Fashion History and Culture

1. Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors in Digital Self-portraitsby Agnes RocamoraFashion Theory: the Journal of Dress, Body and Culture,Vol. 15, Issue 4, pp. 407-424 2011 Fashion History and Culture

2. By brining together “new and old technologies of the self” personal fashion blogs assert themselves as a “privileged space of identity construction” And • “Blogs also reproduce women’s position as specular objects, but also as a space of empowerment through the control it grants bloggers on their own image, as well as through the alternative visions of femininity it allows them to circulate,” 410. • Can blogs offer men a similar “privileged space of identity construction” or “alternative visions” of masculinities?

3. The author says that blogs are a “therapeutic tool” 408. If this is true, what, then, is the aliment? • If you blog or post on FaceBook, how is it “therapeutic” to you? And, what do you think about this idea of identity construction and preforming your identity through each post?

4. New technologies of the self…. • “We employ media as vehicles for defining both personal and cultural identity. As these media become simultaneously technical analogs and social expressions of our identity, we become simultaneously both the subject and the object of contemporary media. We are that which the film or television camera is trained on, and at the same time we are the camera itself . . . New media offer new opportunities for self-definition,” 414-5.

5. “In appropriating mirrors as a tool for their own practice, fashion bloggers have also produced images that are strangely disruptive of the gaze and visions of women as specular objects; with the camera covering her face, the blogger is shown as the eye, the camera itself…hence the subject,” 419.

6. In Sherry Turkle’s book Life on the Screen (1995) she observes • “it is computer screens (and not cinema screens) where we project ourselves into our own dramas, dramas in which we are producer, director, and star. Some of these dramas are private, but increasingly we are able to draw in other people,” 414. • Do you think that in a similar way through Tweets, Facebook posts, blog posts, etc., you preform your identity on the stage of the computer screen? • Your gender identity; Your fashion identity; Your sexuality identity; Your cultural identity; Your political identity; Your socioeconomic identity; Your racial identity; Your national identity; Your religious identity?

7. Read Inquiry Question and Student Responses: Then consider: “How should established fashion publishers respond to these disruptive new technologies of the self?”

8. Titian’s Venus with a Mirror 1555

9. Rubens’s Venus at a Mirror, 1616

10. Velazquez’s Venus at her Mirror, 1647-51

11. Manet, Nana, 1877

12. Degas Woman Combing her Hair, 1883

13. Picasso Girl before a Mirror, 1932

14. Pretty Woman Shopping Scene http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUqnuN2oprw

15. Page 419: the woman artist working against objectification. “Women can be the bearers of meaning but its makers too, they can be in control of their own image and take over the process of representation.” Something the grand narratives of feminism has not accommodated for. Subject? Object? Subject? Object?