Although the first appearance of clothing and its history are traced back to the time of Adam and Eve by some philosophers, it is clear that the history of clothing is tied to the history of theater and the performing arts. Theatrical actors have to wear appropriate costumes, and this is where the role of costume designer becomes more prominent.
Jean Paul Gaultier is one of the fashion designers who has played a significant role in cinema. He even uses the word “ciné mode” to describe what he has done in cinema. In fact, costume design for theater and film forms a large part of fashion history. But here I do not want to talk about the history of fashion in theater.
Since 1960’s, the runway fashion scene received more attention than ever before, culminating in the late 1970s and 1980s when model culture was formed and the most famous models were born: Iman, Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss (They are from different generations of this culture). However, the model body has played a key role in fashion in recent years, and so I want to address the connections of fashion and the history of performance here, especially the performing the female gender.
The work of the Japanese avant-garde and the general arena of fashion provide a unique lens through which to view a central political/intellectual dilemma of our late twentieth century-worlds: the possibilities, not for pristine resistance or opposition, as though such a thing were possible, but for what Linda Hutcheon (1989) calls “complicitous critique” within a discursive field defined by commodity capitalism and mass culture.
The work of the avantgarde designers enacts oppositional gestures to convention: contesting the boundaries between fashion and art, challenging the conventions about what counts as clothing, rethinking the relationship between form and function and the relationship between garments and gendered, raced bodies, refiguring the beautiful, enlarging possibilities for enacting gender, and subverting the gender binary.
But what can their contestations and oppositional practices mean in a domain suffused, indeed constituted, by commodification? A domain whose very existence is defined by the endless production of desire in consumers, planned obsolescence, the global assembly line, and the reinscription of class distinctions?
Sometimes the body is the most available surface for inscribing resistance. Studying fashion thus becomes an intervention that seeks to widen the spaces in the academy for what counts as legitimate academic inquiry and for what counts as political. Popular or mass culture is still viewed with considerable suspicion in some circles, and fashion, in particular, still indexes the frivolous.
The notion of fashion as frivolous also indexes a particular positioning vis-A-vis “the masses”: Fashion is suspect because convention associates it with consumption not production, peace not war, women not men, pleasure not pain, aesthetics not politics, embodied subjects marked by and constituted through gender, race, class, culture, and history, not the disembodied Master Subject.
A scrutiny of fashion requires a reexamination of these hierarchized binaries, forcing a serious confrontation with pleasure, desire and aesthetic beauty as well as with disciplines, coercions, and oppressions–or, restated more felicitously, with the aesthetic pleasures, desires, and political possibilities that can open up within particular regimes of power.
What are those possibilities? Walter Benjamin long ago articulated the problematic that still haunts us in our very different historical moment, in his Arcades Project, unlike more pessimistic members of the Frankfurt School, Benjamin found contestatory potential in the utopian dream-images and the desires articulated in mass culture, including fashion.
In his version of dialectical thinking, mass culture could contain the seeds of historical awakenings that might spur socially transformative change. On the level of fashion and the individual subject, Carolyn Steedman makes a related point in her Landscape for a Good Woman, when she writes of her mother’s desire for a Dior New Look dress, a “proper envy” of the upper classes that constituted a political critique of class structure.
For Steedman’s mother, fashion enabled the moment of critique, and Steedman calls for a structure of political thought and action that could take seriously her “proper envy.” Benjamin articulated this constitutive contradiction: fashion’s utopian dream wish that held critical and transformative possibility, coupled with its reinscription of capitalist logics, its commodity fetishism, and its dissimulation of ruling class interests, where the desires for revolutionary and perhaps violent change could be channeled into the fetishizing of fashion’s latest trend.
However, when we consider questions of contestation, disparate and perhaps contradictory fields of power must be considered. Fashion immediately suggests its imbrication in reproducing the forces of capitalism, making it at first glance unlikely to support any contestatory claims.
