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Sunday, September 02, 2007
The Sloppy Syndrome
Luther B. says maybe we should balance out the comic book stuff with some chick-lit, so I’m going to liveblog the latest Vogue (Sept. with Sienna Miller - ho hum - on the cover). Holy crap. It’s almost 900 pages. For only $4.99 US. More out here in Singapore, of course. But still a good deal. (Would it be possible to make a profit by buying Vogue in bulk and selling it just for the recycling value of the shiny paper. Must be worth quite a bit. So much shiny paper?)
Isn’t it just amazing. All the lovely ladies.
I can’t possibly liveblog this. So I’ll just skip to the Jean Hanff Korelitz opinion piece, “The Sloppy Syndrome”. (Korelitz is, I gather, best known for her chick-lit novel, The White Rose
There is, in the story of American fashion, a strangely enduring practice of buying an elegant, expensive garment and dressing it so far down it might have been scored at a rummage sale or picked up at a T-shirt stall on the Venice Beach boardwalk. To my mind, this trend was born in 1978, on page 254 of Judith Krantz’ Scruples, the novel that (for better or worse) gave birth to the sex-and-shopping school of popular fiction.
This is the marketing expert named Spider trying to explain to the owner of Scruples, a sedate and refined temple of couture, why her business is tanking:
“I was playing pool at Giorgio’s the other day, and I saw two gals come in together, one in tennis shorts, the other in dirty jeans, a T-shirt without a bra, and scuffed sandals. By the time they’d left ... each of those two ragamuffins had bought three dresses, a Chloé, a Thea Porter, and a Zandra Rhodes - not one of them much less than two thousand dollars.”
That’s, remember, 2,000 1978 dollars.
Back then, wasn’t the whole point of a pretty dress to make it look as if you couldn’t remember where it had come from? Saks? The souk in Marrakech? The Dead concert in Petaluma? Everyone was either young or trying to be, because everyone knew you couldn’t trust anyone over 30. And besides, weren’t we all striving to be free to be ... me? The personal expression of our very special and unique selves was far, far more important than whatever the designer might be trying to say. If you wanted to wear your Chanel jacket with jeans, that was your right as a child of the universe. Ifg you wanted to wear your Yves Saint Laurent dress with flip-flops, what was he going to do? Stop you?
I have always had a very uneasy releationship with the idea of elegance. Nice clothes were fine, but you didn’t want to look as if you were trying too hard or cared too much ...
And our author has her theme. I’ll skip ahead.
This would all be so much water under the bridge if it were not for the fall collections. The clothes trotted out on runways were accompanied by a tribal drumbeat announcing that the designers were back in charge and that neither they nor their precisely constructed clothes would tolerate dressing down. Lanvin’s three part ensembles cannot be picked apart and thrown on with jeans. YSL’s tuxedo dresses and sculpted skirts will require stockings, intentional hair, and serious shoes. (Just try wearing flip-flops, and Stefano Pilati might find a way to stop you.)
The suit is very nice:
I also like the phrase ‘intentional hair’. According to this page, there is an Association of British and Intentional Hair Colleges. But that would appear to be unintentional.
The Department of Everything Studies will have to be just as worried about the downward mobility of haute couture, as noted by Krantz, as the upward mobility of Kirby, relative to High Modernism, courtesy of Lethem. Also, all these problems about intention and meaning. The Korelitz piece is mildly baffling to me in the same way that - for example - Robert Warshow’s classic essay, “Paul, The Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham” is baffling to me. (You can find it in Arguing Comics
Then close out with another semi-ironic gesture, so you won’t look ridiculous, saying what you apparently were saying. Why can’t people just say what they think? Like I do.
Comments
"All the lovely ladies...“
Hmm.
I used to teach a popular culture course on a Postmodernism MA, and sometimes we’d read a current Vogue for class. Some of the images are extraordinary, very high quality photography, the sort of images you pay £60 to own between hard covers in coffee-table-book-form. But one thing used to strike me very forcefully whilst leafing through its glossy pages. Vogue presents its readers--interpellates them--with an ideal of beauty. It articulates what beauty is. Beauty is white. There may be the odd image (in amongst thousands) of a black model, to innoculate against charges of racism; much more rarely an Asian model; but thousands and thousands of white, pale, yellow-haired dollwomen not unlike the photo above. It’s an wearyingly Aryan publication. Not my bag, to be honest, lovely-woman-wise.
I wonder if the point of this is racial, exactly; or, since it clearly is racial, whether its the monetary associations of whiteness rather than the visual ones that count here. After all, many people, Vogue-readers included, consider tanned and brown skin more attractive than milk-white. But if you are a Vogue reader, then clearly beauty is money. It looks fatuous, and obvious, writing it out like that. But the point is that money, clearly, is white. Also, it takes money to be able to be insouciant about enormously expensive clothing (this old thing? It’s a rag, really ...) It’s only the rich who can genuinely pretend to see no difference between $2000 and $2 items of clothing. As to whether skinny white women dressed in rich clothes count as ‘lovely ladies’, that’s a de gustibus question I guess.
