a kind of questioning or deliberation that may contribute to further interaction (e.g., verbal exchange) and new negotiations of meaning or understanding. New styles—introduced on the runway or on the street—are often ambiguous, but they become even more so when subjects fashion them into their own looks—mixing and matching in ways that may not have ever been anticipated by designers. Fashion as a social process relies upon ambiguity to influence new looks and change interpretations of what is “in” (Kaiser et al. 1991). Several factors contribute to ambiguity in appearance styles. First, clothing itself marks an ambiguous and even uneasy boundary between the biological body and the social world (Wilson 1985: 3). Second, fashion is a form of communication that functions somewhere in-between art and language. Fred Davis (1992: 3) indicates that fashion “ ‘merely suggests’ more than it can (or intends to) state precisely.” Cultural Ambivalence A third factor contributing to ambiguity (mixed meanings) in appearance styles is its relation to ambivalence (mixed emotions). Davis (1992) sees the confusion between these two words as instructive, because it reminds us how meanings and moods intertwine as subjects sort through diverse cultural experiences and ask themselves questions such as: Whom do I wish to please, and in so doing whom am I likely to offend? What are the consequences of appearing as this kind of person as against that kind? Does the image I think I convey of myself reflect my true innermost self or some specious version thereof? Do I wish to conceal or reveal? … and so forth. (Davis 1992: 24) 40

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Fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson (1985) indicates that fashion is ambivalent because “when we dress we wear inscribed upon our bodies the often obscure relationship of art, personal psychology, and the social order.” She goes on to say that fashion is endlessly troubling as we are “drawn to it, yet repelled by a fear of what we might find hidden within its purposes” (246–7). Michael Garrison (1982), coming from a psychological perspective, suggests something similar when he describes how ambivalence not only “confuses, devours, and tortures” but also “defines and orders, transforming the unknown into a knowable opposite.” Ambivalence, Garrison argues, has the potential when mediated to “constructively metaphor the world” in an imaginative or even therapeutic way (Garrison 1982: 229). Davis notes how fashion’s instabilities often stem from cultural discourses around identity ambivalences. Hence, ambivalences play or “constructively metaphor” (to use Garrison’s phrase) both individual subject formation and collective fashion change: Among the more prominent ambivalences underlying … fashion-susceptible instabilities are the subjective tensions of youth versus age, masculinity versus femininity, androgyny versus singularity, inclusiveness versus exclusiveness, work versus play, domesticity versus worldliness, revelation versus concealment, license versus restraint, and conformity versus rebellion. (Davis 1992: 18) Davis goes on to describe how fashion operates symbolically by encoding the tensions associated with the above identity ambivalences into dress: “now highlighting this, muting that, juxtaposing what was previously disparate, inverting major to minor and vice versa” (1992: 18). Fashion articulates and represents the “collective tensions and moods abroad in the land” (18). It makes these collective tensions and moods visual and material, shedding light on potential meanings and opportunities for change. The terms ambiguity and ambivalence both have connotations of “two” (in “bi”), and, as discussed in Chapter 1, binary oppositions can foster either/or thinking. Ambiguity and ambivalence, however, tend to emerge in the realm of both/and ways of knowing; they acknowledge the possibility of in-between spaces, blurry boundaries, contradiction, and irony. Further, they are not limited to two options, although modern Western thought has often framed options in binary terms (e.g., mind versus body, masculinity versus femininity, production versus consumption). As we have seen in the discussions on intersectionalities and entanglements, subject formation is a complicated affair. Ambivalence regarding masculinity and femininity, for example, cannot be completely separated from other “identity ambivalences.” Few, if any, subject positions (including gender, as we shall see in Chapter 6) can be fully captured by binary oppositions. Cultural Anxiety The fourth concept contributing to ambiguity in style-dress-fashion is related to cultural ambivalence but less delineated: cultural anxiety. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1980) described anxiety as the “ambiguity of subjectivity.” Whereas 41

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cultural ambivalence involves some kind of crystallization into two or more conflicting emotions, cultural anxiety is a collective sense of free-floating uncertainty, coupled with emotions ranging from fear and dread to hope and anticipation. These emotions are much looser and harder to pinpoint in the case of cultural anxiety. They are up for grabs; they are not fixed with binary oppositions. Although anxiety is often equated primarily with fear and dread, the German philosopher/writer Walter Benjamin (1999) said that for philosophers “the most interesting thing about fashion is its extraordinary anticipations” (63). Like art, fashion often “precedes the perceptible reality by years,” and yet, Benjamin argues that fashion has “much steadier, much more precise contact with the coming thing”: Each season brings, in its newest creations, various secret signals of things to come. Whoever understands how to read these semaphores [visual signals] would know in advance not only about new currents in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and revolutions. (Benjamin 1999: 63–4) Of course, depending on one’s perspective, “new currents in the arts” and “new legal codes, wars, and revolutions” may indeed produce both a sense of excitement about what is coming and a sense of dis-ease (or even fear) with uncertainty. Dread and hope, in a sense, are two sides of the same coin (i.e., anxiety: a both/and phenomenon in a loose sort of way). Fashion represents and articulates cultural anxiety as the ambiguity of subjectivity. Fashion suggests what is to come. It is a process of articulating abstract ideas and negotiating ambiguity.

Assumption 4: The Field of Critical Fashion Studies Needs to Move from Identity Nots to Identity (K)nots In everyday discourse, fashion subjects are generally able to articulate in words who they are not, but it is much more difficult to express verbally who they are (Freitas et al. 1997). In interviews, most fashion subjects are fairly emphatic about who they are not or do not want to look like. Undoubtedly, the scattered nature of hegemonies across subject positions contributes to this difficulty. Through style-fashion-dress, individuals have opportunities to articulate— visually, materially, and bodily—what might be too challenging to express in words. The metaphor of entanglement complicates strict binary oppositions between identity and identity not: female versus “not female,” gay versus “not gay,” etc. Such oppositions cannot capture how power works; they cannot explain complex interactions and influences through which people negotiate, regulate, and appropriate style-fashion-dress. Although not patterns are inevitably part of entangled (k)nots, opening our imagination beyond binary limits enables more complex ways of thinking about subjectivity and intersubjectivity (interactions between subjects). If we begin to interpret difference not as something that is apart from our own identities, but rather as a kind of entanglement, we can begin to imagine more openness 42

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to difference and the discovery of unexpected commonalities. “Not” becomes embroiled in a more complex “(k)not” as entanglement replaces opposition as an organizing logic. New questions arise: What happens when nodes “pop” or stand out and hold disparate subject positions together? What connections might overlapping threads reveal? And what becomes concealed? The knot metaphor of fashion allows us to consider how some truths can be covered over temporarily, only to be revealed as a knot is loosened. Hence, truth is partial and contingent, according to issues of time, space, and power relations. The three-dimensional surface of a knot both reveals a temporary prominence and conceals portions of the threads underneath. In the process, self–other relations emerge as entangled, rather than binary (Kaiser and McCullough 2010: 381). Let’s consider how a transnational fashion subject experiences entanglement across time and space. Cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall (1990) discussed circuitous (or entangled) routes that individuals from Africa have traveled. These routes are not just one-way trips from Africa to the United Kingdom, for example; nor are these routes straight. Rather, they loop around, reverse on themselves, and change courses as individuals have had the agency to explore new possibilities for subjectivity in the context of the African diaspora. The Greek-derived word diaspora means dispersion; to disperse is to sow or scatter. The term diaspora was first used to refer to the dispersal of Jewish people around the world due to persecution. It is also used to describe diasporas from Africa, whether they are based on slavery (as in the case of US, Caribbean, and Brazilian history between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries) or on immigration (from Africa to Europe, for example) or some combination (e.g., centuries ago from Africa to the Caribbean due to slavery and then immigration from the Caribbean to England in the 1950s and 1960s: the route traveled by many individuals in the Black British community). Fashion subjectivity in the African diaspora involves more than an either/or kind of style-fashion-dress. Instead, it represents and articulates all kinds of entanglements based on uneven power relations and the movements that result from these: the flight from religious persecution, slavery, the search for a better life beyond poverty, and so on (more on this in Chapter 4). Fashion studies scholar Leslie Rabine (2002) has shown how some African Americans in Los Angeles, for example, design and wear styles such as dashikis (loose pullover tunics) made from West African printed fabrics to express their transnational, ethnic identities. The influence is not only one way, however. Artisans in Dakar, Senegal (known as the “Paris of Africa”), adapt African American styles and prints. Entanglements abound with mutual aesthetic influences. Complex distribution networks link production with consumption across continents, as structures of feeling become part of the circuit of style-fashion-dress, as shown in Figure 2.2.

Assumption 5: Fashion Is Transnational—Not Merely Western or “Euromodern” In other words, there is more than one “fashion system” (Craik 1994)—more than a singular complex through which appearance styles change (and why they do) through 43

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the “circuit of style-fashion-dress” (Figure 1.3). “Modern” history itself is often framed exclusively as euromodern—a term that includes Europe, especially Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand (Grossberg 2010). Grossberg argues that euromodernity is just one of multiple possibilities for imagining modern histories. Just as history itself suffers from a “Western” bias, fashion history has had its own limited story/stories. Much of it has revolved around the dominant story of the birth of fashion in the Italian Renaissance and in the French courts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, respectively (e.g., Steele 1988; Davis 1992; Lipovetsky 1994). Historian SarahGrace Heller (2010) complicates the idea of identifying a particular time and place for fashion’s beginning. She argues that historians tend to discover a “birth of fashion in whatever period” (and place) they study. Fashionability, she concludes, is “in the eye of the beholder” (Heller 2010: 34). Rather than attempting to look for the origin of fashion, she argues that it is more fruitful to explore “when the cultural value placed on novelty becomes prominent, and when the desire for innovation and the capacity for the production of innovation” become part of an ongoing system of change (Heller 2010: 25). She argues that in Europe there was some kind of fashion system operating in the growing towns and courts of France since at least the twelfth century; by the thirteenth century, “full-blown fashionable values were in evidence” (34). If we broaden our conceptualization of fashion (and, indeed, culture more generally) to include Africa, Asia, and the southern hemisphere, then we can begin to consider how social and cultural change happens in a variety of ways, with different paces and within different spaces. Eicher (2001) makes this point in her introduction to the National Geographic Society book Fashion: Fashion is, after all, about change, and change happens in every culture because human beings are creative and flexible. However, when we encounter people in other cultures who appear not to be part of our modern world (maybe they don’t dress the way we do) and whose past does not include written history, paintings, or drawings, we often categorize them as coming from static worlds. (17) Eicher (2010) proposes the term “world fashion” to break out of the binary opposition of fashion as “west versus ‘the rest.’ ” She uses it in a way that is very similar to the way anthropologist Aihwa Ong (1999) employs transnationality to refer to “the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space—which has been intensified under late capitalism” (4). This term suggests that there are some new and ever-changing relationships between nations and capitalism (economic systems based on a profit motivation), but the prefix trans also implies crossings of various sorts: through space or across other kinds of boundaries. Transnationality also indicates ways in which new arrangements or possibilities are imagined: translations, transactions, transversals, and even transgressions (Ong 1999: 4). Like Ong (1999), we use the term transnational to describe larger cultural contexts that transcend nations. We use globalization and global more narrowly—to refer to those transnational arrangements that involve “new corporate strategies” (4). Since the 44

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1980s especially and the restructuring and continued spread of capitalism worldwide, transnationality has become part of everyday life in the circuit of style-fashion-dress. As feminist theorist Gayatri Spivak (1999) puts it, we “wear globalization on our bodies.” The circuit of style-fashion-dress, discussed in Chapter 1, articulates the complex interplay of subject formation within the production, distribution, consumption, and regulation of textiles, clothes, images, and ideas that circulate globally. Fashion historians Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (2010: 4) discuss two challenges associated with transnational histories of style-fashion-dress. The first challenge is to redefine fashion to include “consumers, producers and mediators well beyond the geographical boundaries of Western Europe, North America and perhaps those outposts frequently forgotten in the northern hemisphere, of South Africa, Australia, and parts of South America.” They go on to note the compelling issues associated with “the emerging economies of India and China”—nations that have rich and fascinating textile and stylefashion-dress histories as well. The second challenge is to refrain from thinking that a transnational understanding of fashion has only recently become possible because of “the result of globalization and the growth of new middle classes”: Recent innovative research underlines how places as disparate as Ming China, Tokugawa and Meiji Japan, Moghul India or Colonial Latin America and Australia, engaged and produced their own fashions both in conjunction, competition, collaboration and independently from Europe. The fact that these historical traditions of fashion are not as well known or advertised as the European one should not diminish their value. Braudel [the historian] famously wrote that “Europe invented historians and then made good use of them.” (Riello and McNeil 2010: 4)

Assumption 6: The Process of Negotiating Ambiguity Is Not a Level Playing Field, and It Is a Material Process—Especially in a Transnational Context Fashion, as a process, requires negotiation: give and take as individuals dress, perceive one another, articulate ambivalence and anxiety, work through ideas and possibilities, and modify appearances in an ongoing way. Sociologist Herbert Blumer (1969) used the phrase collective selection to capture how subject formation becomes a cultural process. As multiple subjects purvey available options in the marketplace (i.e., styles that have been produced and distributed, as shown in Figure 2.2), frequently there are some bestsellers that seem to capture their collective attention. These are the styles that feel fresh or right; they seem to capture the moment and to articulate the tensions at play in cultural discourse. Through the process of consumption (purchase and wear), individuals engage in subject formation (as they interact with one another in a cultural context). As shown in Figure 2.2, they negotiate various “structures of feeling.” As subjects interact 45

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with subjects in the contexts of visual and material culture, subjectivities meld into intersubjectivities: shared ways of knowing and articulating structures of feeling. The symbolic interactionist (SI) theory of fashion (Kaiser et al. 1995) pulls together many of the concepts and flows presented in Figure 2.2. The SI theory proposes that fashion change thrives on cultural tensions (e.g., cultural ambivalence and cultural anxiety) that contribute to individual articulations of appearance style that are at least initially ambiguous (new and fresh but hard to put into words). The meanings of appearance styles are negotiated in everyday social life through interaction with others. These negotiations—involving both visual and verbal discourse—enable fashion subjects to grapple with ongoing cultural tensions in subtle but complex ways. Still, the underlying tensions themselves are not completely resolved, so the process of fashion change continues: the ambivalence and anxiety in cultural discourse, the symbolic ambiguity in fashion subjects’ appearance styles, and the negotiation of meaning in social interactions (Kaiser et al. 1995). Where and how does the negotiation of ambiguity occur? Hegemonic stories place fashion in modern, Western, urban contexts. These stories continue in global discourses about “world fashion cities,” which Breward and Gilbert (2006) have challenged. As they observe, cities such as Paris, Milan, and New York “are routinely incorporated into the advertising of designer brands and retail outlets” (ix). Yet who gets to decide what constitutes a “world fashion city”? How do processes of production, distribution, and consumption articulate to create systems of representation? And how and why do power relations become a factor in fashion hegemony from a transnational perspective? This last question gets into issues of relations across national, ethnic, religious, and other subject positions. A bit of transnational, historical grounding will be helpful at this point—to have a context for understanding uneven processes of negotiation due to power relations. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Europe had successfully cemented its position as the dominating force in the world. Paris had obtained a reputation as a major world’s fashion center (Steele 1988). By 1882 India was officially a part of the British Empire headed by Queen Victoria. At a Congress of Berlin in 1884, Africa was divided among the colonizing nation-states of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal. People of European descent also governed Australia and New Zealand as well as the Americas, where Native Americans were dispossessed of their traditional territories and subjected to numerous forms of genocide. Russia ruled a vast empire in Eastern Europe and was to become the world’s first communist state. The Chinese were already feeling the force of European culture and politics, and Japan was forced to open to the West by American naval pressure in the 1860s. Japan had already been dominating Korea by that time. And, the domination of the Islamic empire by the Turks ended when the Arabs and European allies created the “Middle East” (Appiah and Gates 1997: x). Much of European colonizing can be connected with the discourse of modernity. With the spirit of modernizing came a desire to get out and use new technologies and opportunities for travel and wealth accumulation. There was interest in learning about the rest of the world; what is not often recorded as faithfully in the histories of European 46

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explorers is how and what they learned from the rest of the world. Sandra Harding (1998), a feminist philosopher, argues that colonization relied heavily on “discovered” peoples’ ideas, technologies, and treasures (e.g., “exotic” textiles and spices). She argues that the colonizers rationalized their actions through representations of places outside of Europe as unchanging and timeless—as lacking cultural histories of their own. The European colonizing nations reasoned that they were more advanced and progressive than any other region of the world. To colonizers, colonialism offered the best of European civilization to Africans, Asians, and others: the opportunity to become modern. In fact, Harding (1998) argues, Europeans appropriated heavily from the traditions of the cultures that European explorers encountered. These cultures had already created complex mathematical, theoretical, and technological traditions, and they also often had goods (luxurious fabrics, jewels, spices, and other objects and artworks) that European explorers wanted. For example, as the historian Beverly Lemire (2010) documents, printed Indian cotton textiles became wildly popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. Calico fabrics with floral prints captured the imagination of British consumers in a variety of social classes. In the early seventeenth century, Dutch and English traders made significant profits by selling these cotton textiles, produced in India, in Europe with high markups. Between 1664 and 1678, Lemire (2010) notes that the value of the English East India Company’s textile imports represented 60–70 percent of their trade. The British textile industry reacted, and a discourse of cultural anxiety ensued: Oriental fabrics were imbued with alien and gendered characteristics. They were depicted as effeminate luxuries, corrupting in particular the female populace with their lightness and brightness, while impoverishing deserving artisans. The language of this debate was frequently couched in terms of gender antagonisms with women asserting their right to dress as they pleased and weavers claiming the right to work and constrain the choice of apparel for women, as necessary. (Lemire 2010: 201–2) There seems to have been a kind of “disconnect” between British textile production and consumption. In 1721, most East Indian textiles were banned in England, and British textile manufacturers had the legal protection that gave them some leeway to work on developing new systems to “knock off ” Indian cotton calico and chintz fabrics (Lemire 2010). Indian scholars have shown how India’s highly developed cotton textile industry provided both technical and artistic ideas—especially related to dyeing and printing— which helped to advance the British textile industry. Britain needed to suppress or “deindustrialize” India’s textile industry in order to enhance the development of its own industry in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Harding 1998: 32). Harding (1998) argues that modern science is and has been multicultural, because it incorporated or appropriated the elements of a wide range of knowledge traditions into it. The same can certainly be said of fashion, which has been represented in EuroAmerican societies as modern and Western, as we have seen. Indeed, as the hegemonic 47

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story or discourse goes, fashion originated in Europe. What emerged as modern or Western fashion has spread to other parts of the world, along with processes of industrialization. In other words, wearing Western style-fashion-dress became framed as part of the process of becoming modern. Ethnic dress, in contrast, was hence associated with traditional societies and soon to be replaced with modern or Western dress with discovery of the “benefits” of modernization. And the West, according to this story, has led the way in the industrial production of textiles and fashion as in other scientific and technological advances. Yet the story is actually more complex and more entangled than the patronizing telling above. Historically and currently, many Western fashion trends derive from cultures not included in the hegemonic narrative of Western modernity, and Indigenous cultures have likewise adopted and incorporated new materials and ideas into their styling-fashioning-dressing practices. Change is part of fashion everywhere. Take for example Plate 7, which includes three different shawls designed, made, and worn by Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations’ women in the early 1880s. The shawls were collected by J. A. Jacobson for the Ethnological Museum of Berline (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches) in 1882 (Green 2013). By this time in the late nineteenth century, Nuu-chah-nulth people had developed complex trade relationships with those aboard the merchant ships that had frequented their coasts since the later eighteenth century. The exchange of goods brought new materials to the Northwest Coast and, likewise, brought new materials (like sea otter pelts and Indigenous works of art and design) from the Northwest Coast to the rest of the world. These three shawls are similar in form and production method but differ in terms of materials and color. All include some kind of fur at the neckline and were constructed using a wrapped twining technique. The shawl at the top is made entirely of natural resources from Nuu-chah-nulth territories: beaten and softened cedar bark and animal fur, including a very small amount of mountain goat fur spun with cedar bark to create the subtle parallel white lines along the hem. The shawl in the middle has a similar neckline and hem to that above, but the designer has altered the design by incorporating strips cut of calico printed textiles and wool blankets into the wrapped twining. This creates a dramatic contrast against the beige cedar bark. The final shawl at bottom is made almost entirely of trade materials (with the exception of the fur neckline). Upon a closer inspection, the kinking of the red yarns that have been bundled together between the white cotton twining is a material clue: The kinks reveal that these red yarns were likely previously woven together, perhaps as a red Hudson’s Bay blanket. The blanket was likely unraveled to be remade into this shawl, embellished at the neckline with locally sourced fur (Green 2013: 174). Newly available materials in the late nineteenth century were refashioned into a distinctly Nuu-chah-nulth, but also transnational, dynamic, and ever-changing fashion aesthetic. Cultural appropriation involves taking elements from another culture, often without giving credit to that culture or, worse still, at the expense of that culture (Ashley and Plesch 2002; Green and Kaiser 2017, 2020). Cultural appropriation becomes most problematic, from a cultural studies perspective, when there are power differences between the 48

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cultures and when a more powerful “taking” culture has the motivation to dominate a less powerful culture (Ashley and Plesch 2002). Yet cultural studies scholar Minh-Ha Pham (2014) points out that this way of thinking actually perpetuates “the very thing [scholars] intend to oppose: white Western domination over and exploitation of culture at the expense of everyone else,”2 and high versus low, powerful versus disempowered, and other unhelpful binaries that eclipse the complexities of the debate. Is it possible for appropriation to be a respectful process of aesthetic influence or inspiration, if an appropriate degree of credit or profit is given? Who decides what’s an “appropriate degree of credit or profit”? Can it ever be just a matter of cultural “borrowing”? (And when/ how will the other culture be “paid back”?) Who profits? And how do people feel about having aesthetic, spiritual, and expressive aspects of their culture taken and redesigned for predominantly white, Western consumers? Asian American studies scholar Sunaina Maira (2000) has studied cultural appropriation in the form of Indo-chic: the mainstream popularity of South Asian cultural markers and practices such as refashioned saris, styles worn in Bollywood Hindi films, mehndi (patterns painted on hands with henna), and bindi dots on the forehead. The young South Asian American women with whom Maira spoke were “deeply ambivalent about the implications of mehndi’s mainstreaming.” She found that their feelings of anger regarding the appropriation of mehndi were “sometimes mixed with varying degrees of curiosity, pride, pleasure, guilt, and confusion.” One woman, Shamita, had grown up in Calcutta, India: For us it [mehndi] goes back many years, it’s part of our culture. … Sometimes I feel annoyed because we’re so used to seeing it in the proper context … at home, you wear a sari, you have the proper jewelry, the proper makeup. … I also don’t know where it’s from, and the history, but we’ve just seen it around us, or we know the context, where it stands, but people not from South Asia wouldn’t know where it stands. (Maira 2000: 350) Maira goes to point out the contradictions or ambivalence in Shamita’s comments: it is not that culture should be fossilized as static, but she does want to see her culture’s symbols in a context that “fits” (and acknowledges that even she doesn’t know everything she might know about her cultural symbols’ histories). Visual and material culture, including style-fashion-dress, is especially susceptible to appropriation, especially in the context of a global economy and digital technologies that make it possible to copy an image and modify it slightly at the stroke of a computer key. Global capitalism, in fact, thrives on the appropriation of culture and labor, as well as consumer desire for agency and creativity. As the circuit of style-fashion-dress model reminds us, the interplay between agency and power relations shapes the flow of materials, processes, and possibilities. The following chapters (3 through 9) locate 2https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/05/cultural-appropriation-in-fashion-stoptalking-about-it/370826/

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transnational, intersectional fashion subjects in the overlapping contexts of national, ethnic and racial, religious, classed, gendered, sexual, and embodied subject positions that conclude in Chapter 10 with the intersection of time and space in relation to age/ generation and place. But first we will consider—to close this chapter—an example of transnational, intersectional fashion subjects. First, let us briefly explore the case of Anthropologie, a retailer headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but with stores throughout the entire United States and expanding to Europe. Founded in 1992 by Richard Hayne—who had been an anthropology major in college—in Wayne (a suburb of Pennsylvania), Anthropologie (owned by the parent company of Urban Outfitters) is in many ways a store that capitalizes on transnational, intersectional female subjectivities. The store evokes feelings of romantic, whimsical, and cross-cultural happiness: an eclectic assortment of goods (roughly two-thirds clothes and one-third household accessories) in locally designed settings that exude global aesthetics tailored to euromodern tastes. Yet a group of Anthropologie staff spend over half of the year traveling through Europe, India, and the Far East, perusing, adapting, and appropriating ideas derived from flea markets, estate sales, and antique stores. White, middle-, and upper-class female customers in the United States are encouraged to “shop like a Frenchwoman” at a global flea market. These customers tend to have the following profile: 30–45 years old with a college or postgraduate education; a professional or ex-professional, in a committed family relationship with children; and with an annual household income of $150,000–$200,000. The president of Anthropologie describes their “model customer” as “well-read and well-traveled. She is very aware—she gets our references, whether it’s to a town in Europe or to a book or a movie. She’s urban minded. She’s into cooking, gardening, and wine. She has a natural curiosity about the world. She’s relatively fit” (LaBarre 2007). She is a privileged, transnational, and intersectional fashion subject. To the extent to which we all (producers, distributors, and consumers alike) become entangled in the circuit of style-fashion-dress, we become transnational, intersectional fashion subjects embedded in cultural discourses that shape not only what we wear but also how we feel.

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CHAPTER 3 FASHIONING THE NATIONAL SUBJECT

The world has not always been divided into the “patchwork quilt of differently colored countries” that is shown on today’s maps and globes (Calhoun 1997: 13). Making maps of nations is a relatively modern process; it involves a neat delineation of borders and represents the world in a way that looks outward from one’s own positioning. Maps abstract space, typically through the vision of those in power, and have thus played an important role in colonial expansion and dispossession. At the time of this writing, there are nearly two hundred nations—not all of which officially belong to the United Nations. On a regular basis, new nations join the United Nations. Nations have “no clearly identifiable births, and their deaths, if they ever happen, are never natural” (Anderson 2006: 205). This description applies to fashion as well, although nations present themselves as more stable, certain, serious, official, and political than fashion.

Nation ≠ Essence In cultural studies terms, a nation is not a thing or an essence that necessarily has a culture wholly distinct from other nations. Rather, a nation is a context and a site of articulation and ongoing formation; the concept of nation offers a way to study articulations that are both political and aesthetic and that bring intersectionalities to light. Style-fashion-dress is also a context through which aesthetic and political details can be represented and deciphered. Not surprisingly, as a subject position, national identity assumes multiple forms across and within countries. In his development of a widely accepted definition of nation as an “imagined community,” Benedict Anderson (2006: 6) argued that nations have to continually re-create themselves in order to foster a sense of belonging (a “we”) on the part of their “members.” Some imagination is required in this process because it is not possible for all of the subjects belonging to a nation to interact with each other on a face-to-face or daily basis. The contradictions in nationalist cultural discourses have much to do with the entanglements between an individual’s subjectivity (i.e., agency, ability to represent) and their “national fabric” (i.e., power, hegemony). Nation-related subject positions do not always neatly coincide with one’s ethnic or other subject positions; frequently, for example, it is often women’s bodies that serve the purpose of representing the nation. Beyond the level of the nation is the complexity of individuals who perceive themselves as transnational subjects (e.g., in African, Chinese, or Indian diasporas around the world)

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in a global world. Moreover, in a global economy, national economies ironically depend on a complex combination of the national imagination and a transnational appeal. Nations, like fashions, are made, not born. Fashion, like nation, requires imagination and fosters a sense of identification. Subject formation is inextricably linked to the processes of creating and re-creating both nation and fashion. By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, modern nations had emerged in Europe. Part of the process of creating modern nations was the development of style-fashion-dress that represented modernity and nationalism alike. Fashion theorist Efrat Tseëlon argues that in euromodernity the concept of nation “was premised on the tendency of dominant cultures to appropriate the national narrative by claiming a coherence and uniformity that, on closer inspection, often provide to be more imagined than real” (Tseëlon 2010: 152). The identification and storytelling of national differences have more to do with categorical thinking (the drive to classify and compare in order to develop a sense of identity, as well as difference from other nations) than they do with distinguishable cultures or characters. A critical evaluation of the concept of nation is especially important in the context of the blurring of national boundaries since the globalization of fashion production, distribution, and consumption since the 1980s. There was a long history, though, of a global exchange of goods and ideas between the East and West well before Columbus “discovered” the New World while searching for India in 1492. (He named the people there “Indians” to “honor his confusion”; Calhoun 1997: 7.) In the other direction, looking east from Europe, the network of routes known as the Silk Road was developed before the birth of Christ, had its heyday during the Tang dynasty in China, and played a unique role in the foreign trade of silk and other goods, as well as in political relations and the spread of religion (Wild 2011). Along with the desire for exotic goods and new ideas, the creation of modern nations in Europe contributed to the process of European expansion, also known as imperialism (the expansion one’s nationalism into a broader empire) and colonialism (the settlement and often violent encroachment and occupation of Indigenous territories around the world). Modern European nations emerged, in part, to create a system for acquiring resources for—and extending—the production of goods and to foster new consumer markets for goods. In other words, the expansion of capitalism and empire is inextricably linked. European nations were not “pure” in terms of ethnicity or religion. Essential national identities had to be created to make people feel that they were internally united and different from people in other nations (Calhoun 1997: 7). Imperialism and colonialism were belief systems that incentivized the creation of modern nations. Today, these nations continue to rely upon their articulation with capitalism in upholding white supremacy and Indigenous dispossession, especially within the United States and other nations such as Australia and Canada. In this chapter, we address how nations have appropriated dress to create identities and to profit in modern capitalist systems, colonized people to extract resources and labor, used dress to accomplish the formation of nation-states, and refashioned dress to foster recognition and reward in a global economy. But we also address modes of resistance and rearticulation. We begin with a look at the ways in which style-fashion-dress lends 52

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itself to what fashion scholar Simona Segre Reinach (2011) calls “a nation’s position, amidst memory, mystification, and imaginary” (271).

Nation as Different Than: Representing the Other There is a long history of thinking about nations as having distinct characters or cultures, and style-fashion-dress has been part of illustrating this thinking. Historian Eugenia Paulicelli (2010) conducted a close textual analysis of costume books (two editions of a book called Habiti) published by Cesare Vecellio, who had the goal of “mapping the world” through a kind of encyclopedic approach to national dress, first in 1590 and then in 1598. Paulicelli notes that Vecellio was extremely curious about other cultures and geographic spaces, but Vecellio inevitably depicted others as different than the European norm with which he was most familiar: Italy and Venice. Paulicelli sought to decipher “national character” using style-fashion-dress as a guide. In sixteenthcentury Italy, there was already considerable anxiety about the blurring of many kinds of boundaries associated with gender, identity, moral codes, and appearance. This anxiety surfaced in the context of early modernity and a lessening hegemonic influence of the Catholic Church on moral codes, including appearance. Somehow the sorting of others in the world by national costumes, perhaps, provided a sense of world order through classification, offering some assurance that nations, at least, could be organized to assuage anxieties about other kinds of blurred boundaries. Vecellio used Rome and its history to represent a Eurocentric vision of the world where Christianity is a foundational context from which to imagine other nations and to represent their stories (Paulicelli 2010: 142). In part, this foundational choice was a strategy to ameliorate Italy’s relative lack of power in Europe at the time of his writing. He characterized Italy, in general, as a site of tremendous diversity because Italy had been “prey to foreigners and the site of fate; and for these reasons it should not be a surprise if here one can see much more variety in clothing styles than in any other nations or regions” (Paulicelli 2010: 142). He worked with the artist Baldo Penna to represent the Italian in the book as a naked man, carrying a piece of wool cloth on his shoulder. No single form of dress could capture Italians, Penna explained; the naked “national character” himself could choose a tailor to cut his clothing according to his own taste and agency. The nation, as a whole, was too complex to be represented by one costume, he suggested. In contrast, other nations could be represented visually to offer some order to the chaos of a changing world. Vecellio illustrated Turkey, Africa, and America with exotic costumes. He drew a contrast between France and Spain and distinguished class and social status as they intersect with gender. Paulicelli notes that Vecellio seemed to be aware that his project could only be partial, “no matter how great his anxiety to map the entirety of the world through dress” (2010: 156). Of course, it is not really possible to “map the world” through style-fashion-dress or any other means. However, Vecellio’s attempts to do so and to struggle with issues of national—or, perhaps more accurately, regional—representation point to the importance of collective identifications in modern 53

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nations. Ultimately, the idea of a “naked ‘national character’ ” could not suffice; there needed to be more cultural representation to foster a sense of local/regional/national identity through joint processes of subject formation.

Folk Costume, National Dress, and Fashion One of the ironies of modern national dress is its frequently nostalgic relationship to what has been called rural, peasant, or ethnic attire. Fashion scholar Lise Skov (2010) has described how part of the process of nation formation in Europe was “the romantic search for folk dress” (4), which became a means to appropriate “preindustrial rural” cultural aesthetics and transform them into “a mediated national discourse” (4). In other words, folk dress became national dress and reified as such through public display (Petrov 2019: 63). Fashion historian Julie Petrov (2019) notes that Universal Exhibitions and World’s Fairs of the nineteenth century became sites where “folk costumes demonstrated the authentic and unique traditions of culturally distinct societies” (70). While these displays represented folk dress as static and “fixed,” dress historian Lou Taylor (2004) has argued that rural peasant attire was never static but rather constantly shifting. Within the context of nationalist turmoil in Europe (especially Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe) in the period between 1850 and 1914, museums collected such attire as a “precious carrier of local, regional and created ‘national’ identities,” according to Taylor (2004: 201). Some of the heightened interest in rural attire could be attributed to cultural anxieties regarding loss within the contexts of industrialization and urbanization. Taylor argues that royal and aristocratic landowners fostered the preservation of their own peasantry’s rural way of life, because they were (1) very aware of the high degree of rural poverty and (2) concerned about rural depopulation, as many rural peasants migrated to cities that were becoming industrialized. Collecting European peasant and regional dress has served “the political and ideological purposes of nationalists, artists, designers, utopian socialists, Fascists and Communists alike” to represent various forms of nationalism (Taylor 2004: 200–1). Another explanation of the fascination with folk costume of this period is its framing as “ethnological dress.” Petrov (2019) points out that folk costume was often displayed alongside technological dress innovations at industrial exhibitions of the nineteenth century, which upheld anthropological theories of cultural evolution by conveying “an evolution of cultural production … through the visual ordering of the material culture of particular nations and people” (62). One example of folk dress becoming national dress, as well as national fashion is Germany’s Tracht, which roughly translates in English to “dress, attire, garb; costume, uniform; national or peasant costume; fashion, style” (Betteridge 1982: 612). Covering the gamut of clothing-related terminology, the range of options for the translation points ambiguously to the meanings of specific articles of dress and actually blurs binary oppositions such as fashion versus dress, or fashion versus costume. The term Tracht is most commonly associated with the Dirndl (traditional womenswear) or Lederhosen 54

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(traditional menswear) linked historically to Alpine regions in what is now Bavaria in Germany, as well as Austria. However, Tracht in fact is a more general term referring to German-speaking folk or traditional dress across regions and cultural traditions in dress. There is a reason for the narrower Bavarian connotation: During the Nazi period in the 1930s and early 1940s, the dirndl became part of a larger political and cultural, hegemonic and appropriative project of re-creating “ideal” German femininity in a xenophobic and racialized (Aryan) manner. Hitler’s “blood and soil” rhetoric emphasized the important role of “the farmer’s wife” (Guenther 2004: 114): a symbol of “Mother Germany” (109). Hitler aimed to eradicate—in an “identity not” way—semblances of French fashion influences, as well as Jewish production, distribution, or consumption of the dirndl (and any other textile and fashion items and beyond) in Germany. For example, in 1900, the Jewish brothers Julius and Moritz Wallach had opened a store in Munich, and in the first two decades of the twentieth century, they became successful in their marketing of dirndls and lederhosen as a kind of “urban ‘rural chic’ ” (Hutter 2019). Women (including Jewish women) in Berlin and Leipzig, as well as Munich and other cities wore dirndls at different price points, but by the mid-1920s after the First World War, German women were back to craving French fashions, and the dirndl became less popular (Guenther 2004: 114). During the Holocaust, the Nazis threatened the Wallachs to sell their business and confiscated their goods, forcing them to escape to the United States. The Nazis promoted the mass production and marketing of the dirndl by Aryans, and the revival of the dirndl served their nationalist, racist, and sexist agenda. After the war, those connotations diminished the dirndl’s popularity as Germans sought to distance themselves from Nazism and look toward the future. As with many clothing items, layers of meanings linger even as new ones are produced. By the late 2010s, dirndls and lederhosen had again become popular in southern Germany and Austria; millennials did not associate these styles with Nazism, but rather with fashion and regional identity. Having become ubiquitous at events such as Oktoberfest and special occasions, dirndls and lederhosen reentered the fashion lexicon in new ways. The revival of these Tracht styles paralleled a greater acceptance of national pride at events such as the World Cup. Still, the lingering connotations of a problematic form of nationalism were especially embraced by conservative politicians. A “free the dirndl” trend emerged to take back what had been appropriated by the Nazis: to make the dirndl a more inclusive article of dress. Some young Jewish women wear the style and point to the fact that there was a history of Jewish production, distribution, and consumption of the dirndl before its appropriation by the Nazis (Rubin 2019). German designers with African heritage have created dirndls with African prints, making innovative articulations that move the styles in new directions with new layers of meaning. And German drag queens wearing dirndls challenge the gender-exclusive connotations of the styles (Hutter 2019). Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean, dirndls and lederhosen remain popular among German Americans, especially for holidays. German studies scholar Verena Hutter (2019) points out that the dirndl communicates not only “pride, emotion and Heimat [homeland]” but also “projection, power and abuse” (para. 11) to the extent that it “upholds a racial hierarchy 55

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in which people of white, European ancestry are at the top” (para. 12) and are able to “opt out of showcasing their heritage” (para. 11) in a way that is not accessible to Black and Indigenous people of color. As the complex “tug-of-war” (Hutter 2019) meanings of the dirndl illustrate, a number of ironies, ambiguities, and contradictions underlie the concepts of national dress and its more exotic-sounding cousin: “national costume.” Just as a nation is not an essence but rather a context, essentialist notions of national dress limit opportunities for interpreting ironies, ambiguities, and contradictions, as well as intersectionalities among subject positions. Here, once again, Carol Tulloch’s (2010, 2016) style-fashiondress terminology helps to remind us of the importance of context, relationships of parts to wholes, and possibilities for both continuity and change.

Working the Hyphen: Nation-State and Style-Fashion-Dress So far, we have been focusing on nation as an “imagined community,” but when nations become recognized geographically and politically, internally and externally, they can be characterized as nation-states. Feminist theorist Judith Butler points out that the state is not always the nation-state, and the nation is not always the nation-state, but the two get “cobbled together through a hyphen” (Butler and Spivak 2007: 2). She asks: “What work does the hyphen do? Does the hyphen finesse the relation that needs to be explained? Does it mark a certain soldering that has taken place historically? Does it suggest a fallibility at the heart of the relation?” (Butler and Spivak 2007: 2). Butler’s questions about working the hyphen could apply as well to style-fashion-dress. Nation-state and style-fashion-dress are both terms that suggest, as Tulloch (2010) notes, critical questions about parts and wholes. The same may be true of hyphenated national/ ethnic identities, such as German-American, Somalian-Finnish, or Pakistani-British, to the extent that individuals’ identities straddle nations or ethnicities. The process of “working the hyphen” may account for some of the contradictions, ambiguities, and ambivalences surrounding each term. In the context of the nation-state, for example, it is instructive to examine the issue of the “right balance,” or what is the “best articulation” between subject formation (and associated liberties or rights of citizens as individuals) and regulation by the state (presumably for the good of the whole nation?). When, for example, has style-fashion-dress tilted toward uniformity in order to represent the nation, if not the nation-state? Let’s consider two case studies to think through the importance of context (e.g., time, space, cultural and state politics) in cultural debates/discourses that bear some relation to the idea of a national uniform during the (1) French Revolution (the 1780s and 1790s) and (2) the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–76). French Revolution By the 1770s in France—during the reign of King Louis XVI—European Enlightenment philosophy and politics had contributed to a popular desire to replace old ways of thinking 56

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about being subjects of the “state” (the monarchy) with principles of individual liberty and expression. Dire economic conditions for much of the public, including poverty and starvation, fostered the sense of a disconnect between the lavish spending and decadent lifestyle associated with the royal court (epitomized during the reign of Louis XIV, the grandfather of Louis XVI), on the one hand, and the everyday life experiences of the courts’ subjects. The French Revolution (1789–99) sought to replace old ways, especially fashionable excess and hierarchy, with symbols of nationalism such as the red and blue cockade (a knot of ribbons usually attached to a hat) and sans culottes (i.e., long working-class trousers, as opposed to aristocratic breeches; see Plate 8). Fashion was a deadly serious matter, as the French people could tell at a glance who supported the revolution as opposed to the monarchy. Some European Enlightenment writers went so far as to argue for a national uniform as an alternative to the lure of fashion, excess, and status hierarchies (Möser [1775] 2004). Based in part on Enlightenment thinking, some authors argued for a national uniform that made no major distinction between military and civilian attire. The sans culottes style—although not a uniform per se—came to represent the national subject. The underlying assumption was that citizenship was a masculine construct; men were to be on call 24/7 for military service as needed. In The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, Gilles Lipovetsky (1994) notes how the nation-state’s marking of geopolitical boundaries through dress shifts a sense of responsibility from community as a whole toward the individual as a “national subject.” The Enlightenment thinkers who argued against the idea of a national uniform reasoned that it would undermine the idea of a national subject. A free nation, they submitted, required the ability for citizens to express themselves, whereas a national uniform would “suppress and stifle the taste of a people” (Witte 2004 [1791]: 78). What was the appropriate way to articulate individual freedom, as compared to the larger, collective spirit of a new nation? If the nation-state was to require everyone to wear a uniform, wouldn’t this contradict the whole idea of democracy? Not everyone was viewed equally as a national subject, however. The intersectionalities among national, gender, and class subject positions were key to the French Revolution. Although some women adopted symbols of the French Revolution, they were not perceived as full citizens (Weber 2006). The new nationalism was gendered as masculine and also classed as working class. If, indeed, the project of the European Enlightenment was to make “men out of boys” (Butler and Spivak 2007: 116), then perhaps it is no accident that the American and French revolutionary movements coincided with the start of the so-called masculine renunciation of fashion (discussed further in Chapter 7). The French Revolution was decidedly antiroyalist: against the monarchy associated with King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. But it was Marie Antoinette who came to symbolize all that was wrong with the monarchy. Marie Antoinette, born in Austria and “traded” as a royal family member to France to marry Louis XVI, was trained as a young girl to become the future queen of France. Her roles in France were to represent the nation and to produce an heir for the future throne. In Austria, she had 57

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learned how to embody the French monarchy in a feminine fashion: how to carry herself and how to glide in the style of the French court. It turns out that this was necessary but not sufficient for the French public. Marie Antoinette was already suspect because she was Austrian (and hence foreign), enjoyed luxury goods when there was rampant poverty in France (she earned the nickname Madame Deficit), and was blamed for not readily producing a male heir to the crown. The media also questioned her sexuality because she spent so much time with female courtesans—and not enough time, according to critics, working on heterosexual reproduction; this charge could not be fairly attributed only to her but her foreign “otherness” carried over to other stigmatized subject positions. Fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell (2015) argues that Marie Antoinette’s association with the marchande de modes, the French Guild organization considered to be fashion stylists of the time, also had negative repercussions for her because guild members were associated with heightened aesthetic display and licentious behavior. Marie Antoinette experienced gender trouble, as well as national, sexual, and class trouble. And much of this trouble played out through cultural anxieties about her style-fashion-dress: her Austrian origin, despite her clothes intentionally designed to foster her Frenchness; her tribute to Louis XIV through her masculine-influenced attire for horse-riding; her association with the marchande de modes; and her role as a troubled fashion influencer in the middle of a class-based, nationalist revolution (Chrisman-Campbell 2015; Weber 2006). As Chrisman-Campbell (2015) notes, “while royal and aristocratic ladies had been the traditional arbiters of taste, fashion was increasingly driven by urban women lower down the social scale, from actresses and courtesans to the wives and daughters of bankers, soldiers, and statesmen” (32). Fashion studies scholar Agnès Rocamora (2009) observes that the French Revolution had had the effect of centralizing Paris’ role as “the space for the expression, celebration and consecration of the nation” (6). Marie Antoinette continued a French tradition dating to the late seventeenth century, when Louis XIV had “used fashion as a token of royalist and nationalist power in France and across Europe” (25). The fashion and textile industries became a central component of France’s influence in Europe and set the stage for its promotion of French luxury goods. By the eighteenth century, Parisian fashion circulated throughout Europe via fashion plates (drawings) and fashion dolls. Its hegemony as the first global fashion city became challenged in the late nineteenth century, when London, Milan, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, and other cities joined the ranks with fashion weeks with an ability to develop local and national fashion identities, in concert with global recognition (Gilbert 2006; Rocamora 2009). Still, the mystique of Parisian haute couture (high fashion) tended to linger (Rocamora 2009: 33), as evident by such framings as Shanghai (“Paris of the East”) and Dakar, Senegal (“Paris of Africa”). These framings are not without colonial underpinnings in both cases. In Dakar, for example, a “Eurafrican hybrid” form of fashion (Mustafa 2006: 177) has referenced both Parisian fashion and “processes of decolonization, neoliberal reform, globalization,” represented through a postcolonial African aesthetic (Mustafa 2006: 179). 58

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The dynamic interplay between national and fashion identities in France over time— from working-class revolutionary symbolism to haute couture—represents a kind of sartorial tug-of-war that is classed and gendered, as well as politicized nationally. Some of the same issues apply in the case of style-fashion-dress in China. Chinese Cultural Revolution (and Beyond) Cultural anxieties became intensified during the Chinese “Great Proletarian” Cultural Revolution (1966–76). This revolution did not involve the overthrow of an existing regime but rather an enforcement of the principles associated with the earlier (1949) communist revolution, which had resulted in the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Mao Zedong was the Chinese leader between 1949 and 1976, and he attempted to destroy traditional culture, which had a rich history among the wealthy, at least, in terms of textiles and fashion. He also wanted to resist Western bourgeois modernity; he and his Communist Party aimed for a different (anticapitalist) form of modernity. Their efforts had only been partially successful; coastal cities such as Shanghai, which had been semicolonized, still had a vibrant fashion scene that included Western business suits and leather shoes for men and the cheongsam and high heels for women. In other cities, some people still wore the traditional long robes and mandarin jackets associated with ancient China and the stratified system of ranking associated with Confucianist philosophy. Both Western modern fashion and Chinese traditional dress, as well as the belief systems that they represented, were rejected by Communists; Mao began to pursue an agenda of more radical change in China (Mei 2005). Private companies in China merged with state-owned companies, so that the state would have more control over the economy. There was a shortage of materials, and in 1954, the state issued a coupon system for fabrics, food, and furniture (Tsui 2010: 15). During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), militarism became embedded in national subject positions as millions of young people moved from cities “up to the mountains and down to the country” to engage in hard labor wearing the green military uniform (with a red badge on the sleeve) of the Red Guard, forcibly recruited from universities and high schools. This adaptation of the “liberation army uniform” became “the most revolutionary, pure and reliable symbol” of what it meant to be Chinese during this period (Mei 2005: 103). The uniform actually derived earlier from Sun Zhongshan (or Sun Yat-Sen in Cantonese), the “Father of Modern China.” A tailor, Tian Jia-Dong, modified the style of the suit to make it more flattering for Chairman Mao, who was physically large. The suit became looser overall, the collar became wider, and the corner of the collar became squared (rather than rounded) (Tsui 2010: 16). When a version of this military-inspired garb became the uniform for the Red Guard on young people’s bodies, it came to represent the hegemonic nation-state’s vision of the future. The concept of the military- and revolutionary-inspired suit spread throughout the nation with some variations. Christine Tsui (2010) asserts that “no country has ever been influenced so dramatically, across such a large geographic area and long period of time, over people’s daily wear as has China” by the Cultural Revolution (17). Juanjuan 59

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Wu (2009) explains this conformity by the tense political environment, in which “the fear of being labeled reactionary led people to speak, act, and dress like other, since blending into the crowd was certainly safer than standing out” (2). Yet Wu (2009) goes on to argue that despite a “rigid uniformity” in dress, the Cultural Revolution did not kill fashion (2). Instead, fashion just assumed a “different mask” (a cover for a wider range of belief systems). In her nuanced analysis, Wu submits that there was a complex paradox or contradiction operating in the context of proletarian (working-class) ideology of the Cultural Revolution. On the one hand, because fashion was associated with Western bourgeois cultures, Chinese people needed to avoid appearing concerned with “superficial, outward appearances.” On the other hand, “any deviation from the rigid dress code could result in life-threatening consequences, and in this sense, ironically, one had to be fully aware of dress and appearance to an unprecedented degree” (Wu 2009: 2). Hence, the minutest of details became very significant and assumed a deepened sense of importance, emotionally and politically. To the Western eye, mediated by imagery in television, magazines, and films, everyone’s fashion in China looked alike (terms such as “blue ants” and “gray ants” were used to describe masses of Chinese people). However, there were a number of subtleties and differences that existed within the broader conformity. Colors included olive green (the Red Guard military garb) and white, in addition to blue and gray (Wu 2009: 3). And while there were not major differences between men’s and women’s styles overall, a number of details surfaced in the clothes that women often made for themselves to infuse a touch of femininity: Garments were sometimes decorated with floral patterns on inner or fake collars or scarves (Wu 2009: 4). Features such as these also helped to extend the use of materials that were scarce. A common expression during the Cultural Revolution to describe the life of a new outfit or pair of shoes was “three years new, three years old, and another three years of mending and patching” (Yan 2009: 211). After Mao’s death in 1979, government economic reforms toward privatization changed consumption from a frivolous bourgeois pastime into part of the political agenda. This shift, too, generated cultural anxiety. Wu (2009) notes how there was a great deal of ambiguity in what was considered appropriate during the beginning of the transitional post-Mao period. Part of this ambiguity came from the ambivalence of the party itself, which was anxious both to promote reforms toward a market economy and to reinforce a confidence in socialism. People were encouraged to dress “to reflect the spirit of socialism” and to emancipate their “minds to become more creative” (Wu 2009: 17). It wasn’t exactly clear what this meant, and the ambiguity certainly played out in style-fashion-dress. Wu describes the “shocking sight of women in high heels, long hair, and jewelry and men with their long hair, sideburns, and mustaches, along with bell-bottom pants, flowery shirts, jeans, and sunglasses” in the late 1970s (1). Since then, post-Mao China witnessed the birth of the Chinese market economy, becoming the largest powerhouse of production in the world and a significant consumer market for international luxury goods (Wu 2009: xii). Chinese fashion itself was also reborn (Tsui 2010; Wu 2009).

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Nationalist symbols prevailed in both the French and Chinese Cultural Revolutions— each with their own particular cultural/economic agendas, social norms, and power dynamics (e.g., a social movement “from below” to overthrow the government versus one imposed “from above” by the government). These symbols were neither fixed nor authentic, but rather they were part of fashion processes of articulation and negotiation as a means of subject formation and nation building.

From European Expansion to Globalization Western Europe became dominant economically and politically through colonial expansion. Colonies were established in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands (Appiah and Gates 1997: x). In the sixteenth century, Indigenous nations in the Americas were colonized by the Portuguese in Brazil and the Spanish in Central and South America; Native populations were decimated by warfare, disease, and genocide. Fabrics woven on narrow looms are described as “pre-Columbian” (e.g., pre-Christopher Columbus) in contrast to those woven on wider looms, initially introduced by the Spanish in the sixteenth century (Kennett 1995: 26). African people were enslaved and forcibly brought to the New World to labor and produce goods in an economy built upon exploitation. They were dispossessed of their language, clothing, jewelry, and other body modifications and made to conform to the preferences of the oppressor. One of the luxury goods sought through world travels and trade was silk, as evident by the naming of the Silk Road connecting Asian with European countries. Another natural resource that was pursued was fur, which Europeans regarded as “exotic.” A lively fur trade developed between Britain and the New World. North America had become a source of wealth to Western Europe by the seventeenth century, as European traders began to dominate Indigenous peoples’ modes of gathering and hunting through such means as the Hudson Bay Company, established in 1670 (Emberley 1997: 67). Nicolas Thomas (1991) has critiqued the notion that exchange is always the domination of the West over local systems (35, 83) and instead offers the concept of entanglement as a more nuanced way to think about the interaction of Indigenous systems with other cultural and economic systems of trade (4). Anthropologist Eric Wolf (1982), for example, argues that Indigenous traders on the Northwest Coast were incredibly savvy and successful, in part because of longstanding, pre-European contact trade on the Northwest Coast, the astuteness of Indigenous traders, and the role of kinship and social organization that enabled the heads of families to leverage their executive positions to manage wealth and control connections (189). In the 1790s, Boston ships began visiting the northwest coast, and the west coast of Vancouver Island in particular, when they participated in the “Golden Round,” a trade route that resulted in threefold profits that began with sea otter pelts acquired from Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations on the west coast of Vancouver Island (Gibson 1992). Historian James Gibson notes that while Indigenous peoples were “eager to trade,” the Bostonians had no choice but to accommodate their seasonal schedule,

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as well as ceremonial protocols (114–16). Trade, he argued, was both destructive and productive (269). Julia Emberley argues that fur fashions became a symbolic, feminine “prop for the edifice of imperial trade and colonization in the ‘New World’ ” (17). Yet there were contradictions built into this symbolic domination. While the British state was in full support of economic expansion, which the fur trade represented and helped to accomplish, much of the spirit of British nationalism was a discourse that had a strong need to protect the domestic economy and its favored commodity: wool, the material and symbol of masculine tailoring (Emberley 1997: 63–4). Some historians have shown how these feelings about wool could be equated with a kind of masculine British nationalism associated with the business classes’ need to establish an identity that was differentiated from “feminine” and “foreign” influences, such as silks from France or China, and furs from the New World. During the seventeenth century, when trade with the New World was contributing to the growth of the business classes, a British writer John Evelyn expressed concern that mode (the French word for fashion) was the enemy of British national loyalty. Instead, British masculinity needed to be manly, tailored, and worthy of the business class. Evelyn and others became anxious that Britain might lose its dominance if it became too susceptible to the influence of French, Asian, and other modes of consumption that they viewed as feminine and weakening. At the same time, the economic benefits of trade with these other nations were a vital part of Britain’s successes, so there was some cultural ambivalence and anxiety built into the discourse of nationalism. To help to deal with this ambivalence, it seems, there was a need to close off options perceived as unmanly and un-British. British national identity was represented in such a way that symbolized its difference from or identity not in relation to foreign others. Part of the process of creating modern nations was the development of style-fashion-dress that represented modernity and nationalism alike. The hegemonic look epitomizing British national identity, for example, was the male business suit. It was not a coincidence that this suit was also associated with white, Western, upper-middle-class masculinity. Or, perhaps more accurately, it was a style that was not associated with “exotic” or colonized others, the working classes, or women. It is also not a coincidence that, at this same time in the late eighteenth century, bespoke tailoring began on Savile Row, a street in Mayfair, London, that would become synonymous with elite men’s suits. Meanwhile, the same British business classes were profiting from the economic and political arrangements with the colonies. By the eighteenth century, the British East India Company was preventing Indian peasants and artisans from spinning and weaving their own cloth. The British, as other Europeans (e.g., the Portuguese), had been trading with India since the sixteenth century. India had had a thriving textile export industry, but the British East India Company had a powerful economic influence and forced India, by the early nineteenth century, to export raw goods (e.g., cotton) to England in exchange for British manufactured products (e.g., printed fabrics). Indian peasants were hired locally to plow under agricultural food crops to cultivate indigo and dye cotton in a system that has been called “indigo slavery.” The once flourishing agricultural and artisanal 62

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classes in India were decimated; thousands of skilled craftspeople were left without livelihoods. The native industries were restructured around Britain’s manufacturing and marketing needs; this restructuring was justified as a “civilizing mission” (Sharpe 1993), but was in fact exploitation in service of capitalist expansion and colonial domination. The traditional hand-weaving industries were hurt further when cotton mills were established in Bombay and Ahmedabad in the 1850s, as India developed its own industrialized textile business. Thus, cotton textile production became an important symbol of decolonization during the Indian independence movement. Emma Tarlo (1996) has written about the way Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, leader of the independence movement, applied a moral emphasis on clothing, textiles, and fiber production. “Place of origin and means of production were to be the key factors in determining a garment’s moral worth. All machine-made cloth, even if it was produced in India, violated Gandhi’s concept of truth, non-violence, non-stealing, non-possession, and celibate living” (30). He worked to revive the hand-spinning industry (the charkha spinning wheel is the symbol on the Indian national flag), which led to the production of woven khadi cloth (see Figure 3.1). India declared its independence from colonial power through a reclamation of hand production. Handwoven cotton became a symbol of selfreliance, ultimately enabling national independence from the British. Gandhi wore the traditional dhoti (cloth draped around the waist and legs and knotted at the waist like a loincloth), a small cap of khadi cloth, and shawl of handwoven cotton (Figure 3.1). India re-appropriated the European concept of nation as an imagined community to establish an identity using traditional Indian symbols. The handloom industry continues to be supported by governmental programs to sustain India’s craft heritage (Lynton 1995: 9).

