THE END

OF FASHION
 THE END
OF FASHION
Clothing and Dress in the
Age of Globalization

EDITED BY
ADAM GECZY AND
VICKI KARAMINAS
 BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS
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 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vi
Notes on the Contributors ix
Acknowledgments xiii

INTRODUCTION 1

1 FASHION FUTURES Valerie Steele 5

2 TIME AND MEMORY Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas 19
3 FASHIONSCAPES Patrizia Calefato 31
4 PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BODY Olga Vainshtein 47
5 CELEBRITY Pamela Church Gibson 67
6 CINEMA Hilary Radner 83
7 MEDIATIZATION AND DIGITAL RETAIL Agnès Rocamora 99
8 SUSTAINABILITY AND DIGITALIZATION Sandy Black 113
9 GLOBALIZATION Jennifer Craik 133
10 PRODUCTION AND MANUFACTURE Véronique Pouillard 141
11 CURATION AND EXHIBITION Hazel Clark 155

Notes 171
Bibliography 206
Index 229
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures
1.1 ART MOSCHINO—Advertising Campaign Spring/Summer 1990.
Courtesy Moschino 16
1.2 Franco Moschino. Suit, 1990, Italy. Museum Purchase. Photograph
copyright The Museum FIT 17
5.1 Celebrity proof? Fashion at Vêtements. Fall/Winter 2017. Public
domain 78
6.1 From movie palace to parking garage in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013),
directed by Jim Jarmusch 95
6.2 Tilda Swinton wearing her must-have leather jacket with Tom
Hiddleston in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), directed by Jim
Jarmusch 96
8.1 Diagram showing stages of the fashion cycle. Source: FIRE project
team 120
8.2 Unmade online interactive e-commerce site in collaboration
with Farfetch and customizable knitwear designs by Opening
Ceremony 127
11.1 Suits by Cristóbal Balenciaga, 1951, and Demna Gvasalia, 2016,
shown at Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion, The Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, May 24, 2017–February 18, 2018. Photo by Nicky J.
Sims/Getty Images 162
11.2 Tilda Swinton presenting a postilion jacket from 1860 in The Impossible
Wardrobe, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, September 29, 2012. Photo: PIERO
BIASION/AFP/Getty Images 165
11.3 Dysfashional, cur. Luca Marchetti and Emanuele Quinz (edition 2007,
La Rotonde 1, Luxembourg and Great Region—European Capital of
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii

Culture, April 21–May 27, 2007); Untitled, installation by Maison Martin

Margiela, mixed media, original commission and production. Photo:
André Morin 168
11.4 “Inclusive fashion,” by Lucy Jones. Installation view from fashion after
Fashion, 2017, The Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Photo by
Jenna Bascom. Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design 170

Plates
1 Levi Strauss & Co., jeans hand-embroidered denim, c. 1969, USA. Gift of
Jay Good. Photograph © The Museum at FIT
2 Tavi Gevinson. Drawing by Erica Parrott. Wikimedia Commons
3 Susanna Lau (Susie Bubble) in 2007. Wikimedia Commons
4 The power of retouch. A model’s face is divided into two parts—good
retouch and bad retouch. Getty UK 154949082
5 Lena Dunham at Maryland Film Festival 2010. Photo by Alison Harbaugh
for the Maryland Film Festival. Wikimedia Commons
6 Zendaya. Wikimedia Commons
7 Kim Yu-Mi, Miss Korea 2012. Wikimedia Commons
8 Renée Zellweger at Berlin Film Festival 2009. Wikimedia Commons
9 Hari Nef on the red carpet of the Berlinale 2017 opening film. This image
was published by Martin Kraft under the free licence CC BY-SA 3.0,
Wikimedia Commons
10 Geena Rocero. Photo by Steve Jurvetson. Wikimedia Commons
11 Andreja Pejić at Galore Pop-up party, New York City, February 6, 2013.
Wikimedia Commons
12 Kim Kardashian in an earlier incarnation and a transitional phase: her
companion is television presenter and former footballer’s wife, Lizzie
Cundy. Photographer, Anne-Marie Michel
13 Gvasalia’s secretary suits on the runway at Balenciaga. Vêtements. Public
Domain
14 Martine Jarlgaard Spring/Summer 2017 collection could be viewed
using Hololens headset and holographic technology for a mixed reality
experience. Photo Brendan Freeman, courtesy Martine Jarlgaard
viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

15 CuteCircuit New York Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2014 Finale with

smartphone operated LED-illuminated clothes. Photo Theodoros
Chliapas, courtesy of Cute Circuit
16 Fyodor Golan “digital skirt” for Nokia at London Fashion Week Autumn/
Winter 2014, featuring a connected array of smartphones. Photo
courtesy Fashion Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion
17 Richard Nicoll fiber optic light emitting Tinkerbell dress for Disney with
Studio XO. London Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2015. Photo courtesy
Fashion Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion
18 Zero prototype simulation of design by Teatum Jones for made-to-order
portal MIXIMALISTE.COM 2017. Image courtesy MIXIMALISTE.COM
19 Suits by Cristobal Balenciaga, 1951, and Demna Gvasalia, 2016, shown
at Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion, The Victoria and Albert Museum,
London, May 24, 2017–February 18, 2018. Photo by Nicky J. Sims/Getty
Images
20 “Harmonic Mouth,” by Henrik Vibskov. Installation view from fashion after
Fashion, 2017, The Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Photo by
Jenna Bascom. Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design
 NOTES ON THE
CONTRIBUTORS

Sandy Black is Professor of Fashion and Textiles Design and Technology in

the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, London College of Fashion, University of
the Arts London, UK, and has extensive experience in both academia and the
fashion industry, formerly running the Sandy Black Knitwear company selling
internationally. Her current inter-disciplinary research is into the role of design and
new business models in addressing issues of sustainability in the fashion sector.
In 2005, she initiated the Interrogating Fashion network to create a research
agenda for future fashion, and led the project Considerate Design for Personalised
Fashion Products. Recent funded research into the designer fashion sector
bridges research, innovation, business models, and sustainability under the
umbrella F.I.R.E. (Fashion, Innovation, Research, Evolution). Sandy has published
widely on sustainable fashion including Eco Chic the Fashion Paradox (2008); The
Sustainable Fashion Handbook (2012); The Handbook of Fashion Studies (2013);
and also on knitwear including Knitting: Fashion, Industry, Craft with the V&A
Museum. She is founder and co-editor of the journal Fashion Practice: Design,
Creative Process and the Fashion Industry, published since 2009.

Patrizia Calefato teaches Sociology of Culture and Communication at Università

degli studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. Her main fields of research are fashion theory,
socio-semiotics, and cultural studies. She is a member of the Advisory Boards of
international journals, among them Fashion Theory, Journal of Asia Pacific Pop
Culture, Semiotica and Jomec Journal. Among her latest works are Paesaggi
di moda: corpo rivestito e flussi culturali (2016); Il giubbotto e il foulard: studi
culturali, corpo, comunicazione (2016); “Italian fashion in the latest decades:
From its original features to the ‘new vocabulary’”, Journal of Asia Pacific Pop
Culture (2016); “Il corpo e l’essere umani oggi: protesi, macchine, moda”,
Comunicazioni Sociali (2015); Fashion Journalism (2015); Luxury, Lifestyles and
Excess (2014).

Pamela Church Gibson is Reader in Historical and Cultural Studies at the London
College of Fashion, UK. She has published extensively on film and fashion, gender,
history, and heritage. She is the author of Fashion and Celebrity Culture (2013)
and has published essays in various journals, including Fashion Theory, and the
x NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

Journal of British Film and Television Studies, while also contributing articles to
various anthologies on fashion and on cinema. She has co-edited several books,
including Dirty Looks (1993); Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations, Analysis
(2000); More Dirty Looks (2004); and Fashion Cultures Revisited (2012). She is
the founder and Principal Editor of the journal Film, Fashion and Consumption.
In 2012 she co-founded the European Popular Culture Association and was its
first President. She is on the editorial board of several international journals and
various book series; she is also the founding Editor for Edinburgh University
Press of the new book series Films, Fashion and Design.

Hazel Clark is Professor of Design Studies and Fashion Studies at Parsons

School of Design, The New School, New York, USA. Building on a degree in fine
arts and a PhD in design history, her scholarship has focused on uncovering
new perspectives, cultures, and geographies for the study of fashion and design
internationally. She has taught in the United States, UK, Europe, Australia,
Hong Kong, and China. Her collaborative publications include Old Clothes,
New Looks: Second Hand Fashion (2005), with Alexandra Palmer; The Fabric
of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, and Globalization (2009), with Eugenia Paulicelli;
Design Studies: A Reader (2009), with David Brody; Fashion and Everyday
Life: London and New York (2017), with Cheryl Buckley; and Fashion Curating:
Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond (2017), with Annamari Vanska. In
2017 she co-curated, with Ilari Laamanen, the exhibition fashion after Fashion at
the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.

Jennifer Craik is Professor of Fashion at the Queensland University of

Technology, Brisbane, Australia. She is author of several books on fashion
and arts and cultural policy, including The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in
Fashion (1994), Uniforms Exposed from Conformity to Transgression (2005),
and Fashion: The Key Concepts (2009), and has mostly edited (with M. Angela
Jansen) Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity in
Fashion (2016). Her current research projects include fashion in the Asia Pacific
region, including contemporary Indigenous fashion design and contemporary
Chinese fashion design.

Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at Sydney College of the Arts,
the University of Sydney, Australia. With twenty-five years of artistic practice,
his video installations and performance-based works have been exhibited
throughout Australasia, Asia, and Europe to considerable critical acclaim. He has
produced numerous books, including Fashion and Orientalism (2013), Fashion’s
Double: Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film (with Vicki
Karaminas, 2015), and Artificial Bodies: Models, Mannequins and Marionettes
(2017). He is editor (with Vicki Karaminas) of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop
NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS xi

Culture (Penn State University Press) and editor (with Jakelin Troy and Lorena
Fontaine) of ab-Original: Journal of Indigenous Studies and First Nations’ and
First Peoples’ Cultures (Penn State University Press). His most recent titles
include (with Vicki Karaminas) Fashion and Masculinities in Popular Culture
(2017).

Vicki Karaminas is Professor of Fashion and Director of Doctoral Studies for the
School of Design at the College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington
New Zealand. With Adam Geczy she has co-edited Fashion and Art (2012),
co-written Queer Style (2013), Fashion’s Double: Representations of Fashion in
Painting, Photography and Film (2015), Critical Fashion Practice from Westwood
to Van Beirendonck (2017), and Fashion and Masculinities in Popular Culture
(2017). Other book projects include Shanghai Street Style (2013), Sydney Street
Style (2014), Fashion in Popular Culture (2010), The Men’s Fashion Reader (2009),
and Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television (2009).
She is founding editor of The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture and the
founding editor (with Adam Geczy) of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture. She
is a member of advisory and editorial boards of a number of international journals,
including Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress and the Body.

Véronique Pouillard is Associate Professor in the History of Modern Europe

at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation, and History, University of
Oslo, Norway. Prior to this, she held posts and fellowships at the Université
Libre de Bruxelles and at Columbia University, and was a Newcomen Fellow
at the Harvard Business School. Véronique’s research focuses on the history
of international business, especially in the fields of fashion, advertising, and
intellectual property. Véronique was Principal Investigator with the HERA II
Enterprise of Culture Project financed by the European Science Foundation. She
is now the Humanities coordinator of the Nordic Branding research project, a
multidisciplinary initiative at the University of Oslo. She is the co-editor (with R.
L. Blaczszyk) of the book European Fashion: The Creation of a Global Industry
(2018).

Hilary Radner is Emeritus Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University
of Otago, New Zealand, and author of three monographs that form a trilogy
addressing the formation of feminine identity at the end of the twentieth century
and the beginning of the twenty-first century: Shopping Around: Consumer
Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure (1995), Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films,
Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture (2011), The New Woman’s Film: Femme-
Centric Movies for Smart Chicks (2017). Her recent publications include a
co-edited special issue of Fashion Theory (2017), with Vicki Karaminas, and
Raymond Bellour: Cinema and the Moving Image (2018) with Alistair Fox.
xii NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

Agnès Rocamora is Reader in Social and Cultural Studies at the London

College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK. She is the author of
Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media (2009). Her writing on the field
of fashion and on the fashion media has appeared in various journals, including
Fashion Theory, Journalism Practice, Sociology, Sociétés, and the Journal of
Consumer Culture. She is a co-editor of Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to
Key Theorists (2016), The Handbook of Fashion Studies (2013), and Fashion
Media: Past and Present (2013). She is also a founder and co-editor of the
International Journal of Fashion Studies and is on the editorial board of Cultural
Sociology and of Fashion Studies.

Valerie Steele is Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at the Fashion
Institute of Technology, New York, USA, where she has organized more than
twenty-five exhibitions since 1997. A prolific author, she is also the founder and
editor in chief of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, the
first peer-reviewed journal of Fashion Studies.

Olga Vainshtein is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in

the Humanities at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow,
Russia. She has taught courses on Fashion Studies in Moscow, at the University
of Michigan, and at Stockholm University. Her current research interests include
the cultural history of fashion, European dandyism, fashion and the body, fashion
and beauty. She has written for The Fashion History Reader and Men’s Fashion
Reader; Fashion Theory Journal; Fashion, Style & Popular Culture. She is the
author of the book Dandy: Fashion, Literature, Life Style (2006, 2012) and the
editor of Smells and Perfumes in the History of Culture (in two volumes, 2003,
2010) and the book series Library of Fashion Theory (in Russian). She is a
member of editorial boards of the journals Fashion Theory: Journal on Dress,
Body and Culture; Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion; International Journal of
Fashion Studies; and the Russian version of Fashion Theory Journal.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank Lauren Beasley for all her editorial contribution to this
project. Our gratitude goes to our editor Frances Arnold and to Pari Thompson
at Bloomsbury Publishing for their unwavering support and enthusiasm. We
would like to acknowledge and thank the College of Creative Arts at Massey
University for awarding a Massey University Research Grant (MURF), which
supported the international conference and associated exhibition, The End of
Fashion, which was held on December 8–9, 2016, at the Wellington campus
and cosponsored by the University of Otago. Many of the chapters in this book
were first presented as keynote papers and later developed for publication.
Vicki Karaminas would like to thank Emeritus Professor Hilary Radner for her
support in co-convening The End of Fashion conference and Adam Geczy and
Sue Prescott for curating the associated exhibition. She would also like to thank
Professor Claire Robinson, Professor Tony Parker, and Distinguished Professor
Sally Morgan for their creative and intellectual energy. Adam Geczy would like to
thank Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. Most important, we
are indebted to the contributors themselves who saw the value of this project.
 INTRODUCTION

One of the cultural aftereffects of postmodernism is that any pronouncement of

a phenomenon’s death is not necessarily cause for alarm. On the contrary, it can
provoke excitement. This is not to be perverse, but rather to acknowledge that
former paradigms have been exhausted, or re-oriented. It can mark the end of
a canon or a doxology. The end of history, the end of painting, the end of art,
and the end of man are among the many proclamations toward the end of the
last century. The historicity that underpinned postmodernism entailed a strong
consciousness of memory, resonance, and historical signification, especially
in the way that narratives, styles, and traditions lived on, or how they were
reconfigured into new forms and under different conditions. Culturally speaking,
to consign something to death is to open a door to an afterlife, which can be
as cliché, or as reinvention. The “end of fashion” is the result of a number of
forces caused by the redistributed networks of communication and of global
economies. The chapters in this book explore the causes of this end and its
many ramifications, critically situating fashion within our vertiginous present.
This present is what Slavoj Žiźek has recently identified as the “End Times.”
Noting that this term is in the plural, these “End Times” are endemic of
radical changes in consumption and communication against the backdrop of
overpopulation, the strain on resources, and the threat of impending ecological
disaster. Announce to any average educated consumer that we are now living
in an era of the end of fashion, and you might be surprised to witness a lack
of dissent—not that they will explain why—that betrays the temperature of the
times. It is an intuition that is arrived at from the now immeasurable immensity of
the consumer market, that the dizzyingly heterogeneity of commodities, and the
many ways—virtual as well as physical—that these commodities are transacted.
“End Times” is not only the backdrop of impending doom but the end of the old
myths and beliefs, the end of Communism, and the age of “post-democracy,”
where the so-called new order is just another fragile order for a deeper disorder.
As Žiźek concludes, the predicament of “End Times” is that, in the twentieth
century, the Left thought it knew what to do, and simply had to wait for the right
occasion to do so. Yet today, in these times, “we do not know what we have
to do.” Yet we know that nonetheless something needs to be done.1 In other
words, in the wake of ends, there is still call for new strategy and invention.
2 THE END OF FASHION

For fashion these new conditions are reflected in a number of ways, in how
fashion is designed, received, worn, and represented. There is no longer a universal
canon as say, Dior’s “New Look” became a ubiquitous standard in the years after
the Second World War. Rather, dress is increasingly approached as a mode of
personal expression, rather than as a signifier of status or profession, with, of
course, notable exceptions. To date little research has been done on the causes
and implications of this shift, which has had significant consequences in terms of
fashion design and its place in society, the mandate of fashion scholarship and
our general attitude toward clothing. Designers are increasingly treated as “artists”
and their designs as “art,” while fashion encroaches ever more frequently into the
museum space. Arguably, these shifts are a manifestation of important evolutions
in perspective on a global scale tied not only to technological innovation but
also to new ethical modalities emerging in response to what Canadian scholar
Marshall McLuhan termed in the twentieth century “the global village,” promoted
initially by television and intensified with the growth of the Internet.
The “end of fashion” is therefore not to be taken literally but rather in terms of
the way fashion and the fashion system, as we have understood it to be in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have radically changed. For mass mediation
and digitalization have broadened the way that contemporary fashion is now
perceived and consumed. Such changes are allied to those in industries such
as music, where we have witnessed the demise of record and CD shops, and
where now consumption is conducted online. Similarly, “to go shopping” need
no longer mean a physical outing and visit to a store; it can just as much mean
visiting an Internet site: one can shop between sets in a gym, or while distracted
in the workplace. The fact that people are feeling increasingly at home with online
shopping has enormous consequences for the fashion industry, which includes
the trajectories of its visibility. Its ramifications are also for the phenomenality of
fashion, from the physical display of a boutique to the tactile experience itself.
When designer Yves Saint Laurent departed from the fashion industry in
2002 declaring “I have nothing in common with this new world of fashion,” it
was not just a valedictory announcement and far more of an indication of the
changes that lay ahead. At the end of Laurent’s career, fashion had reached
its apogee, or its end time depending on one’s viewpoint, in the ways that it
was being produced, manufactured, and consumed. Yes, the cognoscenti of
Paris still had the capacity to influence direction, but they were not alone, as
there were more than one set of judges and gatekeepers, and these in the most
unpredictable of places. Bloggers emerged as power elites shifting the terrain of
traditional fashion reporting and dramatically altering the ways in which fashion
is disseminated. Commerce and media have united to create new ways of
experiencing designer’s collections as runway shows now compete with Internet
live streaming, digital fashion films, Instagram, and Pinterest. Similarly, concept
stores have also replaced the department stores and traditional forms of retailing.
INTRODUCTION 3

It is worth returning to the rhetoric of ends as it has traditionally been leveled at

culture, and in particular, art with its effect on fashion. It is an important concept
to consider, as the “end of art thesis,” as it has come to be known, occurs
together with the shaping of art history (and fashion) in particular with the thought
of philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Working on J.J. Winckelmann’s History of Ancient
Art (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 1776), Hegel placed his work within
a topology that was justified according to historical progress. Art was viewed
by Hegel as a receptacle of the all-pervading Spirit, which slowly disclosed
itself over time and with greater degrees of force and lucidity according to the
different media—architecture, sculpture, painting, and music—that enshrined
it. Eventually, Spirit would have developed to a degree of self-awareness and
sophistication that would prove inadequate to art, whereupon it would need to
move elsewhere (from religion then to philosophy). At this point, art would be
just a spent husk, expended and otiose. Taking up Hegel’s declaration of the
end of art, Arthur Danto claimed that because of pop art, art’s attainment of self-
consciousness by the 1960s meant that “history was finished.” “Artists, liberated
from the burden of history, were free to make art in whatever way they wished,
for any purposes they wished, or for no purposes as at all.”2 For Danto, art had
progressed through three linear phases: the imitation of reality up until the late
nineteenth century, the fracturing of art into manifestos claiming its motives and
intentions, and, finally, art’s awareness of itself. In other words, art no longer
imitated life, but it represented representation itself; its content and form were
irrelevant. Danto’s “end of art” proclamation, much like Hegel’s, was more about
the end of art’s narrative than the end of art itself. The same linear schema
can be applied to the “end of fashion” trajectory as it has progressed since
the nineteenth century: the setting of styles and trends by the aristocratic elite
that “tricked-down” and were imitated by the masses, the breakdown of social
class differentiations through manufacturing and production, and the collapse of
geographical style distinctions via mediation and digitalization. Like art that no
longer imitates life, fashion is no longer about class distinctions, but it represents
representation itself. Despite fashion being an embodied practice, embedded in
life and inextricable from life’s performance, it is stalked by its representation in
the image. And as Danto effectively argued, that end of art is not about the end
of art per se but the end of a narrative, so too have we come to the end of a
fashion system.
This short itinerary is useful not only to remind us of the historical and
theoretical background of ends as they are seen to appear in art and aesthetics.
It supplies important historical points that herald “ends” in contemporary fashion.
Fashion “ends” after Dior’s “New Look,” which not only set a universal standard
but was the last overarching style that physically manipulated the body (Dior died
in 1957). Following this, DIY approaches, the re-use of clothing, stressing and
marring material, particularly by designers such as Westwood and Kawakubo,
4 THE END OF FASHION

caused to shatter the notion that high fashion was of fine materials and good
tailoring. Wear and dilapidation were fashionable at that time, which also had
extraordinary consequences for fashion’s relationship to class. Finally, fashion’s
end is decisive at roughly the same time when “contemporary art” takes over as
a moniker from “postmodern art,” that is, around the new millennium. Yet one
more of the many manifestations of the breadth of approach and the elusiveness
of definition as noted by Danto is the way that many fashion designers identify
themselves as artists, fashion just happens to be their medium. And just as
contemporary artists no longer need to draw in the academic sense, the mandate
of that designers know that traditional tailoring techniques continue to alter as
a result of outsourcing, global markets, and 3D printing technology. Ironically
enough, contemporary fashion remains relatively insulated from charges of
frippery and triviality, especially in comparison as how they have been leveled
against contemporary art, not least because fashion has always lived under
the shadow of such claims. If anything, the technical invention and conceptual
sophistication are greater in fashion than ever before. So perhaps another way
of reading “the end of fashion” is with the demise of the old binary of art and
fashion, and to acknowledge that the equation frivolity and fashion is more of an
anachronism that now calls for very different perspectives.
 1
FASHION FUTURES
Valerie Steele

“The End of Fashion” is a phrase, it seems to me, with at least three possible
implications. First, it could be an imperative: “End fashion!” Second, it could be a
statement of fact: “Fashion has ended.” Third, it could be a warning: “Fashion is
about to end.” The discourse surrounding the “end” of fashion also calls to mind
debates about the end of, say, art, religion, or printed books. Announcements
of their demise have proved to be premature, and the same may be true of
fashion. Nevertheless, it is striking that fashion has attracted such hostility or,
at least, ambivalence. Anti-fashion sentiment has a long history, composed of
a number of different critiques. The idea that fashion is “vanity” and a source
of immorality goes back to the dawn of Christianity. By the nineteenth century,
when industrialization made it possible for many more people to follow fashion, a
variety of groups emerged that positioned themselves “against fashion,” including
both dress reformers and advocates of “clothing as art.” Dress reformers, some
of whom were feminists, argued that fashion was a tyrant and women its victims.
Fashion was also criticized from a utilitarian point of view as a waste of time and
money. For aesthetes, on the other hand, contemporary fashion was ugly. As
Oscar Wilde quipped, fashion was “a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have
to alter it every six months.”1 For leftists, fashion was and remains “capitalism’s
favorite child.” Tansy E. Hoskins’s Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of
Fashion (2014) is an example of activist discourse on fashion as an exploitative,
racist, sexist industry, which supports hierarchical distinctions in society,
promotes the beauty myth, and destroys the planet. Many of her criticisms of the
capitalist fashion system are widely shared, and her book, as a whole, is a call to
end fashion, although she does propose a vague, utopian vision of revolutionary,
“post-capitalist” fashion, reassuring readers that they will not be forced to wear
uniforms like people during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.2
Barbara Vinken’s Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System
(English translation, 2005) exemplifies the statement that fashion has ended. A
German scholar, Vinken argues that “the century of fashion is over: the very idea
6 THE END OF FASHION

of Paris fashion is at an end—even an anti-fashion could not save it.”3 According

to Vinken, the modern fashion system developed in the 1860s with the rise of
the haute couture in Paris, and ended about a century later, when fashion no
longer filtered downward from the elite, but rather moved up from street and
subcultural styles. Although prestigious designers quickly appropriated such
demotic styles, this was not enough to maintain the fashion system as it had
long existed. Vinken goes on to argue, however, that after a century of fashion,
there came something she called “fashion after Fashion” or “postfashion.” In a
series of chapters, she analyzes its various typologies, from Karl Lagerfeld at
Chanel, with the transformation of the griffe, to Martin Margiela, whose work
was characterized by the registrations of time. Whereas fashion had previously
rejected the démodé in favor of a ceaseless search for the new, postfashion
incorporates the old into a new process of time. Vinken’s approach to fashion
was similar in some ways to that of certain art critics, who discussed the status
of art after “the end of art,” a discourse which was related to critical theory about
“postmodernism.”
Teri Agins’s book The End of Fashion, published in 1999, is perhaps the most
famous example in recent years of a warning that fashion is in danger of ending.
An experienced fashion journalist, specializing in the business of fashion, Agins
observes some ominous long-term trends, which could be summarized as
“nobody’s dressing up and everybody loves a bargain.” The demise of Christian
Lacroix’s couture house and the growing importance of mass-marketing and
brand image seemed to provide evidence that the fashion system, especially
the subset of high fashion, was entering a difficult economic period. For many
consumers, Agins warned, designer fashion had begun to seem like a “rip-off.”4
I spoke with Agins in 2017, almost twenty years after she published The End of
Fashion. “I deliberately chose a provocative title,” Agins recalled. “The publishers
didn’t like it. They thought it was too negative. Back then people kept saying ‘Oh,
fashion will come back.’ Now people tell me, ‘Your book was ahead of its time.’
A big game changer was the disappearance of dress codes. A whole generation
saw the captains of Silicon Valley wearing T-shirts and sneakers—and these are
their role models.”
A $700 iPhone is most people’s clothing budget for two years, continued
Agins. “The phone is indispensable. New clothes are not. Of course, people still
want trendy stuff, they just want to get it cheaply. Already in the 1990s, Target’s
slogan was ‘It’s fashionable to pay less.’ This is capitalism. Some people will still
make money. I didn’t anticipate on-line shopping in 1996. There is an emerging
middle-class in Asia, and there is also white space in plus-size clothes. But the
mystique of fashion is gone.”5
In 2015, the eminent trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort published her Anti-
Fashion Manifesto, proclaiming that “fashion is obsolete” and has become “a
ridiculous and pathetic parody” of itself. According to Edelkoort, “Marketing … killed
FASHION FUTURES 7

the whole thing … It’s governed by greed and not by vision.” In interviews, she
reiterated: “This is the end of fashion as we know it.”6 The last clause is the key,
because she also suggested, counter-intuitively, that couture, the most exclusive
and expensive component of fashion, will be coming back, along with an emphasis
on clothing rather than “fashion.”
In contrast to Agins’s business-oriented analysis of problems in the
contemporary fashion system, Vinkens’s theoretical analysis of historical changes
in fashion, and Hoskins’s activist analysis of injustices in the fashion industry,
Eidelkoort’s Anti-Fashion Manifesto is a hybrid of warning, statement, and call
to action. Fashion is simultaneously described as dying, dead, and about to be
resurrected in a new form. It is a bit like the medieval philosophy of the King’s two
bodies, whereby the court announces: “The King is dead! Long live the King!”
Eidelkoort’s manifesto has been greeted with considerable enthusiasm within
academia, more in the liberal arts than in fashion design, however. Members of the
fashion industry have been respectful, but there is also considerable disagreement
with her analysis and proposed improvements to the fashion system.
Any discussion of the “end” of fashion also inevitably evokes the idea of the
“beginning” of fashion—and, indeed, the definition of “fashion” itself. While the
majority of dress historians tend to believe that fashion began in fourteenth-
century Europe, as part of the gradual rise of capitalism, there are also scholars
who identify the beginning of fashion with nineteenth-century modernity, as
well as those who focus on the eighteenth-century beginnings of the Industrial
Revolution and the consumer economy. In addition, there has recently been a
movement toward looking globally at the rise of fashion, with special attention
paid to eleventh-century Japan and to the T’ang, M’ing, and Q’ing dynasties in
China.
These differences of opinion are obviously directly related to differing
definitions of “fashion,” as opposed to “dress” or “costume.” Although fashion
is often defined as a regular pattern of style change, there is little agreement
about the required rate and degree of change, and whether fashion necessarily
involves changes in silhouette, as opposed to, say, color or decoration. Another
unresolved question is to what extent it matters if changing styles of dress are
restricted to members of a tiny elite. Fashion in Heian Japan, if we can call it
fashion, was restricted to members of the court, as, indeed, it mostly was in
fourteenth-century Burgundy.
As an historian, I am inclined to think that fashion did not “begin” abruptly in
one time and place, but rather gradually developed in different places, following
different trajectories. Similarly, rather than trying to identify the “end” of fashion,
or the rise of “postfashion,” it seems more useful to think in terms of changes
within an evolving fashion system.
In this chapter, I will look at how fashion “as we know it” has changed and
where it may be going. I will make no attempt to go back to the “origin” of
8 THE END OF FASHION

fashion, focusing instead on the past few centuries. My own research indicates
that ever since the late seventeenth century, Paris was the center of fashion in
the Western world, setting new styles that were adopted in many other countries.
Significant changes in the fashion industry began in the mid-nineteenth century,
with the rise of the grande couture (now called the haute couture). At the same
time, developments in mass production, together with a retail revolution and
inventions such as the paper pattern and the sewing machine, led to fashion
becoming a genuinely popular phenomenon. For approximately 100 years—from
the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century—Parisian haute couture
was at the pinnacle of the Western fashion system, and couturiers were widely
regarded as “dictators” or “geniuses” (although this was always a misleading
stereotype). When Dior launched his 1947 New Look, it was copied throughout
much of the world, including Japan. Increasingly, most people thought of fashion
as a phenomenon relating to women’s clothing. Men’s clothing appeared to
follow a different trajectory, changing much more slowly. However, the fashion
system changed dramatically in the subsequent decades. No longer can a single
designer like Dior create a collection that women everywhere adopt. Already
by the 1960s, the empire of fashion had begun to break up into multiple style
tribes. Some women wore Chanel couture suits (which cost about $500) and
others wore licensed copies (which cost about $25), others wore youth styles by
English designers like Mary Quant or futuristic fashions by designers like Pierre
Cardin and Andre Courrèges. Young men also increasingly adopted new styles
of their own, which were collectively characterized as “the Peacock Revolution.”
Increasingly, Paris was challenged by new fashion cities, such as London,
Milan, and New York. Haute couture diminished in influence, as designer ready-
to-wear, youth styles, and sports clothes emerged as vital components of the
fashion system. London, in particular, spawned new youth styles, from Mod to
punk, which embraced menswear as much if not more than womenswear. The
young British people who identified as Mods were often working class. They
were not anti-fashion. Indeed, they were extremely interested in fashion—as
long as it was their fashion. “The original Mods had their clothes made, hunting
down tailors and shoe-makers prepared to bend to their fantasies or, if they did
admit something mass-produced they either modified it, took it out of context
or insisted on certain stringent qualifications—their jeans, for instance, had to
be American.”7 Gradually, designers emerged to cater to the new market. As
the self-taught designer Mary Quant put it, “To me, adult appearance was very
unattractive …. I had always wanted the young to have a fashion of their own.”8
Many London boutiques, such as Quant’s Bazaar, Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba, and
John Stephen’s eponymous menswear shops, accommodated young people’s
tastes for “modern” styles associated with popular culture and music. Miniskirts
and tights for young women and brightly colored trousers and shirts for men were
among the most important new styles, which soon spread from London around
FASHION FUTURES 9

the world. Eventually, the new styles took root in the Paris system, becoming
transformed into more stylized futuristic looks.9
As the Mods gave way to the hippies in the late 1960s, attitudes toward
fashion changed radically, as the hippies proclaimed themselves to be adamantly
anti-fashion. Positioning themselves as anti-conformity, anti-consumption,
and anti-hierarchy, they rejected the changing styles promoted by the fashion
industry. The long ago (Victorian petticoats found in thrift stores) and the far away
(Chinese workers’ jackets) provided inspiration for individualized ensembles. Anti-
war sentiment was ironically expressed through the wearing of cheap and tough
garments from army and navy surplus stores. But hippy style was epitomized
above all by blue jeans.
A book published in New York in 1970, The Greening of America: How
the Youth Revolution is Trying to Make America Livable, explained the new
“consciousness” among young people, whose first “commandment is: to be
true to oneself.” As the author, Charles Reich, explained: “A good place to
begin is clothes, for the dress of the new generation expresses a number of
the major themes of Consciousness III in a very vivid and immediate way. The
first impression the clothes give is of uniformity and conformity—as if everyone
felt obliged to adopt the same style.” But this was “an erroneous impression.”
“[T]here is agreement on certain principles, but great individuality within these
principles.” Young people, Reich explained, favored “inexpensive clothes,”
because they believed that “neither individuality nor distinction can be bought in
a clothing store.” They wore “earthy, sensual” clothes, such as blue jeans, which
give the wearer “freedom to do anything he wants,” in a “deliberate rejection of
the neon colors and plastic, artificial look of the affluent society” and the socially
mandated need to “dress up.” Young people’s clothes might look uniform, but
they are not, because “they are extremely expressive of the human body, and
each body is different and unique.” Whereas “men’s suits really are uniform, …
jeans make one conscious of the body.”10
Formerly a working-class man’s garment, blue jeans were now adopted by
young men and women of the middle class. While ceasing to be vernacular
workwear, jeans also seemed to be outside of the fashion system, and therefore
“authentic,” especially when hand-embroidered, or otherwise individualized
(Plate 1). “The new clothes express profoundly democratic values. There are
no distinctions of wealth or status; people confront one another shorn of these
distinctions.”11 In fact, of course, jeans were rapidly incorporated into an evolving
fashion system. Manufacturers machine-embroidered and otherwise embellished
jeans, and new brands appeared. Jeans became fashion.
The punk subculture notoriously rejected hippy love and peace in favor of
sex and anarchy, but they inherited at least some of the hippies’ sentiments
against fashion. They refused to accept social rules governing appropriate
dress and behavior, and they were uninterested in following trends set by
10 THE END OF FASHION

the fashion industry. However, they were very interested in creating their own
transgressive styles. Because their styles were often deliberately shocking,
punk was initially rejected with horror by a fashion industry that had easily
assimilated mod and hippy styles. Punk would therefore appear to be the
poster child of anti-fashion. Yet almost immediately, creative entrepreneurs
began to cater to the new punk subculture, and remarkably rapidly punk style
infiltrated the fashion system.
Vivienne Westwood became the first and most important punk fashion
designer. She and Malcolm McClaren began designing and selling clothes in the
early 1970s, frequently renaming their store as their styles changed. McClaren
also promoted punk bands like the Sex Pistols. Punk also became a part of
the fashion system when designers such as Zandra Rhodes and later Gianni
Versace created garments that visually referenced punk tropes, such as safety
pins and rips. Indeed, virtually all street and/or subcultural styles, no matter how
outré, have proved relatively easy to assimilate into the fashion system. Every
few years, high-fashion designers and fashion stylists resurrect elements of past
styles. Although members of the various subcultures often complain about the
loss of “authenticity” that results from the incorporation of subcultural styles, this
has no effect on the process of fashionization.
Avant-garde Japanese designers, such as Rei Kawakubo of Comme des
Garçons, had a huge affect on international fashion, beginning in the mid-
1980s. Many people today believe that the “Japanese fashion revolution” was
the last really significant challenge to the fashion system. Yet although they
helped “brand” Japan as a fashion-forward country, once they had begun to be
successful, avant-garde Japanese designers almost always moved their runway
shows from Tokyo to Paris. Indeed, instead of competing with Paris, Japanese
designers confirmed Paris as the world capital of fashion. More significantly,
many of the design innovations pioneered by the Japanese avant-garde, such as
the use of frayed edges, were also incorporated into both high fashion and mass
fashion. Essentially the same thing happened with avant-garde designers from
Belgium, such as Martin Margiela. Thus, avant-garde fashion, like subcultural
style, was never effectively or for long a form of anti-fashion.
Whether avant-garde, high fashion, or mainstream, designers have traditionally
presented their collections at fashion shows, attended by buyers and journalists.
The buyers placed their orders and journalists featured their choice of dresses in
daily newspapers and monthly magazines. Then clothes arrived in stores a few
months later. People waited and then they bought garments, usually at full price.
Not anymore. There have always been copyists, but things really changed when
fashion shows started appearing online, where everyone could see the latest
looks from the runway almost immediately, including consumers and fast fashion
companies. Fast fashion companies knocked them off instantly and shipped
cheap copies to stores months before the high-fashion originals got there.
FASHION FUTURES 11

There are good aspects to this “democratization” of fashion—ordinary people

can afford trendy clothes. But there is also exploitation of workers and theft
of creative ideas from designers. The clothes are cheap and poorly made, so
consumers tend to throw them out quickly and buy more. This is obviously
environmentally unsustainable. The Rana Plaza factory disaster in Bangladesh
in 2013 also demonstrates how dangerous and unfair this system is for the
workers. Today, issues of sustainability and social justice are among the most
important criticisms leveled at the fashion system, with activists asking whether
it is even possible for fashion to become sustainable.
Fast fashion was the result of both technology (especially the internet) and
globalization (with most textile and clothing production going to Asia). Obviously,
both technology and globalization have long influenced fashion, but they have
been ramped up to new levels in the twenty-first century. Moreover, the speed of
all fashion accelerated as a direct result of the impact of fast fashion. Consumers
grew accustomed to getting new merchandise every few weeks through fast
fashion retailers, such as H&M and Zara. They no longer wanted to wait months
after they had seen the Fall or Spring fashion shows online before they could buy
the clothes in stores.
High fashion designers responded by producing two additional collections,
usually referred to as the Resort and Pre-Fall collections, which were supposed
to help fill in the gaps between the “real” Fall and spring collections (which
gets the lion’s share of media coverage). From creating two collections a year,
designers started doing four, or six if they also did couture, or eight if they also
did menswear—not to mention overseeing accessory design.
The veteran fashion journalist Suzy Menkes was one of many to comment on
the frantic pace of fashion: “A couple of promotional shows in Asia, Brazil, Dubai,
or Moscow can bring the count to ten. Ten shows a year!” notes Menkes, “that
means a show nearly every month.” After the suicide of Alexander McQueen
and the drug-and-alcohol-fuelled public meltdown of John Galliano, even more
people started talking about the stress under which designers worked. As
Menkes writes: “If we accept that the pace of fashion was part of the problem
behind the decline of John Galliano, the demise of Alexander McQueen and the
cause of other well-known rehab cleanups, nonstop shows seem a high price
to pay for the endless ‘newness’ demanded of fashion now. The strain on both
budgets and designers is heavy.”12
Meanwhile, in October 2015, Raf Simons left Dior, Alber Elbaz left Lanvin, and
Alexander Wang left Balenciaga—triggering more anxious press. Actually only
Raf Simons left because the speed with which he had to design was incompatible
with his creative process. Stress was apparently not an issue, but he did say that
he was frustrated by the lack of time to create: “You have no incubation time for
ideas, and incubation time is very important …. I’m not the kind of person who
likes to do things so fast.”13 Raf Simons’s departure from Dior was, for many
12 THE END OF FASHION

observers, a kind of wake-up call. People began talking more about the fashion
system as being broken or unsustainable. Asked if fashion moves too fast now,
Karl Lagerfeld said, that is just the way it is: fashion moves fast. “If you are not
a good bullfighter, don’t enter the arena,” he says. “I have no problem, but not
everybody may have dream teams to do all that work. It goes with the times we
live in. There is no way to look back. For some people and smaller companies,
it could become too much, but big companies like Chanel, Dior, Vuitton, etc.
are organized to face speed…. The thing I hate most are designers who accept
those very well-paid jobs and then think the demand is too strong, that they are
afraid of burn-out, etc…. Fashion is a sport now. You have to run.”14 Lagerfeld,
of course, is a notorious workaholic, who also, as he admits, has the money
of Chanel behind him to hire teams of assistants. But most other designers
interviewed by WWD magazine also seemed reluctant to complain about the
speed of fashion, perhaps fearing that it would make them look uncompetitive.
Only Alber Elbaz did say: “Are we turning into an entertainment business? Is that
the fashion business? I’m questioning, I’m not criticizing.” And he observes, “I
ask editors ‘how are you?’ and they say ‘I cannot see 60 shows in one week.’”15
Fashion editors and retailers increasingly complained that they were deluged
with too many collections, too many brands, and too many products. Although
Paris held the line at 90 shows for their fashion week, at last count New York
Fashion Week had more than 200 fashion shows. Consumers, too, began to
suffer from fashion fatigue. They shopped less, and tended to look for sales—or
special collaborations. For example, when the expensive, high fashion company
Balmain collaborated with H&M on a special “capsule” collection, it triggered
frenzies among shoppers—in part because Balmain’s designer, Olivier Rousteing
has so many followers on social media.
Some observers argued that consumer indifference was also related to
scheduling problems in the fashion system. For example, the main Fall and
Winter collections arrive in stores in July, when in most countries in the northern
hemisphere it is really hot. Then the clothes are only in the stores for about
eight short weeks, before going on sale. Fashion pundits argued in favor of a
new idea—“show now, buy now.” It was, of course, recognized that there were
real problems with logistics. How could designers get the clothes made and
shipped right after the shows? Should there be closed shows only for buyers,
followed a few months later by big public shows (when things are in the stores)?
How could you keep the closed shows secret? Some designers in New York
and London expressed interest in the Show Now, Sell Now concept, but
representatives of the fashion associations in Paris and Milan insisted that real
creative fashion was worth waiting for. In practice, only a handful of items from
any given collection were available immediately for sale. Thus, the initial attempts
to capitalize on “Show Now, Buy Now” proved less successful than anticipated.
The litany of complaints about overworked designers also dwindled. When Raf
Simons became creative director at Calvin Klein, replacing both the designers
FASHION FUTURES 13

for womenswear and menswear, and taking on an even larger role than he had
had at Dior, the fashion press treated his move to Calvin Klein as entirely positive,
One of the biggest issues in the fashion system, of course, is globalization.
Within the global fashion system, the main actors with decision-making power—
the creative and operational heads of big companies, specialist producers,
flagship stores, and so on—are concentrated in a few world cities, like Paris and
New York. However, the center-to-periphery framework has been complicated,
by the rise of fashion pluralism and new fashion centers. Today these are four
major fashion capitals—Paris, New York, Milan, and London—but many up-
and-coming fashion cities. The map of fashion has changed. Today, there are
hundreds of fashion shows around the world, testifying to growing numbers of
designers and consumers. In East Asia alone, there are fashion weeks in Tokyo,
Seoul, Shanghai, and Beijing, while South and Southeast Asia hosts fashion
weeks in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangkok, and Jakarta, to name only a few.
Most independent designers are trapped between the big luxury companies
(like LVMH) and the big fast-fashion companies (like H&M). But it is even harder
if the independent designers are not based in one of the big fashion capitals.
Some cities, such as Berlin, have a certain stylistic influence, while others such
as Mumbai or Shanghai occupy an important economic position, which they are
trying to transform into a better symbolic position in the global media.
It is clear that local designers will never dress everyone—Zara and H&M do
that. But local designers can represent their nation or community, and local
fashion shows can definitely improve the local economy. Because of the structure
of the global fashion industry, designers in peripheral cities need to take a two-
pronged approach—simultaneously building local fashion centers and making
an effort to penetrate world fashion capitals.
What are the factors that contribute to building both economic and symbolic
capital and creating a viable fashion identity? A good fashion school, like Central
Saint Martins in London or the Royal Academy of Art in Antwerp, seems to
be important. So is the development of intermediate institutions, such as
independent fashion boutiques and local fashion weeks, which help local
designers and retailers. The presence of skilled and specialized subcontractors
is crucially important, as are links between fashion and other cultural institutions,
such as museums. Fashion cities also benefit if they have access to technology
and science. Los Angeles has become something of a regional fashion center,
in part because of cheap real estate and a pool of labor. But technology is also
an issue. The LA-based company Skincraft, for example, utilizes body-scanning
technology as well as laser-cutting for a customized fit.
All evidence indicates that the future of fashion will be closely connected to
advances in textile technology. The Dutch designer Iris Van Herpen is known for
sculptural silhouettes, new materials and construction techniques, and use of digital
technology. Unusual as her work is, it also reflects fashion’s obsession with new
materials, techniques, and silhouettes that extend or otherwise alter the shape
14 THE END OF FASHION

of the body. New materials can add volume without undue weight, for example,
while new technologies, such as computer-aided design tools, can create new and
complex shapes in clothing—just as they do in architecture. 3D printing is especially
fascinating because it could potentially end up transforming the entire way we
manufacture clothes, eliminating the need for low-skilled, out-sourced labor.
But discussions of technology lead back to one of the most mysterious and
critical issues in fashion—creativity. Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something
new is created—be it an idea, a work of art, or an invention. In the fashion world,
creativity is usually attributed primarily to the individual fashion designer, who is
popularly seen as a unique “genius.” Obviously individual designers have their own
inner lives and personal histories. However, even the greatest fashion designers,
such as Lee Alexander McQueen, do not create new fashions in isolation. Like
all individuals, McQueen also worked within the context of a particular culture
and society. He grew up gay in an era of AIDS and overt homophobia, and he
identified with victims of prejudice, such as Joan of Arc. He apprenticed on Saville
Row, worked in fashion in Italy, and attended Central Saint Martins, thus acquiring
a deep body of knowledge of fashion techniques and fashion history. It was not
just a matter of acquiring knowledge, but also being encouraged to put ideas
together and determine which ideas were better and thus worth pursuing.
In his groundbreaking book, Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi emphasizes
that creative ideas and products arise “from the synergy of many sources and
not only from the mind of a unique genius.” Moreover, “The level of creativity in
a given place at a given time does not only depend on the amount of individual
creativity. It depends just as much on how well suited the respective domains
and fields are to the recognition and diffusion of novel ideas.” A domain, he
explains, is “a set of symbolic rules and practices.” For example, fashion is a
domain. So is mathematics. A field comprises “all the individuals who act as
gatekeepers to the domain,” the ones who judge the value of a new creation.16
Thus, if creativity is to flourish, there must be a critical mass of knowledgeable
people who come together to share ideas and judge which new ideas are best.
Consider the Italian Renaissance—were there suddenly more creative people
born in and around Florence, Italy? Or was there something about the situation
at that place and time that encouraged the creation and acceptance of new
ideas and new types of painting?
Paris has long been considered the ultimate site of creativity. Less than two
years after the Nazi Occupation of Paris ended, Christian Dior presented his
first collection. Dubbed the New Look, its extravagant luxury and femininity
revolutionized fashion. This was not only due to Dior’s “genius.” After the war
ended, the domain of fashion and the field of fashion journalists, buyers, and
consumers were receptive to a new, highly feminine, luxurious style. Decades
later, even prickly individuals like McQueen were able to acquire allies and
supporters, a network of gatekeepers—who collectively produce the A list/B
FASHION FUTURES 15

list rankings which help establish which designers become most respected and
successful.
Creativity studies show that a diversity of people, cultures, and
domains increases the chances of coming up with creative new ideas. As
Czikszentmihalyi writes: “Centers of creativity tend to be at the intersections
of different cultures, where beliefs, lifestyles, and knowledge mingle and allow
individuals to see new combinations of ideas with greater ease. In cultures that
are uniform and rigid, it takes a greater investment of attention to achieve new
ways of thinking.”17
In creating exhibitions, I have certainly discovered that the intersection
between domains is a fertile place for creative discoveries. Thus, for example, last
year I organized an exhibition on Dance and Fashion, exploring how these two
art forms have influenced each other. Another MFIT exhibition, A Queer History
of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk also explored how the experiences
of LGBTQ people has enriched fashion.
Iris Van Herpen has been especially interested in the intersection of fashion
and science. She graduated from the ArtEZ School in Holland; like Central
Saint Martins, it is an art-oriented design school. After working with Alexander
McQueen, she started her own label in 2007 in London. She showed her
collections at Amsterdam Fashion Week before moving on to Paris. Her Capriole
collection of July 2011, when she made her debut in Paris as a member of the
Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, was a collaboration with the architect
Isaie Bloch and with the 3D print company Materialise.
Iris Van Herpen has said that “Technology creates new design possibilities
and innovative materials.” In the future, she says, “I hope … there will be a
totally new generation of ‘super’ materials that do not exist today …. Future
fashions could include ways to dress in substances that are not touchable or
stable, but actually move and change with the wearers’ moods and expressions.
Rather than wearing clothes made of solid substances, in future people could
be dressed in such things as smoke, drops of water, colored vapor or radio
waves.”18 However, technology, per se, is not, perhaps, the central aspect of
Iris Van Herpen’s work. It is, rather, a means she uses to explore feelings and
ideas. Her Capriole collection, for example, included five looks inspired by her
experiences of free-fall parachute jumping (Capriole is French for “a leap into the
air”). One look, for example, recalls the moment of free fall, when, she says, “The
adrenalin surges through my body, I can feel every fiber of my frame, my mind
is not thinking anymore, and all my energy is concentrated in my body …. Once
I’m safely on the ground, I am reborn.”19
How different Iris’s creative system is from the non-stop production of most
fashion workers, including the so-called creative workers, like designers. Fashion
has become more and more like factory farming. Already, in the early 1990s,
the Italian designer Franco Moschino launched an advertising campaign and
16 THE END OF FASHION

window displays urging viewers to “STOP THE FASHION SYSTEM!” Moschino,

who founded his company in 1983 and died of AIDS in 1994, was known for
his witty designs, such as jackets embroidered with slogans like “Expensive
jacket” (Figure 1.1). But the campaign to “STOP THE FASHION SYSTEM!” with
its striking image of a vampiric female figure was not just a joke (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.1 ART MOSCHINO—Advertising Campaign Spring/Summer 1990. Courtesy

Moschino
FASHION FUTURES 17

Figure 1.2 Franco Moschino. Suit, 1990, Italy. Museum Purchase. Photograph
copyright The Museum FIT
18 THE END OF FASHION

Elizabeth Wilson once wrote, “the thesis is that fashion is oppressive, the
antithesis that we find it pleasurable.” As she further observes, dress “is never
primarily functional” and human beings “are not natural.”20 To which I would add,
it is precisely the artificiality and “pointlessness” of fashion that make it valuable
as an aesthetic and expressive vehicle.21 So how do we keep the best of fashion
while minimizing those parts of the fashion system that are dehumanizing? One
venue for thinking about fashion is the museum, and in recent years curators
have increasingly begun to explore possible futures for fashion. The Museum
of Art and Design recently presented fashion after Fashion (2017), curated
by Hazel Clark and Ilari Laamanen, in collaboration with the Finnish Cultural
Institute in New York and Parsons School of Design, The New School. The
exhibition argues that “the term ‘fashion’ itself demands redefinition” in order to
accommodate “a wider range of practices and ideologies.” The exhibition title
uses “fashion” (in the lowercase) to signal “a more reflective, … creative process
that is not determined solely by commerce, the market, and trends.” According
to information provided by the museum, the participants in the exhibition “call
into question the state of Fashion (in the uppercase) and challenge some of
its main constructs, including the myth of the individual star designer, short-
lived and commodity-driven products, gendered dressing, ideal bodies, and
waste.”22 Utopian Bodies—Fashion Looks Forward, curated by Sofia Hedman
and Serge Martynov, at Liljevalchs, Sweden, is another recent exhibition with an
excellent catalog, which identifies key issues, including sustainability, change,
technology, and craft, as well as more intangible ideas, such as community,
resistance, memory, gender identity, love, and utopia. The exhibition and book
explore “fashion’s possibilities and human creativity,” asking: “How can fashion
be harnessed to create a better future?”23
In conclusion, it may be useful to remember that fashion is not only an
economic and material entity but also a cultural and symbolic one. Long
dismissed as superficial, fashion is, in fact, profoundly linked to our sense of
individuality—and even our humanity. To enhance the symbolic value of fashion,
or to use fashion to make a better future, it is necessary to foster an environment
within which everyone’s creativity can flourish. Finally, it is important to remember
that fashion is not just about clothes, but about new ways of seeing and thinking.
 2
TIME AND MEMORY
Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

Fashion has always had problems with origins, starting with the beginnings
of clothing itself, with the transition from bodily covering to dress. This is a
transmutation that is linguistic in structure, analogous to the mythic transition from
speech to language, or from raw to cooked. Clothing holds a special place within
the linguistic conscience of civilization, since it comes into being “as such”—after
the Fall, after leaving paradise—where it is a signifier of shame and lack. Clothing
both covers and compensates what it is we “truly” and “only” have. From the
beginning, then, fashion and dress are haunted by an end, namely the end of
a particular condition, a state of being and consciousness, that subsequently
necessitated clothing. Fashion is haunted by prurience, shame, and insecurity.
As Hegel states in his Lectures on Aesthetics, “it is the feeling of modesty
(Schamhaftigkeit) that drives man to cover himself with clothes.” It is thus “the
beginning of anger over something that ought not to be.”1 Since these can never
be fully satisfied, fashion lives on endlessly in the chain of fetishes.
The relationship of fashion and ghosts can also be examined in a different
way. The original piece in haute couture appears always already as a double
or triple, modeled and represented before it is individually owned. This means
that from the very outset the wearer is effectively a specter or revenant (from the
French revenir, to come again or come back). In contemplating the contemporary
polemic of the so-called End of Fashion, we might arrive at the conclusion that
any suggestion of the end of fashion leads us not to an outermost abyss, but to
an insight into fashion’s very ontology. For as it is often said of fashion, it is over
once it has arrived. But further still, the arrival is already marked by a pre-arrival
(the inspiration, the model, the representation), which means that the presence
of fashion in the form of this arrival is as a phantom, a phantom that is complicit
in fashion as phantasy, an active and material constituent in the construction of
the way the world is apprehended and understood. Perhaps fashion’s “life,” that
is, the period before its supposed death, is the great phantasy of fashion before
it came to grips with its inner nature and truth, a life that had to be undergone
20 THE END OF FASHION

to facilitate the more robust state of death. This “death” of fashion has aligned
to the heroic afterlife in the wake of Nietzsche’s “last man,” or Dostoyevsky’s
gnomic statement that “God is dead, now everything is permitted.”
The philosophical terminology of this chapter draws heavily from Jacques
Derrida’s later work, particularly his essays on Marx, under the title Specters of
Marx ([1993] 1994). Here Derrida asks where the “true” Marx resides: there is
the historic Marx, the Marx who lived, there are his interpreters and those who
devised new ideas under his aegis, while there are also differentiated variety
of “Marxisms” in both theory and practice. And, whether or not communism
of one or another state can be called Marxism is all a matter of position and
rhetoric. As such, Marx for Derrida lives on in a multiplicity of forms2; Marx is also
a metonym—if not the name for a theoretical artifact—for humanist meliorism,
economic fairness, and ultimately the messianic wish for a better future. But
Marx’s continued presence was also confirmed by the pervasive rhetoric at the
end of the twentieth century of his death.
This paradox is explored in an important passage early in Derrida’s book.
Writing at a time when the eruptions of Perestroika were still fresh, Derrida
discusses the perceived end of the revolutionary age and turning away from the
“old Europe,” which gives way to a kind of pen-cultural euphoria. “The dominant
discourse,” states Derrida, “often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form
that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work.”3
Following the “incantatory” proclamations of “Marxism is dead, communism is
dead,” and so on is the new refrain: “long live capitalism, long live the market,
here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism.”4 Yet the transition, as
Derrida argues, is far from simple and clouds a more preponderant state of affairs.
For “never, never in history, has the horizon of the things whose survival is being
celebrated (namely, all the old models of the capitalist and liberal world) been as
dark, threatening and threatened. And never more ‘historic’, by which we mean
inscribed in an absolutely novel moment of a process that is nonetheless subject
to the laws of iterability.”5 The “old” laws and means that have been jettisoned
thus re-arise (are the revenants) in different clothing, but requiring many of the
old responses and diagnoses of the concepts that they jettisoned. For instance,
the world of technology, language, and communication of the mass media was
no better presaged by Marx himself. The “historicity” of contemporary society
and its politics are precisely the way it seeks not only to mine history to prop up
its legitimacy but also to find direction. (This need to draw from the past is also
invoked by Derrida in the multiple uses of the term “debt.”)6 History has never
been so present yet so structureless. And it is this very lack of structure that
we fear, since “Marx” is the name for a structure. Hence, the more we seek to
invoke alternatives to him while intoning his death, the more we reveal the extent
to which he is mourned.7 It is in repudiating him that he rises as a ghost to haunt
the new world order, which is a mildly organized disorder.
TIME AND MEMORY 21

Now to translate this to the present notion of the “hauntology” of fashion.

Strictly speaking, contemporary fashion as a historical phenomenon can be
traced back to the industrial revolution along with the democratization of luxury
when the acceleration of time was triggered by industrialization and consumption.
Fashion’s birth as haute couture is, ironically, contemporaneous with Marxism,
if only to begin crudely with a series of dates. Marx and Engels’s Communist
Manifesto was published in 1848, A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy in 1859, and the first volume of Capital appeared in 1867. Meanwhile,
in 1858 Charles Frederic Worth opened his fashion house on the rue de la Paix
(not too far from another monument of Baroque revivalism, Charles Garnier’s
Opera House or “Palais Garnier,” began in 1861 and completed in 1875). Two
years later, Princess Pauline von Metternich appeared in court wearing a Worth
dress, which drew the envious attention of the Empress Eugénie. Not long after
Worth had close to exclusive say over all aspects of the Eugénie’s wardrobe,
and the bulk of her entourage; he also clothed numerous celebrities of the time,
including the Australian operatic soprano Dame Nellie Melba. On one hand,
Worth’s clientele were a concentration of the highest elite, who, on the other
hand, were dressed in a sumptuousness that was only matched by the courts of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were no greater heights to go
and after Napoleon III’s spectacular fall, the house of Worth itself lived on for a
little while in its own particular shadow.
Worth’s greatest debt—the term by now is now quite loaded—was to artists
during the heyday of the European oil painting tradition, from the Renaissance
through to the early decades of his own century. His “inspiration” was voracious
and promiscuous, taking from Titian and Bassano to Fragonard, Gainsborough,
and Thomas Lawrence. Perhaps his favorite influence was Rubens’s greatest
pupil van Dyck, whose paintings he plundered, while adding his own finishing
touches and luxury finishes such as gold tuille or mother-of pearl. It was very
much as a result of Worth that the hitherto specialist area of fine art became
a talking point among the upper classes, such that wearers self-consciously
wore not only a Worth “creation” but also the added value of the artists to which
he was indebted. In short, the birth of haute couture is indissociable from the
revenant of identifiable paintings and aesthetic forms, allowing these paintings to
live on, more pervasively and with greater force, if only as facsimiles. By repeating
the image of a dress in a painting, the dress is imbued with a new life, but a life
that is as a shadow of the previous one. It is by repeating something that what
is repeated is rendered original, but also therefore distant and dead. Moreover,
the lived, performed presentness of the fashion is perpetually haunted by the
past, engendering an imprecise past and future. As Derrida observes that with
appearance of the specter “no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living
past or a living future.”8 And although fashion is always past, its ghosts in terms
of influences, inspirations, homages, and stylistic paradigms persist as ghosts
22 THE END OF FASHION

that as signs in fashion history have a robust life. In Derrida’s words again, “a
ghost never dies, it remains always to come back and to come-back.”9 To gloss
the innumerable subsequent cases of inspiration in fashion history would be an
exercise in alignment and comparison that would soon lose its interest. Instead
we will turn to the notion of the ghost within the garment.

