Comparing Fashion Tales of Travel and Translation

Canadian Comparative Literature Association, Toronto, 27-29 May 2017

Organizer: Markus Reisenleitner

The fashion system is replete with imaginaries of spatial, temporal and social alterity. While fashion studies has produced ample research that traces the material flows and global centres of garment and image production, the translational aspects of the fashion system’s global circulation have not yet played a major role in methodological approaches. Comparative approaches that mobilize concepts of cultural, stylistic and linguistic translation provide an opportunity to expose the convergences of, and fissures within, the global fashion system and thus add to the methodological toolkit for approaching fashion as a context in which affects, identities and personal and social transformations are negotiated and exposed in literature, film, print and digital media, and other venues. This panel explores fashion and style-related issues from the perspective of linguistic or cultural translation understood broadly and fluidly, that is, with a recognition that the languages involved, whether linguistic, visual, etc., are constantly in process and transformed in space and time.

From Nowhere to Elsewhere: Indonesian Punk Fashion’s Cultural Translation as Socio-political Mobilization

Joshua Trichilo, York University Punk fashion is undoubtedly a particularly translative aesthetic. And the Indonesian punks were one of the first groups to adopt it in the 1990s, an early gesture of globalized cultural translation. Indeed, cultural translation, like its linguistic cousin, does not engender homogenous identity, but difference. And punk, despite its similar sartorial signals, effects a correlational development with the various punk subcultures across the globe – both the socio-material semiotics of punk as well as the culture that dons it are mutated by and through their relation. In other words, punk is changed by where it touches off and where punk touches off is changed. This paper explores the way the Indonesian punk groups mobilized this correlationality, arguing that they approached punk translatively in order to both signal and cause internal and external changes in their difficult, oppressive daily lives. It argues that approaches to the Indonesian punk’s mobilization strictly in terms of cultural value and the global market fashion industry lack the analytic ability to subtly and ethically approach the Indonesian punks’ aesthetic in relation to its socio-cultural conditions, which include precarious work and penalization from the state as well as imposed normalization social ostracization from their communities. Punk has been a cathartic technology for these groups, one that gives voice and meaning to the communication of their trauma.

Buying Japanese: Anglosphere Translations of Japanese Menswear Culture in Online Menswear Communities

Nathaniel Weiner, Wilfrid Laurier University

In his book Ametora, David Marx details the ways in which American style has influenced Japanese men’s fashion. He emphasises that this was not so much a case of mimicry as one of translation, with American items, from button-down shits to jeans to sneakers, taking on new meanings in Japan. Marx notes that because of the internet, these Japanese brands have started selling their translation back to Americans. One of the principal sites for the discussion of these Japanese brands is the world of online menswear communities. The members of these communities are amongst the most enthusiastic Western devotees of Japanese menswear. Drawing on an online ethnography of these communities and interviews with their users, this paper investigates why men in the Anglosphere are so enamoured with the Japanese interpretation of American style. I describe how Japanese brands’ attention to detail, craftsmanship and choice of quality materials make Japanese clothes desirable to Western men, showing how Japanese translations are believed to be superior to contemporary American offerings. Finally, I argue that this Japanese translation provides insights into the distinctive mentality of online menswear community members. Their attention to detail, their fetishisation of production techniques, their slavering admiration of product photos and their treatment of clothing as a hobby are all, in many ways, translations of Japanese menswear culture.

Translating Fashion Across the Atlantic: French Fashion and the Fight Against U.S. Racism in the Interwar Period

Jen Sweeney, Bard Early College-Cleveland

This paper argues that African American women fought U.S. racism during the interwar period by translating Parisian fashion into a tool to combat white supremacy. They recoded French fashion into an African American context to affirm black femininity in the face of a racial system that only granted them agency and beauty through passing. To make these arguments, this paper turns to Jessie Fauset’s novel Plum Bun. Published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the novel narrates how protagonist, Angela, translates Parisian fashion into a subjective framework that allows her to feel beautiful and black at once. Angela initially longs to wear French fashion because it represents for her the epitome of feminine poise. However, to enjoy it in the U.S., Angela must pass because its racism bars her from the social spaces necessary to purchase or wear such designs. Angela’s choice to pass complicates her longing for Parisian fashion because it leaves her unable to embrace her full self. In response, she applies for a scholarship to study in France. In moving from New York to Paris, Angela transforms her admiration for French fashion into a cosmopolitan ethic that entwines her love of Parisian design with her desire to annunciate her black identity. Paris and Parisian fashion allows Angela to publicly announce her blackness while still participating in the sartorial styles that made her feel beautiful in the U.S.

Translating and negotiating latinidad in L.A.’s fashion system

Markus Reisenleitner, York University

“LA’s growing cool factor on the global fashion stage” (LA Times, 10 Nov 2013) is based on reclaiming the city’s downtown, art and fashion districts for the multiethnic flaneuse on foot and promotes an image of a pedestrian-friendly, walkable, ecologically healthy Los Angeles by obliquely referencing historical imaginaries of the city’s pseudo-Hispanic lineage and folding them into what is now understood, and represented in the digital mediascape, as street style. In this current and ongoing rebranding of Los Angeles as a city with a walkable core, Latino fashion and street style operate as apposite props for performing new urbanist principles of retro civic community on an urban stage that blurs the line between material traces of (often violent and painful) histories and imagineered sets of city branding.

In this paper I discuss the role Latino lineage (both in its contemporary, imagined and mediated dimension and in its historically suppressed and ghostly aspects) plays in re-shaping contemporary LA’s image, fashion, and urban spaces. Tracing the emergence and negotiations of latinidad in a part of the fashion system in which social issues such as immigration, illegalization, and Latino urbanism have achieved ambivalent forms of commodified visibility can reveal what constitutes, mediates and transports the desire and need for translating ethnicized fashion into its location-specific manifestations.