Decolonizing Fashion: Beyond the Metaphor Gandhi’s use of textiles and dress as a material and symbolic vehicle of decolonization is useful to think through using the circuit of style-fashion-dress. It was not just about reframing the consumption of fashion (i.e., rejection of European products and style) but also about reclaiming the means of production and, in turn, systems of distribution and practices of consumption. To be part of the independence movement meant that one’s body was expected to be adorned in khadi and traditional Indian dress (e.g., a form of regulation), which intersected with other subjects’ positions (i.e., gender, age, religion, etc.) to produce a new national subject (and before independence, an “identity not” situation—that is, a visible identity that was clearly not European). Gandhi used khadi and style-fashion-dress as a means of decolonization. What does it mean to decolonize fashion? In the literal sense, is it possible to decolonize and reverse the subjugation, oppression, and dispossession of a group— typically Indigenous communities—by that of colonial and imperial powers operating under capitalism? If, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) have argued, “decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (1), then how might stylefashion-dress aid in this pursuit? Using decolonization as a metaphor may, in fact, 63

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problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity and rescue settler futurity; therefore, we instead consider examples in which style-fashion-dress has played a more literal role in decolonization efforts. For example, the shirt pictured in Plate 9, which is part of the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, was made and worn in Guinea in Western Africa in 1958. The shirt combines a European silhouette and construction methods with wax resist textile design techniques and indigo-dyeing (Byfield 2002). A close examination of the shirt reveals that the textile design was created through hand application of hot wax in the repeated shape of the word “Non” (French for “no”) to a cotton plain weave, which created a resist, and then was dyed with indigo. The shirt was worn in the months leading up to September 28, 1958, when the French held a plebiscite, known as the Guinean Constitutional Referendum. The colony voted whether or not to adopt the new French Constitution, which, if Guineans voted yes, meant they would remain a colony as part of the French Community. If they voted no, or non, they would gain independence and decolonize. Thus, this example of style-fashion-dress was worn to encourage people to vote “No.” Over 95 percent voted “non,” and Guinea declared independence on October 2, 1958. The production of this shirt and its public display on the body prior to the plebiscite aided the independence movement in time and place. A screen-printed textile produced a couple of years later (Plate 10) conveys these sentiments of decolonization even more literally: Ahmed Sékou Touré, the first president of the Republic of Guinea

Figure 3.1  Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) wears a dhoti and small cap of

khadi cloth while sitting at a charka (spinning wheel), circa 1925. The charka, weaving loom, and khadi cloth became symbols of independence, decolonization, and nonviolent political action. Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images. 64

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post-independence, rides a white horse wearing European-style armor. He is reminiscent of Saint George the Trophy-bearer and is depicted stabbing a serpent with the French word colonialisme (colonialism) written across its body. The textile conveys victorious public sentiment about the end of colonial rule in 1958 and represents decolonization through both/and thinking, incorporating and re-appropriating symbols of the colonizer—like the white horse, reference to Saint George, and armor—into tools of selfdetermination. Moreover, the yellow and blue print, at first glance, looks like a common pattern from Provence in France (appropriated from India). But a closer look reveals that the blue is used to accent the horse and emphasize the armor, thus re-appropriating the color combination to emphasize the power of decolonization. Efforts to decolonize fashion have taken a number of different forms in Native American and First Nations communities in North America—from reclamation of Indigenous design practices to calling out appropriation. In Plate 11, Haa’yuups (Ron Hamilton), of the Hupačasath First Nation, stands alongside a kiitsaksuu-ilthim (ceremonial painted cedar board screen used during potlatch ceremonies) in the storage area of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The screen was collected for the museum in the 1920s, a time when ceremonial rituals like the potlatch had been banned in Canada; therefore, screens like the one in this photo were considered evidence of transgression. One of the last public uses of the screen took place in 1910, when Haa’yuups’ great grandfather, Chuuchkamalthnii, held a potlatch. After dispossession, the screen was displayed for many years in the Northwest Coast Hall at the museum and was later removed for conservation and restoration. Numerous images of the screen circulated in books and catalogs, eventually reaching fashion designers for the non-Indigenous athleisure brand NoMiNoU located in British Columbia. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) has argued, “this collective memory of imperialism has been perpetuated through the ways in which knowledge about indigenous peoples was collected, classified and then represented in various ways back to the West, and then, through the eyes of the West, back to those who have been colonized” (1–2). In 2016, non-Indigenous designers for the brand took the crest imagery from the ceremonial screens and digitally printed them onto yoga pants. Minh-Ha T. Pham (2017) offers “racial plagiarism” as an analytical framework that foregrounds “racial relationships and inequalities that are obscured by terms like cultural appropriation, cultural appreciation, and piracy” (69). Fashion historians Sara Marcketti and Jean Parsons (2016) note that copying, counterfeiting, and design piracy are business and design strategies built into the modern ready-to-wear fashion system. Pham argues that acts of dispossession like copying must also consider the intersections of race and complex power dynamics. “As with other plagiarisms,” Pham writes, “racial plagiarism covers verbatim copying (or in fashion terms, the line-by-line copying of a racially marked garment) and unacknowledged paraphrasing (a reworked but still recognizable derivative model)” (69). The framework opens up possibilities for other forms of plagiarism that overlap with various aspects of one’s subjectivity, such as class, age, religion, nationality, among others. For example, the same brand (NoMiNoU) were accused in 2019 of appropriating religious imagery onto their yoga pants, and they 65

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publicly apologized to the Universal Society of Hinduism for a Lord Ganesha design (Crawford 2019). The example of the NoMiNoU Hupačasath yoga pants bring forward the intersection of religious and racial plagiarism, since the crest images are of a highly spiritual nature and also connected to ancestry. Pham explains: To meet the racial plagiarism standard, it is not enough that a racially marked object or style is used or consumed by someone who is not part of that racial or indigenous community. Racial plagiarism centrally involves and colludes in racial capitalist processes of value extraction in which racialized groups’ resources of knowledge, labor, and cultural heritage are exploited for the benefit of dominant groups and in ways that maintain dominant socioeconomic relationships. (2017: 73) NoMiNoU extracted value from Hupačasath heritage, which benefitted the brand until they were called out for stealing the design. In an era of global circulation of imagery via the internet, members of the Hupačasath First Nation became aware that the brand had copied their sacred imagery onto fashion products and demanded that the company cease all sales. The company complied and sent all remaining products to the Nation. Since then, the company has endeavored to work directly with Indigenous artists and credit them for their artwork. The ability to hold companies accountable for exploitation, appropriation, and plagiarism has become more possible with social media, but often requires an incredible amount of additional labor and diligence on the part of Indigenous peoples.

Globalization The concept of globalization is often associated with the consequences of the restructuring of capital (financing systems) around the world in the 1980s, and certainly there were enormous changes that occurred during this period of deregulation and a blurring of national economic and cultural boundaries, made possible in part through digital technologies. Fashion historian Christopher Breward (1995: 229) describes contemporary global fashion—with its branding and worldwide distribution of clothing and advertising imagery—as “a kind of contemporary Esperanto [a universal language], immediately accessible across social and geographical boundaries.” Although much of what we know as a globalized fashion business can be linked to contemporary digital technologies, speed and flexibility in production and distribution, and ease of imitation through trend spotting, globalization can probably best be understood through larger histories of intercultural and transnational interactions. Stuart Hall (1997) argues that there has been a major transition in the technical, economic, and cultural forces connected with globalization. He suggests that there has been a shift from a British model of globalization, associated with the colonization around the world, to a US model of globalization, characterized by a kind of transnational mass culture (Hall 1997). Both forms of globalization can be described as hegemonic because there 66

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are struggles over subjectivity and representation at play in each. Hall suggests that the British model was based on the construction of English identity as a kind of ethnicity, and it emerged over the last three hundred years as a way of emphasizing the difference between England as a nation and other nations or cultures. Is globalization a remarkable opportunity for a cross-cultural exchange of ideas and understandings? Or, is it a nasty scramble for wealth and power? Does it foster an erosion of local cultures and traditions, or does it pose new ways of relating across cultural boundaries? Part of the complexity of the new corporate strategies is that they seem to suggest a lot of things at once. They include issues of political economy, such as the “race to the bottom” for the lowest labor costs for garment production to maximize corporate profits. Yet they may also include openings for innovative business models. Among the giant global “fast fashion” clothing companies (e.g., GAP of San Francisco, the British Topshop, Benetton of Italy, H&M of Sweden). Zara of Spain, owned by the company Inditex, initially flourished with a business model based on production that was closer to home (Spain, Portugal, India, Turkey, and Morocco) but has eventually spanned to Vietnam, China, and other locations around the world. One of the secrets of Zara’s appeal has been its garments’ fashionability and feeling of quality. Its trend spotters constantly travel the world and surf the internet to monitor trends at the same time Zara store managers send instant consumer feedback to Zara’s in-house designers. Styles turn on a dime, with as little as a two-week lead time from feedback or inspiration to receipt of the garment in stores around the world, shipped from Zara’s centralized distribution center (Tokatli 2008). Ironically, in the context of transnational production, distribution, and consumption, it seems that “national fashion” becomes more relevant than ever. For example, fashion studies scholar Simona Segre Reinach (2010) notes the national storytelling required to promote “made in Italy” fashion: During Pitti (men’s fashion collection exhibition held in Florence twice a year) in January 2009, men’s socks imprinted with the Italian national anthem, the story of Garibaldi, and other cornerstones in the history of Italian national unity were presented. The Lavazza Calendar for 2009 features episodes ranging from Roman history, with the Wolf and the Twins, Futurism, to La dolce vita (Fellini 1960), through the Renaissance, still the most quoted reference when the words “Italy,” “creativity,” and “fashion” are mentioned together (Reinach 2010: 206). Reinach goes on to indicate that the word “authentic” does not apply well to fashion, which “is always the result of many encounters and hybridization.” Instead, she illustrates how contemporary communication strategy in Italy draws on history, which has “a peculiar role in fashion, especially when applied to matters of national identity” (Reinach 2010: 208). Ironically, she says, the “Renaissance artisan creativity associated with ‘made in Italy’ … is a considerable historical falsehood, since ‘made in Italy’ was born from abandoning artisan work for industrial fashion” in the 1980s with designers in Milan such as Armani, Ferré, Missoni, and Krizia: the creators of “made in Italy” (210). Further complicating the picture is the fact that many of Italy’s global luxury brands are produced in China, whereas Italian fast fashion brands are more likely to actually be made in Italy (often by Chinese factories that have relocated to Italy). 67

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Figure 3.2  Contestants wear hybrid cheongsam dresses at a beauty contest held at a hotel in Singapore, circa 1955. Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Between 2002 and 2010, China had transformed itself from an outsource manufacturer to a nation with global fashion brands and consumer markets (Reinach 2019: 191). Italian fashion hence became “resituated in China’s global fashion” (216). Another way of visualizing what occurred is to think about what became a “co-production of Italian-Chinese transnational capitalism,” wherein new forms of value and accumulation emerged (Yanagisako and Rofel 2019: 4), as did novel aesthetic styles. At the same time, a global dynamic developed between China and the rest of the world; this dynamic required “constant negotiation” (Yanagisako and Rofel 2019: 1) and could also be described as an ongoing, creative tension that moved beyond either/ or framings such as fashion versus costume, fashion versus tradition, or fashion versus uniformity. Part of this global dynamic involves what Wessie Ling and Simona Segre Reinach (2019) have called “multiple Chinas”: including the diasporas in (post) colonial places such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Macau, and the United States. All of these places have become “part of the reality of contemporary Chinese fashion” (5). As early as the 1950s and 1960s, for example, Singapore—as well as Shanghai— played an important role in the emergence of the “hybrid cheongsam” (Figure 3.2). This variation of the Chinese cheongsam, or qipao, involved a tighter fit and the “wasp waist” associated with Christian Dior’s “New Look” in 1946 but articulating it with distinctive Chinese elements (e.g., silk fabrics with elaborate patterns, mandarin collars, angled bodies closures with covered buttons, straight skirts). In Singapore, the style was frequently further hybridized with the substitution of local batik fabrics (Chung 2019). 68

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Hybridity is an important part of globalization; new aesthetic formations result from transnational exchanges. At the same time, it becomes more compelling than ever for designers and fashion firms to assert some kind of national identity, but doing so in a way that captures a larger global market. Fashion theorist Anneke Smelik (2017) highlights this point in her analysis of contemporary Dutch fashion, which has involved a fresh, imaginative “interpretation and transformation of cultural heritage” (16) in a way that simultaneously connects both subject formations of designers and consumers alike in a sense of “who we are” nationally and resonates successfully in a transnational marketplace. The Viktor & Rolf Spring/Summer 2015 collection (Plate 12) is an excellent example of this: the collection was titled “Van Gogh Girls”—a reference to the famed Dutch artist— and was constructed of Vlisco wax prints, a manufacturer of “real Dutch wax” in the Netherlands since 1846 and exporter of these fabrics to mostly Western African markets (Bruggeman 2017). Fashion scholar Danielle Bruggeman (2017) argued that Viktor & Rolf ’s use of Vlisco was a form of re-appropriation of wax prints for Western audiences that created a “new performative and discursive construction of Dutchness” (199). Globalization has many facets; one of them is the fostering of national dreams about becoming recognized and rewarded as fashion centers (Skov 2011). As we have seen, well into the first half of the twentieth century, a nation had been imagined as a homogeneous community, framed by a shared history, language, culture, and economy. Globalization challenged this assumption, as geopolitical boundaries surrendered to the transnational flow of capital and commodities. At the same time, there was an increased awareness and understanding of ethnic diversity within nations, as well as ethnic belongings across nations, thanks to the development and expertise of ethnic studies and diaspora studies. The blurring of national boundaries does not mean, however, that national subject positions are erased. Rather, they intersect in complicated ways with other subject positions (e.g., ethnicity, gender, social class) within and beyond the nation.

Intersectionalities and Entanglements Articulations and negotiations of what it means to be part of a nation are multidimensional, involving complex intersections and entanglements with gender, class, ethnicity, religion, and other subject positions. Often, for example, the nation is represented on and through women’s bodies. This is one of the reasons why the global Mattel company marketed Barbie dolls dressed in saris in India; in contrast, Ken remained dressed in American clothes. And why was Barbie dressed in a sari, instead of one of the other many styles worn in the very ethnically diverse nation of India (Grewal and Kaplan 1994)? Who determines (and how is it determined) what gets the stamp of approval as national dress? In many ways, any kind of representation of national dress can be seen as hegemonic. That is, power relations are operating, and these relations tend to be based, at least in part, on the ability to persuade. This does not happen accidentally. When there are multiple ethnic or tribal groups within geopolitical boundaries, what represents a nation, and how/why? Two specific examples help to open up this question further. 69

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The sari often represents India as national dress. Yet within the vast diversity of Indian ethnicities, religions, languages, and traditions, the sari is one of various competing styles. Representing Hindi style (and not other religions such as Islam), the sari became recognized as the emblem of the new Indian nation once independence was achieved after years of colonialism. Governmental posters, politicians, ambassadors, and even film stars from Bollywood enhanced the recognition of India’s national identity through the sari (at least as it is represented by women). Indira Gandhi, who represented India in the United States and other nations in the 1970s, was very aware of her role in the popular imagination—within and beyond the boundaries of India as a nation-state— according to Mukulika Banerjee and Daniel Miller (2003) in their book The Sari. She became a trendsetter with her elaborate and impressive wardrobe of saris. Bollywood film stars have continued to foster an elaborate, transnational network within a rapidly changing Indian fashion system (including the sari and the Islamic-based salwar kameez) that circulates in geographic locations ranging from India to Indian diasporas in South Africa, England, North America, and beyond. The case of Kenya offers a different example. As Leslie Rabine (2002) puts it, Kenya has an “unfinished quest for a national outfit” (99). Although there is a strong desire on the part of some to develop national dress to represent Kenya (e.g., at international business conferences, diplomatic and other transnational political functions, and global beauty pageants and model searches), ruptures between the wide array of kin-groups, precolonial histories, and a history of colonialism have proven too great to overcome. There are more than forty ethnic groups in Kenya; who is to decide how to represent the nation? Despite numerous design competitions and, in 1971, an appointed committee from different ethnic groups charged with developing a national dress style, the search to represent the nation as an imagined community continues. As Rabine points out, it has been extremely difficult to distinguish Kenyan national identity from West African fabrics and styles, in general. And the garments created to represent national dress have frequently ended up representing the very contradictions they set out to resolve. Authentic identity cannot easily be defined against the contexts of neocolonialism and ethnic differences. Still the quest continues. In Kenya’s fashion industry, designers are creating clothing styles that fuse various Kenyan ethnic elements with global fashion. Olivia Ambani, the design and marketing manager with the Kenyan fashion house KikoRomeo, thinks a national dress can be achieved with a bit of flexibility: I think it will take people being more open to cohesion and accepting that, if it is slightly more Maasai or more Kikuyu or more Luo or more coastal, it is okay because it still is part of the country and it will still represent us,” she said. Kenya does have its distinctive fabrics, most notably the checkered or striped shukas worn by the Maasai, the lessos, or khangas, which originated on the coast, and the kikoy … KikoRomeo’s designs draw upon cultures from all over Africa. Design and marketing manager Olivia Ambani said “For instance, one of the collections that we have is Afro-punk collection. There is a lot of imagery on it, embellishment that 70

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is taken from scarification, which is something that is quite big in the continent. We give it the punk style, which is obviously something that is very British and taken from that era. (Majtenyi 2010: para. 6) In addition to colonial entanglements, representations of nationhood have a strongly gendered dimension, and it is one that—once again—is contradictory. Both men and women represent the nation through their style-fashion-dress but in different ways. Whereas masculinity has become equated with modern cosmopolitan citizenship (through, most notably, the modern business suit), femininity—especially in developing nations—has become emblematic of traditional cultural imagery. Although the particulars vary by cultural context, the idea of a national costume is one that may represent the nation as an exotic entity, and often, although not always, this entity is feminized. In contrast, the concept of national uniform is more likely to be masculinized based on its connotations of (male-ordered) citizenship. The concept of national dress is probably the most gender-neutral of these three terms. Yet entanglements prevail due to histories of colonialism, racism, ethnic diversity, and religious movements. The next chapter focuses on race and ethnicity as subject positions, as they intersect in complex ways with national, religious, gender, class, and other subject positions.

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CHAPTER 4 RACIAL REARTICULATIONS AND ETHNICITIES

Black Lives Matter. These three words—a brief declarative sentence—capture an urgent social movement that, by the third decade of the twenty-first century, has rattled the consciousness of the United States: a nation beginning to recognize its 400+-year history of racism, inequity, and the violence of colonialism. From the arrival of the first European settlers, which fueled Indigenous dispossession and genocide, to the enslavement of people from Africa and their first arrival in 1619, to the Jim Crow period of segregation and oppression in the South, and ongoing violence and inequity including police killings and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted people of color in the United States— white supremacy has been produced and upheld by numerous institutions and systems. On her cellphone, a teenager captured Floyd’s murder, caused by more than a nineminute neck hold and back pressure, which cut off his ability to breathe; the recording went viral, and was circulated internationally. The BLM social movement, which began several years earlier, was mainstreamed. Protesters and allies use style-fashion-dress, whether T-shirts, facemasks, and other accessories, to convey antiracist sentiments in support of BLM and to express hope for a future where social justice is possible and systems of white supremacy are dismantled. Other ways of showing solidarity with the BLM movement through dress have been more fraught. On June 8, 2020, Democratic members of the United States Congress donned kente cloth stoles while kneeling in recognition of the amount of time George Floyd was held down, knee on neck, by police officers during his murder (Plate 13). This act of styling the body publicly and performatively was heavily criticized for appropriating a textile of cultural significance as a political prop. In an article for the New Yorker, Doreen St Félix (2020) criticizes the performance and argues, “What was projected was limp domestic diplomacy, akin to historical images of white political leaders preening in the exotic ‘garb’ of people living in countries that they are exploiting. Inadvertently, the cloth emphasized the sense that Black Americans are foreigners in their own land.” Complicating potential interpretations of Plate 13 is the backstory. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) had distributed the kente cloths to the Democrats in advance of the announcement of their proposal for a law against police violence. Some of the Democrats present had participated a year earlier in a trip to Ghana as a sad remembrance to the 400th year anniversary departure of the first ship carrying enslaved peoples for what is now the United States. Congresswoman Karen Bass (D-California), chair of the CBC

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at the time, explained to reporters at Emancipation Hall, “The significance of the kente cloth is our African heritage and, for those of you without that heritage who are acting in solidarity” (Paquette 2020). While kente cloth has specific origins in the Asante kingdom in what is present-day Ghana, the cloth has come to have broader racial connotations as a means of articulation between the Black diaspora and Africa. The geometric designs are produced through weaving silk and cotton yarns of different colors, each with particular symbolic meanings. The woven designs have inspired a range of printed imitations using silk screen, digital, and wax printing technologies, and fashion designers and everyday individuals have worn the print as a source of Black pride. Kente stoles are often worn by Black graduates at high schools, colleges, and universities. Fashion designers T. J. Walker and Carl Jones frequently used kente as inspiration for a range of textile designs in their T-shirts and button downs. Their brand, Cross Colours, was founded in 1989 with the motto of “clothing without prejudice” and amplifies this motto through a celebration of African motifs. Around the same time in the late 1980s, Patrick Kelly used a screen-printed version of kente to create a number of different cocktail dresses, jackets, and skirts in his 1988 spring/summer ready-to-wear collection that debuted in Paris. These uses of kente have thus popularized the textile through production, distribution, and ultimately consumption. It has been worn on the body to make statements about identity and, in some cases, attempts at conveying solidarity. The meanings of cultural symbols—although often complicated in their own right— change dramatically when they are worn on differently racialized bodies. Worn by individuals with white skin—regardless of the backstory, often unknown to perceivers anyway—the kente cloth is likely to be viewed as contradictory at best, and as culturally appropriative and/or politically opportunist. We introduce this chapter with the above vignette not only because it reveals the complexities surrounding debates regarding cultural appropriation but also because it points directly to discourses surrounding race and ethnicity.

Race and Ethnicity: Sliding Signifiers As subject positions, the concepts of race and ethnicity share some common roots: Both have been constructed as mechanisms to classify human difference. The meanings of both have shifted over time and for various political, scientific, and economic purposes. Many centuries ago, they were often used in ways that were similar to the concepts of nation and religion. During the Middle Ages, religion “meant membership of a community much more than adherence to a set of principles or beliefs,” and it was common to think of individuals as born Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, just as one was born English or Persian (Bartlett 2001: 41). Similarly, in the sixteenth century (and earlier) in Europe, race described a group of people who shared ancestors—also classified as a tribe or a nation or people of common stock (e.g., the British race or the Roman race; Oxford English Dictionary 2020). 74

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In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the connotation of race changed along with the emergence of modern nation-states and the biological sciences. Race came to mean visible genetic markers (e.g., skin color, hair texture, facial features) as the newly emerging biological sciences sought to classify and label differences within nature: humans, as well as plants and animals (Marks 2010). Scientific classifications and hierarchies of the human species were used to justify slavery, conquest, and colonization. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, slave merchants sold an estimated 2.5 million African people into enslavement, mostly to the Americas. An important factor in these sales was capitalism, which flourished through a trade in textiles, enslaved peoples, and sugar and spices (McClintock 1995: 113). In many ways, the modern nation-state and economy was built on the backs of bodies classified as racially different. Still, the significance attached to visible markers varied dramatically from one society to another. For example, even the slave societies of Brazil and the Old South in the United States interpreted skin color very differently. Whereas the United States structured race in binary (Black versus white) terms, the Brazilian racial system has included multiple categories of skin color. In Britain, the term “Black British” has variously been applied to characterize immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia (e.g., India, Pakistan). Hence, the boundaries among race, ethnicity, and nation vary and shift in meaning(s). In particular, cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall (2017) has characterized race as a “sliding signifier” in the context of changing cultural discourses and classifications, “because of the will to power and the regime of truth that are instituted in the shifting relations of discourse” (45). The same is basically true of the use of terms of nation (to the extent that geopolitical boundaries shift) and ethnicity. As a concept, ethnic derived from the Greek word hethnic, which meant “heathen” or “pagan” in the fifteenth century. From a European perspective, ethnic meant “pertaining to nations not Christian or Jewish” (again, religion was a strong factor). In the nineteenth century, ethnic became known as “pertaining to race; peculiar to a race or nation; ethnological—common racial, cultural, religious, or linguistic characteristics.” In the United States, ethnic came to assume the connotation of foreign or exotic (Oxford English Dictionary 2010). And yet, there was a contradictory discourse of the United States as a “melting pot” of ethnicities. This model of assimilation frequently assumed a white, Northern European (and generally Protestant) background: an assimilation or melting of individuals of British, German, and Swedish national backgrounds, for example. The connotations of ethnicity changed in the 1960s, when the civil rights movements fostered the concept of identity politics and an increased awareness (and critique) of cultural representations of difference (including, but not limited to, racial, ethnic, national, and religious differences). This awareness led to multicultural discourses, which acknowledged difference, to replace the older, mythical melting pot model of assimilation, which erased difference (Perry 2002: 8). Also in the 1960s, ethnic minority came to mean “a group of people different from the rest of the community by racial origins or cultural background, and usually claiming or enjoying official recognition of their group identity” (Oxford English Dictionary 2010). 75

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In the twenty-first century, scholars of race and ethnicity have further questioned the idea of a binary opposition between ethnic options (self-ascribed) and racial labels (imposed by others). They have argued that the concept of ethnicity tends to be overly romanticized, especially when applied to white populations (Kang and Lo 2004). Herein lies a striking contradiction: Ethnicity becomes constructed hegemonically both as a nostalgic version of whiteness (e.g., European peasant attire) and as “racial” (nonwhite) otherness/difference. Yet race and ethnicity become entangled in everyday life. Indeed, the concepts of race and ethnicity are slippery, if not blurry (Kang and Lo 2004). As we saw in Chapter 3, the differences between national dress and ethnic dress are also slippery and frequently hegemonic (as when one of multiple forms of ethnic dress becomes hegemonic so as to represent the nation). Hence it is inappropriate to define national identity in ways that gloss over cultural struggles and power dynamics of what it means to be Chinese or Kenyan, for example. China has fifty-six state-recognized ethnic groups, with overlapping forms of style-fashion-dress influenced by geography, natural resources, religion, and other cultural factors. Kenya has more than forty state-recognized ethnic groups but closer to seventy distinct ethnic communities. Not surprisingly, it has been challenging to identify a single representative form of Kenyan national dress, as discussed in Chapter 3 (Rabine 2002). Gender, class, and other subject positions intersect in complex ways with race and ethnicity. In their current usage, the concept of ethnicity seems to offer more opportunities than that of race for agency, articulation, and flexibility for self- and group expression through style-fashion-dress. Racialized discourses still have a tendency to fix race as biological or natural. As subject positions, both race and ethnicity are embedded in cultural discourses; both are socially constructed. The meanings of both race and ethnicity are fluid and have overlapped considerably at different times in history. What is at issue in this chapter is the extent to which individuals are subjected to oppressive, politically motivated, and scientifically mobilized discourses based on physical attributes (i.e., how and why their bodies become racialized), and to what extent they are able to exercise agency and to articulate subjectivities of their own choosing (i.e., those that connect with community identities and cultural belongings). In cultural studies terms, individuals continually navigate and negotiate between processes of belonging and differentiating. Styling-fashioning-dressing the body enables articulations of what cultural studies scholars call belonging-in-difference (Hall 1991; Scott 2005). Following the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1980) fusion of power and knowledge in his writings, Hall (2017: 48) argues for the addition of a third term: difference, or power-knowledge-difference. Imagining and belonging to a community always involves some kind of differentiation from other communities. Most commonly in fashion studies, race is studied in the context of certain visible features of the body, such as skin color, hair texture, or facial features, as we have seen. Some of these features (e.g., hair) can be readily fashioned and refashioned on a daily basis, whereas others are not so easily manipulated and have historically become bases for discrimination. In contrast, ethnic dress has been studied as clothes worn by individuals 76

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to express their belonging to a community with a common heritage and to differentiate themselves from other communities (Eicher and Sumberg 1995). Often, the term ethnic dress has been used to describe clothes that are different than euromodern fashion. Just as Stuart Hall (2017) has argued for a third term to the power-knowledgedifference complex, fashion theorist Carol Tulloch (2016) takes the possibilities for reimagining ethnicities in a new direction by insisting on breaking down old binaries such as (ethnic) dress versus fashion, and fashion versus (subcultural) style. She adds a third term and creates a conceptual triad: style-fashion-dress. Opening up ethnicity as a subject position linked to the parts and wholes of style-fashion-dress (Tulloch 2010), rather than dress alone, offers critical and creative possibilities for imagining both subject positions and subjectivity, regulatory cultural discourses and personal agency, and past and future. Writing about her experiences as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants to England during the “Windrush” period in the 1950s, Tulloch (2016) highlights the importance of “the aesthetic of presence” as “a technique of being to counter the aesthetics of invisibility that people of the African diaspora have had to overcome since slavery” (3, original emphasis). She goes on to say that the styled body represents fighting for the right to be and stay in England, producing “joy … as a mark of freedom” (176). She highlights the importance of style as agency via “the construction of self through the assemblage of garments and accessories, hairstyles and beauty regimes that may, or may not, be ‘in fashion’ at the time of use” (4). Questions such as the following become relevant when trying to make sense of processes through which bodies become classified and through which they are fashioned to connect with places, cultural spaces, and communities—past, present, and future: Where do I belong? With whom do I identify? Who are my ancestors? Where are my cultural connections? Did my ancestors live within the boundaries of the nation-state where I currently reside? How do they compare with the way I look (and can I know)? Where was I born? Where have I moved? Where am I going? What do I believe in? How do style, fashion, and dress become strategies to establish and reinforce the idea of having a place to be and become in the world: to have a cultural history or perspective, to be from somewhere, and to face the future with a sense of connection, as well as agency?

Racial and Ethnic Rearticulations Beginning in the eighteenth century, race was represented through scientific discourse as a biological concept—tied to physical features such as skin color, hair texture, facial features, and other visible qualities of physical appearance. These qualities have been characterized as phenotypic—meaning that they are visible properties that can be traced in large part to genetics. Yet many scholars have noted how race is, in fact, a kind of fiction. For example, anthropologist and cultural studies scholar Roger Lancaster (2003: 77) indicates that race has been understood as a biological concept for so long “because a colonial history framed the way people, including scientists, perceived and thought about human bodies,” not because it was a scientifically sound system for 77

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capturing phenotypic variation (it was not). As we have seen, Stuart Hall (2017) has made a similar point: that race has more to do with “the will to power” than it does with scientific truth (45). Still, for people of color, it is not possible “to ignore their identity because it’s not as simple as changing your outfit” (Maxwell 2020: 20). At the same time, race is not static; cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall (2017) described it as a “sliding signifier” and as a “cultural and historical, not biological, fact” (32). In other words, it means different things to different people in different times and places. According to cultural theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2015), race is a way of “making up” people (105), as “structural forms of racial inequality persist and in many cases have deepened” (1). They contend that race is inherently unstable and is “continually in formation”; it is “socially constructed and historically fluid” and operates “at the crossroads where social structure and experience meet” (x). Because scientific and cultural representations have had so much do to with how race has been constructed and interpreted, the focus in cultural studies tends to shift from race as a thing to racial formation as a social process that categorizes people and creates social differences. The categories that emerged in the United States and elsewhere have often revolved first and foremost along the lines of color. Skin color becomes one of the markers that influence treatment by others when walking, driving, running, shopping, and so on. Similarly, sociologist Maxine Craig (2002), author of Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race, defines race as “a set of socially constructed boundaries, practices, and commonly held meanings mapped onto a population whose members themselves represent wide physical and social diversity” (9). She points to the ways in which racial rearticulations become processes through which the boundaries, practices, and meanings of race are continually revised both from the bottom up (through everyday shifts in self-fashioning) and the top down (from media and legal categories imposed through cultural discourse). The interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes of racial rearticulation parallels the ongoing structure–agency dynamics of subject formation and consumption. We suggest that the concept of rearticulation applies, as well, to ethnicity. Stuart Hall (1990, 2017) uses the concept of ethnicity to consider how identities related to space and cultural background are about not only the past but also the future. Ethnic rearticulations involve becoming, as well as being. They have histories, but at the same time, they undergo constant transformation: Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they [ethnicities] are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power. (Hall 1990: 225) The process of design, of course, offers multiple opportunities for racial and ethnic rearticulations. Take, for example, the design featured in Plate 14 by Black fashion designer Kerby Jean-Raymond for Pyer Moss. Pyer Moss’ Spring/Summer 2020 Sister The 3rd Collection was shown in late 2019 and featured the histories of African Americans, including the origins of rock-and-roll, style switching and mixing through fashion and 78

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dress, and highlighting the accomplishments and persecution of artists such as Richard Phillips. Phillips had served forty-six years in prison for a murder he did not commit; he was exonerated in 2017. Jean-Raymond collaborated with Phillips for the 2020 Spring collection, highlighting Phillips’ art in the prints on the fabrics in the Pyer Moss runway styles (Plate 14). A review of the Pyer Moss collection in the New York Times highlighted how JeanRaymond “is trying to change how we think about clothes and who gets to be a part of making that myth known as ‘American fashion’ ” (Friedman 2019). The author/fashion critic Vanessa Friedman (2019) credited him with “embracing a different understanding to move forward” and indicated that the fact that “he can do it so gracefully, without accusation, and with such multilayered meaning, is what makes him so effective.” Friedman goes on to suggest a both/and situation. Jean-Raymond says he is more interested in correcting the record about African Americans and their contributions to the United States than he is about selling clothes. But within the confines of a capitalist economic system, he must make money for his brand to survive. Friedman (2019) concludes that “the ability to not worry about the one lays the groundwork for the second. It could be a genuine game changer.” The following sections consider the ways in which racial and ethnic rearticulations confront and resist hegemony, moving through a structure–agency continuum of sorts: from color to hair to ethnicities.

Color In the United States, racial formation developed along an opposition between Black and white based on a history of slavery and the “one-drop rule” that identified anyone with “one drop” of blackness as Black (Russell et al. 1992). This binary model has become more multicultural as the political agency of Native Americans, Chicanx, and Asian Americans has made it apparent that there are many limitations to this binary, oppositional (and essentialist) system of racialization. After 1965, for example, when many immigrants came to the United States from Central and Latin American countries, Spanish-speaking groups in the United States were all recategorized by language and called “Hispanics.” In fact, the backgrounds of many Indigenous people or those who were Mestizaje (meaning “mixture”)—frequently of mixed Indigenous and European backgrounds—became glossed over. Immigrants from Southeast Asia (e.g., Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) were classified by continental origin and called Asians—along with Americans descending from China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other areas of the Pacific. Yet such delineations did not recognize ethnic groups such as Hmongs. Individuals descending from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka became distinguished regionally and so were called South Asians. (Individuals in Great Britain with the same backgrounds are called Asians; the categories vary by nation.) Whereas most scientists agree that race is “not a useful biological concept,” the lay public still sees visible differences in physical features and “treats them as racial 79

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differences caused by differences in ‘blood,’ ” according to the sociologist Herert Gans (1999). Although people do vary, of course, by skin color, the real issue is what gets noticed and judged: Some visible bodily features that distinguish people are noticed and judged; some are noticed but not judged one way or another; and yet others are not even noticed, seeming to be virtually invisible … A major ingredient of the social construction of race is the determination of which visible bodily features are noticed and used to delineate race and which remain unnoticed. (Gans 1999: 383, emphasis added) By going unnoticed or remaining unmarked and yet simultaneously representing the hegemonic norm, whiteness becomes a privileged visible bodily feature. This privilege manifests itself from class relations to beauty and fashion systems. The civil rights movements of the 1960s challenged these systems and heightened awareness of skin color with the self-accepting “black is beautiful” ideology, for example, that challenged, if not subverted, beauty standards. Activists (e.g., the Black Panthers) contributed to a process of racial rearticulation, enabling African American women “to see beauty where they had not seen it before.” (Craik 2002: 108) Asian American studies scholar Susan Koshy (2001) demonstrates how whiteness itself has been rearticulated at different times in US history; it is not a fixed racial category. The initial boundaries of whiteness expanded to include groups (e.g., Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Jews) that were initially seen as racially distinct. She also shows how, historically, the US legal system has inconsistently classified Asian Americans— constructed through a “racial” category across a wide range of national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries—as white and not white. Some similarities of inconsistent racialization have applied to the experiences of Native Americans, Latinx, and Hispanic Americans. In the late 1990s, film studies scholar Richard Dyer (1997) and American studies scholar Ruth Frankenberg (1997), along with others, theorized the concept of whiteness in relation to race. Dyer (1997) observed: It would probably be a better world if we didn’t use colour terms at all to designate groups of people. Failing that, it might well be better if we used other terms, like pink, olive and grey, to refer to what we now call white people, partly because they are less loaded, partly because this would break up the monolithic identity, whiteness. But we do use the one term and its loading and its designation of a group not ineluctably tied to geographical origin are crucial to our understanding of white people’s hold on privilege and power. (44) Dyer (1997) further points to the paradoxical nature of whiteness as a skin color: as both a color and not a color—as simultaneously visible and invisible. Frankenberg (1997)

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similarly describes whiteness as unmarked or even transparent and hence maintains its privilege and power unless and until it is critically and self-reflexively examined. It is relatively easy for individuals who are “white” to take white privilege for granted. An intersectional example of this—not initially created in connection to whiteness—can be seen in the pink “pussy hats” associated with women’s protest marches immediately after the inauguration of President Donald Trump in January 2017. After a tape had been released indicating that a famous man like himself can do anything to beautiful women, including “grabbing them by the pussy,” hand-knitted pink pussy hats became a major visual presence at the marches across the United States and even internationally. Meant to be a symbol of feminist solidarity, unfortunately the hats did not necessarily feel inclusive to women of color, nor to transgender women (Kaiser 2020). Whiteness was taken for granted; it was both invisible and yet made visible in its exclusion. In fact, there are “shades of whiteness,” as studied by sociologist Pamela Perry (2002) in an ethnographic research study of two high school settings. She wanted to understand how students create boundaries between white and nonwhite and to examine the extent to which they use clothing, music, and other cultural forms to make sense of shades of whiteness. She found that most believed to be white “meant that you had no culture” (Perry 2002: 2). At one of the schools, the white students—influenced by media—wore hip-hop clothing and listened to rap music without critique from other students (white, Black, or other students of color). At the other, more diverse school, however, hip-hop styles marked racial and ethnic boundaries that were more difficult to cross (Perry 2002: 21). Perry’s research points to the ways in which style-fashion-dress, as well as visible physical features, is subject to racialized discourses and social contexts. This is one of the places where the boundaries between race and ethnicity become blurry. Also blurry is the binary opposition between Black and white. Former US President Barack Obama’s biracial or multiethnic background (a Kenyan father and white mother from Kansas) represents the complexity of race and ethnicity—never simple but more highly visible in the twenty-first century. By the end of the twentieth century, fashion industry discourse had already appropriated and celebrated “in-between” or hybrid racial spaces through “ethnic marketing” (note the shift from racial to ethnic terminology): Nothing is actually black and white anymore. Neither the classic blue-eyed blonde nor the African queen [is] gracing the covers of fashion magazines. Instead, the idealized beauty standard is somewhere in between, a mélange of off-white features and khaki tones in a two-way process in which the black-female ideal lightened up from the 1970s Afrocentric period at the same time that the archetypical white woman was darkening, if only slightly, to a more mestizo presentation. Once black supermodels were on board, fashion magazines and cosmetic companies quickly began featuring Latina, Eurasian, and other mixed-race faces. (Halter 2000: 178) Given the history of slavery in the United States, there are many shades of skin, and many people classified as Black due to the “one-drop rule” do not have dark skin. The poet and creative writing professor Caroline Randall Williams (2020) wrote a compelling opinion 81

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editorial article in the New York Times, titled “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument.” She writes that “the black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from” and that she has “rape-colored skin.” Her “light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.” My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. Hence, Williams is the great-great-granddaughter of Edmund Pettus, and she supports the renaming of the Pettus bridge to honor the civil rights legend John Lewis, who was beaten by Alabama state troopers as he and other African Americans marched across the bridge in 1965. When he died in 2020, his body crossed the bridge one last time in a flagdraped casket carried by a horse-drawn carriage. The Alabama state troopers saluted his body. As noted by Stuart Hall (2017), race is a sliding signifier.

Hair In addition to skin color, physical qualities such as hair texture and color have been used to mark race, along with facial features and other attributes. Hair can be altered: straightened, permed, dyed, cut, braided, teased, and so on. It can also be covered—or be required to be covered (as we will see in the next chapter on religion). The transnational marketing of wigs and weaves opens up all kinds of options, as well as questions about race, ethnicity, and national “origin,” as anthropologist and fashion studies scholar Emma Tarlo (2017) writes: Indian, European, Brazilian, Peruvian, Malaysian, Burmese, Russian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Filipino, Indonesian, Mongolian, Uzbek—the categories keep increasing. Ethnic and racial classifications are ubiquitous in the hair trade, but what do they actually mean? Consult the websites of hair companies and you will be bombarded with a dizzying yet curiously vague array of explanations. (159) Tarlo (2017) goes on to question why Chinese hair is not featured, even though China is the largest manufacturer of hair products in the world and harvests a huge amount of hair from its own population. And, why is there so much Brazilian hair on the market when Brazilian women themselves “are far more likely to be wearing hair extensions than selling their own hair”? (161). Such questions might not be so compelling, Tarlo argues, were it not for racial hierarchies that date back to classifications of hair by anthropologists in the nineteenth century, and had by then been used to justify slavery and colonialism and, later, eugenics (164–5). 82

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While there is a relatively high degree of agency in the styling of hair, it is also important to locate hair in the structural contexts of racial formation, systems of hierarchy, transnational marketing, and regulation. This section—recalling the roles of subject formation and regulation in the circuit of style-fashion-dress—focuses on the politics and aesthetics associated with black hair to illustrate how subjects alternately, and even simultaneously, internalize and resist hegemonic norms. In her study of African American beauty, Maxine Craig (2002) notes that historically there have been no neutral words to describe varying textures of black hair. Prior to the 1960s, hair was classified as “good” or “bad” in everyday discourse. Good hair was straight, whereas bad hair was kinky or nappy. Ritual grooming practices for girls involved a hot comb with pomade, beginning around the age of seven or eight. In the early twentieth century, Madam C. J. Walker (1867–1919) became a prominent social activist, philanthropist, and millionaire after she invented, produced, and marketed hairconditioning products for African Americans. Born the daughter of formerly enslaved parents and orphaned at age seven, Walker worked in cotton fields in the South and then as a launderer and cook before building her own factory and business (Bundles 2001; Rooks 1996). According to American studies scholar Noliwe Rooks (1996), Walker also encouraged African American women to “free themselves from economic dependency on dominant culture and African American men. She counseled women to become hairdressers and make money for themselves, which they should use to help others who were not as fortunate” (58-59). Advertising was an important vehicle for Walker to engage in these conversations publicly, and to connect with women, share her story, and sell hair products. Rooks (1996) points out that Walker used advertising to both create a need for her product and fulfill an existing desire among African American women (51). By the 1950s, most African Americans (especially women) had adopted grooming practices to straighten their hair. Craig notes how this changed with the civil rights activism of the 1960s and “black is beautiful” discourse and practice. Everyday habitus changed through a fashion cycle influenced by political activism: In 1952, a black woman proudly wearing “nappy” hair was unfashionable. In 1960, she was a curiosity, in 1965 a militant, and in 1968 stylish. In 1970, she might have been arrested for too closely resembling Angela Davis. By 1977, she was an anachronism. (Craig 2002: 78) As the symbol of Black pride disseminated as a fashion trend, it ran its course and lost the political edge associated with activists such as Angela Davis (see Figure 4.1). By the mid- to late 1970s, the Afro hairstyle had faded from fashion. Yet like many forms of style-fashion-dress, it has made a comeback. It fits critical theorist Walter Benjamin’s (1968) concept of a “tiger’s leap into the past”—wherein inspiration is derived from the past and comes back (never exactly in the same form) in a way that now feels fresh. The politics of hair did not end in the early 1970s. Hairstyle, like skin color, has been the focus of US court cases revolving around potential racial discrimination. Issues such as these have been analyzed in the field of critical race theory—“a dynamic, eclectic, and 83

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Figure 4.1  Angela Davis wears an Afro hairstyle in May 1975. Photo by Sophie Bassouls/Sygma via Getty Images.

growing movement in the law … challenging racial orthodoxy, shaking up the legal academy, questioning comfortable liberal premises, and leading the search for new ways of thinking about our nation’s most intractable, and insoluble problem—race” (Delgado and Stefancic 2000: xvi). One good example of a critical race theoretical analysis is legal scholar Paulette Caldwell’s (2000) critique of a 1981 court case, Rogers v. American Airlines. The plaintiff in the case, Renee Rogers, was a Black female flight attendant challenging American Airlines’ policy that prohibited braided hairstyles. She argued that the policy discriminated against her on the basis of race (Blackness) and gender (female). That is, the argument was one related to intersectionality: the airline regulation affected her especially because she was a Black woman. The legal system, however, is not set up to deal with intersectionality, according to Caldwell, who noted how structural racism, as well as sexism, worked against Rogers in the court’s dismissal of her claim (2000). Adding insult to injury, so to speak, the white male judge asserted (in concert with American Airlines’ argument) that Rogers adopted the prohibited hairstyle after it had been popularized by Bo Derek, a white actress, in the 1979 film 10. This film featured Derek as the perfect (white) female “10” body—with long blond hair braided in a cornrow style—while running in slow motion on the beach. The film popularized both Derek as a sex symbol and the cultural rating system of female attractiveness. The 84

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cornrow braid hairstyle worn by Derek also received a great deal of attention, but it was not new. As Caldwell (2000) notes, Black women had been braiding their hair in Africa and African diasporas for at least four centuries. Derek’s use of the style is a classic case of cultural appropriation, and the court’s use of the term “popularized” only amplifies the problematic power relations in the intersectionalities between race and gender. The court simultaneously reinforced white hegemonic beauty standards, trivialized the racial politics of hair, and failed to acknowledge that some Black women may choose to wear braids for the sake of the long-term health of their hair (which can be permanently damaged by the use of chemical straighteners), as well as cultural identity. In 2018, incidents of discrimination against Black students and workers due to their hair became publicized in the media. A Louisiana school official told a 11-year-old girl that her braids violated school policy; she left her classroom in tears. In New Jersey, a referee told Andrew Johnson, a 16-year-old high school wrestler, that he had ninety seconds to decide if he would (1) remove his dredlocks or (2) forfeit his wrestling match. The referee viewed the dredlocks as “unnatural” and against the dress code, although the National Federation of State High School Associations (whose rules the school followed) later indicated that the hairstyle had been legal. Johnson did not want to let down his team, who would lose the meet and hence the division title, so he agreed to have his dredlocks cut. The video of the trainer cutting them went viral and became “a shared and painful experience for many who see how issues of identity, subjugation, power and freedom are intertwined in African American hair” (Washington 2019). Johnson’s background is mixed racially and ethnically; his mother’s background is Puerto Rican with some European lineage, and his father is African American. After the barber had a chance to fix his haircut, Washington (2019), a sportswriter for The Undefeated, described the style as follows: The sides of his hair were faded close to his scalp. A low carpet of hair lay on top. From the crown grew one last dreadlock, uncut, in its natural state, with inseparable strands of Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States of America. Fashion studies scholar Tameka Ellington (2020), who has written extensively about Black hair and recently co-curated the exhibition, Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair, has coined the term texturism to think through the intersecting layers of discrimination within Black hair. “A sister to the term colorism […] the ideology that light-skin Blacks are more beautiful, more intelligent, and more civilized. The same goes for texturism” (18, original emphasis). She points out that Black hair was historically dehumanized and called wool, “thus the straighter (less wool-like) the hair, the more beautiful society claimed it to be” (18). Alongside socially- and racially-constructed terms like “beautiful,” are words like “professional.” Ellington describes a series of “hair traumas” in the opening essay for the Textures exhibition catalog, including subjection to racist dress code at an amusement park where she worked during college one summer, and where “employees could not wear Afros, braids, or dreadlocks” (15). 85

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Incidents of hair discrimination in the workplace are longstanding, but became more visible to the public when The CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Coalition reported that African American women were 1.5 times as likely to be sent home from work based on their hairstyles, and 80 percent agreed with the statement “I have to change my hair from its natural state to fit in at the office.” The CROWN Coalition has worked to promote state-by-state legislation across the United States to ban discrimination based on “hair texture and protective styles such as braids, locs, twists, and knots in the workplace and public schools.” California was the first state to pass the legislation in 2019; and after several other states had also passed what is known as The CROWN Act,1 the US House of Representatives passed the law in September of 2020. The CROWN Coalition has fostered awareness that what is considered to be “professional” is, in fact, discriminatory due to the hegemony of whiteness (and its intersections with class, gender, etc.). By 2020, even the US military was beginning to recognize such discrepancies. As what sociologist Erving Goffman (1961) called a “total institution” that involves a “stripping of the self ” in order to impose uniformity, the military is all about disciplining the individual bodies in order to achieve institutional goals of cohesion, order, and mission by being and appearing “clean cut.” As French philosopher Michel Foucault ([1977] 1991) argued, even the smallest of details on the body become sites for the imposition of power. For example, in the US Army, for example, male recruits are subjected to buzz cuts that foster a “tapered appearance.” Women in the army are afforded more leeway, with recent changes enabling braids, cornrows, and twists for women, as long as the hair is above the collar and enables headgear to be worn properly. The regulations prohibit clips, loose buns, and “imbalanced or lopsided” hairstyles (OMK 2021). Civilians, of course, generally have more flexibility in their hair stylings. But white hegemonic beauty standards, as we have seen, still constitute structural, attitudinal barriers that require continual resistance. Part of this resistance happens through expressions of ethnicity, as described in the next section.

Ethnic Rearticulations: Belongings-in-Difference Ethnic studies scholar Lisa Lowe (2000) notes that it is difficult to completely disentangle race from ethnicity because of the discourses that have historically linked them. She points to the importance of focusing on the cultural practices that produce identity, rather than focusing strictly on the identities themselves. The concept of “Asian American identities,” for example, should not be seen as a fixed “given” but rather as a process of ongoing subject formation and “never complete” cultural formations. Lowe observes that discussions of ethnic culture and racial group formation vary widely among Asian Americans. There is tremendous heterogeneity in terms of national and class backgrounds, histories of immigrant exclusion laws, gender, and other factors

1thecrownact.com.

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influencing Asian American experiences in relation to hegemonic culture (Lowe 2000: 428). For example, in research studies (surveys and interviews) over the past thirty years or so, Susan and collaborators have asked hundreds of respondents about their ethnicities using an open-ended format. Responses reveal the complexities associated with terminology, as well as sites of identification and differentiation. They range from Asian American to more specific national affiliations: Korean American, Japanese American, Filipina American, Chinese American, and so on. South Asian or Indian American or Pakistani American. Latina or Chicana or Mexican American. American Indian, Native American, or specific tribal and/or confederacy membership (e.g., Choctaw, Navajo, Cherokee, Haudenosaunee confederacy). African American or Black. White or Caucasian or Norwegian American, and so on. Individuals identify with, and differentiate from, one another on an ongoing basis. Part of the struggle for meaning within culture involves the twin processes of identification and differentiation. At times, due to historical and political circumstances, differences become glossed over, and yet at later points in time, they become extremely relevant, if not divisive. It is often difficult to sort out just which differences are racialized, which are ethnic, which are religious, and which are national or transnational in nature, and this difficulty stems from the ways in which identities intersect in complex ways. Ethnicity enable people to think through how (and with whom) they experience a sense of identity and belonging. Although hegemonic culture tends to regulate ethnicity (like race), and the meanings of both shift in an ongoing way, the concept of ethnicity tends to connote a higher degree of agency and a sense of identification and subject formation. As noted earlier in this chapter, the concept of ethnicity refers to the place(s) or space(s) from which people articulate their identities and communities, according to Stuart Hall (1991). It also implies a kind of self-awareness or self-reflexivity about a group’s own cultural uniqueness; it is a process of belonging-in-difference. There is a great deal of fluidity in how people articulate ethnicity. Some articulations are grounded in nations or other kinds of “imagined communities”: the Japanese kimono, the Chinese cheongsam, the Mexican sombrero, and the Scottish kilt, for example. Yet when we examine the cultural histories of any given form of ethnic dress, we frequently find complex appropriations and hegemonic processes, as well as invented (imagined?) traditions and complex intersectionalities. Further, in the everyday process of minding appearances, individuals negotiate their identities in ways that—consciously or otherwise—rearticulate race, as well as ethnicity and other intersecting subject positions. Historian and fashion studies scholar Tanisha C. Ford (2015) writes about this process using the terminology of “soul style” in African diasporas that circulated globally in the 1970s: Soul style comprises African American and African-inspired hairstyles and modes of dress such as Afros, cornrows, denim overalls, platform shoes, beaded jewelry, and dashikis and other garments with African prints that became massively popular in the 1970s when “Black is Beautiful” was a rallying cry across the African diaspora. (Ford 2015: 4) 87

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Ford (2015) notes that from South Africa to the United States to London, “soul was shaped by often-tenuous cross-racial and cross-ethnic political alliances among people of African descent, white ethnics, and South Asians” (8–9). Cultural theorist bell hooks (1990) identifies another related concept, fresh, as an important element of Black street culture: “Fresh is a word used to express aesthetic evaluation of the unnamed forces behind a style, a concept, that add something new to our way of seeing—enhancing the visual experience of the look, the gaze” (51, original emphasis). African American cultural stylings have historically had an improvisational quality (Kaiser et al. 2004). The everyday process of minding appearances includes articulations and rearticulations that meld nostalgia with newness. The concept of double consciousness articulated by African American theorist W. E. B. DuBois ([1903] 1997) describes the experience of knowing two worlds at once: the dominant culture and the minority one. Similarly, feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins (1991) discusses the importance of both/and thinking in Black feminist thought. Writing from perspectives that bridge fashion studies and cultural studies, bell hooks (1990) and Gwen O’Neal (1998) note how African American style is simultaneously political and aesthetic; it defies binary oppositions between political agency (which challenges hegemony) and “just fashion” or “just for looks.” Yet as we have seen, the timing, the context, and the wearer’s intent and motivation all contribute to the extent of the melding of politics and aesthetics. A good example of racial and ethnic rearticulations is the concept of “re-mix” in hiphop culture. In music, as well as style-fashion-dress, artists and designers and consumers alike mix it up with elements of old and new, high and low (in cost), commodity capitalism and DIY, and so on. Keeping it fresh is an important part of the remix and, in the process, bottom-up and top-down processes become blurry; they resemble circuitous routes rather than linear, hierarchical up and down arrows. Tanisha Ford (2019) explains it in her memoir: Fashion trends were still regional in the late 1980s. But hip hop culture was going national … We were teenagers now. We had to look the part. We had to be people who could be recognized as somebody. Hip hop culture was where it was at, coast to coast and in the middle states too. We were hip hop. We wanted the athletic team apparel and the crisp midnight-wash jeans and the tennis shoes. We had to have the tennis shoes. (68–9) Ford discussed the trend to have one’s jeans airbrushed at the mall: “It was all so ephemeral, so in the moment. The airbrush could instantly transform an old pair of jeans, and that’s what fashion was for, to remake something old into something fresh” (81, original emphasis). The transnational distribution of hip-hop culture—through sounds, images, commodities, dance moves—offered a variety of means for ethnic subjectivities through processes of hybridization and cultural authentication. Dress scholars Joanne Eicher and Tonye Erekosima (1995) describe cultural authentication as a process by which external 88

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(e.g., African American) elements become assimilated into an already existing fashion system. As fashion theorists M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik (2016) have argued, there are multiple fashion systems around the world, and with transnational flow, ethnic identities frequently become hybridized (Jansen and Craik 2016: 11). Further, ethnic identities intersect with other subject positions such as gender, class, sexuality, national and regional identifications, and so on; they are complex. Intersectionalities famously influenced the belonging-in-difference articulation of ethnicity by the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). In an essay published in The Latin American Fashion Reader, Maria Claudia André (2005) describes how Kahlo articulated an ethnic nationalist Mexican identity, as well as complex gender and sexual subject positions through her style-fashion-dress. Born in a well-to-do family, just a few years before the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, Kahlo adapted Indigenous Tehuana ethnic dress—from the Tehuantepec region of Mexico—to represent an anticolonialist and nationalist Mexican identity, as well as her own unique sense of style and representation (see Figure 4.2). Her mother’s family had worn Indigenous dress; her father was German. Kahlo articulated resistance to both Spanish colonial and local masculine domination through the aesthetics associated with a matriarchal society. She linked this articulation contextually with a nationalist project fueled by revolutionary activism. Representing

Figure 4.2  Artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) wearing a huipil (blouse) and jewelry associated with her ethnic Mexican identity, circa 1945. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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herself in complex ways in her brightly colored dress (including huipiles [blouses woven and embroidered by Indigenous women] and long, brightly colored skirts) and in her painted self-portraits, Kahlo has assumed the status of a cult figure since the mid-1980s. Her images—seen on everything from T-shirts to refrigerator magnets and wooden doorway beads—raise some interesting questions regarding representation: Was Kahlo aiming to articulate a “self-exoticizing” image? Or was she appropriating from Indigenous ethnicities? Regardless of her intentions, global capitalism has benefited from her representations with commodities that continue to flow within and across multiple nations. And her imagery leaves ambiguous traces of intersectionalities that still capture the imagination and compel critical interpretations. Chicana studies scholar Norma Cantú (2020) describes how she started wearing huipiles in the 1970s; she has done (and continues to do) so both to honor the artists and to reclaim her own Indigenous identity. She was startled when, in the 1990s, an anthropologist she had just met criticized her for “insulting Indigenous women” for wearing a huipil she had bought in Oaxaca (25). Presumably, the anthropologist thought Cantú was appropriating, without knowing her ethnic background. Some scholars have used the term “portable ethnicity” to describe consumer experiences pertaining to specific ethnicities and imagined communities in transnational contexts (Halter 2000: 9). We could analyze the huipil as a kind of portable ethnicity, but Cantú’s experience is a helpful reminder that ethnic articulations involve cultural struggle and should be analyzed context-by-context. Cantú (2020) explains, self-reflexively, the challenges of having a Chicana, mestiza (mixed) subject position; although her Indigenous roots have been erased through a kind of detribalization, Cantú still identifies with Indigenous women (25). Like the huipil, kente cloth may be analyzed as a kind of portable ethnicity. Both have roots in the lives (the making, the wearing) of BIPOC (Black and Indigenous people of color). And both have routes as well. They travel, offering numerous opportunities for belonging-in-difference, as well as cultural appropriation.

Sliding into Appropriation, Sliding into Religion As described by cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall earlier in this chapter, ethnicities are continually in motion through the “ ‘play’ of history, culture and power” (1990: 225). Transnational discourse opens up cultural spaces for new expressions of belonging and becoming. Perhaps these new (transnational) ethnicities offer avenues to explore the politics and aesthetics of style-fashion-dress through new sites of identification and differentiation. A product, in many ways, of this transnational slippage is the age-old practice of cultural appropriation within the fashion industry, more broadly, and in everyday appearance management practices, more specifically. In our previous scholarship on this topic, we note that “appropriation has been a cog in the fashion machine as long as people have engaged in trade and communicated cross-culturally” (Green and Kaiser 90

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2017: 145). Cultures—themselves diverse amalgamations of a range of individuals—have long looked to the collectively relative “exotic” and “different” with curiosity, fascination, as well as contempt, fear, and disdain. Cultural appropriation can be defined as acting upon this kind of exoticism, taking aesthetic or material elements from another culture by someone who is not a member of that culture without giving credit or profit … Typically, those stealing design elements or ideas profit from them, while the culture of origin makes no profit and may be humiliated, disrespected, or harmed through the process. Cultural appropriation is possible because the ‘taker’ is typically in a position of power, whereas those who are taken from may not have easy access to legal recourse or enforcement of requital. (Green and Kaiser 2020: 145) A return to the example of kente cloth helps us to understand the complexity of appropriation. Kente is transnational, connecting the African diaspora to the African continent. In becoming transnational, has kente been subjected to appropriation? How does appropriation function when diasporic designers like Patrick Kelly, T. J. Walker, and Carl Jones—members of a larger community with ancestral connections to kente— transform the cloth into marketable clothing sold in a capitalist economic system? Arguably, it is not cultural appropriation but perhaps an appropriation of systems of production—that is, the material change from woven to screen-printed design, from manufacture by weavers in Ghana to highly industrialized textile mills in France, the United States, China, India, or other manufacturing sites. How does a textile with a particular origin in the Ashanti kingdom become representative of an entire continent and diaspora? Does this erase difference and essentialize the meaning? When the cloth is worn on white bodies in a display of allyship, does it cause harm by reducing a textile with important symbolic and cultural meaning to a performative political prop? Or, does it expand possibilities for cross-ethnic identification and political transformation? Most likely, there is a both/and component involved; intentions, actual interactions and relationships across ethnicities, and policy outcomes all help to sort out the contexts of meaning. Other textiles that travel internationally are head coverings such as the veil or hijab and turbans. The practice of veiling among women is believed to have originated in Assyrian (now Iraqi), Persian (now Iranian), and Byzantine cultures, well before the birth of the Islamic religion in the seventh century CE. The first known historical reference to veiling was an Assyrian legal text of the thirteenth century BCE. Urban upper-class women wore the veil to mark their prestige and to represent their privilege to shield themselves from the “impure” gaze of commoners. It became illegal for lowerclass women and sex workers to wear veils (Zahedi 2007). The cultural practice of using fabric as a head covering became common to men (more commonly the turban) and women (more commonly the veil) throughout the Middle East and parts of Africa and South Asia. With the advent of Islam, this practice—widely varied in specific locations and contexts—came to have religious connotations (Zahedi 91

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2007). World trade, imperial conquests, and colonization helped to spread the practice of textile head coverings in various forms. In particular, Europeans became fascinated with what Edward Said (1978) called “Orientalism”: biased and distorted “outsider” interpretations of the East—attitudes shaped by imperialist attitudes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The roots of Orientalism had been seen in a fascination with imagined national differences. In the nineteenth century, Western fashion experimented with various forms of head coverings and the concept of bifurcated lower garments (i.e., trousers) for women. Inspired, for example, by Turkish styles, US feminists such as Amelia Bloomer experimented with the appropriation of some aspects of Oriental (Turkish) styling into their everyday attire in the 1850s, as a dress reform alternative to corsets and hoopskirts. Although the bloomer style did not catch on and evoked substantial public ridicule, the style became incorporated into children’s and women’s bloomer or romper styles for active wear and young women’s physical education uniforms (Warner 2006). Yet it was probably the continuing influences of Orientalism that contributed most to Western masculine “harem fantasies.” The Russian ballet (Ballets Russes) set and costume designer Leon Bakst drew heavily on the European fantasies (see Figure 4.3) in the 1910 production Scheherezade, which was based on One Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights). In the production, the heroine and storyteller (to the king) extraordinaire was depicted in exotic harem pants, turbans, and jewels. Bakst’s extravagant and exotic set and costume designs in the Ballets Russe adaptation of the story debuted in Paris and attracted the fascination of the French fashion designer Paul Poiret (1879–1944), who began to adapt the stage costumes for modern fashion. Poiret is famously known for his elaborate and exotic parties. In 1911 he and his wife, Denise, hosted “The Thousand and Second Night” party, requiring guests to wear stylefashion-dress inspired by The Arabian Nights—and coincidentally available through his own designs. Denise played the role of the Queen of the Harem and wore a turban with egret feathers and harem pants designed by Poiret. The turban epitomized the European perception of Persian dress. Guests were invited—indeed required—to wear similar Oriental styles such as harem pants and turbans, styles that Poiret himself had been designing (Takeda and Spilker 2010: 176–7). Hollywood starlets wore turbans in the 1920s and 1930s on the silver screen, and turbans have continued to circulate now and then on fashion runways and in everyday life. In 1938, King Farouk of Egypt visited London, bringing with him his new wife and sisters. They were received by the King and Queen of England and were the first royal Muslim women to be received at court; they were a sensation. They dressed in Western fashions, but with their stylish hats they also wore veils (Jirousek 2019: 222). Fashion picked up the turban long associated with Islam, and the draped veils worn by the women, and suddenly turbans were all the rage. This style lasted into the 1940s (see Figure 4.4). In her posthumously published book, Ottoman Dress and Design in the West, Charlotte Jirousek (2019) argues that turbans became a mainstay in European fashion in the late fourteenth century and that “everyone was aware at this time of Muslim 92

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Figure 4.3  Michael Fokine and Vera Fokina as the Golden Slave and Zobeïde in the 1910 Ballets Russes production Scheherazade. Photographer unknown.