Fashion, depredation, and death

Fashion in modernity in the early twentieth century was very much steeped in
life. While Poiret claimed credit for freeing women from the corset, Patou and
Chanel laid enormous emphasis on activity, sportliness, and mobility. Fabrics
were repurposed—most famously by Chanel, who made a practice of making
once prosaic material chic, such as schmuck jewelry, and most famously her
redeployment of jersey in the name of postwar frugality and affordability (although
she herself noticed how easily it was to get her clients to pay high prices for
garments made of cheap materials). This era of reinvigoration reached a slightly
compromised juncture with Dior’s “New Look,” which despite the name in fact
conjoined the clean lines of modernism with the constraints of an earlier era. In
the first half of the twentieth century, clothing played a key role in shaping the
utopian dreams of art and society. Bauhaus principles of functionality held for
furniture and housing implements as it did for dress.
The early decades of the twentieth century, which was a fertile period for
collaborations between artists and designers—Schiaparelli and Dalì, Chanel’s
work alongside artists like Picasso with the Ballets Russes, are oft-cited
examples—also witnessed artists making forays into clothing design. Avant-
garde artists such as Giacomo Balla and Alexander Rodchenko designed
clothing that was unmistakably futuristic. These garments, real or unrealized, were
utopian with little regard for the past. Under the aegis of Russian Constructivism,
Rodchenko’s designs were intended as a fusion of Constructivist formalism and
everyday life, the higher ideals of art made available to the proletariat. Alas, their
success was limited to say the least. While modern and modernist designs had
little regard for the past, it was, however, precisely because of their unfulfilled
(failed) ambitions that they ushered in some sense of an ending. After the
Second World War, what was new would always be understood in terms of the
inevitable, and interminable newness inscribed within the fashion industry, but
the newness was not necessarily philosophical. Even Courrèges’s sci-fi designs
were not ordained for a utopian future rather they were very much “cold war,” a
celebratory sartorial aftereffect of the arms and space-race.
Ironically, the new age of newness returns with garments that look back
again to the past. But such retrospection differed from Worth’s appropriation
from art in a number of ways. For designers in the 1970s, Vivienne Westwood
TIME AND MEMORY 23

and Rei Kawakubo were the most influential in introducing history to the
very fabric and material of clothing. Westwood would begin what would be
her signature practice of alluding to an historic model or example, but her
foundational work with Malcolm McLaren approached clothing in a very lateral
way that no longer placed the newness of the fabric at a premium. By stressing,
tearing, wearing, and tarnishing the fabric, these designers were instrumental
in adding a new value to the perception of quality in clothing, giving a new kind
of material and visual syntax. By reusing materials, or suggesting that a piece
of clothing had had a previous life, Kawakubo and Westwood were effectively
inserting a ghost into the clothing. As opposed to the ghost in the machine,
which gives the machine a greater functionality, the ghost in the garment is the
trace of unreachable and irretrievable events, where the garment is somehow
a residual form of something past. The new garment is a definite term, an ideal
or standard object ready to be inserted into the events of life. The recycled
garment, or the new garment that replicates signs of wear, is from the start a
provisional entity in which the present state of wear is haunted by implications
of a better past, that of the time before wear and before the garment had to
bear the burden of being unique. For to be unique is either to be an artifact
or to have the signs of use. The latter form of uniqueness is not particularly
auspicious, just bearing the irregularities wrought from the passage of everyday
life, the way that teeth are unique, or the irregularities on the surface of the skin.
It is this element of the quotidian and even the indifferent that lends itself to the
refrain, “fashion is dead, long live fashion,” since the language of repurposed
clothing affords fashion with an afterlife.
Death and decay are familiar themes in contemporary fashion practice and
are often found in the work of conceptual and experimental designers such as
Martin Margiela and Hussien Chalayan. Margiela’s reuse of old garments that
he unpicks at the seams and reworks into new arrangements with cut out darts
and dyes are a vestige of historical resonances containing the revenants of past
memories and lives. As Caroline Evans observes,

Margiela transformations of “abject” materials in the world of high fashion

mark him outa s a kind of golden dustman or ragpicker, recalling Baudelaire’s
analogy between the Parisian ragpicker and the poet and his poem “Le Vin
des chiffonniers” (The Ragpickers; Wine). Like Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century
poet-ragpicker who, although marginal to the industrial process … recovered
cultural refuse for exchange value, Margiela scavenged and revitalized
moribund material and turned rubbish back into the commodity form.10

Margiela was re-newing clothing and drawing attention to the contemporary

concept of “disposable fashion.” Equally these designs were a metaphor for
modernisms throwaway culture and the transience of time.
24 THE END OF FASHION

Margiela’s preoccupation with the past resurfaces in his 1997 exhibition,

9/4/1615 at the Museum Bojimans, Rotterdam, where garments treated with
live bacteria and mould were then displayed on mannequins. Margiela’s intention
is to draw attention to the fashion cycle process and its preoccupation with
the constant death and rebirth of new styles. The revenant appears, like Walter
Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” to signal the destruction of the past and the passing
of time in the storm of progress. And, yet for Hussien Chalayan’s moulded dresses
sculptured in resin (Ventriloquy, Spring/Summer 2000–2001), the ghost of time
is arrested in the materiality of the resin. These are signal examples of the way
in which designers have often turned to death and transgression to explore the
limits and excesses of corporeality in their attempts to foreground the provocative
power and role of clothing as a vehicle to understanding contemporary issues
of cultural anxiety.
Modernist clothing denied the past by turning to the future, or assumed a
neutral, default position whence the garment came, and understood clothing as
smoothly integrated into the composite flow of life. By contrast, the past evoked
in the clothing of designers like Kawakubo or Margiela is postmodern inasmuch
as they consciously evoke the past and seek to reconsider and reconfigure
it. Using terms borrowed from literary and cultural theory, their approach and
philosophy of clothing is historicist, or rather “new historicist.” As Brook Thomas
contends, “One measure of a new historicism might be, then, the extent to which
it risks experimenting with new forms of narrating the past.”11 Thomas is writing
from a literary perspective, yet his conclusions prove to be enormously useful
for understanding new historicism in clothing. As he continues: “To pose the
question this way is to identify two strains of the new historicism. One tries to
offer new narrative structures to present the past. The other retains traditional
narrative structures but offers new voices from which to tell the past.”12 “New
narrative structures” is analogous to repurposed clothing, including clothing
made from previous clothing, while the retention of “traditional narrative” offering
“new voices” is the garment modified by stress and wear which impose different
meanings from the ones of the untouched original garment.
Even when the original garment is the stressed, marred garment, it resides
within the garment’s syntax, a putatively usullied and ideal origin, otherwise the
aesthetic of stressing would cease to have much meaning or effect. This creation
of a fiction around the garment, or within the garment, has telling consequences.
For, bracingly and profoundly, the practice of designing clothing that had the
semblance of wear in effect introduced a language of absent-presence into
clothing: someone had been there before. But unlike secondhand clothing, that
person was from the start a conjuration, a hypothetical and imaginary presence.
This absent-presence begins its life as ghost; ghostliness is woven into the fabric
itself. One is literally invited to wear wreckage, to clothe oneself in memories. These
memories can be fluid and alterable, thereby revealing the inner nature of history
TIME AND MEMORY 25

and memory. Or to put this differently, the end of fashion has been reached before
the garment is even worn, and the wearer returns the clothing to the world. As a
result, the wearer’s subjectivity is displaced to become a revenant, one’s identity
redeployed within the spaces of memory that the garment aggressively exudes.
Like Walter Benjamin’s and Charles Baudelaire’s “rag picker,” the allegorical
figure who finds value in the detritus and is the essence of consumerism, so too
Margiela designs become a metaphor for modernism throwaway culture and
the transience of time. The poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi explored
the power of fashion and its relationship to death when he personified them as
sisters in the Dialogue Between Fashion and Death (1824). “I’m saying that it is
our nature and our custom to keep renovating the world” (Leopardi, 1982, 7–8),
says Fashion to Death, to which Death replies, “then I believe that indeed you
are my sister, and if you want me too, ill hold it more certain than death itself—
without having to prove it with a parish birth certificate” (Leopardi, 1982, 7–8).
“Does fashion die … because it can no longer keep up with the tempo- at least
in certain fields?” (Leopardi, 1982, 7–8). While Walter Benjamin believes “that
fashion mocks death,”13 fashion’s erasure and abolition of the past, argues Jean
Baudrillard, “comprises of [the] death and the ghostlike resurrection of forms.”14
For Baudrillard is convinced that every form of identity is impacted by fashion
because of its very ability to revert all forms to non-origin and reoccurrence. In
other words, the constant repetition and recycling of styles renders fashion as
rétro, because of its abolition of the passé (the past); “the spectral death and
resurrection of forms.”15 Its up-to-dateness and its relevance is not a reference
to the present but to the past, to a dead fashion that presupposes a dead time
of forms: “signs, that by a twist of time, will return [like revenants] to haunt the
present ….Fashion draws from the death and modernity of the déjà vu.”16
An example in this vein that deserves detailed attention is the first collection
that earned Kawakubo widespread critical attention (Spring/Summer 1983),
which spawned the phrase La Mode Destroy, which can figuratively mean both
“fashion of destruction” and “the means of destruction.”17 Called alternatively
an “aesthetic of poverty” and “deconstructivist fashion,” this was an approach
to fashion that placed perturbations and imperfections at a premium: torn and
stressed material, asymmetry, superfluity (an extra sleeve), haphazard make-
up—in short anything that could register as incongruent to the body or to
conventional beauty. This aesthetic was the equivalent of the “freak” aesthetic
in the manner of the maligned and banned film Freaks by director Tod Browning
(1932, a year after he directed Dracula). Kawakubo’s aesthetic of deformity
occupies a very particular place in fashion, and in late twentieth-century culture
more generally, for like Browning’s film—despite accusations of exploitation—it is
neither a self-conscious ploy to “give voice to the Other” nor simply a masochistic
game of ugliness. Rather, it operates more in the direction of Degas’s images of
washerwomen which in their time were considered ugly and reprobate images.
26 THE END OF FASHION

Yet Degas’s actual intent was to find gestures and silhouettes that were outside
of the conventional classical repertoire, the repertoire on which he had been
slavishly schooled as an art student under the great academician Ingres. Similarly,
Kawakubo’s collection is the expression of impatience with conventional fashion
silhouettes, deeming them exhausted believing what can be considered chic can
be stretched and ultimately modified.
Another important component for evaluating Kawakubo’s approach that also
enriches the understanding of the end of fashion is that of status of art and culture
after the Holocaust of the Second World War. Kawakubo is assertive to the point
of aggressively reticent about connections between her work and the nuclear
cataclysms and Horishima and Nagasaki, but her work nonetheless invites them.
In his much-quoted essay, “Culture Criticism and Society,” Theodor Adorno makes
the provocative gnomic statement, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
“Cultural criticism,” Adorno explains, is faced with the “dialectic of culture and
barbarism” such that “critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as
long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.”18 These are multivalent
statements that have been lavished with a considerable amount of subsequent
critical attention. One of the main meanings that can be distilled from it is that
after an event such as Auschwitz—which stands for the name of a place but is
also a metonym for systematic atrocity and mass killing, just as Hiroshima is the
name of a city but is also the metonym for nuclear holocaust—earlier approaches
and understandings of what can be considered beautiful can no longer apply. For
beauty has lost its innocence and disinterested critical or aesthetic contemplation
can no longer be taken for granted as such. Kawakubo’s tendency to distort
and subvert the shape of the body and the garment can be read against such
a position, as her designs continually give life to a hidden, maybe monstrous
element to contemporary life that is the residue of atrocity, affliction, and trauma.
In the contemporary sense of the term, conventional beauty is to be distrusted if
taken on its own and as a given, as it exists at the expense of what it dominates
and represses. Kawakubo is not implying that “ugly is beautiful,” far from it. Rather
her aesthetic gives rise to an awareness that beauty sits among a broader reservoir
of terms, just as the fabric of life is full of exceptions to habitual expectations.
Kawakubo’s wariness to affix holocaust references to her work is
understandable as such corollaries are apt to be expanded at the expense of
what else she sets out to achieve. To be sure, as Yuniya Kawamura observes,
Kawakubo’s “controversial collections include an apparent anti-war statement,
when army uniforms were deconstructed and remade; clothes misinterpreted
as a reference to Auschwitz uniforms, and in the early 1980s, knitwear with
deliberately gaping holes that were dubbed ‘Swiss cheese’ sweaters.”19 In many
respects, Kawakubo plays significant role in fashion and memorialization, and
the way in which past as series of traces and signifiers can be melded into the
garment and worn on the body.
TIME AND MEMORY 27

After the death/Post-death

Much has been written of how clothing acts as a vessel that contains memories
embedded in its fabric. Stains, shapes, and sweat that belong to the wearers
past but are contained in the present. Cloth preserves the past as evidence of
human interaction and is a powerful trigger for social and cultural memories—
the revenant of times past that returns to haunt the living. The power of clothing
to invoke emotions and memories is captured in a scene from Ang Lee’s
film Brokeback Mountain (2005). Based on Annie Proulx’s short story of the
same name, the film narrates a tale of desire and forbidden love between two
cowboys, Ennis Del Mar (played by Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (played by
Jake Gyllenhaal) during a summer spent on Brokeback Mountain in the Wyoming
ranges. On hearing of Jack’s untimely death (the result of a homophobic attack),
Ennis visits Jack’s parents with the offer to take Jake’s ashes back to the
mountain. Jacks parents refuse, preferring to have Jake interned in the family
plot and instead they permit Ennis to see Jake’s childhood bedroom, where he
finds his bloodstained shirt hanging on a nail. Underneath his shirt was another
shirt belonging to Jack, also stained from the fight they had on the mountain that
summer. It was the shirt that he thought he had lost on Brokeback Mountain
instead, Jack stole the shirt as a memento of the time that they spent together.

[Ennis] pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his
mouth and nose hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty
sweet stink of Jack, but there was no real scent only the memory of it, the
imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what
he held in his hands.20

Ennis and Jack’s shirts become mediators of memories that highlight the passing
of time. Like an image or a text, the shirts are painfully isolated vestiges of that
idyllic summer. Surviving in memory like revenants long after Jake and Ennis
relationship has ended. In a different, but similar context, Susan Sontag observes
with regard to photographs that continue to represent people and places long
after they have changed or perished; “all photographs testify to time’s relentless
melt.”21 The same can be said for garments.
In her essay “Memory and Objects,” Juliette Ash writes that clothes serve
as memory objects that remind one of the people whose body once wore the
garment and the associative memories belonging to that absent person. She
writes that

the associative memory of an absent person, stimulated through the viewing

or sensing of an item of clothing requires us to be imaginative about the past,
about the object or person when they did exist.22
28 THE END OF FASHION

Not only do garments function as signifiers of loss and absence, they also serve
as a representation of death and as a reminder of the past that is lost. Garments
in this sense become a substitute, a surrogate, or consolation for something
that is missing. In death clothes are considered a memory material that function
as a receptacle for the lived body by virtue of the garments close proximity to a
breathing body. Now absent, they contain the revenant of the person that once
resided in its folds. In Adorned in Dreams, Elizabeth Wilson begins her seminal
study on contemporary fashion among the eerie and disembodied garments in
a costume museum. Wilson writes that the “deserted gallery seems haunted
[as the] living observer moves, with a sense of mounting panic, through a world
of the dead.”23 In the beginning of his essay “Valéry Proust Museum,” Theodor
Adorno insists that the “museal” [“museumlike”] produces discomfort and
contains overtones of unpleasantness. This is because it “describes objects to
which the observer no longer has a relationship and which are in the process of
dying.”24 For Adorno, the objects collected in a museum are preserved to mark a
historical moment, rather than to serve the needs of the present. “Dead visions,”
he writes, “are entombed there.”25 Much like Walter Benjamin, who eloquently
argues in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibiliy”
(1935), that works of art contain an aura of authenticity, that even the most
perfect reproduction will lack the presence of a particular time and space that
is unique to the artwork. Much like photography’s ability to make a historical
claim by preserving the past by means of the captured image, fashion preserves
the past in its constant deferral. Like objects in a museum, artworks in a gallery
are testaments to a historical moment that is no longer in the present. Making
an analogy (not just phonetically) between museums and mausoleums, Adorno
implies that museums, much like mausoleums, are places where objects are
saved out of time. Borrowing Adorno’s analogy, Elizabeth Wilson writes that
garments of the past are like “congealed memories” suspended like specters
in the “mausoleums of culture,” vestiges of a life once lived but now long gone.
“Once they inhabited the noisy streets the crowded theatres, the glittering soirées
of the social scene. Now like ghosts in limbo they wait poignantly for the music
to begin again.”26
Similarly, Charles Dickens, who Wilson quotes at great length, wrote about
the ghost-like qualities of embedded in discarded clothing. In “Meditations in
Monmouth Street,” Dickens recalls the secondhand clothing market that once
existed on Monmouth Street in London with its “extensive groves of the illustrious
dead.”27 For Wilson, the anxiety and uneasiness experienced by viewing clothes
in a museum (or in a secondhand store) is largely because dress, as an embodied
object, gives social meaning to a biological body. Dress marks the lived body
into the social world, leaving its imprint via discourses of class, age, gender,
sexuality, and so on. It speaks of the wearer’s identity forging their existence,
their place, and position in systems of communication and the order of things. As
TIME AND MEMORY 29

Wilson eloquently puts it, “dress is the final frontier between the self and the not-
self.” Its removal from a “breathing” living body is akin to death, for the garment
no longer fulfills its role in the present but is cast into the realm of the symbolic.
When Marc Jacob’s was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times as to whether
he would consider a retrospective exhibition of his work in a gallery or museum,
he replied that

fashion is only valid if it is lived in and worn. I make clothes and bags and
shoes for people to use, not to put up on a wall and look at. I think clothes in a
museum are complete death. I have seen exhibitions of the clothes of Jackie
Kennedy and I am not interested in her wardrobe. I am interested in the life
and the women who wore those clothes.28

Baudrillard argues that is by no coincidence that the development of

contemporary fashion is aligned with that of the museum. Defined as a “single
cultural super-institution,” the museum (much like fashion) is the archive of
signs gone askew, the “gold-standard of culture” where artifacts (and styles)
are gathered and stockpiled in a temporal reserve. The temporality of works
is gathered and displayed as signs of a “perfect” past that is never actual but
announces fashions ephemerality.29
Let us return to Derrida, not to his writing on Marx, but to his concept of
the archive, which he developed in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
(1995). For Derrida, the concept of the archive is twofold; it marks the place
of commencement (arché) as the place where “men and gods command,”
or as “the place in which order is given.”30 As the place of commencement
“there where things commence—physical, historical, or ontological principle,”31
the archive is ambivalent but its implication is closely tied to the production
of knowledge. Derived from the Greek, arkhein means the house or address
of senior magistrates, the archons, those who order over and interpreted the
archive. The archons, Derrida writes,

were considered to possess the right to make or represent the law. On

account of their publically recognized authority, it is their home, in that place
which is their home …. That official documents are filed. The archons are the
first of all the documents guardians. … They have the power to interpret the
archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect speak the
law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law.

In other words, the archive houses traces of the past that are considered or
deemed of value by those chosen as the “legitimate hermeneutic authority”32
to preserve and interpret documents as historical evidence. These documents,
“which are not always discursive writings,”33 are subjective constructions with
30 THE END OF FASHION

their own histories of negotiations and contestations over knowledge and power.
Derrida contends that this archontic power gathers the functions of compilation,
identification, and classification and consigns (to deposit) into a place; a container
or depository of signs. This gathering of signs is coordinated into a single corpus;
a system in which all the elements create an ideal configuration that is worthy
of preserving. No element can function as a sign without referring to another
element. This interweaving of elements, what Derrida calls textile, produces a
text only in the transformation of another text. Each new text contains traces
of the past that is always present or absent; in other words, all new forms carry
traces of the ghost of past time and memory. If read in terms of fashion, the
archive’s presence in a brand is twofold; as a corpus of garments selected for its
representational qualities associated with a brands identity and as a system of
representation that builds on historical narratives that efface (not erase) the original
design by coalescing elements of the old garment with the new. Fashion exploits
the past by creating new narratives that are attached to previous narratives and
their representations. These narratives appear embedded in garments of past
collections, technically or conceptually, creating new garments that are grafted
on multiple designs and their representations. Fashion’s capacity to inscribe the
past in a season’s collection and its ability to present the collection as innovative
and original are the bedrock of fashion.

Conclusion
The “end of fashion” is a problem of filiation. Filiation finds itself in historicism, in
the endless troping, quoting, alluding, and implication of the past. This is done by
the designer, or it is done by the consumer—and it is now also done by algorithms
that rhizomatically locate references and similarities to anything, and anywhere.
The problem of filiation also arises in copies and imitations. Shazaming an item
of haute couture can yield numerous results of how to procure items similar to it
at cheaper prices, as well as items that may go well with what has been chosen.
The “end of fashion” is the era of branding where Nike no longer makes sneakers
but places its brand on sneakers produced by third world countries, or where a
fashion brand stands for a company of nameless designers working under his
labels. We are a long way from the unique “creation” as conceived by Worth.
The unique creation in fashion, in light of all the ends we describe, stands like an
uncanny waxwork, a revenant from a time when the demarcations of materiality
and immateriality, of quality and identity were easier to discern. Fashion now
exists in a nanosphere in a state of global flux of multiple representations.
 3
FASHIONSCAPES
Patrizia Calefato

Landscape—that, in fact, is what Paris becomes for the flâneur. Or,

more precisely, the city neatly splits for him into its dialectical poles:
it opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a
room.1

These words by Walter Benjamin symbolically describe the idea of “landscape”

in the city at the end of the eighteenth century, at the very beginning of mass
society, when the new urbanization process transformed European capitals—
especially Paris—into cities of communication, lifestyles, consumption, and
fashion. The landscape was then the space into which the social subject of
the modern city, the flâneur, lived and acted with ease, without any boundaries
between the inside and the outside of his social environment, as if he was in
an open space and in a closed room at the same time. Benjamin’s model of
urban landscape worked until the most part of the twentieth century as the
pivotal place for fashion as social practice, body language, narration of time,
and a means of communication of style. It was in the city that, during the last
century, fashion transformed itself in response to historical processes such as
wars, women’s emancipation, and youth rebellions. Street styles created by the
other prototypical image sketched by Benjamin, “the collective,” were born in the
urban landscape. Benjamin describes the collective in this scenery:

Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally
unquiet, eternally agitated being that—in the space between the building
fronts—experiences, learns, understands, and invents as much as individuals
do within the privacy of their own four walls.2

The first usage of the term “fashionscapes” is by Vicki Karaminas in “Image: Fashionscapes—Towards
an understanding of new media technologies and their impact on contemporary fashion imagery,” in
Fashion and Art, eds. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2012), 177–187.
32 THE END OF FASHION

Between the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century,
this landscape model significantly mutated. Globalization has shattered the
stable hierarchy of center and periphery, the neat distinction between the cities
and non-urbanized areas has faded, the mobility of people has immensely
increased, and the means of communication have become places for social
life. Contemporary landscapes have taken the form of flows: of signs, images,
bodies, as proposed by anthropologist and sociologist Arjun Appadurai’s “global
and cultural flows” model. Fashion is one of the most interesting forms of this
global cultural fluidity. Its “landscapes” are marked by objects and signs, bodies
and images, myths and narrations: these elements reproduce themselves and
move as digital information impulses do, continuously traveling around the world.
In his book Modernity at Large, Appadurai describes his view of the
contemporary world as “a congeries of large-scale interactions” that have
proved to be “of a new order and intensity” in comparison to how they were in
previous times.3 He writes that “the world we live in today is characterized by
a new role for the imagination in the social life.”4 In the definition of the idea of
imagination, different meanings are at play, according to Appadurai: the “old idea
of images, especially mechanical reproduced images (in the Frankfurt School
sense).”5 To this I would add Walter Benjamin’s philosophical interpretation of
the serial reproduction of the work of art and of signs. Then Benedict Anderson’s
“imagined community,” according to which every idea of community postulates
an imaginative act, that is, an ideological network which renders the conception
of it as a bonded human group.6 Finally, there is “the French idea of the imaginary
(imaginaire) as a constructed landscape of collective aspirations, which is no
more and no less real than the collective representations of Emile Durkheim, now
mediated through the complex prism of modern media.”7
Based on these theoretical references, Appadurai’s concept of imagination
is conceived as an active productive force and as a social fact, which can
play a pivotal role in the global cultural interactions of our time. Within such
interactions Appadurai identifies a constant tension between homogenization
and heterogenization.8 In other words, globalization as we know it comprehends
many contrasting tendencies, as in the pair global/local. In the dynamics of
this pair, some cultural practices, such as internet communication, cuisine, or
fashion, show how the complexity of the present is determined.
In the field of internet communication, social networks unveil how Marshall
McLuhan’s global village focuses—at the same time and contradictorily—both
on the “global” perspective of a network of unknown friends located on the
entire planet and on the “village,” a familiar, friendly, “neotribal” dimension of
communication itself.9 In the field of cuisine, adjectives such as “ethnic,” “exotic,”
“national” coexist and feed off the homogenization and widespread knowledge
of habits and cooking fashions; at the same time the latter praise more and
more low food miles, DIY, urban agriculture, farmers’ markets as cultural and
FASHIONSCAPES 33

political practices for common wellness and sustainability. In the field of fashion,
it is shown how, mostly in the last two decades, its economic and cultural
dimension, represented by big commercial and luxury brands and by fast
fashion multinationals, must relate to local, idiolectal, and personal characters
of clothing, which are extensively expressed by day-to-day styles, domestic
laboratories for clothes and accessories, and also unpredictable exchanges,
fusions, and translations of fashion signs circulating in the social imagery through
digital media.
Appadurai categorized the fundamental disjunctions of culture, economy,
and politics of our world into five dimensions of the “global cultural flows”:
ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes.10
Each of these dimensions, whose nature is explained by the root preceding the
suffix “-scape,” describes our world as a fluid landscape, constantly moving.
Appadurai writes that it shows “the multiple worlds that are constituted by the
historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread on the globe.”11
Resonating with Appadurai’s landscapes, I am inserting the idea of
fashionscapes—with which I refer to the stratified, hybrid, multiple, and fluid
disposition of imageries of the clothed body of our time. Building on Vicki
Karaminas’s coinage, fashionscapes12 set up fashion nowadays according to
new processes that are different from Simmel’s classical model—imitation and
distinction, from upper to lower classes—and from the late twentieth-century
models, based on the relationship between institutional fashion and subcultures,
summarized by the phrase “from the streets to the runway.” The idea of mass
moda, which I introduced in 1996, and again in 2007 in Fashion Theory,
describes how those models changed at the end of the twentieth century by
confronting to “a variety of tensions, meanings and values—not only in relation to
the clothing dimension” of fashion.13 This complexity has its core in the body and
its way of being into the world, of its representations, its masking, its disguises,
its measures, and its conflicts with stereotypes and myths.
Even the mass moda model seems outdated by the opening of new scenarios
that, rooted in fashion or their surroundings, translate fashion beyond itself. The
metaphor of fashionscapes can easily describe this mutation, according to which
fashion is firmly part of the contemporary global cultural flows. International
fashion studies are perfectly aware of this transformation, as the December 2016
conference The End of Fashion demonstrates.14 The validity of the claim of the
“end of fashion” rests on four fundamental events. First, the modes of production,
communication, and consumption of the fashion system and the resulting
relationship of fashion and time in the wake of the diffusion of internet and digital
media. Second, the already mentioned collapsing of boundaries between global
and local. Third, the increasing permeability of the division between fashion and
art. And fourth, the dissolution and growing fluidity of the idea of identity as related
to clothing. This chapter looks at fashionscapes not only as spatial vistas but far
34 THE END OF FASHION

more as a temporal complex. It considers that the “ends” can be read in terms
of the way that temporal the palimpsests of fashion—the way a style from the
present bears the imprint of one(s) from the past—have become less discernible.
“Fashionscapes” as I read it later is the refolding of time such that the layers and
lineaments, as in a landscape seen from afar, have become scarcely visible.

The time and the seasons of fashion

The relationship of fashion and time has already been largely analyzed by the
classic authors of fashion, from Simmel to Benjamin. In this paper I would like to
treat the subject according to two fundamental and complementary branches:
the time of production and the time of patina. I begin with the former. When
Roland Barthes analyzes the title of a fashion magazine piece entitled Blue is in
Fashion This Year, he highlights that fashion is mostly a system of signification.15
The style of magazines is the model for the communication and reproduction of
the “actual” fashion system of modernity, and the proof of this is represented
by how the time of fashion, as social time, is built through that style. Barthes
picks some titles and captions containing other phrases such as “the accessory
makes springtime,” or “for a tea-time dance at Juan-les-Pins a lavish, straight
neckline.”16 That these are “true,” that there actually is a relationship between
the shape of a neckline and the occasion of a dance in that precise place,
for example, cannot be certified by an alleged objective truth. Yet there is a
semantic relationship represented by the magazine as a natural or utilitarian fact
of fashion signs, along the line of the most clear tradition of semiotic construction
of contemporary mythography. The relationship between these signs and time
must seem natural, always given, and also functional, because the magazine
says so, and more extensively, it is a construct of fashion discourse.
Fashion discourse’s construct of time defines the time of its production both
materially and symbolically. The so-called seasonal quality of fashion was in
fact invented during the passage from the sumptuary law society to the society
of fashion as Appadurai describes the transformation of societies dominated
by a selection and a limitation of consumption into the actual society of mass
consumption.17 Production, exchange, and consumption of fashion have been
dictated—exclusively until the end of the last century, less drastically nowadays—
by “seasons,” called “Autumn/Winter” and “Spring/Summer,” to which still
correspond events such as fashion shows and exhibitions, commercial practices
such as orders, clearances, opening or closures of stores, social practices such
as shopping, end of season sales, holiday gifts. There are many examples of
occasions in which fashion literally creates time and space. From another point
of view, it is created through imagined times and spaces: the evening or day
dress, the cocktail dress, holiday fashion, walking shoes, or work bags.
FASHIONSCAPES 35

These models of signification are now different indeed: on no account would

any fashion report sound so old fashioned, giving a normative function of time
to one more or one less ribbon on a hat, in our age of layered clothing. Wearing
layered clothes, from the lightest to the thickest, is a way to be apt to confront
any situation. It is a way of dealing with occasions such as travel to places with
variable weather, such as hiking on mountains, where in the summer the weather
can change from suffocating heat to very cold, from sun to rain, from low to
high pressure. Ironically, this is a paradox in our age of real-time online weather
reports, which being based on satellite data and refined algorithms are actually
vulnerable.
Of course fashion nowadays is completely into the idea of layering: for
many years everyday clothing brands sold matching items, from tank tops to
windbreakers, vests, and lightweight sweaters, to be worn one on top of the
other. Trousers that can become bermudas by unzipping the over-the-knee zip
are not only items of outerwear anymore, but are part of urban street style, while
keeping an eye on the occasion and the rules imposed by the environment. The
urban landscape also becomes the scenery of a travel when being out of the
house for an entire day faces the risks of any change of the weather.
This condition is not only an issue for meteorologists and fashion designers,
but also for the artists whose work focuses on the relationship between the
body, its clothing, and the setting it inhabits: from the dress to the house, from
the city to the country. In the nineties, as an example, British artist-designer
Lucy Orta designed a collection named Refugee Wear, inspired by the living
conditions of the homeless and the outcasts living on the streets: her shelter–
dresses become almost houses, a domestic and public space, a frontier object
interfacing the skin and the street. The clothing item, with this particular concept
behind it, shields the wearer from adverse climatic conditions and brings back
clothing to one of its primary functions, protection, which has been obliterated by
fashion and luxury in favor of the symbolic function of social distinction.
The 2010 Hamburg Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe exhibition named
Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster was based on the subject of the
relationship between human body and climate change. Artists and designers
answered the question “How do we want to live in the future?” by creating
protective objects—capsules, indeed—that could preserve human life despite
the potential environmental and climatic disasters. These artistic metaphors
combine design, architecture, geo-engineering, and fashion. The capsules
incorporate the vital parts and wrap the bodies both as an armor and as a refuge:
inside them it is possible fertilizing the soil with sea water and diffusing sulfides in
the atmosphere, sheltering endangered plants, or distorting background noises.
The concept of capsules was developed in many projects of the twentieth
century—such as the capsules of space missions—but nowadays it takes new
meanings: the need for protection is not due to the unpredictability of space
36 THE END OF FASHION

travel, but to the earthly travel in our everyday locations, where serious and
precise responsibilities decree climate change and its effects on human beings
and life in general. Climate is not in fact a “neutral” variable, but it has a direct
relationship with social inequality. These are augmented by disasters, or better,
often disasters are related to social forms, to exploitation of the environment, on
the ground and on the water, and to fundamental common goods.
Travel and weather therefore meet in reality and in metaphor, sealing their
bond in the name of the uncertainty and signature of the present. Therefore,
one must be prepared: clothing, in a very ample sense, is also a life-saving
“capsule.” So, the habit of layering clothes could be seen from a theoretical point
of view. The actual and metaphorical uniforms we wear make us fixated and
stereotypical. On the contrary, wearing many clothes that enable us to cover
or uncover ourselves, depending on the weather changes, could represent the
symbol of a condition of flexibility, of prudent adaptability, of willingness to accept
any of the circumstances, while never becoming capricious.
If, on the one hand, the succession of “Spring/Summer” and “Autumn/Winter”
still pace the production, the market, and the consumption of clothing; on the other
hand, we can report a bizarre randomness in the relationship between weather
and clothing. The practice of layering, or the rise of new synthetic materials,
has nowadays created an ideal of “clothing for all seasons,” not in the sense
of clothing that can be equally worn in the summer heat and in the below zero
cold, but as an abstraction, as a condition of possibility of breaking the traditional
rules of meteorology. This abstraction is often possible in an imaginative act, as
the one we accomplish when, under our own gaze or even on our own legs,
a pair of trousers known by the retro name of “Capri pants,” as in the sixties,
stopped referring only to icy lemonades, bare feet, and sunny piazzas, and
became recontextualized in a rainy autumnal urban environment. The textiles are
warmer, and wool, fleece, pile protectively veil the legs down to the knees or just
under them. Bright colors and chequered patterns are tight on the thighs or
slide wide onto them. The “Capri” model explodes into the more traditional
“knickerbockers,” and, contrastively, the bell-shaped line models of the more
classic jeans. Fashion immediately grasps the slang and re-elaborates it: knee-
length trousers under imperial laden or flashy fur coats, the revival of the “skorts”
from the seventies, “plus fours” variations. The military or mountain universes
provide the models to copy, substituting the traditional summer icons whose
prototypes can be traced in Brigitte Bardot and Jackie Kennedy on the paved
streets of Cote D’Azur or the actual Capri. The clothing therefore dissolves the
limits of the physical seasonality and becomes the symbol of a narration, and a
virtualization of both weather and time.
Forms of time in fashion have noticeably changed since the first years of the
twenty-first century. From the productive point of view, the rise of fast-fashion
has dismantled, even if not completely, the old pace of seasonality because the
FASHIONSCAPES 37

productive chain is based not on the long terms of prêt-à-porter anymore but on
the fast needs of consumption. From the communicative point of view, traditional
media is now accompanied by new ones, from blogs to TV series, which
sometimes completely substitute them, other times they complement them.
The narrative aspect, the first person, and the individualization of consumption
act more strongly nowadays than in the past in the construction of fashion
discourses. Blogs have partially taken the place of magazines, e-commerce
is becoming more and more captivating and customer-friendly, the practice
of storytelling is more and more common in marketing and commercials, and
fashion is integrated in other cultural and communicative systems.
These transformations concern what I call the time of patina. Appadurai
writes that the patina is “that property of goods by which their age becomes a
key index of their high status.”18 It is a regular alteration of time on the surface
of things, lasting and becoming the place where the true, worn out, endured
identity of the objects covered by it is gradually inscribed. Fashion lives in and
lives off of the time of the patina, drawing inspiration and nourishment from
intrusions in the past which help it to revive more ages at the same time on
bodies, through the dresses and the accessories that represent them. The patina
is an element of symbolic enhancement of value: for example, it is said that one
of the customs of some dandies was the habit of letting a servant wear a new
suit for some time, before wearing it in public. This way the suit developed a
patina on itself, both actual and metaphorical, both as a mark of time and as an
alteration generating the uniqueness of the model.
Nowadays vintage is the most stable and complete expression of the time of
the patina. Originally referring to a practice relating to clothing fashion, the revival
of the past, and its subsequent decontextualization and recontextualization in
the present of its signs, it has become mostly common sense in the many fields
of living. The term “vintage” nowadays usually defines those items of clothing,
of furnishing and generally the taste for things coming from a close past, dating
in a span of half a century or little more. Extending the use of the word, we say
“that person has a vintage vibe,” “that place has a vintage environment,” “that
musician has a vintage style,” in order to refer to situations in which the close
antique is hinted at or actually revived. It can be a “space” mini-dress, as those
designed by Courrèges and Paco Rabanne in the sixties, a seventies’ punk-
inspired leather jacket, a big hairstyle as Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan
(Susan Seidelman, dir. 1985), or a square-designed car from the eighties. Today
we recognize these signs as “evergreens,” but there was a time in their history
when their popularity was in fast decline and they were forgotten, sometimes
even with a hint of disgust. Decades later, those signs come back into fashion:
newer generations discover them as if they were appearing for the first time in
the world of images and communication; the older generation appreciates their
revival with mild sentimentality.
38 THE END OF FASHION

The first field involved in vintage is clothing, because it is directly related to the
body, skin, the sense of tact, and therefore it has a privileged relationship with all
human senses. However memory and nostalgia are not a sufficient explanation
of the contemporary fascination with the close past. Through the objects, the
images, and the signs of vintage we can enter a historical perspective, we can
relive the experience of time—although short, as in Eric Hobsbawm’s famous
definition of “short twentieth century”—which is seemingly impossible in the
present. We are in fact forced to become accustomed to values such as speed,
multitasking, immediacy, brevity, and sometimes also ubiquity: these values are
not inherently negative, but sometimes they are so pressuring that we have to
be superficial, ordinary, and we lose the sense of time and space. The time of
the patina, otherwise, gives us back the best of the past; it retrieves the aura of
things and invites us to pursue practices of reuse and recycling of objects and
signs.

The museums of fashion

A logical step in the discussion of fashion and time is to turn to the artifact, the relic,
and the archive, and where they all conjoin as spectacle, namely the museum.
“Museumization” is a term which we often use with a derogatory connotation:
past its literal meaning, which simply refers to “display or preservation in, or
as if in, a museum; transformation into or confinement in a museum,” as it is
in the Oxford Dictionary, there is also a further meaning of this word implying
the transformation of an object, an environment, and a social phenomenon into
something lifeless. The underlying concept in this meaning is the antiquarian
attitude toward history, to use Nietzsche’s term, and toward the objects of
the past. It is the concept behind common idioms such as “museum piece,”
meaning something old fashioned, stale, which has not any effect on the present
and, therefore, it better be secluded into moldy rooms!
Despite this common meaning, new concepts of museum are getting more
and more relevant all over the world nowadays, with new museums concerning
not only the art of any time and place, but also the art of tourism, mountain
culture, photography, toys, popular traditions, cinema and, last but not least,
fashion. The museumization of fashion elicits all the ambiguity of the word, as
we have already seen: on the one hand clothing and accessories are considered
worthy of immortality; and this dignifies fashion, its creators, and its system,
making it a proper branch of contemporary art. On the other hand, the clothing,
being museum pieces, lose the vitality that only the contact with a body and with
day-to-day life can give them, so that fashion becomes a universe for fetishists,
more than it already is. To put this in yet another way, they exist essentially as
FASHIONSCAPES 39

vintage items, but denuded of any dynamism. The museums confer a special
status on these objects as being both of time and suspended from it.
In spite of all the debates surrounding the withdrawal of clothing from the
body to the vitrine, fashion exhibitions remain popular and museums are founded
in fashion’s name. For example, the museum of fashion, MoMu, opened its doors
in 2002 in Antwerp, and works as a beacon for the great artists/designers who
studied in that school, based on Martin Margiela’s legacy. And it quickly made
the old diamond trade city a new world capital of clothing culture. Sometimes,
fashion also transforms old museums into progressive and very contemporary
locations, as in the London Victoria and Albert Museum, which has undergone
something of a renaissance since the beginning of the twenty-first century,
thanks to its new fashion and design branches. The fashion museum is, in fact,
not only a place for preservation of objects, but also a place where a virtuous
conjunction of art and the technology of displaying objects-goods inherent to
the fashion system as the production system of the social imagery is put to
test: dresses, bags, photographs, those signs that create the atmosphere of
time. It may be a film, a song, or a literary excerpt ideally linked to an image
of the clothed body; fashion in museums recalls the contemporary mythology,
recreated by the space of the museum itself or else produced as originals. This
is the reason why today it is most common for fashion museums, for example
The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology based in New York, to host
courses in new concepts of museology and museography, linking art and life in
an essential, critical, and innovative way.
It often happens that great traditional museums open their gates to a wider
audience through fashion, gaining new visitors or giving them the opportunity
of learning aspects of lesser-known cultures. Such is the case of the 2011
exhibition of the Beijing National Museum, in Tiananmen Square, named 125
Years of Italian Magnificence, on the history and display of Bulgari jewels, which
was previously hosted at the Rome Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 2009 and at
the Paris Grand Palais in 2010. The derogatory connotation of museums and
culture in general, often considered “useless” expenses to be cut, seems to be
a predominant attitude in the age of radical financial capitalism. Language and
common sense must instead acknowledge the mechanisms of museums into
cultural capital. They are an organic part of mass society, as shown by the long
queues that tourists patiently form outside the most renowned ones throughout
the world. They are affected by the society of the internet, as it is demonstrated
by the smart and constant use of new technologies, from online museums to
video-art apps. No less, they are part of the society of consumption, as it is
proved by the sale of magnets, book, postcards, and gadgets in the museum-
related bookshops. But, above all, museums are an active part of our historical,
anthropological, aesthetic, and human awareness.
40 THE END OF FASHION

Between stories and history

Clothing tells stories, contains passions and memories, builds maps with textiles,
colors, styles, sounds archived in it as a written memory, a mobile writing, which
models the past and foretells and shapes the present and the future. Fashion is
the system which organizes the sense and the social meaning of the dress in the
modern age, and it does that in an intrinsically literary way. Not because it is a
subject of literature, but because its reasons and the tensions which originate it
are made of the same stuff as literature. To begin with, its “aesthetic function” was
theorized in the thirties by anthropologist Pëtr Bogatyrëv (one of the members of
the Prague Linguistic Circle) identifying a hierarchy of functions of the dress—
practical, magical, ritual, and aesthetic—of which the latter is the least functional.
Similarly, the phatic function of language, whose purpose is solely limited to
maintaining the communication channel, was theorized by Roman Jakobson in
Bogatyrëv’s same years and same intellectual context. What is indeed the meaning
of fashion, and moreover of the dress, of the decorations, of the clothing, of the
body, if not only “being in fashion,” stating a volatile pleasure, depending and at
the same time creating the taste as common sense? This principle transforms
cyclically the taste, sometimes even forcing it, but it always acts in the field of the
same unfunctionality and phaticity of signs that is also the foundation of literature.
There are many ways in which dresses, accessories, the objects of fashion,
and the fashion system itself are able to narrate. There are many stories of
dresses, but fashion has a peculiar style of narrating them: it is the tangible
manifestation of how history in itself is not a linear path on a horizontal timeline,
but it proceeds forwards and backwards in leaps. As already mentioned, Walter
Benjamin wrote, in his theses on the philosophy of history, of fashion as a leap
of a tiger (Tigersprung) toward the past. Benjamin writes: “Fashion has a flair
for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s
leap into the past.”19 While we all have to live in modernity, in a never-ending
present in which fashion has a central role, the perspective of the “tiger’s leap”
is the one conceiving fashion as history, as the depth of past into the present.
Clothing narrates by itself, but often it has to interact with other visual systems of
signs, especially with cinema. In cinema the sign–clothing creates a fundamental
narrative unity, acting often at the same level of dialogue or voiceovers. As an
example, Antonella Giannone writes, in Moda e Cinema, about the black and
white film Schindler’s List (1993), where “the uniform clothing marked by the Star
of David is an active part of creating the anonymous mass of Jews deported
and killed by the Nazis, and where, in order to highlight a particular little girl, the
director literally colours her red coat in postproduction.”20 The same coat, in a
later sequence of the film, stands out dramatically in the carriage transporting the
bodies of the prisoners after their passage in the gas chambers, offering us the
implied narration of the horror of the death of the little girl.
FASHIONSCAPES 41

Clothing therefore narrates a history, in the meaning of Historia rerum gestarum,

but is able to do so only through the narration of stories, often involving individual
affections, memories, blurred images, sensation that we carry on ourselves as a
scent or a flavor.

Fashion as cultural translation

The final step in what is a much larger itinerary is that of fashion as cultural
translation. The role of time is critical to any conception of culture, which is
defined according to past events, examples, and images. Culture always exists
as a configuration, a constellation, in which temporal residues are key. The “end
point” with respect to fashion is the endless possibility of translation and re-
adaptation, in which the past is reinvented with that of the present.
By way of example, the Indian film The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra, dir. 2013)
recounts an interesting perspective through which we could reconsider
the time of communication. Actually, it is not a film about fashion, however
fashion is involved in the “beyond fashion” sense of this chapter. For more
than a century, it has been common for Mumbai workers to have their lunches
delivered by dabbawallas, people who, late in the morning, collect lunchboxes
(dabba) containing the meals cooked by housewives (or sometimes by some
restaurants) and deliver them to their recipients, using trains or bicycles to reach
their destinations. Each dabba, a pile of metallic cylindrical containers stacked
one over the other, reaches its recipient using a code of signals, numbers and
colors. The entire process of delivery was studied in 2010 by Harvard Business
School as a case study.21 A number between 4,500 and 5,000 dabbawallas
accomplish every day in Mumbai between 175,000 and 200,000 deliveries; the
margin of error was reported to be one on sixteen million deliveries.22 The film
narrated one of these very unlikely errors. The dabba prepared by Ila, the film’s
protagonist, instead of being delivered to her husband, reached Mr. Fernandes,
a still attractive office worker on his way to retirement; a widower, a misanthrope
who especially despises change. Fernandes immediately acknowledges the
excellent quality of the meal, especially tasteful as opposed to the insipid meals
which he receives from the restaurant. Realizing the mistake, Ila sends a note to
her unknown recipient in one of the containers. This causes the beginning of a
daily correspondence between the two characters, kept by the persistence of
the mistake of the dabbawallas, during which both characters change, develop
mutual feelings and the awareness that will determine some decisive choices in
the lives of both.
Even if the film is set in our times and many of its scenes take place on Sajaan
Fernandes’s open space office, technological media such as computers and
mobile phones are not the primary means of communication. It is central, on the
42 THE END OF FASHION

contrary, to the role of means bound to individual bodies and craftsmanship—

the handwritten notes, Ila’s tasty food, her dialogues with her aunt living upstairs,
whose voice is the only thing we experience of her—or of vintage means of
communication, such as Ila’s radio and her aunt’s audiotapes. Communication is
performed through the smells of Ila’s lunchboxes, almost perceptible in the scenes
of their preparation, the spices and the many ingredients put together by her, until
they arrive on Fernandes’s desk, who, silently, enjoys them. The colors and the
noises of the busy streets of Mumbai have a communicative role, the songs sung
by the children in the streets played by the radio, the chants of dabbawallas in
the evening after work and their pure white clothes. Or on Ila’s husband’s shirt,
which she smells before washing it, realizing that he has been cheating on her.
Communication in this cinematic narration therefore completely relies on the
senses and the body, reclaiming the need for individuality, intimacy with things,
sensoriality, which seems to be completely lost nowadays. Analyzing this film,
Rey Chow highlights the role of the writing voice that, in Ila’s case, has a peculiar
connotation. Chow writes:

What is vocalised on the screen is a message placed not just anywhere but in
a lunchbox. If cooking, as a creative act, is de facto Ila’s voice (albeit a silent
one like many housewives’ domestic labour), the message in the lunchbox is
more precisely a supplement, a communication that is added as an extra or
second voice to her daily culinary performance.23

The relationship between the two protagonists is established by chance, by the

dabba going to someone who was not its presumed recipient. But it was actually
meant for that one person, according to the serendipitous philosophy of life of
Sheikh, the young employee destined to replace Fernandes after his retirement,
with the sentence: “My mother always said that sometimes the wrong train
brings you to the right station.” The events happen, therefore, after an unwanted
chance, according to which, while being headed toward something we err, but
erring we find the right destination.
It is the same way in which the cultural flows influence the world, translating a
way where, when we leave, we do not know where the translation will bring us,
in the sense of bringing something through something else, as the lunchboxes
of Mumbai are transported on bicycles by dabbawallas. And, as in the film, the
translation of cultures interpreted by fashion transfers signs and senses into the
space of imagination. It is not a case that the cinematic metaphor I chose comes
from Indian cinema, belonging neither to Hollywood nor to Bollywood, as the
New York Times critic Anthony O. Scott wrote (2014), it is influenced by themes
of the old Hollywood such as Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop around the Corner
(1940) and Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998). Cinema and fashion reinstate
themselves as forms of cultural translation, as I maintain in my book La moda
oltre la moda [Fashion Beyond Fashion]:
FASHIONSCAPES 43

Cultural translation is based on a sometimes almost automatic or complex

mechanism, through which the signs of a culture migrate into another and are
interpreted, reproduced, utilized, reinvented, cited, mixed, hybridised. Cultural
translation can be the forced transposition of said signs into a stereotype, for
example when a dominant culture absorbs and improperly re-elaborates the
signs of a subordinate or “other” culture; but it can also be—and this is the
meaning I intend to use—the construction of a space of interaction, a “third
term,” in Rey Chow’s words, a third space between cultures.24

As an example, the self-production of clothing all over the world is nowadays

often on mixing forms and inspirations from the past, classics of fashion, and
innovative styles. Moreover, the attention to practices such as recycling and
reusing, and generally the ethical attention toward the production and the times
of fashion highlight issues in which cultural translation also means recognizing
common opportunities in the global world. This disrupts the classic differentiation
which, in the creation itself of fashion as a system of social cohesion, was
established between fashion (Western) and tradition (non-Western), between the
center and the peripheries, between empires and colonies. The clothed body is
not a standardize body, always repeating itself in the name of alleged “traditions”
or the “primordial” traits of cultures: even the clothes which we wrongly consider
more traditional and always the same are regulated by the cycles of fashion and
taste.
On this subject, it is very interesting to analyze the unconscious stereotypes
of a piece in the Giorgio Armani collection of 2011, which was inspired by the
Japanese tradition in the forms, the textiles, and the cut of the dresses: “Paris
runways are strutted by a geisha who is not a geisha, a concept of Japan, a
dream, images imprinted on memory and transferred to the catwalk by Italian
style and the purely European art of couture.”25 The underlying concepts of this
excerpt are: the European models are the expression of an identity opposed
to the “geisha,” while “Japan” represents at most memory or dreams, whose
images inspire the Western designer. The art of couture is completely European—
how could it be otherwise? The style undoubtedly “Italian.” The postcolonial
East is again colonized in the imagery and the language. But are those images
“authentic?” Or are they an orientalist projection, in the double meaning of the
word “projection,” being an external transfer of feelings that the subject refuses
or does not acknowledge as its own, and therefore are attributed to other people
or objects, on the one hand; and the projection of images, as in projecting a film
on the screen, on the other hand?
On the same occasion, Armani declared: “When we draw inspiration from
Japan, the risk is creating clothes that resemble costumes, but I keep far from
folklore, I am still faithful to the European forms.”26 The fixed idea underlying
such sentence is the one counterposing Europe as the place of fashion (and of
44 THE END OF FASHION

modernity) and Japan (and the East) where the traditional clothing is prevalent,
typical of a culture in the sense of “folklore,” always the same from centuries and
immune to modernity. These stereotypes elicit the same discomfort as Arjun
Appadurai expresses toward the term “culture,”27 which sometimes becomes
a term linked to the preservation of what is presumed always the same ad is
actually always changing, instead. This recalls the beautiful David Cronenberg
film M. Butterfly (1993), in which a French diplomat in China is attracted by a local
opera singer, and is so much fixated on his idea of how the “oriental woman” has
to be according to the stereotype, which he has interiorized through Puccini’s
Butterfly, that he does not realize that the woman he loves is actually a man.28
Fashion theory is a complex, varied, and transdisciplinary field of knowledge
that translates the great power of the human body as a creator of not only
unpredictable signs and meanings, but also constraints and stereotypes, the
objectification of the body through fashion and its imagery. The concept of
translation is to be intended both metaphorically and literally, as an inter-cultural
relationship, according to Benjamin’s concept (2002) of translation as a practice
in which language thinks the “unfamiliarity of languages” as its limit, but at the
same time it is the only possibility to achieve its highest and purest form. In this
sense, fashion theory today meets the universe of fashion studies which involves
the material and professional processes of its production and reproduction:
planning, design, communication, industry. Moreover, fashion theory includes
issues such as sustainability, ethics, the relationship between East and West,
between the South and the North of the world, the role of clothing in the creation
of multiple identities, the relationship of the body with different technologies, of
fashion and media, the new cultural and economic of luxury in our age, the
crossing of languages and cultures.

A sort of conclusion: The hill of safety

jackets of Lesbos
During 2015 and in the first months of 2016, the Greek island of Lesbos was a
passage for around half a million migrants and refugees, fleeing by sea mostly
from Syria to Europe. While disembarking, many of them threw away their used
safety jackets, amassing them in a part of the island in a proper black and orange
hill. For many of them the crossing of the Mediterranean was fatal, because
many of those safety jackets were made in clandestine factories in Turkey, with
unsafe and unfit materials. In January 2016 some international nongovernment
organization volunteers created an artistic installation in that location, by
arranging 2,500 safety jackets into a gigantic peace symbol. Nowadays on the
hill of Lesbos thousands of safety jackets are piled, carrying their wearers’ DNA
FASHIONSCAPES 45

on themselves: they are not bomber jackets or parkas, nor trendy leather jackets,
but clothes that recount a passage and the hope for freedom. Filmed by a drone
in the occasion of Pope Francis’s visit to the island, the life jacket hill of Lesbos
is a symbol of the modern condition of the clothed body and of the cultural flows
of which the body is the protagonist.
Translated from the Italian by Sveva Scaramuzzi
 4
PHOTOGRAPHY AND
THE BODY
Olga Vainshtein

Contemporary fashion has increasingly generated theoretical discussions on the

end of fashion and the connection of fashion with postmodernism and post-
postmodernism.1 The mounting transformations inside the fashion system have
led to destabilizing traditional understandings of style and beauty, the rejection
of authorities, new appearance modes that transcend rigid gender categories,
and blurring the distinctions between visibility and illusion. Present-day culture
is particularly marked by what is often called a “postmodern sensibility”: irony,
play, pastiche, and the dominance of the visual over the verbal. This is a world of
playful simulations, quotations, and hints creating a hovering sense of instability,
fluctuation, and indeterminacy. “Let us be witnesses to the unpresentable, let
us activate the differences,”2 wrote Jean-François Lyotard, one of the leading
theorists of postmodernism. In the realm of contemporary fashion, one can
discern a number of “trouble sites” where “undecidability” is at work. This
chapter will examine how Jacques Derrida’s notion of undecidability operates
in the world of fashion and fashion photography, revealing its self-transgression,
and present a detailed analysis of several areas in which the discussions and
conflicts are a significant sign of new stakes being introduced in culture.
Derrida introduced the idea of “undecidability” (L’indécidabilité) to describe
the space of hesitation where opposites merge in a permanent exchange
of attributes. The concept of “undecidability” proved to be one of the useful
working tools for describing the postmodern culture. Using the method of
deconstruction that he popularized, Derrida revealed the hidden contradictions
in numerous philosophical concepts such as friendship, giving, writing, and
speech.3 Derrida read these ideas in such a way as to show how they reveal
condition of undecidability and the need to alter established rules. And indeed,
there are occasional “rips” in the fabric of culture that serve as evidence of a
paradigm shift and the dramatic change in aesthetic and ideological structures.
According to Jack Reynolds,
48 THE END OF FASHION

An undecidable is one of Derrida’s most important attempts to trouble

dualisms, or more accurately, to reveal how they are always already troubled.
An undecidable, and there are many of them in deconstruction (e.g., ghost,
Pharmakon, Hymen, etc.), is something that cannot conform to either polarity
of a dichotomy (e.g., present/absent, cure/poison, and inside/outside in the
above examples).4 For instance, the term “Pharmakon” in Plato’s “Phaedrus”
means both “poison” and “cure” and contains an undecidable contradiction:
“Pharmakon properly consists in a certain inconsistency, a certain impropriety,
this non-identity with itself, always allowing it to be turned against itself.”5

Derrida’s theory has parallels with some directions in contemporary fashion

design: the works of Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela, Dries Van Noten,
Hussein Chalayan, Rei Kawakubo of Commes des Garçons were consistently
labeled “deconstructionist (or deconstructivist) fashion.” “La Mode Destroy” was
a term taken from Kawakubo’s early 1983 Spring/Summer collection, and work
in this mold has been analyzed as approaches to fashion in which the processes
of fabrication and/or outcomes are analogous to the philosophical strategies
of Derrida.6 Destabilizing the fixed meanings in metaphysics was frequently
compared to operations that make experimental garments look “unfinished,”
“asymmetrical,” “worn inside out” or “decomposing.” Caroline Evans has
demonstrated, for instance, how the use of vintage and secondhand fabrics
by Martin Margiela and Hussein Chalayan effectively erases the opposition of
old and new in their designs, thus creating undecidable collisions.7 Similarly,
the work of designer Demna Gvasalia (Vêtements) presents an ironic play with
symbols of pop-culture, mixing high fashion and reconfigured street style, such
as oversized clothes.
New technologies quickly lead to the revealing of potential contradictions and
development of conflicts. It is these trouble sites where a state of “undecidability”
arises, as described by Derrida, the tension between old and new conceptual
structures becomes more acute, and one can notice obvious ruptures caused
by unsettling of long-standing institutes and social norms. The symptoms of
this fertile tension include doubt, distrust, and suspicions concerning visual
credibility, animated debates, and conflict. And this is generally when people
begin to talk about “gaps,” illusions, and doubts.

“How bad Tavi’s bow really was”: Fashion

Bloggers vs. Editors
A powerful sign of the major shifts in the world of fashion is the tension between
fashion bloggers and the editors of glossy magazines, a friction that has been
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BODY 49

occurring in various forms now for several years. One of the first of such events
involved the thirteen-year-old popular fashion blogger, Tavi Gevinson, whose
enormous large pink Stephen Jones hair bow flustered the viewers of a Dior
display in 2010 (Plate 2). “How bad Tavi’s bow really was” was one of numerous
comments from enraged spectators of the show. More recently, a shouting match
erupted in the autumn of 2016, when a group of Vogue editors publicly accused
well-known bloggers of engaging in continuous self-promotion, and wearing
outfits provided by brands as a form of product placement. The insults that were
hurled – “desperate,” “pathetic,” “heralding the death of style,” – represented
serious personal attacks on these bloggers.8 In response to these critics, the
popular bloggers Susie Bubble (Susanna Lau) and Bryanboy accused the “old
guard” from Vogue of wanting only to protect their own “ivory tower,” contending
that the fashion blogosphere is where the principles of democratization and
diversity actually take place (Plate 3). “The fashion establishment don’t want their
circles enlarged and for the ivory tower to remain forever that. Towering and
impenetrable,” tweeted Susie Bubble.9 Also, she noted, “bloggers who wear
paid-for outfits or borrowed clothes are merely doing the more overt equivalent
of that editorial-credit system.”10 These examples make clear that there was an
inherent contradiction between print magazines and new media. The two sides
represented different generations in the fashion world and, more importantly,
fundamentally differing systems of fashion. Whereas the traditional system was
ruled by the glossy magazines and seasonal shows presented six months ahead,
the new system is based on instant broadcasting of fashion shows through video
reporting and live streaming on Instagram and other social networks.
The new system of fashion that has emerged from the digital revolution is largely
centered, in marketing terms, on popular bloggers, who have unprecedented
influence due to their massive numbers of subscribers. If an elite blogger (an
“influencer”)11 has more than half a million subscribers, his or her influence can
be worth a significant amount of money: the value of a single post mentioning a
particular brand is in the range of five figures. Obviously, this approach leads to
limited ability to make independent critical judgments. However, when choosing
an outfit for a photoshoot, an influential blogger is guided not only by the profit
motive but also, and primarily, by a sense of style. Otherwise, the trust of
subscribers may be lost. For subscribers to an Instagram page, their idol is not
merely a guide to the latest fashion, but is the key to an aspirational lifestyle. The
direct personal contact between popular bloggers and their subscribers allows
the former to be an intermediary between the brand and the consumer. This role
is not available to models, whose position makes no allowance for expressions
of personal taste.
The changes in the professional status of fashion bloggers are significant.
Initially, enthusiasts would start a fashion blog to make a name for themselves,
and later find work in the industry proper, but fashion blogging has now become a
50 THE END OF FASHION

profession in and of itself, conferring both prestige and significant money. These
changes are starkly reflected in the new ways of determining who is placed in the
front row at fashion shows. Tradition dictates that the seats of honor in the front
row (the “frow,” as it is known) are given to the editors of glossy magazines, but
now these places are frequently given to the new elite—the celebrity bloggers. It
would seem that the conflict around the “pink bow” problem remains critical as a
sign of democratizing of fashion reporting, and is indicative of the major changes
in the world of fashion.

