Placing Imaginaries of Fashion and Style
ACLA in Toronto, April 2013
Organizers: Markus Reisenleitner and Susan Ingram
Despite the firmly established nexus between fashion and world cities, fashion is often perceived as being globally homogenized through flagship stores of luxury labels controlled by multinational brand empires, and global “fast fashion” chains, as well as through internationally promoted and accessible internet portals, runway shows broadcast globally on special interest channels on TV, video-podcasts, and (semi-)professional fashion blogs, which make it easy for global audiences to follow, imitate, and comment on representations of urban street style. In response, the textual and visual discourses constituting the “fashion system” (Barthes) have developed a rhetoric replete with nostalgia for a past of “authentic,” easily recognizable, individualized local styles and material productions. This seminar explores textual and visual practices that establish a sense of place in the modern and contemporary fashion system. It explores the cultural interaction between fashion and urbanity in establishing cultural topographies of style. Given the double-pronged pressure to erase place specificity, which cultural strategies and representations work towards fashion and style maintaining a sense of place? And what precisely constitutes, mediates and transports the desire and need for “placing” fashion?
Day 1
NARRATIVES OF THE BUTTON-DOWN SHIRT IN BRITAIN AND AMERICA
Nathaniel Weiner (Communication and Culture, York University)
Abstract
How does a garment as simple as the button-down shirt come loaded with such different meanings in the British and American context? This question is addressed using Roland Barthes’ notion of ‘fashion narrative’ to interpret fashion texts’ paratextual relationship to national imaginaries. I describe how in the American context, the button-down shirt is closely associated with Ivy Style, a style that emerged from the elite Ivy League universities but had become mass fashion by the mid-1960s. While the garment remained youthful, continuing to draw on the collegiate fashion narrative, it also spoke to an American national imaginary of affluence, abundance and class mobility. Both the garment and its paratextual symbolic meanings circulated through the global fashion system, emerging in a very different context in 1960s Britain. Speaking to British imaginings of America, it remained youthful but was transformed by the particularities of the British class system, becoming closely-associated with two of the canonical post-war working-class subcultures: the mods and the skinheads. Emblematic of the subterranean passion for clothing that characterised the culture of young working-class men in Britain, the button-down shirt became a subcultural icon. In turn, the historicisation and commodification of these subcultures has ensured the button-down shirt’s place in the British national imaginary. Comparing recent publicity materials produced by the American clothier Brooks Brothers and the British clothier Brutus Trimfit, I examine how the garment’s fashion narratives, both British and American, continue to circulate.
Bio
Nathaniel Weiner is a PhD student in York and Ryerson University’s joint PhD program in Communication and Culture and holds an MA in Media and Communication from Goldsmiths. His interests include subculture, men’s fashion, consumption and social realist drama. He is currently researching men’s online fashion culture.
SUBVERSIVE SIGNIFICATIONS, CONFLICTS OF INTEREST: THE IRONIC T-SHIRT LOGO AS LOCATIONAL HIP-HOP ARTICULATION IN HIGH FASHION CONTEXT
Rebecca Halliday (Communication and Culture, York University)
Abstract
In October 2012, a design collective called Conflict of Interest New York released three t-shirts for sale on its website. Each bore the logo of a high-end fashion house, appropriated to reflect a hip-hop aesthetic: “BALLINCIAGA,” “GIRAUNCHY” and “BODEGA VENDETTA.” The collective came to public attention when a New York fashion editor wore the BALLINCIAGA t-shirt at London Fashion Week and her image appeared on the fashion media site Style.com. This paper uses theories of logos and branding (Lury 2004) and of subcultures (Hebdige 1979; Muggleton 2000) to examine the C.O.I. NY t-shirts’ ironic significations, in relation both to high fashion and to hip-hop discourses (Gates 1988; Romero 2012). I argue that these t-shirts function as an intelligent form of postmodern culture jamming (Lievrouw 2011) that originates from within the capitalist spectacle (Debord 1967) to present a political articulation of Black, urban life in the United States. In particular, I focus on the BALLINCIAGA t-shirt’s high-end/low-end linguistic and graphic subversion and its textual references to Harlem, a birthplace of hip-hop culture (Dimitriados 2009). Further, I address the clash of “semiotic landscapes” (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010) that resulted from the t-shirt’s appearance at London Fashion Week. What happens when a garment’s allusions to “the street” intersect with “street style” in high fashion? Did the photograph and its circulation sustain the t-shirt’s moment of resistance or facilitate the statement’s assimilation?
