Book Review: Japanese Fashion Designers

By Tove Hermanson, January 17th, 2012 at 5:23 am (Book Reviews, International Fashion)

Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo

by Bonnie English

Berg Publishers (2011)

Soon to delve into research of my own in the area of Japanese fashion (specifically deconstructed styles), I was delighted to sink my teeth into Bonnie English’s Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo. English’s writing style was concise, with fun extra Notes and a thorough Index for quick lookups. The first half covers the Big Three designers listed in the title, plus the “next wave” including Naoki Takizawa, Dai Fujiwara, Junya Watanabe, Tao Kurihara, and Jun Takahashi, all of whom lean heavily upon technological textile development and textile collaborations. The second half covers textile artists who dabble in or collaborate with fashion designers.

English offers 1970 as the jumping off year when Japanese fashion infiltrated Western dress, initiated by Issey Miyake, but she highlights an inherent and long-standing Japanese dual interest in tradition and progress. In fact, Western clothes like bowlers and high-collared shirts infiltrated wealthy Japanese society in the 1890s, and in the 1930s Japanese businessmen adopted the Western suit for the office, reserving the casual summer yukata kimono for home wear. In the print below you can see Empress Shōken dressed in black (a repeating Japanese fashion theme as you’ll see) in the Western style of dress; this print was actually promoting the wide but temporary adoption of Western dress, including written instructions and illustrations on Western dress construction (for details, see an informative blurb on Lina’s Lookbook).

Empress Shoken promoting western dress, 1887 (click to enlarge)

Japan adopted Western items (again) in the 1940s in part, I’m sure, due to the lingering post-WWII U.S. occupation, but in the 1960s there was a reversal and a re-embracing of traditional Japanese culture. Though Western dress certainly influenced them, most of the contemporary Japanese designers’ inspiration was somehow rooted in the oh-so-Japanese kimono, Samurais, paper arts, the tea ceremony, and Buddhist concepts.

kimono construction

"ma" of the kimono

A recognizable image connecting Japan to its heritage, the kimono has been essential to all these Japanese designers. Its simple construction (8 rectangles connected by straight seams) has helped make it accessible to every social strata of Japan. Boxy as it is when flat, the kimono nonetheless drapes pleasing layers around the human body loosely, with ample space between the body and cloth (called “ma“), as opposed to the Western standard of tailoring closely to the contours of the body. The kimono embodies the Japanese preoccupation with anti-structural layers, allowing freedom of movement with a simplicity of cut. Issey Miyake acknowledged the influence of French couturier Madeleine Vionnet on him, who minimized cutting, abandoned tailor fits, and created patterns and texture with pleats of the fabric itself. Paper arts have a religious significance in Japan, and Miyake experimented with paper-like pleating in linen crêpe, woven cotton, polyester, and jersey, seeking functionality with interesting texture. In his “Pleats, Please” collection of 1993, he revised Fortuny’s Delphos and Peplos gowns of the 1930s, incorporating more sculptural origami pleating effects to Fortuny’s distinctly Grecian versions. To illustrate how freely a body could move in them, dancers modeled the collection rather than professional models.

draped Madeleine Vionnet gown with rough hem, 1917

Fortuny "Delphos" gown, c. 1930

"Pleats Please" collection, Miyake

The major Japanese designers discussed all create clothes with many flowing layers and with a dominance of the color black, a shocking counterpoint to colorful Western collections. But to the Japanese, black is not drab but rather indicative of restraint and dignity. Samurai were highly respected, fierce and skilled (male) warriors, and in the late 17th century their role changed from military to bureaucratic. Accordingly, their luxurious custom kimonos morphed into darker palettes — black was associated with self-discipline — and with expensive elements hidden, such as decorated silk linings. Subtle — or even private — luxury became preferable to typical Western in-your-face glamor. Ms. English astutely points out that dressing down to dress up, as these understated Japanese textiles and clothes aim to accomplish, was seen in late 18th century England when the landed gentry imitated workers’ dress; the same comparison could be made to pre-revolutionary France when it was actually dangerous for the aristocracy to flaunt their wealth sartorially.

black kimono with discreet red lining, early 20th century

This preference for subtlety is rooted in Buddhism which emphasizes the appreciation of poverty, simplicity, and acceptance of imperfection. Challenging the Western artistic conventions of attempting perfection (symmetry, hemmed edges, corsetry to mold an “ideal” figure, etc.), the Japanese typically encourage the (human and therefore fallible) hand of the artist to peek through. Simplicity and perishability are echoed in the Japanese tea ceremony, an everyday task that became an artistic ritual, symbolic of the import of simplicity and the appreciation of perishable goods (as evidenced by the kimono detail below, literally depicting tea ceremony objects).

kimono detail with tea ceremony utensils, 19th century

Issey Miyake was one of the first post-WWII Asian designers to infiltrate the French fashion system, working in Paris in the late ’60s. Sometimes called “anti-fashion,” his clothes favored asymmetry, folds and pleats, exposed stitches, “found” objects, accidents — Kawakubo worked with textile artists to create such “accidents” by loosening bolts on looms, deliberately dropping stitches in knits and other strategies to create irregularities in the industrially produced goods:

deliberately unravelled sweater, Comme des Garcons

Along these lines, Comme des Garçons, founded by Rei Kawakubo in 1969 with Yohji Yamamoto collaborating shortly afterwards, presented “shrouds” at Paris  Fashion Week in 1981. Unprepared Westerners dubbed the distressed look the “aesthetics of poverty.” Tellingly, Yamamoto and Kawakubo both grew up in the poverty of post-WWII Japan and perhaps saw beauty in that poverty, because as designers, both favored black, irregular shapes, hugely bulky, layered, torn, uneven and un-stitched hems. This style was later called “deconstructed” and fashion theorists have alternately claimed it represents post-WWII Japan, homelessness, or is a reaction to contemporary global recessions. A perceived affront to the existing ostentatiously glamorous and feminine Paris fashions, it was icily received by the press with harsh headlines smacking of racism, like “Fashion’s Pearl Harbour.” This anti-fashion — asexual and loosely fitting with signals of status overturned — was clearly hard for European audiences to appreciate, but “hifu” is a familiar concept of anti-style, confusion and disarray to the Japanese. Select European artists have, however, experimented with this concept as well. Yamamoto has sited as an influence photographer August Sander and his project of documenting the poor everyman; the Arte Povera art movement of the 1960s also embraced the art of everyday living and the rejection of everything shiny and new as representative of The Establishment.

Comme des Garçons “bag lady post-Hiroshima” look, 1982

As kimonos are worn by the wealthy and the masses alike, so are they worn by both men and women, and the discussed Japanese designers all played with concepts of gender roles in their contemporary designs. Kawakubo, having experienced a surge in Japan’s feminist movement firsthand (Japanese women were only granted suffrage in 1946, in part due to pressure from the occupying forces of the United States), often questions Western body ideals, beauty in simplicity vs. over-the-top European glamor. Kawakubo and Yamamoto don’t rely on the body shape as the focal point of attraction, breaking from young models in favor of unconventional beauties, non-professional models, and mature women. Kawakubo’s “Bump” collection (Spring/Summer 1997) showcased garments with oddly padded lumps, effectively critiquing the idealized feminine shape. Yamamoto frequently deconstructs the Western business suit, removing the padded shoulders, lining, expanding the armholes, or making it asymmetrical. In his 2002 collection, draped skirts with frayed threads replaced pants, crossing gender barriers. His softer shapes and deconstructed techniques questioned the ideal masculine angularity; his skirts for men questioned the Western sexual silhouettes.

Textiles, as the building block of all garments, are central to these Japanese designers, resulting in collaborative experiments with textile artists. (I actually wish Ms. English had opened the book with the textile artists, as it seems all the fashion designers themselves approach their clothes by addressing textiles first.) Miyake, for example, frequently works with Makiko Minagawa, a textile “artist-engineer.” Miyake has been known to give Minagawa such obtuse and deliberately vague instructions as “Make me a fabric that looks like poison.” While traditional Japanese clothes have been made of natural fibers such as cotton, silk, and paper (for warm linings), Miyake emphasizes the ancient interest and import of industrially produced clothes with synthetic materials, effectively harnessing the past, present and future with such textile breakthroughs as multi-directional pleating , metallic skin encasement, collaged crazy quilt material, and inflatable trousers. Kawakubo, too, is known for her laissez faire collaborative methods and cryptic instructions, like providing a textile designer with a crumpled a piece of paper for inspiration (!!), encouraging others to contribute to her initial concepts.