Undecidability in Photography
Photographs have been retouched for about as long as photography has
existed. The desire to perfect the photograph was surely there from the
beginning, to make it conform to a particular stylistic standard and the taste
of the client. The Countess Castiglione, a legendary beauty and the prototype
for many contemporary models, colored and drew on her own photographs to
maximize their effect. Indeed in the nineteenth century, doctoring of portraits was
practically obligatory. Nadar’s portrait studio in Paris had twenty-six employees,
of whom six worked solely on retouching. As Franz Fiedler, the German portrait
photographer and author, wrote of the end of the nineteenth century, within
forty years of photography’s existence, “Preference was given to the studios
which made the most assiduous use of retouching. Wrinkles on the face were
smeared away; spots on faces were ‘cleansed’ by retouching; grandmothers
were transformed into young women; a person’s distinguishing features were
well and truly wiped away. An empty, flattened mask was cherished as a
successful portrait. Tastelessness knew no bounds, and trade in it flourished.”12
One interesting detail in this passage is the suggestion that retouching as a
cultural act was, from the very beginning, aimed at adapting photographs to the
dictates of mass culture. As we will see, this has continued.
More recently, as the possibilities of computer processing have grown and
developed, the number of “improved” pictures has increased immeasurably. As
early as 1992, there was an article entitled “Photographs That Lie.”13 This piece
recounted the most scandalous forgeries of the time: one of the pyramids at Giza
was shifted to fit onto the cover of National Geographic; the color of the sky in
photographs of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in the Orange County Register
was made flawlessly blue; Ron Olshwanger, a Pulitzer Prize winner, had a can
of Diet Coke removed from his hand in the postproduction process. In the wake
of these revelations, the credibility of photography was compromised. As J. D.
Lasica puts it, “the 1980s may have been the last decade in which photos could
be considered evidence of anything.”14 Lasica quotes Ken Kobre’s summary of
the situation: “Digital manipulation throws all pictures into a questionable light.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BODY 51

It’s a gradual process of creating doubts in the viewer’s mind.”15 Contemporary

scholars use the term “soft image” to describe digital photographs to reflect the
characteristically pliant, transient, and uncertain nature of digital images.16
This situation leads to a number of questions: is it admissible to use
photographs as evidence in legal proceedings? Can news photographs be
trusted (as long as journalists remain prepared to resort to photo montages in
search of a sensational story)? And finally, the more fundamental problems: what
are the ethical consequences of this loss of visual credibility? Where is the line
between the documentary qualities of photography and the artifice of art?
The most common tools now used to process photographs are Adobe
Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and other special software that can combine up
to twenty images into one. But the problems with Photoshop have recently
led to increasing criticism. Gone is the time when Photoshop was adopted
enthusiastically, and consumers more and more often reject Photoshop as a
lie, a trick intended to deceive them. This is particularly apparent in the case of
photographs meant for advertising. The gravest doubts in this regard concern
the documentary accuracy of photography in advertisements. And while there
are various new programs that allow users to determine whether Photoshop has
been applied, these are used primarily by specialists, and ordinary consumers
raise the red flag only when a picture is egregiously altered.17 Consumer actions in
this vein sometimes have startling results. For example, L’Oréal Paris was forced
to pull an ad starring Julia Roberts from the UK due to excessive Photoshopping.
Consumers were also successful in a campaign against the use of computerized
models on the website of the H&M Internet store.18
In the latter case, the heads from photographs of real models were pasted
onto identical bodies, which some consumers noticed. Nevertheless, this
practice is in fact quite widespread, and there are even advertising agencies
that specialize in creating photo-montages from various body parts. Models are
often chosen based on the supposed perfection of a specific body part. As
Danielle Korwin, founder of Parts Models, Inc., puts it: “Yes, we do handle all
body parts. Everything from finely manicured hands and feet to pouting lips,
weathered hands, even models with two differently colored eyes”19 As advertising
photographer Michael Raab states, “it’s difficult to get the foot, ankle and calf
perfect on the same leg. Sometimes you have to strip images together to get all
three perfect.”20 Such mechanical assembly leads to advertising images that are
composed of disparate “ideal” parts and often appear standardized and lifeless.
It should come as no surprise that such an aesthetic leads to an alienation that
gives rise to doubts on the part of consumers, and even potential conflicts.
These confrontations, which have been repeated in various countries and with
various causes, often include the same echoing arguments from the opposing
sides. Those who alter photographs professionally defend their craft, sometimes
in a rather cynical way:
52 THE END OF FASHION

I create the image that people want to see. It’s up to me to fake people out
…. Basically you lie to people. You create … a picture and then they adapt to
that picture. You can bring people up in taste level, you can bring them down
in taste level, just by what you create.21

The actions of professional photoshoppers are guided by a particular

understanding of “style.” They create the images that the market demands.
These frequently reproduce the Hollywood glamour standard of sensual beauty,
combining ideals developed in the mid-1920s and 1930s, when photography
and retouching began to follow set rules to achieve the effect of glamour. The
pioneers of this technique were the Hollywood photographer Edward Steichen
and, just after him, George Hurrell. They were the first to establish the canonical
features of glamour photography: an aura of sensuality, a particular lighting that
made the subject appear to shine, streaming illumination, a focus on the face,
and sharply contrasting tones. All of this contributed to the transformation of
the body into a commercial product, the “objectification of the body,” and thus
making it possible to easily distribute images in postcard form.22
The work of the professional Photoshopper results in the ideal Barbie Doll
body, the projection of a glamour ideal onto real human bodies. The most
common alterations in magazine photography are to create an even hairline,
render the whites of the eyes pure white, and create a smooth philtrum, flawless
armpits, sharp elbows, round breasts, smooth knees, and symmetrical feet with
evenly sized toes.
To some extent, this process can be compared to the revision of an article
by the editor of a glamour magazine, forcing the author’s living text into the
stereotypes of glamour writing: in both cases, it is referred to as “editing.” In both
cases, everything “superfluous” is removed. The text editor cuts the author’s
lexical repetitions and run-on sentences and revises awkward turns of phrase.
Typical tasks when retouching photos are to make someone thinner, take out a
wrinkle, remove extra hairs, even out the color, adjust the silhouette of the outfit,
and fill in the holes in the hairdo.
The end product is a perfectly smooth body in which all “superfluous”
corporeal aspects are removed: a complete package, an ideal background to
an ad for whatever fashion or cosmetics product you wish. We might compare
it with the role of a sauce added to a dish to give it a “glossy” look when being
photographed for a culinary magazine, as Roland Barthes once described: “The
‘substantial’ category which prevails in this type of cooking is that of the smooth
coating; there is an obvious endeavour to glaze surfaces, to round them off, to
bury the food under the even sediment of sauces, creams, icing and jellies.”23
From this perspective, the body takes on a state of visual closure, a completeness
reminiscent of a sealed packaging. One can also analyze the phenomenon in
terms of the Nature/Culture dichotomy, in which repressed natural corporeality,
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BODY 53

with its hair, fluids, and all manner of bumps and bulges, is dispensed with, and
in its places triumphantly appears a perfectly rounded and smoothed product,
a representation of the body shaped to conform to all rules and intended for
consumption as part of glamour culture.
Any disruption of the smooth contours of the body is interpreted in this
framework as indecent, a scandalous manifestation of repressed Nature. In
such cases, feminist critics often use the term “leaky vessels.”24 “This discourse
inscribes women as leaky vessels by isolating one element of the female body’s
material expressiveness—its production of fluids—as excessive, hence either
disturbing or shameful,” writes Paster about the images of women in Renaissance
city comedies.25 According to Gail K. Paster, this discourse connects liquid
expressiveness with women’s verbal fluency and asserts the need of patriarchal
control.26
The word “leak” is often used in such contexts, and may be associated in
contemporary culture with all sorts of discordant violations of the glamour canon.
We see here a typical example of how the body involuntarily “leaks,” and goes
along with all the other manifestations of corporeality that have no place in the
world of glamour: blood, saliva, sweat, phlegm, tears, fat, wrinkles, pimples, and
so on.27 Thus the female body becomes the locus for the battle between nature
and culture, a constant source of contradictions and doubts.

“Photoshop of Horrors”
In 2011, the American Medical Association warned that altered advertising
images pose a threat to the health of consumers by creating unrealistic ideals.
By way of example, they pointed out that no natural human body has a waist
circumference less than its head circumference. However, natural proportions
are the least of the worries of advertising photography professionals, and in
many cases they go a bit “over the top,” resulting in absurd images. The feminist
website Jezebel once had a regular column entitled Photoshop of Horrors, which
presented stark examples of bodily distortions: impossibly twisted arm positions,
unbelievably narrow knees, extra body parts, and missing body parts28 (in June
2012 issue of the Chinese version of Vogue, the Dutch model Doutzen Kroes
was deprived of her right leg).
A few years ago, a series of photographs circulated on the internet with the
caption “What’s the secret of my beauty? Adobe Photoshop day cream.”29 This
series included images of Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears, Gwyneth
Paltrow, Beyoncé, and other stars. The finished product in each case was a
mashup with two sides of a face, before and after processing with Photoshop.
The difference was so striking that it rendered the unaltered faces almost
unrecognizable. The people who alter the photographs often compare their work
54 THE END OF FASHION

with the everyday use of makeup. In this seemingly innocuous interpretation,

women are said to be diligently “retouching” their own appearance, while these
professionals are modestly taking these efforts to their logical conclusion (Plate 4).
Certain ads are even explicitly based on the parallel between Photoshopping and
cosmetics: Maybelline’s anti-aging cream, The Eraser, is presented in an image
as a graphic editor that removes wrinkles just like Photoshop.
Recent years have seen an increase in the number of scandals associated
with the use of Photoshop: in 2014, the famous comedy actress Lena Dunham
(Plate 5) was photographed for the cover of the American edition of Vogue,
but her fans were disappointed when they hardly recognized her after the
extensive alterations. The list of changes wrought by Photoshop in the actress’s
appearance is quite exhaustive:

• Shoulder/back of neck shaved down, lengthening the neck

• Line near mouth on face removed
• Jawline sharpened
• Neckline of dress pulled up—cleavage altered, armpit covered
• Waist/hip smoothed, made narrower
• Elbow shadow/dimple removed
• Hands smoothed30

To say the least, Lena Dunham’s appearance underwent substantial changes.

The feminist site Jezebel paid $10,000 for the original unretouched photos of the
actress, and the difference was astonishing. The photographer was the famous
Annie Leibowitz, who decided to shoot Dunham as her character Hannah from
Girls. Along with Dunham, the shoot included her co-star Adam Driver. It is
noteworthy that his fate was considerably different: his face and body remained
largely untouched (as did the dog in the shot). This is indicative of how culture
treats the female body specifically as the object of “editorial corrections,” given
that it is the traditional object of commodification. However, in the case of Lena
Dunham, who is not a professional model but rather an actress known for her
intelligence, this standard approach was unexpected to say the least.

Protesting Against Photoshop

Owing to the rise in public scandals over Photoshop horrors, the movement
against Photoshop has mounted steadily. A new fashion for naturalness
is developing: the original, unadorned appearance is proving to be more
compelling. One of the first signs of this change31 with regard to makeup in 2014
was the emphasis on natural eyebrows instead of plucked “threads.” In addition
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BODY 55

to ordinary women, models also started posting natural pictures of themselves,

including ones with armpit hair and visible pimples on their skin.
The Australian website MamaMia recently launched a campaign called “Body
Positive” in which women were asked to post photographs of themselves
without makeup. In addition to just faces, the site’s editors suggested taking
photos of “a particular body part that bothers us [for which] we tend to buy
clothes that hide or cover or draw attention away from it.”32 Readers were given
challenges such as taking a picture after a workout, or a shot of their body
after giving birth. The creators of the project wanted to emphasize the body in
action rather than its static outward attributes. The hardest task was the final
one: tell about shaming comments made about a particular part of your body
and then post a photo of the same body part. The purpose of this challenge
was to allow the participating women to be freed from the burden of negative
impressions left by past insults and to “rehabilitate” their own bodies in their
own eyes. The reaction to the Body Positive project, from both viewers and
participants, was resoundingly affirmative. The concept behind the project was
to create a new idea of what constitutes “normal”: the “new normal” is “diverse
and interesting and REAL. One that talks about the female body in terms of what
it can DO and not what it looks like.”33 Another example in the same vein was
the documentary film Embrace, released in 2016. The director, Taryn Brumfitt,
interviewed women and analyzed their relationships to their bodies’ image in
connection with unrealistic advertising. The picture gained honors at the Sydney
Film Festival and has enjoyed great success.

Reactions from Stars

Certain celebrities have also spoken out against alteration of their photographs
and begun to post unaltered photos online. Some have requested that magazines
remove their retouched photographs. Emma Thompson and Rachel Weisz have
issued statements against unrealistic beauty retouching in ads. Kate Winslett
even included a “no retouching” clause in her contract with L’Oréal.34 Rumer
Willis protested against photographs of her in Vanity Fair in which the size of her
jaw had been substantially reduced. Willis referred to this as a form of “bullying”
and insisted that she was happy with her appearance and had no need for such
“editing.” As evidence of this, she presented an ordinary selfie on her Instagram
page.
A similar event involved the American actress Zendaya (Plate 6) She also
posted selfies on her Instagram page after the magazine Modeliste published
photos of her with significant alterations: her thighs and waist were narrowed, and
her skin lightened. “[I] was shocked when I found my 19 year old hips and torso
quite manipulated.”35 When comparing the two photos, Zendaya’s Instagram
56 THE END OF FASHION

followers unanimously remarked that the selfie without Photoshopping looked

far better.
Hence the protest against manipulation of photographs is gradually becoming
an indicative trend, and in some cases even an advertising technique. Aerie,
a lingerie brand, increased its sales substantially after it began refusing to use
Photoshop in advertisements. After publishing photographs of real bodies, with
moles, tattoos, and the various individual peculiarities, the brand increased it’s
commercial success with consumers responding to the more honest approach
to advertising.

Legislative Initiatives
History provides us no shortage of examples of laws regulating fashion.
Sumptuary laws date back to Middle Ages as a means of regulating trade or
status. Our era requires different sorts of laws. On March 27, 2014, the US
House of Representatives considered the Truth in Advertising Act, which
contained a “strategy to reduce the use, in advertising and other media for the
promotion of commercial products, of images that have been altered to materially
change the physical characteristics of the faces and bodies of the individuals
depicted.”36 The text of the bill points out that the truth in advertising criteria
set by law had not changed since 1983, and that the time had come to update
the law based on the requirements of the new digital era. The bill proposed
implementing recommendations from experts for high-risk categories: children
and adolescents, and so on. In 2014, the bill did not pass. In 2016, another
attempt was made and this time more progress was made. The bill has not yet
been passed and at this writing is in committee, which is just the first stage of
passage. In the 2016 version of the “Truth in Advertising” bill, the Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) was required to submit a report to Congress on the current
status of visual images that deceive consumers and threaten their health by
creating unrealistic conceptions of the body through digital processing. The final
aim of the bill on truth in advertising is to create a legal mechanism to track post-
processing changes made to bodily proportions, alterations to skin tone, and
reducing signs of age.
A similar law was passed in France in December of 2015.37 This law states
that, first of all, photographs must indicate that they have been retouched or
processed in Photoshop. The fine for failure to comply with this law is 37,500
euros. A second innovation of this law is that models working in France must
submit a medical certificate which, among other things, indicates their body mass
index and states that they are permitted to work professionally in the modelling
industry. The fine for failing to have such a certificate is 75,000 euros. This law is
meant to fight anorexia and eating disorders among young people. Despite the
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BODY 57

fact that 30,000 to 40,000 people in France suffer from anorexia, representatives
of the modelling industry commenting on the law have attempted to defend their
corporate interests by disputing the connection between anorexia and images
of emaciated models.38
There have also been attempts to change the status quo through mass
petitions. This issue has been raised regularly on Change.org, a website for
creating petitions and gathering signatures. A petition under the title “Help Us
Create Positive Change for Young Women by Reducing Photoshop in Magazines”
attracted a great deal of attention when it was initiated. The petition was created
by photo editors from well-known glamour magazines. As the petition text stated:
“We want to see cover girls and editorial in your magazines that don’t alter the
already perfect bodies of the women you feature and don’t erase their fine lines
or the unique attributes that make them truly beautiful. Remove a pimple or that
crazy stray hair if you must, but other than that let their natural beauty shine!”39
The petition garnered 4,927 signatures before closing, but this was well short of
the goal of 10,000.
A petition initiated by the fourteen-year-old Julia Bluhm for submission to
the editors of Seventeen magazine met with more success. In April 2012, this
petition, entitled “Seventeen Magazine: Give Girls Images of Real Girls,” asked
the magazine to print at least one photo spread per month without the use of
Photoshop.40 The magazine’s chief editor, Anna Shokets, invited Julia and her
mother to meet with her and the request was granted. The petition received
more than 86,000 signatures. As of this writing, Seventeen continues to publish
one photo spread per month without the use of Photoshop.
One of the most interesting cases is that of the Dove Company, which was
among the first to take a stand on body image issues with its “For Real Beauty”
campaign in 2004. Since its inception, these photos of ordinary women, far from
the expected appearance of models – plump, aged, freckled, and so on – have
been enshrined in the history of advertising. And yet, as was later revealed, even
these photographs were retouched with Photoshop. The post-processing of
these pictures was performed by the renowned photo editor Pascal Dangin, who
confessed to the New Yorker: “Do you know how much retouching was on that?
But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing
the mileage but not looking unattractive.”41 This publication was followed by
several contradictory and vague statements from Dove, which hardly served to
dispel the doubts of their audience. In 2014, again on Change.org, a petition was
circulated to “Ask Dove to Help Protect Our Children from Photoshopped Ads
and Beauty.”42 This petition earned 9,867 signatures, just short of 10,000. The
petition’s creator, Seth Matlins, a father of two from Los Angeles, called on Dove
to refrain from publishing Photoshopped advertisements in places where children
might see them. Matlins also called for the use of a special “Truth in Advertising”
label if an ad had been produced with Photoshop. In response, however, Dove
58 THE END OF FASHION

gave no more than a statement claiming that they always try to preserve all
features of the shape of the face, the skin color, age-related changes, and so on.
Concerning the suggestion that they specially label ads made with Photoshop,
Dove chose to remain silent. These are but a few examples that reflect a crisis of
representation in fashion photography and in advertising in general.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard developed the now famous idea of
the simulacra, an imperfect copy, a sign that does not reflect reality. Baudrillard
identified four forms of relationship between sign and reality:

1. It is the reflection of a basic reality;

2. It masks and perverts a profound reality;
3. It masks the absence of a basic reality;
4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure
simulacrum.43

With regard to the fourth form, pure simulacra, Baudrillard notes: “Simulation
is infinitely more dangerous, since it always suggests, over and above its
object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than
a simulation.”44 And this is the reason why attempts to regulate the use of
Photoshop by law meet resistance. It is also why perpetrators easily avoid
responsibility, remain silent, or mince words indefinitely. Pascal Dangin, having
initially admitted openly how he convincingly showed the “mileage” of Dove
models, retracted his claims after the interview. In a society where forgery and
distortion are the norm, even such “rigid” criteria as bodily integrity and financial
losses are blurred.
As such, it is a major challenge to preserve these criteria. Yet they are inevitably
eroded by constant distrust in authenticity, in a situation of undecidability. Digitally
altered images straddle the border of simulacrum. This boundary is transparent:
the viewer initially presumes that the image “reflects a profound reality,” but then
it becomes clear that masking and distortion have taken place, and that there is
clearly an “absence of profound reality.” An important attribute of simulacra is the
unnoticed substitution, which shifts the criteria, erasing the boundaries between
reality and the constructed image. Photoshop artists, if they engage in pure
creative art, are making the fourth type of simulacrum according to Baudrillard’s
classification.
But what should one do as a consumer if one needs, for example, to make
an informed decision about an internet purchase based on a virtual image?
Undecidability complicates the decision-making process. What should one
do if one is a parent of a young girl whose weight is dropping to an unhealthy
level based on the example of advertising simulacra? And what should people
do whom society suspects of falsifying or altering their appearances by plastic
surgery?
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BODY 59

Cosmetic Surgery: Mind the

Credibility Gap
Plastic surgery is yet another area that raises crucial doubts, where a “visual credibility
gap” continually surfaces. This is a space of secrets, silence, guesswork, dispute, and
denial. With regard to such operations performed on celebrities, the veil of secrecy is
often particularly opaque, and journalists are left to guess or consult with specialists
to determine whether plastic surgery has been performed. Cases where the opposite
happens are quite rare. Kim Yu-Mi, who held the title of Miss Korea 2012, was
accused of being helped to win the competition by her previous plastic surgery (Plate
7). Yet she managed to defend herself and retain her title after calmly acknowledging
the fact, which protected her from further reproaches. More frequently, however,
celebrities continually deny such operations, and it is almost impossible to determine
what is true and what is not. According to Luciana Ugrina, “online cosmetic surgeries
databases often identify evidence of surgical procedures in celebrities photos when,
arguably, cosmetic surgery may not have been performed.”45
One typical case is that of the actress Renée Zellweger (Plate 8). In October
2014, she first appeared in public with her face unrecognizable. Commentators
immediately remarked that her new appearance was the result of several
rounds of plastic surgery, most significantly blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery). After
presumably changing her appearance, Zellweger joined the ranks of Hollywood
Barbie dolls, despite the fact that she was best remembered for her role as
Bridget Jones, not least because her appearance stood out from that of other
actresses. It should come as no surprise that the overwhelming majority of
viewers reacted in a highly negative way to these changes in her appearance.
Many called on her “to own the work.” Her fate was to lose a number of future
roles. However, the actress herself wrote an essay in the Huffington Post in
which she refuted her critics and called the judgments about her appearance
“humiliating.” As she emphasized:

Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face
and have surgery on my eyes. This fact is of no true importance to anyone at
all, but that the possibility alone was discussed among respected journalists
and became a public conversation is a disconcerting illustration of news/
entertainment confusion and society’s fixation on physicality.46

Even after Renée Zellweger’s article, many people from the viewing public are still
doubtful. As Ugrina notes:

The preponderance of images of surgically enhanced bodies in celebrity

media, along with increasing unreadability of these images, demonstrates that
60 THE END OF FASHION

celebrity cosmetic surgery images produce a proliferation of meanings that do

not always correspond with stable and predictable patterns of “before” and
“after.”47

Most members of the audience react negatively when stars have plastic surgery,
for two main reasons. The first is that they are used to the accustomed appearance
of famous actresses. When stars change their image, they are contravening
established expectations and disrupting predictability. Many viewers very likely
grew to love them precisely because of their particular appearance, and so any
attempt to change is taken as a violation of the established relationship between
the celebrity and the public, a breach of an unspoken social contract. Cosmetic
surgery is thus taken as a lie, a replacement of the old “authentic” image with a
new, false one: a persona instead of a person. It becomes another cause for doubt,
by analogy with the artificial beauty created by makeup and other “tricks.” The
second reason is more complicated. Among the religious conservative segment of
the viewing public and in their traditionalist world view, plastic surgery violates the
integrity of the body and distorts the person’s original image. For Christians, as the
Bible says, man is made in the image and likeness of God, and thus a change in
one’s appearance can be thought of as a loss of spiritual integrity that might even
prevent the resurrection of the soul after death. Based on this same line of thinking,
conservative critics and religious fundamentalists remain unsympathetic to avant-
garde art.
It is worth noting that plastic surgery itself is subject to the vicissitudes of
fashion. As Bor Stenvik remarks,

“Diamond noses,” once popular, were replaced by “Rosenberg noses” (so

named for the plastic surgeons who developed these particular shapes). The
human face has become a fashion object. The thin, elongated faces that were
once in style have been replaced by the latest innovation, the so-called “new
new face,” which has more child-like features and requires a greater effort
from the plastic surgeon. Now they are not limited to the usual facelift, but the
facial muscles themselves must be slightly raised to create a new shape so
that the face becomes more like that of a child.48

The rise of different fashions even within plastic surgery adds yet another aspect
of undecidability, indicating the instability of beauty standards even here. Thus
plastic surgery, just like retouching of photographs, multiplies doubts, creating an
erosion of identity (particularly when the subject denies that any plastic surgery
has been performed). The difference with plastic surgery, however, is that we are
speaking not about a representation, but rather about the human body49 itself or,
more precisely, about “corporeality,” which has traditionally been considered a
bulwark of authenticity, original-ness, and truth.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BODY 61

A useful analogy is the fate of the work of art in the era of mechanical
reproduction. As Walter Benjamin states, reproduction removes a unique work
of art from the realm of tradition, causing it to lose its authenticity and its aura,
resulting in a change in the emotional interpretation.50 In this new structure of
interpretation, standard faces, as objects of mass reproduction, also lose their
individual “aura,” becoming part of the usual postmodern visual landscape.51
Broadly speaking, plastic surgery is causing faces to become more uniform, to
lose their individuality, as it reproduces whatever canonical standards of beauty
are fashionable at the time.

Deconstructing Gender
Another area that frequently involves doubts about bodily authenticity is the
attitude toward transgender models. Contemporary transgender people must
often prove that they are “the real thing.” Gender-bending has regularly found
its way into fashion in the past. Suffice it to recall the “la gаrҫonne” style of
the 1920s or Marlene Dietrich and her love of trouser suits. In recent decades,
famous androgynous stars have included David Bowie, Tilda Swinton, and Annie
Lennox.52 But if before these were merely marginal trends, now, with the new
ideology of diversity, the popularity of transgender models is growing steadily,
and they are more and more often stepping confidently to the podium. These
include Saskia de Brauw, Carmen Carrera, Hari Nef, and others (Plate 9). In
2014, the runway model Geena Rocero was invited to speak at the White House
on the problems faced by transgender models in modern society (Plate 10). Not
long before this, her TED talk, in which she spoke about her decision to change
her sex, garnered 2.6 million views.
The best-known transgender model is Andreja Pejić, a former man born
in Bosnia (originally known as Andrej), who in 2014 completed a sex change
operation (Plate 11). Prior to this, Pejić had appeared in showings of both men’s
and women’s collections by Jean-Paul Gaultier, who in 2011 entrusted him with
the final role of “the bride.” Pejić was also seen on the cover of the French Vogue,
and in ads for push-up bras. Many assumed that Andrej(a)’s career would end
after the surgery because now, as a woman, (s)he had lost the uniqueness
of being a transgender model and become just one of the crowd (and thus
subjected herself to much greater competition). However, the flamboyant green-
eyed blonde Andreja recently took a bold step: in an interview with Vogue in
2015, she openly informed the world about her operation: “It is about showing
that this is not just a gimmick” she declared.53 Soon after this, Andreja collected
$63,325 on Kickstarter to make a film about her transformation.
Andreja’s transgender colleagues have assumed a wide range of roles. Erika
Linder, who bears a striking resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio, has appeared in
62 THE END OF FASHION

both male and female fashion shows and has launched her own brand of unisex
clothing. There are also women who cross over to the male side: Elliott Sailors
was a women’s clothing model for a long time, but then cut off her long blonde
curls, wrapped her breasts, and became a male model.54 Elliott claims that she
made this decision in order to extend her career.
The fluidity of gender standards is also reflected in clothing design. Many
collections by both established designers (Marc Jacobs) and younger ones
(the Vaquera, Vejas, and Gypsy Sport brands) are showing a marked tendency
toward unisex styles. In 2016, even the mass market giant Zara released its
“Ungendered” line of gender-neutral clothing. Men’s collections are including
increasing numbers of pieces with feminine leanings, and women are boldly
usurping male clothing by cross-dressing. This is hardly a new trend, however:
as early as 1985, Jean-Paul Gaultier developed a collection with skirts for
men under the title, “Une garde-robe pour deux” (“Wardrobe for Two”). And in
2003–2004, the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged a popular exhibition entitled
Bravehearts: Men in Skirts. In the last two years, the number of men’s collections
that borrow articles of clothing from women has grown and, more importantly,
this fashion is spilling over into everyday decisions about clothing. All of these
changes are of course taking place more broadly than just in the world of fashion.
The transgender trend is partly supported by Japanese popular culture, and
it is no accident that many Manga and Anime characters have androgynous
appearances. The Japanese rock star Gackt became famous for his theatrical
experiments with feminine images in the “Visual Kei” style.55
Similar processes are underway in the cinema: in 2014, Amazon.com released
a series entitled Transparent, telling the story of a man who acknowledged
his true nature as a woman. At the age of 70, he revealed the secret of his
transformation to his former family, including his three adult children. The series
was phenomenally successful: the lead actor Jeffrey Tambor and the director Jill
Solloway were both awarded Golden Globes, and in 2016, Solloway also won
an Emmy. The film The Danish Girl (2015) is in the same vein, telling the story of
a transsexual in the 1920s, played by Eddie Redmayne.

Fashion and Optical Illusion

The topic of optical illusions in fashion has recently been surfacing with increasing
frequency.56 This is becoming a new trend in the world of fashion and the internet.
It all started in February 2015, when a Tumblr user aired his confusion: what color
was the tight-fitting dress in the picture: white and gold, or blue and black? The
question was instantly seized upon, dividing the internet community.57 However,
no one could reliably determine the true color of the dress, and passions flared.
The number of posts on social networks grew exponentially, and hashtags
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BODY 63

began to appear: #whiteandgold, #blueandblack, #thedress, and #dressgate,

with the latter enjoying particular popularity. News soon spread of arguments
about the dress among families and friends. Celebrities stepped in with their
views: Kim Kardashian and her husband Kanye West joined the argument (and
with differing opinions), as well as Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, and Lady Gaga.
Within 24 hours, the dress had been the subject of 4.4 million tweets. Analysts
compared the speed and scale of the discussion with the spread of a new meme
or a viral media campaign.
Neurophysiologists then joined the discussion, cooling the heat of passion
somewhat by explaining the different interpretations through the structure of the
eye and the process of chromatic adaptation. The difference in perception is
associated with individual features and habituation to artificial or natural lighting,
which causes our brains to process visual information differently.58 It was thus
determined that the dress was in fact blue and black, and the illusion occurred
due to the type of lighting used in the photograph and to the way the image was
digitally processed.
Naturally, after this eruption of animated interest, sales of the dress
skyrocketed, and the manufacturer, the British company Roman Originals, soon
issued a limited-edition run of another version of the famous dress, this one white
and gold, so as to please everyone. One of the white and gold dresses was put
up for a charity auction on e-bay and fetched a significant amount of money.
The picture of a heavily beaten woman with bruises wearing the white-and-gold
dress was used in the innovative campaign by South African Salvation Army. The
slogan “Why is it so hard to see black and blue” was aimed at raising awareness
of violence and abuse against women.
And yet the story still did not end there. In October 2016, another “dressgate”
(the term had become widely circulated by now) began to spread, this one
regarding the color of a bag. To some, a Kate Spade handbag appeared white,
and to others it looked blue. In reality, the bag was light blue, or at any rate the
manufacturer itself referred to the color as “Mystic Blue.” After the bag, everyone
started talking about a plaid shirt that magically changed colors. One of the most
recent optical viral illusions circulating on the internet asks whether a pair of legs
is oily or smeared with paint.59 At first glance, the legs appear to glisten with oil,
but after a few seconds the viewer begins to see that this is not glistening oil, but
rather streaks of white paint. The originator of the photograph, Instagram user @
leonardhospams, revealed that the effect is indeed caused by streaks of white
paint.60
As these stories show us, fashion has unwittingly become a touchstone
for questions about the reliability of visual images. But as long as the game of
illusions is to some extent inherent in the structure of our perception, it is added
motivation to remain attentive, to document, and to analyze the areas of doubt
and undecidability that emerge in contemporary culture.
64 THE END OF FASHION

Conclusion
In reading the texts of Stéphane Mallarmé, Derrida astutely discusses how
appearances often contain an element of illusion that erases the distinction
between truth and falsehood. Speaking of the idea of “false appearance,” he
defined this as “mimicry without imitation, without verisimilitude, without truth
or falsity, a miming of appearance without concealed reality, without any world
behind it, and hence without appearance: false appearance.”61 This is a classic
example of “undecidability.” “Undecidability” in visual images is the equivalent of
the state of doubt caused by the multitude of information sources on the internet.
The uncritical assimilation of information from the internet (including such sites as
Wikipedia) often leads to false “knowledge” and further dissemination of errors.
As Brenda DeMartini-Squires remarks, “Internet or virtual browsing, although
seemingly lightening quick and convenient, can involve hour after hour of false
starts, interruptions, and quite frequently, questionable ‘information.’”62
It is clear that technological progress and the equally feverish search for
novelty have now crossed over into the realm of new technologies. If fashion
was once a testing ground, a priority area for innovation, then now the users of
new technologies are the victims of anxiety and a need for constant change. This
involves intense competition among brands and an endless anticipation of new
models and new versions. Consumers are prepared to go to great sacrifice and
suffer significant inconvenience for the sake of prestige, even if the latest version
is perceived as inferior to the previous one. Clothing fashions are primarily left
with fusion styles and self-irony, while the most interesting processes take place
at the intersection of fashion and new technology, in body modifications, in
the blogosphere and on social networks. At the cutting edge of these dynamic
processes are teenagers and youth who have had a symbiotic relationship with
gadgets since their birth. This is a generation that cannot imagine itself without
the internet. It is a generation that lives in a double world reminiscent of what
the early nineteenth century European Romantics – Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel,
and E. T. A. Hoffmann – postulated as dualism of day dreams, a permanent
strain between the world of dreams and reality. Today’s “techno-dreamers” exist
halfway in virtual reality and are programmed from childhood to see themselves in
representation: through selfies and endless Instagram posts. They deftly calculate
the effects of various perspectives, instinctively adopt fashionable poses and
trendy facial expressions, and expertly Photoshop their own pictures.63 Due to
this array of visual skills, they are often more successful in things related to public
self-expression and image management skills. The conflict between fashion
bloggers and editors discussed in the beginning of this article signals precisely
this tension. Thus a new model of corporeality is gradually emerging, developed
in no small part through the activity of young users of new media.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BODY 65

Doubts almost always apply to the accuracy of photographs and

advertisements, as the use of Photoshop is assumed by default.64 The use of
such software is only an indicator, a litmus test, of all the new areas of doubt and
undecidability in contemporary culture. These are found, as we have seen, in
various areas: not only in Photoshopped pictures but in debates around plastic
surgery, the popularity of transgender models, and the unprecedented interest
in optical illusions. In all likelihood, there is no reason in our current era to expect
truthful communication and “pure” facts in the world of fashion. It seems we
must get used to the new rules of the game: a permanent condition of underlying
doubt.65
The tendency toward critical doubt in the world of fashion is more relevant now
than ever before. But with regard to making responsible decisions concerning
the health of children, for example, or the identification of individuals, or the
possibility to make informed consumer choices, we are facing the other side of
the undecidability coin: a demand for truth and authenticity. This is what we see
in the consumer protests, the movement against Photoshop, the fashion for a
new naturalness, the legislative initiatives for truth in advertising, and the petitions
on Change.org. These are attempts to confront the world of “hyperreality,” and
they are also a signal: this is a time when games with visual signs require constant
analytical awareness.
Translated by Keith Blasing

The author would like to thank Rebecca Arnold for her friendly advice and
feedback.
 5
CELEBRITY
Pamela Church Gibson

The new cultural landscape

Although it is a truism, if not a complete cliché, that the Internet and the immense,
extraordinary power of social media have, between them, altered the world
almost beyond recognition, there is nevertheless no consensus that these radical
changes have in any way altered things for the better. For among other things,
they have in fact facilitated and now shore up the new, all-pervasive power of
contemporary celebrity culture, of which Chris Rojek has written: “Latching onto
a star in celebrity culture is to voluntarily submit to a kind of modern serfdom ….
the serfdom in question is the bondage to celebrity culture.”1
Certainly celebrity culture has radically changed “fashion” and has arguably
divided its history in two.2 At the same time, it has reconfigured traditional
patterns of stardom in the film industry3 and altered many aspects of the “art
world.”4 Of course, “celebrities” themselves are a centuries-old phenomenon, as
Leo Brandy has convincingly argued.5 However, in the past, public interest was
invariably related either to the political power or to the social status the celebrities
possessed, or to their demonstrable and recognized talent. Until recently, a focus
on their physical attributes and their private lives was secondary to what Rojek
has called their “ascription” or their “achievement.” He identifies three types of
celebrity; the first category is that “ascribed” or created by birth and his second
is that “achieved” through unusual talent. But today there is a predominance of
celebrities in Rojek’s third and final category, that of “attributed” celebrity, which
describes those who become famous by attracting media attention in some way,
and indeed are colloquially described as “famous for being famous.”6 The work
of other media theorists and cultural historians, of course, provides a backdrop
to this same phenomenon.7
The new mediascape has also created our so-called post-truth era, in
which “alternative facts” can now be publicly cited and a reality television star,
on becoming the most powerful politician in the Western world, can choose
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not to communicate through conventional means but through Twitter “feeds”

and widely advertised public appearances. Ironically, in the past some cultural
theorists firmly believed not only that drastic changes to the traditional media
were necessary, but that these would, when implemented, radically improve
our quality of life. The most notable example is, perhaps, Hans Magnus
Enzensberger’s essay “Constituents of a Theory of the Media.” This often-
quoted and highly optimistic text, published at the close of the 1960s,8 was a
conscious updating of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproducibility.”9 Half a century ago, in that period of great
political and cultural upheaval when there was still a sense that scientific, political
and cultural progress were inevitable and interlinked, Enzensberger carefully set
out his egalitarian ideals. He was firmly convinced that, very soon, we would
be able to create and to use our own media, so replacing our dependence on
a mediascape rigidly controlled by those with political and social power. The
participatory model that he proposed was part of an overall socialist strategy
to develop the potentialities of communication media. He advocated collective
production and general participation, and interestingly in a pre-digital era
effectively predicted what Henry Jenkins would later christen “convergence
culture.”10
Arguing that contemporary capitalism depends completely on the exploitation
of unreal and “false” needs, he suggested that a truly socialist movement
ought not simply to denounce these needs but rather to take them seriously,
investigate them carefully, and then make them politically productive.11 Using
Lefebvre’s concept of mass consumption as “spectacle, exhibition and show,”12
he developed this further into his own notion of “a totality, a permanent theatre”
in which “the fetishistic nature of the commodities triumphs completely over
their use value.”13 This, he argued, was actually based on a real and undeniable
“mass need,” a need with “physiological roots,” which could “no longer be
suppressed.” It was not necessarily one restricted by the “internalised rules of
the game as played by the capitalist system.”14 He concluded with his belief that
“consumption as spectacle is—in parody form—the anticipation of a Utopian
situation.”15
Sadly, the new media landscape of the second millennium is simply a
nightmarish parody, even an inversion, of his Utopian dream. We are still
enslaved by “false needs,” albeit now presented to us in a profoundly different
way; global capitalism is more entrenched and all-powerful than ever. And while
Enzensberger lamented the fact that fashion design was a “largely unexplored”
sector of industry,16 it is now of course part of a massive world-wide phenomenon
employing millions; however, they work within fashion production rather than
fashion design, and very often do so under appalling conditions for derisory
wages.17 Interestingly, with a very few exceptions, the academic discipline of
fashion theory has not given its attention nor analyses over to the exploration of
CELEBRITY 69

fashion production, with a minute number of exceptions.18 How many on the left—
liberals and bien-pensants, so many feminists—are now deeply compromised in
this respect? We should be talking and writing here from a point of complicity.
The new media have assisted in, if not created, the proliferation of a celebrity
culture based in the main on physical attributes, at a time when there is an ever-
growing, seemingly insatiable interest in fashion. This has led, inevitably, to the
careful, highly profitable mining of the new “celebrification” by the fashion industry
in general and by the luxury brands in particular. It is this particular combination
of factors that is conceivably responsible for any announcements of the “end of
fashion.” For although “fashion” itself is undeniably flourishing under these new
conditions, it is the fashion system as we understood it which has, if not ended,
then undergone radical reconfigurations in order to survive, to function, and
arguably to triumph under these changed conditions. It is not that the traditional
system with its patterns of creating, communicating, and disseminating changes
has broken down; it continues to operate. The combination of “high-fashion”
trickle-down19 and street-style “bubble-up”20 is working as before; however,
as this article will show, it now has a rival “celebrity”-based system working
busily alongside it. And possibly this rival system is now as powerful as its
predecessor—perhaps more so.
For the new competing system combines the endless possibilities of the
digital era with the extraordinary commercial potency of our celebrity-dominated
culture. Agins21 and Edelkoort,22 who both announced “the end of fashion,”
were writing from a marketing perspective and so did not seek to locate their
insights within a wider social and cultural context. The rival system now spans
the entire spectrum of industry activities, from the marketing of luxury brands to
the creation of cheap clothes mimicking celebrity choices.

The divided system

Thirty-three years ago, Elizabeth Wilson famously defined fashion as “dress,
in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles”23; today,
that “change” is more “rapid” than ever. In 2014, I described the way in which
the system of fashion seemed to have split in two, creating separate systems
with very different ideals and images.24 However, the intervening years have
brought further changes; not only is there now significant overlap between
these divergent and competing forms of “fashion,” but the traditional system
has seemingly capitulated in certain important ways to its rival. However, in an
attempt to defend itself, it is simultaneously encouraging forms of resistance and
rear-guard action.
As I have previously argued,25 developments within and around celebrity
culture have offered women an apparently new image, a highly sexualized,
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curvaceous body template which, combined with a very different way of making-
up and dressing, challenges the traditional silhouette of high fashion. This style
of self-presentation I called “pornostyle”26 since it deploys the longstanding
and recognizable tropes of “glamour modeling” and soft-core pornography,
bringing them firmly into the mainstream. Significantly, both the magazines and
the newspapers of traditional print culture and the new forms of social media
much prefer this “glamorous” ideal to the slender body and restrained makeup
associated with catwalk shows and ultra-fashionable magazines. The makeup
and clothes of the “celebrity look” are no doubt familiar to those reading this: fake
fingernails, nude “wet look” lips, liberal use of facial “contouring” techniques,
eyelash “extensions,” plunging necklines, skirts slit to mid-thigh, high heels,
and tight boots. But this style does not mean a lack of “labels” or designer
clothes, now perhaps more desirable than ever; in this mode, they are worn and
accessorized in a different way. There is currently a penchant for “nude” and
“sheer” fabrics, deployed rather differently from their use within “high fashion,”
here used to reveal whatever parts of the body might have to be covered outside
a domestic setting. The “celebrity” body should possess pronounced breasts,
which can be the result of artifice or intervention, a tiny waist and lightly tanned
limbs—here “fake tan” seems de rigueur.
The epitome of this look, at the time of writing, is, of course, the ubiquitous
Kim Kardashian, who has added very prominent, deliberately accentuated,
occasionally bared, and frequently photographed buttocks to what is already
a hard-to-achieve “celebrity” ideal (Plate 12). These buttocks of course are
presented, it seems, as a deliberate provocation, flouting the fashionable
ideal and even triumphing over it. Her body, its constant display, and indeed
some of her behavior are all, quite deliberately, “transgressive” in a perhaps
unprecedented way and she appears to be happily complicit in the public
construction of her physique as that of a new-millennial “Hottentot Venus,”
as has been suggested elsewhere.27 In the nineteenth century, the original of
the title, Sarah Baartman, whose body was exhibited in “freak shows” across
Europe, was in fact a prisoner whose captors reaped the profits. But in a new
millennium, it is of course Kardashian herself who both parades and profits from
her own unusual physique. It is she and her family who will be the epicenter of
this essay, forming both reference point and case study.
They are of course perfect examples of Rojek’s “attributed celebrity.”28 In
2007, Kardashian achieved her first moment of fame through a leaked “sex tape,”
her partner in crime being rap star Derek J. Throughout the film, she constantly
pouts at, and poses for, the camera. There were suggestions that the “leak” was
deliberate in some way, but it seemed that she had no part in it so, after much
legal wrangling, she accepted a payment and then conceded ownership of the
footage to a company, Vivid, which made it widely available. In the same year,
her entire family—Kim herself, her mother and stepfather, her sisters, stepsisters,
CELEBRITY 71

brother, and assorted partners—became the stars of their own reality television
show, screened on cable network E!. Despite consistently adverse criticism, the
show became extremely popular; a thirteenth season began in March 2017. The
family’s tendency to be “transgressive,” to flout whatever convention might still
be at stake, together with their pride in their perceived “otherness,” has been on
display throughout their rise to worldwide fame. Her stepfather, a former Olympic
athlete, underwent highly publicized gender reassignment in 2015, appearing in
her changed identity as Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair.29 Since then,
Kardashian and her various siblings have exploited the full potential of every form
of social media, gaining in the process extraordinary popularity, immense wealth,
a global reach—and making “celebrity style” something desired by millions.
She has also, as this essay will show, managed—after frequent attempts—to
make successful inroads into the diametrically opposed world of high fashion.
Her stepsister Kendall Jenner, whose body is the antithesis of hers, conforming
perfectly to catwalk standards, has become a leading fashion model. But
Kim’s own relationship with the historic fashion system, to which her constantly
proffered, pneumatic body constitutes a permanent challenge, is rather complex.
She was originally regarded with some hauteur by many in the industry; things
changed considerably when she became first the girlfriend and later the wife of
rapper Kanye West, himself already embedded within this system in a number
of ways.

Social media: The dissemination and

consumption of “celebrity fashion”
If what many want or need from cyberspace is simply some form of reassurance
through virtual contact with perceived “friends,” significantly for “celebrity
fashion,” a vast number seek further instruction in the art of self-presentation.
So for this—and other complex reasons—they assiduously “follow” the posts
and the videos of established celebrities, together with lesser known fashion and
beauty “bloggers.” Those, like the Kardashian sisters, who are already public
personalities, have the chance massively to increase their incomes through
various forms of product placement; others who were previously anonymous
figures have used these new digital platforms to create careers and achieve
“celebrity” online, if not elsewhere. Of course, many of the most successful
“fashion bloggers” are involved in the traditional world of “high fashion.” The
most popular online posts, however, display the rival “celebrity look.”
Endless instruction in how to create this very different ideal of “beauty” can be
found in cyberspace. While there are indeed “beauty tutorials” created, as well
as consumed, by young women in modest suburban bedrooms, some reach a
far wider audience. Interestingly, the “teen Instagram star”30 Essena O’Neill left
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the platform and deleted her posts; she announced that “I just want young girls
to know this isn’t candid life; it’s contrived perfection made to get attention.”31
But it doesn’t seem as if many young women paid attention to her example; a
recent estimate put the number of Kardashian “followers” across the entire digital
spectrum at “half a billion between them—twice the size of the US population.”32
Among these online exemplars of style, the various Kardashian sisters, Kim is
well to the fore—it is she who today would be recognized anywhere in the world.
Of her sisters and stepsisters, it is Kylie, small in height and generous in curves,
who comes second in popularity. The tall, slim Kendall, with her highly visible
modeling career at the heart of high fashion, comes third.33
The three sisters I have just mentioned are among the “top ten” most-followed
figures on social media, and in fact they are the only “celebrities by attribution” on
these lists across the various manifestations of social media. For the other young
women followed are successful young singers. Significantly, corroborating the
growing concerns about young girls enslaved to their smartphones, there are
only three men currently in the running and, while one is singer Justin Bieber
and another the well-dressed footballer Christiano Ronaldo, the third is the
uncompromisingly unstylish wrestler-turned-film star Dwayne “The Rock”
Johnson, star of the critically ignored and massively successful franchise, The
Fast and the Furious.34 Kim Kardashian’s overwhelming online presence means
that she is currently offered up to half a million dollars each time she promotes
a product on social media35: her sisters and half-sisters are offered slightly less.
The actual nature of the products they promote are rather worrying; while new
Apple phones are expensive but harmless, “weight loss teas,” meal substitutes
created to facilitate weight loss, and “waist whittlers” are more disturbing. A “waist
whittler” looks like a brightly dyed piece of period underwear and constricts the
waist as fiercely as its name implies; however, unlike its historical predecessors, it
is designed to be worn during vigorous exercise, supposedly in order to enhance
its effects. Kim directs her followers not only toward innocuous products such
as nail polish and makeup, but also, perhaps more questionably, toward home
laser treatments for the total eradication of every trace of body hair demanded
by ‘pornostyle’, and to ‘morning sickness’ pills. Of course, these women have
a vast variety of their own branded products. These include Kylie’s “lip kits” for
those anxious to emulate her trademark pout, and the “Kardashian Kollection”
of clothes at Sears. There was even, albeit briefly, a “Kardashian Mastercard.”
However, Kendall may have diminished her earning potential, after a massive
controversy, across print media and online, around her commercial for Pepsi-
Cola in April 2017, which had to be “pulled” after twenty-four hours. She was
paid 40 million dollars for this advertisement, in which she is seen posing for
a fashion shoot just as an unspecified “protest march” comes past, made up
entirely of good-looking young people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.
She removes her fashionable accessories and joins the protesters. The march is
CELEBRITY 73

swiftly halted, and she walks alone to the waiting policemen, offering one a can
of Pepsi-Cola and so resolving any possible tension.36

Shifts, changes and academic responses

Riccardo Tisci, head designer at Givenchy from 2009 to March 2017, proclaimed
in an interview given just after he left this post: “Four or five years ago, no fashion
house would touch her. But Kim represents the woman of today—she defines
society today.”37 Kardashian and her sisters used to shop on the American
high streets; now their stratospheric incomes mean that they can patronize
Parisian couture houses. This is not done so that they may conform to the rules
of traditional “high fashion,” however, but rather as a demonstration of their
extraordinary power. Significantly, there are new young designers in some old,
established houses who like Tisci are aware of changes in supply and demand;
consequently, they now produce the kind of clothes that embody the “celebrity
look.” Olivier Rousteing, for example, who took over at Balmain in 2009, is a
friend of Kanye West and creates glitzy clothes for celebrities; the ethos of the
design house has changed drastically. Journalist Jess Cartner-Morley called his
clothes “colourful, tight, and bright.”38 Tisci, the former designer at Givenchy, is
also a friend of West. He invited Kardashian to her first “Met Ball” in 2013 when
he was helping to host this annual event, usually referred to as the Oscars of
fashion, and designed her dress for the occasion. He also created the clothes
for her spectacular two-day wedding to West, making both her dress and his
tuxedo; the ceremonies involved a formal dinner hosted at Versailles, to which
the couple were driven in a coach formerly used by royalty or state visitors. He
was also responsible for Madonna’s bondage bustier and her bared, black-lace-
covered buttocks at another Met Ball in 2016. She herself defended the outfit as
a “feminist statement” made to combat ageism.
If the clothes created by other designers are not sufficiently form-fitting or
revealing, they can always be adapted to fit the rules of “celebrity style.” A judicious
rearrangement of couture garments can ensure the maximum exposure of flesh,
while there is always scope for celebrity “accessorizing” of a kind that could be
anathema to devotees of the designers. Kardashian was photographed at the
Balenciaga shows in October 2016 wearing a trench coat pulled so far off her
shoulders as to constitute a parody of the Vogue-endorsed trend for “shoulder-
robing.” Hardly a figure associated with the more minimal aesthetic of Céline, she
was nonetheless photographed in March 2017 wearing one of the house’s long
knitted dresses, but pulled so far down that it hovered just above and sharply
defined her breasts. On her feet—in sharp contrast to the sneakers favored by
the Céline designer Phoebe Philo—she wore very high-heeled snakeskin boots.
It is worth noting that, by contrast, those in charge of Céline had in fact already
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carried out a certain form of resistance to contemporary celebrity; in 2016 they

employed the venerated writer Joan Didion, then in her eighties, to model in
the advertising campaign for their sunglasses, thus declaring a preference for
cultural over “erotic” capital.
At first the two co-existing systems were locked in a kind of “Mexican standoff”
whereby the traditional fashion world saw itself as working to protect the notion
of “good taste.” Although celebrity covers were already widely used in order to
sell fashion magazines, only those celebrities who sought to follow the “fashion
look” rather than the “pornostyle” template were featured, invited to high-fashion
events, and given front-row seats at shows. “Glamour girls” were not offered these
privileges, nor were they asked to be “brand ambassadors” for fashion houses,
or to feature in exclusive “fragrance” campaigns. Certain couture houses declined
offers to design for them, and refused to lend them clothes for publicity shoots.
But in 2017, much of this had changed: the industry increasingly obeys purely
economic imperatives and “celebrity fashion” is in the ascendant. Alas, these
changes within fashion, which surely constitute a paradigm shift, do not seem
thus far to have been fully acknowledged within fashion theory, just as fashion-
related issues have not been properly addressed within the new and expanding
area of “celebrity studies.” This latter discipline, newly created and with a variety of
different aspects, is curiously averse to exploring its extraordinarily strong links not
only with the “fashion system” but also with the field of “fashion studies,” itself of
course another late and sometimes unwelcome arrival in the groves of academe.39
Although Rojek argued that “we will not understand the peculiar hold
that celebrities exert over us today unless we recognise that celebrity culture
is irrevocably bound up with commodity culture,”40 he did not specify precise,
susceptible forms of commodity culture. David Marshall, one of the earliest writers
on the phenomenon of modern celebrity culture, has consistently suggested that it
is a means within consumer capitalism whereby the dominant classes can ensure
social control.41 This could suggest, perhaps, a “bread-and-circuses” model
worryingly appropriate for the contemporary cultural and political landscape.

Fashion, art and celebrity culture

Whatever lines of demarcation still remain between “high art,” popular culture,
fashion, celebrity, and commerce, these by now are increasingly blurred, given
the modus operandi of the fashion industry and the “celebrification” of the art
world.42 Today, not only does Kim Kardashian have a marked presence right
across the current landscape of popular culture and increasingly within both
“fashion systems,” she has also crossed other significant boundaries. Over the
last few years, she has acquired a presence within the “art world,” if only as
“subject” rather than producer of art. Her image has moved from magazine
covers to gallery walls, and she herself is seen at private views and art fairs.
CELEBRITY 75

Her marriage to musician Kanye West—who is himself adept at self-promotion,

has collaborated with designers in different ways for several years, and is now
finally enjoying a coveted success as a fashion designer—has increased her
visibility and her access to “high end” fashion. Significantly, for a tour in 2013,
West was dressed by Maison Margiela, hardly a publicity-seeking fashion house.
The year before, in a 2012 episode of her reality show, he had publicly cleared out
Kim’s wardrobe and restocked it with “high fashion” garments and accessories.
Acting together, they have managed successfully to infiltrate the inner citadel of
“high fashion,” which had until recently worked hard to keep Kim and her family
at bay. West’s move from rap artist to fashion designer has helped them here.
Their wedding showcased not merely Tisci’s Givenchy outfits, but matching
leather jackets for the couple especially decorated with slogans and images by
the Los Angeles artist Wes Lang; he has also designed tour merchandise for
West in the past. West’s design career started with footwear; his collaborations—
with Nike and later Adidas—have been enormously successful. The 2016 music
video for his song “Wolves” also turned out to be a promotional fashion film for
Balmain, which West directed. It starred his wife and her fashion-model sister
Kendall alongside assorted supermodels and some Victoria’s Secret underwear
models. Still images released to accompany the film were the work of leading
“high fashion” photographer Steven Klein. Throughout, West and his wife both
wore the futuristic Balmain outfits made for the Met Ball in May of that year.
West’s own Yeezy fashion range, featuring both menswear and womenswear,
gradually began to win approval, with the acknowledged arbiter of American
fashion taste, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, attending his shows and happily
publicizing them. West has employed artist Vanessa Beecroft to choreograph
these shows; she did the same for the various events that took place as part
of his wedding. Beecroft is herself a part of the new art-fashion-celebrification
process, while transgression—seemingly integral to Kardashian success—is
central to her work, and indeed led to her self–imposed exile from the art world.
She became especially famous through the installations that she created for Louis
Vuitton. For the opening of the large shop on the Champs-Élysées, she created
an installation made up of semi-naked models, all women of color, displayed
fetishistically and provocatively on the shelves of the store, adorned with carefully
arranged Vuitton belts and bags. As the belts were entwined around their legs
and arms in a way suggestive both of Bondage and sado-masochism (BDSM)
and of prison shackles, the work received an enormous amount of publicity, a
good deal of it negative. Beecroft claimed that the installation was a reflection
on gender and ethnicity; her critics saw it as a disturbing reminder of slavery.43
When she became the subject of a documentary film screened at the
Sundance Festival in 2008, about her attempted adoption, two years earlier,
of two orphaned Sudanese babies, she was deemed to have gone too far, and
there were calls to ban her work.44 This film included footage of the distressed
nuns who ran the Darfur orphanage trying to stop her stripping the babies naked
76 THE END OF FASHION

in a chapel, before having herself photographed attempting to “breastfeed”

them in a white Prada dress with specially cut out nipple zones. Copies of this
image, entitled “White Madonna,” were sold for fifty thousand dollars apiece.
This unsurprisingly caused outrage in the black community, despite Beecroft’s
insistence that she self-identifies as black. Beecroft removed herself precipitately
from the art world and later resurfaced working for West.
It seems as if West and Kardashian now have a public presence and economic
power reminiscent of that wielded by the powerful dynasties of Renaissance Italy
(without the taste many of these family members possessed). West in fact likened
his wife’s semi-naked “selfies” to Renaissance paintings when they were collected
together for her book, Selfish, published by the respected art publisher Rizzoli.45
Her very first foray into the art world in November 2010 had seen her naked, but for
Barbara Kruger’s blocks of text, on the cover of W magazine’s The Art Issue.46 But
she has since moved on and up. Jeff Koons became her friend, featuring in one of
her Instagram photos in 2013. In the following year, it was the art-fashion-magazine
Paper47 that published a very revealing photograph on its cover, advertised
as her attempt to “Break the Internet.” The picture was taken by the respected
photographer Jean-Paul Goude, and Kardashian was invited to the promotional
dinner held at “Art Basel Miami,” a very important annual event that has, of course,
become thoroughly “celebrified.”48 In April 2016, she and Kourtney Kardashian
were photographed for the “Yeezy 3” campaign by Juergen Teller; in one of these
deliberately controversial images, the pair seem to be wrestling in mud and Kourtney
is clawing at her sister’s naked buttocks. Another photograph, showing Kardashian
crawling up a stony slope wearing only a fur jacket and knee-high boots, was blown
up and exhibited at another significant annual event, Art Cologne. In August of the
same year, she helped to sculpt her own naked body for the life-size sculptures of
sleeping celebrities created for West’s music video, Famous. Here she and Kanye
are depicted in bed with a group that includes Donald Trump and Anna Wintour.
The sculptures were exhibited soon afterwards at the Blum and Poe art gallery in
Los Angeles. It may well be that Kardashian now sees herself as an “artist” and
not simply as an “attributed celebrity”; for International Women’s Day in 2017, she
posted a selfie of herself made up and accessorized to look like Frieda Kahlo.

Fashion’s factions: Infiltration and

resistance
If the walls of high fashion were first breached by the use of “celebrities” on
magazine covers, the “celebrities” chosen always fitted the “fashion-model”
template. Actress Kiera Knightley, an early favorite for fashion titles and later for
prestigious advertising campaigns, became and remains a “brand ambassador”
CELEBRITY 77

for Chanel. In fact, she played the designer herself in one of Karl Lagerfeld’s digital
productions.49 The actress Kristen Stewart has moved away from Hollywood and
found success in European art-house cinema, so that she brings cultural capital
to her own role as a current Chanel ambassador.
However, US Vogue capitulated some time ago; in March 2014 it featured
Kardashian and West on the cover.50 The result produced horrified readers, a
“Twitter storm,” and canceled subscriptions. But in December 2016, UK Vogue
seemed to be claiming back lost ground, asking hopefully in its pages, “Whatever
Happened to the Cleavage?”51 It featured and championed demure red-carpet
appearances by Alicia Vikander and other successful, slender actresses.
Another form of fightback against what might otherwise seem to be the
unstoppable force of “celebrity style” has garnered a good deal of publicity—
and generated enormous sales. Some designers in “high fashion” are producing
designs that are radically different from the form-fitting, curve enhancing designs,
which appeal to celebrities; they are often semi-androgynous and deliberately not
glamorized. The most notable and commercially successful designer of clothes
that is the complete antithesis of the tight, glitzy garments that characterize,
say, Rousteing’s designs for Balmain is Demna Gvasalia, whose work for the
newly established Vêtements made that label inordinately successful (Figure
5.1). The catwalk models in his womenswear shows were devoid of makeup
and sometimes crop-headed; the first dresses he showed were very loose and
overlong, and he created outsize “hoodies” for both sexes. The well-known and
very influential blogger Leandra Medine, whose professional soubriquet is “Man
Repeller” champions a “fashion aesthetic” that resists overt sexuality in dress.
Her strapline is “Seeking Love, Finding Overalls,” so it would seem that she might
respond positively from the first to Gvasalia’s work.
But initially this was not the case. “Confession—I Don’t Get Vêtements,” she
wrote, in 2016. She went on to explain: “You want to lose your shirt over clothes
that make you feel like 18th century royalty while you’re washing the dishes—I
totally get that. But to wear clothes that make you feel like you’re about to wash
dishes? Where’s the grand illusion there?”52 Four months later, however, she was
converted, writing that the brand was “becoming an ongoing art installation,
which is what I really like about it.”53 She has continued to support Gvasalia’s
aesthetic, praising his use of older, unconventional models in his catwalk shows.
She has also noted with pleasure across the past few months such features of
his work as “secretary suits” (Plate 13), police mackintoshes, “punk” bath towels
covered with emojis, plastic macs, camouflage battle dress, and a parody of the
classic Chanel suit.
However, a certain kind of celebrity—young musicians in particular—liked
and wore some of the clothes, particularly the hooded sweatshirts and slouchy
track suit trousers: Rihanna, Justin Bieber and, inevitably, the label-aware West.
Inevitably, Kardashian herself was finally seen in a Vêtements hoodie, although
78 THE END OF FASHION

it was worn with thigh-high fetish boots designed by West for Yeezy and little
else (Figure 5.1). Eventually, Gvasalia succumbed, as a favor, it seemed, to
Kardashian, and temporarily abandoned his anti-bling aesthetic. Kim and her
daughter, North, were then photographed in October 2016 in matc aesthetic
hing tight, sequined dresses he created especially for them.
Gvasalia has also had an extraordinary effect on “high street” fashion. While his
original “reconstructed” Levi’s cost over a thousand British pounds, copies of these
jeans, with their distinctive stepped hems, swiftly appeared on the high street—at
every “price point.” Gvasalia went on to be creative director of Balenciaga, one of
the most revered ateliers, previously known for its elegance. Other young designers
have also produced desirable clothes that do not emphasize or display the body.
Simon Porte Jacquemus’s designs for his eponymous company garnered much
“high fashion” enthusiasm, and were displayed in glossy magazines across the
globe. In a different kind of “anti-celebrity” style and statement, Louis Vuitton, the
creator of the instantly recognizable luggage carried by so many celebrities, made
a deal in March 2017 with Supreme, designers of skateboarding and streetwear
coveted by young people across the world.

Figure 5.1 Celebrity proof? Fashion at Vêtements. Fall/Winter 2017. Public domain
CELEBRITY 79

The resistance, however, may seem to have only a rather tenuous purchase.
Indeed, for one English fashion journalist Kardashian seems to be an arbiter of
fashion change on a grand scale. Writing about “fashion’s return to technicolour”
after “decades when it was essentially a bit naff to wear anything that wasn’t
black,” Cartner-Morley outlined the gradual shift:

The erosion of the status of black began when it started to be outranked by

navy, and went mass when Kim Kardashian underwent a style make-under
which involved wearing grey or beige head to toe.54

So it seems that, whereas in the past leading designers—first Poiret, then

Chanel, later Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo—dictated radical changes in
the color palette, today that task is carried out by whoever is the current leading
arbiter of celebrity style.