Yet the fashion world is globally dispersed, profoundly implicated in capitalist and colonial/neocolonial relations, and it is perhaps the key site in urban societies for the production and performance of identities as gendered, raced, sexualized, class bodies. Consequently, fashion’s wish images and fantasies must also be analyzed as they are worked through gender, sexuality, and race, perhaps at some levels contesting, contradicting, yet remaining inextricable from class reproduction and capitalist recuperation.
Fashion has provided the ground for articulating far-reaching arguments about the nature of our present society and historical moment, including processes of signification, subject formation, forces of domination and inequality, and the possibilities for political transformation. Using fashion as their point of entry, several Continental thinkers have theorized critical aspects of social formation and cultural politics.
Any mention of fashion in academic circles immediately evokes Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System, an exercise in early high semiotics and an attempt to demonstrate the privileged status of linguistic models for social analysis.
Barthes takes as his object of study the discourses of fashion as they circulate in fashion magazines in service of his larger project: to further studies in semiology, the science of signs, applying Saussurean linguistic models to extralinguistic domains.
In The Fashion System he attempts to capture the structure and the code of fashion and, on one level, he successfully argues that fashion discourses constitute a signifying matrix. In analyzing “how vestimentary meaning is produced” (59), Barthes attempts mightily to apply Saussurean categories to the corpus of fashion discourses he has amassed: delineating langue from parole, finding the elementary signifying unit (“the vesteme”) of what he calls “the vestimentary system,” distinguishing syntagm from paradigm, establishing the system of meaningful differences and their variants that constitute the vestimentary code.
Though fashion is convincingly presented as a meaningful discourse through this semiological approach, Barthes begins to show the strains of applying Saussurean concepts when he is forced to confront the literal materiality of clothing.
He distinguishes an object of signification (e.g., a sweater), a support of signification (e.g., a collar), and a variant (e.g., the type of collar: boatneck, closed, etc.). The support of signification is the excess that cannot be accounted for in the vestimentary sign.
Here, we see the inadequacy of Saussurean formulations that figure language as an abstract system of differences, i.e., of negative relations. The materiality of the garment in this instance must be conceived as prior to signification and cannot be accounted for within a purely negative system of differences.
Barthes’s appropriation of the Saussurean paradigm cannot account for this materiality within its own terms, revealing the limits of a Saussurean semiological project. Pierre Bourdieu (1975, 23) rightly notes Barthes’s rigid formalism and his forced transposition of linguistic models to extralinguistic domains, further arguing that Barthes’s mode of analysis simply uncritically reproduces common-sense assumptions in an academic register.
For Bourdieu, Barthes remains part of the celebratory apparatus that creates the phenomenon of fashion; for him, a truly critical approach would reveal and problematize the underlying mechanisms of capitalist production and class reproduction (26).
Further, in terms of the understanding of fashion itself, Barthes’s rigid, structured semiological grid is of minimal usefulness, for the operations of signification Barthes describes could be attributed with equal persuasiveness to any extralinguistic signifying system. That he chose fashion as his object seems merely incidental.
In contrast, for Jean Baudrillard (1976), fashion is the central logic of our “consumer society,” “the most superficial game and the most profound social form-the inexorable investment of all domains by the code” (“le jeu le plus superficiel et … la forme sociale la plus profonde-l’investissement inexorable de tous les domaines par le code” ) (Baudrillard 131).
In L’echange symbolique et la mort, Baudrillard is in a transitional phase of his thinking. He has problematized the Marxist categories of production and consumption which were foundational in his earlier work and is on the way to articulating fully the notions of simulation and the hyperreal that animate his later theorizing.
At this point, Baudrillard associates production with a phase of history defined by the Industrial Revolution (77). In its place, he argues, we have entered a new regime of simulation, a world where the referential and the real dissolve in an enchanting play of floating signs that refer only to each other. Fashion embodies the processes of simulation and the rule of the code.