Another trademark of Japanese fashion seems to be a conceptual approach (as evidenced by obscure textile inspiration), and a questioning of the Western fashion system. Miyake broke boundaries of season-driven conventional fashion and the cult of the young, using older and non-professional models, as in his 1995 “Beautiful Ladies” collection where models were between 62 and 92 years old. Yamamoto’s 2008 collection (the first year of the US depression/recession) included “gauzy rags sewn together with simple white stitches” as though for a funeral procession, according to Eric Wilson of the NYTimes. Comme des Garçons’ Spring/Summer 2002 collection involved models with helmets made of Le Monde newspapers with Taliban war headlines. In spite of the overt political references, Kawakubo claimed it was a last minute decision with no political meaning; she could not protest as strongly in 2003 when her clothes were emblazoned with slogans like “the majority is always wrong,” and “long last the 1 percent.”

"gauzy rags" in Yamamoto's Spring/Summer '09

newspaper hats in Comme des Garçons SS02 collection

You might also remember the controversial photographs taken by Yuriko Takagi of Miyake’s pleated clothes taken in a remote Indian village where locals who could not actually afford such garments modeled them, which could be commentary on the artificiality of traditional studio fashion photo sessions, but was widely lambasted for exploiting the poor to attract publicity for designer garments. Whatever your feeling on that example, editors have widely attributed socio-political commentary to the clothes of Miyake, Yamamoto, and Kawakubo with those designers’ consistent breaking of barriers between sexes, high and low culture, and Eastern vs. Western ideologies. Interestingly, the designers inevitably deny such deliberate signification, but fashion, as art, may be the receptacle upon which viewers project their own ideologies or questions, and designers’ intent is perhaps only partially relevant.

Yuriko Takagi photos of "Pleats Please" collection

All in all, I learned a great deal from Japanese Fashion Designers. This book is not — as the title misleadingly suggests — an in-depth exploration merely of Miyake, Yamamoto and Kawakubo, but is rather much broader in scope. I do wish Ms. English had provided a summary of Japan’s history of textile development and followed the strands of current practitioners from there — Kyoto was the ancient center for textile experimentation and that more recently Tokyo has caught up, but why or how that happened is not elaborated on, nor is the interesting topic of why Eastern fashion has infiltrated the Western world, and vice versa. To eliminate some redundancy, I might have divided the subject matter thematically rather than by designer (as I did for this review); I suspect a stronger narrative thread with less repetition of material might have developed, but I realize this is my own style to which I am obviously partial. The actual organization will, however, be helpful for anyone looking to hone in on one specific designer rather than the Japanese fashion/textile movement as a whole. I did crave more color photos — I know they’re expensive to produce, but when you’re looking at textiles with subtle mottling, irregular patterns, translucence and iridescent sheen, black-and-white images leave something to be desired. There were, however, exhaustive lists of museum exhibitions and gallery installations including these designers’ works (implicitly contradicting the designers’ protests in having their works compared to “art”) which would be incredibly helpful to any scholar wanting to compile images and investigate further. Japanese Fashion Designers was much wider in scope than I anticipated, well researched with complex concepts broken down, and it would certainly be a helpful reference book for anyone remotely interested in Japanese fashion and/or textile technology.

Related WornThrough entries:

• Jenna’s “Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion” part 1 and part 2
• Jenna’s “Yohji Yamamoto at the V&A”

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Book Review: Fashion and Music

By Tove Hermanson, November 21st, 2011 at 5:33 am (Book Reviews)

Fashion and Music

by Janice Miller

Berg Publishers (July, 2011)

Though I typically concentrate on the Everyman’s experience with clothes and fashion, it is oftentimes easier (or simply more fun) to see trends in fashion and aesthetic movements in celebrities. The melding of the physical and the lyrical is critical to music performers. Janice Miller, Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion, addresses the relationship between fashion and music in simply named Fashion and Music. In the 161 pages, each of the seven chapters is further broken down into sub-sections, with frequent references to itself — “in this chapter I will discuss / have discussed…” — indicative of the textbook style of the work which can feel a bit clunky when read straight through.

The book opens with a look at Fans, Music, Clothes and Consumption, solidly linking consumerist culture to eager audience’s desire to emulate the “authenticity” of favorite musicians. Fans might collect clothes worn by celebrities, which has fan cache and emotional significance as physical items suggestive of the presence of stars, though the fan might not ever wear those precious souvenirs of music culture. Fan websites may inadvertently and unofficially promote brands in discussions of celebrity clothes, even as they create a social sphere of celebrity fan alliance. Though Miller seemed suggest that fans can be “productive” or creative in their obsessive interest in celebrity style and collectibles within these forums and by collecting ephemera, I remained skeptical of this point.

In Branding, Fashion and Music, Miller addresses the music industry’s entwined relationship with the fashion industry, which concentrates on corporate elements of both music and fashion, and how they feed each other’s profits on a large scale. Ironically capitalizing on many music genre’s underground/alternative credentials, Miller asserts that musical success is dependent upon the ability to communicate an “authentic” story — no matter how manufactured some music may be. Fashion, therefore, enters music producers’ domain in creating successful, marketable musicians, and music or musicians are often used by designers or brands to lend a visual story to their labels.

Musicians might offer alternatives to mainstream fashion and ideas of femininity in what Miller calls the “witchy look,” which I never quite embraced in Witchy Women: Fashioning the Womanly Body of the Female Singer-Songwriter. This witchy woman is a of nonthreatening, alternative pagan-esque woman who is nonetheless traditionally attractive; Miller used Natalie Merchant’s Ophelia cover as an example:

Female performers are billboards for ideas of femininity, and embody expectations of how women’s bodies should look and perform; usually based on typical heterosexual tropes. Female singer-songwriters, generally autobiographical, must connect to the Female experience and therefore are more prone to embrace an anti-fashion that does not go so far as to hamper success in the (male dominated) music industry. Pop music lyrics often reinforce perceived women’s outlooks — romance, subordinate love, nurturing, abused — to be mirrored in clothes. Miller suggests that Janis Joplin was so successful because her lifestyle included typical masculine activities such as drinking heavily and being sexually promiscuous (which, one could easily argue, was how all young people acted in the ’70s); Janis tempered this hard side of her by wearing boas, ruffles and necklaces. Miller suggests that most critics of Janis Joplin don’t actually critique her powerful music as they might a man, but criticize her in a female framework: her frizzy hair and weight.

Miller addresses the pervasive presence of one of my favorite articles of clothing — the suit — in White Suited Men: Style, Masculinity and the Boyband. She offers the suit as an archetypal garment whose conservatism and mutability enable musicians to express many different versions of masculinity. In addition to providing bands with visual coherence, suits express power and constrained masculine sexuality. The Beatles wore up-to-the-minute fashionable, mod suits in the ’60s, riding the fine line between acceptance and rejection of societal norms. Many male solo artists and band frontmen have adopted the suit, tweaking it to their own styles and messages: Mick Jagger, Prince, David Bowie (I would add David Byrne) all wore altered suits altered in such ways that sexual connotations were actually enhanced, rather than diluted. Suits create a uniformity among pop band members, and specifically the white suits favored by 1990s boy bands present a respectable, sanitized version of masculinity for boys who typically sing about puppy love to female audiences. Matching suits also make it easier for managers and producers to swap out one generic member for another without disturbing the visual unity for the audience, or even of starting a new boy band with a tried-and-true visual formula for (financial) success. Though rock music and rock derivations are often considered transgressive, these genres have relied upon variations of the standard suit for decades.