Seeking explanations
This new-millennial, all-conquering media spectacle is largely constructed
around photogenic young women with spectacular bodies. Some journalists—
able to publish far more speedily than academics in this rapidly changing
landscape—and celebrities themselves have claimed that the current display
of the female body is in fact a form of “female empowerment” and should be
championed as “postfeminist.” Yet, rightly, Susan Bordo argued back in the
1990s that the female body is increasingly over-disciplined55 in the Foucauldian
sense, over-determined by the “commodified body”56 and the entrepreneurship
of the self prevailing within the contemporary scene. Her ideas have found wide
acceptance among scholars. The new, opulent bodies, insistently presented as
a mode of self-advertisement, are likewise “disciplined”57 and surely feed on the
more and more obsessive self-scrutiny of young women and their increased fear
of imperfection, of gaining weight, of ageing.
In a recent feature in Harpers Bazaar online, quoted earlier in this essay,58 it
was mooted that “the Kardashians are to blame for the rise of millennial women
getting cosmetic procedures.” Ironically, the Kardashian-Wests always feature
heavily in both the print and the online versions of this magazine. Here, cosmetic
surgeon Dr Simon Ourien, whose patients are getting ever-younger—some are
in their teens—has claimed that “the reason for this shift is because of social
media, selfies and the Kardashians.”59 Another well-known cosmetic surgeon
also interviewed for this Harpers feature, one Dr. Sebagh, called the phenomenon
“damaging” and “absolutely mad.” He argued that these new young patients
“have such insecurity and such image perfection issues” because they are
“constantly on their smartphones.”60 “High fashion” has of course traditionally
80 THE END OF FASHION

been blamed for the obsession with slenderness, for causing young women
to starve themselves in order to achieve fashion-model slimness, so risking
anorexia. Now these surgeons are suggesting that the ubiquitous images of
“celebrity style” are equally damaging, in a different way. Although displayed
online as selfies, many of these pictures involve and even acknowledge the work
of makeup artists in their achievement of glossy perfection. There seems, here,
to be a covert insinuation that celebrity style could cause emotional distress and
even mental health problems61 rather than the debilitating physical conditions
and even illnesses that can be the result of a preoccupation with high fashion.
In this respect, both forms of fashion seem equally open to being problematized
or interrogated.
In defence of “celebrity style,” it has been claimed that the semi-naked celebrity
selfies are an instance of women taking total control of their “own sexuality.”
Feminist writer Naomi Wolf seemed convinced by this particular argument when
she interviewed celebrity Emily Ratajowski, herself possessed of a spectacular
body, for, once again, Harpers Bazaar.62 Ratajkowski herself is another example
of “attributed celebrity.” She is regularly photographed at premières and award
ceremonies, her designer dresses the subject of fascinated fashion copy. She
was in fact an “erotic model,” until she appeared in a music video for Blurred
Lines in 2013, described by one journalist as “the most controversial song of
the decade” for its seeming defence of non-consensual sex.63 The video created
a “separate but overlapping controversy”64 since it featured Ratajowski and
two other models dancing topless with, and around, three fully dressed male
musicians. This brought Ratajowski to public attention and to a small part in the
equally successful film Gone Girl.65 The highly photogenic Ratajowski—slender-
bodied but full-breasted, so combining both “celebrity” and “high fashion”
attributes—has worked as a fashion model for Miu Miu and Marc Jacobs,
together with her “glamour” covers for Sports Illustrated.
The Naomi Wolf interview was illustrated by a full-page image of Ratajowski
rather than of Wolf and she together, and showed her sitting naked astride a
white horse without bridle or saddle. When she explained to Wolf her claims
to be a “new kind of feminist,” the writer of The Beauty Myth66 surprisingly
seemed to accept them. The naked selfie that Ratajowski had shot together with
Kardashian—which attracted optimum publicity—was, she explained, a gesture
of sisterly solidarity after the latter had been vilified for posting a previous “selfie”
in which she herself was for the first time completely naked. She managed to
persuade Wolf that this was indeed empowering, at a time when government
reports in the UK have shown that young women have lower self-esteem than
ever before.67
How can we begin to think about, let alone theorize, this bizarre narrative?
Those of us who have worked—however briefly—within the new field of celebrity
studies, coming from whatever academic discipline or practitioner perspective,
CELEBRITY 81

have surely all wanted to find the Holy Grail of a single ur-methodology—which
while providing us with a truly political perspective, will finally allow us to bring
together what seems at times to be a very disparate and diffuse subject area.
What we need, in fact, is a near-magical way of making proper sense of the
endless diverse and constantly developing activities around celebrities, which we
could bring together and fully understand. It is difficult to know which previous
scholarship might be best employed in our efforts to understand the continual
changes around us and the new, frenetic consumption of both goods and images.
Fifty years after The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord might find it difficult to
comprehend the way in which “spectacle functions and dominates society now,”
so far does it exceed everything he described.68 Before this age of consumption
that is not only “conspicuous” but continuous, and which in its insidious way
crosses every social strata and income level, Thorstein Veblen might retreat,
baffled.69 The melancholy if not bewilderment of the various different members of
the Frankfurt School would be understandable enough.70
It is tempting to read off one specific site of study, the Kardashian celebrity
narrative depicted here, against the model of the “historical stages” in the
relationships between symbols and reality as outlined by Baudrillard in Simulacra
and Simulation.71 He was of course linking these “stages” to different historical
moments in the development of capitalism across two centuries, rather than as
stages in a personal saga across a single decade. But just as there are four stages
in Baudrillard’s historical model, spanning the period from before the Industrial
Revolution to the advanced stages of late capitalism, so the Kardashian career,
central within the narrative unfolded above, has gone through four perceived
stages of development. The “faithful image” of stage one would be the “sex
tape” that began this story. The years during which the “reality show” became
so extraordinarily popular might constitute Baudrillard’s “breakdown of reality,”
the “second stage.” The “signs and images” of the stage that he calls “the order
of sorcery” would involve the stepfather’s change of gender, the lavish wedding
to West, motherhood, art gallery openings, and the bare-buttocked shoot for
Teller. The fourth and final stage is characterized by a complete lack of reality.
And there is no sense of reality in this family saga any more, only insatiable
public interest in bizarre dramatic stories: robbery at gunpoint, breakdown and
madness, incarceration.
But, neat and ingenious as this correspondence of four-phase narratives
might be, it does not take us quite far enough. Enzensberger’s “theatre” has
become a dizzying circus.72 So profound a shift in the culture is perhaps best
accounted by means of the new and varied forms of radical political critique—
Naomi Klein, Wolfgang Streeck, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, David Graeber, Nick
Srnicek, and many others73— that has been notably emerging or consolidating
itself since the crisis of 2008, and its understanding of what has been happening
to us since (approximately) the early 1990s. One might fasten in particular on
82 THE END OF FASHION

Berardi,74 not least for his resituation of Baudrillard in this context. For Berardi,
Baudrillard was a prophet of what is by now a catastrophic age (catastrophe,
here, should not be read as betokening more or less imminent apocalypse; the
catastrophe is, perhaps, more than anything else, ethical, or incipiently ethical).
For understandable reasons, the modern promise to which the twentieth century
so ardently subscribed, if with often disastrous results, has broken down. In
effect, says Berardi, the future is over. In our “postfuturist” culture, the new is no
longer just the eternal return of the same which Benjamin thought constituted
modernity in its satanic aspect. By now, the new is as likely to spell regress as
it is progress, to the point where the terms themselves seem nugatory. So, too,
we are witnessing a wholesale shift from what Berardi calls the “conjunctive”
to the “connective,” from community and solidarity, for example, to aleatory
and disparate relations between “infospheric individuals”75 as monadic entities,
above all, as a result of the growth of the digital web, the development being so
pronounced as to breed and proliferate new psychopathologies. Postfuturism
is eradicating the cultural, juridical, and psychic conventions of modernity. The
ironical manner in which I have used the word “transgression” throughout this
essay underlines the point. For Berardi, these days, “transgression” is embodied
by the likes of Berlusconi and smoothly reconcilable with media-populism. It was
Baudrillard who heralded this psychic mutation and the implosion of thought
and value implicit in what he took to be the “logic of simulation,” and foresaw
the contemporary reversal of the “energetic subjectivation” characteristic of
modernity.76 We might think that, with what is represented in the Kardashians
and their remarkable and increasing influence, fashion culture has reached its
“postfuturist” phase, revealing itself as both “stimulated hyperexpression” and,
at the same time, a form of “exhaustion.”77
 6
CINEMA
Hilary Radner

Cinema, fashion, and femininity

In the 1958 Hitchcock classic Vertigo, the protagonist “Scottie” (played by
James Stewart) takes his girlfriend, soon to become his lover, to a department
store. He wishes to buy her a gray suit, a specific gray suit that a woman wore
the year previously, a woman whom he believes to be dead. The viewer, along
with “Judy” (Kim Novak), a counter girl at another store and the recipient of
“Scottie’s” attentions, watch as a house model displays a nearly identical suit,
which “Scottie” dismisses as not being what he wants (the room is littered with
further rejected garments). While some women spectators may have scoffed
at the idea that a man might readily distinguish between a self-belted subtle
peplum and a straight seam, they might equally fantasize about a partner
able to appreciate the finer details of their clothing choices. Finally, the head
saleswoman, seized by inspiration, instructs her assistant to find last season’s
suit, which not coincidentally was precisely the item that “Scottie” had in mind.1

Classical cinema and Haute Couture

I begin with a description of this scene because it invokes the world of fashion2
as it was conceived at the time, in which shop girls like “Judy” sought to emulate
the look of a married woman whose dress served to communicate the status
and affluence of her husband. Fashion was imported from France with haute
couture designs adapted to the American body and sold in department stores
on a piece by piece basis, sometimes made-to-order, but, more often, with
in-house dressmakers tailoring the garment to suit the taste and dimensions
of the consumer; less affluent shoppers grabbed similar, more cheaply made
items off the rack, perhaps adjusting these themselves, or taking them to a local
dressmaker.3 The fashionable woman kept track of the dictates generated by
Parisian couturiers from season to season and year to year, dutifully updating a
84 THE END OF FASHION

set of prescribed garments for every occasion, with eveningwear, for example,
clearly demarcated as such. Stars such as Grace Kelly continued the traditions
of the pre–Second World War years, functioning as fashion templates on the big
screen, reflecting American iterations of Parisian glamour for women viewers,
who constituted Classical Hollywood’s most important audience.4
Yet, with the rise of television and youth culture, beginning in the early 1950s,
both cinema and fashion were already in decline, or at least their dominance
had been challenged. Significantly, what is colloquially called beatnik style had
already made it to Hollywood, perhaps the first example of what would later be
routinely called “bubble up” style, in which fashion was determined anonymously
on the street rather than by a designer and his wealthy clients.5 Audrey Hepburn
in the 1957 Funny Face (Stanley Donen) is best known for the black Capri pants
and black turtleneck, an outfit put together by Edith Head, the film’s costume
designer, inspired by contemporary street style, which she wears before her
conversion to high fashion. Viewers are less familiar with the opulent gowns
designed by Hubert de Givenchy that she dons at the film’s conclusion, having
converted to high fashion.6 Kim Novak would herself wear stovepipe trousers
and a black turtleneck in the role that follows that of “Judy,” in Bell, Book and
Candle (Richard Quine, 1958), in which she plays a beatnik/witch.
The black stovepipe trousers and turtleneck combination was also widely
imitated by young fans whose budget did not include the upscale garments found
at the local department stores that served wealthy women in the days before the
advent of catalogues that catered to credit card orders phoned in by customers,
not to mention the internet shopping that would follow. The black pullover/narrow
trouser outfit, especially the turtleneck, in the 1950s and the decades that ensued,
was a wardrobe staple for males and females under twenty-five, presaging the
androgyny that would become increasingly prevalent as the century progressed,
and undermining fashion’s function as marking the gender of the wearer.

New paradigms: Disintegration or

rejuvenation?
By the 1980s, both cinema and fashion had changed irrevocably. Theatrical
release and haute couture had both become loss leaders, a means of advertising
a vast array of products to a wide spectrum of consumers. Yet, in many ways,
both style and screen narratives continue to occupy, if anything, a growing
importance in consumers’ lives, with their choices, arguably, multiplying. While
a notable army of scholars have commented on the passing of cinema,7 only a
few journalists and scholars have noted the demise of fashion.8 What precisely
has changed? Is there a connection between the much-lamented death
of cinema and the quieter end of fashion as the dominant force determining
CINEMA 85

modes of dress? Both cinema and fashion have been dismissed as unimportant
dimensions of human activity, mere entertainment in the first case, and “the very
exemplum of superficiality, frivolity and vanity” in the second.9 And yet the first is
often categorized as the art form that captures the essence of twentieth-century
culture, or modernity itself,10 and the other as one of the primary mechanisms
whereby the subject’s relations to itself (its body) and to others are regulated,
“one of the means by which bodies are made social and given meaning and
identity.”11 Or, in the words of Giuliana Bruno, “Skin is our first coating, our
first dress, and then fashion becomes our second skin. Fashion is the way we
decorate our epidermic selves. … By way of dress we actually ‘fashion’ our own
selves, which also means our identities.”12
With the advent of television, exacerbated by VHS, DVD, and other forms of
delivery, cinema no longer offered a unique experience over which the viewer
exercises little or no control. Rather, the second half of the twentieth century
witnessed a radical decentralization of viewing and production in comparison
with the structures generated by the classical studio system. Currently, popular
advertisements for home delivery services promise that each individual viewer
may revel in the opportunity to watch what he or she wants, when he or she
wishes, as many times as he or she desires. A sense of community and cohesion
that marked earlier viewing situations makes way for relationships founded on
aggregations and networks of overlapping experiences that are grounded in
choice and are essentially individualistic.13 The formation of communities that
may be geographically dispersed, but united in terms of aesthetics, politics,
and ethics, offsets this initial risk of solipsism, while viewers’ choices remain
constrained and directed by what the larger institutions governing distribution,
from the Hollywood conglomerates to national internet providers, deem
financially advantageous. The majority of viewers are loyal to the blockbusters
pushed by the conglomerates. In contrast, groups of cinephiles (literally, “film
lovers”) obsessed with cinema and certain esoteric films communicate and
exchange movies over the internet. Initially, cinephila was associated with large
urban centers, in particular Paris, beginning with the French New Wave. It is now
a global phenomenon. Digital media have made available rare films by directors
such as Jacques Rivette and Jean Eustache, some of which have not been
screened theatrically for decades. Cinephiles distribute these directors’ works on
a global, if modest, scale, in terms of numbers, manipulating networks perhaps
initially generated for monetary gain, but here serving a different purpose.14

Decentralization and atomization

Arguably, the circulation of fashion and style operates similarly, with the result
that today fashion scholars often talk about style tribes rather than seasons,
86 THE END OF FASHION

pointing to, for example, the longevity of the Perfecto leather jacket in certain
contexts.15 Designers such as Tatsuro Horikawa for the line Julius, or Julius 7,
develop international reputations without recourse to the red carpet,16 while
remaining relatively unknown even to the readers of magazines such as Vogue,
which circulate news and advice about fashion in print and digital form (Condé
Nast, the magazine’s publisher, distributes over 20 editions). Developments in
the garment industry have contributed to these changes: perhaps most notably
the entry of China into the clothing market, with its ability to produce attractive
garments quickly and cheaply, accompanied by new distribution networks
delivering goods to retailers with increasing rapidity, in spite of the distances
involved.17 New media contributed: the rise of the global fashion blogger who
promulgates the principles of eternal style across national borders, with no regard
for time zone, served to intensify the shift away from Paris as the epicenter of
fashion.18 On the one hand, scholars argue that consumers are caught up in
a frenzy of continued, planned obsolescence in which poorly made garments
are endlessly replaced.19 In reaction, consumers have turned to secondhand
clothing, optimistically referred to as “vintage,” and to home sewing, which is
enjoying a renaissance. On the other hand, a chorus of voices argue that we
have witnessed the democratization of fashion, with a consequent undermining
of the categories of class and gender.20
The nature of the audience and its relations to a mode of distributions did not
produce the only notable transformations. Technology had a fundamental role
in other ways as well. More people making more movies than ever before, as
manifest in phenomena such as cell-phone film festivals, and the development
of national cinemas such as that of Nigeria (otherwise known as “Nollywood”),
which are founded on digital technology and straight-to-video production.
Scholars such as Roger Odin, taking a more optimistic view, consider that the
twenty-first century witnessed the rise of new cinematic cultures, distinctive yet
still properly cinema, which itself always encompassed a degree of diversity,
using the history of home movies and amateur film to exemplify his argument.21
Others, such as Raymond Bellour, take a more pessimistic view, pointing to the
loss of cinema as a specific kind of collective experience grounded in a unique
shared memory of a particular event.22 Yet scholars, whether in one camp or the
other, or, more typically, located in between, agree that cinema as an economic
and social institution has undergone crucial changes.
The first set of changes were generated by the 1948 Paramount decree,
which required that the Hollywood studios set up safeguards that would prevent
them from exercising a monopoly over the three arms of the cinematic institution
(production, distribution, and exhibition) exacerbated by a significant population
shift from urban centers to more fragmented suburban townships, accompanied
by the rise of television. By the end of the 1960s, and certainly by the 1970s,
the package unit system of production had been put in place, creating what
CINEMA 87

Tom Schatz has described as “New Hollywood,” which replaced the old studio
structures.23
Consequently, the star and his or her agent, rather than the studios,
became the most influential forces in Hollywood. By the 1990s, stars and
agents were quick to take advantage of digital technology as offering new
forms of communication in order to further promote themselves beyond their
performances, recognizing that, in the words of Pamela Church Gibson, “images
now ‘bleed’ right across the whole spectrum of the media through its formerly
discrete strands.”24 Stars became franchises rather than actresses or actors.
They consciously developed themselves as “brands” that endorsed everything
from jewelry to home appliances. This movement intensified in the 1990s as new
media became more pervasive, underlining the continued cultural and social shift
toward “rhizomorphic” structures, to use the metaphor proposed by philosophers
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.25 In other words, the new structure whereby
images circulated was metaphorically closer to a geometrical decentralized figure
called the rhizome than the hierarchies identified with the vertical integration of
the studio system, in which the roles of producer and consumer had been clearly
defined. For example, in the studio era, a spectator bought a movie ticket in
order to see the movie; the film was a product that the studios delivered to
the viewer. Today, theatrical release is less about selling tickets (though selling
tickets is critical to a film’s success) than it is about selling an array of ancillary
products. Similarly, when a viewer watches a film on television, the network is
not selling the movies, but rather using the movie to attract numbers of viewers
for prospective advertisers.
Fashion followed a similar path, insofar as its breaks with the past are
generated around two important moments: the 1960s “youthquake,” in which
style became the purview of the ready-to-wear market geared toward a more
youthful, androgynous, and less well-moneyed set of consumers. Yves Saint
Laurent’s embrace of the counterculture in his ready-to-wear lines in the late
1960s and 1970s emblemized this movement. Concurrently, there was also
an attendant de-emphasis on haute couture and made-to-measure dress in
general, accompanied by the gradual falling away of categories such as daywear
and eveningwear. Cristóbal Balenciaga closed his house in 1968, proclaiming
that haute couture was no more.26 Balenciaga’s statement carried weight, given
his position in the world for fashion. Susan Irvine, writing for the Telegraph,
explained, at the time that he died in 1972, “There was only one king of couture,
the one whom Christian Dior called ‘the master of us all,’ while Coco Chanel
said he alone was ‘a couturier in the truest sense of the word. … The others are
simply fashion designers.’”27
Arguably, the second such transformation in the fashion system occurs in
the 1990s, marked by the rise of high street fashion and the flooding of affluent
countries with inexpensive, poorly made, but trendy, clothing. The clothing
88 THE END OF FASHION

industry responded by focusing increasingly on style as part of an entertainment

system in which fashion as spectacle, in the form of television programming,
from news reporting to reality shows, became a topic of wide interest to broadly
based audiences, who had no intention of actually wearing what they saw.

The reign of celebrity culture

Cinema and fashion have continued to come together through the cult of celebrity,
which has grown unabated throughout the twenty-first century, surviving, and
even profiting from, the demise of Hollywood, which set the stars free from their
studio contracts.28 Stars are now cross-media phenomena who maintain their
presence in the public eye across a wide variety of media from print to Twitter, in
which performance in a particular medium may be relatively unimportant to their
credibility. Brigitte Bardot in the mid-twentieth century, because of her bikini,
was an exception. She was a media celebrity before she became a film star. The
obsessive attention of the paparazzi ensured that her image was disseminated to
audiences who had never seen her in films.29 Today, many fans follow celebrities
whose films or concerts they may have never attended––and without any intention
of doing so. Fashion has followed suit: if, in the past, film stars may have been
one of the privileged vehicles whereby the designer presented his creations to
the world, today, celebrities may take over the role of the designer, sometimes in
name, but often in fact. Style and celebrity are becoming synonymous, with the
celebrity figure thus dictating future trends.30
In the 1990s, the fact that a particular actress such as Sarah Jessica Parker
sported a specific handbag in her role as Carrie on the television program Sex
and the City (HBO, 1998–2004) was enough to ensure that consumers would
rush to buy the item, recalling Hollywood studio days when Joan Crawford
inspired thousands of young girls to copy the party dress she wore in Letty
Lynton (Clarence Brown, 1932).31 Crawford, however, earned nothing from this
transaction. Thirty years later, in the 1960s, stars such as Audrey Hepburn began
to seek some form of financial reward for their participation in the fashion system.
Today, in the twenty-first century, while the specifics of these arrangements
are confidential, stars earn thousands, and even millions, of dollars through
various forms of endorsement, including personal appearances.32 Scent, long
a mainstay of the fashion industry, has now become a routine extension of the
celebrity franchise, with celebrities endorsing traditional brands, or often creating
their own fragrances. Products themselves are available for immediate purchase
through phenomena such as “e-tailing,” whereby component parts of a celebrity
outfit are quickly identified and located for interested consumers online.33
In response, international brands have arisen that refuse to enter the celebrity
circuit, preferring to be identified with less mainstream publications such as i-D.
CINEMA 89

One of the most prominent is Rick Owens, a California designer who has lived in
Paris since 2003.34 He describes his clothes as “anti-status” … “my clothes are
supposed to be not about status, not about novelty” [sic]. He explains: “I may
not do any of that red-carpet stuff … but I know that people buy my stuff by the
armful to wear in their real lives, and there’s something really nice in that.”35 In
2009, the New York Times considered that he “may be fashion’s most imitated
designer.” Owens, however, avoids designing for red carpet events, and neither
advertises nor seeks endorsements.36 The New York Times magazine describes
his operation in 2017 as “relatively small. His turnover is approximately $140
million, paltry when compared to luxury behemoths. But it’s perfectly formed.”
Notwithstanding, in the same article he is described as “the Cristóbel Balenciaga
of our time,” with Balenciaga, in the view of Alexander Fury, the author of the
article, having “influenced an entire generation of designers.” Fury opines,
“Owens’ technique has stealthily proved just as influential.”37
Owens’s New York store is a cavernous, monochromatic structure, where
shop attendants (young men with vaguely British accents) wear black beanies,
low slung trousers with dropped crotches, white singlets, and black trainers. They
lounge on the street corner smoking cigarettes during their breaks, and could be
mistaken for young urban lads of indeterminate income almost anywhere in the
world. Pleasant and chatty, they are a far cry from the snotty saleswomen of the
past, notoriously satirized in Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990).

Modernity and its vexations

Both the rise of fashion as the primary means of regulating dress and the
development of cinema as a socioeconomic institution have been associated with
modernity and a break from the past––from cultures associated with tradition and
hierarchy––thus heralding a new mode of being in which social and geographic
mobility have increasingly become the norm. Not unsurprisingly, modernity was
not monolithic, but often paradoxical and contradictory, being associated with
diverse social trends from the rise of nationalism to the secularization of public
culture. The twentieth-century fashion system itself, from the perspective of
scholars such as Bonnie English, sowed the seeds of its own disintegration from
its inception, as illustrated by designers such as Charles Worth, who “attempted
to establish himself as a creative artist” while exploiting his position to ensure
“international commercial fame (which led to greater financial returns).”38 Thus,
even in the nineteenth century, designers such as Charles Worth sought to
market (and protect) their designs, while in the early twentieth century, others, like
Coco Chanel, were eager to sell their wares to the largest number of consumers.
English argues that “while haute couture reigned supreme at the turn of the
century, ironically it predicated its own demise.”39
90 THE END OF FASHION

In contrast, for scholars such as Barbara Vinken, fashion is crucially linked to

modernity as a largely twentieth-century phenomenon.40 Looking back on the
1970s, she proclaimed, “The century of fashion is over. … On the one hand, the
fashion-buying public has increased; on the other hand, this public no longer
determines trends, but reacts to trends that emerge from subcultures.”41 Other
scholars see the break with traditional fashion coming later in the century. Teri
Agins argues, “By the early 1990s, a confluence of phenomena arising from
retailing, marketing, and feminism began transforming the ways of fashion
forever.”42 For Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, the development of the
Internet, and of inter-media forms in the twenty-first century, such as the fashion
film, constitutes the significant break. This new fashion system, “increasingly
blurring the line between fashion and industry, creativity and control,”43 has
resulted in what Karaminas describes as the emergence of “fashionscapes” as
a “transformative moment.”44
As in the case of cinema, to argue that fashion has disappeared seems
counterfactual. Both, however, have undergone significant transformations,
or, perhaps more accurately, a series of transformations in the past century.
The important question, then, is how the evolution of these institutions offers
insight into the nature of the larger changes of which they are, perhaps, the
consequence. Are these transformations the harbingers of even more radical
transformations to come? Do they have a role in influencing the further
inevitable developments that will follow? Church Gibson avers that while “film
had a greater influence on fashion than any other form of visual culture, … the
very shaping of consumer culture … depends upon the cinema and its unique
power to generate both demand and supply.”45 Peter Wollen, commenting
on Walter Benjamin’s influential writing, claims that for this philosopher:
“Fashion displays both an object lesson in commodity culture and a possibility
of messianic redemption.”46 Film scholars, beginning with Vachel Linsay,
the American poet,47 have underlined film’s utopian possibilities, with others
reposting with more negative predictions that extend to mass culture in all its
manifestations.48

Gender issues
A significant facet of cinema and fashion is that both have been inextricably
implicated in the ways in which gender has been constructed and reproduced
as governing social categories within modernity. In the same period during which
scholars have been heralding the ends of cinema and fashion, feminists such as
Sneja Gunew have proclaimed. “We are post-woman. Get over it,”49 suggesting
that we may, perhaps, at least in the view of feminist scholars such as Gunew, be
experiencing the end of gender, or, at least, of the concept of “woman.”
CINEMA 91

A crucial dimension of contemporary identity is “gender,” tied to a fashion

system that emerges in the nineteenth century in which, as students have
dutifully repeated over the last three decades, “men act and women appear,”50
and which is marked by what is known as, in the words of John Flügel, “man’s
‘great renunciation’ in matters of dress,” often referred to as “the great male
renunciation.”51 When feminists such as Gunew proclaim (as they have been
for a few decades), “we are post-woman,” they are alluding to an array of
changes with regard to gender in which both cinema and fashion inevitably
participate.
Fashion has long been a topic of debate and concern among feminists.52
Scholars who study the history of feminist criticism know the name Carolyn
Heilbrun as a groundbreaking literary scholar in this area during the 1960s.
She is described by New York Magazine as “one of the mothers––perhaps the
mother––of academic feminism laying the groundwork for women’s struggle over
the past decades with what they called the ‘patriarchy.’” New York Magazine
also noted that “she had stopped wearing nylons and heels at 62, as always, as
a matter of principle,” a fact that no article commemorating her life and death
has failed to mention.53 Born in 1926, Heilbrun would have been 62 in 1988, a
period that witnessed a number of dramatic changes in women’s wear. Indeed,
wearing “nylons and heels” might have seemed anachronistic in the late 1980s,
with pantyhose and lycra the norm in Manhattan, which Heilbrun called home
at the time, and where she filled a named chair in English literature at Columbia
University.
The 1980s, arguably the height of a philosophy known as “dress for success,”
or “power dressing” for both men and women,54 also saw the working woman
(as opposed to the wealthy socialite) firmly ensconced as the icon of style, a
trend that had begun earlier in the century, in spite of remonstrations by the
like of Heilbrun. By the late 1980s, women such as Donna Karan, launching the
Donna Karan New York collection in 1985,55 built a career on catering to women
who wished to look successful and attractive while having minimal amounts of
time to invest in fashion. Karan, herself, is “widely credited with changing the way
working women dress.”56 The tailored primness popular earlier in the decade
gave way to an ideal that emphasized a woman’s body while forgiving her what
was termed her curves, through the use of elasticized fabrics that molded to her
form while shaping it subtly. Known for her “seven easy pieces”57 that could take
a woman from her desk to an evening affair, Karan embodied this woman in her
own life. She developed a “wardrobe” that combined ease with glamour and
eschewed an aesthetic that required a “new” look with each season and which
was, as a consequence, largely impervious to trends. For Heilbrun, and her kind,
however, to be a feminist was to discard the trappings of a fashion system in
which feminism was equated with to-be-looked-at-ness, and femininity tout
court.
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Popular feminism, exemplified by designers such as Donna Karan, advocated

a form of feminism referred to as “neo-feminism,” “post-feminism,” “market place
feminism,” “consumer feminism,” and so on58––a feminism that embraced “to-
be-looked-at-ness,” with an emphasis on dimorphism (breasts, derrières, and
shapely fuzz-free legs), as a source of feminine empowerment and identity. In
advocating a season-less look that did not change from year to year, designers
such as Karan challenged aspects of the fashion system. They also preserved,
however, a strong division between femininity and masculinity. With the demise
of Karan’s designer line in 2015 (and Karan’s retirement) described by the New
York Times as a “major shift for fashion,”59 fashion seems to be increasingly
challenging the masculine/feminine and even the male/female divide, at least in
certain sectors, as suggested by the continued vigor of designers such as Rei
Kawakubo who emphasize androgyny as a fashion choice.

Androgyny and fashion

Indeed, the 1980s highlighted not only the sexy “neo-feminist” incarnated
by Karan but also what is known as the “Japanese invasion,” including Rei
Kawakubo whose fashion line is called Comme des Garçons, or “like the boys.”
While Donna Karan retired in 2015, her licensing businesses and diffusion lines
continued to be economically viable. Her designer line, however, which bore
her own name and design imprimatur, did not correspond to contemporary
sensibilities. Kawakubo continues to dress the generations, with new converts in
each successive decade, promoting a design philosophy that supported a vision
of the subject as essentially androgynous. In 2017, Rei Kewakubo became the
second living designer to be honored by an exhibition at New York Metropolitan
Museum of Art (May 4–September 4, 2017). Rei Kawakubo: The Art of the In-
Between as the exhibition is called, represents a tribute to the prestige that she
and her designs enjoy in the twenty-first century.60
Should heilbron choose to visit Comme des Garçons in Paris, or in any of the
other major fashion capitols graced with dedicated retail outlets affiliated with
Kawakubo’s lines today, she would have no trouble finding stylish attire that
met her requirements, established in “her sixties” when “she had the courage to
throw out her high heels and skirts and dress entirely in flat shoes and trousers.”
Washington Post’s Selwa Roosevelt (clearly no fan of Comme des Garçons)
opined in 1997, with respect to Heilbrun’s sartorial choices, “There I doubt if
she will find many takers, and she is aware of that ….”61 The continued success
of Rei Kawakubo’s design philosophy suggests otherwise, proving that two
decades later, in Heilbrun’s words, “at least some women will wish to be judged
by qualities other than their dress, their ability to appear thin and helpless, their
success in inspiring male lust.”62
CINEMA 93

For Heilbrun, the move away from a femininity defined in terms of “dress,”
and as “thin,” “helpless,” and sexy to men was not a move toward masculinity.
Drawing on Virgina Woolf, Heilbrun advocated an ideal grounded in androgyny.
She introduced her benchmark volume Towards a Recognition of Androgyny, first
published in 1964, with the following words: “I believe that our future salvation
lies in a movement away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender
toward a world in which individual roles and the modes of personal behavior can
be freely chosen.” The term “androgyny” for Heilbrun “defines a condition under
which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by
men and women, are not rigidly assigned.”63 Vanessa Grigoriadis explained in
an article in New York, written shortly after Heilbrun’s death in 2003, that “the
object was not for women to become men per se but rather (as Woolf similarly
argued) for a ‘reunification of the sexes in the self.’ To recommend that women
become identical to men, Heilbrun writes, ‘would be simple reversal, and would
defeat the whole point of androgyny, and for that matter feminism: in both, the
whole point is choice.’”64 Heibrun’s clothing choices were a figuring forth of her
convictions, however unconventional they may have appeared at the time.
Not unimportantly, Rei Kawakubo’s designs are noted for their “radical
abandonment of the conventional notions of attractiveness.”65 In the rare
photographs available of Kawakubo, she routinely wears a version of the biker
jacket, a long skirt, and a pair of trainers. Her fashion shows and the exhibition at
the Met offer what might characterized as experimental designs that challenge
notions of clothing, “wearable abstractions,” in the words of New Yorker fashion
writer Judith Thurman.66 Her “‘easier-to-wear’ subsidiary line,” “Comme des
Garçons, Comme des Garçons,” formerly known as “Robe de Chambre,” with
a more practical thrust and described as “a microcosm of her own wardrobe,”67
has many items that would meet with Heidbrun’s approval, including flat and very
comfortable shoes designed in collaboration with Doc Martens, the producer of
the standard subcultural footwear initially associated with skinheads in 1960s
Britain––as well as generously tailored trousers, forgiving of both male and
female forms.
The persistent androgyny advocated by Rei Kawakubo, and others such as
Rick Owens, Gareth Pugh, and Ann Demeuelemeester (whose line’s designer is
now a man, Sebastien Meunier),68 suggests a shift in the ways that appearance
and gender are articulated within a particular, if perhaps limited, arena, but one
that has strong ties to youth and street culture as evidenced in such publications
as i-D. Indeed, in 2015, fashion writer Ruth La Perla announced “fashion’s
gender blur,” and a concomitant “narrowing of the sexual divide,” in the New
York Times.69
The consequences of the much-heralded end of cinema, the less loudly
proclaimed end of fashion, and the, perhaps uneven, fading of “woman” are
reflected in the topics pursued by contemporary cinema, especially, but
94 THE END OF FASHION

not exclusively, independent cinema, which seeks to offer an alternative to

Conglomerate Hollywood fare.70 Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
constitutes a significant meditation on the confluence of the cultural trends that
have inspired scholars to talk about, variously, but rarely together, the end of
cinema, the end of fashion, and the end of gender.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Jim Jarmusch is described by the Guardian as a “hipster” and “without a doubt
the most rock’n’roll of filmmakers.”71 Like many films that he directed, all of which
challenge the norms of contemporary Conglomerate Hollywood, Only Lovers
Left Alive had a fraught production history. Jarmusch shot the film digitally
because he was “hemmed in by financing”; however, Sony Pictures Classic72 (an
arm of one of the conglomerates) ultimately distributed the title, though original
funding was from Cyprus, France, Germany, and the UK. The production might
be described as an independent American film (shot in Michigan, Germany
and Morocco) with a Euro-pudding funding profile, neither national cinema nor
international fare, and certainly not independent of the conglomerate system.73
Investors’ reticence was not ill founded; the film was well received critically,
but its box office failed to recover its initial budget.74 Thus, like many independent
film projects, its purpose was artistic and personal, rather than being financially
motivated––with Sony most likely encouraged by the prestige afforded by the
status of director and cast. This project, like many others in its category, in terms
of medium and distribution, suggests the fragmentation of cinema, which is,
arguably, no longer a mass medium, but one that is divided between “event
films” targeting ever younger viewers, and the so-called niche films that may
enjoy cult status, while never achieving box office success.
Only Lovers Left Alive revolves around the centuries-old relationship between
two globe-trotting vampires, “Adam,” played by Tom Hiddleston, and “Eve,”
played by Tilda Swinton. Atmospheric rather than plot-drive, the film recounts
the couple’s attempts to survive the contemporary world. The film concludes in
Tangiers as the two vampires prepare to murder a couple of young lovers as their
only means of survival. The vampire as a narrative conceit afforded Jarmusch the
opportunity to “sneak in an overview of cultural history,”75 in which, among other
things, he revisits a cinematic past that includes an old movie palace, now a car
park, which, metaphorically, marks the death of cinema (Figure 6.1).
The obsession with the past in the present was literally embodied in the
costumes worn by the vampires, all of which were made for the film, which
highlights that these garments had no direct connections to the world of fashion.
Jarmusch, in particular, avoids any involvement with the luxury industry, or
mainstream culture more generally, which has contributed to his status as an
CINEMA 95

Figure 6.1 From movie palace to parking garage in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013),
directed by Jim Jarmusch

authentic “indie” director.76 Tilda Swinton was intimately involved in the creation
of her look, claiming that she and the costume designer always work together
very closely:

As far as I’m concerned it’s the lion’s share of my work, putting together the
disguise. … We had such fun putting all the looks together, … we had to keep
alive that they were living in all centuries at once. So every element, the height
of the heel, the substance of the pants, the cut of the jacket had to, or rather
needed to not indicate one period. So, the jacket might be a bit fifties, a little
bit 1530’s, a little bit last season. That feeling of fluidity and lastability was
essential and fun to do.77

Only Lovers Left Alive was, however, promoted by fashion publications,

particularly with a view to its sartorial choices. For example, Vogue’s Patricia
Garcia extolled the film’s look: “There’s a special kind of nonchalant cool found
in every Jim Jarmusch film.” She continued invoking Swinton and Hiddleston as
fashion models: “Inspired by their bedhead and their grungy rock-‘n’-roll style—
there’s a white leather jacket we need in our closets right now—we picked six
looks you can make your own” (Figure 6.2). Vogue then goes on to detail how
the consumer can recreate various outfits worn by the characters by purchasing
contemporary garments.78
96 THE END OF FASHION

Through her “look” in this film and her status as a fashion icon, Swinton
challenges the division between the fashionable and the unfashionable, while at
the same time supporting, and being supported by, an economic system that is
grounded in something like “a timeless style,” ironically predicated on clothing as
increasingly disposable. Through her appearance, she suggests a physical ideal
that is neither feminine nor masculine, but, rather, androgynous, and famously
so, a cult figure among feminists, the offspring of Heilbrun’s generation.79
Swinton nonetheless maintains a degree of “to be looked-at-ness” as a desirable
quality, with her penchant for disguise putting into question the very notion of a
stable identity, while at the same time enhancing her iconicity as the emblem of
perpetual transformation, the ideal spokesperson for various brands.
Her character in the film enjoys a doubly privileged position, as a wealthy
immortal, that is neither a function of gender nor of class as typically conceived.
The film, however, does not so much advocate a classless system as describe
a new class system in which the autonomous individual (rather than groups) is
singled out as the site for identity. Vampires metaphorically occupy a place of
extreme privilege that depends upon their exploitation of others as a result of
their nature, as the film’s conclusion makes abundantly clear. Temporarily without
money or connections, the two vampires attack two young lovers in order to
survive, their ethical reservations notwithstanding.
The messianic dimension of the film and of fashion, highlighted by Lindsay
and Benjamin, respectively, is apparent in the way that neither vampire is content
with how things are and must always strive for something new, something better.
In this vein, the vampires are consistent critics of contemporary culture, which

Figure 6.2 Tilda Swinton wearing her must-have leather jacket with Tom Hiddleston in
Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), directed by Jim Jarmusch
CINEMA 97

is never sufficient to fulfill the dreams of the past, and which are kept alive in the
present, paradoxically, by the vampires’ privileged status as immortals (they are
great collectors of books and art, for example). Vampires also typically represent
a being that may be notionally gendered, but for whom gender is not the defining
moment of identity. In the words of Geczy and Karaminas, “The vampire exists
outside of time and subsequently history and language, collapsing the binaries
between man and woman, human and animal, heterosexual and homosexual,
lodging themselves outside the slippages and folds of language.”80 In the hands
of Jarmusch and Swinton, the figure of the vampire is used to question the very
notion of identity, including gender. While the vampire is technically immortal,
he or she changes over time, becoming something that is no longer human, no
longer himself or herself––a condition of being that is often a source of anxiety for
the vampire in question. For example, in the case of Only Lovers Left Alive, Tom
Hiddleson’s character “Adam” routinely suffers from depression and a pervasive
anomie. Swinton’s “Eva” is post-woman because she is first and foremost a
vampire and notably more rational than “Adam.” Nonetheless, her position as
gendered is effectively conveyed in the film as part of her star persona. Her
fashion choices are equally ambiguous, suggesting how boundaries between
binary systems (including that of gender) have become increasingly blurred
without disappearing as such.

Conclusion
At the end of cinema, films, or more properly screen narratives, are not simply
messianic in terms of their themes; as a medium film is, increasingly, everywhere
and nowhere, as film theorists such as Raymond Bellour have repeatedly
noted.81 Film has become a democratic art form not simply in the viewing
(though this is the case more intensely than ever), but in the making, with more
movies being made than ever before, owing to the facilitation made possible by
digital technology and the internet. Similarly, as noted by Karaminas, “fashion
imagery, as a mode of representation, is in constant flux with the social forces
that shape culture and political change.”82 The new “fashionscapes” described
by Karaminas have authorized an ever-widening range of cultural intermediaries,
with style icons developing a global reach that is ever more fragmented in the
discourse and standards that these last disseminate.83 Fashion, like cinema, is
everywhere and nowhere.
Tilda Swinton as a star emblemizes this paradox. She is a fashion icon who
is indifferent to fashion; a mother who is celebrated for her androgyny; a film star
noted for her ability to disguise herself and her accent; an aristocrat known for
her lack of pretension. If she has one single defining characteristic, it is perhaps
her capacity to endlessly transform herself, a practice that incarnates and reflects
98 THE END OF FASHION

the shifting terrain of contemporary culture in the twenty-first century. This trope
of transformation applies perhaps equally to fashion and film, neither of which
has disappeared. Rather, both have continued to mutate into multiple versions,
fragments of what they once were, now taking on new forms, that nonetheless
recall the old.
 7
MEDIATIZATION AND
DIGITAL RETAIL
Agnès Rocamora

Introduction
The word “mediatization,” although not a new one,1 was refashioned—
“awakened” as Gianpetro Mazzoleni puts it2—in the late twentieth century, but
especially in the early 2000s by social sciences and humanities scholars to
reconceptualize the relation between media and society. Whereas media had
often been studied as conveyors of meaning, they started being conceived as
agents active in the making and transformation of social and cultural practices.
In the growing literature on mediatization,3 the contrast between the two
approaches is sometimes signaled by the use of the term “mediation” to refer
to the representational role of the media and “mediatization” to refer to their
agentive power.4 Studying mediatization does not mean studying the media per
se, but rather studying the sites and practices they saturate and shape, and
the forms this shaping takes. As Eric Rothenbuhler puts it, mediatization is “the
process by which activities of various social spheres come to be conducted
under the influence of the media, with the media, through the media, or by the
logic of the media.”5 Mediatization interrogates the transformative power of the
media, and their role in the “moulding” of society is the focus of theoretical and
empirical discussions, and a guiding research agenda.6
The bulk of mediatization studies has concentrated on politics. However, the
concept is useful for investigating a broad range of practices and fields, including
fashion, as I have argued in an article in the journal Fashion Theory.7 In that article,
I discussed examples of fashion shows, bricks and mortar retail, and makeup,
in the light of digital culture and argued for the importance of mediatization as
articulated in digital media, as opposed to traditional, mass media. Indeed, much
of the literature on mediatization has attended to this process as taking place
through the latter, but more attention needs to be paid to the specificity of digital
100 THE END OF FASHION

mediatization.8 As Kunilius et al. observe, “the dominant mediatization narrative

still extrapolates from the epoch and conditions of mass mediatization. This
begs the question, how is this theorizing valid in the current, networked media
environment and infrastructure.”9
In this chapter, I pursue my engagement with the idea of digital mediatization,
and in particular as taking place in the field of fashion, by focusing on e-commerce.
It is also an opportunity for me to return to a concept that is useful for making
sense of digital fashion media: remediation.10 In bringing mediatization and
remediation together in an analysis of fashion e-commerce, the chapter also turns
to the notion of commercialization to account for the ways it intersects with both
remediation and mediatization. It shows that current online fashion retail practices
allow us to explore the congruence of processes of mediatization, remediation,
and commercialization. This chapter first looks at the rise of e-commerce, and
more specifically at the concept of shoppable magazines, to comment on the
idea of the history of the mediatization of fashion commerce, and on the logic of
entertainment that underpins retail and the media. It then turns to the notion of
remediation as a way of conceptualizing shoppable magazines, and to examine
mediatization in relation to digital culture. Finally, it addresses the theme of
commercialization, discussing the idea of brands as publishers—and the related
notions of branded content, content marketing, and native journalism—in the
light of the idea of the commodification of everyday life through online fashion.
In exploring the nexus mediatization/remediation/commercialization in the
field of fashion, this chapter aims to contribute not only to current debates on
mediatization but also to understandings of recent developments in the field of
fashion. What is discussed is not the end of fashion, contra many pessimistic
views of the current state of both fashion and the media, but fashion’s
reconfiguration. This chapter thus shows the relevance of all three concepts for
grasping this reconfiguration.

e-commerce and shoppable magazines:

Context
While the nineteenth century was the century of the department store, the
twentieth century that of the shopping mall, the twenty-first century could be
seen as that of online commerce. Facilitated by the use of credit cards, non-store
retailing grew in the 1990s,11 and, today, online commerce is “the fastest growing
retail channel.”12 Also known as e-commerce, online retail began in 1995. At
first relatively shy—in March 1996, for instance, nine months after it had gone
online, Argos had sold only twenty-two items13—it quickly accelerated. In 2015,
in Great Britain alone, business-to-consumer e-commerce reached 157 billion
MEDIATIZATION AND DIGITAL RETAIL 101

Euros,14 with 77 percent of UK internet users having purchased something

online.15 And in the UK, as in many countries, the most popular type of online
purchase is clothing (Ecommerce news 2017), which, together with textile and
footwear, accounted for 14.1 percent of all online retailing in April 2017.16 The
emergence of e-commerce followed an older tradition of home shopping by
phone and mail through print catalogs and television. However, with the rise of
mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets, non-store shopping soon
detached itself from the fixity of place to become mobile, in the form currently
know as m-commerce. Thus, in the words of Kenneth Laudon and Carol Traver,
“in 2015, 2.25 billion people worldwide use a mobile device to access the
Internet, and over 45% of total Internet traffic comes from mobile devices.”17
E-commerce is also s-commerce, which stands for “social commerce,” a form
of commerce social networks and online sociability enables.18 This includes
platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat. Social
e-commerce is still in its early days. However, as Laudon and Traver observe, “in
2014, the top 500 retailers in Internet Retailer’s Social Media 500 earned about
$3.3 billion from social commerce, a 25% increase over 2013.”19
Where window-shopping once referred to looking through the panes of glass
of shop frontages, it now also involves engaging with a digital screen.20 Where
it once involved an urban flânerie only, it now involves digital flânerie as well.21
As Anne Friedberg puts it, “to glide electronically through shops” has become
“the digital equivalent of an escalator ride.”22 The words of New York’s Saks
Fifth Avenue fashion director Roopal Patel somewhat capture the importance
that digital window shopping has taken up in consumers’ lives. In discussing
the store’s recent see-now-buy-now operation during the New York and Paris
collections, Patel states: “The Fifth Avenue windows were set to go live at 9
p.m. after the [Ralph Lauren] show and a digital e-mail was sent to customers
immediately after the show went live.”23 Here, an expression, “go live,” normally
used in reference to the launch of online events and websites, is applied to a
bricks and mortar space. This semantic transfer is also indicative of the merging
of off- and online retail practices: omni-channel retailing—the selling of products
through various channels and the integration of bricks and mortar stores with
websites and mobile platforms24—is currently on the agenda of many retailers
and brands.
The history of e-commerce is also the history of the development of ever-new
and enticing ways of capturing the attention of online users. The year 2000 saw
the creation of Net-a-Porter.com, the first luxury fashion e-commerce site, and in
October 2016, it was said to have 5.2 millions visits per month.25 In 2013, Net-a-
Porter launched the weekly The Edit. With an editor’s letter, a contents list, fashion
features, and fashion spreads, this online magazine/e-commerce space looks,
on the screen, like a traditional print glossy, only, it is immediately shoppable—
hence the name “shoppable magazine”—for by clicking on a link the user can
102 THE END OF FASHION

head toward check out. There, goods are worn by models and laid out as on the
pages of a glossy, captioned by attention-grabbing headlines. By clicking on the
arrows on the left or right outer margins of the digital magazine layout, the user
can browse through the issue, turning the pages of The Edit as if those of a print
magazine. Advertisements are included, once again, as in “glossies.” The front
pages are reminiscent of the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and other high
fashion magazine titles. The May 10, 2017 issue, for instance, features social
media fashion celebrity Olivia Palermo sitting on the stairs of a grand mansion,
while the cover lines read “Secrets of Chic,” “Wave Hello,” and “Need Right
Now,” the latter indeed capturing the immediacy shoppable magazines afford,
with expressions such as “right now,” “the latest,” or “just in” having become
common tropes of online fashion.26
In Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Anne Friedberg refers to
the “mobilized gaze” for the way of looking at goods that emerged with their mise–
en–scène in the nineteenth century.27 An elaborate staging of commodities started
serving as a facilitator for the gaze of the passersby, encouraging consumption.
The gaze became transformed into a commodity and “sold to a consumer-
spectator.”28 In the late twentieth century and early 2000s, and in the context
of what some have described as a “poverty of attention,”29 enticing shoppers to
click through to check out means finding new ways of mobilizing and catching
the contemporary mobilized gaze; the fickle gaze of the digital flâneur.30 A lavish
layout such as that of shoppable magazines is instrumental in this mobilization.
The Edit is not the only shoppable magazine, and Net-a-Porter not the only
e-commerce platform that is also a purveyor of editorial content. A newcomer,
for instance, is Semaine.com, launched in 2015. Vogue describes it as an “online
magazine–meets–concept store.”31 Each week is devoted to a new personality,
interviewed about their life, their work, their taste, their favorite outfits, all instantly
shoppable in a “shop profile” section. Capturing the ideal of time-space compression
that underpins many online platforms, Georgina Harding, the creator of the site,
states that “everything is within reach.”32 On accessing the home page, the user
can head straight to the “shop” section, or she or he can choose to access past
profiles in a “stories” section that features, among others, Leaf Greener, Caroline
de Maigret, Pixie Geldof, Nick Jones, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. From there
the user will always be able to browse and purchase goods.
A shoppable magazine is an online platform but it can also be a print one. Where
The Edit is a shoppable e-magazine, Net-a-Porter is also behind the shoppable
print magazine, Porter. Launched in 2014, and with six issues a year, Porter
resembles the likes of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and other traditional fashion
magazines. An app enables the reader to scan the goods featured on its pages to
then acquire them online. As with The Edit the commercial and the editorial blend
with each other. Such blending also informed publishing group Condé Nast’s
decision to make Vogue and GQ shoppable via Style.com/Vogue and Style.com/
MEDIATIZATION AND DIGITAL RETAIL 103

GQ. Formerly reserved for editorial content, Style.com was revamped in 2015 to
become a commercial platform. In April 2017, it started featuring lavish shoppable
“The Vogue edit” and “The GQ edit” fashion spreads. Online viewers were invited
to “shop the shoot.” They could buy “As seen in” Vogue/GQ items by clicking
through related hyperlinks. In June 2017, Style.com was discontinued and,
following a partnership between Vogue.com and e-commerce website Farfetch.
com, users started being redirected to Farfetch. An official statement reads:
“The partnership will offer readers the unique ability to browse and shop Condé
Nast’s inspirational editorial content on a global scale, further commercialising the
editorial platform.”33 Similarly the digital platforms of magazines such as Harper’s
or Grazia allow readers to instantly buy some of the products featured by clicking
on a hyperlink that takes them to an e-commerce site selling the linked product.
In the field of fashion, the distinction between commercial and editorial content is
becoming increasingly tenuous, an idea I will return to later.
Shaped by the format of fashion magazines, and sometimes indistinguishable
from them, e-commerce platforms instantiate the process of mediatization that
is informing online fashion retail. It is characterized here by the transformation
of online retailers into media content providers akin to traditional fashion media.
The notion of “media logic” is useful for understanding this idea. Developed
by David Altheide and Robert Snow, “media logic” has underpinned much
discussion of mediatization, where the latter is defined, then, as referring to the
process whereby, in their ways of doing, institutions conform to media logic.34
It functions, Altheide and Snow argue, “as a form through which events and
ideas are interpreted and acted upon.”35 It is a “way of ‘seeing’” and “consists of
form of communication; the process through which media present and transmit
information.”36 By adopting the format of glossies—including a glamorous cover
image with cover lines, a content list, an editorial, features, fashion stories,
beauty and travel sections—the way sites such as Net-a-Porter commercialize
their goods is an instance of mediatization. No longer are they simply commercial
platforms, they are editorial ones too, a transformation indicative of the
mediatization of e-commerce.
Furthermore, Altheide and Snow identify entertainment as a key dimension
of media logic.37 The logic of entertainment, they write, has become “a ‘normal
form’ of communication.”38 Similarly, entertainment has long been a key
component of shopping.39 Indeed, with the advent of department stores, the
nineteenth century sealed the relation between consumption and spectacle, also
making shopping “an acceptable leisure activity.”40 Thus, “the history of modern
consumer culture,” Christoph Grunenberg writes, is “in essence also a history of
the continuous evolution and ever increasing sophistication of commercial display
and presentation methods.”41 Grunenberg does not discuss e-commerce, but
the novel use of content-rich formats such as shoppable magazines is another
step toward the increasing sophistication that he writes about. Thus the use
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of the print media format in e-commerce can be seen in the light of a logic of
entertainment that is at the heart of both the media and retail. Mediatization
allows for the consolidation of e-shopping as a source of entertainment, much
like browsing through a fashion magazine and its fashion stories. It is a logic that
serves the interest of capitalism and brands’ aim to increase their profit by selling
ever more commodities, an issue dealt with in the final section of this chapter.
Mediatization is frequently defined as a recent phenomenon and a feature
of late modernity.42 However, some scholars have insisted on the importance
of historicizing mediatization, contending that as a process it has a long past,43
and can even serve as a concept for historical research.44 Thus a comprehensive
investigation of the mediatization of fashion would have to trace and analyze this
process as occurring since the birth of the first fashion media—print titles such as
Le Mercure Galant, or even the use of fashion dolls before the circulation of print
media.45 A historical analysis of the mediatization of fashion could also take into
account the particularity of the media genre discussed in order to consider the
heterogeneous nature of mediatization.46 This would attend to what Ekstrom et al.
argue is missing in existing approaches to mediatization: the comparison of media
forms and communicative contexts.47 One could, for instance, look at the rise of
color photography and its role in the mediatization of fashion, or that of the moving
image and television. A historical analysis would allow one to revisit the interplay
between fashion and the media. This would highlight the role of media texts as not
only representational (as in much work in fashion studies) but also as transformative
of practices (of production, distribution, consumption, and representation).
This kind of historical analysis is outside the scope of this chapter. However, in
the instance of the relation between fashion commerce and print magazines, we
can turn to the past for examples of the mediatization of fashion retail that predate
shoppable magazines. For instance, department stores, in order to promote
and sell their wares, have long used catalogs with a layout often reminiscent
of fashion magazines. In the United States, one of the precursors was Sears
Roebuck (1886). Pages from the 1920s issues, for example, are reminiscent of
fashion plates.48 Bloomingdale’s Illustrated 1886 Catalog (1988) also features
fashion illustrations evocative of fashion plates and magazine illustrations. In
1976, the American department store commissioned fashion photographer Guy
Bourdin to illustrate its lingerie catalog Sighs and Whispers.49 Now a collectors’
item, its pages are more akin to those of a glossy fashion magazine than a
commercial catalogue. Similarly in 1978, the founders of Banana Republic, the
Zieglers, created a catalog full of what Robin Cherry calls “wit and whimsy, with
Mel, a former journalist, writing quirky copy and Patricia, an artist, drawing the
sketches”.50 This blurred the distinction between the editorial and the commercial,
pointing to the mediatization of retail.
By adapting the conventions of fashion media to e-commerce and through
the transformation of their e-commerce platform into an editorial space akin
MEDIATIZATION AND DIGITAL RETAIL 105

to fashion, magazines sites such as Net-a-Porter.com illustrate the process

of mediatization of online retail, a mediatization characterized by the union of
newer (websites) and older (glossies) forms of media, and by the transformation
of e-commerce brands into purveyors of editorial content. The notion of
remediation is helpful for making sense of this coming together and of the type
of mediatization that is articulated on sites such as Net-a-Porter.