Figure 4.4  Turbans self-fashioned from scarves and worn by white-appearing women in France in 1944. Photo by Fred Ramage/Getty Images.

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turbans as an exotic prototype of headgear” (59). Turban wrapping styles were diverse, and between 1380 and 1450, numerous styles and adaptations existed. By the start of the sixteenth century, the style had fallen out of fashion, but the European victory against the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 resulted in further fascination and adoption of the style (102). Jirousek suggests that these military confrontations in the mid- to late sixteenth century may have inspired new styles of turbans in Europe because “such headdresses came home with returning soldiers as trophies” (105). The turban thus became a symbol of triumph, conquest, and imperial power and has maintained a steady presence in European fashion since. In 2010 in New York, models wearing designer Jason Wu’s spring collection wore black or cobalt turbans. Meanwhile in Milan, Giorgio Armani accessorized his monochromatic collection with North African-inspired turbans. Some of the models resembled Greta Garbo in the 1926 silent film The Temptress. How can one explain the fascination with head wraps? Harold Koda, curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, does not believe it has anything to do with politics or world events: “It’s not a part of a Kumbaya fashion movement. I think it’s more of Poiret’s view of Orientalism than women watching the news and referencing what’s going on in Afghanistan. It’s an exoticism, a sense of the other that is visually compelling” (Oliver 2010). Textiles travel transnationally as well, in diasporas, and not always in ways that can be attributed to ethnicity. In the closing of Emma Tarlo’s (2010) book, Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith, she discusses online discourses among young Muslim women on topics related to style-fashion-dress: from politics to shopping, and how to wear hijab (a head scarf) in a variety of styles and with other clothes and accessories; reviews of fashion-related magazines and television shows; links to online hijab shopping sites; and different international Islamic fashion events in Britain, the United States, Canada, Turkey, Egypt, and Indonesia. Tarlo argues such discourses—as well as the styles worn in everyday life—represent the birth of modern Islamic fashion “in which distinctions of ethnicity have become irrelevant” (Tarlo 2010: 225, emphasis added). Undoubtedly, Tarlo is using ethnicity here to refer to the diversity in the regional and cultural backgrounds of Muslims within national contexts: British, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Arab, Albanian, Bosnian, Iranian, Nigerian, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Turkish, along with individuals of mixed backgrounds, including white British and European converts. Many of Tarlo’s informants sought to distance themselves from the ethnic dress (or national dress?) of their parents’ generation. Rather they sought to wear modern, Islamic style-fashion-dress. Tarlo’s point about the diminishing importance of ethnicity and ethnic dress observation, however, raises a crucial question on the relationship between ethnicity and religion/faith and a provocative possibility at the heart of subject formation through style-fashion-dress. Ethnic identities, appropriations, and racial rearticulations cannot be separated completely from discourses of religion, considered in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 5 RELIGION, FASHION, AND SPIRITUALITY

There is little scholarly consensus on how to define religion. Though its etymology is uncertain, it seems to have been derived from the Latin stem leig, which means “to bind.” The Latin word religio designates the bond between human beings and the gods (Taylor 1998). The word religion, however, has no equivalency in many non-Western languages. In the early twentieth century, the sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) described “the ambivalent twilight that for us surrounds the origin and the nature of religion” (1997: 275). He argued for the need to understand how religion is more than individual bonding with a god or gods, but rather is intrinsically social and cultural and “neither a finished thing nor a firm substance, but rather a living process” (287). In other words, like fashion, religion is not an essence. Interestingly, Simmel (1997) wrote in similar ways about religion and fashion as social processes. In his Philosophy of Fashion, he used religious metaphors as he described fashion: “the embodiment of a joint spirit” (194)—yet one that includes “the right to be unfaithful to it” (205). It is the unfaithful, or fickle, component to fashion that, one can infer, distinguishes it from religion, which relies on devotion in an ongoing way. The concept of religious dress conjures images of distinctive dress that marks one as holding certain beliefs; religious dress is “a visible signifier of difference” (Hume 2013: 1): one that has become recognized with the material in recent decades in the field of religious studies (Paine 2020). Simmel may well have been influenced by his own positioning, growing up in a bourgeois Jewish family that had converted to Christianity. By the time of his writing in Berlin around the turn into the twentieth century, the city had become an important fashion center, where there were quite a few Jewish clothing makers and department stores (Schramm 2007: 31). We will come back to the history of Jewish people in the development of the textile and apparel industries later in the chapter, in the section on production, distribution, and consumption. Around the same time (in 1905), also in Berlin, the sociologist Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In 1930, it was translated into English ([1930] 1992). He argued that the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century had fostered the belief that salvation is an individual, rather than a collective, affair. In part, this contributed to the transformation of the market into an ethos that “the pursuit of self-interest” is good for the whole society and economy (Taylor 2014: 2). Weber’s theory helps to explain how and why modern capitalism was so compatible with the modern history of Northern Europe and its spread to the United States and globally by the 1980s elsewhere, resulting by the early twenty-first century in high-speed financial capitalism, fast fashion, and the “race to the bottom” in garment labor.

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Weber’s theory—linking the emergence of capitalism with Protestantism—has been critiqued for paying too much attention to religion as a singular causal factor in shaping social, cultural, and economic conditions (Barbalet 2006). Bioethicist Matthew Vest (2019) indicates that the Protestant Reformation revealed “in religious garb” (metaphorically) “the core commercial motivations within society” (267). Further, intersectionalities with other subject positions, such as class, gender, nationality, race, and ethnicity, influence how religion plays out in relation to the global circulation of style-fashion-dress. For example, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) have been dominant in the history of the United States, and issues beyond religion have influenced their style-fashion-dress, which has largely been “unmarked.” Part of the Protestant Reformation had been a desire to distance the Protestant faith from the material and visual symbolism of the Catholic Church. This distancing can be seen in differences in the architectural styles of churches: for example, the simplicity of wooden benches and little decoration in Lutheran churches as compared to the majestic Catholic cathedrals in France or the colorful Eastern Orthodox churches in Russia. The differences within most Protestants’ style-fashion-dress and with those of Catholics are generally likely to be much more subtle, if present. Yet, in the Alsace region of what is now northeastern France (having been part of Germany at some point in the past), differences could be detected between Protestant and Catholic dress historically. The large bows worn by women in the region (with variations) and in the city of Strasbourg in much of the nineteenth century were distinguished by colors and the size of the tails. Protestant women tended to wear black or dark green bows, whereas young Catholic women of marriageable age wore red or other bright colors. Skirt and blouse colors followed similar systems, with Protestants wearing more subdued colors, whereas Catholic women had more contrast and patterning. In the 1970s and 1980s, anthropologist Atwood Gaines (1985) found that in Strasbourg (about 68 percent Catholic and 27 percent Protestant—especially Calvinist or Lutheran at the time), Catholic women still tended to wear brighter colors, more jewelry, and more makeup than Protestant women. Gaines concluded that religions seem to instill longer-term structures of feeling, even when these are subtle in the context of modern style-fashion-dress. Moreover, Gaines indicated that “Protestant aesthetics minimize both color and evidence of wealth. That it does so is recognized by Protestants as having a religious (theological) basis. In Calvinist doctrine, icons and elaborate sacred decoration are seen as detracting from the contemplation of divinity” (1985: 54–5, original emphasis). Calvinism, however, also grappled with a kind of anxiety about salvation, leading followers to look for signs of reassurance (Gordon 2010). John Calvin (1509–1564) “preached against gross consumption of worldly goods and immodesty,” according to religious studies scholar Bruce Gordon (2009: 147). At the same time, his own sense of style … allowed him to admire clean lines and simplicity. He liked what was tasteful. In his correspondence he could let drop a line that indicated an eye for beautiful buildings and a well-dressed woman. His painted portraits reveal 96

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Figure 5.1  John Calvin (1509–64). Courtesy of Hulton-Deutsch Collection, Corbis Historical/Getty Images.

his modest yet evident elegance—a good-quality cloak or gown with fur collar, nothing ostentatious or extravagant. The fine things of life point to a gracious God. Through the eyes of faith the elect enjoy these things not as momentary pleasures but as the revelation of God’s love. (Gordon 2009: 147) Calvin’s unmarked appearance style in his time (see Figure 5.1) was not altogether without a touch of luxe (perceived as evidence of god’s grace). Calvin viewed life’s joys (e.g., fur trim, a glass of fine wine) as a means to “sustain and nourish the pilgrim along the journey” (Gordon 2009: 147). His style-fashion-dress basically fit with that of Protestant theologians and academics in his day, with influences dating back to medieval times. (Still today, professors wear similar gowns at college and university graduations, with velveteen trim substituting for the fur.) Intersectionalities come into play in important ways, as well, of course: European women, for example, were not entitled in the sixteenth century, and for centuries later, to serve in the roles that include the wearing of these privileged gowns. And, class differences influenced the quality of the materials. Moreover, it is important to note that Protestantism was associated in an unmarked way with whiteness and its contrast against dark or neutral colors. Style-fashion-dress scholars Linda Arthur (1999) and Gwen O’Neal (1998, 1999) have studied two forms of Protestantism that are less unmarked: Mennonite dress, and 97

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appearance style in the Black Church, respectively. We address these later in the chapter, but it is important to note at this stage that identity and difference have been central to the study of religion and dress. Further, Arthur (1999) focused on structure and the church’s control over women’s bodies, whereas O’Neal (1998, 1999) emphasized agency, with the church as a vehicle for stylistic expression. Both scholars, however, would probably agree that structure and agency are dynamically negotiated rather than statically opposed. Yet the dynamic—that exchange between factors that control the body and those that offer opportunities for individual, creative expression—continues to operate in processes of everyday subject formation. The question is the extent to which religion can explain such processes, and how it does so through style-fashion-dress. How has religion fared in the twenty-first century? In many ways, as religious studies scholar Linda Woodhead (2013) observes, religion has not been “declining or dying, but transforming” (xvii), especially in the context of global, capitalist circuits of stylefashion-dress. She notes how, since the 1980s, an important part of “a tectonic shift in the religious landscape” has been the ways in which fashion choices have become central to the religious lives of many people—especially women (xvii). Notably, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, major museum exhibits focused on the interplay between religion and style-fashion-dress: “Faith, Fashion, Fusion” (focusing on Muslim fashion) at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, in 2012; “Veiled Meanings” at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 2017 and San Francisco in 2018; “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018; and “Contemporary Muslim Fashions” at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco in 2018 (D’Alessandro et al. 2018). The expansion of global capitalism in the 1980s, along with the impact of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, contributed to the “tectonic shift” to which Woodhead refers; there was a melding of politics, religion, and style-fashion-dress in relation to the veiling of Muslim women. In a later section in this chapter, we consider how and why the circuit of Muslim style-fashion-dress has expanded dramatically since the 1980s with the development of Turkey’s modest fashion industry, tesettür, and especially so in the twentyfirst century. Not surprisingly, there has been a surge in the literature on Muslim fashion trends and their complex variations, as well as in online commerce and social media. Islam is the second largest and fastest growing religion around the world. In addition to work around the turn of the century that analyzed “religious dress” (Arthur 1999, 2000; El Guindi 1999), there is now work addressing religion as dynamic and changing in the context of global capitalism—including a dramatic increase in diasporic style cultures, the digital distribution of images, and online shopping opportunities (Lewis 2013a, 2015), among other social and political factors. Books based on ethnographic and media research use terms such as “visibly Muslim” (Tarlo 2010), “modest fashion” more generally to include other religions such as the Orthodox Jewish and LDS faiths (Lewis 2013a), “Muslim fashion” (Lewis 2015), and “pious fashion” (Bucar 2017). Overall, these and other works point to the idea that religious devotion and active participation in the fashion process are not mutually exclusive endeavors. This clarifies that it is possible to be at once religious and fashionable; although this both/and dynamic was not necessarily 98

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new to the twenty-first century, it became particularly evident in the joint contexts of global capitalism and marketing, online shopping, social media, the growth of Islam, and Islamophobic and nationalist anxieties. Still, some might say that it is rather “discombobulating” to think about religion and fashion together conceptually (Woodhead 2013: xvii). Doing so requires both/ and thinking: grappling with ambivalence and contradictions, struggling with issues of structure and agency, navigating materiality and immateriality, and reconciling tradition and change. Whereas the phrase “religious dress” conjures images and symbols of tradition, “religious fashion” continues to require more explanation (as we have found when telling people about the topic of this chapter as we were writing it). Of course, dress in general is never completely static, and through processes of stylistic articulation, fashion can combine religious and secular (nonreligious) elements: religious dress is not without variety or fashion change and choice, as we can see in the array of options for Jewish yarmulkes or kipas (caps) in Plate 15. The remainder of the chapter is loosely organized around the circuit of style-fashiondress (Kaiser 2012). It begins with subject formation and the interplay between subjectivity (here highlighting spirituality) and subject positionality (foregrounding modesty as a common concept across religions). Then, there is a turn toward the regulation of religious appearances, considering the roles of organized religion and nation-states. Finally, we address the remaining components of the circuit through case studies that address the relation between religion and the production, distribution, and consumption of style-fashion-dress. As fashion studies scholar Reina Lewis (2015) notes, the circuit highlights “meaning-making as an ongoing process”; the component elements are fluid and “mutually constitutive” (5). It challenges the idea that any part is more important than any other. They all co-construct each other, flow into one another, and dynamically reveal shifting power relations.

Subject Formation Based upon long-term ethnographic research among young multiethnic Muslims in Chicago, Su’ad Abdul Khabeer (2016) developed the concept of “Muslim Cool” as “a way of thinking and a way of being Muslim that resists and reconstitutes U.S. racial hierarchies” (7): Muslim Cool as racial-religious self-making … occurs at the complex intersections of race, class, gender, and style … investigating a specific headscarf style, the “hoodjab,” to uncover how Blackness, interpolated through the ‘hood, gives meaning, that is contested, to the female practice of Muslim Cool. (23) The hoodjab can be described as an articulation between the practice of (1) hijab or head covering common to Muslim women in some communities around the world and (2) the form of headwrap worn traditionally in Africa and among African American 99

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women—casually linked to the concept of the hoodie, which is frequently worn in the United States and is especially symbolic in the Black community. The hoodie took on new meanings after the violent killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. Martin was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a “neighborhood watch coordinator” in a Florida neighborhood, while he was walking down a street wearing a hoodie and eating candy. Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges related to the murder in 2013. Part of the significance of the hoodjab by African American Muslim women, according to Khabeer (2016), is its resistance to the hegemonies of both white supremacy and Middle Eastern hijab. It allows Black Muslim women to “reclaim the Afrodiasporic headdress as Islamic” (122). The hoodjab does not cover the neck, but rather is worn like a turban, but often tied up around a bun in the back, enabling women to wear earrings (often hoops). It represents a good example of articulation between the hoodie and hijab, displaying agency and identity in the process. It is also “emblematic of the convergence of religion, race, femininity, and hip hop in the United States” (115). In Chicago, African American Muslim women interact with South Asian and Middle Eastern Muslim women in the context of the church and community centers. Khabeer (2016) interviewed a young Pakistani American woman, Fateema, about her adoption of the hoodjab, offering us a sense of her process of subject formation: I don’t think that I actually started wearing it that way until I started working on the South Side and started seeing more people from IMAN, mostly African American and Arab, wear that particular style. And I think I must have seen at least one or two Pakistani people wear it, and then I felt even more so, “Oh, ok, this is something I can do as well.” A lot of times the way people wear hijab is very cultural …, so there was a part of me that didn’t want to try and be something that I am not. Pakistanis wear their scarves very differently, tucked in behind the ears. I never wore it that way but I did like the way African Americans were wearing it, which in some ways is connected to the ways it is worn in Africa. I am pretty sure I saw it on Erykah Badu, too, and I was just like, “Oh cool!” There is definitely some sort of link to pop culture. Initially I was just excited by the fact I could wear my hijab and show my earrings and my necklace. I liked how it was versatile, I could wear it that way and it didn’t have to immediately mean, when someone saw me, “Oh, she’s a Muslim.” And yes, part of it is that it’s cool because it’s different and it’s cool because I can wear earrings. (131–2) Khabeer (2016) notes that in addition to navigating her gender, religious, and ethnic identities, Fateema grapples with her class identity. She lives in an upper-class Chicago suburb with her parents, in contrast to many of the African American young urban women she knows through the church community (132). For Fatema, the hoodjab and hip-hop music offer access to “a wider aesthetic” (133), and she can afford the “freshest kicks” (latest sneakers; 132). Fateema is aware that her Muslim cool style choices may be regarded as cultural appropriation of Blackness, and she actively mediates her intersectional subject positions by engaging in activist projects that directly confront 100

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racism (135). The group of young Muslim women in London (Plate 16) also articulate “Muslim cool” through their compelling outfits, evidence of the transnational circulation of this style in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Religious studies scholar Timothy Beal (2008) argues that “the heart of any religious belief, practice, or institution is in the details” (6). The complex of style-fashion-dress exemplifies this emphasis on details. Most likely, it is in the details that people literally wear their religions on their bodies; this is not only about what they wear but also about how they wear it: how long a Hasidic Jewish man’s payot (side curls) are, how fitted a Mennonite woman’s shirtwaist dress is, how many strands of hair peek out from an Iranian woman’s scarf, or how long a Mormon’s sleeves or shorts are (so as to cover the sacred underwear). In the Amish religion, there were differences that led to different churches—largely over debates about men wearing suspenders (Hostetler 1980: 276). One church would not allow suspenders at all, one would allow one suspender (with the other one not pulled up over the shoulder), and others would allow two suspenders (all in lieu of wearing a belt with a buckle, viewed as too ornamental). The following three sections consider aspects of the interface between subject formation and religion: (1) spirituality, subjectivity, and materiality, (2) modesty, and (3) piety. All three point to the importance of the interplay between agency (including subjectivity) and structure (addressing subject positioning). Spirituality, Subjectivity, and Materiality In 1890, the American pragmatist philosopher William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology: The body is the innermost part of the material Self in each of us; and certain parts of the body seem more intimately ours than the rest. The clothes come next. The old saying that the human person is composed of three parts—soul, body, and clothes—is more than a joke. (1890: 146) James points to the ways in which material and spiritual issues are intertwined, although there has been a long tendency in Western philosophy to debate—if not to separate— the mind and/or soul from the body, dating to the works of philosophers such as Plato (about 428–424 BCE) in Ancient Greece, and René Descartes (1596–1650) in France. Theologians and philosophers have continued to debate the relationship, but many in the twenty-first century submit that mind–body dualism should be rejected in Christianity (Baker 2004) in favor of imagining “embodied souls” and “ensouled bodies” (Cortez 2008). In the Jewish faith, the body has a “spiritual purpose,” given the belief that god created humans in “his” own image (Grubin 2008: 174). Hence there are ethical and spiritual obligations to expand one’s soul and to “grow by our spiritual yearnings, not by our bodily yearnings” (188). Yet, for many individuals, there is a distinction between spirituality (what people feel and value) and organized religion. Surveys after the turn to the twenty-first 101

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century indicate that many individuals in the United States view themselves as spiritual but not religious (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 1). For example, and dating to earlier traditions from non-Western spiritualities and religions, cultural practices and products associated with yoga, New Age music, chakra, and the use of crystals have become more commercialized in what religious studies scholars Heeles and Woodward (2005) call a “subjective turn,” presenting Christianity with “a new competitor” (1–2). In other words, there has been a search for spiritual meaning that does not necessarily reside in organized religions. The idea of spirituality is one that flows through subjectivity and focuses on personal life experiences that may or may not pertain to an organized “higher truth” beyond the world that includes scriptures, dogma, rituals, and so on (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 30). And, as it turns out, there are likely to be multiple truths due to diverse cultural traditions, subjectivities and spiritualities, and ways of knowing and experiencing everyday life. These multiple truths can coexist in pluralist societies (Berger 2016), and individuals may combine elements of them in their own subject formations. In Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism there is a tantric worldview of metaphysics. Dating back to thousands of years ago in India—where some of the oldest religions emerged—the word “tantra” in the Sanskrit language can be translated to “loom,” “warp,” “weave,” or “to spin out”: meaning to set up the warp (vertical) threads on a loom so as to stabilize the basis for weaving together new formations: textiles. Metaphors abound, and the materials worn on the body become important ways of understanding abstract concepts that are spiritual in nature. Metaphoric thinking involves the use of visualization, and fabric production became a way to imagine weaving together diverse ways of knowing (e.g., the warp [vertical] and the weft [horizontal]) and expanding one’s horizons in the process of doing so (Timalsina 2015: 63). Tantra also refers to embodied daily practices—practices that are situated (Entwistle 2000) and that become routinized. Yoga, meditation, and other mind–body rituals are age-old ways of surpassing one’s immediate, personal concerns. According to Roxanne Kamayani Gupta (2008), a scholar of India and religion, in the tantric and yogic traditions, the body is “its own universe, a microcosm that reflects the macrocosm. The body becomes the means by which inner subjective consciousness projects its experience and then observes its reflection in the objective world. The body is a veil of senses, a delicate curtain dividing the inner and outer worlds” (63). Gupta indicates that in Hinduism “entire cosmos takes the form of Sri, the goddess as embodied nature” (62). In this sense, she argues the traditional sari metaphysically becomes a form of traditional sanctuary, in which femininity represents nature and preserves tradition (62–3). The sari’s uncut yardage (about six) represents spiritual continuity not only in traditional feminine, Hindi dress but also in that of monks in another tantric religion: Buddhism. In such practices, the body and the dress are interlinked in visual and material, as well as spiritual ways. The overt idea that visual, material, and spiritual practices are interconnected can also be found in the history of the Black Church—a term dress and fashion studies scholar Gwen O’Neal (1999) uses as a shorthand reference to multiple Black Christian churches in the United States. O’Neal describes how dress and being are inseparable in the Black Church, where “norms of church dress are necessarily based upon religious ethics rooted 102

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in African religion and philosophy” (117). The Black Church connects spirituality and materiality through a “unity of community” (O’Neal 1998: 171) that extends back to the era of slavery. Although enslaved peoples could not “retain their own cultural artifacts, the conditions of slavery did not eradicate their cultural memory” (167). Wearing one’s “Sunday best” represented the opportunity to articulate a collective spiritual practice and to express agency; Sunday was the one day of relief amidst of harsh and exploitative working conditions that made almost no allowance for individual and collective expression. Spirituality, in this context, became part of the African American experience, passed from generation to generation, which was both “in the clothes” (initially self-made or obtained second-hand) and how one wore them. As one of O’Neal’s informants in the 1990s indicated: It’s tied up in my own spirituality. It’s tied to my ancestors. It is sort of my way of connecting. (1998: 171) O’Neal (1999) refers to the Sunday experience as a “sacred cosmos” (129): one articulated through not only what one wears but also how they wear it. One of her interviewees said: “It’s something about the way a black woman puts a hat on her head … It’s not so much what you do, but it’s the attitude and the spirit with which you do it” (O’Neal 1998: 170). African American designer Patrick Kelly (discussed in Chapter 4 and shown in Plate 6)—the first American admitted into the ready-to-wear component of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne (the Parisian fashion system)—grew up in Mississippi and always paid tribute to his Black roots. After Kelly died of AIDS, his partner Bjorn Amelan said the following about Kelly: “While he loved Madame Grès and Yves Saint Laurent, he’d say that in one pew at Sunday church in Vicksburg, there’s more fashion to be seen than on a Paris runway” (Givhan 2004: C02). Kelly also brought the church to the runway, and according to fashion studies scholar Eric Darnell Pritchard (2018), “Kelly often began shows inviting his entire team to pray with him in the tradition of the Black church” (15). Like Kelly, the former Vogue fashion editor André Leon Talley’s love of fashion was influenced greatly by the Black Church. Talley grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and was largely raised by his grandmother, who had a wardrobe of hats that she wore to church on Sundays. In the documentary The Gospel According to André (Novack 2017), Talley described every Sunday as being “like a fashion show” (especially the hats) and goes on to say: “Fashion has to uplift the soul. It uplifts the spirit. It’s a moral code to dress well.” The relation between morality and dress is one that points to the concept of modesty: a major theme in religious studies, as well as fashion studies. The next section considers modesty as a factor in subject formation. Modesty A philosopher and religious studies scholar and author of Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress, Elizabeth Bucar (2017) spent a summer in Iran conducting field research. 103

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Because head coverings (hijab) are mandatory in this Islamic state, she routinely wore headscarves and comments on how this affected her: I realized that modest dress had a moral effect on me. It altered how I saw myself and how I interacted with others, and it influenced my expectations for how Islamic public space should be organized in terms of gender segregation. It also had an aesthetic effect on me, shaping what I expected from and admired about Muslim women’s clothing. This is all to say that I found surprise, pleasure, and delight in pious fashion, as well as an intellectual challenge to the neat boxes I had once put things in: modest dress as imposed on women, fashion as a symptom of patriarchy, and aesthetics as separate from ethics. (ix) As a situated bodily practice, the act of wearing clothes—including those with spiritual or religious implications—is part of subjectivity, which includes a sense of agency. Yet to the extent that organized religion exerts social control over what people wear, there are structural, regulatory components to style-fashion-dress as well. The concept of modesty is one, as Bucar notes, that is frequently associated with Muslim women in a way that undermines a sense of subjectivity and agency, but her ethnographic studies in multiple Muslim sites (Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia) reveal a much more complicated picture of the structure–agency interplay. Further, modesty as a concept cuts across multiple faiths, with very different visual and material forms and practices. Part of the complexity of modesty as a concept is its ambiguous reference to multiple issues with which various religions tend to concern themselves: sexual desire, humility, ostentation, conformity, and so on. Modesty is inevitably intersectional—cutting across issues of gender, sexual display and desire, social class, age, nationality, ethnicity, and so on. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary (2020) defines “modest” as follows: “Of a woman’s dress: seemly, not ostentatious; sober in colour and style, so as to avoid revealing the figure of the wearer. (Occasionally also applied to men).” In addition to the obviously gendered and sexualized connotations of the term in English, the “sober” and “not ostentatious” aspects of the definitions suggest the need to avoid drawing attention to oneself. The historical literary references from the Oxford English Dictionary (2020) below point to the different connotations of modesty, from Judeo-Christian to Puritanic to Muslim contexts: 1611 Bible (King James) 1 Timothy ii. 9. That women adorne themselues in modest apparell. 1700 S. Wesley Epist. Poetry 5 Style is the Dress of Thought; a modest Dress, Neat, but not gaudy, will true Critics please. 1858 H.W. Longfellow Courtship Miles Standish iii. 53 She, the Puritan girl … Making the humble house and the modest apparel of homespun Beautiful with her beauty.

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1920 E. Wharton Age of Innocence i.4 A warm pink … suffuse the young slope of her breast to the line where it met a modest tulle tucker fastened with a single gardenia. Coverage of parts of the body is just one of the meanings of modesty, and this interpretation may conflict with a second meaning: not drawing attention to oneself (Miller 2013: 124). In other words, this meaning applies to the concept of being unobtrusive, inconspicuous, or “unmarked.” The Protestant Puritanic Longfellow quote above from 1858 conjures the image of a woman wearing a simple gray dress that covers her collarbones, ankles, and wrists. This style was unmarked in her time and place, but would stand out in the present day. What is considered inconspicuous varies as social, cultural, historical contexts change; this variation can be attributed to structural changes (including fashion changes) that require new forms of agency and subject formation. The structure–agency interplay continues. In ultra-orthodox Jewish religions such as Hasidic Judaism, the laws of tzniuth (modesty) apply. Married women cover their heads (often with wigs), as well as their collarbones and ankles, especially in the synagogue (Auerbach 2008: 205–6). Indeed, all three of the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) have histories of modesty and women wearing head coverings, which have become “flashpoints” in perceptions of contemporary Islam (Wilson 2013: 158). It is a symbol that can be described as “simultaneously readable and unreadable” (Zeiger 2008: 267) and as “marked” if it is not part of the visual norm in a given setting. Modest dress is a paradox and can only be interpreted fully by analyzing the contexts (e.g., time, place, manner) in which it becomes materialized and visualized. More than religious dogma, it is an ambiguous, intersectional concept that combines structure and agency, blending in and standing out, and muting and attracting. To the extent that dress can be described as a broadcast signal that cannot be directed toward specific audiences, it is not possible to understand a wearer’s intention—which is usually more than one meaning anyway, nor how it will be perceived by others in diverse contexts. If modest dress is paradoxical, modest fashion is even more so. As fashion studies scholar Reina Lewis writes in the introduction to the edited volume Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith (2013a), modesty is “a mutable concept that changes over time and is diversely adopted, rejected, altered by or in some cases imposed on different groups of women (and, to a lesser extent, men) in different times and places” (3). In Modest Fashion, there are a number of chapters that reflect on how the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) address what anthropologist Daniel Miller (2013) calls the issue of “how much and what parts of a woman’s body should be covered” (122). In addition, of particular interest to the study of religion in the context of fashion studies is Reina Lewis’ (2013a) observation that “attempts to secure particular dress styles as the property of a single faith are likely always to be undermined by the magpie nature of fashion … [C]‌ross-faith modest fashion activity witnessed in the early decades of the twenty-first century is likely to be more lasting than any wardrobe ensemble” (12).

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If the idea of modest fashion is not unsettling enough, that of “pious fashion” broadens the cultural contradictions and tensions. Piety, Orthodoxy, Religiosity Based on her study of Muslim dress in Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia, Bucar came to use the term “pious fashion” to communicate moral beliefs and multiple meanings and values, including modesty, modernity, and beauty (2017: 14). She uses the term to describe women who dress in a way to demonstrate their devotion to Islam. She argues that pious Muslim fashion has ethical, religious, and moral implications; it constitutes a kind of disciplinary practice that includes “character formation through bodily action,” the regulation of sexual desire, and the creation of “public space organized around Islamic moral principles” (3). She also uses “pious fashion” to “unsettle assumptions” about fashion and piety alike: “fashion is not merely superficial, and piety does not efface the body” (4). Hence the two terms are mutually informative, and considering them together, Bucar argues, can foster understandings of the complexities of Muslim women’s actual style practices. Using a both/and framework, Bucar notes how it is possible to express both devotion to a religion’s ethics or belief systems and attention to personal style-fashion-dress within those systems. Her study of Muslim dress in urban areas of Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia led her to conclude that it is possible both to demonstrate “good taste” and “personal submission to Islam” (Bucar 2017: 3). That is, pious fashion is about not only being or becoming good but also “appearing to be good as well” (190). Closely related to piety (an individual way of being and becoming) is the concept of orthodoxy, which implies the established religious doctrine on which a person’s piety or degree of daily religiosity is based. For example, dress scholar Linda B. Arthur (1999: 1) studied Holdeman Mennonites—a relatively orthodox community among the larger Mennonite religion. In her fieldwork in northern California, Arthur found that clothing was used as evidence of being on the “right and true path” (in the words of one of her informants). Within this community, women’s dress generally consists of shirtwaist dresses below the knee, uncut hair worn in buns, and prayer caps. More leeway is granted to the “right and true path” of young women of marriageable age, who can wear more fitted and shorter shirtwaist dresses. However, they are expected to wear more loosely fitting and longer shirtwaist dresses once they are married. Men, in contrast, do not dress substantially differently than men outside the religion. What is framed as “orthodoxy” (again, as a level of religiosity or piety) applies to various Jewish communities. For example, perhaps the most orthodox of various Jewish communities are the Hasidic Jews living in Israel, the Brooklyn area of New York City, and parts of Europe (e.g., the Netherlands). In contrast to Holdeman Mennonites, it is Hasidic Jewish men, rather than women, who are expected to convey their level of religiosity most obviously through their dress. Details include the length of the beard, the type of head covering, the side curls in the hair, the cut of the suit, and so on. In a cultural context that fosters gender segregation (Lewis 2013a: 4), Hasidic Jewish men 106

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spend a great deal of their time together reading and studying the Torah, which invites ongoing interpretations. While Hasidic Jewish men dress in highly visible ways to display their level of orthodoxy, Hasidic and some other Orthodox Jewish women dress modestly but wear wigs (called sheitls) to cover their hair once they are married (Tarlo 2016: 107). The wigs often go unnoticed by individuals who are not part of the Orthodox community (110). Hence, their wearers are relatively unmarked in their appearances, as compared to their husbands. Regulation In 2013, the New York Times reported an incident in a Hasidic Jewish community in Williamsburg (in Brooklyn), New York. A “modesty committee” told a shopkeeper to take mannequins displaying women’s clothing out of her store window, or her business would be shunned by the community. She complied with the request; the men who call themselves the “Gut’s polizei” (“God’s police”) are self-appointed, and while the official religion posts “rules of conduct” on trees and walls in the community, the Rabbis insist that they do not enforce them (Berger 2013). The above story focuses on the regulation of retailing through social control, whereas a more direct form of regulation focuses on members’ own bodies. Dress scholars Jean Hamilton and Jana Hawley (1999) describe how the Church of LDS (commonly known as Mormonism) relies on a system of self-control through “individual agency” (37). Members who have been endowed (i.e., received the covenant in the temple) wear a sacred undergarment that is largely hidden by one’s street clothing (44). The garment has symbols embroidered in various places to serve as daily tactile reminders of religious doctrine and practices of piety (e.g., prayer). The closeness of the undergarment to the body makes it an intimate and sacred relationship with the faith and an embodied one. However, it is not completely invisible to perceivers. It shapes the options for outerwear, due to the length of the sleeves and legs (making it difficult to wear sleeveless tops or shorts). Change happens over time in the design of the undergarment, as Hamilton and Hawley (1999) observe: One is instructed about wearing the garment at the time of one’s endowments. Interestingly, the absence of detailed instructions makes it possible for some to push what others feel are the limits regarding the rules for wearing them … Indeed, endowed Church members may remove the garment for activities that reasonably require it, such as swimming. While there are no specific rules regarding swimsuit type, members are, in general, encouraged to dress modestly. Thus, the appearance of a string bikini on an endowed woman at a swimming pool would doubtless result in substantial clucking from others … Still it is not difficult to find examples of individuals who stretch the limits and of others who are judgmental about it. Informants were quick with stories of women who tuck the cap sleeve of the garment under their bra strap so they can wear sleeveless blouses or dresses, or of men who wear only their garment tops with biker shorts. (46) 107

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The regulation of religious style-fashion-dress has to be understood as a structure–agency interplay that is not immune to change. Most of the time, of course, it is difficult for some outside of the community to pick up on subtle details of religiosity, so conservative religions use dress as an outward symbol of modesty and piety. The regulation of dress is a way of determining if a person is on the “right and true path” (Arthur 1999: 1). In Linda Arthur’s ethnographic study of orthodox (Holdeman) Mennonite women, as noted earlier, the style and fit of their clothes (a shirtwaist dress and head covering) are closely monitored through processes of self-control and social control. As one woman noted, “I put on all of the Church’s rules” about submission and modesty (Graybill and Arthur 1999). Other forms of enforcement may occur, however, when governmental entities establish laws. Again, often these laws revolve around the regulation of women’s bodies. Ostensibly, there are three philosophies of nation-states’ relations to religion: (1) state alignment with a given religion—at one with the nation-state, (2) freedom from religion (a separation of church from state, disallowing overt religious expression that might be seen as interfering with the state), and (3) freedom of religion (also a separation of church and state, but with allowance for freedom of religious expression). The following sections discuss each of these legal philosophies along with the limits and nuances that complicate their enforcement in the context of style-fashion-dress. Among these are the complexities of fashion change and shifts in political regimes. State Alignment with Religion Bucar (2017) noted that pious fashion (hijab) has been heavily regulated in Iran since the Revolution in 1979, which declared Iran as an Islamic state. According to Article 638 of the 1991 version of the Iranian Penal Code, the punishment for any woman who does not wear “proper hijab” can be a sentence to two months in jail or a fine. However, as Bucar (2017) notes based on her ethnographic fieldwork in Iran, there is considerable ambiguity surrounding what “proper hijab” means (6–7). Iran may be a religious state, but there is still some degree of agency women can exercise as they put their looks together with their head coverings. Freedom from Religion The French Revolution in the late 1780s, discussed in Chapter 3, had intersectional origins—pertaining to religion, as well as nation and class. The desire to separate the nation-state from the Catholic Church, which perpetuated and ordained royal rule, was an important contributing factor. Since the Revolution, the French nation-state has operated on a principle of laïcité, which roughly translates to secularism, or a separation between church and state. In 1905, a law was passed to prohibit the state from recognizing or funding any religion; the goal was to keep religion out of public education. Religion was to be a private, not a public, affair. The modern nation-state, according to this system of laïcité, supersedes religion as the structural space of authority and power.

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About a hundred years later (in 2004), the French passed a law banning “significant religious symbols” in public schools. Examples of such symbols were Muslim girls’ hijab, Jewish boys’ yarmulkes, Sikh boys’ turbans, and necklaces with large Christian crosses or Jewish Stars of David (smaller symbols were okay). Because it was widely believed that the real target was hijab, the media have typically referred to the law as the “French headscarf ban.” This was not a completely new concern in France. In 1989, there had been attempts to control Muslim women’s dress, and in 1994, “ostentatious” symbols of religion were banned (Lewis 2015: 9). After the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, however, there was some backlash against Muslims in the United States and Europe, and as a result, considerable debate ensued about Muslim symbols perceived by the French government as conflicting with the principle of laïcité. Reina Lewis writes that after 9/11, the veil became reframed as “an exclusively Muslim marker” (2015: 11), resulting in efforts to regulate it. In 2011, a “burqa ban” went into effect in public spaces in France, prohibiting fullface veils (niqab) worn by some Muslim women. Niqab is a practice among some women in Saudi Arabia, but the “burqa” term refers to what women have worn in Afghanistan. The burqa covers the entire body, with a mesh panel covering parts of the face to allow vision. By this time, the discourse had shifted from one of significant symbolism to one of security, as well as an “attack on the liberty and dignity of women,” according to dress scholar Heather Akou (2018). Similar bans on niqab were later enacted in the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as Quebec in Canada. The cases went to court, and in July 2014, the European Council of Human Rights upheld the bans (Lewis 2015: 8). The regulations did not cease, however. Earlier in this chapter, we considered how swimwear becomes an issue for LDS (Mormon) followers. It is certainly an issue for devout Muslim followers in certain contexts (depending on time and place) as well. Style-fashion-dress scholar Heather Akou (2013, 2018) discusses how in 2004, Lebanese Australian designer Aheda Zanetti created a special, full-body swimsuit with pants, a tunic, and a hood to accommodate the need for a modest and UV-protective alternative to mainstream swimwear for lifeguards in Australia. Similar styles were manufactured in California, Brazil, and Turkey and were eventually picked up by Nike™ and Speedo™. In addition to serving the needs of those following religions that promoted modesty, the style worked well for cancer patients, active senior citizens, and burn victims. Known as the burqini (an articulation of the words burqa and bikini), the garment did not cover the face as did niqab. In 2016, thirty towns in Germany, Austria, France, and Italy passed ordinances to ban the burqini from public pools and beaches. In August 2016, the highest French court struck down the bans on the basis that the burqini posed no risk to the public order, but some cities and public and private pools ignored the court ruling and continued to harass burqini wearers in sites such as the French Riviera. Why would a modest swimsuit cause so much controversy? Perhaps the answer lies in the ambiguous, multiple meanings associated with modesty. Although the burqini is modest in the sense of body coverage, that coverage actually calls more attention to the body in public settings where most people are less covered. Further, the garment’s religious symbolism

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appears to generate cultural anxieties—such as those associated with Islamophobia. There are no guarantees that everyone in a secular state is tolerant. Secular societies are associated with a move away from religion and toward capitalism as a nationalizing principle. Moreover, if political regimes change, the degree of enforcement of secularity is also likely to change. Or, there can even be changes in policies. The histories of Iran and Turkey are cases in point. Iran went from a focus on modernization and secularization prior to the revolution in 1979 to a religious state. Women could not wear head scarves, and then they were forced to. Turkey, which became a secular state in 1928, paradoxically emerged as the center of the Muslim fashion business in the 1980s. Freedom of Religion (Religious Freedom) There is another paradox when it comes to the relationship between religion and secularity in a society. As fashion studies scholar Elizabeth Wilson (2013) notes, “only in a secular society can the right of all religious believers of whatever faith to practice their belief be assured” (170). In other words, it is only in a secular nation-state that legal protections are offered to people of different faiths. For example, the United States was founded on the principle of religious freedom; the First Amendment (1786) to the Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” not only establishing a “wall of separation” between church and state (Lankford and Moore 2018) but also guaranteeing “free exercise” of faith. Among court cases testing this legal protection was a Supreme Court decision in 2015 regarding the apparel company Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F). In 2008, a young Muslim woman, Samantha Elauf, had applied for a sales job at A&F and was not hired because she was wearing a headscarf. A&F had a rather ambiguous “look policy” that prohibited the wearing of caps by salespeople. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission took up the case and in the court awarded Elauf $20,000. An appeal overturned the ruling, which was then taken up by the Supreme Court, who ruled in her favor (and against A&F), with the following rationale: “Religious practice is one of the protected characteristics that cannot be accorded disparate treatment and must be accommodated.” Subsequently, A&F modified their “look policy” toward a more individualist approach and changed the titles of the sales associates from “models” to “brand representatives.” The Council on American– Islamic Relations welcomed the “historic ruling in defense of religious freedom at a time when the American Muslim community is facing increased levels of Islamophobia” (Naylor 2015). This comment is a reminder that legal protection does not always translate to religious tolerance. And, the A&F case points to the role of the industry in the production, distribution, and consumption of style-fashion-dress: the topic of the next section.

Production, Distribution, and Consumption The production, distribution, and consumption of style-fashion-dress have historically interfaced with religion in a number of ways. In this section, we consider how religion 110

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has shaped and been shaped by capitalism using two case studies: the role of the Jewish diaspora in the textile, clothing, and retail industries; and the production and circulation of modest fashion (and, especially, Muslim fashion) since the 1980s. The Jewish Diaspora and the Textile, Clothing, and Retail Industries The history of Jewish diasporas intertwines with the histories of the textile, clothing, and retail industries and, hence, consumption. As key factors in the diasporas, centuries of discrimination and persecution have been responsible for the migration or movement of Jewish people—disseminating practices of textile and garment production and retail. Anti-Semitism, in fact, can be seen as shaping the course of textile and clothing production and distribution in Europe and the United States, for example. For thousands of years, Jewish people were forced to move from their homelands and form diasporas around the world. They left what is now the Middle East and moved to Western Europe (e.g., Germany, England), Eastern Europe (e.g., Poland), and the Russian Empire at various stages. From the early 1880s to the early 1900s, there were massive migrations, especially, to the United States and England, having important influences on the development of the garment industry. But the history in Europe, for example, goes back to earlier centuries, with a number of challenges along the way. In Germany, in 1295, Jews were banned from selling yarns to weavers in Berlin; the Christian-dominant guilds also prevented Jews from joining. For centuries, Jewish textile producers could only sell within their own communities (Guenther 2004: 77), thus fostering a largely self-contained circuit. In much of Europe, Jews were forbidden to own land and—with limited options for the textile and clothing trade—a few Jewish people obtained some wealth by lending money with interest: a practice that was prohibited by Christians and led to the stereotyping and stigma associated with “money handling.” Most Jews, however, were poor, and by the end of the eighteenth century, they had developed systems of traveling and peddling fabrics and clothes (often old fabric and used clothes from the middle and upper classes) from village to village, circulating not only fashion but also news, humor, and stories (Friedrichs 2007: 20). In London as well, Jewish peddlers offered inexpensive alternatives to people in the growing population who could not afford new clothes (Jewish Museum London 2019). Due to this loophole available to Jews involved in the used textile and clothing trades, they developed a substantial amount of experience in retailing, which later contributed to their prominent role in the development of department stores. In 1871, with the unification of Germany, Jews obtained fuller rights to retail (Friedrichs 2007: 22). Jewish tailors were commissioned to produce ready-to-wear uniforms in standardized sizes for the Prussian army (Loschek 2007: 49). In the 1880s, “pogroms” (violent riots resulting in the massacre or persecution of Jews) in Eastern Europe and Russia drove Jews to immigrate in large numbers to countries offering human rights and religious freedom in Western Europe and the United States. Cities such as New York and London experienced a wave of Jewish immigration in 111

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1882, bringing many tailors (and other skilled workers) who fostered the growth and development of the ready-to-wear industries. Historian Nancy Green (1998) notes that “for every Eastern European tailor or seamstress, there was a garment worker who learned to sew or treadle only in the New World. Light industry of all sorts provided opportunities for Jewish workers, but it also often meant seasonal work and precarious employment, wages, and status” (234). A similar pattern occurred in London. Additionally, a “sweating” system emerged whereby recent immigrants stitched men’s scarves on sewing machines (which had become available in the latter half of the nineteenth century) (Green 1998: 18). By the early twentieth century, there were quite a few Jewish clothing makers, dress shops, and department stores in Germany and Austria. Nathan Israel’s department store employed 2,000 workers (Schramm 2007: 31) in Berlin; essentially, it was a counterpart of Harrods in London. By 1925, Berlin had become a shopping destination, as well as a center of artistic and intellectual life (Loschek 2007: 59). It was also a model ready-towear city (49). For the most part, there was a gender distinction in the roles. Women frequently sewed at home, whereas “the point of sale increasingly became detached from the point of manufacture” (Friedrichs 2007: 23). Similar patterns developed in other cities in the United States (e.g., Cleveland, Chicago), where Jewish immigrants in the needle trades played a critical role in labor organizing within the garment industry (discussed further in Chapter 6). Some Jewish immigrants who had originally moved to New York and worked in the garment industry later moved to Los Angeles and established knitting mills and clothing factories, as well as the motion picture industry (Hollywood). There was a direct link between the fashion and movie industries, with Jewish founders at the center of them. Swimwear and casual leisurewear companies, for example, produced styles that were distributed not only materially but also visually in Hollywood films in the 1920s and 1930s (and beyond). During the First World War, there had been a growing rise in anti-Semitism in Germany (Guenther 2004:52), which was further aggravated by the 1929 economic crisis (Schramm 2007: 42). The Nazi platform included a plan to dissolve department stores in order to assist small business owners; the actual goal, however, was to eliminate ownership by Jews, who were the only ones forced to sell at amounts lower than their value (Guenther 2007: 78). Nazi discourse included claims that there had been an “un-German” and “un-scrupulous” Jewish takeover of German clothing (80). Nazis claimed that 80–90 percent of clothing businesses (including production and distribution) were Jewish-owned, but the actual figure was about half of the businesses (Guenther 2007: 80–1). Part of Nazi discourse and propaganda, according to historian Irene Guenther (2007), was a struggle over German womanhood (cross-cutting nationality, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and probably class). A Nazi handbook cajoled German women “to buy only German products” so that they would no longer “hurt their own national community” with their “selfish consumption” (92). The slogan Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church) largely reduced women’s roles to the family and the home. Moreover, Nazi propaganda explicitly interlinked production, distribution, and consumption in its anti-Semitism. The idea was to restrict clothes to those made “by 112

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Aryan hands only,” so as to “cleanse” the fashion industry (using a racialized discourse). The Aryan label Adefa (roughly translated as the Working Association of German-Aryan Manufacturers of the Clothing Industry) was created to accomplish this (Guenther 2007: 89), with the goal of “breaking the Jewish ‘monopoly’ in the German clothing industry and ‘eradicating for all times’ Jewish persons and Jewish influence in the ‘design, production, and sale’ of German clothing and textiles … [in other words], ‘to break the hegemony of the Jewish parasite’ ” (155). Guenther (2007) offers a detailed analysis of Adefa’s failure. Even the wives of Nazi officers preferred Jewish companies to the Aryan label, and the Nazi nationalist companies were not compelling either. On November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) turned out to be a violent pogrom; Nazis looted and burned hundreds of Jewish synagogues, shops, department stores, and other businesses. The Jewish staff of Nathan Israel (since 1815)—the oldest and first Jewish-owned department store—were deported to ghettos (Guenther 2007: 162–3). The Nazis decimated Jewish homes, murdered and tortured Jews, and sent over 20,000 in the following days to concentration camps (162). This violence of the Holocaust continued for years. Jewish-owned factories and stores were taken over and erased. According to Magde Goebbels, wife of a chief Nazi propagandist, “along with Jews, elegance disappeared from Berlin.” She referred here both to Jewish fashion makers and consumers (Loschek 2007: 72). In an essay titled “Jewish Genes, Jewish Jeans: A Fashionable Body,” cultural studies scholar Karen Anijar (1999) wrote about her mother’s funeral, over which an ultraorthodox rabbi presided in New York City. She reflected on a 3,500-year-old religious body and tradition that had “undergone a transformation that has relegated the Jewish body indistinguishable from the body of the rest of the American nation [through assimilation] … The assembly lines and consumer goods impetuously transformed the Jewish body … in a political triumph of intensified capitalism and capitalistic development” (182–3). She goes on to note that consumer capitalism “was not antithetical to Jewish tradition,” and Jewish holidays melded into the fashion cycle” (185). In an ethnographic study of Hasidic Jewish femininity in Brooklyn, New York, Fader (2009) pointed to the both/and nature of materialism and modernism (which young Hasidic women described instead as “with it”) on the one hand, and modest on the other hand. Even in such extremely orthodox or pious community, there are ways in which multiple meanings and ideologies can be navigated through articulation. Contradictions also abound in the next example of production-distributionconsumption-related ambivalences and anxieties; again, articulations become ways through which style-fashion-dress point not only to contradictions but also to intersectionalities between religion and other subject positions. The Globalization of Muslim Fashion In the 1950s and 1970s, there were global Islamic revivals of veiling—especially after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Most of the veils were homemade and considered religious dress, not religious fashion (Lewis 2015: 69). In the 1980s—a decade of rapid 113

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globalization – a new clothing business called tesettür emerged in Turkey with a focus on Muslim dress. Reina Lewis (2015) has described the resulting style-fashion-dress as follows: Producing new urban forms of Islamic dress, the tesettür wearer sported a distinctive combination of a long-sleeved and long, often ankle-length, raincoat (pardesü) with a large square scarf pinned close under the chin and cascading down to cover the hair, neck, and shoulders in their entirety, unlike the loosely tied basörtüsü (worn with mid-calf coats and stockings). The new head coverings were called türban by the Turkish press … The development of the commercial tesettür industry in Turkey is linked to the growing power of Islamic political parties and the concomitant rise of Islamic, or green, capital. (71) The tesettür industry contributed greatly to the Turkish economy; in the 1990s, the textiles and apparel became branded for both domestic and export markets (Lewis 2015: 75). Based upon research on tesettür-branded companies, Lewis identified a “global perspective informed by regional and Islamist politics” (80). Dress scholar Heather Akou (2007) describes Islamic dress in the twenty-first century as a “new world fashion,” distributed through digital discourse (including online retailing and social media) and, as Lewis (2013b) observes, a “combination of commerce and commentary, helping to grow and legitimise modest practices” (194), across geographic, national, and ethnic boundaries. Pakistanis don’t just have to wear a salwar kameez, Moroccans don’t just have to wear kaftans. And so the internet was a way for Muslim women around the world to exchange ideas, look at what each other are wearing … new ways of styling your headscarf, and so on. (197) In addition to the material production and distribution of fashion, new forms of mediation or meaning-making (advertising, promotion, image distribution) emerged in the form of catalogs, billboards, or other advertisements. Initially it was not considered appropriate to highlight women’s bodies on fashion runways, and line drawings communicated the styles, but this eventually changed to images of veiled models with mobile phones (Lewis 2015: 85). The rise of Muslim fashion or—more generally—new world fashion, challenging the hegemony of so-called Western fashion, raises numerous debates around the world. In urban Indonesia, for example, there are issues of the apparent contradictions between the simultaneous increase in Islamic piety and consumerism; these contradictions have been embedded in discourses regarding how modernity and piety can coexist comfortably (Jones 2007). Increasingly, however, there are both/and articulations that enable, as Reina Lewis (2015) notes, “a web of multiple fashion systems seen within the frame of multiple modernities” (13).

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By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Muslim fashion market had exploded into a global multi-billion-dollar market. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, and the apparel industry has responded to the consumer market potential. When Ramadan became part of the fashion calendar (because so much shopping occurs before the religious holiday begins), the global capitalization of Islam became especially evident. The marketing of modest Muslim wear, beginning with tesettür in Turkey and small online businesses, expanded to mainstream (non-Muslim) companies. In 2018, the British retailer Marks & Spencer began to include “modest outfits” as an online search category (Lewis 2019: 35). By 2018, Muslim sportswear had become “the next big thing” (Janmohamed 2018) after the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in which a female Muslim fencer wearing hijab won the first medal for the United States. In December of 2019, Nike announced that it was offering modest swimwear, designed with close consultation with the Muslim community. For $600, the “Victory suit” featured a loose, two-layered tunic with a hoodie, plus pants; the fabric and cut were designed to be water-shedding. Less expensive, but still functional, was a salwar kameez (tunic top) for $80, which could be paired with long pants ($68) and a hijab designed for swimming ($40) (Binkley 2019). Most likely, even the less expensive version is still out of reach for many potential Muslim customers around the world, but yet a lower price point would likely mean a lower wage paid to the garment worker (who may in fact be a “potential customer”); the production-distribution-consumption complex poses many intersectional issues, including social class, the topic of the next chapter.

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At the end of the twentieth century, some politicians and academics declared “the end of class,” and—that class was now a “zombie category” (Friedman and Laurison 2019: 322). Twenty years earlier, journalist Teri Agins (1999) had declared the “end of fashion.” Both “end of ” narratives have been based on a myth of class equalization. Agins (1999) was actually talking about the end of high fashion: Since at least the 1980s, the global production and mass marketing of fashion had made clothes cheaper for consumers, who were no longer willing to follow the dictates of designers but were often still brandor style-conscious. Previously, in the early 1970s, women had rejected high fashion’s edicts as to what they should wear and when. This is nowhere more evident than with the failure of the midi skirt after women had been wearing miniskirts since the mid-1960s and, by the early 1970s, had pantsuits as an alternative. In terms of the “end of class,” sociologists Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison (2019) documented how and why it still “pays to be privileged” in the marketplace of diverse occupations in the twenty-first century (209). Drawing on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and based on their multi-method research, they point to how three forms of class privilege benefit Britons in their careers: economic capital (inherited wealth and income), cultural capital (educational background, taste, embodied confidence), and social capital (valuable connections through networks) (14). The fashion industry is not immune to issues of class privilege, especially when considering the stark differences between corporate brand executives and garment workers. Although in some ways the field of fashion design invites multiple perspectives for aesthetic inspiration (and appropriation), the culture of the industry itself—especially in prominent fashion cities where it is so expensive to live—benefits those who come “from privilege and legacy families” (Fernandez 2019). Aspiring designers frequently need to either rely on their family’s financial support or juggle multiple jobs and accrue credit-card debt, because “an intern wearing head-to-toe designer fashion will get noticed above his or her more frugal rivals” (Fernandez 2019). Fashion studies scholar Jennifer Ayres (2017) points out that interns are often exploited for their labor (which is often unpaid) and are “less able to negotiate competitive salaries and advocate for their rights, fair working conditions, and ethical practices” (164). Interns in the fashion industry who come from wealth are able to work without pay in “fashion’s world cities,” which are also places with higher costs of living. In addition to issues of economic capital, there are those of social capital (connections) and cultural capital. The latter includes a style of “studied informality” (Friedman and Laurison 2019) that includes dress as well as attitude and confidence, ways of greeting others (e.g., kisses or hugs versus handshakes), and other

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subtle details. Nevertheless, the fashion industry also offers opportunities for cultural creation through fresh ideas and diverse life experiences, even as it also appropriates: Even the luxury brand most synonymous with the UK has its business tangled up in the country’s complex class system. Burberry once launched an entire rebranding strategy by downplaying its iconic check pattern after it became infamously mired in working-class “chav” culture. Interestingly, it now sells £550 trackpants and £650 trainers. (Deeley 2019, para. 2) Studies of the relationship between class and fashion need to consider the ways in which societies create different systems to classify (construct differences) and stratify (layering and ranking those differences in terms of status). The structural part of the structure– agency dynamic has historically and cross-culturally been dominant and material in nature: It involves the everyday lives of human bodies and their labor, the ability to afford clothing and to dress in ways that express subjectivity and sense of agency, and the very fibers, fabrics, and fabricated garments that have made it possible for people to express themselves, resources permitting. In the twenty-first century, class and fashion alike have continued to thrive, albeit in at least partially transformed ways. Traces of class linger—not through blood or biology but rather through economic, cultural, and social structures and practices. These structures and practices become embodied, in part by how individuals fashion and groom their bodies. As fashion historian Rachel Worth (2020) observes, “dress itself contributed to the evolution of how we understand the idea of class” (2). Dramatic changes have occurred in the extent to which it is easy to classify another person’s social status, as we will see in this chapter on what some scholars call the “democratization of fashion.” This concept is based in large part on the mechanization of textile production by the nineteenth century and, eventually, the ability to make garments on sewing machines in an industrial context later in the century. As fashion became more affordable to more consumers, structural and visual boundaries among the classes became blurrier. Not surprisingly, by the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, sociologists such as Thorstein Veblen (1899) and Georg Simmel (1904) were writing about the nuances of class symbolism and class imitation, respectively, as a means of social mobility through dress. The sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) made a distinction between class (“stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition of goods”) and status groups (“stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special ‘styles of life’ ”). In other words, he argued, status is not just an issue of how much one has and can potentially consume, but rather how they consume (Weber 1974: 52). For example, what might be a “Sunday best” suit for a working-class man could be everyday business attire for a bourgeois or upper-middle-class man. Further, class is about who makes our clothes and the extent to which they are or are not compensated for their labor. Although production by sewing machines is much faster than hand-stitching, the technology of garment making has essentially remained the same since the late nineteenth century; it is still a very labor-intensive process that 118

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often involves both machine and handwork. In this chapter, then, we consider the larger circuit of style-fashion-dress, especially in relation to the interplay between production and consumption. In the nineteenth century, critical theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (2002) defined class in terms of ownership and control over the means of production, based upon—and critical of—the industrial model, which they argued alienates textile and garment makers from their bodily labor. Worth (2020) describes how the term “class” became more prevalent in the nineteenth century as a result of industrial capitalism and the restructuring it generated. Previously, terms such as rank, order, or station were more prevalent in England, dating from medieval times. Still today, class cannot be fully conceptualized as a subject position without analyzing the circuit of style-fashion-dress, as well as the intersection of class with other subjectivities like gender, race, sexuality, and so on.