Rather than the “real” itself, Baudrillard argues that fashion creates a world of representations or models of the real. Fashion becomes the ”jouissance de l’arbitraire,” at once exceeding the purely economic domain even as it remains the highest expression of the workings of commodity capitalism (142).
According to Baudrillard, fashion invites censure not because of its sexual element-indeed, he argues that fashion paradoxically desexualizes subjects into mannequins-but because it interrupts the economic principle of utility, the puritanical valorization of use and function. Fashion’s power is precisely that of the “pure sign that signifies nothing” (“signe pur qui ne signifie rien”) (144)
For Baudrillard, fashion is a totalizing logic permeating what he calls at this point “modernity” and will later call “postmodernity.” Consequently, there is no way to subvert fashion, “for there is no reference with which to place it in contradiction (its reference is itself)” (“parce qu’elle n’a pas de referentiel avec lequel la mettre en contradiction (son rejerentiel, c’est ellememe)”) (151).
Reacting against fashion simply reproduces the principles of its code; fashion cannot b etranscended. Instead, the project must involve “a deconstruction of the form of the sign of fashion and of the very principle of signification, just as the alternative to political economy can only be in the deconstruction of the commodity form and the very principle of production” (“une deconstruction de la forme du signe de mode, et du principe meme de la signification, comme l’alternative d l’economie politique ne peut etre que dans la deconstruction de la formelmarchandise et du principe meme de la production”) (151).
Baudrillard’s characterization of fashion displays his penchant for hyperbole, particularly in his insistence on fashion as the enchantment and jouissance of the code, a fairyland of floating signs; this emphasis on simulation and models will spin off in ever more grandiose formulations in later work.
Nonetheless, he does argue convincingly that fashion is an exemplary instance-the exemplary instance- the logic of contemporary society, a logic that cannot be transcended. Baudrillard’s formulations are useful and prescient, articulating what will become a standard premise of a poststructuralist politics: that there can be no outside space of transcendence and that a political project must depend in part upon problematizing the foundational assumptions constituting the tacit, unspoken-hence unquestioned-rules of the game.
In Distinction (1984) Pierre Bourdieu combines a Durkheimian preoccupation with systems of classification with a Marxist concern for systematic inequality and class struggle. In this study of taste and consumption, he seeks to give “a scientific answer to the old questions of Kant’s critique of judgment, by seeking in the structure of social classes the basis of the systems of classification which structure perception of the world and designate the objects of aesthetic enjoyment” (xiii).
Bourdieu’s project is to demystify the claims of high culture, showing how the supposedly transcendent domains of refined taste are constituted through a system of class distinction, permeated by the logic of cultural and symbolic capital. Fashion, music, political orientation, leisure, lifestyle, tastes in food, types of dwelling, and interior decoration become sites where class distinctions are articulated and reproduced.
Basing his project on a comprehensive survey of over 1,200 respondents, Bourdieu convincingly analyzes the functioning of taste and its relation to social class. He utilizes the standard methodologies of social science to impressive effect, persuasively mapping this relationship through discursive analysis supplemented with charts, photographs, statistical tables, interviews, excerpts from journals, and advertisements.
However, the seemingly comprehensive nature of the inquiry cannot mask the limits of its conceptual foundationalisms. Despite occasional protestations to the contrary, Bourdieu in the end appears to subscribe to a class-based objectivism that takes consciousness and meaning as ultimately derivative.
Indeed, structure, culture, science, production, consumption, among other categories, remain unproblematized, rather than terms that must themselves be subject to interrogation. The Durkheimian legacy couples a classificatory imperative with an emphasis on social science, creating a matrix of closed categories that ultimately misses the fluidity of the social battles Bourdieu so richly describes in his vignettes.
The lived nature of the classificatory struggle never sufficiently emerges from the totalizing grid of classification. Here, for example, is the revealing description of the presuppositions that inform Distinction: Thus, the spaces defined by preferences in food, clothing, or cosmetics are organized according to the same fundamental structure, that of the social space determined by volume and composition of capital.