Backstreet Boys, Millenium cover, 1999

Gender disparities are addressed again in Dressing Your Age: Fashion, the Body and the Ageing [sic] Music Star, as there are different aging pressures for men and women. And perhaps celebrities endure more scrutiny than the average Joe, as objects of desire in international spotlights. Since the beginning of the rock music scene (Miller does not address anything pre-TV, which I would’ve been interested in), there has been a connection between youth and music, the youthful body ideal (also relatively new in the history of fashion culture), sex and rebellion. The older generations typically fear or lament younger generations who use fashion and music to differentiate their values from the (older) establishment; the mods, Teddy Boys, and punks are just a few examples. Fashion and body maintenance have been used by stars to negotiate the public aging process, which may have consequences on their careers if ignored.  Miller notes that the media was obsessed with Madonna’s turning 50, implying her overtly sexual self presentation was no longer appropriate, touching on the social aspects of the aging process, as opposed to the purely physical (because really, her bod is still pretty damn smokin’). The general public looks to celebrities to find images to emulate themselves, but these celebrities are also subject to judgement and societal restrictions — particularly women, who are deemed worthless once stripped of their sexual allure (usually associated with aging).

Madonna on Dazed & Confused cover at age 50, 2008

Miller focuses on hip hop and rap as representations of Clothes and Cultural Identities: Music, Ethnicity and Nation, suggesting these music forms of the “Black Atlantic” offer resistance to the marginalization of black masculinity. Returning briefly to the suit, the ostentatious, baggy zoot suit (see Heather’s previous post) became a powerful emblem of black / Hispanic identity, starting in the ’30s jazz scene. Little Richard’s zoot suit complemented his shocking singing style while Fats Domino catered to black performer traditions in his dinner suit uniform. As opposed to many types of (mostly white) rock previously discussed, which often attempt to reject middle class standards by adopting alternative fashions, African American hip hop and rap generally embrace the American Dream — which many blacks have struggled in vain to achieve — and so black musicians often sport bling to advertise they’ve “made it.” (Miller generally omits in this discussion black groups that address these social and fiscal disparities in lyrics, such as The Fugees, De La South, and The Roots.) In gangsta rap, black men have asserted their anger and strength through music and style as an alternative to ineffective or slow political routes. Recently there has been a movement of black preppy style, such as OutKast’s Andre 3000, who now has his own fashion line. Andre’s Benjamin Bixby label, which replicates a 1930s era, upper-middle class, collegiate / jock style favored by some alternative, fashion-forward African Americans, is essentially appropriating the symbols of white wealth and putting them on black bodies.

Lil Jon bling

Andre 3000

Miller discusses how music and fashion has been used as a means to inject queer performers into the mainstream, in Spectacle and Sexuality: Music, Clothes and Queer Bodies. Queer performers may dress unconventionally, or display “unconventional bodies,” marking their queer culture (Miller misses an opportunity here, I think, to point out that many non-pop musicians do the same). David Bowie used clothes to counter the counter-culture — specifically the distinctly anti-glamorous hippies (which Miller dubiously suggests was a purely premeditated marketing ploy). Bowie embraced the artifice of appearance that so many celebrities try to present as their casual, “authentic” selves, but in spite of his costumed superficiality, fans still conflated the person with his performing alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust, so that when Bowie performed as Ziggy  for the last time in 1979, people thought it was the death of Bowie himself. Bowie’s admitted bisexuality, of course, complimented his radical image, calling attention to the performance inherent in gender — the difference between biological sex and gender. Miller discusses camp, exemplified by Freddie Mercury of Queen and the New York Dolls, as signals of gayness within that culture where many try to “pass.” So successful has camp been as part of a branded image that it has since been adopted by straight, mainstream performers like Kylie Minogue. Miller suggests that female lesbians, on the other hand, generally turn to conflations of overt masculinity and femininity, preferring mundane male clothes to flashy, campy ensembles. In looking at large queer performers like Beth Ditto, Miller suggests that fatness might be part of an overall lesbian / feminist movement to reject the negative body attitudes of heterosexual societies. In addition to her successful band Gossip, Beth Ditto has become an unlikely fashion icon, appearing on Gaultier’s catwalk in 2010, and launching  her own fashion range at the plus-size Evans in 2009.

Though I certainly believe this is a worthy subject, in many places, this book reads like a clunky thesis, peppered with “I will demonstrate” and “later in this chapter….” Substantial points were inevitably quoted by outside sources, which is a good introduction to outside texts, but the quotations were so plentiful (often 10 per page) that I frankly found it distracting, not to mention the inevitably choppiness of reading many people’s voices rather than one dominant one. Aside from a discussion of fan culture, there was little mention of the concert and lifestyle cultures that accompany music scenes and influence group fashions, which I would have been interested in. There was a distinct concentration on contemporary music and musicians, which perhaps was an attempt to make the text relevant to young audiences, but which sacrificed the long-standing narrative flow of music and fashion, even within the confines of the latter 20th and 21st centuries. Lastly, photos seemed like an afterthought; those chosen were not necessarily the most representative examples I myself could think of, and there were not many. All in all, I would recommend this to people as a resource to get your (or your students’) toes wet in the topic of the fashion and music industries. The index is thorough and the bibliography will lead you to more meaty texts.

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Beach Blanket Bibliography: Blogging from Athens and Crete

By Jenna, August 30th, 2011 at 9:00 pm (Book Reviews)

This week and next I am on vacation in Greece, but the reading material I have brought along in my carry-on luggage and the sites I have flagged up to visit while I am here will ensure that this is an educational holiday for the fashion brain, and inevitably an opportunity to observe what people are wearing away from home.

Having arrived in Athens on a Monday, the day most museums worldwide seem to be closed, I will wait until next week to serve up some snapshots and thoughts on fashion history in Greek museums. Disappointingly, I have missed out on an exhibition on Monsters in Fashion at the Benaki Museum which closed last month, but I am hoping to be able to pick up an exhibition catalog while I am here.

This week I offer my beach blanket bibliography, which also extends to reading material earmarked for plane journeys, ferry rides and cafe visits. If you have read any of these while home or away, or want to know which I recommend wholeheartedly upon my return to London, send your comments. For the moment, the paperbacks here listed are fresh and still smell of the Amazon.com cardboard packing they came in, but are soon to be marred by suntan lotion fingerprints and encrusted with sand.

For this reason, I had opted to splurge on only one e-book to read on my iPad while in transit or indoors. According to the Kindle app, I am only 23% finished with this title, but I want to go ahead and recommend it with nearly fanatical enthusiasm. You might not want to read this book while vacationing in your hastily purchased holiday frocks, footwear and bikinis – but Lucy Siegle’s ‘To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?’ is a searing, timely and info-taining examination of the principles, practices and consequences of fast fashion. Dismiss it as an eco-rant if you fear the changes it may inspire in your consumer habits, or be bold and responsible and read it. I haven’t gotten to the part where she advises readers on how to redeem their addiction to fast, cheap and unethical fashion, in favor of the ‘curated wardrobe,’ (which I am already seduced by in name alone) but I am hoping I get to that part before I decide to buy any cheap flip-flops, sun hats or bogus hand-crafted traditional textile products. Bad enough, I spent five euros on phony designer sunglasses this morning in order to be be able to read from my iPad in the sun. I am ashamed, but was unable to find any eyewear that wasn’t pretending to be Rayban, Prada, Dior or Versace in my price range…

Hopefully the rest of the books in my tote bag won’t rile me up into a fashion ethics crisis frenzy or I may just have to seek out decaf caffe frappes for the rest of the trip. But I will be resolving to explore the topic of fashion and sustainability with more attention and to put my money where my mouth is when shopping – whether at home or abroad.

Until then I’ll be indulging in reading up on youth subcultural fashion in London, starting with:

The Way We Wore: A Life in Threads by Robert Elms, which is a fashion memoir written by one of the UK’s most well-known style journalists, who lived every style you ever wished you had been there to witness from Mod to Punk to New Romantic and beyond. I reckon that this book will inspire a playlist, and a visit to the library to pore over copies of The FACE, which Robert Elms was a founding contributor to.