Conceptualizing Class In her book Where We Stand: Class Matters, feminist theorist bell hooks (2000b) argues that class is “the uncool subject” that “makes us all tense, nervous, uncertain about where we stand” (vii). She goes on to argue that race and gender politics are more visible and become “screens to deflect attention away from the harsh realities” exposed by class politics (7). One of these harsh realities is income inequality; for example, three white men in the United States have as much wealth as the least wealthy half of the population.1 Class is more than what people do or earn for a living. It is a complex concept and subject position, typically located by combined demographic variables such as income, education level, kinship relations, occupation, and other aspects of family background. Yet there is more to class in a cultural sense: the ambiguous issues of cultural “taste” and everyday habitus learned through kinship (Bourdieu 1984). Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977) theorized cultural capital as including tastes and attitudes, and ways of eating and grooming, as well as how individuals are taught to act and how they relate to the future: how they fashion and imagine themselves becoming. The resources people have, of course, affect the ability to buy clothes. And because social class is more than what people buy and how much money they have, it also includes how people carry themselves through style-fashion-dress, and how they present themselves to others—what Marcel Mauss (1973) called “techniques of the body.” Through cultural capital and techniques of the body, class becomes embodied; it is part of an individual’s habitus. Sociologist Joanne Entwistle (2000) describes habitus as “seemingly natural bodily demeanour we learn as members of a particular family/ class” (135). One example of this would be the “royal carriage,” or the way an aristocrat such as Marie Antoinette could glide so impressively through the Versailles palace in her debut from Austria to France (Weber 2006). This is what Mauss would have called 1https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality

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an “education of movements,” because Antoinette was taught not only how to dress but also how to move in her clothing (85). This was a situation where class appeared to transcend nations and ethnicities, but also intersected in important ways, as we saw in Chapter 3. As historian Caroline Weber (2006) notes in her engaging analysis of Marie Antoinette’s fashion sense leading up to (and beyond) the French Revolution in 1789, issues of nationalism, ethnicity, and other politics continued to plague Marie Antoinette; gender issues were no small factor. Let’s consider a different example of the intersectionalities among class, nation, race, and gender. When Prince William of the British Royal Family married Catherine (Kate) Middleton in 2011, the eyes of the world were upon her to see not only what she was wearing but also how she was wearing it—that is, how she embodied class through the dress. There had been substantial media discourse about how Middleton was a commoner from a family with new wealth, making her among the nouveau riche. People around the world were rooting for her, and she used her fashioned body to challenge the idea that it necessarily takes generations to cultivate cultural capital associated with “grace.” The media focused on her class, but what was almost never discussed was her whiteness, which remained “unmarked.” Seven years later when Prince William’s younger brother, Harry, married US American Megan Markle, an actress whose father is white and mother is African American, discussions of race (more than class and even nationality) were at the forefront of nearly all media discussions. Once again, the world looked to the fashion of Markle on her wedding day when she was literally veiled in empire and place. The veil was embroidered with fifty-five different flowers: fifty-three to represent the nations in the British commonwealth, one to represent a flowering tree outside of her home with Prince Harry, and the last to represent her birthplace of California (see Plate 17). The gown, designed by Givenchy’s first female creative director, Clare Waight Keller, was otherwise without much surface detail. From the outset, the United States established itself in a way that differentiated itself from the European court system: The United States strongly rejected the idea of royal class lineage. Hence, a large part of the foundational myth of the nation is that “all men are created equal”: a statement that initially applied only to white men of Western European backgrounds. The exclusion of women, Native Americans, and other people of non-European backgrounds from this founding principle was a significant part of emergent inequalities in the United States. Yet the very idea of class itself also needs to be interrogated. Even as early Americans espoused principles of equality, Brekke (2010) argues that they remained “uncomfortably mired in and dependent upon a system of style that upheld fundamentally hierarchical differences—of class, gender, race, ethnicity, age, and region” (263). There is a lot of shaky ground when it comes to class. Anxieties, ambiguities, and ambivalences abound regarding poverty, snobbery, striving for upward mobility, “fear of falling” (Ehrenreich 1989) or losing ground, children’s well-being in the future, and dilemmas associated with looking “respectable,” and “professional,” as well as fashionable. As a subject position, class is not a class, but rather a class “location-within-relations” (Wright 2005: 19). It is a relative concept that can only be understood in relation to other 120

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subject positions and social relations. Hence, class dynamics and interactions become the key to understanding stability as well as mobility. Caste Systems The most restrictive systems of classification and stratification are caste systems. Typically associated with the Hindu class system in India for at least 4,000 years, the concept of caste derives from the Portuguese word casta, which means “something that is pure.” Foreign invaders observed the Hindu hierarchical system, which was based on the concept of varnas, which meant colors or categories and was attributed to early writers such as the Brahmins: the priestly and scholarly class. The system of hierarchy has included the assignment of occupations, restrictions against mobility, and constrained interactions and relationships (Bapuji and Chrispal 2020). Notably, the Indian caste system is thousands of years older than the European concept of race. According to the academic journalist Isabel Wilkerson (2020), Caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity. It is like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs … Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy … It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things. (69) Wilkerson (2020) studied and compared caste as a concept in three contexts: the Hindu Indian caste system, the racial caste system established in the United States through slavery, and the Nazi caste system during the Second World War. Although differing in duration and cultural context, Wilkerson found that there were similar principles at work. Religion and racialized “laws of nature” were used to justify the caste systems, which were inherited. To reduce options for upward mobility, there were regulations to prevent procreation and marriage “outside” of one’s caste. There were fundamental beliefs in the “purity” of the dominant caste and the fear of pollution from those castes deemed to be beneath it. Occupations were dictated and restricted on the basis of caste. And, clothing was regulated in order to maintain the higher castes’ sense of superiority, which they framed in opposition to inherent inferiority. For example, in India, the lengths and the folds of a woman’s saris were regulated by the caste system. Dalits (formerly called “Untouchables”) were forced to wear tattered clothing of coarse fabrics to “mark their inferiority”; they could not wear the clothing or jewelry of upper-caste people (Wilkerson 2020: 160). Similarly, the South Carolina Negro Code of 1735 regulated the fabrics enslaved Black people were permitted to wear. They were not allowed to wear “any sort of garment or apparel whatsoever, finer, other or of greater value than Negro 121

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cloth, duffels, coarse kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen, or coarse garlix, or calicoes.” The Nazis were incensed to see Jewish women wearing furs (and responded violently), when they could not afford to buy them for their wives (Wilkerson 2020: 161). Wilkerson (2020) argues that the structural rigidity of caste systems—even when officially abolished—often influence attitudes and behaviors for years to come. Historically and cross-culturally, attempts to restrict and legislate clothing materials according to caste are longstanding. Sumptuary Laws, Materials, and the “Natural” Order The historian Alan Hunt (2010) indicates that in Japan and China, as well as Europe, sumptuary laws represented attempts to reassert feudal hierarchies during periods of hierarchical decline. In China and Japan, sumptuary laws emerged when local feudalisms evolved into more centralized and bureaucratic class systems. This consolidation of power occurred in China in 220–250 CE, and sumptuary laws were put into place in the T’an period, 618–906 CE. In Japan, the centralized Tokugawa family clan dominated through a system of hereditary military dictatorship from 1603 to 1868 and instituted a rigid class structure. At the top of the classes managed by the Tokugawa system was the samurai warrior class, followed by farmers, artisans, and merchants. Justified by the Confucian belief system, merchants were at the bottom of the social class structure because they did not produce anything (Dunn 1969: 11). In Japan, as in China, the merchant class generated the most anxiety among the central leaders because they threatened traditional hierarchies. If they were successful, they could dress as well as or better than the higher classes. Hence, the key target of sumptuary laws was the merchant class, “whose irresistible rise was eating away at the very possibility of a stable system of social closure required by the bureaucratic regimes” (Hunt 2010: 43). In the seventeenth century, for example, a Japanese law prohibited commoners such as merchants from wearing finer silks and gold lacquer. In the eleventh century, a Chinese edict disallowed fine black sables and ermine for anyone except the nobility. Commoners could only wear sable sheep and moleskins. Similar sumptuary laws governing fur were enacted in late medieval England (Hunt 2010: 44). In addition to attempting to maintain elite class superiority, sumptuary laws served to restrict foreign imports in favor of domestic industries. Between 1337 and the early 1600s in England, a series of laws prohibited everyone except the “most elevated ranks” from wearing fur and “foreign apparel” (such as French silks). Henry VIII indicated that he did not want people to overindulge by dressing above their means. In 1671, Richard Allestree provided a divine explanation in The Whole Duty of Man Historian: “God hath placed some in a higher condition than others; and in proportion to their condition, it befits their clothing to be. Gorgeous apparel, our Saviour tells us, is for King’s courts” (cited in Worth [2020]: 32). It was widely believed that the order of society was ordained by God, and this order was closely linked to land ownership, which was related to the monarchal system through nobility. Concepts of “order” and “rank” had emerged over centuries in relation to this system of stratification. 122

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These laws continued a longer tradition from the Middle Ages (between the fifth and fifteenth centuries—also known as the Medieval Period) in Europe, when societies were organized in a very hierarchical manner—in a pyramid-like feudal structure. The elite’s wealth and power at the top resulted from their ownership of land. Below the elite was a class of merchants, clerics, and artisans. At the bottom of the class pyramid were peasants who comprised a large portion of the population and who often lived in poverty. In addition to the prohibitive cost of fabric and dyes, there was the issue of clothing and work. Because lower-class individuals had to perform manual labor, it was difficult to keep their clothing clean. The color of clothing—dark colors to hide dirt versus lighter colors for those who did not need to worry about manual labor—also became a key indicator of social status. Class was a subject position determined largely by birth; there was limited social mobility (i.e., no accessible social ladder), and people were expected to conform to the class-related nature of their life circumstances with respect to their dress, education, and personal choices in general. Historians Riello and McNeil (2010) indicate that there were supposed to be natural ways of dressing in accordance with social class: “Therefore a knight was supposed to wear precious fur to demonstrate his social rank, while the same material would have been seen as totally inappropriate for a merchant, and even more so for a peasant, even if they could afford it” (20). The cost of materials prohibited most people from having very many clothes prior to the industrialization of fabric production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fabric was not widely affordable, and most people had to spin their own yarns, weave or knit their own fabrics, and sew or drape their own clothing (in their spare time when not farming or working for other, wealthier individuals). Frequently, it was women who performed these tasks as a form of reproductive labor. Homespun garments, as opposed to the more finely spun and woven fabrics and garments made by artisans or craft producers, were a mark of the lower classes. Clothes, when of fine quality, were prized obsessions that were bequeathed in wills. And yet, from time to time, people of the lower classes were able to secure relatively expensive fabrics or clothes (e.g., through handme-downs, second-hand markets, or production sites). The historian Christopher Dyer (1989) argues that as early as the fourteenth century, peasant appearances challenged what had become hegemonically naturalized as categories of class within style-fashiondress. He found historical evidence that peasant clothes were not always made from the cheapest materials available. Some of the fabrics in wealthier peasants’ tunics were not too different in cost from the cloth purchased by some people in the upper classes (176). Even with economic delimiters, then, there were sites of status ambiguity that made those with the most power anxious. Fashion historian Christopher Breward (1995) shows how the sumptuary law of 1365 in England was designed to limit lower-class individuals (e.g., servants, urban craftsmen) from wearing materials other than cheap woolen clothing, but the law did not really work. Among the higher classes, merchants who were worth 1,000 British pounds per year were not allowed to dress any better than “gentlemen” who received 200 British pounds per year in rent. Both groups could wear silks and some furs. In contrast, knights worth 1,000 British pounds could wear almost anything, except ermine. Although such laws were ineffective, their passage did indicate 123

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“a recognition within medieval society of the power of dress as a communicator of rank and a longing for that power” (Breward 1995: 27). Breward argues that such laws were based more on the desire to foster a system based on social positions than it was on wealth. Otherwise, why would laws be necessary? During the Middle Ages, a person could typically spend from 20 to 30 percent of their wealth on textiles and clothing. Fabrics themselves were the source of much of this cost because of the extensive hand labor that went into their making and also into clothing production. However, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the European economy developed urban and trading centers (e.g., Venice, Genoa, Amalfi); some merchants became wealthy and displayed their status through their own and their families’ attire (Riello and McNeil 2010: 20). The merchants’ social mobility was most likely a contributing factor to the continued development of the sumptuary laws. At the end of the fifteenth century, some European artisans bequeathed fancy or ornate clothing in their wills. Breward (1995: 28) suggests that the “power of clothing to transform and transgress perceived social barriers was perhaps stronger than its supposed ability to define them.” And by the end of the sixteenth century, aristocratic dress had become “fantastical” (44). Queen Elizabeth’s reign was known for its dress and artifice (e.g., dark and deeply colored velvets and brocades, garments trimmed with fur, exaggerated colors or “ruffs”) in the court, and status competition also played out on the streets of London (Breward 1995: 52), fostering anxieties about the “breakdown of the moral and economic status quo caused by over-zealous fashion consumption” (54) and imported luxury goods such as silks and dyes (56). A debate ensued in the late sixteenth century around men wearing velvet (imported, rich, wasteful) versus cloth (plain, simple, practical) breeches (58). By the 1660s and 1670s in France, there was an annual turnover in the fashionable woven silks designed and made in Lyon. Each year, the court of Louis XIV (1638–1715) ordered fresh silks for the royal wardrobes and dispensed with the year-old ones (Edwina Ehrman, cited in Worth 2020: 2–3). By 1700, most sumptuary laws in England had been repealed, largely because they were ineffective (Worth 2020: 32). The laws could not keep up with the changes in fashion and commerce. Class is a tricky and unstable subject position: it is always in relation to the class subject positions of others. On the one hand, it can be viewed as a kind of bottom line in terms of one’s economic circumstances. On the other hand, there are some contradictions surrounding class as a subject position. These contradictions revolve, in part, around class’ relation to processes in the circuit of style-fashion-dress.

Class, Intersectionalities, and Industrial Capitalism An ongoing debate in fashion studies revolves around the question of democratization: the extent to which the industrialization of textile and apparel production made fashion more accessible across social classes of consumers. Indeed, the monetary cost of clothing was generally reduced with the mechanization of the textile industry in the 124

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eighteenth century and the invention of the sewing machine in the nineteenth century. Exploitation of human labor and the environment also contributed to lower prices for garments and textiles as well. Hence, it became more difficult to ascertain social class quickly by one’s appearance as clothes became more affordable. For example, in England it was common for landlords to wear frock (tailored, fitted) coats, whereas workers wore smock-frocks (gathered, looser). By the 1870s, smock-frocks had been replaced by corduroy trousers and slops, and most workers had at least one tailored Sunday suit (Worth 2020: 22–3). The stylistic differences in class were more subtle and pertained to the quality of the materials, the fit, and detailing. These still existed however, and there was much attention to the details associated with class status. A case in point is Karl Marx’s coat: the subject of an article by the historian Peter Stallybrass (2004). Although Marx and, especially, his wife were from privileged family backgrounds, they struggled financially in the 1850s. He supported his family, with three children, through his journalistic writings, although he wanted to spend his time working on theoretical and academic work such as Das Kapital. After his wife had pawned the family’s silver and other items, Marx began a routine of pawning his coat (see Figure 6.1). There was a class conundrum—or a “Catch 22”—involved with this routine. In order to be admitted into the British Museum, where Marx needed to access the archives necessary for his research, he needed to “look the part” of a bourgeois or upper-class man. The museum would not admit commoners into the archives. At the same time, he needed to pawn the coat in order to support his time to work on projects that did not pay. In his work, Marx made a distinction between exchange value and use value. Stallybrass (2004) explains that Marx knew the exchange value of his coat because he went through the process of pawning it and then buying it back when he was able to do so. In his case, the use value of his coat was diminished by his inability to keep it out of hock long enough to wear it when he needed to enter the museum. Generally, however, Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels wrote about industrial production. Engels was from a very privileged family; his father was a successful industrialist who owned textile factories in Germany and England. As the first industry to become mechanized, textiles could be a very lucrative business for those with the means to invest and build factories. Engels did not want to work in his father’s business, in part because of his liberal politics, which made him very critical of the working conditions in textile factories in the nineteenth century. However, he did spend time in one of his father’s factories in England; this experience intensified his interest in critiquing the system, which set up a binary opposition between the bourgeois (or upper middle) class of factory owners and managers, versus the proletariat class of factory workers. As Worth (2020) observes, the concept of class came to replace terms such as rank and station in the nineteenth century; class was closely aligned with capitalist, factory systems of production (17). In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels ([1845] 1969) acknowledges that consumption rises when the cost of textiles and clothing goes down, but one of the key factors in the success of the industries in England was “raw material [that] is 125

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Figure 6.1  Karl Marx in his frock coat, circa 1860. Courtesy Hulton Archive/Stringer and Getty Images.

cheap.” This observation leads us to cotton: a raw material made “cheap” because it was produced through exploitation and empire. The British textile industry imported the “raw material” of cotton (itself produced by planting, cultivating, and picking) from the southern United States, the Caribbean, India, and Africa. Cotton was inexpensive because of enslaved and exploited labor, made possible through colonialism. Although Marx and Engels did not focus much of their attention to slavery and its relation to race, Marx did write: Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies that have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for largescale machine industry. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. (cited in Foster et al. 2020: 49) Worth (2020) describes how slavery was “the most extreme example of a system of oppression of one class by another” (18), and the cotton industry was key to this oppression and was hardly democratizing when it came to labor. On the other hand, consumers wearing affordable cotton garments experienced a blurring of class distinctions (18). Hence cotton has a contradictory and complex history: one that has fostered a 126

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disconnect between production and consumption, or slavery and democratization, respectively. Calico-printed cotton fabrics, which were especially fashionable in the nineteenth century, involved the appropriation of printing techniques and natural dye methods developed in India (Worth 2020: 55–6). They were much more affordable to consumers than silk fabrics with similar patterns. Clearly, the principle of increased class ambiguity did not apply to textile and garment labor. Furthermore, in the 1840s, Engels (1845 [1969]) argued that industrial factories replaced the craft guild system and resulted in less social mobility as they altered the class structure: In the place of the former masters and apprentices, came great capitalists and working-men who had no prospect of rising above their class. Hand-work was carried on after the fashion of factory work, the division of labour was strictly applied, and small employers who could not compete with great establishments were forced down into the proletariat. At the same time the destruction of the former organisation of hand-work, and the disappearance of the lower middleclass deprived the workingman of all possibility of rising into the middle-class himself. Engels (1845 [1969]) was also concerned about the displacement of male labor in factories by child and female labor. Textile machinery did much of the work (e.g., spinning, weaving), and the labor consisted primarily of piecing or tying broken threads and other work requiring flexible fingers more than muscular strength. The labor costs associated with child and female labor were half to two-thirds of the amount required to hire male labor. He also pointed out “the curious fact that the production of precisely those articles which serve the personal adornment of the ladies of the bourgeoisie involves the saddest consequences for the health of the workers.” He addressed here the plight of needle workers (who sewed garments by hand); the sewing machine sped up the process of garment-making, but this only made it possible to produce more and did not necessarily translate to better wages or working conditions. Hence, while the industrialization of textile and apparel production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively, contributed to some class-related ambiguities, it also accentuated class through labor. Although Marx focused on how workers (the proletariat) had little control or say and reaped little of the company’s profits, he also noted how workers did not define their identities in terms of their work but rather in relation to whatever control they had over their lives and free time outside of work. At work, as Marx articulated, factory workers tended to experience alienation and a lack of meaningful agency ([1844] 2012). Between the 1830s and the 1860s, thousands of “mill girls” migrated from New England farms to work twelve- to thirteen-hour days in the textile factories of Lowell, Massachusetts: the first industrial city in the United States. Their diaries, letters, and essays reveal that although they felt a sense of agency and independence as wage earners, some felt like “living machines,” as Ellen, a factory worker, indicates in 1841: 127

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I object to the constant hurry of everything. We cannot have time to eat, drink or sleep; we have only thirty minutes, or at most three quarters of an hour, allowed us to go from our work, partake of our food, and return to the bell—and out of the mill by the clang of the bell—into the mill, and at work, in obedience to that dingdong of a bell—just as though we were so many living machines. (Levinson 2007: 26) Before the Industrial Revolution, life moved at a different pace and, according to Sven Beckert (2015) in his analysis of cotton’s role in the rise of global capitalism, was lived in relation to “climate, by custom, by the cycles of nature but not by machines” (179). The interaction of humans and machines in production processes relied upon the “ability to persuade or entice or force people to give up the activities that had organized human life for centuries and join the newly emerging factory proletariat” (179).

From Textile to Apparel Production: At Home, in the Factory, and in Protest In 1836, one of the first large-scale labor strikes occurred in Lowell, when the managers proposed an increase in room and board rates, which was equivalent to a 15 percent wage reduction. In the 1840s, the women fought for the ten-hour workday (Levinson 2007: 11). At the same time, they desired to own the textiles that they labored in factories to produce. Women workers frequently wrote about their desire to purchase fabric for a new dress. In addition to being able to buy new clothes, many young women sought some economic independence—as a motivating factor to move from their New England farms to work in the textile factory in Lowell, which had tempting retail stores in the downtown area near the factory: Ever since the visit of the Slater girls, with new silk dresses, and Navarino bonnets trimmed with flowers, and lace veils, and gauze handkerchiefs, her [Abby’s] head had been filled with visions of fine clothes; and she thought if she could only go where she could dress like them, she should be completely happy … Yes, she would go to Lowell, and earn all that she possibly could, and spend those earnings in beautiful attire; she would have silk dresses—one of grass green and another of cherry red, and another upon the colour of which she would decide when she purchased it; and she would have a new Navarino bonnet, far more beautiful than Judith Slater’s. (Factory Girls of an American City 1844: 26–7) Yet once Abby went to Lowell, she exercised considerable restraint—in keeping with the values of thrift in her puritanical family. Then her co-worker Judith Slater encouraged her to buy a beautiful piece of silk or piece of beautiful muslin. Abby had wondered before going to Lowell how people lived there with so many stores, without spending everything they earned. Once in Lowell, she put most of her earnings in a savings bank. One Sunday, Judith did not want to go to church with Abby, because Abby’s bonnet 128

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was too “dowdy,” and “her gown must have been made in ‘the year one.’ ” Abby made it through one year (the length of stay she had promised her father) in Lowell without purchasing a single silk dress, but she did return home wearing a new straw bonnet with a light blue ribbon and a dark merino (wool) dress. She brought gifts of “some little books for the children,” a new calico dress for her mother, and a black silk handkerchief for her father to wear around his neck on Sundays. That night, she asked her father: “May I not sometime go back to Lowell? I should like to add a little to the sum in the bank, and I should be glad of one silk gown!” Her father agreed (Factory Girls of an American City 1844: 29–33). Abby’s story is similar to that of Mary Paul, of Barnard, Vermont. Mary Paul had worked for a short time as a domestic servant near her home but requested her father’s permission to go to Lowell, with the following rationale: “I think it would be much better for me [in Lowell] than to stay about here … I am in need of clothes which I cannot get around here and for that reason I want to go to Lowell or some other place” (Dublin 1993: 20). Mary Paul worked in Lowell for four years and later as a seamstress in Brattleboro, Vermont. She expressed some guilt about not contributing to support her father. Abby’s and Mary Paul’s stories reveal their ambivalent subjectivities: their love of stylefashion-dress, which sometimes competed with their family commitments and values. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that industrialization re-dictated entire ways of life and social relations. The factory owners gradually replaced the original New England mill girls with immigrants they paid less. By the 1870s, the invention of the sewing machine meant that industrialization had reached the process of garment production. Whether their clothes were made in the home or in the factory, some European and American working-class families had a few special occasional items of clothing typically considered to be middle class (e.g., a silk dress, a bourgeois-ish man’s suit or hat), as noted earlier. According to sociologist Diana Crane (2000), a higher proportion of French working-class family clothing budgets went to married men and children than to married women. Crane indicates further that single working-class women (like the earlier Lowell mill girls) in France, England, and (especially) the United States had some flexibility to spend some of their discretionary income on the primary consumer good for working women: style-fashion-dress. Breward (1999a) provides a compelling example of status anxiety among bourgeois women in the 1870s. A letter in The English Woman’s Domestic Magazine (February 1876) expressed some uneasiness that was presumably shared by many of the bourgeois readers who were noticing a blurring of the differences between how their servants dressed (with their growing access to dress patterns, fashion information, and needle and thread) and how they themselves dressed: My income is small, but I have to keep up a good appearance, and am therefore obliged to keep two servants, a cook and a housemaid. My cook I have had for nearly two years, and I have got on very well with her until the last few months. By degrees she has been getting gayer and gayer in her dress of late, and last Sunday 129

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when she started off for church, she wore a black silk made exactly like a new one I had had sent home in the beginning of winter, and a new bonnet which I am certain I saw in Madame Louise’s window in Regent Street marked 25s. She looked as if she had stepped out of a fashion plate, all but her boots and gloves … I feel certain that if I remonstrate with her she will leave, do you not think I may well discharge her at once? (cited in Breward 1999a: 24) “Getting gayer and gayer” had a different meaning, of course, in the 1870s than it would mean 150 years later. Part of what historical materials indicate about this meaning was the surprise that European visitors to the United States expressed about the appearances of single, working-class women. It seems like it was the brightness of the colors, the combinations of clothes, and the obtrusiveness of the accessories that drew the most attention. Color—one of the important factors—can be attributed in part to cost. By the 1860s, aniline (synthetic) dyes had been developed and were enabling a wide range of pastel colors (e.g., pink, lavender) that became a status symbol in middle-class women’s dresses (Crane 2000; Garfield 2000). By way of contrast, brighter textiles (e.g., red, purple) were less expensive and also easier to keep clean than lighter colors. Class and gender subject positions also intersect with ethnicity; by the second half of the century, many single working women immigrated from Eastern and Southern Europe, with a wide range of aesthetic dress traditions in color and color coordination. Subtle or not-so-subtle differences between class and other aesthetics notwithstanding, it is evident that experimental challenges to traditional class boundaries generated cultural anxiety—uncertainty, to use bell hooks’ (2000b) phrase, regarding “where we stand.” They also generated cultural discourse regarding democracy—drawing implicitly on the metaphor of the social ladder and the possibility of “dressing up.” In 1899, a little more than a hundred years after the founding of the United States, the feminist sociologist Jane Addams (1860–1935) asked in an Atlantic magazine essay: “Have we worked out our democracy in regard to clothes farther than in regard to anything else?” She noted how visitors from Europe often remarked with surprise at American women’s obsession with fashion. Of particular interest was the style-fashiondress worn by working-class young women. Addams (1899) explained this occurrence as follows: The girl who has a definite social standing, who has been to a fashionable school or to a college, whose family live in a house seen and known by all her friends and associates, can afford to be very simple or even shabby as to her clothes, if she likes. But the working girl, whose family lives in a tenement or moves from one small apartment to another, who has little social standing, and has to make her own place, knows full well how much habit and style of dress have to do with her position. Her income goes into her clothing out of all proportion to that which she spends upon other things. But if social advancement is her aim, it is the most sensible thing which she can do. She is judged largely by her clothes (emphasis added). 130

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As Addams articulates, clothing had become especially important in signifying class in the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century. Status competition in the nineteenth century seemed to intensify through women’s fashioned bodies. Working-class women (including garment workers) used style to make statements on city streets, such as in New York. To the upper- and middle-class eyes, the colors they put together were startling, and their accessories were assembled in a way that created hybrid styles (Crane 2000: 60–1). Class-related cultural anxieties about young working-class women’s consumption practices also carried over into anxieties surrounding their role in production and labor organizing. Building upon the activist efforts of the earlier Lowell mill girls, young immigrant (Italian and Eastern European Jewish) working-class women organized through labor unions to combat their poor working conditions as early as the end of the nineteenth century. In November 1909, in New York City, Clara Lemlich led more than 20,000 garment workers in a protest (see Figure 6.2). These (mostly) workingclass, Jewish immigrant women were producing apparel separates such as blouses/tops, known as shirtwaists (Esbenshade 2004: 9). In part, it was the mixing of shirtwaists/ tops with skirts and hats that fostered the hybrid styles of young, working-class women. Rightly, garment (production) and retail (distribution) workers played important roles in the circuit of style-fashion-dress, and they viewed themselves as expert experimenters who embraced the idea that their self-fashionings were an investment in their futures. However, as Nan Enstad (1998) has argued, their ability to acquire “ready-made clothes in the latest styles should not be heralded as the ‘democratization’ of fashion due to industrialization” (754), because the clothes they could afford were often of poor quality, especially in the way they were sewn. To counter this problem, Lower East Side garment workers could purchase fabric remnants and samples from pushcarts and warehouses. Then, using their sewing skills, they often produced their own shirtwaists and underwear and decorated dresses and hats with lace, trims, feathers, and the like. They were able to inflect “their consumer practices with an element of their own creative production” (Enstad 1998: 755). Overall, Enstad concludes that the availability of fashionable dress shifted “but did not obliterate” the role of clothing in class distinction (1998: 754). When middle-class reformers joined the garment workers during strikes, some of them, along with observers, were surprised to see how fashionable the garment workers were: “I had come to observe the Crisis of a Social Condition;” wrote one commentator for Collier’s magazine, “but apparently this was a Festive Occasion. Lingerie waists were elaborate, [hair] puffs towered; there were picture turbans and di’mont [fake diamond] pendants.” Working women were well known for their exuberant embrace of consumer culture products, particularly fashion, but elaboratelydressed female strikers did not meet middle-class expectations for the proper demeanor of political participants, and the reporter for Collier’s magazine did not immediately recognize them as political subjects. The shirtwaist strike is famous in labor history and women’s history both because it was the largest female-dominated 131

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Figure 6.2  A group of women, many wearing shirtwaists, raise their hands to volunteer for picket

duty during the New York Shirtwaist Strike of 1909, which was also known as the Uprising of 20,000. Photo courtesy of the Kheel Center for Labor-Management and Documentation Archives, collection # 5780, International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Photos. Photo ID # 5780PB32F26D.

strike to that date and because it inaugurated a string of large, “women’s strikes” in the 1910s that dramatically asserted working women’s political participation and firmly established women’s unionism. While women’s fashion does not play a large role in the established histories of the strike, it did play a part in the unfolding events of the public strike debate. (Enstad 1998: 745) A similar class- and fashion-related dynamic occurred in the 1930s when Rose Pesotta ([1944] 1987) led strikes by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Los Angeles: Each picket line was a lively parade. The girls came dressed in their best dresses, made by themselves, and reflecting the latest styles. Many of them were beauties, and marched on the sidewalks like models in a modiste’s salon. (Pesotta [1944] 1987: 40–1) The picketers were able to make their dresses despite the fact that 40 percent of them were being paid less than $5 a week: far lower than the federal minimum wage of $15 per week and the state minimum wage of $16 per week in the 1930s (Pesotta [1944] 1987: 40). Without the sewing machine, it would have been much less feasible for working women to be able to produce clothes in factories and also have the time and energy to make their own clothes. Historian Nancy Page Fernandez (1999) argues that some of the 132

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anxieties surrounding class and clothing related to the sewing machine itself. It had two meanings, and they were contradictory. It represented “the exploitative conditions of the factory and homework” for working-class women, but it was viewed as a form of leisure and “conspicuous consumption” for middle-class women: “Anxieties about the impact of industrialization on American life shaped cultural constructions of the family sewing machine” (Fernandez 1999: 157). Advertisements sold the idea that a good middle-class husband could relieve his wife of labor around the home, maintain family gender roles, and eventually eliminate the need for servants.

Class and Fast Fashion In many ways, fast fashion—fostered by the continual global search for the lowest garment labor costs, known as “the race to the bottom”—deflects attention away from income inequality. With globalization, as discussed in Chapter 1, sites of production and garment labor have become increasingly invisible. In the global circuit of style-fashiondress, consumption is paradoxical when it comes to class. On the one hand, there is at least an appearance of democratic fashion, because fashionable clothes are simultaneously available at multiple price points. On the other hand, the quality of the materials and the lack of compensation for the labor that goes into the clothes’ production are less visible, so class often gets a “pass” from critical scrutiny. And, how can fashion be democratic if there is such a class-related disconnect between production and consumption, especially in a global economy? The collapse of the garment factory building in Bangladesh in 2013, which resulted in more than 1,100 garment worker deaths (as discussed in Chapter 1), attests to this tragic disconnect. Metaphors of Class Structure and Change: The Flows of Fashion Various metaphors (or models) have been used across time and space to decipher class and how it influences changes in style-fashion-dress. These metaphors emerge from sociology, critical theory, and fashion studies. If we push these metaphors to their limits, it becomes possible to expose ironies and hypocrisies in class hierarchies. First, the pyramid metaphor has characterized societies in which there have been very large peasant classes, enslaved people, or low-paid workers who are the foundation of wealth for a small number at the top. The tip of the pyramid is the highest class (i.e., the nobility, the aristocracy, the upper upper class, and those who own the means of production). In-between the base and the tip of the pyramid is the middle class; however, there is virtually no strategy for social mobility (e.g., no ladder). Those at the tip of the pyramid may attempt to regulate how people below dress so as to maintain distinction. Examples of this metaphor include the European and Asian feudal systems that historically regulated who could wear special furs or silks, as well as the caste system in India. This metaphor does not allow for social mobility, and it breaks down as class structures change. 133

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A second metaphor, especially popular in the United States, is the idea of a level playing field (i.e., a classless society): everyone (or at least all white men) is said to be created equally. In a democratic society, as this cultural discourse articulates, class is not what defines the person. We are free to make our own way with our own subjectivities. A sense of classlessness has been an almost invisible assumption that is counter to political and economic facts, as we have seen. Communist nations such as the USSR and China in the twentieth century also used a classless metaphor, but rather than highlighting the potential for individual subjectivities, the goal has been a single, collective subjectivity. These conflicting ideologies between capitalist and communist nations—despite similar models of classlessness—have been reflected in style-fashion-dress (as in the case of the Mao suit in China before it opened up to global capitalism). Capitalist nations thrived on individualism and changing fashions, largely embracing the bourgeois class’ penchant for status symbolism as a stimulus to the economy. In contrast, state communism promoted an ethos of uniformity, with bourgeois values and appearances as a major threat and source of anxiety. The irony in both systems is the importance of the bourgeois class. How can nations simultaneously be classless and yet be so focused on a particular class—either as a threat or as a model for mobility? But how can one fall or climb in a classless society? Yet a third metaphor—also very popular in the United States and contradictory to the classless metaphor—is that of the social ladder: the idea that it is possible to climb from rags to riches due to the social/upward mobility allowed in a free (capitalist) nation. In the social ladder metaphor/model, there is a high degree of hope and aspiration, which is why it has also been called the “American dream”—that is, a dream of possibility to transcend one’s own economic station in life. In this scenario or cultural discourse, it behooves individuals to fashion their appearances in ways that look upward, toward the higher classes to which they aspire. So, people “dress up.” The concept of upward mobility has been captured historically in terms of what has been branded as the “trickle down theory,” developed to explain fashion and class dynamics around the beginning of the twentieth century. Attributed to Georg Simmel, although he never used the term itself, the trickle down theory relies on the socialpsychological motivation to imitate the style-fashion-dress worn by higher classes and that of the highest class to differentiate itself from lower classes by moving on to new looks. And hence, as Simmel (1904) put it, “the game goes merrily on.” As we have seen, by definition, a person’s class refers to their income and education level, as well as family background. One can change social class through higher levels of education and income, but in the case of the aristocracy or “old money,” one must technically be born into it. This class theoretically would have little motivation to participate aggressively in fashion as a social process, because there is more of a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Hence, classic (note the root word of class) styles such as cashmere sweaters, pearls, and woolen suits are considered to be typical styles worn by the British upper class. Simmel indicates that individuals in the highest class “dread every motion and change … No change can bring them additional power, and every change can give them something to fear, but nothing to hope for” (2004: 305). The French phrase nouveau riche refers somewhat derogatorily to people who have become newly rich or who have a lot of new money but who—as the stereotype 134

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goes—lack the cultural capital that the upper upper, or aristocratic, class has with its old money. The stereotype further extends to style-fashion-dress: the tendency to wear colorful, ostentatious status symbols, combining them in looks and outfits that are less refined than those of individuals whose families have had their money for generations and have more cultural capital than individuals whose money may be newer (even if there is more of it). These ideas move cross-culturally and transnationally. The 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians, based on the book trilogy by Kevin Kwan, used fashion in powerful ways to explore “varied definitions of what it means to be rich” (Chan 2018). The circuit of style-fashion-dress, and of culture more broadly, reminds us to think about both production and distribution: a film is quite literally framed, costumed, edited, and (re)presented to the public for all to view. American studies scholar Mark Tseng-Putterman (2018) points out that “it’s noteworthy that this [Crazy Rich Asians] is the sort of story that industry advocates and audiences have coalesced around—one that eases collective anxieties about Asian and Asian American difference by adopting the universal aesthetic of the ultra-rich” (original emphasis). This aesthetic was created by costume designer Mary E. Vogt, production editor Nelson Coates, and set and interior decorator Andrew Baseman, none of whom are Asian. Tseng-Putterman explains: Director Jon M. Chu has been forthright about his desire for the film to transpose Asian faces onto a quintessentially Hollywood—which is to say, white American— story … It’s no surprise, then, that the film drips with an art-deco aesthetic, nodding to American cinema’s black-and-white days with one party scene—which rivals Gatsby’s finest—where women in flapper fashion swing and twirl to a Singaporean jazz band. The concept of nouveau riche, as discussed earlier, was something familiar to white audiences. Costume designer Mary E. Vogt drew upon these aesthetic tropes of “old” and “new” money and consulted with the book’s author, Kevin Kwan, “to get the tone right” (Chan 2018). Character Goh Peik Lin, played by Nora Lum (a.k.a. Awkwafina) (see Plate 18), represents the nouveau riche of Singapore through the aesthetics of “new money tacky.” In the film, Lum appropriates a “blaccent,” and Tseng-Putterman argues that her “approximation of the ‘sassy black friend’ trope exploits blackness for cheap laughs—implicitly aligning Asians (or at least the crazy-rich ones) with white people.” Goh Peik Lin’s style-fashion-dress, as well as the interior spaces she inhabits perpetuate multiple stereotypes about race and class. The history of class and fashion in euromodernity reveals that status can depend more on unique taste and styling ability than on family background. The background of Ralph Lauren’s Polo label is just one example of this. Although Lauren himself actually came from a modest Jewish background, he is known for creating functional, classy, and classic separates that seem to belong to “aristocrats, Ivy Leaguers, and adventurers” who ride horses on ranches, take safaris in Kenya, or yacht in Newport. As Lauren put it “modestly,” “I elevated the taste level of America.” In the 1970s, he convinced Bloomingdale’s that it would be effective to put all of his ties, suits, dress shirts, and 135

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raincoats together in their own special little boutique. He designed this space to feel like a gentlemen’s club with wood paneling, brass fixtures, and elite accessories such as walking sticks and antique alligator luggage. His “rich man’s look … stirred all kinds of longings in people, the dream that the upwardly mobile shared for prestige, wealth, and exotic adventure (Agins 1999: 87). … Lauren’s ersatz old-money look was more expensive than usual, but still within reach of those who lusted for a piece of the good life. And millions of Americans did” (88). Lauren made new money look like old money (Davis 1992). His tweed jackets and polo knit shirts fit the old money lifestyle; he managed to appropriate elite “town-andcountry style” and turn it into fashion (Agins 1999: 89; Manlow 2011). Ralph Lauren was not the first to appropriate and rearticulate aristocratic style. The modern, industrial, and urban world in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England offered new opportunities for mobile white subjectivities aimed at producing glamour and redefining taste. George Bryan (Beau) Brummell (1778–1840) was born into a middle-class family but became known as England’s “prime minister of taste” (Vainshtein 2010: 329). According to Elizabeth Wilson (2007), Brummell made his mark as a figure of glamour who replaced the power of aristocrats and princes with his own personal charisma and uniquely, beautifully understated sense of style-fashion-dress (see Plate 19). Brummell was a British socialite known for his sharp dressing and wit. He was “not a self-made man in the bourgeois sense.” Rather, he was a “self-produced modern individual” who was anti-bourgeois and aristocratic in his sensibility, but ironically had an enormous influence on bourgeois style-fashion-dress (Entwistle 2000: 125). Despite his modest background, Brummell was able to climb the “social ladder” by moving in aristocratic circles (something enabled by being male, white, and youthful)—including a friendship with the Prince of Wales (later King George IV). Brummell was able not only to appropriate the style of the highest class but also to take it to a new level of elegance. Known for his subtly cut and impeccably fitted trouser suits and elaborate neckwear (especially the cravat), Brummell articulated through his style-fashion-dress the principle of “conspicuous inconspicuousness”—a principle that Olga Vainshtein (2010: 329) uses to describe the simultaneous ability to dress elegantly and yet unobtrusively. We might say that this principle fosters the combined ability to reveal how “clothes make the (high class) man” in a way that is “unmarked” (considered in greater depth in Chapter 7 on gender), or without visual overstatement or pretension. Brummel used clean lines and muted colors to modernize menswear. It was not just what he wore but how he wore it that made his style so influential: it was the way he wore his hair, the way he tucked his fitted breeches into his boots, and the way he tied his cravat (scarf or tie), as shown in Plate 19. Stories circulated that Brummell took as long as five hours to get dressed and that he recommended polishing boots “with champagne.” The key to Brummel’s successful fashion influence was in his ability to keep the labor that went into his style invisible. Enduring today is the principle that hegemonic masculinity should not look like it takes a lot of time and effort. Using his attention to detail and material quality in his style-fashion-dress, Brummell defined a way of blurring class distinctions not by mere imitation but rather by erasing “the aristocratic pretensions to demonstrate wealth and 136

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noble origin through lavish clothes” and by privileging “deliberate self-fashioning and taste” above birth and wealth (Vainshtein 2010: 329). Brummell was not a self-made middle-class man; in fact, he barely worked except for a brief period in the military through an appointment by the Prince of Wales. He lived off the inheritance of 30,000 British pounds left by his father (the personal secretary to Lord North from 1770 to 1782); Beau received this inheritance in 1799 and proceeded to set up his bachelor quarters and his lavish lifestyle in London. In his style and ethos, he was “aristocratic and anti-bourgeois” (Entwistle 2000: 125). He epitomized the upperclass principle of “conspicuous leisure” (Veblen 1899). He did not, however, have the funds to spend so profusely without working, and he went into tremendous debt. A few years after he fell out of favor with the Prince of Wales in 1812, he fled to France to escape his creditors and died penniless in 1840. Wilson (2007) argues that cultural figures such as Brummell—known in fashion studies as a “dandy”—participate in a cultural discourse of glamour. Glamour, she submits, tends to parallel tragedy and related mixed emotions of desire, fear, anxiety, and loss. Perhaps part of what was lost through Brummell’s popularity and fashion influence in the first decade of the nineteenth century was a faith in the idea that aristocrats are the trendsetters in society by function of their class of birth. These ideas are further dismantled in the contemporary, as social media platforms have emerged to create “democratized” space for influencers—many of whom are neither celebrity nor of the wealthy class (though, interestingly, the ascendance of an influencer enables them to gain and build wealth through brand collaborations and product placement). Ironically, although Brummell himself rejected bourgeois (upper middle class) style, ultimately his legacy was the novel unmarked masculinity that he articulated. His use of the trouser suit and neckwear “became the template for the nineteenth-century bourgeois businessman” (Wilson 2007: 97). At the intersections of class and gender, Brummell’s look of leisure paradoxically became the bourgeois masculine norm. Brummell’s style ironically influenced the blurring of class boundaries; Fred Davis (1992) observes how status ambiguity eventually plays out: Not that anyone, or hardly anyone, wishes to be taken for Nobody, but conveying an impression with clothing that one is Somebody is neither as easy nor as obvious as it may at first seem. (58) Fashion theory offers a fourth metaphor to the understanding of class dynamics: percola­ tion. The percolation metaphor brings attention to bottom-up flows of fashion: for example, from the street (e.g., working-class subcultures such as teddy boys, mods, punks) to the runway. According to this metaphor or theory, most inspiration for new style-fashion-dress emerges from the innovative stylings of ethnic minority cultures (e.g., the African American community), the gay community, or working-class youth subcultures. Fashion designers appropriate ideas from how people put their looks together and show them on the fashion runway, where they are much pricier. If we were to use Simmel’s theory about imitation and differentiation, we would just flip it around 137

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and consider how the fashion industry imitates (appropriates) ideas from everyday street style; once these styles become commodified through capitalism, the individuals who initially created the looks differentiate themselves from these commodified styles and initiate new looks. Hence, the “game goes merrily on.” The social ladder metaphor can be described as a top-down (with upward climbing as a motivating force) model, whereas the percolation metaphor is bottom-up. A fifth and final metaphor has more of a horizontal flow. It assumes that each class has its own cultural system, and that influences happen within rather across classes. Marketing theorist Charles King (1963) proposed this trickle across model as a more democratic alternative to the top-down model of class influence. In 1969, sociologist Herbert Blumer (1969) published a paper titled “Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection.” He critiqued the idea that the desire to look rich motivated people to adopt fashion. Rather, he indicated, what motivates individuals is the desire to be in tune with the times: to be in fashion. In other words, Blumer argued that being current or modern outweighed status concerns. Although Blumer argued against class as a factor in fashion change, one can interpret his work in a way that is somewhat similar to King: fashion is a process of influence among individuals sharing a cultural milieu (including, by extension, class cultures). This brings us to the theorist who has directly addressed class in a cultural context: Bourdieu, mentioned earlier as the individual credited with the idea of cultural capital. Bourdieu (1984) focused on how each class has its own culture of taste, socially reproduced from one generation to the next and yet susceptible to change through processes of fashion negotiation within classes. Each of the above metaphors sheds some light on class dynamics related to stylefashion-dress. However, no single metaphor explains how there are multiple movements and flows occurring simultaneously: flowing down and percolating up, crossing and zigzagging, emulating and differentiating. Moreover, the intersections between class and other subject positions (e.g., ethnicity, gender, national identity) complicate the extent to which any single metaphor (or model) discussed above can explain how and why people dress as they do according to class alone. The remainder of this chapter continues to grapple with different approaches to the interplay between fashion and class as a focal point among other subject positions. The following section considers historical shifts in class-related ambiguities and anxieties. Then, we consider the ways in which we might reconceptualize class in relation to contemporary, transnational style-fashion-dress. Drawing on a general theme of ambiguity to consider the ways in which style-fashiondress make and blur class and status boundaries, the following section draws on, and updates, Fred Davis’ (1992) theory of identity ambivalences.

Status Claims and Status Demurrals One of the more nuanced analyses of class/status subject formation is Fred Davis’ (1992) chapter in his book Fashion, Culture, and Identity. He framed his analysis in both/and, rather than either/or terms, or even linear terms such as one might ascertain in a trickle 138

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down approach. The title of this chapter, “Ambivalences of Status: Flaunts and Feints,” points to the idea that class—as represented through status in style-fashion-dress— involves mixed emotions, contradictions, and reversals. Class-related subject positions entail entanglements. Davis begins his chapter with a quote from fashion designer Coco Chanel’s (1883– 1971) admonition that “women should dress as plainly as their maids.” Presumably, Chanel’s use of “women” referred in fact to bourgeois or upper-class women who could afford to have maids. Recall the anxious quote from a middle-class woman from the 1870s, earlier in this chapter, about her maid dressing too fashionably or too “middle class” for their working-class station. Chanel’s use of plain jersey, typically used for underwear, and her design of plain black dresses (the “little black dress”) in the 1920s, can be seen as flipping such anxiety around while blurring class boundaries in an appropriative sort of way. Plain black dresses, at the time, had associations with workingclass maid uniforms and became the ubiquitous dress of retail and office workers. But for a middle-class woman, the newly appropriated little black dress became a fashionable, flexible, elegant, modern uniform that could be dressed up or down and could move from daytime to evening cocktail wear. One way to address class anxiety (e.g., a “fear of falling”), it seems, is to face it head-on and to appropriate symbols of the working class. As Davis (1992) notes, blue jeans represent a similar pattern of class appropriation— from its working-class, Gold Rush roots in the mid-nineteenth century in California, to premium denim jeans costing hundreds of dollars in the twenty-first century. But what is the difference between cultural anxiety and cultural ambivalence? Whereas cultural anxiety (involving uncertain, queasy feelings of dread as well—potentially—as hope) is freely floating and hard to pin down, cultural ambivalence is clearly framed in both/and, oppositional terms, such as “status claims” and “status demurrals” in Davis’ terms. Claims to status through style-fashion-dress may involve flaunting what one has. Sociologist/economist Thorstein Veblen (1899) called this conspicuous consumption in his satirical analysis of the “leisure class”: bourgeois and upper-class individuals who derive prestige by revealing that not only do they have a lot of wealth but they also need not engage in manual labor for a living (conspicuous leisure). A number of fashion studies scholars have critiqued Veblen for being too utilitarian and hence missing the point of fashion (Wilson 1985), too focused on status differentiation (Davis 1992), too linear in his rank ordering of class (Crane 2000), and too dated and too dismissive of bourgeois women’s agency (Entwistle 2000). Nevertheless, there is something compelling about Veblen’s satirical tone and in his ability to point to hypocrisy, which makes his work still worthy of attention. Even if class boundaries have become less important than they were before the 1960s (Crane 2000), there is still a viable luxury goods market that relies on the discretionary incomes of wealthy consumers, even during economic downturns. The concept of luxury good fashion evolved from the Parisian haute couture (high fashion) system, attributed to the British textile merchant and fashion designer Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895), who moved to Paris in 1845 and managed to obtain Empress Eugénie (wife of Emperor Napoleon III) as a fashion leader/customer, along 139

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with other wealthy clients. Worth, a creative designer with a deep knowledge of textiles, managed to move effectively in French aristocratic class circles; he also donned a beret to articulate a rather ironic national/class intersectionality. Around the same time in Paris, approximately 15 percent of the population were textile workers and a number of worker uprisings took place, most notably during the Paris Commune in 1871. Paris had become an important site of production—both of materials and of the notion of luxury. The century before, Rose Bertin (1747–1813) had been the dressmaker/designer/stylist for Marie Antoinette and had built a highly influential business in Paris. Historically, the luxury design fashion model appears to best fit the trickle down (upper to middle class) metaphor of fashion, discussed earlier in the chapter. However, this metaphor does not tell the whole story, and this is where Davis’ idea of identity ambivalence becomes crucial to grapple with the complexities and nuances of class and status. Davis (1992) explained the interplay between status claims and status demurrals as “ever-shifting ambivalences regarding matters of wealth, worldly attainment, and social position” (57). In other words, there are numerous “twists, inversions, contradictions, and paradoxes” in relation to status symbolism (72). The ambiguity associated with identity ambivalences provides all kinds of opportunities for innovation, articulation, and the simultaneous endorsement of and resistance to class-related hegemonies—complicated as they are by inter- and intraclass entanglements, as well as intersectionalities with other subject positions, including gender, the focus of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 7 GENDERING FASHION, FASHIONING GENDER: BEYOND BINARIES

When appointed to the US Supreme Court in 1993, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was already visually distinctive sitting court amidst seven men and only one other woman, Justice Sandra Day O’Conner. Like the other justices, she wore a billowing black judicial robe that obfuscated most of the body, with the exception of the head, neck, hands, and feet. So, like the other justices, Ginsburg styled-fashioned-dressed these places where the body was revealed from beneath the robe. Notice in Plate 20 that all of the justices are using neckwear in distinctive ways to convey themselves: different colors, patterns, textures, forms, and meanings. The type of neckwear also does the work of signaling gender: neckties and bowties for male justices, and lacy jabots for female justices. Against the backdrop of the otherwise unembellished robe, one might expect that all forms of neckwear would stand out; however, the neckties and bowties worn by male justices received little to no attention in the media and almost go unnoticed, whereas the decorative judicial collars of Justices O’Conner and Ginsburg received a lot of media attention over the years and have been the topic of much discussion. Why is it that men’s neckwear is so often overlooked? How did these styles become unmarked? Once again, power is at play: The US Supreme Court was comprised exclusively of men until 1981. Today, men still account for two-thirds of the justices, making the necktie a kind of normalized, expected, and therefore unmarked fashion. When Justice O’Conner became the first woman appointed as a justice, she also became the first to incorporate a decorative white judicial collar (O’Conner 2013). But it was arguably Justice Ginsburg who developed the fashion, both aesthetically and semiotically. In initially adopting the collar, she conveyed solidarity with Justice O’Conner. She then developed the fashion into her own distinctive style with a growing collection of collars. The collars stood out through a kind of aesthetics of exaggeration. Neither subtle nor demure, Justice Ginsburg’s collars were instead dramatic and attention-grabbing. She was already a visible minority on the court as a woman, so rather than attempting to downplay that aspect of her identity, she chose to unapologetically celebrate and call attention to her gender through her style-fashion-dress. Over time, Justice Ginsburg developed a kind of collar-semiotics—that is, a way of coding and inscribing meaning to particular styles, the most famous example being her dissenting collar. She wore this collar to sartorially signal her dissent from the majority opinion, and it has become so iconic that the fashion brand Banana Republic began selling copies of the collar in 2012, which they re-released in 2020 following Ginsburg’s

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death in 2019. Ginsburg also was known for her majority collar, which she wore when announcing the opinion for the court. Through the explicit coding of her collars, Justice Ginsburg marked the fashion accessory as meaningful and noticeable. Far too often, fashion is sidelined and disregarded in popular culture and the media as frivolous and meaningless—and these narratives of triviality are regularly tied to fashion’s association with femininity. By showing how collars have meaning—both in terms of identity and gender expression, but also through semiotics and encoding—she conveyed the importance of style-fashion-dress. Justice Ginsburg’s collars are but one example of the many ways that style-fashiondress enables the production, performance, and negotiation of gender and its intersection with other subject positions and larger sociocultural and economic contexts. From the moment of birth (and even earlier in some cases, with parents’ anticipation of birth), gender becomes an everyday process of performance and negotiation of the body as it navigates time, space, and other intersecting subject positions. Becoming visibly gendered—binary oppositions notwithstanding—involves engagement with complicated, shifting coding systems related to colors, fabrics, trims, forms, shapes, and patterns and other body fashionings and manipulations. These symbolic systems are not natural or essentialized; rather, they are arbitrary and vary across time and space, history and cultures. Some elements of gendered symbolic systems are evident in Plate 21, where Susan’s grandchildren Henrik (almost 7) and Hope (almost 4) are taking advantage of one of the few rainy days in California. Colors and motifs (rainbows, dinosaurs, camouflage, unicorns) signify gender differences that are prevalent in the marketplace in northern California in the early 2020s. They are old enough to exercise their own agency and choice (and they do!) within the limits of the gendered symbolic system. In many ways, their styles are more gender-performative in a special occasion such as a rainstorm. Hope says that this outfit makes her happy; her favorite color is pink, and her unicorndecorated boots light up when she stomps. And she loves the rainbow umbrella, which had also been Henrik’s favorite when he was younger. The image of Denise being held by her mother shortly after birth in the hospital (Plate 22) tells another story. As a newborn in an institutional setting (the hospital), she had little agency and arguably no choice about the clothing and accessories she wore on her body. It was the institution—for example, the healthcare workers within the hospital and administrators who make decisions about hospital supplies—that chose to stick a bow on her head to mark her as having been assigned female at birth (AFAB). The functional purpose of a hairbow is for hair styling—most often to hold hair back away from the face (something that Denise has very little of in this photo, and certainly not enough to hold a bow). Note the bow at the neckline of her mother’s gown—a kind of collective selection (Blumer 1969) and shared feminine aesthetic. While Denise’s parents may not have had a choice about the bow taped onto their new baby’s head, it’s not something that shocked them in a hospital in 1985. The way gender has been marked has also become unmarked and normalized. It also becomes shared intergenerationally—in this case, shared feminine-coded aesthetics between mother and daughter. At the moment of 142

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birth (and sometimes even in anticipation of it), hospitals, institutions, parents, friends, family, and strangers often feel the need to do something to differentiate gender in a binary way from the outset. From gender-reveal parties to marking newborns in the hospital, fashion produces, and is produced by, gender. The contemporary baby clothing market in the United States is a far cry from that of the early 1900s. Boys and girls alike wore long white dresses, which became shorter as they began to crawl and walk. Gender “guessing games” were popular in women’s magazines, because there were few, if any, cues that made it easy to distinguish baby boys from baby girls, according to clothing historian Jo Paoletti (2012). Gender ambiguity was tolerated, if not enjoyed. This began to change as the children’s clothing industry developed in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and cultural discourse includes some debate regarding the gendered meanings of colors such as pink and blue. In 1918, a magazine advised parents that pink was the more robust and hence the more “masculine” color, like a boy with rosy cheeks who had been playing actively outdoors. Blue, on the other hand, was considered to be soft and demure, and hence more feminine (Paoletti and Kregloh 1989). This advice may seem strange to consider today; it shatters a gendered social order or cultural logic that has become naturalized as some kind of essentialist law. The gender coding system remained rather ambiguous into the 1930s and then began to settle down into the pink-is-for-girls and blue-is-for-boys maxim. Paoletti (2012) describes the baby boom generation (1946–64) as the first US cohort to be consistently color-coded at birth. The pink-versus-blue system is so entrenched in the popular psyche that it is routinely accepted as natural well into the twenty-first century. As is often the case with gender-coded appearance symbols, exceptions are made, but they often apply only in one direction. For example, girls may wear blue, but transphobia and sexism have produced anxiety amongst some adults in the United States when they see boys wearing pink (especially when they are very young, an example of the way perceptions of gender intersect with age). As we see in this chapter, this “identity not” (Freitas et al. 1997) principle—that masculinity is defined as not femininity—applies more generally to the fashioning of gender in euromodernity. There is also some room for play (in the minds of most, especially in the context of limited experimentation) with cultural gender codes through style-fashion-dress. Gender is always under construction, socially and culturally speaking. Yes, it is a subject position with all of the historical baggage regarding roles, ways of appearing, and expectations that one would expect from prescriptive cultural discourses that become embodied in everyday habitus. But it also interacts with other subject positions to become a form of subjectivity and—indeed agency—that requires ongoing articulation. Gender is not just who we are; it is what we do or perform as we participate in an embodied way with and within cultural discourses. Feminist critical theorist Judith Butler ([1990] 2006) refers to this gendered interplay between cultural discourse and everyday habitus as performativity. Style, fashion, and dress become critical components in this interplay, in everything from the use of mascara to shaving to pedicures to the colors, patterns, and materials that circulate in the gendered circuit of style-fashiondress. By performing gender in an iterative way between our bodies and social worlds, 143

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we inhabit and continually “map” both old and new ways of becoming. To the great extent that these mappings vary dramatically across time and space, we cannot think of gender merely as a biological essence but rather as a social construction that is performed through embodied dressing. From a performative perspective, gender can be described as a way of repeatedly styling the body; this styling is regulated by cultural discourses, but becomes part of the ongoing experience of fashioning the gendered body on a personal and a social level, as well. Let’s consider a few examples of gender as a social construction across time and space. For example, the long white dresses worn by infant boys and girls alike in euromodern cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would be considered too effeminate for infant boys of today. Contemporary Korean men may wear pink style-dress-fashion in traditional ceremonies; this would be unlikely in either a “Western” Korean wedding ceremony or in euromodern cultures, unless the color is restricted to the small spaces of a tie or pocket hanky. Sikh men wear wrapped turbans on their heads. In euromodern contexts, these turbans may be perceived as hats—and hence, for example, the inability of airport security systems to understand why they cannot be simply removed and put on a conveyor belt. But turbans are not hats, and they are not equivalent to euromodern feminine fashion statements. Turbans have religious and cultural significance for Sikh men, who carefully wrap and unwrap turbans in the processes of donning and doffing. This significance is undermined when they are reduced to a piece of fabric in an airport security system (Puar 2007). Meanings of gender vary historically and culturally, and so does the style-fashion-dress that represents and articulates gender. Gender is part of a larger system of concepts: sex, gender, and sexuality. In euromodern terms, each of these concepts is framed as binary: male versus female, masculine versus feminine, and heterosexual versus homosexual. Since the 1970s or so, academic writers have strived to differentiate among sex, gender, and sexuality. Permeating these differentiations has been a fundamental debate between biological determinism and social constructionism—that is, the nature/culture debate and extent to which biology is framed as destiny (the essence or truth regarding who we “really are”), and culture produces social categories such as gender (through cultural discourses, style-fashion-dress, and everyday power relations). Most commonly, sex (male, female) has been contrasted with gender (masculinity, femininity), with sex referring to biology and gender referring to culture (but in both cases are framed problematically in binary terms). Unfortunately, as feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling (2003) points out, the sex–gender distinction itself easily becomes a binary opposition in its own right and oversimplifies or obfuscates complexities: how “sex” too is immersed in cultural discourse, how the body meets culture through concepts such as habitus, or how different fields of study (e.g., the biological sciences, the social sciences, cultural studies) need to collaborate to bridge unhelpful boundaries. Sexuality (discussed further in Chapter 8) and transgender experiences (discussed later in this chapter) have also been debated in terms of biological determinism and social constructionism. In the field of gender studies, biological determinism is not seen as valid research position but rather a nefarious ideology. Research on trans issues, in particular, has emphasized plasticity in 144

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the biological realm. Therefore, the approach in gender studies is that all essentialisms are strategic, that is, politically motivated, especially the ones that claim to be objective. Judith Butler’s (1993) Bodies That Matter, which followed up on her 1990 book, Gender Trouble, shows how even supposedly biologically grounded sex is performative and discursively constructed. Overall, the concepts and experiences of sex, gender, and sexuality—especially in conjunction with style-fashion-dress—include some kind of both/and or multiple, rather than strictly either/or combinations.