Remediation
Ulrike Klinger and Kurt Svenson argue that mass media logic and digital media
logic can inform each other and overlap.51 Similarly, Morton Michelson and Mads
Krog ask, “what happens when an ‘old’ medium like radio is influenced by Internet-
based media and must adapt its practices to web 2.0 and individualized listening?
Are radio and the Internet two distinct processes or just the media?”52 They wonder
if one can talk about “double mediatization,” enquiring “if cultures had been through
one mediatizing process related to a specific medium, how did this culture function
in relation to later processes (from printed to recorded music, mass-circulated
print media in relation to electronic media)?”53 Indeed, websites are media, and
so by virtue of appearing as websites, e-tailers are forms of fashion media. This
online presence can be seen as an instance of the mediatization of retail, that is, of
the transformation of retail from an activity located in three-dimensional spaces—
physical shops—to one tailored to, enacted through, and indeed turned into, a
media interface. E-tail is therefore mediatized retail. However, when e-commerce
sites adopt the conventions of older media, such as glossies, a second process
of mediatization takes place whereby an e-tailer turns into a provider of editorial
content and becomes akin to more traditional fashion media. It is on this second
process of mediatization that this chapter has focused in discussion of sites such
as Net-a-Porter. Both this second process, and the intertwining Ultike Klinger and
Jakob Swvenson identify, can be addressed through the notion of remediation.
Theorized by David Bolter and Richard Grusin in 1999, the term “remediation”
points to the importance of attending to the ways digital media refashion other,
including older, media.54 It is “the representation of one medium in another” and
“a defining characteristic of the new digital media.”55 The newness of digital media
“lies in their particular strategies for remediating television, film, photography,
and painting” but also the book, radio, the magazine or DVD Multimedia.56 The
Web repurposes and recontextualizes traditional media.57 Net-a-Porter’s The
Edit is an instance of such a process. Other examples of remediation include
the ways fashion blogs remediate some of the conventions of print magazine,
in the bloggers’ poses, for instance, which are reminiscent of those of models
in glossies, as I have argued elsewhere.58 But one could also look at the use of
fashion illustration in blogs, such as Garance Doré’s (now Atelier Doré), or the
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remediation of fashion photography by fashion films, or indeed that of fashion

plates by fashion photography.
In terms of e-commerce, fashion e-tailers do not just remediate print, they also
remediate moving images. When browsing through the March 16, 2017 issue of
The Edit, for instance, the flow of still images is interrupted by a short video-ad
for luxury watchmakers Audemars Piguet. E-tailers also remediate blogs. Asos’s
“Fashion and Beauty Feed,” for instance, opens onto a range of sections the
user can access, such as, on April 12, 2017, “Brand Buzz: Meet cult beauty
brand the Ordinary.” By clicking through the post, the site displays images and
written texts formatted like a beauty blog. Asos.com also have their own blog,
updated on a regular basis in an a-chronological temporal order characteristic
of a blogging format. Thus, as Knut Lundby also observes, mediatization “may
incorporate the concept and processes of remediation” because the media are
constantly in dialogue with, and influenced by, other media.59 Remediation is the
process by which new media refashion other media, but it is also the process by
which older media transform themselves in response to the challenges set out by
newer media. This argument can be considered in the light of print media, such
as Vogue and Grazia, which have responded to the challenges of e-commerce
by developing online shoppable platforms.
Although they do not use the expression, Altheide and Snow also point at
the process of remediation that underpins the development of much media: “As
legitimizing agents,” they write, “the dominant media in a society also serve as
agents of legitimation on other media.” Further, “This occurs in several ways: one
medium may adopt the format of another medium; the format of one medium
also may affect the content of another; and, overall, a standardization of media
formats may occur.”60 In this respect, remediation may be seen as another
dimension of media logic, while also being a process that allows e-commerce
to respond to the logic of entertainment that underpins both commerce and the
media, and is formative of today’s “experience economy.”61
The notion of remediation suggests that new media are never completely
new. Yet some features are particular to digital media technology and the binary
makeup of its data.62 In the case of e-commerce remediating print magazines,
one of those features is the possibility of immediate purchase. Where with print
the act of browsing through a magazine and the act of purchasing a commodity
are temporally and spatially divided, with shoppable magazines these acts
are collapsed into a single operation. Hence when studying mediatization as
articulated in digital media, one should bear in mind their specific media logic.
Scholars should move away from the idea of media logic in the singular to that of
media logics, in the plural,63 which entails attending to the specific logic of digital
media.64 Mass and digital media may share certain logics, such as entertainment,
but others are tightly linked to digital media affordances such as connectivity and
immediacy. José Van Dijk and Thomas Poell, for instance, discuss “social media
MEDIATIZATION AND DIGITAL RETAIL 107

logic,”65 while Klinger and Svenson refer to the idea of “network media logic,” a logic
characterized by personalization, reflexivity, connectivity, and virality.66 Mazzoleni
also identifies abundance, interactivity, mobility, dis-intermediation, speed, and
immediacy as central to “network media logic.”67 The collapsing, in e-commerce,
of browsing and purchasing into a single immediate act captures the logic of
immediacy that underpins digital media, and digital fashion media in particular: a
logic of speed, “real time,” “the instant” being at their heart.68 One could even go
further by talking about digital fashion media logic. Indeed, accounting for media
logic as a heterogeneous process also means attending for the specificity of the
field within which it is enacted. In that respect, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the field
can prove useful.69 For in the same way that one could tease out the logic of digital
media, one could tease out the logic of digital fashion media. Further research,
beyond the scope of this chapter, could explore this logic and the relevance of
Bourdieu’s field theory for understanding processes of mediatization.
In this context of the mediatization of e-tail, a mediatization also characterized
by remediation, it is no wonder then that former fashion journalists have taken up
editorial positions in e-commerce.
Lucy Yeomans, for instance, left the editorship of Harper’s Bazaar to become
Net-a-Porter’s “Editor-in-Chief,” the merging between the commercial and the
editorial being captured by the use, within a retail context, of a title— “Editor-in-
Chief” —normally reserved for magazines. Similarly, in 2014, Marks and Spencer
hired fashion writer Nicola Copping, formerly of the Financial Times and Times to
create “magazine-style content” for their website.70
In reference to mediatization, Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser note: “As
most media are run as commercial businesses, media logic both follows from,
and is adapted to, commercial logic.”71 However, one could also add that, as most
commercial businesses are run as media too, commercial logic both follows from
and is adapted to media logic, a process characteristic of mediatization. Various
mediatization scholars have drawn attention to the intersection of mediatization
and commercialization, a process articulated in the mediatization of consumption,
as exemplified by shoppable magazines and the wider phenomenon of branded
content.72

Mediatization and commercialization:

The blurring of the editorial and the
commercial
Mediatization, it has been argued, is not an isolated meta-process and must be
studied in relation to other meta-processes such as globalization, individualization,
and commercialization.73 Some authors have drawn attention to the importance
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of accounting for the capitalist framework within which mediatization is inscribed,

and for the ways it interacts with commercialization.74 This is an approach,
Graham Murdock notes, that has too often been neglected and, given the rise of
the marketization model characteristic of neoliberalism, is “like a ghost haunting
recent commentaries by leading writers on mediatisation.”75 Private corporations
have developed a strong hold over communication networks and the production
and circulation of information, taking over systems that used to be regulated by
public institutions and formerly not subject to commercial logic.76
Such marketization is blatant when considered in the context of digital
culture. Indeed, various scholars have documented the commodification of
digital and social media spaces once outside of the forces of commerce.77 With
the rise and proliferation of social media and the concurrent appropriation of
such spaces by fashion brands and retailers, the link between mediatization
and commercialization is consolidated. The intertwining of marketization with
mediatization which shoppable magazines instantiate must be looked at in the
light of brands’ involvement in the creation and distribution of editorial content, a
practice known as content marketing.
As with mediatization, “content” is not a new term, but like mediatization,
it was redefined in the early 2000s to refer to the reconfiguration of marketing
and promotional practices in the context of digital culture. Content marketing
became a key business strategy. Also known as branded content and native
advertising, it refers to the production of texts which, although promotional, do
not appear as such and are often destined for circulation over the Internet.78 As
Patrick De Pensenmacker puts it:

The assumption behind content marketing is that advertising is most effective

when the consumer does not recognize it is advertising. Moreover, the
commercial message itself cannot be skipped by the viewer, the reader, or the
surfer on the Internet without losing program content, and native advertising
cannot be effectively recognized by ad-blocking software. As a result, the
lines between advertising and entertainment and content have become
increasingly blurred.79

Although the hybrid editorial/commercial is not new to digital culture—in print

culture it can be found in advertorials, for instance80—with the advent of the web
and social media, it has extended to cover a broad range of platforms and texts.
“Content” encompasses a variety of (often digital and social) media products,
such as, in the field of fashion, fashion films, blog posts, YouTube videos, or
Instagram images. With branded content, as Daniel Bô and Matthieu Guével
note, brands turn into media, making the distinction between the editorial and
the commercial murky.81 As Teresa Craner puts it in her business book Inside
Content Marketing:
MEDIATIZATION AND DIGITAL RETAIL 109

You may not know content marketing when you see it. In fact, if the content
creators are doing their jobs right, you often won’t notice you’re being marketed
to until it’s too late, and you’re already poking around the brand’s site—or are
even in a store—to purchase the product the marketers were hoping you
would buy all along. To complicate matters further, content marketing often
doesn’t even reveal what it’s selling.82

In turning brands and retailers into purveyors of media content seemingly distinct
from commercial content, and even publishers in their own right through channels
and platforms such as YouTube and blogs, branded content can be conceived
as a mode of mediatization of fashion.
Content marketing aims at increasing a brand’s symbolic capital, which, as
Bourdieu shows, can be turned into further economic capital.83 It is an aesthetic
project that serves the interest of commerce and is part and parcel of the logic
of aestheticization that informs contemporary capitalism and “the stylization of
consumption.”84 This logic is tightly linked to mediatization, for, as André Jansson
observes, “most kinds of consumer goods have become increasingly image-
loaded, taking on meanings in relation to media texts, other commodity-signs,
entire lifestyles, and so on.”85 This is why, he suggests, it is no longer possible to
make a distinction between consumer culture and media culture: “they collapsed
into one another.”86 In that respect, following Jansson, mediatization also entails
a process of commercialization, and vice versa. Branded content is an example
of the blending of mediatization and commercialization into one another.
For example, in 2017, Chanel launched, in partnership with Caroline de
Maigret, the blog-like site CdMdiary.com. A print and catwalk model in the
1990s, after having somewhat disappeared from the traditional fashion media,
Maigret in recent years rose again to visibility through her Tumblrs and Instagram
accounts. Chanel capitalized on the model’s online fame (which soon translated
into print visibility too) to make her an ambassador of the brand and to promote
Chanel on a site reminiscent of personal fashion blogs. Short films feature
as if shot from a smartphone. They are interspersed with images of Maigret
dressed in Chanel, with posts on her favorite music tracks, her dining and
going out places and other snippets of information on her likes and dislikes.
Although not directly shoppable, the site is branded throughout; a space made
by and for Chanel. The “about” section describes it in the following terms:
“CdMdiary by Caroline de Maigret was created for the purpose of sharing a
lifestyle that incorporates various facets of our times narrated by Caroline de
Maigret, spokesperson and ambassadress for the House.”87 Indeed narration, or
storytelling as it is known in the business literature, is key to branded content and
is a technique many fashion brands use. Their websites become the repository
of visual and written stories that further consolidate the aura of the brand and
transubstantiate it,88 a process also supported by convergent media platforms89
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and their hyperlinked network of Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat channels, as

well as Instagram and its visually enticing images. In this respect, one can also
see the logic of entertainment which informs both the media and retail as key to
commercialization in that entertainment is enacted as a way of selling more, an
idea the marketing notion “retailtainment” captures. One must provide spectacle
and entertainment to sell, a strategy the marketing literature on branded content
also makes clear.90
The overlap between commercial and editorial practices branded content
promotes is also articulated in the concurrent practice known in the business
literature as “native journalism.” Journalists are hired by companies to produce
the content that will promote their services and commodities. Their role is
to tell the stories—the practice known as storytelling—that will infuse brands
with ever more symbolic capital accumulated through the viral sharing and
liking logic of digital networks. Commenting on Marks and Spencer’s hiring
of fashion writer Nicola Copping to produce content for their website, the
retailer’s e-commerce director Laura Wade-Gery observes that editorial
content can boost the site’s sales by 24 percent.91 She observes: “That’s why
we have put publishing and browsing at the heart of the site.”92 In this context
of the mediatization of brands and retailers by way of content marketing, the
roles and responsibilities of journalists changes, a change in turn indicative of
the mediatization of fashion journalism and the transformation to which it is
currently subject.93
Branded content and native journalism raise the issue of the integrity of brand
and media practices,94 and hence of the “moral and ethical consequences
of mediatisation.”95 Indeed as Lundby notes: “While ‘mediatization’ is a non-
normative concept there may be a range of normative issues involved with
mediatization processes.”96 As Jonathan Hardy puts it: “It used to be that
advertising and editorial were kept separate. Today, brands are burrowing into
media content, eroding their own credibility and readers’ trust.”97 A deception of
consumers might take place compounded in the UK and the United States by a
current lack of regulation of the demarcation between editorial and commercial
content.98 This is an issue fashion blogs are facing, as I discuss elsewhere.99 Many
fashion blogs and their hyperlinked Instagram accounts have become monetized
platforms, with some of the most financially successful bloggers professionals
who generate a large income. Brands have capitalized on bloggers’ popularity
to use their platforms for operations of branded content. The commercial links
are not often made clear and transparency has become an object of debate.100
Personal fashion blogs and fashion and beauty Instagram posts can also
be seen as instances of mediatization in that the media technologies bloggers
and Instagramers use inform practices of the self, a mediatized self.101 Makeup,
dress, and digital technologies are appropriated to fashion and define oneself
for a connected other.102 Brands have even responded to this trend by
MEDIATIZATION AND DIGITAL RETAIL 111

developing digital screen—friendly makeup products, yet another instance of

the mediatization of the field of fashion.103
On an Instagram feed, pro-bloggers’ shots may be interspersed with
images from, and of, friends, who may sometimes, like a blogger, post a
picture of their outfit of the day, sharing the same visual conventions while
also using the popular instagram tag #ootd (for “outfit of the day”). Not only
are the images not necessarily clearly presented as commercialized, but in
being mixed with non-commercial posts in a wider hypertextual flow of private
and public postings, the distinction between the commercial and the non-
commercial becomes ever more difficult to ascertain. Hypertextuality may
well erase hierarchies between online spaces, but in doing so, it also melds
the commercial and the non-commercial into one another.104 One’s everyday
visual landscape becomes a de-differentiated space of commodified and non-
commodified images.
The blurring of the editorial and the commercial that branded content nurtures,
the monetization of seemingly non-commercial spaces, and the spread of such
practices across a broad range of texts and platforms that individuals engage
with—all draw attention to the idea of the commodification of everyday life. This
commodification is intensified by the spread of online fashion platforms and
texts and the concomitant convergence of mediatization and commercialization.
Commercialization weaves itself through everyday life through ordinary practices
of mediatization of the self which, together with the digital mediatization of
commercial practices, collapse into a de-differentiated plane of the commercial
and the seemingly non-commercial.

Conclusion
This chapter has argued for the usefulness of “mediatization” to understand
online fashion commerce and the digital culture it is part of. Central to
mediatization theory is an analysis of the ways the media, including digital media,
have transformed ways of doing and ways of seeing. In the context of fashion’s
rapid appropriation of digital media and related digital interfaces, it is important
to unpack the changes of practices with which they are associated. This has
implications for the skills needed to establish oneself as a fashion journalist,
as the practice of native journalism suggests. It also has moral and ethical
implications such as the rampant monetization of everyday life, to which current
digital media practices in the field of fashion point. Contrary to arguments of
technological determinism, new technologies are not outside of the social; they
are made by and for social beings and must be subject to the same critical and
analytical unpacking that informs many social sciences studies of society and
culture, including fashion.
 8
SUSTAINABILITY AND
DIGITALIZATION
Sandy Black

“Fashion is often very old-fashioned,” said Ines Haag of avant-garde design duo
Bless when I interviewed her and partner Desiree Heiss in 2011 for The Sustainable
Fashion Handbook.1 She was particularly referring to how conventional the
teaching of fashion was in colleges, where innovation should be paramount. The
sentiment that fashion is old-fashioned has been repeated more often recently
by influential people in fashion, including designer Stella McCartney, speaking
on issues of sustainability at London College of Fashion (LCF)2; trend forecasting
guru Lidewij Edelkoort reaffirming her 2015 Anti-Fashion Manifesto in London3;
and by designer Prabal Gurung at the 2017 Copenhagen Fashion Summit of
industry leaders.4 While clearly making good journalistic copy, this sentiment also
highlights the paradoxical nature of fashion—its ethos is predicated on speed
and novelty, yet the industry itself has been slow to change and develop from
the practices and schedules established in the mid-twentieth century, especially
in relation to both sustainability and digital technologies.
Contradictions abound, particularly when the complexity of contemporary
globalized fashion supply chains and issues of sustainability are factored in.5
Fashion is the craftsmanship of couture and bespoke set against high volume
cheap (“disposable”) fashion; the luxury of New York’s Fifth Avenue or London’s
Bond Street contrasted with the poverty of many producer communities; and
the inherently wasteful cycles of seasonal change, that also sustain livelihoods
and generate crucial income; an obsession with the new coexisting with the
valorization of vintage. The rise of ubiquitous mobile phone technology has
stimulated e-commerce in the fashion space.6 The desire for faster access to
fashions has fuelled recent disruptive initiatives such as the “See now, buy
now” trend to monetize the catwalk by selling direct to the public, pioneered by
brands such as Burberry and Tommy Hilfiger. The realization has grown within
the industry that the established fashion system—based on bi-annual seasonal
114 THE END OF FASHION

designer presentations to wholesale buyers traveling the globe between

the key fashion capitals—seems increasingly inappropriate in the twenty-
first-century digital economy. External pressures such as natural resource
depletion, escalating consumption and waste, globalized, conglomerate-led
markets and financial fluctuations driven by the accelerating pace of fashion
cycles, coupled with high-profile designer tragedies, resignations and turnover
at luxury fashion brands, all strongly evidence that the current fashion system
is unsustainable from the perspectives of environment, economy, and now, its
creative leadership.
Nevertheless, the fashion industry plays a significant role in many economies
around the world, including the UK. According to a 2017 fashion industry report,
global apparel and footwear consumption is projected to rise by 63 percent, to
102 million tons in 2030,7 increasing the imperative for the industry to address
its vast environmental and social footprint. There is a critical need for fashion
research—both academic and industrial—to take a radical lead in shaping a
more economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable fashion industry
based on alternative paradigms and business models that harness new ways
of creating and producing fashion, and engaging with consumers through co-
creation and novel experiences.
Research commissioned by the British Fashion Council (BFC) in 2009
(updated in 2016) shows the continuing economic significance of the fashion
industry to the UK—valued at £28 billion to GDP, an increase from the 2009
figure of £21billion and more than double the value of the automotive industry.8
According to business research organization Mintel, £27billion worth of
womenswear ready-to-wear was sold in the UK in 2015, predicted to grow 23
percent by 2020 to £32billion.9 The UK designer fashion sector (excluding retail),
which is recognized as a creative engine of inspiration and innovation for the
wider UK and global industry, is comprised of a high proportion of innovative
micro and small businesses.10 These design-led businesses are capable of
being highly agile, using local and novel smaller-scale production methods and
practices to meet changing demand efficiently, and respond to consumer needs,
but often struggle to survive.11 With their ability to maintain control of their entire
supply chain, these micro and small businesses are often pioneers, testing novel
business models and design practices that also work toward full transparency in
environmental and ethical practices.
Since the turn of the millennium, a dramatic shift has taken place toward a
digital economy, resulting in significant disruption in many sectors of commerce
including the music industry and publishing, together with the rapid development
of digital visualization stimulated by the film industry and the fast-growing gaming
sector. However, the fashion industry at its core deals in physical products, and
excepting marketing and retail, it has been slower to take up the opportunities
that the digital opens for design and manufacturing.
SUSTAINABILITY AND DIGITALIZATION 115

As Normann predicted in 2001, the digital economy has liberated us from the
constraints of:

• Time: when things can be done,

• Place: where things can be done,
• Actor: who can do what (human and non-human)
• Constellation: with whom it can be done.

This new paradigm of time-place-actor-constellation has particularly affected

the dissemination of fashion through imagery—now instantly available globally
from live streamed catwalk presentations, and arguably more significant than
the products themselves. Even before the current digital revolution, Angela
McRobbie’s 1998 sociological study of British fashion designers highlighted
the power and significance of fashion imagery disseminated through media
channels—at that time predominantly printed fashion magazines. She asks: “Is
designer fashion, as the respondent suggests, really about spectacle and the
production of images, a kind of service sector to the high street fashion retailers
and to the wider mass media?”12
After a slow start, digital marketing and e-commerce have now gained
significant traction in the fashion industry, overcoming the initial skepticism that
consumers would not buy clothing or accessories that they could not touch, feel,
and try on. Recent statistics show 68 percent of UK internet users buy clothing
and footwear online, and 29 percent of total spending online is on clothing and
footwear, up from 13 percent in 201113 and global e-commerce luxury fashion
sales are predicted to increase fourfold from 3 percent in 2010 to 12 percent
by 2020.14 Many consumers now shop using multiple channels and combine
physical browsing with online purchasing or vice versa. The growing acceptance
of online sales platforms has led to an increasing number of initiatives to create
virtual try-on systems online and in retail stores,15 such as Fits Me.16 Experiments
with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) consumer visualization
systems are prevalent, with predictions of an important future for them as new
marketing channels that can bridge the physical and digital. For example, Top
Shop in London and Tommy Hilfiger in the United States staged simultaneous in-
store VR presentations of their 2015 catwalk shows using immersive headsets.
In 2016, London designer Martine Jarlgaard invited buyers to a virtual showroom
to experience a novel mixed reality fashion presentation using holograms
superimposed into the space that could be experienced in the round by wearing
a headset17 (Plate 14).
However, despite advances in presentation and marketing, many design and
production aspects of the fashion industry are still comprised of fundamentally
craft-based practices: designers creating garments by draping cloth on a dress
stand, cutting patterns, using tailoring techniques and couture-level sewing or
116 THE END OF FASHION

embellishment. Most importantly, garments are still produced by skillful individuals

using manually operated sewing machines, a practice found in factories around
the globe at every market level of manufacturing, including the high volume
markets. Although aspects of the design and mass production of clothing such
as bulk fabric cutting and industrial knitting have been largely automated and
computerized in developed countries, this is not the case in many emerging
producer nations such as Vietnam or Bangladesh.
It is also not the case within the small creative enterprises comprising the
majority of the UK designer fashion sector—often micro-businesses set up
by designer-entrepreneurs shortly after graduating from one of the UK’s many
higher education fashion courses, especially those in London. In common with
current UK trends, where 95 percent of all businesses are classed as micro-
enterprises, the designer fashion sector consists largely of businesses with
under 10 employees, many being start-ups in their first few years of trading.18
Around 80 percent of the designer fashion businesses in Britain (estimated at
400 by Centre for Fashion Enterprise) are located in the London area because
of its status as a global fashion and media city.19 Because of the fast cycle of
seasonal fashion, designers operate in an extremely time-sensitive and high-
intensity system leaving little time and resources for strategic development.
However, a number of innovators are developing alternative business models
that harness digital technology for creative purposes in addition to marketing and
e-commerce, demonstrating the potential for such businesses to be both more
environmentally and economically sustainable. This chapter discusses findings
from research with micro and small designer fashion enterprises, investigating
their knowledge of digital technology and process innovation in the context of
sustainability. It presents case studies of businesses that challenge the current
paradigms, suggesting new models for future fashion.

Digital fashion and the fashion designer

in the UK
The UK is renowned for its creative industries, first defined in a 1998 government
report from the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS), and including
designer fashion as an identified sector alongside product design, graphic
design, and architecture. Based on categories used by Mintel, a later updated
report in 2001 identified designer fashion as including four areas: (a) couture; (b)
international brand designated by a single name; (c) diffusion–collaboration with
high street retailers; and (d) high fashion—up and coming, usually endorsed by
celebrities.20 The report also identified the UK fashion sector as highly populated
by small businesses, in contrast to the United States, France, and Italy. In a
SUSTAINABILITY AND DIGITALIZATION 117

2003 report to the UK Department of Trade and Industry, Malcolm Newbury

defined the designer fashion sector as comprising “individuals or teams that
combine creativity and originality to create collections that have a specific
or ‘signature’ identity and are exemplified by businesses that participate in
international trade shows such as London Fashion Week.”21
This is still the dominant model of wholesale trading that many designer fashion
enterprises operate today, but which is beginning to see serious disruption. A
2008 report by the Centre for Fashion Enterprise (CFE) The UK Designer Fashion
Economy identified a typology of business operations in the designer fashion
sector from micro to SMEs, and mapped a range of business relationships,
from the individual artisan or creative partnership to designers with licensing,
manufacturing, or investor partnerships. I offer here an alternative definition
of designer fashion enterprises as foregrounding innovation, creating impact
through innovative forms, fabrication techniques or methods of engagement
with users, and sometimes creating radical conceptual fashion that disrupts the
established codes and norms.
Much of the attention to digital economy developments in the fashion industry
has focused on emerging paradigm-shifting advances in marketing and retail,
including virtual and augmented reality presentations, mentioned above.22 At the
same time, awareness and acceptance of 3D printing technology has grown
exponentially as it transferred from the engineering and product design sectors
to mainstream consumer markets via strong media promotion. In tandem, the
FabLabs (fabrication laboratories) and maker spaces movement originating at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States in 2001 have
developed to support communities and small-scale designers to gain access
to a range of digital processes for product design. These include 3D printing,
laser cutting, and CNC milling, enabling product prototyping and small batch
production. In contrast, resources available for fashion designers largely consist
of sewing machines and tailor’s body forms, with some access to programmable
industrial textile facilities (weaving, printing, knitting, and embroidery) within arts
universities and large companies, where proprietary computer-aided design
(CAD) software and systems for design visualization, pattern preparation, or lay
planning require significant budgets to install.
In order to improve knowledge of the needs of small-scale entrepreneurial
fashion design businesses, we developed research at the London College
of Fashion (LCF), University of the Arts London, focusing on increasing
understanding of the perceptions and practices of fashion designers and
their innovation processes. This was done by working directly with designer
businesses to catalyze knowledge exchange. Before entering education, I was
designer and director of my own namesake knitwear brand, a small business
selling internationally via the fashion circuit of wholesale trade shows in London,
Milan, New York, and Tokyo. It is pertinent to note that although technology
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and communications have changed dramatically in the intervening decades,

the issues of survival facing a small fashion business have not. These include
financing the production of experimental prototypes, sample collections, trade
fairs, marketing, and bulk production—all months in advance of any income
being received. Moreover, gaining access to key technical resources could be
difficult as a very small player competing for the same manufacturing resources
as larger fashion and retail businesses.
Experimenting with applications of technology developments in the context
of sustainable production and consumption, our project Considerate Design for
Personalized Fashion examined the use of body scanning technology and 3D
printing for personalized product development processes, including seamless
industrial knitwear, a 3D printed flexible glove form and bespoke ergonomically
shaped handcrafted bags.23 The aim was to create products that engage
and delight the consumer for longer through personalization utilizing novel
processes.
In the knowledge exchange project FIREup (Fashion, Innovation, Research,
and Enterprise), we took an action research approach to support innovation in
product development and communication, by pairing fashion academics and
researchers with London-based designer fashion businesses over a six-month
period.24 FIREup funded four small catalyst projects, two of which involved the
use of digital technologies for product development and potential production,
discussed here. The first project worked with accessories designer and maker
Michelle Lowe-Holder, a micro-business operating since 2010, to introduce her
to 3D printing technology and computer-based digital design, in contrast to
her usual craft- and materials-based approach. Working in collaboration with
3D virtual fashion researcher Thomas Makryniotis, she was able to develop
prototypes for a clutch bag design, and went on to develop further prototypes
independently with a London 3D printing bureau. Lowe-Holder’s aim was to use
3D printing to create structures that could not easily be realized in small numbers
by traditional methods of metal forming, then work with these as a modular base
for a range of designs. Lowe-Holder’s perception of this computer-based design
and production process was that “3D print has to be looked at as a modern
process to help bring about small scale design possibilities creating samples
previously not possible economically for a small designer like myself.”25 The
second catalyst project involved upcycling pioneers Worn Again and academic
researcher Kate Goldsworthy. It developed new prototypes for Goldsworthy’s
ongoing Laserline project, working with polyester textiles and zero-waste
garment design, combining laser welding of seams and laser surface decoration
techniques. This one-step garment creation process has potential for reduction
of resources and waste, by using a polyester fiber that can play a key role in
circular systems of material use within the appropriate system infrastructure.26
A collaborative research process of experimental testing of new concepts had
SUSTAINABILITY AND DIGITALIZATION 119

significant benefits to all involved. For example, Worn Again commented, “there
is now a proof of concept with tangible samples to take the conversation with
industry to the next level.”27 These two catalyst projects, although small in
scale, demonstrated the potential of digital processes within a fashion design
and production context to create a new workflow and innovative product
development with sustainability gains.

What’s digital about fashion design?

Mapping the landscape
Results from the FIREup project, including a survey of 56 fashion enterprises,
found that there was little understanding of university-level research, or the
potential benefits of collaboration. There was also little sense of moving research
beyond the inspiration and sourcing of ideas for the next collection. These findings
stimulated a further project specifically focused on the affect and integration of
digital technology into designers’ creative and studio processes, as opposed
to retail and consumer facing applications. In collaboration with research
consultancy AAM Associates, the FIRE team at London College of Fashion
devised a project aiming to explore how technology was (or was not) being used
within the designer fashion community.28 Although, as discussed earlier, new
sales channels have disrupted and changed other sectors, and despite more
clothing being sold online, designer fashion businesses are still working mainly
to a wholesale model of sales and production. We wanted to identify if and how
traditional fashion design is being transformed by digital technology, and to see
how willing designers are to adopt new digital methods and models. The first
task was desk research to map current and emerging digital technologies onto
the fashion design and production cycle. Key stages of the fashion cycle were
identified as:

• Design inspiration and concept development

• Prototyping and sample product development
• Sales (wholesale and business to business)
• Bulk production and delivery to retailers
• Retail sales and promotion through stores and/or online
• Bespoke and customized sales direct to consumer.

These stages are not discrete, as design for the next collection will overlap
with production and delivery of the previous one, creating pressures on
resources—both financial and human (Figure 8.1).
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Figure 8.1 Diagram showing stages of the fashion cycle. Source: FIRE project team

As expected, although few independent designer fashion businesses had set

up transactional websites for direct to consumer sales, research showed a far
greater number of digital technologies and systems on offer at the consumer-
facing marketing and retail stages than others, working across both physical and
online retail contexts.29 These include combinations such as the so-called magic
mirror visualization systems of augmented reality in stores where clothes and
cosmetics can be tried on virtually. Since the concept of mass customization
was first posited in the 1990s,30 “aiming to produce goods and services
catering to individual customers’ needs with near mass production efficiency,”31
personalization and customization of goods have been something of a holy grail
in retail sales.32 Accurate garment fit and sizing is another major retail issue, and
technologies such as body scanning and foot scanning systems that produce
accurate 3D body images have the potential to enable individually sized garments
to be created in a personalized service. However, despite early retail efforts by the
company Bodymetrics (a spin-out from the 2004 UK Sizing Survey33), to provide
bespoke designer jeans with Selfridges and Harrods stores in London and later
Bloomingdales in the United States, body scanning technologies have yet to be
SUSTAINABILITY AND DIGITALIZATION 121

seamlessly integrated into the retail shopping experience. This is in part due to
sensitivity to the accurate results of bodyscanning technology.34 Alternatively,
virtual try-on systems comprising interactive mirrors that capture and reflect a
customer’s image and overlay it with specific garments the customer browses
can express rewarding body images, and link to social networks for fun shopping
experiences.
In contrast to these consumer-facing marketing and social shopping
approaches, the technologies most relevant to the fashion design and
product development process include: digital printing and embroidery onto 2D
surfaces, laser cutting and welding, 3D printing, and 2D and 3D simulation and
visualization of clothing designs (with some systems such as Marvelous Designer
and Optitex using virtual stitching techniques, see Makryniotis [2015] for detailed
explanations). Digital printing of imagery onto fabric has already enabled a new
paradigm in printed fabrics freeing up the scope for complexity of colors and
imagery, scale and non-repeating placement of pattern and design. Fashion
designers whose work is highly distinctive in their use of digitally printed textiles
include Mary Kantranzou, Alexander McQueen, and Dries Van Noten. However,
3D printing has received the widest media coverage, as desktop 3D printers
(e.g., Makerbot) have become available and online bureaux such as Shapeways
offer 3D printing services to anyone. In fashion terms, key designers, such as
Iris Van Herpen, Francis Bitonti, and, more recently, Noa Raviv, have taken a
creative lead in the conceptual development of wearable 3D printed showpiece
garments, working with architects and 3D computer design experts, inspiring
many others. Much of the output of 3D printing uses rigid nylon materials. The
challenge taken up by pioneers Freedom of Creation and university research
groups has been to create a flexible textile-like surface from modular interlocking
elements. Recently, the Modeclix project has prototyped 3D printed dresses
from similar structures, moving research a step closer to the goal of comfortable
and wearable 3D printed clothing.35
Scanning the horizon for digital systems that will affect fashion, much
research is ongoing into wearable technology including electronic textiles or
e-textiles. Since the beginnings of wearable computing in the 1980s when Steve
Mann and others at MIT first experimented with distributed computing functions
around the body, there has been an exponential rise in new developments in
what is now termed fashion technology or “fashtech.”36 The prospects for this
field, in which clothing becomes smarter and responsive to external stimuli,
capable of monitoring vital signs, emotions, location, well-being, and keeping us
entertained—perhaps also changing color and form at will—is widely regarded
as the biggest opportunity for clothing. That is, once all the component elements
have become truly compatible. Much has still to be developed but research has
moved forward strongly in the last fifteen years.37
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Electronic textiles that can respond to pressure, or conduct heat, have

been developed and mass produced by pioneers such as Asha Peta Thomson
(a weaver) and Stan Swallow (an engineer) of Intelligent Textiles. Founded in
2002, they now work exclusively for military research. Since 2015, Google
has invested to scale-up research into electronic functional textiles with their
Jacquard project, which at the time of writing this chapter awaits the release of
its first commercial product—a Levi’s denim jacket that can help take calls and
messages on the move. A novel approach to e-textiles is taken by research in
the Functional Electronic Textile Technology project at Nottingham Trent and
Southampton Universities that embeds miniaturized semiconductors and LEDs
directly into the structure of yarns for weaving and knitting.38 These initiatives
will undoubtedly lead to novel garment applications for both therapeutic and
general fashion use.
On the fashion and entertainment side of the industry, Cute Circuit (fashion
designer Francesca Rosella and interaction designer Ryan Genz) developed their
own fabric technology and hardware components to create large LED arrays
displaying color imagery across clothing. This pioneering company created its
novel Hug Shirt concept in 2005, a shirt that could transmit the electrical sensation
of a hug to a loved one from afar. They later developed the first interactive dress
that could display live messages via Twitter. In 2014, Cute Circuit repositioned
their offer to launch a couture line of stylish garments with LED panels displaying
moving imagery controllable by the wearer (Plate 15), and have recently released
a dress incorporating a graphene-enhanced stretch sensor that captures the
wearer’s breathing pattern.
Further promotional projects for the catwalk, brokered by the Fashion Innovation
Agency at LCF, are milestones in communication of fashion technology. These
include a “digital skirt” commissioned for London Fashion Week February 2014
by Nokia, in collaboration with fashion designer Fyodor Golan and interaction
designers Kin Studio. This used Nokia mobile phone technology in a literal but
eye-catching way for the catwalk—ironically the very opposite of a truly wearable
fashion technology garment (Plate 16). At the other end of the spectrum, a dress
project shown in London the following season—a collaboration between Disney
and late designer Richard Nicoll—created a magical fashion experience using
light optic fibers, realized in collaboration with another early pioneer of wearable
technology Studio XO, founded by Nancy Tilbury and Ben Males (Plate 17). Their
knowledge base also combines fashion, textiles, and computing skills. Studio
XO have created showpieces for entertainers including Lady Gaga. Tilbury
and her team are now setting up a platform for connected devices that will
emotionally engage entire music audiences in a digitally enabled experience.
With the emerging Internet of Things, where devices in the environment and the
home are wired, connected, and accessible to our smartphones, Mark Weiser’s
prophetic vision of ubiquitous computing seems about to come true: “The most
SUSTAINABILITY AND DIGITALIZATION 123

profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the
fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”39
It is clear from the above examples that the integration of digital technologies
in diverse ways is profoundly changing the fashion industry. However, a key issue
to be resolved in the development of all new categories of wearable technology
and functionalized electronic clothing is the simultaneous and seemingly unwitting
creation of a new waste stream of inseparable electronic and textile components.
These new products of the future must be designed for disassembly from the
outset to address the considerable issues of sustainability in both the electronics
and fashion industry. Cute Circuit, for example, have designed their LED display
panels and controllers as modules for disassembly, but these are issues which
need to be widely addressed in this burgeoning industry, alongside user need,
privacy from potential surveillance and monitoring and user’s control of personal
data. To this end, a collaborative EU-funded project WEAR Sustain has recently
been set up to encourage sustainable innovation in wearable technology through
experimental prototyping.40

What’s digital about fashion design?

Insights from an industry/academic
workshop
To interrogate the question “What’s Digital about Fashion Design?” we
convened a workshop with twenty-two established fashion designers, industry
representatives, and academics to discuss how the fashion industry currently
operates within the digital economy.41 The purpose was to identify where
opportunities for innovation in both product and business development lay, and
three themes were established. A comment from one participant reinforced the
slow changing ethos of the fashion industry: “The fashion industry likes how it
works, it has an entrenched way of operating—the seasonality is very difficult to
change.”42
The first theme to emerge was the Challenge to Tradition. In scrutinizing the
traditional fashion design cycle, we questioned how the transition from wholesale
to direct to consumer retail is impacting fashion design. It was agreed that while
digital activity is mainly focused on sales, there is an unexplored opportunity to
introduce digital technologies in the earlier stages of the design process, which
could have the potential to transform both a designer’s practice and business.
The group acknowledged that while it was important to challenge fashion
traditions, nobody wanted to see digital entirely replacing craft methodologies,
rather it could be integrated in a way that would enhance a designer’s practice
and raison d’être: “Digital technology obviously isn’t going to be a replacement
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for craft-based design practices, it should be more about how it can enhance
what I want to achieve.”43
The second theme, Digital and the Design Process, challenged the potential
of digital interventions to help save time and costs in day-to-day processes. It is a
given that fashion designers are time-poor, working at a fast pace, and on a tight
budget—concerns strongly shared by workshop participants. Conversations
explored how designers could potentially invest more time and money into
creative research and development processes if physical overhead costs were
cut and replaced with digital services. The idea of removing the physical store
was just one proposed solution, and by all means not for everyone. However, by
removing the high cost of company stores, designers would be able to embark on
new journeys and perhaps bring in new team members such as consultants and
software developers. Replacing the physical with digital would have an effect on
budgets and free up spending for embedding digital into day-to-day operations.
The thought of this seemed plausible and exciting to several participants: “We
need to collaborate and open research—that is the only way things will change
and [fashion] designers will start to define their place in the digital economy.”44
The group discussed how more collaborations between fashion, technology,
and manufacturing are needed to integrate technology successfully into both
design and production processes. Participants speculated about more of a
start-up culture in fashion, borrowing working practices from the entrepreneurial
technology industry who, unlike fashion designers, are not wedded to the
traditional fashion design cycle, and who are seen to be driving the development
of new revenue models. Fashion designers often think of themselves as a one-
man band, whereas tech startups form functional cross-disciplinary teams, and
are more entrepreneurial in seeking funding—a major cultural difference. The
potential to house designers and technology start-ups in the same building, in
incubator spaces such as Makerversity in London, might organically spark these
types of collaborations and knowledge sharing.
Developing New Models was the third theme. By the end of the workshop,
participants considered that fashion designers were critically well-placed,
with their specialist knowledge and understanding of design, to help shape
developments in digital technology. There was a shared cautiousness about
adopting digital business operations as there is a lack of available technology
in fashion environments to support the transformation. Skepticism remained as
to what extent digital engagement could be integrated into the entire product
development lifecycle within the present fast-paced business and protracted
cash flow models. Although digital was felt to be important, “Not many designers
are able to invest time, energy and money in understanding what digital services
would work for them. They’re too busy getting ready for the next season!”45
This workshop made a contribution to understanding the potential for digital
technologies in fashion design, breaking down the barriers and exploring
SUSTAINABILITY AND DIGITALIZATION 125

opportunities for new models of practice in this period of significant growth in

the digital economy. With the rapid growth of business-to-business trade fairs
such as Decoded Fashion taking place in international fashion capitals, and
many other meet-ups and events focused on wearable and digital technology,
the fashion industry is now moving quickly into the digital space.46 Indeed, in
2016, the Centre for Fashion Enterprise started a three-year EU-funded initiative,
to help establish fashion and technology start-up businesses. Digitization will
continue to play an increasingly important part of daily life, and the workshop
showed that the SME designer community is open to using technology to serve
both the design process and the product and business model development. But
it is in need of collaborative support to achieve this change.

Case studies of new business models

As the workshop illustrated, practices with small design-led fashion companies
come from a conservative place, possibly based on previous education, which
has been slow to evolve, both in terms of digital technology and in terms of
sustainability. Perhaps fashion and design businesses can learn from the start-
up culture of technology businesses. Two London-based start-ups are discussed
below to exemplify new types of business models with digital processes at the
heart of their development that potentially disrupt existing business paradigms.
Both have clear sustainability benefits compared to existing business models.

UNMADE: customized knitwear

Unmade is an award-winning start-up design company, founded in 2013, that in
their own words set out to “revolutionize the fashion industry.”47 Working with the
concept of fashion on demand, the company has harnessed the fundamental
digital programmable capacity of industrial knitting machines to enable the
creation of exclusive one-off knitwear pieces, at a unit cost similar to mass
manufactured premium quality knitwear. Unmade have created an impressive
interactive touch screen interface allowing anyone to customize a sweater design
and then have it knitted as a unique piece. The customer manipulates a realistic
visualization of the garment’s patterns and color palette to create variations of
placement, colors, and scale, of any available pattern design. Having effectively
“hacked” the proprietary programming system and written their own software to
directly command Stoll industrial knitting machines, Unmade has bypassed the
expert programmer role to effortlessly enable designs to be created online by
anyone and sent direct to the machine. The sweaters are knitted in the standard
industrial manner using jacquard structures in fully fashioned (shaped) pieces,
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but one-off knitted garments can be made for the same cost and speed as
mass production, which is in effect mass customization for graphic patterned
sweaters.48
Unmade was founded by three partners, interaction designer Ben Alun-
Jones, fashion knitwear designer Kirsty Emery, and former mechanical engineer
Hal Watts, who all met at London’s Royal College of Art. Their complementary
expertise and new business model, focused on customer experience and digital
technology, soon attracted venture capital. The company quickly grew to include
software designers and developers working in the same space as people who
made up the sweaters. Unmade is so called because each piece is unmade until
the customer is involved. No stock is held. Their system—and the revolution
they refer to—is that only goods that have been pre-ordered are produced,
so overproduction is avoided together with the consequent wasted stock, an
endemic issue in the fashion industry.
An Unmade pop-up store, complete with knitting machine, featured in the
Selfridges London Bright Young Things installation in spring 2016, showing
emerging businesses with a sustainability ethos. The speed of knitting
technology—about 90 minutes to knit a sweater—meant that customers could
see their piece being made, creating a direct link to the process of manufacturing
their personalized design. While researchers and industry players, for example
Larsson and colleagues in Sweden49 and Shima Seiki industrial knitting machine
builders in Japan, have previously investigated knit-on-demand services,
Unmade have achieved this long-term aim of moving from mass production to
mass customization. Initially, Unmade produced the knitwear themselves in their
own London studio in collaboration with fashion designers such as Christopher
Raeburn, each of whom created distinctive graphic patterns. Unmade now
classify themselves as a software design company, shifting their goals from
customer service as a brand to providing their technology platform for much
larger collaborative projects with industrial manufacturers.
In the first realization of this goal, a three-way collaboration launched in
November 2016 with cult brand Opening Ceremony, major e-commerce platform
Farfetch, and traditional knitwear manufacturers Johnston of Elgin, created a
limited edition collection of knitwear pieces available to a much wider audience.
By integrating the Unmade technology platform with a scaled-up production
process and embedding its online retail interface in an existing portal, anyone
can order their customized sweater online and receive it within three weeks
(Figure 8.2). By aligning their service with the digital disruption of 3D printing,
Unmade have caught the imagination of the industry and the public—despite
industrial knitting having been digital and fully programmable for decades. This
has led to some confusion with journalists referring to 3D printing or print-knitting
a sweater—Unmade’s knitwear is neither 3D printed nor 3D knitted.50 There are
currently some limitations such as limited sizing and styles available, and the focus
SUSTAINABILITY AND DIGITALIZATION 127

Figure 8.2 Unmade online interactive e-commerce site in collaboration with Farfetch
and customizable knitwear designs by Opening Ceremony

on graphic jacquard patterns only—although an interesting elliptical sweater

has been devised—however Unmade have their sights on other techniques for
customizations including stitch structures which is far more challenging. They
also have ambitious plans to revolutionize other digital production areas including
customizing digital print and embroidery processes—a revolution indeed.

MIXIMALISTE.COM – 3D fashion
visualization and zero prototyping
A perhaps even more experimental start-up company is Change of Paradigm—
an ambitious name for an ambitious project. This is a business start-up that
designs, develops, manufactures, and distributes luxury fashion capsule
collections through its own online e-commerce platform with an entirely new
business model for the creation and selling of fashion virtually. This is based
on zero prototyping—that is, no actual sample garments are made but virtual
patterns and photo-realistic simulations are created as 3D models using a suite
of 3D CAD software packages to develop highly sophisticated renderings of
designer fashion styles.
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After three years of development and successfully seeking investment,

the platform was launched in October 2016 under the new brand name
MIXIMALISTE. A series of exclusive capsule collections are designed and
developed in collaboration with well-recognized London-based independent
fashion designers such as Boudicca, Fyodor Golan, and Teatum Jones, which are
made available on their e-commerce platform MIXIMALISTE.COM for a limited
period of three weeks.51 All the fashion outfits are displayed as 3D simulations
on 3D mannequins using sophisticated software (Plate 18). By collaborating with
recognized independent fashion designers, collections with identifiable signature
style are created using the designers’ own fabrics, which physically exist and are
realistically rendered. From a hand-drawn sketch, the fashion designer and the
company’s 3D specialist, together with the creative director, work together to
develop the virtual patterns from the designs—using CAD programmes including
Marvelous Designer and/or Clo3D (for more detail, see Makryniotis 2015). These
pattern pieces are then virtually stitched together in 3D and rendered onto 3D
mannequins. Significantly, the outfits are shown highly realistically not only in
static form (back, front and side views) but also as moving garments in a video
sequence changing in 3D display between front and side views, illustrating how
a customer might actually wear the piece and how the fabric looks, moves, and
drapes around the body.
It is worth reiterating that there is no physical garment, pattern, model, or even
photograph in this system: all is virtual computer-generated imagery and data,
only the fabrics are real, based on scanned information. The innovative online
visualizations are super-realistic with much attention clearly having been paid
to creating lifelike fabric and body movements working together. Like Unmade,
the designs are available for pre-order—nothing is made until ordered and a 50
percent deposit paid. Unusually, only one designer is featured at a time, within
a visual setting developed as part of the creative collaboration between the
designer and MIXIMALISTE’s 3D virtual design team.
CEO Henri Mura says, “MIXIMALISTE goals are to enhance the entertainment
value of online shopping for fashion and to promote a sustainable pre-order
business model where cost savings are passed on to customers.”52 Pricing
operates on a direct to consumer basis, passing reductions in overhead and
prototyping costs onto the customer, based on an even split between the
parties: MIXIMALISTE, the designer, and the manufacturing costs. This they
claim offers a competitive half-price premium compared with a normal retail
price markup structure of at least 300 percent. Mura elaborates: “The idea is to
offer women an alternative to both fast fashion, which is often made with low
quality materials, and can be unethically sourced, and luxury fashion with its
premium price. We enable a fashion connoisseur a new entry level to designers
they love.”53
SUSTAINABILITY AND DIGITALIZATION 129

Although, at the time of writing, only a small number of outfits have been sold,
MIXIMALISTE.COM is open for business—albeit in its beta-testing phase. The
brand’s journey is only part way through toward developing a fully commercial
business offer and the company has plans, currently in development, to
make the experience truly interactive in 3D. Soon to be launched are three
different technological systems. In the first, customers can visit a virtual
showroom space, using VR headsets to visualize the pieces and walk around
(virtual) mannequins in full 360 degrees. The second uses augmented reality
applications on mobile devices to interact in the real world with the virtual
collections, including customers’ own living rooms. The third application will
use holographic technology in which a 3D representation of the modeled
outfit will literally “come out of the screen.” This level of 3D sophistication
has already required several technology challenges to be solved including
complex cloth physics (with multiple layers of cloth/body interactions), and
integration with games engines to allow real-time interaction, rendering of high
quality textures, and delivery of video streams in real-time (or quasi real-time)
to multiple users.
MIXIMALISTE are clearly pioneers in a field which anticipates the time when
the paradigm really does shift from 2D experiences of shopping online to a stage
when 3D digital experiences become an everyday matter, including having 3D
cameras on mobile phones as standard. As Mura says, “combining online fashion
shopping with a new user experience” creates interactivity by merging digital
simulation with our real world experience for a mixed reality.54 He envisages a
mixed business model where brands might offer a 3D online experience with
their standard collections, together with the new preorder model for exclusive
ranges.55 Of course, the crucial commercial aim is to convert this experience to
purchases, which still remains to be tested.

Conclusions
Both case studies discussed here work with a new paradigm—changing the
fashion business model from Design/Make/Sell to Design/Sell/Make. This is more
radical than it may seem, requiring a flexible infrastructure to be able to work
with fulfilling individual orders efficiently on a modular basis, but at similar cost
to traditional bulk production methods. Both Unmade and MIXIMALISTE.COM
businesses have harnessed the digital systems available and developed new
digital processes to connect with the customer from an initial online engagement
and experience through to communication of production information (knitting
sequence and machine instructions for Unmade and garment pattern and sizing
information for MIXIMALISTE.COM).
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There is widespread recognition that fashion, as we currently know it, is in a

state of flux, undergoing a process of fundamental change—the “end of fashion”
referred to in the title of this volume. The question remains, how can fashion
businesses thrive while aiming to reconcile the complexity of commercial, creative,
environmental, and social issues in our global connected and increasingly digital
economy? There is greater acceptance of and expectations for digital technology
to pervade all aspects of everyday life beyond communications into services and
experiences but urgent consideration must be given to the overuse and depletion
of natural resources including water and the rare earth metals essential to the
manufacturing and operation of electronic devices. It is imperative to align these
technological advances with design for sustainability thinking, requiring whole
life cycle design and circular material flows for both biological and technical
systems.56
Developing new business models for fashion to reduce consumption but
increase delight by harnessing the benefits of digital technologies could be a
significant contributor to a sustainable future, including for developing countries
that have deftly bypassed the need for fixed based technologies, going straight
to mobile platforms, an infrastructure enabling full access to globalized online
systems.
Mass customization has long been a goal of large-scale businesses, and
apart from the bespoke tailoring and dressmaking services still widespread
in several countries, especially in Asia, digital technologies, interfaces, and
capabilities appear to be finally synchronizing to realize this personalization
ambition for a wide community, now fuelled by small, agile, and innovative
businesses. Sportswear brands such as Nike have been at the forefront of
development of mass customization with their NikeID platform for personalizing
trainers, launched in 2006. More initiatives are taking place: early in 2017, Adidas
opened a pop-up shop Knit for You in Berlin testing a customization platform
with a small range of 3D (seamless) knitted sweaters. Similarly in Boston,
Ministry of Supply launched a knit on demand store with a single seamless 3D
knitted jacket. With the arrival of Amazon selling strongly in the fashion space,
no doubt there will be acceleration of innovation and competition to create and
maintain customers.
The workshop discussed above focused specifically on fashion designers’
attitudes and requirements, and questioned to what extent digital engagement
could be integrated into the entire fashion product development cycle, highlighting
issues within the present business and cash flow models. Fashion designers could
be in a position, with their specialist knowledge and understanding of design and
its cultural as well as economic significance, to help shape developments in
digital technology, especially the burgeoning wearable technology market and
its relationship to the Internet of Things and to the human experience. There
remain further research opportunities to interrogate how the traditional model of
SUSTAINABILITY AND DIGITALIZATION 131

fashion design is and can be transformed by digital technology, and to support

the SME designer fashion community to adopt new models of engagement
with manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers that can underscore
the crucial sustainability agenda. Revisiting the observations of Sarah Scatturo
from 2008, the following still resonates: “If selectively and rationally embraced,
technology can continue to serve the sustainable and ethical requirements
of modern society, enabling ever sophisticated methods of clothing creation,
consumption, and disposal.”57

Acknowledgments
The FIRE team, led by Sandy Black with partner AAM Associates, were funded
for the project What’s Digital about Fashion Design? by Research Councils UK,
under the scheme NEMODE Network+ (New Economic Models for the Digital
Economy) in 2015. Thanks are due to Mary Jane Edwards and Andy Hamflett
of AAM and Gabrielle Miller at London College of Fashion for their valued
collaboration and contributions.
 9
GLOBALIZATION
Jennifer Craik

Introduction
It might seem paradoxical to argue that national fashion cultures have
benefited from global fashion given the major disruptions to traditional business
models within the fashion industry. Significant changes include the decline of
manufacturing in many fashion cities, nations, and areas; the disappearance
of many established national/local designers, brands, and retailers nationally
and globally; a massive increase in the number of fashion design, fashion
communication, and fashion merchandising tertiary programs and graduates;
an increasing rate of turnover of new, emerging fashion designers, labels,
and brands; and steadily growing links with other creative industries, cultural
clusters, and design-related enterprises. With such major changes, how is this
affecting national and local fashion industries? Central to understanding and
responding to this new environment is the need to re-vision fashion as a cultural
and symbolic value-adding component integral to post-industrial restructuring,
and re-positioning it as a much broader and more significant role than as an
industry that makes and sells apparel.
While national fashion may often not be a profitable or viable industry, de-
centered and not-so-global fashion cultures “have had a marked influence on
national images and place-branding strategies” as a symbolic industry.1 Rather
than focusing on the classic fashion capitals of Paris, London, New York, and
Milan, fashion commentators need to shift their focus to second tier—or what
have been called “not-so-global” and “polycentric” cities, nations and places—
and conceptualize them as dispersed nodes with new and distinctive potential
as fashion cultures and alternative fashion industries.
134 THE END OF FASHION

Part I. The wicked problem V lived

experience of fashion
The fashion industry has attracted the epithet of constituting a wicked problem
due to the contradictory and multiple forces that shape its complex and diverse
characteristics. The rise of fast fashion has added another level of complexity
as global fashion brands have come to dominate the fashion industry and offer
universal availability that has radically shifted and shaped consumption habits.
But as the fast fashion industry reached maturation, what are the implications
for fashion in the future? Do the negative aspects and effects of global fashion
outweigh the positives? Is the advent of digital marketing, consumption, and taste
formation increasing or decreasing individual consumer choice and reinforcing
fashion trends or creating alternative fashion systems?
A particular feature of the contemporary fashion system is the multiplication
of cities and places that market themselves as fashion capitals and are
increasingly challenging the status of first-tier fashion capitals as second-, third-,
and even fourth-tier entrants crowd the field of fashion capitals.2 Contenders
include Tokyo, Berlin, Madrid, Dubai, and Shanghai although many other cities
compete for the fashion city tag as the center of fashion shifts away from
Western Europe and North America to Asia, Eastern Europe, South America,
and Middle East/Africa. New and emerging fashion capitals include Beijing,
Mumbai, Singapore, Moscow, Stockholm, Reykjavik, São Paulo, Buenos Aires,
Rio de Janeiro, Abu Dhabi, Dakar, and Beirut. These and many other cities
are staging fashion weeks which are attracting attention away from the iconic
fashion capitals in a bid to establish their reputation as fashion forward, ultra
modern and as offering enviable cosmopolitan lifestyles. These “peripheral”
fashion cities are increasingly seen as developing alternative and edgy fashion
sensibilities.3
At the same time, there are a growing number of commentaries lamenting “the
end of fashion” and the scourge of fast fashion.4 Amid the gloom, the number of
careers in fashion-related communications, styling, commentary, retailing, and
so on is expanding as expenditure on apparel continues to grow, fashion outlets
migrate to new sites and cultural precincts, e-tailing and omni-tailing continue to
transform marketing and selling, and the number of new entrants to the industry
continues to grow. Supporters of the fashion industry argue that these trends
show that fashion is alive and well as the most significant of cultural industries
and visible symbol of the vitality of place. In this scenario, there is enormous
potential for fashion to stand for and transform city life globally. To this end,
fashion cities and fashion weeks have been described as a “travelling discourse
that mobilises people and organizations in different countries.”5 However, there
is a tension between the fragility of local fashion industries and the vibrancy of
fashion and allied creative and design cultures.6
GLOBALIZATION 135

Part II. How do we position “national” and

“local” fashion identity in discourses of
fashion inspiration?
Paradoxically, despite the domination of global fashion trends and undermining of
local holistic (that is, from design to manufacturing) fashion industries, increasing
numbers of cities and regions are defining themselves through their fashion
cultures. “Not-so-global” fashion cities7 have been called “islands of identity,”8
reflecting their peripheral status that has enabled cities like Cork in Ireland to project
an identity of difference through fashion distinctiveness. Here the driver is the
adaptation and appropriation of international styles which are “interpreted and re-
interpreted in a local context” rather than merely copying with minor modifications
called “knock-offs.”9 As a result, there has been the growth of selling identity
through fashion, as, for example, has happened in the case of Italian-designed,
made and marketed fashion that is branded as embodying the spirit of Italy or
what Alice Dallabona calls “Italianicity.”10 Italian fashion shares a tradition for both
couture, as well as more accessible and cheaper lines, and popular brands that
are fused in the label of Italianicity.11 The positive resonances of the “made in
Italy” label includes the success of the town of Prato which is synonymous with
manufacturing fast fashion that is made in Italy by Chinese migrant workers.12
By contrast, Scandinavian fashion (primarily represented by the fashion
cultures of Denmark, Norway and Sweden) has experienced a shift from design
nations (hooked on modernist aesthetics and social progress) to fashion nations
(projecting dynamic and shifting national identities to an international audience).13
Yet, a deeper examination of Swedish fashion indicates that the idea of place-
making a brand as Swedish depends on mythologies of Swedishness that can
be leveraged in different ways that appeal to different markets, namely, provincial
(Resteröds Trikȁ, Sandqvist), pseudo international (Lexington, Hampton
Republic), national (Eton, Tiger of Sweden, Hasbeens) or cosmopolitan (H&M,
Acne, Nudie Jeans).14 While Swedishness might seem cool to international
markets, Swedes seek coolness elsewhere, for example, the brand Lexington
Clothing Co. promotes an American New England profile.15 National identity in
fashion brands is, then, based on circulating mythologies about place, heritage,
tradition, and nationalist stereotypes. Even the largest Norwegian brand on
the international market, Moods of Norway, is another example of a marketing
paradox. Promoting itself as a naïve label based on iconic and humorous images
of Norwegian-ness, it is aimed at an international market that is undifferentiated
beyond constituting “happy clothes for happy people.” Its signature is a bright
pink tractor that symbolizes the rural traditions of Norway and is a simple yet
unmistakable logo on its smart casual diverse range of clothes. After a decade of
success and growth, the company got into trouble by too fast global expansion
and exposés of lack of supply chain transparency.16 These examples show that
136 THE END OF FASHION

branding national identity is a diverse and contradictory project especially amid

international awareness of issues of corporate social responsibility.17
Whereas “Scandi” fashion is often seen internationally as a unified and coherent
fashion embodiment of regional characteristics, the fashion cultures of Belgium
and Holland are regarded as different.18 Belgian fashion, typified by the “Antwerp
6” who trained at the Royal Academy in Antwerp, is touted as developing fashion
as part of its re-invention as a culture city with cultural industries along with regional
(Flemish) promotional identity compared with Dutch inspiration, as Lise Skov (2011)
observed. Across the board, fashion designers draw on a wide range of visual and
tactile sources of inspiration as well as references to the local characteristics and
symbolism.19 Local inspirations include popular cultural motifs (such as folk culture
or national culture), cultural heritage and crafts, local places and landmarks, and
key events in history. However, they are keen to avoid “cultural stereotypes by
making sure their version of the local [is] not obvious” but rather “an eclectic mix
‘n’ match” that implies cosmopolitan cultural sophistication.20 Exploring sources of
fashion inspiration, Alice Payne (2016) found that Australian fast fashion designers
are primarily influenced by international trends with 75 percent citing the following
sources: online sources (trend sites, blogs, key designers, etc.); travel experiences
especially overseas and to exotic places; and the trends and fads of well-known
celebrities. Local cultural inspirations such as their target consumers, magazines,
and new products found at markets, popular music, art and aesthetic trends,
vintage fashion, and successful designs of previous collections accounted for a
minority of inspirations. This suggests that, even when local brands are competing
with fast fashion incursions into their market share, they are following global
trends (found on sites like WGSN, Instagram, and influencer posts), rather than
maximizing “local” inspirations and distinctiveness.21

Part 3. Strategies for local and national

fashion
The challenge facing local and national designers, labels, and industries is how
best to maximize their distinctiveness in the increasingly global marketplace. In
this section, five strategies are proposed.

Selling takes time: As important as design and

manufacturing is attention to, and tweaking of,
techniques of selling
One of the identified failures of local fashion is the assumption that once product
is made, buyers will come, yet the crucial challenge for local fashion retail models
GLOBALIZATION 137

is creating and nurturing a client base that knows a brand, is attracted to it

and its values, and identifies with the brand as fitting with a consumer’s image
and lifestyle. This is often referred to as the designer’s muse, target consumer,
ideal customer, or “our girl,”22 and detailed profiles of this consumer can be
developed. However, it is still necessary to engage and persuade the target
consumer to buy products and hopefully become a regular fan and consumer
that becomes part of the brand “family.”23 Louise Crewe, Nicky Gregson, and
Kate Brooks discuss the importance of creating a group of “like-minded”
followers who share an aesthetic and a knowledge and language of fashion that
appreciate the look and are regular shoppers.24 Equally, such retailers “position
themselves and talk about themselves as part of a creative scene-setting milieu,
which is understood to constitute the alternative-as-imagined.” These fashion
retailers interact with other retailers, designers, creatives, and club regulars
engaging regularly in cultural and collaborative activities. This “knowing, elite,
distinctive cognoscenti” also requires setting themselves against or outside the
mainstream of “unknowing and undifferentiated” consumers who are regarded
as “inappropriate” even when they buy product.25 Equally important is retail
location as shopping malls, high streets, and outlet centers are dominated
by major players, forcing independent, niche, and small retailers to seek out
alternative locations and markets that are “more discerning, style-conscious
and image-centred” thus boosting the impression of an alternative creative
community.26 Many niche fashion labels prioritize stocking by independent
retailers and focusing on the specificities and differences of local markets by
offering a clearly identified point of difference and matching it to target consumer
groups. Above all, it is important not to copy fast fashion trends but find a
counterpoint to mainstream fashion.

Refining omni-tailing and mix-and-match retail

strategies
Bricks and mortar remain important for local and national fashion retailers
despite inroads by e-tailing especially by younger consumers; however, retailers
are increasingly looking at multiple channels or omni-tailing to reach different
sub-groups of consumers. As well as providing multiple channels of access
and contact including websites, email, pop-up stores, apps, mobile and tablet
connectivity, fashion retailers need to make use of Instagram, Facebook,
Twitter, Pinterest, and Siri. This requires considerable investment in deciding
which techniques best suit the label and consumer as well as maintaining
and upgrading systems and promotional strategies. The interaction between
physical, direct, digital, and experiential ways of connecting with consumers is
essential for today’s fashion retailer.
138 THE END OF FASHION

Embrace and engage with the competition internally

and externally
As well as social and cultural connections between others in the fashion/culture
space, fashion retailers typically pay considerable attention to what competitors
are up to in order to meet them head-on and second-guess their next moves.
This industry intelligence is crucial to keeping abreast of trends and adjusting to
shifts in the marketplace internally. At the local level, this means monitoring the
activities of other fashion retailers within a locality, as well as trends across the
nation or region (such as Los Angeles versus Miami; Sydney versus Melbourne;
Milan versus Florence; Shanghai versus Beijing; or Mumbai versus Delhi).
Along with internal competition, fashion retailers need to monitor external
competitors and trends between jurisdictions, such as Amsterdam versus
Antwerp; Stockholm versus Copenhagen; Berlin versus Vienna; and Kuala
Lumpur versus Singapore. Interestingly, in the case of Scandinavia, the
fashion cultures of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland both compete and
cooperate, balancing fierce national pride in, and ownership of, their designers
and labels while, at the same time, promoting “Scandi” or “Nordic” fashion as
a tangible and attractive fashion genre for global consumers and fashionistas.27

Creative collaborations between fashion and other

design fields
In recent years, there has been major growth in collaborations between creatives
in adjunct fields in terms of both individual designers and practitioners, as well
as other cultural sectors, agencies, organizations, and spatial locations.28 To this
end, fashion retailers have invested in developing design communities of interest,
up-skilling in business and strategic planning and management; and fostering
and nurturing a customer base through real-time links and interactions.29 These
strategies may seem a long way from designing innovative apparel and product
development but in many ways are more important for survival and success.