Then carrying on with the theme of youth and subcultural fashion in Britain, I will take it back to 1958, with Neil McInnes’ cult classic novel Absolute Beginners. This title made it to the top of my shame-on-self-for-not-having-already-read list after a lecture I attended on alternative fashion of 1950s London given by Beatrice Behlen, Senior Curator of Dress and Decorative Arts at the Museum of London. Her peek into the forgotten fashion alleyways of late 1950s Soho was inspired by passages taken from McInnes’ novel, which described the dress of the young and restless postwar generation which would come to be mythologized, copied and endlessly sited as inspiration for anyone who ever sat in a smoky cafe and fancied themselves a mod, rocker, beatnik, or later punk – in short anyone who ever was a teenager who wore clothes to express themself from 1959 onwards.

Just in case any of the references to people, places, trends and garments elude me, I tacked Paolo Hewitt’s The Soul Stylists: Six Decades of Modernism – From Mods to Casuals to my shopping basket. It promises to explore the ‘enduring relationship that exists between American black music and British working class style, tracing a Mod tradition that began in Soho just after the second world war and continues to this day.’ With the recent riots in London bringing media attention to youth subcultures and providing opportunity for the continued demonisation of the hooded sweatshirt and the desire for designer sportswear among economically disadvantaged youth, I thought this book would provide background information that no one seemed to be reference when discussing the causes of the unrest or photographing burning shops in London and other affected cities in the UK.

Although it may seem that this reading list is far from light-hearted and a wholly inappropriate travel companion, the last book on my list is really and truly just there for kicks. Fashion Babylon, by Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous has been coming up as an automated suggestion to me on Amazon for nearly 5 years now. Although I have been warned by friends I trust that it is far from enlightening and certainly not a “well written fashion text,” I decided that spending .01 pence plus shipping might be justifiable in this case. I am resolving to read it slathered in suntan lotion, in those phony Ray-Bans and mass market swimsuit, with my tongue firmly in my cheek, if only to prevent the compulsive cringing it may inspire. And if that’s not a good enough antidote for a far too serious holiday reading list, there will hopefully be a newsstand nearby where I can pick up European fashion monthlies at their real cover price – always a guilty pleasure worth indulging!

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Book Review: Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style

By Heather Vaughan, June 22nd, 2011 at 5:00 am (Book Reviews, History of Dress, Uncategorized, Videos)

Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (May 23, 2011, University of Pennsylvania Press)

By Kathy Peiss

Review by Rachel Harris

I’m thrilled to bring you today’s book review from Rachel Harris. A graduate of the NYU Master of Arts in Visual Culture: Costume Studies program, Rachel Harris has been with the FIDM Museum since 2006. In her current position, she manages the Museum’s social media profile, while also creating social media content. Many thanks for her thoughtful review:

The zoot suit silhouette, with its exaggerated shoulders, extended jacket and baggy trousers, is generally interpreted as an example of aesthetics as political protest. In her new book Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style, Kathy Peiss argues against this straightforward interpretation, suggesting instead that zoot suits generated a “proliferation of meanings.” Relying on primary source information, including newspaper articles, satirical cartoons, song lyrics and film, Peiss methodically builds a convincing case for a multilayered interpretation of the zoot suit. In its interest in debunking sacred myths about the zoot suit, Peiss’ work is akin to Valerie Steele’s rethinking of the corset. As Steele did with her book The Corset: A Cultural History (2001), Peiss strives to complicate our understanding of a specific garment.

Mexican American in a Zoot Suit (Via Los Angeles Public Library)

In the first chapter, Making the Zoot Suit, Peiss demonstrates that the bold, almost theatrical silhouette of the zoot suit grew out of historical antecedents, pointing out specific groups of men who rejected the 19^th century imperative to dress in a subdued, dark suit. Immigrants, students and African-American minstrels figure in this history. Peiss also suggests that the zoot suit might have simply been the logical endpoint of 1930s casual male dress, which featured baggy pants and broad shoulders. Like most scholars of the zoot suit, Peiss is unable to pinpoint the exact origins of the contemporary iteration of the zoot suit, but suggests that it emerged almost simultaneously in a variety of locations, including Harlem, Memphis and Los Angeles.

Photo by John Ferrell, June, 1942. The original caption read: "Washington, D.C. Soldier inspecting a couple of "zoot suits" at the Uline Arena during Woody Herman's Orchestra engagement there." Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, reproduction number, e.g., LC-USF35-1326

In chapter two, Going to Extremes, Peiss confirms the origins of the zoot suit with African American men, and also documents the spread of the style to other groups, including Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans and others. Though the style was discussed in media, Peiss notes that it was essentially a street fashion, developed and propagated outside the fashion system. Peiss makes an important point here, noting that few wearers of the zoot suit left written records of their feelings about the zoot suit. This lack of evidence complicates attempts to posit the zoot suit as a form of political protest.

Chapter three, Into the Public Eye, describes the dissemination of the zoot suit through popular media, including satirical cartoons, film, music and comics. (In media portrayals, the zoot suit was a marker of African American identity, a signifier of social deviance, or both. This understanding of the zoot suit is clearly demonstrated by a 1943 Donald Duck cartoon, The Spirit of ’43.  Though some believed the zoot suit was simply a style of dressing; others felt that the zoot suit was a clear signifier of a willingness to commit deviant or unlawful acts. This was particularly true in Los Angeles during and after the so-called “zoot suit riots” of summer 1943.

Chapter four, From Rags to Riot, discusses the Los Angeles riots in detail. In June of 1943, a group of navy men armed themselves with weapons and headed to downtown Los Angeles with the intent of seeking out Mexican American zoot suiters, also called pachucos. On finding a pachuco, the sailors removed the offending suit and beat the wearer. This violence spread, resulting in several days of riots and beatings throughout the city. Peiss’ argues that the riots were the eruption of long simmering racial and social tensions in Los Angeles. Peiss suggests that the pachucos and other zoot suiters were simply easily spotted targets and not representatives of a larger political or social movement.

Suspected members of a Pachuca gang called the Black Widows taken into police custody. (Los Angeles Times 9 August 1942)

The events in Los Angeles spurred widespread analysis and public discussion regarding the meaning of the zoot suit. In Chapter 5, Reading the Riddle, Peiss analyzes these discussions, while also discussing changing perceptions of the zoot suit. In the wake of the riots, zoot suiters were widely considered deviants, though some took a more sympathetic view of the style, suggesting it was simply aesthetically appealing. When social movements of the late 1960s and ‘70s cultivaled a belief that the personal is inherently political, the zoot suit suddenly morphed from a style of dressing to a political gesture. Peiss credits this change to a new mode of analytic interpretation that viewed style, identity, politics and race as part of an interconnected web.

In what might be the most fascinating chapter, Zooting Around the World, Peiss follows the zoot suit as it makes its way outside of the United States. From the French zazous, to South African tsotis and the Russian stiliagi, the zoot suit jumped around the world, finding a home among disaffected youth. Peiss credits the international popularity of the zoot suit to the influence of Hollywood films and its striking visual profile. Again, Peiss argues that the adoption of the zoot suit was not a gesture of refusal, but the result of a variety of factors including authoritarian regimes, post World War II drabness, poverty and an interest in the United States.

Though Peiss’ attempts to complicate readings of the zoot suit are admirable, her insistence on reading the style as anything other than political gesture seems reactionary. Though she is correct in suggesting that the standard interpretation is overly simplistic, Peiss dismisses readings of the zoot suit as subversive largely because of a lack of personal accounts of wearing the zoot suit. This stands in contrast to some fashion historians, who might argue that the extreme silhouette of the zoot suit is a challenge in itself, whether or not there is existing documentation regarding the intent of the wearer. It also suggests that external perceptions of dress are insignificant when interpreting personal style, a position that seems untenable.

Finally, as a believer in the importance of blending object study with other methods of analysis, I was left wondering, Where’s the suit? At no point does Peiss indicate that she has examined or attempted to examine an actual zoot suit. Though it might be hard to find extant examples of a zoot suit within museum collections, surely there are zoot suits out there.  Though there is a wealth of archival detail and information to recommend in this book, I suspect an understanding of the material realities of an actual zoot suit might have enriched Peiss’ analysis.