Fully to construct the space of life-styles within which cultural practices are defined, one would first have to establish, for each class and class fraction, that is,for each ofthe configurations of capital, the generative formula of the habitus which retranslates the necessities and facilities characteristic of that class of (relatively) homogeneous conditions of existence into a particular lifestyle.
By superimposing these homologous spaces one would obtain a rigorous representation of the space of lifestyles, making it possible to characterize each of the distinctive features (e.g., wearing a cap or playing the piano) in the two respects in which it is objectively defined.
Bourdieu clearly assumes that he can exhaustively, objectively specify class and class fractions, precisely linking them with specific displays of taste. Yet one wonders whether his respondents’ choices can be so neatly read off this presumed foundational structure. The fixity and “objectivity” of his categories are meant to signify rigor.
Ironically, however, despite Bourdieu’s criticism of Barthes’s rigidity, the totalizing reach of his own rationalizing grid seems equally rigid, exposing the limits of this classificatory imperative.
In Distinction Bourdieu’s appraisal of fashion exhibits similar conceptual difficulties. At one level, his analysis does the important work of enabling us to understand the ways the clothing we wear, indeed, the very production of bodies, is inseparable from class relations.
Distinguishing “being” from “seeming” (200), he argues that the working classes value function and labor, while the clerical and managerial classes place a greater emphasis on appearance.
Accordingly, in choosing clothing or cosmetics, the working classes are presumably concerned with practicality, value, durability, and function; conforming to normative fashionable bodies and gendered ideals of attractiveness are of peripheral concern.
In the middle classes, for whom performance evaluations on the job may in fact be related to appearance, preoccupations with cosmetics, diet, and proper clothing heighten markedly.
Indeed, Bourdieu makes even more precise and far-reaching claims: “The interest the different classes have in self-presentation, the attention they devote to it, their awareness of the profits it gives and the investment of time, effort, sacrifice, and care which they actually put into it are proportionate to the chances of material or symbolic profit they can reasonably expect from it” (202).
According to Bourdieu, the upper classes demonstrate the greatest satisfaction with their appearance and their bodies, as the literal embodiments of hegemonic ideals, conquering nature through the moral/aesthetic value they call “tenue”-that which is not vulgar (206).
Once again, the correlations are presented as being seamlessly-and suspiciously-tight. The outlines of the analysis are convincing, but one wonders what Bourdieu might do with someone like Carolyn Steedman’s mother, whose working-class positioning combined with an uneasy, contradictory identification with the upper classes and a political critique of class structure that was paradoxically nurtured by her very identificatory desire and her resulting envy of the upper classes.
That is, while Bourdieu’s reproductive model is compelling in its general contours, empirical realities are likely to be more open-ended, contradictory, and complicated. And it is precisely the fissures and contradictions in such a narrative of reproduction that might reveal contestatory possibility.
Bourdieu’s work on the fashion industry as such is therefore useful, indeed indispensable, at one level, but its totalizing closure and class foundationalism prove once again to limit the analysis. In a work that precedes Distinction, entitled “Le couturier et sa griffe,” “The couturier and his signature” (1975), Bourdieu takes as his object the domain of haute couture (luxurious made-to-order clothing, rather than high fashion ready-to-wear).
He characterizes the dynamics of the field of haute couture through its two poles: the established couturiers, who represent luxury, aristocracy, and elegance, versus the challengers, who emphasize their difference from established convention through the invocation of modernity, artistry, and the subversion of perfection.
He perceptively describes the challengers’ task as “vigorously breaking with certain conventions (introducing, for example, mixtures of colors or materials that had been excluded up to that point), but within the limits of convention and without calling into question the rules of the game or the game itself.”
In the same passage, Bourdieu goes on to note that the newer couturiers often emphasize “liberty, fantasy, newness (often identified with youth)” while older, established houses shun anything too unconventional, instead opting for understatement, elegance, and refinement.