Bio
Rebecca Halliday is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York University (joint with Ryerson University). She holds a BA Honors in Drama and Creative Writing from the University of Alberta and an MA in Theatre Studies, also from York.
SEARCHING FOR MISS GENERAL IDEA: A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE FASHION SHOW IN TORONTO FROM PSYCHEDELIA TO SATIRE
Kathryn Franklin (Humanities, York University)
Abstract
Toronto Fashion Week, now in its thirteenth year, is recognized as one of the largest fashion events in Canada showcasing the work of top designers and emerging talents of the country along its runways. Nevertheless it does not attract the same amount of attention as fashion weeks produced by Paris, New York City, London and Milan. Toronto is a regional fashion week and appeals to a large Canadian audience - an easy feat as the event is open to the public unlike its counterparts which tend toward a policy of exclusivity. While critics have argued that Toronto Fashion Week does not have the same global appeal as the top four fashion weeks - citing that Toronto does not have the same historical relationship to fashion as countries in Europe or New York, it would appear, however, that the fashion show as a site of cultural and creative expression has a rich history in Toronto. Over the past fifty years Toronto fashion runways have exhibited a mixture of humour, glamour and art appealing to diverse audiences across the city. An examination of the fashion show at Perception ’67 - the psychedelic festival at the University of Toronto (1967); The Miss General Idea pageant at the Art Gallery of Ontario (1971) put on by the avant garde collective General Idea; and the current incarnation of Toronto Fashion Week reveals that Toronto has a unique approach to its fashion landscape and development.
Bio
Kathryn Franklin is a fourth year PhD student in the Humanities at York University. Her research interests include the history of Glamour, fashion, specifically fashion as an expression of Toronto’s cultural identity, and the ever enduring appeal of David Bowie, arguably the Lord Byron of the 20th century.
JAYWALKING THE INTERSECTIONS OF FASHION AND ART: THE CHROMAZONE FASHION SHOW
Jenna Danchuk (Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, York University)
Abstract
The Chromazone artist collective was a Toronto based group which formed in 1981. In December of their first year together, the group held the Chromazone Fashion Show, curated by Tim Joceleyn and Rae Johnson and featuring the work of numerous independent artists and fashion designers from their community. Bringing to attention the unclear lines between fashion and art, as well as the often othered world of crafting and making, the group used the sensibility of their artist run centre, combined with queer influenced avant-garde aesthetics to make a space for independent art and culture in a rapidly growing “art industry” in Toronto. Collective member Andy Fabo described the project as providing the creativity and energy to move art off of museum walls and into the streets of the Queen West art scene. By “jaywalking these intersections” in both time and space, and of art and fashion – what were the lasting effects of the Chromazone collective’s work on Toronto’s cultural landscape?
Bio
Jenna Danchuk is a Master’s student in the Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies program at York University. Her research is currently concerned with queer and feminist cultural production in Toronto in the 1980’s. She is also the research editor for WORN Fashion Journal, an independent fashion magazine.
Day 2
POOR FOLK IN FURS: TEXTUAL FRUSTRATION IN DOSTOEVSKY AND SACHER-MASOCH
Maya Vinokour (Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania)
Abstract
It is difficult to overlook the strong “Russian” element in Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus in Furs” (1870) – Wanda’s very whip is chosen for its resemblance to “the kind used in Russia for intractable slaves.” There is more to these references than stereotypical notions of “Russian barbarism,” however, as a glance at Dostoevsky’s corpus reveals. Indeed, his first novel, “Poor Folk” (1846), features a microcosm of masochism avant la lettre. A consummate explorer of the tortured soul, Dostoevsky is an equally expert chronicler of psychosexual torsions. His protagonists’ names alone – “Devushkin,” from “devushka,” maiden, and “Varvara,” with its connotation of barbarism – already suggest a skewing of 19th-century Petersburg mores. “Poor Folk” skews not only gender, but also generic norms as Devushkin, a feminized copyist-clerk, and Varvara, an unusually aggressive ingénue, engage in a largely unsubstantive epistolary exchange. Gender relations in “Poor Folk” are even more tangled than those in “Venus in Furs” – unlike Wanda and Severin, whose roles remain relatively static, Varvara and Devushkin are hybrids, their letters forming the inflated currency in their personal economy of suffering. Using a framework grounded in Deleuze’s “Coldness and Cruelty” (1967), I argue that Devushkin and Varvara’s letters, with their conflicting requests for “candor” (Varvara) and “details” (Devushkin), form a narrative of sadism and masochism. “Poor Folk” not only illuminates the literary laboratory of the young Dostoevsky, but also offers a genealogy of Sacher-Masoch’s “Russian” atmospherics.