Soft Assemblages As Fausto-Sterling (2003) notes, gender is not simply “hard wired”; rather, she points to the need to understand gender as “softly assembled” in a complex articulation of the body, time, psychology, and cultural space. There may be periods of tremendous instability in gendered subjectivities, followed by times of relative stability (128). Viewing gender as a soft assemblage, rather than as a fixed essence, opens up the idea of plural ways of “doing” or performing gender, especially when exploring transnational understandings, queer perspectives, and intersectional analyses of gender’s interplay with subjectivities such as sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, national identity, dis/ability, age/generation, and body size, among others. The material and symbolic interplay between the body and style-fashion-dress opens up all kinds of possibilities for gender. In the context of euromodernity, gender has been organized not only in binary terms but also through a cultural logic that has framed fashion itself as feminine. And yet men and non-binary, genderfluid, and androgynous people, as well as women, wear clothes and modify their appearances. At the same time, there is a huge contradiction at play as we contrast this assumption that fashion equals femininity with the euromodern expression that “clothes make the man”—presumably applied most to signify hegemonic (bourgeois) white masculinity (e.g., an understated but well-tailored business suit). Note that the expression is not “fashion makes the man,” but one could well imagine the expression “fashion makes the woman.” Feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir (1947) wrote that “one is born a female, but becomes a woman,” and style-fashion-dress are part of this process of becoming. The same is true, of course, for individuals who are born male or, more accurately, who are assigned male at birth (AMAB). Yet in the case of men, it is a certain kind of clothing, rather than fashion as a social process, that is what makes him a man. “Fashion” seems to imply femininity as a process of frivolous change, colorful details, unnecessary flounces, and superficiality.

Marking, Unmarking, and Remarking Gender Fashion, like femininity, is marked as the context of the other. Masculinity (especially hegemonic masculinity), by way of contrast, tends to be viewed as more “serious,” changes in slower and more subtle ways, and eschews elaborate ornamentation. Masculinity, in 145

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euromodern terms, is unmarked. But we can think of gender more generally as a process of marking, unmarking, and remarking as individuals articulate and perform it—not only as a subject position but also as an ongoing process of subjectivity, being, and becoming. To the extent that fashion as a mode of gender performativity has been imagined as feminine, the idea of “men’s fashion” has been framed as a contradictory space (Edwards 1997: 135). Sociologist Tim Edwards (2006) argues that part of the problem lies in the lack of articulation among the literatures pertaining to fashion, performativity, and masculinity; he points to the need for more bridging, cross-fertilization across fields, and empirical research to understand how men do masculinity in their everyday stylefashion-dress. Indeed, in the interviews that we have conducted in our research on men’s fashion, a number have said that they do not feel comfortable participating in a study on “men’s fashion.” At least initially, some men had felt more interested in, or accepting of, the study when we use a more neutral term such as “menswear” (which is less marked). The marked versus unmarked binary reveals a number of oversimplifying oppositions that organize the process of gendering style-fashion-dress, with femininity discursively constructed as the first of each opposition. ●

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Fashion/expression versus uniformity/standardization. Indeed, the roots of the masculine bourgeois business suit can be found in the uniforms required to dress national militaries in standardized attire. Elaborated codes versus restricted codes (Davis 1992). Variety became the stuff of femininity, whereas masculinity became the epitome of understated elegance, with a much narrower range of options. Disorder versus order. Femininity was the messier, more complex sister to masculinity, which was streamlined of excess as it exuded euromodernity.

Euromodernity—framed by ideas, events, and social movements such as French Enlightenment philosophy (e.g., René Descartes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau), the US and French Revolutions, and political discourses regarding national citizenship—fostered what some style-fashion-dress scholars have called the “masculine renunciation of fashion” (e.g., Flugel 1930). There are debates about when and how this happened, but most scholars agree that bourgeois white men, at least, moved away from color, silk, pattern, ornamentation, wigs, knickers, and tights in favor of darker, more somber, businesslike clothing at the end of the eighteenth century. What does unmarked mean in the context of intersectional gender relations through style-fashion-dress? We can think of it as a kind of euromodern project to rearticulate hegemonic white masculinity. This project can be considered a flight from femininity, as well as fashion in terms of what it meant to appear visibly male. This hegemonic masculine discourse of differentiating gender and distancing from fashion and femininity was neither a sudden nor a decisive renunciation, according to fashion historian Christopher Breward (1999). Instead, it was a protracted process of emphasizing what were to become known as “manly” (heavier, darker, wool rather than silk) materials, cuts of clothing (gradually less shapely or form-fitting and yet still streamlined), and subtlety in detailing (stitching, etc.): a whole sartorial (dress-related) discourse. (By way 146

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of contrast, nineteenth-century, euromodern bourgeois women tended to wear white, pastel, or brightly colored/patterned dresses that were fitted on the top but full and legobscuring on the bottom.) The protracted process of unmarking masculinity involved making style-fashiondress more nuanced and less noticeable, still caring but not letting it show blatantly. This demarcation from fashion and femininity was intersectional, in that it also involved a distancing from the upper or aristocratic class. You’ll recall from earlier chapters that male French revolutionaries in the 1780s rejected aristocratic masculine attire in favor of more influences from the working classes—such as trousers that were full in cut (sans-culotte, or “without knickers”), as opposed to the more aristocratic tapered pant style associated with upper-class men. Similarly, middle-class British men were already distancing themselves from anything they perceived to be feminine or “aristocratic” or “frivolous” or “French” (such as silk fabrics; Kuchta 2002). Fashion studies scholar Olga Vainshtein (2010) notes how the well-dressed euromodern “dandy” fashion of the nineteenth century—for example, Beau Brummell, discussed in Chapter 5—fostered an ethos of “conspicuous inconspicuousness.” The idea was to be unmarked but with an eye for subtle detail; those “in the know” would be able to interpret the codes of fine dressing. This became the crux of being an unmarked man of style: modern and manly through a businesslike demeanor that thrived on tailored nuance rather than obvious fashion change. The business suit, in one form or a subtle another, has endured more than two hundred years as a dominant symbol of hegemonic (bourgeois, white) masculinity. Given that the field of feminist studies is not merely the study of women but rather the practice of dismantling patriarchy, feminists have generated not only histories of women’s style-fashion-dress but also analyses of hegemonic masculinity and its machinations. Sex, Gender, and Style-Fashion-Dress: Feminist Deconstructions In the 1970s, second-wave feminist theory made an important distinction between sex (as a biological construct: male versus female) and gender (as a social construct: masculinity versus femininity). In many ways, the body and its differentiating sexual anatomy (e.g., penis versus vagina) become a metaphor for sex, whereas clothing and its culturally coded meanings (e.g., pink versus blue in contemporary US infant dress) become a metaphor for gender. In both conceptualizations of sex and gender, binary ways of thinking permeate the language of male versus female and masculinity versus femininity, overshadowing the possibilities for both/and thinking, gender fluidity, and androgyny. Binary ways of thinking also overshadow possibilities for deconstructive and utopian practices of self-fashioning that do not accept the binary premise, but rather imagine the body and self otherwise through the richness of embodied experience through style-fashion-dress in social space. Even terms like nonbinary and gender-nonconforming are structured in opposition, another form of identity not. In recent years, transgender theory has influenced feminist rethinkings of the sex–gender binary. 147

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It is important to recognize that gender is something that people do. Applying makeup, shaving one’s face or one’s legs, and donning high heels or a face veil all fall within the realm of doing gender; these processes and practices vary across cultures, times, and spaces. It is important to remember, however, that gender is socially constructed in concert with other subject positions embedded in cultural discourses of race, ethnicity, national identity, class, sexuality, dis/ability, and religion, etc. There is no such thing as gender without its intersection with other axes of subjectivity: it is constructed through and articulated with other forms of difference. When gender appears independently of them, that is an artifact of the structural inequities that enable some genders to appear “unmarked” by the confounding variables of power, hegemony, and intersectional identity. Cross-cultural studies indicate that in many cultural contexts, male activities— whatever they may be—are considered to be more important than female ones (Rosaldo 1974). However, the way gender plays out varies across history and culture. Cultural discourses frequently provide scripts that prescribe what men and women are expected to do (or not do), including how they are supposed to dress. A feminist perspective questions these scripts, especially to the extent that they prescribe essentialist ways of being and limit one’s life choices. Feminists believe that individuals’ self-images, aspirations, and life choices should not be constrained by binary gendered scripts (Ferrante 1995). Feminist theory aims to “complicate” gender: “to analyze gender relations: how gender relations are constructed and explained and how we think, or equally important, do not think about them” (Flax 1990: 40). Notably, feminists have critiqued the binary opposition that organizes gender and other subject positions in euromodernity. Eschewing biological essentialism, a feminist perspective reminds us that gender is not a neutral concept; power relations are involved. The dichotomy between masculinity and femininity limits choices and life options; stereotypes what we are supposed to care about and how/why; and maintains a hierarchical order based in part on a gendered system of looking, in which “men act” and “women appear,” according to the critical art theorist John Berger (1977: 47, original emphasis). Feminist film theorists (e.g., Mulvey 1975) have made similar arguments built upon the hegemonic, gendered system of looking: The gaze involves an active, masculine positioning that has subjectivity (i.e., looking, gazing, knowing), whereas the observed (feminine) position—a fashion model, an actor on the silver screen or on the stage, a person on the street—lacks subjectivity in the simplest interpretation of feminist gaze theory; she is the passive object of the masculine gaze. In 1983, feminist film theorist E. Ann Kaplan (1983) questioned the strictly sexed dynamics of systems of looking. In her article “Is the Gaze Male?” (Kaplan 2000), she cautions against “fixing” subject– object relations in terms of sexed bodies, arguing instead for a more flexible dynamic that acknowledges gendered power relations. This argument has been expanded in feminist theory since the 1980s to address intersections among gender, race, and ethnicity (e.g., Black female spectatorship; hooks 1992); national and transnational identities (Tarlo 2010); gay, lesbian, and queer identities (Hanson 1999; Lewis 1997); and so on. Gender and other subject positions multiply when we take them into account jointly. 148

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The third wave of feminism since the 1980s has sought to clarify the importance of intersectionalities and entanglements, so that we can understand how there are multiple ways of articulating masculinities, femininities, and additional genders and expressions that complicate, dissolve, and upend the masculinity/femininity binary. Still, the gendered “playing field” is not level in terms of representation and subjectivity. Further, the situation is more complicated than a strict, essentialist framework that “fixes” the male body in the role of the gazing subject versus the female body in the role of sex object. Even in the context of global hegemonic (young, white) fashion images, is it simply enough to “reverse the gendered binary” by switching from a focus on predominantly young, white, thin feminine models to one on young, white, muscular, male models? What is to be gained? The larger feminist goal is to deconstruct the subject–object binary and power hierarchy altogether: to break down either/or oppositions and to enable subjectivity on the part of all genders and other intersecting subject positions. Here are just a few examples that may help to think beyond the gender binary hierarchies represented in hegemonic cultural discourse: ●

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What should we make of the trend in euromodernity, since the 1980s (Thompson 2000), to represent young male models in shirtless, six-pack (abdominal) images on fashion websites, retail walls, and shopping bags? Since the 1980s, male models have been depicted in ways that show a lot of skin (at least on top); they too have become sex objects in some ways. But does just reversing the subject and object really circumvent power relations (gendered or otherwise)? To what extent is the binary, gendered “gaze” system biased in terms of sexuality? The gaze is assumed as heterosexual. This question gets pursued in greater depth in Chapter 8, but for now, it seems pertinent to question the degree to which the “masculine” gazing subject and “feminine” (gazed at) sex object are hegemonically represented as heterosexual. What about other possibilities? What about same-sex or same-gender desires? Or, different gender desires when the genders disrupt the male/female binary? Who gets to be in the “desiring” role and who is in the “desired” role? How do intersecting subject positions such as race, ethnicity, national identity, body size, dis/ability, religion, class, age, and other subject positions inform these dynamics? We can also complicate the idea of gendered objects (the “looked at” images/ persons) of desire. The field of transgender studies, especially since the 1990s, has opened up a whole and wide range of options for considering who represents a desirable and desired image and how/why.

Theorizing the Body and Style-Fashion-Dress Just as feminist theory seeks to destabilize or deconstruct gendered binary oppositions (e.g., male versus female, or masculinity versus femininity), queer theory (discussed 149

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further in Chapter 8) destabilizes or deconstructs sexualized binary oppositions such as heterosexuality versus homosexuality. Further, and even more deeply, transgender theory interrogates the whole binary opposition between sex and gender and the binaries through which sex and gender are defined. Transgender theory grapples broadly with the relationship between the biological sex assigned at birth and an individual’s own gender identity and gender expression. As transgender activist and writer Leslie Feinberg (1998) has written, “Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught” (10). Sex, it turns out, is also socially constructed; it is a concept that is embedded in scientific and cultural discourses. Sex is generally “assigned” by a physician at birth (or several months earlier, with prenatal technologies, and then sometimes publicly announced with a “gender-reveal party”). This process can be less straightforward than it may appear. Some individuals feel as though they were born in a physical body that does not align with the gender identity experienced early in life. Further, as many as 2 percent of infants are born with genitalia or other characteristics that vary from the medically defined categories of male and female; yet, they are labeled as either boys or girls. One or two out of 1,000 infants receive, without their consent, “corrective” surgery to reinforce the sex assigned by a physician. For example, when a penis is determined to be too small, in some instances it is removed and the sex assigned is female. This decision, itself, points to values and assumptions regarding embodiment of sex and gender (Blackless et al. 2000). In addition to “corrective” surgeries, practices like circumcision, where the foreskin of the penis is surgically removed, is also performed on babies without their consent. These body modification practices intersect in complex ways with religious beliefs, as well as time, place, access to medical care, and government regulations. In the United States, the practice of circumcision has declined since the late 1970s, with 64.5 percent of babies AMAB circumcised in 1979, and 58.3 percent in 2010. By contrast, the prevalence of circumcision in Finland is only a 2–4 percent, where the Finnish Supreme Court determined that the practice is a form of assault on young children. Bodily autonomy—that is, the right to determine, govern, and control what is done (or not) to your body—is necessary for all people, but has been denied disproportionately to transgender individuals, people of color, and women. The surgical procedure performed on babies without their consent is an affront to bodily autonomy. Human biology and gender are more than genitalia; it includes a wide range of traits (e.g., height, build, voice), genes, chromosomes, hormones, and needs to be understood as a continuum of sex/gender development. Fausto-Sterling (2003) asserts that bodies are not static and should not be limited by biology (31), which interacts in complex ways with social, psychological, and cultural factors. Style-fashion-dress become part of the soft assemblage of biology, culture, psychology, and everyday social life. It bridges the boundary between the body and the social world, albeit ambiguously (Wilson 1985). Feminist theorist Judith Butler ([1990] 2006) argues that gender is not a stable identity but rather “an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts [that comprise] the ‘material basis of gender’ ” (126, original emphasis). Gender, again, is something we do in everyday life: what we wear, 150

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how we groom, how we carry ourselves, and the like. Our bodies and our clothes are key factors in our articulations and representations of gender as a subject position and as a mode of subjectivity. Recent changes in gender terminology have sought to move beyond the binary (though in some cases reinforcing or creating new binaries). Examples include cisgender (when gender identity aligns with sex assigned at birth), nonbinary (outside of or between the male/female dichotomy), transgender (when gender identity does not match sex assigned at birth), genderfluid (actively moving across genders), bigender (identifying as two genders), agender (not identifying with experience of having a gender), among others. Transgender theory helps to open up the possibility to think more flexibly about gender in the interplay between the body and style-fashion-dress. Transgender Studies through Bodies and Style-Fashion-Dress Gender multiplies as we consider intersectionalities and possibilities for articulations through “stylized repetitions of acts.” For historian Susan Stryker, transgender is the “movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place— rather than any particular destination or mode of transition” (2008: 1). In its interrogation of the dominant binary sex/gender ideology in euromodernity, the field of transgender studies includes “anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages” assumed to bridge among biological sex, social constructions, and cultural discourses of gender, subjectively experienced gender identity, and “social expectations of gender-related performance” (Stryker 2006: 3). Topically, the field of transgender studies pursues a wide and flexible range of gender possibilities, including cross-cultural, historical, and subcultural studies of human gender diversity. The terminology is frequently controversial or contested. Historically, the term transsexual was used to describe an individual who has sought, through medical assistance and/or self-fashioning, to modify the gendered appearance of their physical bodies. The term implies going through a physical and social transitioning process that may involve hormones as well as surgery. Its roots in medical discourses have meant that the term has been rejected in favor of transgender, a term that emerges from the community. Overall, body-modifying practices are wide-ranging and dynamic as they articulate with context and intersectional subjectivities. The term transgender has the benefit of including a wide range of subject positions, subjectivities, and practices. Styling-fashioning-dressing the transgender body may or may not include hormonal therapy and surgery. In euromodern cultures, the sex/gender binary has historically only allowed acceptance of, or movement away from, one’s assigned sex/gender. However, in recent years, increasing space for fluid, third, and in-between options has opened. In the early aughts, legislation in the United Kingdom, known as the Gender Recognition Act of 2004, granted legal recognition to nonbinary and transgender people, and just the year prior, Australians had the option of choosing a gender of X, rather than male or female, on their legal documents. In 2014, social media giant Facebook expanded gender identities beyond the binary, and transgender woman Laverne Cox appeared 151

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on the cover of Time magazine in an article called “The Transgender Tipping Point” (Chapin et al. 2019: 77). Legislation in Europe and North American also began to change around this time. As early as 2016 in the United States, states began to allow individuals to opt for nonbinary gender marks on legal documents. In February 2020, legislation was introduced at the federal level to add a third gender designation on US passports. These are relatively new changes in Euro-American cultures. Indigenous cultures, on the other hand, have a long history of welcoming and celebrating additional genders beyond the binary. For example, a number of Native American cultures have a gender space for “two-spirit” people: individuals who articulate both masculinity and femininity and who play a special spiritual role in the culture. Anthropologist Charlotte Suthrell (2004) conducted a comparative ethnographic study of transgender women, or trans women (at the time of the study, referred to as male-to-female MtF “cross-dressers”) in the United Kingdom and India, where there is a separate hijra gender culture. Hijras are initiated into a new life and join a community. Part of the community is based on a spiritual dimension; hijras bestow blessings at heterosexual weddings and before or during birth. Hijras come from both Hindu and Muslim backgrounds and frequently wear a sari or salwaar kameez (tunic and trousers), makeup, long hair, and jewelry, but often smoke, talk, and curse (Suthrell 2004). What Suthrell called the British MtF “cross-dressers,” by contrast, did not live in a separate physical community but were able to experience a sense of community online in the presocial media days of the internet. Suthrell found that they most often experienced the cross-dressing part of their lives in secrecy and with great anxiety. It is evident that in euromodern cultures, it is much more difficult for cisgender men to “cross gender barricades” than it is for cisgender women to do so. Men who choose to wear women’s clothing are viewed as imitating the “inferior sex” (Suthrell 2004: 23), and perhaps this is why popular culture (e.g., films such as Some Like It Hot; La Cage Aux Folles; Tootsie) has found humor in men dressing like women. The principle of hegemonic masculine power operates in such a way that MtF “cross-dressing” arouses more attention and anxiety than Female-to-Male (FtM) “cross-dressing” or trans men. Literary scholar Marjorie Garber (1992) sees cross-dressing as an indicator of a “category crisis” in cultural gender discourse. She sees cross-dressing as “a space of possibility” that structures and disrupts the idea of cultural categories (including, but not limited to, gender categories). She argues that it is important to look at rather than through cross-dressers in popular culture and everyday life: to consider cross-dressing as an additional (third or higher) space of gender possibility; it is a provocative space, because it generates and articulates cultural anxieties. Gender and sexual subjectivities articulate through style-fashion-“(cross) dressing”: within queer communities, gender is sometime performed hyperbolically to subvert binary boundaries (e.g., drag kings or drag queens) and to challenge the hegemonic, gendered system of looking (e.g., “men act, women appear”). This system has been a problem for cisgender men, as well—especially those who choose to exert their agency and express themselves through style. Transgender studies (or indeed trans-fashion studies) reminds us that gender is not fixed in clothes: As transgender 152

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warrior and “gender outlaw” Leslie Feinberg said during hir appearance on the Joan Rivers television show in 1993: “Is this a man’s jacket if I’m wearing it?” What Feinberg was alluding to is that symbols and meanings of gender float across appearances and contexts. When and how symbols and meanings float within and across genders can tell us a great deal about power relations. Feinberg’s provocation points to the need to rethink the concept of “cross-dressing” and to imagine, more fluidly, how symbols of gender float. Trans women’s (historically referred to as MtF, or male-to-female) experiences involving the body itself have tended to receive more attention than trans men’s (historically referred to as FtM, or female-to-male) gender subjectivities, likely due to gendered power relations, along with related cultural obsessions and anxieties. As noted above, there are some complicated politics as to the choice of adjectives in identity and subjectivity, and the terminology is also culturally shifting and personally chosen. Genderfluid, nonbinary, genderqueer, transmasculine, transfeminine, bigender, demigender, agender, androgyne, and transgender are just some examples of subjectivities outside of the hegemonic cisgender male and cisgender female binary. The process of medical transitioning came to the attention of the US public in 1952, when George Jorgensen returned to the United States from Denmark as Christine Jorgensen (1926–1989). Jorgensen had undergone hormonal therapeutic treatments, as well as a series of sex reassignment surgeries, what today are called gender-affirming surgeries. A media frenzy ensued. One example was the headline, “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Operations Transform Bronx Youth,” of an article run by the New York Daily News on December 1, 1952. What was supposed to be a quiet medical process had turned into a deluge by the press, along with an anxious public obsession with the idea of “sex” change. Jorgensen managed to turn the attention into an opportunity to tell her story from her own perspective. She became an entertainer, author of an autobiography, and frequent lecturer on college campuses around the United States, and fostered public awareness about the trans woman experience.1 If we “fast forward” into the 2020s, transgender people have achieved greater visibility and yet still generate public fascination and experience discrimination rooted in transphobia. More generally, transgender experiences include an array of gender crossings: some that are more about the body and some that are more about the stylefashion-dress, and many that involve both/and navigation in-between. Transgender practices include a whole array of mind–body crossings. In the last half of the twentieth century, trans men’s subjectivities received much less media attention than trans women’s. However, in the twenty-first century, there has been some academic interest, community building, and mainstream popular discourse on trans men’s experiences. That said, the popularity of television shows like Transparent and Pose have focused almost entirely on transfemme stories, and mainstream media has focused on trans women like Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner. More trans women have become elected officials than trans men in the United States; for example, most recently, 1christinejorgensen.org.

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US President Joe Biden appointed Dr. Rachel Levine, a white trans woman, as assistant health secretary. A couple of highly publicized examples of trans men’s experiences in North America are Elliot Page and Chaz Bono, both white North Americans: Elliot from Canada, and Chaz from the United States. Chaz’s transition from a lesbian woman named Chastity to a transgender man named Chaz was chronicled in major media outlets in the early aughts. Bono was AFAB and—as the child of Sonny and Cher, the famous singing duo and television stars of the 1960s and 1970s—frequently appeared on his parents’ television variety show in the early 1970s. Hence, the public came to know and adore him as a cute little two-year-old girl who charmed the audience when he spoke to open or close the show. Chaz came out as lesbian when he was eighteen and appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and then announced in 2009 that he was transitioning. As detailed in the documentary Becoming Chaz (2011; World of Wonder Productions), Chaz Bono’s (2011) book Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man, and on his 2011 appearance on the final season of the Oprah Winfrey Show, Chaz explained how from his early life he had never felt comfortable in his body. Puberty was especially difficult when Chaz developed breasts, and their surgical removal during Chaz’s forties was one aspect of the transition process that was most satisfying and gender-affirming. As a public figure who was already widely known (by those old enough to remember the Sonny and Cher Show), Chaz made the decision to tell his story and to contribute to transgender awareness. Similarly, transgender activist/scholar Jamison Green’s (2004) book, Becoming a Visible Man, chronicles his experience of transition, who, like Chaz, was AFAB. He writes about his feelings of identifying as a male within the anatomy of an AFAB body, to his refusal to wear dresses as a child, to his lesbian identity and family relationships, to his decision to undergo the medical process with hormones and gender-affirming surgery to become an FtM transsexual man, which was the terminology more commonly used at the time. Recently, the diaries of writer and transgender activist Lou Sullivan (1951– 1991) were edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma (2019). Also AFAB, Sullivan began his diaries at age ten and, in these early years (and throughout his life), wrote about using fashion to shape gender presentation and perception. “Some night,” he writes as a teen in the mid-1960s, “I’m gonna dress like a boy and walk down some cool streets—being thought of as a boy” (35, original emphasis). The symbolic and phenomenological power of gendered clothing was something Sullivan frequently mentioned throughout his diaries. For example, in early summer 1969 he wrote, “I’m not wearing nylons anymore and am gradually eliminating my dependency on having a purse” (52), and a few years later around 1974, he notes, “Haven’t worn my female clothes since last year, about April. Am making plans to have them cleaned and packed away … It strikes me as a Big Step” (127). Sullivan’s relationship with what he called his “female” clothes was characterized by ambivalence. Sullivan also identified as a gay man, and in particular identified as a “femmy homosexual” (xx). “I want to be a beautiful man making love to another beautiful man,” he wrote in his latter teens (85). His sexual orientation hindered his ability to easily access gender-affirming healthcare within homophobic and heterosexist gender clinics of the 1970s and 1980s. Sullivan was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1986, 154

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and just before he died of AIDS-related complications in 1991, he wrote, “My whole life I’ve wanted to be a gay man and it’s kind of an honor to die of a gay men’s disease” (360). In her introduction to the edited diaries, Susan Stryker (2019) says that Sullivan “offers essentially the same insight into being trans as that offered by the psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan” (9). She went on to explain: The transgender subject is a kind of person who, for Lacan (and, I would argue, for Lou Sullivan) similarly succeeds at the task of becoming a viable non-psychotic subject by entwining the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real—but with a twist. Because of our Imaginary identifications are different from what the Symbolic says our bodies are supposed to mean, we trans folks bring our identities into alignment with the Real by (re)writing them into our flesh; in doing so we come to appear to others as what might be called an “interpretation of our own happiness” that makes our living feel worthwhile. (10) Interestingly, during this same period of time that (mainly white) trans men’s experiences have started to receive more public attention, the study of menswear and the possibility of men’s fashion came out of the closet and became a hot academic topic of study. Regardless of the type of soft assemblage or gendered subject position involved, menswear itself seems to have become a topic that is finally being studied in greater depth, especially in the context of British men’s tailoring.

Menswear Out of the Academic Closet A few examples of works contributing to academic interest in menswear and the process of fashioning masculinity in the context of euromodernity include the following: Christopher Breward’s (1999b) book, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914, unpacks the unmarking of masculinity by challenging the tendency for the male population to be largely excluded from the history of the interplay among consumption, euromodernity, and urban life. He details the ways in which “an underlying insistence on the unmanliness of the whole clothing business” undermined the reality that men, too, were consumers and wore clothes (2). In Sex and Suits, Anne Hollander (1994) argues that the euromodern masculine suit represents a kind of evolutionary streamlining that has become lasting and hegemonic, in part, due to its visual form: The staying power of male tailoring shows how visual form can have its own authority, its own self-perpetuating symbolic and emotional force. This is a modern belief; and the very way modern suits look expresses the thought. (4) Hollander goes on to say that she believes that the history of (euro)modern women’s wear has followed (after modern menswear) a similar path. The flapper look of the 1920s, pants and pantsuits that had become a fixture in women’s wardrobes by the end 155

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of the twentieth century, and jeans all represent examples of clothes that follow this pattern. There are some exceptions to this pattern of streamlining: wedding dresses, bouffant skirts, little girls’ tutus, and so on. Overall, however, a pattern of euromodern streamlining does seem to prevail in womenswear and menswear over time. How does streamlining present itself through color? Again, there are exceptions and ambiguities, but arguably neutrality has become a dominant theme, especially in menswear. In his book Men in Black, John Harvey (1995) analyzes the multiple meanings of black and how it became the dominant color of bourgeois menswear in the nineteenth century. We might say that dark colors helped simultaneously and ambiguously to mark, unmark, and remark hegemonic masculinity. Sociologist Tim Edwards published Men in the Mirror: Men’s Fashion, Masculinity, and Consumer Society in 1997, and then Cultures of Masculinity with a chapter on men’s fashion (2006). His 2011 book Fashion in Focus: Concepts, Practices and Politics also includes a chapter on men’s fashion. Throughout his books, he develops a nuanced argument that “men’s fashion” is a contradictory space that needs to be unpacked and studied in greater depth. Consistent with the circuit of style-fashion-dress discussed in Chapter 2, menswear is a space that is fraught with ambivalence and anxiety. By the late 2000s, men’s fashion had become a hot topic in the field of fashion studies. In 2008 and 2009, two books of readings on men’s fashions were published: one called Men’s Fashion Reader (Reilly and Cosbey 2008) and the other called The Men’s Fashion Reader (McNeil and Karaminas 2009). A number of factors may have contributed to the emerging academic interest in menswear and masculine fashion. One factor was probably the popular discourse around the “metrosexual” or “new” man in the late 1990s and 2000s. Although not a completely new discourse (dating back to dandy discourse in the nineteenth century and the so-called colorful peacock revolution in the 1970s), the timing of the 1990s and 2000s discourse coincided with (1) heightened visibility of men in visual culture since the 1980s, including more media body exposure, as noted earlier, and (2) the emerging field of masculinity studies. One of the major contributions of masculinity studies is a self-reflexive analysis of hegemonic masculinity, along with a conscious attempt to pluralize masculinity into multiple masculinities by way of intersectional lived, embodied, and styled-fashioned-dressed experience (e.g., Connell 2005).

Multiple Masculinities It is a myth that euromodern hegemonic masculinity is masculinity. Pluralizing masculinities, as well as femininities, and thinking beyond these two categories opens up spaces for considering all kinds of intersectionalities and modes of articulation. Historically, the zoot suit is an example of embodied, intersectional production of gender (masculinity), ethnicity, class, age, and musical preference (jazz) that resisted hegemonic white masculinity.

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Zoot Suit In 1931 a New York Times reporter described some of the African American men in Harlem as “fashion plates who were several jumps ahead of the rest of the world” (Foster 1997: 235). In the 1940s, Jelly Roll Morton, known as the father of jazz from New Orleans, proudly described Black men as “suit men from suit land” (White and White 1998: 262). Already identified as “different” in US society and often denied access to its world of masculine privilege, Black—along with Latinx, Chicano/a, Indigenous, immigrant, queer, working-class, and other marginalized folks—used the zoot suit to highlight their differences from hegemonic white masculinity (which inevitably sought to appropriate these styles). Young urban men but also women and trans-people adopted the zoot suit as an enlarged and hyperbolic symbol of masculine power: the suit. By the late 1930s, the term zoot (likely a linguistic reduplication of suit) was used within urban jazz culture and became attached to the “unmistakable style [a long coat with a drapeshape, pleats, and padded shoulders; full pants that could be gathered and pegged at the bottom]” (Cosgrove 1989: 34). By 1943, it had become a potent symbol of ethnic pride and jazz culture in cities ranging from New York to Detroit to Los Angeles. The zoot suit was an integral part of pachuquismo subcultural style from the 1930s to 1950s. Pachucas and pachucos were typically young, “working class and secondgeneration Americans whose parents had emigrated from Mexico to urban centers in California and the Southwest, including Los Angeles and El Paso” (Ramírez 2009: xiii). Resistance to assimilation was expressed and celebrated through style-fashion-dress and language (caló), which incorporated elements of both cultures and nations. The historian Mauricio Mazón (1984) explored the dilemma of both/and for the pachucas: “In Mexico, the pachuco was perceived as a caricature of the American, while in the United States the pachuco was proof of Mexican degeneracy” (5). Pachuco style for young men reflected a particular Mexican masculine national consciousness—and yet one that articulated the ambivalence associated with being caught between two cultures (the United States and Mexico). The historian Catherine Ramírez (2009) argues that the pachuca has largely been left out of historical study of pachuquismo, in part because of how “Chicano history and resistance have been conceived of and represented” (xv). She writes about the “zoot style” of Mexican American women in wartime Los Angeles: The look generally consisted of a cardigan or V-neck sweater and a long, broadshouldered “finger-tip” coat; a knee-length (and therefore relatively short) pleated skirt; fishnet stockings or bobby socks; and platform heels, saddle shoes, or huarache sandals. Many also wore dark lipstick and used foam inserts called “rats” to lift their hair into high bouffant. For extra panache, some lightened their hair with peroxide, sported tattoos, or wore the masculine version of the zoot suit. Also known as “drapes” or el tacuche, this outfit consisted of the “finger-tip” coat, which sometimes extended to the knee, and a pair of billowing “Punjab” pants that tapered at the ankle. (xii)

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There is not one single “zoot style” but multiple (re)articulations of the aesthetic across time, space, and subjectivities. The zoot suit was “put into discourse” in the United States in the 1940s and triggered hegemonic anxieties underlying white supremacy and US nationalism. At the same time, white youth began appropriating the zoot style, and it became widely available commercially despite restrictions (see Figure 7.1). During the Second World War, the zoot suit was criticized by some in hegemonic US society as an affront to American nationalism; it was apparent that racial tensions were a large part of the problem. But there was also a material dimension: fabric was rationed during the war effort, with a mandated 26 percent cutback in the use of wool, in particular. The historian Stuart Cosgrove (1989) explains that “the chino shirt and battledress were evidently uniforms of patriotism, whereas wearing a zoot suit was a deliberate and public way of flouting the regulations of rationing” (9). Tensions most often involved struggles between (predominately white) soldiers, sometimes in uniform, and mostly young Black, Chicano/a, Latinx masculine youth of about the same age. It became fairly common for groups of soldiers to ambush zoot suiters, strip them down to their underwear, and then leave them humiliated in the streets (Cosgrove 1989: 10). Tensions around the zoot suit came to a head in a series of riots in Los Angeles between June 3 and June 13, 1943. There were no deaths and relatively little property damage

Figure 7.1  Jerome Mendelson models a zoot suit in a clothing store in 1942. The look is complete with oversized bow tie, elongated chain, and suspenders. Photo by Marie Hansen/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. 158

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(Ramírez 2009: ix), yet a large number of zoot suiters were arrested. Mazón points out that “what the riots lack in hard incriminating evidence they make up for in a plethora of emotions, fantasies, and symbols” (1984: 1), and these cultural fantasies play out through the style-fashion-dress of the embodied zoot suit. By the late 1940s and in the 1950s (after the Second World War), the hegemonic business suit became a toned-down version of the zoot suit, appropriating its exaggerated size more subtly, through pleated trousers and a fuller jacket cut. Not only was the zoot suit appropriated, but its aesthetic politics were neutralized through the course of hegemonic masculine fashion (which, of course, the zoot suit had earlier rejected through an exaggerated caricature). Figure 7.2 is a good example of the complex negotiation and mediation between the early zoot suit (especially the waistband and pegged pant leg trousers worn by the man on the left) and the dominant suit cut in the late 1940s. The three men in Figure 7.2 are Jamaican immigrants to England, on the ship and about to arrive in Tilbury. They are also wearing what the British call trilby hats. They mark their transition from a former British colony to a hopeful engagement with Britain through entangled masculinities (Kaiser and McCullough 2010). La SAPE in Congo Another compelling case study of multiple, entangled masculinities is the La SAPE movement in Congo. The French concept La SAPE is an acronym for the Societé des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elégantes (Society for Ambiencers and Persons of Elegance). La SAPE is also a slang word for clothing in French. La SAPE has been a tradition in the Congo, a former colony of France, since the 1930s and around the time of the zoot suit’s origins in the United States. La SAPE remains a vital part of visual culture in transnational, urban diasporas associated with the historical entanglements between France and Congo. In popular fiction as well as style-fashion-dress, La SAPE bases itself on a desire to stand out or gain respect (Thomas 2003, 2006). Paris, as the former center of colonial power, still plays at least an imaginary hegemonic role in the narratives of sapeurs (individuals who participate in the La SAPE movement and tradition). As the prevalent popular narrative goes, sapeurs travel to Paris to work and to obtain designer clothes and then return to their Congolese neighborhoods in their new looks. In fact, the designer clothes may be acquired in this way or in other ways (e.g., borrowed, acquired from a relative or friend or perhaps from some form of supply chain or another through various routes in Africa). There has been a great deal of critique of poor or working-class men spending so much on designer clothing. As Thomas (2003, 2006) notes, following critical theorist Homi Bhabha, it is important not to interpret La SAPE as mere imitation of colonizers’ fashion. Rather, it is an expression of colonial ambivalence and a strategy to decolonize the mind; there are entanglements, as with the zoot suit, but there is also a kind of distancing from both stereotypical impressions of African immigrants to France and hegemonic (French designer) fashion norms. In a way, it is an expression of masculinity that strives to beat the former colonizers at their own game. La SAPE can be seen as “a counter-hegemonic 159

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Figure 7.2  From left to right, Jamaican immigrants John Hazel (a 21-year-old boxer), Harold Wilmot (32), and John Richards (a 22-year-old carpenter) arrive at Tilbury onboard the ex-troopship Empire Windrush. Photo by Douglas Miller/Getty Images.

practice that operates symbiotically with the dictates of political authority that serve as a catalyst for its dynamism” (Thomas 2006: 164). Dressing well in Kinshasa, Congo, for example, can even be seen as a “revolutionary act, seemingly compliant at times— because it borrowed its paraphernalia and lexicon from the colonizers and because of its proclivity for aesthethical display—but nonetheless inherently subversive” (Gondola 2019: 162). See Plate 23 for a compelling example of sapeurs’ style. Note the innovative embellishments on the suits and hats. The intersectionalities among masculinity, national identity, and class come through in the following statement by a sapeur who migrated from Congo to Johannesburg, South Africa, a place where he and others in his diaspora experience xenophobia: “When Congolese [men] dress they are telling the public that we are first in fashion and style and class” (de Jong 2018: 113). Intersectionalities are also the focus of the next section on a study of multiple masculinities in the United States. US National Survey of Male Intersectionalities To explore the variety of perspectives on men’s fashion, we became involved in a US national, multiyear, and multi-method study of men’s attitudes toward menswear, 160

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fashion, and media representations of masculinities around 2006 (Green and Kaiser 2016; Kaiser and Green 2016). We began with a series of interviews with men from a range of different ages/generations, class positions, sexual orientation, racial and ethnic identities, among other subject positions and body types. One participant summarized a lot of what we heard from men speaking from a diverse array of intersectional subject positions: “There’s multiple men with different body types, and they’re trying to achieve different things with what they’re wearing” (Latino heterosexual male, aged twenty-seven). We heard from many men of the baby boom generation (born 1946–64) that there should be more men’s body types (not just slim men in their early twenties with sixpack abs) in menswear advertising. Men of this age frequently talked about wanting to look current without looking like they’re trying too hard to look young. One gets a sense of the negotiations of ambivalences at play: navigating deftly between youth and age; caring but not overdoing; looking nice but not too nice; and so on. For example, they said they wanted to represent themselves as “respectable yet casual” and “sharp looking, not loose or wrinkled generally.” The baby boomers’ this-yet-that or thisnot-that responses reveal the need to qualify, mediate, and navigate masculinities carefully. They also offered advice to menswear manufacturers and advertisers: Design the clothes so that they make me feel young again, but design them in a way so that I do not appear too young to others. (Caucasian male, aged fifty-six) Make clothes that are in between what the young people wear and the old styles … Have advertising that depicts men in that age bracket. (white male, aged fifty-seven) More emphasis on comfort and style rather than trying to sell sexuality. I think men my age would be more inclined to purchase a broader variety of clothes if there were more ad campaigns showing men my age in the clothes. (Middle Eastern American male, aged fifty) Stop treating men like sheep. We all don’t like the same colors and designs. Treat men like full time consumers. Women get many choices and stores gear themselves to women shoppers. Men’s clothes are drab and ugly … Men have been made to believe that using bold colors is not acceptable. (white male, aged fifty-one) We also interviewed menswear company representatives to get a sense—recalling the circuit of style-fashion-dress in Chapter 1—of production and distribution approaches to baby boom male consumers. They told us: When we do our advertising, we will still check it against the older consumer to make sure we’re not turning him off, but develop our strategy more so that it gets

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the younger consumer. It’s really both; we don’t want to do anything that would turn him off from the brand. In general, men put more attention into their clothes, not because clothes are important to them per se, and not that they want to be trendy or very fashionable, but most guys put a lot of emphasis on being perceived as current or up to date, and having the right clothes—wearing the right outfit—is part of that, and that is very important to them. In our analysis of these interviews, our research team pursued the dilemma of producing for and marketing to baby boom male consumers, many of whom navigated carefully to maintain just the right degree of unmarkedness. These men do not want to look as though they are trying to be too young, too trendy, or too slick; yet they do want to look good and want to be treated seriously—not ignored or taken for granted—as consumers (Kaiser et al. 2008). The larger research project on menswear and masculinities also revealed that men of different ethnic backgrounds shared some issues of particular concern. Asian American men of different ages told us that they often have a difficult time finding clothes that fit because the standard US sizing system tends to be too “large and tall” for them. We also heard from some Asian American men with relatives in China, Korea, Taiwan, and other locations in Asia that they stock up on clothing there when they travel every other year or so, partly due to the better fit and partly due to ethnic or national identity affiliations. We explored style-fashion-dress issues and intersectionalities further in an online, demographically balanced US national survey, yielding 1,952 usable surveys. Using quotes from the previous interviews, we developed attitudinal statements to which the men responded. We identified the following factors (clusters of statements to which there were similar responses, and exemplify characteristics of behavior): (1) interest in appearance through style-fashion-dress, (2) desire to be unmarked, and (3) participation in gendered risk-taking (Green and Kaiser 2016). We explored the theme of multiple masculinities by looking for differences among the men through intersections of age/ generation, ethnicity, and other factors such as sexuality and location. Navigating masculinities can be described as a process of negotiating the boundaries between what is “safe” and what is “dangerous.” Based on his research with straight and gay Italian men, consumer behavior scholar Diego Rinallo (2007) developed a theoretical model in which men navigate across three zones: There are two kinds of “danger zones” in his model, and in-between is the “safety zone.” The middle, safety zone can be achieved through unmarked style-fashion-dress (Looysen 2008). But if a man moves too far toward more marked ways of dressing (on either side of the safety zone), he moves into a marked territory. One can be in a marked danger zone because he represents too little care of, or attention to, his style-fashion-dress; he is perceived as sloppy or unclean, inappropriately dressed, or hopelessly out of style. The opposite danger zone is marked in a different way: Too much care of, or attention to, his stylefashion-dress labels him as too effeminate or too fashionable. He may be perceived 162

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as gay or as metrosexual, according to Rinallo (2007). Of course, the extent to which there is danger depends on context, as well as the desires, pleasures, and identity issues associated with the boundaries of gender and its intersections with class, sexuality, and other subjectivities. As part of our larger project on menswear and masculinities, we also undertook an in-depth study of men who experiment with gender boundaries and found that many identified a particular safe space/place for such experimentation: Burning Man, an annual festival and experimental artistic project enacted in “Black Rock City,” Nevada the week before Labor Day. Since the early 1990s, an alkaline lakebed desert space has been transformed into a city of tens of thousands of people. Denise conducted ethnographic research at Burning Man in 2007 and 2008 and followed up with men before and after the events to see how experimentation with fashion and gender performance may have influenced their style-fashion-dress in their everyday “default” lives. We learned that Burning Man functions like an “enlarged safety zone.” Articulating the interplay between masculine and feminine style-fashion-dress, the men drew attention to the absurdity of hegemonic masculine norms. (It is important to note that women, too, experiment with style-fashion-dress at Burning Man.) Some examples of male gender experimentation included the combination of bodily markers of maleness (e.g., beards, muscles, genitalia) or masculine dress (e.g., leather chaps) with tutus, pink spandex, lingerie, and faux fur. One research participant, “Kevin,” expressed: “I’m immensely glad that I’m here at Burning Man, because I get to kind of test all these things and try all these things, and it will absolutely inform and transform the way I dress when I get back to California.” Indeed, many men did modify how they dressed in their everyday “default” lives, working in more gender-bending statements and crossing at least gingerly, if not directly, into “danger zones” (Green and Kaiser 2011). The interplay between body and style-fashion-dress in gender constructions and reconstructions can be captured by the idea of performative, soft assemblages, described earlier in this chapter. The interplay between biological and social factors, along with the ambiguities and anxieties that surround gendered appearances, applies to the subject position of sexuality or sexual orientation, considered in the next chapter.

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Style-fashion-dress, like feminist theory and queer theory, challenges and destabilizes categories of gender and sexuality. Visual and embodied, style-fashion-dress is one mechanism through which both subjectivities are culturally constructed and everchanging. The body is not a passive medium that reflects an essence, but rather actively negotiates and performs sexual subjectivities through style-fashion-dress. Like gender, sexuality is not strictly a biological or “internal essence,” but is something we do and perform through the “stylization of the body” across time and space (Butler 1999: xv). The cultural activist and filmmaker Jeremy Horrocks has asked, “How can we ever define what turns people on?” and argues that “human sexuality must be seen as a kind of theatre of the imagination and the body, a theatre in which many forces come together” (1997: 190). This definition of sexuality—as a kind of theater of the imagination and the body—is one that acknowledges the complexity and even the mystery that goes into trying to understand desire or what or who “turns people on.” The body is central to the study of sexuality, but so are emotions and fantasies. Critical theorist Michel Foucault (1977) argued that sexuality was “put into discourse” in the late nineteenth century, and this discourse needs to be understood as exerting power as well as manipulating pleasure through an intertwining of bodies and psyches. The mind–body connection is central to sexuality, which has connotations of subjectivity, and to sexual orientation, which is a way of locating sexuality in a subject position. To be “oriented” in some way (or in multiple ways) typically means to be “going somewhere in space.” This route is not necessarily a linear path, although a “straight and narrow” (heteronormative and monogamous) path dominates hegemonic cultural discourse: from romantic comedies to “happily ever after” fairy-tale narratives to fashion spreads. Hegemonic fashion draws upon sexual desire in multiple ways, including those that are not strictly heteronormative and monogamous. In the 1980s, for example, men’s bodies were incorporated into sexual discourses in new ways. Photographer Bruce Weber, for example, used sexual ambiguity and innuendo as themes in Calvin Klein underwear and jeans ads beginning in the 1980s, exposing men’s bodies and suggesting the possibility of homoerotic and bisexual desire. Cultural theorist Marjorie Garber (1995: 30) asks: “What if we were to begin with the category ‘sexuality’ (or ‘desire’) rather than with a binary opposition between homosexual and heterosexual, or same-sex and opposite-sex partners?” A Möbius strip way of thinking about sexuality as a concept may help to avoid the pitfalls of lapsing first and foremost into binary oppositions, especially in the context of studying style-fashion-dress, in

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which sexuality is a vital component for a number of reasons. First, sexuality is a critical and creative part of our subjectivities, articulated through embodied style-fashion-dress. Sexual identities and systems of desire are complex and cannot be captured by the binary framing of gay versus straight (or, through scientific and clinical discourse, homosexual versus heterosexual). Second, fashioned bodies circulate in everyday life and in popular culture as sexual signs. The distinction between wanting to be and feel attractive and wanting to be and feel sexy is blurry, and it is hard to anticipate how an appearance style will be perceived. Third, clothes—even apart from bodies—can turn people on, because imagination and materiality play such an important role in sexuality. Clothes, like bodies or appearance styles in general, become symbols that are desired or fetishized. Lingerie, high heels, leather, ties or bowties, to name just a few articles of dress, and any part of the body, can be fetishized and could arouse the body and imagination. Fourth, sex “sells,” so the fashion industry and other capitalist enterprises (e.g., films, television, magazines) use bodies and clothes strategically to foster desire. Fifth, sexuality cannot be separated from other subjectivities (e.g., gender, class, ethnicity, religion, etc.). Within queer communities, for example, camp aesthetics function to challenge binaries through juxtaposition: what anthropologist Esther Newton (1979) calls a “philosophy of transformation and incongruity” (105). She describes camp as signifying “a relationship between things, people, and activities or qualities, and homosexuality” (105, original emphasis), and drag is a campy technique style-fashion-dress. Drag shows how gender (along with other subjectivities, like sexuality, class, age, etc.) is not just something one is but rather something one performs. Newton described how drag queens within the gay community use the abstract general epistemology of camp—a cultural sensibility based on irony, drama, and humor—to interrogate gender, as well as sexuality. She noted that camp is style, and it is through the theatrics of camp that the focus shifts from “what a thing is to how it looks, from what is done to how it is done” (Newton 1979: 107, original emphasis). Camp has functioned as a mode of resistance to homophobia and dominant culture. It signifies performance and a sense of community, rather than mere existence (Bergman 1993). Together, drag and camp reveal how gender is not a natural occurrence; it has to be constructed, represented, and performed. Literary critic Marjorie Garber (1992) argues that drag represents cultural anxieties about sexuality, as it disrupts binary gender as well as racial and other codes. In New York in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, drag balls were a space created by and for Black and Latinx (mostly poor or working-class) gay men, transgender, and some lesbian individuals to cross-dress (Cole 2000). On the other hand, bell hooks (1996) has argued that a celebratory focus on drag balls “masks the extent to which the balls are not necessarily radical expressions of subversive imagination at work undermining and challenging the status quo” (282). She uses the example of Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning to explain why the “subversive power” of Black men in drag is undermined by “a racialized fictional construction of the ‘feminine’ that suddenly makes the representation of whiteness as crucial to the experience of female impersonation as gender, that is to say when the idealized notion of the female/feminine 166

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is really a sexist idealization of white womanhood,” something she says is “brutally evident” in Livingston’s film (278). She writes: The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself—its way of life—as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now and make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary afforming that colonized, victimized, exploited, black folks are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power, and pleasure. (hooks 1996: 218–19) hooks reminds us that drag does not happen in a vacuum, and that it is not only about gender and sexuality but also about class, race, and power. For example, Livingston is a white, genderqueer, middle-class lesbian and has been criticized for exploiting the participants in her film and accused of enabling appropriation. bell hooks argues that Livingston’s voyeurism “assumes an imperial overseeing position” (1996: 283). Hence, Livingston documents drag as a practice that glorifies whiteness and makes it easily consumable for white audiences. Through the popularity of the film, voguing came into the public eye, and Madonna appropriated the practice in her song and music video “Vogue,” which came out later in the same year of the film’s release. bell hooks points out that, while Livingston was critical of Madonna, her filmmaking was not any different from the appropriative practices of the musician: “it is precisely the recognition by mass culture that aspects of black like, like ‘voguing,’ fascinate white audiences that create a market for both Madonna’s product and Livingston’s” (1996: 152). Fashion and its representations are an integral part of appropriative systems that rarely have, like hooks (1996) says of Livingston’s film, “greater awareness of the way white supremacy shapes cultural production” (221). Hence, while much of the ongoing, performative, ironic nature of drag—drawing upon the intersection between gender and sexuality—aims to deconstruct rigid, binary oppositions between masculinity and femininity, and gay versus straight, it can also perpetuate class and racial hierarchies in problematic and often ambiguous ways.

Sexual Subjectivities The intersections and overlaps between gender and sexuality are complex. Charlotte Suthrell (2004)—an anthropologist who has done comparative work on issues of sex, gender, and sexuality—observes that the tools of style-dress-fashion (e.g., clothes, accessories, makeup) are extremely helpful in analyzing the similarities and differences among sexual subjectivities. Style-fashion-dress allows for the “play” of identity and selfimage across cultures. Sex, gender, and sexuality ultimately intersect in different ways in 167

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various cultural discourses; they form a knot that is “unusually difficult to unravel, partly because they are so seldom questioned, so integrated into societal structures” (Suthrell 2004: 2). She argues further, based on her research, that these three cannot be fully divided “in the same way that a person cannot be divided” (160). We can imagine stylefashion-dress intimately intertwined with sex, gender, and sexuality, as well as other subject positions. Style-fashion-dress enables articulations of subjectivity, reminding us that clothes mark the boundary between the biological world (the body) and the social world (society, cultural discourse) ambiguously (Wilson 1985). We have to “mind” our appearances to sort through this ambiguity and to navigate through the knot of sex, gender, and sexuality. These three concepts have been debated as attempts to untangle them have generated cultural anxieties regarding nature versus nurture, boundary maintenance, and power relations. If there are ambiguities regarding sexuality per se, Marjorie Garber (1995) argues that bisexuality plays a special role in disrupting the binary opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Using the metaphor of a Möbius strip, as noted earlier, Garber challenges a binary-oppositional approach to the study of sexuality and argues for more nuanced studies of sexuality and desire. Garber notes that it is very complex to articulate bisexuality in terms of style. As a result, it becomes a somewhat invisible or overlooked category of experience. There is a tendency to “look through,” rather than at, bisexuality (Garber 1995: 25). This is consistent with the US survey of men conducted at UC Davis; self-identified, urban bisexual men in the study were the ones most concerned with the idea of being unmarked (i.e., not standing out publicly). We will take this finding up further in Chapter 10 in the context of intersectionalities among gender, sexuality, and place/space. Bisexuality complicates the gay-straight binary, and occupies an ambiguous space style-fashion-dress, that likely requires continual and, perhaps, disparate ways of unmarking appearances, navigating safety and danger zones, and attracting multiple potential audiences. Terms and aesthetics change over time, making age and generation a crucial part of sexual subjectivities as well. The number and changing nature of terms for queer sexualities outside of heteronormative monogamy points to the multiple ways in which individuals can fashion their sexual identities in time and space, which conjoin with lovers and partners, communities, politics, and aesthetics. Acronyms such as LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) or LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and asexual) are meant to be inclusive; however, there are many sexualities beyond this acronym and many other ways of defining the acronym. For example, the ‘Q’ could mean queer or questioning. Other sexualities that do not appear directly in the acronym are pansexual (e.g., experience of sexual attraction regardless of gender), sapiosexual (sexual attraction according to perceived intelligence rather than gender), demisexual (attraction based on emotional connection rather than gender), among others. There are also relational structures that articulate with sexuality, like monogamy and non-monogamy. Polyamory, for example, is often considered an umbrella term for the social practice of non-monogamy, which involves multiple partners (or the potential for multiple sexual partners simultaneously). The 168

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term “queer” has been put forth as the most inclusive term for sexual orientations and practices outside of heteronormative monogamous approaches. While queer was once used in a derogatory way, it has been subverted from homophobic discourse and reframed to capture the obliqueness of sexual paths and practices that are not exclusively straight. Queer theorists point out that queerness is not only a sexual but also a political orientation (Ahmed 2006; Muñoz 2009). Terminology, however, like style-fashion-dress, varies cross-culturally and spatiotemporally. In a transnational context, queer theorists Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett (2011) note that the concept of queer itself has “problems of translation, transmission, transport, and dissemination” and needs to be understand locally and contextually—not just as a one-way influence from the United States (xv). In their book of readings, Queer in Europe, they describe Europe itself as a “queer kettle of fish” with its complicated array of cultural histories. Similarly, queer theorist José Quiroga (2000) argues that queer Latin America cannot just be understood as having imported US versions of identity politics. And feminist scholar Jessica Horn (2006) points out how the European colonial project enforced “new cultural hegemonies” (9) in Africa, including prudish and heteronormative monogamous beliefs. Now engrained culturally, she notes that political leaders often use homophobic rhetoric justified by their resistance to moral corruption from the West. In fact, homophobia is “less an ‘African’ tradition” than one that “has been hijacked into local discourses” (13). The binary opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality is euromodern in its origin. The next section pursues how this occurred and how it pertains to style-fashion-dress.

Binary “Beginnings” and Reversals The terms homosexuality and heterosexuality were coined in 1888. Historian Colin Spencer argues that these terms were created for scientific and clinical discourse because sexologists “needed them for their work in understanding human sexuality” (1995: 11). The history of nonhegemonic sexualities goes back much further, however. By the eighteenth century in Europe, cities such as London had developed small and yet secretive male sexual subcultures such as the “mollies.” Many mollies wore women’s clothing for two different purposes: (1) to foster a sense of identification and community within the subculture, and (2) to signal non-hegemonic possibilities for attracting sexual partners. They met in safe inns and pubs, dressing in styles ranging from milkmaid to shepherdess costumes, riding hoods, gowns, and petticoats; some had painted faces (Cole 2000). In the nineteenth century, gender-based binary frameworks were predominately used to understand sexuality. Sexuality either mapped onto heteronormative gender roles, or it did not. Until 1888, when the terms homosexuality and heterosexuality were invented, the primary term used by sexologists to describe nonnormative sexualities was invert. Benjamin Kahan (2019), however, has pointed out that the introduction of the prefixes 169

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homo and hetero were attempts to standardize a disorganized proliferation of nonce taxonomies for sexuality, not devised to fill a terminological void. A sexual invert was described as a female soul in a male body, or a male soul in a female body. Preference for the “wrong” (same) sex was mapped onto, and confused with, gender identity (Spencer 1995). At the same time, gender was also separated from sexuality: the invert’s pair was the pervert, and the difference between them was gender (they were the same sex and had mutual sexual desire, but were considered distinct types because of their manner of dress and countenance). Invert-based thinking continued in scientific and clinical discourse to the extent that homosexuality could only be viewed as a pathological inversion of the gender binary (Bristow 1997: 24). In other words, there was a perceived disconnect between one’s body and his/ her object of sexual desire: it was considered “natural” to desire the opposite gender, and therefore some kind of “inversion” led some people to desire their own gender. Sexologists such as Havelock Ellis made observations of gay men, whom he called “male inverts,” to determine just what made them different; in case studies, he reported that they focused vainly on their own looks and patterns of adornment and seemed to prefer the color green (Ellis 1938). (The latter observation, it later became apparent, was subject to change in accordance with shifting signs and meanings within the gay community, as well as fashion. Oscar Wilde, for example, was known to wear a green carnation that signaled his sexuality.) Ellis also reported case studies of “sexually inverted” women who enjoyed wearing men’s clothing, as well as those who were “indifferent to dress” and found sewing “distasteful” (Ellis and Symonds [1897] 1975: 88, 91). Historically, there has been a great deal of uncertainty surrounding reports of women who have dressed like men. Many women needed to pass as men in order to survive economically, to avoid physical abuse, or to strive for a sense of equity within a patriarchal world. It becomes very difficult, looking back, to attribute motivation, much less sexual or gender subjectivity. There were a variety of reasons women might have dressed like men, because gender was almost completely conflated with sexuality, and there was an obsession with gender opposition and biological explanations in clinical discourse.