Other reading:

Catherine S. Ramírez’s The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press 2008).

Additional Images: Los Angeles Zoot Suit Grand Jury Hearing via Los Angeles Public Library.

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Book Review: Seventeenth Century Women’s Dress Patterns

By Heather Vaughan, June 15th, 2011 at 5:00 am (Book Reviews, History of Dress, Uncategorized)

Seventeenth-Century Women’s Dress Patterns

Editors: Susan North and Jenny Tiramani

Book Review by: Mark Hutter

I a thrilled to have this book review from the eminently qualified, Mark Hutter. Mark is the Senior Tailor in the Department of Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, and currently serves as a Vice President for the Costume Society of America. Mark holds degrees in art history, history, and theatre. For more than twenty-five years he has studied and replicated original 17th through early 19th century garments, in order to document and reconstruct the practices of the tailor’s trade. As a tradesman and historian Mark shares his knowledge with visitors to Colonial Williamsburg, as well as by teaching the trade in a formal apprenticeship, and in frequent workshops and lectures. Here is his review:

I am captivated by a classic detective story and am thrilled to find one in this innovative study of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean clothing. With Holmesian acuity the team of Jenny Tiramani, Claire Thornton, Luca Costigliolo, Armelle Lucas, and Susan North sleuth the seams, stitches, and styles of fifteen garments in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

While the bluntly factual title, Seventeenth-Century Women’s Dress Patterns, does little reveal the wealth of information within, it does not mislead the reader to believe that this will be a cultural analysis; it is not. It is a thoroughly technical, yet eminently readable, work. It is in many ways the story of the making and, therefore, the makers of these garments as told by the clues left in their creations. Pencil lines, chalk smudges, and abandoned basting tell trained eyes of the process and the people. Brief opening chapters introduce the now anonymous tailors, seamstresses, embroiderers, and knitters who collaborated on these garments. Period commentary on their trades, drawn largely from The Academy of Armory published by Randle Holme in 1688, lays out their tools and techniques.

Adding greatly to this commentary are the modern working tradesmen’s insights of Tiramani and Costigiglio. They, along with Thornton and Lucas, established and operated the wardrobe of the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London. From 1997 until 2005 they built and maintained all of the Shakespearian-period costumes using strictly period- appropriate tools, techniques, and materials. Their work was, and is, based upon an intimate analysis of extant objects, as well as the scholarly scouring of period texts and images. Their perspective as academic artisans is the heart of this book.

This team’s resurrection and mastery of the skills used to manufacture clothes in pre-industrial Europe has trained them to see and assess with the craftsman’s eye, joined with the most knowledgeable curator’s historical hindsight. Their carefully detailed case studies of surviving garments fill the successive 137 pages. The pieces examined date mostly to the first half of the seventeenth-century and include: four ornately decorated waistcoats, a sumptuous slashed satin bodice, a glittering gold and silk knitted waistcoat, an exotically embroidered linen mantle, an exquisite lace-trimmed smock, a curious rare linen hood, an enigmatic coif and cross cloth, a gossamer band and cuffs, a puzzling partlet and sleeve panels, two pairs of requisite gloves, and one humble linen handkerchief. Meticulously drawn scaled-patterns and sequential illustrations of the constructional process of each garment are given. Lest you think that Tiramani and team are complete Luddites, they also employ the most modern photography to highlight constructional details and some rather sexy radiography to see through the layers. In most cases the authors have been able to ferret out contemporary portraits with sitters wearing articles akin to the originals. (In the remarkable instance of Margaret Layton both her waistcoat and a portrait in which she wears the same survive; each was acquired by the V&A in 1994.) Finally, patterns for all the embroidery and each bit of bobbin lace are included. Clue by clue the making of these garments is unraveled, figuratively. While in a few peripheral instances, other sleuths may make different deductions from the evidence, the cases presented here are compelling.

Not surprisingly, among the pieces studied there is a preponderance which is elaborately ornamented. North, Curator of Fashion 1550-1800 at the V&A, explains that the objects reflect the limitations of the museum’s collection, having been gathered primarily for their decorative textiles. Very few humble garments survive across the centuries and nearly nothing at all from between 1640 and 1700. Yet the understanding to be drawn from of these precious pieces is not applicable to the elite alone. The contextual paragraphs for each entry include quotes extracted from early wills and inventories showing that clothes such as these were owned by the gentry and middling sorts. Similar garments, perhaps without the degree of adornment, were worn by the working and lower sorts.

The vast majority of books written on the history of dress discuss the social, political, economic, and artistic aspects of clothing, as seen from the exterior of the finished garment. Disappointingly few books have competently addressed historic methods of cut and construction, let alone seen these aspects as valuable historical records. North’s introduction to the book gives rightful acknowledgment to the works of Norah Waugh, Nancy Bradfield, Dorothy Burnham, Johannes Pietsch, Linda Baumgarten with John Watson and Florine Carr, and most especially Janet Arnold, as having created the cumulative literature on historical patterns. The older works by Waugh and Bradfield give schematics and sketches to trace the changes in pattern caused by the ever-fluctuating silhouette of post-Renaissance women, but do not analyze the assembly. Burnham looked at the cut of garments scattered across time and cultures. It was the now classic works of Janet Arnold that set the first standard in the publication of object-based studies of historic garment, their patterns and construction. Her primary objective was to aid costumers and curators in understanding the methods of garment fitting and assembly throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Her patterns, however, give only one-half of the garment and while her constructional notes are extensive, they are not (and were not intended to be) complete. The more recent works by Pietsch and Baumgarten build upon Arnold’s format, adding more photography of the artifacts. Seventeenth-Century Women’s Dress Patterns sets a new standard for object-based studies: beautiful, complete, and completely usable patterns; crystal clear photographs of the garments appropriately mounted and of carefully charted details; thorough and well illustrated constructional sequences; and scholarly documented comparative material from drawn contemporaneous texts and images. While the first book by this formidable team of scholars and tradesmen is nearly overwhelming in its depth, they are not finished; this is book one of a series.

The great value of this new study lies in the comprehensiveness of its format, and the ability of its authors to detect a story in a single stitch.

For further reading

Janet Arnold:

• Patterns of Fashion: The Cut and Construction of Clothes for Men and Women, 1560-1620
• Patterns of Fashion 1: Englishwomen’s Dresses & Their Construction, 1660-1860
• Patterns of Fashion 2: Englishwomen’s Dresses and Their Construction, 1860-1940
• Patterns of Fashion 4: The Cut and Construction of Linen Shirts, Smocks, Neckwear, Headwear and Accessories for Men and Women,1540-1660

Linda Baumgarten:

• Costume Close-Up: Clothing Construction and Pattern, 1750-1790
• What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America

Nancy Bradfield:

• Costume in Detail: Women’s Dress 1730-1930

Dorothy Burnham:

• Cut My Cote

Randle Holme, see: N.W. Alcock and Nancy Cox:

• Living and Working in 17th Century England: An Encyclopedia of Drawings and Descriptions from Randle Holme’s original manuscripts for “The Academy of Armory” [CD-ROM]

Ninya Mikhaila and Jane Malcolm-Davies:

• The Tudor Tailor: Reconstructing Sixteenth-Century Dress

Bettina Niekamp and Agnieszka Wos Jucker:

• Das Prunkkleid des Kurfürsten Moritz von Sachsen (1521-1553) in der Dresdner Rüstkammer. Dokumentation – Restaurierung – Konservierung

Johannes Pietsch and Karen Stolleis:

• Kölner Patrizier- und Bürgerkleidung des 17. Jahrhunderts. Die Kostümsammlung Hüpsch im Hessischen Landesmuseum Darmstadt

Naomi Tarrant:

• The Development of Costume

Norah Waugh:

• The Cut of Women’s Clothes, 1600-1930
• The Cut of Men’s Clothes, 1600-1900
• Corsets and Crinolines

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Book Review: Mood for Munsingwear: Minnesota’s Claim to Underwear Fame

By Heather Vaughan, June 8th, 2011 at 5:00 am (Book Reviews, Uncategorized)

In the Mood for Munsingwear: Minnesota’s Claim to Underwear Fame.

