Fashion, Civilization, and the Individual in the Modern World

1. Fashion, Civilization, and the Individual in the Modern World

2. The Hipster Beard Click Here for Post-Structuralism and the Hipster Beard

3. How do you choose the clothes you’re going to buy? • How do you choose the clothes you’re going to wear? • What do you think your clothes say? • Why do some people enjoy shopping? • Why do some people not enjoy shopping?

4. Urban Outfitters

9. School Uniforms: Creating the Good Citizen

10. Thesis: For thousands of years clothes have served to mark class and gender distinctions, but in the modern industrial era fashion has served as an expression of the commodification of the self and the eroticization of consumption, and as a highly contested site for the expression of class and gender values.

11. Status, Power and Display Mica Nava noted “Consumerism is far more than just economic activity: it is also about dreams and consolation, communication and confrontation, image and identity.” Rebecca Arnold has argued that by the early twentieth century cities had become the “space in which new categories and new fashions could breed and multiply” and this was especially true of women who “were drawn further into fashion’s realm to seek fulfillment through its fantasy images,to construct a self based upon desires rather than needs.” In this way, “consumption acts as the salve for this lack [of status and opportunity], driving the economy, yet seeming to assuage the inequalities it enforces.”

12. Excess Dior. “New Look” 1980’s “Power” Look. (from http://vagabondvintageclothing.com/blog/) Arnold. Page 9.

13. Cruelty and Power Image from: http://www.helenmode.com/fashion/fur-coats-fashion-trends-2011.html Faux Fur from http://www.garmentcare.com/blog/faux-fur-is-warm-sexy-and-animal-free-meurices-guide-to-faux-fur/

14. Simplicity Image from: http://viktorialove.com/tag/coco-chanel/ Image from: http://www.style.com/fashionshows/complete/slideshow/F2009RTW-CKLEIN/?loop=0&iphoto=0&play=true&cnt=3#slide=0

15. Imperfection Recent photo of Mary-Kate Olsen reviving “Grunge” look—a (pre-)hipster chic. Image from: http://voiceofprojectethos.blogspot.com/ Vivienne Westwood 1970’s Punk Fashion. From: http://fuschialandfashionsource.blogspot.com/2010/11/fashion-1970s-greatest-contribution-to.html

16. Eco Image from: http://binoarealuyo.com/2010/05/life-in-a-chinatown-sweatshop/ Jimi Hendrix

17. Violence and Provocation According to Richard Stivers, violent images are the “most real” in our culture, a culture drowned in imagery, because they “simultaneously give us a sense of being alive and of having control over others.” Similarly, Rebecca Arnold argues that “visual slumming” could represent a sort of rebellion against designers as dictators of taste and culture. When this is “choreographed with scenes of violence this aesthetic plays upon a western culture’s fears of and fascination with the underbelly of consumer society.” At the same time, she claims, fashion images could act out fantasies of revenge “For the alienation and sense of lack felt by those who are too poor to gain power through the acquisition of lifestyle-enhancing goods.”

18. Ultra Style, Ultra Violence Pulp Fiction. Sean Connery as James Bond. Lara Croft

20. Gangsters Collateral.

21. Gangstas NWA Tupac Shakir

23. Skinheads Mods vs. Rockers. Image from: http://www.viceland.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/mods-vs-rockers.jpg British Skinheads. Image from: http://pregnancyfirsttrimester.blogspot.com/2010/06/morons-hired-by-immigration.html Image from: http://menstyleadvisor.blogspot.com/2009/03/skinhead-inspiration.html

24. Punks Image from: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/tags/mikelegray/interesting/ Guy Debord, in The Society of Spectacle, argues that “Spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Sid Vicious

25. Heroin Chic Rebecca Arnold writes “When people feel that they have lost control of their lives, they often turn inwards, reclaiming the body as the only thing left that they can control and demonstrating this power through acts which are self-destructive and defiant. . . . ‘heroine chic’ images short-circuit our expectations of the fashion image as representing submissive femininity. We seek validation from media representations, in images that are projections of desired selves. In these examples, though, we are denied our aspirational voyeurism and given only images of human frailty which is profoundly jarring and unsettling.” Image from: http://www.dontpaniconline.com/magazine/style/the-new-heroin-chic

26. Decadence and Decay Issey Miyake, 1995. Alexander McQueen, 1998. Die Young, Stay Pretty

27. The Eroticized Body The (female) body as challenging the polarity of a body that is acceptably modest, femininely passive, or unacceptably sexualized. How do we make sense of this move in the face of greater political, social, and economic opportunity and equality for women?

28. Underwear as Outerwear Billboard for Wonderbra featuring Eva Herzegova.

29. Eroticism

30. “Skirting the Issue”Frauke von der Horst

32. Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews (c. 1748-1750) displays Mrs. Andrews like a piece of property. Her skirt hints at and promises the woman underneath while showing her like his property.

33. In David’s “Lavoisier and His Wife” (1788) we see a woman who is more mobile and participating more fully in her husband’s life and work (she was a scientist, too).

34. Caspar David Friedrich. “Woman at Dawn.” 1818.

35. Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte” (1884-1886) we see women again expected to display their gender in discomfort.

36. The Gibson Girl style emphasizes the sleeves; she is completely hiding her body

38. Titian. “Sacred and Profane Love” (1560)

39. Boticelli. Birth of Venus. 1485. Piero. Simonetta Vespucci. 1480.

40. Kirchner. Artist with Robe. 1910

41. For Kenneth Clark, Praxiteles’s Aphrodite is unobjectionably nude, but Manet’s Olympia is vulgarly naked, sexually naked.

42. The Speedo: what does it “mean?”

43. Flesh Baudrillard argued that we are all told: “You are responsible for your own body and must invest in it and make it yield benefits--not in accordance with the order of enjoyment--but with the signs reflected and mediated by mass models, and in accordance with an organization chart of prestige.”

44. Gender and Subversion Gender is constructed and the struggle for women to find new places in the workplace and culture has led to various fashion moves that subvert typical gender roles or, alternately, try to consolidate traditional patriarchal structures.

45. New Woman Sandra Bullock in The Proposal. Early Chanel Designs.

46. Dressing Up: Woman “Honey, you’re born naked, and the rest is drag.” (Ru Paul in Arnold, p. 106)

47. Dressing Up: Man Beau Brummell Oscar Wilde “Don Draper” Mick Jagger

48. Unisex

49. Androgyny Kari Weil describes this as mimicry saying that “through mimicry women take control of the role they must play by a deliberate act, and thereby enact and affirm the disjunction between that role and themselves.”

50. Postmodern & the White Shirt