Bio
Maya Vinokour is a third-year doctoral student in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include theories of information transmission, the interface of satire and trauma, narratives of spectatorship, and translation.
ANNA KARENINA GOES GLOBAL
Elena Siemens and Olga Leshcheva (Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta)
Abstract
Anna Karenina Goes Global discusses Joe Wright’s 2012 adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic novel, tracing its impact on the fashion industry around the world. Coinciding with the release of the new Tolstoy adaptation, staring Keira Knightly and Jude Law, major fashion brands (Alexander McQueen, Chanel), as well as prominent retailers (Banana Republic, Zara) have introduced Karenina-inspired clothes. In addition to creating costumes for the film, the Oscar-nominated British designer Jacqueline Durran (Atonement; Pride & Prejudice) curated the Anna Karenina collection for Banana Republic. Durran describes her Karenina designs for the film as follows: “I took an 1870s silhouette, but simplified the details, so it had the simplicity of 50’ couture” (British Glamour, October 2012). Intended for the ACLA 2013 proposed seminar on Placing Imaginaries of Fashion and Style, this two-part presentation focuses on “textual and visual practices that establish a sense of place in the modern and contemporary fashion.” Part One (Elena Siemens) addresses how the Karenina moment in global fashion undermines Russian specificity of place. Part Two (Olga Leshcheva), in turn, discusses how the Karenina global couture sustains and advances Russian place. The talk incorporates contemporary theoretical material on film, visual culture, performance, and fashion.
Bio
Elena Siemens is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Theatre in Passing: A Moscow Photo-Diary (2011), and editor of the forthcoming collections The Dark Spectacle: Landscapes of Devastation in Film and Photography, and Scandals of Horror.
Olga Leshcheva is Master of Arts Candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Alberta.Teaching Assistant of Elementary Russian. In 2009-2010, as a Fulbright scholar worked as a main instructor at the University of Montana, USA, teaching Elementary Russian.In 2011 started her studies at MLCS, University of Alberta
CONTEMPORARY AVANT-GARDE FASHION AND PLACENESS
Charlene Lau (Art History and Visual Culture, York University)
Abstract
This paper examines the relation between the avant-garde project and placeness in contemporary fashion discourses. In the seminal fashion text, Fashion at the Edge, Caroline Evans’s use of the term “avant-garde” is synonymous with “experimental” in discussions of the importance and centrality of fashion’s role in contemporary culture. While the two concepts do overlap in meaning, avant-garde loses its radicality in its pairing with the experimental. The fashion press too employs “avant-garde” to describe unorthodox or “edgy,” fashions, but its meaning is ill-defined at best. Thus, avant-garde is a throwaway phrase equated with “modern” or “up-to-date” (Russell Berman) rather than its more involved definition as tied to the political and social aims of the “original” artistic avant-garde. I propose the need for a continued dialogue on the avant-garde, and specifically, a theoretically rigorous analysis of contemporary fashion within avant-garde discourse. As such, I argue that when used with specificity to its origins in revolutionary artistic practices, avant-garde harkens back to the specific time and place of early twentieth-century Europe. In so doing, contemporary fashion designers including Bernhard Willhelm, Martin Margiela, and Rei Kawakubo situate their practices within the tradition of the historical, avant-garde. I contend not only that these designers align their practices with the avant-garde fashion cities of Antwerp and Paris, but also that their work is specifically tied to the function and identity of such cities.
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 in relation to the fashion practice of Bernhard Willhelm. Charlene’s writing has been published in C Magazine, Canadian Art, Fashion Theory, Magenta, and PUBLIC.