Because the newcomers to the field cannot hope for the same kind of haute-bourgeois prestige accorded the established houses, they must discredit as unfashionable or outmoded anything owing its prestige to age, to history, and to the existence of the bourgeoisie/aristocracy who are its primary customers.
An emphasis on modernity, the future, or on revolutionary visions is thus always already part of the challengers’ stories; so are the invocations of street style and youth. Art, finally, holds a special place for challenger and established designer alike.
Given that fashion is designated a decorative and therefore lesser art, Bourdieu notes that designers often gesture toward their own artistic endeavors and their links to the artistic world (16). Through this delineation of fashion, Bourdieu probes the more general operations of what he calls a field: art, fashion, sports, academia, politics.
In fact, one could argue that Bourdieu has little interest in fashion as such. Rather, he shows the ways these challenges to convention through battles for legitimacy never really threaten the existence of a dominant class or subvert the rules of the game (27).
What is missing, Bourdieu argues, is the possibility for agnosticism about the game itself, an agnosticism he finds essential to an “objective apprehension of the struggle” (28). This objective apprehension would reveal fashion’s implication in the reproduction of class. Bourdieu notes that the appearance of new couturiers, such as the influential modernist Courreges, signals the emergence of a new managerial class that espouses values such as dynamism, function, modernity, and freedom.
In this class, women as well as men may hold managerial positions. Bourdieu notes that the new couturiers have adapted to the shift in gender roles, pointing to this phenomenon as one of the ways the “effects of recent transformations of the dominant class make themselves directly felt in the field of haute couture”.
Fashion and other fields (art, the academy, politics) in fact become arenas for the reproduction of class and for the imposition of the symbolic violence of legitimation, “gentle violence that can only be exercised with the complicity of its victims and because of this fact give the appearance of liberatory action to an arbitrary imposition of arbitrary needs”.
Bourdieu ends his article with a clear message. Fashion is simply another battlefield in the timeless, eternal class struggle: “The dialectic of distinction and of pretension is the principle of this sort of race pursued among the classes, which implies the recognition of the same goals: it is the motor of this competition that is none other than the gentle, continuous, interminable form of the class struggle.”
In this essay Bourdieu convincingly demonstrates that fashion and other domains of taste are inseparable from class distinction. His analysis of the operations of haute couture are unfailingly insightful and can apply with equal elegance to the field of ready-to-wear.
For example, Bourdieu’s description of the strategies available for newcomers to challenge the fashion establishment aptly characterizes the work of Comme des Garcons and other so-called avantgardistes. Their invocations of modernity, street style, the subversion of convention, and artistry are predictable, even as related claims have been made by French challengers to the established couturiers.
Yet, though at one level indispensable and incontrovertible, the reproductive model of class cannot exhaust the political and interpretive possibilities presented in the fashion world. Bourdieu’s treatment of gender is especially telling in this regard.
In the end, for Bourdieu the historical emergence of a new class and new possibilities for women’s employment signify simply another shift in the ways the dominant classes can reproduce themselves. Bourdieu’s analysis is compelling; at the level of class, the new managers-whether male or female-can find their interests and their class bodies articulated in the work of the new couturiers.
Yet might the entry of more women into the labor force in the new managerial classes and elsewhere produce other kinds of shifts that cannot be reduced fully to class reproduction? What of gendered power relations and the gendered constructions of families and workplaces? Bourdieu’s final invocation of the symbolic violence of the eternal class struggle in the end is oddly ahistorical, for historical developments are reduced to mere instantiations of class reproduction.
Again, he leaves no room for contestation, for ambiguity, for meanings that resist closure, for the disruptions other forces such as gender and race might offer to this totalizing narrative, or for the ways class formation and class identities are themselves gendered and raced.
