Cities and their Fashions: Capital Connections

ACLA 2014 at NYU

Organizers: Markus Reisenleitner and Susan Ingram

Since its emergence in the second half of the nineteenth century, the fashion system, as Barthes termed it, has developed and established a hierarchy of “fashion’s world cities,” mirroring the systematic classification of urban centres based on a number of (mostly economic) factors established by Friedmann (1985), Sassen (e.g., 1991) and others. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, London, Paris, New York Milan, and Tokyo have come to be seen as trendsetters in global style, challenged by a “second tier” of cities such as Los Angeles, Miami, Berlin, Stockholm, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai, Sydney, Toronto, and Montreal, which all take their cues from fashion’s global centres while establishing their own niche presence in regional as well as global flows of fashion images and products. This panel is interested in exploring and comparing the imaginaries and representations of the fashions in, and the fashioning of, fashion capitals. Are there discernible differences between them? Do particular cities have identifiable styles? Is there a global urban street style? Does it make sense to speak of a “fashion capital” style? If so, which institutions have contributed to it? Have literature, film, music videos or other forms of cultural production played discernible roles in fashioning city brands?

Session 1

“THE FASCINATING BUSINESS OF BEING SEEN:” HARLEM, FASHION CAPITALS, AND BLACK FEMININITY

Jennifer Sweeney (Binghamton University)

Abstract

In the 1925 anthology The New Negro, James Weldon Johnson named Harlem the “greatest Negro city in the world,” arguing for its centrality to the Black arts. This paper builds upon Johnson’s perspective, reading it as a fashion capital. Fashion capitals emerge when a city’s cultural conditions produce a vision of a particularly dressed subject exported globally through socioeconomic channels. Using clothing as a metaphor for history materialized on the body, this paper analyzes the centrality of fashion in Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel, Quicksand. The protagonist, Helga, utilizes Harlem’s clothing trends to deploy feminine agency. Johnson’s analysis about Harlem’s transnational prominence opens up a reading of Quicksand that traces Harlem’s global influence on fashion. Helga travels from Harlem to Europe, using fashion to interact with and influence the people she meets there. Helga is received by strangers both through her race and her fashion as a symbol for Pan-African blackness. Quicksand describes how Harlem’s clothing trends permeated global metropolises. Reading Harlem as a fashion capital allows us to trace Black gender politics materialized on the bodies that wore its trends. My project engages in a historical analysis of Harlem’s fashions, arguing for their importance to a racial imaginary within Atlantic Modernism. Quicksand confronts the intersection between Harlem’s fashions and the production of a Pan-African, feminine identity. Larsen’s position of prominence within the Harlem Renaissance makes Quicksand an ideal starting point for discussing Harlem as a fashion capital. [expand title=“Bio”]Jennifer Sweeney is a PhD Student at Binghamton University. Her work focuses on the intersection between modernism, fashion, and gender studies.

ON BEAUTY AND BRANDING: “GLOBAL STREET” STYLE IN ZADIE SMITH

Rebecca Strauss (University of Virginia)

Abstract

In an interview about “On Beauty” (2005), Zadie Smith was asked “if, for you, there’s a connection between fashion and identity?” Smith—whose fashionable image is a focal point of her own brand—explained that she “tried to write about it a little bit…. There’s a lot of pleasure in looking at beautiful things and considering beautiful things, and clothing is part of that.” Clothing comes to the fore with “On Beauty”’s self-fashioned gangsta Levi Belsey, whose “global Street” style articulates black urban struggle from “Roxbury to Casablanca, from South Central to Cape Town”—a fashion sense that makes visible economic practices (“We hustling!”) that constitute a form of life (“To hustle is to be alive”) and a brand identity (“Hustler, Playa, Gangsta, Pimp”). It is especially striking, then, that Levi’s name links him to the multinational corporation Levi Strauss & Co., a global market leader in the jeans industry cited as an example of successful branding. Levi Strauss & Co.’s countercultural brand image stands in stark contrast to the brutal conditions of labor that fashioned it, and this paradox underpins Levi Belsey’s “global Street” style, too: Levi equates dress with redress even as Smith shows that Levi’s clothes are embedded in the same modes of global fashion branding, which are an aesthetic manifestation of the economic base of globalization. If clothing is, as Smith claims, a part of beauty, it is the part of “On Beauty” that grinds its geopolitical teeth.