By Susan Marks

Minnesota Historical Society Press (April 2011).

Review by Jane Farrell-Beck

Jane Farrell-Beck is a Professor Emerita, who taught in the apparel program at Iowa State University for 26 years. She has published widely, and has three co-authored books in print, including “Uplift: The Bra in America” (Penn Press, 2002) and “20th-Century Dress in the United States” (Fairchild, 2007). Her current project is “Her Infinite Variety: Dress and the Adult Woman,” being prepared for Texas Tech U. Press.

Ms. Marks has created a pictorial history of the Northwestern Knitting Company, which became the Munsingwear Company in the late 1910s and went public as the Munsingwear Corporation in 1923. Four chapters trace the 1886 inception of the company through its demise in 1981. The tone of the writing is popular, with numerous anecdotes about Munsingwear’s innovations in products and advertising, and the ups and downs of employee relations. Ms. Marks’ early experience in selling Intimate Apparel for Dayton-Hudson, and subsequent work as a costumed and corseted interpreter at the Alexander Ramsey House in St. Paul, undoubtedly helped her relate to the vast Munsingwear  Collection held by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Chapter 1 chronicles the rise of Northwestern Knitting Company from 1886 through the early 1900s. The firm launched in business with extensive improvements in material and styling  to the basic union suit—a conjoined undershirt and underdrawers much in demand in the late 19^th century. The covering, or “plating” of wool yarn with silk relieved the itchiness of the jersey fabric generally used for union suits. George Munsing held patents for this fabric and for the types of covering stitches that gave the garments a durable and neat finish.

Northwestern Knitting claimed to be first to photograph an undergarment on a live model, starting with a child’s image in 1897. Normally, line drawings were used to present undergarments, or the products were held up by fully clad adults[i] or were shown on a marble sculpture of a woman.[ii] It is not quite true that no other undergarments were shown on “live models,” because Kabo Corsets showed their corsets and “bust perfectors” on live figures and Classic Corset Company presented its “Grecian Girdle,” a proto brassiere, in photographs.[iii]

The company prospered, but employees did not fully share in the benefits. A labor activist  writing for the St. Paul Globe, Eva McDonald Valesh, went undercover at Northwestern Knitting Co. in 1888. She documented bullying by a “forelady” who appropriated workers’ lunches, plus the more serious complaints of inequitable distribution of work and poor physical conditions in the plant. Although the exposé did not immediately change conditions, the general labor ferment in the needle trades nudged Northwestern Knitting to build a more hygienic, pleasanter  and much larger plant in 1904 in North Minneapolis.  Chapter 2 documents this growth, explains  succinctly the continuing need for “union suits,” and reveals the systematic thievery of products by Northwestern Knitting employees. Exposed by a detective, the ring was shut down. Such surveillance helped curb union-organizing efforts.

Chapter 3 explains in detail the benefits provided to “Munsingites,” as employees were called.  Medical care was free, there were resting rooms for any woman who was indisposed, and social opportunities abounded, including picnics and sports events. An on-site library and evening classes in English, math, history and sciences assisted foreign-born employees to become assimilated to America. Advancement often meant leaving Munsingwear, however, because promotions generally went to native-born workers. This chapter was the most frustrating in the book, because the text concentrated on the social milieu of the company, whereas the photos and their captions dealt with workers at their machines.  More extensive analysis of production would have helped “knit” the components of the story together.

By 1923, Munsingwear also was diversifying from union suits—no longer in demand because of improvements in central heating—toward lighter “step-ins” and camisoles for women, briefs for men, hosiery, sleepwear,  loungewear and swimsuits.  With the aid of the synthetic elastic “Lastex,” and the genius of Ruth Kapinas, designer of “Foundettes” brassieres and corselets, Munsingwear survived the Depression of the 1930s, and went on to produce uniforms for the U.S. Government during World War II.  Building on wartime systems, Munsingwear returned strongly to consumer products after 1945. Munsingwear produced alluring and fashionable undergarments from the 1950s to the 1970s, under the acquired labels of Vassarette and Hollywood Maxwell. Inevitably, changing tastes and nimble competitors drove the company from business in 1981.

Occasionally, Ms. Marks slips into incautious generalizations.  For instance, rayon did not quickly become a popular fiber for apparel. Developed in 1885-1892, it went through many changes and trial products (braid, linings, stockings) before consumers would accept it in lingerie and outerwear.[iv] The Sweater Girl was a American image in 1940, well before the 1950s proliferation of nylon apparel. It would have enhanced the discussion in Chapter 3 to trace changes in the company through the contents of the in-house newsletter, The Munsingwear News. Finally, captions were needed on the 1950s-1960s fashion illustrations that open each chapter (incongruously, in the first three chapter).  In sum, this is a lively book, to be taken as a popular introduction to the Munsingwear Company, and enjoyed for the many tidbits it provides.

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Book Review: Berliner Chic

By Heather Vaughan, June 1st, 2011 at 5:00 am (Book Reviews, Uncategorized)

Berliner Chic: A Locational History of Berlin Fashion

By Susan Ingram and Katrina Sark

(Intellect, February 2011)

Review by Mila Ganeva

Mila Ganeva is Associate Professor of German Studies at Miami University in Ohio. She has published articles on fashion journalism, fashion photography, mannequins, early German film comedies, and Berlin in film. She is author of the book Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933 (Camden House, 2008).

After a walk through 1920s Berlin, across its busy fashion district and along streets packed with smartly dressed women, Franz Hessel, the city’s most famous flâneur, concluded: “Berlin is well on its way to becoming an elegant city.” Two decades earlier around 1900, another astute interpreter of metropolitan beauty, August Endell, wrote: “The much criticized women’s fashion is almost the only creation [in the city] that is lively and dynamic today, and most joyful to observe.” Indeed, since the late 1800s, fashion has been a persistently bright spot on Berlin’s dramatic, often crisis-ridden historical scene. Fashion has been both a prominent branch of the city’s economy and a spirited everyday practice, but, unfortunately, also one of its best-kept secrets.

While German literary scholars and costume historians have produced numerous fascinating studies on the topic, fashion buffs outside of the German-speaking realm have, rarely paid attention to Berlin as a center of fashion. Susan Ingram and Katrina Sark’s book is thus filling up an important gap in our awareness of fashion in Berlin as a major aesthetic and sociopolitical phenomenon of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In its scope and ambition, this is a pioneering study in English with a comprehensive approach to the various aspects of public life that have constituted historically Berlin’s distinctive position on the international fashion scene. From the onset, the authors readily admit that Germany’s capital may not be a global fashion center with the stature of Paris, London, Tokyo, New York and Milan, but they claim that Berlin is the “spiritual home of a particular kind of fashion.” They call it “Berliner Chic” and proceed to define the term for us: Berliner Chic is never limited only to the production and display of trendy women’s clothes; it embodies an understated flair reflected in a whole array of cultural and urban practices – from movie going to exhibitions, to clubbing – that have shaped Berlin’s fashion identity at different historical moments in the last century.

Ingram and Sark bring Berlin into the major theoretical discussions about the connections between fashion and modernity, discussions from which the city has been surprisingly missing. More than any other place in Europe, the German metropolis became synonymous with fashion, precisely as a result of the forces of rapid industrialization and modernization setting in around mid-nineteenth century. Unlike Paris, a city known as the center of haute couture, the Prussian capital specialized in the production of Konfektion and conquered the world not with charm, but with exports. Konfektion, the serially manufactured ready-to-wear apparel was affordable and appealing to the mass consumer. Most salons in Berlin were as much geared toward creating their own lines of high-end fashion as they were emulating Paris styles and adjusting them for a mass clientele. Since it was known that the fashion-conscious public liked to take its cues from France, the German companies sent designers to Paris to observe what women were wearing in fashion shows, on the streets, at the races, and in the theatre. Upon their return, expensive haute couture creations were transformed into affordable, mass-produced off-the-rack garments of French flair that were not only sold locally but exported to many countries, including France. By the mid-1920s, after decades of steady expansion, the number of Konfektion businesses in Berlin, most of them Jewish-owned, reached nearly 800. The Berlin fashion industry employed then a third of the city’s work force, sold merchandize in big department stores throughout the country, and exported its goods all over Europe and the Unites States.