I’m glad Adam Roberts got here to throw in a “hmm” before I could.
If you’re interested in the downward mobility of haute couture, Dana Thomas just published _Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster_. I was planning to pick it up eventually and check it out.
Chuck Palahniuk (of _Fight Club_ fame) has a novel satirizing Vogue’s fashion voice --- I think it’s _Invisible Monsters._
And, of course, no discussion of Vogue is complete without LolVogues. Which brings us to reception studies --- what do people actually _do_ with their magazines? How do they read them? What do they consider their relationship to be with them? Do they catch the shifts of irony and seriousness; how do they conceptualize Vogue’s ridiculous fashion spreads and imperious, demanding tone? Considering that someone on that thread mentions cutting out pictures of cat heads from Cat Fancy and pasting them on fashion magazine models as a child, we have to take seriously the idea that what people read in a cultural text may or may not have much to do with what is “in” there in a formalist literary or artistic sense.
This is an area where I totally support the claim that Cultural Studies has a better framework for how cultural texts actually function and circulate in a society over English as Everything Studies, which tends to read everything using the same method as literature (not to mention the common assumption that nobody in other departments has ever studied these “everythings” before). On the other hand, I personally find doing literary analysis way more fun. So it’s not like I’m going to completely jump ship (or learn to do ethnographies) any time soon.
See, I think Korelitz is making a brilliant point, one made far less entertainingly by Jameson in *Postmodernism* and by Holbo himself on Theory.
It’s a point about pastiche.
Korelitz begins by mildly poking fun at the post-60s fashion sense that “I can do anything to express my selfhood.” So we get haute couture mixed with flea market grabs and hand-me-downs and whatever else makes me stand out in clothes that express my me-ness.
She contrasts that to the—dare I say?—modernist fashion era of High Style, when you bought a designer’s work and wore it as s/he intended you to wear it. *You* didn’t mix styles; the designer, at best, did it for you. But every design was an expression of the designer’s signature style.
So it’s the difference between Henry James and Kathy Acker. Or the difference between Schoenberg and John Zorn. Or Wittgenstein and Zizek.
Dunno. From what Holbo quoted, it seemed like a smart way of framing the new season. Or at least, no less sophisticated that most LRB or NYRB articles that situate a new work within the context of some on-going debate.
And I don’t think Korelitz is exaggerating her complaint. I don’t even *hear* a complaint in what you quoted. She pokes fun at her own and others’ pastiche fashion, but doesn’t make it a matter of life and death or culture wars or late capitalism or Truth versus Theory.
I’m afraid to say it, but if this were an article about a recent trend in comics or a recent trend in sci-fi, I don’t think Holbo would write it off so quickly.
(And let’s not talk about racial uniformity until your comic book and sci-fi anthologies are chockful of Others. Ursula Le Guin got shit for her *Norton Anth of Sci Fi* precisely because the white sci-fi power structure felt she had neglected them in favor of exotic others.)
Hmmmm, perhaps I should type more of the piece in so we can have a full-dress (ahem) debate. None of this mixing and matching of incomplete quotes.
I DID feel that by admitting, implicitly, that I always write posts with exactly the same ambiguously ironic-deprecating structure, I was letting myself onto the same hook. Luther is exactly right that what she is saying is very similar to things I say. That’s sort of what drew me to it.
Re: Luther not hearing the complaint. In the full piece the idea is that women suffer from esteem problems, such that they are afraid to try to look great - really great, not ironic ‘oh I just threw on this old thing’ - for fear of failing and looking like a cross between Bride of Frankenstein and Lady Who Lunches. The idea is really that women are commitment shy, where high fashion is concerned. I guess I can sort of see it. Sincere lament for the days when men all wore suits and hats and women wore scarves and gloves. But it’s still amusing in a ‘some people have REAL problems’ sort of way. (Sort of like my complaints about the Higher Eclecticism, yes.)
In short, if she had called her piece ‘Against the Higher Sloppiness’, the connection might have been clearer.
That suit is Ugly.
I can’t endorse that sentiment, Laura. I’ll admit it isn’t Sensible.
It reminds me of Pee-Wee Herman.
Pee-Wee: Shhh. I’m listening to reason.
I love that movie.
But seriously. I’d be seriously stretching the truth if I said I had a watertight transcendental argument to the conclusion that the suit is quite attractive. In a sort of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Brave Tin Soldier” meets “Sex in the City” sort of way.
I thought the suit was doing well until the trousers. I like that the jacket doesn’t look like an MLA female power-suit. It’s more like a man’s jacket, almost like David Byrne’s big jacket in *Stop Making Sense*, but tailored big so that it still hugs the form. Hugs, without grabbing.