Bio

I am a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Virginia, where my interdisciplinary research centers on British literature and culture of the long twentieth century in a global frame. I am currently completing my dissertation, titled “Global Fabrications: Fashioning the Global in Text and Textile, 1890–2013.”

HOMOGENIZING THE CITY/RE-CLASSIFYING THE STREET: THE FASHION CAPITAL LANDSCAPE IN TOMMY TON’S “STREET STYLE” PHOTOGRAPHS

Rebecca Halliday (York University)

Abstract

The term street style – fashion “observed on the street” (Woodward, 2009) – traditionally refers to subcultural articulations. In our globalized, fast fashion era, street style has become uniform and mainstream (Hill, 2005; Woodward, 2009)._ i-D Magazine_’s 1980s “straight-up” portrait formalized street fashion photography – capturing ‘real’ citizens in recognizable locations, invoked in both dress and urban markers; the media’s co-optation of street fashion has erased the street and its cultural specificities (Rocamora & O’Neill, 2008). Since the late-2000s, blogs such as Jak & Jil, The Sartorialist and Street Peeper have documented street fashion in international cities. However, with these blogs’ rise to prominence, photo-bloggers have turned their lenses towards scenes outside fashion shows in the fashion capitals. This paper contends that the circulation of photographs of fashion show attendees, under the banner “street style,” inscribes fashion’s elitist social and material ideals. The media has appropriated the term as a privileged site, as many fashion insiders possess notable financial and/or industrial capital. Specifically, I analyze Tommy Ton’s photographs on Style.com for their representation of urban environments. Examining Fashion Week sites as semiotic landscapes (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010), I describe how urban architecture combines with bodies and brand identifiers in the frames to communicate class. Ton’s photographs do not foreground particular features of cities but rather depict the street itself – literalized, often with automobiles – as a generic and editorial backdrop against which to emphasize fashion pieces: redefining the street as itself a status signifier.

Bio

Rebecca Halliday is a PhD student in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities in Toronto. She holds an MA in Theatre and Performance Studies from York (2011) and a BA Honors in Drama and Creative Writing from the University of Alberta (2004).

ALL DRESSED UP WITH NOWHERE TO GO? - FASHION CITIES IN MEN’S ONLINE FASHION CULTURE

Nathaniel Weiner (York University)

Abstract

Early writing on fashion such as Baudelaire’s description of the flâneur, Benjamin’s ruminations on the Parisian shopping arcades and Simmel’s theorisation of metropolitan life have established the close link between fashion and urban modernity. At the same time, the global fashion system has developed into one in which global fashion cities like Paris, London and New York act as central nodes. Yet our understanding of fashion as a system based on particular metropolitan centres is increasingly complicated by the growth of an online fashion culture that seems to disembed fashion from place. Focusing on the examples of menswear and streetwear, this paper explores how online fashion culture has impacted the relationship between cities and fashion. I argue that while the discussion and consumption of clothes online has worked to shift Benjamin’s ‘re-enchantment of the commodity’ and ‘pilgrimage to the commodity fetish’ away from fashion cities, online fashion culture retains a close link with fashion cities. The physical locations of online boutiques, the geographic homes of forums users and the discourse of online fashion forums all point to the continued role of global fashion cities like London and New York, as well “second tier” cities like Manchester and San Francisco, in the fashion system. In this manner, online fashion culture plays an important role in the continued imagining of these cities as fashion cities.

Bio

Nathaniel Weiner is a PhD candidate in York University and Ryerson University’s PhD program in Communication and Culture. He holds an MA in Media and Communication from Goldsmiths. His research interests include subculture, fashion, consumption, masculinity, and social realist drama. He is currently researching men’s online fashion culture.