Berliner Chic by Ingram and Sark is organized in an unorthodox way, measured by strictly academic criteria, since the authors move boldly across disciplinary boundaries and conventional periodization. Some parts illuminate in a broad sweep and quite extensively historical developments. The first four chapters, for example, tie fashion to the elaborate traditions of collecting and exhibiting, to photography and film, and to historiographic discourses. The last three chapters zoom in on contemporary Berlin that had emerged since the 1980s as a center of alternative pop-culture. Particularly interesting is the chapter “Berlin Calling” that immerses the reader in the world of punk and techno.

It is precisely this hybrid and eclectic (in the best sense of the word) methodology that does justice to the idiosyncratic subject matter – the entwinement of the city’s identity with its fashion practices, in both historical and contemporary perspective. And this is what makes the book enjoyable to the scholar-expert as well as the amateur reader. To the former audience Berliner Chic offers a wealth of theoretical references, a historical framework, and a rich bibliography (albeit no index), and for the latter audience there are plenty of charming anecdotes, engaging stories, and ample photographs. One can imagine the reader actually packing this book before a trip to Berlin and using it quite well as an alternative travel guide to the city’s “high” and “low” cultures, presents and pasts, museums and shops, center and peripheries.

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Book Review: Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870-1914

By Heather Vaughan, May 18th, 2011 at 5:00 am (Book Reviews, Uncategorized)

Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870-1914

By Rosy Aindow

Ashgate (October 2010)

Book Review by Sara Bernstein

Today’s book review comes from Sara Tatyana Bernstein, whom I was lucky enough to meet at graduate school (NYU, 2004).   She is a Doctoral Candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis, currently completing her dissertation, ‘From Little Black Dress to Little Blue Vest: Fashion, Film and the shifting Position of the American Shopgirl.’ Her essay “In this same gown of shadow: Functions of Fashion in Villette” is included in the collection The Brontës in the World of the Arts (Ashgate 2008).

The relationship between fashion and literature has held a special fascination for scholars for many years, but the last decade has seen a marked increase in works on this topic. Alongside “old chestnuts” by Lou Taylor and Anne Hollander we now find, for example, books by Clair Hughes (Henry James and the Art of Dress, Palgrave 2001, Dressed in Fiction, Berg 2005), Catherine Spooner (Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Manchester UP 2004), as well a new edited collection Fashion in Fiction (Berg 2009) inspired by a conference of the same name held in Sydney in 2007. Rosy Aindow’s Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870 – 1914 is a welcome addition to this growing area of study.

As Aindow explains in her introduction, whereas the bulk of this scholarship has focused on a close reading of clothing within a particular text or within texts by a single author, her aim is to look more broadly at the role fashion played in the “literary culture” of late 19^th/early 20^th century Britain. Working from the generally accepted premise that the novel negotiated specifically bourgeois values and concerns, Aindow finds patterns across a wider sampling of texts to illustrate the anxieties that the increased dissemination of fashionable clothing generated among the upper middle class. Aindow explores how fashion works as a set, especially of class and sexual codes, the knowledge of which was a tool for differentiating among an increasingly affluent, but not necessarily bourgeois population. Of course, fashion was also a tool for blurring the same boundaries. Drawing heavily from authors such as Wilkie Collins, George Gissing, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Hardy, Aindow seems to suggest that in the end, most of these narratives used “fashionable” characters (usually women) to map and contain the threat of class mobility and sexual liberation that fashionable clothing was thought to engender.

On the whole, this book may be more useful to literary than fashion scholars. The first two chapters, “The Function of Dress in the Novel” and “Development and Innovation in the Nineteenth-century Fashion Industry” are well -researched, concise summaries and read easily. However, if you aren’t already familiar with the history of the fashion industry, the development of consumer culture, and common assumptions surrounding fashion and social class at the time, there are better texts available on these subjects (off the top of my head; Elizabeth Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Daniel Purdy’s The Rise of Fashion, anything by Christopher Breward, Simmel’s Die Mode, Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, etc. etc.). That Aindow found it necessary to include such an extensive overview of fashion, while leaving her assumptions about the value and ideology of the novel unexamined, suggests to me that her imagined audience has spent more time reading, for example Ian Watt (The Rise of the Novel, 1957) than Herbert Blumer (Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection, 1969).

That said, chapters four and five, “Fashion and the Art of (Class) Deception” and “Needlewomen and Shop Girls in Nineteenth-century Fiction” are very strong and will probably find their way into my own bibliographies. Of particular interest is Aindow’s discussion in chapter four of the use of dress color as a marker of class and sexual morality in the years following the widespread availability of aniline dyes. Women working in the fashion industry, as seamstresses, milliners, shop girls, etc. were the focus of special attention by novelists and social critics during this time, because of their ambiguous class position, their perceived vulnerability/accessibility, their role as both producers and consumers, etc.  Analyzing a range of texts that focus on the dangers of constant proximity to fashion by the under-classes, Aindow does an excellent job of situating these works of fiction in the context of broader socio-economic concerns.

There is much to appreciate about this book, but I do have some criticisms. For one thing, I am puzzled that a book about British culture from 1870 to 1914 did not contain the words “Empire”, or “Imperialism” anywhere. I don’t think that this is outside the purview of the text, considering that the shifting economy that is at the heart of this analysis would not have been possible without the extraction of raw materials from the colonies, and that textile production is such a storied and integral part of the rise industrialization and British Imperial power, not to mention British national identity.

This leads me to my main critique. I wish that instead of using the first third of the book essentially to summarize and survey previous scholarship, Aindow had used the space to push her own arguments further. For example to complicate it by considering the other issues that overlap with class and gender, such as national identity; or to introduce into her schema depictions of the girls who worked in cotton mills. In other words, while I would never fault a book for being to short (this one is a manageable 154 pages), my primary disappointment is that there is not enough of Aindow’s analysis. But what is there is quite good.

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Book Review: Glamour (new in paperback)

By Heather Vaughan, May 11th, 2011 at 5:00 am (Academic Research & Related, Book Reviews, Uncategorized)

Katie Netherton earned her Masters degree from New York University in Material Culture: Costume Studies in 2002. Most recently she has worked on the historic documentation project at the Brooklyn Museum, and is currently an independent costume historian working with the Gordon Conway archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

Book: Glamour: Women, History, Feminism

Author: Carol Dyhouse

Book Review by: Katie Netherton

Carol Dyhouse, author of Glamour, is a Professor of History at the University of Sussex, and trained as a social historian and educator. She is not a fashion historian. If the reader is a fashion historian, and knows this before reading, it will be an easier read.

That said, her book ambitiously endeavors to trace the history of the meaning of “glamour,” beginning in 1900 and continuing to the 1990s. She begins by issuing a disclaimer of sorts, that the book is a broad study and is not meant to provide expertise on any one particular subject (p.5). This addition was definitely needed, because as you read, there can be a rather disjointed feeling at times, as if too much ground is trying to be covered in 168 pages of writing. Despite its lofty goal, the book is entertaining, informative and well illustrated. By tracking the use of “glamour” in marketing campaigns by several fashion-related industries, such as fur and perfume, Dyhouse proves how the concept changes according to societal influences and mores. The author also uses actresses and musicians, many of them British, as contemporary examples of the current idea of glamour from each time.

The reader also learns interesting factoids about the industries Dyhouse uses as her examples. For instance, many cosmetics companies used interesting names for their products to communicate to the customer that if they used it, they too would be glamorous. Some of these products, like “Cherries in the Snow”, a lipstick introduced by Revlon in 1953, are still sold today. In fact, I was inspired to buy a tube after reading this book, mainly because I was reminded of the advertising campaign, which touts that if you wear this certain “madly voluptuous” shade, you are as “strange and unexpected as cherries in the snow.” Brilliant!