Though Bourdieu might provide us with provocative insights and a useful framework for understanding the world of high fashion, we must take care to note the ways that his narrative of class reproduction might be interrupted by other forces, especially in the work of non-European, non-white Others.
A final analyst of fashion provides a critique that reveals fissures in Bourdieu’s classificatory grid, yet ultimately remains within a liberal humanist, power-evasive theoretical frame. Gilles Lipovetsky criticizes Bourdieu and takes Baudrillard’s emphasis on the totalizing logic of fashion into historical terrain in L’empire de l’ephemere (translated as The Empire of Fashion).
Taking his cue from Baudrillard, he sees seduction and the ephemeral as central organizing principles of social life. Lipovetsky’s historical approach enables him to argue against Bourdieu that fashion is far more than a site of class struggle, for when seen in terms of the longue duree, it has constituted a democratizing influence and a sign of modernity.
For example, the sumptuary regulations of aristocratic societies enforced fixed social hierarchies, while modem fashion introduces the possibility of mobility and change. The old class order is disrupted by a valorization of youthfulness; the age hierarchy supersedes the class hierarchy.
Indeed, for Lipovetsky fashion is a democratizing influence that promotes individualization and the formation of consumer-subjects who hold the democratic values of tolerance, pluralism, and openness to transformation.
Like Bourdieu, Lipovetsky subscribes to a conceptual scheme that problematically separates culture from structure. Against Bourdieu’s analysis of class structure, he stresses the centrality of modem cultural values and significations, in particular that of the New, which permeates fashion and forms the basis of modem democratic society.
Lipovetsky makes a convincing case for analyzing the emergence of fashion historically, arguing that its appearance was coextensive with modernity. However, his appraisal of fashion as a domain fostering democratic values uncritically reinscribes liberal humanist presuppositions about the subject and about power.
For example, he celebrates the notion of the individual (the always already whole subject ), who chooses and who is conditioned to accept the New. There is too little acknowledgment of the ways the emergence of the liberal humanist choosing subject is above all a consumer-subject, inextricable from the growth of capitalism and the formation of bourgeois possessive individualism.
Lipovetsky’s embracing of this choosing subject inevitably erases those histories of power and domination. Indeed, Bourdieu shows that the valorization of the New among the couturiers and the managerial classes is simply part of the struggle for legitimacy among the dominant classes, a struggle that never seriously jeopardizes class hierarchy itself.
And because Lipovetsky accepts as foundational divisions such as public/private, he fails to account for the ways public social forces intersect in, and construct, the private. Consequently, he cannot effectively come to terms with Bourdieu’s class analysis.
For example, Lipovetsky argues that in a society permeated by the logic of fashion, individuals no longer buy with an eye toward social recognition or social competition, but keep uppermost the purely private values of functionality and individual well-being.
Yet as Bourdieu eloquently argued, these seemingly private values can in fact be produced and reproduced through “public” discourses and are far from innocent of class distinction. Lipovetsky ultimately becomes a liberal humanist cheerleader for fashion.
In different ways, these theorists of fashion offer insights into the fashion world. Barthes argues for fashion as a signifying system.
Despite its class foundationalism and totalizing classificatory imperative, Bourdieu’s insightful work on fashion provides a political and conceptual frame for understanding the dynamics of the avant-garde in fashion and the inextricability of taste from class reproduction.
Lipovetsky and Baudrillard mark the pervasiveness of the logic of fashion in our regime of capitalist (post}modernity, while Lipovetsky’s fissuring of Bourdieu’s narrative of relentless class reproduction leads to a critical reappraisal of Bourdieu’s description of the fashion world.
Finally, Baudrillard articulates the possibilities for always already complicitous critique in a commoditized world defined by fashion. Still, these insights are mediated through a highly problematic, Eurocentric gaze.
What happens to their Western narratives of signification-the jouissance of the code, class reproduction, and the formation of individualist bourgeois subjects-when we consider other axes of power, such as gender, race, sexuality, and (neo}colonialism? Without a broader consideration of these issues, can we adequately address the possibilities for contestation in this elitist, highly problematic domain?