Session 2

FASHION CITIES AND/ AS SECOND SKIN

Susan Ingram (York University)

Abstract

In Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, Anne Anlin Cheng compellingly re-dresses the question of how race figures in Western modernity and argues that, “We do not master by seeing; we are ourselves altered when we look.” Cheng uses this insight to demonstrate parallels between the logic of Baker’s performance aesthetic and modernist European urbanists such as le Corbusier and Loos and their rethinking of the nature of surface and identity. In this paper, I examine the consequences of Cheng’s work for rethinking the rise of fashion cities over the course of the 20th century. As David Gilbert makes clear in his introduction to Fashion’s World Cities, the prevailing discourse in world or global cities scholarship has been economic, with a focus on the structural changes in the economies of world cities seen as “dependent on the form and extent of their integration into the world economy” (10). The performative and highly visual nature of urbanity opens cities to being reinterpreted along Cheng’s lines of surface and identity. The resulting insights should also be relevant for, and allow conclusions to be drawn about, contemporary branding strategies of both global and second-tier cities.

Bio

Susan Ingram is Associate Professor in the Dept of Humanities at York University, Toronto, where she is affiliated with the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies and the Research Group on Translation and Transcultural Contact.

PUEBLO AND HOLLYWOOD, THE PACIFIC RIM AND THE WORLD: RE-FASHIONINGS OF LA’S URBAN IMAGINARY

Markus Reisenleitner (York University)

Abstract

In a recent video that promotes her successful online boutique on the Nowness website, Argentinian style icon Sofía Sanchez Barrenechea strolls through downtown Los Angeles in search of Salvadoran and Mexican street style, tapping into what has been termed “LA’s growing cool factor on the global fashion stage … as the next-generation crossroads of celebrity, art and youth culture and its importance as a gateway to the Asian luxury market” (LA Times, 10 Nov 2013). In addition to “nowness,” the video also conjures up historical imaginaries of the city’s pseudo-Hispanic lineage and folds them into what is now understood and mediated as street style. This paper explores how the contemporary fashion system negotiates the imaginaries of the city of “smoke and mirrors” (Vincent Brook). Specifically, it traces the shift away from Los Angeles’s 1980’s and 1990’s “city of quartz” (Mike Davis) imaginary as a city hovering on the brink of riots and gang warfare, besieged by Asian capital, a rapidly de-industrializing site of disempowerment of the racialized male body where flows of people, capital and cultural memes were clearly discernible and hierarchically demarcated along ethnic, racial and class lines that left little space for an urban fashion imaginary outside Hollywood’s glamourscape. Tracing the transformations that have allowed Los Angeles to emerge as a promising future capital of fashion can shed light on both the city’s and the global fashion system’s recent reconfigurations.

Bio

Markus Reisenleitner is the Director of the Graduate Program in Humanities at York University and the co-ordinator of the Department of Humanities’ European Studies program. He works on urban imaginaries, film and fashion and the role of the digital in Humanities research.

PEOPLE MOVERS AND CULTURAL CAPITALS: LAS VEGAS AND GLOBAL CAPITAL FLOWS

Joyce Goggin (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

Abstract

Through examples from fiction and film, this paper discusses how the trend to theming Las Vegas casinos as centers of capitalist modernity (Venice, Paris, New York), developed from a need to attract capital flows through diversification of the city’s primary industry in the 1990s. As I will argue, by reproducing capital cities in a bid to attract investment and tourist dollars, Las Vegas challenges the notion that finance, or culture can (still) be located in capital, in a capital, or in capitals. While I will begin with the Vegas of films and novels such as Casino, Ocean’s Eleven and Leaving Las Vegas, and the city’s appeal to a broader segment of the population including families and those looking for an authentic experience, I will also discuss the current moment of intense global Vegas-ization. As I will argue, the exportation of Las Vegas models of cities such as Venice, into places like Macau or the Strip planned for the outskirts of Madrid, contributes to the global sense of capital, and specifically ‘casino capitalism’ as described by Susan Strange. Finally, I will argue that the effects of the movement from a local to a global sense of capital are readily observable in Las Vegas itself, as well as in the city’s many filmic and fictional outings, while what was once a local trend that played on globalization becomes a global theme and industry.

