Spatial Ecologies of Fashion

Textual Ecologies, Ottawa, 14-16 Apr 2016

This panel was motivated by the absence of fashion in the “broad spectrum of disciplines” listed in the conference’s Call for Papers. Taking its cues from Barthes’ pivotal writings on the fashion system and his understanding of a text as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (“The Death of the Author”), the panel brings together three papers that, in focusing on the spaces of the production, representation, display, and circulation of fashion in literature, media, and exhibitions, interrogate fashion as an ecology at once both decidedly material and profoundly textual.

Anzia Yezierska’s Sweatshop Socialism: Ready-to-Wear Fashion and the Industrialization of Sartorial Style

Jennifer Sweeney, Binghamton University (jen.f.sweeney@gmail.com)

This paper reads Anzia Yezierska’s novel, _Salome of the Tenements, _in relationship to New York fashion’s rapid industrialization during the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that Salome advocates for a spatial ecology of fashion design that positions the sweatshop worker’s labor at the heart of fashionable aesthetics. It transforms New York’s fashion ecology, where lower east side immigrants work to produce fashions for the 5th Avenue rich, into a melding of worker and consumer that makes labor the lynchpin of fashionable aesthetics. Salome urges for a sartorial ethic premised on a revolution of New York’s fashion system against the horrors of its sweatshops. The novel rethinks the spatial politics of New York’s fashion system toward an ecology of inclusivity, encouraging individualization while banishing class differences from fashion’s political terrain. Set in the early 1900s, when many of New York’s Lower East Side immigrant populations worked in sweatshops, _Salome of the Tenements _narrates the struggles of the working class to articulate a sartorial aesthetic that takes into account their labor and desire to favorably represent themselves. Vrunsky, in Salome’s imaginary, animates the potential for the sweatshop proletariat to activate their intimate understanding of fashion design to produce a sartorial aesthetic that evacuates class differences from American style. Vrunsky’s fashions, rendered for the denizens of the Lower East Side, rejects New York’s fashion ecology in preference for a sartorial ethic that empowers the proletariat without alienating lower class labor from their object of production.

Studs, Sweat, and Tears: The Body Politics of Indonesia Punk Fashion and Its International Coverage

Joshua Trichilo, York University (joshtri@yorku.ca)

This paper explores the body politics of a particular group of precariat in Indonesia with a unique form of political dissent in terms of the interaction of three forces. First, faced with precarious working conditions, natural disasters, and an institutional lack of welfare support, is a particular group of Indonesian precariat who, using the punk aesthetic for much more than simply flagging difference, have deftly mobilized it as the symbolic network of their grassroots politics. Second is the modern-style state discipline, whose attempts to quell the voices of dissent often result in the physical repression of “punk.” And finally, there is the international media’s reporting on key confrontations, whose almost unanimous emphasis on the punk aesthetic ranges from solidarity to spectacle. These three forces converge on the text that is the punk aesthetic to form a dynamic textual ecology. The paper mobilizes Dick Hebdige’s seminal socio-cultural critique of subcultural formations and puts it into dialogue with the political economy tradition of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in order to grasp the various cultural, political, and international aspects of this topic. The situation that surrounds this topic is particularly indicative of the contemporary world order: postmodern subjectivities and their attempt to flatten their terrain confront a country of the global south forced into structuring nationalization by international capital while those in the global north observe the confrontation. With both a hopeful new president and some of the worst environmental crimes in history, the Indonesian precariat and the “punk” movement is sure to continue its involvement in socio-political affairs.

The Catwalk and the Sidewalk: Textual Ecologies of the Fashion Exhibition

Elena Siemens, University of Alberta (esiemens@ualberta.ca)

The “fashion media rarely identifies the locations where its subjects have been found” (Rocamora and O’Neill 2012). However, “there are significant discrepancies between city streets, between the types of people who occupy them and between the fashions they wear” (Rocamora and O’Neill 2012). Moscow’s Red Square, the location of the landmark GUM department store, is associated primarily with tourists and their diverse fashion. The GUM’s 2013 anniversary exhibition of Russian fashion from the tsars to the post-Soviet period was akin to Jean Paul Gaultier’s flamboyant traveling retrospective “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk.” First staged at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art in 2011, this multimedia spectacle (featuring animated mannequins) emphasized the link between the catwalk and the sidewalk. According to Gaultier, fashion “is not art – it represents a bit of what’s happening, it’s a figuration of what is happening out there in society at large” (Gaultier 2015). His exhibit’s most recent stop at the prestigious Grand Palais in Paris in 2015 has presented a considerable challenge to Gaultier’s mandate. The GUM fashion exhibit in Moscow has delivered a similarly conflicting message. Citing diverse critical sources from Michel de Certeau to Andy Warhol, this paper demonstrates how fashion exhibits from Moscow to Paris and beyond are conditioned by their architectural and social environments.