Recognizing different types of local and national

fashion cultures
There are three main forms of distinctive local fashions: the reinvention of
tradition (e.g., England, Italy, and Paris); disrupters to traditional fashion
systems (e.g., Japan and Belgium); and cultural re-invention of “non” places
through fashion (e.g., Ireland, Portugal, New Zealand, Australia, and Reykjavik).
Additionally, fashion is also being employed to re-brand regions as cultures
such as the invention of “Asian” fashion as an imaginary entity30 or Hong Kong
GLOBALIZATION 139

fashion as a distinctive genre.31 A related strategy has been the use of fashion
as part of the promotion of the new cultural economy as a replacement for
other industries, for example, New Zealand.32 In other places, fashion is a visible
symbol of local conditions such as lifestyle, subculture, and climate where a tag
like “subtropical” can come to identify the fashion of a place, such as Australia33
or Brazil.34
Fashion is also entering the world of power and economic strength as
a strategy to compete with and challenge the dominance of first-tier fashion
centers reflecting the global shift of economic dominance from Europe and North
America to Asia, South America, Africa, and the Pacific. This has been called the
construction of “dressed power” in which “fashion is an attribute that nations no
longer seem to be able to do without.”35

Conclusion
In sum, there is an imperative to appreciate the important role of local fashion in
the national and global context as micro-fashion cultures that underpin cultural
identity and differentiation. This requires challenging the hierarchy of fashion
city tiers by constructing a typology of not-so-global fashion tiers as parallel
fashion segments with niche dynamics and strategies depending on macro-
factors such as geographic location, industry capacity, and economic strength,
as well as micro-factors such as characteristics of the consumer base, honing of
appropriate retailing models, and understanding the “style DNA” of local fashion
cultures. In so doing, fashion reflects and promotes diversity and difference
through visible and tangible dress codes. In short, rather than global fashion
obliterating local and national fashion, arguably it has created opportunities for
cultural uniqueness. As quoted in relation to the emergence of distinctive regional
fashions throughout Ireland:

You can’t give away black in Cork. It is a really different look there—everybody
loves colour and black is for funerals. In Galway, they love dressing up and
you really see it at the taxi ranks at the Galway races. There’s a great sense
of style in Limerick and some great boutiques outside the city. That’s why the
UK multiples get it wrong. Each of our regions has to be treated differently and
that’s what gives us the edge.36

Only when fashion engages with its backyard, be that local or regional, as well
as seeking global exposure and export markets, will “polycentric” fashion really
thrive. Fashion will never end but it will have other and diverse futures across
cultures and places.
 10
PRODUCTION AND
MANUFACTURE
Véronique Pouillard

Introduction
The crisis of the fast-fashion model has received important media attention in
recent years. Labor rights and ecological effects represent major challenges for the
fashion industry. Forecasts indicate that the British population will have discarded
680 million garments during the spring 2017 season alone—one-third of which
(235 million garments) will go to landfill, representing an average of nineteen pieces
of clothing per person in Britain. Many ecological problems result from discarding
garments: one difficulty is finding a use for the items that will be consigned,
another is the environmental cost of sending a portion of the donated garments
to overseas markets, and yet another is the environmental impact of the various
clothing materials sent to landfill. Over the last decades, recycling programs have
been launched by many fashion producers and retailers, from the veteran H&M
Hennes and Mauritz AB Group to recent and more niche enterprises like the US
firm Reformation.1 Ecologically minded fashion entrepreneurs face a daunting set
of entangled challenges. Up the chain of production, water consumption, damage
due to pollution, and degraded crop production result from insufficiently regulated
textile and garment industries.2 Down the chain, marked effects of fashion
overconsumption include pollution created from washing and landfill comprising
throwaway fashions. The majority of today’s fashion firms produce nondurable
garments, which are worn only a few times and then discarded.3 Furthermore,
the environmental problems faced by the textile and garment industries are
interconnected with problems of labor conditions.
Despite considerable technological advances, the sewing machine is still at
the core of fashion production. While there have been important changes—such
as the invention of the zipper, as well as developments in the chemical dying
industry and in knitting machines—these innovations have hardly changed the
142 THE END OF FASHION

way the fashion industry works.4 Since the invention of the sewing machine in the
mid-nineteenth century, technology has been remarkably stable5 and innovation
has resided less in the technological realm than in design. In other words, it
is first and foremost seasonal novelty that drives change in the industry. The
acceleration of fashion cycles is also a fundamental factor in its prosperity, even
if, as explored in this chapter, it comes with consequences for production.6
Fabrics need to be guided through the machine by human hands, and
machines today are operated by men and women who often work far away from
the headquarters of retailing firms. Fashion is an important source of employment
worldwide. Competition between contractors at the local level keeps labor
prices down, but sourcing from distant locations is a challenge for firms. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, fashion was manufactured largely in urban
centers, close to the firms that worked on image, media, and value creation.
Paris was the center of design and of bespoke women’s fashions, and London
was the center of tailoring and of woolen clothing, while New York emerged as
the world’s most dynamic manufacturing center.7 In these major cities, unions
and activist groups including consumers’ leagues worked hard to gain more
control over the conditions of production.8 They denounced the use of sweated
labor: the exploitation of low-paid, often immigrant, women and children working
in tenements and insalubrious buildings. To encourage reasonable consumption,
the consumers’ leagues perpetuated the common belief that clothes produced in
bad conditions could carry diseases from the workers, for instance, tuberculosis.
Scientific developments eventually made such beliefs distant memories, and
thanks to the actions of reformist groups, the labor conditions of garment
workers improved to some extent in the West. But, as observed by labor
historians, sweatshops remained endemic. Historian Nancy Green has shown
that the Jewish workers of Gilded Age New York were replaced by new waves
of immigrants, including Italians, Chinese, and Puerto Ricans. Sweatshops
that employed illegal immigrants in precarious conditions never completely
disappeared.9 Another phenomenon that took place in the garment industries
of the West is the offshoring of garment production. It began in the 1950s when
American manufacturing plants relocated to less-unionized areas within the
United States, mainly in the South. New, more competitive places of production
also emerged in southern and eastern Europe. From the 1960s onward, garment
production was relocated again, from Western countries to Asia, the Caribbean
basin, and North Africa. The offshoring of garment production accelerated in the
last decades of the twentieth century with the lifting of quotas and trade barriers.
Many studies have been written on the history of the garment industry. This
chapter aims to give a concise overview of the debates on fashion production and to
place them in the context of the longer-term history of labor and consumption. This
research is based on a wide array of press sources, secondary literature on labor
and consumption history, and reports on garment work by NGOs and governments.
PRODUCTION AND MANUFACTURE 143

The human hand

Until the 1950s, New York City’s garment district was the largest purveyor of
ready-to-wear clothing in the United States. American retailers bought finished
garments from manufacturers specializing in different price levels and distinct
stages in the manufacturing process. Fabric was prepared and cut by the
cutters. Specialized workers then made bundles, or loads of cut fabric ready
to be sewn. The bundles were generally sent to another workshop in the city.
Today, it is not uncommon that bundles of cut fabric are sent to another country
to be assembled; then, the garments may be sent to yet another part of the city,
or to another country, to be finished there.
Then and now, an important part of the manufacturing work could be
subcontracted. In the first half of the twentieth century, the work was very
specialized and the manufacturer, who in New York’s garment district was
called the “jobber,” sent work to a contractor, who often delegated a part of
the assembling to subcontractors. To cut down the prices, jobbers relied on
competition among contractors, who were eager to receive orders.10 In recent
decades, the places of production have changed, but the competitive principles
have remained the same. One effect of the subcontracting system is that, in a
process in which orders are distributed to subcontractors, retailers may lose
track of who their suppliers are.
The postwar period was characterized by the advent of fashions for all,
although this phrase needs to be considered carefully. Historians of vintage
fashion have adequately shown that even in the affluent West, there have always
been significant numbers of consumers who could not afford to buy new, even
at the lowest price point, and had to rely on charity programs and secondhand
garments to make ends meet.11 The idea of mass fashions, even nuanced by
the persistence of secondhand markets, was nonetheless rooted in the ideal of
a democracy of styles. Fresh designs were no longer reserved for the elite who
were able to pay for haute couture originals. The democratization of fashion
was a long-term process that developed alongside the rise of the ready-to-wear
industry. A few fashion centers set the tone for style. While the New York garment
district was the world’s largest center of fashion manufacturing during the first
half of the twentieth century, most manufacturers there were not ready to gamble
on styles. These manufacturers, who often worked with tight margins, wanted
to avoid being left with stock of unsuccessful designs. Middlemen such as Tobe
Coller Davis and Amos Parrish were in charge of scouting Paris trends and, for
a subscription fee, selecting and reporting them to American manufacturers.12
Copyists and counterfeiters also contributed to making the most desirable styles
available at a variety of price points and participated in the democratization of
fashion by providing substitute goods.13 Fashion stopped being purely a luxury
and became a commodity.14
144 THE END OF FASHION

In the last half of the twentieth century, the rhythm of fashion accelerated like
never before. The 1960s featured faster cycles and the first micro collections.15
This change was possible thanks to small units of design and production, often
homegrown. Entrepreneurs in the British “swinging sixties” fashion business—
like Barbara Hulanicki (through her store, Biba) and Mary Quant—favored batch
production for their clothing, but the problem of restocking on time remained
an issue.16 Clothing items were often discontinued, while brand identity was
ensured by advertising and by the licensing of lifestyle and beauty lines.17

Offshoring fashion manufacturing

Issuing desirable styles for the masses in the right numbers, and on time, was
a challenge. Concomitant with this challenge was the offshoring of large parts
of fashion production. In some sectors of the textile and garment industries,
a fear of distant overseas competition emerged during the interwar period. In
Europe, for instance, Flemish lace makers started in the 1920s to denounce
the competition from Chinese and Japanese lace makers. Lace making was
labor-intensive, precise work that was deeply anchored in the history of several
European regions. Textile experts observed at the time that while the differences
between Flemish and Asian lace production were still important, for many buyers
it was only the price that mattered. Belgian producers feared that Asian workers,
having learned the technical skills, would end up competing with the Flemish
production.18
The conditions of manufacturing in the textile and garment industries were
also subject to discussion in the United States. The measures taken during the
mandates of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt to alleviate the effects
of the Great Depression, and especially those that improved traceability of
production within the framework of the National Recovery Administration during
the first and the second New Deals, played an important role in the international
mobilization of experts on the textile and garment industries. Roosevelt convened
the first international conference on the textile industry in Washington, DC, in
1937. The conference brought together experts—representing governments,
workers, and firms—to discuss a report prepared by the Bureau International du
Travail (International Labor Office), in order to evaluate technical, economic, and
social changes in the textile and garment industries at the international level.19
During the postwar period, such efforts to develop a dialogue on the global
future of textile and garment manufacturing could not keep up with the pace
of relocations to less unionized centers in the United States, to southern and
eastern Europe, and to Southeast Asia. During the 1970s, the consequences of
the offshoring of production became visible in the old manufacturing centers. In
Europe, regions such as Lodzkie (around the city of Lodz in Poland), northern
PRODUCTION AND MANUFACTURE 145

England, and Flanders (in Belgium) were hit hard by the loss of large numbers
of manufacturing jobs.20 Countries that had developed a comprehensive welfare
state were unfairly penalized in comparison to those that had not done so and
could for this reason produce at a lower cost. To this day, this remains the core
problem in the industry.
In Belgium, for instance, textile production was hit hard by the economic crisis
that resulted from the 1973 oil shock. Then, in the second half of the 1970s,
the country’s textile production rose again, but not its garment production—the
balance of trade was negative from 1976 onwards.21 Economist Thierry Charlier,
who wrote an extensive study on this question, notes that the reason for this was
the import of garments produced in low-cost countries, especially in Southeast
Asia, eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean basin. The differences in industrial
and retail structures between Belgium and the Netherlands also played a role
in the Belgian garment industry’s decline. The Netherlands, observes Charlier,
“had purposefully let their domestic garment manufacturing industry die in order
to become the first transit hub of the trade of low cost clothing.”22 Indeed, retail
chains like C&A flourished in the Netherlands.23
From the 1970s to 1980s, new trade agreements allowed manufacturing-
intensive countries to use low wages as a competitive advantage in garment
exports. Northern European countries, the United States, Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand were now outpaced by other countries in the flow of
cheaper merchandise, notably Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea. Lower
wages, longer hours, and local production of textiles allowed the new places of
production to offer fashionable goods for retail sale in the West.
In an attempt to limit competition, trade agreements were negotiated between
the low-cost manufacturing countries and the Western importers within the
framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The Multi-
Fiber Arrangement, for instance, had a limiting effect on exports by some of
the countries producing low-cost fashions. Experts have observed, however,
that frauds related to import quotas of garments and the country of origin were
common.24 Agreements also ended up favoring some countries while penalizing
others, for example, in southern Europe. Since the end of the Multi-Fiber
Arrangement, on January 1, 2005, the low-cost garment industry has undergone
a new boom. Despite the negotiation of new bilateral agreements, unbridled
liberalism dominates in the global garment and textile trade.25 For the consumer,
the result is increased availability of cheaper, inferior-quality garments, and for the
producer, decreased costs of labor.
The offshoring of fashion production to distant places raises the question
of what happened to the manufacturing sites that were deserted because
of the relocation overseas of garment and textile production. Movements for
rehabilitating local production have a long history and can take different forms.
They can be associated with forms of nationalism; an example is the Swadeshi
146 THE END OF FASHION

movement in India, which aimed to promote locally made goods, and especially
textiles, as a token of political independence and which was influenced by
Mahatma Gandhi.26
In the West, many of the original production centers and their abandoned
sites, or neighboring cities, became postindustrial creative centers. A multiplicity
of actors contributed to make such reconversions possible: city and state officials
who were eager to reignite activity in dormant regions, designers attracted by
cheaper rents, the last firms left behind, and new entrepreneurs. Returning to the
case of the Belgian region of Flanders, a former center of industrial production,
we see that the project of its rehabilitation was fostered by creative entrepreneurs,
the presence of local firms and know-how, and the federal government of
Belgium, led by Prime Minister Wilfried Martens. For a period of ten years starting
in 1983, the Belgian government financed the Textile Plan, which offered funding
to entrepreneurs, and awarded cash prizes to support creativity.27 The city of
Antwerp, which had a tradition of supporting the arts and was a bustling port
city, became a stage for the transformation of a dormant textile region into a new
hub for value creation through creativity and retail. The reconversion of former
production sites into creative centers depends on many factors and does not
entirely make up for the loss of production activity. The true economic impact
of recovery programs like the Belgian Textile Plan of the 1980s is difficult to
quantify, notably in terms of unemployment that can persist in the rejuvenated
centers. Yet, through this process, Antwerp has earned a place as one of the
new, dynamic, and exciting fashion centers of the postindustrial age.
From the 1990s onwards, flexible specialization firms began to adopt systems
of quick response that were made possible through the development of specific
IT programs.28 In the case of fashion retailer Zara, the company makes decisions
about batch production based on data gathered from consumers’ purchases.29
Today, the fast-fashion groups that developed these IT systems in the first
place—like Inditex, owner of Zara, and Fast Retailing, owner of Uniqlo—can turn
out a fashionable new garment in thirteen days from the drawing board to the
shop floor.30 Many of these designs are inspired by the innovative and creative
fashions presented on the runways by high-end firms. A new fashion system has
emerged from these conditions of production—one that combines the nearly
instantaneous availability of fashionable designs with access to immediate image
diffusion via social media platforms.

The race to the bottom

The idea that fashion is a sociological phenomenon that has a beginning and an
end was developed by sociologists such as Gilles Lipovetsky, who wrote that
the fashion system had a life span of a hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth
PRODUCTION AND MANUFACTURE 147

century to the mid-twentieth century. This chronology coincides with what is

known as the golden century of Paris haute couture.31 The acceleration of the
fashion cycles had been analyzed before, for example, by Roland Barthes, who
identified a series of factors that drove the phenomenon.32 But since Barthes,
the fashion system has become even faster, with its cycles only a few weeks
long, instead of the traditional two six-month seasons a year. In the West, a
consequence was that sewing became devalued and considered a chosen hobby
instead of an economically sound activity.33 The term “disposable fashion” has
since been coined to describe products sold at the lowest prices by retail chains
like Primark. Indeed, garments are considerably cheaper at Primark than at most
other affordable fashion chains: on average, items are sold for £3.87 at Primark
and for £10.69 at H&M.34 There is no denying the attraction to the consumer of
a wide array of up-to-date styles at very low prices. But what is the true cost
of cheap clothing for the people who are at the starting point of the chain of
production? This question has gained prominence in the mass media landscape,
prompting the title of Andrew Morgan’s 2015 documentary film, The True Cost.35
Fashion production provides many people with entry-level jobs but, Morgan’s
film suggests, it has gone too far. In recent years, dozens of fast-fashion retailers
have had their brand names associated with grave labor accidents. On April
24, 2013, 1,135 people were killed as a result of the collapse of the Rana Plaza
building in Savar, an industrial suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh. At the time, more
than 3,000 people were working in the building, producing apparel for various
subcontractors. Among the survivors of the collapse, many were gravely injured.
Several other accidents in apparel factories had occurred in the preceding
months, and others since then have taken hundreds of victims.36
In the days preceding the Rana Plaza collapse, workers employed in the
building had noticed cracks in its construction, but they were pressured to go
to work. The Rana Plaza had initially been built to be a shopping mall, not to
host factories with their heavy machinery and vibration-inducing generators.
The contractors who worked on the building had used inferior-quality concrete
and worked faster than was recommended for materials to dry, in violation of
construction safety codes. Despite the compromised security, three floors were
later added above the ones in the original design plans. This was endemic of
local corruption leading to unmonitored building development.37
The Rana Plaza building housed at least five factories owned by subcontractors
who filled orders for clothing and accessories from mass retailing groups such
as Benetton, H&M, Inditex, Loblaw, Primark, and Walmart. Finding the firms
that outsourced work to the Rana Plaza factories proved difficult. Brand labels
were collected in the rubble of the Savar building, revealing the large number of
popular brands that were made there. Since firms cut expenses first on fabric
and design, what is left for mass fashion brands is to push down the price of
the workforce.38 This phenomenon of a “race to the bottom” is at the core of
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the tensions in fashion production.39 The retailers that found their brand image
tarnished by the Rana Plaza disaster stated publicly that they had not been
fully informed of the conditions of production. They subsequently engaged in
reparation and developed corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs.40

Consumers’ guilt
The news of the Rana Plaza collapse, and of other, similar disasters, caused
public outcry worldwide. Guilt and soul-searching were voiced in the West.
The Rana Plaza tragedy took on symbolic proportions because of both the
magnitude of its death toll and the global popularity of the brand-name tags
found in the rubble after the collapse. The image of the Western consumer
was also damaged considerably at this time—at best complacent, at worst
responsible for unethical purchases. Consumer culpability emerged from the
association made between the deaths of the workers and the frivolous pleasure
associated with fashion. In numerous media discourses, mass fashion became
synonymous with guilt. In some of the most affluent countries in the word, new
discourses encouraging more restrained, responsible consumption have risen
to prominence in the media and on consumer forums, including social media.
The genres of prescriptive literature, consumers’ guides, and self-help books
have seen an increase in discourses promoting restrained consumption, which
often translates into minimalist styles. But these discourses are ambivalent.
Encouraging consumers to cull their belongings has the effect of creating more
landfill—and making space for buying new objects again.41 More importantly,
despite ever-present media coverage of the difficult labor conditions and safety
hazards in garment factories, the market share of rock-bottom-price new
fashions shows no signs of abating.42
In the media, discussions of consumer ethics occupy an increasing amount
of space, but the offer of and demand for fully traceable fashion-branded goods
is not only marginal, but reserved for consumers who belong to a cultural
elite. In Norway, a TV series that first aired in 2014, called Sweatshop Deadly
Fashion, sent a small group of young fashion bloggers to experience the working
conditions of garment factory workers in Cambodia. The series shed light on the
divergence between the fast-fashion consumer lifestyle and the conditions of
workers who stand behind the product.43 The documentary The True Cost had
a similar effect.
The Rana Plaza disaster was one of exceptional magnitude, but more
than twenty years before, the Sacara factory fire in the suburbs of Dhaka had
killed twenty-five women and children trapped in a locked garment workshop.
Labor unrest and union creation followed in Bangladesh, but with little effect
on the industry. After that accident, Clean Clothes Campaign—the Dutch-
PRODUCTION AND MANUFACTURE 149

founded alliance of NGOs and labor unions—carried out in-depth research that
unequivocally showed dangerous labor conditions in Bangladesh.44 Despite the
efforts of NGOs and unions on the ground, the last two decades in the country
have been marked by repeated accidents in factories, regularly killing dozens of
workers.45
Going back further in time reveals periodic occurrences of such accidents,
and not only in developing parts of the world. The problem of safety in the
workplace has become more acute since the advent of the modern factory. In
New York, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911, was the most
significant labor accident in the US garment industry, resulting in the death of
146 workers, most of them young women. The subsequent inquiry showed that
the fire had probably been caused by a lit cigarette that had fallen in a basket of
fabric scraps. The fire spread to the ninth and tenth floors of the building where
the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory had its workshops, on the corner of Greene Street
and Washington Place. To prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks,
the doors of the factory had been locked—a practice that is still frequent today
in low-cost garment workshops, despite not being permitted by safety codes.
The workers who were not able to exit the building by its elevators before they
stopped operating were trapped in the flames, and some of them jumped to
their death.46
After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, workers gathered in the street to
mourn their relatives, friends, and colleagues and to protest against hazardous
labor conditions. The State of New York then passed new legislation to protect
factory workers from similar accidents. Audits were organized to check safety and
labor conditions, and controllers were sent to work sites in person. Historically,
a recurring problem has been finding enough police and auditors to check that
laws and labor codes are respected in the long term. During the interwar period,
the garment workers of New York were the best paid and worked shorter hours
than in any other fashion production center, including Paris. New York’s garment
district workers also became the most unionized in the industry.47
Before the First World War, a double movement had begun to develop in
the West: workers unionized, and consumers started to express solidarity with
the people in distant locations who sewed their clothes. Consumers’ leagues in
Western countries had helped awaken consumers to the danger of acquiring
goods without tracing their production.48 Such activists were concerned by
industry workers’ ages, wages, and health. They visited the tenements in order
to alert public authorities of the dangers of precarious labor conditions, and they
lobbied authorities for regulation of the minimum age of labor.
Following the economist Albert O. Hirschmann, the behavior of Western
consumers can be analyzed using three repertoires, or types of actions: exit (e.g.,
boycott practices, blacklisting), voice (e.g., communication campaigns, consumer
lobbying), and loyalty (e.g., “buycotts,” white lists of ethical companies). As
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consumption historians have shown through many examples, neither the boycotting
nor the buycotting of fashion products carries a single political viewpoint.49 Hence,
loyalty can also refer to the loyalty of consumers who keep buying from companies
that participate in the “race to the bottom.”50 Still, boycott and buycott practices
have contributed to the coming of age of grassroots politics, especially for groups
deprived of full citizenship rights.51 In recent decades, associations like the Clean
Clothes Campaign work with NGOs, the International Labor Organization, local
unions, firms, and governments to establish better labor conditions.

Made in the West?

Debates on the conditions of production in the fashion industry have shed light
on the precarious conditions in which many men and women, some of whom
are underage, work in the manufacturing industries. In 1999, the publication
of Naomi Klein’s book No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies was the focal
point of an important new wave of consumers’ discontent with the aggressive
branding of large multinational conglomerates that produced cheap goods at
the expense of workers’ well-being. Klein explored what she presented as two
faces of a single problem: the value of Western brands had skyrocketed, while
less and less effort and money were being spent on the well-being of workers.
Such brands, argued Klein, had engaged in a race to weightlessness. They had
invested in the immaterial aspects of the brand, which was often headquartered
in a Western country, and had left uncontrolled the manufactured production,
most of which took place overseas. The victims were the workers, especially
in developing countries and tax-free hubs, where most of the production was
relocated. Klein identifies herself as a repentant brand addict. Most importantly,
her book turned the spotlight on associations that work to enforce basic safety
codes and to implement a living wage—which has proven to be difficult, and
sometimes dangerous, work.52 The promotion of Klein’s book turned into a
campaign of activism. Historians acknowledged that No Logo had an effect on
their research agenda, prompting them to investigate, for example, the history
of the early consumer activists who were the ancestors of today’s Clean Clothes
Campaign and other associations.53
Klein’s work contributed to the public discourse around the tensions between
material and immaterial determinants in the fashion industry. The demand for
endless new fashions, met by the fast response of large groups, has brought
fast fashions to the masses. Contemporary fashion industries, characterized
by flexible specialization and rapid response, are characteristic of post-Fordist
economies.54
Buying Western or national is a strategy that consumers may deploy in
order to soothe their own conscience when shopping. Historians have shown
PRODUCTION AND MANUFACTURE 151

that economies supposed to be liberal use various barriers to protect certain

sectors, or, put differently, that there is no such thing as a free market.55 The
term “re-shoring” is currently used to describe new projects that aim to bring
back components of garment manufacturing to the old Western centers of
production.56 One challenge facing re-shoring initiatives, as important as they
are, is to ensure that buying garments labeled as made in the West will in fact
contribute directly to the greater good of the workers behind those garments. As
noted earlier in this chapter, the fiber harvesting, fabric weaving, cutting, sewing,
and finishing of a garment may all, or in part, be carried out in different countries.
Only one or two of these steps will appear on the label that is sewn onto the
garment for retail. It is also possible that even a garment made in a Western
country is made in a workshop employing people in illegal conditions.57
The question of re-shoring applies to the Western retail firms whose
accountability is at stake here. Should global retail chains divest from economies
like Bangladesh? Or are they already so involved in these economies that they
have to face their responsibilities on the ground? In the case of low-wage
garment production industries, many actors tend to agree that it is better for
multinationals to avoid doing a “cut and run” on their orders when they face
subcontractors who do not respect labor codes. Liesbeth Sluiter of the Clean
Clothes Campaign writes that NGOs generally encourage multinationals to
stay and to make sure they work together with local contractors, unions, and
government, as well as the International Labor Organization and NGOs, in order
to solve problems locally and to improve labor conditions.58
The Rana Plaza disaster and several other labor accidents have become
symbols of the urgent need for greater control of labor conditions in manufacturing
industries. The structure of the fashion industry entails the delegation of
manufacturing to subcontractors, and sometimes many subcontractors, who
can themselves subcontract parts of the job like cutting or finishing garments.
Contractors who cannot fill an order will offer the work to a subcontractor, and
along this chain of production, responsibility becomes harder and harder to
trace.59
New York Times journalist Adam Davidson has described low-wage garment
factories as a part of the “T-shirt phase” of developing economies: a phase that
developing economies have to go through in order to provide low-cost jobs
to the masses, before in theory reaching a more advanced stage of economic
development.60 Fashion companies tend to cut costs wherever possible, by
using cheaper textiles and by relocating to low-salary economies and tax-free
hubs. Consumers and some of their defense organizations have frequently
proposed boycotting goods made in such places. Yet in the so-called “T-shirt”
economic phase, it is also often pointed out that bad jobs are better than no
jobs at all. Davidson and other observers underline that the T-shirt phase is a
limited one and should be followed by an influx of jobs for more qualified workers
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and better labor conditions. But the research of labor historians tends to show
that sweated labor comes back in waves, including in Western fashion hubs.61
The recent history of low-cost-production countries—notably Bangladesh,
Cambodia, China, and Pakistan—does not tend to support Davidson’s thesis:
deadly accidents have continued to occur in the industry over the last twenty
years. Furthermore, attempts by workers to unionize and protests demanding
better working conditions are often met with repression.62

New ways of production

Marketing researchers Sankar Sen and C. B. Battacharya show that companies
benefit greatly from offering better conditions to their employees rather than
simply complying with the minimum legal standards of the country where their
workshops are located.63 Compliance issues, however, remain numerous. A
2013 McKinsey report pointed out that less than 2 percent of textile and garment
factories in Bangladesh had a high degree of compliance with safety and hygiene
codes.64 A disconnect between CSR programs and purchasing practices, lack
of resources for carrying out social auditing, and auditing frauds observed at the
local level are all major obstacles to the enforcement of labor codes.65 In order
to move beyond the problems of implementing a compliance-based paradigm,
researchers and organizations propose replacing it with a cooperation paradigm
involving continuous dialogue among retailing multinationals, private and public
local actors, workers, and NGOs.66
Western firms whose brands were involved in recent labor accidents had to
reestablish their reputation, and they tried to do this in several ways. Partly it
was done through their engagement in CSR, which included signing long-term
agreements regarding labor conditions. Another way they restored brand image
was to develop sustainability programs. Production practices are evolving as
well. One point that needs nuanced treatment, and further examination, is the
tendency to associate fast fashion with geographically distant production. In the
1990s, Inditex Group—home to Zara and based in Galicia, a region of Spain—
was already having the most fashionable items in its catalog produced closer
to its headquarters, either in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, or Turkey. A shorter
distance cuts time and thus serves the fast-response model that has been at
the core of the firms’s strategy.67 The basic garments for these firms are made in
more distant locations, for example, in Asia, but this is far from the case for the
entire collections of the brand. Success resides in this diversification, allowing
retailers to sell attractive, fashionable items made closer to home for sensibly
higher prices, while continuing to have the cheap basics made overseas. The
question is whether the fast-response model will survive a closer examination
of the conditions of production. Recent studies show that if workers in low-
PRODUCTION AND MANUFACTURE 153

cost-production countries were paid a minimum wage, the effect on retail prices
would be barely visible. This improvement in labor conditions may cost less than
an extra dollar per item at retail.68
The sewing machine has remained at the core of fashion production and the
development of more sophisticated equipment has not always translated directly
into changes on the workshop floor. Innovative machines can be too expensive
if their potential acquisition is correlated with the price of the workforce, thereby
creating a disincentive for entrepreneurs to pursue technical innovation. Factory
owners can also be reluctant to invest in machines created to perform technical
operations that may become useless when new fashions appear in production.
For example, industrialists may not want to invest in machines for embroidery if
the fashion for embroidered garments is unstable, or if fashion cycles alternate
between ornate garments and plain, unadorned garments.
As far as sewing is concerned, the industry still requires human mediation,
because fabric is a soft material and therefore very difficult for a robot to
manipulate. Recent innovators have tried to bypass this difficulty by creating a
method for stiffening the fabric: specifically, the fabric is plunged into a bath of
polymers, chemicals that stiffen when dried. The stiff fabric can be handled by a
robot-operated sewing machine, and the finished garment is then plunged into
a new bath to rinse out the stiffening product, before being dried and ironed.69
The challenge at this stage is that the cost of the robots—and of 3-D textile or
knit printing machines, another possibility for robotized garment making—is still
not competitive in comparison to that of the workforce. Robotizing a part of
fashion production could be the industry’s most innovative breakthrough since
the invention and commercialization of the sewing machine in the nineteenth
century.70 It could also relieve some of the physical strain on garment workers,
but it may well result in large job losses.71 So far, the cost of such machines has
prevented change. Should it happen on a large scale in the future, though, the
question of a living wage for manufacturers, and of the responsibility of firms
toward their workers, will without doubt create new tensions of a different kind
in the fashion industry.

Conclusion
The fashion industry is currently experiencing considerable attention from activist
movements and NGOs, mainly centered on questions of production. The media
features an overwhelming number of voices. The prevalence of such voices, albeit
critical, may have prevented consumers from purely and simply boycotting fast
fashions—or from exiting, to use Hirschmann’s term. It is possible that a significant
number majority of consumers will voluntarily adopt restraint, choosing to refrain
from buying the cheapest fashions and thereby sacrificing the appearance of
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affluence. Despite an increase in discourses that condemn mass consumption,

many observers within and outside the industry still invoke arguments of freedom
of choice.72 In the past, consumer movements have been efficient laboratories
for the exercise of political rights, yet change often did not just originate from
the consumer; rather, it had to come from political decisions. It is likely that the
range of action of consumers will once again remain limited and that the notion
of consumer freedom may turn against them, as an argument for deregulation.
If altruistic arguments about the well-being of garment workers have little
effect on the consumer, it is reasonable to expect that the issue of ecological
sustainability will garner more attention. Consuming goods produced in better
conditions will affect not only the lives of workers, but also the quality of the
goods themselves, and thus help to diminish the levels of landfill and pollution.73
In recent decades, NGOs and labor unions have accomplished daunting tasks
at home and abroad. They have campaigned for consuming differently, and
they have also observed, reported, and negotiated labor conditions in the field.
Entangled social, economic, and ethical issues characterize manufacturing
production. As such, fashion production is likely to remain a burning question,
whether or not the industry takes a leap into new technologies.
 11
CURATION AND
EXHIBITION
Hazel Clark

Since the new millennium, an increasing number of informed fashion voices,

including journalists, academics and other pundits, at various times, have alluded
to the “end of fashion.” The beginning of the end, so to speak, might be charted
back to Wall Street Journal reporter Teri Agins’s book The End of Fashion (2000).
To be fair, the millennium was a somewhat inevitable historical watermark that
infiltrated public consciousness around the globe due to the greater presence of
the digital in everyday lives. Yet virtual communication also came into question—
we can recall “Y2K” or the “Millennium Bug”1 and the abounding anxieties that
computers would cease to function effectively at the stroke of midnight. As we
know, computers did not all shut down or scramble, but the example can serve
as a reminder of the psychological significance that was attached to the year
2000. Then, all too soon and too tragically, came September 11, 2001 and the
bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. The collapse of the twin towers
felt like a metaphorical crumbling of the twentieth century, the modern world,
and its institutions. The coincidence of the timing with New York Fashion Week
S/S 2002 served also to highlight fashion’s own sense of instability.
For Agins, the “end” came with the increasing market dominance by fashion
brands. In the 1990s, the logo signified not just distinction, but also increasing
competition between labels. It was no longer just a marker of the creative
differences between styles. Agins notes how the branding of fashion “has taken
on a critical role in an era when … just about every store in the mall is peddling the
same style of clothes.”2 The consumer no longer went shopping for a particular
style of garment, but rather for a “Calvin” or a “Ralph.” Choices reflected a desire to
project the brand image, be it “severe urban minimalism” (Calvin Klein) or “athletic,
American conservatism (Ralph Lauren).”3 The consumer, or more accurately
speaking mass-marketing to the consumer, rather than the design of clothing,
had become the seat of innovation as more and more brands competed for a
156 THE END OF FASHION

share in the business of fashion. According to Agins, “that’s why we’ve come to
the end of fashion. Today, a designer’s creativity expresses itself more than ever
in the marketing rather than in the actual clothes.”4 A sense of the designer being
disempowered was reiterated by fashion theorist Barbara Vinken, who uses the
term “postfashion” to describe the contemporary Fashion Zeitgeist where the
designer loses absolute power.5 She attributes the origins of postfashion to the
1970s, and the completion of a hundred years of Western fashion, stretching
from Worth to Saint Laurent, with its high point in the modern designs of Chanel
and Schiaparelli. After that period, fashion praxis “deconstructs modernity and,
in the end, leaves it behind.”6 In the process fashion design engaged with the old,
ugliness, sentimentality, kitsch, bad taste, and traces of the past through endless
historical citation and cultural plundering.
So while fashion did not actually end, many changes took place in the final
years of the twentieth century that reflected fashion’s greater heterogeneity and
ubiquity in commerce and culture, while exposing a dark side of the fashion
system. Yet as fashion scholar Christopher Breward notes, taken from an
historical perspective, “anxieties around the moral worth of fashion culture, or
the ethical implications of sweated labor and global trade are as old as the first
presentation of clothes designed for form as much as for function, for extrinsic
as much as for intrinsic value.”7 Breward stresses how “an informed and critical
apparatus for the study of historical and contemporary fashion is more important
now than ever.”8 He would no doubt have included some fashion journalists and
critics among those who were able to comment authoritatively and critically on
the times. In their number we can count Vanessa Friedman, fashion director and
chief fashion critic of the New York Times, whose neologism “fashionization”
captured the growing presence of fashion in everyday life, not just as clothes,
but also through a diverse range of methods of communication, including
the internet, television, film, social media, and exhibitions.9 Breward was also
reacting to a manifesto that had just been issued by fashion forecaster Lidewij
Edelkoort. In it, as he notes, Edelkoort critiques the prevailing model of fashion
education as perpetuating the myth of star designers, runway shows, and luxury
brands.10 Declaring “the end of Fashion as we know it,” she hurls brickbats also at
marketing, retailing, the press, and consumers, foreseeing an “exodus of fashion”
in favor of a “culture” and “celebration” of clothes. Edelkoort’s manifesto ends
with an “Afterthought” on the recent popularity of fashion exhibitions. She cites
the hugely popular Alexander McQueen exhibition, Savage Beauty, originating
at the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (May
4–August 11, 2011) as evidence of nostalgia “for the heydays of creation and
couture.” She observes, however, that brands increasingly host their own shows
to control their brand identity and product placement, with the artworld a willing
accomplice in the process. The outcome, Edelkoort concludes, is an iron grip
by brands, which means that museums are less able to show fashion, and must
CURATION AND EXHIBITION 157

turn more to displaying clothes. Her corollary is that “the end of fashion curating
is near.”11 While there is strong evidence to demonstrate that the currency and
future of the fashion exhibition are much less bleak than Edelkoort states, her
words nevertheless indicate how, as a form, the exhibition has come to reflect the
complex state and nature of fashion and thus demands scrutiny. It is the task of
this chapter to consider fashion curation and the fashion exhibition, in particular
since 2000, and to question its position and role at “the end of fashion.”

Expanding the field

To provide context we should begin with the late 1970s. It was then that art
theorist and critic Rosalind Krauss published her seminal essay “Sculpture in the
Expanded Field,” to locate and investigate new sculptural practices that began
in the late 1960s. Krauss cited work by artists such as Donald Judd, Mary Miss,
and Robert Smithson, as having contributed to extending the conventional
limits of the discipline into landscape and the jurisdiction of architecture, and to
expanding the cultural field of modernism to postmodernism. In the process the
very nature of what was sculpture became somewhat obscured:

We had thought to use a universal category to authenticate a group

of particulars, but the category has now been forced to cover such a
heterogeneity that it is, itself, in danger of collapsing. And so we stare at the
pit in the earth and think we both do and don’t know what sculpture is.12

Now, exactly forty years later, we might say likewise of “fashion” that “we both do
and don’t know what [it] is.” A hiatus appears to have been reached, an “end” of
sorts, when the term “fashion” no longer defines clearly, but needs definition due
to its expansion as praxis.13 The fashion exhibition has developed the potential
both to recognize fashion in an expanded field, as a cultural practice as well as
an industry, and to contribute to establishing a critical discourse around and
belonging to fashion. While this discourse is overdue, overdue, it is now drawing
the attention of fashion scholars, thinkers, and practitioners.
While working on her doctorate at the London College of Fashion, Jessica
Bugg developed the hypothesis “that there can be clearly articulated alternative
strategies for fashion design and communication that are concept and context
based, rather than being driven by commerce, market and trends.”14 Advocating
an interdisciplinary approach, she called into question the preeminence of industry-
driven definitions of fashion, in order to encompass “beyond the confines of the
catwalk, the traditional store space, and the printed page [into] ….fashion film,
animation, the music industry, art photography, fashion illustration and fashion
graphics, virtual space, performance, curated space, and the art gallery.”15 In
158 THE END OF FASHION

tandem, Bugg noted how fashion curation emerged as a named discipline,16

which could “be seen to reflect the shift towards contemporary fashion exhibition
as a distinctive form, as opposed to the established practices of historical
costume and fashion displays in museums.”17 This fashion “curatorial turn” was
evident by the millennium, and, in common with developments in the fine arts,
it had its origins in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Postmodern
discourse, with its privileging of a plurality of voices over the grand narrative, was
reflected in how and where fashion came to be exhibited.
The development of textile and clothing collections and their exhibition by
museums since the nineteenth century have been well-documented, and do
not need reiterating here.18 Scholars agree that it was not until the 1990s that
exhibitions of fashion, and in particular contemporary fashion, became accepted
and popular in museums and galleries internationally. Such exhibitions coincided
with and reflected new approaches to fashion history and the establishment
of fashion studies as an academic field that encompassed history, theory,
and criticism. In the early twenty-first century, the intellectual and cultural
context which succeeded postmodernism and is one premise for this book is
philosopher Slavoj Žiźek’s, Living in End Times.19 Fashion, serving as a reflection
of its own (modern) times, is inevitably implicated. As I have written elsewhere,
from the 1990s it was acknowledged that fashion, as a contemporary cultural
phenomenon, had “infiltrated everyday lives in an ongoing, sustained way over
time and across class, gender, ethnicity, and generation.”20 At the same time
fashion was “infiltrating” the museum to gain a status that was equivalent to that
of the fine arts. A pivotal exhibition, well-documented in other accounts, was
Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton, held in 1971 at the Victoria and Albert
Museum (V&A).21 By affording garments that had been worn by contemporary
celebrities the status typically given to art objects, this exhibition marked a
shift in the museum toward the display of fashion (rather than dress) that was
also prescient, gaining the accolade of being previewed in British Vogue.22 The
fashion exhibition had begun to emerge and would continue to develop apace.

Exhibition making
Christopher Breward has drawn attention to the central role played by academic
research in shaping curatorial approaches to fashion—and vice versa, and its
impact on the fashion exhibition.23 Breward identifies three specific research
constituencies. The first, and most familiar, were specialist dress scholars
(academics and curators). While this group would continue to use archival
sources, Breward highlights recent exhibitions that had used historical archives
to provide a more in-depth case study approach. He cites, for example,
Fashion and Fancy Dress—The Messel Family Dress Collection: 1865–2005,
CURATION AND EXHIBITION 159

curated by Eleanor Thompson, Amy de la Haye, and Lou Taylor at Brighton

Museum and Art Gallery in the UK (October 2005–June 2006), where family
archives facilitated deep empirical research. Breward’s second constituency was
contemporary fashion practice, which he credits with having “inspired the most
innovative and controversial shows of the past few years.”24 By mentioning Claire
Wilcox’s Radical Fashion at the V&A, London in 2003, and Fashion at Belsay
Hall in the northeast of England a year later, Breward also draws attention to
collaborative endeavors, specifically where curators worked actively with fashion
designers to create new installations, rather than simply displaying existing work.
A seminal example was Malign Muses, staged originally at the ModeMuseum
Antwerp (2004) and then as Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back at the V&A
(2005), by exhibition maker and curator Judith Clark, based on the writings of
fashion scholar Caroline Evans. It was a collaboration that resulted in work being
subjected to “an unprecedented layer of subjective interpretation and editing.”25
Elsewhere, Judith Clark notes the importance of the installation for a fashion
exhibition as well as the exhibition content.26 Collaboration is a strategy that
has also been reinforced by Breward’s third constituency—mainstream fashion
brands, which began to influence the content and delivery of fashion exhibitions,
rather than merely acting as sponsors. Resulting exhibitions make the case.
Breward mentions in particular Giorgio Armani held initially at the Guggenheim,
New York (October 20, 2000–January 17, 2001), and subsequently at the Royal
Academy, London and at the Guggenheim, Bilbao. Controversial for many
due to the confusion over fashion being exhibited simultaneously as art and
commerce, the venue and the installation by the avant-garde American theater
designer Robert Wilson made for a visually arresting show. This exhibition also
demonstrated Breward’s perspective that the fashion exhibition was occupying
more complex cultural terrain.
The three constituencies articulated by Breward provide a valuable framework
for considering fashion research and ideas made explicit in exhibition practices,
acknowledging that evidence from actual exhibitions indicate how these
categories were not discreet. Together they underpin the more recent fashion
exhibitions discussed in this chapter, which were held in different international
venues close to the time of writing—in 2017. Staged, broadly speaking, “within
a framework that encompasses performativity, temporality, spatiality, and
materiality,”27 they address and contribute to fashion as an expanded field of
practice and as a mode of inquiry.28 Acknowledging that the (fashion) exhibition
is a public forum that needs to be experienced to be appreciated fully,29 I will
now focus mainly on exhibitions which I visited, and with a final example that I
co-curated.
The first fashion exhibition I visited in 2017 was The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined
curated by Judith Clark in collaboration with psychoanalyst Adam Phillips at The
Barbican Centre, London (October 13, 2016–February 5, 2017). As in her earlier
160 THE END OF FASHION

work (including with Phillips), Clark raised complex issues, this time with an exhibition
whose use of familiar museum vitrines and plinths at first belied the complexity of
its thesis. Selecting garments from the last 500 years, the exhibition addressed
matters of taste in fashion—bad as well as good, and what determines which is
which. Some of the pieces shown could have been anticipated interpretations
of the theme—an eighteenth-century mantua dress with a skirt extending 2.5
meters, or Walter Van Beirendonck’s Spring/Summer 2014 “Elephant Dress”
with a dangling phallic trunk at the front (Plate 19) Others proved a surprise—
seventeenth-century white, lace collars presented in a stark black setting to
indicate the vulgarity of such purity. The exhibition set up challenges about the
vulgar, enhanced by the detailed museum texts that accompanied the pieces. Text
featured prominently in the installation, and paralleled Clark and Phillips’s previous
collaboration, The Concise Dictionary of Dress, held at Blythe House, the V&A’s
collection store in West London in 2010. A review of the latter also demonstrates
some of the distinctions and comparisons between the two exhibitions and their
venues.30 Each was “archival” in its sources, focusing attention on contemporary
fashion’s relationship to its own past, while posing questions, rather than providing
answers about fashion. As Marco Pecorari observes, the fashion archive is
“indeed a place where it is possible to rebuild the activity of objects and reactivate
and retrace the networks in which they participate.”31 Such reinterpretation in the
guise of the fashion exhibition has been evident in different approaches to the
display of garments from archives of major fashion designers, which not only bring
together historic items, contemporary fashion practices and the brand, but also
demonstrate how the exhibition can serve in an important reflexive role for fashion.
To explain this further, there follows discussion of two exhibitions held in 2017, in
different venues and cities, both devoted to the same subject—Balenciaga.

Balenciaga: A case in point

Admired as a master craftsman, the couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga could
be described as a designers’ designer, highly respected by his peers and his
successors. The esteem in which he is held has resulted in substantial scholarly
research32 and many exhibitions. The Museo Balenciaga, which opened in the
designer’s hometown of Getaria, Spain in 2012, is also devoted to his work. One
of the earliest major Balenciaga exhibitions was The World of Balenciaga, curated
by Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in
1973 (March 23–June 30). Opening a year to the day after the designer’s death,
the exhibition is also considered a landmark as having introduced “a brand new
approach to costume exhibitions. In a spectacular setting a fashion designer for
the first time was given the focus reserved in museums for great artists.”33 More
recently, Balenciaga Paris, held at the Musée des Art Décoratifs in Paris (July 6,
CURATION AND EXHIBITION 161

2006–January 28, 2007), was a collaboration between the museum’s chief curator
of fashion and textiles Pamela Golbin and Nicolas Ghesquière, then the creative
director of the fashion house (1997–2012). This exhibition featured archival pieces,
film footage illustrating Cristóbal Balenciaga at work, and garments designed for
the house by Ghesquière. N. J. Stevenson notes how the strong presence of the
work of the latter in the exhibition served to demonstrate a design continuity in the
house, while also highlighting “a current phenomenon” where some of the Paris
grand maisons had been relaunched under the leadership of younger designers.34
Balenciaga’s fashion legacy was celebrated again with two major exhibitions,
Balenciaga: Working in Black, at the Musée Bourdelle, Paris (March 8–July 16,
2017), and Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion, at the V&A, in London (May 26, 2017–
February 18, 2018). The timing of these two shows, ten years after the Arts
Décoratifs exhibition was not coincidental, but rather marked the centenary of
the opening of Balenciaga’s first fashion house in San Sebastian, Spain, and the
eightieth anniversary of his house in Paris. The exhibitions each used archival
material, but had different strategies toward presenting the designer’s work
as the “juxtaposition of the old and the new.” This strategy has become more
commonplace than the chronological and retrospective fashion exhibitions, but
as Stevenson cautions, it is also potentially difficult, not least because a fashion
exhibition can be subject to a plethora of different constraints and expectations,
including from its audiences, donors, sponsors, and contributors.35
The V&A described its venture as, “the first UK exhibition to explore the work
and legacy of the Spanish couturier … his protégés and contemporary designers
working in the same innovative way today.”36 It featured over 100 garments and
hats, largely from the 1950s and 1960s, which is considered the creative highpoint
of the couturier’s career. Supported by archival material, sketches, photographs,
video, and fabric samples, the show also included “forensic” examination of some
garments. A collaboration between X-ray artist Nick Veasey and pattern-cutting
students at the London College of Fashion resulted in digital representations
that revealed the detailed process and innovative structure characteristic
of Balenciaga’s designs. For the show, the V&A used its own collection of
Balenciaga pieces, the largest in the UK. These were originally acquired by Cecil
Beaton, a longstanding friend of Balenciaga, for Fashion: An Anthology (1971).
Its 2017 successor was staged on two levels, the ground floor featuring the work
of the couturier, and the upper floor designs and video interviews from a diverse
range of designers who had been influenced by Balenciaga, including Azzedine
Alaïa, Oscar de la Renta, Comme des Garçons, Simone Rocha, JW Anderson,
Céline, Iris Van Herpen, Erdem, Molly Goddard, and Rick Owens. Their inclusion
brought currency to the heritage of the couturier, while potentially extending the
audience of the exhibition to aficionados of contemporary fashion. Also included
was the work of two of the house’s recent creative directors, Nicolas Ghesquière
and Demna Gvasalia (2017–). A suit designed by Gvasalia was placed next
162 THE END OF FASHION

to a Balenciaga to construct a narrative of continuity, legacy, and relevance

of the fashion house (Figure 11.1). Yet the increasingly rapid pace of change
encountered by fashion brands and their employees can prove a challenge for
exhibition making. This was highlighted by Cassie Davies-Strodder, curator of
the V&A exhibition,

“When we started 18 months ago we didn’t know that the brand was going
to be more prevalent than ever, so it’s really fortuitous,” said Davies-Strodder,
referring to Gvasalia’s appointment and recent acclaimed collections adding,
“We kick ourselves that Gvasalia’s latest collection which is so literal is just too
late for us to include.”37

For the collection in question, the Fall-Winter 2017 women’s wear show
launched in Paris in early March 2016, Gvasalia plumbed the house archives
and produced “nine modern takes on iconic Balenciaga looks, including two
in black: a voluminous tulle gown pulled in as poufs at bust, waist, hip, and
knee by black ribbon, and a black velvet column tied off at the waist with an
enormous taffeta bow.” The homage was described as “a smart and timely
business move,” but one intended also to respect the legacy of his predecessor
Cristóbal Balenciaga.38

Figure 11.1 Suits by Cristóbal Balenciaga, 1951 and Demna Gvasalia, 2016, shown at
Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, May 24, 2017–
February 18, 2018. Photo by Nicky J. Sims/Getty Images
CURATION AND EXHIBITION 163

The “juxtaposition of the old and the new” referred to earlier also
characterizes a tendency in contemporary fashion, which is being overtly
promoted by luxury brands in particular. In a highly competitive market, where
some houses have been acquired by large luxury conglomerates, notably and
most significantly in terms of scale and impact, LVMH and the Kering group
(which owns Balenciaga), “heritage” has become a commercial strategy. As a
result, contemporary designers are charged with representing continuity and
change, referencing the archives of a house, when they exist, in order to do so.
This tendency to look back and forward is also reflected in fashion exhibitions,
particularly where they are funded by a brand or fashion group, but they can
confuse the visitor, especially those anticipating a historical show or a designer
retrospective. Stevenson notes how Chanel at the Costume Institute (April 5–
August 13, 2005) was criticized for appearing “heavy on branding,” and for
the amount of contemporary designs by the house’s premier, Karl Lagerfeld.39
While Lagerfeld has become renowned in the fashion system for “updating”
the house by not only paying homage to but also parodying some of Chanel’s
classics, such juxtaposition does not necessarily sit comfortably in the museum
exhibition, where certain expectations still prevail.
By comparison, Balenciaga: Working in Black, Musée Bourdelle, Paris
was entirely historical in its content, and juxtaposed “old and new” somewhat
differently, as a dialogue with its venue. The exhibition comprised seventy of
Balenciaga’s designs, all in black, sourced from the archives of the Palais Galliera
fashion museum. Among them were a famed cowl-back silk crepe cocktail
dress, from 1958, and the also renowned origami dress from 1967. Added to
the monotone garment selection, the staging of the exhibition was also striking.
Garments and (black) toiles were displayed amid the bronzes and marbles of
this museum devoted to the work of the early twentieth-century French sculptor
Antoine Bourdelle. Some pieces were positioned theatrically high, causing the
visitor to look up at them, as if on a stage. Others were shrouded in black
full-length cloth structures and could only be seen with the theatrical drawing
back of a (black) curtain to peer at the dresses inside. Bourdelle’s studio, which
remains in tact, included Balenciaga hats in glass cases, which were hidden
in plain sight among the artist’s sculptures and his working environment. As a
result, the design of the exhibition proved frustrating to some, as it took some
intention to look, as well as to see, on behalf of the viewer. Organized by the
innovative curator Olivier Saillard, it followed his previous exhibition at the same
venue in 2011, devoted to the work of Mme Grès, where dresses were similarly
displayed among the sculpture. This strategy encouraged direct comparisons
between the garments and the art works, and thus between haute couture and
fine art, while also enhancing the visitors’ experience of the materiality of the
fashion object.
164 THE END OF FASHION

Object lessons
As director of the Palais Galliera, Paris, Olivier Saillard was credited with having
put that collection “back on the map in 2010,” the year of his appointment.40
The Galliera was closed for renovation until 2013, when Saillard staged his
first exhibition, a retrospective of the work of fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa.
Subsequently he has reinvigorated the presentation of fashion history in the spirit
of the contemporary. His curatorial contributions have reinforced the status of
the object, as well as bringing attention to the performative and cooperative
nature of fashion. Most notable were his two collaborations with the actress Tilda
Swinton. The first The Impossible Wardrobe was staged at the Palais de Tokyo
in September 2012, as part of the Spring/Summer 2013 fashion presentations.
During three 40-minute performances, Swinton, wearing gloves and a white
muslin coat, the typical attire of models in couture salons, and latterly by the staff
of Martin Margiela, walked 57 different items along a short runway (Figure 11.2).
Included were pieces from the museum archive, dating from the late nineteenth
to the mid-twentieth century, designed by fashion luminaries including Christian
Dior, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Mariano Fortuny, and Yves Saint Laurent,
among many others. Even though she was not wearing the garments, Swinton
was performing the pieces enhanced by her gestures and facial expressions,
reinforcing fashion’s corporeal interdependency. Other presentations by the
curator and the actress did likewise. For Eternity Dress (2013), a garment was
tailor-made on the body of the actress before a live audience. The following year
Cloakroom Vestiaire Obligatoire had Swinton interacting with pieces of outerwear
borrowed from members of the audience, whose personae she referenced by
way of their garments.41
Through his curatorial projects Saillard has drawn upon historical archives
to reinforce the relationship of contemporary fashion to its past. In June 2017,
when it was announced that Saillard would be leaving his museum post in the
following January to take up a position in the fashion industry, perhaps it was
not surprising that he was joining a company with a long history. As the future
“artistic, image, and culture director” of the French luxury men’s shoe and leather
goods brand J.M. Weston, Saillard described himself as moving from “studying
the past to creating for the present.”42 The choice of company is revealing—
established in 1891, it still produces shoes by hand, giving the products a lineage
in common with the pieces in the Galliera collection. The move of a museum
curator, and one with a particularly high profile, into the business of fashion
draws attention to the closer correspondence between the professional fashion
worlds of the exhibition and the trade. Luxury fashion brands have created
exhibitions to promote their products, either in their stores43 or more ambitiously
in art museums, often in collaboration with artists. Louis Vuitton has collaborated
with Japanese artists Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama. Hermès, Chanel,
CURATION AND EXHIBITION 165

Figure 11.2 Tilda Swinton presenting a postilion jacket from 1860 in The Impossible
Wardrobe, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, September 29, 2012. Photo: PIERO BIASION/AFP/
Getty Images
166 THE END OF FASHION

and Dior have similarly included contemporary artists in exhibitions which have
been staged internationally in major art museums. Such “artification”44 has been
employed to reinforce the exclusivity and authenticity of luxury brands. In parallel
in the academy, conservator Sarah Scaturro points out how the “material turn”
enabled fashion curators to reaffirm their object-based scholarship, in symbiosis
with “disparate cultural approaches.”45 Furthermore, the ubiquity of the virtual in
everyday existence has arguably served to fetishize the expensive and exclusive
fashion object, as commodity and as cultural artifact. As luxury fashion brands
sponsor exhibitions to demonstrate their longevity and “authenticity,” their
heritage, associations with art, and their contemporary relevance, more (non-
fashion specific) museums have begun to embrace fashion and its objects.
At the time of writing, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) was about
to open the exhibition Items: Is Fashion Modern? (October 1, 2017–January 28,
2018). This will be only the second fashion exhibition to be staged in the museum’s
almost ninety-year history at its midtown Manhattan location (excluding its PS1
venue in Queens). Fashion is also absent from the museum’s permanent collection.
The exhibition concept is based on its predecessor; held at the MoMA, be Are
Clothes Modern? (November 28, 1944–March 4, 1945) was curated by architect
and designer Bernard Rudofsky. While the rationale for that show is not clear, it
was very unusual for the times; it has been credited as being “probably one of the
earliest and most perceptive exhibitions on fashion.”46 Rudofsky’s focus was on
the relationship between fashion design, clothing and the body, and the way that
bodies had been modified by garments, sometimes in what appeared an arbitrary
and irrational way. While not a fashion scholar, Rudofsky’s objective, to reflect
on fashion and its nature rather than just to show clothes, was ground breaking
for its time. As a result the exhibition has been highlighted “as a paradigmatically
relevant precursor for that typology of exhibitions that aim to question and re-
define the very notion of fashion,” and compared to Judith Clark’s Malign Muses/
Spectres exhibition, referred to earlier.47 The 2017 MoMA exhibition will follow the
museum’s object-focused trajectory in featuring “items” as a way of “exploring the
present, past—and sometimes the future”48 by means of 111 clothing typologies
that emerged over the last hundred years. The MoMA co-curators Paola Antonelli
and Michelle Millar Fisher have organized the exhibition into themes, including:
mutating ideas of body and silhouette; the relationship between emancipation,
modesty, introversion and rebellion; fashion and athleticism; everyday uniforms;
and fashion and power. Existing and historical pieces will be enhanced by
special commissions from designers, engineers, and manufacturers, who were
charged by the curators with responding to “indispensable items with pioneering
materials, approaches, and techniques.”49 In answer to the questions why now?,
why MoMA? a Press Release from the museum describes fashion as “a crucial
field of design—[that] touches everyone, everywhere.”50 According to Antonelli,
the exhibition aims to present fashion as
CURATION AND EXHIBITION 167

A powerful form of creative and personal expression that can be approached

from multiple angles of study, fashion is unquestionably also a form of design,
with its pitch struck in negotiations between form and function, means and
goals, automated technologies and craftsmanship, standardization and
customization, universality and self-expression.51

In expressing fashion’s relationship to creativity, personal identity and above

all to design, Antonelli highlights aspects of fashion which often become lost
in its more ubiquitous commercial arena, as well as in museum exhibitions.
Recognition of fashion as a creative and personal expression also references
fashion’s everydayness, which is its extent beyond the realm of the art object. So
while the MoMA is working within its established professional parameters of the
curation of art and design objects, it is also contributing to expanding fashion’s
field. The status and popularity of the MoMA helps to reinforce fashion’s social,
cultural, and creative roles, and, moreover, its potential for critical self-reflection
in the twenty-first century. The MoMA exhibition also follows after an increasing
number of recent exhibitions that have taken a more critical position on fashion
and highlight some of the issues associated with the “end of fashion.” In the
latter category are exhibitions that, in common with some of the MoMA items,
are collaborations with designers and artists that have resulted in the production
of new work, including site-specific installations. Two of these exhibitions are the
subject of the next and final section of this chapter.