Bio

Joyce Goggin is a senior lecturer in literature at the University of Amsterdam, where she also teaches film and media. She has published widely on gambling and finance in literature, painting, film, TV, and computer games. She is currently researching and writing on casino culture, Las Vegasization and public debt.

MOSCOW VOGUE SPECIAL: ART AND FASHION CIRCA 2013

Elena Siemens (University of Alberta)

Abstract

In keeping with the theme of this panel, as well as the conferences’ overall theme Capitals, the paper will discuss Russia’s capital city and its attitude to fashion. In particular, it will analyze a special issue of Russian Vogue dedicated to the subject of art and fashion (July 2013). The paper will compare Russian Vogue to its counterparts in the West, and look into the intricate relationship between art, high fashion, and street style. Addressing an important emerging area of Fashion Studies, this presentation will incorporate references to theoretical writings by such prominent scholars as Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, and Susan Sontag. In addition, it will make use of various resources derived from Vogue, other fashion magazines, advertising campaigns, etc. This paper is related to my current book-length project on Street Style Moscow (contract with Intellect UK), part of Intellect’s innovative Street Style Series. The conference presentation will be illustrated with images from Russian fashion publications, as well as original photography depicting Moscow’s flamboyant and highly diverse street style. Part of the proposed presentation will deal with some unique parameters of fashion photography.

Bio

Elena Siemens is Associate Professor in Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Theatre in Passing: A Moscow Photo-Diary (Intellect 2011), and editor of “Dark Spectacle: Landscapes of Devastation in Film and Photography” (Space and Culture 2014), and “Scandals of Horror” (Imaginations 2013).

Session 3

CAPITAL OF THE CONTEMPORARY FASHION AVANT-GARDE: ANTWERP AND HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR ACADEMIE

Charlene Lau (York University)

Abstract

In the essay “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism” (1985), cultural theorist Raymond Williams addresses the role and orthodoxy of museums and academies in European metropolises during the advent of the avant-garde in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. While Williams’s assertion applies to the historical avant-garde, I argue it is a concept that can be applied to the parallel world of contemporary avant-garde fashion. The ties between Antwerp’s fashion institutions––the fashion department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the ModeMuseum (MoMu)––and its self-conscious branding as a capital of contemporary avant-garde fashion, promote Antwerp as a centre for the display, production and study of contemporary vanguard fashion. This paper examines the interconnectedness between city, academy and museum in relation to the fashion department’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition Happy Birthday Dear Academie at the MoMu. As an affirmation of Antwerp’s commitment to the avant-garde project, the exhibition sheds light on the orthodoxy of the avant-garde as an institutional practice.

Bio

Charlene K. Lau is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at York University. Her current research examines the contemporary avant-garde fashion practice of Bernhard Willhelm. Charlene’s writing has appeared in C Magazine, Canadian Art, Fashion Theory, The Journal of Curatorial Studies and PUBLIC.

Kathryn Franklin (York University)

Abstract

Toronto exists as a glamscape, that is, the city lends itself to juxtapositions of fashion, film, photography and other material culture that interplay with high and mass culture. This paper is primarily interested in the figures, fashions and spaces that have contributed and continue to contribute to this evolving scene and how this affects the creative culture of the city. Most recently the Tate Liverpool curated, “Glam! The Performance of Style,” an exhibit that explored the glamscapes of the UK and the US during the glamrock period of the 1970s. Amidst the glam ephemera was an entire section of the exhibition devoted to the seminal Toronto art trio, General Idea - the Canadian contribution for the exhibit’s “global glam” room. A copy of their 1975 “Glamour Manifesto,” a treatise and definition of glamour in the modern city that was published in their magazine, File Megazine was prominently displayed along with their work from their popular Miss General Idea art installation fashion show. Toronto was also most recently the second stop on the Victoria and Albert’s “David Bowie is” world tour which encouraged the city to revel in Bowie-mania from store front windows displaying mannequins dressed as Ziggy Stardust to the city’s walls splashed with the lightning streaked visage of Bowie’s other alter ego, Aladdin Sane. These exhibitions, however, also emphasize that Toronto has a glam legacy and its current glamscape is worthy of further study.

