The Fashion Lives of Cities
MMLA, Detroit, November 13-16, 2014
In their Fabric of Cultures project, Eugenia Paulicelli and Hazel Clark put forth the view that “fashion is a privileged lens through which to gain a new understanding of cultures and individual lives, as well as the mechanisms of regulating cultural and economic production in the past and in the present” (1). In this special session we turn the privileged lens of fashion, understood broadly to include industrial as well as semiotic processes of material and symbolic production and circulation, on the lives of cities and the lived experiences of urban dwellers in order to ascertain the various ways that fashion has been transforming both built environments and urban imaginaries. We are interested in exploring how the emergence of recognized global centres of the fashion world (Paris, London, New York, Milan, and Tokyo) has affected, and been affected by, developments elsewhere. Participants address questions such as:
- How have the lives, and depictions of the lives, of urban inhabitants been influenced by fashion’s increasing reach?
- Which genres have proven popular for cultural production on topics involving urban fashion?
- How have individual cities been affected by fashion’s siren call?
- How has fashion affected urban space planning?
- Have discernible looks and styles come to be associated with particular cities, or particular parts of particular cities?
- How have issues of migration intersected with the fashion system?
“I’m young and strong, there isn’t anything I can’t do”: Harlem, Race, and the Myth of Fashionable Progress in Ann Petry’s The Street
Jen Sweeney, English, Binghamton University
Abstract
This paper argues that American representations of haute-couture fashion pervaded Harlem’s cultural scene during the 1940’s and produced a system of aesthetic oppression that barred African-American women access from its promises of social mobility. Advertisements in Harlem and individuals’ interactions with upper class white Americans enabled haute-couture fashion to become a culturally hegemonic ideology within the black community situated there. This paper closely reads Ann Petry’s 1946 novel, The Street, to demonstrate how Harlem’s interactions with upper-class fashion affected its sartorial norms. Petry’s narrative describes how high-end fashion advertising and clothing filtered into Harlem through billboards, magazine ads, and actual hand-me-downs from rich housewives to their black maids. The noveldepicts the economic and communal struggles of Lutie Johnson, a single mother living in Harlem, relying upon clothing to reveal the gender issues she confronts there. Lutie’s experiences with her boss, Mrs. Chandler, and with the ideologies of transnational capitalism manufacture her adherence to the possibility of social mobility through hard work and self-reliance. Lutie learns to accept American ideologies of social mobility and applies them to Mrs. Chandler’s fashionable attire. Lutie spends the narrative trying to understand the models of racism that bar her access to Mrs. Chandler’s style. Fashion in _The Street _represents the aestheticized models of racism white supremacy utilized to encourage Harlem’s residents to believe in the myth of American progress without actually granting individuals the possibility of change.
The Canada Geese Look Southward: Hudson’s Bay Company’s Canadiana Amidst the International Infiltration of Toronto’s Eaton Centre
Rebecca Halliday, Communication and Culture, York University
Abstract
In February 2014, Toronto’s downtown Eaton Centre retail hub installed pop-up Olympic Winter Games Viewing Lounges in partnership with CBC, Panasonic and Hudson’s Bay. At the mall’s south end, the public watched coverage underneath the 60 Canada geese replicas that comprise Michael Snow’s artwork Flight Stop. On either side of the television, mannequins, sporting Team Canada athletic wear from Hudson’s Bay, stood in front of Canadian flags. The windows behind looked across the street to Hudson’s Bay’s flagship store. That same month, the US-owned Hudson’s Bay Company announced plans to open locations of the New York bridal retailer Kleinfeld and the HBC-acquired Saks Fifth Avenue in its Simpson Tower headquarters. At the north end, Sears closed out, to be replaced by the US department store Nordstrom. In the face of the increasing “imperialization” of fashion at the hands of select corporations (Godart, 2012) and the influx of international retailers into Toronto’s fashion landscape, this paper reads the semiotics of the Eaton Centre complex of Winter 2014 as and in an emblematic historical moment. Hudson’s Bay’s decision to market itself as Canada’s department store functions in increased tension with its US financial control and becomes a superficial articulation as the store continues its partnerships with American and British companies (e.g. Topshop). It also reflects broader upheaval – centered in Toronto – in the Canadian fashion landscape: the international and Third World business reach of Canadian-founded brands such as Joe Fresh, and the threat to Toronto-based independent storefronts, notably in the Queen West area.
Intersecting Boundaries: Fashion and the Contemporary Cultural Imaginary of Vancouver
Julia Polyck-O’Neill, Humanities, Brock University
Abstract
“Obviously I believe in the role of the material, the visual, and its role in the imaginary.” Liz Magor, “Imagining Nature” (interview with Renske Janssen, 2013)
“The very word ‘teal’ evokes memories of, say, 1992—but it has become a Vancouver classic. This is in a large part due to the fleece industry” (20). Douglas Coupland, City of Glass (2000). How does the material culture of Vancouver fashion intrinsically reflect the city’s collective unconscious? It would seem that, to some outsiders and inhabitants alike, the very idea of Vancouver invokes the sublime landscape, while the concept of Vancouver fashion more often than not, unlike the distinctly urbane gestalt of cities such as Paris or New York, evokes images of casual attire and leisure, articulating an embodied affinity for or closeness to Nature. Certainly, the shifting boundaries of reality extend well beyond these stereotypes, but the notion that Vancouver exists as a veritable ‘brand’, constructed in the global imaginary, is inarguable. But whose Vancouver is inscribed in our unconscious? From Kitsilano to the city’s infamous Lower East Side, Vancouver at once refutes and advances its own clichés. By examining the intersections between various depictions of the city’s fashion in the visual and textual accounts of contemporary voices disseminating personal interpretations of Vancouver such as Dana Claxton, Douglas Coupland, Ken Lum, and Liz Magor, I will address the disparity between Vancouver’s identity as a globalized brand and the veritable contradictions that permeate its pluralistic reality as a product of a truly global flow of goods and culture. Unpacked by means of Henri Lefebvre and Michel Certeau’s critical examinations of everyday life, examinations of fashion and globalization in Margaret Maynard’s in Dress and Globalization (2004) and the work of Carol Tulloch, and Edward Soja and Doreen Massey’s respective postmodernist notions of geography, I will discuss how subjective perspectives on geospecific fashion can advance an intersectional portrayal of cultural space.
Fashioning Lives in Museums: Los Angeles, Fashion Capital of the 21st Century?
Susan Ingram, Humanities, York University
Abstract
Fashion journalists have begun to notice that LA is “having a moment,” as Aaron Gell in the New York Times put it, one with the potential to catapult the city into the ranks of the international fashion capitals of New York, London, Paris, Milan and Tokyo. Whether or not the city ends up achieving that lofty status, Los Angeles is nevertheless finally starting to be taken seriously as a fashion and design centre. The September 2013 issue of Vogue, for example, declared Los Angeles “the coolest city on the planet,” claiming it had become “the new black” on account of its “growing cool factor on the global fashion stage, its place as the next-generation crossroads of celebrity, art and youth culture and its importance as a gateway to the Asian luxury market.” This paper seeks to demonstrate that museums have played a formative, yet unrecognized role in the evolution of Los Angeles’ fashion life by studying two key two collections: those in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising Museum (FIDM). Taking its cues from LACMA director Michael Govan, whose arrival in LA in 2006 provided an important impetus for the rise of fashion in LA’s shifting museum landscape, the paper explores the role of museums in putting LA fashion into larger historical and global contexts as well as providing high-profile spaces for the performance of what constitutes LA style at the present moment.