After Fashion
Dysfashional, curated by Luca Marchetti and Emanuele Quinz, in Luxembourg,
Lausanne, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow (2007–2010), has been described as having
less to do with clothing than with the sensibilities associated with what we wear,
“gestures, noises, odors and self-image.”52 Featuring the work of high-profile
designers such as Raf Simons, Hussein Chalayan, and Maison Martin Margiela, the
show took the form of installations that focused on fashion as a means of creative
exploration. Its curators described Dysfashional as, “a site where the exhibition
space becomes an experimental space, an exploration ground for both the artists
and visitors.” They did not exhibit clothes. The installation by Maison Martin Margiela
for example, comprised tapestry, photographs, and trompe-l’oeil (Figure 11.3).
The exhibition also included a “para-site” that is a temporary “guerilla store” where
paintings, drawings, jewelry, and 3-D models inspired by fashion and produced by
fifteen young creators were available for sale on-site and online during the show.
The nature of the activities in the exhibition, rather than the actual physical space/s
in which it was held, led to it being described as “a hybrid space, halfway between
a boutique and an art gallery.”53 Its form and content reflected the curators’ concept
168 THE END OF FASHION

Figure 11.3 Dysfashional, cur. Luca Marchetti and Emanuele Quinz (edition 2007, La
Rotonde 1, Luxembourg and Great Region—European Capital of Culture, April 21–
May 27, 2007); Untitled, installation by Maison Martin Margiela, mixed media, original
commission and production. Photo: André Morin.
CURATION AND EXHIBITION 169

“that fashion is, beyond the objects that materialize it, an unstable state of sensibility.”54
That sense of instability reiterates how fashion in the end times is an expanded field
of practices that, through exhibitions, are becoming more self-reflexive.
It was the recognition of fashion’s capacity to reflect critically that preempted
the exhibition that I co-curated, with Ilari Laamanen at the Museum of Arts and
Design, New York (April 26–August 6, 2017).55 Titled fashion after Fashion, the
exhibition responded to critical authorities, including those cited at the beginning of
this chapter, and the work of many fashion designers, suggesting that fashion had
entered a new phase. fashion after Fashion took up this call, offering a contemporary
understanding of fashion that drew upon a range of design and artistic practices
and ideologies. The exhibition included new site-sensitive installations by six
designer teams who were thinking about fashion, as well as working in different
aspects of the fashion industry, producing garments and images. We used fashion
(in the lowercase) to signal a more reflective, concerned, attentive, and creative
process that is not determined solely by commerce, the market, and passing
trends, in comparison to Fashion (in the uppercase). By calling into question the
state and nature of Fashion, the exhibition sought to challenge some of its main
constructs, including the myth of the individual designer as author, short-lived and
commodity-driven products, gendered dressing, ideal bodies, and waste. The
work demonstrated the need to redefine the term fashion to signal the way in
which its practices have become more complex, diverse, critically informed, and
socially relevant. Perhaps contrary to expectations for a fashion exhibition, fashion
after Fashion did not feature well-known designer brands and names, or display
garments on mannequins (an approach it shared with Dysfashional). Rather, it
addressed fashion within the expanded field of practice that is determined by
concept and context, and whose practitioners work collaboratively across areas
of design and art, incorporating performances, photographs, video, and sculpture.
For fashion after Fashion, we chose to include the Danish artist and designer
Henrik Vibskov, because of the breadth of his experience working as a fashion
designer and also in producing performances and installations internationally
in a variety of venues, including public spaces. His original gallery installation
Harmonic Mouth had been staged as a performance piece, in a forest outside of
Copenhagen, which was shown as a video in the exhibition. It combined many
references, to the small and intimate spaces of fashion rather than to its public
places, to the visceral qualities of bodies and their relationship to clothes, as well
as to fashion’s relationship to the passage of time (Plate 20). The piece spoke to
and about fashion, and like fashion it both confused and delighted, depending
on the perspective and experience of the viewer. Next to it was an installation
and video by Lucy Jones, a young, New York-based designer whose work aims
to be inclusive of physical difference and disabilities. Her installation, comprising
twenty-two fabric “elbows,” was a visually poetic response to the complexity of
the relationship between bodies and garments, enhanced by her process-based
170 THE END OF FASHION

video (Figure 11.4). The Finnish artist duo ensaemble also addressed relationships
between body and clothes by referencing the inside of garments. New York fashion
designers Eckhaus Latta worked with video artist Alexa Karolinski to produce a
video that emphasized how the intimacies of our human identities and emotions
are related to how we look and what we wear. Toumas Laitinen and Chris Vidal
Tenomaa based a piece on their magazine SSAW, which highlighted Fashion’s
obsession with images. Japanese designer Ryohei Kawanishi challenged the way
that Fashion’s value system can be so dependent on brands and designer labels.
This piece also brings us back to where this chapter began, and the dominance
of the brand—one of the trigger points of Terri Agins’s end of fashion, and one of
Christopher Breward’s three fashion research constituencies.
Breward’s references to the fashion exhibition’s relationship to archival
sources, contemporary fashion practice and business, and their cumulative
intertwining remain a fitting overview of recent exhibition practices, and also of
fashion itself. As the examples given earlier demonstrate, the fashion exhibition
is now more varied in both its concept and its practice than ever before. It can
and should be acknowledged as an expanded field of practice that contributes
to the establishment of critical discourse for fashion. Timing is important. This
discourse is not only much needed, but long overdue. While the “end times”
are not to be taken literally, for fashion they can be seen as signaling a period
of hiatus, of taking stock, when complexities need to be addressed. Now, the
fashion exhibition is an essential praxis for these times.

Figure 11.4 “Inclusive fashion,” by Lucy Jones. Installation view from fashion after
Fashion, 2017, The Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Photo by Jenna Bascom.
Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design
 NOTES

Introduction
1 Slavoj Žiźek, Living in the End Times (London and New York: Verso, 2011), 480.
2 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 15.

Chapter 1
1 Oscar Wilde, quoted in Radu Stern, Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 9.
2 Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion (London: Pluto
Press, 2014), 160, 185–202.
3 Barbara Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System, trans.
Mark Hewson (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 63.
4 Teri Agins, The End of Fashion: The Mass Marketing of the Clothing Business (New
York: William and Morrow, 1999), 280, 11.
5 Interview with Teri Agins, March 8, 2017.
6 Marcus Fairs, Interview with Li Edelkoort. Dezeen, March 1, 2015, last accessed
January 30, 2017, https://www.dezeen.com/2015/03/01/li-edelkoort-end-of-
fashion-as-we-know-it-design-indaba-2015/.
Marcus Fairs, “Li Edelkoort Publishes Manifesto Explaining Why Fashion Is
Obsolete,” Dezeen, March 2, 2015, last accessed January 30, 2017, https://www.
dezeen.com/2015/03/02/li-edelkoort-manifesto-anti-fashion-obsolete/.
7 George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain (London: Allen Lane The
Penguin Press, 1970), 150.
8 Quant, quoted in Valerie Steele, Women of Fashion (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 134.
9 See Christine Jacqueline Feldman, We Are the Mods: A Transnational History of a
Youth Subculture (New York: Peter Lang, 2009).
10 Ibid., 209–210.
11 Ibid., 212.
12 Suzy Menkes, “The New Speed of Fashion,” T Magazine, August 23, 2013, last
accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/t-magazine/the-
new-speed-of-fashion.html.
172 NOTES

13 Cathy Horyn, “Why Raf Simons Is Leaving Christian Dior,” The Cut, October 22,
2015, last accessed January 30, 2017, http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/10/raf-
simons-leaving-christian-dior.html.
14 Karl Lagerfeld quoted in “WWD Overheated!” WWD, October 28, 2015, 50–59.
15 Ibid.
16 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and
Invention (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), 1, 31, 28.
17 Ibid., 8–9.
18 Iris Van Herpen quoted in Bradley Quinn, Fashion Futures (London: Merrell, 2012), 50.
19 Iris Van Herpen quoted in Iris Van Herpen: Transforming Fashion (Groninger Museum
and High Museum of Art, 2015), n.p.
20 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: I.B. Tauris,
1985), 244.
21 Ibid., 232.
22 “fashion after Fashion,” Mad Museum, April 27, 2017, accessed June 1, 2017,
http://madmuseum.org/exhibition/fashion-after-fashion.
23 Johan Deurell and Hanne Eide, eds., Utopian Bodies—Fashion Looks Forward
(Stockholm: Liljevalchs, 2015), 11.

Chapter 2
1 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Werke 14 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp 1986), 402.
2 In a later essay, “Marx and Sons” based on a series of responses to Specters of
Marx, Derrida states: “A shift from Marx to Marxism, then: why? Who is Marxism?
Ahmad? All those he comes forward to represent? But already in this book alone,
there is no possibility of agreement or homogeneity among all the ‘Marxists,’ all
those who call themselves or are called ‘Marxists.’ Even if it were possible to
identify all of them as ‘Marxists,’ it would still be impossible to identify them all with
one another. There is nothing wrong with this, in my view, but it should make the
identifying label ‘Marxist’ more uncertain than ever (I discuss this more than once in
Specters of Marx).” “Marx and Sons,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on
Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London and New York:
Verso, 1999 [2008]), 225.
3 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning
and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge,
1994), 51–52.
4 Ibid., 52.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 93–94.
7 Ibid., 54.
8 Ibid., 99.
NOTES 173

9 Ibid.
10 Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University
Press, 2009), 249–250.
11 Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 24.
12 Ibid., 24–25.
13 Walter Benjamin, Convolute B. 2,4. in The Arcades Project, third edition, trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000., B, 2,4.
14 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (Montreal: New World Perspectives,
Culture Text Series, 1991), 134.
15 Jean Baudrillard, “Fashion or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code,” in Fashion Theory.
A Reader, ed. Malcolm Barnard (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 463.
16 Ibid.
17 See also Geczy and Karaminas, “Rei Kawakubo’s Deconstructivist Silhouette,” in
Critical Fashion Practice (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 29–43.
18 Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and
Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981 [1990]), 34.
19 Yuniya Kawamura, The Revolution in Paris Fashion (Oxford and New York: Berg,
2004), 138.
20 Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain. Cowboys and Horses and Long, Lonely Nights
in the Wilderness,” The New Yorker, October 13, 1997, accessed September 2,
2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/10/13/brokeback-mountain.
21 Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 15.
22 Juliette Ash, “Memory and Objects,” in The Gendered Object, ed. P. Kirkham
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 20–21.
23 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams. Fashion and Modernity (London: I.B. Tauris,
2007), 1.
24 Theodore W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shiery
Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 175.
25 Ibid., 177.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid, 2.
28 “Marc Jacobs says Fashion is not Art,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2007,
accessed September 23, 2012, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/alltherage/2007/11/
marc-jacobs-say.html.
29 Baudrillard, “Fashion or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code,” 466.
30 Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritis 25, no. 2
(Summer 1995): 9.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
174 NOTES

Chapter 3
1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), 880.
2 Ibid., 423.
3 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 27.
4 Ibid., 31.
5 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936)
and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
6 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (1983) (London and New York: Verso, 1991).
7 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 31.
8 Ibid., 32.
9 See Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes. The Decline of Individualism in Mass
Society (London-Thousand Oaks-Delhi: Sage, 1996), and Marcel Danesi, La
comunicazione al tempo di Internet (Bari: Progedit, 2013).
10 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 33.
11 Ibid.
12 See Karaminas, “Image: Fashionscapes,” 177–187.
13 Patrizia Calefato, Mass moda. Linguaggio e immaginario del corpo rivestito (Genova:
Costa & Nolan, 1996) (2nd edition, Roma: Meltemi, 2007)
14 Organized and convened by Vicki Karaminas and Hilary Radner, at the College of
Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand, December 8–9, 2016.
15 Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006), 41.
16 Ibid.
17 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 71.
18 Ibid., 75.
19 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books,
1968), 261.
20 Antonella Giannone, “La costruzione del senso filmico nell’abbigliamento e nel
costume,” in Moda e cinema, ed. Patrizia Calefato (Genova: Costa & Nolan, 1999),
32.
21 “Dabbawala,” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, last modified May 29, 2017, https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala#Origins.
22 Daniel Klein and Mirra Fine, “Dabbawalla” Vimeo video, 3:51, posted by “The
Perinnial Plate,” February 28, 2013, https://vimeo.com/60748502.
23 Rey Chow, “The Writing Voice in Cinema: A Preliminary Discussion,” in Locating the
Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Perspectives, eds. Tom Whittaker and
Sarah Wright (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017)
24 Patrizia Calefato, La moda oltre la moda (Milano: Lupetti, 2011), 138.
NOTES 175

25 Roberta Filipinni, “Armani privé riscrive eleganza della geisha,” ANSA, July 6,
2011, www.ansa.it/web/notizie/photostory/spettacolo/2011/07/06/visualizza_new.
html_789622551.html
26 “Geisha o Dea,” La Repubblica, last modified July 6, 2011, http://ricerca.repubblica.
it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2011/07/06/geisha-dea.html.
27 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 12–13.
28 Rey Chow, Ethics after Idealism. Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading (Bloomington-
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 74–97.

Chapter 4
1 Marcia A. Morgado, “Fashion Phenomena and the Post-postmodern Condition:
Enquiry and Speculation,” Fashion, Style, & Popular Culture 1, no. 3 (2014):
313–339; Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London:
Sage Publications, 2007).
2 Jean-Franҫois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Bryan Massumi (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991), 81.
3 Jacques Derrida, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New
York: Columbia UP, 1991).
4 Jack Reynolds and Jonathan Roffe, Understanding Derrida (New York: Continuum,
2004), 46.
5 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 121.
6 Alison Gill, “Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and
Re-assembled Clothes,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress Body & Culture
2, no. 1 (1998): 25–49; Francesca Granata, “Deconstruction Fashion: Carnival
and the grotesque,” Journal of Design History 26, no. 2 (2012): 182–198; Agata
Zborowska, “Deconstruction in Contemporary Fashion Design: Analysis and
critique,” International Journal of Fashion Studies 2, no. 2 (2015): 185–201. Geczy
and Karaminas, Critical Fashion Practice: From Westwood to van Beirendonck (New
York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
7 Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University
Press, 2003), 249–253.
8 Sally Singer et al., “Ciao, Milano! Vogue.com’s Editors Discuss the Week That Was,”
Vogue.com, September 25, 2016, accessed June 7, 2017, http://www.vogue.com/
article/milan-fashion-week-spring-2017-vogue-editors-chat.
9 Carly Stern, “A VERY stylish showdown!” The Daily Mail UK, September 27, 2016,
accessed June 7, 2017, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3809981/A-
stylish-showdown-Vogue-editors-aim-pathetic-bloggers-sit-row-Fashion-Week-
scathing-article-branding-online-stars-desperate-embarrassing.html.
10 Susie Bubble, September 26, 2016 (12:59 a.m.), Twitter post by @
susiebubble, accessed June 7, 2017, https://twitter.com/susiebubble/
status/780315796107034624.
176 NOTES

11 As defined in the field of marketing, the influencer is the individual whose effect on
the purchase decision is in some way significant or authoritative.
12 Franz Fidler, Portretnaia fotografiia (Moscow: Vsesoiuznoe kooperativnoe
izdatel’stvo, 1960), 13.
13 Joseph Daniel Lasica, “Photographs That Lie: The Ethical Dilemma of Digital
Retouching,” in State of the Ar: Issues in Contemporary Mass Communication, eds.
David Shimkin, Harold Stolerman, and Helene O’Connor (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1992), 189–194.
14 Ibid., 190.
15 Ibid., 193.
16 Ingrid Hoelzl and Marie Remi, Soft Image: Towards a New Theory of Digital Image
(Chicago: Intellect, 2015).
17 See, for instance, last accessed June 7, 2017, http://fotoforensics.com.
18 Olga Vainshtein, “Digital Beauties: Strategies of Self-Presentation and Resistance,”
in Beauty: Exploring Critical Perspectives, eds. Pierre Wilhelm and Rebecca Nash
(Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2016), 81–93, Electronic book.
19 Stuart Ewen, “All-Consuming Images: Style in the New ‘Information Age’,” in State
of the Art: Issues in Contemporary Mass Communication, eds. David Shimkin,
Harold Stolerman, and Helene O’Connor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992),
196.
20 Ibid., 196.
21 Ibid., 197.
22 Liz Willis-Tropea, “Glamour Photography and the Institutionalization of Celebrity,”
Photography & Culture 4, no. 3 (2011): 261–276.
23 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), 78.
24 Gail K. Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early
Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 25.
25 Ibid., 25.
26 Ibid., 23–64.
27 Vainshtein, “Digital Beauties,” 81–93.
28 “Photoshop of Horrors,” Jezebel, powered by Gizmodo Media Group, 2017,
accessed June 7, 2017, http://jezebel.com/tag/photoshop-of-horrors.
29 “What’s the Secret of My Beauty? Adobe Photoshop Day Cream – 25 after before
Photos,” Webneel, accessed June 7, 2017, http://webneel.com/webneel/blog/
whats-secret-my-beauty-photoshop-after.
30 Jessica Coen, “Here Are the Unretouched Images from Lena Dunham’s Vogue
Shoot,” Jezebel, January 17, 2014, accessed June 7, 2017, http://jezebel.com/
here-are-the-unretouched-images-from-lena-dunhams-vogu-1503336657.
31 Maryann McCabe, Timothy De Waal Malefyt, and Antonella Fabri, “Women,
Makeup, and Authenticity: Negotiating Embodiment and Discourses of Beauty,”
Journal of Consumer Culture, article first published online: October 16, 2017,
accessed December 9, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540517736558.
NOTES 177

32 Jamila Rizvi, “Will You Help Turn These Numbers Around?” Mamamia, August 18,
2013, accessed June 7, 2017, http://www.mamamia.com.au/fernwood-body-
image-survey/.
33 Ibid.
34 Michael Zhang, “Kate Winslet’s Modeling Contract with L’Oréal Has a ‘No
Photoshop’ Clause,” PetaPixel, October 24, 2016, accessed June 7, 2017, https://
petapixel.com/2015/10/24/kate-winslets-modeling-contract-with-loreal-has-a-no-
photoshop-clause/.
35 Stassa Edwards, “New Photographs Show That Zendaya Was Heavily
Photoshopped for Magazine Shoot,” Jezebel, March 11, 2015, accessed June
7, 2017, http://jezebel.com/new-photographs-show-that-zendaya-was-heavily-
photoshop-1740424576.
36 Truth in Advertising Act of 192014–H.R.4341, 113th Congress (2013–2014),
Library of Congress, accessed June 7, 2017, https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-
congress/house-bill/4341.
37 Rachel Lubitz, “France passes law requiring companies to admit when models have
been photoshopped,” Mic Network Inc., 2017, accessed June 7, 2017, https://
mic.com/articles/130789/france-passes-law-requiring-companies-to-admit-when-
models-have-been-photoshopped#.llGs9KeX3.
38 Kim Willsher and agencies, “Models in France must provide doctor’s note to Work,”
The Guardian AUS, December 18, 2015, accessed June 7, 2017. https://www.
theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/18/models-doctors-note-prove-not-too-thin-
france.
39 “Raw Beauty Talks: Help Us Create Positive Change for Young Women by Reducing
Photoshop in Magazines,” Change.org Inc., last modified 2017, accessed June 7,
2017, https://www.change.org/p/reduce-photoshop-in-magazines-to-create-a-
better-world-for-girls.
40 Julia Blum, “Seventeen Magazine: Give Girls Images of Real Girls!” Change.org Inc.,
last modified 2017, accessed June 7, 2017, https://www.change.org/p/seventeen-
magazine-give-girls-images-of-real-girls
41 Lauren Collins, “Pixel Perfect. Pascal Dangin’s Virtual Reality,” The New
Yorker, May 5, 2008, accessed June 7, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/
magazine/2008/05/12/pixel-perfect.
42 Seth Matlins, “Ask Dove to Help Protect Our Children from Photoshopped Ads and
Beauty,” Change.org Inc, last modified 2017, accessed June 8, 2017, https://www.
change.org/p/dove-make-real-beauty-more-real-and-sign-the-truth-in-advertising-
heroes-pledge.
43 Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Modernism/Postmodernism, ed.
Peter Brooker (London: Longman, 1992), 152–153.
44 Ibid., 156, my emphasis.
45 Luciana Ugrina, “Celebrity Biometrics: Norms, New Materialism, and the Agentic
Body in Cosmetic Surgery Photography,” Fashion Theory 18, no. 1 (2014): 35.
46 Renee Zellweger, “We Can Do Better,” Huffington Post, The blog, August 8, 2016,
last June 8, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-zellweger/we-can-do-
better_b_11355000.html.
178 NOTES

47 Ugrina, “Celebrity Biometrics,” 36.

48 Bor Stenvik, Vse my vrem. Kak lozh’, zhul’nichestvo i samoobman delaiut nas liud’mi
(Moscow: Alpina Publisher, 2016), 370.
49 Kathryn Yusoff and Claire Waterton, “Indeterminate Bodies,” Body and Society 3,
no. 23 (2017): 3–22.
50 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana,1968), 214–218.
51 Elizabeth Wilson, “Fashion and Postmodern Body,” in Chic Thrills: A Fashion
Reader, eds. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1992), 3–17.
52 In 2013, David Bowie released his song “The Stars Are Out Tonight,” which plays
on the theme of androgyny. In the video Bowie appeared with Tilda Swinton,
Andreja Pejić and Saskia de Brauw. See “David Bowie: The Stars (Are Out Tonight),”
YouTube Video, posted by DavidBowieVEVO, February 25, 2013, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=gH7dMBcg-gE.
53 Alice Gregory, “Has the Fashion Industry Reached a Transgender Turning Point?”
Vogue, April 21, 2015, accessed June 8, 2017, http://www.vogue.com/article/
andreja-pejic-transgender-model.
54 Sadie Whitelocks, “Blonde bombshell who cut off hair to work as male model
reveals how she and her husband now get mistaken for a ‘gay couple,’” The Daily
Mail, October 30, 2013, accessed June 8, 2017, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/
article-2480168/Elliott-Sailors-female-works-male-model-gets-mistaken-husband-
gay-couple.html.
55 Visual Kei is a movement in Japanese rock music. These musicians often aim at
over-the-top theatricality and an androgynous appearance, with a preference for
flamboyant outfits, exuberant hairstyles, and bold makeup.
56 The word “illusion” is etymologically derived from the Latin illusio, meaning deception
or delusion, but the root ultimately relates to the verb ludere, to play. Many great minds
have engaged in this play of illusions. For example, the “rabbit or duck” optical illusion
was analyzed in detail by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations.
57 Myles Udland, “The internet is losing its composure over this dress that might be
white and gold or black and blue,” Business Insider, February 26, 2015, accessed
June 8, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/white-and-gold-black-and-blue-
dress-2015-2.
58 Ian Sample, “#TheDress: Have researchers solved the mystery of its colour?” The
Guardian, May 14, 2015, last modified February 22, 2017, accessed June 8, 2017,
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/thedress-have-researchers-
solved-the-mystery-of-its-colour.
59 Amanda Kooser, “Viral optical illusion asks if these legs are oiled or painted,” CNET
Magazine, October 26, 2016, accessed June 8, 2017, https://www.cnet.com/news/
viral-optical-illusion-legs-oily-paint-the-dress/.
60 Hunter, September 15, 2016, Instagram, posted by @Leonardhoespams, accessed
June 8, 2017, https://www.instagram.com/p/BKZAe_zgQYl/.
61 Jacques Derrida, A Derrida Reader, 184.
62 Brenda DeMartini-Squires, “Now You See It: Disinformation and Disorientation on
the Internet,” in A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18th to the
NOTES 179

21st Century, eds. Jane Kromm and Susan Benforado Bakewell (Oxford and New
York: Berg, 2010), 341.
63 For example, in the world of selfies in 2015, the previously fashionable “duck face,”
with the lips sucked in to resemble a duckbill, was replaced by the “fish gape” (a
half-smile with the teeth slightly exposed).
64 Olga Vainshtein, “Everybody Lies: Fotoshop, moda i telo,” Teoria Modi 43 (2017):
201–235.
65 Josh Toth, The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010).

Chapter 5
1 Chis Rojek, Fame Attack: The Inflation of Celebrity and Its Consequences (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 185.
2 See Pamela Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture (London: Berg, 2012)
and Pamela Church Gibson, “Pornostyle: Sexualised Dress and the Fracturing of
Feminism,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, and Culture 18, no. 2
(2014): 186–206.
3 See, for example, Christine Gledhill, ed., Stardom: Industry of Desire (London:
Psychology Press, 1991).
4 See Nicky Ryan, “Patronage,” in Fashion and Art, eds. Adam Geczy and Vicki
Karaminas (London and New York: Berg, 2012), 155–169, and Mona Schieren
and Andrea Sich eds., Look at Me: Celebrity Culture at the Venice Art Biennale
(Nuremberg: Verlag fűr Moderne Kǖnst, 2011).
5 See Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986).
6 See Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2011). The entire first section of this
book is essential for a full understanding of his categorization of celebrities.
7 See, for example, Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage, 2004);
David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and Ellis Cashmore, Celebrity Culture (London:
Routledge, 2006).
8 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” New Left
Review 1, no. 64 (November–December 1970): 13–36.
9 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, eds.
Michael Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935/2008).
10 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York:
NYU Press, 2006).
11 Enzensberger, “Theory of the Media,” 25.
12 Lefebvre quoted in ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 14.
180 NOTES

15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 16.
17 Louise Crewe, The Geographies of Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 37–65,
see also Hoskins, Stitched Up.
18 Among the few fashion theorists who have discussed production are Joanne
Entwistle, The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion: Markets and Value in Clothing and
Modelling (Oxford: Berg, 2009) and Tim Edwards, Fashion in Focus: Concepts and
Practices (London: Routledge, 2011). For a clear account of the relevant issue,
see the essay by Adam Briggs, “Capitalism’s Favourite Child,” in Fashion Cultures
Revisited: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, eds. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela
Church Gibson (London: Routledge, 2013).
19 The “trickle-down” theory of fashion was originally proposed by Thorstein Veblen,
whose influential work The Theory of the Leisure Class was first published in 1899
and which has been reprinted constantly. It is also linked to an influential essay
“Fashion” by Georg Simmel, republished long after Simmel’s death, in The American
Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (May 1957): 541–558. In fact, Simmel himself was
drawing heavily on earlier work by continental theorists working in other disciplines,
including the sociologist Emil Durkheim.
20 The term “bubble-up” was arguably first used by anthropologist Ted Polhemus,
whose book was first published by Thames and Hudson to coincide with the
1994 exhibition, Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk at the V & A Museum in
London.
21 See, for what seems to be the first published use of the term, Terry Agins, The End
of Fashion (London: HarperCollins, 1999).
22 Lidewij Edelkoort, an influential fashion forecaster, released her tract Anti-Fashion:
A Manifesto for the Next Decade in July 2015; it was published by her Paris-based
forecasting agency, Trend Union.
23 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams (London: Virago, 1984), 3.
24 See Church Gibson, “Pornostyle.”
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Alexandra Sastre, “Hottentot in the Age of Reality TV: Sexuality, Race and Kim
Kardashian’s Visible Body,” Celebrity Studies 5, no. 1–2 (August 2013): 123–137.
28 See Rojek, Celebrity.
29 Vanity Fair (US) for July 2015 featured Jenner’s “reveal” as Caitlyn, both on the cover
and in an extended feature written by Buzz Bissinger.
30 See article by Elle Hunt, “Essena O’Neill Quits Instagram,” The Guardian, November
3, 2015.
31 Ibid.
32 See article by Amy De Klerk, “Kardashians to Blame,” Harpers’ Bazaar (UK), March
31, 2017, May 26, 2017, http://www.harpersbazaar.co.uk/beauty/news/a40729/
kardashians-to-blame-for-the-number-of-millennial-women-getting-cosmetic-
procedures/
33 See article by Harpers’ Bazaar online, item by Sarah Kamali, March 17, 2017.
NOTES 181

34 The Fast and the Furious is an action film franchise, one of the most successful
ever to be created for the cinema. Dwayne Johnson has been part of the cast since
2011.
35 Kamali, Harpers’ Bazaar, 2017.
36 The Pepsi-Cola advertisement, withdrawn after twenty-four hours, was quite rightly
criticized for trivializing protest movements such as Black Lives Matter and the
Women’s Marches against Trump through its use of particular images. The furore
only increased when Pepsi-Cola apologized to Kendall Jenner for having “involved
her.”
37 See interview with Riccardo Tisci by Merle Ginsberg for Prêt–a–Reporter, The
Hollywood Reporter, March 18, 2015, June 26, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.
com/news/givenchys-riccardo-tisci-why-he-782524.
38 Jess Cartner-Morley, “Oliver Rousteing on Rihanna, Kim Kardashian and the
Balmain Army,” The Guardian, September 15, 2016.
39 The best account of the relationship between fashion theory and more traditional
academic disciplines is that provided by Valerie Steele in “The F Word,” an essay in
Lingua Franca, April, 1991, 17–20.
40 Rojek, Fame Attack, 185.
41 Marshall, Celebrity and Power.
42 Schieren and Sich, Look at Me.
43 See, among others, Nick Johnstone, “Dare to Bare,” a profile on Beecroft in The
Observer, March 13, 2005.
44 The documentary film, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, was directed by
Pietra Bretkelly and received its first screening at the Sundance Film Festival in
2008.
45 The book of photographs, Selfish, is written by Kim Kardashian West, and published
by Rizzoli (New York) in May, 2015.
46 W Magazine, The Art Issue, November, 2010.
47 Paper magazine, Winter 2014: Cover and Feature, “Break the Internet.”
48 See, for example, Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (London: Granta,
2008).
49 The film is Once Upon a Time, directed for Chanel by Karl Lagerfeld in 2013.
50 US Vogue, April 2014, cover photograph by Annie Liebowitz of West and
Kardashian.
51 Kathleen Baird-Murray, “Whatever Happened to the Cleavage?” Vogue, UK,
December, 2016.
52 Leandra Medine, “Confession: I Don’t Get Vêtements,” writing for her blog Man
Repeller, March 30, 2016, http://www.manrepeller.com/2016/03/confession-i-dont-
get-vêtements.html.
53 Ibid., January 27, 2017.
54 Jess Cartner-Morley, “What I Wore This Week,” The Guardian, March 24, 2017.
55 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body
(Oakland: University of California Press, 1993).
182 NOTES

56 Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison System (London:
Penguin Books, 1977/1991).
57 Ibid.
58 De Klerk, “Kardashians to Blame.”
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Naomi Wolf, “Emily Ratajowski’s Naked Ambition,” Harper’s Bazaar, July 7, 2016.
63 Dorian Lynskey, “Blurred Lines: The Most Controversial Song of the Decade,” The
Guardian, November 14, 2013.
64 Ibid.
65 Aaron Milchan et al., Gone Girl. Film. Directed by David Fincher (US: 20th Century
Fox, 2014).
66 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
67 See, for example, “Growing Number of Girls Suffer Low Self-esteem, Says Report”
by James Meikle, The Guardian, November 29, 2013 and also, NYC Girls Project,
online 2017.
68 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press,
2004).
69 See Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class.
70 The work of the Frankfurt School has been extraordinarily influential within the
contemporary discipline of Cultural Studies. Originally dating back to Germany in the
1930s, the best-known members are arguably Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer,
and Herbert Marcuse.
71 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1981/1994).
72 Enzensberger, “Theory of the Media.”
73 See, for example, Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
(London: Penguin, 2015): Wolfgang Stree, How Will Capitalism End?: Essay on a
Failing System (London: Verso, 2016) and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future
(Oakland and Baltimore: AK Press, 2011).
74 Berardi, After the Future.
75 Ibid., 137.
76 Ibid., 136.
77 Ibid.

Chapter 6
1 Some of the material included in the chapter appeared in a different form in the
following publications: Hilary Radner, “An Elegy for Cinema,” in Raymond Bellour:
NOTES 183

Cinema and the Moving Image, eds. Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 70–87; Hilary Radner, “Transnational Celebrity
and the Fashion Icon: The Case of Tilda Swinton, ‘Visual Performance Artist
at Large’,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 23, no. 4 (2016): 401–414;
Hilary Radner, “The Ghost of Cultures Past: Fashion, Hollywood and the End of
Everything,” Film, Fashion and Consumption 3, no. 2 (2014): 83–91.
2 Unless otherwise specified, the term “fashion” refers specifically to dress, including
shoes, hats, jewelry, and other forms of personal adornment, rather than to the
general phenomenon whereby contemporary life is understood as governed by
various practices that change with varying degrees of rapidity over time in response
to social and economic pressures.
3 Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades,
1860–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
4 Pamela Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture (London: Berg, 2012), 53–66;
Melvin Stokes, “Female Audiences of the 1920s and Early 1930s,” in Identifying
Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and Movies, eds. Melvin Stokes and
Richard Maltby (London: BFI, 1999), 42–60.
5 Ted Polhemus, Street Style: From Sidewalk to Catwalk (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1994).
6 Hilary Radner, “Migration and Immigration: French Fashion and American Film,”
in France/Hollywood: Échanges cinématographiques et identités nationales, eds.
Martin Barnier and Raphaëlle Moine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 210–211.
7 Raymond Bellour, “Le spectateur du cinéma,” Trafic 79 (2011): 32–44; Giuliana
Bruno, “Cultural Cartography, Materiality and the Fashioning of Emotion,” in Visual
Cultural Studies, ed. Marquard Smith (Los Angeles and London: Sage, 2008),
144–166; Francesco Casetti, “Sutured Reality: Film, from Photographic to Digital,”
October 138 (2011): 95–106; Jon Lewis, ed., The End of Cinema as We Know It
(New York: New York University Press, 2001); Tom O’Regan, “The End of Cinema?
The Return of Cinema?” Metro Magazine: Media and Education Magazine 124, no.
125 (2001): 64–72, 74–76.
8 Teri Agins, The End of Fashion: How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business
Forever (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), Kindle Edition; Barbara Vinken, Fashion
Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System (Oxford: Berg, 2005).
9 Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist, 3.
10 Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and
Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
11 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 7.
12 Bruno, “Cultural Cartography,” 147.
13 See Raymond Bellour, “Querelle,” in La querelle des dispositifs, ed. Raymond
Bellour (Paris: P.O.L, 2011), 13–47; see also Francesco Casetti, The Lumière
Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2015).
14 Campbell Walker, personal communication, November 7, 2014. See also James
Quandt, “Everyone I Know Is Staying Home: The New Cinephilia,” Framework:
184 NOTES

The Journal of Cinema and Media 50 (2009): 206–209; Girish Shambu, The New
Cinephilia (Montreal: Caboose, 2014).
15 Polhemus, Street Style, 12.
16 Judith Yeh, personal communication, October 29, 2014. In the last few years,
this line has arguably gained much higher visibility through media forms such as
Instagram and Pinterest.
17 Elizabeth Cline, The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion (New York and London:
Penguin, 2013), Kindle Edition.
18 Agnès Rocamora, “New Fashion Times: Fashion and Digital Media,” in The
Handbook of Fashion Studies, eds. Sandy Black, Amy De La Haye, Joanne
Entwistle, Agnès Rocamora, Regina Root, and Helen Thomas (London: Bloomsbury
Press, 2013), 61–76.
19 Cline, The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion.
20 See, for example, Agins, The End of Fashion, location 188 of 6227.
21 Roger Odin, “The Amateur in Cinema, in France, since 1990: Definitions, Issues and
Trends,” in A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, eds. Alistair Fox, Michel
Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner (Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons,
2015), 590–611.
22 Bellour, “Le spectateur de cinéma.”
23 Tom Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, eds. Jim
Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8–36.
24 Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture, 11.
25 Agnès Rocamora, “How New Are the New Media? The Case of Fashion Blogs,”
in Fashion Media: Past and Present, eds. Djurdja Bartlett, Shaun Cole, and
Agnès Rocamora (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 155–164; Felicity
Colman, “Rhizome,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 232–235; Giles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980); Hilary Radner, “‘This Time’s
for Me’: Making Up and Feminine Practice,” Cultural Studies 3, no. 3: 301–322.
doi:10.1080/09502388900490211.
26 Valerie Mendes, and Amy De La Haye, 20th Century Fashion (London and New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 194.
27 Susan Irvine, “The Mysterious Cristóbal Balenciaga,” fashion.telegraph.co.uk,
September 3, 2013, accessed May 10, 2017, http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-
features/TMG10275681/The-mysterious-Cristobal-Balenciaga.html.
28 Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture; Teri Agins, Hijacking the Runway:
How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight from Fashion Designers (New York:
Gotham Books, 2014), Kindle Edition.
29 Ginette Vincendeau, “Hot Couture: Brigitte Bardot’s Fashion Revolution,” in
Fashioning Film Stars, ed. Rebecca Mosely (London: BFI, 2005), 137; Church
Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture, 55.
30 Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture; Agins, Hijacking the Runway.
31 Agins, Hijacking the Runway, location 223 of 5463.
32 Ibid.
NOTES 185

33 Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson, “Introduction,” in Fashion Cultures

Revisited, eds. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (London and New York:
Routledge, 2013), 5.
34 “Rick Owens,” en.vogue.fr, updated November 24, 2015, accessed May 10, 2017,
http://en.vogue.fr/vogue-list/thevoguelist/rick-owens/1088.
35 Rick Owens, cited in Holly Shackleton, “step inside rick owens’ world,” i-D, April
2008, posted November 10, 2014, accessed March 21, 2018, https://i-d.vice.com/
en_au/article/8xna55/step-inside-rick-owens39-world-aunz-translation.
36 Ruth La Ferla, “Imitate That Zipper,” New York Times, September 2, 2009,
accessed May 10, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/fashion/03OWENS.
html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
37 Alexander Fury, “The Lighter Side of Rick Owens,” March 2, 2017, T: The New York
Times Style Magazine, nytimes.com, accessed May 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.
com/2017/03/02/t-magazine/rick-owens-fashion-designer.html?_r=0.
38 Bonnie English, A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th and 21st Centuries: From
Catwalk to the Sidewalk (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013),
Kindle Edition, location 420 of 6620.
39 Ibid., location 268 of 6620.
40 Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist, 35.
41 Ibid., 63.
42 Agins, The End of Fashion, location 170 of 6227.
43 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, Fashion’s Double: Representations of Fashion in
Painting, Photography and Film (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 123.
44 Vicki Karaminas, “Image: Fashionscapes––Notes Toward an Understanding of
Media Technologies and Their Impact on Contemporary Fashion Imagery,” in
Fashion and Art, eds. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (London and New York:
Berg, 2012),” Kindle Edition, location 4169 of 5039.
45 Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture, 55.
46 Peter Wollen, “The Concept of Fashion in the Arcades Project,” boundary 2 30, no.
1 (2003): 142.
47 Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1916).
48 For a discussion of the reception of popular culture, see Patrick Brantlinger, Bread
and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1983).
49 Sneja Gunew, “Personal Costs: What Counts as Political?” public lecture, University
of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, September 28, 2015.
50 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting/Penguin Books, 1972),
47.
51 John Carl Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930),
208. For an example of current usage, see Joanna Bourke, “The Great Male
Renunciation: Men’s Dress Reform in Inter-War Britain,” Journal of Design History 9,
no. 1 (1996): 23–33.
186 NOTES

52 Hilary Radner and Natalie Smith, “Fashion, Feminism and Neo-Feminism: From
Coco Chanel to Jennifer Lopez,” in Fashion Cultures (2nd Edition), eds. Stella Bruzzi
and Pamela Church Gibson (London: Routledge, 2013) 275–286.
53 Vanessa Grigoriadis, “Death of One’s Own,” New York Magazine, December 8,
2003, accessed May 12, 2017, http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_9589/.
54 John T. Molloy, Dress for Success (New York: P. H. Wyden, 1975); John T. Molloy,
The Women’s Dress for Success Book (Chicago: Follet, 1977).
55 Dan Schawbel, “Donna Karan: How She Turned Her Passion into a Career,” forbes.
com, October 13, 2015, accessed May 12, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/
danschawbel/2015/10/13/donna-karan-how-she-turned-her-passion-into-a-
career/#8747c50733aa.
56 “Donna Karan,” “Forbes Profile,” forbes.com, updated January 6, 2016, accessed
May 12, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/profile/donna-karan/.
57 Eric Wilson, “Now You Know: The Evolution of Donna Karan’s Seven Easy Pieces,”
instyle.com, July 2015, accessed May 12, 2017, http://www.instyle.com/news/
history-donna-karan-seven-easy-pieces.
58 For a discussion of “marketplace feminism,” see Hilary Radner, “Coda: Feminism
Redux,” in Hilary Radner, The New Woman’s Film: Femme-Centric Movies for Smart
Chicks (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 190–194; see also Andi Zeilser,
We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a
Political Movement (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016).
59 Vanessa Friedman and Jacob Bernstein, “Donna Karan Steps Down, in Major Shift
for Fashion,” New York Times, June 30, 2015, accessed May 12, 2017, https://
www.nytimes.com/2015/06/30/fashion/donna-karan-steps-down.html?_r=0.
60 Lynn Yaeger, “On the Eve of the Comme des Garçons Retrospective, the Notoriously
Reclusive Rei Kawakubo Speaks Out,” vogue.com, April 14, 2017, accessed May
13, 2017, http://www.vogue.com/article/rei-kawakubo-interview-comme-des-
garcons-2017-met-museum-costume-exhibit/.
61 Selwa Roosevelt, “The Later the Better,” Washington Post, March 30, 1997,
accessed May 12, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/
books/1997/03/30/the-later-the-better/953af5b3-8ed6-4be0-9416-4b00718eba5e/.
62 Ibid.
63 Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Norton, 1993
[1964]).
64 Grigoriadis, “A Death of One’s Own.”
65 Yaeger, “On the Eve of the Comme des Garçons Retrospective.”
66 Judith Thurman, “The Misfit,” New Yorker, July 4, 2005, accessed May 13, 2017,
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/07/04/the-misfit-3.
67 Thurman, “The Misfit.”
68 “Fresh Heir: Interview with Ann Demeulemeester’s New Creative Director Sebastien
Meunier,” D’Vine, posted May 5, 2014, accessed May 13, 2017, http://www.the-
dvine.com/2014/05/fresh-heir-interview-with-ann-demeulemeesters-new-creative-
director-sebastien-meunier/.
69 Ruth La Ferla, “In Fashion, Gender Lines Are Blurring,” New York Times, August
19, 2015, accessed May 13, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/20/fashion/
in-fashion-gender-lines-are-blurring.html?_r=0.
NOTES 187

70 For a description of Conglomerate Hollywood, see Tom Schatz, “The Studio System
and Conglomerate Hollywood,” in The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, eds.
Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008),
13–42.
71 Jonathan Romney, “Jim Jarmusch: How the Film World’s Maverick Stayed True
to His Roots,” Observer, February 22, 2014, accessed May 8, 2017, www.
theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/22/jim-jarmusch-only-lovers-left-alive.
72 Eric Hynes, “Tilda Swinton Lives by Night,” rollingstone.com, April 1, 2014,
accessed May 13, 2017, http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/tilda-swinton-
lives-by-night-20140401.
73 Melena Rysik, “This Time, Jim Jarmusch Is Kissing Vampires,” New York Times, April
3, 2014, accessed May 8, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/movies/this-time-
jim-jarmusch-is-kissing-vampires.html.
74 The film is reported to have had a budget of $7 million and a worldwide gross of
$2,588,571 million. See IMDb and the-numbers.com, accessed May 8, 2017,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1714915/business?ref_=tt_dt_bus and http://www.the-
numbers.com/movie/Only-Lovers-Left-Alive#tab=box-office.
75 Ryzik, “This Time.”
76 Michael Newman, “Introduction,” Indie: An American Film Culture (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011), Kindle Edition.
77 Todd Gilchrist, “Only Lovers Left Alive’s Tilda Swinton talks Playing a Vampire,
Working with Tom Hiddleston,” dailydead.com, posted November 4, 2011,
accessed May 8, 2017, https://dailydead.com/lovers-left-alives-tilda-swinton-talks-
playing-vampire-working-tom-hiddleston/.
78 Patricia Garcia, “Dress the Part: Only Lovers Left Alive,” vogue.com, April 10, 2014,
accessed May 8, 2017, http://www.vogue.com/article/dress-the-part-only-lovers-
left-alive-fashion.
79 For a discussion of Tilda Swinton’s profile as a star, see Jackie Stacey, “Crossing
Over with Tilda Swinton–the Mistress of ‘Flat Affect,’” International Journal
of Politics, Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2015): 243–271; see also Radner,
“Transnational Celebrity and the Fashion Icon: The Case of Tilda Swinton.”
80 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, “Lady Gaga, American Horror Story, Fashion,
Monstrosity and the Grotesque,” Fashion Theory 21, no. 6 (2017): 715. See also
Sue-Ellen Case, “Tracking the Vampire,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies 3, no. 2 (1991): 1–20.
81 Bellour “Querelle”; Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy.
82 Karaminas, “Image–Fashionscapes,” location 4229 of 5039.
83 Ibid., location 4169 of 5039.

Chapter 7
1 Andreas Hepp, “The Communicative Figurations of Mediatized Worlds,”
Communicative Figurations 1 (2013): 3.
188 NOTES

2 Gianpietro Mazzoleni, “Changes in Contemporary Communication Ecosystems Ask

for a ‘New Look’ at the Concept of Mediatization,” Javnost—The Public 2 (2017): 1.
3 The literature on mediatization has rapidly grown over the last seven or so years and
cannot all be listed here. However, for some comprehensive discussions of the term,
see, for instance, David Deacon, and James Stanyer, “Mediatization: Key Concept
or Conceptual Bandwagon?” in Media, Culture & Society (2014): 1–13; David
Deacon and James Stanyer, “‘Mediatization and’ or ‘Mediatization of’? A Response
to Hepp et al.,” Media, Culture & Society 37, no. 4 (2015): 655–657; Knut Lundby,
“Mediatization of Communication,” in Mediatization of Communication, ed. Knut
Lundby (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 3–35; Knut Lundby, ed., Mediatization: Concept,
Changes, Consequences (New York: Peter Lang, 2009); Friedrich Krotz, “Explaining
the Mediatisation Approach,” Javnost—The Public 2, no. 24 (2017); Stig Hjarvard,
The Mediatization of Culture and Society (Oxon: Routledge, 2013); Nick Couldry,
“Mediatization or Mediation? Alternative Understandings of the Emergent Space
of Digital Storytelling,” New Media & Society 10, no. 3 (2008): 373–391; Andreas
Hepp, Cultures of Mediatization (Cambridge: Polity, 2013b [2011]); Mazzoleni,
“Changes,” 136–145.
4 See, for instance, Mikkel Eskjaer, “The Mediatization of Ethical Consumption,”
MedieKultur 54 (2013): 26–46.
5 Eric W. Rothenbuhler, “Continuities: Communicative Form and Institutionalization,”
in Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, ed. Knut Lundby (New York:
Peter Lang, 2009), 279.
6 Hepp, Cultures; Lundby, “Mediatization,” 3–35.
7 Agnès Rocamora, “Mediatization and Digitization in the Field of Fashion,” Fashion
Theory (2016), online first, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/136270
4X.2016.1173349.
8 Risto Kurnilius and Esa Reunanen, “Changing Power of Journalism: The Two
Phases of Mediatization,” Communication Theory 26 (2016): 369–388; Agnès
Rocamora, “The Labour of Fashion Blogging,” in Fashioning Professionals,
eds. Leah Armstrong and Felice McDowell (Bloomsbury, 2018); Mazzoleni,
“Changes.”
9 Kurnilius and Reunanen, “Changing Power,” 372.
10 David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT
Press, 1999). See Agnès Rocamora, “Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors
in Digital Self-Portraits,” Fashion Theory 4, no. 15 (2011): 407–424.
11 Neil Wrigley and Michelle Lowe, Reading Retail: A Geographical Perspective on
Retailing and Consumption Spaces (London: Arnold, 2002), 238, citing Christopherson.
12 Kenneth C. Laudon and Carol Guercio Traver, E-commerce 2016: Business.
Technology. Society (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2017), 731.
13 Wrigley and Lower, Reading Retail, 239, citing Reynolds.
14 “Ecommerce in the United Kingdom,” Ecommerce News, last modified February
2017, accessed May 10, 2017, https://ecommercenews.eu/ecommerce-per-
country/ecommerce-the-united-kingdom/.
15 “E-commerce in the United Kingdom: Facts & Figures 2016,” Twenga, 2016,
accessed 4 August 2016, https://www.twenga-solutions.com/en/insights/
ecommerce-united-kingdom-facts-figures-2016/.
NOTES 189

16 “Retail Sales in Great Britain, Apr 2017,” Office for National Statistics, 2017,
accessed May 9, 2017, https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/
retailindustry/bulletins/retailsales/apr2017.
17 Laudon and Traver, E-commerce 2016, 93.
18 Ibid., 59.
19 Ibid., 60.
20 See also Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Kindle Edition.
21 See Rocamora, “New Fashion Times.”
22 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 64.
23 Patel, cited in Lisa Lockwood and Sharo Edelson, “Instant Fashion: Salvation of
Gimmick,” WWD, Instant Fashion Special Report (2016), np.
24 Laudon and Traver, E-commerce 2016, 734
25 Vikram A. Kansara, “Is the New Style.com Working?” BOF, 2016, accessed January
4, 2017, https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/digital-scorecard/is-conde-
nast-style-com-working.
26 Rocamora, “New Fashion Times.”
27 Friedberg, Window Shopping.
28 Ibid., 106.
29 Simon, cited in Frank Rose, “The Attention Economy 3.0,” The Milken Institute
Review: A Journal of Economic Policy. Milken Institute, 2015, accessed July 9,
2016, http://www.milkenreview.org/articles/the-attention-economy-3-0; see also
Elizabeth A. Wissinger, This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of
Glamour (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 17.
30 See also Rocamora, “New Fashion Times,” 70.
31 Alessandra Codinha, “Meet the New Site That Wants to Take the Legwork Out of
Instagram-Stalking for You,” 2015, accessed May 12, 2016, http://www.vogue.com/
article/semaine-online-magazine-concept-store-launches.
32 Harding, cited in ibid.
33 “Style.com Discontinues, Redirects to Farfetch.com,” accessed July 10, 2017,
http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/stylecom-discontinued-conde-nast-partnership-
consolidates-farfetch.
34 David Altheide and Robert P. Snow, Media Logic (London: Sage, 1979).
35 Ibid., 240.
36 Ibid., 9–10.
37 See also David L. Altheide, “Media Logic and Political Communication,” Political
Communication 3, no. 21 (2004): 293–296; Mazzoleni, “Changes.”
38 Ibid., 4.
39 See Mark Moss, Shopping as an Entertainment Experience (Lanham: Lexington
Books, 2007).
40 Christoph Grunenberg, “Wonderland: Spectacles of Display from the Bon
Marché to Prada,” in Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, eds.
190 NOTES

Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein (Ostfuldern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers,

2002), 18.
41 Ibid., 20.
42 See, for example, Lundby, Mediatization; Hjarvard, Mediatization.
43 See, for example, Deacon and Stanyer, Mediatization; Hepp, Cultures; Krotz,
“Explaining”; Mats Ekström et al., “Three Tasks for Mediatization Research:
Contribution to an Open Agenda,” Media, Culture & Society (2016): 1–19; Graham
Murdock, “Mediatisation and the Transformation of Capitalism: The Elephant in the
Room,” Javnost-The Public, 2017, doi:10.1080/13183222.2017.1290745.
44 Jukka Kortti, “Media History and the Mediatization of Everyday Life,” Media History
1, no. 23 (2017): 115–129.
45 Agnès Rocamora, Fashioning the City (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 27; on fashion
dolls, see Juliette Peers, The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie (Oxford:
Berg, 2004).
46 Ekstrom et al., “Three Tasks.”
47 Ibid., 9.
48 For early instances of the fashion pages of Sears, see Robin Cherry, Catalog:
The Illustrated History of Mail-Order Shopping (New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 2008); for histories of fashion plates and of early fashion journals see John L.
Nevinson, “Origin and Early History of the Fashion Plate” (1967); Valerie Steele, Paris
Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 1998).
49 See Rosetta Brooks, “Sighs and Whispers in Bloomingdales: A Review of a
Bloomingdale Mail-Order Catalogue for Their Lingerie Department,” in Zoot Suits
and Second-Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music, ed. Angela
McRobbie (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989 [1982]).
50 Cherry, Catalog, 29.
51 Ulrike Klinger and Jakob Swvenson, “The Emergence of Network Media Logic in
Political Communication: A Theoretical Approach,” New Media & Society 17, no. 8
(2015): 1241–1257.
52 Morten Michelson and Mads Krog, “Music, Radio and Mediatization,” Media Culture
& Society 4, no. 39 (2016): 5, drawing on Deacon and Stanyer.
53 Michelson and Krog, “Music, Radio,” 5–6.
54 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation.
55 Ibid., 45.
56 Ibid., 50, 200.
57 Ibid., 200.
58 Agnès Rocamora, “Hypertextuality and Remediation in the Fashion Media: The Case
of Fashion Blogs, ” Journalism Practice (2012): 92–106.
59 Knut Lundby, “Introduction: ‘Mediatization’ as key,” in Mediatization: Concept,
Changes, Consequences, ed. Knut Lundby (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 13
(drawing on Bolter and Grusin).
60 Altheide and Snow, Media Logic, 242.
61 B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy (Boston, MA:
Harvard Business School Publishing, 2011).
NOTES 191

62 See also Niels Ole Finnemann, ‘Mediatization Theory and Digital Media’,
Communications 36 (2011): 67–89
63 See also Couldry, “Mediatization”; Andreas Hepp, “Differentiation: Mediatization
and Cultural Change,” in Mediatization of Communication, ed. Knut Lundby (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2009), 139–157; Klinger and Swvenson, “Emergence”; Lundby,
“Mediatization.”
64 Mazzoleni, “Changes”; Klinger and Svenson, “Emergence.”
65 José Van Dijk and Thomas Poell, “Understanding Social Media Logic,” Media and
Communication 1, no. 1 (2013): 2–14.
66 Klinger and Svenson, “Emergence.”
67 Mazzoleni, “Changes,” drawing on Klinger and Svenson.
68 Rocamora, “New Fashion Times.”
69 Couldry, “Mediatization.” See also Hepp, “Differentiation”; Stig Hjarvard, “The
Mediatization of Society: A Theory of the Media as Agents of Social and Cultural
Change,” Nordicom Review 29, no. 2 (2008): 105–134; Andre Jansson, “Using
Bourdieu in Critical Mediatization Research,” MedieKultur 58 (2015): 13–29.
70 See Sara Butler, “Marks & Spencer Takes Control of Its Online Store from
Amazon,” The Guardian, 2014, accessed February 19, 2014, http://www.
theguardian.com/business/2014/feb/18/marks-spencer-control-online-shopping-
website-amazon.
71 Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser, “Shaping Politics: Mediatization and Media
Interventionism,” in Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, ed.
Knut Lundby (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 213; but see also Nino Landerer,
“Rethinking the Logics: A Conceptual Framework for the Mediatization of Politics,”
Communication Theory 23 (2013): 239–258.
72 See, for instance, Eskjaer, “The Mediatization of Ethical Consumption,” 29; Andre
Jansson, “The Mediatization of Consumption: Towards an Analytical Framework of
Image Culture,” Journal of Consumer Culture 2, no. 5 (2002): 5–31; Anne Kaun and
Karin Fast, Mediatization of Culture and Everyday Life. Mediestudier vid Södertörns
högskola:1 (Karlstad University Studies, 2014).
73 See also Ekstrom et al., “Three Tasks,” 10; Lundby, “Mediatization,” 8; Kortti, “Media
History,” 115.
74 Krotz, “Explaining”; Murdock, “Mediatisation.”
75 Murdock, “Mediatisation,” 3.
76 Ibid., 4.
77 Christian Fuchs, Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies
(London: Routledge, 2011); James Curran, Natalie Fenton, and Des Freedman,
Misunderstanding the Internet (London: Routledge, 2016).
78 See, for instance, Theresa Cramer, Inside Content Marketing (Chicago: Information
Today, 2016); Patrick De Pelsmecker, “Introduction,” in Advertising in New Formats
and Media, ed. Patrick De Pelsmecker (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2016).
79 De Pelsmecker, “Introduction.”
80 See also Jonathan Hardy, “Sponsored Content Is Compromising Media Integrity,”
April 12, 2017, https://www.opendemocracy.net/jonathan-hardy/sponsored-
content-is-blurring-line-between-advertising-and-editorial.
192 NOTES

81 Daniel Bô and Matthieu Guével, Brand Content: Comment les Marques de

Transforment on Médias (Paris: Dunod, 2009).
82 Cramer, Inside Content, 6.
83 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity, 1993).
84 Celia Lury, Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).
85 Jansson, “Mediatization,” 6.
86 Ibid., 7.
87 Accessed July 17, 2017, http://www.cdmdiary.com/en/about-cdm/.
88 On transssubstantiation, see Pierre Bourdieu and Yvette Delsaut, ‘Le Couturier
et sa Griffe. Contribution à une Théorie de la Magie’, Actes de la Recherche en
Sciences Sociales 1 (1975): 7–36.
89 See Jenkins, Convergence Culture.
90 See, for instance, Bô and Guével, Brand Content, 138.
91 Butler, “Marks & Spencer Takes Control of Its Online Store from Amazon.”
92 Ibid.
93 See Aske Kammer, “The Mediatization of Journalism,” MedieKultur 54 (2013): 141–148.
94 See also De Pelsmecker, “Introduction.”
95 Lundby, “Mediatization,” 32.
96 Ibid.
97 Hardy, “Sponsored Content Is Compromising Media Integrity.”
98 Ibid.
99 See Rocamora, “The Labour of Fashion Blogging.”
100 Ibid.
101 Rocamora, “Personal Fashion Blogs”; Rocamora, “Mediatization and Digitization.”
102 Ibid.
103 See Rocamora, “Mediatization and Digitization.”
104 See George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997); Rocamora, “Personal Fashion Blogs.”

Chapter 8
1 Sandy Black, “Fashion Is Often Very Old-Fashioned,” in The Sustainable Fashion
Handbook, ed. Sandy Black (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 116.
2 Stella McCartney in conversation with Lucy Siegle, London College of Fashion,
November 14, 2016.
3 Robert Cordero, “Lidewij Edelkoort: Fashion Is Old Fashioned,” at the VOICES
London conference. Business of Fashion, December 5, 2016, accessed May 17,
2017, https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/voices/li-edelkoort-anti-fashion-
manifesto-fashion-is-old-fashioned.
NOTES 193

4 Designer Prabal Gurung speaking at Copenhagen Fashion Summit, Denmark May

11, 2017, focused on accelerating action toward sustainability in fashion.
5 Sandy Black, Eco Chic: The Fashion Paradox (London: Black Dog Publishing,
2008); Kate Fletcher, Sustainable Fashion and Textiles. Design Journeys (London:
Earthscan, 2008).
6 29 percent of total spending online is on clothing and footwear, up from 13 percent
in 2011, http://www.britishfashioncouncil.org.uk/pressreleases/The-British-Fashion-
Industry–London-Fashion-Week-Facts–Figures February 2016.
7 Global Fashion Agenda and Boston Consulting Group, May 2017, The Pulse
of the Fashion Industry report p. 10, 2017, accessed May 15, 2017, www.
copenhagenfashionsummit.com/pulsereport.
8 Worth £28 billion (including retail) according to figures released by the British Fashion
Council and Oxford Economics in February 2017, up from £21bn in 2009, and
£26billion in 2013. http://www.britishfashioncouncil.org.uk/pressreleases/London-
Fashion-Week-February-2017-Facts-and-Figures.
9 “Clothing Retailing—UK,” Mintel, October 2016 report, accessed May 30, 2017.
http://store.mintel.com/clothing-retailing-uk-october-2016.
10 DCMS, Creative Industries Mapping Document (London: UK Government
Department of Culture, Media and Sport, 1998); Centre for Fashion Enterprise,
The UK Designer Fashion Economy: Value Relationships–Identifying Barriers and
Creating Opportunities for Business Growth. Report commissioned by NESTA
(London: CFE, 2008); British Fashion Council (BFC) and Oxford Economics, The
Value of the UK Fashion Industry: Economic Considerations for Growth (London:
BFC, 2010).
11 M. Christopher, R. Lowson, and Helen Peck, “Creating Agile Supply Chains in the
Fashion Industry,” International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management 32,
no. 8 (2004); Wendy Malem, “Fashion Designers as Business: London,” Journal of
Fashion Marketing and Management 12, no. 3 (2008).
12 Angela McRobbie, British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? (London:
Routledge, 1998), 69.
13 £12.4 billion spent on fashion online in the UK in 2015, up 16 percent from £10.7
billion in 2014 (Mintel 2015); cited by BFC Press Release February 10, 2017.
14 McKinsey and Business of Fashion report, The State of Fashion (London, 2017), 10.
15 Luciano Batista, “New Business Models Enabled by Digital Technologies: A
Perspective from the Fashion Sector,” New Economic Models in the Digital
Economy, February 2013, accessed April 30, 2017, http://www.nemode.ac.uk/
wp-content/uploads/2013/03/BATISTA-case-study-in-the-fashion-sector-FINAL-
Report.pdf; Sandy Black, ed., Sustainable Fashion Handbook (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2012).
16 See, for example, Estonian-founded fit preference specialists, Fits.me. http://fits.me.
17 Brooke Roberts-Islam, “Martine Jarlgaard’s Mixed Reality Show at London Fashion
Week—A World First,” Huffington Post, September 16, 2016, accessed May 30,
2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/brooke-robertsislam/martine-jarlgaards-
mixed-_b_11919578.html.
194 NOTES

18 Lord Young, Growing Your Business. A report to HM Government (London: HMSO,

2013).
19 CFE, UK Designer Fashion.
20 DCMS, Creative Industries, 1998 and 2001
21 Malcolm Newbery, Conclusions and Recommendations of a Study of the UK
Designer Fashion Sector (London: UK Government Department of Trade and
Industry, 2003), 5.
22 Batista, Business Models.
23 Sandy Black et al., “Considerate Design for Personalized Fashion,” in Designing for
the 21st Century: Interdisciplinary Methods & Findings, ed. Tom Inns (Aldershot:
Gower, 2009). The Considerate Design project was jointly funded by two UK
research councils, Engineering and Physical Sciences, and Arts and Humanities:
Designing for the 21st century initiative, 2007–2009, led by Sandy Black. http://
www.consideratedesign.com/.
24 Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, Creative Economy
Knowledge Exchange scheme, 2013–2014, led by Sandy Black.
25 Michelle Lowe-Holder, report to FIREup project, March 2014.
26 See www.fire-fashion.uk for links to films about these FIREup projects.
27 Nick Ryan from Worn Again, report to FIREup project March 2014.
28 Funded by Research Councils UK under the NEMODE Network+ scheme—New
Economic Models in the Digital Economy, 2015, www.nemode.ac.uk led by Sandy
Black and AAM Associates; see also, https://vimeo.com/147929711.
29 A selective survey listing of digital tools and processes is available at https://
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TGeAVXPp-XLh7qLZ1Ga2TCsL0oL-
9U9OwgX9wYcL8b0/edit?pli=1#gid=796169669&vpid=A1.
30 Joseph Pine II, Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition
(Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1993).
31 Frank Piller and Mitchell Tseng, eds., Handbook of Research in Mass Customization
and Personalization, vols. 1 & 2 (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing, 2010), 1.
32 Jung-ha Yang, Doris H. Kincade, and Jessie H. Chen-Yu, “Types of Apparel Mass
Customization and Levels of Modularity and Variety: Application of the Theory of
Inventive Problem Solving,” Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 33, no. 3 (2015).
33 Philip Treleaven, “Sizing Us Up,” IEEE Spectrum 41, no. 4 (2004): 28–31, accessed
May 10, 2017, http://doi.org/db9tqw.
34 Suzanne Loker et al., “Female Consumers’ Reactions to Body Scanning,” Clothing
and Textile Research Journal 22, no. 4 (2004): 151–160; Tasha Lewis and Suzanne
Loker, “Trying on the Future: Exploring Apparel Retail Employees’ Perspectives on
Advanced In-Store Technologies,” Fashion Practice 9, no. 1 (2017): 95–119.
35 See video demonstration of textiles manufactured using 3D printing technology,
Modeclix, March 7, 2016, http://www.modeclix.com/making-of/.
36 For early history, see Bradley Rhodes, “A Brief History of Wearable Computing,” MIT
Media Lab, accessed May 25, 2017, https://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/lizzy/
timeline.html.
NOTES 195

37 Sandy Black, “Trends in Smart Textiles,” in Smart Textiles for Medicine and
Healthcare, ed. Louiva Van Langenhove (Cambridge: Woodhead, 2007), 3–26;
Joanna Berzowska, “XS Labs: Electronic Textiles and Reactive Garments
as Sociocultural Interventions,” in Fashion Studies, eds. Sandy Black et al.
(London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 456–475; Bradley Quinn, “Technology and Future
Fashion: Body Technology,” in Fashion Studies, eds. Sandy Black et al. (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 436–455.
38 “Functional Electronic Textiles,” accessed May 30, 2017, https://www.fett.ecs.soton.
ac.uk
39 Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st Century,” Scientific American, September,
1991, 94.
40 “WEAR Rationale,” Wear Sustain, accessed June 3, 2017, http://wearsustain.eu/
about/wear-rationale/.
41 Workshop convened as part of the NEMODE Network+ project led by Sandy Black
and AAM Associates on October 25, 2015 at the Photographers Gallery London,
with twenty-two attendees. See Sandy Black, Mary Jane Edwards and Gabrielle
Miller, “What’s Digital about Fashion Design?” a report to RCUK NEMODE (New
Economic Models in the Digital Economy) 2015, http://issuu.com/aamassociates/
docs/whats_digital_about_fashion_design_/1.
42 Workshop participant, taken from “What’s Digital about Fashion Design?” workshop
transcript October 25th, 2015.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 See, for example, “Decoded Fashion,” accessed May 31, 2017, http://www.
decodedfashion.com/.
47 Ben Alun-Jones, co-founder Unmade, in interview with Sandy Black, October 30,
2016.
48 Pine II, Mass Customization.
49 Jonas Larsson, Pia Mouwitz and Joel Peterson, “Knit on Demand—Mass
Customisation of Knitted Fashion Products,” The Nordic Textile Journal, Special
Edition Fashion & Clothing (2009), 108–121.
50 Marc Bain, “Brands see the future of fashion in customized 3D knitted garments
produced while you wait,” Quartz Media, April 5, 2017, accessed May 25, 2017,
https://qz.com/949026/brands-including-adidas-uniqlo-and-ministry-of-supply-see-
the-future-of-fashion-in-on-demand-3d-knitting/.
51 “MIXIMALISTE,” accessed May 30, 2017, www.MIXIMALISTE.COM.
52 CEO Henri Mura October 17, 2016, Linked-in announcement.
53 Third Wave Fashion: Fashion Tech Startups. “Fashion Tech: Meet Change of
Paradigm,” March 2016, accessed April 28, 2017, http://thirdwavefashion.
com/2016/03/fashion-tech-meet-change-of-paradigm/.
54 Personal communication with Henri Mura, May 24, 2017.
55 Ibid.
196 NOTES

56 William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way
We Make Things (New York: North Point Press, 2002); Ken Webster, The Circular
Economy: A Wealth of Flows (Cowes: Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017).
57 Sarah Scatturo, “Eco-tech Fashion: Rationalizing Technology in Sustainable
Fashion,” Fashion Theory 12, no. 4 (2008): 469.