In the early 1980s Japanese avant-garde designers created a sensation in the fashion world, presenting what seemed to be a shockingly different version of gender and fundamentally problematizing what counts as clothing. Bourdieu’s model of the field of fashion, and particularly his treatment of the role of avantgardes, enable us to appraise avant-garde experimentation within our regime of commodity capitalism. After setting the shock of Japanese fashion into historical context, our inquiry focuses on the stagings of gender, sexuality and race in Comme des Garcns runway shows.
The wish-images showcased on the Comme des Garcons runway, the fact that the designers are Japanese- not European, not white, and in particular shifting relations of power vis-ii-vis the West-inevitably position this work differently.
The nature and the degree of difference are the issues. These considerations in turn bear implications for European theories of fashion, and in particular, for Bourdieu’s model of class reproduction. For what happens when we think seriously about gender, race, and Orientalism along with the workings of class and commodity capitalism Bourdieu and others so acutely describe?
Then, what can it mean to be a “chic rebel”? What can we say about the contestatory potential of Kawakubo and Comme des Garcons in providing an aesthetic/political/intellectual challenge in the field of fashion? And what sort of intervention could this be, given the elitism of high fashion and its inextricability from the forces of capitalist reproduction?
Bourdieu gives us the tools to understand the operations of this particular field. His analysis would suggest that the Japanese, like other challengers, would have to present their work as innovative, whether in fabrication, color, experimentation, modernity, youth, or street style.
This strategy is itself dictated by the structure of the field and the designers they challenge: the “tradition” of elegance associated with the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie. Here, Bourdieu captures the overall contours of the Comme des Garcons corporate image, marketing strategy, and critical reputation in the field.
In this case, the emphasis on modernity, experimentation, and new directions takes on a distinctive cast: it is linked with race and nation, as the Japanese are troped in terms of a culturally specific aesthetic and an emphasis on experimentation.
Extending Bourdieu’s analysis of the modernist revolution of the 1960s in the work of designer Courreges, in which he linked the appearance of such designers to changes in class structure, one could argue that the emergence of “the Japanese” simply indicates the addition of another first-world superpower to the roster of global capitalist consumers and corporate exploiters in the garment industry.
Such an interpretation is indisputable at one level, as interimperial and capitalist rivalries are played out in the fashion arena. Furthermore, as Bourdieu indicated, challenges to convention within a field of fashion are inherently limited.
Even if new colors or fabrics or shapes or drafting techniques might appear, the game of fashion itself can never be fully called into question, for ultimately the new or subversive strategies are attempts for designers to distinguish themselves from others in order to succeed at that game.
Indeed, this necessity to ever recreate the new often leads designers, whether established or avant-garde, to plunder the world for ideas. The exotic, whether in terms of the Orient (Martin and Koda), Africa, Latin America, or folkloric costume from Europe, recurs in the fashion world.
So do enshrinements of a neocolonial WASP/European dominance, embodied most strikingly in the clothing and advertisements of Ralph Lauren and the success of companies such as Banana Republic. The politics of such moves are, of course, never considered, as relations of domination are rendered into high style.
A recent Comme des Gancons controversy serves as a case in point. Their 1995 men’s show featured models with shaved heads and striped, pajama-like clothing sometimes printed with identification numbers. The resonances with the Nazi death camps were unmistakable, and in the wake of protest from Jewish groups, Comme des Garcons removed those garments from their collection (“A Bad Fashion Statement,” 8).
Kawakubo herself claimed that the designs were supposed to resemble pajamas and averred that she had no intention of invoking the camps. Similar controversies had erupted the previous year when Chanel featured designs based on the Koran, and with Jean-Louis Scherrer’s collection that seemed to recall Nazi uniforms (“Designer Won’t Sell Pajamas,” 3).