RE-PLACING FASHION IN BERLIN
Susan Ingram (Humanities, York University)
Abstract
Marco Wilms’ 2008 documentary Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie: Comrade Couture (A Dream in Plastic for Strawberries: Comrade Couture) is a work of mourning not for East Germany but rather specifically for East Berlin. Wilms worked as a model for the Fashion Institute in East Berlin, when German reunification put a stop to his career because of the changes it introduced into the fashion system. As he explains it, he had been the sort of model GDR designers wanted but was not suited to the new capitalist styles and priorities. By the mid-noughts Wilms was getting tired of the Ostalgie version of the GDR that had by then established itself and reached a crescendo in the globally popular Goodbye Lenin! (2003, d. Wolfgang Becker). Almost twenty years after reunification and the GDR’s demise, Wilms set out to make a documentary that would dispel the mistaken impression that official kitschy East German culture was all there had been. Rather, a lively alternative urban subculture had existed that was heavily influenced by punk, Goth, and New Wave aesthetics, and to re-enact it, he brought together three of his old comrades from that scene to put on a fashion show of East Berlin fashion as they remembered and could recreate it. My reading of the film follows these comrades and locates their fates in the New Berlin along a strikingly gendered spectrum that encourages us to update our understandings of Ostalgie and better appreciate how limited it was from historical and geo-aesthetic perspectives.
Bio
Susan Ingram is President of the CCLA and Associate Professor in the Dept of Humanities at York. Recent publications include Berliner Chic: A Locational History of Berlin Fashion (Intellect 2011) and the edited volumes World Film Locations: Berlin (Intellect 2012) and Historical Textures of Translation: Traditions, Traumas, Transgressions (Mille Tre 2012).
Day 3
HOW APP-OSITE: FASHIONING THE CITY ON MOBILE DEVICES
Markus Reisenleitner (Humanities, York University)
Abstract
Urban space and virtual space have come together on screens, in GPS apps and location-based art. Apps for mobile devices identify fashion districts in cities, provide access to the programs and locations of fashion events, map and re-map urbanity on small screens. They provide an interface to the social geography of the city that maps it onto fashion space. The proliferation of “fashion weeks” has resulted in a proliferation of these semi-temporary mappings that re-define imaginations of urban space. This paper compares the representational strategies of mobile apps that are based on urban fashion events such as fashion weeks and provide interfaces between fashion, urban and virtual space. It explores how mobile technologies re-define and localize global fashion events in the contemporary city.
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. Current research focuses on visual and textual interpretations of global cities, specifically urban imaginaries in fashion, popular and digital culture.
GLOBAL CHALLENGES AND POSITIONING IN PROJECT RUNWAY
Yu-Yun Hsieh (Graduate Center for Comparative Literature, CUNY)
Abstract
Since 2004, the reality television Project Runway has been a branded product that not only sells fashion to its audience but it also provides an arena for young designers to position themselves in the industry. Unlike most reality televisions that are based on the truthful representation of the candidates’ everyday lives, Project Runway allows its candidates to create something from nothing. Since the show has to represent the process of making, we can see the designers choose the fabric in the Mood and then work day and night in Parsons. Also because of the show has to truthfully represent the trial for the designers, confessional videos are overused in the show to retain the authenticity of the competition. Through the clips of confessions, we can see how the designers detest or loathe each other, though they remain friendly after returning to the working space. The judges of the show, including supermodel, fashion magazine editor, and famous designers, not only promote their ideas of combining high art and commercialism, they also impose their taste of market-pleasing fashion on the global audience. As the show becomes globally successful, more and more oversea designers come to New York for the audition in order to win the chance to put on a show in New York Fashion Week. Though the candidates may come from Japan, Russia, or Trinidad, almost everyone has the same, almost kitschy, American Dream, they come here to take the challenges, repeat the trial, and make it work.
Bio
Yu-Yun Hsieh is PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at CUNY-Graduate Center, adjunct lecturer at Hunter College.