But tapered trousers make me think of bad 80s mom-jeans. You know, with elastic waistlines for more comfort. I like straight, skinny legged trousers. Or maybe a flair at the bottom. But ugh, no taper.
(But yeah, if the article’s about self-esteem, nevermind. The problem isn’t esteem, it’s irony. People are afraid of making the Big Statement in general. You always risk simply being wrong. And bathetic. But let’s not return to The New Sincerity. It’s like the New Puritanism.)
In the author’s defense, the piece laments self-esteem issues only as a MEANS to lamenting the omnipresence of irony - fear of the Big Statement. The accent falls on the desirability of haute couture as an end in itself. Basically, she is saying that if women could just get over the hump of their fear of looking like they are bad mom-jeans all over the place, they could really make the scene in some seriously tapered trousers. For example. Your mileage may vary.
I’m rather surprised that with only one post I have been able to burst the dam of resistance, as it were. We’ve attracted the attention of the the NY Times, with my bold foray into Vogueblogging.
... Particularly in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling around brains, the thrill and social play and complex masquerade of fashion is “very much denigrated,” Ms. Showalter said. “The academic uniform has some variations,” she said, “but basically is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God forbid.”
When Valerie Steele, the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, declared an interest at Yale graduate school in pursuing the history of fashion, colleagues were horror-struck. “I was amazed at how much hostility was directed at me,” Ms. Steele said. “The intellectuals thought it was unspeakable, despicable, everything but vain and sinful,” she added. She might as well have joined a satanic cult.
And that, substantially, is how a person still is looked at who happens to mention in serious company an interest in reading, say, Vogue.
Ah, “in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling around brains.” Sometimes I wonder why no one is ever willing to breath a bad word against de cart - Descartes, that is. Why is it that the humanities are so utterly beholden to Cartesian thoughtways; so unwilling to consider factors like ‘play’, and ‘society’?
I don’t mean to re-dam the, er, resistance; but what’s the evidence that this ‘amazed at how much hostility was directed at me’ is actually ‘amazed at how much hostility the Valve directed at me’? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the world of Letters and Journalism jumping to our tune, but ...
What we’ve got on one hand is serious hostility to a basic human cultural activity and a commodification of brands that’s utterly exploitive on the other. Fashion is badly served either way.
A study of fashions in dress may reveal too much about fashions in ideas that would like to pretend that they were the opposite of an unlined sundress (The New York Times Book Review is open downstairs).
Some academics would pass mental sumptuary laws if they could, requiring a Ph.D. before certain ideas could be entertained, tenure before elaborating on them. (I’ve got a colleague who appears to be sure that anyone with a full time position and an MFA must be a better writer than anyone who doesn’t have those things, publications aside). Academic fashions simply aren’t worn on the body (I think we all know people who are unreservedly hostile to any science fiction but who can’t really articulate why).
Vogue says quite a lot about the culture we live in, maybe not the things its editors think they’re saying. Studying fashion in dress is as reasonable as studying Greek astronomical texts.
The interesting thing about fashion is the cycle of excitement and boredom. The idea that this is purely advertiser driven is probably at least partially in error. It may be driven by male cycles of desire and quests for novelty since female fashions tend to cycle faster, but given that best sellers seem to follow similar cycles, it may say something about human learning patterns, or even mammalian learning and play patterns, since dogs also tire of their toys.
Not that I’m going to study it myself, of course. I’m already declasse enough as someone who has eight s.f. books out.
Adam: “what’s the evidence that this ‘amazed at how much hostility was directed at me’ is actually ‘amazed at how much hostility the Valve directed at me’?”
Who are you going to believe? My complete fabulations or your lying eyes?
I propose that we change the tag in the name of the valve to the comic and pop culture organ. :)
Plus Shakespeare jokes. We’ve got those, too, Gawain.
From The Devil Wears Prada, courtesy of my friend and colleague, Ellen Esroc:
Miranda Priestly: [Miranda and some assistants are deciding between two similar belts for an outfit. Andy sniggers because she thinks they look exactly the same] Something funny?
Andy Sachs: No, no, nothing. Y’know, it’s just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. Y’know, I’m still learning about all this stuff.
Miranda Priestly: This… ‘stuff’? Oh… ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.
John, aren’t you putting Descarte before de whores?
"The interesting thing about fashion is the cycle of excitement and boredom.”
Walter Benjamin wrote that boredom is like a gray cloak inside which we dream, secretly, with a rainbow-colored lining.
He also said “eternity is the ruffle of a dress.”
And also that Fashion is a courtesan who taunts death through the bars.
What you’re supposed to do with this I don’t know, but if he can put it all down in aphorisms, I can too.
What about, “As aubergine is the new black, so Zizek is the new Nietzsche”?
Sisyphus, I forgot to compliment you on ‘de Cartes before de Whores.’ Kudos.