Homophobic Discourses Within scientific and clinical discourse, then, homosexuality was constructed and represented as deviant and unnatural. Once it was named as a psychiatric and psychological illness, it was “back filled” with heterosexuality as its opposite: the “normal,” “healthy,” and “natural” sexuality. Jonathan Ned Katz (1995) has pointed out that the term heterosexual was also an invention and has come to signify “one particular historical arrangement of the sexes and their pleasures” (14). Unlike homosexuality, it became the unmarked norm, and “the idea of a primordial heterosexuality is powerful in our society, a potent sign under whose influence all of us work out our lives, wherever we take pleasures” (14). Homosexuality became a named, marked identity, whereas previously the focus had been on the sexual acts themselves. Characteristics 170

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of homosexual men and women were exaggerated, overgeneralized, and stereotyped. It was not until the 1970s that gay and lesbian activists managed to get the diagnosis of homosexuality removed from the list of mental disorders identified by professional psychologists and psychiatrists. In addition to being pathologized, homosexuality was also criminalized. In the United States, for example, Supreme Court case Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) upheld the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law. It was not until Lawrence v. Texas (2003) that this case was overturned and sexual acts between homosexuals were decriminalized. Some states and cities in the United States also instituted laws and ordinances that banned cross-dressing, as early as 1848 in Columbus, Ohio (which was not overturned until 1974). This criminalization of dress was known in gay and lesbian circles as the “three-piece law” or the “three-article rule”—that is, the requirement that one must be wearing at least three articles of clothing that corresponded with their sex assigned at birth. The three-piece statutes and the ways nonnormative self-fashioning were directly and indirectly criminalized are critical to queer histories. These statutes were directly implicated in the Stonewall Riots, an uprising led by trans women of color and others from the LGBTQIA+ community who were subjected to the rule in a police raid at the Stonewall Inn. Fashion cuts across any clean identity categories, insofar as butches, queens, and trans, among others, were all subject to the three-piece issue and liable to be booked for it whether they identified as a given sex or not. While homosexuality was pathologized in medical discourses, it was also criminalized through its intersections with gender. Popular media discourse also cast people who were labeled homosexual into the role of sexual-deviant. In the 1890s in England, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), a famous author, playwright, social critic, and dandy, was put on trial, convicted, and vilified in the press for “gross indecency with other male persons” (Breward 2010: 728). The British press praised Wilde’s guilty verdict for acts that “attack all the wholesome, manly, simple ideals of English life and set up false gods of decadent culture” (Spencer 1995: 286). The Wilde trials received quite a bit of publicity in the United States as well, and public anxieties about homosexuality (e.g., homophobia) intensified. Media coverage of the trials drew public attention to the idea that homosexuality represented a type of identity, which became visually stereotyped as effeminate (Spencer 1995: 286). Wilde was one of the first public victims of the coining of the term “homosexuality” and the source for homophobic anxieties (Spencer 1995: 20). The image of Wilde’s velvet coats, knee breeches, silk stockings, long cape, and flowing ties became symbolic of how homosexuality was supposed to look. Effeminate, homosexual images such as these continued to generate cultural anxiety well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943) came onto the scene slightly later but, like Wilde, was also renowned for her literary contributions, homosexuality, legal troubles, and outfits (Figure 8.1). In her 1928 book, The Well of Loneliness, the female protagonist, Stephan, is enabled by wealth and privilege to dispose of her “feminine” clothing in exchange for tailored menswear styles. The book is an analog of Hall’s own life and engagement with dress practices, and she and her partner Una Troubridge “used dress and appearance to 171

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express and communicate their lesbian identities” (Rolley 1990: 64). In Figure 8.1 Hall holds a cigarette while wearing a smoking jacket of faux bois (fake wood) silk weave and a pointed lapel collar, paired with a skirt, slicked-back haircut with sideburns, and a monocle dangling from the same hand. She wears a wedding band on her right finger rather than left, and her lover Troubridge sits at her side on an animal hide (perhaps ocelot?), wearing a bob with pointed bangs, a cuff around her right bicep, layered necklaces, stockings, and a dropped-waist dress with bow at the bottom left. Like gay men, lesbians also experienced fashion as a subversive pleasure in their resistance to hegemonic masculinity and femininity, facing the dilemma of fashion as a sign of heterosexual conformity. Perhaps the most profound influence that lesbian culture has had on dominant fashion has been the idea and image of women wearing pants and being fashionable in the process. This practice is essentially a twentiethcentury phenomenon in the United States and Western Europe. In nations such as Turkey and Pakistan, women have traditionally worn bifurcated trousers. Yet women who wore pants in the context of euromodernity were dressing “outside their sex”; it is virtually impossible to know how many women prior to the twentieth century wore trousers, or who “passed” as men for reasons of personal desire, economic survival, or personal safety. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some women lived together in long-term relationships, which in the United States were called “Boston marriages.” The novelist Henry James (1886) used the term in his novel The Bostonians. Lesbian identities became more fully articulated as communities began to form in large cities. In the dress of lesbian couples, the interplay between sameness and difference became an important symbolic theme, as seen with Hall and Troubridge in Figure 8.1 and other representations of the couple from the time (e.g., the 1924 painting Una, Lady Troubridge, by Romaine Brooks depicts Troubridge in a suit and monocle not unlike the one worn by Hall in Figure 8.1). The dominant model of heterosexual difference in modern Western culture made the “pursuit of the whole” very challenging for lesbians wanting to display their union. Lesbian couples who dressed alike simultaneously emphasized their special closeness and their difference from the rest of society. Dress became a vehicle to bind two women together, transforming them from separate individuals into a united couple. Another alternative was to draw on gendered themes in dress—highlighting differences between butch and femme roles—to bring attention to the possibility of active masculine desire within the sameness that lesbianism represents (Rolley 1992). At the end of the nineteenth century, the ideas of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) were especially influential in contributing to homophobic anxieties within and beyond the scientific and medical communities. Initially, he viewed homosexuality as a disorder in human development, but he changed his mind over the course of his career. In his earlier work, Freud characterized homosexuality as an illness and an immature form of sexual development. Freud postulated that infants begin life with an innately bisexual disposition, and normal sexual development (presumably, including genderspecific clothing) led to heterosexuality. Many psychotherapists followed this line of thinking and attempted unsuccessfully to “cure” homosexuality (in individuals who 172

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Figure 8.1  Writer Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), standing at right, was a prizewinning writer whose

novel The Well of Loneliness was originally banned in Britain for its sympathetic approach to female homosexuality. She is shown here with her partner, Lady Una Troubridge. Photo courtesy Fox Photos/ Getty Images.

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had not “matured” sexually) well into the 1970s. Yet in Freud’s later work, he described homosexuality as a variation in sexual development and “a matter of taste, of aesthetics.” He also argued that the “mystery of homosexuality” was not a simple process of gender inversion—that is, binary thinking (Freud [1920] 1963: 157). In general, he regarded the roots of homosexuality as still present, to varying degrees, in the heterosexual adult. This assertion contributed to public anxieties when there were also concerns about the “new woman” of the early twentieth century and, with a declining birthrate, concerns about the future of euromodern nations. Recently, Emma Heaney (2017) argued that transfeminine styling came to signify aesthetic modernity of the “new woman,” further entangling gender, sexuality, and anxieties. The mainstream circulation of Freud’s ideas may have contributed to creative community building among nonhegemonic sexual cultures in the years between the two world wars in Europe. In Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, gay, lesbian, transgender, cross-dressing, and bisexual communities flourished in a vibrant cultural scene. Experimentation with style-fashion-dress was part of this scene. Lesbian and bisexual women wore trousers and men’s jackets with wing collars and wore their hair short. Sometimes the look was topped off with a monocle, as seen with Hall, or a top hat (Cole 2000), as shown in Figure 8.1. Women who had sexual relationships with women were not subject to the same criminalization as men who had same-sex relations. The rationale was that gay men were more subversive in their “threat” to society, which was rooted in many ways to biological reproduction. In Germany, for example, the German Penal Code 5 was put in place in 1871; this code was known as Paragraph 175 (as seen in the documentary by the same name): An unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex or by humans with animals is punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights may also be imposed. (Epstein and Friedman 2000) When the Nazi party came into power in 1933, the enforcement of this law intensified dramatically. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender pubs and gathering places were forcibly closed. Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 gay men were arrested and many were sent to concentration camps, where they were forced to wear pink triangle symbols on their prison garb. In addition to six million Jews who were murdered in the concentration camps, thousands of gay men died as well. Among the survivors, some were reimprisoned after the Second World War ended and the concentration camps were closed, because Paragraph 175 was still law. It was not until 1994 that the law was finally eliminated (Epstein and Friedman 2000). Laws prohibiting sodomy were also on the books in many states in the United States; in 2003, a Supreme Court decision invalidated the laws in those states (about a dozen) where they still existed. Still today, it is illegal to engage in same-sex sexual relations in some nations, states/provinces, and cities around the world. Hence, it is important to remember the extent to which intersectionalities—subject positions such as national 174

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identity, place, generation, and gender—impact sexuality as a subjectivity that is embedded in legal, as well as scientific discourses. Scientific discourse had a strong, anxiety-generating impact on popular cultural discourse in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the United States, with the publication of the Kinsey Reports, which were based on studies that detailed diverse sexual practices. The 1948 publication focused on male sexual behavior, whereas the 1953 publication addressed female sexual behavior. These reports challenged existing assumptions about sexuality and indicated that homosexual and bisexual practices were more common than had been previously believed (Spencer 1995). Although the studies have been critiqued in terms of some technical details, there is no question that they intensified cultural anxieties in popular discourse, generated conversation on topics that had previously been taboo, and opened up possibilities for thinking about sexuality as a continuum rather than as a binary opposition. In her book on bisexuality, cultural theorist Marjorie Garber (1995) critiques the idea of the continuum, indicating that it (1) is too linear to capture the complex, multidimensional realm of sexual experience, and (2) locates bisexuality problematically at the middle of the continuum. Rather than simply being an in-between kind of sexuality, Garber argues that it is a both/and phenomenon. She uses the metaphor of a Möbius strip, introduced in Chapter 1 (and shown in Figure 1.1), to characterize how bisexual subjects may move through time and space in a continuous and circuitous way, without crossing edges. In addition to the cultural anxieties generated by the Kinsey Reports, neo-Freudian psychoanalysts in the 1950s picked up on, and exaggerated, Freud’s conservative interpretations of homosexuality in the earlier part of his career (interpretations, as we have seen, that he later reconsidered more openly and inclusively). Among some of the homophobic writings was a book titled Fashion and the Unconscious, published in 1953 by the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler. Using a link between fashion and homosexuality to condemn both, Bergler derided Oscar Wilde’s clothing style (more than fifty years after Wilde’s death) and that of the Harvard “wannabes” who had showed up in green ties (a sign of homosexuality at that time, likely informed by Wilde’s green carnation) at Wilde’s lectures in the United States (Bergler [1953] 1987). Bergler drew parallels among homosexuality, femininity, and infancy, and he asserted that male homosexual fashion designers’ “infantile and repressed sexuality” was responsible for the “absurdity” of women’s clothes ([1953] 1987). Also occurring in the early 1950s was political organizing for human rights for homosexual individuals, which was known as the homophile movement. One of the founding members of the Mattachine Society, a homophile organization, in Los Angeles was the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, who became famous in the 1960s for designing the topless bathing suit (e.g., the monokini). Indeed, many top European and North American fashion designers (of menswear, as well as women’s wear) of the twentieth century were gay or bisexual: for example, Christian Dior, Cristobal Balenciaga, Willi Smith, Yves Saint Laurent, Halston, Patrick Kelly, and Gianni Versace (Cole 2000). They generally had to keep their sexuality relatively private—until later in the century—in order to be successful. Although Bergler ([1953] 1987) may have been correct in noting 175

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that many male fashion designers were gay, he certainly missed the mark in his analysis of their creative contributions to fashion history.

On the Protracted Coming Out of Heterosexuality Cultural anxieties about sexuality pervaded popular and scientific discourse between the 1890s and the 1950s, as homophobia became institutionalized in US culture. Because dominant (“straight,” white, middle-class) masculinity was generally “unmarked,” or assumed to be the norm without a lot of cultural visibility, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was male homosexuality (along with femininity) that seemed to define what was perceived as not manly. Interestingly, this is sometimes described as the period in which manliness was no longer defined against boyishness (i.e., developmentally), but rather against femininity (i.e., oppositionally). There was a stereotypical, visual image that was supposed to represent male homosexuality, and homosexuality was more fully defined and explained in scientific and clinical discourse than heterosexuality. Katz argues that heterosexuality had a “protracted coming out” well into the twentieth century (1995: 83). Part of the modern legacy of scientific and popular discourse of the late nineteenth century was a “tentative, ambiguous heterosexual” mystique (Katz 1995: 82). Hence, the cultural anxiety. Questions such as the following emerged with this ambiguity: What did male heterosexuality look like? How could one be sure? Although male heterosexuality was the dominant rule, it was unmarked (or not so visible; it was assumed or unmarked) in modern sexual clinical texts. It still had to be “invented.” Ahmed (2006) describes heterosexuality as a “field, a space that gives ground to, or even grounds, heterosexual action through the renunciation of what it is not, and also by the production of what it is” (558). In other words, it requires ongoing work that is not supposed to show. It is “not simply an orientation toward others, it is also something that we are oriented around, even if it disappears from view” (560). She goes on to say that compulsory heterosexuality functions hegemonically like “a straightening device” (562) in order to avoid the “slant” of queer desire. Ironically, despite this distancing of heterosexuality from homosexuality, queer community styles have had a great deal of influence on mainstream fashion. Mainstream fashion is quick to appropriate from queer culture and, in particular, queer cultures of color. And, queer culture is itself complex and appropriative in various ways. White queer culture often appropriates from Black culture, street culture, sex worker aesthetics, and other subcultural styles, as we saw in the earlier discussion of Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris Is Burning.

1960s and 1970s: Social Movements and Sexual Fashions Political activism grew in the 1960s when police cracked down on the assembly of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals in clubs, restaurants, and other public 176

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sites. In 1965 the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis (a lesbian organization) organized the first gay and lesbian protest in the United States. A small group of men and women marched with pickets in front of the White House in Washington, DC. They argued for civil rights, employment equality, freedom from police brutality, and a depathologization of homosexuality. To ensure safety, the men wore business suits (and some wore sun glasses to resist identification), and the women wore dresses, hose, and heels. They reasoned that they needed to look cisgender and of a particular class—that is, “employable”—to make their case. Their picketing occurred without an incident and received very little media attention, but it did mark the desire and ability to engage in public protest (Kohler 2011). The following year, in 1966, a riot broke out at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco between transgender customers and the police (Stryker 2008), and in 1969, the pivotal Stonewall Riots occurred in Greenwich Village (at the Stonewall Inn) in New York. In both cases, trans men and women of color were among the protesters who stood up to the police. Marsha P. Johnson (1945–1992) was integral to the uprising and a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and co-founder, with Sylvia Rivera, of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (see Figure 8.2). As a Black trans woman, activist, and sex worker, she used style-fashion-dress to convey herself and hopes for the future. In Figure 8.2, she attends the second annual Stonewall anniversary march and wears shimmering eye makeup with her brows carefully rounded, in combination with a headband, necklace, silky top, and a halter or bustier beneath. Gay pride parades around the world offer a space for fashion expression through commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, which are frequently cited as an impetus for the gay and lesbian rights movements of the 1970s. The 1960s and 1970s are known for spawning a number of social justice movements: civil rights, Black Power, Chicana/o nationalism, feminist, and gay/ lesbian rights. In the world of fashion, too, and related to the social justice movements, “revolutionary” changes occurred and challenged existing gender, ethnic, sexual, class, and other boundaries. The feminist movement brought to light a lot of the ambivalence that women experienced when facing traditional notions of femininity through fashion. For some lesbians, there were especially compelling reasons to be ambivalent: the differences between butch (masculine) and femme (feminine) fashion that had represented some lesbian communities’ aesthetics were themselves being challenged by androgynous, gender-bending styles. Some writers have reported that there was a general shift in lesbian fashion from butch and femme styles to the “clone” look, featuring sameness, often in the form of flannel shirts and jeans (Wilson 1985). During this period, the butch–femme aesthetic of difference fell out of favor and was critiqued as reproducing heteronormative gender relations (Walker 1993). However, it may be argued that gendered roles within lesbian relationships (i.e., butch and femme roles), like masculine and feminine roles within heterosexuality, are “fugitive rather than fixed,” changing contextually according to temporal, interpersonal, and identity dynamics (Rolley 1992). Further, performance studies scholar Sue Ellen Case recalls and interprets lesbian articulations of style as having been more complex in the 1970s. She offers a personal, 177

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Figure 8.2  American gay liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson (1945–92, wearing headband) and an unidentified person in facepaint, on 7th Avenue South, between Grove and Christopher Streets, at the second annual Stonewall anniversary march (Gay Liberation Day), later known as Gay Pride, New York, June 27, 1971. Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images. 178

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historical memoir of “making butch” in the 1970s in San Francisco lesbian bar culture, extending her previous work highlighting the intersections among class, race, and lesbian identity in the butch–femme aesthetic. Countering the commonplace assumption that lesbian feminism can be characterized unproblematically as “anti-fashion,” Case describes the hippie butch look arising in the 1970s as stylistically combining (i.e., articulating) elements of the classical butch look with “hippie anti-masculine male fashions” (e.g., 1930s men’s clothes and flowing Dietrich-style pants and silk bow ties). As hippie dykes dedicated themselves to new ways of being and appearing, the concept of style became conceptualized as a vehicle for lesbian self-representation. Case argues that the encounter between classic and hippie butches had more impact on new negotiations of style than the stereotypical image of the “clone” lesbian feminist that dominates characterizations of the 1970s (Case 1998). The fashion and beauty industries profited from the appropriation of second-wave feminism’s and lesbian culture’s antifashion, natural discourse. The cosmetic industry developed “natural look” makeup to appropriate the look of wearing no makeup in the 1970s. The practice of wearing jeans and pants also became widespread among women; this practice is a long-term trend with which lesbian and bisexual women and transmasculine people had been experimenting for generations. When the apparel industry replaced the worn-and-ragged jeans of the late 1960s with the designer jeans of the mid- and late 1970s, the lesbian community had to develop some new looks to distinguish themselves symbolically. The late 1960s and early 1970s were also formative in terms of shifts in menswear. Cole (2000) contends that the cultural discourse linking fashion to homosexuality began to diminish with the “menswear” or “peacock” revolution, when menswear became more colorful and included a wider range of fabrics. Accordingly, gay men, as well as straight men, had more license to experiment with fashion. Cole (2000) begins his book, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel, with a quote from Andrew Holleran’s 1978 novel, Dancer from the Dance. The quote describes the obsession of two gay men, living in New York in the 1970s, with clothes: The Clothes! The Ralph Lauren polo shirts, the Halston suits, the Ultrasuede jackets, T-shirts of every hue, bleached fatigues and painters jeans, plaid shirts, transparent plastic belts, denim jackets and bomber jackets, combat fatigues and old corduroys, hooded sweatshirts, baseball caps, and shoes lined up under a forest of shoe trees on the floor; someone had once left the house and all he could tell his friends was that Malone had forty-four shoe trees in his closet … And then there were the clothes that Malone really wore: The old clothes he had kept since his days at boarding school in Vermont—the old khaki pants, button down shirts with small collars (for someone who ran around with the trendiest designers, he loathed changes in style), a pair of rotten tennis sneakers, an old tweed jacket. There was one drawer filled with nothing but thirty-seven T-shirts in different colors. (Cole 2000: 1)

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This vivid description may be idiosyncratic, but it does point to a dominant representation of gay men in popular culture. It especially highlights how white, upper-class males have dominated this representation, despite the involvement of a wide range of ethnic and socioeconomic groups in the gay or queer community. This tendency can be traced to the nineteenth century, and the white, upper-class “aesthetic movement” associated with Oscar Wilde and his gay male followers at Oxford and Harvard Universities. It would also have been the case that upper-class men had relatively more money and mobility to make contacts with other gay men. From a working-class point of view, gay male culture often became associated with leisure class privilege. In the first half of the twentieth century, social class had a tremendous impact on the clothing choices of gay men. Wealthy gay men could buy some acceptance of their difference or afford to create safe private spaces such as the bohemian circles of San Francisco and New York. Middleand working-class men could become socially mobile by associating with men of higher classes, often through artistic or theatrical circles. Remaining culturally invisible, or “passing” as straight, however, was the safest route for many gay men (Cole 2000). Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, working class culture had an influence on LGBTQIA+ style. In the 1970s, as among lesbian and bisexual women, the clone look for gay men included jeans and flannel shirts, although there were other subcultural options (e.g., disco, S&M) available. Garber (1995) observes that the more borders there are to patrol, the more “border crossings” are likely to occur, and the role of clothing and fashion as political statements in this process should not be underestimated (23). She argues, citing the gay publication The Advocate, that style-fashion-dress has contained a more complex function for queer fashion than for heterosexual fashion since the 1970s or so. The straight community did not develop the same kind of complex coding system that was seen, for example, among gay men in the 1970s. Color-coded handkerchiefs, body piercings, tattoos, and other symbols were used strategically to communicate not only male gayness, for example, but also specific sexual proclivities.

1980s and Beyond: Queering Fashion The HIV/AIDS crisis that began in the early 1980s had a devastating impact on the gay community. Activism intensified in response to this crisis, fostering a queer consciousness through groups such as AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP) and Queer Nation. AIDS activists fought for the recognition and visibility of the disease in order to enact crucial, proactive policy-making (e.g., funding for research, outreach) and the reduction of social stigma. Lesbians participated actively in the political organizing and AIDS activism associated with queer politics. In the 1980s, some lesbians in major cities in Europe (e.g., London, Amsterdam) and the United States created a new “subversive” style. Rather than rejecting fashion, they developed the controversial strategy of associating fashion with forbidden areas of sexual experience. Clothing styles included garter belts and bras as outwear, worn with boots and cowboy hats. By the 1990s, younger urban lesbians pursued a different 180

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discourse—one that exposed the constructedness of the natural flannel and denim look, for example, and used fashion as a site for female resistance and masquerade. Experimentation with style and butch-femme roles resulted in alternative selfrepresentations that are in turn appropriated within capitalist economic systems as trendy and chic styles. The process of signaling sexual preference to other women becomes more complicated, yet subcultural knowledge in the form of the ability to read appearance codes provides a sense of pleasure that cannot be easily appropriated. Some pleasure, ironically, can be found in dominant fashion media, in which lesbian consumers manage to read subcultural codes (e.g., short-haired models, motorcycle iconography, mantailored jackets and ties) into “lesbian window ads.” Lesbians “in the know” can read and enjoy these ads subversively, challenging the reading practices of straight culture while also reinforcing the dominance of heterosexual fashionability. From a queer of color perspective, Jose Muñoz (1999) describes the practice as “disidentifying” with dominant culture. Hence, appropriation “cuts both ways.” The political edge of style becomes diffused when it enters the fashion world, but there also seems to be a re-alignment of butch–femme aesthetics within the lesbian community based in part on a new femme, fashionable assertiveness (Clark 1991; Walker 1993). Heteronormative femininity tends to be more visible or marked than heteronormative masculinity, which defines itself primarily in terms of what it is not (gay, feminine). Interviews conducted with heterosexual cisgender men in the 1990s indicated that “identity not” is a major theme. Some cisgender men made comments that were overtly homophobic. For example, one commented: “My dad … saw a shirt of mine hanging in the closet, and he thought a queer would wear it,” and he stopped wearing the shirt as a result (Freitas et al. 1997). As we saw in Chapter 7 in Diego Rinallo’s model of safety (unmarked) and danger (marked) zones, visible signifiers of male heterosexuality became constructed as “safe,” but the boundaries between safety and danger were sufficiently tenuous and anxiety-producing to require a continual process of unmarking—by styling-fashioning-dressing in ways that were not homosexual (Freitas et al. 1997). But how was it possible to gauge this, especially in a period when many gay or bisexual men necessarily, for the sake of safety, styled-fashioned-dressed their bodies in ways that enabled them to “pass” in heteronormative contexts? In this context of safety zones, being “in the closet” became more than a metaphor; it became an epistemology: a way of knowing, a kind of consciousness or subjectivity, or a way of looking at the world (Sedgwick 1990). Style-fashion-dress became an important part of this in-the-closet epistemology, because it was necessary for nonheteronormative individuals to know how to navigate safely from homophobia while simultaneously communicating and developing a sense of community with other LGBTQIA+ individuals. By the early 2000s, popular cultural discourse had begun to grapple more openly with LGBTQ themes—often in a comedic way. In the United States, Ellen DeGeneres starred in the sitcom Ellen (1994–8) and made television history in 1997 when she “came out” as a lesbian personally and through her character on the sitcom.1 Oprah Winfrey 1https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001122/bio

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played the role of her therapist in the episode. The episode triggered cultural anxieties and homophobia, and the show was cancelled shortly thereafter. The reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–7),2 which was revived by Netflix as Queer Eye (2018–present), depicts five gay men who perform a makeover on a hapless straight guy in need of fashion and other lifestyle advice. Media studies scholar Katherine Sender (2006) points to Queer Eye as an example of both “the newly public acknowledgement of gay taste and consumer expertise” and an opportunity for neoliberal expansion. When coupled with the “crisis of masculinity” in the early aughts, gay men take on the role of transforming heterosexual cisgender men into someone who might “attend to their relationships, image, and domestic habitus” (131). Sender (2006) argues that “remaking of the straight guy as not only an improved romantic partner—the metrosexual—but a more flexible, employable worker” is the actual goal of the series (131). The metrosexual label attempted to define a fashion space in-between gay and straight, which created a sense that hegemonic masculinity itself was in a state of flux. Class ascendancy was more possible than ever for straight, white, cisgender men. This was not the first time such movement or decentering had occurred. (The dandy of the nineteenth century and the “New Man” of the 1980s [see Edwards 1997, 2006, 2011] had made such strides but to a less culturally visible extent.) Meanwhile, since the 1980s, hegemonic heterosexual fashion has become increasingly blatant in its circulation of sexual imagery, leaving less and less to the imagination—even on men’s bodies. Menswear (e.g., underwear, jeans) advertising has shown increasing amounts of skin on male fashion models between the 1980s and the end of the twentieth century (Thompson 2000). Accordingly, questions arose regarding the homoerotic gaze in mainstream fashion: Is the fashion gaze necessarily heterosexual? Calvin Klein and Abercrombie & Fitch ads of the late 1990s and early aughts featured men in suggestive poses that could be interpreted as gay or bisexual, as well as straight. Similarly, hegemonic women’s fashion magazines have represented female fashion models together in homoerotic poses. The issues of sexual pleasure via viewing are complex: Fashion imagery (popular discourse) and queer theory (academic discourse) alike have challenged the ideas that hegemonic (heterosexual) masculinity is the only viewing gaze that matters, and that hegemonic (heterosexual) femininity is the only object of a desiring gaze. There are multiple, flexible subjectivities of desire. Alongside the political activism, queer theory and sexuality studies have emerged as vibrant interdisciplinary fields aimed at complicating rigid or fixed sexual categories (e.g., gay versus straight). The study of style-fashion-dress has been important in doing so, because it is a system that brings to life the intersectionalities among sexuality, gender, and other subject positions that are performative—that individuals do and experience through subjectivity in everyday life ([1990] 2006). LGBTQIA+ folx have necessarily had to find their own ways of identifying and circulating sexual signs and of interacting with fashion images and stereotypes.

2https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0358332/plotsummary

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Fashion studies scholars Kelly Reddy-Best, Dana Goodin, and Eulanda Sanders (2018) encountered this while conducting research for a fashion exhibition at the Iowa State Clothing and Textiles Museum, titled Queer Fashion & Style: Stories from the Heartland (February 1–April 14, 2018). Research participants were invited to loan items to the exhibit, and Reddy-Best, Goodin, and Sanders extrapolated themes from open-ended interviews with queer-identified women in the midwestern United States. One of the themes, “Fitting the Stereotype,” captures the complex interplay between hegemonic stereotypes, individual agency, authenticity, and community self-determination. ReddyBest and Goodin (2020) explain: “Some of the women described times in their lives when they felt that they needed to prove their identity or make their sexuality more salient through the use of stereotypical dress or body modifications. Numerous women explicitly described or brought out example garments from their closets that they felt were stereotypical looks worn by someone in the queer community” (124). The LGBTQIA+ community has also actively created sexual signs and cultural discourses that are distributed within their own communities (e.g., zines, videos, books). This community-based circulation of signs and discourses has intensified with telecommunications, including the internet, social media, and cable channels. For example, the now-defunct clothing brand Dykes in the City (DITC) was founded in 2004 by Nicky Cutler, a teacher-turned-designer who wanted to reclaim the pejorative ‘dyke’ by creating a brand that could empower lesbians to connect with one another and convey themselves through fashion. The graphic logo was vital to this process: Designed from the acronym DITC (with an upside-down triangle as the dot of the i), it quickly became an identifiable signifier in lesbian communities and appeared on everything from trucker hats to messenger bags, jewelry, the body (tattoos), sweatbands, stickers, pins, and garments. In the media, DITC was promoted in magazines like Curve and Velvetpark and on television shows like The L Word and others that aired on the HER network. The DITC tank top and trucker hat in Plate 24 were worn together as an assemblage that conveyed political, aesthetic, and social sentiments of their time. The hat and camouflage undershirt-style tank top are from DITC’s 2005–6 “do ask, do tell” collection. The tank top depicts a femme silhouette in pigtails holding a bomb dripping in blood, with text on the backside that reads “No to bombs, yes to bombshells” (the logo replaces the “o” in “bombshell”). The design of this ensemble, and the larger collection that it was a part of, appropriated military aesthetics (e.g., camouflage) and inverted the language of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DATS) official US military policy (1994–2011). By posing the literal opposition—“do ask, do tell”—the design employs the mechanics of counter-discourse, inverting the dominant form and rephrasing in the positive. However, the design is also performing something more slippery and complex than inversion, because it is not actually about a desire to allow LGBTQIA+ people to serve in the military, but instead a critique of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent military action. Further, the “no to bombs, yes to bombshells” at once cites and critiques the militarized gendering of ballistics, like the masculine codenaming of atomic bombs “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.” More than an inversion, the design and its visual-material 183

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signifiers are manipulating and re-appropriating terminology and aesthetics in the interest of political protest. The DITC logo was the medium through which the pedagogical and political work of re-signifying the term dyke was done. Typically, trademarked fashion logos are associated with capitalism, marketing, brand identity, and consumer loyalty. While the DITC logo is no exception, it performed additional political work as a rallying cry for queer reclamation and visibility in an antiwar context. However, the identity-based specificity of the logo—which had empowered the logo to do this political work—was limiting. The logo began to lose traction as the brand’s founder came to identify as transmasculine. “I began to question my own identity as a dyke,” Cutler explained in an interview. “I could no longer support the name of my own company because my own thoughts of myself had altered so much so I decided to end it after 2011.” Sexual subjectivities articulate in complex ways with gender, both of which are dynamic. A second way LGBTQIA+ folx have interacted with fashion media is to direct homoerotic desire toward mainstream media images. Especially since the 1980s, as noted above, a general “queering” of hegemonic fashion—that is, a mainstream “flirting” with homoerotic desire—has made this more possible and has made options for subjective desire, overall, more flexible. Advertisers are aware that there are diverse kinds of desire and have often strategically included signs that would appeal to homoerotic desire in mainstream ads while also being careful to avoid turning off the larger, mainstream, and possibly homophobic market. Examples of this kind of gay “window advertising” in the past thirty years or so in the apparel industry include androgynous images of women in fashion ads (e.g., women with short or spiky hair in pantsuits or black leather) and shirtless men in suggestive poses. This general queering of fashion was not without its new challenges. A fundamental dilemma emerged: how to appear fashionable and signify one’s own LGBTQIA+ subjectivity. The ambivalence associated with identity and difference, or being marked and unmarked in various ways, is not unique to sexual subject positions, as we have seen throughout this book. In fact, all subjectivities are sexual in some way: intersectionality is not an aftermarket complication but a constitutive principle. The simultaneous need for a sense of identity with others and a sense of social difference from some others is intersectional; the entanglements are everywhere and always emerging. And the system of style-fashion-dress is pleased to comply with subjectivity as the site of agency that navigates entanglements—often ambivalently, at times optimistically, and at other times curiously.

Gazing Subjects and Positionalities Issues of positionality come into play, then, as we think through sexuality in relation to style-fashion-dress. Sexual subjectivities involve dressing, gazing, and desiring. Recalling the metaphor of the Möbius strip, we can think about sexual subjectivity and subject position as two components of a united experience. Sexual subject positions bring 184

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intersectionalities to life: they clarify how sexual object choice may be “sticky” (Ahmed 2006), but is not necessarily fixed. Indeed, the complexity and proliferation of labels, looks, and communities used to identify sexual subject positions and subjectivities attest to the role that mind–body desires and fantasies play. Transnationally, colonial fantasies have historically influenced how and why certain bodies, clothes, and fabrics have been imagined and represented in dominant culture as sexually “exotic,” for example. Systems of looking, including the issue of the gaze, become intertwined with power relations. The question of which sexual signs circulate and whose fantasies are represented largely depends, of course, on who has control over the production and distribution of images and ideas. Perhaps it is not too surprising, then, that it has most often been women’s bodies and clothing that have circulated as sexual signs in cultural discourse since the nineteenth century in euromodern cultures. Explanations of fashion change have been developed, accordingly, in terms of heterosexual female sexuality. The theory of “shifting erogenous zones” is a case in point. The ideas behind this theory were first developed in the 1930s by the psychoanalytic psychologist J. C. Flugel. He based his explanation of sexual expression and, indeed, fashion change on human ambivalence regarding modesty and display of the body. He suggested that parts of the body obtained erotic appeal (Flugel 1930: 160). Later, the British historian of clothing James Laver actually named the theory using the phrase “shifting erogenous zone.” Like Flugel, he focused almost exclusively on the female body, suggesting that fashion becomes a kind of game of “hide and seek”—first covering one part of the female body and then another. This game, he argued, kept those gazing (presumably heterosexual men) at the female body by maintaining these gazing subjects’ erotic interest. Parts of the body are revealed, and “once a focus of interest loses its appeal another one has to be found” (Laver 1969: 241). Laver used the example of exposure of women’s backs in the 1930s as evidence for his argument; however, fashion historian Valerie Steele (1989) has pointed out that the shift in emphasis in the early 1930s from the legs to the back probably had less to do with Flugel’s and Laver’s theories than with (1) the influence of swimsuit designs, cut to maximize sun tanning of the back, and (2) the censorship of Hollywood films in 1934, which prevented women’s dresses from being cut too low in the front (and hence the shift to the back). Moreover, she has questioned Laver’s idea that the “Erotic or Seduction Principle” governs women’s clothes, whereas the “Hierarchical Principle” (dressing to indicate one’s position in society) governs men’s clothes. While she acknowledges the role that clothing plays in sex appeal, she does not consider this the “primary purpose of women’s dress” (Steele 1989: 42, original emphasis). Similarly, sociologist Fred Davis raised some fundamental questions regarding erogenous zones: What are the erogenous zones? Are they, as the theory’s implicit biological determinism would lead one to believe, the same everywhere? For all time? Questions of cultural relativism and gender stereotyping are almost impossible to accommodate in the shifting erogenous zone theory of fashion change. (1992: 85–6) 185

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From a feminist cultural studies perspective, one of the major flaws in the shifting erogenous zones theory is its assumed subject position and biological determinism. The theory assumes a focus (gaze) on the female body and from the subject position of heterosexual men who are turned on by the sight of body parts that have obtained erotic capital by being covered for a while. Where is the agency of anyone else (e.g., gay or bisexual men and women, heterosexual women, transgender individuals) who interprets images of sexy women in ways that differ from hegemonic ways of thinking about sexualized being or desire? And what about the possibility of male, transgender, and nonbinary bodies being perceived as erotic or seductive? Certainly, the proliferation of shirtless male fashion models since the 1980s cannot simply be explained by a “Hierarchical Principle.” Or, one might wonder, had the male body been covered up so long that it, too, had gained sufficient erotic capital to become an object of a desiring gaze? Had the male body become marked (through concealment) erotically? To the extent that male power (the Hierarchical Principle) sustains itself through unmarked style-fashion-dress, it makes sense to engage in a critical analysis of those instances when male bodies become sexually marked—and how and why. The shifting erogenous zones theory also does not even begin to explore intersectionalities between sexuality and race, ethnicity, class, body size, age, and so on. However, perhaps the theory could be updated, rehabilitated, and revised to analyze the marking and unmarking of multiple gender and sexual subjectivities as processes, rather than zones per se. Together, marking and unmarking—along the lines of a Möbius strip— would need to be analyzed through an understanding of multiple intersectionalities. Such a project is beyond the scope of this chapter, but could be a fruitful area for future consideration at the interface between fashion studies and feminist cultural studies.

Sexuality through Intersectionalities In many ways, sexuality is a topic and process of subject formation (including subjectivity and subject position alike, Möbius style) that especially demands attention to intersectionalities. Years ago, when conducting research with Anthony Freitas and Tania Hammidi (Freitas et al. 1996) on appearance style and sexualities, we were all struck by the extent to which the gay and lesbian individuals we interviewed emphasized intersectionalities when they talked about sexuality and style. They volunteered information about class, race, ethnicity, age/generational, issues, as well as sexuality and gender. Somehow sexuality seems to open up intersectionalities. At the same time, hegemonic stereotypes persist; they are not fixed, but they are “sticky.” Magazines such as Playboy and the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue historically had kept the heteronormative male gaze on primarily white women with specific thin and athletic body types wearing revealing bathing suits; however, recently both have had notable queer, disabled, and modest fashion inclusions. Romantic comedies perpetuate heteronormative monogamous narratives with young, fit, fashionably dressed male and female pairs. Stereotypes exist, too, about the “model gay consumer,” who is represented 186

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as an affluent, white, and thin with fashionable taste as evident, for example, in Out magazine (Sullivan 2011). At the same time, the LGBTQ community—with an array of complicated and sometimes contradictory politics that require ongoing negotiation—strives to be inclusive beyond hegemonic stereotypes. Sexuality intersects with other subjectivities through the nexus of the body, the imagination, and community building, as well as multiple modes of being and becoming through style-fashion-dress. As noted throughout this chapter, dominant culture has put sex into discourse in a way that unmarks heterosexuality in an uncomplicated way. Further, the euromodern binary construction of heterosexuality versus homosexuality, emerging from scientific and clinical discourse, cannot capture the complexity of sexual desires and experiences. It is hard to anticipate, much less explain, what turns people on. Yet sexuality is much more than being turned on. It also includes a personal sense of agency and identity and a need to belong and express connections with others through time and space.

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CHAPTER 9 DRESSED EMBODIMENT

Fashion is animated by living bodies that are styled and dressed every day. As discussed in Chapter 2, bodies inevitably appear, and these appearances have form—that is, size and shape—as well as movement. Bodies are mutable and change physically and aesthetically as they move through time and space. In this chapter we consider embodiment as part of subjectivity and subject formation, all of which are informed by lived experiences of physicality, dis/ability, “beauty,” body size, and shape. These embodied experiences intersect with other dimensions of subjectivity like race, class, gender, etc. Macrocultural forces articulate with individual embodied actions to produce style-fashion-dress. Joanne Entwistle has argued that “different techniques of dress produce different bodies” (2002: 134); however, these techniques vary. How fashioned bodies move through space is shaped by the designed world and social mores, which articulate with an individual’s dis/abilities, body size, and other physical circumstances—some of which are fluid and changeable, and others may be more permanent or chronic. As fashion studies scholar Chris Hesselbein (2019) notes, “Our bodily movement are shaped through the negotiation with our social and material surroundings,” (2) and of course these surroundings are shaped by power relations and transnational flows. The body itself is both biological and symbolic (Kaiser 2001: 79), which makes it “uneasy territory” as Elizabeth Wilson (2003) reminds us, because it “links the biological body to the social being [and] it forces us to recognize that the human body is more than a biological entity. It is an organism in culture, a cultural artifact, event, and its own boundaries are unclear” (2–3). Individuals manage their appearances daily through an interplay between agency and structure, self and other. Some bodily manipulations make immediate visible impact (e.g., application of makeup, manipulation of hairstyle, or certain types of plastic surgeries), while others may be hard to notice from day to day (e.g., the process of aging, dieting, or even Botox injections). Body modifications are often categorized as temporary, semipermanent, or permanent; however, as a biological entity, nothing about the body is “permanent” or fixed. The body surface is also manipulated and styled through use of materials like clothing and accessories, which are animated by and through the body. Scholars in fashion studies have noted that clothes without bodies create a sense of dis-ease (Wilson 1985). “Clothes without a wearer,” Wilson writes, “whether on a secondhand stall, in a glass case, or merely a lover’s garments strewn on the floor, can affect us unpleasantly, as if a snake had shed its skin” (2). Historian Anne Hollander (1993) considers the other side of this uneasiness—that is, the body without clothing. She argues, “In art the body without its clothes is a pale shadow of its clothed self. But the body shown either partially nude or

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closely accompanied by cloth and clothing can carry a more complex message about itself and its dress. The dialectic of clothes and body is more sharply focused when both appear” (236). The whole and part relationships intimated by the hyphens in Tulloch’s concept of style-fashion-dress acknowledge this uneasiness and complexity of clothing without or in-between bodies or, conversely, the body without or in-between clothes. Dress comes into being through styled bodies and processes of self-fashioning. The body, however, is involved not only in the wearing of clothing but also its making. Returning again to the circuit of style-fashion-dress makes consideration of production requisite, as well as embodiment of regulation and distribution of fashion items. In previous work, Kaiser offered the concept of “minding appearances” as a way of thinking about embodied epistemologies (i.e., ways of knowing) that produces knowledge by experimenting with boundaries (2001: 88). Ultimately, by minding appearances, individuals can acknowledge and grapple with their multiple intersecting identities (97). Entwistle has built on these ideas by considering dress as experience, “a subjective act of attending to one’s body and making that body an object of consciousness and is also an act of attention with the body” (2015: 30–1). In this chapter we consider how the dialectic between dress and the body contributes to embodied subject formation within the circuit of style-fashion-dress. As Hollander points out, this ongoing dialectic never resolves itself, and “fashion has perpetually re-created an integrated vision of clothes and body together” (1993: 85). Like other subject positions, embodied subjectivities such as dis/ability and body size are social constructs that articulate in meaningful ways with production, consumption, distribution, and regulation. As discussed in previous chapters, these articulations are often shaped by ambivalences, ambiguities, and cultural anxieties, in addition to larger power relations within economic systems.

From Phenomenology to Dressed Embodiment The study of embodiment arguably begins with the emergence of phenomenology in the discipline of philosophy. A phenomenological approach is a kind of “style of thought” (Farina 2014: 50) that redresses the mind–body disconnect by valuing the body as a site of knowledge production that intimately ties human beings to the physical world. Lived experience and bodily knowledge are at the core of phenomenology, which emphasizes the first-hand conscious apprehension and experience of phenomena. While the philosophical roots of phenomenology are attributed to Edmund Husserl in the early twentieth century, it was French philosopher Maurice Jean Jacques MerleauPonty who argued that “bodily perception is the core of all knowledge and all relations with the surrounding world” (Farina 2014: 61). Merleau-Ponty (1962) wanted to better understand the relation between mind and body and did so by examining embodiment as a kind of fraught articulation point. Embodiment begins with sensation, which he argued is a unit of experience that facilitates the study of perception. The body is where sensation begins and ultimately where perception occurs (240). According 190

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to Merleau-Ponty, “perception ends in objects” (77)—in other words, the materials of expression. While Merleau-Ponty did not deal with fashion explicitly in his work, he later began to consider how artists and the works they produced were part of a phenomenological form of creative expression. Arguably, individuals engage in a kind of creative production every day through the phenomenological experience of getting dressed and moving through the world. As Entwistle notes, “Dress operates on the phenomenal body,” which is in a dialectical relationship with fashion and is therefore crucial to any consideration of embodiment (2002: 134). Merleau-Ponty also put forward the concept of “body schema” to clarify the relationship between the body and sensation. This “theory of perception” (139) was “first understood to mean a compendium of our bodily experience” (113, original emphasis), but is actually about the body in space in a particular situation—that is, “a way of stating that my body is in-the-world” (115). Movement is a critical dimension that apprehends space and time (117), and the relationship between the body and space is transformed by movement (178). Merleau-Ponty writes, “Our body is not primarily in space: it is of it … I am not in front of my body, I am in it, or rather I am it” (171–3). One strategy for moving through space are motor and perceptual habits that “enable us to understand the general synthesis of one’s own body” (175). For Merleau-Ponty “all senses are spatial” (252), and space is only ever unified through the “interplay of the sensory realms” (258); this interplay is always at the whim of the dimension of time (278). He defines space not as a container or setting but as a connector, “the means whereby the position of things becomes possible” (284). Recently, fashion studies scholars have begun to argue that the field has taken an “embodied turn” (Davidson 2019: 329). Davidson argued that a kind of “mainstreaming” of embodiment in humanistic academic disciplines over the past decade has legitimized longstanding work on embodiment in fashion studies (330–1). This larger embodied turn has created possibilities for rethinking the more material focus in the field to consider bodily experience in clothes. Hesselbein argues that we must now move away from our scholarly emphasis on the “dressed body” to consider instead “dressed embodiment” (2). Whereas the “dressed body” considers fashion on the surface as a kind of boundary or augmentation, “dressed embodiment” integrates dress and appearance management with the moving, living, animate body. Hesselbein (2019) explores these ideas from the perspective of catwalk models in New York City within the context of their coaching and the embodied performance of the spectacle that is the New York Fashion Week runway. Through ethnographic vignettes, he shows how dressed embodiment is produced through pressurized fashion week performances. The heightened visibility of the runway, combined with the variability of event spaces and other challenges like slick flooring, teetering heels, a designer’s desired aesthetic of gait, and other unexpected manipulations of the body through materials and spaces, demands a particular kind of embodied knowledge and performance. This knowledge is learned and produced in catwalk schools, which are often connected to modeling agencies within a networked economic world where models’ bodies are trained and traded in service of a designer or brand’s image, season’s collection, advertising 191

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campaign, and other interlocking systems of representation. While magazine catalog and editorial shoots represent an inanimate body frozen in photographic form, fashion runways bring clothes to life on live bodies that appear before those with financial clout, whether the buyer for a department store, the editor of a fashion magazine, or a wealthy client. In European and American fashion systems, the embodied performance of clothing on the catwalk has played a critical role in the economic circulation, material production, and distribution of fashion across the globe. Over the past twenty-five years, rapid development in computing, telecommunication systems, digital rendering, and photographic technologies has enabled the production and circulation of new ways to represent dressed embodiment. Websites became possible in the 1990s, social media in the aughts, and artificial intelligence (AI) renderings in the 2010s; all of these have allowed both brands and individuals to represent dressed embodiment in new ways. Prior to this, film and television had been the platform to represent bodies in motion, with the entertainment industry largely in a position of power to determine which bodies were visible and how they would be represented. If we look to the circuit of style-fashion-dress, we would consider how characters in a Hollywood film, for example, have been produced through a costume designer, script, and director; that their embodied performance also produces, through representation, intersections of different subject positions—all of which is consumed by the moviegoing public, who has accessed the film through some kind of distribution network that facilitates their consumption. Now, with the advent of social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Vimeo, among others, networks of production and distribution have emerged and enable a wider range of self-representations.

Abstracting the Body and Representing Embodiment New systems of representation augment a longstanding practice of abstracting and representing the body in the design, production, distribution, advertisement, and sale of garments and accessories within the European and American fashion industries. Engraved and sometimes hand-painted fashion plates from the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries represented clothing on illustrated bodies. Subsequently, in the twentieth century, fashion photographs—many of which were airbrushed and later photoshopped—manipulated the appearance of the body-in-clothes. All of these abstractions circulated in the fashion media. Bodies are also materially abstracted in the production of everyday appearances: heels for height, shoulder pads for a stronger silhouette, or shapewear undergarments like corsets, girdles, or control-top nylon tights, to name a few. The manufacturing of fashion items begins with the design process, which also means abstracting the body: first through fashion sketching and illustration, draping onto a dress form and/or flat patternmaking, grading patterns according to a sizing system, and eventual production through garment construction. Once the garment reaches a retail space, the body is abstracted yet again in the form of a mannequin. The mannequin stands in for a body, as a kind of “performative 192

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sales tool” that has produced certain beauty ideals, informed by representations of gender, age, body size, and race (Chapin et al. 2019: 80). According to fashion historian Alison Matthews David, mannequins are, like dress forms, a kind of “body double” and “a key technology in the construction of normative bodies” (2018: 5). But what is a “normative” body? As duGay et al. have argued, “Meaning is constructed—given, produced—through cultural practices: it is not simply ‘found’ in things” (1997: 14); therefore, what other cultural practices—particularly within the circuit of style-fashion-dress—have produced “normative” bodies? How did tall, thin, youthful, white, female bodies come to represent the unmarked, “normative” body—what Minh-Ha Pham (2015) critically describes as the “sign and standard of fashionability” (166)—that dominates runways and fashion magazines?

Anthropometrics and Sizing One means of producing “normative” bodies is through the development of a standard— in the case of fashion, the standardization of garment sizing. The idea of a sizing system is to ensure “good fit” for a wide range of bodies. Fit is one way of describing the relationship between the body and clothes; however, the term problematically suggests binary ways of thinking—right versus wrong fit, good versus bad fit. Often, fit is framed as something objective, functional, and quantifiable; however, thinking of fit in these terms ignores and erases the aesthetic and social possibilities of diverse approaches to fit that consider both/and thinking instead of either/or (i.e., good versus bad fit). Fashion studies scholar Minh-Ha Pham (2015) points out that the concept of “perfect fit is a racially unmarked and seemingly neutral category of dress style consistent with aesthetic norms of middleclass respectability. It depends for its meaning on the social construction of a binary other, the classification of the bad fit that has historically included the oversized zoot suit, the too-tight ‘hoochie’ dress, the too-voluminous burqa, the saggy jeans, and the extra-large hoodie sweatshirt” (168). In other words, “bad fit has been a salient aspect of the visualization of otherness. As a visual cue, it indicates a mis-fit of the individual to the social norms, practices, and values that clothing signifies” (169). For designers, achieving a particular fit must consider the relationship between subject formation and production. Material fashion ultimately ends up on bodies— whether “body doubles” like the mannequins found in retail spaces or museums, living bodies used for the purposes of runway or print promotion, or individuals in their physical and digital everyday lives—we wear clothing and see it worn. While these garments do inevitably appear, as discussed in Chapter 2, their appearance is the product of a complex chain of production, typically from fiber to fabric to the finished fashion item. Along the way, the body is considered and reconsidered, policed and regulated, abstracted and reimagined in aggregate. In ready-to-wear or factory-made clothing, bodies are first considered in the development of a pattern or template from which two-dimensional fabric is cut in order to be seamed together in the production of a three-dimensional garment. This pattern is typically created from either draping, which involves manipulating fabric directly on a 193

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dress form, or flat patternmaking, which typically uses a foundation pattern known as a sloper that represents a basic tailored shape that fits snugly to the contour of a body. A fit model is often employed during the iterative design process to ensure that the garment design works on a moving body. Both draping and flat patternmaking ultimately result in a pattern, which is then graded to produce a range of sizes to accommodate differently sized bodies. Sizing and pattern grading systems are often informed by anthropometric data—that is, the systematic collection of body measurements of a particular population, which is then used to classify bodies through a sizing or grading system. Karen Labat (2007), a scholar specializing in sizing and fit of apparel, explains that “the theory is that clothing produced using a standardized sizing system based on scientifically derived anthropometric data will provide consumers with a product that they can rely on to fit in the same way, purchase to purchase” (89); however, Labat notes that 70 percent of women in the United States and half of men are dissatisfied with the fit of apparel. Industry compliance to a sizing standard in the United States is voluntary, and furthermore, the standard adopted in 1958 by the National Bureau of Standards was based upon anthropometric data from a highly unrepresentative sample: primarily white, female volunteers between the ages of 18–30 (94–5). Thus, the sizing standard in the United States does not account for variability in body size and shape related to diverse aspects of embodiment and has undoubtably contributed to the production of “normative” bodies in fashion. Is it possible for standardized sizing to accurately account for the heterogenous nature of human bodies? Fashion studies scholar Lauren Downing Peters (2019b) argues that early anthropometric studies—both the aforementioned USDA data from the 1940s, as well as earlier studies at Vassar, Smith, and the Pratt Institute—“had a cumulative effect of skewing averages and creating a naturalized bias for slender bodies within mass manufactured clothing” (170). Sizing systems in the United States were developed based upon data from mostly young, white, slender, wealthy, or upper-middle-class women. Thus, the science of aggregation in anthropometrics marginalized larger and differently shaped bodies, and the material inputs of production—the patternmaking and grading systems of incremental sizing—excluded certain bodies. Fashion historian Carmen Keist (2017) points out that while clothing brands for larger “stout” women emerged in the 1910s, a dearth of choice and supply meant that “stoutwear” was always in demand (100). The stout woman was simultaneously praised for her patronage and buying power and ridiculed for the “problem” that her nonnormative body created in ready-to-wear manufacturing processes, “commentary that essentially described the stout woman as a burden to mass manufacturing” (Peters 2019b: 171). Peters argues that the fashion media discourse, alongside that of the medical profession, generated and perpetuated “America’s emerging fat stigma.” Stigmatizing and Celebrating Fat Bodies Fat stigma, according to sociologist Sabrina Strings, has deep historical roots that articulate with religious, class, and racial identities. In her book Fearing the Black Body, Strings 194

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outlines the discursive production of pro-thin and anti-fat bias in the West throughout art, philosophy, and religion. She shows that Protestant moralism and associated practices of self-abnegation made diet and corpulence a moral issue, which was then fueled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by eugenicists promoting race science. “Many early to mid-twentieth century physicians relied on moral and racial logics to rail against persons deemed too fat or too thin,” and increasingly fatness was condemned (Strings 2019: 165). In mid-eighteenth-century England, excess of all kinds was condemned on moral grounds and contributed to the codification of new beauty ideals and embodied performances of etiquette, what Strings has termed an “ascetic aesthetic” (100). She argues that during this period, restricted consumption of food and drink “became evidence of refinement,” and the thin bodies produced by these restrictions came to represent these ideals. It was thus not a coincidence that “at the same time gluttony and fatness were becoming associated with African women in scientific racial literature, the values of delicacy, discipline, and a slimmer physique were becoming associated with English women by the arbiters of taste and the purveyors of morality” (100). Later, in mid-nineteenth-century England, the Muscular Christianity movement emerged to link morality, gender, race, and nation to physical prowess. According to cultural studies scholar Sarah McCullough (2010), it became a “foundation upon which to rearticulate white, middle/upper-class masculinity, traditional social values, and a capitalistic meritocracy through sport and competition. This movement utilized a variety of technologies—from weight machines to sportswear—to naturalize the supremacy of white Western European middle to upper-class men in embodied athletic practices” while, at the same time, framing fat as evidence of moral, racial, gender, and class inferiority. Contemporary writer and humorist Lindy West (Plate 25) notes the ongoing and persistent impact of these ideologies in her memoir Shrill: As a woman, my body is scrutinized, policed, and treated as a public commodity. As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trails, and—the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on—my ability to be loved … For me, the process of embodying confidence was less about convincing myself of my own worth and more about rejecting and unlearning what society had hammered into me. (2016: 67–9) Reclaiming and celebrating fat bodies has meant dismantling the deeply sedimented discourses, narratives, and hegemonic beauty ideals that have fueled weight bias and size discrimination, as well as racism, sexism, ageism, and other intersecting forms of discrimination. Recent work by fashion studies scholar Ben Barry (2019) explores the intersections of masculinity, queerness, disability, and fatness among men who “are the most distanced from fashion ideals” (275). He uses the concept of “fabulous masculinities” to explore the strategies and possibilities of fashioning fat, queer, disabled bodies. Fabulousness is another way of flaunting fat and challenging the hegemonic fashion system “to make fashion and fashion culture work” for marginalized bodies (275). 195

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The fat acceptance movement began in the United States in the late 1960s with the formation of what would become known as the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) and, later, other organizations like the Fat Underground and the Association for Size Diversity and Health. In the 2010s, the body positivity movement emerged as a kind of counter-discourse to what scholars describe as “the constant barrage of media images promoting unrealistic and unattainable appearance ideals” (Cohen et al. 2020: 2). Social media has played an important role in this particular movement, which provides a platform for individuals and celebrities alike to celebrate their bodies in an effort to improve body image for all. And, initial research suggests that the proliferation of celebratory images of diverse body sizes may in fact help to improve body image (Cohen et al. 2020: 7); however, the body positive movement has also been criticized as too prescriptive and exclusive. A quick search of the five-million-and-counting images on Instagram with the hashtag #bodypositive in June 2020 reveals mostly young, white women with toned athletic bodies. According to media studies scholar Alexandra Sastre (2014), body positivity websites “ultimately reflect, more than reject, the very narratives of conformity and regulation they seek to push past” (930). Looking beyond the hashtag, the concept of body positivity has been transformed in radical and inspiring ways by Black, Latinx, queer, crip, trans, disabled, fat, and other marginalized communities. Social media, along with art, fashion design, and other sites of cultural dissemination, offer new possibilities and platforms to celebrate diverse bodies. The circuit of stylefashion-dress (Figures 1.3 and 2.2) reminds us that all of these negotiations occur within complex systems of regulation, distribution, production, and consumption operating within capitalism.