FASHION, FREEDOM, AND FEMALE AGENCY: IRANIAN WOMEN’S DECONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY IN CITIZEN JOURNALISM
Khatereh Sheibani (Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, York University) and Manijeh Mannani (English & Comparative Literature, Athabasca University)
Abstract
For close to a century in Iran, the female body has been the site for authorities to assert and exercise their political and ideological control over half of the population. Our paper explores how women in the Islamic Republic of Iran imagine and enforce their agency in the virtual space and redefine their identity by creating distinctively individualized styles in garments in the 21st century. While the representation of women and outfits used in photographs in the virtual space do not always take up the dress code boundaries formulated by the Islamic government, they are deliberately depicted by citizen journalists to contest the image of the Muslim woman that was preferred and propagated by theologians. Iranian women’s deconstruction of dress codes and reinvention of an individualized fashion is a reactive cultural tool. The reconstructed image challenges the state sponsored depiction of the Muslim Iranian women, wrapped up from head to toe in the quintessentially Shi’a, Iranian fashion statement, the black chador, as devoted and modest. The modified fashion also contests the homogenized narratives of suppression and muteness reinforced by the veil as used by Western media to portray Iranian, Muslim, and Middle Eastern women.
Bio
Khatereh Sheibani is Assistant Professor of Persian Studies at York University. Her book, The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics, Modernity, and Film after the Revolution, was published in 2011 by I.B.Tauris. She has taught courses on Persian literature, Middle Eastern cinemas, postcolonial literatures, and documentary film and television.
Manijeh Mannani is Associate Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Athabasca University.
MAPPING ‘TRAVESTI’ IN NORTH AMERICA
Brianna Wells (Comparative Literature, University of Alberta)
Abstract
Performance en travesti has long been a vehicle for gender play on the operatic stage. Roles such as Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, written specifically for a woman to sing, interrogate social and erotic gender positioning from both a performative and political perspective. Few trouser roles are less overtly sexual than Cherubino, in which the female performer’s body and voice are explicit theatrical signs but ones that resist conventional gender identification. Cherubino is an important example of operatic gender play that subverts traditional heternormative and patriarchal configurations of female erotic and social potential. Beginning with Michael Warner’s reading of texts “though an intertextual environment of citation,” my paper undertakes a formal, historical and contextual mapping of Cherubino and the operatic trouser role in various American contexts. Using theories of performance (Butler, Fischer-Lichte, Blau) and cultural production and circulation (Warner, Benjamin, Povinelli), I examine visual and sonic markers of Cherubino figures in North America. Examples range from Frederica von Stade’s iconic stage portrayal, through Peter Sellar’s “Trump Tower” film with Susan Larson in the role to the 2008 “Marriage of Figaro” episode of Mad Men (wherein a single woman, visibly differentiated by wearing pants, is both fetishized and feared by guests of both genders at a party). The intertextual and intermodal circulation of this role, in forms ranging from live performance through the televisual, invite reconsideration of both opera’s approach to gender play, and the reciprocal influence between the operatic and other cultural forms.
Bio
Brianna Wells is a PhD Candidate at the University of Alberta. Her doctoral research explores networks of operatic circulation in contemporary North America, with specific focus on regionality and technologies of distribution.
DRESS TO BE REAL: CLOTHING AND IDENTITY
Olesya Ivantsova (Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, McGill University)
Abstract
This paper explores the complex relationship between clothing and place in a broad sense. Clothing is a message: it is one of the first impressions that we get of any person we meet; it also plays a significant role in descriptions of literary characters as well as in the creation of a mise-en-scene. How clothing contributes to the image of a person, placing an individual into particular spatial frame (or out of it)? Dress to be real: questions like “How do real Canadians / Germans / Berliners / etc. dress?” seem to be eternal questions of cultural topography; just a short look at the enormous number of Internet texts seeking to find answers is enough. What answers are given and why is this issue still important in the era of standardized style? Do the national attitudes of style vanish in the transnational societies? As the multiple meanings of the word itself suggest, clothing can be a protective surface. Moreover, clothing can become a proof of identity, sometimes the only one or the most important one that a person can have. Putting on someone else’s clothing can mean taking over another identity; is this process reversible and to what extent? These questions are examined on the examples from a variety of media: literary texts, films, digital media in German, English, and Russian.
Bio
Olesya Ivantsovagraduated from Ulyanovsk State University (Russia) with the degree of Candidate of Sciences - Theory of Language (2002). In 2003-2011 worked in Saint Petersburg as a university lecturer, freelance translator and writer. Since 2011, PhD student (German Studies) and German language instructor at McGill University.