Bio

Kathryn Franklin is a PhD candidate in Humanities at York University. Her research focuses on glamour and fashion in cities. Her work features in World Film Locations: Berlin and The Journal of Curatorial Studies. She is a co-editor at Descant Magazine and is guest editing its Berlin issue.

TRANSIENCE VS. SUSTAINABILITY IN MONTRÉAL’S INDIE MUSIC AND INDIE FASHION SCENES

Sara Danièle Bélanger-Michaud (Cégep de Saint-Laurent)

Abstract

Arcade Fire’s triumph at the 2011 Grammy Awards has contributed to putting Montréal on the New York Times list of the world’s hippest cities. This “hip vibe,” even if it remains rather indefinite and relies on tacit recognition, has in fact a lot to do with Montréal’s vibrant music scene that may still be the strongest cultural vector, which brings people together and creates a sense of identity. Montréal’s hipness is strongly related to its indie music scene. Except for a few success stories like Arcade Fire, most Montréal indie musicians only achieve relatively little success on a global scale, even though they attract local crowds. The indie music scene remains mostly local and its artists are often transient. But despite this, Montréal’s transience greatly contributes to the creation of its hip “aura.” Its status as a hub of emerging indie artists, and as a place of convergence, can be interpreted as an organic renewal process that keeps the indie scene alive and allows for more sustainable urban practices to take root. Comparatively, the fashion indie scene (with brands like Bettina Lou, Annie 50, Atelier B., Birds of North America, Jennifer Glasgow, and many others) has become an important aspect of Montréal’s identity as a fashion city and as a fashionable city. Based on a chapter from the upcoming book Montréal Chic, this paper approaches the bivalent links between Montréal’s indie music and fashion scenes.

Bio

Sara Danièle Bélanger-Michaud is a Montreal-based French literature instructor. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Université de Montréal in 2011 and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto. She published a book on Cioran and is currently researching Montréal Chic.

Capitalizing on Fashion and Fashioning City Brands in Berlin, Vienna, and Montréal

Katrina Sark (McGill University)

Abstract

What connects cities such as Montréal, Berlin, and Vienna is not only their status as the “second tier cities” in the global hierarchy of cities outlined by Saskia Sassen, but also the way in which all three cities construct, promote, and capitalize on their fashion scenes. This presentation will outline what constitutes a fashion scene, as well as the key players in Montréal’s fashion economy (Montréal Fashion Week, Groupe Sensation Mode, Bureau de la Mode, fashion media, etc.), and compare them to those of Berlin and Vienna. I aim to show that even though Montréal is not considered a global fashion capital like Paris, London, or Tokyo, its fashion history, economy, and practices are inevitably tied to its urbanity, rapid modernization, turbulent history, vibrant culture, and its unique status as the largest French-speaking city in North America. As such, the city fits in well with the other Urban Chic case studies, such as Berlin, Vienna, and Toronto. This presentation is based on a chapter from the upcoming book, Montréal Chic. Following the models of Berliner Chic: A Locational History of Berlin Fashion (Ingram, Sark, 2011) and Wiener Chic: A Locational History of Vienna Fashion (Ingram, Reisenleitner, 2013), Montréal Chic approaches fashion as a lens through which urban culture, institutions, scenes, and sub-cultures can be analyzed, connected, and compared. It also examines the ways in which cultural production plays an essential role in fashioning city brands.

Bio

Katrina Sark is a PhD candidate and instructor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. She is the co-author of Berliner Chic (2011), and assisted with the research on Wiener Chic (2013). She is currently researching and writing Montréal Chic.