Sizeism and the Fashion Industry Sizeism—that is, the discrimination against bodies based upon their size—is rampant within the fashion industry and media surrounding it (Lewis 2019: 243). Discrimination can be explicit, like statements from Abercrombie and Fitch’s CEO Mike Jeffries, who said that “a lot of people don’t belong” in their clothes and that by not selling sizes XL or XXL in women’s clothing they are able to “market to cool, good-looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that” (Denizet-Lewis 2006). Discrimination can also be subtle and yet ubiquitous, like the previous discussion of sizing systems and standards. The language used to categorize and describe clothing for people with fat or largersized bodies—“stout” clothing in the early twentieth century and “plus-sized” clothing in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries—is almost exclusively gendered feminine (Christel 2018: 44). However, in boys’ clothing, “husky” sizes are available, and in menswear, “big and tall” serves as the equivalent to women’s “plus-sized clothing.” Often these sizes are available from specialty stores or brands. As Lindy West (2016) explained, “Plus-size garments cost more, are rarely on-trend (let alone fashion-forward), and are harder to find. Even companies that manufacture plus sizes often don’t carry them in their brick-and-mortar stores. The rare retailers that do sell young, fashionable clothes 196

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to fat people reserve their best designs (and a far wider selection) for their straightsize collections.” Even the terminology of “straight” or “standard”-sized clothing creates exclusion. Journalist Britt Aboutaleb (2016) says that the industry has plenty of excuses and most often appeals to the economics of production: purported manufacturing challenges related to increased fabric usage, coupled with “the belief that plus-size women don’t want to spend a lot of money on clothes because they plan to lose the weight,” resulting in a dearth of fashionable options available to fat women. Thus, production challenges impact the consumption and the social aspect of acquiring new clothes: “Until mainstream stores offer inclusive sizing,” Aboutaleb argues, “consumers can only shop with like-sized friends.” Weight discrimination and, more specifically, fat-shaming and fat phobia are fueled by medical discourses that have pathologized larger bodies. According to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), being overweight or obese is considered a “disorder.” While US federal antidiscrimination laws protect individuals from being fired from employment positions because of disability, race, religion, age, gender, sexuality, and national identities, there are no laws in place to prevent workplace discrimination according to weight. Discrimination based upon body size is not limited only to fatness but also may include thinness (being “underweight,” according to the CDC, is also a “disorder”). Other aspects of size, such as height, or the size of particular body parts, like breasts, genitals, or nose, are also sites of discrimination. Social norms and beauty ideals related to body size intersect with other subjectivities, like race, religion, and gender. For example, social psychologists Linda Jackson and Kelly Ervin (1992) found that “for men, being short is more of a liability than being tall is an asset” (442). Context is also crucial: in the same study, they discovered that for women in the workplace, being short was also a hinderance (442). Discrimination is frequently framed as an “ism”—for example, ableism, sizeism, sexism, and racism; however, discrimination against fat people specifically is often referred to as fatphobia. Applying the suffix phobia, sociologists Abigail Saguy and Anna Ward (2011) argue, “evokes the fear and hatred that visible body fat on oneself or on others provokes for many in the contemporary United States” and is in some ways like homophobia (54). Both homosexuality and fatness have been stigmatized and pathologized. Homosexuality was only removed from the DSM in 1973, but being overweight or obese is still classified as a “medical condition” by the World Health Organization. Negative attitudes about fat bodies are thus perpetuated and informed by medical professionals, international organizations, nations, and regulatory institutions. The fat body has thus been stigmatized—socially, medically, visually—as a kind of “abomination of the body,” in the words of sociologist Erving Goffman (1963: 4). In some cases, Goffman argued, the stigmatized individual is presented with the possibility of “correcting” their stigma. The weight loss industry in the United States continues to grow each year, by 4.1 percent in 2018 alone, making it a 72.7-billion-dollar industry. The fashion industry has contributed to the stigmatization of fat bodies through exclusion and discourses that promote concealment or visual reduction (i.e., 197

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prescriptions like “wear black to appear thinner” or proscriptions like “don’t wear horizonal stripes”). The industry and associated media have thus offered techniques that fat people can use to “pass”—either by concealing the body or creating optical illusions through the use of design elements like color, line, pattern, and form. Fat rights activists and others have rejected these prescriptions and proscriptions in favor of “coming out” as fat. Rather than hide the body, it is flaunted through embodied dressing (Saguy and Ward 2011: 57). “The way that we are taught to think about fatness is that fat is not a permanent state,” says West. “You’re just a thin person who’s failing consistently for your whole life.”1 Coming out as fat can be a radical declaration of identity that challenges the hegemony of thinness and Eurocentric beauty ideals. At the same time, writers and scholars like Roxane Gay (2017) complicate this assertion by writing about fatness as a symptomatic identity, one that is an emergent effect of prejudicial treatment on the grounds of race, gender, and sexuality. She explains that her life is “cleaved not so neatly” into two parts: “Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was raped” (14). She writes: I began eating to change my body. I was willful in this. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away. Even at that young age, I understood that to be fat was to be undesirable to men, to be beneath their contempt, and I already knew too much about their contempt. This is what most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us. (Gay 2017: 30)

Flaunting Fat Coming out as fat, for Lindy West and others in the fat acceptance movement, transforms the relationship between the body and clothes into a new form of dressed embodiment. When West got married, for example, she used the occasion to celebrate her body rather than hide it. “I wanted to make a statement with my dress—I didn’t want to hide my body the way fat women are taught to,” West recalls.2 In an earlier article for The Guardian, she explained: My friend, artist and designer Mark Mitchell, and I conceived of the most beautiful dress we could imagine, which, according to the old orthodoxies, just happened to 1https://www.thisamericanlife.org/589/transcript 2https://apracticalwedding.com/lindy-west-wedding/

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be the least “flattering” dress possible for a fat chick: a strapless, skin-tight mermaid gown exploding with silk flowers. The flowers—my god, the wisteria!—added extra bulk in areas I’m supposed to try and “slim.” The silhouette accentuated my stomach instead of camouflaging it. My arms looked like what they are—strong, and big. I didn’t wear Spanx. I was beautiful.3 As a co-design endeavor, West’s wedding gown also disrupted traditional systems of production and consumption by allowing West more agency in determining how the design would look, not just on her body but as a part of her fat body in the form of dressed embodiment. Techniques of flaunting often use principles and elements of design to create dramatic visual impact through style-fashion-dress. In West’s wedding gown (Plate 25), the bright contrasting hues and dimensional form of the silk flowers are placed on a diagonal that wraps around her body, thus creating emphasis and drawing attention to the body itself. Flaunting is a means of confronting dominant beauty narratives, like the idea of wearing “flattering” clothes. What does it mean to “flatter” the body? Who is the body being “flattered” for? The idea of “flattering the body” through clothing suggests that to be “flattering” the garment must visually reduce the appearance of body size as opposed to emphasizing it. Flaunting flies in the face of these ideals through powerful visual emphasis. Melissa Viviane Jefferson, known professionally as Lizzo, is a singer-songwriter and flutist known for her dramatic stage costumes, social media posts, and red-carpet gowns that emphasize and celebrate her body. In Plate 26, Lizzo reminds us that flaunting can also be campy, using hyperbole to humorously (yet also seriously) draw attention, reflection, and critique. Photographed on the red carpet of the Brit awards in London in February 2020, she performatively bites her small clutch purse made in the image of a chocolate bar. Lizzo’s look also playfully references the intersection of her Blackness and fatness through the “milk chocolate” textile design while arguably critiquing the capitalist nature of the music, fashion, and food industries with the large, visible barcode at the hem. Jeremy Scott, known for his irreverent and campy designs for fashion house, Moschino, has used the textile design and form of the gown as a literal wrapping around the body. Lizzo’s body thus becomes the metaphorical milk chocolate within the wrapper. Fashion studies scholar Sequoia Barnes (2017) argues that “Camp is inherent in black style. We have a cultural symbiosis with the highly stylized. There is a hard to name and even harder to describe seemingly innate emphasis on the adorned body to exercise one’s blackness” (685). Flaunting the fat, black, female body through camp fashions work to upend hegemonic and heteronormative notions of beauty.

3https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/21/my-wedding-perfect-fat-woman

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Dis/abled Bodies Relation to dis/ability is shaped by bodily lived experience and social expectations about what the body “should” be capable of doing, alongside stigmatization of bodies that are hegemonically deemed “different.” Dis/ability, like other aspects of subjectivity, is produced through discourses, networks of power, materials, and everyday selffashioning. Dis/ability articulates with systems of representation where some bodies are rendered exemplary and others deficient (Garland-Thompson 2005: 1558–9). The language of ability and disability may problematically produce an either/or scenario, where bodies are essentialized as abled (“superior”) or disabled (“inferior”). Instead, we offer the term dis/ability to push against the either/or and to consider the potential of dis/ ability as a both/and embodied, fluid, and intersectional identity. In the field of feminist disability studies, Rosmarie Garland-Thompson (2005) explains that disability should be considered as a “cultural interpretation of human variation rather than an inherent inferiority, a pathology to cure, or an undesirable trait to eliminate. In other words, it [Feminist Disability Studies] finds disability’s significance in interactions between bodies and their social and material environments” (1558). In fashion studies, we must consider how the variations presented by dis/ability articulate with style-fashion-dress. How have dis/abled bodies been stigmatized, celebrated, pathologized, regulated, and discriminated against? Physical prowess, for example, has historically been celebrated in athletics, where bodies on display compete against one another in an effort to win. The body thus also becomes a site of morality and discipline, and of “belonging” to a team, nation, school, community, and/or place. World events like the Olympics are a great example of the intersection of dis/ability and nationality. Individuals compete on behalf of their nation, and national identities are in turn shaped by the outcomes. In 1968, the Special Olympics were founded to celebrate athleticism of people living with disabilities, many of whom experienced discrimination in the traditional athletic realm. In the media, athletes are often represented as role models for youth, framed as a body that one might aspire to achieve. Athletics and Bodily Exceptionalism Athletes’ bodies have shaped fashion and body ideals in numerous ways. Fashion historian Charlotte Jirousek (1996) argues that the televised depiction of American football in the mid- to late twentieth century contributed to the production of a male body ideal: broad shoulders, toned waistline, and defined musculature. This bodily silhouette was created through developments in protective undergarments, like flak jackets and shoulder pads, which protected the players’ bodies from harm. The technological developments in functional protective undergarments produced a fabricated silhouette, and as football became a major televised sport in the latter half of the twentieth century, this image was broadcast across the United States. Jirousek argues that televised football set the stage for the rise of Hollywood stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose physique would have appeared unrealistic in the decades prior but was perfectly suited to represent, through 200

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the physical body, a silhouette represented by the body-in-uniform of football stars of the period. Clothing and undergarments that reshape the body silhouette have immense visual power, especially when they are combined with idealized imagery of athletes. Fashion also has the potential to enhance and transform certain bodily movements. For example, wingsuits made of ripstop nylon reshape the body into a silhouette reminiscent of a flying squirrel, thus allowing the body more control over movements as they glide through the air after basejumping or skydiving. Spacesuits provide astronauts with oxygen, temperature regulation, and protection when in the harsh vacuum of space. Skates enable the body to glide on ice or roll across a flat surface. These types of garments, which use different apparel technologies to alter the body’s relationship to space, are often defined as functional apparel (Watkins and Dunne 2015). In the realm of sports, functional apparel may protect athletes (like the aforementioned protective undergarments worn by football players) and could also enhance athletic abilities. Athletes’ bodies are externally and internally regulated: both the body surface (e.g., uniforms) and its biological constitution (e.g., hormones), and by the individual as well as sports-governing bodies. Cultural studies scholar Sarah R. McCullough (2010) questions what constitutes a “natural athletic body” and argues that in contemporary sport “some technologies become naturalized as part of an acceptable human form, while others become labelled as deviant” (2). She uses the example of Speedo’s LZR swimsuit to show how technologies create ‘natural’ bodies that allow both the athlete and the viewing community to imagine a narrative of athletic and human progress that is both separate from—and reliant upon—technological enhancement. The sporting event becomes simultaneously a performance of the natural abilities of the human body and a commercial for the physical enhancement of human ability made possible by a high-tech product available to anyone with enough capital. (2) Leading up to the Olympics in 2000, Speedo collaborated with biologists and material scientists to create a new textile using biomimicry to imitate the skin of a shark (see Plate 27). Apparel designers then developed a bodysuit with the textile, which came to be known as the FastSkin (and later the FSII in 2004, the FastSkin FS-Pro in 2007, and eventually the LZR swimsuit in 2008). The bodysuit did not alter the overall silhouette or shape of the body, which McCullough says enabled spectators and regulatory groups alike to “reconcile this post-evolutionary innovation with the natural human form” (11). Swimmers have long manipulated the skin’s surface in the interest of reducing friction, by shaving arms and legs and covering hair on the head with a swim cap; however, the FastSkin and LZR body suits functioned like a kind of prosthetic, augmenting and covering human skin with a new material that mimicked sharkskin and significantly reduced drag. Controversies around the suits began to permeate media discourses, and the bodysuits were called a kind of “technical doping.” These controversies, McCullough argues, revealed “a complex nexus of ideologies of fair play, capital production, narratives of progress, and idealized athletic bodies” (16). Ultimately, the full-body polyurethane 201

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swimsuits were banned in international competition in 2009. Who decides at what point an apparel item provides an unfair advantage? In other sports, these debates have unfolded around shoes, compression tights, and other functional fashions. Enmeshed within all of these debates is the idea of “the infinitely improving human body,” a mythical aspiration enhanced by apparel technologies that are at times naturalized and at other times deemed a form of cyborg “doping.”

Addressing Ableism The celebration of bodily exceptionalism and the role of fashion and textiles in enhancing certain physical abilities may appear most obvious in sports but permeates other aspects of everyday life. Consider, for example, how the environments that surround our bodies— architecture, interior design, clothing, and transportation—are often designed with the assumption of certain physical abilities. Historically, and still today, access to education, employment, and healthcare has also been asymmetrical, often privileging those who do not live with disabilities. Ableism is the term used to describe this inequality, social prejudice, and discrimination against people living with disabilities. The disability rights movement has attempted to redress many of these inequalities through legislation and education. It was not until 1973 that US federal legislation was put in place to protect some civil rights (The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, section 504), and in 1975, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act expanded these rights to include access to education. In 1990, much of this legislation was consolidated and expanded through the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which proscribed discrimination against individuals on the basis of disability and required accommodations to improve accessibility. According to a 2018 press release from the US CDC, approximately one in four Americans is living with a disability that has a major impact on their daily lives. The CDC have defined disabilities by categorizing them as related to mobility, cognitive, hearing, vision, independent living, and self-care. According to the Anti-Defamation League, “people with disabilities have pushed for the recognition of disability as an aspect of identity that influences the experiences of an individual, not as the soledefining feature of a person” (n.d.: para 1).4 In other words, disability is an intersectional experience that informs, and is informed by, other aspects of identity. And, like other aspects of subjectivity, dis/ability also has the potential to be fluid and changeable— while some disabilities are chronic, others may be temporary or occur at some point in life and remain a part of a person’s life for the duration. In disability studies, scholars have moved away from thinking about the body/person/subject as disabled and instead have focused on enabling/disabling environments; therefore, one major reason why disability might be changeable is not just because some are “curable,” but because

4https://www.adl.org/education/resources/backgrounders/disability-rights-movement

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all disabilities are context-dependent—that is, someone disabled in one environment may not be in another, or may cease to be disabled in the same environment if that environment were organized differently or operated according to different norms. In other words, dis/ability articulates in critically important ways with space and the designed world.

Disabling Environments and Style-Fashion-Dress Mirroring that of other fields, American and European clothing scholars and home economists after the Second World War and in subsequent decades tended to medicalize dis/ability rather than consider it as a social construct (Lamb 2001:136). As a result, research focused on clothing as a kind of “treatment,” with emphasis on apparel as a rehabilitation instrument that could enable disabled people to adjust and adapt to the “normal” world, rather than the other way about (Newton 1976; Yep 1977). Fashion studies scholar Jane Lamb (2001) challenged the field to consider disability as “a social problem created by society’s disabling environments and attitudinal barriers. Social action, rather than individual treatment, is needed to correct it” (135). She offered the example of getting dressed: a medicalized approach might assume people living with disabilities have “problems” donning and doffing their clothes and thus need to adapt—through rehabilitation or other means—to remedy their “dressing problems.” Indeed, earlier quantitative and qualitative research by Susan and colleagues (Kaiser et al. 1985; Freeman et al. 1985–6; Wingate et al. 1985–6) had found that US students with physical disabilities were ambivalent, at best, about functional, self-help features designed to ease the process of dressing. They were much more concerned with how they felt while wearing their clothes: embodied aesthetics (looking good), access (ability to find clothing aligned with their style), self-esteem and comfort issues, and so on. They mentioned structural problems such as attitudinal barriers in society, the medicalization of disability, and concerns about the cost and marketing of products designed for people with “special needs.” They wanted to keep the medical field out of their wardrobes. Instead, Lamb argued, fashion scholars should consider the clothing as the problem, not the disabled person. She questioned why so many fashion garments require the use of fine motor skills to begin with and argued that designers should make designs that are accessible and inclusive for all—adaptive clothing, often found in medical supply catalogs, only exacerbates exclusion from fashion (Lamb 2001: 136). As feminist scholar Liz Crow explained, “It wasn’t my body that was responsible for all my difficulties, it was external factors, the barriers constructed by the society in which I live. I was being dis-abled—my capabilities and opportunities were being restricted—by prejudice, discrimination, inaccessible environments and inadequate support” (1996: 206). Accessibility is critical for fashion designers to produce garments and collection that do not further exclude, stigmatize, and marginalize people living with disabilities. 203

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Fashioning Disability People living with disabilities have a long history of self-fashioning and employing a variety of techniques in order to visually, materially, and socially destigmatize their bodies. Artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) famously painted the cast corsets she wore for most of her life after a bus accident at age eighteen (in addition to painting representations of them in her artwork); she also had polio as a child, resulting in a leg length discrepancy. She created close to two hundred paintings, often using images of her fashioned body that showed her pain, as well as her politics, ethnicity, and nationalism, in a visual, metaphorical way to illustrate her process of subject formation (Plate 28). In a drawing labeled Appearances Can Be Deceiving, Kahlo reveals her fractured body, corset/brace, and pubic hair underneath a transparent ensemble (a long skirt, huipil blouse, and rebozo, or shawl). In other words, she reveals what is underneath, or concealed by, her style-fashion-dress. As discussed in Chapter 4, in 2004, a bathroom that held many of Kahlo’s personal artifacts, including clothes, prosthetics, jewelry, and photographs, was opened up in her famous Blue House (now a museum), enabling museum exhibits in Mexico City, London, and Brooklyn, New York. Fashion curator Circe Henestrosa (2018) explains Kahlo’s clothing choices as follows: Kahlo’s choice of style and dress was rooted in an ongoing search for selfaffirmation. The quest for apparel that would help her deal with the impact of ill-health was possibly a driving force that would eventually lead her back to her mother and to the familiarity of the stylistically rigid and traditional forms of the Tehuana. Her adoption of this dress was conscious and considered, both distracting and purposeful: a complex combination of her communist ideology, her Mexican-ness, constructed from her personal traditions and as a reaction to her disabilities. (78, original emphasis) Henestrosa (2018) goes on to describe how Kahlo refused to let her corsets define her. She decorated them as though she “had explicitly chosen to wear them. She included them in the construction of her style as an essential wardrobe item, and they functioned as her second skin” (80). She was able to wear the corsets comfortably under her huipil blouses, the short and angular shape of which also had the effect of visually lengthening her height and avoided the discomfort of fabric bunching around her waist while seated (80). In the exhibition, Henestrosa also included examples of European fashion designers, like Jean-Paul Gaultier, who have appropriated from Kahlo’s corsets in their creative work (see Plate 28). Frida Kahlo’s striking style-fashion-dress, along with her self-representations through her art, raise the question of what constitutes deception in the context of agency. Kahlo did cover her body and prosthetics (her “second skins”), but she revealed—even flaunted—what was underneath her clothes in her artwork and in photographs. And, how does deception compare to concealment (which is part of what clothes do over the body in everyday life)? 204

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Clearly, Kahlo’s style-fashion-dress was a form of intersectional agency. Her disability was one aspect of her subjectivity, but she negotiated it with her self-expressions of gender, ethnicity, national identity, and politics. Although her artistic sense was and remains highly unique, she represents a remarkable and complex example of what many of us do in everyday dressing: covering or downplaying one part of the body, highlighting another feature, figuring out what offers us pleasure, all in dialogue with feedback from others, and so on. In an early study by Kaiser, Freeman, and Wingate (1985, 1990), Susan and colleagues built on Fred Davis’ concept of “negotiated outcomes” to analyze how students with visible physical disabilities employ a variety of strategies to represent themselves in everyday life. Based on focus group interviews in six colleges and universities in northern California, and the qualitative comments on a national survey with over three hundred respondents around the country, the following strategies were identified through a grounded theoretical approach: Concealment Like Frida Kahlo, we found that some students managed their visual impressions by covering their disability: I get a different response from people when I wear short sleeves so I very seldom wear short sleeves. It camouflages my disability (missing arm) when I wear long sleeves. Because of my amputation at the hip, I prefer dresses without a waist or gathering at the bodice of the dress. Dresses that flare out more at the tail are more attractive. This was not a deceptive strategy, but rather a strategy of what Erving Goffman (1963) calls “stigma management”; they were ready to talk about their disability with others, but just did not want to present it every day to others as necessarily their most salient attribute. It made everyday life feel safer and reduced tensions in interactions with individuals they did not know. Diversion and Reframing Some students in the study reframed others’ attention away from their disability by diverting attention toward another attribute. For example, some individuals emphasized drinking habits (a relatively common behavior among US college students) through the following slogans on their T-shirts: “I don’t have cerebral palsy; I’m just drunk”; “Tengallon weekend”; and “Moosehead beer.” With these shirts, they used a confrontational (rather than defensive) strategy of stigma management. Sartorial deflection generated the possibility of a social space liberated from total definition by disability. In other words, the students used their T-shirt slogans to highlight the very hypocrisy by which a social order derogates people for their involuntary incapacity, but laughs off people’s voluntary self-incapacitation through legalized substance abuse. 205

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Modifying and Making Taking existing garments and sometimes working from scratch, students creatively fit their needs and pleasures through DIY or even “hacking” (von Busch 2008). A number of students made ingenious adaptations to ready-to-wear clothing. In the focus group interviews, the students shared their “make-do’s” with a sense of pride and seemed to enjoy sharing their hacking strategies with each other. For example, one male student who was a wheelchair user dealt with pressure-point problems while seated by having his mother remove the pockets in the back of his blue jeans and sew a patch of sheepskin inside on which to sit. Other make-do’s included alterations to shoulders in dresses and shirts for quadriplegic students, or alterations to pants to enable an even hemline in the seated position. One young woman who was missing one arm wore a prosthesis in the form of an artificial shoulder. She had been provided with a strap to hold the prosthesis, and this strap greatly limited the kinds of clothes she could wear (e.g., high-necked styles and dark colors). She developed the idea of gluing the prosthesis rather than using the straps, and this technique enabled her to wear a greater variety of styles. Some of the students commented that every body is different anyway, and the same is true of disabilities, so individual adaptations are often necessary and offer a sense of accomplishment. Compensation Some students highlighted other aspects of their intersectional identities, such as ethnicity or career aspirations. In other words, they communicated that “my disability is not all of me.” For example, one student explained that he emphasizes the intersection of his ethnicity and nationality (Mexican American) and his flair for style by wearing white peasant pants, a white vest, huaraches, a Panama hat, and a blue handkerchief around his neck. At times, he noted that he has enjoyed wearing this outfit to attract attention. Another student said she wanted to be known more for her attractive clothing than her disability (quadriplegia) and, therefore, spent a lot of time on her clothing. On the questionnaires from students around the United States, they reported wearing T-shirts that emphasize occupational identifications and goals: “Social workers do it in the field,” or “Love a nurse today.” Some reported communicating their political orientations: “No nukes,” “Nuclear power—No thanks!”; “ERA.” Today, we might also anticipate “Black Lives Matter” or other slogans from online communities like the Disability Visibility Project.5 Social Inclusion Similar to Jane Lamb’s (2001) call for more universal design features in clothing, many students wondered why more functional features could not become commonplace in the apparel market in general. They noted that everyone has some kinds of needs, and why can’t all clothing be more versatile and adaptive? The students wanted to include 5https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com

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everyone in the arena of functional clothing. Note that today the theme of social inclusion is usually used to encompass individuals who have been marginalized by the fashion industry, so the form of social inclusion described in this context may at first seem like a reversal. Yet the net overall effect or result could be the same. This is also much like, in the context of queer studies, what Eve Sedgwick (1990) calls the difference between a “universalizing” and a “minoritizing” view of social difference. Here, the disabled students are refusing to subscribe to a minoritizing discourse that would emphasize their right to mainstream inclusion based on their special minority status and, instead, are articulating a universalizing discourse of bodily difference and functional apparel needs. They are asserting that rather than an exceptional minority experience, theirs might actually be the exemplary case of a general relation of compromise and innovation between specific embodiment and standardized clothing. Social Uniqueness On the national survey, students were presented with the statement “I like to draw attention to myself through my clothes.” The three hundred responses were mixed: 37 percent agreed, 39 percent disagreed, and 24 percent were undecided. At least a third, however, were open to the strategy of emphasizing their uniqueness or, as in fat studies terminology, “flaunting.” Recognizing that their appearances were already “marked,” some commented in the focus group interviews and in the surveys that they have discovered they can capitalize on their difference by highlighting their appearances and becoming even more memorable to others, on their own terms. I like bright colors. I used to think that I didn’t like that extra attention, but in the last year I’ve noticed that I like it. I used to resent all the extra attention I got being in a chair, but I kind-of am finding that I like the extra attention, so I take advantage of it Just trying to be sexy. It must be my age. Low cut and things that show off my bustline. Self-effacing humor may serve as a means of tension release, enabling passersby to smile and make contact. T-shirt messages were used to this effect: I’m no quad; I’m just tired of walking. Guess which part of me is not bionic. Again, this could be described today as flaunting as a means for expressing agency and confronting attitudinal barriers directly. The question arises about the extent to which these students’ responses from the 1980s would still apply today. Most likely, many of the underlying issues still apply (and research would be needed to analyze this possibility), but there have been some positive changes that should be acknowledged. The field of critical disability studies has developed further, as has critical fashion studies. There is more social activism, promulgated in part by social 207

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media and opportunities for online communities and businesses. There have been efforts to foster social inclusion in the fashion industry. There are more fashion models with disabilities, and there seems to be more flaunting. Mainstream clothing brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Zappos, and Nike are designing for and marketing to people with disabilities. An article in the British newspaper The Guardian declared “a landmark year for disabled fashion” but indicated that “the conversation around it is just beginning” (Jackson 2019). The last year has seen a radical rethink in our understanding of how to design for disability. The rise in adaptive fashion—clothing specifically designed for those with disabilities and chronic conditions—reflects newfound awareness of inclusive design. In fact, searches for adaptive clothing saw an increase of 80% over 2019, according to global fashion search platform Lyst. This encompasses everything from discrete elasticated waistbands, which are pinch-free when seated, to magnetic fastenings for independent dressing. Jackson (2019) described Tommy Hilfiger’s X Zendaya collection as featuring ten stylish adaptive garments. Earlier in the year, Nike launched the Air Zoom Pegasus 35 FlyEase trainers in the United Kingdom, allowing the wearer to use only one hand while putting on the shoe due to a wraparound zipper at the back of the shoe, connecting to cables that tighten the laces. In addition, startups such as Kintsugi in Manchester, United Kingdom, highlight the importance of beautiful individuality. Its founder Emma McClelland explains: The brand is about empowerment—it’s a middle finger to the fashion industry’s reluctance to represent people who fall outside its narrow limits. (Jackson 2019) Representation is but one aspect of overcoming the ableist hegemony of the fashion and related industries. Marsha Elle, a musician, motivational speaker, and model who was born with proximal femoral focal deficiency (PFFD) that resulted in a complete amputation of her left leg, has chosen to emphasize her prosthetic and bring attention to inequalities around prosthetics—that is, their tendency (like other types of bandages) to be “flesh-toned,” a category that excludes nonwhite skin tones. In April 2020, Elle became the first Playboy Playmate to be depicted with a prosthetic in a photoshoot, and in the article, she recounts the challenge of finding a prosthetic that would match her skin tone, which would enable her to wear shorts, skirts, bathing suits, lingerie, and other garments that would reveal both legs. Inclusive and adaptive design ultimately means thinking intersectionally about both the needs and desires of fashioned subjects. Diagnosed in her mid-20s with a rare form of muscular dystrophy, designer Keisha Greaves (see Plate 29) created her own t-shirt clothing line, “Girls Chronically Rock,” drawing on her love of graphic T-shirts, her expertise in fashion design and business, her desire to help others experiencing chronic illness, and her goal of fostering disability 208

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awareness. The word chronic (historically meaning “of or relating to time”) is now defined under the subheading of disease as something “lasting a long time, long-continued, lingering” with the connotation of ongoing (Oxford English Dictionary, 2020). The brand “Girls Chronically Rock” highlights the complex intersectionalities, challenges, and agencies associated with dis/abilities across time, as well as place(s). As shown in Plate 29, Keisha Greaves lives and works in Massachusetts, but a sign on her wall reveals her affinities, as well, with New York City.

Embodied Subjectivities Embodiment shapes how we move through time and place in the world, and simultaneously, cultural discourses shape hegemonic ideas about how bodies should look and move. While the fashion industry has contributed to sizeism and ableism, embodied dressing through style-fashion-dress affords individuals and communities agency in challenging discrimination, inaccessibility, and injustice. Change is often said to be the one constant in fashion, and the mutability of the body is integral to both/and thinking in fashion studies. Bodies do inevitably appear, and they also inevitably change with time, experiences, and interactions. We negotiate these changes in our bodies through embodied dressing, and that embodied dressing is an intersectional part of our subject formation. Body size, dis/ability, and other aspects of how our bodies look, feel, and move through the world articulate in powerful ways with style-fashion-dress. The following, final chapter addresses the theme of embodied dressing in time and place.

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CHAPTER 10 BODIES IN MOTION THROUGH TIME AND SPACE

Gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, dis/ability, nation, and other subject positions do not happen “on the head of a pin” (Cresswell 2004: 27). Rather, they happen or, more accurately, we do them in the larger contexts of time and space. Intersecting, embodied subjectivities are not just about who we are becoming; they are also about when and where we are becoming. Time and space are abstract and yet crucial concepts that shape how we style-fashion-dress our bodies, which move themselves through time and space. How we “mind” our appearances (Kaiser 2001) undoubtedly relates to our ages and generations in time, as well as the places we inhabit, visit, virtually participate, or imagine ourselves to be at any point in our lives. Hence, in this chapter we propose age/ generation and place as integral to subject formation. We begin with a brief overview of the relation between time and space (and place), enabling us to place in contexts the intersecting subject positions discussed throughout this book. Then, we offer some closing/opening thoughts regarding the future interplay between fashion studies and feminist cultural studies.

Time and Space (and Place) How do we make sense of both “where we are” and “when we are”? Style-fashion-dress offers some strategies to do so. To the extent that resources allow, body fashionings articulate not only the intersectionalities among our various subject positions but also the interface between time and space. We might call style-fashion-dress a situated spatiotemporal practice. Inasmuch as time involves memories of the past, tentative ideas about the present, hopes and anxieties regarding the future, it cannot be separated from space. The philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) emphasized the importance of thinking about time and space together: “Time is known and actualized in space, becoming a social reality by virtue of a spatial practice. Similarly, space is known only in and through time” (1991: 219). The feminist geographer Doreen Massey (1992, 1993, 2005) agreed with Lefebvre’s call to think about time and space jointly, but she delved more deeply into the binary power relations involved in the opposition between time and space. She argued that in modern Western thought, space became constructed as static, whereas time represented change. Thinking about time and space together (space–time) helps to overcome this binary opposition (Massey 1992). Time and

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space can be distinguished abstractly from each other, but they cannot be separated, as discussed in Chapter 1 (see Figure 1.1). The same—as seen throughout this book and as represented in the Venn diagram in Figure 2.1 in Chapter 2—can be said of all of our subject positions. We move through time and space in our physical and perceptual, embodied and fashioned experiences—in our style-fashion-dress—as we become through subject formation. Personal style enables a sense of subjectivity in a visual and material way, representing some tentative idea about who we are and are becoming, both to ourselves and others. In recent decades, there have been important developments in the interdisciplinary fields of spatial studies and time studies, as well as critical fashion studies, and it makes sense to look at the intersections among these fields in order to understand the when and where of subject formation through fashion (Kaiser 2013). Space and place are interdependent concepts that cannot be separated from subject formation and dressed embodiment. Lefebvre notes that humans are corporeal, sensuous, imaginative, and use their bodies to enter into relationships with others to produce space as well as time. Time becomes inscribed in space, and space is bound up with social realities and is produced through a tripartite dialectic: (1) spatial practice (e.g., perceived space, phenomenological, material social practice), (2) representations of space (e.g., conceived space, linguistic/semantic, discursive), and (3) spaces of representation (e.g., lived space, symbolic dimension, artistic expression). Another way to consider the ongoing dialectic is through the phenomenological body: Space is (1) perceived, (2) conceived, and (3) lived. It is not a “thing” but a set of relations between things (e.g., bodies, materials, etc.)—therefore, space is not merely its contents but a set of relationships. What is the difference between space and place? For philosopher Edward Casey (1996), the difference between space and place is analogous to the difference between a universal and a particular. For example, we might think about where are we geographically—In a city? In the country? Or a suburb? In which area of the world? Which nation? If we think more particularly, we would consider not only the larger geographical space but also the particulars of our body within a specific space (in a building? a park? a store? a school?) and time. Casey (1996) describes place as more embodied than space. In other words, individuals’ bodies are located at any given time in places (94). The cultural geographer Tim Cresswell (2004) describes place as “space invested with meaning in the context of power” (12). That is, some places have more of a hegemonic hold on access to power than others. For example, who gets to decide which cities are “world fashion cities”? And to what extent is there an urban or “metrocentric” bias in what counts as fashion (Goodrum and Hunt 2013; Kaiser 2013)? The cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) describes space as the more abstract and open concept; it is the geometric opening that makes movement and freedom possible. Place is part of space but can be considered a pause with reflection. Tuan suggests that what begins as “undifferentiated” space “becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (6). The idea of investing place, as well as time, with meaning comes through clearly in a clothing line featured by the company Hanifa and designed by Anifa Mvuemba. Their recent 2020 collection, “Pink Label Congo,” was an homage to the 212

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Democratic Republic of the Congo where Mvuemba’s parents are from. Mvuemba was born in Nairobi, Kenya; when she was 3 years old, her family escaped the violence of war and moved to the United States. A sweeping gown from the collection features the Congo in an explicitly representational way: printed on the silk georgette is a scene of the Congo River—“where the Atlantic Ocean kisses the land.” The gown features softly draped folds of fabric on the side, toward the back and is meant to embody “the gentle confidence of the Congolese people.” The caption accompanying the gown literally notes the idea of embodying/wearing place: As Mái’s silk georgette flows over your hips, the subtle placement of the green grassy hills call out your power within. This feminine design was created to flow like the rivers of the Congo.1 The high-end Mái maxi dress was available in sizes XXS to 2XL for $499. In addition to embodying place, the dress and its innovative distribution via social media during the Covid-19 pandemic referenced a particular time as well.

Age/Generation and Place Processes of subject formation take place within time and space in an embodied way. We can think of age/generation and place as intersectional subject positions (recall the Venn model in Figure 2.1). Age/generation is an embodiment of time—that is, when one lives and develops/ages. Space is the more abstract cousin to physical place, which is both where and when one lives. Through interlocking, overlapping subjectivities, we experience age/generation and place through their intersections with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and so on. For example, in our 2008 national survey among US maleidentified fashion consumers, it was urban men who expressed the most interest in fashion and appearance, followed by suburban and rural men. Younger men were generally more interested in fashion than their older counterparts. Sexual subjectivities complicated these findings, however. Gay rural men expressed the most interest in style-fashion-dress issues, whereas urban bisexual men were most concerned about navigating how to be “unmarked” (not to stand out too much in some settings). Among the gay rural men were the following self-descriptions: A 65-year-old white, single male described his style as “colorful, casual, comfortable.” A 27-year-old white male in a committed relationship described his as “casual, neat, colorful.” The urban bisexual men, who tended to be younger overall, were most in agreement with statements about the need to be unmarked, expressed some irony—if not campy ambiguity—in their selfdescriptions: A 21-year-old white male in a committed relationship described his style as “alternative/indie.” A 24-year-old Asian American male characterized his as “fetish, tight, urban.” A 27-year-old Black, single male said his was “classic, own, unique.” Ironically, 1https://hanifa.co/collections/pink-label/products/mai-maxi-dress

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a 30-year-old white (urban) male described his as “casual farm chic.” And a 60-year-old white married male identified his as simply “casual” (Kaiser 2012: 187–8). How does the field of critical fashion studies grapple with age? Sociologist Julia Twigg (2013) points out that inasmuch as “fashion is strongly—perhaps inherently—youth oriented,” the process of aging and even the category of age have been largely ignored or taken for granted (80). Age, she argues, is often omitted more generally in academic scholarship on intersectionality (80). It is difficult in the English language to capture the entanglement between age and generation, but in German, the word Jahrgang combines two distinct words: Jahr (year) and Gang (walk, gait, or course of action), into a compound word. It is used, as fashion theorist Heike Jenss (2015) observes, to “date” a person’s birth or a product’s origin (Jahr) as “vintage” (15). Materials and consumer products, such as clothing or wine, age, and so do people. Yet Jenss further notes that Jahrgang is more than this; it has a connotation of movement and development (Gang) over time. It means more than the year one was born; it is more like a generation that is moving together in time. It has a connotation, too, of opening up the possibility of motion. For as we have seen, the concept of place complicates how generations experience the same periods of time. In a subtle contrast, the word cohort (Kohort in German) has the connotation of emphasizing sameness due to age/generation. Further, cohorts tend to get labeled generationally: for example, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Gen Z (or Zoomers).

Figure 10.1  Susan at 4 years of age in Orléans, France, circa 1957. Photo by Clyde W. Benke. 214

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We (Susan and Denise) are both white, US American, cisgender women, with similar educational backgrounds and middle-class upbringings, but different ages and sexual subjectivities. Susan was born in 1953 and is technically part of the Baby Boom generation, while Denise was born in 1985 and therefore considered a Millennial. We have passed through the same place (Davis, California) at the same time, in the aughts. We have also lived in the same state (Texas) at different times in our lives. And we have met frequently in a range of other places over time (e.g., Ithaca, New York, and numerous conference sites). Our ages, however, are different. We are “from” different generations in time, but have interacted in time and place—either in person or virtually (in different time zones on our respective coasts). Born somewhere in the middle of the Baby Boom generation (1946–64), Susan grew up as an “Army brat” who moved every three to four years until she was in high school. Overall, she has lived in four different cities in Texas, as well as in France, Germany, Virginia, and California. In Figure 10.1, Susan wears a typical dress from the 1950s: a full skirt that had likely “trickled down” from Christian Dior’s New Look of 1946 to become a staple in young girls’ wardrobes. Puffed sleeves and the ruffled trim further mark her gender, age, and the times. The plaid fabric is more gender-neutral. Susan still “marks time” in her life in terms of places lived, although she has been in Davis for forty years. She has a strong interest in the interplay among fashion, time, and place (e.g., Kaiser 2013) perhaps, she believes, because she experienced very different clothing norms in the various places she lived, but finds it hard to separate time from place. Denise can be classified by cultural discourse as a Millennial, because she “came of age” in the twenty-first century. She lived in upstate New York until she was 10, where she was photographed (Plate 30) at about 4 years old, dressed in OshKosh B’gosh overalls, hairbows, heart-shaped glasses, and a pink baseball cap. The outfit is a great example of the kind of eclectic, postmodern styling of the late 1980s. When Denise was 10, she moved to a suburb north of Dallas and returned to upstate New York for her undergraduate studies at Cornell University (2003–7). During this time, she collaborated with Van Dyk Lewis and Charlotte Jirousek on an ethnographic study of Ithaca as a college town, observing how it becomes “a laboratory for fashion experimentation” for undergraduate students during the four years they spend there (Green et al. 2013). Her interest in studying place, time, and identity through fashion continued when she was pursuing her master’s degree at the University of California at Davis. She conducted an ethnographic study of Burning Man, which we later theorized as a “transformative space” that enabled men to experiment with fashion in ways they felt were inaccessible to them in their everyday lives (Green and Kaiser 2011). Denise later completed a PhD in anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where she studied the entanglements of place and territory through Nuu-chah-nulth ceremonial curtains and other forms of regalia (Green 2013, 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2019, 2020). Of course, we cannot make direct generational comparisons because our places and life experiences are different, but there have been some meaningful areas of crossgenerational convergence: our shared interest in critical fashion studies, Joni Mitchell (Green et al. 2019), and many other points of articulation. 215

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Twigg (2013) argues that there is a “new old” and a trend toward Baby Boomers “moving younger” (82) as “styles are diffusing older” (89). In part, this may be because age is “simply not fashionable or sexy” as a subject position or topic in fashion studies (Twigg 2010: 475). The process of aging becomes sublimated under a mythic ideal of “ageless style” in hegemonic fashion discourse. It seems that fashion and age “do not fit easily, or happily together” (Twigg 2010: 472) in a discourse that revolves around the imagery of young girls made up to look older, and adult female models airbrushed to eliminate any signs of maturity. On the other hand, there has been a curious kind of agerelated ambivalence at play in fashion discourse, in which young women have sported gray hair or locks in a kind of “granny chic” (Mackinney-Valentin 2013)—at the same time, gray hair next to a face with real aging wrinkles has a different effect. Fashion plays with age as a way to play with time. Real grannies today (such as Susan) may have briefly worn “granny dresses” (maxis) in the early 1970s. How do older women feel about seeing primarily young women representing what it means to be fashionable? Fashion studies scholars Kozar and Damhorst (2008) conducted research with 163 women in the United States, ages 60 through 80. They found that the women perceived older-looking models to be more attractive and more fashionable than the younger-looking models, and the women studied indicated a higher preference to purchase the clothes the older-looking models were wearing. We found somewhat similar results in our study of US men. Although our sample was not as old as Kozar and Damhorst’s study of older women (ours ranged in age from 18 to 65), we did find that the older men we interviewed or surveyed were interested in seeing more male fashion models who had bodies and ages that were more reflective of their own experiences. They tended to be weary of sexualized images of young athletic men, with bodies they felt that were unrealistic for them to achieve (Kaiser 2012: 185). Another study by Paul Simpson (2013) involved an ethnography of middle-aged gay men in Manchester’s “gay village.” Although gay male culture has been typically known for its emphasis on youthful, sculpted bodies and fashionable attire, Simpson found social acceptance in the time and place of the community; the men made claims to a kind of bodily authenticity that coincided with aging gracefully and emphasizing emotional strength instead of unachievable physical ideals in a time–place interplay. As bodies develop and age, they go through changes. Beginning at infancy, the fashion industry marks early bodily developments with stages and labels: infant, toddler, and so on. The sociologist Daniel Cook (2004) has documented how the emerging children’s wear industry in the 1920s and 1930s capitalized on age/stage development. In the late 1990s, the industry attempted to label the ambiguous age/size space between being a child and a teenager, classifying issues of age and generation in its identification of the “tween” consumer, largely constructed as female and in the wide range between the ages of seven, eight, or nine to the early teen years; in previous decades, this market segment had been variously labeled “girls,” “preteens,” “subteens,” and “new teens” since the Second World War (Cook and Kaiser 2004). The categories themselves are complicated by the ambiguities of age and size. Infant clothing is often sold by age, and then later, a 216

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number is assigned to a particular size (though these numbers vary by brand, as there is no standard). Sizing categories are not neutral. In addition to noting a particular age category, McCall’s pattern company, for example, would indicate whether child’s pattern was “suitable for chubbies” or “not suitable for chubbies,” thus proscribing and prescribing what body sizes and shapes were “suitable” for each pattern. The “tween” emerged as a category “somewhere in-between” children’s and teen’s sizes and ages. Hence, not surprisingly, industry labels have not been found to be relevant or even legible to girls themselves (Cook and Kaiser 2004: 218), although they are still used casually in marketing contexts to characterize this age/size “category” as an ongoing conundrum in the fashion industry. Recall the picture of Sienna (almost 11) and Juliana (8) in Plate 1. Similar to Cook and Kaiser’s finding, they do not relate to the industrial “tween” label, and they put their looks together—combining clothes and accessories in ways that could not have been anticipated by designers, producers, or retailers. In many ways, the period of childhood has shifted stylistically over time, as styles from older teens and young adults have trickled down into children’s wear. Fashion theorist Annamari Vänskä (2017), in her book Fashionable Childhood: Children in Advertising, argues that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the fashion industry had “thoroughly seized the concept of childhood” (190). In the clothing of babies and small children, especially, the capitalist system “strives to turn the whole world into a production line of endless new and exchangeable commodities” (190) that will be worn only for a very short time. The art historian Anne Higonnet (1998) notes how images of children are at once common, sacred, and controversial in cultural discourse. Contradictory cultural impulses play out on the bodies of young children, according to Susan Kaiser and Kathleen Huun (2002): [T]he desire to preserve childhood innocence coincides with an anxious goal of fostering development toward adulthood … [B]oth innocence and anxiety entail an array of mixed emotions: bittersweet, nostalgic recollections of times gone by that coexist with symbolic detachments from the past in the name of progress and modernity; and a sense of anticipation or even hope that coexists with uncertainties and fears about the future, respectively. (183–4) As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard ([1844] 2014) said over 170 years ago, cultural anxiety is future-oriented, that “one can feel in one’s bones that a storm is approaching” (139). Because children represent the future, which is uncertain, and because there is generally strong cultural consensus both to prepare and to protect them, cultural anxieties abound when it comes to thinking about children. Kierkegaard (2014) describes the close relationship between innocence and anxiety through children, who represent both the innocence of the past (as people recall their own childhood and look back) and the anxiety of the future (as people anticipate uncertainty). Gender (discussed in Chapter 7) and sexuality (discussed in Chapter 8) intersect with other subjectivities,

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including age, which generate cultural anxieties about the (uncertain) future. According to Kierkegaard ([1844] 2014), In all peoples where the childlike is preserved as dreaming spirit, there is this anxiety. The profounder the anxiety, the profounder the people. (66) If childhood becomes a metaphor for nostalgia about the past and anxiety toward the future, then the question arises: How do cultures vary in their representations of children? How do they differ in their representations of older adults? Childhood, older adulthood, and non-Western cultures alike cannot be “fixed” in the past. In the following sections, we open back up to general questions of fashion in relation to time and space/ place.

Fashion’s Way with Time in Space: Spatiotemporalities In the edited volume Time in Fashion: Industrial, Antilinear and Uchronic Temporalities, fashion theorists Caroline Evans and Alessandra Vaccari (2020) explore the ways in which fashion interfaces with time in order shape a sense of temporality: how people perceive and experience time through fashion, how fashion orders and disorders time, and how time orders and disorders fashion. Fashion’s temporalities shape individual and collective subjectivities, and vice versa. Evans and Vaccari (2020) propose three, often overlapping, fashion temporalities: industrial, antilinear (nonlinear, circuitous), and uchronic (imaginary). Industrial Time Industrial time is modern clock time; as we discussed in Chapter 6, the mechanization of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries subjected textile and garment workers to the monotonous routine of producing to meet deadlines within the factory—clocking in and out was (and today still is) required by the factory owners and managers. In a 1967 essay called “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” cultural studies scholar E. P. Thompson noted how clocks had coincided since the fourteenth century with “a new Puritan discipline and bourgeois exactitude” in England and Northern Europe (56), but by the middle of the eighteenth century, clock time had penetrated industrial society (57). Benjamin Franklin’s famous maxim that “time is money” was especially prevalent in factory spaces, as economies shifted from rural to urban industrial spaces. It was during the Industrial Revolution that time became standardized through the use of clocks (rather than church bells, for example, in Europe) and the international, hegemonic determination as Greenwich Mean Time. In the following sections, we discuss each of these kinds of fashion temporalities, linking and locating them within place and space. In addition to constructing time–space binary oppositions such as urban (dynamic) versus rural (static), euromodern histories and ongoing thought tend to represent time 218

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as linear (i.e., increasingly modern). In fashion, this translates to season after season, with each serving as a break with the recent past. But style-fashion-dress complicates this linear representation and instead articulates cyclical or circuitous ways of thinking about time (Riello and McNeil 2010: 2–3). The circuit of culture through style-fashiondress, discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, reminds us that production, distribution, and consumption are not a “chain” or simply part of a straight line from production to consumption. Rather, they are part of a more complex and interdependent circuit, in which consumption, regulation, and distribution likely drive production. For example, as mentioned in Chapter 1, during the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020 and resulting lockdowns, a number of retailers cancelled their contracts with manufacturers. Textile and garment workers around the world were fired, laid off, or unpaid for their work (McNamara 2020). As journalist Mei-Ling McNamara discovered, powerful US and European fashion companies have refused to pay overseas suppliers for more than $16bn (£12.3bn) of goods since the outbreak of Covid19, with devastating implications for garment workers across the world … the pandemic exposed the huge power imbalance at the heart of the fashion industry, which demands that suppliers in some of the poorest countries in the world bear all the upfront production costs while buyers pay nothing until weeks or months after factories ship the goods.2 The circuitous and relational articulations between production, distribution, regulation, and the overlapping context of time and space within the Covid-19 pandemic have exacerbated economic inequalities that have long run rampant in the global, transnational fashion industry. In addition to disruptions from the Covid-19 pandemic, consumers and stockholders have expressed concerns in recent years about the need for environmental sustainability. They have also advocated for ethical labor practices when it comes to garment and textile manufacturing. Nevertheless, there is still a prevalent, linear way of thinking with time (ignoring place/space in the mainstream fashion industry) from production to distribution to consumption, historically driven in part by euromodern notions of progress and history. The restructuring of the world economy in the 1980s fostered globalization and digital technologies, ushering in new relations between production and consumption, human and machine, local and global, and present and future. In the process, time and space have become smashed together, so to speak, like compressed Möbius strips. Economic geographer David Harvey (1990) argues that the significance of place increases, paradoxically, with globalization, which threatens place with the speed and flexibility with which money and goods flow across national boundaries. He and others have called this phenomenon time–space compression. 2https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/08/worlds-garment-workers-face-ruin-asfashion-brands-refuse-to-pay-16bn

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Industrial time, like preindustrial time, has been broken up into seasons and continues to operate that way with the fashion industry. Luxury fashion companies, couture fashion houses, independent designers, and various governing bodies and organizations host seasonal shows and “fashion weeks” in various cities around the world. The compression of time and space, coupled with the context of globalization and fast fashion, means that seasons became truncated and therefore multiplied—going from a few per year (e.g., fall/winter and spring/summer) to two-week cycles. Fashion theorist Agnès Rocamora (2013) describes how digital media fostered the acceleration of “material and symbolic goods” as “timeless time,” in which the “past and the future collapsed” into a “rapid succession of instants” (65). Fast fashion consumers could not assume that styles would be available if they did not purchase them when they first saw them. The philosophy of “here today, gone tomorrow” replaced the idea of a season with later markdowns. Essentially, the fast fashion clothes had been marked down from the outset, often through exploitation of the environment and garment workers around the world who were not paid a living wage. Journeys of production, distribution, consumption, subject formation, and regulation involve complex navigations through space and place across time. These routes are not linear or straightforward, like phrases the “apparel supply chain” might suggest. Rather, they twist and turn, detour, and entangle with other routes. Fashion moves through and beyond certain “world fashion cities” and is found in all corners of the world. As globalization blurs and threatens national boundaries, and regulations shift and change, new circuits of production–distribution–consumption relations ironically also offer new opportunities to articulate national and local, macro- and micro-identities. The transnational, twenty-first-century context of digital design and communications, social media, flexible manufacturing, and time–space compression challenges key assumptions about fashion and space/place. Clearly, fashion does not only emerge from a limited set of world fashion cities, and, further, fashion is not necessarily only urban. Long before the arrival of the internet, catalog shopping enabled those in rural areas a means to access clothing or the patterns, textiles, and notions needed to home-sew the latest fashions (Blum 1981). Postal and private delivery services (i.e., distribution networks) have enabled consumers to purchase from afar, whether through a catalog, computer, or phone. In some regions of the world, like the United States and Europe, brick-and-mortar retail spaces are closing at a shocking rate, thus earning the moniker “the retail apocalypse.” If one wants to design, market, or purchase clothing, there is little reason to be confined to particular physical retail spaces. Digital technologies (e.g., computer-aided design/manufacturing and internet marketing and shopping) hasten the processes of production, distribution, and consumption, which involve multiple material routes (Hall 2003). These routes have included the flow of people, products, and profits in systems designed to foster modern industrial capitalism. As it turned out, by the end of the twentieth century, industrial capitalist time and place were not so linear after all, and the “center” of fashion’s “world cities” could not hold.

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Anti-/Nonlinear Time and Space Space, of course, is nonlinear; even its routes tend to be circuitous. Neither is fashion time linear; it is not an evolutionary route to increasing aesthetic progress, although fashion’s materials may become more technologically functional. Evans and Vaccari (2020) describe antilinear time as fluid and “the antithesis of clock time” (22): The concept of antilinear time goes beyond the straightjacket of industrial and postindustrial capitalism, including work time, to focus instead on how fashion design can actually represent time, how theorists can think about it, and how photographers can picture it. (22) Fashion designers continually derive inspiration from the past, as well as spaces and places. Fashion theorist Patrizia Calefato (2004) argues that fashion mocks linear time and “continually renews itself by drawing sustenance from the old” (124). In this section, we consider three ways in which style-fashion-dress draws sustenance from both places and past times: nostalgia, cultural appropriation, and decolonial fashion discourse. Nostalgia In Fred Davis’ (1979) book, Yearning for Yesterday: Sociology of Nostalgia, he analyzed how the past becomes integral to collective identities in the present. That is, who we are depends in part on who we were. As Davis argued, it is not necessary to have experienced certain pasts in order to feel nostalgic about them. The construction and reconstruction of some kind of “authentic” past helps to cope with, and find meaning in, the present (Davis 1979: 47). He further argues that fashion and nostalgia are “inextricably tied” together, and that nostalgia thrives when individuals feel a sense of transition and discontinuity— such as in the case of the life stages of adolescence and early adulthood (69). When combined with the freedom to explore and experiment, these feelings are likely to play out through age-related identity ambivalences associated with the transitional spaces between childhood and adulthood (Kaiser 2013). Hence it is not surprising that youth cultures frequently incorporate the past in their appearance styles, musical preferences, and other representations. Fashion studies scholars Heike Jenss (2004, 2015) and Nina Cole (2020) have conducted in-depth studies of retro 1960s “scenes” in youth cultures of the 1990s. In both cases, places became critical parts of the scenes in complicated ways. Jenss studied the 1960s scene in Germany and explored how/why people in their teens and up to their thirties related so deeply to clothes, hairstyles, makeup, and accessories from the 1960s, which were before their time. Influenced heavily by the British mods (e.g., the Beatles, Mary Quant, etc.) of the 1960s and larger international revivals since the 1970s, participants in the German 1960s scene strove for a sense of authenticity in the cut and materials of their clothes. They would either buy 1960s clothes from vintage sources or make their own using patterns derived from this decade. Jenss notes that contemporary bodies differ from bodies forty years prior; bodies in the early twenty-first century tended to be

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taller and more muscular, which presented a material challenge when wearing vintage. This example is also illustrative of the intersection of body size, age, and generation. Individuals in the 1960s scene have been able to incorporate an array of 1960s styles (e.g., op or pop art, psychedelics, hippie dress) into their everyday lives in the twenty-first century. Jenss (2004) explains that retro “epitomizes the idea of space/time compression in dress, evoked through globally circulating images of other times and places” (398). Cole (2020) studied the vintage (1960s) Jamaican music and fashion scene in Los Angeles from the 1980s onward. Similar to Jenss’ study, there have been a mixture of 1960s styles (from mod to early skinhead to Fred Perry polo shirts) and, importantly, a “lived multiculturalism associated with 1960s Jamaican and British subcultures” (196); the scene is racially and ethnically diverse. An oral history with scene participant and professional journalist Ernesto Arce nostalgically describes his first experience with the club scene: We walk towards the front and there’s already a long line around the building. I had no idea that this scene existed. And it was like a picture right out of 1964. Everyone was impeccably dressed. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. I was so moved. I was like, I will never again be the same person after this day. It was the most beautiful thing. … I think one aspect was that it was such a diverse crowd. It was just everyone. There were white kids, mostly white kids, but there were also a lot of Asian kids, there was a lot of Chicano kids as well, there was a lot of Black kids. … It kind of felt like utopia to me. The ska scene, from this moment on, equals utopia for me. I want to be it, I want to live it, I want it to be me. … Everything about this scene will now be my life. It was a transformative experience. (in Cole 2020: 205) Cole coined the phrase “scenarios of style” to capture a method to study scenes in their entirety: including music, fashion, performances, and so on within the larger contexts of transnational routes and fluid senses of, and feelings about, time. Jenss’ and Cole’s research studies are a helpful reminder that individuals experience time and place subjectively. Style-fashion-dress can function as a kind of retro recycling, as well as periodic punctuations in anticipation of the future. The cultural theorist Walter Benjamin referred to fashion’s ability to make a “tiger’s leap into the past” (cited in Evans and Vaccari 2020: 26) to grab and appropriate styles and somehow rearticulate them to appear fresh. The impulses associated with nostalgic time scenes differ in significant ways from those associated with capitalist profit. In addition to nostalgic reasons for using the past for present inspiration and a sense of belonging, such leaps into the past are not confined to those of designers’ own places or cultures and can best be described as cultural appropriation. Time–Space Compression and “Speed-Space” Time–space compression has accelerated into what Paul Virilio (2001) calls “speedspace,” a world governed by new technologies that make “presence in time” possible 222

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through programming (e.g., the virtual world), perhaps more than physical space. Computers and telecommunications have enabled a rapid circulation of images and ideas, along with monitoring of the body (as seen with the Fitbits in Plate 1). With an internet connection or cellular service, individuals can readily acquire garments, fashion items, and aesthetic influences from far-flung physical places. They can also track their movements (along with the movement of whatever they have purchased) through technologies. This “speed-space” has accelerated the production of consumer goods, as well as of culturally appropriative fashions. Media platforms have also brought awareness to the exploitative and insensitive nature of the longstanding practice of appropriation and exploitation within the fashion industry. Social media watchdogs are an integral part of “call out culture”—they are naming appropriative designers. Cultures of origin are also doing this labor through new media and technological platforms. Power dynamics are still at play—particularly around big tech and accessibility; and in general, formal reparations seem to rarely occur. Elsewhere, we have written about Ralph Lauren’s ongoing appropriation of the Cowichan sweater (Plate 31) as an example of the complex intersections of capitalism, colonialism, and appropriation (Green and Kaiser 2017, 2020). The Cowichan Tribes are a Coast Salish group with traditional territories in the province of British Columbia, Canada, with longstanding and ancient traditions of spinning and weaving fiber (Meikle 1987). For more than a century, the production of “Cowichan sweaters” has been an important livelihood for Cowichan peoples, and their designs have circulated around the globe. In February 2015 the Cowichan took to social media platforms and press releases to call out Ralph Lauren for selling “Cowichan sweaters.” Because the Cowichan Tribes are from Canada, they are not protected by the United States’ Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, which is truth-in-advertising legislation that prevents companies or individuals from selling products that they call Native American; this body of law only offers protection to federally recognized Native American groups in the United States. Ralph Lauren responded by renaming the sweaters “Cowichan-inspired” and offered no compensation to the Cowichan. The so-called “Cowichan sweater” (Plate 31) sold by the fashion brand Ralph Lauren and manufactured in China is an unequivocal example of appropriation: He has never collaborated with or given any profit to the Cowichan, and yet continues to use their name. Legal scholar Susan Scafidi (2005) offers the three S’s—source, significance, and similarity—as a way to evaluate appropriation. Who is the source community? What is the significance of this design to the community? How similar is the design that was made by someone outside of the community? Another way to think through the complexities of cultural appropriation is through the cultural studies concept of cultural hybridity, which “has sought to subvert the idea of cultures as bounded, separate entities; rather, the concept acknowledges cultural differences and distinctiveness alongside the inevitable influences of crossfertilization of ideas, aesthetics, and intersectional identities in a global world” (Green and Kaiser 2020: 147). Cultural hybridity shares some similarities with the concept of “transculturation,” which was coined by anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (1995) as a way to consider the “highly varied phenomena” and “extremely complex transmutation of 223

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cultures” he witnessed in his ethnographic work in Cuba (98). The Cowichan sweater is in many ways a product of cultural hybridity and transculturation: encroaching settlers in the mid-nineteenth century brought sheep. Soon after in 1864, the Sisters of St. Ann established a school where they began to teach knitting to Cowichan girls (Meikle 1987: 3). The Coast Salish Wool Dog went extinct, and sheep became the new source of fiber. While weaving continued for ceremonial regalia, knitting became increasingly used for everyday dress and as an important source of income. Cowichan sweaters are typically two-color patterned knits made using the Fair Isle technique, a method named after one of the Shetland Islands in Scotland. Scots were one of the largest immigrant settler groups to contribute to the dispossession of Cowichan territory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Cowichan used this knitting technique to render their own designs and also took inspiration from other places. In Margaret Meikle’s (1987) book, Cowichan Indian Knitting, she highlights a dragon-like design by Cowichan knitter Marilyn George, who says that the design came from her grandmother, who she believed “got this pattern off of a Chinese tea box” (18). Another sweater on the same page, which was purchased in 1932, features a bow design reminiscent of Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1927 trompe-l’oeil bow sweater. Creative production does not occur in a vacuum—it happens within cultural and economic contexts, networks of power, a particular spatiotemporality, and articulates with other social, political, regulatory, and colonial forces. Cowichan sweater designs are dynamic and transcultural, entangled in complex ways with colonialism and capitalism, and an important livelihood and site of artistic and cultural expression for Cowichan knitters. In Chapter 3, we introduced approaches to decolonial fashion studies (Jansen 2020) and offered examples of resistance to colonization through style-fashion-dress. Here, we want to pick up on this discourse by returning to Hanifa, a contemporary fashion house that disrupts colonial histories, decenters “world fashion cities,” includes diverse body sizes, and innovates modes of distribution in real time—in other words, a designer who directly enters decolonial discourse through place and time. Hanifa is an excellent example of new fashion routes and centers: in September of 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, it was not feasible to hold traditional fashion shows with live models in physical spaces. Founder and designer Anifa Mvuemba came up with a creative solution: a digital fashion show on Instagram Live. She created a new kind of digital place where imagined, virtual embodiment became possible. The clothes were not shown on living bodies, but instead on avatars that conveyed body shapes and movement beneath the clothes, but did otherwise “show” a body—that is, no skin was revealed but a seemingly fleshed-out silhouette intimated the body. The digital “speed-space,” coupled with the absence of an identifiable model, enabled viewers to imagine themselves in the clothes. As the clothes moved via invisible avatar silhouettes, they opened up routes, sizes, and possibilities for multiple female bodies at the nexus of time and space: fashion models “for the moment.” One dress from the collection, “Kinshasa backless mini dress,” features pleats and the colors of the Congolese flag—red, blue, and yellow—in order to represent the nation 224

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and the geopolitical place. Kinshasa is the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The caption for the dress—available in sizes XS to 2XL for $369—is as follows: Congo’s flag has much meaning. This pleated design mirrors the strength in the history of our people. The A line silhouette personifies releasing the pain of the past and our backless design invites the peace and hope of the future.3 Let’s think about the soft and the sharper folds in the two dresses by returning to the textile-related metaphor of the fold (Deleuze and Strauss 1991: 243; Benjamin 1999; Smelik 2015), as discussed in Chapter 1. This metaphor helps us to consider the doublesidedness of fabric and ways of thinking about fabric’s malleability. Imagining time on one side and space on the other—but in one material form—we can envision the extent to which they are inseparable, and how they move with the body and through space. If draped or wrapped on the body on a daily basis, they become a little different each time. Even if they are stitched in the form of pleats, bows, or other embellishments, they take up space in different ways at different times. Cultural theorist Gilles Deleuze described this latter process as the “unfold,” which he characterized not as an opposite of folding but rather as a continuation of materiality and its open possibility of becoming something new (in Deleuze and Strauss 1991: 243). Hence the fold can be conceived as more of an infinity than an essence (227). As noted by fashion studies theorist Anneke Smelik (2014): The fold of fashion then is a dynamic process of becoming multiple, of searching for a new place of the human being in the world. Fashioning the fold can help to envisage the process of becoming, where the subject never tires of “folding, unfolding, refolding.” (54) As noted in Chapter 1, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin (1999) also theorized the fold from a philosophical point of view. He imagined gathered textiles (creating lots of loose folds) in the form of the ruffle as a material metaphor for fashion and subject formation through time and space. He wrote: “The eternal, in any case, is far more like the ruffle on a dress than some idea” (Benjamin 1999: 69). What did Benjamin mean by this? Unfortunately, due to his untimely death during his escape from Nazi Germany through Spain in 1940, he was not able to elaborate on his ideas and finish the book, The Arcades Project, in which this quote appears. But a few scholars have offered some potential interpretations. Philipp Ekardt (2020) suggests that Benjamin’s contrast between the ruffle and the idea was both a playful provocation and a product of his time and place (Europe in the 1930s, when ruffles and frills became fashionable after a period of streamlined silhouettes without much ornament). Also, Ekardt notes how the ruffle “acquires its significance in fashion theory as an item that has been set to permanence” and has a kind of “material obstinacy” (133). Similarly, Andrew Benjamin (2003, no 3https://hanifa.co/collections/pink-label/products/florence-backless-mini-dress

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relation to Walter) points out that the ruffle represents “a possibility of change, and thus the new,” because fashion “mimes history”; it comes up again and again over time and space (49). An example of this idea of the ruffle as a “possibility of change,” while also miming history, appears on the December 2020 cover of Vogue. For the first time in its history, Vogue has featured a man in a solo role on its cover4; however, the “possibility” so far appears limited to white subjectivities. Black men like Billy Porter, for example, have worn gowns on the red carpet, but have not been invited to be on the cover of Vogue. Meanwhile, Porter’s contemporary, the white British singer Harry Styles, wears a doublebreasted tuxedo jacket over “a frothy, lace-trimmed creation,” which was designed by his friend and muse Gucci’s creative director, Alessandro Michele (Bowles 2020: 98). While it is not possible to see the entire gown on the cover, the inside editorial shows it in its entirety: asymmetrical rows of flouncy white ruffles with black rows of trim that match the jacket. The gown pillows on the grass beyond Styles’ body in the photo. About half way down, there is a contrasting gauzy light pink flounce that stands out against the rest of the outfit. Styles has a confident stance, and his pectoral hair peeks out of the top of the gown’s bodice. The caption for the photo is “PRETTY, MUCH?” (Bowles 2020: 98). Styles’ use of ruffles is fresh not only in time and space but also in its complication of gender boundaries: his appearance “manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition” (Bowles 2020: 147). However, the proliferation of ruffles, along with Styles’ whiteness, points to the fact that every metaphor—including the ruffle—has its limits, especially when it becomes materialized. A ruffle is excess, by definition, and is thus aligned with capitalist accumulation. However, the way Walter Benjamin used the metaphor is still noteworthy to the extent that it reminds us that the fashion acknowledges change and recurrence, in contrast to the fascist, Nazi ideologies of his day. Those ideologies were limited, to say the least, by a lack of openness to change or even an acknowledgment of its potential (A. Benjamin 2003: 49). So, there is a contradiction at play here in the ruffle metaphor. On the one hand, the ruffle is “eternal” to the extent that it upholds capitalism and keeps returning through aesthetic change, maintaining ongoing profits for those who own the means of production. Analyzing the Harry Styles image, one might ask: Is a ruffle not just a kind of self-indulgence indicative of capitalism and white heteropatriarchy? On the other hand, fashion has obvious advantages over fascism in its openness to, and acceptance of, change—albeit through capitalism. As we have seen, fashion is not only about time but also occurs in a connected way with space/place, power, and economic systems (A. Benjamin 2003: 48). What happens when we imagine spaces that are “outside” of time and place, and even capitalism? Uchronic Temporality and Utopian Spaces Recall part of the earlier interview quote by Ernesto Arce, the Jamaican scene revival participant in Los Angeles: “It kind of felt like utopia to me. The ska scene, from this 4https://www.vogue.com/article/harry-styles-cover-december-2020

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moment on, equals utopia for me. I want to be it, I want to live it, I want it to be me. … Everything about this scene will now be my life. It was a transformative experience” (Cole 2020: 205, emphasis added). The concept of utopia refers to “an imaginary or mythical place” that may be “impossible to realize,” according to Oxford English Dictionary (2020). Evans and Vaccari (2020) build on fashion theorist Patrizia Calefato’s (2004) use of the term, as a fashionable “time which does not exist” (124). Dating back to the nineteenth century, “uchronia” replaces the place in utopia (topos) with time (chronos): “Scrambling time, it rewrites fashion history as a kind of fiction” (Evans and Vaccari 2020: 4–5). It becomes a way “to investigate the stories that fashion tells about its past and its imagined future” (5). Yet, as we have seen, time and place are intertwined; it may not be possible to replace one with the other—that is, to consider an ideal time without an ideal place. Most likely, utopian and uchronic representations are eclectic and articulate a combination of diverse places and times. Let’s consider Afrofuturist fashion as an illustrative case of spatiotemporal imagining. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, Afrofuturist fashion has demonstrated how the past, present, and future are not on a linear trajectory. Given the ways in which individuals in the African diaspora were subjected historically to enslavement and displacement from Africa, “Afrofuturists develop new identities of their own creation instead of those bestowed upon them by a society that defined them as subordinate” (Havlin 2015). World-making (which includes styling-fashioning-dressing) is critical to Afrofuturism. For example, Brianna Noble (Plate 32) is a Black horsewoman and founder of Mulatto Meadows, an equestrian business, as well as Humble Mulatto Meadows, a non-profit that connects underprivileged youth with horses and the benefits of open spaces (Bravo 2020). On her website, she describes world-building: I find it very interesting how we, as people, tend to build from nothing. We take few, and turn it into many. Slave owners gave us butcher scraps, and we turned it into soul food. We take our pain and sorrows and turn it into beautiful works of art and music. We can take a word that has a derogatory history and turn it into something we instead associate with beauty.5 Noble received international attention when she rode her horse, Dapper Dan (named for the designer), to an Oakland Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020. She used her fashion, horseback riding, and the coming together of people in protest at a particular moment in time and space to create new worlds. Noble explained: A Black woman with dreadlocks on a horse leading a group of people is not generally [a picture] that you would see in history books […] You see the white man, the white conqueror, sitting on his horse, with his sword raised, going to conquer the land.6 5https://www.mulattomeadows.com/copy-of-lessons 6https://www.sfweekly.com/culture/brianna-noble-humble-mulatto-meadows-wildfire-threat/.