The book is organized chronologically into chapters that explore how glamour manifested itself in specific time periods. Chapter one begins in 1900 and continues to the late 1920s. In the 19^th century, “glamour” carried a negative connotation, and was linked to danger and women who exuded some sort of evil quality, like witches or sirens. With a new century, “glamour” suddenly meant something more positive, although still mysterious and definitely still a description for sexual allure. In chapters 2-3, the idea of “glamour” and how it is expressed through film is tackled. In the era of black and white film, the costume had to translate certain qualities without the benefit of color. Shiny silks and lame cut on the bias, iridescent black coq feathers, luminescent pearls, wispy ostrich feathers, stark red lips against a creamy complexion. Many provocative photographs from film are used to illustrate this point. Glamour as shown on screen by actresses like Marlene Dietrich, was a quality for everyday people to strive to emulate.

Chapter 4 picks up after World War II, as a new surge in femininity arrives with the wasp-waisted New Look and an upsweep in the couture industry. The idea of glamour changed from woman as sultry to princess. As a counter-point, however, pin-ups were popular in men’s magazines, as a by-product of the war. Therefore, women were either seen as perfect and somewhat unattainable, or as sex objects.

In the 1960s, especially in Britain, there was a rise in street style. Young people carved out their own style without leaning on what their parents prescribed. Magazines featured musicians and rock stars alongside actors, especially the newer publications that catered to a younger market. In Britain, models such as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton exemplified the youth culture, with their wide-eyed expressions and youthful, stick-thin bodies. Glamour at this time was considered too sophisticated, and accessories such as fur were equated with older, less independent, women. Feminism was also on the rise, and with the publication of books such as Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl in 1962, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, glamour and fashion were sometimes seen as anathema to the independent woman, a repression of a new found power.

In chapter 6, the reader arrives in the 1970s-‘80s, and the rise of a woman who was more socially, financially and sexually powerful. Women had their own money to spend–one no longer had to depend on a man to buy her an expensive sable or mink. In the 1990s, celebrities, especially what they were wearing, became an obsession. Dyhouse singles out Princess Diana and Madonna as examples of this cult of celebrity phenomenon.

The last chapter, called “Perspectives and Reflections,” wraps up the book by giving Dyhouse’s thoughts and theories on what glamour means today. In summation, she writes that glamour is about “fantasy, desire and longing,” as well as “aspiration.” (p. 162-3).  No matter what time period, the word “maintains its power of suggestion, a connection with the dreams of the past.” (p.168).

The nuts and bolts of the book include an extensive notes section and bibliography, as well as an index, which is helpful to researchers. In essence, I feel that the target audience is mainly other social historians; however, a fashion historian like myself must always look to what else was happening in the world, in other industries, and in other countries to fully understand a trend or even a specific design.

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Book Review: Textile Futures

By Heather Vaughan, April 20th, 2011 at 2:00 am (Book Reviews, Uncategorized)

Textile Futures: Fashion, Design and Technology

by Bradley Quinn

Berg Publishers (November 23, 2010)

Review From Worn Through Contributor, Ellen McKinney

Ellen C. McKinney, Ph.D. is a fashion educator who has taught textiles to over 400 students. Research interests include apparel sizing and fit with interest in the use of technology to develop pattern-making theory for improved garment fit, how apparel consumers, retailers and wholesalers impact and are impacted by garment fit, and teaching fitting techniques.

In 2005, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum exhibited Extreme Textiles. According to author Bradley Quinn, it was this exhibit and accompanying book by Matilda McQuaid, exhibitions curator and head of the Textiles Department, that launched him into extensive research of new textile technologies resulting in articles (Textiles in Architecture in Architectural Design, 2006,76: 22–26), speaking engagements, and books (Ultra Materials: How Materials Innovation Is Changing the World with G. M. Beylerian, M. Caniato, and A. Dent, 2007; Textile Designers at the Cutting Edge, 2009). This is not to say that Quinn did not already have expertise in fashion and design. Prior to 2005, Quinn authored books: Techno Fashion (2002), Chinese Style: The Art of Living (2003), and The Fashion of Architecture (2004). Textile Futures: Fashion, Design and Technology(2010) reflects his research and interactions with a wide range of textile experts from artists to scientists.

Textile Futures will expand your view of what a textile is and what functions it can have. If you are generally fascinated with textiles, then you will likely read the book cover-to-cover upon receiving it. The book is of interest to both practitioners and academics. If you are not such a big textiles person, but are interested in new materials and design, this text may also be of interest to you. I imagine you will find yourself surprised by the amazing capabilities of materials you might not have realized were textiles.

The book will inform you of many applications of textiles you may have never heard about. Have you heard about wearable vitamins? How about art made of knitted textiles? What about textiles that sense and alert you to environmental toxins? It also offers explanations for those you may have heard about and wanted to know more. For example, have you ever wondered, “How do those dresses work that light up in response to the wearer’s emotions?” The answer: the fabric can sense physical changes in body temperature, heart rate, etc. that coincide with emotions and relay that information to trigger luminescent fibers within the fabric. How about, “How realistic are all those virtual clothes in Second Life?” The short answer: not very. Quinn helps the reader understand why and possible implications for real world clothes.

The advantage of this book over other books that serve as directories of new materials (such as the Transmaterial series by Blaine Brownell, 2005, 2008, and 2010) is that Quinn groups the textile materials by function and assesses their significance and forthcoming trends in the field, in addition to telling you “who”, “what”, “when” “where”, and “how”. Each chapter is concluded with an interview of a practitioner in the field, giving another perspective on the topic. Given that advancements in the textile field are rapid, it is hard to say how quickly the book will become outdated. However, it is a relatively compact reference, considering all the topics it covers.

It is written in a non-technical way that does not require an extensive background in any of the topics covered. The potential downside is that if you are a real expert in a topic (for example, 3D modeling), you will find the explanation (of virtual textiles) rather basic. Rather, Textile Futures explains textile-related technologies in easy-to-understand terms. It identifies the major researchers, artists, and companies working on the given textile subject matter. Unlike many dry technical textile books, the text is supported by photographs throughout and includes a section of color photographs in the center. The book is generally not in-depth or overly scientific on any topic, but will give you a basic understanding. Textile Futures includes resources to direct you to more information on topics of interest. Extensive chapter notes accompany the text. Many websites are listed for your further research. A Bibliography, list of credits, and an index of persons is also included.

I do have some concerns with the way the book is organized. As a fashion educator that has taught basic and advanced textiles courses many times, I was a bit disturbed that the book was not organized along the familiar lines of 1) fiber, 2) yarn, 3) fabric, 4) color, and 5) finish. I can understand Quinn’s rationale in organizing the chapters along the lines of the function of the textile product. However, there are many cases where he makes little distinction as to whether the technology he is discussing is a fiber, yarn, or fabric in particular.

There are some challenges to using the book as a reference tool. First, the book does not include an index by topic. This is unfortunate, given that some topics are mentioned in more than one area of the book. In other sections, the organizational scheme seems like a stretch to fit in a technology that didn’t have a place anywhere else. Second, the chapter titles (Body Technology, Synthesized Skin, Surfaces, Vital Signs, Sustainability, Contemporary Art, Interior Textiles, Textiles for Architecture, and Extreme Interfaces) fluctuate between clearly stated and somewhat cryptic. Some chapter subheadings give little guidance as to what topics are contained therein (for example, “Extremophiles”), and some just seem repetitive (“Smart Carpets” vs. “Reactive Rugs”). Other subheadings (“Antimicrobial Fabrics”) are quite clear. It is not impossible to find things, but more of a challenge than it should be.

Despite these challenges, this book would be a useful addition to the library of anyone whose field has traditionally or will in the future be shaped by textiles. Textile Futures is a nice collection of not only new textile materials, but also textile innovations the future may hold.

Additional books related to advances in textiles not already mentioned include:

Functional Aesthetics: Visions in Fashionable Technology by Sabine Seymour (2010)

Fashionable Technology: The Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science, and Technology by Sabine Seymour (2011)

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