Decontextualized from structures of power, oppressive historical events, sacred objects, and subjugated peoples can become simply appropriable aesthetic motifs.
Finally, contestatory gestures-refiguring clothing conventions, offering different possibilities for constructing gender-are inevitably mitigated through the fact that fashion is above all a capitalist enterprise based on making a profit, that it is premised on the production of desire in consumers, and that high fashion in particular, through its exorbitant cost, is centrally implicated in the production of social distinction.
The breathtaking price tag is part of the object’s preciosity, an index of social status, and it arouses and maintains desire. Issey Miyake put it well when he stated that the price is part of the design.
Kawakubo herself says that she is very practical; she wanted to be able to make something and sell it. She is equally dedicated to the notion that her work is different and challenging, insofar as the entire line cannot be so different that it will not sell.
The consideration of these issues cannot be seen solely in terms of the work of the design firm itself, and here, the fashion show offers one very partial and particular point of entry into issues of contestation. Ideally, further inquiry should be extended to include the processes of production and consumption.
Who is it, for example, who is sewing those clothes, and under what conditions? At best, the answer is likely to be problematic, as it would be throughout the garment industry.
On the other hand, it is on the plane of reception where possibilities for contestation often lie, and much of the celebratory literature on fashion and subculture from British cultural studies, feminists and people of color, stress the ways the creative recombining of clothing and gesture provide potential arenas for opposition-that is never beyond contradiction and at least partial recuperation.
Production processes were off limits at Comme des Gancons, as was most of the business end of the enterprise, but preliminary interviews with consumers of avant-garde fashion in both the U.S. and in Japan suggest that in both settings Comme des Gancons signifies the different.
Playwright David Henry Hwang, who sometimes wears Comme des Gancons, comments that there is always something off-kilter about Comme des Gancons clothing that gives it a distinctive quality.
This distinctiveness contributes to the construction of an inner circle of fashion cognoscenti who are able to recognize the aesthetic, classbound meanings of Comme des Gancons and other avant-garde designers.
In Japan and in the United States, consumers tend to be those who want something artsy and different about their clothing, and include many in the art, design, advertising and media fields (gyakai, “the industry,” as it is known in Japan). The prime difference between Japan and the U.S. is that the average Japanese consumer of Comme des Garcons and other Japanese designers is much younger.
This is due in part to the strong yen and the correspondingly greater cost of the garments in the United States or Europe. It can also be attributed to the vast numbers of younger Japanese working people who live at home and have large disposable incomes.
For them, Comme des Garcons is something one might wear in college or before getting married-when one might tum to Hanae Mori, for example. The twentysomething graphic designer daughter of Japanese friends owns pieces from Yohji Yamamoto’s Y’s and from Comme des Garcons; the latter she likes because “it’s a little different” (chotto chigau desha).
In the marketplace of commodity capitalism, Comme des Garcons signifies the unusual, even as it confers name brand social status and enforces exclusion and elitism, marking the wearer as unconventional, perhaps artistic, iconoclastic. When specifying the class fractions to which Comme des Garcons most appeals, one could say that Rei Kawakubo is an artist’s and designer’s designer.
As compelling as these interpretations might be, one wonders whether the narratives of global capitalist systems and class reproduction exhaust the political and interpretive possibilities presented by the work of Comme des Garcons and others. What difference, we asked at the outset, do gender and race make in the reproductive model of class?
Two recent interactions at an academic party alerted us to one axis along which the work of Japanese designers continues to assume importance. Upon learning about Kondo’s book, a woman asked from Kondo how the Japanese designers were affected by Paris, as though Parisian fashion were the sole standard and model which, surely, the Japanese must imitate.
Later that evening, a colleague asked Kondo about the production of Comme des Garcons garments. Kondo replied that both Comme des Garcons and Yohji Yamamoto produce their “simple” garments-the less expensive and structurally less complicated bridge lines such as Comme des Garcons Shirt-in France and Italy.