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Noble reframes and rebuilds embodied fashion possibilities for Black women through visibility in space (and her efforts with Humble extend this world-building to young people of color). She, like President Touré in Plate 10, has seized the symbolism of the oppressor (e.g., the horse) and transformed it through embodied fashion that is empowering and joyful. In Plate 32, Noble gets styled for a parade and tribute to the film Black Panther. The fashion design program at the Oakland School of the Arts (where she had gone to high school) designed the costumes for the horses in the parade. Noble’s style bridges cowgirl aesthetics with African elements across places, and yet is also utopian and uchronic. It articulates intersectionalities across subject positions and possibilities for new subject formations and world-making.

Closing/Opening Thoughts As we have seen, time and space/place cannot be essentialized as static or fixed, because just as people grow and change across time and space, so does fashion—through bodies and processes of subject formation. The fields of fashion studies and feminist cultural studies alike remind us that subjectivity is embodied in time and place. The combination of these fields of study moves us beyond hegemonic ways of thinking about subject positions as separate, and other topics in binary terms: together, these fields require us to resist either/or thinking in favor of both/and or, better, multiple ways of thinking about being and becoming. We should always be thinking about additional subject positions that overlap in our model of intersectionality (Figure 2.1), because subjectivities are always emerging and changing within time(s) and place(s). Like fashion, our intersectional identities are unfolding and changing across time. Style-fashion-dress is at the center of important debates about the body, subjectivity, and culture through time and space. Style-fashion-dress constitutes the bridge; styled-fashioned-dressed bodies are “soft assemblages” (Fausto-Sterling 2003). We are born into our bodies at a particular moment in time and place, which means we cannot really choose some of our subject positions fully; however, as we’ve seen throughout this text, style-fashion-dress may enable (and also disable) exploration, self-determination, liberation, and world-making as we think about who we are, and who we are becoming in the world. Our subjectivity cuts across this process of navigating subject positions. Most of the time, we are probably somewhere in-between subject positions. These are the spaces that we inhabit. That’s how we make sense of who we are and how we are becoming. The issues will vary by context or situation, but the cultural anxieties and ambivalences associated with the processes of becoming are likely to influence the everyday choices that we make—whether we are “dressed to impress,” dressed in protest, dressed to be “unmarked,” dressed to avoid looking like someone else, and so on. Each day, we are dressed to navigate in-between spaces critically and creatively. Perhaps it is the process of navigating or negotiating itself that compels us to connect dots that might not otherwise be joined. But, the dots are always moving, as is the nature of fashion’s 228

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constant, daily change. The contribution of style-fashion-dress is that it helps us to perceive, negotiate, and consider subjectivities across subject positions. As discussed throughout this book, feminist, fashion studies, and cultural studies scholars have contributed to deeper understandings of social life and power relations by breaking down binary oppositions (e.g., masculine versus feminine, gay versus straight, Black versus white). Fashion studies scholar Joanne Entwistle (2000) rightfully notes how bodies are central to the cultural studies circuit. Bodies are pivotal to production, distribution, consumption, and other processes within the circuit of culture. These bodies, whether they are producing, distributing, regulating, or consuming, are styledfashioned-dressed. In short, they both do and appear across time and space. In a contemporary world of digitized imagery, social networking, internet shopping, and global retailing, in some ways it becomes easier to think about time and space together. On the other hand, there is a danger of losing sight of time and space altogether, and place may become especially endangered. Some fashion websites, for example, offer little sense of where a company is located, where the clothes are produced, and how long they have been in business. So, we have a delicate challenge here: to think in an interconnected way about time and space, and space and place, but not so abstractly as to obscure our ability to perceive and analyze them at all. It is through the styled-fashioned-dressed body that individuals subjectively experience and navigate time and space. Bodies are in motion, and they are located in time and space. How do bodies manage? We continue to submit that it is through a process of “minding appearances” (Kaiser 2001) that individuals bridge mind and body issues, and style themselves in ways that articulate their most recent thoughts about who they are (becoming). To the extent that resources allow (e.g., one’s bank balance or credit limit, aesthetic knowhow, accessible shopping venues), the system of style-fashion-dress offers a way to bridge across subject positions, manage and respond to power relations, and sort through visual and material cultures to see what just might be the best possible articulation of self at the moment. “Moment”—the root word of momentum—has a certain energy implied in its framing. Hence, time is moving, and, if anything, the pace has both accelerated and slowed with globalization. And, all of this movement happens within spaces that are located geographically, but digitally connected in an instant. In a contradictory manner, style-fashion-dress is locally constructed but yet is global in its circuit of culture. As we have seen, intersecting subject positions (structure) and subjectivity (agency) can be seen as one in the ongoing process of subject formation—like a journey along a Möbius strip (Figure 1.1). Subject formation through the styled-fashioned-dressed body has its political pitfalls, but it also offers opportunities for critical hope, as well as joy. We experience and enact the politics and pleasures of style-fashion-dress together as one convoluted (nonlinear) path through time and space. Time and space, in the process, cannot be essentialized as static or fixed, because just as people grow and change across time and space, so does fashion—through bodies. The Möbius strip, the fold, the ruffle, the Venn diagram, the circuit, and the knot are all metaphors that contribute to different ways of thinking about style-fashion-dress. They 229

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all work against essentialist, binary oppositional, and linear frameworks. Each metaphor or model explains something, but each has its limitations—hence, the need for multiple metaphors or models, so that no single metaphor will need to be pushed beyond its limits. Cultural discourses also have their limits, and they define or structure subject positions. However, individuals exercise agency as they articulate their subjectivities through style-fashion-dress via (1) the intersectionalities among these subject positions, (2) the spaces in-between subject positions, and (3) entanglements with other subjects. Subjectivity, as we have seen throughout this book, becomes visual and material through style-fashion-dress. Individuals navigate within and across overlapping subject positions (e.g., gender, sexuality, nation, class, race, ethnicity, age/generation, place) to represent the process of becoming in everyday life. Together, fashion studies and feminist cultural studies enable us to understand how subjectivity becomes embodied and negotiates power relations as we move through time and space every single day. These two fields of study, in tandem, remind us that power is complex, multilayered, nuanced, and quotidian. Through style-fashion-dress, power tends to operate less like a hammer and more like ongoing intersections, entanglements, tensions, and flows. Mixing metaphors, working through ambiguities and anxieties, and moving through time and space in a nonlinear manner, styled-fashioned-dressed bodies tell political, creative, cultural stories whose endings escape our grasps and extend our reaches.

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Note: Numbers in italics indicate figures. Abercrombie & Fitch 110, 182, 196 ableism 202–3, 209 ACTUP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) 180 adaptations of clothing 59, 206 Addams, Jane 130–1 advertising. See also distribution bodies and 191 distribution and 25 globalization and 66 intersectionalities and 33, 46 “magical system” of 24 menswear and 16, 161–2, 182, 184 race and ethnicity 83 regulation of 223 Africa 19, 46, 53, 61, 75, 169. See also specific names of countries African Americans. See also Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement; diaspora, African; race and ethnicity; specific names of African Americans 1960s and 34, 38, 80, 83 Afrofuturism Plate 32, 227–8 beauty standards and 80, 83, 87–8 Black Church, the 102–3 British royal family and 120 camp aesthetics and 199 class, social and 137 fat 195, 199 hair 83–6 intersectionalities and 2, 43 LGBTQIA+ 213 “one-drop rule” 79 rearticulations of race and 87–90 zoot suits 157 African diaspora. See diaspora, African Afrofuturism Plate 32, 227–8 age/generations. See also babies and children; youth cultures Generation Z 9 place and 213–18 spatiotemporalities 218–28 subjectivities and 228–30 agency. See also structure-agency debate cultural appropriation and 49 definitions 5, 6, 8 hair and 83 intersectionalities and 37

Muslim women and 104 regulation and 33 religious fashion and 98 structures of feeling and 39 subject formation and 27–9, 31–2 AIDS. See HIV/AIDS crisis Akou, Heather 109, 114 Ambani, Olivia 70–1 ambiguity. See also ambivalence, cultural advertising and 46 age/generation and 213 class, social and 120, 123, 127, 138–40 gender 143 introduction to 11 nationalism and 60, 69 negotiation of 45–50 regulation and 108 sexualities and 165, 168, 176 subject positions and 37–42 ambivalence, cultural. See also ambiguity age/generation and 216 circuit of style-fashion-dress model 39, 39 class, social and 120, 129, 138–40 femininity and 62 gender and 154, 156, 157, 161 intersectionalities and 45, 46, 49 introduction to 11 nationalism and 60, 62 religious fashion and 99 sexualities and 177, 184, 185 structures of feeling and 40–2 American Airlines 84 American Indians. See Indigenous peoples; Native Americans; Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations American Museum of Natural History 65 American Revolution 57 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 202 Americas 46, 52, 53, 61, 79. See also names of specific countries; North America; South America Amish 101 anti-Semitism 111, 112–13. See also Nazism anxiety, cultural ambiguity, negotiation of 45–6, 47 ambivalence, cultural and 40–2

256

Index circuit of style-fashion-dress model 39, 39 class, social and 120, 122, 129–33, 134, 137, 139 definitions of 139 gender and 143, 152, 156, 166 nationalism and 53, 54, 59–61, 62 sexualities and 171, 175–6, 181–2 time and space 217–18 zoot suits 158–9 appearance. See also gender; race and ethnicity; religious fashion age/generation and 213 ambiguity and 40, 46 class, social and 125, 129, 133 dressed embodiment 191, 192, 196, 199 feminist theory and 148 gender and 143, 151, 162–3, 226 inevitability of 31, 209 intersectionalities and 31–3, 38–40, 186 introduction to 2, 8, 11, 28 minding appearances 32, 87, 168, 190, 211, 229 national dress and 53, 60 nostalgia and 221 race and ethnicity 75, 76, 77, 79–82, 86, 90 religion and 97–8, 107 sexualities and 162–3, 171–2 structure-agency debate 33, 34 transnational perspectives and 33, 43 approaches to study 1–8 appropriation, cultural. See cultural appropriation Arce, Ernesto 222, 226 Armani, Giorgio 67, 94 Arthur, Linda B. 97–8, 106, 108 articulation binary thinking and 6 defined 6–9, 28 embodiment and 190 gender and 16, 143, 145, 146 globalization and 69 intersectionalities 37, 38 nationalism and 51, 52, 56, 61 race and ethnicity 74–5, 76, 78, 86–90 religious fashion and 99–100, 109, 113 time and space 229 Asia 20, 61, 75, 79, 91, 162. See also specific names of countries Asian Americans 79, 80, 86–7, 135, 162, 213 assemblages gender and 9, 145 introduction to 8–9 race and ethnicity 77 soft 9, 145, 150, 155, 163 athletic bodies 186, 195, 196, 200–2 Australia 46, 52, 98, 109, 151 Austria 55, 57–8, 109, 112 authenticity 67, 183, 216, 221

256

babies and children 50, 112, 127, 129, 142–3, 150, 215, 216–17 Ballets Russes 92, 93 Bangladesh 22, 133 Barnes, Sequoia 38, 199 Barry, Ben 12, 13, 195 beauty standards advertising and 33 hegemony of 85, 186 power and 33 race and ethnicity and 80, 81, 83, 87–8 becoming defined 1 gender and 144–6, 154–5 intersectionalities and 31–2, 35–6 race and ethnicity 76–7, 78 religious fashion and 106 sexualities and 187 subject formation and 26, 27, 28, 31 subjectivity and 4–5, 6, 230 time and space 211–12, 225 transnationality and 90 belonging 3, 28, 51, 76–7, 86–90, 200, 222. See also conformity belonging-in-difference 76–7, 86–90 Benjamin, Andrew 225–6 Benjamin, Walter 4, 42, 83, 225, 226 Berlin 55, 95, 111, 112, 113, 174 biases 31, 44 binary thinking class, social and 125 cultural appropriation and 49 gender and 142–3, 144, 145, 146, 147–53 intersectionalities and 33, 41–4 introduction to 2–3, 4–5, 6, 10, 13 nationalism and 54 race and ethnicity and 75, 76, 79, 81, 88 sexualities and 165–6, 167, 168, 169–70, 174–5 sizing systems and 193 time and space and 211–12, 218, 229–30 bisexuality 165, 168, 172, 175, 213 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Plate 3, Plate 5 18, 31, 34, 73, 227–8 Black Panther (film) 228 Black Panther party 34 Blumer, Herbert 11, 45, 138 bodies 189–209 abstraction of 192–3 athletic 186, 195, 196, 200–2 beauty standards and 27–8 clothing adaptations and 59, 206 conceptions of 8, 189–90 disabled 200–9 fat 13, 194–6, 198–9 intersectionalities and 31, 40

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Index modifications of 189 nationalism and 51 phenomenology 190–2 race and ethnicity 74 religion and 103–6, 113 size and 193–4, 196–8 subjectivities and 36, 209, 230 both/and thinking ambivalence, cultural 139 binary thinking vs. 3, 5, 41 Black feminist thought and 88 introduction to 2, 3, 16–17 religious fashion and 99, 106, 113 Bourdieu, Pierre 32, 117, 119, 138 branding 24, 184. See also distribution; representation Brazil 61, 75, 82, 109 Breward, Christopher 10, 66, 123–4, 129, 146, 154 Britain. See United Kingdom Brummell, George Bryan (Beau), Plate 19, 136–7, 147 Bucar, Elizabeth 103–4, 106, 108 Buddhism 102 Burning Man 163, 215 burqini 109–10 business suits 59, 159, 177. See also menswear Butler, Judith 56, 143, 145, 150 Calefato, Patrizia 221, 227 calico 47, 48, 127, 129 California authors’ relationship to 215 Burning Man and 163 denim jeans and 139 disabilities and 205 facemasks 29 pachuquismo subculture 157 race and ethnicity 86 religious fashion 106, 109 Calvin, John 97, 97 Calvinism 96–7 camp aesthetics 9, 166, 199 Canada 12, 52, 65, 94, 109, 223–4 capitalist systems. See also globalization body size and 196 Christianity and 95–6 class, social and 113, 124–8, 134, 138 cultural appropriation and 49, 90, 223–4 global 52, 66, 69, 98–9, 128 religious fashion and 95–6, 110–11, 113 slavery and 75 time and space in 218, 220–1, 226 Caribbean 43, 75, 77, 126 caste systems 121–2, 133 Catholic Church 96

CDC (US Centers for Disease Control) 197, 202 cheongsam dresses 68, 117 Chicago 100–1 Chicanx 79, 157. See also Mexican Americans China class, social and 122, 134 Cultural Revolution 59–61 facemasks and 19–20 globalization and 45, 52, 67–8 race and ethnicity 76, 82 transnationality and 46 Christianity 53, 95–8, 105, 107, 109, 111, 195. See also religious fashion; specific denominations chronic, 209, Plate 29 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, The 74, 98, 107, 109 circuit of style-fashion-dress model 17–20, 18, 26–7, 30, 38–40, 44–5. See also style-fashion-dress system of concepts class, social 117–40 ambiguity and 120, 123, 127, 138–40 ambivalence and 120, 129, 138–40 caste systems 121–2 definitions of 117–21, 134 France 57, 58, 59, 129, 140 industrialization and 124–8 introduction to 10, 11, 15 metaphors of 133–8 production and 128–33 religious fashion and 100 sexualities and 180, 182 sizing systems and 194 sumptuary laws 121–4 United Kingdom 117, 120, 122–7, 129–30 United States 120 Venn diagram of subject positions and 36 Cole, Nina 221, 222 Collins, Patricia Hill 2, 88 colonialism 46–7, 52, 61–3, 65, 70–1, 89, 159–60 color, skin 79–82, 85. See also race and ethnicity Communism 59, 134 Condition of the Working Class in England, The 125 conformity. See belonging; class, social; regulation Congo, Democratic Republic of the 159–60, 212–13, 224–5 Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) 73–4 consumption conspicuous 139 Cultural Revolution, Chinese and 60 introduction to 3, 22–4 regulation and 29–30 religious fashion and 114 social class and 128–33 transnationality and 32, 43, 45, 47, 49 Cornell University 11, 64, 215

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Index cosmetics. See makeup costume 2, 12, 16, 53–6, 68, 71 costume, theatrical 92, 135, 192 cotton 47, 62, 63, 74, 126–7, 128 Cowichan Indian Knitting 224 Cowichan sweaters, Plate 31, 223–4 Cox, Laverne 151–2, 153 Craig, Maxine 78, 83 Craik, Jennifer 14, 89 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 2, 35 cross-dressing 152, 169–70, 171. See also gender; sexualities; transgender people Cuba 224 cultural ambivalence. See ambivalence, cultural cultural anxiety. See anxiety, cultural cultural appropriation class, social and 139 defined 13 Indigenous peoples and 65–6, 90, 223–4 intersectionalities and 47–50 kente cloth and 73–4, 90, 91 race and ethnicity 85, 90–4 religious fashion and 100 sexualities and 167, 176, 181 cultural discourses age/generation 215, 217 class, social 130, 134, 137 gender 143–4, 149 intersectionalities and 31, 33, 45–6, 50 introduction to 27–9 nationalist 51 race and ethnicity 76, 78 sexualities 165, 168, 175, 179, 181, 185 time and space 230 Cultural Revolution, Chinese 59–61 cultural studies, origins of 14–17 Dakar, Senegal 43, 58 David, Alison Matthews 12, 193 Davis, Angela, fig. 4.1 83, 83 Davis, Fred 11, 40, 41, 137–40, 185, 205, 221 decolonization 63–6 definition of terms. See specific terms Deleuze, Gilles 4–5, 225 Descartes, René 101, 146 designers. See specific names of designers diaspora, African 8, 43, 55, 74, 85, 87–8. See also African Americans; race and ethnicity diaspora, Chinese 68 diaspora, Indian 70 diaspora, Jewish 111–13 Dior, Christian 68, 175, 215 disability 196, 200–9, Plate 29. See also bodies distribution 24–6, 29, 66, 213, 218–20. See also advertising

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DITC (Dykes in the City) brand 183–4 drag 55, 166 dredlocks 18, 18 n.3, 85 Dutch. See Netherlands, The Dyer, Christopher 123 Dyer, Richard 79–80 dyes 62, 123, 124, 130 East India Company 47, 62 Edwards, Tim 146, 156 Eicher, Joanne 8, 44, 88 either/or thinking. See binary thinking Ellington, Tameka 18 n.3, 85 Engels, Friedrich 119, 125–6, 127 England. See United Kingdom Enlightenment, European 58, 146 entanglement class, social and 140 colonialism and 159 intersectionalities and 42–3, 50 modernity and 48 nationalism and 51, 61, 69–71 race and ethnicity 76 Western dress and 48 Entwistle, Joanne 8, 25, 32, 119, 189, 190, 191, 229 environmental issues 13, 19–20, 23, 29 essentialism 16, 17, 34–5, 56, 145, 229–30 ethnicity. See race and ethnicity Eurocentricity 13–14, 47, 53, 198 euromodernity gender and 144, 145–6, 149, 151–2, 155–7 intersectionalities and 43–4, 50 menswear and 34, 154 nationalism and 52 race and ethnicity 77 sexualities and 169, 172, 174, 185, 187 time and space 218–19 Europe. See also colonialism; euromodernity; specific names of countries capitalist systems and 95 class, social 122–3, 130 gender in 151–2 globalization and 61 history of fashion and 14–15 intersectionalities and 44–8 nationalism and 52–4, 57–8 race and ethnicity 74–5, 94 religious fashion in 106, 109, 111 sexualities in 169, 172–4, 180 time and space 218, 220, 225 exoticism 91, 94 facemasks 18–20, 23, 29 Fascism 33–4. See also Nazism fashion, defined 16–17

259

Index Fashion and Race Database, The 12, 14 Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom (digital platform) 12, 14 Fashion Theory (journal) 12, 14 fast fashion 19, 22, 23, 26, 67, 133 fat bodies 194–9. See also bodies Fausto-Sterling, Anne 144, 145, 150 feeling, structures of. See structures of feeling femininity. See also gender gender and 142–9, 152 introduction to 2–3, 15 nationalism and 41, 60, 62, 71 race and ethnicity and 89 religious fashion and 100, 102, 113 sexualities and 166–7, 172, 175, 176, 177, 181, 182 feminism 15, 81, 178 feminist theory 5, 10–11, 15, 35, 88, 147–9. See also intersectionalities fibers cedar bark 48 Coast Salish Wool Dog 224 cotton 47, 62, 63, 74, 126–7, 128 fur 48, 61, 62 silk 61, 62, 74, 146, 147 sustainability of 19 wool 48, 53, 62, 146, 159 film 70, 80, 84, 135, 148, 166–7, 192, 228 Finland 150 First Nations 65. See also Indigenous peoples; Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations First World War 55, 112 flaunting 198–9, 204, 207, 208 Flugel, J. C. 184–5 fold metaphor 4–5, 225 folk costume 53–6. See also costume; nationalism football, American 200–1 Ford, Tanisha C. 38, 87–8 Foucault, Michel 27, 76, 85, 165 France class, social 58, 59, 124, 129, 140 colonialism 64–5, 159 French Revolution 56–9, 108, 120, 146 intersectionalities and 46 nationalism and 53, 55 religious fashion and 108–9 Freud, Sigmund 172–4, 175 functional apparel 201–2, 206–7, 208 fur 48, 61, 62 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 63, 64 Garber, Marjorie 152, 165, 166, 168, 180 garment industry 111–12 garment workers. See also textile workers class, social 117, 127–33, 132

globalization and 6–7, 20–2, 39 regulation and 29 religious fashion and 115 time and space 218, 219, 220 gay men age/generations and 216 class, social 179–80 homophobia and 174 masculinity and 176 menswear and 177, 179 race and ethnicity 213–14 sexualities and 166–7, 170, 182 gaze 2, 148, 149, 182, 184–6 gender 140–63. See also bodies; sexualities age/generation 161–2 assignment of 142–3, 145, 150 becoming and 144–6, 154–5 binary thinking and 2, 3, 142–3, 144, 145, 146, 147–53 colors and 143 definitions of 140–5 fat and 196 femininity and 142–9, 152 intersectionalities and 146, 156 marked status of 142–3, 145–7 menswear 155–63 multidimensionality of 16 nationalism and 55, 57, 58–9, 62, 71 performance of 143–4, 146, 150–1, 152, 163, 166, 167 race and ethnicity 89 self-representation and 176–7, 181 sex and 144, 147–9, 150 soft assemblage of 9, 145, 150, 155, 163 theories of 149–51 transgender studies 151–5 trousers and 92 Venn diagram of subject positions and 36 generations. See age/generations genocide 46, 55, 61, 73, 113 geography. See place Germany 46, 48, 54–5, 96, 109, 111–12, 174, 221–2 Ghana 73, 74, 90 Ginsberg, Ruth Bader, Plate 20, 141–2 global capitalism. See capitalist systems globalization 44, 49, 52, 66–9, 98–9, 128, 219– 20, 229. See also capitalist systems; cultural appropriation; transnationality Goffman, Erving 23, 85, 197, 205 “Golden Round” route 61–2 Gramsci, Antonio 33–4 Grossberg, Lawrence 6, 44 Guenther, Irene 112, 113 Guinea (country) 64–5

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Index habitus 16, 32, 83, 119–20, 143–4, 182 hair gender and 142, 152, 157, 172, 174, 181, 184 nationalism and 60 race and ethnicity 18 n.3, 82–6, 87 religion and 101, 106–7 time and space 216, 221, 226 Hall, Radclyffe, fig 8.1 171–2, 173 Hall, Stuart articulation 6 globalization 66–7 importance of 15 race and ethnicity 75, 76–7, 78, 82, 87, 90 representation 24 transnationality 43 Halston 175, 179 Hanifa (company) 212, 224–5 Hasidim 101, 105, 106, 113 head coverings 91–4 Black Church, the 103 hijab 91, 94, 99–100, 104, 108, 109, 115 Jewish 99, 106–7 “marked” status of 105 regulation of 108, 110 tesettür (Turkish clothing business) 114, 115 turbans 91–4, 93, 144 hegemony. See also power bodies and 198, 208 gender and 146, 147, 149, 156–7, 159 intersectionalities and, Plate 6, 33–4, 36, 37, 42, 46, 47–8, 186 nationalism and 58, 59, 62, 66–7, 69 race and ethnicity 79, 85, 86–7 sexualities and 165, 174, 182, 186 Hesselbein, Chris 189, 191 heterosexuality 170, 176, 182, 185 hijab 91, 94, 99–100, 104, 108, 109, 115 Hinduism 66, 69, 70, 102, 121 hip-hop culture 88–9 Hispanic Americans. See Chicanx; Indigenous peoples; Latino Americans; race and ethnicity history of cultural studies 14–16 history of fashion studies 10–14 HIV/AIDS crisis, Plate 6, 37, 153–4, 180 Hmong people 20, 79 Hollander, Anne 154, 155, 189–90 Hollywood 112, 185, 192, 195, 200 Holocaust 55, 113 home economics 11–12 homoeroticism 165, 182, 184 homophobia 169, 170–6, 181, 197 Hong Kong 68 hoodies 99–100, 115, 193 hooks, bell 2, 88, 119, 166–7 Hupačasath First Nation 65, 66 Hutter, Verena 55–6

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identities. See subject formation identity politics 27, 75, 169 imperialism. See colonialism India class, social and 121 cotton 62, 127 intersectionalities and 49 nationalism and 67, 69 race and ethnicity 69, 70, 75 spirituality and 102 textile industry 47, 62–3 transnationality and 46 Indian Arts and Crafts Act (USA) 223 Indigenous peoples. See also Native Americans adoption of new materials by 48 appropriation, cultural 66, 89, 90 colonialism and 52, 61–6 Cowichan Tribes, Plate 31, 223–4 gender and 152 genocide and 46, 73 indigo 62, 64 Indonesia 94, 106, 114 Industrial Revolution 128, 218 influencers, fashion 13, 25, 26, 137 Intellect (publisher) 12 International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) 21, 132 intersectionalities age/generations and 214 ambiguity and 39–40, 45–50 class, social and 140 cultural appropriation and 49–50 entanglement and 42–3 gender and 146, 156 introduction to 1, 2, 4, 17, 35 nationalism and 51, 69–71 race and ethnicity and 85, 89 sexualities and 167, 182, 184–7 structure-agency dynamics 33–4 structures of feeling and 38–42 subject formation and 33, 34–8 subject positions and 37, 182 transnationality and 31–2, 35–6, 37, 43–5 intersubjectivity 31, 32, 45–6. See also intersectionalities; subject formation Iran 98, 106, 108, 110, 113 Islam 70, 74, 91–4, 113–15. See also religious fashion Israel, Nathan 112, 113 Italy 53, 67, 68, 109 Jamaica 77, 160 Japan, Plate 3, 18, 46, 122 Jean-Raymond, Kerby (designer), Plate 14, 78–9 jeans, denim 60, 88, 113, 139, 165, 177, 179, 206 Jenkins, Kimberley 10, 12 Jenss, Heike 12, 221–2

261

Index Jews 55, 95, 113, 122, 131, 135–6, 174 Jirousek, Charlotte 92–3, 200, 215 Johnson, Marsha P., fig 8.2 176, 178 Jones, Carl 74, 90 Judaism 74, 98, 99, 101, 105, 106–7 Kahlo, Frida, Plate 28, 89–90, 89, 204–5 Katz, Jonathan Ned 170, 176 Keist, Carmen 13, 194 Kelly, Patrick (fashion designer), Plate 6, 37–8, 40, 74, 90, 103, 175 kente cloth 73–4, 90, 91 Kenya 70–2, 76, 213 Khabeer, Su’ad Abdul 99, 100 khadi cloth 63, 64 Kierkegaard, Søren 41, 217 Kinshasa, Congo 160, 225 Klein, Calvin 165, 182 Korea 46, 144 labor issues 13, 19, 197. See also garment workers Lamb, Jane 202, 206 Lancaster, Roger 77–8 La SAPE movement, Plate 23, 159–60 Latin America. See South America Latino Americans 80, 157–8, 206 Lauren, Ralph 135–6, 179, 223 LDS. See Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, The Lederhosen 54–5 Lefebvre, Henri 211, 212 lesbians. See also gender; sexualities; specific names of individuals “clone look” 177, 179, 180 gender and 154, 171–2, 174 self representation 183–4 social movements and 176–8, 180–1 level playing field metaphor 134, 149 Lewis, John 82 Lewis, Reina 25, 105, 109, 114 LGBTQIA+. See bisexuality; gay men; gender; lesbians; sexualities Lillethun, Abby 13–14 linear thinking 4–5, 17, 221, 229–30. See also binary thinking Livingston, Jennie 166–7 Lizzo (Jefferson, Melissa Viviane), Plate 26, 199 logos 38, 183–4 London, Plate 16, 25, 34, 62, 101, 111–12, 124, 169 Louis XVI, King 56–8, 124 makeup 32, 37, 49, 96, 152, 177, 179 male gaze. See gaze mannequins (dummies) 107, 192–3 Mao Zedong 59, 60 Marie Antoinette, Queen 57–8, 119–20, 140

marked and unmarked status binary thinking and 3 disability and 207 feminist theory and 148 gender and 142–3, 145–7 race and ethnicity 81, 120 religious fashion and 105 sexualities and 168, 170, 186, 213 marketing. See advertising Marx, Karl, fig 6.1 119, 125, 126, 126 masculinity. See also gender; menswear atheletics and 200 bias and 10–11 binary thinking and 2 bodies and 195 gender and 18–19, 143, 145, 148–9, 152, 155–63 nationalism and 57, 71 rejection of fashion 57, 146 sexualities and 176–8, 182 time and space 226 unmarked status of 2, 136–7, 145–7, 176, 181 Massey, Doreen 2, 211 Mattachine Society 175, 176 Mauss, Marcel 119–20 Mazón, Mauricio 157, 159 McCall’s (pattern company) 216–17 McCullough, Sarah 195, 202 McNeil, Peter 45, 123 medical transitioning 153. See also gender; transgender people Medieval Period. See Middle Ages men 83, 85, 106–7, 153, 154–5, 216. See also gay men; gender; masculinity; menswear Mennonites 97–8, 101, 106, 108. See also Mexican Americans menswear advertising and 16, 161–2, 182, 184 business suits 59, 159, 177 gaze and 185 gender and 155–63 homophobia and 181 peacock revolution 156, 179 performativity and 146 sexualities and 182 social movements and 179 uniforms 146 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Jean Jacques 190–1 metaphors. See also Möbius strip metaphor; style-fashion-dress system of concepts binary thinking and 229–30 class and 133–8 final summary 229–30 fold metaphor 4–5, 225 jazz 6 knots 42–3 LEGO 5, 6

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Index level playing field 134, 149. See also feminist theory limitations of 138 network metaphor 25 percolation 137 pyramid 133 refashioning of bodies 7 social ladder 134, 138 trickle across 138 Metropolitan Museum of Art 94, 98 metrosexuals 156, 182 Mexican Americans 157–8, 206 Mexico 89, 204. See also Kahlo, Frida Middle Ages 74, 122–4 Middle East 46, 91, 111 Milan 46, 67 military dress 59, 71, 85, 146 minding appearances 32, 87, 168, 190, 211, 229 mixed-race 81, 85. See also race and ethnicity mobility, social 133–8 Möbius strip metaphor defined 3, 4, 5 sexualities and 165, 168, 184–5, 186 subject formation and 28 time and space 219 models, professional fashion 191–2 modernity 46–7, 48, 59, 71 modest fashion 98 modesty 103–6 Mormonism. See Church of Jesus Christ of LatterDay Saints, The Muslim fashion, Plate 16, 25, 94, 98, 99–101, 106, 109–10, 113–15. See also religious fashion Muslims. See Islam; Muslim fashion; religious fashion Mussolini 33, 34 Mvuemba, Anifa 212–13, 224 nationalism 51–71. See also capitalist systems; identities; specific names of countries Cultural Revolution, Chinese and 59–61 difference and 53–4 French Revolution and 56–9 gender and 60, 62, 71, 146 globalization 66–9 intersectionalities and 41, 51, 54–6, 69–71 race and ethnicity and 69, 75, 87 Native Americans. See also Indigenous peoples; Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations adoption of new materials by 48 class, social and 120 Cowichan Tribes, Plate 31, 223–4 gender and 152 genocide and 46, 73

262

racialization of 79, 80 Nazism 55, 111–13, 122, 174, 225, 226. See also antiSemitism; homophobia neckwear 141–2 neocolonialism 70, 71. See also colonialism Netherlands, The 47, 69, 109, 180 New Look 68, 215 New Orleans 157 New York City 46, 106, 131, 176 New Zealand 46 Nike (brand) 109, 115, 208 1960s China and 68 class, social and 117, 139 cultural studies, origins of 15 fat acceptance 196 gender in 154 nostalgia 221–2 race and ethnicity 34, 38, 43, 75, 80, 83 social movements 15, 176–80 swimwear 175 Noble, Brianna, Plate 32, 227 North America 44, 45, 61, 65, 70, 154. See also Canada; United States Northwest Coast (region of North America) 48, 61 nostalgia 88, 217–18, 221–2 Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations 48, 61–2, 215 N.Y. Knit Goods 21, 21 O’Conner, Sandra Day, Plate 20, 141 Olympics 115, 200 O’Neal, Gwen 88, 97–8, 102–3 orientation, sexual. See sexualities originality. See uniqueness Ortiz, Fernando 223–4 Ottoman Empire 93–4 pachuquismo subculture 157–8 Pacific Islands 61 Pakistan 75 Pakistani Americans 100–1 pandemic, Covid-19 18–20, 22, 23, 73, 213, 219, 224. See also facemasks pandemic, influenza (1918–1919) 29 Paris 38, 40, 46, 58, 159 Paris is Burning 166–7, 176 Paulicelli, Eugenia 53–4 performance of gender 143–4, 146 persuasion 33, 69. See also advertising Peters, Lauren Downing 13, 194 Pham, Minh-Ha T. 49, 65–6, 193 phenomenology 190–2 phenotypes 77–8. See also race and ethnicity pious fashion 105–7. See also religious fashion place 209, 213–18

263

Index plagiarism of designs 65–6. See also appropriation, cultural Playboy 186, 208 plus-size 196–7. See also bodies Portugal 46, 61, 67 power. See also hegemony binary thinking and 3, 42 bodies and 189, 190, 192, 199, 201 class, social and 122–4, 134, 136 cultural appropriation and 48–9 gender and 141, 144, 148–9, 152–4, 155, 157, 159 intersectionalities and 38, 43, 46 introduction to 1, 2 nationalism and 51, 55–6, 58, 60, 63, 65, 67, 69 nature of 34 race and ethnicity and 75, 76–8, 80–1, 85, 86 relations 27 religious fashion and 90–1, 94, 99, 108, 114 sexualities and 166–7, 168, 170, 180, 183–4, 185, 186 structure-agency dynamics and 33 structures of feeling and 39 time and space 211, 212, 213, 219, 223, 224, 229, 230 production. See also fast fashion; garment workers; specific names of countries appropriation of 90 binary thinking and 3 class, social and 118–19, 125–33 distribution and 24–5 garment workers 21, 127–33 globalization 21–2 home 23, 132 industrial 19–22, 47, 48, 90 intersectionalities and 32, 43 introduction to 19–22 labor issues 13 nationalism and 58, 62–3, 67, 68 regulation and 29 religious fashion 110–11, 114, 115 time and space 218–20 Protestantism 95–8, 105, 195 Pyer Moss, Plate 14, 78–9 Quebec 109 queer sexualities. See sexualities queer theory 149–50. See also gender; sexualities Rabine, Leslie 43, 70 race and ethnicity 73–94. See also Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement; specific categories and nationalities Afrofuturism, Plate 32, 227–8 appearance 75, 76, 80

appropriation, cultural 90–4 articulations of 74–5, 78 beauty standards and 80, 81, 83, 87–8, 186 belonging and 76–7 binary thinking and 3, 75, 76, 79, 81, 88 biological concepts of 76, 77–9 bodies 74 color and 78, 79–82 discrimination, court cases on 83–5 ethnic dress 48, 75, 76–7 fat stigma and 194–5, 196 gender and 89 hair and 82–6 nationalism and 52, 55–6, 69, 70–1, 75, 94 Nazism and 111–13 racial plagiarism 65–6 rearticulations of 77–9, 86–90, 94 religion and 74, 90–4 sexualities and 213 sizing systems and 194 ska scene and 222 slavery and 73, 81–2 sliding signifiers 74–7 Venn diagram of subject positions and 36 whiteness 81 racialization 79. See also race and ethnicity racial plagiarism 65–6 Reddy-Best, Kelly 13, 183 regulation 29–30, 33, 56, 83, 107–8 Reinach, Simona Segre 52, 67, 68 religion. See specific names of religions religious dress 97, 99, 101 religious fashion 95–115. See also Muslim fashion agency and 98, 108 becoming and 90 defined 95–9 Jewish diaspora and 111–13 modesty and 103–6 Muslim Cool 99–101 Muslim fashion, globalization of 113–15 pious fashion 105–7 production of 110–11 regulation and 107–8 secularism and 108–10 spirituality and 101–3 swimwear 109, 112, 115 religious freedom 108, 110 representation of bodies 192–3 cultural intermediaries and 25 defined 24 distribution and 25 image as focus in 26 retail. See distribution

263

264

Index revolutions, national. See also Cultural Revolution, Chinese; Industrial Revolution American Revolution 146 French Revolution 56–9, 98, 108, 120, 146 Iranian Revolution 108, 110, 113 Mexican Revolution 89 Riello, Giorgio 45, 123 Rinallo, Diego 162–3, 181 Rio de Janeiro 115 Rocamora, Agnès 26, 58, 220 Rogers v. American Airlines 84–5 salwar kameez 70, 114, 115. See also India; Islam Sapeurs. See La SAPE movement saris 69, 70, 102. See also Hinduism; India science 47, 75 secularism 108–10 sewing machines 124, 129, 132 sexualities 165–87. See also gay men; lesbians ambiguity and 165, 168, 176 becoming and 187 binary thinking and 165–6, 167, 168, 169–70, 174–5 bisexuality 165, 168, 172, 175, 213 class, social and 182 definitions of 165–7, 168–9 fat stigma and 196 femininity and 166–7, 172, 175, 176, 177, 181, 182 feminist theory and 149 gender and 144–5, 147–9 heterosexuality 170, 176, 182, 185 homophobia 170–6 insufficiency of acronyms 168 intersectionalities and 186–7 social change (1960s and 1970s) 176–80 social change (1980s and 1990s) 180–4 subjectivities 167–9 subject positions and 184–6 Venn diagram of subject positions and 36 Shanghai 58, 59, 68 shifting erogenous zones theory 185–6 Sikh 144 silk 61, 62, 74, 146, 147 Silk Road 52, 61 Simmel, Georg 10, 28–9, 95, 118, 134, 137–8 Simpson, Paul 216 Singapore 68, 68, 135 size, body 193–4, 196–8. See also bodies; production ska scene 222, 226–7 slavery 75, 79, 81–2, 126–7 sliding signifiers 74–7 social change (1960s and 1970s) 176–80 social change (1980s and 1990s) 180–4 social class. See class, social social ladder metaphor 134, 138

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social media 13, 137, 196, 223 social mobility 10 social movements 1960s 176–80 disability and 207–8 history of cultural studies and 15 HIV/AIDS crisis 180 social change (1980s and 1990s) 180–4 soft assemblage 9, 145, 155, 163 South Africa 70 South America 19, 61, 79, 169. See also North America space. See time and space Spain 46, 53, 61, 67 spatiotemporalities 211, 218–28. See also time and space Special Olympics 200 Speedo (brand) 109, 202 spinning 62, 63, 64 spirituality 101–3 Square, Jonathan Michael 10, 12 status 138–40. See also anxiety, cultural; class, social; marked and unmarked status Stone, Gregory 11, 40 Stonewall Riots 171, 176 Strings, Sabrina 194–5 structure-agency debate 1, 2, 3, 6, 33–4 structures of feeling 38–42, 43, 45–6 Stryker, Susan 151, 154 style-fashion-dress system of concepts. See also metaphors; subject positions assemblages and 8–9 circuit of style-fashion-dress model 17–19, 18, 26–7, 30, 38–40, 44–5 class, social and 119 intersectionalities and 31, 32, 34–8 introduction to 8–9, 13–14 nationalism and 51, 53, 56, 60 subject formation class, social and 138–40 defined 26 final summary 229 intersectionalities and 31–40, 42, 45 introduction to 26, 27–9 nationalism and 52, 54, 56 as preferred term versus “identity” 26–7 race and ethnicity 83, 86 religious fashion and 99–101 time and space and 212 subject positions. See also subject formation; specific subject positions intersectionalities and 34–42, 182, 213 intersectionality of 229 time and space and 212 Venn diagram of 35–6, 36

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Index suits, business 62, 155. See also tailoring Sullivan, Lou 154–5 sumptuary laws 121–2 Supreme Court, Plate 20 Supreme Court justices 141–2 Suthrell, Charlotte 152, 167–8 sweaters 223–4 Sweden 67 swimwear Plate 27, 109, 112, 115, 175, 185, 186 symbolic interaction 11 symbolic interactionist (SI) theory of fashion 46 tailoring 59, 62, 154, 155–6, 159, 160 Tarlo, Emma 63, 82, 94 Taylor, Lou 10, 54 tesettür (Turkish clothing business) 114, 115 textiles 4, 12, 19–21, 47, 58, 225 textile workers 140. See also garment workers theories of gender 149–51 thinness. See bodies time and space binary thinking 211–12, 218, 229–30 compression of 219, 222–6 as concepts and contexts 1 final summary 229–30 fold metaphor 4, 225 industrial time 218–21 intersectionalities and 43 Möbius strip metaphor 3, 4, 5 nostalgia 221–2 uchronia and utopia 226–8 Touré, Ahmed Sékou, Plate 10, 64–5, 228 Tracht (German national dress) 54–5 trade 29, 52, 61 transculturation 223–4 transgender people, Plate 5, 34, 152, 153, 176. See also men; women transgender studies 151–5 transnationality. See also globalization appearance and 33 of fashion subjects 43–5 hegemony and 46 intersectionalities and 32, 43, 45, 47, 49 introduction to 14, 44 nationalism and 51–2, 67 race and ethnicity 88, 90 Troubridge, Una 171–2, 173 trousers for women 92, 178, 179 Tulloch, Carol 8, 14, 28, 56, 77, 190 turbans 91–4, 93, 144 Turkey 53, 67, 98, 106, 108, 109, 114, 115 Twigg, Julia 213–14, 216 uchronia and utopia 226–8 uniforms 59, 71, 146

unions 21, 132 uniqueness 1, 3, 87, 207–8 United Kingdom age/generation 216 class, social 117, 120, 122–7, 129–30 colonialism 46–7 disability in 208 fur trade and 61 gender in 151 globalization and 66–7 homophobia 171 nostalgia and 221 race and ethnicity 75, 77 United Nations 51 United States. See also Americas; Native Americans; North America; race and ethnicity bodies 194 class, social in 120, 127–33 ethnic groups in 55, 68, 111–12, 113 gender in 152 homophobia in 174, 176 intersectionalities and 38 nationalism and 66, 69 race and ethnicity 73, 75. See also race and ethnicity religious fashion 100, 110 time and space 223 Universal Exhibitions 54 University of California, Davis 168, 215 unmarked status. See marked and unmarked status US National Survey of Male Intersectionalities 160–3, 168 Vainshtein, Olga 136, 147 Veblen, Thorstein 10, 118, 139 veiling 91, 109, 113–14 Vietnam 67 Walker, T. J. 74, 90 weaving 61, 62, 64 Weber, Caroline 119–20 Weber, Max 95–6, 118 Welters, Linda 13–14 West, Lindy, Plate 25, 195, 196, 198–9 West Africa 70. See also names of specific countries Western dress 2, 44, 48, 62 whiteness class, social and 120 fashion studies and 10 gender and 2, 226 race and ethnicity 74, 75, 85 rearticulations of 80–1 sexualities and 166–7, 186, 213–14 unmarked status of 120 white supremacy 10, 14, 34, 52, 73, 158, 167

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266

Index Wilde, Oscar 170, 171, 175, 180 Wilkerson, Isabel 121–2 Williams, Caroline Randall 81–2 Williams, Raymond 22–3, 24, 39 Wilson, Elizabeth 10–11, 41, 108, 136, 137, 189 women 1960s and 117 African American 83, 100, 199, 227–8 age/generations and 216 anxiety, cultural and 47 beauty standards and 186 class, social and 120, 127, 129, 139 consumption and 112 Cultural Revolution, Chinese and 60 French Revolution and 57 German 55, 112 Hasidic 106–7 Jewish 112, 113 Mennonite 108 Mexican American 157–8 military, USA and 85

266

modesty and 104 Muslim 98, 100 Muslim fashion and 104, 109 nationalism and 51, 69 Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations 48 production and 127–33 South Asian American 49 textile imports and 47 trans women 152, 153 trousers and 92 white 50 wool 48, 53, 62, 146, 159 workers, garment. See garment workers World War II 158–9, 174 Worth, Charles Frederick 139–40 Worth, Rachel 118, 125 Wu, Juanjuan 59–60 youth cultures 137, 214. See also age/generations zoot suits 157–9, 158

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Plate 1  Juliana (8) and Sienna (almost 11) in Half Moon Bay, California, during the Covid-19 pandemic in January 2021. Photo by Christina Kaiser.

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Plate 2  Lil Nas X performs on-stage wearing a holographic fringed cowboy-style getup by Danish brand Krone during Internet Live by BuzzFeed at Webster Hall on July 25, 2019, in New York City. Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for BuzzFeed.

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Plate 3  A protester wearing a BLM facemask during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan, on June 14, 2020. A large crowd gathered at Yoyogi Park and marched toward Shibuya in Tokyo. Photo by Viola Kam/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.

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a

c

d b

e

g f

h

i

j

Plate 4  Fiber to fabric to garment production in southern India, 2016–20: (a) staple fibers are opened from bales and moved into a blower; (b) fiber spinning; (c) yarn wound onto a cone; (d) cones loaded in preparation for yarn dyeing; (e) yarns loaded into dyeing machine; (f) yarns prepared on warp beam; (g) warping a power loom; (h) power loom; (i) fabric cutting; and (j) garment construction. Photos by Denise Nicole Green.

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Plate 5  On June 20, 2020, people gathered for an antiracism protest in Hyde Park in London. BLM protests were held across the United Kingdom following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Photo by Hollie Adams/Getty Images.

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Plate 6  Designer Patrick Kelly wears his signature look—overalls and a snap-brimmed baseball cap—at a fashion designers’ party against AIDS in Paris, France on October 26, 1988. Photo by Frederic REGLAIN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

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Plate 7  Three examples of Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations’ shawls, circa 1882. All collected by J. A. Jacobson for the Ethnological Museum of Berlin (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum). From top to bottom, catalog numbers IV A 1232, IV A 1153, IV A 2074c. Photos by Denise Nicole Green.

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Plate 8  Sans-culottes with spear and sword in Paris, France during the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Note that the striped trousers are torn at the knee, appear to have a patch on the other leg, and are ripped unevenly (Getty Images).

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Plate 9  Indigo-dyed shirt with the French word Non (no) rendered in repeat using a wax-resist surface design technique. This shirt was worn leading up to the French Union referendum in 1958 as a way to encourage Guineans to vote “no” and thus gain independence from France. Photo by Rhea Garen and courtesy of the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, gift of Paul and Doris Ward, catalogue number 2015.02.083.

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Plate 10  Ahmed Sékou Touré (1922–1984), first president of the Republic of Guinea, spears the serpent that is colonialism in this commemorative cloth from the late 1950s. This textile was designed and silk screen-printed to celebrate Touré’s successful push for a vote of “no” in the 1958 French Union referendum. The overwhelming rejection of the new constitution in Guinea meant immediate independence from France. Photo by Kat Roberts and courtesy of the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, gift of Paul and Doris Ward, catalogue number 2015.02.021.

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Plate 11 Haa’yuups stands alongside his family’s ceremonial screen in the storage area of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, June 2010. Photograph by Denise Nicole Green.

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Plate 12  A model walks the runway at the Viktor & Rolf Spring/Summer 2015 fashion show, “Van Gogh Girls,” during Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week on January 28, 2015. The garments were constructed of Vlisco wax print textiles. Photo by Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

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Plate 13  Wearing kente cloth, Democratic lawmakers kneel on June 8, 2020, to observe a moment of silence on Capitol Hill for George Floyd and other victims of police brutality. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer were joined by two dozen lawmakers in Congress’ Emancipation Hall—named in honor of the enslaved people who erected the US Capitol in the eighteenth century. Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images.

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Plate 14  A model walks the runway during Sister The 3rd Collection by Pyer Moss as part of New York Fashion Week at Kings Theatre on September 8, 2019, in Brooklyn. Photo by Sean Drakes/ WireImage.

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Plate 15  Many multicolored kipas/yarmulkes for sale at a market in Jerusalem. Photo by IAISI/ Getty Images.

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Plate 16  A group of young, stylish Muslim women in London. Photo by Nina Manandhar/Getty Images.

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Plate 17  Britain’s Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, leave from the West Door of St George’s Chapel on their wedding day, May 19, 2018, in Windsor, England. Photo by Ben STANSALL–WPA Pool/Getty Images.

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Plate 18  Character Goh Peik Lin, played by Nora Lum (a.k.a. Awkwafina), in Crazy Rich Asians (2018), directed by Jon M. Chu Lum. She wears a bold rabbit-printed smock by German designer Markus Lupfer, striped pants, a necklace, and undershirt with long pointed collar. Copyright Warner Brothers Pictures.

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Plate 19  Caricature of Beau Brummel in watercolor by Richard Dighton, 1805.

3

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Plate 20  US Supreme Court Justices (L–R) Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter, Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens, Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Stephen G. Breyer pose for the first picture with Roberts in his position in the Chief Justice Conference Room Monday, October 3, 2005, at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC. Photo by Ken Heinen/US Supreme Court via Getty Images.

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Plate 21  Henrik (almost 7) and Hope (almost 4) during the Covid-19 pandemic, April 2020. Photo by P. K. Hart.

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Plate 22  Denise shortly after her birth on April 15, 1985, in Upstate Community Hospital, Syracuse, NY. Photo by Robert Green.

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Plate 23  A Sapeur group poses for pictures at a family house on February 12, 2017, in Kinshasa, DRC. The word Sapeur comes from SAPE, a French acronym for Société des Ambianceurs et Persons Élégants, or Society of Revellers and Elegant People. It also means to dress with “elegance and style.” Photo by Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images.

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Plate 24  Trucker hat and camouflage tank top from the 2005–6 “Do Ask, Do Tell” collection by the clothing brand DITC (Dykes in the City). Photo by Grace Anderson, courtesy of the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, catalogue number 2006.16.04.

9



Plate 25  Lindy West in her wedding dress, 2015. Photo by Jenny Jimenez/Photo JJ LLC.

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Plate 26  Lizzo in a Moschino gown designed by Jeremy Scott and worn for The BRIT Awards at The O2 Arena on February 18, 2020, in London. Photo by Joe Maher/Getty Images for Bauer Media.

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Plate 27  In March 2000, Australian Susie O’Neill, Olympic and World record holder, wears a controversial new suit called Fastskin, modelled on shark skin and improving swim times as much as three percent. Photo by GREG WOOD/AFP via Getty Images.

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Plate 28  A corset designed by French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier and inspired by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, whose own corset and paintings were shown as part of the fashion exhibit “Appearances Can Be Deceiving” and displayed at the Museo Frida Kahlo, Mexico City, and other locations. The clothes, shoes, jewelry, and headdresses from Kahlo’s personal wardrobe have inspired and been appropriated by internationally renowned fashion designers. Photo by Omar Torres/AFP via Getty Images.

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Plate 29  Keisha Greaves and her mother, Patricia Bryan, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 22, 2019. Greaves created the “Girls Chronically Rock” branded T-shirt line after being diagnosed with muscular dystrophy in her mid-20s. While living with a chronic disability, she has turned her love of and expertise in fashion into a successful career. Photo credit: Keith Macri/Barcroft Media via Getty Images.

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Plate 30  Denise at 4 years of age in upstate New York, 1989. Photo by Jean Green.

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Plate 31  At center, a sweater designed and made by a knitter from the Cowichan First Nation. At left and right are knock-off designs by Ralph Lauren, which the brand called “Cowichan sweaters” until bad publicity prompted a renaming of the sweaters to “Cowichan-inspired.” Photo by Grace Anderson for the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, catalogue number 2019.20.001.

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Plate 32 Brianna Noble, equestrian businesswoman and community activist, prepares for an Afrofuturist tribute to the film Black Panther on 30 October 2020. Photo by Yalonda M. James/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images.