Chapter 9
1 Lise Skov and Marie Melchior, “Letter from the Editors,” Fashion Theory 15, no. 4
(2011): 133.
2 David Gilbert, “From Paris to Shanghai: The changing geographies of fashion’s
world cities,” in Fashion’s World Cities, eds. Christopher Breward and David Gilbert
(Oxford: Berg, 2006), 3–32; Sussanne Anna, “The ‘fashion generation’ in a fashion
city,” in Generation Mode, eds. Sussanne Anna and Eva Gronbach (Düsseldorf:
Hatje Cantz, 2006), 7–11; Eva Gronbach, “Global Local: Movements and Counter-
Movements in the ‘Fashion Generation’,” in Generation Mode, eds. Sussanne Anna
and Eva Gronbach (Düsseldorf: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 21–33.
3 Susanne Anne and Eva Gronbach, eds., Generation Mode (Düsseldorf: Hatje Cantz,
2006).
4 Lidewij Edelkoort, “Anti-fashion,” De Zeen, March 15, 2015; Karen Webster, “Global
Shift: Australian Fashion’s Coming of Age,” The Conversation, November 6, 2013,
accessed November 21, 2016, http://theconversation.com/global-shift-australian-
fashions-coming-of-age-19237; Shuk-Wah Chung, “Fast fashion is ‘drowning’
the world: We need a Fashion Revolution!” Greenpeace International, Blogspot by
Shuk-Wah Chung posted April 21, 2016, accessed November 21, 2016, http://www.
greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/fast-fashion-drowning-
world-fashion-revolution/blog/56222/; Clare Press, “Why the Fashion Industry Is Out
of Control,” Australian Financial Review, April 23, 2016, accessed April 26, 2016,
http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/fashion/why-the-fashion-industry-is-out-of-control-
20160419-goa5ic; Madeline Veenstra, “The Australian Fashion Community,” Design
Online, State Library of Queensland, published 2012, last modified 2017, accessed
August 14, 2017, http://designonline.org.au/content/the-australian-fashion-
community/.
5 Skov and Melchior, “Letters from the Editor,” 134.
6 Simona Segre Reinach, “National Identities and International Recognition,” Fashion
Theory 15, no. 4 (2011): 267–272.
7 Wendy Larner and Maureen Molloy, “Globalization, Cultural Economy, and Not-
So-Global Cities: The New Zealand Designer Fashion Industry,” Environment and
Planning D 25 (2007): 381–400.
8 Síle De Cléir, “Creativity in the Margins: Identity and Locality in Ireland’s Fashion
Journey,” Fashion Theory 15, no. 4 (2011): 201–224.
9 Alice Payne, “Inspiration Sources for Australian Fast Fashion Design: Tapping into
Consumer Desire,” Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management 20, no. 2 (2016):
191–207, http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JFMM-12–2014-0092.
NOTES 197

10 Alice Dallabona, “Narratives of Italian craftsmanship and the luxury fashion industry:
Representations of Italianicity in discourses of production,” in Global Fashion
Brands: Style, Luxury and History, eds. Joseph H. Hancock et al. (Bristol: Intellect,
2014), 215–228.
11 Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil Fallan, eds., Made in Italy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
12 Gabi Dei Ottati, “A Transnational Industrial Fast Fashion District: An Analysis of
the Chinese Businesses in Prato,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 38 (2014):
1247–1274; Guoheng Zhang, “Made in Italy by Chinese in Prato: The ‘carrot and
stick’ policy and Chinese migrants in Italy, 2010–2011,” CPI Analysis, October
22, 2015, accessed November 21, 2016, https://cpianalysis.org/2015/10/22/
made-in-italy-by-chinese-in-prato-the-carrot-and-stick-policy-and-chinese-
migrants-in-italy-2010–11/; Unione Industriale Pratese Confindustria Prato,
“Prato textile and fashion centre and the prototype of a manufacturing district,”
Evolution of the Prato Textile District, 2014, accessed November 22, 2016,
http://www.ui.prato.it/unionedigitale/v2/english/presentazionedistrettoinglese.pdf.
13 Marie Riegels Melchior, “From Design Nations to Fashion Nations? Unpacking
Contemporary Scandinavian Fashion Dreams,” Fashion Theory 15, no. 4 (2011):
177–200; Marie Riegels Melchior, Lise Skov and Fabian Faurholt Csaba, “Translating
Fashion into Danish,” Culture Unbound 3 (2011): 209–228.
14 Jacob Ostberg, “The Mythological Aspects of Country-of-Origin: The Case of the
Swedishness of Swedish Fashion,” Journal of Global Fashion Marketing 2, no. 4
(2011): 223–234.
15 Ibid., 231.
16 Torbjorn Netlland, “Moods of Norway towards Global Transparency and Happier
People,” Better Operations, February 7, 2013, accessed August 14, 2017,
http://better-operations.com/2013/02/07/moods-of-norway-towards-global-
supplier-transparency/; Nina Berglund, “Mood Tumbles at ‘Mood of Norway’,”
News in English, November 14, 2014, accessed August 14, 2017, http://www.
newsinenglish.no/2014/11/14/mood-tumbles-at-moods-of-norway/.
17 Esben Pedersen and Wencke Gwozdz, “From Resistance to Opportunity-Seeking:
Strategic Responses to Institutional Pressures for Corporate Social Responsibility in
the Nordic Fashion Industry,” Journal of Business Ethics 119 (2014): 245–264.
18 Nele Bernheim, ed., Symposium 1: Modus Operandi: State of Affairs in Current
Research on Belgian Fashion (Antwerp: MoMu—Fashion Museum, 2008); Anneke
Smelik, ed., Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Fashion (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2017).
19 Payne, “Tapping into Consumer Desire,” 193, 197–198.
20 Lise Skov, “Dreams of Small Nations in a Polycentric Fashion World,” Fashion
Theory 15, no. 4 (2011): 45, 149.
21 Juliette Peers, “Paris or Melbourne? Garments as Ambassadors for Australian
Fashion Cultures,” in Generation Mode, eds. Sussanne Anna and Eva Gronbach
(Düsseldorf: Hatje Cantz, 2006) 133–153.
22 Payne, “Tapping into Consumer Desire”; Sally Weller, “Fashion as Viscous Knowledge:
Fashion’s Role in Shaping Transnational Garment Production,” Journal of Economic
Geography 7, no. 1 (2007): 39–66; Louise Crewe, Nicky Gregson, and Kate Brooks,
“The Discursivities of Difference,” Journal of Consumer Culture 3, no. 1 (2003): 61–82.
198 NOTES

23 Lise Skov, “Dreams of Small Nations”; Louise Crewe and Zena Forster, “Markets,
Design, and Local Agglomeration: The Role of the Small Independent Retailer in the
Workings of the Fashion System,” Environment and Planning D 11, no. 2 (1993):
213–229; Luciana Lazzeretti, Francesco Capone, and Patrizia Casadei, “The Role of
Fashion for Tourism: An Analysis of Florence as a Manufacturing City and Beyond,”
in Tourism in the City: Towards an Integrative Agenda on Urban Tourism, eds. Nicola
Bellini and Cecilia Pasquinelli (Switzerland: Springer International, 2017), eBook
Edition, 207–220; Nancy Rantisi, “The Prospects and Perils of Creating a Viable
Fashion Industry,” Fashion Theory 15, no. 4 (2011): 259–266.
24 Crewe, Gregson, and Brooks, “The Discursivities of Difference,” 73.
25 Ibid., 75.
26 Ibid., 76.
27 Kate Finnigan, “Nordic Chic: 8 Scandi Brands You Need to Know,” The Telegraph,
January 30, 2016, accessed August 14, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/
brands/nordic-chic-8-scandi-brands-you-need-to-know/.
28 Sally Weller, “Beyond ‘Global Production Network’ Metaphors: Australian Fashion
Week’s Trans-sectoral Synergies,” Growth and Change 39, no. 1 (2008): 104–22.
29 Sally Weller, “Consuming the City: Public Festivals and Participatory Economies in
Melbourne, Australia,” Urban Studies, 50, no. 14 (2013): 2855–2868.
30 Sandra Niessen, Ann Marie Leshkovich, and Carla Jones, eds., Re-Orienting
Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Fashion (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003).
31 Lise Skov, “Fashion Flows–Fashion Shows: The Asia Pacific Meets in Hong Kong,”
in Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic, eds. Koichi Iwabuchi and Mandy
Thomas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 221–247.
32 Maureen Molloy and Wendy Larner, eds., Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand
Design, Working Women and the Cultural Economy (Chichester, West Sussex: John
Wiley & Sons, 2013); Sally Weller, “Creativity or Costs? Questioning New Zealand’s
Fashion Success: A Methodological Intervention,” Journal of Economic Geography
14, no. 4 (2013): 721–737; Rowan Anderson, “10 New Zealand Fashion Designers
and Brands You Should Know,” The Culture Trip, October 31, 2016, accessed
November 22, 2016, https://theculturetrip.com/pacific/new-zealand/articles/top-10-
new-zealand-fashion-designers-you-should-know/.
33 Jennifer Craik, “Fashioning Australian: Recent Reflections on the Australian Style in
Contemporary Fashion,” Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture 2, no. 1 (2017): 30–52.
34 Maria Claudia Bonadio, “Brazilian Fashion and the ‘Exotic’,” International Journal of
Fashion Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 57–74.
35 Reinach, “National Identities and International Recognition,” 267–272.
36 Fashion director of Dublin store, Arnotts, quoted by De Cléir, “Creativity in the
Margins,” 217.

Chapter 10
1 John Koblin, “Reformation, an Eco-label the Cool Girls Pick,” New York Times,
December 17, 2014.
NOTES 199

2 Pedersen and Gwozdz, “From Resistance to Opportunity-Seeking,” 247.

3 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Waste and Consumption: Capitalism, the Environment,
and the Life of Things (New York: Routledge, 2011), 19–22.
4 Alexander Engel, “Colouring Markets: The Industrial Transformation of the Dyestuff
Business Revisited,” Business History 54, no. 1 (2012): 10–29; P. J. Federico,
“The Invention and Introduction of the Zipper,” Journal of the Patent Office Society
28, no. 12 (1946): 855–75; Andrew Godley, “Selling the Sewing Machine around
the World: Singer’s International Marketing Strategies, 1850–1920,” Enterprise
and Society 7, no. 2 (2006): 266–314; G. J. Pearson, “Innovation in a Mature
Industry: A Case Study of Warp Knitting in the UK,” Technovation 9, no. 8 (1989):
657–679.
5 David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History since 1900
(London: Profile Books, 2007).
6 Roland Barthes, Système de la mode (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 330– 338.
7 Véronique Pouillard, “Design Piracy in the Fashion Industries of Paris and New York
in the Interwar Years,” Business History Review 85, no. 2 (2011): 319–344.
8 Kathryn K. Sklar, “The Consumers’ White Label Campaign of the National
Consumers’ League 1898–1918,” in Getting and Spending: European and American
Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, eds. Susan Strasser, Charles
McGovern, and Matthias Judt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17–
35; Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, “Women and the Ethics of Consumption in France
at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge,
Power and Identity in the Modern World, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Berg, 2006),
81–98.
9 Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and
Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
10 Helen E. Meiklejohn, “Section VI, Dresses—The Impact of Fashion on a Business,”
in Price and Price Policies, ed. Walton Hamilton (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938),
313–315.
11 Jennifer Le Zotte, From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and
Alternative Economies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
12 Véronique Pouillard, “The Rise of Fashion Forecasting and Fashion PR, 1920–1940:
The History of Tobé and Bernays,” in Globalizing Beauty: Consumerism and Body
Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century, eds. Hartmut Berghoff and Thomas Kuehne
(New York: Palgrave, 2013), 151–169; William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants,
Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1994),
311–313.
13 Brian Hilton, Chong Ju Choi, and Stephen Chen, “The Ethics of Counterfeiting in the
Fashion Industry: Quality, Credence and Profit Issues,” Journal of Business Ethics
55, no. 4 (2004): 350.
14 Diana Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender and Identity in Clothing
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Jessica Daves, Ready-Made Miracle:
The American Story of Fashion for the Millions (New York: Putnam, 1967); Claudia
B. Kidwell and Margaret Christman, Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of
Clothing in America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1974).
200 NOTES

15 Michèle Ruffat and Dominique Veillon, La mode des sixties, l’entrée dans la
modernité (Paris: Autrement, 2007).
16 Mary Quant, Quant by Quant: The Autobiography of Mary Quant (1965; London:
V&A Publications, 2012).
17 Marnie Fogg, Boutique: A ʼ60s Cultural Phenomenon (London: Mitchell Beazley,
2003).
18 Paul Stroobant, “La protection de la dentelle à la main,” Im-ex. La grande revue
belge pour le développement & l’expansion des industries du vêtement, de la mode
et accessoires (October 1926): 8–9.
19 “Une Conférence technique tripartite du textile aux Etats-Unis,” Textilis 9, no. 4 (April
1, 1937): 63.
20 Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Véronique Pouillard, “Fashion as Enterprise,” in European
Fashion. The Creation of a Global Industry, eds. Regina Lee Blaszczyk and
Véronique Pouillard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 24–25.
21 Thierry Charlier, “Un exemple de coopération entre les pouvoirs publics et le secteur
privé. Le programme quinquennal de restructuration de l’industrie belge du textile
et de la confection en août 1980” (MA thesis in Economics, Université Libre de
Bruxelles, Brussels, 1985), 6–7, 12.
22 Ibid., 5; my translation (“ont délibérément laissé périr leur industrie de l’habillement
pour devenir la première plaque de transit en matière de commerce de vêtements à
bas prix”).
23 Lisbeth Sluiter, Clean Clothes: A Global Movement to End Sweatshops (London:
Pluto Press, 2009).
24 Charlier, “Un exemple de coopération,” 16.
25 Ibid., 15.
26 Christopher A. Bayly, “The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and
Indian Society, 1700–1930,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspectives, ed. Arjun Appadurai (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 285–321; Lawrence B. Glickman, “‘Make Lisle the Style’: The Politics of
Fashion in the Japanese Silk Boycott, 1937–1940,” Journal of Social History 38,
no. 3 (2005), 586; Geoffrey G. Jones, Kerry Herman, and P. K. Kothandaraman,
“Jamnalal Bajaj, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Struggle for Indian Independence,”
case study no. 807028, Harvard Business School, 2006 (revised 2015), 1–21;
Tereza Kuldova, Luxury Indian Fashion. A Social Critique (London: Bloomsbury,
2016), 11.
27 An Moons, “To Be (In) or Not to Be (In): The Constituting Processes and Impact
Indicators of the Flemish Designer Fashion Industry Undressed,” in Modus
Operandi: State of Affairs in Current Research on Belgian Fashion, ed. Nele
Bernheim (Antwerp: Mode Museum, 2008), 69–81.
28 Andrew McAfee, Vincent Dessain, and Anders Sjöman, “Zara: IT for Fast Fashion,”
case study no. 9–604–081, Harvard Business School, September 6, 2007.
29 Ibid.
30 Sabine Chrétien-Ichikawa, “La réémergence de la mode en Chine et le rôle du
Japon” (PhD diss., EHESS, Paris, 2012); Kazunori Takada and Grace Huang,
“Uniqlo Thinks Faster Fashion Can Help It Beat Zara,” Bloomberg, March 16, 2017,
NOTES 201

accessed May 15, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-16/

uniqlo-turns-speed-demon-to-take-on-zara-for-global-sales-crown.
31 Gilles Lipovetsky, L’empire de l’éphémère. La mode et son destin dans les sociétés
modernes (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
32 Teri Agins, The End of Fashion: How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business
Forever (London: William Morrow, 2000).
33 Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Holt, 1999),
188–189.
34 “Faster, Cheaper Fashion,” Economist, 5 September 2015, http://www.economist.
com/news/business/21663221-rapidly-rising-super-cheap-irish-clothes-retailer-
prepares-conquer-america-rivals-should.
35 The True Cost, DVD, dir. Andrew Morgan (USA: Bullfrog Films, 2015).
36 Jason Burke, “Bangladesh Factory Collapse Leaves Trail of Shattered Lives,”
Guardian, June 6, 2013; Noemi Sinkovics, Samia Ferdous Hoque, and Rudolf R.
Sinkovics, “Rana Plaza Collapse Aftermath: Are CSR Compliance and Auditing
Pressures Effective?,” Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 29, no. 4
(2016): 624–625.
37 Ian M. Taplin, “Who Is to Blame? A Re-examination of Fast Fashion after the 2013
Factory Disaster in Bangladesh,” Critical Perspectives on International Business 10,
no. 1/2 (2014): 77.
38 Enrico D’Ambrogio, European Parliamentary Research Service, “Workers’
Conditions in the Textile and Clothing Sector: Just an Asian Affair? Issues at
Stake after the Rana Plaza Tragedy,” briefing, European Parliament, August 2014,
accessed June 26, 2017, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/EPRS/140841REV1-
Workers-conditions-in-the-textile-and-clothing-sector-just-an-Asian-affair-FINAL.pdf.
39 Taplin, “Who Is to Blame?” 79.
40 Sinkovics, Hoque, and Sinkovics, “Rana Plaza Collapse Aftermath,” 624.
41 Le Zotte, Goodwill to Grunge.
42 “Faster, Cheaper Fashion.”
43 On the Norwegian media coverage of the Rana Plaza disaster, see Kristin Skare
Orgeret, “Cheap Clothes: Distant Disasters. Journalism Turning Suffering into
Practical Action,” Journalism (2016): 1–18.
44 Sluiter, Clean Clothes, 20.
45 Ibid., 48–49.
46 Hasia R. Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and
the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015);
David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Grove Press,
2003).
47 Green, Ready-to-Wear, 80–86, 97–104.
48 Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).
49 Glickman, “‘Make Lisle the Style,ʼ” 573–608.
50 Albert O. Hirschmann, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms,
Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).
202 NOTES

51 Glickman, Buying Power, 297–310.

52 Sluiter, Clean Clothes.
53 Chessel, “Women and the Ethics of Consumption,” 81–98.
54 Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Knopf, 1999).
55 Paul Bairoch, Victoires et déboires: Histoire économique et sociale du monde du
XVIe siècle à nos jours, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
56 Laura M. Holson and Rachel Abrams, “For the Trumps, ‘Made in U.S.A.’ May Be
a Tricky Label to Stitch,” New York Times, December 28, 2016, accessed May
15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/business/donald-trump-ivanka-
clothes-global-trade-overseas-manufacturing.html.
57 Daniel Bender and Richard A. Greenwald, Sweatshop USA: The American
Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2003).
58 Sluiter, Clean Clothes, 71.
59 Taplin, “Who Is to Blame?” 78.
60 Adam Davidson, “Economic Recovery, Made in Bangladesh?,” New York Times,
May 14, 2013, MM16.
61 Green, Ready-to-Wear; Bender and Greenwald, Sweatshop USA.
62 Sluiter, Clean Clothes.
63 Sankar Sen and C. B. Battacharya, “Does Doing Good Always Lead to Doing
Better? Consumer Reactions to Corporate Social Responsibility,” Journal of
Marketing Research 38, no. 2 (2001): 240.
64 Taplin, “Who Is to Blame?” 76.
65 Peter Lund-Thomsen and Adam Lindgreen, “Corporate Social Responsibility in
Global Value Chains: Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going?,” Journal of
Business Ethics 123, no. 1 (2014): 13.
66 Ibid., 12.
67 McAfee, Dessain, and Sjöman, “Zara.”
68 Knut-Erik Mikalsen, “Nordea-sjef: Dette ville en skjorte kostet om fabrikkarbeiderne
i Bangladesh skulle fått en levelig lønn,” Aftenposten, June 2, 2017, accessed June
2, 2017, http://www.aftenposten.no/okonomi/Nordea-sjef-Dette-ville-en-skjorte-
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69 Taplin, “Who Is to Blame?” 78; Rina Rafael, “Is This Sewing Robot the Future of
Fashion?,” Fast Company, January 24, 2017, accessed June 2, 2017, https://www.
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70 Godley, “Selling the Sewing Machine,” 266–314.
71 Tansy Hoskins, “Robot Factories Could Threaten Jobs of Millions of Garment
Workers,” Guardian, July 16, 2016, accessed June 2, 2017, https://www.
theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/jul/16/robot-factories-threaten-jobs-
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72 Taplin, “Who Is to Blame?” 76–78; Glickman, Buying Power, 294–296.
73 Falasca-Zamponi, Waste and Consumption, 36–39, 42–49.
NOTES 203

Chapter 11
1 The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, Y2K Bug, last modified April 20, 2017,
accessed August 26, 2017, https://www.britannica.com/technology/Y2K-bug.
2 Teri Agins, The End of Fashion, How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business
Forever (New York: Quill, 2000), 15.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 14.
5 Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist, 35.
6 Ibid.
7 Christopher Breward, “Foreword,” in Fashion Studies: Research Methods and
Practices, ed. Heike Jenss (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), xviii.
8 Ibid.
9 Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, Fashion and Everyday Life, London and New York
(London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 235.
10 Breward, “Foreword,” xvii.
11 Lidewij Edelkoort, Anti_Fashion: A Manifesto for the Next Decade (Paris: Trend
Union, 2014).
12 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985),
279.
13 Quoted in Breward “Foreword,” xix.
14 Jessica Bugg, “Fashion at the Interface: Designer-Wearer-Viewer,” Fashion Practice
1, no. 1 (2009): 10.
15 Ibid., 10/11.
16 See Annamari Vänskä and Hazel Clark, eds., Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in
the Museum and Beyond (London and New York: Bloomsbury), 2017.
17 Bugg, “Fashion at the Interface,”13.
18 See, for example, Lou Taylor, Establishing Dress History (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 2004); Valerie Steele and Alexandra Palmer, eds.,
“Exhibitionism” (Special Issue), Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress Body and
Culture 12, no. 1 (2008); Fiona Anderson, “Museums as Fashion Media,” in Fashion
Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, ed. Stella Bruzzi (London and New
York: Routledge, 2000), 371–389.
19 Slavoj Žiźek, Living in the End Times (London and New York: Verso, 2010).
20 Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, “In Search of the Everyday: Museums, Collections,
and Representations of Fashion in London and New York,” in Fashion Studies:
Research Methods and Practices, ed. Heike Jenss (London and New York:
Bloomsbury, 2016), 27.
21 Judith Clark and Amy De La Haye, Exhibiting Fashion: Before and after 1971 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).
204 NOTES

22 Amy De La Haye, “Vogue and the V&A Vitrine,” Fashion Theory 10, no. 1/2 (2006):
132–133.
23 Christopher Breward, “Between the Museum and the Academy: Fashion Research
and Its Constituencies,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress Body and Culture 12,
no. 1 (2008): 91.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid. See also Greer Crawley and Donatella Barbieri, “Dress, Time, and Space:
Expanding the Field through Exhibition Making,” in The Handbook of Fashion
Studies, eds. Sandy Black et al. (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 44–60.
26 Valerie Steele, “Museum Quality. The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition,” in
“Exhibitionism,” (Special Issue) Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress Body and
Culture 12, no. 1 (2008): 28.
27 Crawley and Barbieri, “Dress, Time and Space,” 58.
28 For those seeking more details, Jeffrey Horsely provides a very valuable “Incomplete
Inventory” of fashion exhibitions, 1971–2013, in Clark and de la Haye, Exhibiting
Fashion, 169–245.
29 Alexandra Palmer, “Reviewing Fashion Exhibitions,” in “Exhibitionism,” (Special Issue)
Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress Body and Culture 12, no. 1 (2008): 123.
30 Julia Petrov, “Exhibition and Catalog Review: The Concise Dictionary of Dress,”
Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress Body and Culture 16, no. 1 (2010): 109–116.
31 Marco Pecorari, Fashion Remains: The Epistemic Potential of Fashion Ephemera
(PhD diss., Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2015), 258, based on Bruno Latour,
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 79–81.
32 For example, Lesley Ellis Miller, Balenciaga (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2007).
33 N.J. Stevenson, “The Fashion Retrospective,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress
Body and Culture 12, no. 2 (2008): 224, citing Valerie Cumming, Understanding
Fashion History (London: B.T. Batsford, 2004), 72.
34 Ibid., 226.
35 Ibid., 225.
36 “About the Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion Exhibition,” Victoria and Albert Museum,
last modified 2017, accessed September 2, 2017, https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/
about-balenciaga-shaping-fashion.
37 Scarlet Conlon, “Inside Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion,” UK Vogue, published May
24, 2017, accessed August 20, 2017, http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/v-a-museum-
balenciaga-exhibition-preview-curator-cassie-davie-strodder.
38 Dana Thomas, “Two Major Museum Exhibitions Celebrate Balenciaga’s Fashion
Mastery,” Town and Country Magazine, last modified 2017, accessed August
20, 2017, http://www.townandcountrymag.com/style/fashion-trends/a9178653/
balenciaga-museum-exhibitions/.
39 Stevenson, “The Fashion Retrospective,” 225.
40 Tina Isaac-Goize, “Star Curator Olivier Saillard Is Headed to J.M. Weston,” Vogue,
June 30, 2017, accessed August 17, 2017, http://www.vogue.com/article/olivier-
saillard-weston.
NOTES 205

41 Sarah Moroz, “In a New Performance Piece, Tilda Swinton Turns Fashion into Art,”
T Magazine, The New York Times, November 21, 2014, accessed August 19, 2017,
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/21/tilda-swinton-cloakroom-paris-festival/.
42 Isaacc-Goize, “Star Curator Olivier Saillard Is Headed to J.M. Weston.”
43 For example, Prada Waist Down, the exhibition which was originally staged in
the Prada store in Aoyama, Tokyo (2004–2005) designed by Miuccia Prada, and
conceived by curator Kayoko Ota of AMO, which subsequently traveled to Prada
stores in many major international cities. See “Prada Waist Down,” 2 x 4, accessed
Septmeber 15, 2017, https://2x4.org/work/26/prada-waist-down/.
44 Yuli Bai, “Artification and Authenticity: Museum Exhibitions of Luxury Fashion Brands in
China,” in Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond, eds. Annamari
Vänskä and Hazel Clark (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 213–225.
45 Sarah Scaturro, “Confronting Fashion’s Death Drive: Conservation, Ghost Labor, and
the Material Turn within Fashion Curation,” in Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in
the Museum and Beyond, eds. Annamari Vänskä and Hazel Clark (London and New
York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 22.
46 Maria Luisa Frisa in conversation with Gabriele Monti, “Everybody’s a Curator,” in
Understanding Fashion through the Exhibition, Under the direction of Luca Marchetti
(Geneva: HEAD, 2014), 261.
47 Dobrila Denegri, “When Time Becomes Space,” in Understanding Fashion through
the Exhibition, Under the direction of Luca Marchetti (Geneva: HEAD, 2014), 299.
48 “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” The Museum of Modern Art, last modified 2017,
accessed August 25, 2017, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1638.
49 Ibid.
50 “This Fall, Items: Is Fashion Modern? Highlights 111 Influential Garments and
Accessories That Are Paragons of Design,” The Museum of Modern Art, accessed
August 26, 2017, http://press.moma.org/wp-content/files_mf/moma_items_
expandedpressrelease_final38.pdf.
51 Ibid.
52 Natacha Wolinski, “When Fashion Dresses Up the Imagination,” Beaux Arts
Magazine, pamphlet for Dysfashional exhibition (Luxembourg, 2007).
53 Ibid.
54 “Dysfashional,” Garage Centre for Contemporary Art, last modified 2017, accessed
September 1, 2017, http://garagemca.org/en/event/dysfashional.
55 Ilari Laamanen is an independent curator and currently project manager at the
Finnish Cultural Institute in New York.
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Filmography
Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958)
Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957)
Letty Lynton (Clarence Brown, 1932)
Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)
Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990)
Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Interview
Agins, Teri, Interview by Dr. Valerie Steele, 2017 (March 8).
 INDEX

Note: Page locators which appears in italics refer to figures.

Acne (brand), 135 Balenciaga, Cristóbal, 87, 89, 162,

Adidas (brand), 75 160–3. See also Balenciaga
Knit for You, 130 (fashion house)
Adobe Illustrator, 51 Kering group, 163
Adobe Photoshop, 51, 53–8 Balenciaga (fashion house), 11, 73, 78
Adorno, Theodor W., 26 Balenciaga Paris (exhibition), 160–1. See
“Valéry Proust Museum,” 28 also Balenciaga, Cristóbal
Agins, Teri, 7, 69, 90, 156, 170 Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion (exhibition),
The End of Fashion, 6, 155 161, 162. See also Balenciaga,
AIDS, 14 Cristóbal
Alaïa, Azzedine, 161, 164 Balenciaga: Working in Black (exhibition),
Altheide, David, 103, 106 161, 163. See also Balenciaga,
Alun-Jones, Ben, 126 Cristóbal
Amazon.com, 62, 130 Balla, Giacomo, 22
American medical Association, 53 Ballets Russes, 22
Anderson, Benedict, 32 Balmain (fashion house), 73, 75, 77
Anderson, J. W., 161 Barbican Centre, London, 159
androgyny, 61, 62, 84, 87, 92–8 Barbie (doll), 52, 59
Anime, 62 Bardot, Brigitte, 36, 88
anti-fashion, 6–7, 9–10 Barrtman, Sarah, 70
Antonelli, Paola, 166–7 Barthes, Roland, 34, 52, 147
“Antwerp 6,” 136 Bassano, Jacopo, 21
Appadurai, Arjun, 32, 33, 34, 37 Batra, Ritesh, 41
Modernity at Large, 32 Battacharya, C. B., 152
Apple (brand), 72 Baudelaire, Charles, 23, 25
Are Clothes Modern? (exhibition), 166 Baudrillard, Jean, 29, 58, 82. See also
Argos (brand), 100 hyperreality
Armani, Giorgio, 42 Society of the Spectacle, 81
Art Basel Miami, 76 BDSM, 75
Art Cologne, 76 beatnik style, 84
Ash, Juliette Beaton, Cecil, 161
“Memory and Objects,” 27 Beecroft, Vanessa, 75–6
Asos.com Beijing National Museum, 39
“Fashion and Beauty Feed,” 106 Bell, Book and Candle (film), 84
Atelier Doré, 105–6 Bellour, Raymond, 86, 97
Audemars Piguet (brand), 106 Belsay Hall, 159
Auschwitz, 26 Benetton (brand), 147
230 INDEX

Benjamin, Walter, 25, 31, 32, 34, 40, 44, 90 Calvin Klein (fashion house), 12–13, 155
Angel of History, 24 Capri pants, 36
“tiger’s leap,” 40 Cardin, Pierre, 8
“The Work of Art in the Age of Carrera, Carmen, 61
Mechanical Reproducibility,” 28, Cartner-Morley, Jess, 73, 79
61, 68 Castelbajac, Jean-Charles de, 102
Berardi, Franco “Bifo,” 81–2 Castiglioni, Countess, 50
Beyoncé, 53 CdMdiary.com, 109
The Bible, 60 Céline (fashion house), 73, 161
Bieber, Justin, 63, 72, 77 Centre for Fashion Enterprise, 116, 117,
Bitoni, Francis, 121 125
Bloch, Isaie, 15 Chambre Syndicale de la Haure Couture,
blogging, 2, 37, 48–50, 64, 71, 77, 86, 15
105–6, 108, 109, 110–11, 136, Chanel, Gabrielle “Coco,” 22, 79, 88, 89,
148 156, 164. See also Chanel (fashion
Bloomingdale’s, 120 house)
Bloomingdale’s Illustrated 1886 Catalog, Chanel (exhibition), 163
104 Chanel (fashion house), 6, 8, 12, 77, 109,
Bluhm, Julia, 57 163, 164
Blum and Poe (gallery), 76 Change of Paradigm (company), 127
Blythe House, London, 160 Charlayan, Hussein, 23, 48, 167
Bô, Daniel, 108 Ventriloquy, Spring/Summer collection
Bodymetrics (company), 120 2000-2001, 24
Bogatyrëv, Pëtr, 40 Charlier, Thierry, 145
Bollywood, 42 Cherry, Robin, 104
Bolter, David, 105 Chinese Cultural Revolution, 5
Bordo, Susan, 79 Chow, Rei, 42
Boudicca, 128 Church Gibson, Pamela, 87, 90
Bourdelle, Antoine, 163 cinephilia, 85
Bourdieu, Pierre, 107, 109 Clark, Hazel, 18
Bourdin, Guy, 104 Clark, Judith, 159–60
Bowie, David, 61 Clean Clothes Campaign, 148–9, 150, 151
Braudy, Leo, 67 Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving
Brauw, Saskia de, 61 Disaster (exhibition), 35
Bravehearts: Men in Skirts (exhibition), 62 Cloakroom Vestiaire Obligatoire
Breward, Christopher, 156, 158–9, 170 (exhibition/performance), 164
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 159 Coller Davis, Tobe, 143
British Fashion Council, 114 Columbia University, 91
Brokeback Mountain (film), 27. See also, Comme des Garçons. See Kawakubo, Rei
Proulx, Annie communism, 1
Brown, Clarence, 88 The Concise Dictionary of Dress
Browning, Tod, 25 (exhibition), 160
Brumfitt, Tanya, 55 Condé Nast, 86
Bruno, Giuliana, 85 Constructivism, 22
Bryanboy, 49 contemporary art, 4
Bubble, Susie (Susanna Lau), 49 Copenhagen Fashion Summit, 113
Bugg, Jessica, 157–8 Copping, Nicola, 107, 110
Burberry (brand), 113 Costume Institute. See Metropolitan
Burlusconi, Silvio, 82 Museum of Art, New York
INDEX 231

Courrèges, Pierre, 8, 22, 37 Dove Company, 57–8

Craner, Teresa “For Real Beauty” campaign, 57
Inside Content Marketing, 108–9 Dracula (1931 film), 25
Crawford, Joan, 88 Dunham, Lena, 54
Cronenberg, David, 44 Durkheim, Emile, 32
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 15 Dysfashional (exhibition), 167, 168, 169
Creativity, 14
Cute Circuit (company), 122, 123 E! (cable network), 71
Eckhaus Latta (design group), 170
Dalì, Salvador, 22 Edelkoort, Lidewij, 69, 156–7
Dance and Fashion (exhibition), 15 Anti-Fashion Manifesto, 6–7, 113
Dangin, Pascal, 57, 58 The Edit (online magazine), 101–2, 106
The Danish Girl (film), 62 Elbaz, Alber, 11, 12
Danto, Arthur, 3 Embrace (documentary film), 55
Davidson, Adam, 151 Emery, Kirsty, 126
Davies-Strodder, Cassie, 162 Emmy Awards, 62
De Pelsmacker, Patrick, 108 End of Fashion (2016 conference), 33
Debord, Guy Engels, Friedrich
The Society of the Spectacle, 81 Communist Manifesto, 21 (see also
Decoded Fashion, 125 Marx, Karl)
deconstrictionist/deconstructivist fashion. English, Bonnie, 89
See Kawakubo, Rei Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 68, 81
Degas, Edgar, 25–6 “constituents of a Theory of the
Deleuze, Gilles, 87 Media,” 68
DeMartini-Squires, Brenda, 64 Erdem (fashion house), 161
Demeulemeester, Ann, 48, 93 Esser, Frank, 107
Derek J., 70 Eternity Dress (exhibition/performance), 164
Derrida, Jacques, 20, 21–2, 47, 48, 64 Eugénie, Empress, 21
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eustache, Jean, 85
29–30 Evans, Caroline, 23, 48
“Marx and Sons,” 172 n.2
Specters of Marx, 20 Facebook, 101, 110, 137
undecidability, 47, 64 Farfetch.com, 103
Desperately Seeking Susan (film), 37 Fashion (exhibition), 159
DiCaprio, Leonardo, 61 fashion after Fashion (exhibition), 18, 169,
Dickens, Charles 170
“Meditations in Monmouth Street,” 28 Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton
Didion, Joan, 74 (exhibition), 158, 161
Dietrich, Marlene, 61 Fashion and Fancy Dress—Messel Family
Dior, Christian, 14, 88, 164 Dress Collection: 1865-2005
“New Look,” 2, 3, 8, 14, 22 (exhibition), 158–9
Dior (fashion house), 11, 12, 13, 49, 166 fashion film, 2, 77, 108, 157
Disney (studio), 122 Fashion Innovation Agency, 122
DIY, 3, 32 Fashion Institute of Technology, 15, 39
Doc Martens (brand), 93 Fashion Theory (journal), 33, 99
Donen, Stanley, 84 “fashionization,” 156
Donna Karan (fashion house), 91 fashionscapes, 31–45, 97
Doré, Garance. See Atelier Doré Fast and Furious (films), 27
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 20 fast-fashion, 36–7
232 INDEX

feminism, 5, 53, 54, 69, 73, 79, 80, 90–2, Golden Globe Awards, 62
93, 96. See also postfeminism Goldsworthy, Kate
Fiedler, Franz, 50 Gone Girl (film), 80
FIREup (Fashion, Innovation, Research, Google, 122
and Enterprise), 118, 119–20 Goude, Jean-Paul, 76
First World War, 149 GQ (magazine), 102
Fits Me (store), 115 Graeber, David, 81
flâneur, 31, 101, 102 Grand Palais, Paris, 39
Flügel, John, 91 Grazia (magazine), 103, 106
Fortuny, Mariano, 164 Great Depression, 144
Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, 21 Greener, Leaf, 102
Francis, Pope, 45 Green, Nancy, 142
Frankfurt School, 32, 81, 182 n.70 Grigoriadis, Vanessa, 93
Freaks (film), 25 Grunenberg, Christoph, 103
Freud, Sigmund, 20 Grusin, Richard, 105
Friedberg, Anne, 101 Guardian (newspaper), 94
Window Shopping: Cinema and the Guattari, Félix, 87
Postmodern, 102 Guével, Matthieu, 108
Funny Face (film), 84 Guggenheim, Bilbao, 159
Fury, Alexander, 89 Guggenheim, New York, 159
Gunew, Sneja, 90, 91
Gackt, 62 Gurung, Prabal, 113
Gainsborough, Thomas, 21 Gvasalia, Demna, 48, 77–8, 161–2, 162
Galliano, John, 11 Gyllenhaal, Jake, 27
Gandhi, Mahatma, 146 Gypsy Sport (brand), 62
Garcia, Patricia, 95
Garnier, Charles H&M (brand), 11, 12, 13, 51, 135, 141,
Palais Garnier, 21 147
GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Haag, Ines, 113
Trade), 145 Harding, Georgina, 102
Gaultier, Jean-Paul, 61 Hardy, Jonathan, 110
“Wardrobe for Two,” 62 Harpers Bazaar (magazine), 79, 80, 102,
Geczy, Adam, 90, 97 107
geisha, 43 Harrods, 120
Geldof, Pixie, 102 Harvard Business School, 41
Genz, Ryan, 122 hauntology, 21
Gevinson, Tavi, 49 Haye, Amy de la, 159
Ghesquière, Nicolas, 161 HBO (TV network), 88
Giannone, Antonella Head, Edith, 84
Moda e Cinema, 40 Hedman, Sofia, 18
Giorgio Armani (exhibition), 159 Hegel. G.W.F., 3
Giorgio Armani (fashion house), 43 Lectures on Aesthetics, 19
Givenchy (fashion house), 73, 75 Heian dynasty, Japan, 7
Givenchy, Hubert de, 84. See also Heilbrun, Carolyn, 91–3
Givenchy (fashion house) Toward a Recognition of Androgyny,
globalization, 11, 13, 32, 107, 133–9 93
Goddard, Molly, 161 Heiss, Desiree, 113
Golan, Fyodor, 122, 128 Hepburn, Audrey, 84, 88
Golbin, Pamela, 161 Hermès (fashion house), 165
INDEX 233

Hiddleston, Tom, 94, 95, 96, 97 Jolie, Angelina, 53

hippy, hippies, 9–10 Jones, Lucy, 169
Hiroshima, 26 Jones, Nick, 102
Hirschmann, Albert, 149, 153 Jones, Stephen, 49
Hitchcock, Alfred, 83 Jones, Teatum, 128
Hobsbawm, Eric, 38 Judd, Donald, 157
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 64 Julius, Julius 7 (brand), 86
Hollywood, 42, 52, 59, 77, 84, 85, 87,
88, 94 Kahlo, Frieda, 76
“New Hollywood,” 87 Kantranzou, Mary, 121
Holocaust, 26 Karaminas, Vicki, 33, 90, 97
Horikawa, Tatsuro, 86 Karan, Donna, 91–2. See also Donna
Hoskins, Tansy Karan (fashion house)
Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book Kardashian collection (brand), 72
of Fashion, 5 Kardashian, Kim, 63, 70–9, 81, 82
Hottentot Venus, 70 Selfish, 76
Huffington Post (magazine), 59 Kardashian, Kourtney, 76
Hulanicki, Barbara, 8, 144 Kardashian, Kylie, 72
Biba, 8, 144 Karolinski, Alexa, 170
Hurrell, George, 52 Kate Spade (brand), 63
hyperreality, 65 Kawakubo, Rei, 3, 10, 23, 24–5, 48, 79,
92, 93. See also La Mode Destroy,
i-D (magazine), 88, 93 Rei Kawakubo: The Art of the In-
The Impossible Wardrobe (exhibition), Between (exhibition)
164, 165 aesthetic of poverty, 25
Inditex (brand), 147 Comme des Garçons, 10, 92, 93, 161
Industrial Revolution, 81 deconstructivist fashion, 25, 48
Ingres, Jean-Auguste Dominique, 26 Spring/Summer collection 1983, 25, 48
Instagram, 2, 49, 55–6, 63, 64, 71, 76, Kawanishi, Ryohei, 170
101, 108, 109, 110, 111, 136, 137 Kelly, Grace, 84
Intelligent Textiles (company), 122 Kennedy, Jackie, 29, 36
International Women’s Day, 76 Kickstarter, 61
Internet Retailer’s Social media 500, 101 Kin Studio, 122
Irvine, Susan, 87 Klein, Naomi, 81
Items: Is Fashion Modern? (exhibition), No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies,
166 150
Klein, Steven, 75
Jacobs, Marc, 29, 62, 80 Klinger, Ulrike, 107
Japanese fashion revolution, 10 Knightly, Kiera, 76
Jakobson, Roman, 40 Kobre, Ken, 50–1
Jansson, André, 109 Koons, Jeff, 76
Jarlgaard, Martine, 115 Korwin, Danielle, 51
Jarmusch, Jim, 94–7 Krauss, Rosalind
Jenkins, Henry, 68 “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 157
Jenner, Caitlyn, 71 Kroes, Doutzen, 53
Jenner, Kendell, 71, 72, 75 Krog, Mads, 105
Jezebel (website), 53, 54 Kruger, Barbara, 76
Joan of Arc, 14 Kunilius, Risto, 100
Johnson, Dwayne “The Rock,” 72 Kusama, Yayoi, 164
234 INDEX

L’Oréal (brand), 51, 55 Makryniotis, Thomas, 118, 121

La Mode Destroy, 25, 48. See also Males, Ben, 122
Kawakubo, Rei Malign Muses/Spectres (exhibition), 159,
La Perla, Ruth, 93 166
Laamanen, Ilari, 18 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 64
Lacroix, Christian, 6 MamaMia (website), 55
Lady Gaga (Stefani Germanotta), 63, 122 “Body Positive” campaign, 55
Lagerfeld, Karl, 6, 12, 77, 163 Manga, 62
Laitinen, Toumas, 170 Mann, Steve, 121
Lang, Wes, 75 Marchetti, Luca, 167
Lanvin (fashion house), 11 Margiela, Martin, 6, 10, 23–5, 39, 48,
Lasica, J. D., 50 164. See also Maison Margiela
Laudon, Kenneth, 101 Marks and Spencer, 107, 110
Lawrence, Thomas, 21 Marshall, Gary, 89
Le Mercure Galant, 104 Martens, Wilfred, 146
Ledger, Heath, 27 Martynov, Serge, 18
Lee, Ang, 27 Marx, Karl, 20, 172 n.2
Lefebvre, Henri, 68 Communist Manifesto, 21 (see also
Lennox, Annie Engels, Friedrich)
Leopardi, Giacomo Marxism, 21
Dialogue Between Fashion and Death, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
25 (MIT), 117, 121
Letty Lynton (film), 88 Materialse (company), 15
Levi’s (brand), 78, 122 Matlins, Seth, 57
Lexington Clothing Co. (brand), 135 MAXIMALISTE (brand), 128–9
LGBTQ, 15 Maybelline (brand), 54
Linder, Erika, 61–2 Mazzoleni, Gianpetro, 99
Linsay, Vachel, 90 McCartney, Stella, 113
Lipovetsky, Gilles, 146–7 McLaren, Malcolm, 10, 23
Loblaw (company), 147 McLuhan, Marshall, 2, 32
London College of Art, 126 McQueen, Alexander, 11, 14, 15, 121, 156
London College of Fashion, 113, 119, McRobbie, Angela, 115
157, 161 mediatization, 99–111, 188 n.3
London Fashion Week, 117, 122 Medine, Leandra, 77
Los Angeles Times (newspaper), 29 “Man Repeller,” 77
Louis Vuitton (fashion house), 12, 75, 78, Melba, Dame Nellie, 21
164 Menkes, Suzy, 11
Lowe-Holder, Michelle, 118 Met Ball, Met Gala, 73
Lubitsch, Ernst, 42 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
The Lunchbox (film), 41 62, 156, 160, 163
Lundby, Kurt, 106, 110 Metternich, Pricess Paulin von, 21
LVMH (company), 13 Meunier, Sebastien, 93
Lyotard, Jean-François, 47 Michelson, Morton, 105
Middle Ages, 56
M. Butterfly (film), 44 Millar Fisher, Michelle, 166
Madonna, 37, 53 M’ing dynasty, China, 7
Maigret, Caroline de, 102, 109 Ministry of Supply (company), 130
Maison Margiela (fashion house), 75, 167 Mintel (company), 114, 116
Makerversity, 124 Miss, Mary, 157
INDEX 235

Miu Miu (brand), 80. See also Prada Nokia (company), 122
(fashion house) “Nollywood,” 86
Mme Grès, 163 Novak, Kim, 83, 84
Modeclix (company), 121 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 64
Modeliste (magazine). 56 Nudie Jeans (brand), 135
modernism, 157
Mods, 8, 9 O’Neill, Essena, 71–2
MoMu (Mode Museum Antwerp), 39, Odin, Roger, 86
159 Olschwanger, Ron, 50
Moods (brand), 135 125 Years of Italian Magnificence
Morgan, Andrew, 147 (exhibition), 39
Moschino, Franco, 15–16, 17 Only Lovers Left Alive (film), 94–5, 95, 96
STOP THE FASHION SYSTEM, 16, 16 Opening Ceremony (brand), 126
Multi-Fiber Arrangement, 145 Ornage County Register (magazine), 50
Mura, Henri, 128, 129 Orta, Lucy
Murakami, Takashi, 164 Refugee Wear collection, 35
Murdock, Graham, 108 Ourien, Simon, 79
Musée Bourdelle, Paris, 161, 163 Owens, Rick, 89, 93, 161
Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, 160–1
Museo Balenciaga, 160. See also Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 164
Balenciaga, Cristóbal Palais Galliera, Paris, 164
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 39
Hamburg Palermo, Olivia, 102
Museum of Arts and Design, New York, Paltrow, Gwyneth, 53
169 Paramount (studio), 86
Museum of Modern Art, New York Paris Models Inc., 51
(MoMA), 166–7 Parker, Sarah Jessica, 88
Museumization, 38 Parrish, Amos, 143
Paster, Gail, 53
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), 50 Patel, Roopal, 101
Nagasaki, 26 Patou, Jean, 22
National Geographic (magazine), 50 Payne, Alice, 136
Nazi, National Socialism, 14, 40 Peacock Revolution, 8
Nef, Hari, 61 Pecorari, Marco, 160
Net-a-Porter.com, 101–3, 105, 107 Pejic, Andreja, 61
New Deal, 144 Pepsi-Cola (brand), 72–3, 181 n.36
New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), 85 Perestroika, 20
New York Fashion Week, 155 Phillips, Adam, 159–60
New York Magazine, 91, 93 Philo, Phoebe, 73
New York Times (newspaper), 42, 89, 93, Photoshop. See Adobe Photoshop
151, 156 Picasso, Pablo, 22
New Yorker (magazine). 57 Pinterest, 2, 137
Newbury, Malcolm, 117 Plato, 48
Nicoll, Richard, 122 Poell, Thomas, 106
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 38 Poiret, Paul, 22, 79
“last man,” 20 pornostyle, 70, 72
Nike (brand), 30, 75, 130 Porte Jacquemus, Simon, 78
NikeID, 130 post-democracy, 1
9/4/1615 (exhibition), 24 postfashion, 7, 156
236 INDEX

postfeminism, 79, 92 Rojek, Chris, 67, 74

post-Fordism, 150 Roman Originals (brand), 63
“post-futurist” culture, 82 romanticism, 64
postmodernism, 4, 6, 47, 157 Ronalso, Christiano, 72
Prada (fashion house), 75 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 144
Prague Linguistic Circle, 40 Roosevelt, Selwa, 92
Pretty Woman (film), 89 Rosella, Francesca, 122
Primark (company), 147 Rothenbuhler, Eric, 99
Proulx, Annie, 27. See also Brokeback Rousteing, Olivier, 12, 73, 77
Mountain (film) Royal Academy, London, 159
Puccini, Giacomo, 44 Rubens, Peter Paul, 21
Pugh, Gareth, 93 Rudofsky, Bernard, 166
punk, 8, 9–10, 37, 77
Saillard, Olivier, 163–4
Q’ing dynasty, China, 7 Sailors, Elliott, 62
Quant, Mary, 8, 144 Saint Laurent, Yves, 2, 87, 164
Quant’s Bazaar, 8 Saks Fifth Avenue (store), 101
A Queer History of Fashion: From the Savage Beauty (exhibition), 156
Closet to the Catwalk (exhibition), 15 “Scandi” fashion, 136
Quine, Richard, 84 Scaturro, Sarah, 166
Quinz, Emanuele, 167 Schatz, Tom, 87
Schiaparelli, Elsa, 22, 156, 164
Raab, Michael, 51 Schindler’s List (film), 40
Rabanne, Paco, 37 Schlegel, Friedrich, 64
Radical Fashion (exhibition), 159 Scott, Anthony O., 42
Raeburn, Christopher, 126 Sears Roebuck, 104, 190 n.48
Ralph Lauren (fashion house), 101, 155 Second World War, 2, 22, 26, 84
Ratajowski, Emily, 80 Seidelman, Susan, 37
Raviv, Noa, 121 Seiki, Shima, 126
Redmayne, Eddie, 62 Selfridges, 120
Rei Kawakubo: The Art of the In-Between Bright Young Things (installation), 126
(exhibition), 92, 93. See also Semaine.com, 102
Kawakubo, Rei Sen, Sankar, 152
Reich, Charles “September 11,” 155
The Greening of America: How the Seventeen (magazine), 57
Youth Revolution is Trying to Make Sex and the City (TV series), 88
America Livable, 9 Sex Pistols, 10
remediation, 105–7 Shapeways (company), 121
Renaissance, 14, 53, 76 Shazam, 30
Renta, Oscar de la, 161 The Shop Around the Corner (film), 42
Reynolds, Jack, 47–8 Sighs and Whispers (catalog), 104
Rhodes, Zandra, 10 Simmel, Georg, 33, 34
Rihanna, 77 Simons, Raf, 11–13, 167
Rivette, Jacques, 85 Siri, 137
Rizzoli (publisher), 76 Skincraft (brand), 13
Roberts, Julia, 51 Skov, Lise, 136
Rocero, Geena, 61 Sluiter, Liesbeth, 151
Rocha, Simone, 161 Smicek, Nick, 81
Rodchenko, Alexander, 22 Smithson, Robert, 157
INDEX 237

Snapchat, 101, 110 Ugrina, Luciana, 58, 59–60

Snow, Robert, 103, 106 Uniqlo (brand), 146
Solloway, Jill, 62 Fast Retailing, 146
Sony Pictures (studio), 94 University of the Arts, London, 118
Spears, Britney, 53 Unmade (company), 125–7, 128
Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back Utopian Bodies—Fashion Looks Forward
(exhibition), 159 (exhibition), 18
SSAW (magazine), 170
Steichen, Edward, 52 Van Beirendonck, Walter
Stenvik, Bor, 60 “Elephant Dress,” 160
Stephen, John, 8 Van Dijk, José, 106
Stevenson, N. L., 161, 163 van Dyck, Antony, 21
Stewart, James, 83 Van Herpen, Iris, 13, 15, 121, 161
Stewart, Kristen, 77 Capriole collection, 15
Streeck, Wolfgang, 81 Van Noten, Dries, 48, 121
Strömbëck, Jesper, 107 Vanity Fair (magazine), 55, 71
Studio XO, 122 Vaquera (brand), 62
Style.com, 102–3 Veasey, Nick, 161
Sundance Festival Veblen, Thorstein, 81, 180 n.19
sustainability, 113–31 Vejas (brand), 62
Svenson, Jakob, 107 Versace, Gianni, 10
Swadeshi movement, 145–6 Vertigo (film), 83
Swallow, Stan, 122 Vêtements (brand), 77, 78
Sweatshop Deadly Fashion (TV series), Vibskov, Henrik, 169
148 Harmonic Mouth, 169
Swift, Taylor, 63 Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), 29,
Swinton, Tilda, 61, 94, 96, 95–7, 164, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162
165 Victoria’s Secret (brand), 75
Vidal Tenomaa, Chris, 170
Tambor, Jeffrey, 62 Vikander, Alicia, 77
T’ang dynasty, China, 7 Vinken, Barbara, 90
Taylor, Lou, 159 Fashion Zeitgesit: Trends and Cycles
Telegraph (newspaper), 87 in the Fashion System, 5–6, 156
Teller, Juergen, 76, 81 “vintage,” 37
Textile Plan (Belgium), 146 Vogue (magazine), 49, 53, 54, 61, 73, 75,
Thomson, Asha Peta, 122 77, 86, 95, 102, 103, 106, 158
Thurman, Judith, 93 Vreeland, Diana, 160
Tilbury, Nancy, 122 The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined
Tisci, Riccardo, 73, 75 (exhibition), 159
Titian (Tiziano Vecelli), 21
Tommy Hilfiger (brand), 113, 115 W (magazine)
Top Shop, 115 The Art Issue, 76
Transparent (TV series), 62 Wade-Gery, Laura, 110
Traver, Carol, 101 Walmart (company), 147
The True Cost (documentary), 147, 148 Wall Street Journal (newspaper), 155
Trump, Donald, 76 Wang, Alexander, 11
“Truth in Advertising” bill (USA), 56 Washington Post (newspaper), 92
Tumblr, 62, 109 Watts, Hal, 126
Twitter, 67, 77, 101, 110, 122, 137 WEAR Sustain, 123
238 INDEX

Weiser, Mark, 122 Worn Again (company), 118–19

Weisz, Rachel, 55 Worth, Charles Frederick, 21, 22, 30, 89,
West, Kanye, 63, 71, 75–9, 81 156
Famous (music video), 76 WWD (magazine), 12
Weston, J. M. (brand), 164
Galliera collection, 164 Yamomoto, Yohji, 79
Westwood, Vivienne, 3, 10, 22–3 Yeezy (brand), 75, 76, 78. See also West,
Wilcox, Claire, 159 Kanye
Wilde, Oscar, 5 Yeomans, Lucy, 107
Willis, Rumer, 55 YouTube, 101, 108, 109
Wilson, Elizabeth, 18, 28–9, 69 You’ve Got Mail (film), 42
Adorned in Dreams, 28 Yu-Mi, Kim, 58
Wilson, Robert, 159
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim Zara (brand), 11, 13, 62, 146, 152
History of Ancient Art, 3 Inditex, 146, 152
Winslett, Kate, 55 Zellweger, Renée, 59
Wintour, Anna, 75, 76 Bridget Jones, 59
Wolf, Naomi, 80 Zendaya, 55–6
The Beauty Myth, 80 Zizek, Slavoj, 1
Wollen, Peter, 90 “End Times,” 1
Woolf, Virgin, 93 Living in End Times, 158
The World of Balenciaga (exhibition), 160.
See also Balenciaga, Cristóbal
PLATE 1 Levi Strauss & Co., jeans hand-embroidered denim, c. 1969, USA. Gift of Jay
Good. Photograph © The Museum at FIT
PLATE 2 Tavi Gevinson. Drawing by Erica Parrott. Wikimedia Commons

PLATE 3 Susanna Lau (Susie Bubble) in 2007. Wikimedia Commons

PLATE 4 The power of retouch. A model’s face is divided into two parts – good retouch
and bad retouch. Getty UK 154949082

PLATE 5 Lena Dunham at Maryland Film Festival 2010. Photo by Alison Harbaugh for
the Maryland Film Festival. Wikimedia Commons
PLATE 6 Zendaya. Wikimedia Commons
PLATE 7 Kim Yu-Mi, Miss Korea 2012. Wikimedia Commons
PLATE 8 Renée Zellweger at Berlin Film Festival 2009. Wikimedia Commons
PLATE 9 Hari Nef on the red carpet of the Berlinale 2017 opening film. This image was
published by Martin Kraft under the free licence CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
PLATE 10 Geena Rocero. Photo by Steve Jurvetson. Wikimedia Commons
PLATE 11 Andreja Pejić at Galore Pop-up party, New York City, February 6, 2013.
Wikimedia Commons
PLATE 12 Kim Kardashian in an earlier incarnation and a transitional phase:
her companion is television presenter and former footballer’s wife, Lizzie Cundy.
Photographer, Anne-Marie Michel
PLATE 13 Gvasalia’s secretary suits on the runway at Balenciaga. Vêtements. Public
Domain

PLATE 14 Martine Jarlgaard Spring/Summer 2017 collection could be viewed using

Hololens headset and holographic technology for a mixed reality experience. Photo
Brendan Freeman, courtesy Martine Jarlgaard
PLATE 15 CuteCircuit New York Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2014 Finale with
smartphone operated LED-illuminated clothes. Photo Theodoros Chliapas, courtesy of
Cute Circuit

PLATE 16 Fyodor Golan “digital skirt” for Nokia at London Fashion Week Autumn/
Winter 2014, featuring a connected array of smartphones. Photo courtesy Fashion
Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion
PLATE 17 Richard Nicoll fibre optic light emitting Tinkerbell dress for Disney with Studio
XO. London Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2015. Photo courtesy Fashion Innovation
Agency, London College of Fashion
PLATE 18 Zero prototype simulation of design by Teatum Jones for made-to-order
portal MIXIMALISTE.COM 2017. Image courtesy MIXIMALISTE.COM
PLATE 19 Suits by Cristobal Balenciaga, 1951 and Demna Gvasalia, 2016, shown at
Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, May 24, 2017 –
February 18, 2018. Photo by Nicky J. Sims/Getty Images
PLATE 20 “Harmonic Mouth,” by Henrik Vibskov. Installation view from fashion after
Fashion, 2017, The Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Photo by Jenna Bascom.
Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design